ARC Raiders, The Outer Worlds 2, Tavern Keeper | Noclip Crewcast

Episode 252 of the noclip papa papa, papa papa podcast.

Pick up a penguin, we're here.

Jesse grash is here on the wheels of steel.

How you doing, my friend, 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 it.

Wheels of wheels of steel.

I meant like like disco wheels like oh okay, like you know, like you got the two worker worker, they make them out of steel, is that they don't?

But I mean, do they?

I don't know Frank, do they?

Do you ever?

Have you ever?

Uh, if you ever, I don't know have you ever been to a like a, an EDM club before we got to a dance night, some drum and bass 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 uh no, I don't know.

What's Magra.

So Magra is a, uh, it's in the, it's in the Japan video.

It's a, and they stream on Twitch all the time.

So like they run from like midnight to 5am Tokyo time.

So when I wake up in the morning, the club is still going and you can see the Twitch stream.

But it's yeah it's, it's a, it's a, it's a basement club where they just play like anime music, J pop, video game, music.

And they also have visuals on screen.

Uh and uh 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 us. 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.

Outer Worlds 2, of course, came out this week.

Do 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 and 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.

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 Yotei.

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, 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 100000 hours long.

It just never ends.

And it's dark by like 5 p.m.

I don't know what it is by 3 p.m.

I'm like as much.

It's 10 p.m.

Surely I check my phone and it's.

Oh, God, I'm 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.

Maybe I felt more so there than London.

I wonder if it's because where we are in 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 because 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 but i think somebody mentioned there was a 45 minute one as well which is just like you're what you're getting into you know i'll just i'll i'll meet you outside the bar at you know whatever 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 ludicrous yeah it's like also australia has seven states apparently um as per this image i'm looking at you were close you were close uh do you have the names of them yeah go ahead uh 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 uh darwin's the guy no i don't i don't see it here listed anyway unless i'm looking at northern most city is it not there is there what's that city sure let me look darwin australia darwin australia you got three i know you got three more you got three more i don't call like is what i don't call like the central territories or the emu there is a territories okay northern western territories is 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.

Sorry.

The picture I was looking at was so small.

That's a separate.

Is that 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.

Puerto Rico counts.

That's America.

Sure, but in Tasmania, they're probably allowed to vote.

Hopefully, yeah.

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.

Yeah.

In Tasmania, okay.

So the ones I missed were north, south, and west.

They were so simple that you wouldn't have possibly guessed that that was.

I mean, we have one up here, 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 fuck it.

You're stupid.

This is dumb.

The sun doesn't care what you think.

Exactly.

We're not harvesting corn or raising cows. 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 care 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 oh it's too early we can't get them now exactly that well i don't know so that's the thing we disagree on that but we'll see we're gonna test it out and see what happens um 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 uh maybe we had we had so like our main coon died last last week uh but in the interim we had been completely unrelated we were not trying to replace him um yeah 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 there 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, 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 hissed

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 Blade 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 and now you have a family member.

Then is that what you're saying?

Permanent making a play, and he's kind of a main 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.

Um, and then the other guy fucking his shift.

Last night he came around and he got some food and i'm like 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 a back to say hello, exactly.

No, don't get me sorry sorry sorry, it's fine, it's just a pet, it's okay.

Um yeah, but i was like uh, I have to, I have a child.

I'm like whenever people are like crazy, and I just I'm going to offend a bunch of our listeners that whenever people are like super babyish about their dogs, and I get it.

Dogs are way more smart than cats.

Like, 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, shit 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.

It seems a bit much, so i went.

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, that's good, we might go for 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.

Right?

True.

Yeah.

Right?

Sure.

What a great movie.

Daywalker.

Call him Daywalker.

It's good, too.

That'd be a good name.

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 Blade.

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 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, Frank, what's the worst wrestler to actor?

Hulk Hogan.

You think it is legitimately the worst?

Yes.

Yeah.

There's no thing.

It just is.

Yeah.

What was the name of that movie again?

Well, there's like suburban commando there.

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 this.

There's some days I hate this job.

And like, that was his review.

It's like after going to, after seeing suburban commando, I don't know if I like the movies anymore.

It's not like that, but like, Because 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, you know, Captain Insano.

Like 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.

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 in anything he's in sucks so much.

But it's – he is good in Gremlins too.

That's the only legitimately good role.

He's in Gremlins too.

Is that the one where he yells at the movie theater, right?

He's like, get these idiots off the screen!

Yeah, yeah.

So in the theatrical and Blu-ray version – 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.

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 vh, in the vhs version of gremlins 2 they, they fiddle with the vcr and it cuts to like the a team and it's mr t and he's like listen, i pay the fool, don't fix the vcr.

I love that.

You know this.

Yeah yeah, this is great that that might be on, like the blu-ray extras.

But the vcr edition is like lost to time.

But because like that's not in, you know, so that's like right right, so like they would do that a lot, 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 etc, etc.

Now our thing is like there's one version of something.

Yeah tv, i watched uh, i watched christine last week for the first time and um, The John Carpenter, you know movie about a crazy death.

Okay.

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 seventies.

That's strange.

Um.

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 version.

No 20 minutes, uh, that I missed out on.

And I was like, man, the plot in this movie is so fast.

It's 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 and then that's why like, when batista became an actor, it actually started getting cast in prestige films.

That's why the rock had to like stop.

Like 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 gotta 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.

Apologies to the French.

You are fragile, no?

Love it.

You know who we love?

J'adore le Battle Pass Hordales.

I will not do the entire line in French, I promise.

All of our awesome Patrons like Lev Preet, Yut, Tiny Tal, Dwayne the Rock Lobster.

Congratulations on the smashing machine.

Anthony Thomas, Nico Bassateri, It's a me, Ferrario.

I'm glad I didn't have to do the Italian accents in a French accent.

Senator Armstrong, Redredge Harry Flanagan, Douche Arno, Matt Pearson, James Brown, Mark Rojas.

Quote Tucker Morgan, David McGarry Goddison, Sven Hooster, Pez John Akers.

You and Nate.

Tim Robinson.

Forrest Pruitt.

Dark Insanities.

Jonathan Kremen.

Eric Hamilton Schneider.

Christophe Fatui.

Enochs.

Grizzly Mug.

Cameron Laird.

Zachary Snader.

Alex Goucher.

George Sakotas.

Jacob Godserve.

Entheogen.

James Med.

A bit late.

You're almost forgot there, Jesse.

It's all right.

Uh, toyota and ricin.

Thank you all so much.

Uh, we did the halloween names last week.

There was one for you frank which uh, 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.

Really yeah, it's good.

Maybe it was okay.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ching chill zone.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ching.

Oh, wow, right in.

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.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ching.

Okay, folks, welcome.

We're in the chill zone.

This is a special pocket of a podcast within a podcast, as the McElroys would say, all about our creators.

This is the sign on the door to let you know that Secret Tape, our white label company, has done a series on Ark Raiders.

It'll be coming out very soon on Ark Raiders' 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 Ark Raiders 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, but 7Frank, obviously.

Frank was over in Sweden with us on the crew.

We also played the game there.

We played the game here as well.

We had access to development builds and their testing that they were doing twice a week.

So we played a lot of it.

You hadn't touched this.

Had you touched the tech test or any of the... previews that they had done at any stage.

Not a dang old thing about Ark Raiders.

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.

Jesus, really?

I don't do that anymore.

I played it for like, I woke up at maybe 9 a.m. on Sunday.

I think I played it until 11 p.m.

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?

Did I game too hard?

I thought I was sick.

I was no, I was sick from gaming too hard.

You have Speranza-itis.

Exactly, yes.

Yeah, Ark 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 fun. 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, it's not really that bad.

It's a full ish price, like double a price game.

I think it's like 40 bucks, right?

50 bucks, 40 bucks.

Um, 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.

It's basically a bottle pass by any other name.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's our, it's our in universe version of a battle pass.

Um, 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.

Uh, But yeah, it's so it's 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 development?

Because I was like maybe we shouldn't say actually I'm not sure, but when I saw 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 on the mission.

I think it was like bullcrab 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.

Ah, interesting.

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 algorithms and brain building that Boston Dynamics does for their robots.

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 the headline of them like you know making guns or whatever you know like or or you know making the level or doing shit like that um, but yeah, they have.

Well, 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 and it's 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 and like this before.

You blow 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, because it's like running away from you, but its 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 him.

We were like, yeah, let's go, man.

So that that part of it, the yeah, let's go, man.

The character player interaction stuff that I'm seeing is like so exciting.

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, 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.

I can draw the drones.

People know where you are.

Like it's risky to extract, which is part of the tension.

Even how 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 out.

Totally, yeah.

Or 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't hit the button if you're down.

Yes, exactly as well, you can.

Yeah, you can crawl up and you have 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, 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 gunned 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 things, 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 some of them are.

It's weird because it's 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's like so it seems so unnecessary, especially for the quest stuff.

Right.

Why would you not just use people who just a couple can 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 Benzer, 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 eight 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, 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 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?

It's which I can totally get.

It's a lead time issue.

It's like a, it's like a, and we have to be locked into the script.

Like it's the same reason why scripts in games, you know, I'll, I'll talk to Greg.

I'm sure about this with the Haiti 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 that 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 have 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 100 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 Ark Raiders.

It's a lot of, like, specific shit.

Like, 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, fucking rename 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 like that's.

What i'm saying is the voice call of duty, battlefield sparks.

They have call outs 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, quests 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 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 then have somebody turn around and go.

Oh, you know, these are our 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 2000 hours in and every quest is getting read out, still I'm going to blow my brains out.

It's so many voice lines that are playing just now.

I don't know.

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, like i'm sure it's a timeline, it saves money oh, guaranteed it saves money.

But it's not not, it's dropping the bucket shit.

We're talking about triple a game development.

Hiring voice actors for a few is not, 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 cause they have no like NPCs in this game.

So the only way I can see that they can do this whole building, the lower thing is with voices.

Um, so that's the, 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, the issue you're bringing up is, is an irrelevant one in terms of the quality as well.

Um, 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, just having played years of games of voices that were digitally made.

It's like, I think, 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 or not that making thousands of those every hour because people are, you know, hammering those data servers to make all that slop um, i don't know, but at least that's the production, i think.

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, it's.

This is clearly a production problem that they've run into and something that they wanted to find a solution to.

Yeah, but yeah um, 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 there, 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 had a 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.

It's if a game is, is it a logical excuse?

Does it make sense?

I mean, it's an excuse.

Everyone, you can logic your way into any excuse for sure.

Cause.

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 worker voice work.

People were setting up their own boots 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, 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 a, 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 an external studio that it's like voice actors dedicated to that.

Yeah.

I 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 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 um, 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 premier to do assembly cuts of my doc, so I didn't have to fuck or log the, I guess it does log the scripts.

I literally could do that right now.

I don't, but I think it automatically fucking makes uh, makes uh captions and scripts of everything.

You can edit by text or whatever.

And I don't use that shit.

But um yeah, so i don't know, i i just, i like, i like having conversations about the nitty-gritty on this stuff, because i'm not saying what they did is right uh, i'm but but i think there's so much lost in the nuance with this stuff and and there is a big difference between, you know, generative stuff and art led or design led decisions when it comes to this um, this stuff.

But yeah, the voice acting is not going to win any no, any prizes.

I think the ones on the cut scenes are better or something.

I 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.

I don't 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 I'm skipping over it 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, yeah, 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.

I just feel like what you've just said and it's 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.

Uh, I think, I think we're here, baby.

Um, 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 for 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 has 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.

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, in games like this.

And if that is the case, I imagine we'll hear that a lot more.

Um, and I don't know if that's good.

Cause, like five years from now, if our graders 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.

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 in a lot of this stuff is that like do I think – I don't like a lot of this generative 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 ChatGPT or Sora or whatever it is, where you have a planet of people making shit.

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, 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 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.

But like 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 I think a lot of the we fired all these people for AI stuff is is the type of shit you say to your shareholders to make it sound better.

Like you're like fire people was a good excuse.

Yeah.

So I don't trust a lot of that stuff.

And I also think, like the socioeconomic 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 what about ism, and I 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 that are just like you know.

I think the biggest thing that will happen is when, whenever this bubble does burst, that's what's going to fucking ruin everything.

But yeah, 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, 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 issue, and that that and them giving access, using invisible money to give people access to generate slop, that ends up um uh uh, you know burning, burning all of our resources and and and fucking ruining companies and all that sort of stuff.

I.

I think there's going to be a more limited effect, like driverless cars, like people said, and 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 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 and the llms is 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 level designers?

Not really.

Is that an apples to oranges comparison?

Perhaps.

But 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.

It's very, very different.

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 I don't know.

I think.

Yeah, I don't know.

I, 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 daddy, 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 AI stuff my, my position on it has been fairly neutral.

You've been consistent, consistent on it.

So yeah it's, it's a yeah, and i hate that because, because it, because then i spend all my time praising it.

I'm 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 Maybe, that's.

The thing is 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'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 – And sometimes just shit makes you feel gross.

Yeah, totally.

And this is one of those.

You don't have to – yeah, you don't have to argue it.

It's like that's fair.

Like if you just – if you see that and you go, ugh. like you do with the voice acting.

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 moral argument to hate something.

Like I get that.

That's, that's, that's totally fine.

Um, yeah.

So yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm sympathetic to that response.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Yeah.

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 you were – 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 like uh.

Some woman run past me yesterday and was just like hey, i'm just doing a quest, but like i wanted to see what you were doing up here because i was opening one of the the, the arcs.

Um, 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 gotta back off because the fire, the vent, comes up and like all the fire comes out.

I will say, with the questing outside of the, the vo stuff, i think that stuff is really smart.

The tutorial on the game is very short right, they give you just 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 um, 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 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 PUBG 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 two guys or kill a bunch of rocketeers, or kill a rocketeer probably.

And then sometimes it's like oh like, use that, cause 200, like a thousand damage to other raiders using a machine gun.

And I'm like, oh, great.

Daddy's given 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 do.

Revive them and then just keep doing it.

Yeah, because you're getting the, you're getting the, the points.

Yeah, you're a monster, you.

What do you think?

Getting people up at battlefield six just to snipe them again, just waiting here for the xp?

That's all it is.

Baby frank's in the inner, for the love of the sport, that's uh.

That's it, uh.

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 it 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 nighttime 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 the effect uh, 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.

You can slide on your butt, which is very funny.

I 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 awesome, crazy.

The finals was like pretty good.

It's a launch 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.

And bark is uh, is on a whole nother level in terms of their technical, uh prowess.

It's it's yes.

Arc raiders is i don't know man I, 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, 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 um, 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 of a pub g game of a, 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, you do that at home.

I've had no problem with the amount of resources I have.

Like I'm, 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 got to go, I got to 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.

Did you get the cat bed?

Oh, no, no.

That's cute though.

You got to update.

I think it's for like level three scrappy.

You got to get it right.

You got to find a cat bed.

So.

I, and a couple of other things to make it happen.

Um, so I'll say that like the, 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's single shot rifle.

Yeah.

Rifle.

I like that one a lot.

Um, but, uh, but yeah, I'll say, I think the in-between menu stuff is, is fun enough.

Um, 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.

And I, 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 hover 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.

And it be too hard to find it unless it's like an epic item or something like the rarity obviously impacts how yeah easy it is to find um i agree on the menuing the game isn't yeah it's it's a bit cumbersome and i i i get what they're trying to do to try and make it feel like this is a place right yeah but it's just menus right so and these are people even though they're just voice lines set by ai so it's yeah it's it's yeah maybe i did that yeah we probably so at least some of it if not all of it um so Yeah, I think that stuff is a little bit tricky.

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 some of them have night raids and you unlock them by doing various things.

But it's fairly trivial.

I'd say you unlock 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 as 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 um 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 Skinner 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 in Simi and 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.

Like, it's so good.

Even how they sound.

Yep.

You know, because they're, like, kind of da-da-da-da.

Like, they sound panicky.

They're the R2-D2 fucking.

Yeah, it's all very contrived, but it works.

You know, it's like, oh, this is very, like, you know, video game-y 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.

So yeah, it's cool.

I yeah, I'm surprised by how good it I knew that I would enjoy it, but I 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 in the finals anyway.

The final was obviously free to play.

I think 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 co carnage play a little bit of it.

I was like, that's not for me, man.

I'm not doing that.

Getting to second monitor with a map on it.

You got to track the sun and shit.

I'm not doing that.

Like, 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 art.

I don't know, nuke the level until it's reset and all the 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 could 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.

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, you're exposed.

It's like beeping.

Yeah, you're like shut the fuck up.

Yeah kunk, kunk with your big hammer axe thing.

Yeah, it's great.

Yeah, it's wild.

All right, chill zone over.

That was Arc 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 just about this.

Like 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.

Um, 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.

Um, but yeah, it does seem like the type of thing that is, um, yeah, is some of it's not going away.

Hopefully, a lot of it is um, and we're going to unfortunately have to talk about it.

Um uh, 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.

Um, i played on pc, frank.

What did you play on?

Did you xbox, this bad boy?

Yeah yeah, on game pass, xbox series x.

Excellent okay, series series x.

Um, 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 in.

I could probably check my save, but like I'm on the second planet now.

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 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 uh like in a good way limited thing where it's like it's not too overwhelming instead of there being one giant map oh okay you did everything on this planet time to go 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 but like So it's so much more relaxing as opposed to when I play games, I'll get like 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.

So yeah, I really like it.

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 way more challenging.

And I've had to, like think more about my builds 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 you'll deconstruct stuff.

I'm not doing any of the shops except to buy like, crafting mods and things like that.

So um yeah, so so now i'm on the second planet.

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.

So read a book.

And So this does the same thing, like with like, New Vegas has a skill check thing.

I think even Baldur'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, there's so many valuable like choices and paths you can do.

So yeah, I think my character right now is like speech, hacking skills 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 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 just almost like very simpsons like blah blah blah, welcome to the amazon play.

And it's just like okay, i get it, i get it.

Um, But the gameplay and graphics are really nice.

One thing that is cool is, we mentioned Venture Brothers last week.

James Urbaniak is one of the voice actors in Outer Worlds.

So it's most notable on the second planet.

You meet 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 Urbaniak did a bunch of voices for Outer Worlds too.

So that's been really cool.

Awesome.

So yeah, I like this game.

I feel like I'm maybe...

I don't know how many plants 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.

Cause it's like nice and tidy, but yeah, I'm, 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.

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 and 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 a 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 i played maybe four or five hours.

I think the um, would you even call it like the opening chapter is really well done.

Like they, the writing is very good.

Um, the the script is fun.

The uh, the.

The the level you do is like a sort of a precursor to then what the rest of the game is.

But it 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 mouse keyboard feels so punchy and like feels it feels like playing like a, like an online shooter, like it's super, super effective um, but then yeah, at the end of that, they basically give you like 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.

That the opening, the two hours, i think is super, super slick.

Um, and i like the setup of it.

Um yeah, from a graphics perspective, i had 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 like put everything down to medium to get a frame rate that felt like it was good.

It looks incredible, like it looks super incredible, looks super rich and detailed.

Um, 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.

Um, uh, but, uh, but yeah.

Um, and then, yeah, the combat stuff is fun.

I think like there's a lot of tools and like, uh, ways around people in sort of that in semi 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 a prey 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 like frank said you have your traits and or your skills and and those those impact uh what you're able to do yeah I haven't played as much as you so I don't have too too much to say more about after what happens that first area but yeah it's a good one it's 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.

It's, I need to go back and play more of that.

I did not like about, 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.

Um, I am curious though, cause I found the first game.

I really, really liked that first world.

I thought everything that we're doing there was funny.

I like space's choice.

I thought that was all like, well done.

Haha.

Commentary.

Isn't capitalism bad?

Um, 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, but like they do, but the?

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 um spacers choice and what's what was the other ones called?

Again, it's like auntie something, but like now, 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 smart.

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, it's a very clean setup that I think is much more motivating.

Cause 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 else.

All right.

Get my whatever.

Get your whatever in the Outer Worlds 2.

Come on down.

Outer Wilds 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 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 here. 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, but then it still does the thing of like if you're favoring whatever the different factions and stuff.

But I really appreciated that.

Yeah.

You've actually 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?

Um, cause outer world one.

The outer world 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 the spaceships do they?

Where does it sit on that?

Like Starfield to no man's sky.

Space gameplay.

Uh 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 it's definitely.

It's not a robot.

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 um, you get gadgets, you get, you get gadgets that manipulate time and things like that.

So it's like okay, this is this is uh yeah better, more flavorful and like Yeah, I feel like 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.

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 acting is great, but the performance stuff is really good too.

Like the actual character animations are Like it's.

It's a significant jump up from Adderall's from the first one.

Okay, cool.

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 in on this random thing.

Whereas like it feels a lot more, I don't know, lived in or something.

Yeah.

Even even your, even your, your ship that you're in, it's 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 go, i better start until november, finish it.

If you're gonna 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 could have all the time i have.

Um, you know what the thing about arc raiders is?

You you, You could play it for eight minutes and then, and then be fine and turn it off.

We're out of the shill 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.

I mean, three video game was early access, but whatever.

It's out.

That's crazy.

I want the Red Bull they're drinking.

It's crazy.

It's not so yeah, good for that.

It's absolutely mad.

Yeah yeah, really crazy.

Hopefully they've got some cool stuff.

Pentament two let's go the pentamenting hope.

So pentament harder oh no no, maybe not.

Um, all right that's, let's wrap that up.

I want to talk about two.

No no jesse, let's go to you first.

You you've a couple of indie games here that you're.

You want to give a brief little check-in on?

Uh yeah, i'd love to talk about.

Uh, egging on, this is a uh, this is a Fun video game.

Egg parkour.

Is that what we're not even that far?

Not even that far.

It is egg getting over it.

Oh, OK.

OK.

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.

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 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 at baby steps, they're kind of trying to thread that needle and they're doing a good job.

Um, egging on is just what?

What if benefati was an egg?

Uh, which is like cool, not benefati the person, but like what if getting over with benefati 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 yolk perhaps, that you're moving around.

Oh, right.

So there's like the center of gravity shifting a little bit maybe?

Yeah, 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.

Um, 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 sense.

It's physics.

Um, 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.

The 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 yoke.

Oh, that's cool.

Lives on.

Wow.

It's infinite.

It's like an alien egg or something.

I don't know.

They don't say move the yoke.

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 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.

They're like, hey, the narrator coming to 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, where there are opportunities again to find shortcuts and make it easier.

I think if you don't like doing the same thing 100 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, like climbing sort of sort of thing?

It's, it's a bit like baby steps.

We're like, well, actually no, it's not like baby steps.

Cause 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.

Um, what was the one that the guy fucking took down off steam?

What was that?

Remember that only up?

Yeah.

Only up.

Yeah.

Um, so yeah, it's.

It's a closer to an only up or like a chain together or something like that, where 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.

Cause of course it does.

And, like the narrator, he's 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 what 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.

Or if it was just the most tedious hellish thing.

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.

You should know that.

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 like a frying pan big enough oh my god at that point you just like if you want to dip your toast in that you're putting a whole loaf of bread in there forget it yeah or like a hard-boiled egg could you like just get a huge pot 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 yeah that might be actually or salmonella inducing i have no idea that's all right the emus have salmon is that a thing they can do salmon for the ella that they get salmonella ella 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 up or egging... Sorry, 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 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.

That feels good.

It's not out yet.

How much would I send?

Oh, it would.

Oh, would.

Sorry.

I would pay like 15, 20 bucks.

Yeah.

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 game 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 you know 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 like, 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 building and operating a tavern, so a pub that sells like food and has like other sort of stuff in it 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.

And there is a really complicated and detailed what would you call it?

Um 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.

You can, you know, 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.

Um, 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 a 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, 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.

Um, the 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 us the graphics are gorgeous that it has its own unique art style the characters don't have arms their hands just sort of float um which is which is uh a bit wild at the start but you get used to it like remaining style where the hands are like not attached to their body and just sort of do you say rain man style like ray man ray man oh rain man i thought you meant rain man no no dennis hoppin didn't do that no dennis hop no yeah like like knock a bunch i was like wow what did the canadian version of rain man not have they see all their arms that's crazy no exactly um yeah kind of like rayman you're right yeah less french though more english um yeah and it's just yeah sound the music's fun the the graphics are cool and then what it what it does which i really like this is this i think this 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 in the world you'll get free items like oh you can buy this crocodile mat for free like just go go stick in your pub like it's very generous to the gamer i would say and but it has this thing i don't know what they put that on the box it's generous to the gamer that's that's like i've heard developers have told i've said that to me about like uh design philosophies of being generous yeah yeah it's like it's like a whole thing of like giving them little sweets and candies every once in a while i believe it just sounds like something usher would say for xbox like 10 years ago we're generous this is very generous merry christmas we're generous to gamers um 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 gonna 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 what Frank thinks of this.

I was thinking this could be something they use.

Because in Outer Worlds 2, if you don't have the stealth, it's not available, right?

But you can see it's there.

In this one, 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 thing.

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 going to try this one and then it'll, and you can and here's the other thing, you can you can decide to reroll.

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 these, these roles.

But it's not just a case of good or bad things happening.

Like in Dwarf Fortress, famously, the 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 lion head.

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 the most interesting one of these I've played in a long time.

Very evocative of Dungeon Keeper, of... theme hop park of two point hospital it feels right at home with that but it's doing a lot of new stuff like like the story stuff and and other things that i that i i find really compelling this sounds amazing i'm watching the trailer for it uh and there's a lot of minutiae is the only thing uh 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 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 uh the game's opening is absolutely fascinating because most of the ui is covered in like 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 a 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 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 automatically with the wood and you go click on it and it opens up a new menu.

And so they're, they're giving you a lot of this detail throughout the process of playing the game.

Um, which I really appreciate.

I haven't gone down to some of the nitty gritty stuff like the time management stuff.

Um, but, uh, 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 um, 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, I, I feel like that level of same with the design stuff.

Like when you put designs in the in the world, you put things in the world, it adds to your ambience 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.

Um, I have definitely not felt um overwhelmed and I've unlocked the vast majority of the systems, I'd say at this stage.

That's good to hear.

Cause I you were talking about the design stuff and I'm looking at this uh 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 uh.

What game is this, brother?

What are we playing?

Yeah, it's... That's for the sickos.

Yeah.

That stuff is for... That's amazing.

A lot of that's optional.

For sure.

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 stick it in.

Oh, can you actually download player-created like?

I've not done it yet, but yes, that's the promise.

That's amazing.

Yeah, that you can... Yeah, it's like a marketplace.

You can go in and... Yeah, and share stuff.

And this is early access.

That's what I'm saying.

I was just gonna say, this is early access.

Like, you don't feel... what is there a part of this you can point out and say like okay they're still working on or have they do they have like a is there an orc standing somewhere with a sign who's like we're not ready yet for you to see this like 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 um and i don't know i 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 yeah 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 um so yeah and it's also maybe a bit of a you know it's a it's a release valve in case there's something not working you know what i mean or or design stuff they need to figure out it is like for early access this thing is stupidly finished like or a feature feature rich let's say that um yeah it's very good if you if you like these types of management games 100% give this thing a whirl uh you know check in on it um yeah i was uh i was very um 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 i reckon they had a lot of wish lists for this given the community um but yeah i full 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 yeah or maybe it's already up because of time that's how it works uh 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 give it what what what is this thing yeah i played about an hour of this uh also i wanted to say uh it's dustin hoffman i said dennis hoffman earlier i was very mad at myself the whole time i wanted 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 um Yeah.

Yeah.

Q up cup.

If you want to call it that up to you.

Um, quantum up.

Is that what it's called?

Who's who's to say, uh, 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 weight the coin.

It's not a roguelike where you change the coin or anything.

There's no like – 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've, 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.

Uh, you start on a, 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 made me 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 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 a 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 Q 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 um, and then whoever wins wins.

But the real goal for the player is not like to win, because you, 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 uh, there's these like that your characters have there's, i think there's like nine or ten, i think it's ten characters, might be eight characters um, each of them has a different special ability and like different um passives where like oh, if you flip the coin and it lands on your side, either up or q, you get randomly assigned one side.

If you win, then this will trigger and then this will trigger the thing next to it.

You don't pick anything, you don't pick the side of the coin, 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 from the folks who made babel royale, which is a, a scrabble, battle royale game.

So that's that's what we're, that's what we're sort of working with here.

Folks they're they're, they're in it for the juice.

Um yeah, studios names everybody, house games.

Yes, they also make universal paper clips.

If you're a computer game sicko on the web, then you know about that one.

Um yes uh, queue up.

It's 899 currently, 10 off, 10 bucks 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 going to 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.

It's an interesting game.

It's not a wholehearted recommendation.

I find it very interesting, and it definitely tickled me in lots of ways.

In other ways, 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 in this where like it it I I, I.

I got it, but it didn't resonate.

Let's say that that type of thing.

Uh, but there are parts of this game that also did resonate.

So I won't.

It's you kind of have to talk around it a little bit and mileage is going to vary on the, on the subject matter and whatnot.

And, but it's essentially a game where you are playing a counter like a counter strike, 16 ass looking video game.

Um, with a bunch of other people and they're all talking on voice chat and it's real voices uh, from these people and that, where you're playing this game and it's you know, it's basically about uh, friendships.

It's about like dynamics between these people.

Um, you know, what, what happens sometimes if you're on the outside or, or you feel a friendship wavering, it's, it's the type of thing that like, I think, um, would have connected more with me and probably will connect more with people in their like mid twenties.

You know what I mean?

Like the stuff that's in this, that is like it's it's, it's a.

It's a bit saccharine for me, being 40 and married and have a kid.

Like these are issues that I don't have to get 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 don't, but I, but I totally get, and what I liked about it was it was, it was a personal experience.

It definitely seems like Thomas McKinnon, 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 quite good.

Some other times, it's a little bit too saccharine for my taste.

But it was really interesting.

I think if you want to sit down for an hour and you like Kenna Strike Wump, 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 um it's more it's more of an art game than that i would say sunny parable sort of pushes through a more jokiness to it and there are jokes and i laughed a couple times there's some funny moments in it and ridiculous things that happen which i i liked like this silly things that happen each time your your crew loads into uh the next round um but i would say that it it's 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 q up this is less of a jovial funny commentary on games and more of a sort of a, an analysis of why we play with people online and what, what do we know about them and how, you know, what are people like on the other side of the, of the, the mouse?

Like, and, and I think for as much of, there were some parts that I was a bit too much for me.

There were parts that really resonated.

There's 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.

Um, Yeah, so 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 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, it literally like says all right, you're done.

You can head out like the servers, you know, servers are offline kind of thing.

But no, more like you won't have played a game like this before.

Like it is very singular and very vision driven.

Um so yeah, so for, 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 it'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 uh um, i'll leave it.

I'll leave it there.

I guess i want to check that out for sure.

Uh, not to distract from it, because 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, what do i have to do?

What do i have to do to get you guys to play the beginners guy?

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 clear play the game.

Okay, I'll play the fucking Begunner's Ghost.

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 Yotei?

Frank, we're going to talk about Ghost of Yotei.

Sorry, I'm not going to leave him on.

Yeah, come on.

Tinder hooks like that.

Frank, you having fun in Yotei?

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.

So it's extremely bloody and filthy, and it's got chill beats the entire time.

So the music's incredible.

Love it.

And yeah, I'm doing the thing where it's Japanese dialogue, English subtitles, and yeah it's, it's so great and smooth.

And the thing i really like about it is it's like insane.

Like turning on the ps5 and even if you've like closed the app, if you boot up ghost of tsushima, it like boots up instantly and there you are on the field, ready to go to your next mission.

So it's like the easiest game to like.

Pick up play, do one little can't like you get like maps and you figure out spots like 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.

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 dude.

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 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 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 first.

Like, I can already go to the next area, get a different weapon.

But I'm like, no, no, no, I'm not done here.

And the progression's very nice.

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, like, that is so satisfying, doing an entire camp where you're just stealth killing.

You can hide in the bushes.

Yeah, so it's just very good and 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 what I like about this game, and I also increase, you can turn on increased contrast.

So the game is so colorful and just bold with its visual style.

It's so pretty.

Did you have trouble with it?

Because the Kurosawa mode.

The biggest issue I had was that 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 cursor.

I toggle it on for a minute to see and it's cute because there's the film grain.

But even the audio gets kind of tinny, which is cool.

But yeah, I have the colors and stuff on.

But playing this it feels like, even though it's American-made, it's like a Japanese Red Dead, because it's like you're just on your horse, you're traveling around and there's even bounties.

That's my favorite thing is you go into town, you check the bounty board and like there's a bounty for your character.

Oh, this woman is going around killing people.

We need to put it in.

Yeah.

You rip the bounty, but it stays in your, it stays in your like mission log.

So it's like, you can see the bounties and it's like, Oh, I got to find this person.

Hmm.

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, i liked it too.

I don't think it has the same impact as the first one, because the first one was obviously that came out of the blue and was just so strong.

Um, 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, 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, very fun, very gorgeous looking thing.

Good stuff.

Thanks Frank, appreciate it, brother.

Uh we, that's all the games, our graders, the outer worlds, hades 2 no, i didn't talk about hades 2.

Uh, i'll talk about tomorrow.

Tomorrow time, tavern keeper it takes a war ghost of yote 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.

Uh 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. are in our Patreon and the podcast chat channel.

Once again, that's podcast at noclip.video.

First question comes from Ken, asking about end of year backlog.

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 in a setting grossly 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.

I played some of that recently.

Very good story.

Yeah.

I think you, Ken has mentioned all of the best parts of that game.

I don't like fighting.

Is the gameplay fairly basic?

Getting around is fine.

I like the, 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.

Hmm.

Have any of you guys played Keeper yet?

No racial on the colors.

Sorry.

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, because i absolutely loved 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 seth at midnight as well, maybe as well.

Um yeah, i think skin deep is one for me.

I need to play more clear obscure.

I think i played five or six hours.

I've really enjoyed it, but i i want to play more of it.

Uh, that's running too.

I've not played enough of i'm i'm.

You know i need to give that a proper go and silk song as well.

I've not played enough of um.

Yeah, hades 2 post 10.

I've been sort of fixing that this week.

I played a shitload of it uh, which was good fun.

Uh, anything for anything else, for you guys promised mascot agency.

Uh, they sent a key forward 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 like focus.

And I haven't had much of that this year.

So I've been waiting to, for a good excuse to play it.

Uh, and I think it's finally time.

I think it's time that I really sit down and give it a full, full, a 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 yayo is on there.

So you know it's good.

I still have to do outer worlds to keep playing some more of that.

I feel like there's a bunch of indie games that i'm probably gonna.

I mean, we could open our dock, actually the game of the year one.

It's already absolutely insane.

It's bursting games.

It's throbbing here.

It's turgid.

We have a turgid sheet like rematch.

Um, oh yeah, rematch schedule one um head is a bunch of these homogenics.

Yeah, we should check that out.

That'll be fun.

That's not out until next year.

You've got the alters.

That's the alters.

Do i have it on there?

Yeah, i do.

I have it as a joke.

I have it as in like uh, not yet.

Yeah um, the alters i need to play post release.

I played the demo and, and roger as well is another dude.

And roger, oh my god, i make sure you're ready for that.

Oh boy, i think 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?

You can say 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.

Sorry.

It's $90.

Canadian.

So I was like 70 American or something like that.

Yeah dude, that's why i don't play triple a, i want to play digimon story time.

Stranger, so bad.

But it's 94 plus tax.

And also no, when did that come out?

Uh, two months ago, month and a half, something like that.

It was like the digimon 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.

What if it's yeah, make it?

What if it's one of the best game of the years?

I think it's a publisher, it's gonna be for me.

Let's get some keys.

If bamco, i was emailing it's something, i don't know if things fell through and i just didn't get it, but i got it the key for uh, for frank, for once upon a katamari.

So i don't.

I don't know what happened there.

They saw that i liked digimon too much and they were like forget about this guy.

Yeah, they were like we're gonna 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, there's a fake JR logo on it.

I looked at the trailer.

I think there's Shibuya.

Yeah, so it's a game that you're in Japan walking around.

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 the game is so good.

Um, i can't.

Yeah yeah, there's a lot of games there's.

It's gonna be a crazy month.

We gotta play donkey kong bonanza.

You gonna play that?

I played a bit of it yeah yeah, i got the switch to um.

Mario kart is just non-stop in our house since we got it.

It's so much fun insane it's so.

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.

That's killing me.

My OCD brain is absolutely losing its mind.

Uh, any other ones?

I do want to make one more point about, uh, 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 led or eligible rather,

Cause, 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.

State Story's December 8th.

Is that too late, you think?

Probably, right?

Oh, what the hell?

Yeah, Terminator 2 got pushed to December 12th.

What the hell?

Yeah, second delay.

It took them out in September.

I mean, fucking December 12th, no.

Oh, 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 gonna have to record the podcast the first week of december.

Hey, you dropped indiana jones in there on that for 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 all right.

I'm trying to think there's anything else, but jeremy will be back next week.

He's coming back.

He's a little vacation yeah, which is pretty good.

Can we take this next email from Steven Frank?

Yeah.

Uh, 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 a, 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 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 theme 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 art.

But yeah, I have no problem with it at 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 feel 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 to make your ego chest beating difficult game.

It's always about that.

Like, no, they shouldn't.

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 so which is 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 when 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.

Like that's the designer did it.

They, they.

They did it to appeal to a market, but like they, they.

It's a video, it's a toy you spent money on.

Like everything is there for a reason to sell it to somebody to some extent.

Um, there's, it's a different conversation, but whatever.

It's like, I don't know.

I feel like every time we get into this, of the a 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.

Cause I spent the time to learn.

Um, 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 it better.

And that goes into loads of stuff like localization and, you know, all that sort of stuff.

Like it's really cool that we have pipelines within production and we have companies that even like do a lot of work and accessibility 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 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 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.

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 the podcast this week, folk.

It's in the water station.

Exactly.

We need to exit here.

To the loot. you can hear all those beeps can't you when you sleep jesse so good yeah 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 yourself dropping in december uh we're gonna the format's going to change a little bit this year but it'll largely be similar in terms of vibe and uh the amount of content uh if anything we'll be making more than usual because of noclip2 um so yeah we're going to be uh picking out a bunch of games that are our games of the year we will not be listing them one to ten or anything like that um we may be changing up the giving them random awards thing um uh we'll we'll see about that uh 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 as a result of that we are going to be producing a lot of that stuff this month so if we have a bunch of stuff hitting noclip 2 including the demon school exclusive preview we have the a bunch of indie recommendations hitting of course and some new and interesting stuff that we're going to be testing out as well and on top of the disco elysium doc 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 um so there's loads there's loads um 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 i really appreciate anyone who's um who uh um is is chipping in over there we're at uh um about 641 paid patrons which is really awesome um the growth we've seen over there has been pretty consistent and and cool and same on the youtube channel with subscribers and viewers and um i'm having really cool chats with developers of some really big cool games about doing previews and and everything else and and people wanting to help us out and sponsor new features and do all kinds of shit so um yeah i'm uh i'm excited for 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 i've enjoyed them too and it's good stuff and so yeah for the moment just uh check out spooky sessions over on noclip2 if you're a patron um the podcast and the four videos are up uh of uh of us playing the spookiest games we played uh last uh or that we played in our lives that all that stuff came out and we have a indie recommendation for uh for straight children the the uh, the inspiration turducken as Jesse put it, um, a game made by, uh, some folks and inspired by folks who, uh, by the game that undertale was itself inspired by, um, straight children is, uh, it's, it's, it's, uh, 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.

Um, yeah.

And we'll have some more.

I'm going to try and do an indirect this week for, uh, Tavern Keeper.

We're 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.

So I 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.

He'll go oh right okay, all right, let's get the fuck out of here.

Thanks for listening to the pod folks.

Uh, we'll see you next week and jeremy will be back.

We'll talk about the shit he played.

See you guys bye.

[Noclip Podcast Episode 252: Ark Raiders, Outer Worlds 2, and the Ethics of AI in Game Development]-[ARC Raiders, The Outer Worlds 2, Tavern Keeper]

📋 Summary

Noclip Podcast Episode 252 Summary

The "Shill Zone": Ark Raiders and AI Controversy

The Outer Worlds 2: A Refined RPG Experience

Indie Spotlight and Quick Takes

Accessibility and Future Outlook

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Noclip Podcast Episode 252: Ark Raiders, Outer Worlds 2, and the Ethics of AI in Game Development]-[ARC Raiders, The Outer Worlds 2, Tavern Keeper]

📋 Summary

Noclip Podcast Episode 252 Summary

The "Shill Zone": Ark Raiders and AI Controversy

The Outer Worlds 2: A Refined RPG Experience

Indie Spotlight and Quick Takes

Accessibility and Future Outlook

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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