ARC Raiders, The Outer Worlds 2, Tavern Keeper

you Hello, friends. Welcome to episode 252 of the Noclip-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-

I'm good. I'm riding in hot on the wheels of steel. Yeah, and my Colt 45. That's not a that's not a vehicle. That's a gun. It's fine. I'm riding on wheels of wheels of steel. I meant like like disco wheels like chicken chicken chicken chicken like okay, like You got the two. Worker, worker. They make them out of steel? They don't. I mean, do they? I don't know. Frank, do they? Have you ever, I don't know. Have you ever been to an EDM club before? Have you ever gone to a dance night?

Some drum and bass, some trance, Euro trance. Not like a legit. Well, the only one I went to was that one in Tokyo, Magra. But I don't think I've actually gone to like any other types of club for now. What's Magra? So Magra is a. It's in the Japan video. And they stream on Twitch all the time. So they run from midnight to 5 a.m. Tokyo time. So when I wake up in the morning, the club is still going and you can see the Twitch stream. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's a basement club where they just play like anime music, J-pop, video game music, and they also have visuals on screen. And yeah, it's like I wake up in the morning and I put it on and I discover so much like fun music. So it's great. Yeah. Hell yeah. I like it. Overload the senses with beautiful Japanese art. I love it. We're going to overload your senses today with beautiful video game art. A surprising number of AAA games will be talked about today.

for our podcast uh outer worlds 2 of course came out this week um Did you do thumbs down for that? That wasn't for Outer Worlds. That was for the amount of AAA games we're covering. Sorry. Okay, fair enough. Oh, but don't worry. Even worse, we're going to enter the shill zone because we're going to talk about Ark Raiders. Oh, yeah, right. A game that... Our white label company. Yeah, exactly.

spent a significant amount of time in the past year covering its development of. We'll have news on that later. Jesse, though, you did not touch that project, so you're good to go. I can say whatever I want. I'm free.

You're brilliant, exactly, yeah. We're also going to talk about some Tavern Keeper, It Takes a War. I played a bunch of Hades too, maybe because we're going to film some cool stuff later this week. I don't know, I don't know. Maybe I was just getting... up to speed and then a couple of other indie games egging up queue up and we might finally have time to talk to Frank about his intro experience with Ghost of Yote because

Last week, I cut it from the pod because we were running long. So sorry, dude. And of course, we got some emails. So we got all that good stuff going on. How are you guys doing? What's the story? Did Daylight Savings hit Canada as well? Or are you guys smart enough to not do it?

No, we still do it. We're waiting for, I think we were supposed to undo it. If like New York and some other city that matters was like, eh, don't worry about it. We're not going to do it anymore, but we're still suffering. Through the war that is daylight savings time. It sucks, man. I feel like every day now is 100,000 hours long. It just never ends. And it's dark by like 5 p.m.

Dude, I don't know what it is. By 3 p.m., I'm like, it's 10 p.m., surely. I check my phone and it's not. Oh, got it. Sorry. The early night makes you feel like the day is longer. Yeah, so much longer and not in a fun way because it's just dark. It's just sad and dark and there's nothing fun to do. It's the number one reason I left Europe.

Or like Northern Europe. I mean, I didn't grow up in Oslo, but like it gets real dark in Ireland real early. I felt more so there than London. I wonder if it's because where we are. You know the way like GMT has like a, like obviously it's the north part, but also GMT has an eastern and a western most point, like all time zones do. So surely that makes a difference too. When I was in Australia, these people are insane.

I learned that there are parts of the country that have 30 minute time zones. Yep. That's deeply upsetting. Like hours are bad enough, but like, I guess some of the state, cause it's like, you know. There's only like, what, six states, is it? Something like that. That feels right. Yeah, maybe five. I don't know, six, five or six. And some of them are like the size of, you know, as wide as almost America. So I guess it makes sense.

I think somebody mentioned there was a 45 minute one as well, which is just like, you're getting into, you know, I'll just, I'll meet you outside the bar. at you know whenever i guess it wouldn't happen to local things it would only happen to if you're you know calling up somebody or had a had a phone appointment but that just seems

That seems abusive. It's ludicrous. Yeah. It's like also Australia has seven states apparently. As per this image I'm looking at. You were close. You were close. Do you have the names of them? Yeah, go ahead. Victoria. New South Wales, Queensland is one of them's called like something stupid, like Southern Australia. I think it's the one Adelaide is in South Australia. Yeah. South Australia. Um,

Darwin? Is Darwin just in Darwin? Darwin's the guy. No, I don't. I don't see it here listed anyway. It's in Northern Mo City. Is it not there? What's that in? City? Sure. Let me look. Darwin, Australia. Darwin, Australia. You've got three more. You got three more. You got three more. Is one of them called, like, the Central Territories or the Emu Plains? There is a territory. Okay. The Northern Territories. Western Territories? It's Western Australia. It's just called Western Australia. Yeah.

Okay, God, they really had the fucking thinking caps on for this stuff. So I'm missing two. Tasmania? Tasmania. Tasmania, sorry. The picture I was looking at was so small. That's a separate thing. Island, yeah. Okay, so that makes sense. Yeah. Okay. So that's the seventh I wasn't thinking of. Yeah. Tasmania is like, yeah, it's its own like little archipelago or whatever. It's like Puerto Rico counts. That's America.

Sure. But in Tasmania, they're probably allowed to vote. Hopefully. They probably have state representatives, unlike Puerto Rico. What was the one I missed then? What was the seventh? That was it, wasn't it? Yeah. Was it something territories? So there's Western Australia, Northern Territory, South Australia, so we can get out of this bit. Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria. New South Wales, Victoria.

Tasmania. Okay. So the ones I missed were north, south, and west. There were two. They were so simple that you wouldn't have possibly guessed that. I mean, we have one up here in Northwest Territories in Canada. So I feel like everyone's got a thing like that. But your time zone point. It's funny. America, I know, has like stretches of land where.

Part of it is owned by tribes that, you know, this is their original land and they don't follow daylight savings time. So you can drive through like a 30, 40 minute stretch, I think of Nevada. And it's time zone changes like seven times. If you just go in that straight line because of all the little differences and so weird, your phone must go crazy. Freaking out. Where the hell are you?

That's amazing. I love it. I like, yeah, I like the belligerence. Just be like, no, no white man. We're going to fucking, you're stupid. This is dumb. The sun doesn't care what you think. Exactly. We're not harvesting corn or raising.

cattle over here. We're not saving coal for the war effort. All right. We're not doing that anymore. It's been a problem with the goats because I started locking them up super early because I'm like, oh, it's nighttime. I better lock them up. But I'm like locking them up three hours early. And then my wife last night was like. no fucking the coyotes don't or mountain lions aren't you know they're not they're not gonna like come

Just because it's, you know, daylight savings, it's early. It's too early. We can't get them now. Exactly. Well, I don't know. So that's the thing. We disagree on that, but we'll see. We're going to test it out and see what happens. Just on the animal thing while we're padding for time, it sounds like here. I told you about the barn cat situation, did I? Maybe. We had, so like our main coon died last week. In the interim, we had been completely unrelated. We were not trying to replace him.

We got these two barn cats to like, it's basically like, oh, they're building houses somewhere in Petaluma. So you have these colonies of cats that need to be rehomed because they're where they were living is basically getting taken over. And so they just like.

give you some cats and stick them in a cage for three weeks on your properties. We had them in the back garden and they were pretty pissed about that. And I fed them every day and gave them water and all that shit and cleaned up their kitty litter and, you know, tried to play with them and they'd hiss.

One of them hissed a lot. Our cat that died last week is called Mischief. We called this guy Hisschiff because he's just like an absolute fucking nightmare. I named the other one Blade, which I liked. I'm a big Wesley Snipes fan. But Blades started coming around to the door a lot and like meowing, which is like, oh shit, he knows about humans. He knows stuff's good. So we've been feeding them. We've been feeding them.

Do you have any family member then? Is that what you're saying? He's making a play. And he's kind of a Maine Coon as well. He's like a real outdoor looking one. Well, you kind of got it at that point. Right? But I can't bring him in. But the other cats are freaking. They're like, what the fuck is this? Because he looks like twice as big as them. And then the other guy, fucking his gif, last night he came around and he got some food. And I'm like, uh-oh.

Time to build a second house just for those cats. You'll go in there for a couple hours, hang out with them. Come back in your own house. I don't know, man. Somebody was talking online about like the cat replacement. fucking system or something that like this is what happens is that when a cat dies you just somehow another cat makes it to you either they cry in a shop window well enough or

Or someone has an extra one or something. Right. So I'll give you updates. Mischief coming back to say hello. Exactly. Don't get me started. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. It's fine. It's just a pet. It's okay. Don't say that.

I have to. I have a child. I'm like, whenever people are like crazy, and I'm going to offend a bunch of our listeners now, whenever people are like super babyish about their dogs, and I get it, dogs are way more smart than cats. Like, I can leave our cats, the two of them, for like...

a week on vacation and they're cool they play with each other they're fine we have somebody come in and give them food like that i'd feel terrible if i left a dog so maybe i'm about to contradict myself but i also have a human child and so there's a level of There's a level of mourning about animals that I'm willing to accept before. Sure, on the hierarchy. Yeah, yeah. I get you there.

That seems a bit much. So I'm just saying all this to let everyone know I will be giving updates on this. I think I'm not going to call him Blade because he's too cute. he's actually like not a blade at all. So my daughter suggested fang and I quite like that. So we might, we might go for a blade alternative. Yeah. Yeah. And Wesley Snipes had fangs in blade. So he did.

That's what he said with the motherfuckers ice skating uphill. Rice? True. Yeah. Rice? Sure. What a great movie. Daywalker. Call him Daywalker. It's good, too. That'd be a good name. Yeah. Yeah. Please send in your suggestions for Blade Universe themed names. Could call him Triple H. Remember Triple H was in the first Blade? Do you remember that, Frank? I did not know that. Triple H, yeah. He's like one of the like...

Oh, he's in Blade Trinity. Oh, that's what he's in. Sorry, not the first one. I thought he was in the first one. I thought he was too. Maybe there's just another large, bald, white guy in there. Oh, he wasn't bald. This was like... This was Triple H when he had the Hunter Hearst Helmsley hair. He had the long hair. Spitting the water in the air. Shit. I think it might have been... You know all the...

You know, Frank, what's like the worst actor, like wrestler to actor? Hulk Hogan. You think it is? He's legitimately the worst actor. You think it is? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's legitimately the worst. He just is. Yeah. What was the name of that movie again?

Well, there's like Suburban Commando. That one's horrible. That was the one that Roger Ebert had a review for Suburban Commando. That was like when I tell people when people ask me what I do for a living, I say I'm a critic. I got to watch movies. It's the best job ever. After seeing Suburban Commando, I don't I hate.

There's some days I hate this job. That was his review. After seeing Suburban Commando, I don't know if I like the movies anymore. I was watching a match on WCW and everyone in the ring had been in the movies. Giant. He was in Adam Sandler's Waterboy, Captain Insano. Even Bill Goldberg was in this match, and he was in Santa's Sleigh. He's in Expendables. He is in Expendables. I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

um and i think kevin nash has done comedy stuff and like i think he was in the longest yard a bunch of sandler stuff and like These three guys who don't build themselves as actors, they're just large wrestlers, are so much more naturally charismatic, whereas Hulk Hogan and anything he's in sucks so much. He is good in Gremlins 2. That's the only legitimately good role. Is that the one where he yells at the movie?

theater right he's like get these idiots off the screen yeah yeah yeah so that's so in the in the theatrical and like blu-ray version and digital VOD version of Gremlins 2 they go up to the projection booth and mess up the film and it cuts to Hogan watching the film and it's like listen brother me and all the Hulkamaniacs want to see Gremlins you put the movie back on the screen but in the VHS version of Gremlins 2 they

fiddle with the VCR and it cuts to like the A team and it's Mr. T and he's like listen I'm being the fool who don't fix the VCR I love that you know this yeah yeah this is great that might be on like the Blu-ray extras, but the VCR edition is like lost to time. But cause like, that's not in, you know, so that's like, right. So like they would do that a lot that they would have.

like films. Nowadays, everything is just made for one version or maybe it'll be the extra unrated extended version, iTunes, whatever. But back in the day, they would have separate scenes shot for like the VHS home releases and then TV version, et cetera, et cetera. Now everything is like there's just one version of something. I watched Christine last week for the first time and the John Carpenter movie about a crazy death.

Angry Car. Yeah, super Stephen King book. And yeah, I watched it on YouTube TV, I guess, because it was like, oh, I have YouTube TV for football and I don't have to rent it. I don't have to pay anything extra for this. And then like 30 minutes in, it did a fade to black and I was like, oh, that was weird. And then it faded up again. I was like, huh. I guess they were using Dissolves back in the 70s. That's strange.

And then the second time it happened, it happened with a song playing. And then the song came back up and I was like, oh, fuck, I have the TV cut of this movie. It's the TV version. No. It was 20 minutes that I missed out on. And I was like, man, the plot in this movie is so fast. Just like, there's no fat on this at all. They're just making their way through it. I was trying to think of other actors, like other attitude era wrestlers that were in.

anything. Yeah. I mean like the rock, the rock legitimately was the biggest actor who like launched out of it. And then that's why I like when Batista became an actor and actually started getting cast in prestige films. That's why the rock had to like stop. He's in the smashing machine, which is good, but it's like it's a very like it's the funniest thing for him to go to. He's like, oh, I got to pick a prestige thing where I can show my range as an actor. What if I do?

A slightly enhanced version of the thing I did for like 25, 30 years. That's the saddest possible next step for him. Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, I feel like if you're like a six foot four, like. Samoan. I don't know. Batista did great in Blade Runner. Yeah, that's okay. That's fair. Yeah, you're right. He's actually arguably bigger. He's a bigger guy then. Yeah, that's true. Denis Villeneuve was like, I see something deeper in you.

As a French, we love big people who are small on the inside. We love you so much. Exactly. Apologies to the French. You are fragile, no? Love it. You know who we love? I will not do the entire line in French, I promise. All of her. Awesome. Patrons like Levpreet, Youth, Tiny Tal, Dwayne the Rock Lobster. Congratulations on the Smashing Machine. Anthony Thomas.

Nico Passateri. It's Samir Ferrario. I'm glad I didn't have to do the Italian accents in a French accent. Senator Armstrong. Redredge. Harry Flanagan. Joosh. Arno. Matt Pearson. James Brown. Mark Rojas. Quote. Tucker Morgan. David McGarry. Goddison. Sven Hooster. Pez. John Akers. UNH. Tim Robinson. Forrest Pruitt. Dark Insanities. Jonathan Kremen. Eric Hamilton Schneider. Christoph Fatui. Enox. Grizzly Mug.

Cameron Laird, Zachary Snader, Alex Gouche, George Sakotis, Jacob Godserve, Entheogen, James Med, a bit late. You're almost forgot there, Jesse. It's all right. Toyur Tilyev and Rycin. Thank you all so much. We did the Halloween names last week. There was one for you, Frank, which I need to look on the Discord again because I cannot. Oh, it's Frank Howling. It's good. Frank Howling.

I think he said that on accident in the last episode. Oh, really? Yeah. It's good. Maybe it was something else. Okay. Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.

Ch-ch-ch-ching, chill zone. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ching, chill zone. Welcome to the chill zone. Wallets at the door, keys in the bowl. Welcome to the chill zone. Cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-ching! Okay, folks, welcome! We're in the shill zone. This is a special... pocket of a podcast within a podcast as the McElroys would say um all about uh uh our creators but we just this is the this is the the sign on the door

to let you know that Secret Tape, our white label company, has done a series on Ark Writers. It'll be coming out very soon on Ark Writers' channel. It's a three-part series all about the development of that game. I'm really proud of it. I think it's fucking cool. They're all about 30 minutes long.

And they show insight into what I think is a really interesting team working on a lot of very difficult problems because we filmed most of the interviews last year when they were still trying to figure out a lot of what our creators would be. That said, we're now going to talk about our creators and our experience with it. I'll go second. Jesse, you hadn't touched it. Seven, Frank, obviously. Frank was over in Sweden with us on the crew. We also played the game there. We played the game.

Same here as well. We had access to development bills. their testing that they were doing, uh, you know, twice a week. So, um, we, we played a lot of it. You hadn't touched this. Had you touched the tech test or any of the, uh, previews that they had done at any stage? Not a dang old thing about our creators. I knew nothing.

So what do you make of it? Yeah, I really, really, really liked this game. Like an uncomfortable amount. I played 18 hours of this over the weekend. Oh, Jesus, really? I don't do that anymore. I played it for like, I woke up at maybe 9am on Sunday. I think I played it until 11pm. I woke up on Monday. I thought I was sick. I had a really bad headache. And as the day went on, I was like, do I just have eye strain?

Like, am I, did I game too hard? I thought I was sick. I was, no, I was sick from gaming too hard. You have Speranza-itis. Right, exactly, yes. Yeah, Arc Raiders is... Such a good game. It's an extraction shooter, which I'm not super well versed in the genre, so I won't try to speak on it too strongly. But from what I understand, structurally, it is a game about going into a map from a base point where you have resources.

and items, equipment that you can use or not use as you choose. You go into a level, pick up items as you would in like a battle royale style game. And with the items that you pick up, they all have different... levels to them. You have rares and uniques and whoa, this is an epic. It's pink. So it's really good.

And you can bring it back to your base. But if you die on the map, then you lose all of your equipment and the stuff that you've picked up, except for one slot. That's like, you can bring this home with you. We'll bring your corpse back and the key that you wanted to bring with you. Why not? And you go back and you just keep on doing runs. You get some missions.

And the gameplay part of it, I think I have not had this much fun playing a multiplayer game in a really, really long time. Like this is so... interesting from a social perspective. I've played it exclusively solo. It is a third person shooter. So it's, you get to see your character and other characters on the map and you can customize them to some extent, but like the monetization stuff is not really that bad. It's a full ish.

like double a price game. I think it's like 40 bucks, right? 40 bucks. Yeah, 40 bucks. So it's a reasonable price. There's some cosmetics that you can spend money on, but they also give you enough resources to get some of the stuff from like their battle pass or their deck. I think it's called. Yeah, it's just I don't know. Yeah, they did.

it's basically a battle pass by any other name. Exactly. Yeah. It's our, it's our in universe version of a battle pass. Right. They don't have any holders. They don't read a bunch of names before you start the game though. They should, it would be better. But yeah, so you have all these characters. Everyone sort of looks a little bit different. There are enemies on the map as well. So it's not just other players. There's AI characters you can fight against called the Ark. They're like these...

robots of varying shapes and sizes. Some of them are big drones. Some of them are drones that look a little bit different and have armor. And then there's like these crazy ones. Like there's a leaper that's like a...

spider with armor on it and an eyeball in the middle looks like something out of the incredibles frank do you remember what that was called during devout i can't because i was like maybe we shouldn't say actually i'm not sure but when they when i saw it leaper i was like huh that's not what it is

It was definitely called something else. I probably have gameplay footage of whatever it is. I think it was like Bull Crab or something like that. It had like a weird, yeah. That's kind of cool given its personality. Yeah, totally. And they were testing it out when we were there. So we have loads of free release footage of them trying to get this fucking thing working because that's the one that uses the ML locomotion.

So when they're watching the, and I mean, I don't want to spoil the video or anything like that, but they were attempting to use basically the like, algorithms and like brain building that like boston dynamics does for their robots so like i think and i think this is where some of the because it says on the steam page that they use ai and like this is kind of what they're

talking about, but it's not, you know, it's not, it's not the headline of them, like, you know, making guns or whatever, you know, like, or, you know, making the level or doing shit like that. But yeah, the whole third video is basically all about that. But yeah, it was like a lot of work for them to get it to work. And they kind of didn't get most of it working, but they had at least one.

ml locomotion uh enemy in the game and it's that fucking thing and it's and it's it's been amazing watching videos of people like going oh there's no way you could get up here and then the thing just fucking jumps and uses like it's 300 miles away I mean, it has a jet thruster on its arse that it uses to fucking try and get down and it can crawl down. And all that is basically, yeah, they baked all of these different brains. It has like several different brains that it's able to.

This is what I do if I'm far from a raider. This is what I do if I'm close. And they have kind of very little control. Like they can tweak the dials when they go to break the brain. But then what comes out is like, that's just its behavior. So...

Like, and they're super smart as a result, which is pretty cool. So yeah, it's interesting fighting them because you're like, oh, I've never fought an enemy in this, like this before. He blew off one of its legs and it still is able to... figure out how to get to you and all that shit yeah and interestingly it like also cowers from you like there's this sort of I felt

sad, almost killing it at the end. Cause it's like running away from you, but it's legs are weakened. So it was sort of like dragging its body down this set of stairs away from me. I was like, Oh my God, what have I done? And then me and the other guy killed it. And we were like, yeah, let's go, man. Um, so that, that part of it, the, yeah. let's go, man. The character player interaction stuff that I'm seeing is like, so.

I think I've said before, like I've always wanted to get into these multiplayer games that you guys are always talking about, like Battlefield and stuff, because the player part of it, like the community is the part that makes the game so memorable in a lot of aspects. And this one for me has been like.

so interesting because the solo queue, I had the understanding that extraction shooters based off the Tarkov fan base was going to be this like hardcore PVP. No man left alive. If you're in front of me and my gun sees you, you're dead. But no, like this is. I've never seen so many nice people willing to just do anything for anyone else. Like, hey, you need an item, man. It was great. My one moment of true shame that I had playing this game.

I came upon a crowd or two people. This sounds scripted. I sound like I'm reading a commercial. I know we're in the shill zone. I'm not. I was walking up. stealth or like crouched, um, towards an extraction zone, which is how you get out of the level and back to your base with all of your equipment. You have to wait for this elevator to come up. Each level has like a different thing. It's very loud. Everyone knows the drones. People know where you are. Like it's risky to extract.

which is part of the tension. Even had the... Even had the doors close. I love because it's like if you're on the wrong side of that door, you're not getting in or you're going to get pushed out. I've seen people get flipped back. Totally. Yeah. Like people who like when you get down, you don't die right away. So you're crawling on the ground and like that could be part of it as well. You can get in there.

And if you're down, you can still get out, but you have to have already hit the button to open the door. Like there's so many little things. And you can hit the button if you're down. Yes, exactly. You can, you can crawl up and do so many options there. It's so interesting. But so this situation, these two guys, this guy walks up to this other player who's sitting there and he goes, Hey man, are you new to the game? I could give you a blueprint to help you.

play the game. Cause there's like, it's a cool item and they're talking and I'm like, what if I fire bomb these two right now? They're on fire. They're both running separate ways. I gun down the one. I'm chasing the other. This other guy comes out of nowhere with a chain gun and kills the second guy. I killed the guy with the chain gun.

I have two defibrillators. I get the guy up who's in the extraction zone, the second guy. And then the other guy that I shot is coming towards me. He's like, no, no, he's the bad guy. Don't help him. And I'm like, no, man, no, it's all good. I get that other guy up. I'm like, hey, I'm going to be honest. I thought you were the chainsaw guy.

Or the chain gun guy. And they were like, oh, dude, no worries. Thank you for getting us up. And they dropped me items. No, I was like, this is the greatest game ever made. I'm having so much fun messing with people and like the weird. interactions, the like community focus that's built up around it already. It's so cool. I know the team stuff, it gets a lot more stressful, but like just the solo play has been like my favorite community gameplay stuff I've done.

Maybe of all time. Of course, the AI stuff does, you know, it's a little it's a bit of a hamper. I don't like the AI voice stuff. I think it's really awkward. I was trying to figure out which stuff is because I think the quest stuff, a lot of it seems too well done. I disagree.

I think a lot of... Some of it doesn't, but I think some of them... Yeah, some of them are... It's weird, because a lot of it's like, I don't know, for like a multiplayer, you know, fucking... game i'm like yeah whatever like i like not from a moralistic standpoint from a quality standpoint like if this was like people i'd be like that's the thing i don't understand like if i'm wrong and those are people i'm sorry like my bad but like if they are ai

It seems so unnecessary, especially for the quest stuff, right? Why would you not just use people? It's reading a couple canned lines. So the issue is, and this is not me, I am not bootlicking. why people would use this stuff but let me just my understanding from talking to them is and I think this should be like prefaced by like

And Bensa, who I interviewed from the audio team, he's like the guy who made Battlefield Guns sound good back in the day. There's a whole section on him about like his process for recording sounds. And it's insane. He like...

Fires every gun. They... pull them all apart they systemize all of the recordings they do them at distance they do all this sort of stuff so the reason why this game sounds so good is because like when you fire a gun that's like got an electric mod on it it's firing like seven or different sounds like it's doing a bunch of work and he's like an absolute stickler for that type of thing

The issue they ran into with the voice stuff, according to him and some other people I talked around, was that this is a live game. So if they want to add something in, if they have a voice actor, what they found in the past was you have to book them months in advance.

because they might be on a film shoot they might be doing something uh you know another project they might contracts can only last i know this is not them saying i know this personally if you're doing a film or a or any type of like contracted on a piece I think the maximum you can do is five years so then you I don't know what it's like in Sweden but I presume there's a lot of like you know stuff around that so then that

opens up its own problem whereas if the voice actor drops off the project and they've been this character for five years in this live game do we have to re-record all this stuff so for me what I heard was that it's a production related issue it's a problem that audio teams have

when it comes to live games in particular, because they're like, oh, we want to add in this seasonal thing. Okay, we need to script all the lines as early as humanly possible. We need to book the person. You know what I mean? Which I can totally get. It's a lead time issue. It's like a... It's like, and we have to be locked into the script. Like, it's the same reason why scripts in games, you know, I'll talk to Greg, I'm sure, about this with the Hades stuff. Why, like...

a lot of this stuff needs to be done super early while they're still figuring out a lot of the rest of the game. So I get it from a production standpoint. I'm not saying moralistically it's good or bad or whatever. I know also the voices are not like generated via, like they hired independent voice actors to come in and build the voice libraries with them.

So that was apparently a lot of work. They had to come in for a decent amount of time and do all that sort of stuff. So again, I'm just devil's advocating this a little bit. Like there is a genuine production reason why that would be the case. And it's also not a massive team. Like they're not.

This isn't EA. This is like, you know, there are a hundred and something people, I think, putting two games together because the finals is the other one. And it's the same problem with the finals. Because they add in all this seasonal shit all the time. And then it's like a way, I guess, of making so it's not just barks. Because it's not just barks and arc raiders. It's a lot of like specific shit like...

Like, I'll meet, you know, you tag an elevator on the other side on the map. And it's like, okay, we're going to meet by the such and such elevator, right? They fucking renamed that elevator for some reason or something happens. And if they put a new drop zone in, suddenly they have to go call their...

voice actors in all the different regions to you know what i mean yeah so i'm not forgiving it i'm just saying like from a production standpoint i could see the argument to do more with voices yeah But it's not a new problem, right? This is a problem that's been in the multiplayer games industry for a long time. But you don't have voices in a lot of multiplayer games. Apex Legends, Call of Duty, Battlefield. It's just barks. They have callouts for specific locations and stuff.

yeah but it's but those games are you know what i mean like what i'm saying is if they add a new level to this game or they add some seasonal like they're the amount of voice stuff that they have in currently or like quests quest is a big problem right because i'm sure

people are going to burn through the quests in this game at a certain point and they are going to or maybe in the in the production pipeline they don't want to have to okay we have to build out six months of quests ahead of time because of the voice cast like that's that's the that's the production

cork in the bottle that they have to worry about whereas now they're like oh no no we can do this now and we can figure out the quest between the quest we add between december and january we can figure that out in november and we don't have to worry about scheduling voice actors for all

of that stuff that we put in or what usually happens in a lot of these games there is no voice acting because it's just a fucking quest so it's like when I play PUBG and I'm doing my dailies there's no one talking to me about it you know what I mean it doesn't cut to a thing

and have somebody turn around and go, oh, you know, these arcs are such and such. It kind of sucks in arc creators, in my opinion. I kind of don't like it. It's actually aggravating. I've only played like 18 hours, but if we're 2,000 hours in and every quest is getting read out still, I'm going to blow my brain.

so it's so many voice lines that are playing just now i don't know i i get what you're saying that there's like legitimate logistical reasons to do this sort of thing it's not money saving let me say that no I'm sure it's a timeline thing. I'm sure it saves money. Oh, guaranteed it saves money. But it's not, it's dropping the bucket shit. We're talking about AAA game development, hiring voice actors for a few, that's not the issue. Like, if they could pay through the problem, they would.

I'm sure like that's what companies do. They hire middleware. They hire external contractors. Like to me, it seems like a like a. they if they want to have this level of voice work in the game and they want to be able to because they have no like npcs in this game so the only way i can see that they can do this whole building the lore thing is with voices um

So I'm not agreeing with it. I'm just saying like that's the production challenge that's there. And this is a solution that does work. The issue you're bringing up is an irrelevant one in terms of the quality as well. Ethically, there's a whole other conversation to be had about it as well. I think I'm probably, like we've talked about it with Jeremy and stuff before, I think I'm a bit more forgiving of it.

having played years of games of voices that were digitally made it's like i think on the on the environmental side sure i don't know how much power it's really costing to generate a few voice lines as opposed to Sora making a video of a bear blasting a granny's house apart, or not that, making thousands of those every hour because people are hammering those data servers to make all that slop.

I don't know. But at least that's the production. I think the conversation about it being something to do with saving money is totally relevant a lot of the time. But I think on this case, this is clearly a production problem that they've run into and something that... they wanted to find a solution to. Yeah. But yeah. I can see that. I do think...

I don't know. I don't know enough specifics about it. You'll you'll know more, I'm sure, from conversations you've had with them. So I won't say anything, I guess, as I was. Yeah, as we're a bit in the shill zone here and you're a bit in the sauce documentary about it. I do think like everything you said does sound a bit of like.

Can we make an excuse for it? Basically of like, there's workers you need to be considerate of. You have to be considerate of their schedules, their timelines. Can we sacrifice that and still make something viable and decent enough that people don't get frustrated?

And I think that's the excuse that will continue to be brought up of like, well, you know, we want to, but we got to plan in advance three months and that's annoying and we don't want to do that. It's a live service game. We got to be quick. I think that's a, I think that's an excuse.

Is it a logical excuse? Does it make sense? I mean, it's an excuse. You can logic your way into any excuse, for sure. No, because an excuse can be a lie, or an excuse can be something that you're like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Sure. It makes sense. Lies make sense a lot of the time. That's good lies. I guess the answer is like, do you like, you know, we had this with like Darren on Hades.

Yeah. Recording all the voice work and a lot of that was getting people up to SF to do it and the biggest... thing that happened i guess that was somewhat handy in a weird way which we covered in episode five was because of covid suddenly everyone was at home but everyone was setting up

All the voice work people were setting up their own booths now to do their own thing. I'm not saying there's not a world in which they could have gotten, you know, a bunch of people who could quickly turn over some voice lines because it's not. all that much work um it's only five voices in the game i think and then probably i think there's two voices for each of the body types maybe

for the barks, but I think that's probably less of a thing as it's mostly those NPCs. I'm not saying there's not a world in which you had like an audio person who is responsible for that. I bet no one on the audio team wanted to have to handle that shit. Probably. Maybe. You know, it's boring shit work, you know, working with remote voice actors. Dedicated to that. Yeah. Perhaps. Yeah. But then it's another production hurdle that you have to worry about. It's a lead time on top of that. It's.

you know, exposure to unfinished stuff, yada, yada, yada. So, yeah, I'm not saying that there's no world in which, like, they could have taken a different path, or that I might have, but... There's no upside to them doing it aside from the production stuff and the fact that they don't want to do the work. Like it's like it's it's it's like in the same way if I could get Premiere to do assembly cuts in my dock so I didn't have to fuck or log.

I guess it does log the scripts. I literally could do that right now. I don't, but I think it automatically fucking makes captions and scripts of everything. You can edit by text or whatever, and I don't use that shit. Yeah. So I don't know. I like having conversations about the nitty gritty on this stuff because I'm not saying what they did is right. But I think there's so much lost in the nuance with this stuff. And there is a big difference between...

you know, generative stuff and art-led or design-led decisions when it comes to this stuff. But yeah, the voice acting is not going to win any prizes. I think the ones on the cut scenes are better or something. Yeah. Not really. Really? Are you being overly critical of this because you know that there is eyes on this? I'm making a point.

If it is not AI, I am sorry to the voice actors. I don't think it's good. I think it's very stilted. There is awkward inflections at the end of sentences where it shouldn't be. It just does not sound good. There was multiple times I was listening to it. I was like this. is not good. I've played other games recently where I have gone, this is awkward and gone to check and it's not AI and I'm like, oh, I feel bad that that was my gut reaction.

I still don't think it's good. I don't think it's better because it's a person. I still think it's bad. Like, that's the thing is most people aren't going to know or care or check. They'll think it's good. They'll think it's fine. I didn't even give a shit. Like, it's not dispatch. Like, you know what I mean? It's a fucking.

So, so I'm skipping over at half the time. I don't care. Oh, here's the new place you can go to. We were sad when we were here last, the robots came and I was like, Hey, I want to shoot some guns. Like I don't, I don't give a shit. So I get why they're like, why would we spend all this time? They should have hired you.

I could have read all the lines. I would have done it here. We're here at the robot place. Um, I just, I just feel like what you've just said and it is not a knock on you. It is not an arc on embark. I think I can take it. I don't care. Sure. All right. Well, you're a bitch. I think I think we're here, baby. I just think that that course of explanation.

will be a continued thing of like, we're not against workers. We just, workers are in the way basically of like, how could we get all of these things out of the way of.

quickly updating our video game and making changes as we see fit. And I understand the desire to do that, the technical issues, the design issues that come in place of like, we want to make sure we maintain a level of quality while still doing what we want to do and iterating on it, especially with a live service game where you want new things to happen.

on a regular basis. I think there are ways that other companies are doing that. Of course, EA's got EA money, you know, Battlefield is EA as well. And then... like Apex is what I was saying with the first one, but I guess that they do both of those. And then Activision is, you know, it's Microsoft at this point. They've got a gajillion dollars. They've got the war money. So like, and yet they're still closing all their studios and not making hardware. Also not nice.

Yeah, it's it's just a it's it's I'm curious to see if that thing continues to come up. I had not heard that as the argument for why you would use AI generated voices if that is the case in games like this. And if that is the case. I imagine we'll hear that a lot more. And I don't know if that's good because like.

five years from now, if our creators are still banging, like those voice actors could, I don't know, maybe they can, I don't know what their contracts look like, but if they were still coming back for work, there'd be opportunities to negotiate and get a better pay for what they're doing for their consistency of work. It's like, now you don't have to worry about that. And we can use your voice for.

tens of thousands of hours, money that you couldn't possibly make because you can't work that much because you're a person. It's that's that's not untrue, but it's also an extreme version of a situation that could be used to win an argument. And I think that's the problem I run into a lot of this stuff is that like. Do I think I don't like a lot of degenerative stuff because I think it's burning through our resource. Like to me, there is a critical difference between.

a person using one of these things for a reason and having access to things like chat gpt or sora or whatever it is where you have a planet of people making shit like the the Energy usage of those two things are completely different to each other, but we sort of have lobbed it all in together.

I also think that as bad as this AI stuff is when it comes to workers' rights, I think there's a couple of different industries where this is entirely true. I think translators and local interpreters and stuff like that, their job is basically fucked. I think it's...

definitely hit people like concept artists um but i do think its stretch is limited i think software engineering is fundamentally changing because of it i have friends who work in games and outside of games and the reality is that like that is going to that is changing a lot of who they're hiring and what those hires are able to do and how they clean up bad code, which is an obvious part of this.

this uh the language models are better at code because it makes sense because it's you know it follows a lot the patterns are stronger i guess and that type of thing I think a lot of the we fired all these people for AI stuff is the type of shit you say to your shareholders to make it sound... better like you're like firing people was a good excuse yeah yeah so i i don't trust a lot of that stuff and i also think like the socio-economic implications of massive corporate like these massive

corporate you know the activision microsoft thing was insane and they're getting bigger and bigger and bigger the whims of those companies the issues it's and this is you can put your hands up and say this is whataboutism and i'll fully accept it but like the

The things that are going to affect people on the ground are going to be them making decisions that have nothing to do with AI one way or the other, that are just like, you know. I think the biggest thing that will happen is whenever this bubble does burst. that's what's going to fucking ruin everything. But I don't necessarily blame the technology for that. I blame its use as a, and I don't like a lot of this technology, I want to say again.

But a lot of this stuff predates this generative shit. You know what I mean? Like the locomotive tech they're working on or like, you know, Google DeepMind stuff with medical research. Like a lot of this stuff is amazing and it's going to help us. In ways, you know, and so will quantum computing, if they can figure it out. It's like the folding at home stuff on the PlayStation 3. Like, you know, they're finding solutions to medical problems that have, or research issues that have, you know.

duped people for you know a decade or longer and that stuff's good and that's cool the fact that a lot of this tech has been wielded as snake oil by a bunch of economic terrorists that to me is is the bigger And that and them giving access, using invisible money to give people access to generate slop that ends up... you know, burning all of our resources and fucking ruining companies and all that sort of stuff. I think there's going to be a more limited...

Like driverless cars, like people said. They still say like, oh, we're going to 10 years, we're going to have driverless cars. People, you know, there'll be no taxi drivers. Every 10 years, it's 10 years away, I feel like. Yeah. It's like, we were just joking last time.

I think the reach of a lot of the generative models in the LLMs is, I think we're probably over the curve on a lot of it. And hopefully it all starts to, you know, fuck off soon. But I do see a difference between that and... developers using it as tools and a lot of developers are using this stuff as tools and a lot of your favorite developers are using this stuff as tools it's like oh yeah did we complain about procedural generation getting rid of getting rid of level designers not really

Is that an apples to oranges comparison? Perhaps. But like, if you're looking at game development 20 years ago, you look at the jobs that were there, the makeup of a team, how many programmers there were, how many designers there were, and then look at a team now.

Like, it's very, very different. Like, the industry does change. The landscape does change. I'd also argue there's more work for voice actors now than there ever has been in the history of video games. That is true. It is objectively true. You know, so I don't know. I think...

Yeah, I don't know. The worst thing they did was call all this shit AI because it's just put it all under the same tent. But I fully appreciate that if people see this stuff and they think this is some bullshit and this is some... bootlicking by Danny I didn't have to talk about this like I don't give a shit I've you know even before we were doing this and we were talking about um AI stuff my my position on it has been fairly um you've been consistent consistent on it so yeah it's it's a

Yeah. And I hate that because because because then I spend all my time praising it and not complaining about the shit I hate. But everyone else is already complaining about the shit I hate. So we're sort of established on that. But then it ends up me. you know sitting here and trying to trying to argue a bit of uh or devil's advocate or or whatnot on it but yeah yeah would it be a better game if they'd hired voice actors to do those lines yeah you're probably right maybe yeah

Maybe that's the thing. It was like, I was playing this and I was like, I don't know. Is this, is this not like the end goal of this stuff? Like when I was playing video games, when I was growing up, I always thought like with like new Vegas or Skyrim, I was like,

I wish the game could react to me more realistically and the characters could say things that made more sense, lines that lined up with what I was doing. No one comments on me jumping on top of the sawmill and it's like, what is he doing up there? They do sometimes, but like you got to plan for that stuff in advance as a designer and like that.

It's hard to implement. So, but I'm 50, 50 on it in terms of the technological stuff. Then I'm like, I don't know. I feel like there's bits and pieces of it where we're just kind of like, sometimes just shit makes you feel gross. Yeah, totally. And you don't have to, you don't have to. Yeah. You don't have to argue it. You know, it's like, that's fair. Like if you just, if you see that and you go, ugh.

Like you do with the, the voice acting and the, the, I think I have pretty good reasons for it past just, but I get what you're saying on top of it. Yeah. You know, I'm sorry. I'm not, I'm not just reducing it down, but like, yeah, if you, but if I'm just saying like, you don't know, people don't have to have a Mar-a-Large. to hate something like i get that that's and that's that's totally fine um yeah so yeah i'm i'm yeah i'm sympathetic to that response absolutely okay ai right over

Yeah, well, I wanted to go on what you were saying with the squad stuff because I didn't realize they were going to separate the squads and the teams. Frank, did you have that opinion when we were doing demos with them? I guess we always teamed up, didn't we? Yeah, I don't... Are squads different than teams now? So they're in two different...

Maybe they always were. I don't know. But yeah, if you go if you go solo, I don't think you meet other teams. Is that right, Jesse? Yeah, no, you can do self-found or whatever it's called where you like team up with a bunch of strangers. But if you go solo, you go solo. It's always solo. Yeah.

And is there a way to mechanically be on the same team? I have not seen anything where you can like team up like an interaction menu or anything with other players. It is just a code of honor, spit in the hand and shake. It's probably better that way.

And also then you don't get access to like where they are on the map and all that. And it's funnier because if you say that and then you betray them right at the end, there's no, the game doesn't tell you that was bad. That was your teammate. Don't do it. I've had so many, I was shocked. First couple of days, first couple of hours I'm playing, I played maybe like nine or 10 hours.

i'm just fucking shooting everyone right and everyone's shooting everyone and then something happened in the meta and i think i think we might be in the golden age and it all might go sour in the next few weeks but like right now it's like an 80 20 chance that they're cool

Like that they'll be like, Hey, what's up? I just want to, I want to see what you're doing or, you know, yeah. Friendly, friendly, friendly, friendly. Hey there. Yeah. I had like, uh, Yeah, I had some woman run past me yesterday and was just like, hey, I'm just doing a quest, but I wanted to see what you were doing up here because I was opening one of the arcs.

that was like one of the big ones that was downed in the map. And I was like, oh yeah, when it opens up, you got to back off because the fire, the vent comes up and it like all the fire comes out. I will say with the questing outside of the VO stuff. I think that stuff is really smart. The tutorial on the game is very short, right? They give you this like very quick, like this is how you shoot things. This is what happens when you get downed. This is how you extract. But then they sort of...

Almost like a single player game, I guess. They sort of piecemeal out the mechanics to you in the quests where they're like, oh, by the way, have you noticed that there are these metal shacks that have certain colored, you know, fabric on them? they have these, you know, things in them and you can bring these other things to them. And, and it's light questing. Like this isn't like a single player narrative experience, but it's definitely more than.

i'm used to from like a pub g or something like that you know where and i've loved that shit you know i love when it gives me ones like you know it'll be like oh like use a grenade on to on two guys or kill a bunch of rocketeers or kill our rocketeer probably. Um, and then sometimes it's like, Oh, like use that cause 200 to like a thousand damage to, to other raiders using a machine gun. And I'm like, Oh great.

Daddy's giving me an excuse to be a bad boy. You gun someone down. They're just on their last breath. They're like, I was just doing missions. So was I. And then you take them out. Oh, you know what you should do? Revive them. And then shoot them again. Because you're getting the points. Yeah, you're a monster. What do you think? Getting people up at Battlefield 6 just to snipe them again. Just waiting for the XP. That's all it is, baby.

Frank's in it for the love of the sport. That's it. What do you make of how it looks and sounds? Oh, my God. It looks amazing. This game looks so good. I thought the finals looked really good. Like, I thought that was very...

bright and like reflective nothing was matte everything was glossy but like also you go to places that look like italy and you're like swinging around there with your grapple hooks and it's so nice looking and they've done the same thing here the art direction is so good the like

gradients that you get from the sun. Like every level has different weather effects that can take place on it. And sometimes you'll be in time stuff as well. Have you done the night raids? I have not done a night raid yet. I'm a coward. They're fine. I want to, it looks cool just from the screenshot that they show you hover over it.

intense it's like yeah there's just so much fucking arc activity and usually there's only one elevator you can all get out of so it's just a nightmare yeah that's cool because that was like the division one uh that was the only other extraction style shooter i've played is that has like dark mode

And you would go into New York and it's dark and that's where you would be. But like they didn't have enemies in that one. So it was just PVP and like no one fought anyone because I don't care. I'm just here to get the items and leave. Oh, you're kidding. Yeah. So it was funny. They had to add to the fact. So this, yeah, similar thing. The look is just great. Everything about it is beautiful. Like it feels at times.

cartoony almost like not to a ridiculous degree like it's silly the physics of it are a little bit silly um you can slide on your butt which is very funny uh but like sliding down the stairs in the subway it sounds so good as you're going down the stairs. It sounds great. Like there's so much about this game that is so impressively put together. I cannot believe that it looks, and also biggest point, it runs phenomenally. The performance on this game is...

Crazy. The finals was pretty good. It's a large Unreal Engine game. Unreal Engine 5, I think, right? Which is like... Dude, it's running on my 2070 Super on my old PC, my like i5 4900 or something like funny. They should not. Nothing plays on that anymore. And this launch game, I'm getting 60 FPS. Like it's it's crazy how good it runs. It's I can't believe it.

is on a whole nother level in terms of their technical prowess. It's, yes. Arc Raiders is, I don't know, man. If they keep updating it with like weird stuff that makes me want to keep coming back, I'll play it forever. I don't know. I'm having so until the meta gets weird until it starts getting really combative and it stops being fun. RP moments where you can like someone downs you and you say, I was just getting items, man. What the hell? And then they get you back up and then you shoot them.

As soon as it stops being like that and it's just everyone's downing everyone and no one's being nice. Everyone's a quadruple agent. Yeah. They're all just like running. I'm the only one who's allowed to do that. Everyone else has to be normal and nice to me. You're like one of those social hackers, you know, who like figures out how to give people, have them give them their credit card information. Yeah, I'm just so nice to them until they give me their social insurance number.

I think there's probably a lot of people listening who are like half thinking about this one and they're wondering about like the challenge of it. I'll say that I don't like extraction shooters. I like playing this solo. because I can largely keep out of I guess trouble a bit but it's the quests are the thing that I care about the most like I really have no interest in going in and

Like it's not about winning. Like it's not like everyone dies and you're the last one at the end of the map. And also what I like about it is sometimes my rounds are very, very quick. Like sometimes I'm in and out in five minutes. I think that's the thing that I didn't appreciate about the... get set up at home thing. It's basically the opening 10 minutes of a PUBG game.

where you're just walking around trying to collect the basic loot that you, you know, I need a helmet, I need a vest, I need a gun, I probably need a grenade, I need a first aid kit, like...

You do that at home. I've had no problem with the amount of resources I have. Like, you're constantly finding resources. You have lots of... money that you can buy resources some of the traders I think the interface is very menu-y like it's kind of you're doing a lot of like inventory and then I gotta go I gotta go see my chicken who collects

scrap for you. That's right. Which is a thing. You have a rooster. Scrappy or something like that? Yeah, you can rename it. You can get different skins for the chicken. You can put a dog collar on it to train it to pick up more resources while you're gone. That's great. You feed it like there's quests for it. So like if you find pears and shit, you give it to them. And there's a cat bed one. I was, did you get the cat? Oh no, no. That's cute though.

You've got to update. I think it's for, like, level three scrappy. You've got to find a cat bed and a couple of other things to make it happen. So I'll say that, like, the losing stuff sucks, but... I don't know. It depends how much, if you went in with some really good shit, then maybe, but like I go in pretty low. I go, I run with the Pharaoh pretty much all the time. That single shot long rifle. Yeah. Rifle. I like that one a lot.

But yeah, I'll say I think the in-between menu stuff is fun enough. But there is a lot of, I have found that there was a lot of like inventory management that I wish I didn't do. You know, I still don't know how to upgrade the benches.

when you're on the bench screen you can go to the far right of the top menu like just hit right bumper three times and then you're on that level up screen you need a certain number of resources and you can track them too which is good the game is really good about like telling you what you need and usually where it is too like if you

or over something, it'll say, you could find this in mechanical, medical, administration, technological areas. And like on the map, you'll see a little icon that matches that and you can go to that area. won't be too hard to find it unless it's like an epic item or something like the rarity obviously impacts how easy it is to find um i agree on the menuing the game isn't

Yeah, it's a bit cumbersome. And I get what they're trying to do to try to make it feel like this is a place, right? But it's just menus, right? And these are people, even though they're just voice lines set by. so it's yeah it's it's yeah maybe i did that yeah we probably at least some of it if not all of it um so uh yeah i think that stuff is a little bit tricky um And then I think the last thing I'll say about it is I really like the quests. A lot of them are vague enough.

where you have to sort of look at the map and figure out where you want to go. You also don't plan where you arrive in the map. You can pick which map you want to go to. There's like three or four maps. There's four maps in this, I think, and then summon above night raids, and you unlock them by doing various things.

but uh fairly trivial i'd say you unlock a lot of what this game has quite easily if you just put the time in it's not it's not particularly taxing um but yeah i liked how you know there was one thing where one of the like the robot guy a trader was asking me to get medical supplies and i couldn't find anything and i was like wait a second and i went to the maps and i looked at all three maps and i found a place that was like medical building and i'm like all right surely here and then

It was like a red zone, so it had loads of arc in there. But yeah, sure enough, I found, you know, three of the four items in there on my first run. And that felt cool. That was like, okay, yeah, there's like, you know, I can... Think this out. It's not just, it's not, it's not as skin or boxy as I think a lot of multiplayer shooters are, you know, it's not about the numbers going up and getting the kill and doing that. Like there is a.

you are constantly thinking. You're either thinking because of the human engagements or because of the arc engagements or because...

you need to get out and you're trying to be like, okay, which elevator should I go to? Or like, should I wait till the end of the map where most people have extracted and then try and get one of the last elevators down? Or, you know, is somebody going to come with... loads of equipment like that's what i enjoy about it is that it's it's a super systemic game it's like it's kind of kind of imsimi in some ways um

And the physical nature of it I like as well, where everything is physics-based. So if you shoot, like, the fucking rotors off one of those drones that it can't fly anymore and it falls over. Dude, it feels like Horizon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Even how they sound. Yep.

You know, because they're like kind of like they sound panicky. They're the R2-D2. Yeah, it's all very contrived, but it works. You know, it's like, oh, this is very like, you know, video gamey or whatever. Actually, someone was watching me play it, had no context, and they were like, is this Star Wars?

Are you playing a Star Wars game? Funny. I guess it's like a desert and white looking tech. They're on Dagobah. They're shooting them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's cool. I, yeah, I'm surprised by how good it, but I knew that I would enjoy it.

but I'd played enough of it, but I'm surprised at how good 1.0 came out. Yeah, and I don't know. It'll be interesting to see. It's had a better start than the finals anyway. The finals was obviously free to play. I think that had a big spike and then it fell down. So it will be interesting to see how they support this thing going forward. I think for people like me, it works because it's like, finally, one of these games has a huge audience, looks good, runs great.

and is really approachable like tarkov to me i've seen videos of it i watched coke carnage play a little bit of it i was like that's not for me man i'm not doing that you need a second monitor with the map on it you got to track the sun and shit i'm not doing that really like i'm i don't know i don't know literally what you have to do but you do have to have the map somewhere and like

really get hardcore on it that seems great if you like that simulation stuff but this is capturing that same level of tension anyway it feels like anyway uh it's capturing like A real joy. I didn't realize I was missing from the social aspect of multiplayer games. And then also just like a gameplay.

thought experiment of like, you mentioned sometimes you'll get onto a map and like, oh, there won't be any of the thing you were looking for on the map. There's also times you'll get somewhere late. Maps have like a 30 minute time limit before the arc. I don't know, nuke the level until it's reset and all this stuff goes back.

If you join, you can join like 10 minutes late. And sometimes you'll get to a point in the map where you're like, I need to go to the medical office. I spawned. You spawn randomly. You can spawn on the other side of the map. You get to the medical place. Everything's looted. And my thought was, well, that sucks. I guess I'll just.

leave and then go back or i could kill someone who has the thing i want and there is the genius of it you could just if you want equipment and you know it's not there anymore shoot shoot shoot baby shoot first ask questions later camp at the subway station that's right fucking um get them at the raider hatch see if they have a key exactly yeah i love finding it's all yeah and this funny little i love how everything you do is so loud

Everything. It's like if you want to open anything or fucking crack open one of those arcs or one of the, what do they call the supply drops? You're just there. Oh, yeah, yeah. Super exposed. It's like beeping. You're like, shut the fuck up. Kunk. With your big hammer axe thing. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, it's wild. All right, chill zone over. That was Ark Raiders and a little bit of a conversation about the ethical usage of AI in games design.

As ever, we really appreciate you guys talking to us about this. This is a really touchy subject within the industry. It's certainly my... experience that developers don't want to talk about it on the record because some of them have you know softer maybe uses or things that they wouldn't mind doing or whatever

So I've been trying to get a video together about this stuff for a while, but it just seems like it's, you know, I could probably write an article and get people off the record in that respect, but I think people have already done some of that work. But yeah, it does seem like the type of thing that is...

Yeah, is some of it's not going away. Hopefully a lot of it is and we're gonna unfortunately have to talk about it and You know probably into the future as well From one triple-a game to another and myself and Frank have played some outer worlds 2 and I played on PC

Frank, what did you play on? Did you Xbox this bad boy? Yeah, on Game Pass Xbox Series X. Excellent, okay. Series X. What is your... How much have you played? And what's your experience? This is obviously the sequel from Obsidian. This is post-Microsoft acquisition and you can kind of tell it's got a lot more production value and feels like it's... maybe building pretty significantly on the first one. But yeah, how much have you played and what have you made of it?

yeah i'm like six to eight hours and i could probably check my save but like i'm on the second planet uh now uh and yeah i really like the first outer worlds it's a game i played on my own and then we did a documentary on so i played like two and a half times I get different endings and stuff but I really like it the biggest thing with this and then Obsidian also released avowed earlier is like this scratches that same like Bethesda style game itch but in a way more like

in a good way, limited thing where it's like it's not too overwhelming instead of there being one giant map. Oh, OK, you did everything on this planet. Time to go to the next planet. And so it's like it's it's so easy to like.

I don't know. The levels are literally compartmentalized. So it's so much more relaxing as opposed to when I play games, I'll get like... uh choice paralysis where it's like oh my god the map is too big what the hell do i do whereas here it's very easy to kind of know when you've done everything and move on um so yeah i really like it um at first the first planet i thought the combat was like man this is really easy what the hell and then i got to the second

planet and it's uh way more challenging and i've had to like think more about my build uh like adjust my strategy with my companions had to like use you pick up so much crap in these games and now there's crafting and even i mean there's always been crafting but um

one of your companions you're allowed to craft at any point so i run out of ammo all the time so after a fight i'll just craft stuff or deconstruct stuff i'm not doing any of the shops except to buy like crafting mods and things like that so um Yeah, so now I'm on the second planet and the combat's getting...

better um and then yeah just like with all these games especially rpgs is um i'll always have a few skill perks saved so when i get to like a choice command it's like oh if you're level five guns you can do this so i'll back out of the conversation and like spend one or two points and then go back in Suddenly get really good at guns. Yeah, yeah. Read a book.

so this does the same thing like with like new vegas has the skill check thing i think even balder's like a lot of these games have like even if you don't have the abilities it'll show you what the skill check things are and so that's been really fun just kind of seeing like oh there's so many uh there's so many valuable like choices and paths you can do. So yeah, I think my character right now is like speech hacking.

guns uh medical and engineer and that's been fun like a lot of it's just hacking stuff getting through stuff and um yeah again it's it's kind of like a valve where the gameplay is really good i'm kind of skipping through dialogue stuff i'm like okay i get the point i get the point the tone of outer worlds is like more annoying than like fallout or new it's it's almost like very simpsons like blah blah blah welcome to the amazon plan and it's just like okay i get it i get it um

So, but the gameplay and graphics are really nice. One thing that is cool is we mentioned Venture Brothers last week. James Urbaniac is one of the voice actors in Outer Worlds. So it's most notable on the second planet. You meet like this army general and it's like, well, well, what do you want? And I'm like, holy shit. I had to pause it, Google it, and sure enough on IMDb, James Urbaniac.

did a bunch of voices for outer worlds too. So that's been really cool. Um, so yeah, I like, I like this game. I, I feel like I'm like, maybe. I don't know how many plants there are, if there's five or how many, but I feel like I'm like maybe 25% through the game, so I might stick with it and beat it because it's like nice and tidy. But yeah, I'm enjoying it. I will say like on the second planet, I've had a little bit of frame rate stuff on the Series X.

Um, they simply let you toggle like optimize performance, whatever. I always do frame rate mode, but I've noticed that like choke a little bit. I think there's just way more. The second planet is almost like.

alien bug war world war one themes which is like i love that setting so the first one is like cool exotic alien planet i feel like you kind of get it the second one's theming is way cooler i think it's the kind of thing of like all right they're they're back in the zone they figured it out and so i like the second world lot that's cool that's yeah I I've I've really enjoyed it I was I'm not as far as you I think update maybe four or five hours I think the um

what would you even call it? Like the opening chapter is really well done. Like they, the writing is very good. The script is fun. The level you do is like a sort of a precursor to then what the rest of the game is, but it's sort of designed in a way to get you to pick what, like... type of character you should have because they give you lots of options and then you get to have a bit of gunplay the gunplay is really good like the gunplay i'm playing pc mess keyboard feels so punchy and like

It feels like playing like an online shooter. Like it's super, super effective. But then, yeah, at the end of that, they basically give you like a... a choice to respec essentially you know your your whole thing which is and it works within the lore of what's happening it's it's it's very well it's super slick the the opening two hours i think is super super slick

And I like the setup of it. Yeah, from a graphics perspective, I think the problem I was having was I was bouncing from Arc Raiders, which is one of the most beautifully optimized fucking games ever. And then I was popping over here and I was having...

Yeah, I had to put everything down to medium to get a frame rate that felt like it was good. It looks incredible. It looks super incredible. It looks super rich and detailed. It might be overly detailed. I don't know. I was walking through some of these places going like, this is... insanely beautiful looking. Like, I'm spending 10 seconds in this room. I feel guilty about how good this looks.

But, but yeah. And then, yeah, the combat stuff is fun. I think like there's a lot of tools and like ways around.

people in sort of that in simi way like it's there's always a hatch there's always a it basically is an immersive sim like it's an rpg but it's a it's it's an immersive rpg like it's it feels very similar to it pray or something where you're you're doing a lot of um figuring out how you get into a place or figuring out how to do that combat encounter um i guess like player abilities there isn't anything like that that you're specking into or anything but um

You know, like Frank said, you have your traits or your skills and those impact what you're able to do. Yeah, I haven't played as much as you, so I don't have too much to say more about after what happens that first area. But yeah, it's a good one. It, yeah, it's, I don't, I think I like it more than Avowed. I don't know if that's a world building thing or if it's a gun thing. Could just be a gun thing, honestly.

I do want to go back to Avowed because I did really like Avowed. Avowed felt more like... What did you say? Avowed has guns. Oh, Avowed does have guns. You're right, yeah. So I don't know what it is. Maybe I was... Maybe this feels more like a PC shooter to me for some reason. I don't know. It just feels more, I don't know. I need to go back and play more Avowed. I did not like Avowed, but it just didn't, it didn't like hook, hook, hook me. Whereas this, this, this has gotten its tendrils in.

when I'm, when I, when I have the time, uh, which, uh, Jesse, do you have any questions about it? Are you going to, are you interested in it or did you, I do want to play it at some point, uh, eventually maybe down the line, maybe next year. Um, Unless you guys were going to be all over it, I'm not really interested in investing like 60 hours into a big RPG when we got a bunch of Game of the Year stuff to play, baby. We got to get ready for the end of the year.

I am curious, though, because I found the first game. I really, really liked that first world. I thought everything they were doing there was funny. I like Spacer's Choice. I thought that was all like, well done. Haha. Commentary. Isn't capitalism bad? Do they do that still here? Are they really leaning hard on that capitalism stuff again? Or is it like, are they trying to do it? But like they do, but I think they do a good job of recognizing that the.

the train has moved on to another station. Like, it's not the same. You can't do this. Like, you know, they showed it in some of the trailers and previews. Spacer's Choice, and what was the other ones called again? It's like... auntie something but like now there's been a giant merger so I think it's like it's like granny's choice right for the new one or auntie's choice something like that yeah something like that yeah so it's that's I think that's quite funny because especially with

yeah the acquisition microsoft stuff like it like so yeah i mean it's written by obsidian so they're they're good at what they do like and and it's not just about that like there's there's other stuff going on that's definitely the the setup i think the setup of the system that you're in is smarsh i think it like gives you i think one of the things in

The first game was that I felt like I was doing a bunch of work for a bunch of other people and I didn't really have skin in the game. Like, I couldn't even fucking tell you what the main motivator for the player character was in that first game. really or even distinctly with the other ones but in that first two hours in this one they really give you like a personal reason to want to do what you have to do and also a

narrative reason for why it needs to be done now and in this system. Like it's a very clean setup that I think is much more motivating because I felt like in the first one. I was mostly playing just to see what cool new stuff there was. Whereas in this, I'm like interested in where this is going. Like I have, I have skin in the game. I want to, I want to get, you know, get my, get my, whatever. I don't want to say anything. Okay.

Get my whatever. Get your whatever in the Outer Worlds 2. Come on down. Outer Worlds 2. No, they're not doing that. One thing I will say that I love is, and I think they did this in the first one, but... um you don't have to pick up everything on the map it's like literally high you can turn this off but it's literally highlighted in blue like here's ammo here's some food here's armor you're not picking up bowls and forks and crap there's no weight limit or inventory limit

Oh my God, it's awesome. So I appreciate that. You can go in a room and quickly assess like that. And then there's no like... if you're caught there's like a morality scale but there's no phantom morality where if you pickpocket no one sees you your morality doesn't go down it's like okay so you can pickpocket steal um but then it still does the thing of like if you're favoring on whatever the different factions and stuff but um i really

appreciated that. Sorry. You've reminded me of something from Starfield that was actually I was thinking about with Outer Worlds 2. Where does this sit on the sauce meter? Cause outer worlds one, the outer worlds one I thought was like, eh, you know, they were trying, it was weird, but it wasn't like, it kind of just felt like earth in space.

Yeah. Starfield has a similar problem where it's like everyone's a human and in space and it's just like this is like New York, but like, whoa, spaceships. Do they where does it sit on that like Starfield to no man's sky space gameplay? meter how weird is it does it get weird or is it still just i don't know if it's that weird okay what do you think i definitely it's not a robots

Yeah, it's definitely a lot more personality than Starfield. But it's like you're dealing like there's alien gas. There's there's aliens, alien spiders, alien. But, you know, you get you get you get gadgets that manipulate time and things like that. So it's like, OK, this is this is.

uh yeah better and more flavorful and like yeah i feel like you're you're actually roaming the planets more as opposed to like you're on a space station or here's a space colony it's like no go explore the planet okay um and i found that pretty fun and like

Yeah, yeah. It's not self-serious or anything like Starfield was. You know, it's quite, you know, the main story has a... real edge to it which i think is like the voice the the voice acting is great but the the performance stuff is really good too like the actual character animations are like it's it's a significant jump up from outer roles from the first one okay cool um

Yeah. And I would say in the, in the level, it almost seems like an over correction on the level production, on the production design stuff. Cause it, I mean, the game looked good before, but it did feel like you were kind of in the desert on this random thing. Whereas like. It feels a lot more, I don't know, lived in or something. Yeah, even your ship that you're in is just like really well. It's just fun to be in those rooms and look at shit like it's...

Yeah, it's gorgeously put together. So, yeah. It is funny, though, isn't it? I'm the same as you. I've played so many of these great hour-long games that, like, there's this intimidation factor now when you play these games where you're like, oh, well, I better start, I better finish it. If you're going to put out something that's more than like 15 hours, man, like unless you're arc raiders for some reason and I have a free Sunday, then you can have all the time I have.

You know, you could play it for eight minutes and then and then be fine and turn it off. We're out of the show zone. You don't have to be nice anymore, Danny. It's OK. I think shout outs to Obsidian, by the way, for. successfully putting out two video games this year three that are both giant rpgs three how do they what's going on over there what are they drinking two as well

They granted three video games. Well, it's early access, but whatever, it's out. That's crazy. I want the Red Bull they're drinking. It's crazy. It's nutso. Yeah. Good for them. It's absolutely mad. Yeah. Really crazy. Hopefully they've... Got some cool stuff. Pentiment 2. Let's go. The pentimenting. Hope so. Pentiment harder. Oh, no. No, maybe not.

All right, let's wrap that up. I want to talk about... No, no, no. Jesse, let's go to you first. You have a couple of indie games here that you want to give a brief little check-in on. Yeah, I'd love to talk about Egging On. This is a... This is a fun video game. Egg parkour? Is that what we're going to say? Not even that far. Not even that far. It is egg getting over it. Oh, okay. This is a 3D third person platformer.

where you play as an egg and you're trying to climb a building. Well, chicken coop to be more specific. That has something perhaps supernatural has happened to this. This chicken coop and the house surrounding it. And you are trying to climb to the top of this. Why? Because you can. Why? Because you should. Because that's what you're supposed to do. It's there to be climbed. Exactly. There's a narrator who tells you, who eggs you on.

to climb up this tower. I think this is the baby steps came out earlier this year or like a month or two ago and you were praising it and saying it was really good. And I checked out the first bit of it and I thought it was really good. I really enjoyed it. I want to finish it.

before we do Game of the Year talk, because I thought it was really cool. And I think what they succeeded at there was like taking that formula that Bennett Foddy and team had... sort of formulated of rage formers, if you want to call them that, and found a through line to make a narrative argument about why people play these and what...

what is allowed to be hard? Is it fairly, is it fair to call it a masochistic act to play something like that? Or is there something more to it? And I feel like from what I've played a baby steps, they're kind of trying to thread that needle and they're doing a good job.

egging on is just what what if benefit was an egg uh which is like cool not benefit the person but like what if getting over it with benefit was an egg um which i think they've actually done in a really interesting mechanical way so like the way that you move the egg

I hate talking about this game because I feel like a crazy person. But the way you move the egg that you're controlling is like you're rolling it around like there's a marble inside of the egg, a yoke, perhaps that you're moving around. Oh, right. So there's like the like the center of gravity shift.

a little bit maybe exactly so like it's not like wobbling in the same sort of way but you do have a lot of control it takes a long time to get used to but you have a lot of control over the positioning of the egg not like you can stop it and turn it or anything but like you just sort of roll it around

And the way that you jump is you just hit the right trigger and you jump, but like you get a better jump if you roll or you jump rather while the tip of the egg is on the ground. So you get a better course. Jump height makes perfect. It's physics. And you're trying to climb through the coop, but like you will fall and you will die a lot. And death in this game is presumably right. Exactly. It's a fucking egg breaks open.

But, and I thought this was a really interesting solution to a design problem of like making a highly detailed 3D space with an orb in it. How do you, that's always, you're asking for trouble with the math there. When you die, your shell breaks open and your yoke is free. And then a new shell forms around the yolk. Oh, that's cool. The egg lives on. Wow, it's infinite. It's like an alien egg or something. I don't know. Can you move the yolk?

You can move the yoke when you're out of it, but you're much slower and you're also very slippery because you're a yoke. So that's how they sort of solve the like clipping issue is like if something has squished the egg into place, the yoke will slip through it and be fine and like reform and everything.

But you lose a lot of time. So I actually I was playing right before we hopped on and I fell very high up all the way back to the bottom. And I was like, well, I'll save that for another day. Is this fun? Or is it like, or is it just, is it one of these games that's difficult? And if you don't like playing one of these games that's difficult and getting the joy of besting it, that it's not for you. Is it like...

What is your vibe with this? That's a really good question. There are a lot of opportunities to smoothly find shortcuts. So like if you like the act of hardcore platforming, I think this has more of that. aspect of it of like figuring out how to best the level design or like there's things that they sort of make obvious like you you go through the trap that they tell you to go through like hey

The narrator will come in and be like, there's a shortcut over here. If you go check it out and you check it out, it's like impossible and you die. But when you land, you find a different shortcut. So it's sort of it was worth doing. Right. This game does a lot of that.

Um, where there are opportunities again to, to find shortcuts and make it easier. I think if you don't like doing the same thing a hundred times, you're going to hate this. Don't play it. Like it's not, it's not doing anything different to, to really stretch. too, too far away from that structure. But I think it's just enough to feel like you're getting better at it. And also the better you get at the movement mechanics, the jumping, the better it feels.

I found myself redoing that coop area a couple of times, the very beginning of the game, after I got to the next couple of sections. And I flew through what used to take me an hour or two, mostly because I understood the controls better. So it's good at that. I think it's one of those weird little games. Are the levels sort of distinct checkpoints on this?

climbing sort of sort of thing it's a bit like baby steps where like actually no it's not like baby steps because baby steps does have those plateaus where you're really not going to get back to that first area unless you do something catastrophically wrong what was the one that the guy fucking took down

off steam what was that remember like only up yeah only up yeah yeah um i think so yeah it's it's a closer to an only up or like a chain together something like that where yes there are clear distinct biomes with different challenges that sort of are thematic

throw of them. But for the most part, unless you do something catastrophic, like what I did, you're not really going to lose all your progress. So you have to be a little bit careful, but not too much. Um, I just want to mention last thing, the sound design in this game, this is egg ASMR. It sounds so good. It has this jangly guitar in the background because of course it does. And like the narrator is doing a good job, but like the sound of the egg rolling on stuff I could listen to for hours.

The sound of it rolling on metal on glass, the way that it sounds when it plunks on the glass and when it jumps off the glass. I would love to see the behind the scenes footage of the Foley artist. Doing a bunch of rolling and throwing and smashing of eggs on different surfaces. I bet that was a blast to do for a week. I wonder if it was or if it was just the most tedious hellish thing.

Oh, maybe instead of an egg, it might've been an, you know, it might've just been like a, you know, well, that's not fun. You got to get in the art of it. Hey, Foley is about making the sounds, right? That's true. It's not about replicating. It's performance art, though. You got to use the eggs. Eggs are expensive, though. Jesse is very dogmatic about egg.

sounds in games. It's very important. Do not AI generate your egg sounds in video games. I'll be very upset. You can't. There's just some things that the technology is not able to do. Absolutely not. I was talking to somebody about emu eggs, a friend of mine who's Australian, and I was like, can you fry an emu egg? Could you get like, because they're fucking huge. And he could buy them there, apparently. This might just be some...

taking the piss out of somebody, not from Australia situations, but he was like, you can make an omelette out of it real easy because you just crack that fucker open and get it. But I was like, can you make like a sunny side up? Could you get like a frying pan big enough? Oh, my God. At that point, you just like you want to dip your toast in that. You're putting a whole loaf of bread in there. Forget. Yeah. Or like a hard boiled egg. Could you like just get a huge posh?

Probably not. You probably couldn't evenly boil. I don't think water is that good. It can't penetrate, like, several inches of... It would be like... Really overcooked on the edge and then really runny on the inside. That might be good. Or salmonella inducing. I have no idea. That's alright. Do emus have salmon? Is that a thing they can do? Salmon? For the ella that they get? Salmonella? Dear lord.

I'm so sorry. Let's move on. I'm going to quickly jump on one. Tavern Keeper. Oh, sorry. There's no price for egging on on Steam because it's not out yet. Do you know the price? Egging up does sound like what it should be called.

It's on... It's not on an Xbox yet. They did not send it in the email. I'll see if I can find something. Okay. How much did you pay for it? I didn't pay for it. It feels good. It's not out yet. How much would I send? Oh, would. Oh, would. Sorry. I would pay like 15, 20 bucks. Cool.

Yeah. All right. Sorry if it's more than that. I spent $24. 20% off currently on Tavern Keeper which is a game from Greenheart games who are some of the folks behind game dev tycoon Which came out in 2013 they have been working on this bad boy for a while now and it tells it's in early access from what I've played the six hours or so, you wouldn't know it's an early access game. It's super well polished. So this is basically a mix of your sort of theme park, theme hospital, two point hospital.

building a hospital-style thing. And it's kind of just one of those. Actually, it's not even a mix. It's one of those with, I guess, some interesting fantasy and storytelling elements that really add a lot to... the flavor of it so essentially what you're doing is you are you are building and operating a tavern so a pub that sells like food and has like other sort of stuff in it and in like a fantasy world full of orcs and

witches and wizards and a union of taverns who will come and ask for money from you and give you missions. You have to build your bar, you have to buy the beer stock from either like a traveling salesman or from another brewery. It arrives, you have to tap it, stick it in the tap, you have to...

get a kitchen and then you have to like order ingredients, set the menu. So like skewered rats, really easy because you just buy the rats and they skewer them or you can start adding different flavors to them and stuff like that. There is a really complicated and detailed... What would you call it? The decor system, I guess. Decorating. Like...

crazy amounts of detail required. Like there are going to be sickos on there and they do have like a portal within the game for you to go and either decorate stuff, detail it yourself or put it up on the marketplace for people to download as well. It's you can, you know, put putting doilies on tables and little knickknacks here and there and the right bottle and put the cutlery here. Like if you want to, you can go super crazy on that stuff, which is really cool.

The game is, so it's a kind of a money management slash. time management thing because your you know your workers will go to sleep do they have enough time to clean the floor we're running out of beer the traveling salesman's not coming for two days you know what are we going to do here um

Do we have enough money to upgrade this room, this stock store room or put a toilet in the tavern? Are we earning enough sort of day by day? Like what's the profit and loss look like? That type of thing. But it's all taking place in a really... Well, like the production value on this feels exactly like a bullfrog or like a lion head game is maybe more accurate. It has a narrator who is voicing, you know, what's going on in the, oh, you should, the writing is really good.

for the narrator as well. There's a second narrator, she's sort of like a... I forget what you call it, like a wisp that sort of lives with you as well and gives you different types of advice. The tutorial is super strong for it. The graphics are gorgeous. It has its own unique art style. The characters don't have arms. Their hands just sort of float. which is a bit wild at the start, but you get used to it. Like remake style where the hands are not attached to their body and just sort of...

Did you say Rain Man style? Like Rayman. Rayman. Oh, Rayman. I thought you meant Rain Man. No, no. Dennis Hoppin didn't do that. Dennis Hoppin. No, yeah. Like... knock a bunch of, I was like, wow, the Canadian version of Rain Man not have, they CG their arms out. Tom Cruise, no. Exactly. Yeah, kind of like Rain Man, you're right, yeah. Less French though.

More English. Yeah, and it's just, yeah, sound, the music's fun, the graphics are cool, and then what it does, which I really like, this is, I think, the... the coolest thing about it is like, there's a single player campaign where you go from pub to pub, tavern to tavern. You can also just do like,

Free play. Like, it's really feature-rich for a fucking early access game. I'll say that. There's this card unlock system where you get a bunch of collectible cards. If you do objectives within the world, you'll get free items. Like, oh, you can buy this crocodile mat for free. Like, just go stick it in your pub. It's very generous to the gamer, I would say. But it has this thing. I don't know what they call it. Put that on the box. It's generous to the gamer.

That's like, I've heard developers have said that to me about like design philosophies of being generous. Yeah, yeah. It's like a whole thing of like giving them little... sweets and candies every once in a while. I believe it. It just sounds like something Usher would say for Xbox like 10 years ago. This is very generous. Merry Christmas. We're generous to gamers.

But it has this thing. I don't know what it's called. It's like a storybook mode or something. But essentially, every once in a while, someone will come in and they have a little storybook over their head and you click it and the storybook opens and it's narrated. And it's basically like, oh, this person has come. It's like, I'm going to make one up for fun, right?

an ogre turns up and the ogre is, you know, annoyed because nobody's coming over his bridge, right? And he's here to have a drink and he settles down, yada, yada. And then he's like, maybe you could like, you know, build a pub over on the other side. of the bridge so that when people you know come up i'm making this one up and you can basically like just make moral decisions and the stories continue sometimes they come back

Like it's a multiple story thing. And then also you build sort of your character, I guess, at the start. You have certain traits right off the top. And I really like this. And when I was playing Outer Worlds 2, I was thinking, I wonder if Frank thinks of this. I was thinking...

this could be something they use because in edwards too if like if you don't have the stealth it's not available right but you can see it's there in this one uh if you don't have like really good whatever the thing is you still can go for it But it's like a spin wheel and your odds are just bad. But you could pull it out. You know what I mean? And I thought, and it's really cool. So like, oh, like, oh, my, my, my.

my whatever my bravado or whatever is not high enough but like i'm gonna try this one and then it'll and you can and here's the other thing you can you can decide to re-roll uh and if you do like the thing that's doing the rolling starts cracking So like, it's, it's a playful game. It's like, they let you try and cheat your way out of situations, but there's going to be a cost. And they also talk about kind of in the dwarf fortress vein of, they talk about like,

You lose these roles, but it's not just a case of good or bad things happening. Like in Dwarf Fortress, famously, they use the word fun to explain when shit goes wrong. Like, that's what they refer to it as. Because that's the whole point of playing Dwarf Fortress. If everything worked, it wouldn't be fun. It's when things go haywire that things are interesting. And this game is having a similar thing where they're like...

They're playing. They're having fun. Like, and stuff can go wrong. You can have fires. You can have infestations. The game is crazy good at allowing you to, like, tweak. all of this stuff so you can just turn that stuff off if you want there's menus full of like here's what you can and can't do or yada yada yada and from a ux perspective like just the interface the camera all that stuff is super

like Lionhead, Two Point Studio quality level stuff. And I'm pretty sure this is from like an independent team who have just spent years putting this together. So it's very, very good. It's the best one of these games. I don't know if I've played any one of these games this year. My wife's been playing Jurassic Park Evolution 3. It sounds very much like...

more Jurassic Park Evolution 2, which is fine because that was the best iteration of that game so far. But this to me is like the most interesting one of these I've played in a long time. Very evocative of Dungeon Keeper, of... ThemeHop Park, Two Point Hospital. It feels right at home with that. But it's doing a lot of new stuff, like the story stuff and other things that I find really compelling.

This sounds amazing. I'm watching the trailer for it and there's a lot of minutia is the only thing in parts of it. Like I'm seeing near the end there's a lot of like... How much, what time do you want people to do certain things? How long are they going to be a chef for? Is all of that stuff a necessary gameplay element? Or is that like, if you want to zoom into the Europa Universalis 4 map, you can if you want to. Is it like that level of it?

I'll say two things on this. It's definitely the latter. The game's opening is absolutely fascinating because most of the UI is covered in like slats of wood nailed up to it. So they are intentionally from the start trying not to overwhelm you. They're like, the tutorial in this is, the tutorial in this and the Outer Worlds 2, the openings, made me really appreciate player onboarding. I was like, man, they have to do so much work on this shit. So you're doing a lot of this and...

The objectives are fairly surface level. Like, you know, Bill, tap your first thing, your first keg. Get a one star rating in... your drinks or whatever and then the game does a great job of like showing you how the menus work like you hold over them for the while and then you can get to the nested menu you actually get there's a whole part where they do a whole like oh do the camera do the save game do the all that stuff

When you do the save game part, the guy you're talking to is like a wizard or something. He's like, oh, shit, I set your save game on fire. Quick, reload it. And you reload your game. And then he comes back and he's like, oh, phew. They get you to do all this stuff. But then as you're... It's very fun and it's very cute and it totally works. I like it a lot. But then as you're doing the tutorial, little bits of the UI will start shaking.

with the wood and you go click on it and it opens up a new menu. And so they're giving you a lot of this detail throughout the process of playing the game, which I really appreciate. I haven't gone down to some of the nitty gritty stuff like the time management stuff. But yeah, it seems like a game that you can run. If you run the pub, I should just say tavern. If you run the tavern poorly,

I think the only thing that happens is you just don't make as much money as if you were min-maxing everything, you know? So I feel like that level of... Same with the design stuff. Like when you put designs in the world, you put things in the world, it adds to your ambiance and all that sort of stuff. And then it makes happier punters. But ultimately...

how much you care about how that table looks is not going to really move the dial on that all that much. So it's more like player expression, I'd say. Like those are optional things for player expression. I have definitely not felt... overwhelmed and I've unlocked the vast majority of the systems I'd say at this stage. That's good to hear because you were talking about the design stuff and I'm looking at this screenshot on the Steve page of design mode.

Object hierarchy, group 14, and there's a 3D rotation widget on a door for a cabinet. What game is this, brother? What are we playing? Yeah, that's for the sickos. Yeah, that stuff is a lot of that's optional. All that like design stuff. And you can just go on like, you know, Gran Turismo style and just download your favorite skin or whatever, you know, and can you actually download player created? Like I've not done it yet, but yes, that's that's the promise.

Yeah, it's like a marketplace. You can go in and share stuff. And this is early access. I was just going to say, this is early access. You don't feel... Is there a part of this you can point at and say like, okay, they're still working on it? Is there an orc standing somewhere with a sign who's like, we're not ready yet for you to see this? Is it something like that or what are they doing?

I don't, I haven't come across anything like that. I imagine the campaign will end soon enough and then I'll just be doing sandboxy stuff. And I don't know. To me, it seems like these games are just, like early access for some games has just become...

like a moniker for this is a live game. You know what I mean? Like we're going to keep adding stuff to this. We're listening to your feedback and addressing it on a moment to moment basis. So some of the, yeah, some of the early access stuff feels more. not to keep using the word over and over again, but sort of vibe-based or based on the expectations of specific communities within the Steam gaming ecosystem. So yeah, and it's also maybe a bit of a...

You know, it's a release valve in case there's something not working, you know what I mean? Or design stuff they need to figure out. It is like, for early access, this thing is stupidly finished. Or feature rich, let's say that.

Yeah, it's very good. If you like these types of management games, 100% give this thing a whirl. You know, check in on it. Yeah, I was very... I played it in Australia and they had a specific... set by set west style demo for it and i played it and completed it and i liked it um this version is significantly more polished than even that was so i was

yeah sort of it was over my expectation actually so yeah yeah it's it's it's very very good it's got 483 very positive reviews as of two days after launch which is um

Pretty good. I reckon they had a lot of wish lists for this, given the community. But yeah, full-throated support. I really like it. It's great. Wicked. We'll probably have an indie recommendation video up in the next few days. Oh, yeah. Or maybe it's already up because of time. That's how it works.

Jesse, you have another... Do you play this weird queue-up game? I remember seeing a trailer for this and thinking, is this about betting on streamers? It came out this morning, so you've not played all that much, but give it... What is this thing?

Yeah, I've played about an hour of this. Also, I wanted to say Dustin Hoffman. I said Dennis Hoffman earlier. I was very mad at myself the whole time. I'm going to say Dennis Hopper. Imagine Dennis Hopper in Rain Man. That would have been something. It would have been a lot more energetic. Yeah. Maybe a little too much. Yeah. Yeah. Cue up cup. If you want to call it that up to you. Quantum up. Is that what it's called? Who's who's to say this is a multiplayer, but not really.

auto battler coin flipping game. And guess what? The odds every time 50, 50, there are no, there's no. It's not you don't wait the coin. It's not a roguelike where you change the coin or anything. There's no like joke, but there are jokers. So the thing about this is this is a parody of like competitive multiplayer video games, esports, but then also like if you've ever played a mobile game. that is very

you feel like it's cheating to give the other person the advantage. So you, they have the good items and stuff like that. It feels like it's, it's commentary on that. It is definitely a very commentary forward video game. You start on a very big menu with a lot of things to look.

at like it feels like an overwatch menu or like something like that like the finals even maybe to an extent where there's a bunch of things like there's a shop and an about and you have messages you can get like the messages are really funny and they have the commentary sort of stuck in there there is gear you can equip items that you buy from the shop

And like all the upgrades for the shop or a little tongue in cheek, like, Oh, you need gems to unlock the shop. Oh, just kidding. You need two gems to unlock the shop after you already spent a gem to unlock it. Stuff like that. You get emails for like, Oh, the, the, they have a very like. Overly descriptive version of how the the coin flipping works, but like.

It's just, you know, they're explaining quantum physics and like, oh, the the the Newton zone that the coin exists in when it flips on this axis, it can induce a hadron sphere. And like when you hit Q up to Q into it. game. You have this big like e-sports. Everybody walks into the stadium. You don't see the characters, but like the idea is the camera is the characters walking into the stadium. You see a big queue and a big up banner. And then you zoom into what I can only describe as.

the large hadron collider, but in the center of it is just a big coin with a Q on one side and up on the other side, because you have to make sure that you're doing this in a quantumly fair space. Oh, my God. It's a 50 50 chance. Best of five. And then whoever wins wins. But the real goal for the player is not like to win because you can't do that. Like you can't you have no control over that. Your goal is to level up.

And you level up by there's these like skills that your characters have. There's I think there's like nine or ten. I guess ten characters might be eight characters. Each of them has a different special ability and like different. passives where like, Oh, if you flip the coin and it lands on your side, either upper queue, you get randomly assigned one side. If you win, then this will trigger the thing next to it. You don't pick anything.

You don't pick the side of the coin. Do you have no control over anything? Every single thing in this game is a coin flip. Everything's a 50% or like a 5%, 15%. It's very, very funny. It's like poking fun at mobile games. It's poking fun at games as a service. It's poking fun at like e-sports and competitive gaming in its nature because a lot of those games are.

Coin flips half the time. 50% chance something happens. How many of those games have been lost on that? I'm still mad about the World Series. Why did he take his foot? Why did he slide? He should have ran. He would have hit the plate. But it's a very... We I'm excited to play more of it and see more of where the story goes, because right now it is poking fun at a lot of things and I want to see if it sticks on one.

particular note because it keeps sort of jumping around between like it's a joke about corporate culture at video game companies it's a joke about tech bro company it's a joke about quantum physics and how ridiculous that is and hard to process. Like, there's a lot of those angles they're taking. So I think it's very, very funny so far. I like it a lot. Cool. This is from the folks who made Babel Royale, which is a Scrabble Battle Royale game. So that's what we're...

That's what we're sort of working with here, folks. They're in it for the juice. Yeah, the studio's name is Everybody House Games. Yes. They also make universal paperclips. If you're a computer game sicko on the web, then you know about that one.

Yes. Q-op, it's $8.99 currently, 10% off, $10 usually. And then I've got one more to throw in this week. It Takes a War. This is a game I put in my indie recommendation video. Had a very interesting Steam demo that was sort of self-aware because it's a short game. It's only about an hour long. I don't know the price. I did reach out to the publisher about or the comms person about the price. I'm just gonna double check.

He's an old friend actually. Let's see if he's gotten back to me yet. He has not. So I do not know what the price is. I would say it's fairly relevant given the nature of the game and the length of the game. I think 55 minutes on Steam or something like that before I completed it. And it is a, it's an interesting game. I wouldn't, it's not a wholehearted recommendation. I find it very interesting and it definitely tickled me in lots of ways. In other ways, it was, it's telling.

a very particular story and i think it's a personal story and i think oftentimes i play games with personal stories um you know i'd even put great games like dear esther in this where like it it i i i I got it, but it didn't resonate. Let's say that type of thing. But there are parts of this game that also did resonate. So I won't...

You kind of have to talk around it a little bit, and mileage is going to vary on the subject matter and whatnot. But it's essentially a game where you are playing a Counter-Strike 1.6 ass-looking video game with a bunch of other people. And they're all talking on voice chat and it's real voices from these people. And you're playing this game and it's, you know, it's basically about friendships.

It's about like dynamics between these people. You know, what happens sometimes if you're on the outside or you feel a friendship wavering. It's the type of thing that like I think.

would have connected more with me and probably will connect more with people in their like mid 20s. You know what I mean? Like the stuff that's in this that is like, it's a bit saccharine for me being 40 and- married and have a kid like these are issues that i don't yeah i got over this half my life ago i don't care anymore yeah my ego death happened a long time ago like it's like it's fine i i don't but i but i totally get and what i liked about it was it was it was a personal

It definitely seems like Thomas MacKinnon, the creator, this is something very personal to him. I think the... writing and the voice acting is fine it's not incredible a lot of the time it's it's quite good um some other times it's a little bit too saccharine for my tastes um but it was really interesting like i think if you want to sit down for an hour and you like kind of strike one

and you like games that are, like I think in the video I said this was kind of like Stanley Parable meets CS 1.6. It's more of an art game than that, I would say. Stanley Parable sort of pushes through. a more jokiness to it. And there are jokes and I laughed a couple of times. There's some funny moments in it and ridiculous things that happen, which I liked like this.

silly things that happen each time your crew loads into the next round. But I would say that it's more serious. Maybe not serious is the wrong word. It's more of a personal. sort of tale about friendship than a commentary on goofy video games or whatever, you know what I mean? It's not, it's not queue up. This is less of a jovial, funny commentary on games and more of a...

Sort of an analysis of why we play with people online and what do we know about them and what are people like on the other side of the mouse. And I think... For as much of, there were some parts that I, it was a bit too much for me, there were parts that really resonated. There was one part near the end where I was, it was like a fucking, it was a sucker punch. I was like, oh boy, all right, that one hit home.

Yeah. So it's a, it's an interesting game. It's a fun art game. I think if you, yeah, like I said, if you've, you know, 50 minutes to, to, to play something interesting that you'll never play again. I mean, you'll never play again. You actually, it's funny when you complete this game.

literally like says all right you're done you can head out like the servers you know servers are offline kind of thing um but no more like you you won't have played a game like this before like it is very singular and very vision driven um so yeah so i think for that reason i'm also quite like i'm on its side you know what i mean i think it was a it's a cool game and i'm glad i played it um

Yeah, it takes a war. It's one that's hard to talk about because it's 50 minutes long and it's about, it's trying to keep its cards close to its chest. So I'll leave it there, I guess. I want to check that out for sure.

not to distract from it. Cause I think this sounds like an interesting thing and I'm probably, I'm just in that age range where I'll probably get something out of it. But, um, have you played the beginner's guide? No, no, no, no. What do I have to do? What do I have to do to get you guys to play the beginner's guide? You and Jeremy both.

As people who like video games need to play that game. Like you like the design of them. You like the narrative of telling the stories of the people who make them. It's such a, ah, I think I played a demo of it or something.

No, it's long time ago. I might have. Okay, I'm adding it to my car now. It's 10 hours. Play it. Play the game. Okay, I'll play the fucking beginners game. Game of the year fucking season, Jesse. It's not that long. It's like three or four hours long. Okay, I'll play it and I'll enjoy it. Okay.

That's all the games. Wait, no, what about Ghost of Yote? Frank, we're going to talk about Ghost of Yote. Sorry, I'm not going to leave him on. Yeah, come on. Tenderhooks like Dosh. Frank, you having fun in Yote? Yeah, it's incredible. Oh, my God. I was like a month late. This game is so good. It's so cool. I like it even more than original Ghost of Tsushima. The biggest reason is I'm playing with both the Watanabe mode on and the Takashi Miike mode.

It's extremely bloody and filthy, and it's got chill beats the entire time. The music's incredible. I'm doing the thing where it's Japanese dialogue, English subtitles. Yeah, it's so great and smooth. And the thing I really like about it...

It's insane. Turning on the PS5, and even if you've closed the app, if you boot up Ghost of Tsushima, it boots up instantly, and there you are on the field ready to go to your next mission. So it's the easiest game to pick up, play, do one little... can't like you get like maps and you figure out spots like every time i like that i like that stuff it's like map finding yeah trying to like you you

put the map over the world map to try and find where it goes yeah i love that yeah it's cool it's cool yeah everything is in it's like the the context of it's nice like you'll sit down to rest and then a traveler will come up to your camp it's like oh i heard there were some bandits over there and you'll get like a oh you heard there's bandits in this area and then you can go back to town and ask the map maker to like give you a map for it so it's like

Again, it does the nice, it's like the in-between, like, you know, when Breath of the Wild came out, it changed open-world games forever, where it's like, okay, how much do we tell the player up front? Ghost of Tsushima, sorry, Ghost of Yotei is very natural with it. But yeah, like, the map is kind of... It's natural, but it's like, oh, there's like, it's like almost like a grid, like every square block. There's like a shrine to do, a puzzle, a wolf's den, whatever. But it's.

it's so rewarding and yeah i'm doing kind of like even outer worlds where it's the thing where it's like all right let me do all the side stuff in this zone for like i can already go to the next area get a different weapon but i'm like no no i'm not i'm not done here and the progression's very nice like um

like yeah there's bow and arrow stuff like there's different trees but yeah now i'm finally leveling up my assassination stuff and now that like that is so satisfying doing an entire camp where you're just stealth killing you can hide in the bushes um yeah so it's just it's just very good

Very, very smooth. So I'm liking it. But specifically, yeah, the Watanabe mode and Miike. Because the last game only had the Kurosawa mode, which puts it in black and white, which is neat. Which this game also has. Yes. Yeah. But like what I like about this game and I also increase like you can turn on like.

increased contrast so the game is so colorful and just bold with its visual style like it's so pretty did you have trouble with the because the Kurosawa mode the biggest issue I had was that like you were so reliant on the color of swings coming in for whether or not you're supposed to block or if it's a heavy one. And all that stuff is obfuscated in black and white, I'm pretty sure.

yeah so that's why i don't play with the curse i toggle it on for a minute to see and it's cute because it like there's the film grain but even the audio gets kind of tinny which is cool but yeah i i i i have the the colors and stuff on but like playing this it feels like

even though it's American made, like it's the, it's like a Japanese red dead. Cause it's like, you're just on your horse, you're traveling around and like, there's even bounties. You can, that's my favorite thing is you go into town. You check the bounty board and there's a bounty for your character. Oh, this woman is going around killing people. We need to put it in. You rip it down. Yeah, you rip the bounty, but it stays in your mission log. So it's like you can see the...

bounties it's like oh i gotta find this person which is really really funny so yeah just everything about it it's like clever and nice and like there is story stuff you can like go back to your parents farm and flashback and do like oh let's do blacksmithing with dad which is like

cute but whatever um there's a lot of all these playstation games have the force like oh blow into your playstation stuff like that that i don't like but you can hold x to skip that stuff yes thank god when you're doing the cooking or any of that stuff yeah yeah you can if you want you can do all that shit

But yeah, it was nice that they let you skip it. It's pretty frictionless that way. Nice one. Yeah, I'm glad you're enjoying it. I liked it too. I don't think it has the same impact as the first one because the first one obviously came out of the blue and was just so strong. And I'm not sure the central story I'm as interested in as the first one. I really, really enjoyed the thrust of the first one. I need to play more, though, because I think the stuff between...

Yeah, I won't. It's hard to talk about, but the main character is solid. It's just that I'm not super enthralled in the story stuff yet, but I think... I should give it a bit more time and maybe that'll come across. But the rest of the game is, yeah, it's very fun, very gorgeous looking thing. Good stuff. Thanks, Frank. Appreciate it, brother. That's all the games. Ark Raiders, The Outer Worlds, Hades 2. No, I didn't talk about Hades 2. I'll talk about it tomorrow. Tavern Keeper, It Takes a War.

Ghost of Yotei, egging on, and queue up. As ever, Jesse will have all that stuff in the show description. Thank you very much, Jesse. You're the best. Frank, we got some emails here.

Yeah, we have two emails that people want to write to us. Our email address is podcast at noclip.video or in our patron and the podcast chat channel. Once again, that's podcast at noclip.video. First question comes from Ken asking about end of your back.

What's the number one release from 2025 you want to circle back on before Game of the Year discussions? Until recently, mine was South of Midnight, which I just got to play and absolutely adored. It has some of the best storytelling and art design I've experienced in years and is setting grossly under...

underrepresented in the medium between rewatching sinners and my mother's anecdotes about living in the deep South. This game was really clicking for me. Oh, cool. That's cool. That's recently. Very good. Story, yeah. I think you, Ken has mentioned all of the best parts of that game. Is the gameplay fairly basic? Getting around is fine. I like the movement mechanics are really good. Combat.

If that game didn't have combat, I think it would be a better game and people would probably like a little bit more. It's kind of like, I don't care. Like the boss fights are cool, but like the side stuff is just like beat the black wisp with your white wisp power. And I'm like, okay. Have any of you guys played Keeper yet? No racial on the colors. Sorry, what? Has anyone played Keeper yet? Yes. The double fine game. Yeah, I played like half an hour of it.

I'm just like flicking through game of the year stuff to see if there's anything that I need to go play more. Like I played Atomfall. Like that's really cool. I want to play more of that. But Keeper is like a playable painting. There is virtually nothing going on. It's like, it's very simple puzzles. very linear and straightforward it's good but it's like it's just a very cool art piece it feels like so far maybe by the end it'll be more deep cool we'll see um

Adam fall is one that I was hoping some other people would play. Cause I absolutely love that. I really liked the opening, man. That start was great. Yeah. Yeah. I need to play more skin deep. Me too. That's a big one. I need to play set the midnight as well. Maybe as well. Um,

Yeah, I think Skin Deep is one for me. I need to play more Claire Obscure. I think I played five or six hours. I've really enjoyed it, but I want to play more of it. Death Stranding 2, I've not played enough of. I'm, you know, I need to... Give that a proper go. And Silk Song as well. I've not played enough of. Yeah, Hades 2.0, post 1.0. I've been sort of fixing that this week. I played a shitload of it, which was good fun. Anything else for you guys? Yeah, Promise Mascot Agency.

They sent a keyboard a million years ago and I was like, I need to wait until I'm mentally prepared to play this video game. I really want to give it all my attention and focus. And I haven't had much of that this year. So I've been waiting for a good excuse to play it. And I think it's finally time. time that I really sit down and give it a full...

Full, uh, full try. Cause I thought paradise killer was one of the best games I ever played personally. I love it. Love the music, love the presentation, the writing, all the characters were great. Um, the demo for this was good for promise mascot agency. So got to give it a shot and the music's banging alpha Chrome. Yay. It was on there. So, you know, it's good.

I still have to do Outer Worlds 2, keep playing some more of that. I feel like there's a bunch of indie games that I'm probably going to... I mean, we could open our dock, actually, the game of the year one. It's already... Absolutely insane. It's bursting. With games. It's throbbing here. It's turgid. We have a turgid sheet. Like rematch. Oh yeah, rematch. Schedule 1.

Yeah, there's a bunch of these. Omogenics. Yeah, we should check that out. That'll be fun. That's not out until next year. You've got it on here. The altars. Do I have it on there? Yeah. Do I have it as a joke? I have it as in like, not yet. The alters I need to play post-release. I played the demo. And Roger as well is another one. Dude, and Roger. Oh my god. Make sure you're ready for that. Oh boy. Take like a weekend.

Oh boy. I don't have a beer line around or something afterwards. Anyone going to go back to blueprints? I don't know. I don't think it's for me. Yeah. Frank, do you even care? No, that's fine. I don't care about it. There's only a little bit of math. Actually, it gets worse the more you do it. Don't do it. Silent Hill F I want to play, but it's $90. It's $90. Canadian. So I was 70 American or something like that.

Yeah, dude, that's why I don't play AAA. I want to play Digimon Storytime Stranger so bad, but it's $94 plus tax. When did that come out? Two months ago, month and a half, something like that. It was like the Digimon game. Fucking expensive, man. Just brother. It's a hundred dollars. I'm not billing you for a video game that no one else is going to want to play either. Like, I'm just going to play it. I would like to play it.

Yeah, make it. What if it's one of the best game of the years? Who's the publisher? It's going to be for me. Let's get some keys. Bamco. I was emailing something. I don't know if things fell through and I just didn't get it. But I got the key for Frank for Once Upon a Katamari. So I don't know what happened there.

They saw that I like Digimon too much and they were like, forget about this guy. Yeah. They were like, we're going to break his sweet little harsh. Is there like a four pack on Steam? I wish. Can we go to Costco? Do they have like code things we can bundle it together? I'll do it that way.

Is it a four-player loot shooter? No, no. I like the idea that we all have to play it. Again, any game that takes place in Tokyo, I'll play. You go to Akihabara in this game. Oh, this takes place in Tokyo. I thought it was in the digital world.

or like it's a mocked but no yeah you're you're like there's a fake JR logo on like I looked at the trailer like there's I think there's Shibuya or yeah so it's like it's a game that you're in Japan walking around so there you go all right maybe I will expense it he said so I have to Play more Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 as well. So do I. That game is so good. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of games. It's going to be a crazy month. Are you going to play Donkey Kong Bonanza? Are you going to play that?

I played a bit of it. Yeah, yeah. I got the Switch 2. Mario Kart is just nonstop in our house since we got it. It's so much fun. Insane. It's so good. We almost have all the fucking guys. We can't. The last one we need is like one of the last character we need is like one of the ones that you get from the magic man and they're random. So it's one of the mobs. So we just, we just love Ghana. It's killing me. My OCD brain is absolutely losing its mind.

Any other ones? I do want to make one more point about this setup. Is there like a cutoff for time? Like in terms of the game of the year? Like when are we going to stop saying this is... Legible or eligible rather, because like December 4th, Octopath Traveler Zero comes out and routine that space survival horror game. Terminator 2D, no fate got moved again, Frank, to like.

The middle of December or something. It's like Seat Stories December 8th. Is that too late, you think? Probably, right? Oh, what the hell? Yeah, Determinator 2 got pushed to December 12th. What the hell? Yeah, second delay. It's going to come out in September. I mean, fucking December 12th, no.

Okay, fine. Sorry, Terminator. But like, I don't know, maybe we have a special slot. We keep one slot open or something. That's a good question. I don't know. Probably first week of December. Like we're going to have to record the podcast the first week of December. True.

Hey, you dropped Indiana Jones in there on that for it when no one else had played it. You got lucky. It was good though, right? It was. It was a good ass video game. Yeah. Jeremy hated it. Good ass documentary. Did he hate it? I don't know. He didn't like it very much. Did he? Yeah. He was over there.

All right. I'm trying to think if there's anything else, but Jeremy will be back next week. He's coming back from his little vacation. Yeah, which is pretty good. I can't wait. Can we take this next email from Steve and Frank? Yeah, Steven wrote in about accessibility. We often hear about games that are hard to complete or in some instances never complete. What are your opinions on accessibility for difficulty?

So that difficult games reach a larger audience and more gamers experience the wonder and majesty of some really, really good games. Interested in your thoughts on the subject? Difficulty is like a... is it is like a it's a game mechanic it's it's like it's it's fake like games are there to get you to complete them and some games have more like tension with that and other games don't so i

I think it's great if a designer has the way they want you to play the game. Like most first-person shooters, they're like normal. And then they have easy and then they have the sicko modes. This has been going back as far as Wolfenstein, like accessibility options and difficulty options are the same thing to me. I think it's just. the game deviating from its critical path to allow people to experience them. I think the more we can make games accessible to more people, the better.

But specifically as, because I know this gets involved in this whole conversation about artistic intent and difficulty and all that sort of stuff. And I think what happens there is that some gamers kid themselves into thinking that these games are like mountains to climb and they're not themed. parks to go to that like most games are designed to get you to the end like you're not like defeating you know this this impossible task you know like it's actually

the game is giving you the tools to do it. So like, don't look down on people who need a little bit of help or who want a little bit of help. Like, I think that's totally fine. Who gives a fuck? Like, you know, let people see the game if they don't. Will they have a less valuable experience than you? Perhaps. I don't know. Mileage varies on Arsh. But yeah, I have no problem with it all. Yeah. Difficulties like taste. Like if you've played a lot of platformers.

Mario probably is boring and sucks, but like little kids fucking love Mario, man. It's great. And also find it challenging because it's not, they don't understand the nuance of how Mario jumps and how that feels. Like how long can you hold the run button and have it still be viable?

based on the level design like that's something that just becomes innate to you you don't think about it anymore but that stuff is challenging for some players and it's like you know people aren't having difficulty conversations about Mario in terms of the accessibility it's usually games that yeah are turned into like

this is my my cross to bear is dark souls i am a real true gamer like that's not like your ego chest beating difficult game it's always about that like no they shouldn't you and i'm you know It's great that people play those difficult games. It took From Software about four of those games to get people in the mass market to actually do it. So, which is great for them. But like, yeah, if there was an easy mode in Dark Souls, I just wouldn't pick it.

Because it wouldn't feel like, but I'm happy for it to be there. When I'm playing Celeste and I go to the options menu and it's like, hey, here's the infinite lives mode. But they stop you and they say like, hey.

If you want the intended Celeste experience, this is not it. But if you want to see the game through to the end and see the story, like we have an option for players like that. I think if you see something wrong with that, I feel like you're like the designers put that in there. If you're like, that's against the designers intent.

They put that there. The designer did it. They did it to appeal to a market, but it's a video. It's a toy you spent money on. Everything is there for a reason to sell it to somebody to some extent. It's a different conversation, but whatever. I don't know. I feel like every time we get into this of the hundred times I've seen it happen since I've been.

thinking about video games really hard online. It's always like, it never goes anywhere and it's just like, yo, my game, I'm special for playing this game. Why can other people do it? It's like, I can do it because I spent the time to learn. I think accessibility, the only important part of it.

to me is like making it available for people who live with disabilities that like make it harder for them to game, whether that's visible or like audible or whatever, like making that easier for people is great. It's important. Yeah. Absolutely. More people can play, the better. And that goes into loads of stuff like localization and all that sort of stuff. It's really cool that we have pipelines within.

production and we have companies that even like do a lot of work and accessibility and in terms of not just like doing you know policy stuff but also like there are companies that studios hire to help instruct the types of accessible design they should be doing and stuff like that yeah and and when that when those two worlds rub up against each other we do have this sort of online friction about that stuff and yeah i think we all sort of lie on the side of

I'm, I will, I am, I will play the game in the pure way, but I am fine with there being options for other people that doesn't take away from my feeling of experience or accomplishment or whatever, you know, whatever. It's all good.

Don't shoot. Friendly. Easy mode. Yes. You know what I mean? I'm not doing squads. I'm pinging. I'm doing it. Yeah. Let's go to the water station. That's podcast this week, folk. It's in the water station. Exactly. We need to exit here. You can hear all those beeps, can't you, when you sleep, Jesse? So good. That's a podcast, folks. Thank you so much. Welcome to pre-Game of the Year season. Like I said, we're going to have pretty much all the Game of the Year stuff dropping in December.

The format's going to change a little bit this year, but it'll largely be similar in terms of vibe and the amount of... content. If anything, we'll be making more than usual because of Noclip 2. So yeah, we're going to be picking out a bunch of games that are our games of the year. We will not be listing them 1 to 10 or anything like that. We may be changing up the...

giving them random awards thing. We'll see about that. But I suspect we will have a bunch of podcasts here in December where we go through everything. And then also we will have videos hitting Noclip 2 across December. of that we are going to be producing a lot of that stuff this month so if um we have a bunch of stuff hitting note clip 2 including the demon school um exclusive uh preview we have the um a bunch of indie recommendations hitting of course and and some new

and interesting stuff that we're going to be testing out as well. On top of the Disco Elysium dock hitting noclip proper and then Cyberpunk starting in December hopefully as well. That might just, we'll see how much of that's going to actually make it out in December with all this going on.

So there's loads, there's loads, there's loads happening over here. And once again, thank you all so much for supporting us. We still need more patrons on the Noclip2 Patreon. So we're really valuable, really appreciate anyone who's... who is chipping in over there, we're at about 641 paid patrons, which is really awesome.

The growth we've seen over there has been pretty consistent and cool. And same on the YouTube channel with subscribers and viewers. And I'm having really cool chats with developers of some really big, cool games about doing previews and everything else. people wanting to help us out and sponsor new features and do all kinds of shit. So, yeah, I'm excited for what's going on over there. And it's just been a lot of fun. Like, I've...

I've had a blast doing all this stuff and hopefully you guys have as well making them and hopefully the folks watching have, uh, have enjoyed them too. That's good stuff. So yeah, for the moment, just check out Spooky Sessions over on Noclip2 if you're a patron. The podcast and the four videos are up. of us playing the spookiest games we played last, or that we played in our lives, that all that stuff came out. We have a indie recommendation for Stray Children.

The Inspiration Turducken, as Jesse put it, a game made by some folks and inspired by folks who, by the game that Undertale was itself inspired by, Stray Children. It's, yeah, it's one of those games. If you are into those games, you should check out this video. If you do not like those games, you can maybe pass on this video. It's like, it's one of those ones, which is pretty cool. Yeah, and we'll have some more. I'm going to try and do an indie rec this week for...

Tavern Keeper are going to record it later today with Frank. And we might have some more stuff. Do you guys think maybe we'll leave it mysterious for now? Yeah, I'm going to check a couple things out. There's one that I'm pretty confident on, but I want to put some time into it and see if it works as the way that we do indie recs.

Excellent. Yes, I will be filming in San Francisco Thursday and Friday, so for something mysterious. Exactly. I'm trying to come up with a funny reference. That'll work. I'll be going... To hell and back. To hell and back. Which, of course, I'm referring to the greater San Francisco commuting area. Take the bus. I will see. I will. I will take the bus. I will take the... Maybe I'll take the boat. I'll talk to the boat man. And he'll go... Oh, right.

Alright, let's get the fuck out of here. Thanks for listening to the pod, folks. We'll see you next week. And Jeremy will be back. Woo-hoo! We'll talk him all about the shit he played. See you guys. Bye!