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Avoiding the Main Quest
64 Plays2 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about adopting your partner, sex before marriage, saving themselves for games, Shadows of the Erdtree, and Nightingale in this week's episode!
Intro:
- Etrian Odyssey V - Battle 2
Outro:
- Kirby Theme (Phonk)
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Transcript
Kickoff and Dog Adoption
00:00:57
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I am joined by my co-hosts, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? It's good. That's good. Do you want to know why it's good? No. I got to have dinner with a friend. I picked up the dog today. Not physically. She's heavy, but I could. I could. You've been working out. I'm working out. Yeah.
00:01:25
Speaker
The one specific muscle for picking up dogs, which I guess is the biceps. Maybe a bit of forearm. But I was going to say I've also officially adopted this dog. Oh, dang. In that I have paid them money. That being the primary difference. I think that's fair. I'm watching the bar at the bottom, usually eating your microphone. It's going to be impossible. It's your job to balance it this week. It's fine. It's fine.
00:01:49
Speaker
You know I'm going to let it do auto leveling, right? And I'll just be like, it's fine. It's going to clip and lose a little bit of quality. All of my effort goes into spending three hours picking an intro and an outro that anything else I pick would be fine. But I want something that I like. I mean, that's fair.
00:02:07
Speaker
I usually just download a couple like OSTs all at once and then pick a song from each thing. Last time we had like Mango on for an episode and I was like, I'm just gonna grab the entire Sims. OST, that sounds like it can be bad to have. But I congratulate you. We talked for an hour beforehand. I explicitly asked like, how's the dog doing? And Dave managed to not spill the beans that it's an official adoption. So it's a big deal. I posted that in Discord.
00:02:36
Speaker
I don't really have the time to view Discord anymore. I actually did not see that. Is this under cute animals?
Relationship Reflections and Advice
00:02:44
Speaker
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Oh, and there's a bunch of reactions. I'll just up all these reactions, fine.
00:02:53
Speaker
When was that? Two days ago. The TLDR is I was essentially doing a dog fostering type thing while she was undergoing some treatment still. I was like, oh, she's kind of a butthole at times, but she's she's my butthole. And now I have two buttholes. Yeah. But no, she's cute. I like having her around.
00:03:19
Speaker
she's currently just asleep in the dog bed but it's i don't know it's nice having a little pet little buddy yeah
00:03:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's always good that, uh, that's, that's basically the tell is like, once you, and you enter, you get to the, uh, the crossroads of the fostering process. Are we going to continue this or not recommitting? It's like, do I like having you around? Yes. No. Right. All of these considerate all of these ups and downs and all of that under effects. Um, I mean, honestly, I was worried for a bit. Yeah. Just because like she was getting into some trouble. Um, when she wasn't created and I was like, okay, we have to start creating.
00:03:56
Speaker
Um, a little more liberally. Um, but she's actually been a lot better with it. That's good. Like, uh, when friend came over and we went out for dinner, I'm like, Hey, listen, sweetie, baby bubble cakes. We need to go out for a little bit. We'll be back, but you get into some shit. Can you please go in the crate? And she went in first time.
00:04:17
Speaker
Instead of like, going to the other end of the room pretending she can't hear me. That's a really good sign for sure.
00:04:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think fostering is a lot like according for humans. There are people who are just like, oh, you shouldn't live together before you get married. That's insane to me. It's actually insane. I generally think a lot of different approaches can work towards for any of that sort of situation, people pairing up with their partner.
00:04:50
Speaker
But just straight up not knowing people on their off days and their good days and stuff like that before you make that commitment is actually insane to me. This is where I put my foot down and be like, that doesn't sound right. Because everybody's a little bit different in public. I have a public face as far as if I went out to a restaurant.
00:05:13
Speaker
I'm not going to be saying inappropriate jokes or being super obnoxious and loud because I realize I'm in a public space and other people are there. I'm not trying to be offensive, but if I was just at home with friends, like anything goes really, right? You're not worried about other factors.
00:05:36
Speaker
Going to marry somebody just based on their public face, it's just like when you call your grandmother, you're like, hey, grandma, how are you doing? Like you've never sinned a day in your life, right? It feels weird. It's kind of like a facade. It can be. It definitely can be. And I mean, if people are being completely true, then yeah, there's plenty of opportunities where it's not going to
00:05:58
Speaker
Maybe it wouldn't necessarily impact something. The other thing though, while I brought up this topic, so continue segue off of it, that I'm not super understanding of, but I can get it for like a religious reason or whatever is like abstinence before marriage. Um, but this isn't because it's like, Oh my gosh, it's insane that you guys aren't having sex. Like that doesn't make any sense. It's actually, or maybe some people hold that belief. I don't believe, but it's like, if it's.
00:06:26
Speaker
there's a danger, especially with Christians, of like, oh my gosh, we gotta rush marriage because I'm horny, right? And I want this to resolve to something. And so you could look over red flags or yellow flags or school buses that you're running over on the way to end up somewhere. And that's why there's these really quick turnarounds on marriages and stuff like that sometimes where it's just like,
00:06:52
Speaker
We just rushed to that. I have a friend who went through something kind of like that. They were not absent specifically, but they kind of rushed into a marriage, they would say. And it did not pan out. Grant, that was like over a time. It wasn't like a snap, oh, hey, shit type of thing. A Vegas marriage. Yeah. I don't know.
00:07:21
Speaker
I guess when you're in that space and that's your world, it makes sense, but it's like, Hey, you have two options. Um, not have any sex before marriage and marry this person or have sex before marriage. I'm like, let's have sex before marriage.
00:07:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's like it's a it's a part of a relationship for most couples. So just making sure it's just like making sure you have like a dialogue and conversation, right? Yes. You don't want to have nothing common, nothing you can talk about. In the same way that you want to be able to express
00:08:03
Speaker
affection in different ways, one of which is physical. I feel like, yeah, you got to be on the same page with a lot of stuff. And a lot of that comes out for just living through somebody. Yeah. What if there's somebody who lets the dishes soak?
00:08:18
Speaker
Yes, I'm that person. But I live alone. The problem is both me and my wife are people who let the dishes soak. So occasionally we're just like, all right, gas mask on, whole hazmat suit. Let's go run the dishwasher. Question. Do you ever do like a drive by pass?
00:08:41
Speaker
I should add a little bit more soap to that. And you do a little bit of hot water wash. I do. I do. There's additives. Cleaning additives buys you a little bit of time. Yeah. The thing for us, though, is we don't have like a ton of utensils and dishes and stuff. So we actually have like a capacity problem where it's like, let's have dinner. There are no planes. What have we done? OK, well, I see the issue. Right. Let's let's go ahead and take care of this. But yeah.
00:09:09
Speaker
I do want to clarify my position slightly in that I'm specifically like it's fine if people want to wait. Don't let anyone rush you into anything you're not, you know, ready for or whatever. And I even think it's fine for people to choose like not to have extensive physical intimacy and things like that.
00:09:28
Speaker
um, while they're courting or, or leading towards something. The thing I would advise against is letting your hormones in pursuit of that thing, like redirect you into a relationship that you otherwise wouldn't pursue. Right. That's the thing. It's, it's tough to know if you're in that position or not, or if you're just like, does kind of suck that we're not having sex. Right. It's like, yeah, we should get married. Right. Right. So, um,
00:10:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think in general, before making any sort of important decision, you should resolve yourself. Maybe a way today, right? It's most decisions you will have to make in life are not going to be, hey, you have 10 seconds to decide, otherwise it's gone. Yeah. That's what marketing will do to you. But honestly, you still can go back and buy that thing whenever, right? So sleep on it, or just wait a little bit. Don't rush into decisions that are going to be important.
00:10:19
Speaker
But yeah, that's just our relationship advice. That's just what you get from post nut clarity.
00:10:36
Speaker
Yeah. And you can derive from that. You you would be screwed only literally not or only figuratively, not literally at all. If your religion is like abstinence before marriage and also masturbation is a sin. If you're in that, there's no you're in a no win situation. You're never going to achieve clarity. You're doomed. It's all it is. But just subsisting off of wet dreams.
00:11:04
Speaker
How'd you sleep last night? Pretty good. Yeah. It's like, why do you always answer like that? This isn't just strange, but yeah. So anyways, that's a relationship advice portion. But you know, sometimes you just have to ignore the main quest.
00:11:28
Speaker
I'll be honest, you sent this to me as a message. I responded with the emoticon Nani and then you never followed up. Yeah. So usually we don't have the peek behind the curtain a little bit. We don't usually have the title in mind when we record the episode, because then you can have the most appropriate title possible, right?
00:11:50
Speaker
Um, cause you were like, oh, we just, we just talked about frogs for an hour and a half. Uh, we'll call this one frogs. Right. Um, but I had to think I wanted to talk about, which is my critique of nightingale and you have your thing you want to talk about,
Elden Ring Discussion
00:12:07
Speaker
which is the announcement for the DLC for Elden Ring. And I assume that's the only thing. Oh yeah.
00:12:17
Speaker
So both of those are things that are not the main quest or after explanation. Hopefully you guys also agree you're not the main quest. And then also I was just thinking about it. I was like, I don't know. I don't know if we've talked about this idea of getting to do what you want to do in a game and
00:12:40
Speaker
Man, like that question or that idea just really applies to both Elden Ring and Nightingale. So, framing. It's framing. How do you like Elden Ring? I think it's a pretty good game. I've enjoyed my time with it. I am very much so looking forward to the DLC, Shadows of the Urchery.
00:13:06
Speaker
Your tree is actually, I was thinking of like, how do you, how do you, how do you put those words together? It's like the, or DLC or something that are deals. Your DLC. Yeah. It's something that we've been kind of.
00:13:22
Speaker
I mean we knew it was going to come out at a point and then they announced just like a picture a year ago and now we actually have a trailer for it and a release date and it looks cool. To be fair, it would be very hard to not make me think it looked cool.
00:13:40
Speaker
Because I just like how they do things You guys see the stick figure boss, holy shit That was the original orphan of costs was just the stick figure design like maybe we should flush them out literally Yeah, they could be an Eldritch God
00:14:05
Speaker
But yeah, it's been very fun to kind of watch content creators I like in the soul space, uh, kind of explored a little bit. And VatiVidi is pretty much the figurehead of that community. Yeah. And a lot of stuff that he's getting is typically also being fed from his own research. And then of other people in the community, um, his patrons, et cetera. And there's just like a lot of cool stuff with it. Cause like.
00:14:32
Speaker
What was funny was talking to several people who watched the trailer. They were like, I think this guy in the trailer with like the flames. I think that's Mikola. Yeah. It was like, OK. And then you watch at the end of the trailer. It's like, hey, if you want to do like this pre-order edition, you get a statue of this character not named Mikola. And I was like, maybe it's not Mikola. Right.
00:14:54
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's it's over two years since the first since the game released. This is this is a long time to wait for DLC. How is that? How is the weight for Shadows of the Earth Tree changed your expectations of what it'll be, if at all? No, no, that wasn't even a yes or no question. How was it? You're like, no, I honestly like.
00:15:22
Speaker
I didn't have enough stuff to start theorizing off of in the same way with Silksong to a degree. I just know it's coming at some point in the future, and whenever that point is, I'm looking forward to having that experience. Because what did we have prior to the actual announcement? I think we had a still image of a person with long hair on a tree, or on a steed going toward a tree. It was Mikala on Torrent in the Shadowlands. Yeah.
00:15:50
Speaker
Badlands, shadowlands. Lands of shadow or something like that. We must never go there, says Mufasa. Everything the light touches. Yeah, that's your dream. I mean, what about you? If you have something announced with granted little information, does the longer wait make you kind of forget about it and then you're pleasantly surprised later, like finding a $20 bill in your jacket or?
00:16:21
Speaker
Does it kind of drive you insane? When the fuck is Silksong coming out, for example? Yeah, I mean that's a good question. Because I think I agree with you as far as Silksong. We saw some gameplay from Silksong a long time ago. That was in the teaser. And so it makes it feel like it's a lot closer.
00:16:41
Speaker
than it really was because Shadow of the Earth Tree is apparently coming out first, right? Or if Silksong beats it, it's because it like shadow drops or something, which would be cool, I'd be all for it. But I kinda don't expect that. I mean, on one side, you have like the extreme of something like Cyberpunk 2077, where they announced it and it was just a teaser for...
00:17:05
Speaker
lady who goes cyberpsychotic with mantis blades and then is taken down by max tack, right? That was six years before the game came out, if I recall correctly. That's insane. Don't do that. I assume you forgot about it after like a couple months. I mean, kind of, I guess, but it really depends on like
00:17:33
Speaker
I don't know, you can give people the impression that things are further along than they are. And if you don't know that a game can be announced and then take six years to come out, like, yeah, you're going to be disappointed by that if it's big. No, I wasn't like huge into cyberpunk, so I'm sure that's maybe like not as drastic as it could be for me. But then once it came out, I became a big fan and stuff. I really, I really like games having a short
00:18:00
Speaker
amount of time from announcement to being able to play it because yeah it's when you announce it that's when I'm gonna have that level of interest and get pulled in I'm like oh this looks cool I would like to play this experience it when is it coming out yeah now if they say anything that's like six months to a year I'll be like okay cool and then I will catalog it back I'll never see it again some point be like this game came out I was like oh shit that's cool
00:18:28
Speaker
Versus like hey, this comes out like a month. You're okay. I can who else wants to play this game with me? Yeah, I think you kind of get the the ball rolling on the hype and if it was longer than that Especially if you're excited for it like silk song which I think is having that experience with the community. It's We saw a thing for this
00:18:50
Speaker
these had this initial date, and then it wasn't that date, then we haven't heard anything else, and then every time that there's a direct, everyone's like vibrating in their seats, and then posting clown emojis. Yeah, it's...
00:19:04
Speaker
It's very much like, I think at a point you can reach kind of like the valve problem if it's a hotly anticipated game, where it's like, okay, whatever the next Half-Life is, the next Half-Life episode, the next Half-Life version, whatever, it has to, like the more time it passes, the more people's hopes and dreams and whatever are caught up and compounded and put together. And like, I mean, there's going to be people who legitimately are not as sold on Silksong when it comes out, just because there's no way it can live up to
00:19:34
Speaker
this anticipation that's carried for so long, right? There's a game, I'm gonna call them out for giving them credit just specifically for this and probably nothing else. But like the one that I can think of that did this the best recently, that's not Hi-Fi Rush, that was literally a shadow drop, that's, it's impossible to beat that for turnaround from acknowledgement to satisfaction, right? Was like Fallout 4.
00:20:01
Speaker
I think it had like five months or something like that from the time that it was announced as a game to when it was playable.
00:20:07
Speaker
And that's insane. People don't do that anymore. They're like, oh my gosh, think about how much our stock could have been growing. I think part of it is with pre-orders for the game, let alone special editions in the case of Elden Ring here for the DLC. I think that definitely drives some of it where they want to announce earlier to try and capitalize on that.
00:20:33
Speaker
as we've seen with some AAA titles, they don't necessarily follow through on delivering that finalized product at all. And it's a huge pile of shit, which is unfortunate. At least in the case of FromSoft, they have a really great track record with their games and their DLCs.
00:20:55
Speaker
It is kind of interesting. But I haven't even pre-ordered it. I mean, that's fair. It's a DLC. Or did I? No, I did. Yeah. I mean, if there's something, so the list of comfortable developers to pre-order their content shrinks every year, I think, right? But FromSoft is still there. If they miss, then you can go, you can add them to the pile of people you don't pre-order for, right? But when it's always a hit,
00:21:24
Speaker
I don't know. I think they deserve some of that rep. It's when people preorder games that just turn out to be duds, it's like, why would you encourage this? But yeah, I mean, it does obviously always involve taking a risk. And if you choose never to preorder, that's fine. We live in an age of digital distribution, right? So it doesn't normally hurt you that much if you have good bandwidth. I do think it's interesting that this was announced so long in advance, and I almost wonder if
00:21:53
Speaker
They usually wouldn't have done that if it wasn't kind of how the industry just does things now. Um, cause I don't recall them having such a long period of time between like previous DLCs being announced to release. I'd have to check the timeline on things, but I believe. Actually, do you know this? Did they release armored core six before they announced the DLC? Oh, that's a good question. I'm not sure. I know they announced armored core six.
00:22:25
Speaker
Or I'm pretty sure they announced when was shadows of the urge tree announced Yeah, it's possible they had Something else in the pipeline for that. Yeah, this is like The top result is a is a week ago, and I don't think that's accurate Yeah It's it's hard to say
00:22:52
Speaker
Cause everybody's taught, people have been talking about it for a long time. So it's hard to pick out like a particular article. Well, I think that kind of answers your question as to why they do it early is especially when from soft games are so sparse as far as lore and where to find it. Um.
00:23:13
Speaker
let your community theorycraft that I think is honestly part of the fun yeah but it also will drum up hype and especially for how fucking big Elden Ring was like huge fucking game it looks like size and it's a adoptability
00:23:34
Speaker
It looks like it's actually almost a year to the day of our recording of this podcast. February 28th of last year is when it was announced. So they're going to have like the announcement. The game was out, I think around February, a year later they announced the DLC and then a year and a half or so after the announcement of the DLC is when the DLC launch. Which is like, it seems like a little bit of time.
00:24:04
Speaker
Yeah. It's not six years though. That's the thing. Like you said, it keeps people thinking about it. It keeps people talking about it. It keeps Alden ringing at the forefront. I think for DLC, it's also nice because it knows that, you know, that the game is not done. If the DLC is announced, you're like, okay, well, maybe I'll keep trying character ideas. Maybe I'll make sure to stay on top of builds or whatever. You don't like just put it in on the shelf and leave it there forever. True. So.
00:24:35
Speaker
Yeah, I'm, it'll probably be good. Still very excited for it. We're definitely going to do more stuff with sleep as a status effect. Uh, there's definitely some new crucible night abilities that they were showing off. Um, I think they have some new weapon types. Yeah. One of which is a fucking repeating crossbow. Um, Evelyn has to be in every single game. Yeah. It's basically the moon, my great sword at this point. Yeah.
00:25:04
Speaker
I just, I want to hear more about the, the lore side of things. Cause we know Mesmer is a, another one of America's kids. Yeah. And Mesmer is a great name. It's also an excellent class in Guild Wars. So that's pretty cool. Um, yeah. And we know that, uh, we know that this is prop. They, I think they said that this is the biggest DLC they've ever made and released, which at first you're like, dang, nice. And then you like, think about it a bit and you're like, were the previous DLC actually that big for like,
00:25:35
Speaker
any given Dark Souls and generally not, not really. They're kind of small. Yeah. Like you can put some good time into them, but they're not huge. Yeah. Like Ash is very on though. Literally a painting. Yeah. Snowy landscape and then a couple of buildings.
00:25:56
Speaker
Also, it's literally impossible for me to ever think about the painting from Dark Souls and not associated with Super Mario 64. Oh yeah, you jump in. Ripples.
00:26:10
Speaker
Yeah. This is actually a very big game. It is open world. So the DLC for that will also be open world. They said it's going to be very dense even compared to the world of the base game, which is like, that's a lot.
00:26:31
Speaker
But yeah, you're right. If, if you would have picked up like the, uh, I can't remember the DLC for prepare to die edition of dark souls, it was something Artorias. It's not just night Artorias. It's something like that, but Oolacil that whole place. If you were to just grab that and drop it and you're like, this is the, uh, this is the Elden Ring DLC. People would be like, what have you done? There's nothing here. Right. So I could understand it. Can I understand it taking more time for that? So.
00:27:00
Speaker
Hopefully this is a continuation of the Elden Ring experience, because I must admit, I haven't actually played that much Elden Ring. I've only beaten it like one time, I think. What? Yeah. For me, the first playthrough was like, anything goes. So I was doing Mimic tier and giant bleed weapons. And then the second time I went through, I'm like, you are not allowed to use Mimic. And I was like, ah.
00:27:28
Speaker
But it was fun to like, uh, put a challenge and try and do a specific build with limitations. Um, I, I've done or started some other runs like that. I just get distracted, but it's definitely worth going back re-experiencing some of that. So that's the question is we know, or we probably know that the DLC is going to be something that you probably access after millennia.
00:27:56
Speaker
No. No. We know that that's not the case. The conditions are you have to have killed Radon. Okay. And you have to have killed Moog.
00:28:06
Speaker
That's very late game. So the reason that I got confused here was because I killed Moog and then I killed Melania. And those were the two things I did at the end of the game. That was after like main story and everything. With the standard progression. Yes, there is a gate to Moog's area from the snow planes, which is the DLC area, which connects
00:28:33
Speaker
Not DLC area. It's the optional area, which then connects to inventory. But you can get there earlier. Yeah, I learned that. I learned that later, but that was like specifically NPC side quest stuff. Yeah. But also the level that you can access it there. You're going to have a bad time. Yeah.
00:28:55
Speaker
Although it was really good to farm souls there with a wave of gold. Lots of you've beaten the game, right? I had beaten the game again before I even made it to Moog. I was like, without the wave of gold, you can do something like shoot an arrow at like a giant enemy from far away. One of the dogs will suicide itself. Yeah. That was pretty good too.
00:29:20
Speaker
Um, but I still can, I still, I still maintain Moog is as far as power scaling, he's expected to be like one of the last three bosses you fight. Like if you beat him early, you can, you can beat any of the bosses early in this type of game, but like, you're going to have a bad time. And specifically Moog is also like, Hey, I am dreaming you dry of health.
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah. Imagine doing that with like only having 50 L when he starts talking to you in Latin, you're like, fuck. Yeah, it's a bad time. What if we didn't, I'm a piece out. Um, so the, the, what I was leading to this though, before my factual misstatement, um, was, are you going to make a character before the DLC drops that you intend to play the DLC with? Probably. Yeah. Um, just because.
00:30:18
Speaker
And it's something to go back to a game and a little bit old save that I have not played in such a long time. It feels weird. Like I don't have the context of what I was doing. And now I'm just like a very high level person with some items. Okay. Like I don't have that attachment to.
00:30:36
Speaker
keep going back to it versus oh this one's fresh in my mind this is going to be my character or build that will go into the dlc right now of course i still have the option to switch it up um but i'd honestly rather just have
00:30:55
Speaker
something kind of fresh in. I'm just trying to think if I want to do those fights again. Yeah. But honestly, for the practice, I don't think it's bad to just go back and replay some content. Yeah. Yeah. I'll probably I'll probably make a checklist for what I want to pick up for the character.
00:31:10
Speaker
and get them in a pretty good spot before then. Because if Moog is one of the gates to get in here, that would put it towards some of the other DLC that had been released, such as the Ring City. Again, I can't remember the DLC for Dark Souls 1.
00:31:33
Speaker
They all intended you to be in the endgame. For Dark Souls 1, it required you to fight an enemy near the Hydra in that Lost Lake area, or the lake near the Darkroot Basin, I think it's called. Which is not too late endgame, but then to reach the Archives, which does specifically require you to get the Lordvessel and go out there. So you're at least approaching endgame.
00:31:58
Speaker
And Ring City is the end of the game. And I think Ring City and Moog are kind of like equivalent there. So if you start up a character and you're like, I'm just gonna rush the DLC, I suspect, and I could be wrong about this, when you end up in DLC land, it's gonna be like, hey, we tuned this area to 300%. These enemies have a ton of health, they do a ton of damage. You're gonna have that. I think that's safe to assume. I think in an interview they said that
00:32:28
Speaker
in addition to you still being able to gain levels and put points into different stats to increase your damage output potential they're doing something kind of similar to Sekiro where you can essentially have like a flat power increase right when defeating some bosses because Sekiro would like upgrade his weapon right with the uh
00:32:50
Speaker
Well, yeah, it's like a flat, you cash in the, the one, whatever boss spirit. It's like, ah, you got this memory and then your attack power just goes up. Yeah.
00:33:01
Speaker
So yeah, I think for that type of option on top of the existing scaling, it really would have to be endgame. Also, it's kind of weird too. Someone's like, oh, I just did this many armed fellow. Oh, what's this door? And then it's just the most random of stuff that has deep lore implications to things that you have not experienced yet.
00:33:24
Speaker
It would be really funny if you're just like, oh yeah, it's just everything's a really low level, but it is giving you this attack power. It's just the Twink Dungeon. You just go there if you want like a ton of power, and then you come back out and destroy the rest of the game. Twink Dungeon sounds like a club I went to when I was in the same camp. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
00:33:44
Speaker
Very friendly. Question for you. Sure. So obviously we know that Mesmer is going to be a main antagonist. He's on the box. You see him doing moves against the player character, blah, blah, blah. Who else do you think is going to be there? Or who would you like to see? Miklo. Same. There you go. No, I confuse your name with the boss because Melania
00:34:14
Speaker
Blade of Melana? Is it Melana is the fire keeper in this one? Yes, but canonically, she's dead, no? I don't know, it depends on what they mean. Like when does this happen, right? Because you can beat Moog before she's dead, right? True, but if that's like the true end of the game, you've set the fire.
00:34:44
Speaker
with her. That's true. She could be dead. She could be dead at the point that you play in the DLC. I mean, I don't know, though, because I still this is my hope to answer your question. It would be cool to have more of her character because she never really explains too much. She she.
00:35:07
Speaker
All of the Dark Souls games have this. She's the Emerald Herald or whatever, the Firekeeper, whatever. But they do a better job of flushing out her character, I think.
00:35:17
Speaker
And some of the Indians is very much like an interesting character that seems like it could even lead into, we're talking spoilers for Eldering, doesn't matter, games are not for 20 years at this point. I'm specifically thinking of Frenzied Flame, right? Because in Frenzied Flame, it's just like, oh, I'm gonna freaking hunt you down. It is now my job to eliminate you after you betrayed the world, basically, to Frenzied.
00:35:45
Speaker
Um, and if not shadows of the erd tree, then when, right? Like, how long are they going to make DLC for this game? So I would like if she had a role to play here, if she was still alive at the point that the story happens. Okay. Also. She, uh, she's, she is the one that delivers torrent to you. Right. So that's like another, or am I confusing her with Ronnie?
00:36:14
Speaker
No, uh, Melana gives you the, the whistle, the summon. And then Ronnie gives you the spirit calling bell. And she's also like, because you have Torrin. Yeah. But it was given to you by Torrin's former master, which is Mikala. So Mikala is involved in the storyline. Um,
00:36:34
Speaker
which is cool, because if you look at Mikkelor, which is very cool, I honestly would also like to see, well granted, I think this is still a physical place that we're going to in this DLC, and I think it's in the same universe. I don't know if it's like a pocket dimension type thing. The whole point of why I'm saying this is I would love to see something with Godwin,
00:37:03
Speaker
Mm. Because Godwin is such like a hey, they murdered him at the beginning cutscene and here is his like super weird tree corpse throughout a good portion of the game. Yeah. I would love to see if they had like maybe it's a shadow remnant of him or something. Because you is it is it Godwin? Am I misremembering one of the the ever jails?
00:37:29
Speaker
has, it's not Godwin, it was one of those guys. Godric. Yeah, I was like, it's one of the guys with the same exact name, because they have the stupidest names in this game. But, okay, Godric was the one in that ever show. Yeah, Godwin is the sibling of Nicola and Ronnie and. Right, he's the one killed with. Yes, the black knife. Yeah.
00:37:56
Speaker
Gotcha, so I agree it would be cool to, so we're going in different directions, right? I want to see what happens kind of like towards the end of the main game with some of the characters involved in, and you're like, I want to see some of the stuff that happened in the inciting events that kicked off Elden Ring, which I think is fair. I do think yours is more likely to come true, because it's kind of easier to fill out the past than the future when it comes to games like this, and they like to do that also.
00:38:27
Speaker
And I also, I have a feeling there could be one more DLC. And if there's one more DLC, that could be the one that comes afterwards in the same way as like, again, Ring City for Dark Souls 3.
00:38:43
Speaker
I mean, I wouldn't hate if they made more Elden Ring content until I was done. Like I would get the battle pass. I would get the little cute emoticon for playing season three of an Elden Ring. I would pay $5 to revive. I'd simp hard. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to take as much time. This is more interesting. I am very excited. I mean, we haven't actually talked about it all that much because it's like,
00:39:13
Speaker
What are we gonna do? We're gonna talk about speculation up to this point. Now it's at least locked in, right? So it's coming out in June. Mid June, early June. Last time I guessed late June and that was incorrect. So it has to be mid or early.
00:39:29
Speaker
I thought it was like around June 21st. I have to double check the date. Maybe I said mid June and it's actually late June. I'm going to definitely need to schedule some PTO for that because I'm not going to be paying attention to work at all. 20th. If I have this unbeaten Dark Souls game in front of me. Yeah. That's fair. Yeah. Man, Elden Ring is really good though.
00:39:55
Speaker
That's the thing. Like I, I have wanted to go in and put more time into it, but I've been playing all these other games. That's the trick. And this is, I think we should grab a multi-person party and do like the seamless DLC or I can play a specific class. You can play a specific class. We can have somebody else. Right. Yeah. I was playing, uh, I was playing bloodborne a lot recently. I went through and I a hundred percent in blood. I don't know if a hundred percent.
00:40:26
Speaker
I got all the trophies and that basically is close to 100%. And I'm like, I'm good on it now. And like, there are people who are like, port Bloodborne to PC and all this stuff. And I'm like, eh, you don't think really have to. It's fine if you don't actually. It's not that it's bad, but it's also like, it is aged. And the process of consuming some content for Bloodborne, I kind of like realized how good of a game Elden Ring is.
00:40:56
Speaker
more so because it really is just like all of the skill trees from all of these FromSoft Souls games and Bloodborne, it all just feeds into Elden Ring. Yeah. And I didn't know to the extent that I went back and played it. I'm like, dang, play Elden Ring. Then they announced the DLC. Trick weapons, rally mechanic.
00:41:26
Speaker
That's sky, sky babies patches. It's all there. It's all there. Um, but, uh, yeah, I'm sure we'll talk about it more. Maybe we'll have an anticipation episode, another anticipation episode on her tree. If they give us more information, um, or the, what we should do is we should have the, uh, the Elden ring primer guide, not prima primer guide.
00:41:54
Speaker
to shadow of the urge. It's just like, all right, this is what you got to do to get you ready for the expand. We can also make a shadow of the urge free bingo cards. That would be good. That'd be really good. I think it's something that people don't do enough, but every time I hear about it, I'm like, that sounds kind of fun. What we should do is have like a period leading up to the bingo card creation where we're just like, what do you guys think should be on the bingo cards?
00:42:24
Speaker
and then take some of those ideas and put them together. That'd be cool. We're not starting now though. Don't send any ideas. They'll be disqualified. But shadow of a weird tree, pretty cool. I've been playing Nightingale. And that's one of the things that led to me being like, Dave, we should call this episode. Ignore the main quest. Because in Elden Ring, you can.
Critique of Nightingale
00:42:54
Speaker
The only real designator for what the main quest even is is you're like, is that gold thing vaguely pointing in that direction? Is that the way I'm supposed to go? And that's kind of it, or just go to the big thing on your map, right? But otherwise, you are encouraged to ignore the main quest, and you absolutely can. So do whatever you want. You can't do that in Nightingale. And that's very sad, because it's a survival crafting game.
00:43:24
Speaker
And it's a survival grafts crafting game. That's like in order to get the next layer of tech or unlock things or whatever, you have to do the main quest a lot of the time. It's just depressing. Yeah. You told me about this and I got sad for you because I'm a very empathetic person. Yeah. But yeah, I really don't like that type of design.
00:43:52
Speaker
For how many times I've betched about having to sit through credits or a cutscene in Monster Hunter World? It is bad there. It is so bad. Especially if the game crashes after the credits, I think, in your case, and you had to redo the whole thing. Oh, I had to redo the credits. It was like another 10 minutes.
00:44:14
Speaker
Yeah, I really don't like when the game designer essentially forces something onto the player, whether that's hey, you have to sit through this, right? Right. Hey, you have to do this in this order. Okay, it sounds like less of a game and more like chores, chores you're giving me. Because it's really fun to just
00:44:35
Speaker
I'm going to go using Eldring as an example. I'm going to go fuck off and explore random things. Holy shit. What's that? Holy shit. What's that? You should put some markers on your map to follow up. Um, Oh, I'm way too low level for this. Oh, I found a cool magic item. Like it feels good to discover and come upon some cool stuff versus what is a very scripted experience of here's the thing you do now. Next thing you do. Cool.
00:45:05
Speaker
Yeah. And our, our play group, the thing that it kind of gets equated to sometimes is it feels kind of like MMO gating. Like you're not high enough level for this. The gear is not high enough level for this using Eldering. For an example, if you do find yourself in like the wrong part of town, the wrong area of the map, like you might find a really cool item in the ground and you're just like.
00:45:26
Speaker
I think I just executed a speed run strat. The answer is you didn't, but like maybe it's speed run adjacent or it's an idea that could be used, but like just because you found some really cool item on the ground in an overleveled area, doesn't mean necessarily that you broke the game, but it feels like you did. And that feels awesome, right? You're like, I am where I'm not supposed to be. I'm getting stuff I haven't even earned yet. I'm just going to grab this. I'm going to die and I'm going to respawn over there, right? And you can absolutely do that.
00:45:56
Speaker
Nightingale, it's not so much like that. Like almost everything is constrained behind these cards and gear, the Rome cards, which are a cool idea for develop, like basically opening instances with specific traits. And then the gear, which is pretty much just gear score from any MMO. But the issue is like, if you go to a high level area and you're like, oh, cool, there's.
00:46:20
Speaker
uh, minerals I've never seen before. You can't mine them. Like your pickaxe isn't good enough. Right. So like, there's no cheating it to, to get the content that you want. Really. It's very much in the vein of you should be doing the main story. And I got to a point where like the main story was like, specifically open this type of realm.
00:46:47
Speaker
to fight this creature, to get this thing, and then you turn it in for a quest. And the game, I didn't have the card for that type of realm. So I've just been fluffing about, trying to, I'm making cool stuff, building some things, gathering resources and stuff. And eventually I was just like, I don't think this card's gonna drop. I straight up don't think I can progress the main story. And I looked it up and it's just something that the game just doesn't explain. And it's just like, it's very frustrating. It's very frustrating.
00:47:18
Speaker
As you were talking, I was like, oh, I'm going to compare this to Valheim. Doesn't Valheim do the same thing? No, it actually doesn't because you don't need the bosses to progress technology. So you were talking about chopping down trees, right? Well, you can chop down trees through your axe.
00:47:37
Speaker
It would be less efficient. Oh, I can't hit these stronger trees. Okay, you need a different resource. You can go out and get that, right? Nothing's really stopping you from doing that. Now maybe certain high level stuff might be gated behind an area or a boss that's very dangerous.
00:47:57
Speaker
But at no point was I being forced to go and do something. And in a lot of those games, you want to make a cool base. Explore around. Oh, this would be cool. Thought of our base. Oh, what do I have access to? Okay, let's do a fucking tree house, right? It allows your creative juices to kind of stew. And then you can act on them versus someone being like, you have to make this before you do anything else.
00:48:24
Speaker
Yeah. I like, I would, I would counter the Valheim actually. I think it does explicitly block you in a couple of spots where it's like, Oh, we beat the boss. Now you can get iron tier something or whatever, but they also give you reasons to do all the lower level stuff and just exploring gets you progress in ways that this game doesn't. Um, and it also was just like, you're not.
00:48:47
Speaker
the low level stuff's not outpaced dramatically. But in this game, it's very much like, this is a tier two resource. You have tier one resource, just throw the tier one resource away. Like you do not need that anymore. It's not situational. Now they have a bunch, I don't want to completely misrepresent it. They have like all these different types of ore for whatever tier. So this ore might be better for ranged weapons or melee weapons or clothes or whatever the crap. And I like that. That's a cool system, but.
00:49:15
Speaker
Is there any reason to go back to a realm, a low level realm once you have gotten the cards there? No, not really. No, it's, it's pretty much a waste of time. So the game has a long way to go, but so much of it is just like if they completely let you have natural progression and continue to just like grow your character as you're just making better gear and exploring new places without the main story.
00:49:44
Speaker
requirement tied to that at all, it would just straight up be better. Right. Cause then you could just like do what you want to do, explore, have a good time and go ahead. But it's early access. Maybe they fix it. I think right now it's deserved. It's mixed on steam.
00:50:05
Speaker
Um, but I don't know. I, I'm not going to afford them both like positivity or negativity. Maybe they make it. Maybe they don't. There's cool stuff in the game. Um, I'd like to see it succeed, but it's not guaranteed too. And who, who makes this as a big studio?
00:50:27
Speaker
Uh, I can't even remember the name of it. That's kind of unfortunate, but it's ex Bioware devs mostly. Like refugees from Bioware, which is also, I was joking in this card. That's probably the reason there's so much text in the game. Like by a Bioware dev is not satisfied unless they've like written a novel every day for whatever game they're working on. So that's true.
00:50:55
Speaker
There's tons of different types of games and definitely a whole host of people who enjoy different types of things. But certain things I feel are kind of...
00:51:08
Speaker
I want to say objectively bad, even though I know it's so subjective to me, but I don't think if you were to change, make some of these changes that we're discussing as far as not limiting player options in progression, that people who are not, you know,
00:51:25
Speaker
gaming sticklers like us, they're not going to be worse for it. They're not going to be like, Oh, I hate that I have options. Yeah. Right. You could still do the main quest. Yeah. A hundred percent. It's like, that's the thing is you have to, if you're making a game, it's really important that for whatever gameplay loops you have, for whatever mechanics you have, like you're not putting people in a situation where they want to be interacting with some part of your game, but you're not letting them. Right.
00:51:54
Speaker
It's just like, Oh, I want to go do this. Well, you can't do that because we said that you had to do this quest first. Right. Like that's just. Anti-fun, but would be kind of like a way to put it. Um, and the true survival crafting games, I think are like the best at this, like seven days to die is the one I go back to where it's like.
00:52:16
Speaker
At least for one of the times we played, we could specialize. Could be like, oh, this person's going out and they're doing missions, they're adventuring, they're gathering loot, they're bringing it back. This person's farming, this person's building traps.
00:52:27
Speaker
person's gathering resources like all that stuff right like they're all the traffic guy yeah if you want wooden spikes in a game I'm your man yeah and if you don't want them they're still gonna be there it is in the game good luck getting back to your house it's movie uh-huh it's just like why is my leg bro okay all right
00:52:46
Speaker
Sure. Remember the one time that we were playing this is early days of rust and we had like a kind of skirmish was we had an exchange with somebody who is further away. We didn't really know what their intentions were. It was at night. It was dark. And one of our players started firing upon this person. He was like, I got shot. I got shot. They didn't get shot. They accidentally hit some of the spikes that I had placed and somehow it couldn't wall. So they took damage randomly.
00:53:17
Speaker
Um, they're like, all right, open up. They're coming right for us. It shows the damage indicators. Like you were hit from behind. Uh, yeah. Yeah. No, it's a friendly fire. Isn't that's the, uh, the mantra from, I think a call of duty kill stream or something like that. That isn't fire. What else would it be? It's, uh, it's funny. Yeah. It's English is not being specific enough. Um,
00:53:47
Speaker
But yeah, I like those games where you can kind of contribute. And this game is also nothing against the group I'm playing with. Love them all. But like this type of game is kind of the type of game that you can just play on your own. And that's not a benefit from playing with the people outside of not just kind of there also, not unless you want them to do things for you. And if you want to do things yourself, which is oftentimes the case, if you want to like play a video game,
00:54:15
Speaker
this game doesn't really encourage it, right? Where seven days to die, there are so many things to do. It didn't feel bad if someone had placed a bunch of traps or crafted a bunch of food or something
Creative Freedom in Gaming
00:54:26
Speaker
like that. It's just like, no, we're all contributing to the commune. And this one, it's like, if someone's crafting all the gear for me, what am I doing, right? Like, yeah, it just feels like you're being uplifted rather than earning your place. So we'll see, but,
00:54:44
Speaker
Yeah, that and Palworld were the two games so far. And I think I had more fun with Palworld. Maybe Shadows of the Year Tree can dethrone it for Game of the Years. I don't know. It's gonna be close. I'm sure there's some other stuff coming out as well. But I wanted to give my impression. I needed to spend some time on the podcast talking about it because I spent a lot of time playing it.
00:55:14
Speaker
And I got to get something out of this. The houses are cool. You can make really cool looking houses. So that's nice. Anyways, in my head I'm going, neat. But at the same time, I do actually like creating structures and making a little space. But I just haven't experienced it directly to see if it's the vibe for me.
00:55:42
Speaker
I would say wait, this is my bypass wait thing. I would wait on this game until it's in a slightly better state and they fix some of the issues as far as like pacing and content gating and maybe rationale to play multiplayer. I think it has the potential to be a decent single player game, but it also kind of plays like an MMO and you don't want to play a single player game that plays like an MMO. So there's some stuff that they would need to solve before I really recommend it.
00:56:12
Speaker
I will say though, you can pick up things and then just move them. And that's really nice when a lot of games are like, oh, sorry, you placed that, destroy it, right? Just destroy it. And this one, it's just like, oh, this bench is in a really stupid spot. And you can just go more and drop it there, rotate it a little bit. Place it. That's nice. All games should do that, but not reason enough to play. I agree with your statement that games should give you that option.
00:56:41
Speaker
I don't think it feels bad to miss collecting like You should like breaking your own shit because it's off by five pixels. Yeah I Also really like I really like the cards because I have this like realm like transmuter outside of my desert house I just like a occasionally feed it a cool card like this card makes it so all the tools I make are better this card makes it so it's low gravity and stamina recharge is faster something like that and
00:57:09
Speaker
And then I'm in a desert and I, for some reason decided this was the place where I wanted to grow crops. And I'm like, this card makes it so it's an eternal storm and it's always raining. And, uh, I felt pretty smart for that. So that's cool. But again, not, not a recommend. Not yet. I like some of the concepts in that. Yeah.
00:57:39
Speaker
It has cool ideas. They just need to fix the bad idea. Do you know what I really love for survival crafting the most? Do you remember back in the days of Minecraft, there were some different mods that were coming out. One of which was the pocket dimension.
00:57:59
Speaker
Yeah, I love this ever living fuck out of that. That was so cool. I was like, hey, where's your house? I'm like in this little portal and you'd go there and she owned a little space. But that one might even go into to other random doors. You'd find out in the world. You're like, where is this going? Uh huh. Yeah, we were talking about a related one in the lead up to Nightingale. But one of the times we played together, we played with missed craft.
00:58:27
Speaker
which was like you were basically taking words and putting them together to make like a page and a book and that page would be the portal. And we had, we recounted the story of like, we all got together and we're like, we just want like freaking diamonds. And this was a heavily modded out version of Minecraft where we had like,
00:58:48
Speaker
I'm gonna call it like a world extractor cube that basically was just scanning the earth, gathering everything in this massive, it was just eating a chunk out of the world. And it was just feeding into this tesseract, which was providing it power from another dimension where we had like a reactor or something. And then the resources would get portaled into it and then be sorted out into all of these chests back at the main base. So we were just interdimensional,
00:59:17
Speaker
scavengers, essentially. And we created a realm that was
Episode Wrap-Up
00:59:21
Speaker
like the main aspects were just like, it's super flat. There are no enemies. It's covered in diamonds. And the price we paid for that was it was a high like volatility world. It had a bunch of corruption that spread from block to block to block is like this pink sort of like inaccessible blocked texture thing.
00:59:44
Speaker
We're just like, all right, go, go, go. We all just jump in the portal. We set it up. We get our huge mining extractor. We're watching the corruption approach to the extractor as it's just carving huge chunks out of the earth. It was so fun. And I remember it very fondly in a long time with Minecraft.
01:00:07
Speaker
Give your players options for things. Yeah, exactly. Choose your own adventure. If you have a linear game, I can understand if he pours people to do the main quest. It's fine to have a game like that. It's just when you have something that is
01:00:28
Speaker
open and gives you options for how to approach things, you should not narrow them into an alleyway and force them to do things. Because even if it is a fine thing to do, the fact that somebody's telling me I have to do it and it's gating other stuff upsets me greatly. And then I'm a spiteful individual, so I'm now going to hold it against you until I die.
01:00:56
Speaker
And I did. I died in Nightingale trying to climb on top of this like calcium thing on the outside. I ran out of salmon and I fell and broke my legs and died. I had to run back and grab myself. That's why, thank God, I've never made you across here. I've never broken my legs because I don't want to die in real life. Yes. That's how they get you. That is how they get you.
01:01:18
Speaker
But if you've broken your legs in real life, I have no segue off of that actually. No, tell us how. No, I'm just kidding. Um, yeah, your miraculous recoveries, any incidences of miracles, supernatural phenomenon. We record all of that. Uh, send it in soapstone podcast at gmail.com, or you can join our supernatural investigation squad on Facebook, facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one.
01:01:48
Speaker
Hello everybody, and welcome to Soapstone Podcast. My name is Dave, joined as always by my co-host, Jake. How's it going tonight, Jake? I'm not going to say it.