Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
2024 in Review
17 Plays4 months ago
Dave and Jake look back wistfully at what happened to gaming in 2024 for the year's final episode!
Intro:
- Final Fantasy 3 - Cloud of Darkness Battle Theme (The Last Battle 3)
Outro:
- Stellar Blade - Hypertube Slide
Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Holiday Fatigue and Social Events
00:00:42
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Serpstone. My name is Jake. I am joined by my co-host is always Dave. How's it going today, Dave? Pretty good. A little tired, but pretty good overall. How about you? I'm in a similar boat, although I've gotten more sleep recently. And I will say getting enough sleep is so nice. It's so nice.
00:01:05
Speaker
Um, but you are you tired because of a over exertion on your part towards social activity, uh, this week. That's my assumption based off a little bit everything I know. Yeah. It's just the past three days been going to people's houses and socializing around the Christmas time yesterday drove out of town and back in the same day. Mm-hmm.
00:01:32
Speaker
And then I had to go get the dog, but not before staying at home for three hours, for just me time, before being like, right, I have a kid I need to pick up. Just leave them at soccer practice. Fun goes down.
00:01:50
Speaker
Yeah No, I I feel that although I have not felt that exactly I've had a a more social week than I usually would um And it's not over for me. I've got one more event ah later this evening. We're gonna go watch Nosferatu but um Still it's more social than I usually am so at least for that part I can I can empathize It's not not the best, huh Yeah, it's not it's not bad, but it's not bad. There are times it's it's obviously more draining than not. Yes. Like it's one thing if you're like, oh, I'm going to the store for errands. Bing, bang, boom, go home or I'm going to do something with somebody.
00:02:32
Speaker
And you're already looking at like an hour and a half to two hours. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And we also, for the event earlier this week, we hosted it here. And so the day before we're like, okay, here's all of our cleanup. Here's all this stuff. Here's everything we're taking care of. And that's good to get done. Cause there was a bunch that we needed to clean in general, um but it's been a week. um
Gaming Industry Challenges and CEO Accountability
00:02:54
Speaker
So I'm also ready to take a little bit of a break. um New year, and probably.
00:03:03
Speaker
that's That's weirdly when I have my next social obligation. Yeah, okay. That's fair. That's But, I mean, not just us, not just we, not just us that's been busy. It's also been the games industry. Segue straight off the cliff.
00:03:23
Speaker
real um It's been a pretty, pretty spicy year. Couple big, big releases, I would say. A lot of changes in the industry as far as like, do we want employees?
00:03:43
Speaker
um how ah if you were If you were to rate this just based off of impressions without thinking about it too hard, better or worse than last year as far as the games industry is concerned. What do you what are you thinking? What's your impression? I would say worse just because I do not remember as many layoff happenings. Yeah. We're just hearing about that in the news. Nope. They were definitely starting up, but they went full speed this year.
00:04:16
Speaker
Yeah. And it it sucks because anybody losing their job, it's, it's your income you depend on. yeah Um, and I feel like companies should be looking out for their employees and maybe some of the CEOs and stuff could, uh, take a hit from that financial. There's a classic like, um, yeah do you remember? I forget one of the directors of Nintendo.
00:04:45
Speaker
They had like a ah bad year and instead of like people not getting their bonuses or having to reduce payer lay people off ah He just took it from his salary. Yeah, he just he just ate the whole thing and he's like, it's my responsibility Technically at some point along the way I fucked up or I'm responsible for whoever fucked up. Exactly Yeah, there's kind of without dedicating the entire episode to anti-capitalist diatribe There is definitely like a difference in responsibility because in the US
00:05:19
Speaker
You might have like a CEO, say maybe like the richest person in the world or second richest person in the world. And they want to be responsible for every good thing that happens at their company when it comes to ah bonus time, right? When it comes to, you know, getting paid by the board. um They're like, this would not have been possible without me at the helm.
00:05:44
Speaker
But on the flip side, when it comes time to downsize, when they're trying to push people out of the company, it's now not their mistake that those people were hired in the first place. It's just like, okay, well now it's just good fiscal management that these people go away or whatever. Right. And you can't have it both ways. Right. Like if your company was too big, then that was your, that was your fault. If you're the CEO, if your company was too small or whatever, it's not growing.
00:06:13
Speaker
That's your fault as a CEO, and in the US, we tend to only focus on CEOs doing well.
Job Security and Team Stability in Game Development
00:06:19
Speaker
There are exceptions, I think, until CEO stepped down because they've been really struggling, but like it has to get really, really bad. like You can't pan you can't but even blame anyone else at this point before it really hits the CEOs here, it feels like.
00:06:36
Speaker
sound yeah and so I mean, they pretty much treat a lot of workers as seasonal as far as video game projects where it's like, hey, we had you on for this. All right, see you. I don't know their reasoning behind that, per se. Maybe you can um share a theory if you have one. But I feel like.
00:07:02
Speaker
If like a game came out and it went well, it's because of the team who put the time and effort into it. Mm hmm. They double checked things. They um put passion into writing the dialogue, whatever it is. That thing is a culmination of that team's work. Right. And you're like, let me try this again. But with different people, instead of being like, oh, let's see if they can, you know, strike lightning again.
00:07:31
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, but you're basically, I can see how a purely pragmatic person with a business suit and a briefcase and a like white room decision making scenario could be.
00:07:45
Speaker
We would just release the game. We don't need all of the employees for the phase of development we're at for the next game. We're going to downsize. um And that happens sometimes. It's only in like the best years that you're really keeping everyone on all of the time.
00:08:03
Speaker
But contrast this to what like you're describing, which is basically like the super giant setup where it's like these people know each other. They are friends. They trust each other. They work together. They can develop those inner team synergies to steal words from corporate America. But like they can infuse that passion because they know that they're safe. I don't know not to throw shade against contractors because you know some people some contractors do show a lot of appreciation and ownership for their work. Usually that's for like things that they control though. right like If you're a contractor of one for a company,
00:08:42
Speaker
Yeah, you want your work to be received received well. But if you're just like filling in the gaps at the bottom of the hierarchy, basically doing what needs to be done to get by, are you going to be suggesting award-winning dialogue and you know reinventing like people's perception when it comes to graphics or gameplay mechanics and things like that? Probably not. right You're not invested in it.
00:09:08
Speaker
realistically, no, like if you follow the human psyche at all, you could be like, Oh, obviously they're not motivated. They're not inspired. And it's just a, it becomes a ah tedious nine to five. Yeah, I feel like some people through TV and movies are just being so far removed from that direct group of people working have the idea of like,
00:09:32
Speaker
Who's the princess with the glass slipper? Cinderella. Cinderella, where she's like poor and sweeping and then she looks out her window up at the sky hoping for better days if if only I had this one opportunity, you know, and that becomes this great success story and yada yada. But like, that's not how people work. People work jobs because they need the money to pay for stuff. That's it.
00:09:54
Speaker
um Yeah, I think the other factor is also just like game development is huge now. um We're gonna talk about in the ah the losers for this year category, the one that everyone would expect. It had a budget of 200 to $400 million, dollars um which is a ton of money. like it's not I think Grand Theft Auto is still like the most expensive game to make because they spend a decade working on it.
00:10:25
Speaker
and they license every song. The most expensive songs they can find. but like but like um And Call of Duty is also super expensive. But that's kind of just been the train the the how but the trend for AAA games is they're like, we got to make them bigger. We got to make more action packed explosions and full mocap and ah full original orchestra and all this stuff. and it like I get it. Right. There's there, there is a point where the more people you have on a project, the better the product can be at the end up to a point.
Creative Risks and Originality in Games
00:11:06
Speaker
Can be, it can be. I want to say the key thing is can be. Yes. Very important. There's an adult video from many years ago called too many cooks talks about how if you have too many cooks in the kitchen, um, you can kind of get in the way of each other and it's harder for everybody to have a shared
00:11:25
Speaker
vision for a project ah right as scope grows. right But yeah, we don't need to hire insane people or license new music or have the score be the best or have this the highest graphical fidelity possible to justify these new consoles.
00:11:46
Speaker
um The key thing is for games to be fun. Yes. Yeah. I'm going to, I might jump ahead a little bit here, but to use an example of one of the games that really popped off and their success is Bellatro. Yeah. Where they found something that they thought was interesting and fun gameplay mechanic, and then everybody else agreed with them. Yeah.
00:12:08
Speaker
And I don't know how big their team was or how big their budget was, but it's less than the 400 million. You can tell you that. Yes, I'm guaranteed. Yeah, there's kind of a I'm just going to keep stealing terms from corporate America for this episode, I guess, but killed in committee um is one of them. It's basically the idea that if you get an idea in front of.
00:12:31
Speaker
a large enough group of people people will never approve of that idea right the idea is like the group as a whole will probably kind of make it more homogenous, more, itll they'll round out off all the sharp edges. um And sometimes in games, sharp edges are interesting, right? um when If you took Bellatro, for example, someone might be like, I mean, poker's cool and there are people who like poker, but it's not the most
00:13:08
Speaker
um approachable approachable medium for a roguelike. So we don't, I'm actually against you making a roguelike poker game. um And that could just kill the base concept of Bellatro, right? Like you could make a, again, person in a suit with a briefcase and a white room argument against the concepts in Bellatro saying that it's not palatable enough, right? um But like,
00:13:35
Speaker
because there was no person in an issue with a briefcase in a white room we got Bellatro and it's awesome so like sometimes risks and I think in video games in particular risks are almost maybe not always worth it but like you need to take them in certain times um yeah um going to an example of almost killed by committee Um, I forget the person's name. I do apologize. Um, but the original creator of Yakuza, um, they had, they were working for a game studio, but they basically said like, Hey, I have an idea for this game. Like I want this to be a project that we work on. And also like, if it fails, like you can fire me. I'm willing to bet my job on this. Yeah. And then it did really well and it's popped off and now we have lots of those games. Yeah.
00:14:29
Speaker
But again, that was a risk. um Sometimes things don't work out like Donkey Konga and the Bongos or anything from Nintendo doing music. I think it's all very weird. um Nintendo Labo.
00:14:45
Speaker
Do you remember when they just had cardboard for stuff? um ah Yes, I do. I do remember. That was it's an interesting idea. but Yeah. You got to try things though, because you don't know. You can't guarantee how it's going to be received by the public. You have to let them decide for that. But yeah, a lot of times if you just have.
00:15:03
Speaker
passion for what you're doing. A lot of that stuff will fall into place over time. Right. And the best idea is very rarely one that someone has already done well. Right. Like if you i how if I was like, man, I really want to make a military World War Two shooter.
00:15:24
Speaker
because see people seem to like shooters and stuff like that. My competition is insane. If Bellatro was like, hey, do we do you guys think we can make the world's best indie poker roguelike game?
00:15:40
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, you can. Because no one else could name a game that was a poker roguelick. So like yeah exploring into spaces other people aren't. Again, steal going back to the corporate terminology. Greenfielding. Ideas in places or Blue Ocean, where people are not already in that space. um novelty novelty gets you points, right? It really does. Because the reason I don't usually score the second game in a series as highly as the first unless they actually went a different direction. Yeah, it's a lot of games that have success will see imitators come up. I still remember
00:16:25
Speaker
open world survival crafting block based, not called Minecraft technically. um And they just took those same ideas and pretty much everything and just kind of moved it over into a slightly different game. But if you're looking at the two products and you don't know as a consumer, why would you necessarily choose that one? If you already have like, this is the one I'm seeing in stores, this one seems very popular, loved by all the kids.
00:16:54
Speaker
I don't think you can make a better version of that, or if you're trying to truly iterate on it, yeah but a lot of these World War II shooters or things that come out.
00:17:06
Speaker
um I think they're looking to just have maybe new tech, new maps. and You can take a different approach. You can be more realistic, you know a little bit less arcadey than Call of Duty is. you know That's what ARMA does. um like There's different angles you can take, but like don't follow the exact same trajectory as the one that shot the moon.
00:17:27
Speaker
Right. Well, you need to want to play Minecraft. You could be playing Minecraft right now. Right. No one needs Minecraft minus out there. Exactly. It's just like with vampire survivors. I mean, that's actually a little bit different because I'm like, oh, what do these powers do? um But I don't think there's ever going to be a survivor like that. I'm going to appreciate more than vampire survivors. Yeah. Because it keeps adding on things that I'm like, oh, holy shit.
Trends and Adaptations in Gaming
00:17:56
Speaker
But again, very minimalist style. So the more they add, the more impressed I am. Yeah, there was another, um we can start talking about the year in review at some point here, but there was another, ah I can't recall the name of it, but it looked kind of like Diablo II. It was in the vampire-like space. It's like something of torment, Halls of Torment. Halls of Torment, yeah. um And I enjoyed it. And i I'll probably play it some more someday.
00:18:26
Speaker
But it's also not, it's pretty close to the trajectory of vampire survivors. The thing that actually moved it a little bit off and into novel space was like, I'm getting Diablo II vibes off of this. um And vampire survivors does not have any overlap with Diablo II for me. So that's kind of cool, even if it's just aesthetics. But yeah, when it comes down to it, ah these companies overhired, they had a bunch of people, they struggled to justify all of their jobs and Then, obviously, whenever businesses start losing money, you start chopping the people at the bottom off instead of the top. and That's how anti-capitalist diatribe.
00:19:09
Speaker
i i think it's stupid I'm not going to go on the whole rant, even though I always have one queued up. my Again, the the boots on the ground type people, people who are directly working on stuff, um, should always be involved in decision-making. Let's say you have a team of 10 people and they have a manager your and then above them, there's more levels of managers above them. One more level of managers, right? Right. And now let's also add in the game of telephone where things kind of slowly get lost in translation over time. But.
00:19:44
Speaker
Oftentimes even the manager directly above the people working on stuff do not have a good grasp on what it should be or exactly what they're doing or why. And they just seem very removed from the whole process of it. And they don't realize how much they need those people to be doing those things that they're not even considering. Right. Because again, if you're just looking at it from a a top level thing, you're basically comparing Two numbers in your mind. Right. And you're not factoring in anything else because again, your focus is not the game itself as much as it is. This is a product that we are selling. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's why smaller groups help.
00:20:33
Speaker
But um there's a lot else that happened this year, opening on some nice news. that happened all the way back in January, but I don't think we covered it then. ah We finally beat Tetris. It took a very long time.
00:20:47
Speaker
But specifically, the NES version of Tetris was beat by a 13-year-old boy, as we always knew it would. um And beating Tetris, the infinite game means getting all the way to a kill screen or ah a screen where the game cannot continue anymore. I think it actually is past graphical corruption at that point. um Like the colors change for the blocks and everything because it's starting to read from the wrong places in memory. Oh, wow.
00:21:15
Speaker
but Yeah, no, that is kind of insane that one of the earliest games is now Actually beaten. Yes. This was surprising to me. I was like, how is how is this not happened? Right? Because Tetris is Still the most sold game of all time, maybe. So I think people have been trying for a while. Obviously, people who love Tetris. But I remember hearing about there's a technique that they use because as things get faster and faster, you can only do so many inputs on the directional pad to arrange your block or move it down faster or slower.
00:21:55
Speaker
um And as that will cap at a certain point, you can't really beat that speed unless you turn the controller upside down, you wear a special glove and then you essentially tap really quick with all five fingers while holding the input on the other side, which allows you to, yeah, technically still hit the input for it to register, but you can do it a lot faster. That's crazy. Yeah. It is kind of nuts that like, they're like, how can we do this? And they're like, Oh, we found a ah really weird way.
00:22:27
Speaker
I also looked it up and I'm i'm very, very wrong about it being the most healthy. Minecraft is by a ah country mile, 300,000. No, 3 million sales for Minecraft compared to a paltry, barely even significant, 205 million for GTA 5. So it's not even close.
00:22:50
Speaker
well But but that was that was cool. We also had TV shows come out about video games this year. We had both Fallout and the continuation of Arkane, so it doesn't get full credit. But how are you feeling about the trend towards you can't escape video games even if you want to boot up Netflix?
00:23:11
Speaker
I mean, I'm, I'm good with video games becoming more mainstream in media as far as promoting it and seeing other things through a cool light because arcane season one. Very good. Very good. Arcane season two.
Game Failures and Community Relations
00:23:30
Speaker
I'm not a fan, but I mean, you can definitely have some misses like I mean, this is technically not a game, but Avatar, where it going from a cartoon to live action movie was not translated well. um Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. They weren't good, really. Neither was the Super Mario Brothers movie originally. um But now we have some CGI stuff and I haven't seen it, but I heard it did decently well and
00:24:07
Speaker
For families or just kids, like if that's your first exposure to it, you're like, oh, I like these cool characters. All I can play them in this game, maybe that's something that draws you in. right I like them from that aspect. See, what I'm looking forward to is we we might finally get a Silent Hill movie. Maybe that'll happen. Or you know what? A long time ago, they made the ah the Matrix video game. Maybe we'll get a Matrix movie.
00:24:32
Speaker
no Yeah, that would be cool.
00:24:37
Speaker
um Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure exactly where this is all going. Um, I mean, I'm still using the fallout is kind of the litmus test for me. Cause that is a universe that I am a lot more familiar in and i' I've spent a lot of it time in. And so I'm like, all right, fallout season two really just sucks. Then all, all bad idea. No, no more, no more game show. Um, but yeah, I think we're going to continue to see these properties be intertwined.
00:25:08
Speaker
Yeah. I'm obviously going to love it for the things that I enjoy more and care a lot less for the things that I don't. In that vein, um did you end up watching the. Oh, I love bringing up a thing and not remembering exactly what it's called. ah The same people who did love death and robots. um They had a mini series on video games.
00:25:33
Speaker
Oh, is this the, um, the next level thing or whatever it was called? something ah Yeah. That sounds right. Um, I haven't, I saw it. I saw it when we were watching stuff earlier and I was like, oh okay, this is available. I could watch this at any point. So I might take a look yet, but I haven't watched it. Okay. I won't spoil anything. Um, but I will say I really did like some of them and I was kind of maybe appreciated the IP more.
00:25:59
Speaker
or was curious about the new IP. And some other ones were dog shit, like really bad. And it just, again, seemed like it was promoting a game that already came out. It felt more like an advertisement than a, hey, let's explore this space. Yeah. It has to be able to stand on its own. It can't just be like, like you said, a continuation in advertisement ad campaign.
00:26:25
Speaker
Like, oh yeah, we're going to have a GTA six show in order to get people hyped for GTA six, which is going to come out at the end of the first season or something like that. Like that's fine. If your product can stand on its own, if it is interesting, but if not, then.
00:26:41
Speaker
Don't.
00:26:44
Speaker
ah Another thing happened last year. um You may have heard of this. There's a form of DRM called Denuvo. Denuvo, yes, that's why I pronounce it. um And for some reason, I don't know how this was the case.
00:27:01
Speaker
But they didn't realize people disliked them. um This is one of the ones that's like very obtrusive and there are tons and tons and tons of reports of it slowing games down like legit that legitimately owned games.
00:27:15
Speaker
um But they're like, we got to clean up our image. So they made a Discord server. Bad idea, first mistake. And then a lot of people to publicly post. Second idea, really bad mistake. And it got flooded with very bad stuff. And in a lot of cases, just a lot of toxic comments against them. um So they locked it down almost immediately and then only opened it back up in slow mode. But The company came out and said, um, they suspect that the toxic comments and things like that. Those are all from pirates. Those are from people who are advocates of piracy. Right. Um, well, that's very out of touch. Yes. Again, this is why you want to have people who are with the boots on the ground crew. Um, part of the decision-making at some point along the way, because how could they not know, but obviously they didn't, right?
00:28:15
Speaker
So, but out of that whole company, nobody said like, Hey, I think everybody fucking hates us brought it up in a meeting. Um, so yeah, I feel like something was swept under the rug or ignored in that regard, but Jesus Christ. It was, it was, it was kind of funny cause like, so kingdom come deliverance. We're not going to be talking about the game. That one hasn't come out. It's just been announced, but they said it was going to have.
00:28:44
Speaker
Uh, this DRM de novo. And
Live Service Games and Market Viability
00:28:47
Speaker
then the community was like, don't, don't do that. And so they, they walked it back and they're like, okay, it won't. Excellent. Good. More, more companies should do that. If people wanted to pirate their game, they'll wait three days for it to be cracked. And if they don't want to pirate the game, then.
00:29:10
Speaker
They'll buy it whenever they want to buy it. So, um, whatever. Yeah. It's, it's also that thing where you want to be on good terms with your community if you want to establish that relationship. Um, but then actually listen to feedback.
00:29:30
Speaker
Because obviously like if you're being attacked, the default is to go defensive because I don't want to be attacked. Please stop doing that. Yes. um But and they want to believe that they're doing a good thing for the industry. Stop beating me. But yeah, I mean, obviously, if they are that fervent with an opinion, um they probably have a good reason for it and they feel strongly about it.
00:29:56
Speaker
Okay, let's hear them out. Maybe they have a good take on something. Or maybe it can be like, that's dumb and here's why, right? Right. But in any case, having that dialogue will improve your relationship. Yeah.
00:30:11
Speaker
You can't hit people with the no true Scotsman fallacy and be like, Hey, no person who's actually criticizing us would also be people who buy the video games with our DRM. It would definitely only be the pirates, but yeah, whatever. We'll see what happens next year. It's going to be a part of a continuing awareness building campaign between CEOs and the people who use their services.
00:30:38
Speaker
ah
00:30:42
Speaker
But we also had a lot of big name misses this year. um So we were talking about everything that was going on with layoffs, all that jazz, maybe a cause, maybe caused by um for each of the games on this list. The first one, the Suicide Squad killed a Justice League.
00:31:00
Speaker
was a massive live service failure. They really thought they were going to be providing that game services with battle passes and stuff like that month over month over month. And it got almost immediately canceled. Yeah. I don't know what it is. I'm not somebody who browses the internet a whole lot i going on Reddit to see people's like views and opinions. I think a lot of it's just YouTube thumbnails.
00:31:26
Speaker
but When I browse that real quick, I already get the vibe that nobody cares that this game was coming out, let alone we want to spend money on it. Kind of similar to Morbius in that regard.
00:31:39
Speaker
So I don't know yeah why they felt that way. Yeah, I think like and they're trying to force success. I think they're doing it in sort of the wrong order, but I sort of, I also kind of understand. In my opinion, a live service game needs to be shown as viable before you really commit to a bunch of the live service follow-up. Too many games are being made where it's like,
00:32:05
Speaker
Hey, we're going to make this with a multiplayer focus and ah we're going to be updating it every month and we're going to have a battle pass. We're going to have all this jam. Then they launched the game and like no one wants to play or they play for like till they beat the campaign or whatever contents there and then they just go back to whatever else they want to do. And it seems just like it seems kind of like bad business sense to it's literal to use the old expression putting the cart before the horse like you don't know that the market is going to be receptive to what you have.
00:32:39
Speaker
um And actually, I think almost everything on this list to some degree or or not is going to have some issue with that, where the failure this year was, they really misread how it was going to land. um Yeah. and
00:32:59
Speaker
Again, from the consumer perspective, when I buy something, I want the entire package. If I go and ask for a sandwich, I want the sandwich I ordered, not just the bread. And then if I love the battle pass, I can have different I can have spinach instead of lettuce. You know, it's a good deal.
00:33:18
Speaker
um So I think the knee jerk reaction is it feels like they're kind of locking content um behind stuff. Yeah, so they would do a free battle pass, but I'm not sure how common that is. I think Overwatch is free. Yeah, they have brief to say they have free plus plus premium track, I think is the the most common games as a service meta. You want to have the free version of the battle pass at least available to get people to keep people playing your game.
00:33:50
Speaker
Um, but you want to incentivize them to pay the extra 10 bucks or whatever.
Ubisoft's Challenges with Star Wars
00:33:54
Speaker
Um, so that they get everything on the premium track. Um, but yeah, I'm not sure prioritizing the structure of the model and how it's going to change season to season over things like gameplay and making it a really fun, interesting game to the market. Yeah. Okay. Maybe that money is going to get wasted when it doesn't pan out.
00:34:21
Speaker
um The next one on the list, this one technically would not have qualified, um with if not for an extenuating <unk>cum circumstance. Star Wars Outlaws had a relatively low 75 on open critic.
00:34:36
Speaker
um That's not enough to end up on like the the flops of the game year, but it was also published by Ubisoft and Ubisoft had a terrible year. ah They're still on about NFTs and I think they made like two blockchain games or something like that or NFT related games and they laid off a ton of people and they had studios close and it's just like they were pretty much on fire for the entire year. So they really wanted this Star Wars, this open world Star Wars game to um
00:35:07
Speaker
revitalize a lot of that bring people in. And from what I heard, the PC port was very, very difficult to get to run at like a good spec. um And they just Yeah, this is this is the line item for Ubisoft this year. Sorry, guys. I'm glad you took that one because I had ah such a lack of information compared to you apparently on that one. I mean, it's kind of I used to play a lot of Star Wars games, but like the quality is not always up there anymore. Like I enjoy um Jedi. Crap, I can never remember the first one. I know the new one survivor.
00:35:47
Speaker
um I was a fallen order. Yeah. I think it was Jedi Knight fallen or something like that. Um, or Jedi fallen order, but I enjoyed it. I'll probably play the follow-up survivor at some point, but like they keep releasing unoptimized. I'm like, I don't have to buy this at launch guys. It is in my best interest to just wait until the end of the year, pick it up on sale or whatever, or two years. Right. Um,
00:36:14
Speaker
So yeah, I cleaned it up. I feel like a lot of companies here making these games feel like they're like, this is our fucking knock it out of the park thing. or Maybe they're just putting all their eggs in one basket for that, but.
00:36:31
Speaker
I don't know how you, you stray so far. Yeah. Cause like Star Wars is a very beloved IP. Oh yeah. Yeah. And you had its space, right? You can do a lot of cool stuff with that. You can have a lot of interesting stories. Um, and you know, they're spending money to like get the ability to make this right. Like this is Star Wars owned by Disney. Um, and.
00:36:56
Speaker
Yeah, they're violating the principle you said earlier, which is like, make a fun game, right? Like that's, that's your baseline. Make it work. Um, I'm going to throw them a bone. It is possible since the IP is owned by Disney, there could be a degree of scrubbing those needing to round the edges of something. Like maybe they couldn't tell as dark or interesting of a storyline because they're like, Hey, we don't want to really promote that. We're going to promote.
00:37:25
Speaker
the light side of the force. We want to have Luke or who's the new. Great. Calcastis is the. ah Oh, you're signed for the movies. Hmm. Oh,
Game Performance and A.I. Development
00:37:37
Speaker
I have no idea. I saw the I saw like two of the movies. I saw ah Rogue One and the first the first one that came out. but I haven't seen the rest. um Yeah, it could be partially not wanting to change whatever image they want to have.
00:37:53
Speaker
Or like Ray for the game. Ray. Yeah. Yeah. it It takes a while. They all have one syllable name, so there's nothing I can do here. It's hard to keep but keep them all straight. But yeah, I don't know. Well, we'll see, but hopefully they don't. I mean, I I don't know if I would throw them the same bone because Ubisoft themselves will round off any edge, right? Like they own the Assassin's Creed franchise.
00:38:19
Speaker
That is nothing. It is a sphere. It is the apple of Eden. At this point, there is there is no edge left. um It's again, I think one of those examples where. Assassin's Creed 2. Very interesting, very hype for the time that it came out, right? Yeah. And then they're like. We can do this infinitely, just print money. Yeah.
00:38:45
Speaker
um It is Call of Duty. You just changed Ezio's hat? Oh, Ezio's in the American Revolution. Ezio's a Native American this time, guys. That's different. We haven't done that before.
00:38:59
Speaker
um yeah so it's yeah The Assassin's Creed rant is a separate rant. We don't need to get into that now. but Um, they had it rough. Uh, this one's a brief mention. Starfield had its first DLC. Um, I don't, this is the sort of like dead dove don't open paper bag of like, I don't know what people expected. Um, but this is just more of the same. Um, and the funny thing to me, isn't that this came out, it's that they've talked about a commitment to continuing to release content for this game for like a foreseeable future. I'm like.
00:39:36
Speaker
Why? Why, though? I think I would imagine they want that to be there. People keep coming back to a game. Oh, have you played the latest expansion? Starfield checked out this new. I don't know. Again, trying to play devil's after you get through them alone. I yeah, they want to get more money out of it.
00:39:57
Speaker
i It's not a battle pass. I'll give them that. That is the bone I'll throw them is it's not literally a battle pass for a single player game, but I don't know. Like what people want are mechanical changes and things like that. They want improvements. They don't just want more content in a flawed game. Yeah. um Quality of life is a big, big thing. Yeah. And from what I've heard, the writing hasn't gotten much better. It like immediately opens with like when you arrive in the DLC area.
00:40:28
Speaker
And there's people who are like fighting over something. They have this conflict that's going on. And then like you can't actually investigate what they were fighting over. They literally just present you with this, hey like hey, we're fighting over this thing. But your job is to focus on a different thread. So you, the player, have no volition to actually dig deeper into what they were fighting about. And it's just like it's the most whatever. Anyways, Bethesda.
00:40:55
Speaker
um Dragons they come to some of them do it. Okay, kind of sometimes and other times not so much Dragons dogma to I'm it's on this list. I actually want to pick it up at some point. I think it's still mixed or maybe mostly positive Um, waiting for it to be very cheap. I just thought it was funny that the game launched had terrible performance and it was because their their stated rationale for this was the NPCs in the game were spending too many clock cycles
Concord's Launch Disaster
00:41:24
Speaker
cycles. They were eating too many CPU cycles, like processing what they should be doing. Um, which is hilarious. This led to like, um, somewhat anti-intuitive behavior of.
00:41:37
Speaker
Oh, if you go to a town for the first time, the first thing you should do is just kill a bunch of the people like in the village or whatever, because it will literally make the game run better if you wipe out the local populace. That's insane.
00:41:53
Speaker
And also, how is it that we don't know how to do A.I. in video games? Now, I'm not talking generative A.I. I'm talking to enemies moving around and NPCs baking bread or whatever. Yeah, we've we've had that forever. Yeah, this isn't in like every game scripted and be like, oh, this is the NPC that walks around town. Here's their path. When you walk by them and be like, hello. And then for the combat NPCs. Oh, I'm going to run at them.
00:42:21
Speaker
unless I see an obstacle that I'll try and path differently, but I want to now attack and kill the person yeah and use whatever my attack is. You'd think it'd be solved, but apparently not. Um, but although there might be other misses this year, the one I wanted to be the ultimate for my list, at least is of course, Concord.
00:42:45
Speaker
which was that a 200 to $400 million dollars investment game took eight years in development. Um, it had a blistering launch of a a maximum of 697 players on steam, which like dropped precipitously the following week. And it was shut down two weeks after it launched with people getting refunds.
00:43:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's. Remember when Redfall was bad? Yeah, didn't even make the list. It wasn't. If it was this year, it should have been on the list, but yeah, I don't know since the time anymore. Might have been last year, but yeah, Concord is it's almost impossibly bad, like the failure financially and to find a market Like statistically, you would think that even the people who didn't know anything about the game but wanted to play something that looked like Guardians of the Galaxy would have bought it anyways, but they didn't even get those people. Yeah, I i don't know how it was received so poorly.
00:43:56
Speaker
um Because I mean, it seemed kind of interesting. But again, if you're trying to do exactly Overwatch, There's already overwatch. I'm going to play these fun cartoonish iconic characters versus I've seen the trailer. Everybody seemed fairly generic. I didn't know what their play style was, you know. Mm hmm. Again, if you prioritize fun and having it be kind of arcadey to a degree, um it does pretty well. Yeah. Cough, cough. I feel like Marvel recently put out a game
00:44:34
Speaker
Yeah, it seems to be doing pretty fucking well. Yeah, that was on my success list. Like I do think Overwatch has been a gatekeeper in the, um, the hero shooter space because like, say what you will. And there's a lot of things to be said. It's still a very high quality premium game that feels pretty smooth to run around and shoot people. Um,
00:44:57
Speaker
And they raised the bar high enough that it was hard for other, kind other games to get into that space. Like what, what competes against prior to rivals? What competes against Overwatch? Like Valorant? No, not really. That actually competes with like CSGO, right? Um, so deadlock. Yeah, you know, the MOBA, um, Overwatch, but no, it,
00:45:26
Speaker
There's not really been anything remotely like that. Yeah. It's, it's Titanic levels of failure. Um, so much so that I'm literally hoping that the ripples from Concord keep people from making life service games.
00:45:43
Speaker
That's my hope for the year, like going into next year. As we'll be like, what if we just make, what if we, what if we spend, you know, $300 million dollars making a game and then no one plays, which is a question that nobody, like no one would have aired that hypothetical before, but now it's possible.
Success Stories: Helldivers 2 and More
00:46:02
Speaker
That's true. They're definitely kind of setting the bar as far as like, Hey, this is how deep it can go down. Yeah. Um, they do go down.
00:46:11
Speaker
I don't think anybody's really going to outdo that as far as time and money spent. But again, comparing it to something like Bellatro, which comparatively much smaller budget you know is lower risk. It made more money. It money. Yes. But ah did you have any other losers this year? Do you want to switch over to the winners?
00:46:41
Speaker
Let's do some winners. Let's talk about some people or some games, teams that knocked it out of the park. Sure. ah First one on my list, and I have not purchased the game yet, but I might at some point, Helldivers 2 was a studio released under Sony. They had a lot of success, pretty much like off the jump this year.
00:47:05
Speaker
um Maybe it's part of like the viral marketing sort of idea around Helldivers or the fact that it's pretty much Starship Troopers and everything but name. But like this PvE game just massively exploded. It did so well for them ah this year. There were multiple times where I was like, should I just pick this up? like Other people are playing it. I don't know. Maybe I should just grab it.
00:47:31
Speaker
I mean, it looks really good and smooth. And I think again, I'm going to harp on this point a lot um is it's fun. Yes. Like they made another start an actual Starship Troopers game within like the last couple of years. And it felt like generic the game. And the again, you want to incentivize your players to play the game. Right. And a lot of that is like dopamine from Playing the game. I want to spend more time them having a great time, right? Yeah, exactly ah Next one on this. I'm gonna hand to you black myth Wukong. Why is that one of the winners this year?
00:48:17
Speaker
China, man, they, um, China, man, China, man. But again, blacksmith wukong is a soul's like, ah, we hate that term in the quote unquote industry. Um, but it is the reigning example of, this is what gamers have enjoyed. This is kind of the pinnacle. This is what you want to strive for.
00:48:46
Speaker
And Blacksmith Wukong follows a similar thing as far as it being an action RPG, but it doesn't penalize you for anything at all. um The gameplay and all the stuff you can do with the different staff stances and transformations and magical abilities, really fucking cool. um It feels really nice to play and also As you go on, the game is beautiful. Yeah. um The cinematics are really good, like stupidly good. Like it played with music and I teared up a little bit. um But yeah, it's just a shining example in multiple regards. And it was appreciated for that. Oh, yeah.
00:49:36
Speaker
Cause even with lies of P there wasn't such a ah hype around it. Like an Oh, holy shit. Yeah. It's a different tier. Wukong is the most hype non souls game souls. Like I think ever, I think that's pretty, pretty safe to say. Yeah. But it's cool to see that another studio can find success in that space. Hmm.
00:49:58
Speaker
Yeah, for sure curious to see what they do in the future and i'm waiting for that deep discount for wukong So I can jump jump on to um or Moving away from this Yeah, you say is it on game pass or I said maybe that would be some point in the future If it came to game pass, that'd be sweet um Moving away from souls lakes for a moment A lot of games kind came out and they'll have dlc But how can they compete with shadow of the archery?
00:50:28
Speaker
Can't, there you go. Yep. But no, again, it's, um, they made it so polished and it wasn't a small thing. I spent a game fucking good chunk of time exploring and trying things and trying to strategize to kill all these new bosses. But again, very polished. Oh yeah.
00:50:54
Speaker
Yeah. My, my take for shadow of the retreat is as a DLC, this is like Lord of destruction. This is like Diablo, Lord of destruction to you like, it stands alone. It could be a standalone game. It wouldn't be as long as Elden ring, but in some ways, because one of my only gripes was really the progression as far as the difficulty and stuff like that. I almost wish it was a standalone game because that would have simplified some of those questions. Um, but, um, for what it is, like.
00:51:23
Speaker
Good luck. Good luck to anyone who wants to have their DLC comparative shadow of the herd tree. it It did have like a a full price. I believe it was like 40 or 50 bucks. I can't recall 40 bucks. Yeah. 40 bucks. Yeah. Um, but I mean, even at that price point, it was extraordinarily good.
00:51:44
Speaker
And this was the one where people were, ah for for myself, I was like, yeah, I don't know if I really liked the DLCs and the game awards categories and stuff like that, but I guess Shadow of the Urge is in there. So maybe it's not so bad, right? Like maybe maybe it's okay, maybe without a couple in.
00:52:01
Speaker
um I'm gonna mention, um you can, let me know if you have any comments on these or jump in. I'll mention them as a group, you can pick any. But from the game awards, as far as other successes this year, they had metaphor, refentazio, stellar blade. I don't like JRPGs. Okay. That's better. Stellar blade. I've actually started playing a little bit. Um, I think it's a pretty game and I do like some of the, the combat stuff, but it is very focused in some other areas and it's not level here down.
00:52:38
Speaker
Or no, it's a little gooner to a degree. Okay. Like, yeah. Logical physics and animations where you're like, ah, gotcha. Gotcha. They're going for that audience. Yeah. That's fair. Um, Silent Hill two, which I observed didn't play, but it's cool that, you know, uh, remakes are, are still being successful. Um, Indiana Jones and the great circle, um,
00:53:08
Speaker
Which, I mean, if you can successfully draw an actual circle, that's always great. That's impressive in its own right. Well, I think the interesting thing here is this is a success in a VR space. Interesting. I didn't know you could play that in VR. This is the one Dunkey was playing, like people who rocks at them.
00:53:29
Speaker
Okay. That's not VR. I was like, I was ready to believe it though. I was like, if you could do, I don't know why, but that's, that's been sitting in my head, that thought, which was a presumed fact for way too long. No, that's fair. sorry abstraction That's what we're here for. We, uh, we, we, we purged those, um, animal. Well, got overwhelming positive reviews. Again, you know, first game published by a donkeys company.
00:53:54
Speaker
But I want to say how much do you think it was donkeys kind of online internet presence? I mean, the game was good. I think the game would have seen some success regardless because of, because of the nature of that. I'm not that cynical. However, having this be the first thing that big mode was pushing and advertising, like at the end of his videos is being like, by the way, no like, uh, get ready to play animal oil, right? Like.
00:54:24
Speaker
You can't deny that that's gonna have a massive, massive impact, right? um Especially since Dunkey doesn't generally shill for things. So when he shills for his own things, it's like, okay, well, it carries more weight.
00:54:37
Speaker
It's not like, Hey, this episode brought to you by factor or whatever the crap. Right. Um, Nord VPN. As he said, like he is a gamer. So like for his point of view, he's like, it's really fun. I enjoyed things about
Marvel Rivals and the Hero Shooter Space
00:54:52
Speaker
it. It's, it's coming from Aaron's place and for how the game has been reviewed. A lot of people have been feeling the same. Yeah. So it's good that it got that spotlight and success. Yeah. I'm not sure that there were a lot of contenders.
00:55:05
Speaker
to be the first one out of the gate for a big mode. um And I don't know if there's other things cooking you know and the and the in the the back rooms of the ah the big mode kitchen, but um I've heard good things about this. um And even amongst friends who have played it, they've said it's it's really good. and Um, I introduced this just because I didn't talk about it at all. I played it in the week preceding this episode. No one else is going to talk about it. That's fine. Slay the princess came out. Um, that's a fun game. It's a, it is basically just a story driven narrative, but I thought it was good. It's overwhelmingly positive on steam. I made it here in this list. I've heard, uh, other people on some other discords that I'm I interact with have enjoyed it as well.
00:55:54
Speaker
I added it to my emotional category. It is joined by Undertale and Amore. And those are the only other games in the emotional category. So it's cool. um i'll I'll grab this one and try to be brief. Destiny 2 The Final Shape. I put that on my good list. It reviewed really well. The expansion specifically. um I thought it was awesome. It was the end of the arc. It would be a travesty to not mention it.
00:56:24
Speaker
in our end of year recap, but I also wish that Destiny 2 ended once this expansion was done. I know that there's a lot of people who want to like buy groceries that might not make that a possibility, but narratively, they should have. It can only go down.
00:56:52
Speaker
So you will attack on some just game modes. Yeah, I mean, that they're still doing stuff with it. I just. I've made peace pretty much with the game. I think I've I signed in to like run the new dungeon with friends of the show, Ian and Landon and special guest, you but like.
00:57:09
Speaker
Yeah, i'm I'm done, I guess. I'm satisfied. umm I'm glad that you're finally able to come to terms. um Get yourself out of that cult. It's a lot of picking yourself up by the bootstraps. oh yeah And it was a really cool expansion for people who were there. It was awesome. Great raid, all that stuff. But we mentioned Bellato probably enough already in analogies to other games. Bellato did well. Astrobot also did well.
00:57:38
Speaker
um Particularly though I have picked up, but I have not had a chance to play it. I have to let me know your impressions, share them with the people. Um, but then the last one, which I'm circling back to and in my list, cause we alluded to it, Marvel rivals is a winner for me. Cause it like smashed through that overwatch gate. Um, not to be confused with watch gate, which I think is maybe a separate game or something. I don't know. Um.
00:58:09
Speaker
I played it only a little bit, but from the time that I played it, this is one of the games where I was like, I kind of want to get a group of friends together and literally just play it, play bot matches, play against people. I don't really care. It's really good. Yeah. Part of the fun of that is just, Oh, I know this hero from a game I've played in the past or the show growing up and, and you're like, Oh, holy shit. Like.
00:58:36
Speaker
How do they play in the game? Oh, they have this cool village. I'm going to try them out. Yeah. That's the appeal of that space is you've got to get to embody, you get to play a spider. Yeah. You could really feel like Spider-Man. But yeah, that's kind of the excitement of it. Yeah. And also it seems to be very fast paced as well. Oh yeah. Especially like for certain characters. You mentioned Spider-Man. Spider-Man is a dive character, like who's supposed to,
00:59:06
Speaker
get in, wipe out the back line, wipe out the supports. They don't call them tanks, healers, and supports. They call them, like,
00:59:17
Speaker
Vanguard dualists and I think strategists, like but okay. yeah This again brings me to a point that I know I have throughout the week with you probably already. Um, I wish they would just kind of simplify the names and just agree on a standard. Like if it's a tank, it's a tank. It's kind of like Starbucks and they're like, it's a venti. Give me the big one. and I want the big coffee. Big bigger than that. Yeah. There you go.
00:59:44
Speaker
it It feels like you need to have, oh no, it's definitely not called a ah flask. It's an aether potion. ah yeah It's sunny D. It's always been sunny D. Pay your royalties and move on. Exactly. um But yeah, it's it's got good character
Reflections and Future Anticipations
01:00:04
Speaker
variety. um They're still obviously developing it a lot. They have their monetization scheme in place as far as cosmetics and things.
01:00:12
Speaker
They've already got in-game tournaments um for people who want to group up and play against other brackets and stuff like that. a Group up, did you say? Group up. ah Avengers Assemble in it. um I don't know ah if you're going for a different reference. I heard you say grope up. Oh, grope up. No, that's a different game.
01:00:31
Speaker
um but Uh, yeah, Marvel rivals, uh, doing really well. And my steam's list, my steam friends list drives that home. People are actually playing this game. Um, it's kind of surprising. I wasn't sure it was going to land. And yeah, especially when Concord was being shown, it felt like there was a lot of, Oh, here's yet another hero shooter or a hero based action game capture the point. yeah I don't know. Yeah. But.
01:01:02
Speaker
They made it fun. They made it really good. Um, so again, shout out to the success for Marvel team. Yeah. Because between this and like Marvel snap, they're like running with these IPs. Yeah, for sure. Um, and you know, glad to see the competition. Maybe it'll make overwatch better. A person can dream. Um, anything else you've got access to the same notes. I've got anything else notable, uh, you want to touch on, make sure it's mentioned for a year in review.
01:01:31
Speaker
Uh, another crab's treasure. yeah Um, definitely a soul's like, uh, definitely has a message in it. Um, definitely is really fun and creative, like really, really creative yeah and pretty damn fun. Um,
01:01:50
Speaker
But yeah, it's nice to see more polished, well thought out games in the souls like space. Yes. I also found this game very funny at times. Yeah. It doesn't, it's main drive. Isn't just that it wants to be a dark souls ripoff. It's main drive is that it takes that for combat. It uses that and it's inspiration for combat.
01:02:13
Speaker
but like that is not the core pillar of this game. It's got that witty writing, it's got the theming, it's got the art style. like um They had good ideas. They had sharp ideas, kind of going back to that idea that weren't all rounded off. Um, and let's, yeah, as an example of the good design is because you are underwater and a very small hermit crab, you'll come across these other crabs that have little bottle cap hats, which is adorable. Oh yeah. But after you murder them, you can take and wear that bottle cap, but it was very cute to see how
01:02:50
Speaker
I mean, the game is tied to pollution, surprise, surprise, but it is very cool to essentially take those different pieces of trash that are in the ocean and use them as weapons or see them as like a little house design. Right. Again, very nice attention to the passion in the game. Exactly. Yeah. If you guys want to hear more about that, we have an episode on it. Check it out in our feed, wherever you're listening.
01:03:18
Speaker
um Anything else that really stood out? I've got like, these are all mentions for me, but we already covered Sons of the Forest. We have an episode on it. Um, um Hades two, the early access stuff has started, but calling it early access is.
01:03:37
Speaker
Weird. I feel like the base game is out and they're working on DLC. That is truly how it feels to me. Right. It doesn't feel like, Hey, we're starting out with something. It's very much a, this is a polished finished product at this point already. I think we resolved it's a lot further along than Hades one was at launch. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. Um, I'm curious to hear in the new year, you know, going forward, um,
01:04:06
Speaker
how things work out with Palworld that also launched to Early Access, played that with a group of friends back near the start of the year. We'll see they if they exist as a company next year or Nintendo wipes them off the face of the earth.
01:04:20
Speaker
um ah Stormgate, I wanted to mention because this was one that was like, yeah, we can finally do it. We can finally have a successor to Starcraft. And I haven't heard anything super good about it. It's unfortunate. They funded really well, but they haven't found their footing. um So I also hope they can see more than in the new year um when they officially launch. Yeah, it would be nice to see another Starcraft successor.
01:04:49
Speaker
in that space because the one or two I've seen as far as alternates feel very short-lived. Yeah. RTSs are tough right now, for sure. All I'm saying is I just want a game that is the commander mode. Give me the co-op commander mode. Give me a bunch of commanders, make give them progression, all of that stuff. that' also um That's That's my tip to the to the industry.
01:05:19
Speaker
Um, but there were hits, there were misses all in all. Pretty decent year, you know, got some good stuff out of it. Got some nice memories. Um, looking forward to looking forward to the next one. Uh, do you have any thoughts in memoriam for this year? Now that we're closing, closing the lid on it, putting a Manila envelope into the filing cabinet, squeeze closed, lock it, burn the house down.
01:05:46
Speaker
ah There's going to be more games from FromSoft coming out. oh yeah um Night Rain being one of them. um and I'm sure they'll announce something else in the future as well. so There's always that to look forward to, even when sometimes life can be bleak. it still have cast day I'm in a whole mood, dude. That's fair. i was like We still have FromSoft. We still have SuperGiant.
01:06:12
Speaker
We've got some other ones in the pocket, um even if the big one that I will build my house upon. Uh-huh, exactly. um And maybe, maybe someday Soap Song, we'll see. um But if there is a game we didn't mention, maybe it's a highlight for you this year, feel free to let us know. Tell us why you love it. Soapstone podcast at gmail dot.com. Or you could join the discussion on Facebook at facebook dot.com slash Soapstone podcast. And as always,
01:06:42
Speaker
We'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.