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S3 Ep198: Talkcast - March 2022
78 Plays4 years ago
Join Dave and Jake about Elden Ring everything except Elden Ring in this week's episode!
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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/
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Transcript
Introduction and Casual Greetings
00:00:44
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake, and I'm joined by my co-host as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave?
00:00:52
Speaker
Uh, it's going fine, I think. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, uh, another day of the week. Life goes on. That's true. Hopefully.
00:01:07
Speaker
How's your current situation? You say is that we didn't just finish talking about my current situation. Well, I meant more of like. So again, we record on video because we do this remote, so it's nice to have like visual cues for like, hey, shut the fuck up and other things. So I see you and the audience does not. Would you like to explain to the audience what I'm seeing? Sure. So I'm basically like
00:01:38
Speaker
You know, like shadow puppets, I'm very close to just being a shadow puppet because I'm currently sitting in the closet. I guess my closet to be specific, um, with my laptop and audio interface device. And we're, we're trying this stuff out before I move out of the apartment. So.
00:01:58
Speaker
His apartment is a closet. It's not a lot of space. To be fair, it's basically free for the rent he pays. I mean, that's not true. Four square feet, done. I was actually talking to someone today who lives on the West Coast, like in California.
The Cost of Living on the West Coast
00:02:17
Speaker
And he was talking about how he and his girlfriend have, it's like 600 square feet or something like that.
00:02:27
Speaker
My face scrunched at that number. $2,000 a month.
00:02:32
Speaker
Oh, I did a reverse face scrunch out of surprise and disgust. I hate that. Yeah. And we were talking about housing and stuff because, you know, so next week after the record, presumably depending on when the record happens. Um, well, if it happens on the weekend, that's going to be kind of rough because we're moving to a new apartment, a new house. I'm still telling you, we're going to cancel it. It seems like it'll probably be the case, but we'll, we'll, we'll see. We'll see if we make it. Um,
00:03:01
Speaker
But so I was like, oh yeah, talking about house prices and stuff like that. And he's like, out here. Not only are things going above asking price, people are putting offers in for houses that are $1 million above asking price. And I was like, you could buy my house. How many millions are they asking? Right? Yeah, I don't know. But it's so insane.
00:03:29
Speaker
If you have that type of money, why do you ... I guess you really want that location, I guess? Right. It feels like ...
Changing Perceptions of Money Over Time
00:03:38
Speaker
I mean, for us, when you're a kid, the concept of $20, you're like, holy fuck, that's a lot of money. But then when you have income, you're like, okay, $20 is $20. Yes. Obviously, that scale goes up with more money you have.
00:03:52
Speaker
That's still, for me, I don't think I'm ever going to hit it. I don't think I'm ever going to have a million in the bank account. That seems like a lot, right? Yeah. So it's like, hey, more than you'll ever make in a lifetime, but I want to guarantee you buy that house. Jesus.
00:04:07
Speaker
I mean, part of it has to come from the fact that like California has a GDP that's greater than some countries, but like still, I guess GDP stands for greater than Poland. Uh-huh. Yeah. It's actually very specific and who they're comparing against. Um, but yeah, I actually.
00:04:29
Speaker
I don't know. I can empathize with that. You're talking about like the concept of difference in understanding of like the amounts of money something costs. Cause like maybe in California, you're just like, oh yeah, 2000 bucks a month. It's kind of hard to hit, but, or like, it's a little expensive.
00:04:45
Speaker
But you might be getting paid more or something like that, but you don't realize that, like, legitimately, there's places out there where rent is $400 a month or like or there it was maybe in the before times. And the story like for understanding the scale of money, I figured this out roughly at the age of 18.
00:05:07
Speaker
when my grandparents, when I was young, I think I was like 13 or something like that, maybe 14, they got me a bond, a US bond. And I don't know exactly what kind of bond it was, but it was like, it'll be matured when I'm 18.
00:05:24
Speaker
And they bought it for something like 20 bucks or whatever. And they're like, yeah, just hold on to it. Kind of like a life lesson or something like that. Right. When I was 18, it was fully matured and $100. And I basically learned that I didn't care because I already had a job at that point. And that was like, it was like 25% of I think a paycheck I was making there. And so it was.
00:05:52
Speaker
It was like a lesson in absurdity to me because the amount of time I spent waiting for it to be fulfilled, it was just completely, I don't know, I should have cashed out before I got a job is the takeaway. Yeah, but at the same time, like it's free money over time. Like it's essentially its own form of interest if you like do a bond or like a checking deposit.
00:06:16
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, not it's not worth it in your lifetime. Yes. Yeah. And the thing was like, if they would have given me $20 as a 13 year old, I probably would have appreciated that a lot more than a hundred dollars as an 18 year old was basically the difference at 13. I could have gotten like a premium toy. I could have bought a new video game, anything like that, that I would have gotten more enjoyment out of.
00:06:43
Speaker
By the time it was $100, I was already fed up with capitalism. What are we going to do?
Financial Lessons and Advice
00:06:51
Speaker
Yeah. Also, at that age, you're not making money. You might have an allowance for doing chores, but that would be it. It was fucking negligible. They just wanted to teach me, my parents, these people, they wanted to teach me saving money and investing. I had to do 10% to church tithe and 10% of savings.
00:07:13
Speaker
And then the rest was like my pretty much just candy money or things I could use for snacks that I wanted to go get that I couldn't keep in the house. I had to like go out to the Redners, get whatever, and then like just bring it back in like a hoodie and then like have like a treasure trove of bullshit. You just stashed away candy.
00:07:36
Speaker
Yeah. It'd be great because I'd go in. I actually had a closet that I'd go into. And you remember those glow in the dark stars and moons? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's like thin plastic. You just put them everywhere with a little sticky putty. Yeah, a little bit of putty.
00:07:52
Speaker
Yeah. And I put that all in there. That was like my little vibe room. And it was, to be fair, like this shittiest, smallest thing. But I like go there, hang out, like have some snacks. There was no light, so I couldn't really do much else. Yeah, it's all like this. Yeah. But it was the, oh, he just covered the camera. Yeah. Well, I know I didn't even cover the camera. I turned my phone flashlight down and it goes pitch black instantly.
00:08:23
Speaker
Yeah, those were fun times as a youth. A yout. Yeah. A yout. But also like all
Diving into Elden Ring Obsession
00:08:30
Speaker
of your expenses that you didn't even know you had are covered by other people. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, very slowly over time, they're like, this is your problem. Yeah, I didn't have a slow accrual of expenses. It was more of a, um,
00:08:50
Speaker
As soon as I left home, it all just hit me at once. That's actually, that's a lie because I actually lived with my girlfriend's parents for like a couple of years while I was building residency in Pennsylvania. So they still basically covered my expenses. And then I went to school and then loans covered my expenses, which is almost me, but it's future me. It's not present me that's covering my expenses at that point.
00:09:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's paying it ahead. That's the bank covering it, and then you're like, bank will get you back eventually. Uh-huh. You know I'm good for it. Actually, you don't know I'm good for it. I don't have credit yet. I won't learn what that is for another decade.
00:09:36
Speaker
Oh, I think I told you. When I saw you guys the other day, I have a credit card now for the first time ever. I would clap, but I'm holding the microphone and a phone with a light on it. I've spent maybe like $100 so far. I wasn't sure if you're going to clap because you've moved on.
00:10:01
Speaker
But yeah, now I still need to set up a way to auto pay that off because this is not letting me do it. So I'll call them tomorrow to be like, Hey, figure this shit out because I don't want to pay interest on a thing. I just want to build credit because it's apparently needed. Yeah.
00:10:16
Speaker
I like how we immediately went into like, hey, financial stuff and now I'm like, here's why capitalism is fucked. We can talk about insurance too. We live in, this is a financial podcast where we give financial advice, not advice, but we talk about financial advice. The advice is to finance.
00:10:39
Speaker
Oh, that would be, that'd be a great podcast name. We'll have to see if that exists. If it's just financial vice, the name of a podcast. Cause that would, that would be legit. If that doesn't exist, I'd be kind of surprised. I mean, if you want to really lock it in, uh, I can learn nothing about finances. So we can start a second podcast. There you go. I say second. This is honestly our third. Nobody knows about the other one. Yeah. That's true. Nobody's found it yet.
00:11:08
Speaker
Are we just talking about like before we renamed the podcast? Is that what we're referencing? I just want to pretend there was like another thing where we didn't talk about video games and other stuff is like very, I guess a very nuanced podcast. We are basically red letter media. That's the other one. Ah, I gotcha. Yeah. I mean, talkcast is kind of like that. We basically just.
00:11:33
Speaker
I think normally we ramble for about 10 minutes and then we start talking about video games and talk cast. A lot of times we'll ramble a bit longer. Although red sign is also still talk. It's kind of talk about whatever also. Yeah. Now there's.
00:11:52
Speaker
As we've said multiple times, it's such a finite amount of time in a week and this week, and I can't really talk about it too much because that's a future thing. It's been Elden Ring. I think I was on Discord briefly to say hi to somebody, and then I played a Dota game or two with some other people. That's fucking it.
00:12:15
Speaker
Most of my Discord interactions have actually been talking about Elden Ring between playing Elden Ring. That's fair. I was looking at some memes last night. I think I essentially won before I went to bed, but I was in a
00:12:31
Speaker
what the kids would call a happy place. As I was going to bed, I was just dying at some of them because I'm like, Oh my God, that's so true. Stuff like that. But it's been wholly consuming. It'll probably take another week of my time. Yeah. And then depending on how physically drained I'm after that, I might start another play through.
00:12:56
Speaker
Yeah, I was talking to, it seems like all of my anecdotes are, I was talking to someone like during work hours or talking to a coworker or something like that.
00:13:06
Speaker
Or here's a life lesson that my grandparents tried to teach me. That's it. Those are the two categories of things I talk about. But I was talking to a coworker about Elden Ring, of all things. And he was like, oh, do you have it? I was like, yeah, I'm like 30 hours in. And he was like, oh, okay. I mean, I'm actually behind a lot of people that are playing, though. People are popping off. We didn't take time off for it.
00:13:34
Speaker
So like, you know, maybe it takes like, you have less, less availability, but it's also a game that's so absolutely dense. I almost took time off for it and then did not, and I'm glad I didn't. Cause I need time to decompress. It's better for pacing probably.
00:13:53
Speaker
I took that first Friday off and then I had the weekend, but also work has been so ungodly slow as I've complained about multiple times.
00:14:07
Speaker
During a lot of the workday outside of today, I actually did some stuff today, like a third party call or two. But like, I'm still getting in play time because I'm not doing other stuff. And I've already done like an errand or a chore. And I'm like, that game, I'm really excited. Right. I was I didn't actually I forgot to like actually finish the story talking. No, no, it's good. I forgot legitimately where I was going with it.
00:14:38
Speaker
Um, but, uh, he's like, oh yeah, you know, 30 hours playing the game. And then we literally just went on this, like, I was describing the little things that I love about it. Compared
The Impact of Tension in Gaming
00:14:49
Speaker
like comparisons to previous games and Dark Souls, not the fact that it's open world or breath of the wild or any of that stuff.
00:14:56
Speaker
just like little tiny minor improvements that I absolutely love about it. And then I capped it off with like, oh, so you're going to do like an episode on it. I'm like, yes, at least one. We'll see how many people, how many people stick around after we have Elden Month podcast episodes.
00:15:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it'll be a long one, I'm sure, or broken up into multiple pieces. Wink, ha? Call back.
00:15:28
Speaker
I guess more of a reference. Yeah, that's fair. But I want to I want to pivot off of that. I have so much to say about it. It's like, don't pull the thread because I will be naked in like two seconds. I am I am 95 percent thread. Yeah. I will say very briefly an anecdote. I will definitely have many other anecdotes related to it. But when I was playing the Dota game with people,
00:15:58
Speaker
You've heard of the game Dota? Yeah, it doesn't actually stand for anything anymore. Defense of the attack on Titan of the Dota. But somebody else who I was playing with also picked up the game, and I had watched some of them playing a boss, so I was ahead of them at that time. So I was like, oh, how far have you gotten? What have you done? And he's like, oh, I did this boss. I'm like, oh, I haven't beaten that boss yet, but I have encountered them.
00:16:27
Speaker
And then we're talking about some other stuff. And then it was like 15 minutes of just verbal diarrhea because I had not talked to anybody about anything. It was like so sheltered. Yeah. And then we're like 10 minutes in the game. I'm like, hey, guys, I'm really sorry. I'm going to stop. I'm going to hard cut. Stop talking about it. And we'll go from there.
00:16:44
Speaker
But like there was like four other people we were playing with or I was playing with so this was party chat like this was yeah That's absolutely hilarious like we went through cue we went through like picking heroes and then like we're into the game It's like we got us. I got a stop Yeah, that's really funny actually
00:17:08
Speaker
I just, I wonder if like the other people are like crap. If they like muted you immediately to avoid spoilers or what, you know. I don't think other people were going to play it. Okay. Oh, you were, you were in a party with, was it all, there was no randoms on your team. No, it was discord thing. Yeah. Oh, okay. Oh, you were talking in discord.
00:17:29
Speaker
Yeah, I wouldn't just. So that's, that's what I interpreted. I thought you like straight up grabbed a guy, a friend, and then like joined as a party of two with pubs and then just started talking about. Use the in-game voice chat versus any other voice. That's what was, uh, that's what I think I thought was going down.
00:17:47
Speaker
I can't remember the last time I've actually used VoIP outside of like me asking people in Overwatch what people's favorite flavor of ice cream is. Yeah. And that's really just for shits and gigs. Cause I don't want to talk to strangers ever. Yeah. There's like no benefit in it for me.
00:18:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think if there's a couple of games I've played throughout the years that had like default voice activity on and like that's, that is a sign that one of your developers or at least somebody who like was involved in decision making for the game is actually evil, like morality, evil. Um, I think the division had it cause they had proximity voice chat. Um,
00:18:35
Speaker
I don't hate the concept of it. It just shouldn't be defaulted. It should very much be an opt in. Fallout 76 was the other. So one of those games had some things going for it. It was the division. The division was the game that had some things going for it. I don't think I ever checked that out. It's an interesting concept. I think it would have been
00:19:03
Speaker
It was, you know, like that star Star Wars meme where it's like, we were so close to greatness. Like we were this close. Um, it's, it's basically like that for me, but you can play essentially the game co-op, um, as a shooter. It's kind of got like budget and I don't want to say budget, but like different vibes and kind of like destiny. It's a little more like stop and pop.
00:19:32
Speaker
Oh, a cover shooter. Yeah, it's much more like a cover shooter, but they had like abilities like drones and healing grenades and stuff like that. I don't like them. I don't like cover shooters at all. Yeah. I think Gears of War is actually trash. I just really don't enjoy the style of gameplay.
00:19:55
Speaker
It did really have, it had one really cool concept and that was about it. Cause like that the enemies became kind of like bullet sponges. And if you're an FPS and your opponents are bullet sponges, unless you're literally kind of, even if your border lands, I don't pick particularly enjoy it. There's other games that are just better genres to have enemies that have a bunch of health.
00:20:23
Speaker
Yeah. I feel like for an FPS specifically, it's really about the skill of the aiming and the reaction time. And if somebody just has a fuck ton of health, it's not going to be hard for me to spend three seconds lining up the headshot and then holding down left click while I do all of the ammo. I don't know. It can still work in some things. I don't hate Borderlands, but I don't love it either.
00:20:52
Speaker
Yeah.
Game Mechanics and Lore
00:20:53
Speaker
I think Borderlands was, it was pretty enjoyable like when I played through it, but most of the enemies have the right amount of health. And even the bosses don't take like, they normally don't take that long to kill or their massive scale or something like that. The division wasn't necessarily like that. You'd just be fighting MOOCs, like people who basically are just guys.
00:21:16
Speaker
And if they were high level, they would just have a bunch of health. You're like, oh no, I'm going to have to shoot this guy five times with a shotgun before he dies. And that just feels pointless.
00:21:26
Speaker
although I will say to the redeeming point of The Division, that's not the game that we're talking about, and not Elden Ring. It had the Dark Zone, which was a very novel concept, I feel like, at least for the time. It was like, it was a PVEVP sort of area.
00:21:48
Speaker
where you could group up with people and complete objectives and get loot. It's like messenger bags and things like that, just basically gear.
00:22:01
Speaker
And it's not actually gear until you cash it out, which you can do it like a helicopter drop like call area And then you could go to the helicopter like load your bags onto it And then it would give you loot you could claim when you left the Dark Zone and a lot of it would be like good stuff It'd be like currency. It would be like high-tier gear stuff like that
00:22:21
Speaker
The caveat to all of this is everyone is technically on the same side, they're all agents, but you could, if you want to, just kill another person at any time.
00:22:37
Speaker
at which point you would go rogue and other people would get rewards if they killed you. And if you continued to fight them off and continued to kill them and take their stuff, eventually you just get like this wanted mark on the map. And every other player in the Dark Zone knows exactly where you are at all times. And it was glorious.
00:23:06
Speaker
It was legitimately crazy cuz you could you could get a squad of three people and be like Let's go and then just start killing people and grabbing their stuff and just see how long you could last I Feel like this has evolved to what I currently understand is now Tarkov. Mm-hmm
00:23:24
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. Despite hearing a bunch about Tarkov, I know nothing about it. I can't figure out what the game is. I watched like, let's say 20 minutes of Wubbe streaming it on Twitch. Just why I had like a brief idea. Also, I usually enjoy or find this content entertaining. But it seems like they had a squad and they had like a mission that they were going to do in a giant zone. Right.
00:23:51
Speaker
but there are other people doing other things. So like people could come in and shoot them and steal their shit. Um, it's kind of like, I guess high risk, high reward. Yeah. Because besides like your team, there are other people out with like their own interests. They could be friendly. They could not be friendly. Right. Um, but it's, I guess like trying to get good loot and shoot people for the most part, but it sounds very much like that dark zone. Yeah.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yeah, I kind of prefer that to, I guess these are probably the protoplasm that makes up the battle royale genre, right? It's like, oh yeah, get in an arena and fight a bunch of people. But battle royale is like you explicitly starting as a group and you're explicitly working against other people.
00:24:44
Speaker
There's no truce in a battle royale. Yeah. There's no possible alliances. Yeah. Like it's, it's forced fighting. And I would say part of the joy or appeal of that is it could go wrong at any moment. Yeah. Like, do you remember the days of rust where like we formed alliances with like other players in the server? Cause it was all like,
00:25:09
Speaker
free for all PVP. It's just the people that we played with, we didn't attack each other because we were on Discord and chatting. That would have been weird. Just betray your friends. Do you got something to hop on? No, Dave, you're going to stab me in the back again. Yeah. Yeah, you got me. No, I got him.
00:25:29
Speaker
It was like the making alliances with people and like having truces or pretending to have an alliance with somebody and like sneak in and steal their shit. It's the role play aspect of it to a degree. Yeah.
00:25:45
Speaker
It definitely adds some depth to it when it's a little bit unknown. Maybe the earliest game, other than literally like hidden role games, that is similar to this is something like Daisy, which I didn't play. I didn't play Daisy, but I know that it's a, you know, the traditional, the original at least the mod was like run around.
00:26:07
Speaker
there's zombies, but you could also run into people and maybe they're friendly and maybe they're not and you don't know. Maybe you make friends, maybe you trade, you stab them in the back, they stab you in the back, all that stuff. I like that more because it's always tense. Exactly. Hit it in a role like you know, like with Among Us, you know that there's somebody who's evil. Yeah. And you can like look out for it.
00:26:32
Speaker
But that's like the whole point of the game is to figure that out. Whereas the point of these other games is to do something else entirely. And then you also have to keep an eye out for other players because you don't know them. You don't know their motives. They might be feeling feisty. Mm hmm. Yeah, I don't I don't know where to go with feisty, but yeah, I agree. I and the tension does make a lot of it. I think like we touched on that concept a little bit with
00:27:00
Speaker
like horror games and how this is a different element, right? Cause horror games aren't traditionally PvP unless it's like, I don't know what actually PvP game is a horror game. That's kind of difficult to do dead by daylight. I thought about it. Some of them are kind of creepy.
00:27:18
Speaker
Actually, they the last the last killer they introduced is from the ring and she crawls out of televisions and there's televisions all over the map. So she is literally a jump scare, terrified people killer. So maybe that one counts. But I mean, like all of the villains in that are from horror movies. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I was just talking like.
00:27:42
Speaker
They don't necessarily have to be scary in gameplay in that game, right? Even if you're a survivor, it's tense because, you know, maybe they down you or, you know, worst case, kill you. They sacrifice you to the entity or something, but like. They're not necessarily there to like jump scare you, but some of them, the most recent one actually kind of does so.
00:28:06
Speaker
I feel like I've lost the plot a little bit for your point. Yeah. My point was more something like amnesia or like, I think when we were talking about amnesia, the game was more interesting to me when the tension was high, when I knew there was like, when I thought there was risk.
00:28:23
Speaker
When you remove that feeling of risk, then I became a little bit less invested. You're talking about the feeling of tension in general. Yes, exactly. I also lost the plot a little bit, but that's the origin of the plot. To plot the plot, you put it there.
00:28:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's very much like once you see the monster and just you're like, I'm just going to push through it. Mm hmm. Like it's it's way different than I remember when we talked about this and I I've highlighted it multiple times whenever I talk about this game. Early on, you get into the castle. Things are getting a little bit spoopy. And it's early on giving you some tool tips like press E to interact with something. Press space to actually you can't jump or like find a thing. But when it tells you, hey, press shift to run,
00:29:09
Speaker
And then it doesn't give you any reason to run. It just gives you that piece of information. Right. It's not to overcome a puzzle. Yeah. It just, it instills that in you. You're like, Oh, and that feeling of tension, I think it was like really good because like you're walking around a spooky thing and you're like, when's it going to get spooky? Like it gets the atmosphere correct.
00:29:31
Speaker
Yeah. And I also like that, like in the PvP aspect of it, of these types of games, like lethality is sometimes really high. Like in the division, for instance, if somebody turns on you and they just walked up to you and they shot you with a shotgun, like you're dead. The consequence that they suffer is not that you can immediately
00:29:55
Speaker
commit retribution against them, though you will respond and you get a chance. It's that they're now wanted, right? And other people can kill them with no penalties whatsoever, um, without themselves becoming wanted. So like, yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting dynamic that doesn't fit into all games for sure, but, um, it can be fun.
00:30:20
Speaker
trying to think of other games I play that are like, that could have that degree of tension. Because a lot of times in my brain will go to gamifying a system, or figuring out what like systems are at play. Yeah. So like,
00:30:35
Speaker
not to go into L-Train, but with those types of games, there are times like, oh, I'm learning enemy moves or, oh, I'm just running through something. I'm like, oh, there's a corner in the map. They must've put this on the map for a reason. Let me go check it out.
00:30:53
Speaker
And then usually in other games too, like you might find something and it's different from like freshly discovering it because like you looked at the mini map and you saw like, oh, there's like this little offshoot that I could fit into. Hmm. Let me go check that out. Versus if you didn't have that and you were just exploring and you found it.
00:31:14
Speaker
Yeah. A more like immersive experience as opposed to something super optimized. Yeah. In the same way, like you might abuse interacting with an item to get like iframes or something else like that.
00:31:31
Speaker
I did notice, again, not talking about Elden Ring, that when you mount or dismount the horse, you have iframes. I know this because I went to mount the horse and a massive weapon swung through my hitbox at the exact time and I didn't immediately die.
00:31:48
Speaker
Good to know. Yeah. Gonna start using that in a really important boss fight. I thought about it. I was like, could I actually weave this? Could this be an optimization? No. Because you get it, I think you get it on dismount too. So if you're running around on a horse and you're about to be hit, it actually makes sense to jump off the horse because it gives you eye frames during it, I think. I probably just killed somebody somewhere because they're like, I'm going to try it. And then they get vaporized.
00:32:16
Speaker
What other game systems you try and like, I guess notice and abuse? Hmm. I mean, farming farming is the classic one. If a game lets me farm things, then I'll basically put fun on the back burner sometimes and just be like, all right, I'm going to be here for a bit.
00:32:35
Speaker
Not talking about Elden Ring. Convergence mod was a great example of that. It's Dark Souls 3 mod. It's like legitimately it's non-gameplay to sit there and interact with a bonfire.
00:32:51
Speaker
like leave the bonfire let the enemies passively die in the background and then interact with the bonfire leave the bonfire let the enemies die in the background like it's the definition of not actually playing a game and i didn't care because the efficiency was high i feel like it's
00:33:10
Speaker
For more open world things in general, where they have like different types of enemies, I like that they interact and they're not friendly with each other. That makes sense in world, in game. But if you're just like standing by in the case of like a souls, like you get the souls from it. Yeah, anything you get credit. Or something else, you might get like the items that like drop. So you just kind of like watch. You're like, yes, yes, dance my puppet. And you get free shit.
Gaming for Enjoyment vs. Routine
00:33:39
Speaker
But it would be weird if
00:33:40
Speaker
You had like bats and people just kind of like walking in like whatever their looping path is and they're just like, man, it's fine. It's whatever.
00:33:51
Speaker
Yeah, I know you said, well, you said bats and I'm not sure if you meant like the animal bats or people with bats, but my, it made more sense in context to say like the animal bats. Yeah. Versus like where my brain was like, I was like, yeah, what if it's like West Side Story and there's just people beating each other up and there's some kid off in the background. He just hits level two out of nowhere, passive experience game.
00:34:18
Speaker
I thought of like three tangential, but dark jokes off of that. Yeah. You're just like witness agenda anyway. Yeah. Not firsthand though. So that's good. Um, probably shouldn't have followed up on that one. That's all right. Uh, other things, video games, are you playing anything else besides Dota and Elder Ring?
00:34:48
Speaker
I'm just kidding. I'm still playing hot periodically. Not as much, but occasionally it will clear the dailies. I've done Magic the Gathering dailies, but that's like my eating breakfast, dicking around before work stuff.
00:35:06
Speaker
But it's just because I'll get experience, I can get it for card packs and at some point I will play with some people again. But it's just a thing to do. I don't get massive enjoyment from it, it's just a thing to do. It's like Lost Ark for me.
00:35:26
Speaker
which is I don't know when I'm getting back to that. Yeah. Like it's, it's such different gameplay in comparison. Like I still want to do some group stuff with people cause we never got around to it yet. Um,
00:35:45
Speaker
But yeah, it's just, it's another social game. In the same way, going back to, like you said, you're playing hunts. You're playing that with people at all? You're just doing that? Yeah, if there's solo dailies. If there's people around, they're both fine. I enjoy both modes. It is very much in the same way that I basically played Paragon. It's just they're not all bots in this case. Some of them are people, but the matches are short enough that they might as well be bots, you know?
00:36:10
Speaker
Can we talk about Paragon for a sec? Sure. Game was fucking weird. It was great. There's some cool stuff in it. It's like, hey, here's a MOBA. Hey, it's gonna be third person. Huh? Yeah, there's like verticality and stuff and you can jump.
00:36:26
Speaker
What? I mean, it's also like smite, right? I don't think I played that one. It's basically the same, but smite is more like cartoony and gods and stuff like that. Is it not isometric smite? Is that actually third person? Yeah, it's third person over the shoulder.
00:36:47
Speaker
Um, so I think I'm pretty sure Smite did it first, but Paragon had good graphics and it was like, they tried more for realistic sort of bent on it. And I don't know if there's just a bunch of cool stuff with it, but
00:36:59
Speaker
It did not catch on as much. Let's just say like, so when Blizzard was like, Hey, we're going to cancel the competitive league for hots, a lot of people were upset. And Epic was straight up like, we're going to turn off the Paragon surfers. And I was upset. So that was the difference with the public's reaction.
00:37:23
Speaker
Oh, yeah, it's I know we played it for like a week or two because it was cheap or free or is free. Yeah.
00:37:33
Speaker
I think there's something about like leveling up characters. I'm not sure if it's just for cosmetics or if you got some passive bonus with them. Yeah. So it was kind of similar to the way hots does it where like, as you level the character, you would get what are essentially loot crate drops. And then the loot crates would contain cards that you could equip as part of your build. Uh, okay.
00:37:59
Speaker
So like one card might be like increased self-healing or like damage over time or chase speed if you get hurt or something like that. Like a bunch of like effects like that where certain ones were definitely way better and way more meta, but you could, I guess as I'm describing this, it's literally functionally the same thing as like the league of legends. Yep. I was going to say the rune tree. Yeah. Um.
00:38:25
Speaker
I don't know what it is, but if a game puts that type of effect on a card, I tend to... I don't want to say enjoy it more, but it's more interesting to me than if it was just like a skill tree. And I think that's just because I've played fun card games. And it's literally just a stupid Pavlov dog brain association. When you're playing Back for Blood, motherfucker.
00:38:51
Speaker
So I mean, I like the cards there. They're they're actually really fun. Like it's it's obviously still like Left 4 Dead style gameplay, but I really like that I can hunker down and like, oh, I just do all of the damage with this type of weapon and bullets. Right. And I take penalties to health because of how much ammo capacity I have and I've chosen this life.
00:39:17
Speaker
In general, it's fun to have a build in a game because you're customizing your gameplay to what you want to do versus everybody plays the exact same way. Which again, it's usually fine. Like, Left 4 Dead 2 was just a shooter. Didn't matter which character you had. You're just shooting zombies and shit. It's fine.
00:39:39
Speaker
But it adds another level when it's like, oh, I'm going to I think I'm trying to do it this way. It's like you get to have your brain act on these machinations and it gets the gears turning a little bit. Yeah. If I could jump off of that and just try to explain why I like cards more in the skill trees, I think it's largely because games that have card like meta progression or perks or picks or things like that.
00:40:07
Speaker
Those usually don't have prerequisites in the way a game that has like skill trees does, right? Like if you're, to use Borderlands as an example, if you want an ability at the bottom of the tree, you're putting all these points in and like, maybe you care about the skills on the way, maybe you don't.
00:40:25
Speaker
Then you get to the end result and you're like, awesome, I've unlocked the thing. Whereas the feeling you're describing of like
Skill Trees vs. Cards Debate
00:40:33
Speaker
picking things for your build and you're like, ooh, I could have some of this and some of this and some of this. Like the part of your brain that activates and like pumps happy drugs into you is better activated when each one of those choices doesn't need to be polluted by having to make like
00:40:53
Speaker
a concession along the way, an empty, you know, something in a skill tree you don't care about or something like that. Yeah. It's nice to have it flattened.
00:41:02
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. To use like Lost Ark as an example. I've only played the game like literally twice. I put a lot of time into it and I played the game like twice. You have to like put points into each skill to unlock, I think like three tiers of upgrades is where I was at. And sometimes I'd be looking at that third tier upgrade and I'm like, ooh.
00:41:26
Speaker
If I get this, it turns it into like a massive AOA that kills everything on the screen and then it crashes the server. And that sounds pretty good to me right now. But these first two options are garbage, right? You like don't care about those as much, but you really want that third one.
00:41:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, hey, I'll change your damage type to this other thing. You're like, I don't even know what damage types are. Right. Hey, I'll make this thing like 20% wider. You're like, what the fuck's 20%? Yeah. It's just, it feels very negligible versus like, here's the big one. Yeah.
00:41:57
Speaker
I just had a thought when you were like, I don't even know what damage types are. You're like, what if it just changed it to healing? Your text now heal your enemies. But I mean like in that game specifically, I don't know the weaknesses of enemies. I don't think they make it super apparent, at least from what I've seen. So if I'm doing like fire versus lightning versus bleed,
00:42:20
Speaker
Okay. Like maybe the color of my damage number changes. I don't, that's it. Like, yeah. I know more damage is better. And beyond that, I'm fucked. I don't know. Has it been long enough that I can talk about the things that really kind of turned me off on Lost Ark?
00:42:41
Speaker
Yeah. We just can't talk about Elden Ring anymore. It's really hard. I'm literally picturing Elden Ring like while you were describing everything with the damage types. I was like, I wonder if lightning is good against dragons in this game.
00:42:56
Speaker
Now I'm thinking about it again. Anyways, Lost Ark. So one of the things, and I didn't want to be a downer while people were still super aggressively pursuing it. Or also just give the game not a fair shake. It's to a certain extent unfair to critique something on a principle of the type of game that it is instead of comparing it to its peers within that space.
00:43:22
Speaker
In which case I think Lost Ark does fine. But like I really don't...
00:43:30
Speaker
I don't mind doing dailies occasionally. I don't want to have to do something every day. Or I feel like I'm missing out. And Lost Ark is straight up like, you should probably have like six characters and you should probably do something every day or you're not really playing the game the way that we want you to. And if that's not true,
00:43:55
Speaker
If they didn't want you to spend all of your energy at your island or whatever, they didn't make it very clear to me. And every time I saw it, I just remembered like never winter and how that game was straight up like daily, daily, daily, daily, daily. You're done with your dailies. Your reward is the ability to do more dailies. I was like, I kind of just want like a story or something or anything that I care about.
00:44:22
Speaker
I mean, that's an MMO. So I think it's more indicative of the genre that you're just farming dailies out the ass. Yeah.
00:44:34
Speaker
I mean, you can still do other stuff too. Like you can, oh, we're doing a raid at seven. So we'll do some like dailies between six and seven and then play a raid with people and then fuck off or something. But I, I don't think I've ever had a, every single day game. Right. Besides Dota. Well, I need to vice it. Hold on now, Jacob. Bring us some very fair points. Um,
00:45:02
Speaker
But I would say that those are different because I enjoyed playing those. Yeah. So that was just the game that I was playing at the time. They don't have dailies unless you're counting the Battle Pass for Dota maybe. True. But I think if I'm very much in the mood of a game,
00:45:21
Speaker
I guess this could apply to MMOs as well. That's what I'm doing. Dota was my main game for a bit and it was my social game, so I played a lot. It was familiar, it was comfortable, and Binding of Isaac was the same way as a single player experience.
00:45:40
Speaker
I don't know where I was going with that whole train of thought. Cause again, that could still technically apply to MMOs if you enjoy it in the same way. Right. I mean, to finish your thought in a way that maybe you didn't intend, a lot of people play MMOs and games like Lost Ark, which is, I mean, it is an MMO, um, like not necessarily for enjoyment or story or single player experience or whatever it's more for.
00:46:07
Speaker
That last one I actually shouldn't have even included in my example. Playing with friends in an MMO, I think can be a lot of fun. And there's a lot of MMOs out there that seem to not care about that part of it at all, or like they don't really cater to it. And doing the same thing over and over for no reason. It's like, it's like grinding greater riffs in Diablo or something like that, where it's like,
00:46:35
Speaker
Maybe you're getting gear or whatever, but it's not radically different gameplay, you know? Hitting a button to send people off on an expedition is just like...
00:46:47
Speaker
I don't know. It feels like I'm poking. I'm prodding at little weaknesses, waiting for something to snap. But it's more just the density of tasks that the game has. I dislike. I actually want the game to have fewer things to do. And I realize that doesn't make any sense from a certain perspective, because I don't have to do them. I could just choose not to interact with these systems. There's two types of people.
00:47:15
Speaker
I'm just watching the bar and it was almost full of your voicing like, I better say something. But there's two types of people. There's people who they see a little notification. They're like, I got to click it. I got to clear it. Whereas people would be like, all emails are read. All notifications you responded to. There's other people who were like, I don't give a shit. I've gone from one to two.
00:47:41
Speaker
I used to do it a lot more and now I can't be asked sometimes. Yeah. Are you the person who feels the need to clear stuff if they're like, hey, here are these things you can do? Yeah. I think once I've cleared everything on the current Elden Ring map, I can proceed to the next main boss. I think that's the type of person that I am. Okay. So you want to complete and explore as much as possible in something?
00:48:11
Speaker
Knowing that I've left things undone or that I'm like leaving efficiency on the table kind of bothers me. It's like if you saw a collectible in a game and you only had to go out of your way a little bit to get it and you don't care about collectibles at all. I'm the type of person who gets the collectible anyways.
00:48:37
Speaker
like, not because I enjoy it. In fact, I resent the game for having the collectible in the first place. And I could choose not to interact with it. This is the, what is it, not drama. It's like the paradox in my thought process here. But I know that if I don't go out of my way to pick up that collectible, that will haunt me for the rest of my play time. So.
00:49:06
Speaker
It's tough. I sympathize, but I can't really- Sniper monkey. I don't know.
00:49:20
Speaker
I like collecting some things like in Elden Ring, I'm enjoying getting different pieces of armor and weapons because it's all bright and new and shiny and I'm just curious about it, right? Yeah. But at the same time, I'm not going to get every single piece in this playthrough or every single spell or whatever, but part of it for me is like
00:49:42
Speaker
I'll be excited when I watch a lore video and they're like, hey, with this one thing, I'm like, oh my God, I didn't even know that was a thing. So it takes my universe of the gameplay experience and just widens it even further, which is saying a lot. But I like that extra bit of discovery. I don't need to always necessarily have it for myself. I would like to.
00:50:06
Speaker
It's just in the same way. If we're sharing some of our experiences in our playthroughs right now, and I'm excited to see what things you find that I've encountered, and maybe you'll say, oh, did you do XYZ? I'm like, what? It's like that shared
00:50:22
Speaker
It's the discovery. It doesn't need to come in like a single universal package. Yeah. I mean, I would make the argument and I don't know if you're even disagreeing necessarily, but I would make the argument. There's a fundamental difference between like running a daily or collecting a pigeon or a sea shanty or taking down a poster of you.
00:50:44
Speaker
I seem to be picking on Assassin's Creed a lot right now, so getting a Korok seed and finding a new weapon potentially, an Elden Ring, where you get to check out the description and maybe it has a little bit of lore that is about something that you're interested in, or you just look at the weapon and you're like,
00:51:05
Speaker
I'm not that many points of strength off. Those are gameplay impacting things. I would say the other difference is one is you don't know how many things there are versus, in something like Assassin's Creed, they're like, hey, there's this many things. How many things do you want to do? It lets you know that there is a thing you could do.
00:51:30
Speaker
versus you finding out something that you didn't know was there. Right. It's like, but they also realize that all of these people whose lives you're experiencing, they're all kleptomaniacs and they picked up every single thing that they ever saw if you want that full synchronization. So it's like, Oh no, at COE collected pigeons. No one really knows why, but he had like thousands of them, you know, like,
00:51:56
Speaker
Secretly, Mike Tyson. How do you feel about collecting things physically, like having an interactable versus you just walk near it and it's like you got that shit?
00:52:12
Speaker
I thought for a second we were gonna like step away from video games for a second. I'm like I have no idea I guess I've got some books My possessions are like a computer and a bed very happy about the bed that was relatively That came late in my my life you guys boots on for a long time, right? Oh
00:52:34
Speaker
Well, we had a bed to be fair. We had no bed frame. It depends how much elevation you want. I thought that was the case, but as soon as I got the bed frame, I was like,
00:52:49
Speaker
Why is it so easy to get out of bed in the morning? Oh, right. Because I don't have to like overcome gravity every single time. But yeah, I mean, in games, it probably depends. There's games that don't have an auto collect. And I'm like, this should really be an auto collect for like currency or something like that. Absolutely. Don't make me pick up trash off the ground with a button.
00:53:16
Speaker
My controllers lasted a long time, but it's not going to be around forever. You're just killing it. You're just taking some time off its lifespan.
00:53:26
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, otherwise, I kind of like the way that Elden Ring does it, where it's like, souls? Yeah, don't worry about that. You'll collect those a mile away if something like freaking looks, thinks about dying and just vanishes from existence. But like, oh, that's a nice painting. You get to like walk up to it, take a look at it. That's different.
00:53:51
Speaker
Because that, I would argue, is a collectible versus some of the plants and flowers you can manually pick up. Oh, I see what you mean. So low-tier gatherables and things like that. Yeah, so this is off of, I think, Nakey Jakey's video on Last of Us 2. Oh, yeah, yeah. He's kind of condemning the, you have to go around a mashed triangle to get all the screws and other things, whereas you could just
00:54:20
Speaker
I don't know. Yeah, just just had them. I think you could. For that game in particular, for the last of us, holding the button would have been a much better compromise if you're holding the button, you just pick up stuff around you. I'd be fine with that. I don't like going over something and then I have to like maybe I'm running away from like an enemy. I have to like mash the button. Yes, if I'm by it, just just give me the thing like.
00:54:49
Speaker
For craftable ingredients, 100% that should have been the case for Elden Ring. Because I find myself in the same experience. This is basically quality control 101. What is the behavior of the people who actually play your game? And in Elden Ring, if you are going from one place to another,
00:55:08
Speaker
or you're going around an area that has things you want to pick up, you're mashing the button. You're not waiting for that prompt to come up on your screen, particularly if you're doing this efficiently and you're on a fast horse, right? You're just mashing the button, which is dumb, and it's not really particularly gameplay. And the reason people do it is it is the most efficient way to just pick up crap.
00:55:32
Speaker
I would argue that that is the thing that's wrong with Elden Ring.
00:55:40
Speaker
Like, it makes more sense to have an interactable in something like Monster Hunter, where you're going to like a node specifically to get things. And there's also an animation involved with some of those collectibles. Most of them probably not. Versus it just disappearing. Yeah, right. Into the magical inventory. Yeah, so if it's going to do that for any game, I'd say just let me being adjacent to it or walking over it.
00:56:07
Speaker
Just give me the item. Yeah, I don't think it's adding a lot to be like oh you pressed Y you now have a thing Congratulations on this brand new gameplay. Nah If you have infinite inventory space and then excess that you pick up just goes to your stash There's no downside. It's automatically picking it up
00:56:29
Speaker
Now maybe the downside would be that the developers kind of like muck it up and they're just sending a pickup command like thousands of times a second and it actually introduces legitimate lag to the game. But that was, there was a mistake. A mistake was made along the path there. I'm imagining you running through like, maybe there's some like very dense area and you just like see all these notifications. Like all these things just flying in your image. Yeah. That's actually that, that's one of the, um,
00:56:59
Speaker
I didn't expect this to segue to Lost Ark, but that's the pet quest, right? It's legitimate. I'm going to spoil this. I don't even care. It's Lost Ark. I don't get Lost Ark. There's not a story. It's legitimately just like, hey, here's a chest, and there's some problem or whatever, and a billion carrots fall out of it. And the game's like, all right, get to work. And you pick up all the carrots, and you're like, button, button, button, button, button, button, button.
00:57:27
Speaker
And then you get a pet and the pet like picks up everything in like two seconds. It's like and this is why you have a pet. Elden Ring needs a little bunny pet. Follows you around, picks up all the stuff. Oh my god, it's that game of pets. DLC 1, this is how we make it a perfect game.
00:57:47
Speaker
I would spend decent money on a pet. I just want an unusual ghastly gibbous in Elden Ring, that's what I want. It's a TF2 hat, yeah, with some particle effects. How much would you pay for a cosmetic in a game today? Or would you at all?
00:58:10
Speaker
Is there any game where it would add something? You're like, I wouldn't drop five, 10 bucks. Right. Normally the answer is just straight up no, but that's actually a lie. Hmm. That's a lie. I have in my lifetime, but overwatch loot boxes. I also like bringing up the Dota story. Yeah. Oh, right, right, right. Well.
00:58:33
Speaker
Yeah, I guess when I was thinking of cosmetic, I was thinking like, oh, here's a hat or like a jacket or some sort of clothes change.
Spending on Game Cosmetics
00:58:40
Speaker
Enigma's bracers, Enigma's golden bracers in Dota. Those are something else. Cause they make your ultimate look super cool. Yeah. Holy crap. It looks cool. And I spent way too much money on those.
00:58:57
Speaker
Probably not that. Probably not that again. I'd like to believe that I learned my life lesson because I think that was like a hundred dollars or something. Also, I want to explain for anybody who's not aware, this was tied with a battle pass. So as you get levels in a battle pass, you can get unlockables, cosmetics, other shit.
00:59:17
Speaker
So jake spent a bulk amount to level up his battle pass really quickly to get to that point it was like he saw the thing is like hundred dollars for these bracelets yeah no i didn't and there was other stuff there but i didn't care about anything else on the way to it right.
00:59:35
Speaker
Um, probably not. I feel like I don't, this might actually just straight up be a lie. I'll preface what I'm saying with this might be a lie, but it was an early battle pass. It may have even been the first one. It was the first or second battle pass for the international. And I don't think it was as, it was as easy to level like free for the first couple that came out. Um, but I could also just be wrong and I was really, it's been too long for me to say really impatient. And I just wanted the golden braces.
01:00:07
Speaker
Now, though, I don't know if there's a game that I'm playing where I really care about cosmetics to that degree, even if it's like Overwatch. I kind of just have cool things on each character, so I don't feel like I have to have. You know, I want cool things for the characters that I play, but I've had like. What is it?
01:00:32
Speaker
the vampire hunter, Cassidy. And like that one's really cool. And like a couple cool ones for Reaper. But those can also be unlocked in game. Yes, right. I'm just saying there was a time when I was playing Overwatch where I was like, that is a really cool skin. And I bet that if I pick up like 30 loot boxes right now, I could probably get it. Gotcha. Yeah. So I would I would count that as equivalent.
01:01:00
Speaker
because I was still, you know, spending IRL money and the pursuit of it. I don't know if you landed on a number, but it sounds like you wouldn't spend any money today. Yeah, I mean, maybe like 15 bucks if I really liked it, I would think. Okay. But I just don't play that many games, I think, right now where I both need cosmetics and would be interested in them.
01:01:30
Speaker
I feel like it also have to be a multiplayer game that you played a lot with people. Oh yeah. Like who would ever buy a cosmetic in a single player game? You just turn around and show Jenny, like, Hey, check this out. She's like, cool. It was worth it. It's kind of evil. I actually, I don't know. I have mixed thoughts on that, but I feel like we should save some of that for the cosmetic episode.
01:01:57
Speaker
Where we talk about all the cosmetics and, uh, I was trying to think of a meshing. Maybe that is that you're talking about like the, actually creating the models for the cosmetics. I guess. I don't know. Yeah. I wasn't gonna go with maybe she's born with it. Maybe she spent money on loot boxes, but it is late. Um, it's also very dark.
01:02:24
Speaker
outside of the light that my phone is producing. But, um, if it's not dark where you're at, or if it is dark, but you're still awake, you could send in episodes for other episode like top. Wait, no, you can't send in episodes. That'd be funny though. Hey, record throne. Send it in. You can take my spot, but send in ideas for future episodes if you have them.
01:02:49
Speaker
Or if you don't, that would actually be pretty funny too. Just up some podcast at gmail.com. Or you could join the discussion on Facebook or meta at facebook.com slash up some podcasts. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a straight up bangin' evening.