Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 217: Player Profiles and Games
184 Plays10 months ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast! Today Alex and Taya review the Magic Psychographics and then discuss how they can be applied to other games. What do your goblins think about Vorthos in D&D or Spikes in RTS games?
We also finally have a Linktree with all of our discounts/resources
____________________________________________
As promised, we keep Mental Health Links available every episode. But For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
If you’re thinking about suicide or just need someone to talk to right now, you can get support from any of the resources below.
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
- Veteran's can Press 1 at anytime to be taken to the Veteran's Line
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741-741
- International suicide hotlines: A comprehensive resource list for people outside the US.
- IMAlive: Click Chat Now to access a live online network of volunteers through instant messaging.
- TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support): 1-866-488-7386, or text “Trevor” to 1-202-304-1200
- Trans Lifeline (US): (877) 565-8860
____________________________________________
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle)
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello
Introduction to Goblin Lore Podcast
00:00:30
Speaker
Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. Today, tonight we are here to talk about magic stuff and some not magic stuff and I might be getting ahead of myself. We're gonna do some brief intros. We are gonna do our question but we're gonna, that's gonna kind of be broken up a little bit this morning and it'll all make, this morning, it'll be broken up this episode and it'll all make sense as we're going through it.
00:00:56
Speaker
Will it now? Well, hopefully it will. It's to us, maybe, and hopefully for everybody else.
Host Introductions and Social Media
00:01:05
Speaker
But I'm Alex found on Twitter at Mel underscore chronicler. Occasionally I'm close. I log in about once a week to check my notifications. And then I close the app. I'm very happy with my relationship with the app right now. So for now, that's where you can find me. And my pronouns are he, him and Taya. All right.
00:01:25
Speaker
I'm Taya, Taya transcends on blue sky pronouns are she or they them. And yeah, let's just get right into it today.
Player Psychographics and Profiles
00:01:36
Speaker
Yeah. So today we want to talk about the players, psychographics, and the aesthetic profiles. These are things that we've talked about occasionally in the past. I think it's been a little while since our last episode, but this is a good sort of topic to come back to.
00:01:53
Speaker
This is stuff that Mark Rosewater, who's the head designer of magic initially sort of talked about to the community in a few posts. And it's kind of the conversation has evolved over the last, I don't know, like 12 or so years. And it's been a long time.
00:02:12
Speaker
Yeah, and then there's been some refinements and additions and that's where like the aesthetic profiles kind of came in later where they realized, well, the psychographic profiles didn't just hit everything and aesthetic profiles are kind of looking at a similar thing from a different point of view. So rather than, I guess, beating around the bush too much, these are ways that initially, they are ways that wizards
00:02:37
Speaker
sort of conceived different types of players, or at least in their own heads, thought of different types of players who play the game, which helped the developers, the designers and developers and everybody in the Wizards of the Coast, build the game to fit for those players. It was an exercise for them or a practice. It was a thing that they did to kind of tool, maybe is a better term, to help them build a better game for the people who were playing it.
00:03:05
Speaker
So the first three are the psychographic profiles. Talk about why the players enjoy the game. Why, you know, what are they getting out of it in, in sort of how is this satisfying things for them? What is, how is the gameplay appealing to them in different ways? And these break down into
Player Types Explained: Timmy, Johnny, Spike
00:03:25
Speaker
three. And like a lot of things, I think when we get into stuff like this, I think these can be very helpful when you look at them.
00:03:35
Speaker
descriptively, but not really pro-scriptively. I feel like I had a better turn of phrase for that, but basically they can help you.
00:03:44
Speaker
work out a little bit of, oh, this is what I'm enjoying about this game. And it helps you to lean into that or find things that are similar. But it can be harmful when you're like, oh, I fit in this box. And it's the only box that I can fit in now. And so I think there needs to be, I just want to mention that at the top that these can be helpful as tools. But if you're finding
00:04:08
Speaker
it feels constrained and it isn't helping you, that's fine too. You don't have to fit into one of these boxes. In fact, part of the whole thing is some people hit all three or hit one or two and hit different ones and different things. That's part of what we're going to get to tonight as we go on. But so the three main ones that were initially conceived were
00:04:28
Speaker
Timmy or Tammy, Johnny or Jenny, and Spike. The first two have two names because when they were originally conceived, it was just Timmy and Johnny, and then it was like, oh, that's really masculine-ish. Let's try to mix it up a little bit for folks who maybe aren't masculine and play the game.
00:04:47
Speaker
But these three, so Timmy and Tammy, their big thing is that they want to just experience something.
Mechanics vs. Story: Mel and Vorthos Profiles
00:04:56
Speaker
Like the most quintessential Timmy thing in magic is big creatures, big spells. Johnny is more combo oriented. They like to tinker. They like things to kind of fit together. And then spikes are good competitive players. They want to win. Mm-hmm.
00:05:14
Speaker
And then the aesthetic profiles, these came in much later. These are more about what parts of the game are players enjoying.
00:05:24
Speaker
And the two that they kind of have are Mel and Vorthos. And so we talk about these a lot on the cast. Vorthos in particular is the flavor that's kind of where we fit a little bit in the sort of realm of magic podcasts. The Vorthos are the stories, they're into the world and the characters and the lore.
00:05:47
Speaker
Art is all sort of Vorthos-y. If you're big into flavor text, that's a Vorthos field of appreciation for the game. Whereas Mel is about the mechanics, so might really enjoy cards of interesting mechanics. A good example in this article, which Dr. Hobbs maybe we throw this in. It's just an MTG Wiki article that details some of the stuff and gives links to some of the articles if you want to dig in deeper. Like Stuffy Doll.
00:06:15
Speaker
is a good example of a card that a Mel player might really appreciate, because it's this indestructible little artifact creature. When it comes into play, you pick a player, and then you can tap it to do a damage to itself, because whenever it is dealt damage, it does damage to
Hosts' Personal Player Profiles
00:06:30
Speaker
that other player. So you have a mechanic like a 0-1 having tap stuffy doll deals one damage to itself. That's a pretty unique piece of rules text. I don't know that there's probably another card that does that at this point in time,
00:06:44
Speaker
I, maybe not. It's, it's been almost 30 years, so more than 30 years of the game and that this might be unique there, but it fits into the how this card is working mechanically. Right. Yeah. And it, you know, a card with that type of mechanic can spawn a whole archetype all on its own. You, stuffy doll,
00:07:06
Speaker
can spawn, you know, the stop hitting yourself archetype in commander where you try to collect as many cards that do that sort of thing together and you build around that. Yeah. Cause there are definitely cards that when they get dealt damage, you can hit other people. Like that mechanic has been in other places. I remember wireless Reckoner was played standard a lot, like the one standard rotation I played. Yeah. So it's, and
00:07:31
Speaker
So that's a rough rundown of those five. And it's like, I know we've talked about it a lot. And as sort of our opening question, that is kind of where we see ourselves on these profiles. And we talk a lot about how, I mean, mental health is for sure for me and on the aesthetic profile. Both of them really hit, I really enjoy the flavor. I really enjoy the mechanics, but for me,
00:07:59
Speaker
sort of in that Venn diagram, when I really get excited about a card is that middle part where both of these overlap. I was explaining the concept of metal fells to a friend of mine this weekend who's played magic almost as long as me, but he's just not as plugged into all of the articles and the things on the websites and the listening to podcasts as I am. And so I told him what the card floodgate, the card I talk about occasionally is
00:08:26
Speaker
I wouldn't call it my favorite card, but if you look at all the aspects of the card overall, it is probably my favorite card in the game. Because it's a wall, it's a blue wall that when it gains flying, you sacrifice it and it does damage to all the non-flying creatures on the board equal to the number of islands you have. That is so mechanically consistent and flavorful to what the card is.
00:08:56
Speaker
Yeah, it just, you know, you described that card a lot when we were talking about Mel things. Yeah, for me at least, it's the one that comes to mind because I hope anyway, it's a good illustration of that, of those concepts.
00:09:15
Speaker
And kind of outside on the psychographic side, I definitely have some Timmy decks. I'd say I'm more play on the Johnny side where I like to tinker with things. I like decks that have sort of engines in it. I know when we talked, Taya and I, you and I, a few weeks ago I was talking about my Zyra deck. That's one of the things I love about that deck is it has multiple combos with different pieces that are interchangeable and I can kind of build my game plan around what pieces I have and what capacity I have to fill in the gaps.
00:09:45
Speaker
Mm hmm. How about yourself? Well, you know, my I'm, you know, of worth those first and foremost, I, you know, the story is the thing that I care about most in the game. And I think
00:10:00
Speaker
I think it's pretty obvious when you both brought me on board the podcast is that the story was kind of my central contribution to a lot of things on the podcast. You both know the story and know what's going on.
00:10:21
Speaker
I mean, he's got to be simping for bolus, but I've engaged with the story for so long and kind of a little too much maybe, but I'm just definitely that hardcore vorthos.
Engagement with Magic's Lore
00:10:41
Speaker
As long as there's been a story, I've been engaged with it, even when it was the really, really bad books like Arena, which came up with the very early ideas of how the casting systems worked and everything, because there were no, there were no ideas about how casting actually worked in Magic. Yeah.
00:11:05
Speaker
Yeah, I read a little bit back there, but I've, I've been much, much more inconsistent with how much of the story I've specifically been reading and following. Yeah. Um, but, uh, yeah, as long as there's been magic story, I've been engaged with it in one way or another. And when I came back to magic in 2012, one of the first things I did was get onto, you know, the MTG Wiki and just start going down a rabbit hole and, uh,
00:11:35
Speaker
Just, I had probably over a hundred tabs open at one point because I was like, well, that sounds interesting. I'm going to read that later. And then I'm going to follow this thread later. And I'm going to go down that thread and just catching up on the last 15 years of story by reading the Wiki. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I've done a little, but I said not, I've been much more, much less consistent. Maybe that's a more coherent way to say it. Yeah.
00:12:05
Speaker
So yeah, that, that's my psychographic. Definitely. Um, you know, when it's, if you're sticking purely to gameplay, my psychographic is a Tammy spike is I'm going to try to win, but I'm going to do something ridiculous to try to get there. Okay. Yeah. My decks are definitely tuned to win the game, but I, I take a detour.
00:12:35
Speaker
to get there. Yeah, that's a little different for me where I have had to very, very specifically intentionally force myself to put win cons and decks because like one of my favorite decks I ever played was a Karn silver golem deck.
00:12:56
Speaker
that no one else enjoyed, not because I did the terrible nasty things that that deck normally does, but because I would take 25-minute turns and not win. Because I'm so busy casting spells, making copies of my artifacts to make more mana, to make more artifacts, to build a Rube Goldberg machine that does nothing, and then I realize, oh, I should try to win the game, so I put some swords on a plague mirror, and that's my wincon. Yeah, which isn't the most fun wincon either.
00:13:25
Speaker
So yeah, I played that game twice. I won a game with a Lotus Guardian that had swords attached, which is a wild card for anyone to put into a deck. And then the other one was the Plague Mirror. And I was like, you know, I need to take this deck apart. That's when I built, I started working on my Kozilek deck. I had to look up Lotus Guardian because I had no idea what this card was.
00:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, you know, this is a 4-4 flying for seven. It's a 4-4 birds of paradise for seven mana. For seven mana from invasion because that's when I was in high school and played magic. And I was like, oh, it's an artifact deck and I want some- You don't even get the three mana. The flavor text references lotus fields, but for seven mana you don't even get the three back. You can't even get a gilded lotus out of this thing for seven mana.
00:14:22
Speaker
Yep. And I put that in a deck and cast it. Yeah. So I, I, that's the thing I've had to like force myself. Like just, I have to have a way to win, which is why my colorless deck has a giant Eldrazi as a commander. Now, always have a win con. Man, Ornithopter Paradise sure has power crap. That's right. Yep.
00:14:52
Speaker
All right, so that magic portion of the podcast out of the way, what we were going to do for our main topic to try to do something we kind of haven't done, and to be honest, this is just something I've been...
00:15:05
Speaker
itching to talk to somebody about, even if it won't be, well, we'll see. We want to talk about some other games outside of Magic and how the profiles kind of help, or how we engage with those games in that sort of way. And that's kind of going to, like I said, at the top, this idea, and this is a thing that, I don't know, the last decade or so, I've made a concerted effort for is to,
00:15:31
Speaker
Try to understand why I am enjoying something more because that helps me to find things that hit that same note. If that's a note that I want to hit again, like sometimes if I play a game that's really heavy and I enjoy that, I might go, I don't need to play a game that's just like this. Let's find something different.
00:15:52
Speaker
That can be just as important to understand. And I think that's really good when you're talking about things like board games, is understanding, you know, maybe I just don't like engine games that work with the sort of engine. So I know I'm just not going to be interested in playing this type of board game again. I don't need to waste three hours playing it to know I'm probably not going to like it.
Player Profiles in Non-Magic Games
00:16:13
Speaker
Yeah. And that's, unfortunately, I was hoping to get some board games in mind, but I didn't.
00:16:18
Speaker
think of any while we were going. But as a good example of that, just as an example, a friend of mine who was really into board games was talking about that. And he was like something like, I can't remember the whole thing he said, but he was talking about how he prefers like board games with asynchronous powers or something. It's like everybody gets a different character or a different power set at the beginning, but they're all different because that's kind of, he's actually played Magic at a Pearl level for a little while.
00:16:47
Speaker
went to a pro tour or two. And so it's like, for him, like, I think that's part of how he re-engages with the game to try to figure out how to break it is if everybody has different powers, that gives his brain more to examine and test out and play with. And that's a distinction I never even would have thought of to look like this is a class like this is a game mechanic that exists in different types of games. And if you know that's what you like, you can try to find games that do that. So
00:17:16
Speaker
Because I can, I can start and stumble through trying to talk about the first, the first thing for me, which is kind of the, the seed for, for this was. Yeah. Why don't you, I mean, this was your idea and it sounds like you, um, from talking before that you have a lot of, uh, you have a lot of interest in talking about this particular thing. Yeah. Yeah. So.
00:17:40
Speaker
I want to talk about the Dark Souls games slash Elden Ring kind of. The games are in different worlds but they're made by the same company from software and Elden Ring in a lot of ways is like the same mechanics as Dark Souls. It's just an open world game as opposed to a more
00:18:00
Speaker
restrictive paths like like the Dark Souls games you have different ways to go it doesn't tell you where to go but it's it's very if you want to get here you take this bridge you go through this way you go through that some places have multiple ways to get to it but it's much more constricted in how you can move through it supposed to Elden Ring which with less than an hour into the game they're just like here big open field do whatever the hell you want
00:18:23
Speaker
But a lot of the mechanics, so for me to talk about being a Lorthos again, this is a game where I have a huge fascination and how they take some like really game mechanic-y mechanics that are just very gamey and they bake them into their world building, which is just, again, as a Lorthos, it's super interesting to me.
00:18:47
Speaker
And so I will preface by saying I've played all three Dark Souls games, but I played them co-op with a friend of mine who was really into the series. I've played two a little bit on my own. For the most part, that series I played just as a co-op with my friend. Elden Ring, I put a lot more time into myself.
00:19:06
Speaker
ton of time and there's the DLC coming out in this summer that they recently had a trailer for and gave us the release date which is part of why I've been thinking about this game a lot recently but one of the big mechanics in most games like really most video games
00:19:25
Speaker
When you die, you come back. Now, a lot of games, if you die, that is a game over, you go back to a save point or it reloads a little bit. So in a sense, that death is non-canonical. That's not the case for the Dark Souls games. Death very much is part of the story and the characters, particularly the player characters, have in-universe explanations for why they die and come back.
00:19:54
Speaker
I know like in the Dark Souls a big part of it is the main character in all three games is undead actually. Your character died before you started playing. They came back as part of the undead and there's some whole universe things of where this comes from.
00:20:10
Speaker
And part of the whole mechanic is the undead just don't die. Like that's kind of in the name. But as they die more and more, they start to lose themselves. They start to lose their humanity. They start to lose touch with the people around them and then eventually kind of become the mindless undead that you would think of in most games.
00:20:31
Speaker
And that in this game, in that world is referred to as going hollow. And so you'll have people who will talk, people who will know very, as soon as you approach them, that you are an undead. And most of the characters in the game are undead, in fact. And there's a lot of like, well, don't go hollow. Don't let this happen to yourself as you're trying to go through and do things. In Elden Ring, it's a little bit,
00:21:01
Speaker
different. Well, it's definitely different because you're not undead. There's a lot of stuff and I don't know a hundred percent, but I do know like the characters are referred to as the tarnished. And part of their whole thing is that they're guided by grace, which is part of the giant ass gluing tree. If you see that in all of the marketing for it, it's kind of part related to that. And so as whenever you die, you don't actually die.
00:21:29
Speaker
Though, and I found someone kind of explaining this, and I love this explanation. I think this, this jives with what I have. So I'm just going to read this person a draggy dance from steam in a comment here where some people were talking about this. They said, you know, we aren't the only tarnish that can revive from death.
00:21:45
Speaker
Part of Sorcerer Roger's quest line, this is one of the NPCs you can interact with, is talking about one of his deaths. They say, but each time a Tarnish dies, they lose a little of their grace and their will to live until eventually they die or decay for good. You can see this happen to Roger over the course of his quest line, and this part just blows my mind and they put, and technically this happens to players who quit the game before they beat it. That's interesting.
00:22:13
Speaker
Again, that's part of why I love, I'm so fascinated by these games. Yeah. And the other, there's a bunch of other little mechanics, like they have a ton of, I think they even call these like asynchronous multiplayer where you have like bloodstains. You'll just see bloodstains where other players have died recently.
00:22:38
Speaker
So next to a cliff that makes sense next to big monsters, but sometimes that's a good warning Like something dangerous is coming up this I don't this I don't know the explanation for in universe, but they have some explanations for a lot of the phantoms and and there's like the PDP in these games are called invasions and the
00:23:03
Speaker
co-op also works on the similar thing where there's ways for people to come to you and help you out. And some of it is, I don't know if there's like alternate worlds thing. I think there's some suggestion of that, but I might be wrong there. But I do know for sure that there are certain NPCs who will invade you just like a player invasions. And that sometimes ties to story events. Like in one of the Dark Souls games, there's an NPC
00:23:32
Speaker
who you help out and you're working with and things, but they're undead just like you. And depending on how the story plays out, if you don't do certain things, this play, this character will go hollow and invade you, your game at one point, and then you have to kill them. So like, I love that in a lot of ways, the NPCs
00:23:54
Speaker
are doing the same things the player is doing. And so it makes the player feel more like a part of this world as opposed to, well, your character is different and special and does all these things that no one else engages with. Oh, no, there's other people doing these things. There's a whole group in Elden Ring, and I assume the Dark Souls have something similar, but there's a whole group in Elden Ring of
00:24:14
Speaker
tarnished who specifically recruit other tarnished to go invade other people and kill them over and over again to like, I don't know, increase entropy or something like to just to just fly in the face of grace and just kill these people so that they can't accomplish whatever they're trying to do.
NPC Interactions and World Building in Games
00:24:32
Speaker
Basically,
00:24:33
Speaker
NPC griefers. There's a whole questline. You can go in where you do that and you just go invade and you go to attack like NPCs. And I think there's probably some PvP tied into that questline. I haven't done it, but you just, you go through and invade NPCs like a player would be invading your world to attack you. So that's, that's the first one on my list.
00:24:58
Speaker
All right, I'm gonna go with something that it's not a video game per se, but just the whole genre of like TTRPGs and like D&D, maybe more specifically, just because that's probably the other most commonly played, but also the one that I play with. I play these very tammy, like I'm,
00:25:22
Speaker
I just want to do big, cool dumb shit in these games. And I rarely follow the official storylines or official canon. Like I, what I have learned about the official D&D storyline came mostly from the magic sets or from video games. I know like very little else about the official D&D storyline.
00:25:47
Speaker
But I have played hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of D&D campaigns. And so, yeah, it really, you know, I want to do the coolest stuff possible.
00:26:04
Speaker
You know, there is a little spikiness in me. I am a little bit of a min-maxer, not to the extent, I still focus on my RP over my character, but if I'm given the choice, if I can do something in character and maximize it at the same time, I will always maximize my choice in character. You know, I'm not one who will make intentionally bad choices to make bad choices.
00:26:32
Speaker
I also am very much about maximizing turn economy. Yeah, that would be kind of a spiky approach to TTRPGs. Yeah.
00:26:46
Speaker
And I'm also going to mix this with the other one I put down, Baldur's Gate 3 in general, where I am more of a Borthos, where I played that for the story. I've played through it multiple times. I'm sure I will play through it more. But I am, besides playing it for the story, I am also a Total Spike. I will respect my characters. I don't care what your starting character class is.
00:27:09
Speaker
You know, I don't care if you're my romance companion. If you're not pulling your weight in my party, you're gonna get respect or you're gonna get fostered. You know, I need to be taking the maximum amount of actions per turn that I can possibly speak. Nice. Yeah, so it's like, borthos out of combat, total spike in combat.
00:27:33
Speaker
Like, yeah, if my party had better be doing as many possible actions as possible. I have not played ballers gate three yet. I intend to, but I know when I do, I will stop playing everything else for a while. So I'm like, yeah, that's exactly where, where I have been since essentially November.
00:27:56
Speaker
I did take a break to play from the Steam Winter Sale. I picked up the Borderlands Tiny Tina's Wonderland for my son and I so we could play co-op through that because we'd already beat Baldur's Gate 3 co-op. So I did take a bit of a break for that.
00:28:15
Speaker
So, so first called out tangent. How have you played it? Any tiny Tina wonderlands yet? Yeah, we finished that. Yeah. Okay. I played it through whenever it came out. I bought it and played. So what did you think of it? Did you enjoy it? I mean, it was more borderland. So yeah, I enjoyed it. That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. I
Exploring Tiny Tina's Wonderland
00:28:31
Speaker
love, oh, I didn't even think it's okay. So here, speaking of.
00:28:35
Speaker
Lorthos maybe maybe we can talk this one out because I've thought about this I didn't even think about this game for it. I did put it down on mine I put Borderlands and Diablo down on the same line. It's just a pure spike. Yeah All I'm doing is maximizing my build and looking for better and better loot There's I mean if there is a story it is there just to basically teach you how to play the game And the guide you through to get to the initial like endgame, okay
00:29:07
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Sorry, that's totally fair for the actual gameplay. But for the character creation is what I was thinking of. Because Tiny Tina's Wonderland, which is a Borderlands game, 100%, it's in the brand.
00:29:22
Speaker
But it has this framing story where it's Borderlands characters playing a D&D style game with guns, essentially. It's amusing. It's got... Yeah.
00:29:41
Speaker
They try to come up with an in-universe reason for everything. They did a pretty good job of it. It is just more Borderlands, but they did provide an amusing framework for the whole D&D story around it. Yeah, it's been long enough. I can't really talk cogently about it, so I guess I'll stop.
00:30:01
Speaker
I remember the character creation having some really interesting choices where it was like you were building a mini instead of a character. You are. You're building a mini and then you unlock more options for your minis throughout the same way you've always unlocked cosmetics in Borderlands or at least from like two onward. And then you multi-class. So you do get, you start with one class and then you get to pick another class partway through.
00:30:29
Speaker
So I went, I picked two pet classes, so I doubled up on all the pet class boosts. Like I said, pure spike, you know, I just went for the exact, the best possible character build I could get that leveraged each other's abilities. So I wasn't building like a melee wizard, which seemed like a kind of, you know, your abilities are going in opposite directions.
00:30:55
Speaker
Mm-hmm. No, that's cool. Yeah, it's so interesting to go back to D&D just a little bit, the TTRPGs. I have some similar tendencies for very different reasons. I like to do wild things a little bit, cool shit, but for me, it's usually more than a Johnny way of I find some weird build that I go, could this work? And then I try to make this the best that I can make it, even if it's not the best choice you can make.
00:31:23
Speaker
I want to take this weird thing and optimize this as much as I can. Like I had a character who was a multi-classed paladin, sorcerer, Eldritch Knight in Pathfinder, who was like, high agility, didn't wear any armor, but was a frontline casting paladin.
00:31:46
Speaker
It was very
Character Building in RPGs
00:31:47
Speaker
strange, but because I could just dump everything into charisma and agility or dexterity, it worked shockingly well. That sounds pretty cool. I love off-the-wall character builds. It really amuses me.
00:32:06
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. My, someone in my group makes fun of me, likes to make fun of me for how much I multi-class. Like when I play a character who isn't multi-classing, he's like, what are you, when are you going to multi-class? I'm not the scare care. I'm not going to. He's like, are you sure?
00:32:23
Speaker
So for my next one, we'll just do what I see we both had on our list. Mass Effect. I just put Vorthos because I have a big nerd for all these stories. I love this universe. I read all of the Codex entries in all of the games to read the little stories about astro mechanics and stars and all of this stuff. The first time I played the first game, I was reading all the entries on all the planets.
00:32:53
Speaker
how they formed and what their composition of the atmosphere is. I don't know. I go deep for the story of this game. Yeah, the story was good. I don't think I ever got quite that involved in reading the planetary entries like that, but the story was great.
00:33:16
Speaker
You know, I put down, uh, you know, worth those, but like all these, especially single player RPGs, I, and I get, or co-op, I get spiky as hell. I'm, I am going to perfect my party of usually my party of, you know, battle lesbians. If I can, if I can get an all woman party, I will.
00:33:39
Speaker
in these games, but, you know, sometimes you just, you need to bring, need to bring the big beefy guy with you too. But, you know, I try to, I try to optimize optimize on that access as well. I was going to make that joke about there's different ways to optimize. Yeah. But yeah, it's,
00:34:03
Speaker
It's one of those series that I've liked for a long time. I saw you had it. I added it to my lesbians. I wanted to talk about this, you know, where just this idea where I can be of orthos. I can be in it for the story, but since I'm playing a game, I'm also going to be. I want to, uh, I want to make the gameplay is.
00:34:25
Speaker
interesting to me as I can, which for me means making the combat as easy as possible by just steamrolling everything if I can do it. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Like I, at this point, I have a couple of builds that I will try different things and then I always just go back to a sniper with Black Widow. That's just what I do in every Mass Effect game now. How quick can I get to the Black Widow sniper rifle?
00:34:54
Speaker
And that's just how I play that on all of the difficulties. Yeah. I just, I enjoy, I enjoy the story too much and the combat on most of them has been mediocre in general anyway. Which is absolutely fair. The first game in particular is janky. The remake in the Legendary Edition is better, but still not good.
00:35:23
Speaker
yeah better i i think and and it's sad because the games are so good but i tried to introduce my son to the mass effect games and i don't think he could get over the combat system yeah that's that's fair it it sucks but it's fair yeah two two is better combat but i well i really like the rpg mechanics of one that
00:35:49
Speaker
Yeah, one had a great story and it sucks that the combat system was wanky when it came out and 15 years later is not aged well or 20 years later or whatever it is now. No, it really has not.
00:36:06
Speaker
Yeah. A friend of mine recently went through the legendary edition again, because he played the games when they were first coming out, but he's going back to him and we get to just sit and nerd out on stuff. And we're talking about story. And then I'm like telling him about these like Codex entries that have specific stories, especially from three during just say the big invasion events in three, where there's a lot going on.
Appreciation of Game Universes: Mass Effect to Forza
00:36:31
Speaker
And so I'm just talking about, I really get into a lot of that stuff. So.
00:36:37
Speaker
so I had to put that one down. And that's where, again, I have the lore, you know, being a Vorthos, being a Mel, and I realize I wrote, it doesn't matter, being, you know, there are games where I'm one, games where I'm the other, and sometimes it's both, it hits both for me. And this is one for me where it's much more heavily weighted on the Vorthos side. Yeah. And there's just so much lore there.
00:37:04
Speaker
I've read most of the books. I have all the comics. I haven't read those yet. Never read any of the books or comics for it, which is kind of surprising with how much I dug the games. Kind of surprised we never got a movie for that setting. Yeah, there is an animated movie. Yeah. It's OK. Yeah, it's OK. It takes place before kind of between one and two-ish. Right. Something from a completely different
00:37:35
Speaker
from some of the other ones we went. I saw you put the Foroza Horizon series on your list, which was a really different type of game. So I thought that was interesting to see on your list. Well, and I didn't think about it at first, but then I was reading through the article, going back to the MTG Wiki thing, talking about the different profiles, and it mentions
00:37:58
Speaker
in Timmy, Tammy, like diversity gamers is kind of one of the subgroups or talks experiencing all different types of decks and formats. They always try different things because they enjoy constant exploration. And I think that kind of fits for why I really enjoy the Forza Horizon games. And so these are racing games, but I joke with a friend of mine that I don't play them like racing games. I play them like driving games because all I like to do is drive particularly four and five.
00:38:28
Speaker
The most recent two have really large open, they're essentially open world driving games, because especially four and five, you could just plow through most of the walls and fences and just drive anywhere you want in the space that they give you. And the space they give you in five is massive, massive chunk of Mexico that has a lot of diversity of environments. Four takes place in England, which is pretty cool because
00:38:54
Speaker
They do different seasons throughout the year, which is kind of fun to have like, this is a lake in the summer. So you have to drive around it in the winter. It's frozen over though. So you can drive over the lake and there's races that take place only in the winter. But I just.
00:39:10
Speaker
I, there's some, I enjoy doing racing games to some degree, but none of them really do I engage with too much. But there's something about the Horizon games specifically in that I can do a race, but then I can spend the next hour just cruising down a side road that I've never driven down before in this game.
00:39:35
Speaker
Five is also fun, because I could buy a work hog from Halo and just start driving that through the countryside. Yeah, I guess that theory is known for doing some stuff like that, too. You certainly have like a Hot Wheels add-on for one of the games, too. Yep, they have a Hot Wheels add-on for five. I think one of the previous ones did, too. Four had a LEGO section, like a LEGO world you went to, which was fun.
00:40:06
Speaker
And part, one of the different challenges and stuff within the game too, both those two in particular, you don't, there's some amount of story, there's do some things to progress, but they don't tell you which things. They just say go do stuff, earn fame, I think is the currency essentially they call it. And so anything.
00:40:27
Speaker
We'll earn that. Going and winning races, cool. Going and hitting challenges, like I spent an hour and a half running over as many cactuses as I could because I had to like, that was one of the challenges. And so I earned some fame or something by just plowing through cacti.
00:40:47
Speaker
for an hour and a half in my work hog. And I love how the game just, it's such a playground game where, I mean, literally is the name of the developers playground games, but where they just give you like, here's a bunch of different things, a bunch of different progressions and different things and do what you want, and then we'll give you more of that. That's really cool. Yeah, I've never actually played any of those games, but I've always seen them and they looked super interesting.
00:41:14
Speaker
Yeah, I've never gotten around to trying any of them. I I don't know why I started playing for I think it's because it was on game pass. I know that. So I didn't have to. I didn't pay for it because I have. I have. I love game pass game passes. Great. So good for just getting to try things. But I think somebody on a gaming podcast was talking about it. And I think they talked about it multiple times. It was often enough. I was like, fine, fine. I get it. I'll try the game. It's cost me nothing. But the time I see it.
00:41:45
Speaker
I pay to be a Microsoft alumni for, you know, used to work there. It's an annual membership. The discount I get on Game Pass and Office makes it worth more than the annual membership to the Alumni Association. It's worth it just for Game Pass and Office. And then I can get some discount copies for some friends so I can buy a limited number.
00:42:11
Speaker
Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So when yours expires, you can always let me know. I will. Yeah. It's that's a fun game. If you have any that has any appeal to you, give it. Oh, yeah. No, it does. I love you. You made it even more interesting to me, talking about not needing the race to get points, just being able to free room and stuff like that. That's super interesting.
00:42:31
Speaker
Yeah. And one of the things I love about those two in particular, I've actually gone back and I had from some games with Gold Month, probably, I had the first with the original Forza Horizon. And that is different than Forza Motorsports, just for folks who may not be familiar with the series. They're made by, you know, they're the same series sort of, but they're two different series. They share the engine, but that's about it. Yes, the Motorsports are very much like simulations.
00:42:59
Speaker
I think that's how they describe simulation versus... I have no idea. But those are very like in the details, you're putting in these engines, you're doing this stuff. And a lot of that exists in Horizon, but you can ignore it entirely if you want. There's a handful of cars that I've just bought from other players.
00:43:21
Speaker
from with entirely in-game currency, just earned from other things that were optimized enough for what I wanted to do. I didn't even have to think about it. I don't have to learn those systems. I don't have to know how engines work and spark plugs or whatever. But if you really get into that, apparently the motorsports games are amazing, but those are racing games. The Horizon are the open world exploration ones.
00:43:45
Speaker
But even playing the first one was good. But being a 360 game, the technology was more limited. You couldn't drive through fields and things. Most of the fences were just stone walls, essentially. But four and five in particular have so much more freedom. Cool. That's really interesting. And kind of talking on those free kind of games, too, is I put on my list, I put The Sims and Cities and other sort of similar sim style games.
Creative Outlets in Simulation Games
00:44:14
Speaker
Again, I very Tammy on those kinds of games is I just want to do something very cool. And, you know, Sims Sims is one of those games where I will not touch it for three or four years and then go like two or three months where I see only thing I play. And I haven't done that in a couple of years. So it's probably going to happen soon. But yeah, I know it's it's my lesbian collection game.
00:44:45
Speaker
Very much on that. These are games where I don't even care if I cheat, if I use money cheats or whatever. I just want to do cool things and have fun and don't care about the challenge or anything. I still haven't played Cities 2. I had a bad feeling that if I bought it, I would dump a couple hundred hours in it and not know what I had done.
00:45:08
Speaker
Yeah, I played SimCity 2000 is a weird game for me. I played it a lot. I love that game. But it was a game I first played in sixth grade, because my teacher had one computer in our classroom because that was that age. This was a current game. And we could earn like play time to play SimCity 2000 or a few other games that were
00:45:35
Speaker
real games that had some manner of educational value that she deemed was worth putting on this computer. And so that, I got into the sort of bad, always online one, because I had friends playing it and that was fun. But otherwise, SimCity 2000 is really the only like sim game, city or even person sims, that I really ever got into.
00:46:02
Speaker
They've always been like, I see people talk about them, I'm like, I wanna do that. And then I try to play them and it's like, I don't wanna do any of this to start with. I just put the game down. Cities Skyline, I spent so many hours playing the original one. The second one came out sometime late last year and I was just like, no, no, I'm not gonna buy this because I know what'll happen if I do.
00:46:31
Speaker
Yeah. If you have to, you had to keep playing Baldur's Gate three. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Games with no story or no goal are actually probably more dangerous to me than RPG games because I can just get stuck in and playing them. Oh wow. Magic. Yeah. Games with no end state.
00:46:54
Speaker
Yeah. It's those at least, even if you do play them multiple times, you have a good off-ramp where you can like visit and look at to yourself, say, do I want to play this again? Do I do something else? Yeah. Where it's just these ones that I can continue playing forever. Although cities games always eventually end up with me destroying my own creation. There's no fans or bots. I get to the point where I'm just like bring all the disasters. I'm done with this world.
00:47:25
Speaker
the kid tearing down all the Lego, just to bring it back to start anew. Yeah. It gets there eventually. It's like, I have 125 hours invested in the city, but I am done with it. Yeah. All right. So I'm going to talk about a weird game that I hear almost nobody ever talk about, ever.
00:47:52
Speaker
And I love it. Partially, well, a good portion of it is just from nostalgia, but I want to talk about Quest 64. So this is a game that I got on the Nintendo 64 back when that was current. I'm sorry, were you done with sim games? Yeah, I'm good. Okay.
00:48:13
Speaker
But yeah, Quest 64, I bought back when it came out. I got that the weekend it came out. I remember vividly because I was grounded for some reason. I can't remember what I did, but I remember I couldn't play the game.
00:48:28
Speaker
that week and then Reddit calls this the N64's RPG masterpiece. Well, when there's like three options, it's much easier to be number one is what I'm gonna say. It's not overall an amazing game, but I loved it so much because it was the only thing I had as an RPG on the 64.
00:48:54
Speaker
I actually beat this game last year. I went back to it in the year of our Lord 2023 to play Quest 64 for some reason. Well, I needed a game that starts with Q. That's a whole other conversation.
00:49:09
Speaker
But the actual core character progression mechanic, from a male standpoint, I think is really interesting. The world itself is kind of neat for a N64 game. It felt like so revolutionary open world when I was a kid, like I'm playing Breath of the Wild, but really it's more like Ocarina or it's this tiny little world, but you can go anywhere you want, including any of the three places you could go.
00:49:36
Speaker
But the progression mechanic in Quest is your character is a Sorcerer, I think is how they refer to it. Magic is your character. Archetype has a Staff.
00:49:49
Speaker
And as you get spirits, you can apply them to one of the four elements. Fire, earth, air, and water. But then the more you get into that element, it starts to open up new spells. Like, A, easy enough, when you have one rock, you start the game with one of each, so you have rock is the first earth spell. Well, rock eventually becomes rock two and rock three, and it's a bigger rock that does more, but it starts to branch into other things.
00:50:18
Speaker
I think there's some stuff when you get I don't know I don't know if it combines the multiple elements but it's just I and how you navigated the menu was interesting too because of the the n64's controller was so weird but it had the four directional c buttons okay yeah yeah kids if you've never seen this controller before this was a weird controller controller the magical trident
00:50:43
Speaker
that you don't know how to hold, but it's- No, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Reddit's description was a little sarcastic in this game when the average score is 5.5. Oh, absolutely. Again, I think that was the joke of when there's only three options. Yeah, yeah. I had never heard of this, so I went and started reading while you were describing it. Yeah.
00:51:13
Speaker
It's not good, but I enjoyed it. It wasn't terribly long, so it was pretty easy for me to kind of play through it and not feel like I was missing out on other things last year. I had a lot of things that I wanted to play, too. But I really enjoyed that system, and it was really interesting kind of planning out, especially to be honest,
00:51:37
Speaker
using a guide a little bit to kind of look, okay, what bosses are coming up, because different elements are weak to different elements, because that has that whole rock, paper, scissor sort of thing. And so just, I guess, a little bit of the coming up with how do I want to build my character to what elements to go into which fights and start to work on different things and use which spells based on
00:51:59
Speaker
how many of these elements I have. And then, because there's, you can get them through combat, so eventually you could get all of them, but all the four elements I'll cap at 50. And there's only so many you find out in the world. There's a limited number just out in the world. And so it'd be like, okay, if I'm gonna go here, I'm gonna pick up five before I get to the next boss, then maybe I'll get a six through combat. So where are these six gonna go to be the most impact on this one boss fight? Well, also kind of building towards the next boss fight and the next area.
00:52:28
Speaker
I enjoyed that, and I really appreciate it. And again, the C button, sorry, as I got distracted by talking about how we're old and old things are weird, but these four C buttons give you your up, down, left, right, is how you pick your spells. And so you'll hit up to go to error, I think. I can't remember which one. And then that gives you four options on the thing. And if you, it might be air cutter one, and then you push that again, it goes to air cutter two.
00:52:55
Speaker
But there's other spells that you start to open up that give you different branching paths, and so kind of learning which path so you can hit three buttons real quick during combat. Though combat is not real time, so you have however much time you need, but just kind of learning. They took a lot of spells. They were able to take a lot of spells and put them down into just these four buttons because of the way they built the menu. And I thought that was really cool.
00:53:23
Speaker
And so what I'm saying is the best thing about this game is its menus. Nice. I didn't mean that as a compliment, I think. Sorry. I just, because it's such a weird game, I was like, I kind of wanted to bring that one up.
00:53:39
Speaker
All right, I'm gonna steal one off of your list and go to RTS games. And I
Nostalgia and Personal Game Significance
00:53:44
Speaker
think I am with you on here. You put down that you're a Timmy. I'm a Tammy. I am horrible at these kind of games. I'm absolutely terrible because what I like to do is just bunker up until I have nukes and then drop the nukes, even if it's not a good strategy.
00:54:03
Speaker
I wanna see the big things happen. It's like Age of Empires especially. It's like, I'm gonna hide in my castle until I can drop thermonuclear weapons on you. Yeah, my favorite strategy in Starcraft is to go protoss and build as many carriers as my population will allow. Yeah. Because they're big giant ships full of little tiny ships that just zap everything and then everything dies.
00:54:32
Speaker
Yeah, I am so bad at RTS games. It truly is. I loved playing Warcraft for the story. Again, those are games where I did not feel bad if I was cheating in them. When I did play the multiplayer, I was accepting in advance that I'm probably going to lose. Yeah, I have only played
00:55:00
Speaker
one of them competitively multiplayer once. And that was my friend Zeke and I, we played Starcraft one time against each other. I much preferred playing them co-op against the computer. Yeah, we did a lot of Warcraft. Yeah, I did a lot of Warcraft and Starcraft against the computer and Agent Empire. A lot of all three of them, I did a lot of co-op.
00:55:27
Speaker
But yeah, even then I would fall so far behind my teammates a lot of times because I'm just going to be, I was like, I'm going to sit here and I'm going to build weapons of mass destruction. And you're going to do, you're going to do a strategy. Yeah. Yeah. My strategy is going to, I'm just going to stay alive. You're doing a good job with that strategy over there. I'm just going to keep my nukes.
00:55:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's sort of like I just I whatever it is. I have I find the thing I like and then I just build a lot of them. I want to yeah, I'm trying to remember what I did with it. Warcraft and I was playing the night elves. I know I had a bunch of Hippogriff riders. I mean, going back to the original Warcraft, all I wanted to do was summon demons and the very original one, you know, that's all I want to do.
00:56:19
Speaker
I was like, do humans have elementals? I was like, screw elementals. The Orcs have demons. I'm summoning demons. Nice, yeah. I guess I should say Warcraft 3. I've never actually played the first two. I played a lot of Warcraft 3, though. We started building our own custom maps just because. It's like, if we're going to play this as much as we did, we might as well just build custom maps. Yeah.
00:56:46
Speaker
Yeah, I played a lot of those and played quite a bit of. Well, I think the last one I played, I was probably the Starcraft two is the last one I played a significant amount of time. I didn't, I didn't go back and play much when they released the remasters or anything. Yeah, I'm trying to think. I know we played a lot of Warcraft three fairly recently. Yeah.
00:57:13
Speaker
I played some more Starcraft 2 when Wings of Liberty came out cooperative. Yeah, that was probably the last time I played any of them. Yeah, I played through all three campaigns for Starcraft 2. Yeah, I did too. I did play through all the campaigns.
00:57:29
Speaker
which that's about the last I remember. Yeah. Some for me. I don't know if that, that's a, that's a genre I played a ton for a while and then just have not really come back to. I don't know. Taste has changed or maybe it was when I was younger and didn't have the money to buy games. Also, there isn't as much of it anymore. It's mostly been, they've been re-releasing the same games as just,
00:57:56
Speaker
um remastered versions but that's yeah it also is like yeah i just you know i there's other games i'd like to play with the time that i have but yeah i played i played so much co-op of those back in the day and even later but yeah h of empires i love that i love making nukes and they were terrible weapons but yeah just it was so much fun yeah
00:58:27
Speaker
All
Episode Conclusion and Reflections
00:58:28
Speaker
right. Well, I think that's actually probably a good place to, to wrap it up. I got to ask you a question though, because I am not, I'm not familiar. You had another game on your list. I was not familiar with, and this is neon white. What is this? Neon white is, is God, it's hard to even describe it. It's technically in like structure. It's a first person shooter except it's card based and it's.
00:58:54
Speaker
speeder speedrunning based or something it's it's weird the point like all of the stages almost all of them you finish in and like a minute they're almost all a minute long but you have to from beginning to end you have to kill all of the demons
00:59:10
Speaker
And then before you can get into the entrance to finish the stage and most of them you kill drop cards and you can find these cards in other places too they're all weapons and so you might have like a handgun that is a handgun with a certain amount of ammunition.
00:59:26
Speaker
that as soon as you use it, then it goes away. Or you can drop the card, sacrifice the card to get a movement ability. So the handguns one is always like it gives you a double jump. The rocket launcher is a grappling hook. And so like the game becomes this, it's a puzzle almost.
00:59:45
Speaker
It's structurally a first-person shooter, and there's cards for some reason, but it's more of a puzzle of how quickly can you get from point A to point B while killing all the demons in between.
00:59:59
Speaker
I don't know. I put in my note too, this is the closest to Spike, I think for a game because most of the time I'll play even games like this that are all like, hey, look at the leaderboards. I don't care. I could not care about leaderboards at all. There's nothing. But this particular game, I would play levels over and over again to get better scores. Now, a little piece of that is it does require you to get
01:00:26
Speaker
They have four metal, like gold is the second highest, the second best you can do to get some of the aces are kind of ridiculous. I only got a few of them through the whole game, but they require to have a certain number of golds to kind of get to the next piece of the story. But once you finish, say 10 stages, if you're in chapter one, there's 10 stages, you can then just replay those as much as you want.
01:00:50
Speaker
Then I think you needed five I needed five golds. So each time you only need to like do pretty good on half of the stages. But I would like the first one was like I needed five golds. I thought I don't think I'm going to like this because I don't like having to replay the same content. But because these stages are so short.
01:01:09
Speaker
It doesn't, I will say until the very end, there's a few stages that are a little longer that were starting to try to be a little trying for me. But my struggle is I don't like to need to be like fully on for that long period of time because it always, the longer it goes, the more I get to my own head about don't screw it up, don't screw it up, don't screw it up. And then I screw it up and then I have to start all over. But some of these are cleared in 15 seconds, 20 seconds. And so they're short enough.
01:01:36
Speaker
that I just had fun, even when I would mess it up. Like, oh, I got to just jump this way instead of jumping that way. Throw the gun instead of using it. You know, whatever. I love the game. I got it on my Steam Deck. I played it on the bus. It is all of the bullet points for this game say this is a game I shouldn't love, but I loved this game.
01:01:59
Speaker
Cool. That sounds like a really unique game. Yeah. That's, that's what I gather from the, according to some person on a podcast who was reviewing it, I think for Game Informer, I think the creator said that it was a game for freaks, by freaks or something like that. It's, it was, I really enjoyed it. I got it during the Steam winter sale. All right.
01:02:26
Speaker
Well, that's it for tonight. I hope you all enjoyed this talk about psychographics and other games. Yeah. And hopefully it helps you all kind of think about that whole concept, if that's helpful for you, of just really examining what you like about games and how you enjoy the games to help you find other things that are similar.