Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S3 Ep242: Deadfall
86 Plays3 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about Redfall, Deadspace, and a bunch of other things in the summary this month!
Intro:
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Intro:
- OMORI - You Were Wrong. Go Back.
- OMORI - World's End Valentine
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
Recommended
Transcript
Nuances of Everyday Language
00:00:46
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake and I'm joined by my co-host is always Dave. How's it going, Dave? I haven't decided, so it must be good because it wasn't a knee jerk bad. Yeah, is that just the default case? You fall out of the switch statement and it's like acceptable. If someone's like, how are you doing? It doesn't immediately go to like, oh, this terrible thing happened today. I feel like your answer has to be good or at least OK. Right. Yeah.
00:01:17
Speaker
Yeah, I think OK is the most neutral response you can get.
00:01:21
Speaker
But I don't know. Actually, if I hear someone say, OK, there is kind of an implication, something went wrong, but you don't really want to talk about it. Well, it's like, OK, and fine or both like the. Mm hmm. Oh, OK. There's like, I want and it's like, do I forget to take the garbage out? Like what's going on, Dave? With I mean, you did, but it's fine. It's fine. But like with pubs or if I'm at like an appointment or something or just
00:01:49
Speaker
Anybody who's not, people who I consider to be friends in like a professional context or an adult context, I will always say peachy. I've been doing it consistently for at least five years. Ah, OK. And nobody expects peachy. And a lot of times you go to like doctor's office and you're like, oh, haha. Like that must be a good thing. Or it's a very, very sarcastic, bad thing. Yeah. I like that. But it's just like I say it and I move it on type thing. Yeah. Yeah.
00:02:20
Speaker
Yeah, they definitely can throw people off. I like peachy. That's that. That one's particularly good, especially because of the vast difference between. Are you seriously asking me? It's like peaches are delicious. Yeah. But also peaches brews easily. How are you doing? Right. I usually say well now because I've I spent too long thinking about the difference between good and well.
00:02:49
Speaker
There's a did you see 30 Rock? I've seen some of it. I didn't see. I've seen clips, I should say. OK. Well, the one clip that I remember, I've also watched the show like three times. It was not when it was on Netflix.
00:03:03
Speaker
a character's like, Oh, how you doing? They're like, Oh, I'm doing good. And then the character, one of the characters who is usually more of like a dumb character says like, you're not doing good. Superman does good. You're doing well.
Language Judgments and Accents
00:03:15
Speaker
Like he just corrects him on the spot. Yeah, it's not a
00:03:21
Speaker
It's not something you usually try to get into. People say good. It doesn't matter. It's fine. You know exactly what they mean. But it's it would bother me. Right. It's. Yeah. Because I I'm thinking about it in the moment.
00:03:36
Speaker
It's kind of in the same realm of when people say less or fewer. That one's been drilled into me. OK, I got the eyes. I don't know. I want to hear a live use case, because I feel like I'm about to neurotically latch onto something. Sure. All right. I apologize. You might want to just skip ahead if you're the type of person to latch onto this. So if I said,
00:04:02
Speaker
Say you were buying things from the store for me in this domesticated lifestyle situation we've already established. Did you not come to the store with me? Am I your servant to go out and do your bidding? Well, maybe I was busy. I was doing the artwork or something. So you go out and you get some groceries. And I was like, hey, remember to pick up apples. We need a lot of apples because we're going to need to bake like an apple pie.
00:04:27
Speaker
in this hypothetical. And you came back and you had just like 50 bushels of apples. I don't know how many that is, but like hundreds of apples. I was like, well, to be honest, we need a lot less than what you picked up right there. I've made a mistake. Okay. The mistake I've made is I said less for something that was countable and it should have been fewer.
00:04:56
Speaker
So if something is quantifiable, you should always say fewer or greater instead of less or more. Then what would you use more or less? If it was like water, you're just like, oh, I want a cup of water. Could I have more water, please? Because you're not saying like I want I want for water.
00:05:14
Speaker
But of course it's not like a defined unit in that case, it's just in the context you want a more ideal to fill up the glass again. I would like less water, you just pour some back in. No thank you sir. Exactly.
00:05:30
Speaker
But this is this is this is a brain worm. This is the problem So hopefully people if they skipped ahead they skipped far enough ahead that they didn't get the spoiler and my useless story didn't take too much time Because now that you know, you're gonna hear it when other people do it. I'm not
00:05:46
Speaker
So you'll is OK. I hear it when other people do it. If they're just like, oh, I picked up a bunch of toys or something like that, but I didn't pick up enough for the kids or something. And they're just like, how many did you get? You got 10. You're like, oh, yeah, I needed less. It's like it's a little dumb thing, but it's like, I don't know. Did you? Is it less? Shouldn't it have been fewer?
00:06:15
Speaker
And I'm sure that if you were to look at like schoolwork for young kids, this would probably be incorrect all over the country. Yeah.
00:06:28
Speaker
Uh, our, our previous employer, uh, boss is boss. Um, I'm not going to, I'm not going to name, not going to talk about work or whatever. He's the one that corrected me one day. And, uh, I just, it just completely short circuited my brain. Whatever I was talking about, he, he, he was bothered enough that he mentioned it. And I was like, this is going to haunt me for the rest of my life. I'm not even sure I know who that is, but I like how that has haunted you and persisted.
00:06:59
Speaker
I told one other person I could tell this is the problem you can't tell people because it has nothing to do with what you're talking about and People kind of sometimes take being corrected as a personal judgment
00:07:13
Speaker
Oh yeah. And I do mean it as a personal judgment if I do correct you flat out. Like for people who fuck up there in
Challenges in Game Releases
00:07:21
Speaker
text, what's wrong with you? You're an adult at this point. Like just quit fucking up. I don't know. Yeah. Or the cases for two, two, two, two.
00:07:34
Speaker
Um, I, I sometimes will make a mistake and I'm like, Oh, I gotta edit that as fast as possible. Cause I can't have like a written record that I used to with two O's when I should have used one or something like that. Um, like what if I run for office someday, right? Like I have to have this consideration. They do look that up specifically. I can't afford the scandal. I don't know. I feel like there's a fine line between.
00:08:00
Speaker
having everybody agree within a society about just like how like basics of communication as far as text. But also for like speech for what you're saying with more or fewer, less or more. Like in certain context, it's just a turn of phrase and like it's understood whether or not it is syntactically or correct in the sense of language.
00:08:24
Speaker
At a point, you're just being nitpicky. It's true. Yeah. But like I might judge somebody for what you always say across versus across. And I remember I pointed that out multiple times. I'm like, why are you why are you like this? But it's literally just another turn of phrase and it's not incorrect. Uh huh. So like it's just in the same way somebody might judge me for something else. I'm like, why do you care about that? Just you know what I meant.
00:08:51
Speaker
The the other the other one I think about some of these are we're getting into accent a little bit but I'll say Instead of to the store. I'll say to the store To the
Exploration of Arcane Studios' Games
00:09:04
Speaker
store. It's like milk and milk like I know what you mean. Yeah But sometimes again because brain worms I think about it. I'll say it and I'm like, hmm Why did I say it like that? Take the garbage out
00:09:20
Speaker
I thought you said you were going to take the garbage out. Actually, I did already. So I'm good on that friend. But yeah, accents are fun. I saw a clip. We can talk about whatever happened in January in a little bit here. I saw a clip that was like, I think it was someone with a Louisiana accent or maybe a South Carolina, something like that, some strong regional accent. And his wife or girlfriend or whatever was the one recording and was like, you need to read these sentences.
00:09:49
Speaker
and try to read them with an accent and then without an accent. And the guy was just like sweating bullets, trying to say stuff without an accent. It was the hardest thing possible for him. He had to stop and enunciate every single word. Well, that's the thing, because you're literally not speaking as you would normally because it is so ingrained. It just it is natural. That's just how you do it. So for you to remove that piece, you actually have to stop and like retrain your brain to be like, don't do that thing that we've always done for since the beginning of time.
00:10:19
Speaker
It's crazy. Did you ever see the one I think it's a Baltimore? Yeah, they're an ironed iron earned Aaron earned and iron earned. Yeah, and then when the first when the first one first reads it like all the words are exactly the same. Uh-huh
00:10:37
Speaker
And then the guy says it separately and he's like, holy shit. Because he actually saw the difference between this is how we talk every day and this is how people fucking hear us. Wild. Yeah. That was the video I was going to reference if he didn't. Because it was like,
00:10:55
Speaker
It's such a perfect example because every word sounds the same. Yes. Maybe for my example, you're like, OK, one word kind of sounds off or whatever. But no, you see on the page, all of these are different words. And I just said the same word five times. That's the thing. If you didn't have the context of like the subtitles of what that person was trying to read, you'd be like, what is this video? Mm hmm. The man just repeats a word five times.
00:11:25
Speaker
Yeah, no, it was it's a it's a good time. I guess we can talk about stuff that we would usually talk about, though, for a month in review episode. You have anything that came up? I mean, we're approaching pretty much the end of the month that people listen to this the day it's posted. They're like right on the cusp, basically. And also, if you've looked up anything, you've seen that February is a much more exciting month where like 16 games come out.
00:11:55
Speaker
Yeah, you don't want to. I think it's actually kind of risky to release stuff in January. It happens, obviously, and there's some stuff that came out in January. But if games are picked up for the holidays in Q4, you may actually see fewer sales early January. Yeah, we can't get Timmy dead space. We just got him Horizon Zero Dawn Forbidden West. Right.
00:12:21
Speaker
Did you hear the quality of that edit? It sounded like I just said that in the record. It's just like a great episode, Dave. Not a problem at all. Way to not be racist. Yeah.
00:12:40
Speaker
But yeah, there was some stuff still in January. We'll get to February. February is a big month, obviously. One of the big ones for me. And by that, I mean, 50 percent of the notes that I took were about this game. And after I was done, I was like, I wonder what Dave's preparing. And I checked Discord and saw that he had posted the same video I just watched for general consumption. I was like, Dave,
00:13:03
Speaker
Yep, this is our content. The reason I knew you watched it is one of your lines is like verbatim from the video. I'm like, yeah, he saw it already. Uh huh. Try to put it in quotes. All right. Quit quit holding us on the on the ledge. What is what is this news? Yeah, ledge runners. Take the segue right angle to nowhere. No, it's Redfall.
00:13:32
Speaker
which is big because it's made by Arkane and I freaking love Arkane. So also I want to clarify for the listening audience here. Hello, how are you doing? I've missed you. This is something from the Xbox Direct as an announcement or more details of gameplay.
00:13:51
Speaker
versus just a teaser trailer. This isn't something that's coming out until May, but the Xbox Direct recently happened like one or two days ago at time of record. And also, Arcane Studios is well known for
00:14:05
Speaker
I'm always forgetting the name of the big one. Well, the one you might be thinking of. Dishonored. Oh, Dishonored. OK. That is them, right? Well, here's my list. Dishonored is freaking great. Dishonored, Dishonored 2, Dishonored Death of the Outsider, Deathloop, Prey. A lot of big stuff up there. And probably other games.
00:14:24
Speaker
If the
Redfall's Gameplay and Comparisons
00:14:25
Speaker
graphics look mildly cartoony, it's probably okay. They do have that. No, no prey does not actually conform to that example. It kind of like how it does that. The NPCs like they look a little bit like they don't look beautiful. They their NPCs normally look like they have a little polish collection issues. Something like that. Yeah, they're not meant to be like pixel perfect.
00:14:49
Speaker
nor should any NPC be held to that standard. A problem with our society. But yeah, like as far as a Left 4 Dead 2 quote unquote gameplay, I mean it looks fine enough. I feel like
00:15:07
Speaker
I see your Left 4 Dead, too, which is a trap. Because I think it was the director specifically, it was asked. Because of course, there has to be the Left 4 Dead comparison. It's a four-person co-op shooter where you fight the undead. But they explicitly said the gameplay is not like Left 4 Dead. It's more like Far Cry, more like loading into Far Cry.
00:15:27
Speaker
meaning that it's going to be more open versus a fairly linear mission. Yeah, and it's probably going to be more like kind of encounter based, I think. Because like in Left 4 Dead, there were some set piece encounters where it's like here, here's where the infected like jump you or whatever.
00:15:43
Speaker
But you're kind of like trying to make pretty quick progress through this point and then everything else is just the barrier that you're working your way through. And this one seems like it's going to be much more like, oh, you approach from the rooftop or the alleyway and you're using some different abilities to fight this particularly tough enemy. Maybe you're trying to stay silent, do something like that. Which is what I want to talk about, but I'm going to hand the talking stick back over to you or else I'll just go off.
00:16:13
Speaker
Oh, this stick is so smooth and nice. Is this oak? Oh my god. No, it's cherry wood. That would be very expensive. I couldn't afford it with cherry wood talking stick. But yeah, I...
00:16:26
Speaker
I gotta say, like, even whether it's Left 4 Dead 2 or Far Cry Like, I thought it was interesting enough from the initial teaser, but like, watching the gameplay video for me did not overly sell it. Right. Where it's like, oh, holy shit. I still think it looks fun. Like I said in Discord, like, I would love to check this out with people on like a free weekend.
00:16:49
Speaker
Because for like right now, for me, it has back for blood vibes where it's four person co-op shooter. And I don't know how much people are going to be into it. I don't want to like buy it first day. And then people are like, yeah. And then it's like Tuesday. People are like, I'm not playing that shit ever again.
00:17:05
Speaker
That's entirely fair. Also, you were in the Black for Buds. I'm going to move away from the drug dealer simulator joke there. That sounds bad. But yeah, you were a big advocate for Back for Blood when it came out.
00:17:28
Speaker
And I think one of the people who legitimately bought the game, I had a purchase, I had just played that before the weekend. I did not buy the game. The game was generously purchased for me by a friend who I will not name. They get no credit. No, yes. But you did play it and gave it a fair shake, more of a fair shake, I think, than I did. I kind of like started to back out a little bit once my initial impressions were like,
00:17:51
Speaker
I don't know. It's not really filling the Left 4 Dead hole for me. There was some other stuff there. There's a reason I don't think we ever had an episode on Back 4 Blood. I didn't have enough to say. But today's that day is where we do the full comparison between that and Redfall.
00:18:10
Speaker
I think Back for the Blood for me was the, I don't want to say spiritual successor, but it was close enough. And then it also had some progression, which anytime that you can give me like a semblance of like a tech tree or like me choosing what I have equipped, just an extra little layer. I'm like, oh, let me theory craft. And I'll just go off. But I enjoyed it for that. And honestly, if Redfall had something like that, which I feel like all
00:18:36
Speaker
multiplayer shooters like that should.
Vampire-themed Games and Anticipation
00:18:39
Speaker
Because it sucks to be, oh, I'm this person. I can only play this class the same way everybody else does. I don't even think, what was the Warhammer game that came out recently? Dark Tide. Dark Tide. Dark Tide had some customization too, right? Yeah, you have some tech tree decisions where it's like, take this perk or this perk at this certain level. But then you choose your weapons and things like that could impact your play style.
00:19:04
Speaker
Yeah. Stuff like that, I feel is a hundred percent needed to not make everything feel the same. Because even if they do have like a diversity of missions and it is more open at a point, you will have essentially repeat stuff of, Oh, hey, we're doing this mission again. It's the one with the satellite comes down. Like we've all played destiny. We get it. Um, so it's nice to have that diversity at your disposal to make it feel fresh and also allow you to play the way you want to play or to experiment with something.
00:19:35
Speaker
I think that's well said. So I will say up front that I like to feel, obviously I like vampires. I played the tabletop RPG. I played Vampire the Masquerade games. I don't have a lot of faith for the other vampire, the masquerade game bloodlines, I think it is. On its way, maybe eventually will be released if it's not in development. Hell, we'll see.
00:20:03
Speaker
Honestly, they were pretty light on information until this. And they said a 2023 release date. And I think if you go back a couple episodes and you're talking about the games that were coming out this year, like I did not have high hopes that Redfall was going to hit a 2023 release. And then they came out and I saw a YouTube comment on the gameplay trailer where it's like, Oh man, it sucks that it's so far. I'm like, are you kidding me?
00:20:28
Speaker
May is the first half of the year. Yeah. Like going from just like we're going to release at some point that year with few kind of details about the game outside of some stuff that could have been mocked up. Right. Honestly, we didn't know how long the engine how far along the engine was any of that stuff.
00:20:46
Speaker
to like, hear our gameplay mechanics. That's like a huge amount of faith that I now have that the game will at least see a launch this year. And I don't know, to talk about some cool stuff too. I had a lot of, sorry, go ahead, I'll let you go. The one thing that had me curious from this video
00:21:09
Speaker
So as again, left for two comparison, verily linear missions that you progress through. And there's the concept of. What was it? The the A.I. God. Oh, yeah, the vampire gods. Now, what's going on for the else? The the A.I. As people listen to me struggle with my memory.
00:21:32
Speaker
Are you talking about the AI director? The AI director, sorry. Yeah. But basically, if you're like breezing through stuff, they're like, OK, we can add some difficulty throwing more enemy spawns and whatnot. Yeah. So they had a very specific note here of as you make progression and do missions, you can piss off the vampire gods who are like overall like end encounter types and they can summon the rook boss fight.
00:21:58
Speaker
So I'm not sure if that means as a part of your mission, if you've been doing a lot of missions, you're now going to encounter this as part of it. Because again, when I was initially watching it, I was expecting it to be fairly linear. I'm like, oh, this is where they up the difficulty if you're doing really well or killing a lot of vampires versus going sneaky beaky-like.
00:22:16
Speaker
Yeah. I think part of it comes down to the difference in the gameplay loop for Left 4 Dead, which was like, there is no meta progression for Left 4 Dead. Correct. The closest thing you got was working your way through a campaign. But you work your way through the campaign? Awesome. Back to zero. So something like an AI director really made sense there because they wanted to punch you when you were feeling confident. And they wanted to lend a helping hand if you were really beat down.
00:22:43
Speaker
And that's an abusive relationship, so watch out for that. But it was to kind of lead to engaging gameplay. The impressions I've got from Redfall, so some of the, I'm just going to rapidly list off some of the things we saw. We saw like home bases on a map, basically where you'd get missions from.
00:23:01
Speaker
We saw character progression trees where you're kind of like unlocking perks and powers and stuff like that, which made me think of like Borderlands in a way. It was a web instead of working your way down, but that's just aesthetics. We saw like loot in the form of weapons that had like rarities and perks and stats and stuff like that, which again, Borderlands. And then we saw like some glimpses of specific missions and I think two game modes.
00:23:31
Speaker
one of them where you're trying to take back territory, and the other one where you're trying to complete the story. And I don't know what the persistent co-op progression looks like, necessarily, in a system like that, right? I assume it's going to be character-based, but from what they're describing, it sounds like it would lend itself to more of an open, this is the town of Redfall. Here's the place that you can go. Here's your home base, but you now have to do this mission to go over here.
00:23:59
Speaker
Right. Which now reminds me of like humans versus zombies in college. Yeah. But yeah, like from a given point that you can get to, you can access missions that might direct you to somewhere else on the map. But like, let's say you're hosting and some friends join, you'd have access to your missions in your instance and then friends could tag along with that. Yeah. And then however you progress, you might be able to level up your character, put some points in something.
00:24:28
Speaker
I didn't look at any of the characters. I saw that they were different colors thematically, but I didn't look at their individual abilities. I know we have like a stealth sniper and we have somebody who has like a teleport like ability to like jump in and stuff or jump out, presumably. Things are going poorly. And then a woman who like can project, psionically project shields and things like that. So I'm not sure exactly either.
00:24:57
Speaker
But we probably get project much. Yeah, right. But it did give me a lot of Borderlands vibes where it's like I see the sniper and I'm like, oh, it's zero. Right. Or something like that. You can't escape the tropes at this point. You see the person who's jumping around the battlefield and like, that's Maya or. The more popular one from Borderlands one, Lilith. But like, I kind of like that.
00:25:27
Speaker
Because this is a hero shooter then. And I'm a sucker for tech trees. I'm a sucker for being able to use powers.
00:25:37
Speaker
The other thing they showed, which I was kind of surprised that they managed to pull off was it looks like there is, there are systems there to support stealth gameplay. And this is what we kept coming back to was like, if you put four people in a squad, you're not doing stuff. And it looks like.
00:26:00
Speaker
Maybe half of my friends, if I put them in the squad at all. That might still be true. There's no way we could do stealth. But I saw like stealth weapons.
00:26:09
Speaker
So I will say having played Payday with a number of our group over time, granted there were some things that were specifically stealth or you're fucked. Or sometimes stealth is just an option to open with. But it is possible to do, but it does require more coordination. You obviously can't have one person flank and then be doing loud shit.
00:26:33
Speaker
Yeah, someone else runs past the person that's sneaking. This is the traditional visual example, right? They're getting callouts, they're tagging enemies and things, and then the guy just runs up with a rocket launcher. Somebody screams in all chat, I'll crown the witch.
00:26:49
Speaker
for every single encounter, every single boss fight in the game they just charge in. But it looked good for that. I think what they'll probably do is, even in the gameplay they showed, they're just like, here's the advantage to opening with stealth. You might be able to take out a threat, kill a couple enemies with like one hit kill head shots or something and go from there. But they didn't want it to just be Splinter Cell, like your only stealth for the entire game.
00:27:18
Speaker
Because that has its own balancing problems, right and that's own pacing problem. So hopefully they get a mix there I'm a little more I have a little more trust look at it now. I Will say only stealth is a different game that they made called Dishonored
00:27:35
Speaker
Yeah, you can you can actually run through and fight. I know. And I assume crazy videos like the best. There's those videos out there for like dishonored at 2000 or the thousand hours or something like that. Mm hmm. Absolute insanity. What people can pull off in that. I'm going to throw this knife over here at a 45 degree angle. Why? And two hours is going to ricochet and hit this one guy.
00:27:58
Speaker
All the pieces come together. Like stop time, jump in the air, kill an enemy, push that enemy's corpse while time is still stopped.
Evolution of Survival Horror with Dead Space
00:28:08
Speaker
Like throw a grenade, do all this stuff and then unstop time and the physics take over. Everyone dies instantly. It's it's beautiful. I love Dishonored. Speaking of.
00:28:22
Speaker
moving things with your special powers or phrasing them in place. How do you feel about telekinesis or TK? I don't know. It like is the general term or is this a game? This is my transition and talking about the Dead Space remake. Ah, OK. Yeah. I mean, I'm still probably not going to pick it up because I've got a lot of games to go through, but it has incredibly good reviews.
00:28:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's been really good on that front. One of the reviewers who I consistently keep up with, Sphere Hunter, she had this, her most recent video was like, hey, checked it out, it's really good. And I was like, oh, it must actually be really good then. Because she was like a huge dead space fan, has followed the other stuff, had some heavy thoughts on Callisto Protocol.
00:29:16
Speaker
But as much as the praise is high and great, the fact that this is coming in at a new game price, and like you said, having other things coming up on the plate for February, it does feel like a bit much of a buy-in. If you've already played it and you already own the original game. So maybe you're coming in fresh, you're like, hey, I would love a survival horror experience. I would say that this would probably be the one to check out, because it's got to be a lot nicer than the original.
00:29:45
Speaker
Yeah. And they've definitely fine tuned some things, added some other stuff as far as how the tech tree works a little bit. Also, I will say the levels are not individual levels anymore. You can actually backtrack. It's like an energy connected thing via the tram. So you can actually go back into a given area.
00:30:04
Speaker
And you're like, oh, why would you want to go back? Maybe forgot my question. Yeah. Oh, another question. I've already cleared this area. What's the point? I'm just going to go back and grab like a battery pack or something. Oh, we'll do dynamic spawns now. OK, so you can kind of just live in the live in the station for a bit.
00:30:21
Speaker
You can, but they might try and punish you for exploring too much by throwing a couple actual difficult enemies at you. Gotcha. So it will be more active and dynamic versus, oh, that's done and cleared. I'm fine to go do whatever. Right. Which I think is a cool addition. Oh, yeah. I'm glad they're they're clearing the remake bar instead of just doing a remaster. Yeah, it's not just prettier. Yeah.
00:30:47
Speaker
Yeah, again, that was my impression too because I didn't I don't think they really were too vocal about what they were going to change. Yeah. But I hear the cannon section has been fixed. Hooray. It's worth my money. They also have layers on the enemies as well. OK. So chipping away.
00:31:09
Speaker
Yeah, obviously in Dead Space, you're like, oh, their limbs are off. They're not moving. They're dead, probably. But they actually have a peeling mechanic, where as you deal damage to an enemy, you can rip off skin and then flesh. So you can actually use that as a health indicator. OK. Huh. That's macabre. Yeah. But I mean, for a game that introduced the mechanic, strategic dismemberment, it is on breath. Yes. I should honestly just,
00:31:39
Speaker
link you the video. I'm not sure if it's out for public consumption yet. I'll have to check. Make sure it's actually listed. But I recommend it to anybody. Check out her stuff. But also if you're specifically interested in that game, interview on it. I think she has a pretty good take because she got her review copy. Nice. Or another YouTuber that you trust and you care about their stuff.
00:32:02
Speaker
But I think a lot of people are covering this game because that space is larger now than when it launched, right? Especially at the close to protocol. True, actually. Not not what they wanted to do. It was such unfortunate timing that they were so close together. Yeah, I mean, but that wasn't that wasn't Dead Space's fault. It was both Callista protocols fault, but also they knew they had to launch first or else. Well, who's going to buy a game if it comes up pretty soon afterwards?
00:32:33
Speaker
And it just was not.
00:32:35
Speaker
And there's so much information out there out there about cholesterol protocol, but they failed there. Yeah, I looked up some critical reviews for Dead Space. It's very highly scored across the board. I think one of, if not like the highest scoring game this year so far, which is impressive for a remake. And like Dave said, I'm not going to I'm probably not going to pick this up. I have a lot of other games to play. But the original came out in 2000 and.
00:33:06
Speaker
Eight. So there's a lot of people out there who didn't play Dead Space One just based off that. So this is your chance. It's the 15 year anniversary of Dead Space and apparently Breaking Bad. Ah, that's a little so hold up really well. There you go. But yeah, if this goes on sale, I mean, I would love to go back and replay a better version of it. Mm hmm. Yeah.
00:33:35
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, once it's on sale, throw it at me for a couple bucks. I'll pick it up and play it through instead of going back and be playing through Dead Space One. But others have echoed our sentiment, which is like even till today, Dead Space One actually holds up. Like you can play through it, which is crazy. But now you got to adjust or the
The Role of Game Reviews
00:33:56
Speaker
remake. We already talked about this a lot in another episode, but like it just it was set up in a way to where it like didn't immediately age. And it's been able to keep that.
00:34:05
Speaker
And also it's one of the first major entries in like survival horror. So it's like that Silent Hill Resident Evil are like the big ones of like, oh, I feel underpowered.
00:34:19
Speaker
Yeah, I wasn't sure if you were going to continue that sentence with more qualifiers or you're just going to say it was one of the first entries in survival horror because I'm like, that's going to be a very contentious message. I'm not saying it's like, that's the one. But it's like it was an early milestone for like, hey, this is what we like and how it should be like a good example, I would say. Yeah.
00:34:40
Speaker
I will say it is one of the best early examples of horror in a space third person shooter simulation game. He's like family friendly, not NSFW.
00:34:58
Speaker
Good to play with friends, not really. No, it was good and they nailed it. I feel like most people, it's probably still the best in the series, even if you like some of the mechanics they introduce later.
00:35:12
Speaker
Seems good. All I'm saying, sign a protagonist, best games, just saying. Well, for some protagonists, that's definitely true. It would have been better if they were silent. All right. What have I got here? Here is kind of like a meta thing, but I'm probably going to start talking about meta critic scores and also open critic scores at some point.
00:35:35
Speaker
If for those aren't familiar with open critic I've referenced Metacritic for a very long time But open critic is a site that kind of competes with them and they don't use weighted scores like Metacritic does Where Metacritic is like IGN game game spot all that stuff. They'll have More weighted total points to those well-known sites as opposed to other community members and stuff like that. So I
00:36:02
Speaker
Yeah, on Open Critic, Dead Space Remake had a 90% and 96% of the people who reviewed it recommended the game to pretty much everyone, which is a very high recommendation rate. Which I think is also another metric that would be useful to get out of reviews. Be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever you scored it. Do you say other people should play this game? Right? Like, blah, blah, blah number. But yeah, should people play the game?
00:36:32
Speaker
Because that's kind of more meaningful, really. It is. Because objectively, I could say, I'm going to throw a game I haven't played under the bus, Persona 5. Everything I've heard about it is great. So honestly, I'd probably rate it pretty highly. Would I recommend other people play it? No. But again, that's a personal bias coming in. And admittedly, you haven't played the game to review it, and then you're right. Exactly. So maybe it's slightly different. Again, I just wanted to lead with, I have not played it.
00:37:01
Speaker
But like there are other games that I love where like this is really good. I don't recommend it for everybody. Like there are certain things like Dead Space where I feel like pretty across the board. If that's your jam, by all means, check it out. There are some other things that like Omori, amazing game. Do I recommend it to everybody? Definitely not. Yes. Mainly for like trigger warning reasons. That's it. Otherwise, like it's just a delightful experience.
00:37:31
Speaker
And it's like a great RPG. But yeah, I like qualifiers. Like, early days, I feel like in high school or middle school, everyone's like, you have to like the thing that I like. I recommend this to you. If you don't like it, we're not friends. Like, you have to like, you have to like Halo. I'm an Xbox household. In this house, we play Xbox. My dad had weird girls, but.
00:37:59
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't get grounded. I just lost my Xbox live permissions. Mm hmm. But yeah, I like when people give me specific recommendations like, hey, you would like this. It's not, hey, this is a good game. Hey, you would like this. Mm hmm. Which is funny. Because we actually kind of approach that evaluation when we talk about like a 10 point score or something like that. That's what I was doing internally. If something's a 10.
00:38:26
Speaker
then I probably recommend it to people even that don't like the genre. It's like you cannot exceed it. This is the best. You have to experience it. Yes. So regardless of your pinnacle of what condition. Yeah. Yeah.
00:38:39
Speaker
Um, whereas there's some other games like the stalker series where it's like, I would recommend this to fans of the stalker series. Right. Um, and I think that would be great because those two camps, those are the camps I want to know for a Maury. Do should this be recommended to everyone? Should this be recommended to people who like classic RPGs and indie games and stuff like that? Um, probably more of the second, to be honest, but it's exemplary within that field.
00:39:10
Speaker
Yeah, I would honestly leverage tags for recommendations more heavily than anything else. Because like typically if somebody likes a genre, they will like games in that genre. Right. Though obviously some are better than others.
00:39:30
Speaker
I'm sorry, I have to look this up because we were just talking about it. Talk about recommending based off tags. If you saw the tag psychological horror, sexual content and fantasy, would that be your bag?
00:39:44
Speaker
Did you just look at my Steam profile? Are you looking at my Steam games right now? No, no. I looked up a very specific game. And I'm going to tell you what it is based off whether you, well, I'll tell you regardless. So I mean, honestly, those are all things that I can appreciate. It's not like stuff from like, oh, we have to have these features in the game. That's right. But I would bet you money that I've played this game based on Jake's facial expression and nothing else.
00:40:13
Speaker
Yeah, we're talking about the Bible again. This is the Bible. It came back. Yeah. But fair point. And that that's what eventually we'll get there for reviews. It's just kind of hard to take a bunch of information and smush it into that sort of format where it's more meaningful.
00:40:37
Speaker
A lot of things are multifaceted. If you don't know what multifaceted is, think of a 20 sided die. It means multiple things going fast. Again, we don't fact check here.
00:40:56
Speaker
So I wanted to mention this. I don't think I'm going to really discuss it because, to be honest, I don't have any interest in the game. But I thought it was hilarious when I looked at For Spoken came out this month, which wins all the awards for worst name in a game to come out in January, I think. But also, like, it came out on consoles and they did release the system specs for PC.
Trends in Open-world Games
00:41:24
Speaker
And they were like,
00:41:26
Speaker
Ridiculous. There was like the base level, which is probably still like where my computers at or maybe a little bit better. There was recommended specs and then there was ultra. And if you wanted to run this game at high, it was they were recommending like a graphics card that just came out in like November or December. It was like the RTX 4080. No, no, no, that one's a little bit older.
00:41:50
Speaker
So it's been around for like a year or so, but still top of the line graphics card. And 24 gigabytes of RAM for this game. And based off of the people who've actually been able to play it on PC, the performance is terrible. And that's what they did to kind of like hide it. It's so unoptimized that they're literally just like, we can't make this work. Make people have like miracle machines. That way we can say that they can play it at a higher frame rate. Because the recommended specs are for 30 frames per second.
00:42:20
Speaker
Ouch. On PC. Ouch. That is definitely not ideal. I feel like they pulled a bit of a cyberpunk with that regard. Mm hmm. Just a little bit. As far as like the game itself, I've seen obviously some trailers. It feels very. What was the Avengers game that they had in the last year or two? We played as Kamala Khan.
00:42:49
Speaker
I'm not sure. Whatever that is. I'm not support. It 100% feels like that, where it's like a AAA. I want to use the term cash crap, but anything that it typically is, or the thing that's going to be a financial positive investment. But you play as an unlikely hero who doesn't really fit in with a lot of people, and then they get transported to this magical world. It just all feels very, I don't know,
00:43:18
Speaker
All the interactions I've seen as far as like the main character and like your little side helper companion feels very, I don't know if contrived is the right word or just overdone or I've seen it in enough things. Yeah. That's the word I keep seeing in reviews is that it's just like, even for the people who score it is like a decent game. It has terrible recommendation rate. People are just like, there's really just no reason to play this game. Like.
00:43:45
Speaker
There are just other games that do all of this better and it's less just baked in tropes and boring interactions and stuff like that. It looks pretty. Granted, it was a pre-rendered cutscene on YouTube. It better look pretty if it takes 24 gigs of RAM. That's all the pretty assets are loading in there, Jake. Yeah, I guess so.
00:44:12
Speaker
I'm not I'm not going to play this game, though. So they're probably not worth the most to talk about. The only reason it was worth talking about for me is just how mediocre and extreme the requirements were for recommended and for ultra settings. It's just like, there you go. Everything else is OK. This was touted for a while and a couple of trailers over the past year or two of like
00:44:40
Speaker
Here, look how pretty it is and how graphically intense and other stuff. They're like, if you have a PS5. Mm hmm. I don't know. I mean, it's Square Enix, right? Like, oh, say no. All right.
00:45:00
Speaker
I just searched for it. And the top story as of right now was you can tell First Spoken to shut up and other important settings as a Kotake article. But yeah, I mean, people Square Enix does RPGs, not always the best ones. And it seems like this is one of them. It's not like Square Enix has ever had a lack of like creative ideas as much as I'll always like shit on Final Fantasies and like chaos.
00:45:29
Speaker
Yes, like thematically they do some like really fun interesting shit like Final Fantasy 16. I don't know if it's gonna be a game for me, but like The child in me that has imagination loves the idea of it and looks really fun and cool How many series go up to 16?
00:45:46
Speaker
Without skips. Never an extorted. Wait, no. The blind here loses. Gotcha. We're at least one game four times. But yeah, it's just it also is falling under the unfortunate time of open world has definitely blown up, seen a lot of success. But again, it's being I want to say reused, but a lot of people are doing it, but not necessarily to the same degree of success as Breath of the Wild.
00:46:15
Speaker
Elden Ring obviously did really well as an open world. Horizon. Horizon did a great job. But I feel like things like Far Cry and other things like the strictly AAA space, even though the other games we mentioned are also AAA, just less EA forward. Yeah. Just I don't think have been keeping the same heart to it as much. Yeah, that's what you say. Ubisoft and Far Cry and anything like that, if they are
00:46:45
Speaker
The most defining feature is that their games feel very samey and they would be terrified if they ever didn't. So yeah, it is what it is. They could pair up with with Pokemon and Pokemon can make an overworld game. Oof. Some people like that one, though. I don't have a horse in the race because I really play Pokemon. You don't have a ponytail in the race. You fucking hate it. Sorry. Sorry. That was a that was too far.
00:47:13
Speaker
Taking the garbage out, and I'm not coming back. But what did come back, I'll let you pick. Oh, you can take the talking sick at a time here. Very brief deal thing. We haven't really been telling people about the freebies on Epic Games Story. And we're going to continue that trend, because that's not what I have on the list. For the next couple days, even after this release is going through February 2nd, Titanfall 2 on Steam is $3.
00:47:42
Speaker
And that is a good game for three dollars. It's no vampire survivors, but I mean, three dollars is actually it's good. Just for the single player campaign, which is actually really good in Titanfall, too. Yeah. Three dollars. Also, I did look at Epic Games Store for like the freebies. But like if I'm not saying something, there's a reason I'm not saying something. Gotcha. Going for a big one.
00:48:10
Speaker
Well, it has to be like something interesting for me to recommend it. I mean, by all means, feel free to like check it when they have their updates. There might be something that catches your eye. And again, it is free. But a lot of them just seem like very niche. Like I definitely wouldn't pay money for them anyway. But it's not something that I feel driven to play or interested in. Yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at.
00:48:38
Speaker
The two right now are apparently Adios and hell is others. The trailers did not do much for me. That's fair. Yeah. And, oh, upcoming. Actually, you see the upcoming ones. I didn't know that was true. Um, after February 2nd through the ninth is dishonored death of the outsider while we were talking about dishonored.
00:49:03
Speaker
Um, I had some fun with it, but I recommend that to fans of the Dishonored series, not people who haven't even tried the first or second games or for people who really enjoyed audios. I have no idea what audio says. I don't know if I can agree with that. It, it looks bad. I can only say that because I
Multiplayer Experiences and Storytelling
00:49:26
Speaker
haven't really checked it out. I've just only watched the trailer.
00:49:30
Speaker
Genshin Impact is apparently still free, so that's good to know. Yeah. I don't like gachi games on principle, actually. They could be great games. Fall Guys is still free. Yeah. Yeah, it's always unfortunate to go that way. But speaking of free games, we have been playing or checking out a little bit of DMZ. That's true.
00:49:57
Speaker
So DMZ is apparently like Tarkov, which I don't know anything about. But apparently it is a squad based shooter where you go in for a set amount of time into a map. It's a pretty large map, the genre name. Sure. So they are extraction shooters. That's what they're called. Yeah, this is to differentiate from Battle Royale, where you have to
00:50:20
Speaker
kill people and you're kind of forced into the middle area. So it's people just hanging out in the woods three miles away. But you go in with a squad, you do missions. There's a lot of PvE killing some NPCs, getting cash, getting some guns, and you also run to enemy players as well. But whatever you take out with you, as far as guns and gear, you get to keep and you can use on future missions.
00:50:47
Speaker
And if you don't make it out for any reason, that is gone. Yes. I have died a lot. But I've still had fun with it so far. And I'm still looking to play some more with different groups of people. Find my true squad. No one's matched so far. That's fair. I feel like I'm definitely the weakest player out of everybody else, because everyone has definitely spent more time in it than I have.
00:51:14
Speaker
Um, I've had a couple of good head shots, believe you me, but I'm definitely curious to see a little bit more with it. Um, I will say it's not the most stable right now. No, I've not run into these issues, but I've heard an air full of these issues from other people who've unfortunately encountered them. I've run the gamut gambit gamut. Uh, I've run, I've played gambit. Um, I've dropped in the middle of a match with an error code. I've dropped at the start of a match with an error code.
00:51:44
Speaker
Um, I was watching a friend play the match where almost like half of the population that were playing it timed out. Cause the, the node they loaded into was just super laggy. Like there are issues with the game for sure, but it's fun. It's fun in a, um, kind of like a bursty way where if you're fully kitted out, you're fully decked out, you have the best gear. Awesome. You can feel powerful for a bit that will not last.
00:52:13
Speaker
the game would actually not be engaging if you weren't motivated to spend money and gear up and do all that stuff. So losing it, even though it doesn't feel good at the moment, is part of the core loop, right? Yeah, it adds a definite degree of tension because I feel like
00:52:34
Speaker
Unless you're playing on the highest difficulty in a game, you can always outsmart the AI because they have patterns and it's like, oh, I'm just going for them to peek at a cover, shoot them in the head type thing, or just dodge and they throw a grenade. But the fact that there are one more difficult AI, especially if you get outnumbered, because like sometimes enemies just show up and you're like, that's too many around all 360 degrees.
00:52:58
Speaker
Or you'll encounter a helicopter on you. Literally on top of you. Or you'll go against another player and they'll be like, let's call it an airstrike on them. And then, oh, they're calling another airstrike. That was fun. So you get very nervous about losing your stuff or keeping your squad alive. But it's also nice to get into that mindset of group coordination, where people may call us and like, oh, they're on the roof. Or like, hey, I'm down, but I'm going to scoot my body inside the building.
00:53:31
Speaker
Which is which is fun it's not as ridiculously like Spawn in get shot in the back as like Call of Duty deathmatch or team match or like things Oh, no, it's like modern warfare 2 were like it is like a battle royale sized map. Yeah, very large so Encounters with players can be lethal or they can just be like we saw them they saw us and we just backed away from the situation slowly Or maybe we merge squads
00:53:59
Speaker
Or I left the squad, and then AJ and Zach died. Or Zach died. And I thought that they were both dead, so I quit back out to menu. And then AJ came back and reminded Zach, and I was like, crap, I should have kept playing. But yeah, there's a lot of fun times.
00:54:18
Speaker
And it's a story generator in the same way like Sea of Thieves is, right? Like I'm going to avoid telling more than one, but there was one time we saw a guy sniping on top of a big radio tower and we're like, how are we going to close on him? Like how are we going to take this guy out? He was pulling back so we couldn't hit him with our sniper rifles and he's really far up there.
00:54:37
Speaker
And so I called an airstrike on him and he died. And that's exactly how it resolved. Unrelated entirely. But I have another gaming story I want to share. I was playing MGS 5 and I was first in quiet. And yeah, similar experience. So he called a great honor. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. 100 percent. Uh huh. No.
00:55:00
Speaker
Uh, it's fun though. And maybe, I don't know, maybe I'll, maybe we'll circle back for an episode or something like that. Do a little bit more of a deep dive. Who knows? We talked about it enough.
00:55:09
Speaker
before we started recording today for sure. So I'm sure that's just been our recent thing and like Destiny 2 just doesn't generate any fun stories. Yeah. Did you grind out your weekly stuff? Yeah. Okay. See you next week. Speaking of Destiny 2, great segue. Um, the one thing I hate to say about Destiny was they had a bunch of stability problems this week. They had a rollback because
00:55:33
Speaker
You can look at the technical details for it, but basically the in-game achievements, like some of the really old ones did not, were not going to play nice with a new like character data migration system. And people started losing a lot of progress. They realized after this patch went out and they're like, all right, we have to hard roll back because otherwise people.
00:55:53
Speaker
literally will just like have entire sheets of stuff missing from their character. Yeah. So they had to roll back. That sucks. But then they also announced some stuff for Lightfall, like they're making the mod system actually usable. And I'm not going to go into details on that. You can look it up on your own time. But that's all big because it was basically a lot of people in our play group didn't even use mods. It's like, I'm not going to figure it out. There's too much. And I can't judge them. So.
00:56:22
Speaker
Yeah, the game does not do the best as far as getting on board with that stuff. They're like, go figure out the third party source. There's somebody who really cares. Yeah, you're not wrong. So that plus loadouts and everything else feeding into Lightfall. Maybe some nice improvements. It's on a very old game system. But we'll see. I mean, they can't even get rid of light blue engrams.
00:56:48
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's funny in its own right. Well, like, OK, we can reduce the drop rate. That's the best we can do. But if we actually remove them, if you're at cap, then the game is unstable. And I don't as somebody who does work doing some development here and there, like, I don't understand how you wrote that to have it function that way.
Industry Changes and Economic Impacts
00:57:14
Speaker
But I do find those stories are always funny.
00:57:17
Speaker
Yeah. The other thing is like we give, um, we give destiny to kind of a pass sometimes, I think, because it came out so long ago. So long, so long that I even had to look it up here to kind of understand, but it came out in 2017. Yes, that is a while ago, but I mean, overwatch has been out for longer than that. So.
00:57:45
Speaker
I didn't realize that. It doesn't even make sense in my brain, because we played the game so long. But to quote one of our friends, small indie company. Yeah. They can't afford to fix that. Speaking of, go ahead. You take the segue. This looks a really good segue, right? Speaking of small indie companies, Animal Well is going to be an actual published by a big mode, which if you remember is Dunkey and Leah's
00:58:16
Speaker
game studio publishing studio publishing publishing company. So that's going to be their first one that they've signed on with. I think it's supposed to be sometime this year. I didn't double check. Yeah, I didn't see either. I'm glad to see what was initially like a short YouTube video and then a blow up on Twitter of everyone going, what? You can't do that.
00:58:43
Speaker
to now actually becoming a thing. So I hope it goes well. Like I said before, really wish them success. It's always nice to see people who really love gaming be involved in gaming things.
00:59:00
Speaker
It's not like you're like, Oh, this person's a piece of shit. I want to see them fail. You're like, Oh, like I've been watching their videos for years. They have actual good opinions on stuff. They really care about games. Yes. Of course. I want to see them succeed. Right. I mean, even if this game didn't succeed, I think donkey would be fine. They're probably, I don't, I don't see as I'm not as accountant, but I mean, if you start up a game publishing studio, then.
00:59:25
Speaker
Your function is to provide money for other people so they can ship their stuff and you can all make money. That's what publishers do. So I think you'll be fine. But also I do like Animal Well itself. He gave like a brief voiceover in his year in view type video where he talks about some of the some of the big ones. And then you can also find the developers video summary of Animal Well as as well.
00:59:54
Speaker
uh, which gives a lot of cool details. And, um, I don't know if it's particularly my game or not, but it looks pixel, pixel beautiful. And, um, some of the gameplay looked like people who are into vore could be, could be it because your little, your little animal might be eaten depending on like how you interact with other animals. So like, I don't know. That's maybe a different audience than me, but it looks nice. Yeah. It looks cute, pixely, puzzley.
01:00:21
Speaker
Mm hmm. But again, I don't know if it's my bag per se. Yeah, that's fair. We'll also see what it what it launches for. If Dunkey comes out and he's like, 90 dollar game, that'll solidify it. So I have a couple I want to hit. I'm going to skip some of my news pieces. I know we're coming up on time. So are you doing are you doing the it's it's two minutes and I'm just going to just figure out those two minutes. Yeah.
01:00:50
Speaker
Um, with intro, we're like, we're already over, but that's fine. We don't, we never stop at exactly one hour. Um, so Google Stadia is dead. Nobody knows what a Google Stadia was except Shane. So like, it's fine. Um, I like how we just keep throwing out these names. You're like, nobody knows who the fuck they are. They're all friends of the show. It's fine. Um, maybe not special guests yet, but Shane was a special guest. So, um,
01:01:20
Speaker
I believe so. We did a, didn't we talk about a game or we at least recommended a speed run at one point. I thought we did. I thought we did one episode with Shane. I think we might've recommended that he was speed running something, but I know we explicitly linked like a YouTube channel at one point, but I can't recall what we covered for that game. It should have been near. Oh well. I will.
01:01:50
Speaker
Put in recording, I will bet you money and you can choose the amount of money that we've never had Shane as a guest. I mean, I'm not that confident in it. So choosing to bet money doesn't make much sense because I'm like coin flip myself. But anyways, Shane's a person. I think I heard him talk about Stadia once, but that's gone. A bunch of people lost their jobs. Not a huge surprise. That's the economy. Xbox game division lost 10,000 people.
01:02:17
Speaker
They have a lot of companies underneath them, like Bethesda or 343, Google laid off 12,000 people. So is this as a part of actual economy? Or I know a lot of times after like a game release cycle, people will be let go. Yeah, I think this is economy because we're seeing it across the tech tech sector in general. We were kind of at a point where a bunch of companies were hiring really aggressively and
01:02:44
Speaker
Economy goes a little bad and those people do not stick around. Sucks, but that's the news. And maybe an upside. I'll end on this piece, this last piece of news. Blizzard games are not available in China anymore.
01:03:05
Speaker
What did they do to piss off China? So I don't know if they directed to piss off China, yeah, this time. But they were unable to renew their contract with NetEase, which was their partner in China. Because the way business works in China is basically you have to have an advocate that's already approved by the government in order to work with them. Yes. You have to have somebody who's in China who's like, we vouch for them. Exactly. Because the government has a lot of oversight of these partner companies.
01:03:34
Speaker
And they might not have the same oversight if the US were to try to just directly do business. And China is about oversight. So that shouldn't surprise anybody. But because they couldn't renew their relationship and their contract with NetEase, which was their provider for China, all Blizzard games are unavailable in China. Overwatch 2, not available. Hearthstone, not available. Like World of Warcraft, not available. So that's kind of massive, actually.
01:04:05
Speaker
Because companies put a lot of work into trying to establish these partnerships. Because China makes a lot of money for video games companies in the US as well. Yeah. Population density alone. Yeah. But the other crazy thing is, what happens to all of the people in China who had purchased Blizzard games? Can they just no longer access? They would have gone through a separate launcher, right?
01:04:35
Speaker
China has a lot of things in place for tracking the amount of time people are on games, kids in particular. Do they still have that? I believe so, yeah. And they lock down more aggressively for a while. I think those are starting to lift up. But China started to turn anti-video games in general and has been dialing it back a little bit.
01:04:57
Speaker
Well, I thought it was a latency issue, like they were having too much Xi Jinping or something. Ah, OK. Yeah, they love. They love that. They love when people change this fucking podcast. Dave, we have like we have like 10 listeners we cannot afford to alienate anyone.
01:05:18
Speaker
But no, I kind of actually like this Not because I'm sorry for anyone who doesn't isn't able to play the games they wanted to play that sucks but
01:05:29
Speaker
A lot of US companies kind of bend over backwards to self-censor their games in order to make sure that they could be in China, to the detriment of society, I'll just say, or human rights or anything else that the Chinese government's not really big on these days. So this is an opportunity, one that I don't think Blizzard would take, but an opportunity to kind of make a clean break here and say like, well,
01:05:58
Speaker
Maybe we can actually just the moral high grounds over there. Maybe we connect. Can we can we do that? Is there that is that a choice? Could we walk over there and like
01:06:07
Speaker
You know, take a stand for some good things. Everyone. This is Blizzard's turning point. No, I'm just saying, I'm just saying, here's here. Here is the crossroads again. It is yet one more opportunity to make a mistake. But I don't know, we'll see. We'll see what the follow up is probably next month in review. It'll be like new partner.
01:06:30
Speaker
Um, so donkey and blizzard. Ducky's got more reach than I thought. I wish I could do a donkey presentation. Be like, Hey, listen, guys, as he talks with his YouTube core audience. Oh my gosh. Yeah.
01:06:54
Speaker
Um, but I think that's about it. That's every single piece of news through all aspects and the, the, the entire span of human existence, uh, for this month, uh, contained within one hour, roughly podcast. So you're welcome.
01:07:15
Speaker
I also would say that you are welcome. I don't want to make it seem like Jake is the only person who's saying that you're welcome. I want you to feel included. I love you as well. That's good. That's a good note to end on. I realize I've now said I love you to a random person in the audience twice. Twice, yeah. The first one is just like, are you sure? And the second one was confirmation. So if there were any doubt.
01:07:37
Speaker
Um, but if you have any doubt, you can send in your, uh, heartfelt confessions of infatuation to us at soapstone podcast at gmail.com. Or, uh, you can help us change our relationship status on Facebook, not like our personal ones, but the ones for the podcast itself. That's the joke at facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.