Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Despelote, Skin Deep | Noclip Crewcast

🎵 🎵 Thank you. Hello, friends, and welcome to episode 226 of the No Clip Podcast. It's a crew cast. The whole crew is here.

Jesse managed to make it all the way to Amsterdam and back.

He's here. We have a lot of fucking video games to talk about, demonetized on YouTube already for that F -bomb.

Let's go. Probably because last week we didn't have a crew cast. Last week we just had a fun little interview about Atomfall, which is a fun -ass video game.

It was a good interview.

Thank you, Jesse. jesse well produced jesse great job jesse you guys are great jeremy's here frank's here the whole thing's great too shebang frank is shaking his head he's like you left your country and you didn't go to japan i know i'm sorry i didn't even do one weed i was there i was in amsterdam i'm 420 i didn't do one narcotic wow i know what a loser it was great he didn't do anything did you not did you have sex with a prostitute at least i was there with my wife so i mean i'm gonna say no man did she have sex with a prostitute what do you guys do what happens in amsterdam stays days in Amsterdam

pineapples let's go the only thing I will say that's very funny 420 uh Easter same day but also the day before I was like wow all these holidays all converging now we just need the Pope to die and it'll be a crazy day here boom I was like no do you think it's because he smoked too much wheat I think it's because he was in the vicinity of JD Vance and just like he was done he couldn't do it so it was yeah I think he played Indica last year and he got the wrong message from it he was like you know what i need to do smoke some indica yeah exactly you know that's fuck you know that pope mobile yeah

sorry it's just a it's just a drivable hot box i need to look up the pope that's true it's also a bulletproof hot box yeah so you just be like you were having like a panic attack in there and you were like smash the windows i gotta get out here you could not oh my god this is real i thought this was like a joke in movies no that's real mobile they need to be able to see him while he's not getting shot because he a pope was shot i forget which one or somebody tried to shoot john paul or something like that i don't know presumably because of his stance on marijuana yeah that's what it is i think

imagine that you can drive around in a i guess you can't drive and smoke weed at the same time doesn't stop half of oakland but i that is very true i actually have an interesting tidbit on this um when i had a when i had an rv a recreational vehicle um there are certain laws that pertain only to rvs and not cars so for example if i was driving in the front and i had a friend in the back and in the house portion like you know go on a road trip with friends they could crack a beer and drink it in the back because it's like a limousine yeah totally because it's not open container because they're

in like the house portion um but you can technically walk from your way was yours a was yours a cab a truck cab or could you walk for i forget your rv your rv you You had to get out of the front to get in the back, right?

No, you could crawl through the back, but it was like, not while you're driving or you die.

Like, if you were like, hey, man, give me one of those brews, I could go off the road.

You can't crawl into the back seat while you're driving either.

Yeah, that's true. That's a good point.

I'm not sure where we draw the line as a culture, but for whatever reason, yeah, someone could crack a beer.

So I was always curious, like, if we got pulled over and my friend was blasting a joint in the back, you know, and all the windows are open.

I don't know. don't know where we draw the line what do they do if they pull you over uh and and a friend was drinking a beer in the back or like smoking oh uh i mean i wouldn't be smoking weed because i'm a law -abiding citizen but my friend in the back i would be like you know i've i can't control him i'm up here eyes on the road officer i'm keeping up with the flow of traffic and it's not my responsibility to what if you get a context high what are you gonna do well that's that's i don't know how legal the weed thing is it's because like i don't know i mean we have to ask a limo driver this like

um like a limo driver in southern california where this probably comes up a lot what's a context tie that's i knew it i saw it coming that's a family guy joke where stewie griffin pretends to be high i think i'm getting a context tie and now i say that's pretty good instead of thank you instead of contact i just say context that's beautiful yeah i wonder i think limo drivers are probably more worried about getting like stis or something like that than uh than hot boxing it but that's a good but you could the thing the only thing that would get you done is if they weren't wearing a seat belt right

They have to have a seatbelt, don't they, in the back of your RV?

I actually don't, in an RV, I don't think so.

It's been a while. I don't know.

None of this is professional or legal advice if you drive an RV around with your friends.

We have a trailer, so it gets dragged behind the car.

So it's not like an RV where you were driving.

You'd have to do some sort of like speed two or speed one sort of crawling out the back of a car.

you know it'd be quite difficult to get into the trailer while you're driving down the highway um but uh i'm pretty sure like whenever because like we'll stick all of our camping shit in there so like i'll put in my like daughter's bicycle and shit right so there's just and then whenever we arrive wherever we're at a campsite i open up the door and it's like a fucking disaster has occurred like you know all like the diet cokes that i put on the bed are all over so i always always think like it's probably really not a fun time to ride in the back of the trailer but you know that one time I was moving

uh and we were we didn't have enough space in the front of the truck uh this is a joke if the police are listening okay uh and me and my friend were in the back of the truck like with all the furniture and everything trying to not get hurt and uh that was fun so I could tell you firsthand that I would not recommend being in a moving vehicle with a lot of loose items yeah my dad put me and my brother in the back of like a little like a shitty little little trailer which i don't even know if he owned it or just he found it or something but it was just like a a terrible one axle like i don't know

six by six foot wooden trailer like it was just like a like absolutely like a like a donkey should have been pulling it and we were bringing stuff out to the the dump in waterford in my hometown and he let me and my brother sit in the back and he was driving like 40 down the road and we were just waving at people and shit and it's like like, you know, little screws are going loose as you're bumping over.

That sounds like the kind of thing where, like, when you're a kid, your dad is like, if you guys aren't good, I'm going to take you to the dump and leave you there in my dump trailer.

You guys are like, oh, no, he's for real this time.

He's taking us to the dump.

We had a, when I played football as well, our manager had like a paint, he was a painter, like a contract painter guy.

And oftentimes we wouldn't have enough people like parents to bring us to like an away game and like 30 miles away and out on the coast and so he'd just stick us all in the back of his paint fan so there'd be like 10 of us in the back of this like sitting on paint cans in the back of a like a white van with no windows um and he'd bang he'd bang if there was like police for some reason i think that's like that's how like there was a back i think there was windows in the back doors so he wanted us to duck if ever we went past were they taped over perhaps or i was gonna say this This sounds like

when you see footage of Nazis pulling up to a white supremacist rally.

That's how they pull up.

There's 15 of them at the back of a paint van with the windows ticked over.

Or they'd pull us over and think we're being human trafficked.

But this guy only stole children who were dressed in soccer gear, I guess.

He stole an entire soccer team at once.

Exactly. He's the greatest thief of all time.

So what did you do in Japan?

Nothing. in Amsterdam if you weren't um you know doing doing weed or doing ladies or what else is there to do whatever uh I mean it was my first time in Europe it's my first time outside of North America so I was yeah really it was my first time um so it was nice to just look around the rest of the country we spent a lot of time obviously in Amsterdam that's where our hotel was uh we actually got a lot of really good advice from a patron it was super helpful let me get his name because he was just like he gave us so many good restaurants uh atomic apologies I'm gonna gonna preface this by saying

anything i say in dutch uh i'm butchering it it's not on purpose uh great language very funny tommy dare sue aaron uh uh very nice very helpful from the discord gave us a lot of really good places to go including museums which were a lot of fun uh we had a lot of great food although uh i don't really get down with the dutch delicacies the pickled herring not for me uh yeah but i like the desserts the dutch pancakes were really good had a lot of those we went traveling like i said outside of amsterdam so like some of the neighboring cities we went to uh uh utrecht which was really cool and um zanfort

yeah it was really nice yeah that was my first time going to an ocean to the north sea which is wild because i'm surrounded by two oceans and i've never gone either of them um maybe have you ever seen the ocean in your life that was the first time i'd ever actually seen the ocean like obviously i've flown over sorry yeah did you look at it a play yes in the window i don't want to see it in person yeah yeah um that was the the first time I got in front of I smelled the salt coming off of it it was beautiful I've been you've been to Boston before I that's what I'm saying I've been to Boston like

three times and I just never went east you're gonna be Boston in like two days I know we're gonna go to Cape Cod I promise it'll be my second ocean one year it'll be great I'll get it all out of the way then I'll go to the Pacific Ocean at some point um yeah so that was just great going to all those little places Zandvoort was beautiful it was like this sandy beach um with all these different like the architecture was really cool.

It was just such a blast to be there, uh, in a, in a place that felt so different and yet so like at home.

Uh, the, the one big thing I want to mention that I thought was really, really cool, um, without just like going into every bit of my itinerary.

Um, we went to the Rijksmuseum, which they have, you know, Rembrandt's nightwatches there, like a lot of really great classic paintings.

They had some Van Gogh.

That was really nice to see.

Uh, but there was one painting that I saw of, uh, St. Bavo church in Utrecht, uh, or no, sorry in harlem where we also went um and i saw the painting it was done in the 16th century it's by this guy like you know here when you go to a museum in canada or america like the closest you're getting is some old building from the 1800s at best late 1800s uh that you could still go to i went into the church i saw a painting of a church from the 16th century and then i went into that church and stood with a guy did the painting and they had like a printout of it at the church where you could stand where he

did it and they had like outlines of the things that that had been moved in the painting it was just it was so i felt like part of the world when that happened i was like oh my god i'm living i'm in history i'm living it uh so that was just a really eye -opening experience for me of like how old the world is and the fact that we still live in it because again like oh yeah you see a building here there's a painting here and it's like this was a fur trader in 1893 this used to be a mcdonald's yeah exactly yeah yeah this building is the same building it was it was just slightly shorter like all right

cool man that's cool it was a blast yeah what was any any good food any uh we had some iraqi food oh my god forget about it it was so good i know that's what i'm saying uh i had never done that before it was really good i don't remember the name of my dish it was uh again i'm already butchering enough dutch i don't need to ruin any other languages a dutch iraqi dish that's a real fucking well the cool thing was like they have obviously every culture in europe you know is like everything everybody's right there so i was more excited if anything to try different cuisines we had some italian food

that That was just awful.

Like the worst Italian food I've ever had in my fucking life.

The pizza was, not to say that the food there is bad necessarily from Italians.

We just went to like touristy spots on accident.

We didn't know. But across the street from there, great New York bagel place.

So that was cool. Yeah, the Iraqi food was great.

Lots of like sauce and meat and more.

It was so good. Did you go to The Hague?

We didn't. I wanted to, but all the train tickets, we went.

So it was the end of tulip season basically when we went.

um so we went to kuchenhof that was great that was like a monumental experience like disneyland for flowers was so good um but i wanted to go to the hague we want to go to brussels we wanted to go to uh we almost went to rotterdam but i decided we should go to utrecht instead um but yeah we couldn't get train tickets anywhere because it was so busy there's so many tourists like i've never seen that many tourists in a place before my life because the week that we left was um conningstag again i'm sure they're supposed to have a funny accent when you say that uh but it's it's the King's day, I think

it's called, which is a huge like celebration in Amsterdam.

Everyone's getting drunk and high in the streets.

I've seen some clips from it after we left and it's, it looks like a blast, but I'm glad we weren't there cause it was exhausting, uh, on a regular day.

So yeah, didn't get to do any of that, but it was still really cool.

Uh, we didn't go to the Anne Frank house, which was a bummer, but again, tickets were just out of the way.

Uh, everything we did though, very happy to do it.

It was, uh, honestly, some of my favorite experiences were just going to the supermarkets and getting really good pastries for really cheap.

Like Like they had better croissants I've ever had.

Yeah, dude, I can't.

We've had a loaf of Dempsters or whatever here.

And I'm like, I hate this.

I need to make my own bread now.

I have to be one of those guys.

I got to get a stone flour mill in the backyard. I got to figure this out.

It's a nightmare. Bread and soup, man.

I just can't deal with it over here.

Oh, the soup was so – Cassie had maybe the best chicken soup she's ever had in her life at the Rijksmuseum.

At their stupid little cafe.

Like, oh, my God. Again, I'm probably – that's not how you say it.

It's probably Rook's Museum or something.

I don't speak Dutch. much but yeah no just really real like everything was so good though also the tap water shout outs to the tap water baby they don't mess around we cassie needs to drink water like all the time because she's a human being who exists um and we we would try to fill up our bottle whenever we could but she's so against drinking tap water because here it's like it's high quality don't get me wrong but it's you don't know what's in there they're putting chemicals in the water no we have a lot of like i don't know the pipes in hamilton specifically i'm doxing myself uh are very old

and falling apart. So you never know what's going to be in the water.

But when we got to Amsterdam, she still had that same feeling.

So we were spending like four dollars on bottles of water because they're like, who?

Why would you ever buy water?

Taps are so clean. So we drank a lot of sparkling water for the first two days until I was like, there's no way they have like these dunes of sand that they bought that filter the water that we passed when we were going to Zandvoort.

I was like, that's amazing.

That's their water filtration system.

That has to be better than ours.

we have like big nets that catch shoes and tennis balls like there's no way another syringe got through why does the water taste like fentanyl what's that about um yeah that's my report back from the trip it was a lot of fun i'm glad to be back though to talk about some video games yeah glad to have you back man glad it was a fun time where we where would the next spot be where would the next uh european spot be yeah that's um probably somewhere not so popular uh uh didn't have an issue with the amount of people it was just like a little overwhelming if you wanted to do anything it took a really

long time which you know that's what you get i'm adding to the problem uh i would probably go to either greece or spain you're probably you're on that old shit hit yeah you want to like how old can i get exactly yes what's the oldest thing i can walk into where's the cave that jesus woke up in i want to walk into that let me in let's go to to constantinople you know mesopotamia exactly keep going just keep going east fuck it go to go to iran go you know the cradle of civilization make it happen uh glad to have you back i'm going to talk about some video games this week we've got a bunch to talk

about this week exposition 33 are various uh expeditions in oblivion and some hot ass indie games came out too despolates out out skin deep is out and jesse's going to give us a little bit of catch -up on blueprints and we've got some good questions too and a lot to talk about just in the world of games coverage as well um with the uh just kind of i don't know wholesale uh shuddering or or just i don't know what you call it ransacking of polygon and and giant bomb sort of giant bomb straw that broke the camel's back for much of the community sort of moment that happened last week as well and with a bunch

of folks being left off uh let go there because of some really seemingly and allegedly uh incredibly myopic decisions from the their c -suite people over there and i found them but um we will we will get around to all that sort of stuff first of all massive thanks to all of our supporters over at patreon .com slash no clip thank you so much for helping us do what we do both on the documentary side and here on the podcast and uh as we'll talk about maybe a little bit later increasingly um in other places maybe maybe noclip crew will be getting a a bit of a major rehaul maybe we're we're working on something

over here um uh we are i shouldn't i should stop saying maybe we'll talk about a little bit we're still figuring it out but we're we're sort of i'm definitely reacting to the the what's going on in games coverage with a sort of mixture of anger and frustration and fuck it let's see if we can not fix this but but maybe carving a new way forward um but we'll get to that later um massive thanks to all the folks though who let us do this stuff including our battle pass holders and a new one welcome to love preat welcome to the crew alongside yuts dwayne the rock lobster anthony thomas nico passadari

it's amy ferrario penelope the a's senator armstrong thank you for your service harry flanagan that's not i don't know why i said that that's not a army thing i don't like him at all i like this thing yeah nanomachines son hey look everything he said came through jews true arno jose or matt pearson james brown mark rojas tucker morgan david mcgarry sven hooster pez john acres you ain't nate tim robinson Jonathan Krammen, Eric Hamilton Schneider, Christophe Fatoui, Zachary Snader, Alex Gouchet, George Sakotis, Jacob Godserv, Entheogen, James Med, Tokir Teliev and Rison.

Thank you all so much for slapping your names all over our podcast, you disgusting foul beasts.

beasts let's talk about i'm trying to think because a lot of these are some are new and small some are big and a little bit uh i'm so surprised you want to hop into the games and not talk about the hottest news in gaming right now should we should we talk about all that no we don't have to i thought you would that's all i'm saying it's such a but everyone's been taught are you oh sorry sorry i'll tell you sorry i'm running it back i'm running it back now i know what you're talking are you talking about the the trailer that went live today yes okay grand Grand Theft Auto six.

Yeah. OK, that was it.

OK. All right, moving on.

Trailer came out. What do we think of the trailer?

It looks like one of those.

They didn't show gameplay, man.

Yeah, it looks pretty.

If that's all an engine.

Looks incredible. The jiggle physics are off the chart.

They've really done themselves on the butts and sides have never looked as good.

They're going all in.

Sunsets have never looked as good.

They have the shiniest crocodiles in the business.

Cyberpunk move over.

We've got a new RTX 5090 testing suite.

i can't wait for digital foundry to talk about that trailer for 300 hours i want to hear them talk about how the volumetric weed smoke really works um yeah there's a player uh off of one of the police sirens like the light and i was like oh john's gonna lose his mind that just looks so cool he just like it's like the jizz in my pants face he just like that oh yeah like that okay every time that happens it's incredible um yeah they also put up uh rockstargames .com slash uh vi will bring you to uh kind of a little splash page that they put together did you see this this no has like a bunch more

information on it's like a good amount of a chat about the uh the two characters and jason duval and then lucia caminos the two main characters and one of the other characters that appears cal hampton in the trailer and a bunch of other sort of bits and bobs um alluding to i guess like what's going to be in it and what was there anything that stood out to you guys in terms of like what you saw in there or was it just similar thing where technically this looks really good that's it yeah i mean it's incredibly technically impressive i i'm waiting for like the moment that the story kind of grabs

me because these gay like grand theft auto 5 was so impressive but i i feel like i didn't get that hooked into the story and i feel like i i enjoyed enjoyed it for a while and then i kind of just petered off and then my playstation 3 died and it was like there's no way i'm going to replay the first 25 hours of this game um but uh yeah i need i need to be like hooked in emotionally but i mean like you know technologically it's fucking it's a powerhouse i just uh i'm not these games aren't for me let's be honest i've it's very impressive i can't imagine a more anti -jeremy jane game i'll play it

and it'll probably be great but it's uh yeah i'm not the target audience i'm just kind of like oh wow i I liked Grand Theft Auto III when I was a kid.

They detailed some of the areas as well.

Vice City, obviously, is in it, but it's much bigger than that.

It seems to be a significant portion of Florida.

Linoda Keys, which is presumably based on the Florida Keys.

Grass Rivers is an area that looks very much like the Everglades.

Port Gellhorn looks like Port Everglades, perhaps.

And there's an area called Ambrosia, which looks like some type of industrial area around Miami.

But then they also have a mountain in there.

Like Miami is famously one of the flattest states in the nation, certainly for a coastal one.

And they do have Mount Calaga National Park.

So folks are wondering if it's going to sort of stretch up into Appalachia maybe a little bit and sort of have some of the southern south as it were stretching in there as well.

I assume just from a gameplay perspective, they probably need to not stick entirely to the geography of the area if they want to make it interesting, which obviously they got for free in GTA 5 with all the Hollywood Hills and big mountains and stuff like that.

Yeah, but it has like sort of Hawaiian Polynesian vibes that area does a little bit.

So who knows? Maybe they're doing something Caribbean with it.

I don't know. That'd be cool.

Yeah. I have to see, but it looks pretty good.

Obviously the game has been delayed.

It's coming out now, may of next year.

We got to check that bingo card. I was going to say that was the bingo.

Definitely on the bingo card. A hundred percent.

I think it was that center square.

I feel like it might've been, that was a real bold center square.

I was looking for the bingo.

I could not find the bingo thing.

Can someone find the bingo card?

I'll look for, I'll hunt.

Could you look for the bingo card?

because i feel like between that and all the games also that was right yeah right yeah there was a what was a big structural change at ubisoft we did you were right 10 cent bottom up they did they sold like shed all the brands anyone cares about yeah he's trying to think what else hey i got bingo and staff chat we posted it you do your staff chat yeah the discord thank you jesse Jesse, do you want to go through it?

Yeah, I'll see what we got.

Increased layoffs. We never really agreed on what that meant, but I feel like it keeps happening.

No Death Stranding 2 delay yet.

Just go through them one more.

Okay, so GTA 6 is delayed.

That was one? Yep. State open beta technically has been announced, I think.

Okay. Go through all of them, even the ones that aren't right, maybe.

Oh, sure. Okay, all right.

Yakuza Kiwami 3 announced.

It hasn't happened yet.

Okay. I already said the increased game industry layoffs.

Death Stranding 2 delayed.

Who knows? There are people there, so there must be something to see.

PlayStation franchise will release on Xbox.

Not yet, but Gears of War is on PlayStation.

A lot the other way.

Yeah, not yet. Horizon on Xbox.

New big budget MMOs announced.

GTA 6 gets delayed.

Silksong release date.

We don't have unless you want to play it in a museum.

We know that that's happening.

uh reveal trailer for a first what is this for a first or third person thriller with hans zimmer or people playing game unconvincingly uh yeah that happened switch to probably yeah switch two trailers all right switch two yeah i'm checking these off so we have an update bingo new resident evil code veronica announced or dino crisis not yet we're almost there i believe of a dream yeah bloodborne remake i don't think that's happening they already did dusk bloods or or whatever hey yeah but that does that can't no no it doesn't it doesn't but i feel like if they're doing that they don't give a shit

uh big changes at ubisoft done we're almost we're almost all beat out here it's not bad uh ea skate open beta and then our center square is major studio gets caught using ai art just fill that out that's done uh phil seems like it's the wrong word there yeah normal just does it uh yeah phil spencer leaves xbox hasn't happened yet uh live service game gets announced released canceled in 2025 i think that was me i could see it happen uh new call of duty game based on real war come on almost kojima meets another euphoria character that happened there's been a few since i don't think so he met margaret

quali maybe i don't know she's not on the show though she was in death stranding one oh oh she is right yes yeah my bad in um derivative game imitates popular old game and takes its place you can tell which ones are jeremy because they're so like because they're very specific insane that one i feel like there's been a lot of um that one's hard to pin down because there's been a lot of sort of like action rpgs that look like diablo 4 but i don't know if that counts because path of exile is trying to get in on that diablo 2 uh true excitement which i think is more what i was getting at so i'm not sure

if that one's been checked give it time rematch will take over fifa i'm sure uh gta 6 ps5 bundle they're not bundling that shit ps5 will cost eight thousand dollars that's true gta 6 will cost eight thousand dollars yeah on its own yeah uh netherrealm announces a new game that'd be cool switch to release yeah we got three of the bees we can almost make a line here with the bees um new call to duty game based on real world war that's on there twice well that means we gotta swap out one of those bees into something we have true we gotta make this happen uh dmc remake timothy chalamet as link i believe

i believe uh an ichiban or majuma and tekken 8 not kiryu because it doesn't hit women that's uh that's on there so yeah we got three four something like that in that line all right we're working on we got some of the big ones some of them are more dreams i feel like like like dino crisis we still got another half of a year give it time we do we got two thirds hopefully do we may jesus let's see you going fast oh lord anyway let's talk about some video games before the year is out let's talk about expedition 3 or not the expedition 3 33 hopefully there isn't an expedition 3 yeah i mean in the case

of that game it fucking better not happen uh so i played a bunch of this you've played a bunch of this jesse yeah i'll let you take the lead on it i do want want to be a little bit yes vague about the story stuff because i think the opening two hours of that game and what the lore is if you don't know the opening of that game oh i wish i could be the kind of person who gets to play expedition 33 for the first time and doesn't know the setup did you know the setup yeah i did i i knew nothing about i was so excited for this game i was like watching constantly so that's that makes sense it was such a great reveal

a whole world what What?

Yeah. Really terrific.

I was like, man, this game is a stupid name.

And then by the end, I was the first 90 minutes.

I was like, I get it.

I get it. I get it.

Danny DeVito is crying.

Yeah, I get it now.

Yeah. What is this game?

Yeah. Yeah. Let's try to describe it.

Clear, obscure Expedition 33, developed by Sandfall Interactive, new studio.

It was made by 33 people.

No, it was not. That's not how video games work.

work um a bunch of you ex ubisoft staff and then you know people from wherever and the contractors um came together to make this really great uh homage i suppose to jrpgs this is a uh third person yeah turn -based action or not action rpg sorry rpg with timed button presses so it's a bit like a mario uh and the setup is it's very french it's got that like belle époque like dystopian uh paris look to it uh the costumes are really funny also you can you'll see screenshots shots if you look at the game um but overall the story of french people bro that's just what they look like yeah you're right

i'm sorry for being so so anti -french they all look like robin patterson rob yeah robert patterson you play as a team of expeditioneers on uh an expedition for some reason we're not going to say what the story stuff is i suppose but you're leaving your home of lumiere to travel the world uh on on an expedition for some reason there's a paintress in the world who who does something with her paint uh don't worry about it it's big 33 i don't know what that's for uh somewhere in the distance you'll find out by playing uh but the gameplay is uh i think the combat for this by the way for a jrpg is really

really strong like i think making turn -based gameplay and adding button prompts and dodges and stuff it almost it can be a little bit uh too much i think in some games they tend to go a little overboard here it works really well so So the structure is like a turn based JRPG where, you know, you have your team and enemies and they all have different abilities and there's a turn order.

But when you're performing certain actions, usually skills, you can hit a button, a timed prompts like a cutie that pops up and you do a little bit more damage or you continue the attack and you do more steps to it.

And when enemies attack you, you can dodge out of the way or you can parry.

The dodge window is a lot lighter, so you have more opportunity to either just get out of the way or get a perfect or you can parry and hit them back for big damage.

it's really fun it has that like sekiro uh or dark souls kind of pattern to it it's not you know the mario party games have it too but it has more of a wind -up than i think those games had some of the enemies in expedition 33 will spend like two minutes that's that's i'm exaggerating but like a very long time setting up their attack before you can parry it um so that's really good i think the characters also are all really diverse and interesting in their uh approaches to gameplay like it's so strategic the options that you have it almost at times feels like playing a roguelike in the options

that you have for each character you can build them out in different skills like it's not a roguelike and that you could die and come back and have oh i got four keys i played blueprints earlier um but like you come back into it you do the attacks you you have your special abilities everyone's got their own thing like uh what's the main guy's name gustave i don't know something french yeah i think it's gustave yeah i was gonna say guillaume but Robert Pattinson voiced by Charlie Cox Daredevil if you're playing in English oh that's okay I thought it was Ben Starr it's not um he has like a special

thing where he gets overcharged and then his special ability does more damage and there's other people who have like there's one uh I think her name's Miel whose abilities feel like the Watcher from Slay the Spire where she has stances that can switch in the middle of combat based on the abilities that you use so there's so much like you're thinking two three turns ahead lining things up trying to get everybody to work together it's and i think that plays into the the theme of the story which i mean danny you you you're not going to talk about the story too much but like do you have any overarching

thoughts on what's going on here i just think like i you know i don't want to get into specifics yeah because you'll be more i'm you know i don't know what counts as a spoiler so i want to make sure that you're the one who just don't need to talk about a story at all like like there's no if there's no need to you can talk about the quality of the game but i think anyway i just i mean no don't need to you don't want to continue you don't want to i don't want to be spoiled as much as possible people to play i don't play now yeah i think i think yeah i think like production the production on this thing

is incredible like it looks wonderful the art style the art direction is incredibly strong it feels um very sure of itself i do not play these types of games like i have sort of on this podcast historically been been sort of desperate to get into a jrpg like i tried to play the new final fantasy remake stuff obviously when we did the final fantasy 14 stuff i tried to play that i've always trying to like dance in genres i've historically not liked and for whatever reason i just bounce off those i think it's because well let me say the difference between this story and a lot of the jrpg stories

stories is this one i immediately connected with the plight of the people like yeah i bet it was really it was like really well acted yeah a really like believable human story even if it's in this ridiculous fantastical setup um definitely fascinated by the world and the initial mystery of the world that's why i think it's important not to talk about it a bit because i think to me that that was a real driving force and the game has continually for the opening hours revealed like revealed that concept a lot yeah revealed enough but also shown me new things to be fascinated about and the combat i

really like i again don't generally like term -based stuff and i think it's because i feel like i'm i don't have an agency that i like to the one game that i've gotten into that is term based in recent years is uh the like dragon series and i think the reason i like that is because at least i'm able to move the characters around in between them and it gives it gives me that sense of uh presence or whatever it is similarly with the with the dodging and the uh the what's it called the parry mechanic parrying mechanic that stuff feels great like i really like that it's kind of reminds you of like

you know souls like games where you're basically watching the animation is trying to get used to the animation and difficult enemies sort of do things out of rhythm and and all that they have they also have a like they just have they layer on enough mechanics it hasn't gotten to the stage right where i i think there's too much going on now so i hope it doesn't get to that stage but like for instance there's like a a shooting mechanic that you also have that like there are certain enemies that you can like just straight out pull out your gun and aim when you're in the turn -based thing at like a weak

point and it'll take off a bunch of damage yeah or like when you're in the overworld if you if you get the jump on them first like a lot of rpgs right you get your first shot in or if they get you and it yeah it's just there's you know it's also i think more linear than i was expecting like yeah are you finding yourself getting lost at all though in the areas once or twice okay yeah but but i was i don't know i i associate jrpgs with more like eventually you sort of get access to an overworld and i don't know if that happens in this much but like i've felt much more like this is pretty guided

you know i'm still finding a lot of the people and doing stuff but um and you know my crew is getting built up and all that but like i don't know does it open up more i don't know it gets a little bit bigger at a certain point it does the sort of thing that i had no idea it was going to do uh i mean i did because i i had seen footage but i didn't know how they were going to do it how they're going to set it up um yeah yeah that's that's all i'm saying um but it was really good it was just like i think the way that it expands the world in terms of its scale and also like you were saying like this is the only

story thing i'll say it's not a narrative thing it's it's more of a general concept um i think the way that stop me when i'm you think i'm swirling something um i think the way that expedition 33 presents its story is incredibly confident in this way that it accepts that the player wants to go on this journey with it It's not spending an hour setting up like here's a you're going to the kingdom to save the princess who's been taken by the bad guy.

They're just like this is the world the characters limit it.

Go on this journey with them and figure out what that means.

You can piece it together as you please.

And it's just it feels so much more worthwhile to become invested in the narrative than it does in almost any of these other games.

Like it's you know it's fun to keep track of what's going on in Dragon Quest 11 or if you're playing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

i want to know all the mini games but here there's this economy in their storytelling that's so impressive the things that they're able to pull off with the budget that they had they i mean i just i assume they spent a lot of it on anti -circus and other uh actors who were in the game um but just the way that they've yeah set it up like you were saying it's this sort of continues to roll out new information and build on this premise that is so unique and like harrowing but fun to learn about in this weird sort of morbid way like I want to know more about why it is structured in the way that it

is and the rules and yeah it's very good it's very very strong strong opening and I haven't really felt like the momentum has slowed down for me I feel like I'm constantly interested in playing it I'm finding myself not being able to go to bed because I'm so excited to see what the next thing is whether that's combat a new opportunity for something a new picto build where I go oh if I use these abilities and line them up and talked about that yeah The theory crafting you can do for your characters is just off the charts.

There's so many options.

It's a very dense game that does a lot with its very small spaces, small scale to feel a lot bigger than it actually is, which is just so impressive.

I haven't stopped enjoying it since I started playing.

Yeah, it does a great...

Like you said, that's actually a really good point.

I think... What game was I playing?

I've played a couple of games that are under embargo this week as well.

I can't... Most of which I can't talk about i am playing doom the dark age as well as well at the moment so we'll have videos up for that on no clip crew next week um uh whenever the embargo drops i'm not sure when exactly i think i know where it is i don't know if it's public i think it's public i don't know anyway um i'm not talking about that but there are some other games i've been playing as well that are um where the intro you know i've been playing the start of a lot of games recently and the start of expedition expedition 33 is so good ash that like you said it's not like the land of lumiere

blah blah is ruled by and this happened then and this you're just like what the fuck's going on and they're using all of these like the gommages today and like all this stuff you're like what the fuck is the gommage you know she got her flowers you're like okay yeah and they're all other also great use of french curse words a lot of terrific a lot of in here yeah yeah it's a good time Charlie Cox is doing a good French accent every time he needs to use one of those words.

Yeah, it's a, it's a, I wonder, can you play this in French?

Probably. Yeah, you can't play it in French. I wanted to, but I was like, man, that's a good set of actors.

I want to hear how they do their performances.

Oh, I might swap to French. We'll have to see.

Can you play it in Japanese?

No, I tried. No, it's only English and French. Wait, you're playing too?

Oh, you're playing it too?

I started. Oh, yeah, but only the first like 90 minutes.

It's all like stories set up, but I did get to try some of the combat and the combat's really good.

Nice. yeah it's good stuff yeah so fair play to them um sand fall interactive expedition 33 um they showed it to me last year at one stage we talked about doing something but i was you know we don't tend to do pre -release stuff on on noclip so it's kind of like you know maybe we'll talk after you know make sure you're recording your dev stuff yada yada yada um yeah so it's uh it's really cool and you were you were alluding to on social media there was just some people saying that the game was made by a small number of people which is not really you know i think yeah i don't know i think there

are narratives that exist that people want to especially when it's a x ubisoft people that they want to say like x ubisoft by five people or whatever but but also i think in general people tend to over sensationalize when something is successful that they didn't see coming like oh blueprints was really good and it was made by one person blah blah blah and it's like okay like yeah ball yeah balatro like you know it's it's but this one in particular is a real like the game isn't just good because it's a well -made game with talented people who perhaps had to contract out to others or do whatever

it took to get it done uh i mean they had a ton of money behind them kepler interactive i think are partially owned by tencent right like it's not netties netties thank you um it's one of those two if you pick a game company they're partially owned by one of those two yeah um but like there's a a ton of money behind this yeah like it's it's not some totally out of the blue thing just because you didn't hear about it and then again the narrative that shows up with that is like it's breaking all the rules and it's like it's it's being made against the culture of games it's like i don't know man maybe

maybe don't talk about games like that man just talk about how art sets your soul on fire it's weird to talk about it like yeah like it's it's it's it's a great i'm delighted that like this team has done it it seems to be the thing that we talk about non -stop on no which is if you get people who are knowledgeable who have like great institutional knowledge if you can retain them if you can train juniors up in in in that type of environment where they are they are developing faster over the course of a project then you get situations like this where you have like hades being made by 25 you know

people and but but also i think this shows like like a different type of you know we adam fall was a similar thing right it's a smaller size team it's closer to what we had with like you know 50 people making oblivion right things like that where i think studios are picking their battles a bit more like this game is somewhat refined it's not like a massive open world you know crazy scope game i don't i don't think do you know how long it is i think it's like 30 hours if you don't do a bunch of the side stuff something like so if a game is 60 or like a Final Fantasy is like 100 like those hours

don't come for free that's content that has to be made so I think like Adam Fall was a similar thing where I think it's like you know back in the day when first person games were like 10 hours long like I don't know how long I played Adam Fall for I don't think any longer than 15 I don't I don't think it was that crazy long but it also was a game that was making smart decisions design wise it was economically economically designed, I would say.

Right. They put the money in the right buckets.

And then another thing we're seeing is outside of just outsourcing, you know, stuff like rendering materials or making models or whatever, more and more you're starting to see middleware companies or production houses that can do very specific things really well.

So like, you know, we were just well, I can't say publicly, but like we were in Sweden talking to a studio about games they made and they worked with one company for all of these games to do all the like motion capture and stuff because they were a company that did that like a lot of that stuff is in house at some studios and more and more there's there's more of that stuff and then yeah kepler was founded by the uh koala nights folks like this is a this is a funding this is a publishing company which is trying to make money in video games and it's trying to do it in a slightly different way than the traditional

ones have it's not that dissimilar to a lot of the vc money that's come into games as well where they are investing in smaller teams that can use technology to uh punch above their weight and if you are sort of naive to this world you look at that and go you know the credits are this many people wow I can't believe they did that and it's like no this is this is just a new way of investing in games and working game making games and that shouldn't like this is the problem we're going to run into over and over again is because people are like this company bad this company good this form of funding

bad this form of fun you know this form of capitalism bad this this form of capitalism good like it's it's it's it's so hard to pull the art from the funding if that's what you're the cross you're going to die on like it's at a certain point it's hard to just like what are we saying is good what are we saying is bad is it good for companies to be big is it good for companies to you know ubisoft for the longest time has employed a lot of people made a lot of games that people didn't like there are people that worked for 20 years there that's kind kind of good right isn't that good that people actually

bad because they had to make assassin's creed games four times actually it's bad because the mission markers that were on the screen exactly so all this is like i'm not i'm not trying to be like a fucking uh contrarian here but yeah i think i found it particularly funny when people were saying that sandfall was this like and i've talked to those people they seem lovely they've made a really terrific game they should should be really proud of and i don't put any asterisks next to that at all i don't care where you get your funding from as long as it's not from you know fucking pure evil or whatever

you know but like is that the dog food company pure evil but for people for like people on social media to be saying that this was like a like a real indie tour de force just shows how we need to kill the term indie game forever it needs to die self -funded i've seen developed like yeah exactly it needs to be broken down into we need to balkanize the term indie into a thousand sub labels yeah yeah right now it just sounds cost less than you'd think exactly yeah you go to a convention you see like this is the indie mega booth and it's like hey i'm funded by devolver digital it's like hey i mortgaged

my house again and i don't think i'm gonna make my money back it's like that's the same thing like what are you talking about yeah and every a lot of things like devolver i would have considered indie at a time yeah uh you know uh bethesda i would have considered indie at a time you know what i mean when when wasn't it indie it's hard to tell when did you know xenomax when did i guess when definitely when microsoft bought them yeah were they independent before that i don't know or you know or the way people talk about arcane and machine games you know it's it's just so much of it is marketing

and people don't realize yeah it is also uh specifically like number one it is marketing and number two it is odd that um in i feel like it's sort of a specific thing to games the way that people engage with the business side of it because like i i maybe never see people talk about the size of a film crew unless it's something like tangerine that was shot on iphones with a very small crew or something like it's only the extreme edge cases where no one is like oh christopher nolan made inception with only like 123 people that's You know what I mean?

Like, I don't even know how I like people talk about budgets sometimes with movies, but way less common, but never fucking like team size or I don't know.

It seemed it seems like talk about industry in in games is is both like more common and also often driven by sort of just like sticky narratives that don't really map onto the reality.

like when people it's a metric yeah it's it's a number you can point at and say like look they did it with this many people why does it take 1000 people here to make this game that sucked when you could make a good one with 33 people it's a defiable thing you can compare people like dissect the topology of AAA assets like what does this cape have like four billion polys and it's like I've you know it's Danny you bring this up a lot but it's sometimes people will assume like ignorance or foolishness on the part of these people who are like insanely talented talented, skilled technicians, and it's

like, it's usually like, design goes through a process of iteration.

It's usually not just like, oh my god, dude, we left in the cape that has like four billion polygons.

What the fuck? I hope no one notices.

There was that one time in Final Fantasy XIV, remember, there was a barrel that was like 15 ,000 polygons or something, and they couldn't this part of the world, it wouldn't load forever, and they realized they left in this fucking super high textured barrel, but yeah, Yeah, I get that it's based on broad narratives about like, you know, fucking production line video game development.

Like, I get it. But it's just I think I think it's when I think it's when it's people, especially like these super naive, like, I don't know, online content creators who are trying to talk game about game development and they really don't know what they're talking about.

And they're going around saying things like this or tweeting things like this.

and then it's kind of like all right well you know we're just going to spread lies i guess now and this will be the new lie that you know people have to be angry about for the next or not i have to be angry about for the next 10 years because somebody said something stupid one time yeah it's just like it's just drama like rage bait content a lot of it is just like i mean you know there is larger discussion about how sort of like algorithmic engagement and like narratives that are sticky are things that get people either elated or enraged and it doesn't even matter if they're true because that initial

like engagement is what fuels further initial engagement so uh i just think you know if i would just was like gabe newell killed a man with his bare hands it's like either it doesn't have to be like i feel like that would go viral just if i just don't pull that quote take that back that was a joke it's not a soundbite no he would have used a knife come on yeah yeah it's true he's got so many knives he escaped a shark he might be unkillable exactly yeah you're right that's why the shark ran away yeah he was like oh shit it's that guy the shark escaped him exactly yeah uh yeah and look it makes

sense for those of us who are you know our team in the business of trying to uh demystify games development to show how complicated it is that superficial narratives like that are quite frustrating um but yeah super cool game i yeah as a as a outsider to this genre totally besotted with with the world and the gameplay i really think it's special and uh yeah fair play to everyone who worked on it both of them um let's uh let's talk about another game that was made with a small team and this at least initially uh oblivion i know we talked about this a couple weeks ago i think i had 90 minutes or two

hours in the game before we had to record it um i've played i think 25 hours of oblivion over the past two weeks fuck man oblivion such a good time i think oblivion is just it was my first elder scrolls game and i think it's just it's peak open world fantasy for me it's uh it's also very 2007 and lots of lots of silly ways frank you've played a bunch as well right yeah i think i'm also maybe like 20 to 30 hours and uh it's it's so funny going back to this because like i I barely remember it this this is like the first game I played on 360 where I got all 1 ,000 achievement points and like I remember

vague things I remember going to oblivion gates I remember doing thieves guild and stuff like that but now I'm actually in the world it's like it almost feels like playing it for the first time because I don't remember any of the details even like progression and stuff at first was so confusing because it was like oh I really can just you could just go any direction any town and just start to get like you can fast travel yeah anywhere even if you've not been there yeah which I I totally forgot was the thing that they allowed then that's that kind of like screwed me up because I was doing that a lot

and then I was like all of a sudden like I was following the main quest and then I was getting killed I had really bad gear and I realized like oh wait no you're supposed to explore like go into random goblin caves and just get like so once I started doing that actually walking the world and killing things and then then all of a sudden I started getting way better loot and and really enjoying the game and um so yes but it took me a while to remember how to play this game because like i was just not used just not used to it and uh it's uh yeah it's been really really fun to be back yeah i've uh

i've had a blast with it i've i i've played a lot of oblivion but i i'm like surprised by how much i forgot i guess like you know like the dark brotherhood stuff i remember in the the arena and all that stuff but i guess there was loads of side quests that I either never did or they're just so quick that I forgot about them and yeah and also something about I don't know what it is about this the way that they've produced this thing it's obviously an unreal engine I think somebody somewhere I saw a post somewhere that it's like a rapper or something because like it's game brio underneath right

okay yeah because I can't believe how like much it feels like oblivion like all the same little weird ai things happen and um just the feel of it but for whatever reason maybe it's because i played it on 360 on a pad before but playing it on mouse and keyboard and it running this fast i just feel like so i don't know kind of powerful because i mean i always played these games using uh bow and arrow as well so i'm just like fucking nailing people from really far away um i'm jumping around a lot more the inventory so much easier to use with mouse and keyboard so i'm just like i'm i'm i'm eating

up the content i'm just burning through stuff you know i have like i've collected like 17 earn route at this stage like i've you know i i just spent like i spent two hours one night just walking along the river bank of every water source in the game collecting fucking you know weird sounding weeds because i i just wanted to complete that that quest um and then the level scaling stuff i'd forgotten about so you know i was getting into these you know little dungeons and collecting all those crystals they're what are they went whaling stone i always called them whaling utani stone whaling wendell

stone i don't know what they're called and then like suddenly there's like minotaurs and shit in there because i've i've leveled up yeah it's crazy so um yeah man they still have the persuasion wheel do you still have to play that weird minigame yeah they kind of fixed the look of it a bit so it's a little bit easier to to i just bribe everyone i just like you know you can like persuade them by giving them some in the game or like yeah yeah i just like to hear them say all the classes like don't talk such rot like they just have such weird uncanny lines i just love hearing that shit again dude

every time someone says blessing of standar upon you i'm just like fucking yeah now give me agitosh i'm twisting a back itosh upon you oh oh and then every once in a while like they kept all the lines including that one lady who does the ricot you know she's like there's that famous oblivion line which she says the line and goes oh let me do one more time yeah i've seen that they kept that in which is great that's awesome um but the character creator's still but ugly martians like are they still the grossest thing he's ever seen yeah you can see somebody made the um the the uh who's the what's

jd vance face you know like the meme version where it's all blown up yeah big head somebody made that pretty be good i hope there's no pope in oblivion it runs into that character created yeah i heard jd vance met uriel septum that's what it was poor patrick stewart who's alive by the way yeah he is yeah like no in the last episode no no and when you guys were talking about oblivion i think danny said rested power uh about no i was thinking about uriel's no i know you mentioned about uriel septum but it sounded like you were saying patrick stewart died you knew something thing that we didn't know

no sean bean's in this too um which i forgot you know yeah well i mean he's died and everything else so so far um he's uh yeah i forgot sean bean was in this also hilarious that sean bean is playing like the young person you know in this in the story um fucking great man oblivion is a good time you guys not gonna jump in play some oblivion i might but i might I don't know.

It looks amazing. I kind of...

Oblivion is a very specific sort of holistic experience for me.

Which is weird because it's not even fucking nostalgia because I played it for the first time two years ago and talked about it on this podcast. So I feel like it's both a little too soon for me and also, yeah, I don't know.

The old -timey aesthetic, I feel like, is part of the experience that I enjoyed.

So, yeah, we talk about this all the time.

Remakes are one of those specific things that are either either like cilantro or you don't it tastes like soap to you yeah so i think um when i was growing up oblivion was kind of the first game that i really watched reviews for and like i remember when knights of the nine dropped i think i watched i think i watched greg kasavin's review of oblivion like 40 times nice and then i watched someone's knights of the nine video like so many times i was like i can't wait to play this expansion to a game i haven't played yet but I eventually played it I think maybe six or seven years ago uh for the first

time and I was like oh this is really great I love the speed tree stuff I love the weird like high definition ray stuff going on like that stuff yeah like it's it's a very specific look to me so when I watched the opening of oblivion the remaster and I see you come out of the cave and it doesn't look like that I'm like I don't really want to play that to me that's not oblivion like I get it I can can totally understand the appeal of it looking the way that it does like it still looks great don't get me wrong um but part of the charm of oblivion to me is that that version of it in my head yeah

that i like because i feel like most remasters the goal is to make it well i don't know necessarily how true that is but i feel like the goal is to make it look like how you remember it looking here i remember it looking more fun than this it looks kind of like i think i said the same thing two weeks ago when i was chatting about this about how you've gotten over it especially when you do a side -by -side yeah but you got I got so over it so quickly because I was just like man let's fucking this lock picking many games is there no like dissonance between the jank and the visuals like that doesn't

get in the way or does that make it funnier I think I think I think the problem is if you do side -by -sides of them it's super obvious if you're playing the game it's not except for that one spot because everyone has that image of the green hills and the and everything and it just does feel less saturated and less inviting but But I think, here's the thing that I'm not sure.

I probably need a side -by -side to do this.

The original Oblivion, when I played it back then, one of the things that I found sort of limiting about it is that I kind of largely felt like the world looked the same everywhere.

I didn't really feel like there were many distinct biomes in it.

And there are, but they are similar looking.

In my mind's eye, they were.

In this, they're not.

not in this the lighting and the colors in the different parts of the world are very different.

So it feels different like the areas and I remember in Skyrim feeling that like oh solitude feels very different to like this other part of this part and I don't know if that's part of it like maybe maybe that area doesn't feel that way because other places feel more lush or Frank what do you think?

I I feel the I don't know why my brain goes away but I always change the time of day to be like morning so it is green and sunny I hate like when it's night or but there are parts where it's snowy I don't know I don't know I again I'm fast traveling so much that it's like I'm not seeing the evolution of like the volumes as they go by but yeah by once I was playing it it's like the the way the game feels it feels exactly I remember it back in 2006 2007 the graphics are are different but um but i appreciate it being 60 frames and it not dropping like 20 frames on the 360 so i'm i'm very happy with it

but um yeah any of my skepticism with like the colors like are washed away once you start playing it also like and i feel like half the time you're in caves anyway dude the dungeons look so good the lighting on in the in the in those spots is is really cool and i've got i'm playing around more i think the first time i played it and i played a lot of it but i'm trying to think how many times i replayed it i think i was always like fairly conservative of what i was doing so i'm sort of like trying to fuck around more this time because i'm so familiar with the world i'm trying different things and i'm

not doing as much magic as i used to and i'm messing around with different like finding interesting um you know buffed med you know necklaces and shit like i i have um my two favorite ones are i have the necklace of sea walking which lets me just straighter jesus myself across wow you got rosary that's awesome it's i found like four of them and they were worth a fortune so i've sold the other three they're worth like a thousand gold each or something that sounds like a story out of the bible dude yeah yeah dude it's so funny because you just this guy from nazareth and he won't fucking cut it out

now there's four of them walking around out there yeah yeah i'll just like hanging hey what's up um but and you can like get caught out you can fall through the water if you like try and grab something under the water and stuff but i i use it to like i'll pull mobs and just run into the middle of a lake and they'll like chase after me and i'll just be like fucking arrowing them as i'm like standing above them and then i have the other one the the the uh of sea breathing or whatever water breathing so i can just go underwater for as long as i want and for that one i've just been diving into massive

like into lakes and stuff and just trying to find some shit like find some chests and stuff it's awesome the way you describe that sounds like a um like a like a logan paul youtube prank channel where you're like pranking people and then walking out to the water so they can't chase i don't know exactly that is how i picture that is like you hitting a goblin that you're like what are you gonna do about it man i'm gonna fucking like this fucking asshole one one hitting things in this game just like i'll just like aim at like a fucking wolf from across a valley and just be like yeah and then you

hit that and then they die you're like oh i saw speaking of the hit detection stuff i saw they they changed whether or not this is bad up to the person uh i saw that they changed it so their reactions to the hits now like is that real did they not before yeah oh yeah you'd hit somebody with a sword and they were just like ow you jerk but like their bodies didn't like flinch yeah it was like stop yeah even violated the law it's so funny eating sword slashes do you guys remember the youtube video of the guy who did the perfect oblivion guard impression and uh him and by the pool like the real life

one fell in the water i have to do you guys remember what that channel is called sorry i'm like sourcing old meme videos on the podcast smosh no shot they're not that funny i'll find it i'll find it and i'll mention it by the end of the podcast such a good time yeah good old oblivion never never never change uh i wonder if they'll do a Skyrim one now?

Probably. I bet. Yeah, probably.

I bet. It's LaFaveBros.

L -A -F -A -V -E -Bros. Oblivion 4 is the name of the video on YouTube and it has 11 million views.

It's probably my favorite Oblivion video of all time.

Stick it in the comments.

Yeah. I was a big fan of the Consolvania review, which is a bunch of Scottish guys you probably don't know of who did one.

That was pretty good.

Pretty good. good stuff oblivion is still a threat um don't take a quick break this is probably going to be a long podcast i feel like sure don't take a quick break sure we'll do pp somebody needs to pee i gotta empty my nappy you know oh man all right everyone have to eat their nappies we're back in a second welcome back folks more video games to talk about this is what happens when you have a week without a crew cast we gotta we gotta plunge deep into the video game hole jeremy Jeremy, what do you want to pull out of this whole, pick one of your two here.

They're both bangers.

Let's talk about Despilote.

Despilote. Despilote.

Check out my interview with the designer of Despilote over on Ludonaricon's website.

We'll have links to that and talk about that at the end of the show.

I've been dying to watch it and I have not watched it yet because I played this whole game yesterday.

So I was waiting to experience it.

Despilote is a first -person narrative game.

It is about a young boy in Ecuador.

And as as Ecuador fights its way towards trying to enter the World Cup, soccer fever, football fever for the alliteration seizes the nation of Ecuador.

The game starts with this sort of parallel narrative about how an Ecuador, an athlete from Ecuador won a gold medal, I think, for power walking in 96.

And then everyone in Ecuador was like, we fucking Power Walk here.

Now that's our thing.

Showing that like, you know, when you're with someone from your sort of like out of the spotlight quarter of the world raises to the national stage, it becomes this this matter of immense national pride.

But also it becomes part of this.

It's becomes part of your identity.

It's not that you're just like we're the nation where that guy who Power Walks come from.

it's now like we are a people who are proud of our power walking prowess uh and so similarly you know despite the fact that football soccer obviously is a bigger part of the culture you know than power walking presumably um once Ecuador sort of is fighting its way towards the world cup it becomes this uh this fever that seizes the whole nation and so uh you play a small ball boy in ecuador around this time um the game or the despot is told across like five games on the road towards the world cup and it's sort of this like story of it's very slice of lifey is how i would describe it this is it's

i thought it was gonna be way more about soccer and about the world cup that is sort of the like that is the water in which you swim but the actual focus of the game is very much about the life of this young boy and sort of like his experiences within than that backdrop um this reminded me a lot of like yasujirou movies kind of slice of life movies or um uh i just watched um where's the friend's house somewhat recently by abbas kiarostami a very famous iranian filmmaker uh i this reminded me so much of kiarostami to the extent that i think there was a reference to where's the friend's house in this game

i need to ask the people who made this game if it was a reference um but regardless uh just sort of like very slice of lifey quiet humble domestic portrait of life um and so the the game sort of has these open somewhat open little vignettes where uh you know someone will be like uh hey you gotta be back here at 10 30 don't be late and you could look down at your little watch and then just run around in the world and so uh it's it's beautiful the way it just kind of like lets you off the leash and lets you explore and um and there's weird little pockets of interactivity like that i kept thinking

about um it was i forget where i read it it was by melos hontani the guy who made a anodyne and a bunch of other games um was talking about how there's this philosophy about game design where a lot of western developers will think that freedom for the player emerges from creating a huge number of systems and that like freedom for the players player expression as it were is is you know do i level up strength do i level up until intelligence am i a bow guy am i a sword guy but um but he was contending that sort of a a sort a form of freedom uh that we don't sort or that we sort of underestimate

is is bespoke moments that are more curated by the developer but because the player can't predict what's going to happen it almost feels like infinite possibility so like if a game is you know your character is going towards this inevitable plot point that's about to happen or there's like a set of a few limited interactions interactions.

Because each one of those is specially curated by the developer, if you set it up right, the player can essentially feel like they are having this infinite possibility space.

Because they're like, oh, wow, I'm a little kid who can go around and kick a soccer ball anywhere.

And it's just one interaction.

It's just kicking a soccer ball.

It's not a huge systemic thing.

But because there are just soccer balls laying around in this world, it feels like this much larger possibility space.

Because you come across some kids who are kicking a soccer locker ball around and I just like like older kids and I just ran in and like took their ball and started dribbling it around and they're like what the fuck it just came and like pushed me to the ground and took it back um and it's the it's just this very small bespoke interaction but it creates this feeling of a larger possibility space that I think uh I think Desperate does that a lot I think um it really creates this feeling of of being a kid and wandering around and just being able to go up and uh if you hit space bar when there's

not a specific interaction in front of of you you just wave and say like oh uh and I was just going up to like it's this is just like a being a gregarious child simulator half the time I was just going up to random people and being like can I pet your dog and they're like oh yeah pet my dog and I was like this is fucking this is so charming um and yeah it's just this like beautiful sort of personal story about a real time in one of the developers lives but sort of semi -fictionalized in a lot of ways and uh it's so it sort of slowly breaks its frame and does interesting things i wouldn't have expected

it ended up um um being pipped for the chemist mcnally and the nuevo award by consume me which is another game coming out of nyu game center as this one also did uh julian codero um came out of there and i believe uh jenny from the consuming team did as well um but it did win the excellence in audio and I want to ask you about that because one of the things that I asked Julian about was the the voice work in this game I thought was amazing and I was and also just the sounds they apparently went back to this town in Ecuador to record all of the sounds there but also the voice work I was thinking

I basically asked him I was like is this because it's not in English and I'm sort of prescribing some more authenticity to it maybe as somebody who doesn't understand what they're saying um or or is it is it not that and he he told me the process of recording the audio which was absolutely mad which is that like for instance the parents in the game are his parents I figured yeah his parents have since divorced oh my gosh so he had them basically in the same room together just chatting like he didn't he never told anyone anyone want to say there was no like script for this stuff you would basically

just like give people like a situation like you're in the car we're driving to this wedding what would you talk about and they just riffed and like and you recorded loads of this stuff and then sort of uh used it and i think it's it it totally works for the the perspective of a child because you are such a passive you know you're like a passenger in other people's lives to a certain extent when when you're a child and you know they're not directly talking to the player character aka the child in those scenarios you're just sort of overhearing adults talking about stuff a lot and i i think it's

such a a beautiful way of um of adding to the game especially with regard to how sort of stripped back the art style is like it gives so much presence to to every moment um and obviously it won an award for it but you know jeremy what did you make of it and jesse's well you played a bunch of this right you played the demo at least last year no I finished it last night yeah uh as well it was I think the music the sound the way that it's recorded like you're saying that sounds really cool for the for the dialogue but even just I think you make a really good point that sometimes it's easy to say

oh the voice acting is really good because all you hear is the emotion and you can't really discern what's being said um but I think just the way that the presentation is done from the perspective of yeah a child the way that characters talk like there There are moments where you can play soccer in the game digitally, like there's a soccer game within the game and the characters will be talking overlapping that now.

Of course, if you don't speak Spanish, you have to read the subtitles to keep track of what's going on.

And in that moment, I was getting a little frustrated at first because I was like, I want to read this dialogue, but I want to score on Ecuador or I want to score on whatever.

Uruguay, I think Uruguay.

Yes, the first one.

Yeah, I was like, I really want to make this happen.

But then I realized, like, yeah, I'm ignoring the parents so I can play the video game.

I'm experiencing. And in that moment, I was thinking about that Keita Takahashi interview that I brought up a couple of weeks ago about how he wants games to be capable of showing perspectives and ways of life that aren't just shooting things and punching things.

It's like you can tell stories and games.

You can make games about childlike wonder and present it in this way.

That's not exclusively, you know, making cute colors flash on the screen to distract you for 45 minutes.

You can be you can get down to the scale.

Like I thought of a lot about the Florida project while playing this, not, you know, some aspects of that didn't overlap, but the scale at which it's told and the way that it centers itself around children.

And then also Nickel Boys, a movie I watched recently, which is like a very dreamlike story about these kids who live through hardship, who were taken to like, I think, a reform school and are forced to live their lives there.

And just the way it's shot and edited with this sort of dreamlike quality to it where it sacrifices its ability to tell a totally linear narrative so that you can experience emotion more rawly and in this way that like is very honest and deep.

And I felt that while playing Despilote as well.

Like it's not told fully linearly.

Like you go through these days where the football games are happening.

But there's other stuff that happens between those that sacrifice that and you see what they're able to do by jumping around in time.

And like, I don't know, there's so many moments that there was one moment in particular, I won't say, but like where I felt like it was a purely systems driven thing.

You had to go home to your mom.

That's it. uh that happens a couple times like you guys said but there was like stuff around that that scared the shit out of me for like no reason and it just reminded me of being a kid and and the way that like my brother who's only i think 10 months younger than me i think i've only been alive for 29 years um who um and he would be out later than me and we would go looking for him and he was like fine but it just scared the crap out of me and i was thinking back to that while playing despilote a lot of stuff like it brought up a lot of really sad and nice memories and i think that's what draws

me to this and what draws me to games in general is like their ability to put you in someone else's shoes and give you the chance to see what life is like from a perspective that you may never get to see in latin america in the midst of soccer come on like what what more exciting moment could you ask for when they're finally getting to the world cup like i've been hanging out around a lot of chileans and they're like a basic soccer game here for a sports team no one cares about they win and they're like it's time to party let's burn down the streets like it's awesome yeah it's very this is very

much the experience of growing up in Ireland and then 1990 1994 World Cup as well it's just complete it's a complete fever for the exact same reason and that's why I like having the interview with him was a lot of fun um and we'll link it in the in the the show notes um because it's almost the exact same thing where it's a small country I I don't know what the population of Ecuador is.

Is it about the same?

Ireland's about 4 million when we were qualifying for those.

Oh, Ecuador's way more.

It's like 18 million.

And it's weird. In a way, a lot of countries qualify for the World Cup in South America.

They get like eight slots, or six maybe, or seven.

But it tends to be.

The problem is you've got Brazil, Argentina, you know, a bunch of other teams that historically have a lot of decent teams in them and then you've got a lot of really small countries as well um that tend not to make it but bolivia i think uh or ecuador sorry was probably punching below its weight for a long time there um or didn't have enough players together so yeah it was cool i'd never i never knew that this was this was the fever that they they had um going into that so cool little game any other final thoughts on despilote i want more games told from like this slice of life perspective that are about such

a particular moment in time i think this is so interesting obviously like jeremy said there's some fictionalization going on here i wouldn't call it a straight autobiography no it's definitely not no but being able to capture a moment it's like this uh what is it called black revolution 1979 or something like that um it's a game about the yeah 1979 revolution black friday i played this like a decade ago no nine years ago when it launched in 2016 and it's about uh let me just double check and make sure i'm saying the right country here but it was about like a civil war i think in iran and uh it's

just such an interesting video game like i think back to it a lot because it touches on subjects that you never really get to see the fall of the shah or something i think something like that yeah so it was just very interesting i nine that feels like it was earlier than that i don't know it might have been but just yeah more games like that please thank you all talented people make what i want and not what you want um yeah i i my sort of bottom line on despilote is that uh i i watched a really good lecture that the NYU Game Center put on recently, given by Carina Pop, who is, I think, a visiting

arts professor. I forget what her title was, but I'm not going to paraphrase her ideas on it because it was way more academic.

And you should just go watch the talk if you want to see the real version of this.

But one of the contentions she made is that people often think that video games are games.

And she made the contention that video games are a separate thing that are that are different than games, that video games are not games.

And I thought this was a really interesting thing and I started thinking a lot about it that games are inherently these things that have like rules usually like points some level of competition or a person trying to overcome an objective and stuff and video games are more like sometimes they have game -like elements sometimes there are numbers that go up and points and stats and all these things but video games are more like interactive spaces possibility spaces and sometimes they have characters uh sometimes they have interactions but it's it's more like it's a totally different separate thing

and i think despilote is such a good illustration of this that this is this is not a game where it's it feels like a weird open like i felt like i was playing like um i kept thinking when i was playing this that like oblivion in many ways is like a walking simulator or that like when you play morrowind that like morrowind isn't great because that like the combat sucks in morrowind morrowind is like a walking sim in a fantasy world and i just kept thinking that like like a for an immersive first -person slice of life game I think is is such a rich uh area to explore um I brought up earlier movies

by people like Ozu and Kiarostami um these are movies where you know often in an entire scenario an entire scene will be crafted out of like kid sitting on a bench and like can't move until their mom gets back and they have to like watch people going by and stuff and I think when you bring those sorts of like domestic or pastoral quiet scenes real life slice of life scenes into the format of a video game and let the player choose what they're interacting with it uh i think it could reach a lot more people because i think a lot of people see movies by people like ozu and they're like oh that's

that boring ass movie where like they drink tea for 25 minutes where's the colors boo i'm not watching this yeah well yeah i just think like quiet humble explorations of everyday life in the form of of a video game i think is a really powerful thing because I think video games by by virtue of being interactive draw you in so hard that uh I don't know yeah I think you could tell stories like that in video games in a way that would reach people who might otherwise not be open to that kind of story I think we're I think the thing the thing that sometimes I'm a bit protective of is the idea that we

feel this way whenever somebody does it well like that there are people trying to do this stuff sometimes and they're just they just don't work like they either they don't hit the right tone or or technically and i think over the past few years like the past 15 20 years games game developers have gotten better at this like i think it sort of isn't surprising that this is coming out of a place like nyu game center where they're really attacking the skill and art of making video games from like multiple ways and there's probably a lot of stuff going on that like makes a despilate work and makes

another game not work um and like obviously the the walking simulator genre is is sort of like a you know a relatively derogatory thing because you go back to games like dear ester and like they literally just are you're walking listening to someone talking you know what i mean like like we've we've come a long way since then so i hope that what you're saying is true like and i think that maybe it's just taken a long time for people to maybe it's maybe it's two things maybe it takes a while for the market to be okay with it and maybe it takes longer for people to you know find find a way to to

make these more interesting because despilade doesn't feel boring or preachy or slow it's like curious and fun and sweet you know it's it's different and i don't i don't have the brain to figure out why but it is you know and it works better yeah i mean games are you know relative to cinema games are pretty it's a young medium um and so you know you don't get like an ozu or a kuros dummy until whatever like the uh 50 well ozu was working earlier than that but like what we think of as ozu comes later and stuff but cinema's been around since the late 1800s and like you know know the earliest games

that were made on like fucking oscilloscopes and nasa labs were like the 60s or whatever so yeah i don't know i i think that uh yeah maybe maybe we're getting to to a point where there's like an artistic inflection that explores you know i mean there are quieter humbler slice of life games and stuff but i do feel like this uh this shows that i i think there's a huge amount of potential untapped in in that sort of area for like everyday stories about real people's lives or like based on real people's lives speaking of of everyday stories based on real people's lives skin deep is out and jeremy

how much of this have you played as well yeah sorry sorry jesse meow jeremy meow uh i have played a few hours of this um this is fantastic this game is really really good this is a uh like a a slapstick immersive sim like a comedy immersive sim um from blendo games who've made games such as uh 30 flights lights of loving uh they did quadrilateral cowboy too right yep great uh bunch of great games check out every game by blend o games fantastic body of work but um this is like this is such an interesting flavor of immersive sim um m sims are typically like dark and oppressive and like the government's

got like a mind virus or like this plague of rats taking over the city uh and this is like you know what if you're freeing cats as an insurance adjuster in space and you You have a third lung and you could fly around in space.

Is that why she's able to fly around in space?

All the insurance adjusters have a third lung that allows them to exist indefinitely in space as they're assured by their employer.

But the assurance has made it a way where it seems like they're not very sure of it themselves.

So I don't know if you should push the limits too much. But yeah, this is sort of this like mission -based but narrative -driven IMSIM where you're going into these ships that are taken over by pirates and they've taken the crew captive the crew are always these weird polygonal box -headed cats um and you're essentially playing in this sandbox of just like a ridiculous number of overlapping systems uh you're usually severely like underpowered relative to all these pirates which I think is I think that's such a great twist on immersive sims because a lot of times I am not a stealth gamer I like I'll

I'll get caught by the first guard in a dishonored game And I'll be like well I guess I have to murder everyone You know It's not my fault that I'm fucking I'm going weapons loud you forced me to do this Just cause one guy's like what was that noise And I'm like I guess I have to murder you Um so yeah Having to like throw pepper at dudes with guns And then jump on their backs and slam Them into walls And then they can revive themselves So you have to pop their heads off Because they'll revive otherwise you carry the heads Around and the heads continue to talk So they're like making noise toys

uh and then you have to flush the heads down toilets or put them in garbage chutes or you can go out into space with them and just like pitch them into the void of space uh which is very very funny so um yeah it's just this bizarre little comedy im sim that's it's so fun yeah it's skin deep is like the funniest game i've played this year i would say almost hands down like it the way that it gives you opportunities to do funny stuff not unintentionally like it's not glitchy i mean yeah there's a little stuff here and there but sometimes you see a clip when it's like the funniest thing that's ever

happened dishonored and it's like someone's skin is stretching across the whole map yeah right stuff that's here is like you slipped on soap and and now you're rolling around on the ground like a sausage like it's the it's just so quirky and not in a derogatory way like it's yeah it's very funny and silly and i think more than other uh immersive sims to jeremy's point about like it's not oppressive it's almost the tone of it being funny encourages you to to do whatever like right in dishonored it's i don't want to do any magic stabbery because then i'm not going to get the ghost mode here he's

just like you messed up that's fine whatever run away you'll you'll be in stealth mode again and that'll change how things play out and whatever have some fun with it throw a banana peel see what happens um there's so much to see and do and experiment with that i think it's just even in the first handful of levels um the stuff that was in the demo that i haven't been able to play past that but just the stuff that's in the demos is just like so good, such a good introduction to the mechanics.

And then also your ability to do stuff and try different things.

It reminds me of playing the opening of hit man, the IOI newer ones, the 2016 or whatever, um, where it's like, here's okay.

You did a level, try it again and do this fun thing.

That's a little different here.

There's nobody saying to you.

I think there's a little, like there's some objective things you can get.

That'll give you more points or whatever.

Like you didn't find this thing, figure out where that is.

Um, so there was a little bit of that there, but for the most part i was playing through levels multiple times just to try a different way to get in there and to un unpack whatever the puzzle is to like open the windows or disable this computer over here like how do i get a hold of this key card so i can open and like so much stuff like that where i was just i wanted to see how deep it went um and i was laughing the whole way through i don't think i don't think there's more than 10 minutes i've played of this game in a row where I wasn't laughing my ass off.

You're at least going to get one of those fucking cats.

Absolutely. The funniest cats in gaming.

It gets me every single fucking time.

The sense of humor in this game sometimes works for me and sometimes does not, but the one bit that always gets me is when you free one of the cats it goes into a slow motion and they go meow and it says meow on the screen and they just like fly out of the box in slow motion.

Jesse, can you stick a meow in here?

Meow. i laugh every single time i it's it's in it's like someone is hitting my knee and my like leg is doing the involuntary motion i just laugh at it every time it's so fucking funny um but yeah skin deep is fantastic i mean if you like immersive sims i think this is a great immersive sim if you're not really into immersive sims i feel like this might be a good entry point because it's it's less self -serious but it is still very uh systems rich it's not like a this is not like a tonka toy truck version of an msim where it's like easy or light on systems yeah yeah exactly yeah it's not the baby version either

yeah yeah it's not yeah i'm excited to play some more the demo they released was pretty generous so i'm still in the same situation with jesse where i'm kind of you know playing it differently as well which is fun i think like i'm excited to remember when i played the demo stuff i was like i'm excited to do this different next time like to to mess around a bit um we will have a quick look of that and also of expedition 33 up on uh noclip crew um we'll talk a little more about all that and later on uh so if you're if you're thinking about it go check out the quick look uh skin deep um looks pretty

cool it's got i think it's got 360 reviews on steam so it doesn't look like it's doing gangbusters 390 and despilote also does not have nearly as many reviews on steam as it should really yeah this this sucks first off this is that we're even talking about this this shouldn't have to be a hundred that we care about but why we have to do something jesse absolutely yes but it sucks that this is the metric that steam uses to be like people like it it's like team reviews are on average awful like even good ones are pretty you know mediocre um like of these hundred reviews i bet like two of them are useful

product reviews and then i mean actual reviews themselves yeah yeah like like the content of them the fact that like you have to rely on people willing to write reviews on steam to sell your video game sucks i hate it yeah but it is a little bit like if it's good yep it's a little bit like if um if the movies that showed in theaters were determined by letterboxd reviews is kind of how steve feels sometimes you know what i mean if like meme reviews where someone's like you know i i can't riff a meme review but you know the reviews on letterboxd that are like people will write this big essay about like

this has moved me to tears I can't believe such a depth of pathos is possible and then someone else is like did that guy shit his pants and in 35 minutes in and then that's like the top letterbox review as it should be that's what all criticism's about I'm not going on letterbox to read your your essay that you wrote for four hours for free all right I want to read a funny haha and then close the app that's it at least in steam you have to have like played the game you know it's not like it's not like fucking you know it's more been time or whatever you leave a review on conclave you're like wow

i can't i hope they put the pope in real life like that's that's the review that okay that's it that's funny it's beautiful i saw somebody i saw somebody there was a twitter post for morbius saying like oh shit we were busy that weekend re -release morbius yeah third time's the charm and we've got some other games here we we might want to have some fat for next week yeah some of these have you played a lot of or yeah i mean i finished both of those but we can totally save it really holy shit okay i had i wasn't on for like a month it's fine i know it's a good point we're gonna talk about lab rat then

and uh initial thoughts on both lab rat and blueprints i guess just for folks who are blueprints is really good i think uh it has problems that uh are a little too much for some people i like the meta puzzle solving stuff and uh that that's all i got it's It's a very good game that structurally frustrates me at times.

And Lab Rat is just a really good short Sokoban puzzle game with neat ideas about AI.

Sokoban. Yes. Oh, hit my microphone.

Sokoban. I want to make sure I get the dev name right because they worked on something else.

Chump Squad, who made Kine, which I think the lead developer was in one of Jason Schreier's books, was sort of the focus point of one of the bits there.

Good game, though. So really fun puzzle.

Published by Clay as well.

Yeah. Gotta get to the publishing world.

There you go, Lab Rat.

All right, that was a bunch of games there we talked about.

Expedition 33, Oblivion, Dispelate, Skin Deep, and some brief mentions of Blueprints and Lab Rat there as well.

Looks like we got some emails this week, Frank.

Shall we jump on in?

Yeah, we got a lot of emails and Discord messages.

If people do want to write to the show, So email us podcast at noclip .video or in our patron Discord in the podcast chat channel.

The first one's from Alex Sills.

Sending this preemptively, assuming there will be Claire Obscure talk next week.

The game has been amazing so far and made me think about the last couple of years of AA or maybe just not quadruple A releases that seem to be knocking it out of the park.

Claire Obscure, Lies of Peace, Stellar Blade, probably more I'm not thinking of.

This has been discussed before, but what are your thoughts on the apparent great success of non -massive studios coming out with bangers?

That's nothing. new i can't see where they're coming from i think i think the quality i think the quality of work i think the one thing you'd say about games like clear obscure elizabeth and stellar blade is that they don't feel double a and i think that's one of the things that people are maybe feeling a bit bit different about these days is that like a lot of these games looked or felt or sounded not as glitzy as some of the triple a games and there's been a bit of a slowing down of progress like uh you know uh i don't know the the the the bell curve is kind of are you know diminishing returns

maybe on triple a i mean we're looking at this gta6 thing that looks fucking crazy right but like a lot of triple a games don't look insane when they come out anymore so i think that has been helping a little bit um but also i think just it must be tools a more um mature industry so like stuff like clear obscure where you just have like really strong leads really strong uh you know juniors that are learning really well and smart development processes that you're able to get these games out and then just more economic designs games that aren't trying to do too much you know which is the the blush

that you get into like with a starfield for instance where there's just like you know or fallout 4 right where you have these systems upon systems upon systems and it just becomes a little bit too much and then you know you lose a bit of something I think there's a big desire for games that are more economically and I don't mean in terms of development costs I mean in terms of the design that they're more sort of uh they're less broad but they're really well produced and I think all of these games sort of tick that box and I think they just look closer to AAA than they ever have for I think they've

gotten better it's gotten less expensive to make stuff that good and also AAA has probably slowed down a little bit in that that work?

Helps everything's on the same engine too.

Everyone's using Unreal in some way, so it's easier to make it look like an Unreal game if it's all in the same default assets.

Yeah. Uh, I think there's a lot of really good AA games that I've played over the years that, uh, but you have a good point that, yeah, things have gotten, it's gotten easier to make a game that looks good, uh, which I think has been a good and bad thing.

There are a lot of games that look good that are not fun.

And there are a lot of games that don't look that good, but are really, really enjoyable.

enjoyable um but we are hitting more of a of a middle point where it's yeah the quality is more visually obvious and then i think also part of it is um the press consolidating the the amount of people left to sort of highlight video games that aren't live service ones are looking for weirder more you know uh going against the grain games like glare obscure or at least a little or just the market the market too yeah for sure people are getting bored of those games there's no big you don't want to play assassin's creed shadows for 100 hours you don't want to do that here you go then yeah then maybe

these games are i mean they are more interesting absolutely yeah they don't have crafting systems tacked onto them you know i don't think there's a yeah it might just be that to a certain extent that there's so much i mean there is so much frustration with triple a and there kind of has been for a long time so and i and i get it and they're taking longer to make the games and then when they come out maybe they are below expectation and there's something cool about these games that people a lot of the time don't know much about them before they came out out like atomfall really took me by surprise

for whatever reason it just was not on my radar claire obscure was only announced like last year yeah right yeah summer games games fest yeah it's out less than 12 months later so i think i think a lot of that stuff has is helping too you know it's so much about expectation at that stage frank go for it all right ollie can't wrote uh what do you think constitutes as spoilers for a game for me for me spoilers is more about story and area discovery related things let me get out to count game mechanics and spoilers and new weapons or the answer to puzzles that felt odd to me because I play for immersion story

mechanics to me or just a means to an end so I have no shame in using a guide if I get stuck on something I want to move on and then other people thought I was crazy for doing that it's interesting though because it speaks to what I think what it is in games that we value and I just wanted to hear your thoughts uh I mean it is your mileage may vary it's it's different for everyone there's no hard hard, fast answer.

My personal philosophy is that some of my favorite experiences with games, movies, books, any anything in life is that if I want to know just enough to know that I'm interested in a thing and literally nothing fucking more, I there, you know, there there are people who say like spoilers aren't real and that like knowing a particular detail of a plot or a mechanic or whatever will not spoil the entire experience for you.

I think that is true in some regard but i think that my personal ideal experience is knowing fucking nothing because then every little oh my god like they have potions in this game like the littlest thing can become this moment of delight and surprise and i think that the the denser a game or an experience any experiences with like with wonder with surprise with like mystery with curiosity the denser those things are the more of them there are um the better the experience for me so uh yeah i again i've given you this before but there's there's a i think it was a terence malick movie i watched

one time where i didn't even know what it was about and it's like about a small town and then someone died and i was like this is a movie where people die like that's insane i i thought this was just gonna be like a quiet little dialogue movie um and i talked to someone who is a cinephile and they were like oh that's wild because that's like everybody knows that about that movie i was like i'm so fucking glad i didn't because like i'll never forget get watching that movie that time yeah i i will i go first all right i'm just i i'm not i'm not as big of a stickler on on spoilers as you guys are that's

all yeah i'm to me the the two point jeremy basically said the two points i'd say which is that mileage may vary mileage does vary and you don't know what someone else's mileage is so like that's why i always think it's more important to To say as much about the game, to be as selfless as possible when you're talking about games in the context of a review or in the context of a podcast or whatever it is, because if you are selfish, then you can sort of like make any excuse for why it's important to talk about this aspect, right?

Like, because it makes you feel a certain, you know, you really want to make a point about this mechanic or you know there's an element of this story that really resonated with you and you want to put it across and that's all fine but you're making a decision there to value your experience over someone else's and so that's why in my head whenever i'm talking about anything i'm always trying to i i you know i think part of it is because that's the media ecosystem i grew up in i think part of it is because i have been playing or talking about writing reviews reading reviews for so much of my life

that it's the same problem I have when people talk about movies if like somebody who doesn't know anything about movies or narrative or doesn't watch a lot of movies what they think is a spoiler is not the same as somebody who like watches a lot of fucking movies because they can say something and it's not that they said that thing it's that from that thing you can intuit about 30 other things and they might not because because they don't think about movies that way or games that way but my fucking stupid ocd brain will and and it will it will tell me like you know i have tried i there's this famous

famous sorry infamous moment of my life where i used to tell because i i have like intrusive thoughts and i have like voices in my head when i was a kid and stuff so like i have like parts of my psyche that will fuck with me when it comes to spoilers so that's why i don't feed that guy anything because he'll let me know and i used to like tell that to my friends and my friend he spoiled the end of or what happens in terminator 2 for me by standing in front of me and saying a phrase a five sentence phrase like a hundred times so i couldn't get it out of my head and now whenever i think about that movie

i think about that phrase i'm not going to say it here but it's basically what happens to the antagonist in that movie so i am like super sensitive spoilers and mostly it's because i know that like maybe five percent of our audience listening to this is and i think about games like the outer wilds right sorry my bad outer wilds i didn't know anything about that game so within the first hour my mind was blown over what you were essentially doing for the entirety of that game i did not know that was going to happen so and that's like one of the best gaming experiences i've had of the past 10 years

so it's it's it's hard so i think it depends on the game or the genre fifa we're driving games yeah wait what who's in fifa you know exactly no whereas like expedition 33 i enjoyed the start of that game so much because i knew nothing about it that i wouldn't want to take that from somebody you know what i mean so but uh yeah but i get it people some people don't give a shit or is you know i try to be careful about it on the pot i try my best you do not no you do definitely yeah because i i there's a lot of stuff where i'm like that's fine it's in the first hour but like i know that that's like

especially for you know i can weigh the value of it i think is what i'm saying like uh with expedition 33 the opening that game very cool don't want to talk about it because i know that's it's a cool thing even if like i knew before going in and i still was shocked how cool cool it was um so that was like that's one of those things but other stuff i'm like i don't know whatever this actor's in the movie he's not on the poster he's in the first five minutes it's funny some people say that or like um trailers used to be a thing i know a lot of people would say like oh it's in the trailer and it's

like something's in the trailer like something can be in the trailer like the gta trailer where people are going to frame by frame that shit basically pull every single thing or like something can be maybe he watched the trailer once like i don't even watch movie trailers like for that reason when when my wife yeah when when when we're like going to watch something like especially horror movies because we're always we always watch sluggy horror movies it's a lot of fun fucking all on that blumhouse shit right just like cheapo whatever and i'll walk out of the room she goes look at the trailer

i'll walk out because i'm like oh that's you don't want to see megan 2 .0's trailer you don't want to know what dance moves she does i did watch the megan 2 .0 trailer okay oh so we make exceptions no i'm just kidding no because because i wasn't sure if i'd want to watch it and i don't now after after watching the trailer because they like ai her face or something oh that too yeah is that what that it looks gross it looks shit yeah it looks terrible like the original one it looked it was the fucking robot right or like they cg'd it or something but it looked good it looked like ai schlock i was like

what the fuck is this is the sequel whatever yeah uh spoiler megan 2 .0's face looks stupid my favorite story about spoilers is i think this was an old harm in town episode where they were talking about this but uh three people are on a couch watching a movie and one One of them has to leave before the movie ends.

So he he's like, just tell me what happens.

And one of the people on the couch says, I don't I don't want to know, though.

And so the third guy who has not spoken has seen the movie before.

So the guy leaving is like, just whisper into my ear, does that guy die?

And he whispers in his ear and the guy leaving says, oh, good.

And he's like, he's like, I didn't say what it was.

And he's like, yeah, but you said you're not saying, oh, good.

He fucking died. Like, it's just it's funny how like the absence of information can be just as big of a spoiler.

Yes, 100 percent. Yeah, I think that happened with Blueprints as well.

uh not not in the same way of like people sort of like alluded to something that ruined it now you're expecting something but the hype around that where it's like don't say anything don't know anything go into it totally blind i think was a bad idea i think a lot of people went into that game thinking it was going to be something different including me uh and walked away from it like this is not what i thought it was you guys made it sound like it was going to be something different because you set up an expectation without explaining what the game was right right so funny a little bit of that good

question thank you ollie kant mostafa writes in hey no clip crew I recently played wonder stop and loved it a seven -day holiday had just started I was really burned out and needed to relax then I played this game for the first two days it felt like everything I learned about myself through therapy and life experiences in my relationship to my work in the past years was compiled into a single seven -hour game and I loved it deeply whoa getting to know that some other person on the other side of the world 99 % knows how you feel is the most rich rich experience i've had in gaming have you guys ever

played a game that you think you played in the best possible time of your life and felt like it was tailor -made for you oh that's a good question man i don't know if it like resonated that strong in the moment but i've definitely had games that were that i needed at that moment i remember being in a really rough it was like my last no i guess the covet stuff was tough it was like a bad moment of depression uh like a good like four or five months that was that was particularly tough in maryland and uh horizon zero dawn came out and it was so optimistic and outdoorsy and i was living in maryland so the fucking

outdoors was just like the trees were just skeletons it was awful and i remember like feeling like that game really dragged me out and like and it's all about like we'd move to maryland right i had basically like hardly any social life in maryland for the two years we were there which which was fine because our daughter was born and we were mostly being parents, but I think it was before she was born.

And yeah, it was just...

And that's a game about like, you know, it's a real going and journeying into the world and meeting people.

And it was just so positive.

The whole thing was just so uplifting and positive that it made a massive difference for sure.

I think for me, it was probably Disco Elysium.

Disco Elysium speaks to a number of different facets assets of my life that were all sort of reflected there um like you know substance abuse depression uh regrets about the past um just like a million different things that i was experiencing and seeing them reflected back in this uh sort of like emotional play space was a good way to kind of have like independent therapy without a therapist or something to like work through these things and also uh it's this sort of like relentlessly optimistic game in the face of all this pessimism uh you know it like drags you through the fucking mud but then

there are these pockets of of humanity and lightness and humor and connection and um and yeah it's like it never shies away from beating you up emotionally but as it does so there's there's sort of like um it's never like a cynical game in the way that it's depressing it's always sort of like yeah this is this is the worst thing that's ever happened to you but you're gonna get through and there's more to life than this uh for me i think it's got to be what remains of edith finch uh i was dealing with like just a lot of family loss people dying that i i didn't really know like their life story

i didn't know much about them but i knew that they were important figures in the family um and trying to learn more about them was so it like it was they had impenetrable lives it was like nothing was documented no one wanted to talk about what anyone had done you hear like whispers and it's like oh yeah this guy swallowed a key after the police showed up and they were inside of a stolen or an abandoned building um it's like cool stuff like that but you know you don't get the full picture of somebody uh and it's you don't have those opportunities so playing a game that's about exploring the ways

that people die but then also their own lives and like through their spaces and what's important to them the shrines they make to their own lives it's like yeah it was very very cathartic uh but sad but nice but sad come on frank yeah uh yeah persona persona 5 uh this was uh god okay whatever um yeah after my first breakup uh i started playing persona 5 and the key thing of that game is like your friends like i guess final fantasy 9 is the same theme but like your friends lifting you up and carrying you through stuff and so like that's so simple but like i would play persona 5 every saturday morning

and like it was like i just because i you have to dedicate time to if you ever really want to beat a jrpg because it takes like 120 hours so it was like every saturday morning i was gonna start playing this game but like the the game loop of every persona starts is like you're in your room and you get text messages from friends like hey you want to go out hey let's go see a movie whatever and like just by playing that every saturday like it became a habit but then while playing persona then i would start texting friends also and it kind of like helped me like go from like being in a relationship

where i was just with one person all the time and like then all of a sudden having that void and then just remembering like oh wait way i have all these friends around me and then it's still like the but the on my phone it's still the persona 5 text tone when you get messages from that game so like yeah persona persona 5 and then it's so funny because like i was playing that game here in this room then i moved down to san diego and was still playing it and it did take me like i don't know like two years to beat it and then i still haven't beaten persona 4 or 3 because those games are so long but like

the persona 5 was the first one that clicked for me but just like the just texting your friends became like a game mechanic that like i had to remind myself to do in real life and i was like oh my god it was great and then the music and the aesthetic and yada yada so yeah persona 5 is one example hell yeah and yakuza of course yeah like a dragon yeah during covid the yakuza series is like oh my god yes and then finally be able to go to japan after playing all the games through quarantine was like such an insane uh payoff um and then katherine wrote in and said uh i'd love to do some setup here

but as you're aware of the gutting of polygon and other outlets in the last few days you're a small operation that seems sustainable from the outside but what's the future of games media and reporting in your opinion especially for those who aren't personalities already as someone who wants to cover games RINBUTT online .com the ongoing brain drain and loss of generational talent is immensely disheartening it's great to see operations like noclip and aftermath help some of those already here carry on but what comes next yeah I don't fucking know noclip baby that's what comes next be sure to support

us you can get access to behind the scenes content stop stop stop stop stop this is probably yeah exactly it's like it's nice that someone asked the question because i find it very difficult to talk about this stuff sometimes because it feels like you're dancing on someone else's grave because it always comes up when when this type of shit happens um yeah i don't there's two answers to this question one is about writers and one's about video people unfortunately and for writers i don't know like i writing across the board has has become uh it always struck people always struggles to make money

from from writing writ large i mean even like i read a article yesterday about yeah i've read an article oh i thought it was dead exactly right about um just how little even like well -published authors make in 2025 in comparison just because of how um like international markets are really good but because the stakeholders involved in like distributing and publishing stuff weirdly in some markets are is still owned by a very small amount of companies like we're running into that problem again with film you know like independent film is very tricky to get it's not even it's not even a problem with making

the money to make the movie it's finding where it goes where you know cinemas and streaming platforms and all that stuff are largely owned by a uh consolidated smaller amount of industry of companies corporations and it's definitely the case in games writing games publishing at the moment as well and online is just you know it's really tricky and you do have the aftermath model but that requires or you know substack or whatever but that stuff also requires people to be well known and have a following but that kind of always was the case like it's not like there's a meritocracy in any art form

you know it's your ability i think rob zachny and uh patrick klepek from remap name dropping uh talked about this a little bit when when they found out about giant bomb and polygon and they were like rob made a really good point you know rob zachny right yeah i talked to him about formula one cars every day i talked to him two hours earlier today uh and i know patrick as well we were both at cbs at the same time and he was a giant bomb um i was a game spot yeah um they were talking about how like there can only be so many patreons oh yeah every like how many of these are just a small subset of like

a thousand or so people who are paying every single patreon like five to seven bucks a month like this that's not a it's not an industry where do you grow from there you know what i mean yeah 100 and that's another reason why i don't like sticking my head out or why like no clip crew has been a thing that we've been flirting with for years and i've been the one selfishly not pulling the trigger on doing a crowdfunding thing for it because i don't want to double dip with the noclip community or triple dip for those who follow me on shift f1 rob's probably got the same thing with uh what they're

working on and he's on multiple ones as well right like dnd ones and lots of other stuff and and yeah like you said like we compare notes like i look at the you know patrons on noclip open the patrons on shift f1 you know it's a me ferrario is a is a battle pass holder on this and a and a livery sponsor on the other one um which thing so thank you so much it's uh so yeah it's yeah it's that's a really good point so if the question is like broadly what this means like the enthusiast press is largely dead it had already like ign does some reviews most of this stuff is done by freelancers same with game

spot you know tomorrow's reviews editor most of their reviewers are contractors um when i was at game spot it was probably what do you reckon jeremy 70 30 maybe with uh with remote with contractor workers like 70 in -house 30 there then they fired a bunch of them and then it was probably close 60 40 maybe and but like now it's i don't know is it 80 20 contractors um how do you build a culture within a website you know but you can't pay for those people it was but then video people like things are have been really good for video people right because of youtube and streaming and you know the pivots

of video in general well it's just there's lots of you know you can do netflix and all that sort of stuff I do think what we've done with secret tape has been really demonstrative of the secret sauce that video people have in so far that we have a marketable skill that pays well and writers don't.

writers can do contract work but it doesn't really pay that well whereas if you're you know aggressive and and good at what you do on the video side um or even if you just want to do whatever you know what i mean you can get really good you can make a killing doing fucking little promos or you know wedding folks do really well like you you have a you have a marketable skill that is useful and like what uh what i found at least like my my dream for any publication is that you don't the the the desire to sell out will always be there because eventually someone will just turn up with a huge fucking

pot of money which just seems to be what happened with with polygon uh uh and and you you know the numbers don't add up or you just want to get an extension to your house and you just do it you know or you get sick of doing you get tired whatever it is the owners do it whereas if you own the company like I always looked at Red Bull and went Red Bull is the perfect company Red Bull sells fucking cans of drinks and they use that money to do all of this crazy fun shit which then gets to the stage where it makes its own money but it needs that safety net to do it um and i i i adopting that model towards

the work that we do here i think has been really interesting and i think you could do more of that but but it's hard yeah it's uh i don't know how do you find that uh how do you bridge that gap between what magazines used to be which was basically just ads like it's just ads yeah like i go back could read old game pros and i'm like was any of this like writing was it all just advertisements oh you mean the actual writing themselves yeah well not not specifically the writing but like just the content of the magazines if you go back like it's 120 page issue it's like 75 of the pages are advertisements

um but weirdly it didn't feel as intrusive as like it didn't because it was advertisements for things that you wanted to know about anyway well that's very true yeah that is true like it was okay it was like okay they're advertising the new diablo i didn't know that was the thing cool like that and it was like on a different page yeah that's true yeah i don't know why covering the text and you had to like scroll past it it's just exactly or it wasn't a uh five minutes into a youtube video we're going to talk about fucking squarespace yeah fucking you know yeah go go yeah go go to the part of the tracker

where you see the biggest peak and that's where the ad stopped you know like it's that stuff feels way more intrusive you know do you just start a i mean i was i was i went for a drive last night because i was a lot of these questions are going through my head and i was like you start a website right and then you have a show that's just called the shill zone and it's just like people pay you oh my god and you play whatever fucking game and and but everyone knows because it's 2025 and people aren't fucking stupid they know when it's something that's paid for so you just wrap your fucking arms around

it and you make it it's like the devolver digital thing did you see that where they're purposefully going to launch a game the same day as gta6 that's just counter program that shit put your dave oshry hat on you know what i mean become become the ultimate disruptor and i don't know i'd like people people get really i look i'm i'm i don't want to rant this is like the thing on monday where we had that big conversation about this and i was like it's just going to be me ranting for two hours if i fucking start on this so i'll cut myself off in a second but people you know when we did like secret

tape stuff right we did a bunch of work and we did you know you do work for companies that you like you know they pay well and maybe you don't have the same value as your clients like that happens happens.

I think mileage varies on that.

I think if you had a publication where you were as transparent as you possibly could be about that, it's difficult sometimes because you're negotiating with people behind closed doors for very good reasons.

You can have a stronger business position or because they're working on something that they can't talk about publicly or whatever.

But there is a world in which people hold us to count about that already.

By design, there were people in our community who didn't like that we were producing that.

And I totally understand that i also like taking money from people who aren't our patrons the robin hood of gaming right here if somebody wants to fucking pay and what i did with that and what i what i've done with all of our secret tapes off is i've put the number at the this would be hard to walk away from number you know what i mean like those series is like six videos paid for one of our team for the year like that's not that's and that wasn't that much work to put in it was a decent amount for me but it wasn't like insane amounts of work i like taking money from people who have too much fucking

money i think it's great i think those are the people you should fucking take money from and i understand that people don't want you know independence means a certain thing right but if i have to take money from people who have you know kids who both you know both of them go go to work every day they fucking already have netflix and all this sort of stuff then i'm asking them for 10 bucks a month or i can get like a fucking corporation to give us like whatever fucking six figures to do a fucking weekly show for you know a year or fucking not sorry that would be that would be like a monthly show

for them but like then i'll then fucking do it and and be transparent, and everyone knows, and they have the money to waste.

Because these companies do have the fucking money to waste.

That is the thing that I have learned.

A lot of the people we've worked with, a lot of the people that I have turned down projects for, or couldn't meet my budget expectations or whatever, it's not because they don't have the money.

It's orders of magnitude more.

And so honestly, sometimes I look at video game coverage and I'm like, Like, I don't know, somebody hasn't cracked a nut somewhere because the money's there.

Maybe the audiences aren't big enough.

I think that that's a big part of it.

I think a lot of these publications just simply did not have enough people watching their videos.

And like, I think that's sad and I wish more people did.

But you can look at YouTube numbers, you can look at streaming numbers, you can somewhat get an idea of page impressions or comment sections on websites or whatever it is, and you can figure it out.

And if you don't pass a threshold, nobody wants to work with you.

and then it's not corp then it's not anyone else's fault you know what i mean like that's that's also part of the fucking the dance unfortunately but i don't know i don't know what it means for individual writers i don't know what it means for the next generation coming through like how can you how can you this is why everyone wanted to be youtubers 10 15 years ago and they were right you know why would you ever try and convince somebody to get into games coverage at this stage as much as you know we many of us love it it's fucking And yeah, we don't have that paradigm breaking thing.

And I don't know where it's going to come from or if it's going to come from anywhere.

And discovery is only becoming more difficult because the Internet's getting sludgier and sludgier.

So why would I read a review when I could watch 400 TikToks in an hour?

Yeah, yeah, that's what it is.

That's, you know, a lot of peers put out that video about like funding in the games industry.

And it's like, man, the challenges and even video games or Netflix, it's fucking TikTok.

talk like everyone with idle time is wasting it on that it's like you're not gonna i gotta read a review that takes 10 minutes i could walk you know how many funny dog videos i could watch in 10 minutes life is so much faster than it was 20 years ago yep absolutely i get my magazine pc gamer that's the only thing i had to read about video games for the like a month yeah yeah so i read every single no wonder i loved all those people and yeah there was tiktok before that it was this mono game thing it was minecraft and fortnite it was we have a whole generation of kids who grew up who don't really

like we it was a bit of a bubble because they didn't really play games the way we play games they were mostly using them as like social like ways to connect with their friends outside of school and they still are also cool yeah it's also cool but they're not buying fucking blueprints you know what i mean not yet not until they get xbox game pass yeah it's we've talked about this a little bit before but it's it's hard to inspire people organically to to conduct themselves in a way that is more conducive to creating a slower pace of consumption or a more diverse range of consumption I feel like

it takes this is a skill I've built over the last like decade that as things have sped up it's taken more and more effort on my on my own behalf for myself to just like make time to find an article I really want to read and just keep that tab open until my fucking computer crashes because I have 600 articles I i want to read in my firefox and then i'm like well i guess i just have to read all these now or they'll be lost to the sands of time um or just like you know just like forcing yourself to watch a good movie uh it's i i'm someone who like i'm a real f***ing cinephile i love good movies i

love weird movies i love art movies i love unwatchable hard to watch s*** sometimes and uh even then as someone who loves that it's it is hard to force myself to sit down to play like an art game or watch like a really weird challenging movie um i'm always glad i did it but it is, it's sort of like exercise or something where it's like you have to build a routine of doing it.

Even if you know it's rewarding, even if you know you enjoy it, it takes real concerted effort to, uh, to maintain that relationship.

And so, you know, how do you, how do you preach about that to people who don't recognize that as anything other than preaching?

Cause it does sound like fucking, you're being like preachy.

You watch movies. Yeah, exactly.

If you want to to be as good as me you can watch all this art bullshit um but yeah i mean no it just depresses me so much when i see like videos go viral where they're like can we all stop pretending that our favorite movie is like a movie where like a french guy eats a croissant oh dude those are the worst where they're like oh they're making a lot of directors doing their letterbox top four and which already in itself is dumb yeah um but then they're like oh but my favorite movie is this french film from it's of course their favorite movie is like some weird esoteric thing you've never seen

before because they watched it when it was important to them like shut up but the but But the thing is, I think you don't like the hat.

So the hidden dimension of that is that I feel like the people I know who are the most like deeply into weird art movies and games and shit, they talk about that weird, obscure art in the same way that they talk about like pop culture art, because there is not this artificial division of like, oh, I'm going into like art mode or I'm going into like Christopher Nolan mode or I'm going into like Marvel mode.

There are it's just a spectrum of of things, of experiences you can have. And so like the you know, the people that I like when they talk about movies talk about Ozu the same way they talk about, you know, contemporary pop culture directors and stuff.

They're not like it's not a separate thing.

And so, yeah, I don't know.

It's breaking down that barrier I think is important and showing people that there is a different like flavor of experience that these things hold.

That is it's it's not superior.

It's not better than but it is like an important thing to experience as a person and to like force yourself into those other spaces sometimes.

yeah yeah and i i think one of the things that i've really valued about doing this podcast especially is that um i know on a on a personal level is jesse's just been i've had enough his camera's had enough of this shit they're like two hour podcast what are you doing um uh is that like um i have connected with a bunch of games and stuff that i wouldn't have have done uh through even just being on this podcast so and i know that a lot of folks in the in the community feel the same way but i'll be honest i sort of like thought like oh that's cool like we're not really doing like a service or anything

it's like people fucking you know they probably get more recommendations from social media or steam fucking emailing them or putting it up on their thing or whatever it is right and and would they have lived a happier life if they they hadn't played this game anyway, maybe I don't know.

I'm always sort of trying to be a morbid realist of it.

A lot of this stuff, but something about last week scared the shit out of me, which is that like, you know, Pottygon, Pottygon felt like it was safe.

Like Pottygon felt like it was making money and, and doing good work and had struck a balance between doing the sort of like, you know, SEO, although SEO has fucked everyone, that's, that's the big thing that actually has destroyed half of the fucking web publishing business but you know that they were doing the sort of i don't want to say clickbait but like more shareable let's say stuff alongside really great reporting and some really interesting video stuff like they were they were doing a lot of interesting stuff i think tonally a lot of that stuff wasn't for me but over the years i have really

enjoyed and appreciated a lot of the work that they did but moreover it seemed like it was it was a business that was healthy and profitable um so that's the shock stuff with the giant bomb situation or like game spot would be and jeremy know a lot more about this sort of internal workings like game spot was in the red for years when i was working there right it was not making any fucking money it only existed because of corporate ownership and i think like you know giant bomb has only found it because of corporate ownership because shelby bonnie wanted to make a bunch of websites again and you

know I don't know how much money that made before it got sold off into parts who knows um so you know the original sin of a lot of these places or the fact that they've survived as long as they have sometimes is because they did have big pockets or big wallets that they could put their hands into but something about last week with with the two of those i'm worried about game spot as well obviously and e3 is coming up like summer games fest is coming up and i'm like who the fuck is covering this stuff is it like five companies now thank god min max is out there doing the good work you know ign's

still around they've largely are down in la now because that's where all the video production shit is um mostly remote seems like a lot of the the final brian brian lives in town here so he must must be going to a studio in sf or somewhere um and uh yeah I think Scoville's in the east bay or something's got docks everyone while I'm here but like so they're local enough but like it's like you can count the amount of like outlets on one hand almost like it's fucking that's scary that's scary to me I always just assumed someone will figure it out they'll be like churn but like I look at like what's

going on now and I'm like maybe these people won't start their own patreons maybe they maybe they'll just get a job in part pr marketing in the way of stability where's the next generation i don't know yeah i don't know it's scary i um yeah and and as like you know i i'm trying to make games right now and thinking about the future as someone who spends part of my time on games media side and part of the time making games and it's like thinking about it from both angles is a little scary because it's like you know if if the only people left to talk about these things are streamers and youtubers

sort of like individual voices there is so much pressure on those people to talk about things that will get clicks that are like when you when you have the corporate backing and it's like ad driven and you do the spot for like the new fire emblem game and that funds like talking about stuff with a little less pressure on uh on views it frees you you up in a way that uh that is allows you to talk to to highlight games that are you know maybe not the new hotness or take risks or like you know i mean we did a we did a quick look on dredge and we didn't do it because it was gonna fucking blow up and then

it did blow up but like oh yeah i forgot yeah yeah that was like one of our bigger videos probably the biggest quick look we did on crew um but you cannot you cannot cover games in the same way if you're like is this is this preview gonna blow up especially if it's a game that no one knows about yet and so if you you want to perform the service of calling attention to important new games that people don't know yet which i think is a huge you know i mean there are people a lot of people who do this more on social media and i follow a lot of those people and value the work they do but i think that it's

a self -selecting audience of people who follow those things versus something like a brand name like an ign or a polygon or whatever um people who follow like an institution i think are doing it to be exposed to a range of perspectives whereas like influencers and content creators sort of curate to what their audience wants or expects and more of i don't know yeah yeah you need to fund it and spend money on um on sorry and jesse if i'm cutting over you i can't see you anymore so if i guess no you're good you're good i don't i can't tell if you're getting ready to speak no i'm looking at what you

guys say i think like when we worked at game spot like at an e3 for instance like everything got covered like we knew what the big games were going to be presumably and those were getting more promotion or maybe getting like you know the the top billing and the carousel on the website and getting tweeted about and shit like that but like everything got covered like oh the wii version of some game that came out on ps3 ages ago like we sent someone to fucking cover that you know the trailer for whatever this down the other they all went up and to pay for it like to do that you need to do the time

like we have we're lucky that you guys do a bunch of you're playing a lot of different types of games i'm not paying you for that time by the way it should also be mentioned you know what i mean like we do have budget for stuff when we're doing it right patreon .com no clip please everybody right so expensive but you know what i mean like or like game of the year for instance right there is a budget that is allocated based on uh probably here's like i don't know what did we do last year year i forget 20 30 hours what was it was it 20 hours something like that i don't know 24 hours of of of like

you'll probably play games for game of the year for this much and then you know the games themselves right obviously yeah no clip pay for those as well but like yeah to do that work properly like if we're doing coverage which we're not going to do on a no clip you know crew was set up to sort of do that type of thing to a certain extent but yeah like we had a big meeting on monday and like we're looking at all this and thinking and again i don't want to step on anyone else's toes i don't know what's going to happen with ex polygon or giant bomb people i don't know but it's gotten so i was talking

to juror about it this morning because i was like i still don't want to like announce anything or i want to like i want to slowly figure this out over the night not that slowly because you guys have been very fucking patient with me about this because i've been talking about this for about three or four years but i was like i still don't want to step on anyone else's toes and drew laughed at me and he said oh because people are like scrambling to to get into the profitable world of video games coverage like like what are you fucking talking about like nobody nobody nobody's getting into this for for the clout

or the money you know what i mean like so so yeah that's where i'm at is i'm going to ask i wasn't going to go to summer games fest i am now frank is going so we're going to cover it for whatever no clip crew through i don't know we'll probably turn it into something else but we're starting quick looks again this week we haven't published anything on the channel in eight months there wasn't a budget for us quite frankly um you know secret type stuff paid for a lot of us um and we're gonna try and figure something out i i don't have the answer catherine for what it means like if you have enough

money and you have enough of a pipeline then you can start hiring writers to write cool cool stuff you can start hiring reviewers to review games you can do all that i don't know if that's you know that's that feels like if that is a possibility that's a long way down the road and i rather start walking and and figure it out but yeah i think i said on the patron show it's kind of shit or get off the pot time for me when it comes to this stuff and i i think in the next month or so we're going to be we're going to be trying our best to to get into this world and I'm reaching out to people already

about you know money stuff that we can we can bring into this I don't know what that looks like I've already talked mad game about the type of money we can bring in and who's willing to pay for it and what they'd want for us and that type of thing you know meet us in the shill zone I don't know I want to be on the shill that sounds awesome sponsored by Walmart I can't make that joke there is an outlet sponsored by Walmart I'm sorry that'd be great I'll do do non -endemic till the fucking cows come home non -endemic like endemic advertising is like within games right so like non -endemic is anything

else i'll fucking i'll what was this who the fuck used to what was the candy airheads used to sponsor the fucking e3 stage do you remember yeah disgusting do i'll cannot scout sour skittles if the we'll call it the skittle zone if you want let's get remember the fucking we got sponsored by samsung and i had to talk about the fucking samsung galaxy s on the e3 stage show there is videos of me and chris waters just self -awarely talking about our they didn't call it a stylus we weren't allowed to use the word stylus we had to call it shit you not the s pen jesse knows i've been s pen s pen do you

know what s pen kind of sounds like if you shift the letters around it sounds like penis s -pen it's an i'm using my s -pen i like how hard my s -pen that's games journalism right there it's that it's great though because it's like if the shill zone is us playing a game that we might otherwise play and then we do the shill zone episode on it that it's like what if we talk about that game on the podcast and then it's like well you guys are just talking about it because it's on the shill zone it's like well no we did the shill zone but the game rules but if it's like fucking i'll do a tier list of every

sour patch kid and tell you which ones are the best for you know whatever money the fucking why don't we we should get some big fucker publisher or fund to pay for us to do a show about games that don't have like pr people but it's just games that cannot afford to market themselves and we go out and find them and we call it big game hunter yeah yeah if only there was someone we knew with a podcast with a similar name also i'm watching this samsung clip where you're sponsored by uh samsung you're sucking down some pabst blue ribbon with mikey neumann and others uh and man this is funny as hell

where was this on giant bomb no no someone put up a compilation 10 years ago um which was roughly when this happened e3 2014 i think i might have of brought the s -pen on the giant bomb catch with that was that with mikey uh you're doing that's like a big panel you got two big tables jeff gersman in the middle it's kind of like the last supper um but for gaming there's a joe biden cutout i think yeah is that the giant bomb after after our show or whatever possibly is jeff in a chair on his own and the rest of us are on a couch jeff's in a chair with uh sorry two other people from giant bomb i think

and then you guys are on not couches oh is that weird one okay yeah yeah i think that's the giant bomb show i think it's hard to tell but there'll be no giant bomb show at e3 this year either oh man don't say that something i don't know the ai generated giant bomb at night we'll make it happen me and jeff have been talking about doing an amiga show for three years he says he's up for doing it i've never organized it i want to call it the three amigas but i don't have a third person i thought maybe the amiga it could be the third amiga i don't fucking know i don't know we got nine years worth of thought

quality ideas like that just fucking in the chamber waiting to blow them into your face i get more messages about fat session than than documentaries i've done that have millions of views as well i'm sorry about that no you don't have to apologize no we just have to bring it back at some point yeah people love those fat sessions they do they're great to sleep session they're beautiful yeah i love it because i feel like the deeper i get into one of your fat sessions i feel like there must be an attrition rate you know it's like it's like getting there mightn't be but just knowing how youtube watch

curves go the further it goes the more i feel like i'm sort of exploring unknown territory it feels special it feels that way when i make them too because as like when i'm when i'm six hours and two beers deep into heroes of might and magic three i'm getting i'm getting loose i'm getting weird so that's where the gold comes out because was your solo presenting that whole time it's like a fucking yeah it's beautiful you're i like that too shit with you you know being in solitary or something you know totally you're like locked up in my insane asylum um yeah i don't know i i love doing stuff with other

people but i've always felt like my comfort zone as a presenter is just like being on my own too so i feel like doing solo long form stuff is very appealing to me um does anyone else have anything else to say about this because i have a very funny transition if you don't fire away okay frank should we talk about our creators for a second yeah sure so uh we've not talked about this publicly we don't talk about a lot of our secret tape stuff publicly this is our this is the shill zone this is our our uh our production stuff you know we did our like uh our gta uh gta we did our now people are gonna i

think we're doing spoilers because i fucked it up didn't i yeah we did our half -life uh one and two documentaries fucking cat get out of here um uh we've done a bunch of stuff battle aces we've done you know other bits and bobs um we are working on a series for the folks at embark studios on art creators we filmed it last year in sweden frank we had a good time in sweden last year i was uh checking in with them actually when i was just in sweden recently as well that's not why we were there but i was chucking checked in with them that time as well the arc raiders tech test was just on tt2 um me

and frank played a shit ton of it because we were capturing gameplay for this documentary series we're working on um which is also probably why we didn't bring it up today because it feels a bit like uh you know it's it's uh not something i basically want to get out ahead of this and be like if we're talking about our creators know that we are working on this uh project and we've been embedded i've been embedded with this team for much longer actually just because i've known a bunch of people over there for a while and i've known what they've been working on and the tech they've been working on and there

are a lot of questions about art creators because when i originally showed it it was a completely different game it was like a pve um like uh like more co -op more i don't know what you'd call it like like you were a more powerful character in the world sort of dominating the robots they had this trailer with robin music and obviously the version that's coming now is this more sort of pd pve uh extraction shooter type thing um which uh it seems has gone down well it's the the it was the fifth most streamed game on twitch over the weekend and uh was uh it seemed a lot of youtubers were playing and it

seems to have um uh uh come down well at least um i'm really into it uh frankie are you less into to it what's your what's your what's your vibe with it because you did you play groups much at all were you solo i'm mostly playing solo yeah for the for all the tech tech test stuff i did group up with random people which is always a very funny experience like doing public lobbies and stuff but i'm just not a fan of like pvp stuff but i really like the pve stuff like hunting and shooting rob robots and looting is like so satisfying um but every time you get killed by real people i want to track no i

i i hate pvp but um the robot uh stuff is very cool shooting their parts off and like seeing them freak out is very very satisfying and like the aesthetic is incredible um but yeah i'm just not like a general fan of like extraction stuff yeah me me neither actually like i'm more of i like i enjoy pub g and stuff because i can solo stuff and hide from people i found it more frustrating when i was playing with random groups because i would feel the social pressure to do stuff with them you know what i mean and then also if you get caught with one of them they generally know if there's another one

of you around whereas solo i was able to like hide in places and kind of keep away from the pvp and i would i was almost playing the game like i was like getting it like kind of like the way you're supposed to feel about the arc robots i guess the machines is like going in getting my shit and getting the fuck out of there as quickly as i can or like waiting really long in the map so that that most people had extracted so that i could so the tension when i was trying to get out was really was really good i'll say it's so much better than it was when we played it at the first tech test back in january

i think there were fundamental aspects of the the um the loot and the quests and stuff that they're working a lot better um so yeah we'll uh we'll see we'll see how it how it turns out it's um it's an interesting proposition that both that game and marathon are in because they are both games that were previously free to play it was marathon going to be free to play and isn't now as well am i right i don't remember you nodding i have no idea i don't know i thought i saw a video i thought i saw like a friends per second video or something about how it wasn't free to play or wasn't going to be for war

it was or it wasn't yeah it's not free to play it looks like initial price tag on ei so this is on our games from three weeks ago so maybe it wasn't ever free to play i guess they only just answered like months ago so it couldn't have been um but yeah and the same thing was was true of our creators right they were gonna originally go free to play and then now aren't so i'm wondering what that looks like as well like what does a what does that mean you know because it technologically like rendering like the the actual performance and look of the game is is quite impressive i think um but then i

would say out because i'm in the place you're showing brought to you by the shill zone the shill zone um yeah so anyway i played a shitload of arc raiders over the past week but mostly i just wanted to uh let people know that that's a project that we're working on and i can't say when it's gonna come out those are the treats that you get if you stick around two hours and 32 minutes into a podcast yeah you get to finally hear why i was in sweden why myself and frank were in in sweden that time or if you're a patron you can find out why i was in sweden three weeks ago um why why i you know got that blood

clot what it was what it was all what it was all in service of it's still so scary hey it's not like i just sat down for two and a half hours yeah that's fine i guess i got up and walked around a little bit in the middle so you're okay yeah it's all good i only got like i i one of my uh a friend of mine wants to bring me to a racetrack to drive around cars on the weekend and i was like just don't crash because like yeah that's It's usually top of mind when I get in the car.

My blood is so thin it's just going to pour out.

You think blood is viscous usually.

You just wait until I've got an arterial bleed with two months of blood.

Like a water balloon.

Yeah, exactly. I'd be like that scene in Adam's Family.

You'd be like the blood elevator in The Shining.

Exactly. Fun, fun, fun.

Alright. On that note, I guess We'll end the podcast I don't know how to end the podcast We just rambled Or I rambled We all rambled for a while We will have some quick looks this week We're going to have quick looks for Skin Deep For Expedition 33 And Frank He's going to do it We're going to do WWE 2K25 Because he's played about 16 ,000 hours of it Since it came out We're also going to have Some type of quick look stuff For Doom the Dark Ages next week And a bunch of other things We're getting into it We're going to slow and steady steady we're going to start putting stuff up on noclip crew we

are fucking 99 chance going to rebrand that channel we have a free patreon for noclip crew that we set up originally just to track uh interest um we are going to be using that as well and likely rebranding it um we will not be starting a 100 crowdfunded organization i do not think because i want to um i want to fucking i want to blow past expectations for what we could do with this thing but i want to do it slowly um slowly and steady so this month is quick luck month for us at the moment over our noclip crew um we're gonna just keep keep you know get get a decent patter of these up um and then

we'll uh we're talking you know we've been talking a lot already this week we're gonna keep talking i'm talking to people outside and uh we're gonna we're gonna put something together but we're gonna to do it on our own pace.

The reason you might want to subscribe to that free Patreon is because I'm hoping, I'm planning to put together a sort of patron podcast feed just that is sort of about putting this together where we elicit feedback and I bring on people from the industry who I want to talk to about this and sort of have chats about, you know, some of the ideas that we have and ideas out there about what we need to do or what games journalism needs to look like in 2025 um and like i said we'll be we'll be at a summer games fest um i'm also putting the flag down we will be at pax west as well um or at least some

of us will be so we're no clip or whatever our fucking other brand is going to be whatever it is um we'll we'll be there uh i'm committing to that as well also going to be a quake con as well if anyone's heading to that so that should be good good fun um yeah and we're gonna see if we can try and figure out a way of adding to this and i think number one is what we're best at here on the podcast which is uh highlighting games that you may not have heard of um before most of the mainstream press tends to um you know games like expedition 33 yeah a special little game no one's ever heard of before

exactly we're a little bit slow off the mark at the moment just because we're you know because jesse was away so we gotta he's gotta play all those sokelbond games you know as quickly as possible um other stuff to to talk about we were media partners for ludonaracon if you head over to youtube .com slash at fellow traveler and fellow travelers sir fellow travelers the uh the the indie label that puts together ludonaracon uh so if you type fellow traveler into youtube you'll find their channel and uh i think i'm not sure if your demo stream has gone up jesse but my despelote interview is up and i

think my uh rise of the golden idol one is also those are more interesting anyway so you can go check those out and hopefully jesse's demo stream will be up soon enough um as well uh you can also go to ludonaracon .com and check out those as well uh bonus pod last month was the borderlands review i fucking even forgot we did that i've my brain has scrubbed that that was so so fun i'll see more of those dude i i'm always down to watch a good movie but i'm also equally down to watch a completely dog shit movie i think final fantasy the spirits within is is ripe for the picking yeah we should do that i

like that movie it's weird yeah i haven't seen it since i saw it in theaters with my dad and he we left the theater and he was like what the fuck was that it's like when i brought my dad to the fifth element but he was like yeah that was great rate what happens at least that's a good movie directors are weird yeah um all right what are you guys doing for the rest of the week frank what's your week look like any wrestling shows i am so they had golden week in japan which is a week off it's and so everyone travels like mainly to tokyo and other parts so there were every single day in tokyo was like

a massive wrestling pay -per -view so i've been catching up on all of these wrestling shows so uh i'm you know making my way through it and i'm starting to get into like uh luchador wrestling so there's even a a legit like lucha show happening at the end of the month in la and it's like i finish eddie guerrero's book so i'm learning more about you know the rudos and the technicas and the legacy of the mask so it's whoa i'm yeah i'm i'm all in so lots of watching wrestling hell yeah jesse you're off to boston yes sir i'm going to boston i'm going to jack's east i would love to hang out with jeremy

if we can try to make it happen yeah hell not though at the very least i get to see some cool video games if you see me there bother me I would actually love to meet people at the event it'd be nice bother Jesse although he turned his camera off so maybe he's trying to be incognito well this is just in case uh border border and customs checks and here's that point it's not me saying it it's my evil twin Essig you're like you're like oh we saw you were in a we saw you're in Zandvoort yeah last month what were you uh what were you buying planning yeah yeah exactly yeah Jeremy what about you what's

your week look like oh about to do the first us quick look and well break off the dust and the rust which i'm very excited about and uh been cooking on a little been making a video game that i'm pretty excited about so uh i've i've got a a pretty straight shot i'm hoping to get it into play testing by this summer is my hope but what that means in video game terms is expected in you know 2035 or some shit uh but no no i've i've been cooking on something that i think is actually is is real good so i'm excited i you'll obviously hear me talk about it on here when uh when i'm ready to share more wicked

sick love to hear it um i got a pretty chill weekend my parents are coming over next week first time they visited california uh only second time they visited my me in america they came to maryland like six years ago now um so uh very excited so perfect time to start launching a new video game get them on property get them on get my dad to talk about he used to play um solitaire on his little ibm think inkpad thing okay get him to play balatro that would be amazing yeah you're right he used to do the thing where he'd invite us all in the room when he did the last one so you can watch the that's

great which unfortunately isn't frame rate locked so uh if you do it on modern machines it just goes like that all of them animate really it's like the pac -man problem of they go smooth faster with the less there is to render so lazy devs lazy fucking devs finally someone said it jesse yeah we need a i'm freaking truth to power man that's all i ever do patch solitaire .com that's the real past patch solid what is it like change .org slash patch solitaire yeah let's get it fixed and pinball let's get windows pinball updated too yeah you're right yeah win pin let's change it do you ever play the uh

little pinball game that was in microsoft word do you ever do a little hack yeah there's like a little hack you could do in like word 98 i think and also in excel you could get a flight simulator to appear like using the excel cells yeah there was like a thing you did that like unlocked a hidden game cool and there was a flight sim in microsoft excel and there was a pinball i got the pinball one to work in word i never got the flight sim to work i don't know if someone was fuck with me on that you're getting pranked i think i saw a video yeah you could you could play a little pinball game you

see it i see not like they're beautiful right yeah a beautiful little little hidden hidden pinball game in your microsoft word pinball game microsoft word all the time it's called adding a fucking image to a word document everything goes all over the place aligning text yeah good shit hey if you use squarespace you can also have that um problem uh they haven't solved that one yet for days can we just get jerseys for noclip crew that say like the blue shoe on the chest and then we can just talk about whatever ever video like it there's gotta be someone we're like f1 uniforms with all the random

little logos i just want to be a nascar with oreos on it well now we're just talking about the fucking battle pass holders again like we gotta wear oh yeah put their names on clothes i would do that yeah just a big cameron lad written across the front of it i think if you wear a t -shirt with the word ricin on it though you're gonna get a visit from the fbi ricin is ricin is illegal in 50 states um uh all right we're pushing three hours people have to fucking get on with their lives and this blood cot starting to itch me so let's get out of here thank you all so much for listening to our podcast see you again next time bye you Thank

you.

[Noclip Podcast Episode 226: Gaming Industry Turmoil, Expedition 33, and the 'Shill Zone' Future]-[Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Despelote, Skin Deep]

📋 Summary

Navigating the Future of Games Media and Industry Trends

The "Indie" Label and Funding Realities

Game Impressions: From Expedition 33 to Despelote

The "Shill Zone" and Media Sustainability

Closing Thoughts

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript