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S2 Ep76: Talkcast v3 and The Outer W**lds
85 Plays6 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as Jake forces Dave to talk about The Outer Worlds and then they jump into upcoming games and trailers!
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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 Banter
00:00:32
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave?
00:00:39
Speaker
I'm halfway through my beer, so it's getting progressively better. It's the gradient to happiness, really. Beer is a gradient, or is it from light beer to dark beer, or is it the thickness of beer? I'm not familiar, actually. Or just volumetrically, a little bit of beer or two, a lot of bit of beer. Yeah. I can't really comment on any of those attributes. Well, you don't have gradients work, right? Well, I know. Yeah, yeah. I've used Photoshop. I assume it's like that.
00:01:08
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I just wasn't sure what the analogous comparison was for beer. Yeah. I'm not super familiar with the, uh, the attributes of beer. But yeah, it's just, it's been a weird day, but also week. So please help send news, send news. Yeah. How's, uh, is it, has it been adequately spooky for Halloween? Cause we are recording this on Halloween.
00:01:36
Speaker
I like how the Halloween episode was recorded before Halloween. Yeah. Well, but people aren't going to listen to this until they've already forgotten about Halloween. That's true. You're not going to listen to this on Halloween unless you've waited a good long time. In which case, hello from the past. What are you doing? If you didn't listen to the previous episode and you want more Halloween goodness, don't listen to this one. Just go to that one. Nothing terribly spooky.
Personal Story: Diwali Fireworks
00:02:01
Speaker
Recently it was Diwali the Indian festival of lights Oh Paraphrasing on what the actual holiday is right? It's not uncommon to set off fireworks and firecrackers Yeah, and one of my neighbors who will be unnamed because I don't know who who did it right somebody set off a Firecracker and it went off right next to my window. Now. There's a fucking gunshot. I was a good 10 minutes Until I heard firecrackers afterwards Mike Okay
00:02:31
Speaker
It's just a firefight. Thank God. When you're confident that they're not shooting specifically at you, they're shooting at each other, then you're good. Then you're good. You can step away from the situation. Well, I mean, if it was a gunshot, I want to, like, peep out the window like, oh, who is it? And they'd be like, that guy's a witness. Get him. Yeah. He showed his face for some reason.
00:02:53
Speaker
Yeah, now I'm not familiar with that. I feel like everybody's got a festival of lights. If you went to see lights in concert, that would always be a festival of lights, actually. I feel like this is a band I should know or I've definitely heard of, but I'm not recalling anything they've done.
00:03:11
Speaker
I'll be honest, I'm kind of just banking on the fact that there's a band named Lights. I'm not familiar either, but it's definitely an Ellie Goulding song. Yeah. I don't know if she's still in Vogue or not. I don't know if she was ever on Vogue.
00:03:27
Speaker
Oh, in vogue. Yeah. Yeah. I gotcha. Yeah. I was waiting for the shooting. Great. I was like, I'll give you credit. Yeah. Uh, no, it's such a common word. There's gotta be a band out there named lights. We'll come back and use some of their music for the intro. It'll be, it'll be fun. We won't do that. We might do that. We won't do
Gaming News: Outer Worlds vs. Fallout
00:03:44
Speaker
that. Uh, today though, you mentioned news. There's a little bit of it stuff going on. Yeah. Talk about some stuff we've maybe played recently. Talk about some news.
00:03:54
Speaker
Get into it Don't get into it shake head Shake it off, but also I was saying like don't steal Philip DeFranco's thing. Let's get into it Oh is that I didn't even realize that was the thing. Yeah Does he have like a show or he has a YouTube channel where he does news? Oh
00:04:17
Speaker
Ah, okay. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I forget that Philip DeFranco is like a YouTuber. I know he's very popular. Versus what? Like there's the actor DeFranco.
00:04:33
Speaker
What's his first name? He was in the, um, James Franco, James Franco. There you go. Not DeFranco is. Well, there is also a Dave Franco who's married to Alison Brie, who, I mean, I hate Brie as a cheese. I've never found the appreciation for it, but I think she's very attractive and talented.
00:04:51
Speaker
Interesting not familiar, but she's married to a david. What up? Self high five. Okay. She's just me clapping right? That was just a That's the same thing yeah But yeah, I guess the first thing people are talking about a little bit, but I I spent some time playing the outer worlds actually took time off for it and the best part about this is that
00:05:15
Speaker
Bethesda has been screwing up fallout for a long time what no and I mean we've talked about it in the past right like we had and we'll talk about it again all right as long as they continue to screw up or if at some point they stop screwing up those are both newsworthy items at this point they're doing stuff guys
00:05:33
Speaker
Returning to neutral would be an improvement for them at this point. Newsworthy improvement. So you made that comparison. Does that mean that Outer Worlds is akin to a Fallout game?
00:05:45
Speaker
It is really similar actually, but I was going to start with the fact that Bethesda has done everything they can to possibly help Outer Worlds sales. The first time Outer Worlds was announced, their trailer basically was like,
00:06:05
Speaker
from the makers of Fallout. Like, all of this stuff, they want you to know that Black Isle devs that worked on the original Fallout are actually at Obsidian. And this was all around the original travesty of Fallout 76, like, in response to that. Like, they rode that wave. They're just like, hey, you know how Fallout sucks now? Remember how it didn't always suck? Come check out our game. It's gonna come out in a year.
00:06:32
Speaker
And then as though on cue, when, um, right before outer wilds released this year, I think it was like the week before, uh, Bethesda came out with fallout first. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. From what I've heard from the vitriolic internet, it is a subscription based, uh, service where it's kind of like followed 76, but online and multiplayer, which sounds like a lot like fallout 76, weirdly enough.
00:07:02
Speaker
It's like, it's like an addition to the game. It's like you bought the game and you're, you're playing the game, but would you like to pay more money for more features for the game you've already bought? And this game that also has microtransactions. So what are they incentivizing with from the fallout first side of things?
00:07:22
Speaker
So the big features they were trying to sell with it was private servers so you can play just with your friends instead of joining like a public world and unlimited stash space, which is interesting. So like one of the mechanics in the game was you had to collect a bunch of trash because they introduced that with Fallout 4.
00:07:39
Speaker
like just actual trash garbage aluminum cans all of that and you could only you need to use it for crafting a bunch of the things you can actually produce ammunition you have to store that somewhere like you have to store gear you find that you don't want to equip right now anything you want to store somewhere it goes in your stash
00:08:00
Speaker
And i'm familiar with storing things i'm a hoarder. Yeah, it goes in your mustache right there right up there So people have limited stash space you have more stash space than I have because I can't grow out the mustache tweedle But when uh when 76 came out they were like, all right, well you only get like I think it was like 300 pounds of trash, which fills up really fast When you consider like armor might take, you know, 10 15 pounds have your stuff whatever
00:08:29
Speaker
you'd run out of space really quickly. So they're like, all right, we're going to bump that up after like the beta or whatever to 400 pounds, but we can't go any higher because it will destabilize the game. Which is funny because the game was never fucking stable.
00:08:46
Speaker
It's also hilarious from a technical standpoint because it's like if you had to store items in a box, right? You can think of like a thousand ways to do that programmatically that wouldn't destabilize the game if there was a bunch of items in that box, right? Yeah, they couldn't do that. So they're like, if we increase the stash size, like servers are going to start crashing.
00:09:15
Speaker
I don't know. But anyways, all of that leads up to this. Fallout First has the feature Unlimited Stash Space. So I guess they fixed the bug in like the year of downtime they had. They didn't want to fix the game, but they're like, we can charge money for that fix. Yeah. That'd be real neat.
00:09:34
Speaker
So the two features that they've largely tried to sell here are private servers and unlimited stash space. Unlimited stash space, as it turns out, comes with a slight downside for some players. If they had Fallout first, their stash would start deleting their items. They would just cease to exist. So you'd go to bank something and it just goes away instead. So, you know, that's a pretty good buy for a subscription. It's
00:10:03
Speaker
It's like the Donald Trump of video games. It keeps failing comedically. We're like, it can't possibly get any worse, right? Yeah. Right. And then they take it as a challenge. Yeah. Now I'm the best at doing words. So I'm not sure if like they've just been consistently fucking up and they're trying to cover up their mistakes and just be like, well, it's not us. Or they're trying to spin it in a way where it's, they're still okay in the public eye. Yeah.
00:10:32
Speaker
I don't know. The other feature was broken too, the private server thing. One, if anyone on your friends list, anyone on your friends list could join with you. Admittedly, this game's not on Steam. It's Bethesda's friends list. So like, who has friends that's still playing Fallout 76? So basically their unit test case was invalid because they're like, well, this guy has like one friend, so he can play with him. Cool.
00:10:55
Speaker
And then they would the instance your private instance that gets generated was just reused from a public instance. So like NPCs might be dead gear might be like already looted. It's basically you're like in the trash world of that someone else has gone through already. So.
00:11:12
Speaker
Every part that they tried to market was broken. And it was real dumb. And this was basically a week before the launch of Outer Worlds, which already was advertising as a competitor to Fallout pretty much. So I have a working theory that there's someone on the inside at Bethesda and they're like, all right, how do we tear all of this down?
Outer Worlds: Features and Themes
00:11:37
Speaker
Yeah, we'll add a subscription to our game with terrible reviews and microtransactions right before a competitor launches. Is it possible that they're just that dumb? I don't know. Like, I mean, I imagine they have to have a marketing department or like a PR department or somebody with access to the internet.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yeah, like they have to understand like public feedback. Now, to be fair, as much as we're going to talk shit on Fallout 76 or Fallout first, there are people who are like diehard. Bethesda fans will still be invested in it and buy it. There's just not that many anymore. That's the problem. Yeah, but.
00:12:20
Speaker
I think you might be onto it though. Like I think, I think this may actually be a purely financial decision. Like obviously it's a cash grab, but usually cash grabs, they like, they'll put at least a layer of facade on it. They're just like, Oh, we'll spay print a smiley face on this cash grab. But this one just like breaks into your home and kicks you out of your bed, like lifts up your mattress and grabs your money and leaves. Like they knew they had to have known how obviously bad a decision this was.
00:12:50
Speaker
So the people who own the outer worlds, that is an entirely different entity? Yes, obsidians out on their own, independent. The last interaction they had in the Fallout universe was Fallout New Vegas. Hmm.
00:13:06
Speaker
A part of me wonders out of my depth of cynicism. Yeah. In the same way, you might have like, um, raid, which is like an anti-bug or bug spray. I hate bugs. I hate bugs. We've established this. Don't podcast back.
00:13:23
Speaker
But like they also own other like non name brand, bucks raised. So typically if you go through consumers mind, they'll be like, well, I don't want to pay $6 for this name brand thing, but I can get something that's comparable at a generic price, like two to three bucks. But you get to think it's generic.
00:13:42
Speaker
But it's just called bug spray. I know what it is what it's supposed to do you get it doesn't end up working as Well as you'd hoped you're like, okay. I'll buy the good stuff. Yeah Trick is a lot of those times the company owns both things. Yeah, so you technically they're getting all of that money It's not like you're like, okay, I guess I'll give the the big company the money Yeah, they've been getting all the money
00:14:07
Speaker
it's like what it's like when the people that own camel cigarettes bought jewel vapes it's like yeah it doesn't matter what you choose we're gonna win but the thing the thing does make me sincere is they are completely separate companies so there's not even that justification right like it's it's pretty absurd
00:14:29
Speaker
And I'm sure we won't hear anything else about Fallout 76 and it'll never come back up in the news. Give it a month. Give it a month. Let's talk about the good parts of Outer Worlds because you've actually spent time playing it. What are some things that they really do right or that pay homage to back when Fallout was not shit?
00:14:49
Speaker
Right. So the, the first standout thing is the, the writing. I think like you've played a fair amount of, um, if not with the Bethesda's RPGs, you've played like, you put a lot of time to Skyrim, right? Sure. I just see you stare off into the distance. I've definitely murdered some innocents. Yes.
00:15:10
Speaker
So Bethesda occasionally has a hit with a good NPC where they're like, okay, this one's interesting. But for the most part, it's easy to treat them all as NPCs. They don't have a ton of personality, they're just a top-level trope and they're done.
00:15:28
Speaker
Yeah. Um, they're not nuanced. Yeah. Like they don't have hidden motivations or anything like that. And obsidian on the opposite side has had like really in-depth characters or characters that, uh, like at surface level are a trope. And then if you dig like a little bit deeper, they have a lot more going on. Um, and the writing in this is, uh, like pretty exceptionally, uh, like obsidian grade. It's, it's way better.
00:15:57
Speaker
Um, and I'm, I'm thinking of, uh, some examples in particular, like, uh, there's one where you find a crashed ship and, uh, there's a final log left by the navigator and in like a perfect like monotone droning sort of voice, the lady, uh, recalls.
00:16:21
Speaker
all of the nonsense the captain has done recently and how they're just they're all about to die and she's like I'm done with this she's like you can't see me now and I'm just like flipping him the bird as hard as I can before the ship crashes and it's freaking hilarious like it's moments like that that you don't really get in like Bethesda as much
00:16:43
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. NPCs will sometimes say things just completely off the cuff that made me stop and think about it a little bit and be like,
00:16:56
Speaker
That was an exceptionally piece, exceptionally good piece of writing. Um, something that I definitely wouldn't get in like run of the mill game. Very rarely do games make me slow down and be like, that was hilarious. Like, or that was absolutely appropriate. And I get that a lot more in obsidian games. So would you say it's more human in a way? Cause like a lot of times when I go through AAA games,
00:17:22
Speaker
I mean, tropes are what they are because it's what people understand and can refer to. Right. Like, you know, and that's like the jock bully type and you know kind of how you'd expect that person to act. So it's really easy to have like some simple dialogue. You're like, that's the bully. Exactly.
00:17:37
Speaker
And I, I think about that sometimes too. I like, we've all spent tons of times, tons of time, uh, consuming media. We all have tropes we can rely on. Like this guy is like the lone ranger. That guy is like the Joker. That guy is like Batman, you know, whatever, right? Uh, you could pick a character and be like, that's Morty from Rick and Morty, or that's Rick from Rick and Marty, something like that. Um, or, you know,
00:18:01
Speaker
The other character is from Rick and Morty. I was going to say, was his name Doc Martin? Doc Martin is the shoe, but it also could be Doc Martin. I just remember being called Doc. The Doc from Back to the Future. The original Rick. We all have these kind of frames of reference.
00:18:19
Speaker
I think that's fine, especially for eccentric characters, but it takes a moment of involved writing to go beyond those tropes with characters and make them actually interesting.
00:18:35
Speaker
So that's somewhere like they really excel. I've talked to some other people who are playing the game recently and the things they most often bring up is like, hey, I was having this conversation with this NPC and they totally just said this and I lost it. I'm like, yeah, that's exactly that's exactly what the outer worlds is like.
00:18:54
Speaker
Um, would you say it's uh zany in the way that like borderlands is that's because I feel like a lot of that I haven't played as much as you have obviously I didn't even play three Or two or one. Um Or the pre-sequel. Yeah, I played very little borderlands but a lot of those character designs as far as like dialogue itself seem to be like Kind of zany like hey check this random shit out
00:19:18
Speaker
Yeah Yeah, like I think the standout character in borderlands is definitely handsome jack like they can never beat him again, right? They can't compare I played borderlands 3 there's some cool characters. None of them compare with handsome jack. It's still They almost went too hard on making that character evil and lovable at the same time um
00:19:42
Speaker
And I think a lot of that's present here, but it's tempered in a way that's really true to the roots of Fallout. Because if you go back to Fallout 1, there was atrocities taking place. Terrible things happened over the course of the game. And then they would have a random event that's the Monty Python bridge with the riddle. Literally the same thing.
00:20:12
Speaker
So there's these moments of levity that kind of adds to the absurd nature of the wasteland. And you have to have an understanding of like how humor works and how you can switch between depressing and like really humorous really quickly to really like live in that space. And Bethesda struggled with it, I think.
00:20:37
Speaker
But I think the comparison to Borderlands is actually really strong, especially since it's not a spoiler. One of the main features of the game is all of these corporations are vying for control and they own people's lives to an absurd extent in the game.
00:20:56
Speaker
So like you can basically build up reputation with all of them if you are the corporate lackey or you can work against their interests and make them hate you to a certain extent.
00:21:09
Speaker
or kill everybody, uh, which is an option in the game. Uh, it's not, it's not an option I took advantage of in my play through, but, um, under the hardest difficulty, which is called supernova. Um, all of the NPCs except your party members are non-essential and in supernova difficulty, there are no essential NPCs.
00:21:34
Speaker
You can literally kill everyone to the detriment of your well-being. And the story accommodates it, which is crazy. They're like, what if one person's a murder hobo? No, no, no, we can work, but thanks.
00:21:49
Speaker
What if my answer to ever having to engage with an NPC is to kill them? We can find out now in the Outer Wilds or the Outer Wilds. Outer Wilds is a different game entirely. You said Outer Wilds like three times and I've not called you on it? Heavy, really. Oh, no. Alright. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, that's also another good game, but we haven't had an episode on that. No. It's different. It's good to know that they are stealing that one cool idea from Undertale. Yeah.
00:22:15
Speaker
Yeah, the genocide route. Yeah, it's really solid there. The things I noticed probably most on my first playthrough is just improvements in the pacing of RPGs. Going back to your experiences in Skyrim, how often did you actually use potions in your inventory?
00:22:41
Speaker
I mean, if I got hit by a bear, and I saw my health rapidly deproaching to like two, I'd be like, I'm gonna rub some red shit all over my face. You just start smashing health potions against your face rapidly. And the shards of glass cause you to bleed. The blood is actually the health potion.
00:23:01
Speaker
And I think that's how like most people played that it was either Chug hundreds of potions in response to immediate damage Excuse me, and in response to immediate damage Or use it to like tank dragon fire with constant health regen effects or like do the same thing with cheese wheels But all the other cool potion effects that you're like man I could totally use the potion of invisibility if I wanted to sneak past a guard or something like that You never do it
00:23:30
Speaker
I saved for the final boss. I saved for new game plus. Save it for the final boss and then just like he dies to arrows. Stop putting lectures in games. Thanks. It's like it's been an issue kind of for a while. Like how do you deal with consumables? You can go back to like Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy 7. You're like, no, no, I'm going to need to hold on to those like X potions or whatever they were called. And then you beat the game and you're like, that probably could have been done more efficiently.
00:24:00
Speaker
Not not naming names. I think Dark Souls does it pretty well. Yeah, it's like hey you have a finite amount of resources You're gonna get fucked up on some things. Yeah Cuz a lot of times you're like, okay. Well, I know the boss over here I want to save my health potion for the boss to make that fight easier by dying less and
00:24:20
Speaker
But then like maybe on the way to the boss You make a mistake and some people slap you up a bit. Yeah, and you're like I feel like I should start the boss fight with more than two hell Yeah chugs potion pop a humanity or something like that That's probably one of the better ways They've done it because it was required if you weren't super great at the game to kind of like balance it out um
00:24:42
Speaker
And anyways, consumables in games have always been something that's really hard to balance. Witcher, I think, did it in an interesting way. Eventually, for Witcher 3, your concoctions lasted like a long time. And then you just had to deal with your toxicity bar, I think.
00:25:04
Speaker
That was the solution they finally came to, but temporary consumables are always rough. What I'm getting to with this is in Outer Wilds, you have an inhaler. Outer... Worlds. Oh, okay. Yes, yeah. I will never get that correct. If ever we have an episode on Outer Wilds, I'll exclusively say Outer Worlds to balance it out.
00:25:24
Speaker
The person's looking back at the shadow like, what the fuck? Which one do I buy? Buy both, actually. But you have an inhaler. And depending on your medical skill, you can unlock slots to put ingredients in. And then whenever you want to heal, you take a puff, basically, on your inhaler, and it will use whatever ingredients have those effects that you have slotted. So you get to customize your combat buff.
00:25:55
Speaker
Which is awesome. That is pretty dope.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah. Like some of them increase your, uh, the regeneration of like your time dilation bar. They don't have vats like in fallout, fallout. Uh, but they have like slow mo or you're just like, I'm super fast and headshot, headshot, headshot. Um, or you can like increase your mind stats, your body stats, your personality stats, your health regeneration. Like all of those are options and you just custom make your drug basically. Um,
00:26:27
Speaker
So they solved the problem by doing that. They're just like, oh yeah, just all of those cool combat effects. You can just pick them beforehand and you get all of them depending on your medical skill. If you forego that, then you're probably just healing.
00:26:43
Speaker
But are the slots based off of consumable items? Do I need an ingredient for each slot? Yeah, okay. There is a nice, and this is something I've found more commonly, there's convenience changes in the systems.
00:26:58
Speaker
I was concerned at first that there was, you know, 15 different things that gave me health regeneration, like the same effect. They all had the exact same effect, but there's like 15 different things. Then I realized, uh, if you run out of an ingredient, um, for your inhaler, it will pull any other ingredient you have that has the exact same effect into the inhaler. So you don't even have to micro that part of your inventory. You just keep whatever effects you think are cool and run with it.
00:27:26
Speaker
jake's fucking huffing aluminum cans over here it's like met i will do my character actually did become a drug addict at one point because there's a um there's a flaw system which is the other thing like Bethesda doesn't really like to play with they're like you're the hero no downsides you're the hero where obsidian's like
00:27:47
Speaker
Hey, if you want to like min max your stats, whatever you put men in is going to hurt you a lot. Um, so in character creation, I was like temperament. That's like your leadership skill and other nonsense. I don't care about any of that. I'm going to be smart. So I put that down to like, um, below average temperament. And the game's like, okay, you can do that, but you will have zero health regeneration out of combat.
00:28:14
Speaker
I was like, okay, well, you know, I'm sure there's consumables. I can mitigate this. I want that high intelligence because that has its own bonuses, right? Then I found out some of the inhaler effects are like increase health regeneration by a hundred or 200% for two minutes. I'm just doing some math on my head. Okay. Well, it takes zero. I multiply it by 200%. Ah. Oh.
00:28:43
Speaker
But I really like that. I like when a game's like, you want to make a certain part of it really hard. Cool. You can do that. And I became a drug addict because I struggled with a part of combat and I was just huffing on the inhaler constantly. And then it's like, hey, do you want to take a flaw, which is addicted to drugs. So you get like all of these debuffs if you haven't had drugs recently. But in exchange, you'll get an instant perk point.
00:29:13
Speaker
Ooh, advantage. So you can like gimp your character with like all of these phobias and flaws and stuff that are situational. Like you got like mauled by dogs 50 times because you just really struggle and get jumped by dogs all the time. Here's a phobia for dogs and a perk point if you want it. Perk point, not afraid of dogs. You unfortunately can't balance it out exactly like that.
00:29:43
Speaker
It's really cool because by the end of it, your guy can have like a doctor sheet of medical conditions, but a lot of pricks.
00:29:54
Speaker
What do you need? Um, marijuana for my anxiety and all of these other things, anxiety from dogs and not smoking. It's, I don't know. It's just, I really like when games let you gimp yourself to a greater advantage.
00:30:15
Speaker
Well, it's nice to be able to have trade off. So it doesn't, this getting us back to the, allowing you to play your own play style. Like I love seeing people in bloodborne who like armor. Fuck that shit going quick roll. So they're naked and they have one weapon and their whole thing is like, I'm going to time my dodges and head with a big slap. But when you get punished, it fucking hurts because you have no damage mitigation. Exactly. That's the way you want to play. It's awesome. Do it.
00:30:44
Speaker
It's like the, uh, the demon bell in a second row. Like I played almost the entire game with the demon bell buff. Cause it was like more drop rate though. I have to have this. How, how would I not have this? Like demon bell does increase drop rate, but also makes the enemies tougher. I believe. Yeah. It made the enemies tougher. I think they just, they did more damage to you. I believe could be wrong on that, but that's what I recall.
00:31:09
Speaker
Harder to beat. Yes, because they're killing you more. They kill you more. Not tougher as in higher health per se. Yeah. It was nice for like farming and things like that. So also it could elevate the gear, the items that dropped. So if it was like, here's a tier one list, um, with demon bell, maybe new game plus items would be in their pool. Uh, so how do you pass that up? I mean, death is a small price to pay for better drops, obviously.
00:31:38
Speaker
It's true. And also at a point, you start to learn how the game is played as far as pacing. And this is like true of any, any game in general, but also any souls, like, because there's like a pattern or a dance to the enemy combat, whether it's a standard mob throughout a level or especially bosses where you have to learn the pattern to not die and then deal damage.
00:32:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's all, it's all knowledge and I'm sort of like efficiency is my thing. Like I had a farming route and, uh, and secure route. So like I would a hundred percent take any debuff. That's like better drops, you know, it's, I'll just factor it into whatever, whatever I'm playing. Um, so I like that. I like being able to be like, I really suck at this thing, but I'm really good at the things I care about and, um, the outer worlds.
00:32:31
Speaker
Let's do that. The other thing I picked was like really, really low perception. And Jake, I, person to person, that's fucking you. And are you over there? If you sat still when I like entered your apartment, like after like coming in here to set stuff up or something, if you were just sitting in your living room, I would never find, I would leave after like three hours in confusion.
00:33:01
Speaker
Can I tell the, the wedding present story? Do you remember that one? I think so. You do. I don't recall exactly, but I assume that's probably. When Jake was initially getting married or getting close to be married, we're like, Oh, we should get him a wedding present. So myself and another friend, Mike, I think, damn, I'd have also chipped in. I forget.
00:33:26
Speaker
front of the show and front of the show. Yeah. We're like, Oh, we'll get him a Keurig machine. Cause he likes coffee. Genius. And I think at the time you had like a standard drip pot, which wasn't uncommon. So what we did is like, we replaced it and just like put it there and set it up. We, it wasn't like a fancy unboxing type thing. It was just a, we'll see if he notices.
00:33:48
Speaker
Uh-huh. And so you guys like came back you're putting groceries away and like we're kind of looking at each other like is he good to notice? Uh-huh. And then time had passed and the grocery put away and you're like You guys are being weird. Like do you know us anything new? And you literally looked around for like three minutes like what am I supposed to see? And at a point I was like, hey, how about that coffee machine? You're like, oh, hey, I guess we didn't have that before. And I was like, what the fuck?
00:34:17
Speaker
I'm the kind of person where if someone stole my bed from my apartment and I went to lay down to go to sleep, I would just lay on the floor. I would just accept that this is reality now. You're like, Harry, I remember. That's weird. Jenny, remind me to wash these sheets.
00:34:36
Speaker
So anyways, yeah, my character was like I am in real life, except really smart. And what Obsidian does sometimes is, again, letting people live with their choices. If you're really close to meeting a skill requirement for like a dialogue option,
00:34:56
Speaker
Um, they'll show you the dialogue option, but it will be inaccessible. They will, they will block it out. They'll lock it. So it's just like, you're pretty close, but you're not that close. You know, like you're not good enough. Um, so to make you think like, man, I should have put more points into medical or speech or whatever. Uh, lying is also its own skill here. So convincing someone is different than lying to them. Uh, so if you neglect one of those skills.
00:35:23
Speaker
You're not going to get through every conversation where the other option is not available, which is cool. I like that.
00:35:30
Speaker
um but what they do is they'll show you uh options that are really close to you so i had like no perception and it's like well if you had one perception here's a very basic observation that your character could say they would advance your own goals it's just like if you found a guy and he's like standing over a corpse and he has a bloody knife and the perception one skill is just like
00:35:57
Speaker
Hey, you're hecka guilty. Like I don't have that option on that character. So he was great at convincing people of things, but he had no idea of what to convince them of. Yeah, exactly. It was, it was freaking hilarious. It was also super frustrating, but I loved it.
00:36:19
Speaker
You're like the Helen killer of the group. You're like emphatically trying to like make a point. You're like, why? I was trying to convince guys, we gotta do the thing. What thing? I'm not sure. Yeah, I'll figure that out. I, the player would see the option, but you know, whatever took perception too, to figure out. I have no idea what those options were that play through because I was too far away from me. Um, but it's great.
00:36:45
Speaker
They also have the dumb options, which have been missing for like a long time in fallout. So if you make a stupid, stupid character, like people will just treat you like a stupid, stupid character, special dialogue and everything. What was that classic one from a pizza line from fallout? Um, Ian quotes it all the time and I haven't heard it in a while. I don't, I can't remember off the top of my head. Uh, Ian make a comment. Tell us what the pizza line is.
00:37:12
Speaker
Ian, if you're listening, DM me that shit. Yeah. So we can put it in next week.
00:37:17
Speaker
The one, the one I remember from classic fallout was a, there was a shopkeeper or like a trader you could buy stuff from. But if you're really stupid, every time you talk to him, he would steal some of your money. Yeah, that'll be five bucks. You're like, okay, give them the money. You didn't buy anything. He just took five bucks. I love it. Um, yeah.
00:37:43
Speaker
It's really cool. It's also on Unreal instead of Gamebrio. So that engine Bethesda's been using since looks at non-existent watch, looks at actual watch on the table forever. That crashes constantly has all these issues. No, it's just Unreal now. So there was only one point in the game that caused crashes, and it was like a legitimate bug that everyone had. And it'll probably be patched pretty soon.
00:38:14
Speaker
So a non buggy obsidian game is Crazy to me because their games have always been super buggy And it kind of covers the technical problems. They've had in the past What else does obsidian do because I know I've heard the studio name. Yeah, they start calling so yeah, they did a lot of RPGs for the most part like I said fallout new vegas which came in after fallout 2 but before 4 and
00:38:43
Speaker
and They did not get a high enough metacritic score. They were two points off for getting their employee bonuses from Bethesda Because they were like loaning them the IP basically letting them make the game. Yeah, people were really salty about that they also made pillars of eternity, which was a isometric RPG similar to like top-down view divinity, but I
00:39:07
Speaker
Not as good as divinity goddamn, right? Yeah, goddamn, right. Yeah, you're fucking dead fire I played it some but it's got like some of the pacing problems of old RPGs and Where it's like this world is vast. You're like, I don't have time for this
00:39:23
Speaker
You like walk into a new area and there's like five people that are distinct NPCs to talk to with their own backstories and problems. I'm like, ah, I just quit the game. It's like, I have to run the people at the grocery store. This is too much. Yeah. Um, and it doesn't, uh, the outer worlds doesn't have those pacing problems. Cause it's got probably the best shooter of the fallout series.
00:39:48
Speaker
Um, it's not in the fallout series, but it still has the best of the shooting there. Uh, so I really appreciate it. So you can have like fast gameplay if you want, but you can also have that in depth. I won't say Bethesda like, but in the ways of other elder scrolls type of games or earlier fallout instances, where you can have that like deeper storyline and exploration.
00:40:12
Speaker
Yeah. There's like, there's bushes you can hide in if you want to be, I wanted to be a stealth archer, but because I jumped my health regeneration, I was like, I have to make up for this. So I'm going to wear heavy armor. I was like, well, if I'm wearing heavy armor, like my freaking like full suit of armor, I should use big guns, like plasma guns and stuff. And my stealth archer build turned into heavy weapons guy.
00:40:38
Speaker
Well, you're still a stealth archer. You're just shit at it. Really, really bad as it turns out. Hey, come here. I'm going to shoot you. I don't know. It was, it was really fun. And so we're the, we're the use of the time off. I think it took me 32 hours to beat. Some of it was some farming in the middle, um, which was entirely unnecessary. I was brokenly overpowered.
00:41:02
Speaker
Um, by the end of it. And I didn't actually even have to engage in combat that much because like diplomacy, whereas like Bethesda's like, you need to kill boss. We're not going to deprive people of their boss fight boss fight. And this one, it's like, maybe you find an angle or a piece of information you can use against, you know, whoever's in your path and then just get everybody on your side or just out-negotiate all of them.
00:41:32
Speaker
Do you think your cousin's hot? Let's not talk about that. You can get by, thank you sir. Yeah, little bits of information. Let's get you through there. They're gonna say a little bit on the nose. It's like, I got you. Does someone start beating you in smash? Jake, what the fuck is cousin? It'll be the distraction. I got nothing for that.
00:41:59
Speaker
Anyways, it's a good game. Yeah, I recommend it. Um, it has a lot of, it's streamlined without dumbing it down and feels good to play. I would recommend it even to people who don't usually like RPGs. You have companions, but they just have a single button to activate their skills. Um, there's just a lot of really cool, uh, in-depth things you can do with the skill trees and choices. And it's not black or white or the game black and white.
00:42:28
Speaker
Man fuck that black and white was awesome. I mean it was it's a classic thing But we've all heard the uh, the fisherman song never again. Yeah Um, but yeah totally recommend it. Um, I think it's gotten pretty good reviews overall up to this point And I would add mine to it I could see playing that with people. I assume it does that multiplayer
00:42:54
Speaker
Uh, no, it's just strictly single player out of the world. That's uh, yeah, do enjoy a very good and depth single player game from time to time. I don't know if obsidian's ever made a multiplayer game. Someone write in and tell me where I'm wrong, but I don't think they ever have. They just focus on the immersion. That's fine.
00:43:15
Speaker
I love the immersion. My one friend who's like spinning his mouth, just like looking at the ground. Yeah. I don't think you've really appreciated like video games as a medium unless you run up to talk to somebody and then your ally shoots them or in divinity. It's almost like, I don't think you can outright attack people in conversation, but as soon as it ends, right, you can.
00:43:43
Speaker
So if you are actively engaged, if your character is engaged in conversation with somebody, you cannot attack them all in conversation. They're protected by the dialogue. God, but, uh, if somebody is outside of the dialogue, they can interrupt the fuck out of that dialogue. Okay. So you actually can interact. It would immediately go to combat. Gotcha. Okay. Even if they're not meant for combat, right? Gotcha. Gotcha.
00:44:11
Speaker
Yeah. So unless you've experienced that, you haven't experienced the peak of a cooperative question mark gaming. There are people who you want to overcome challenges with and there are people who you want to.
00:44:28
Speaker
be challenging with you. I was gonna say there are people you want to overcome as the challenge. Yes. And there were challenged people. Yeah. Yeah, we've been there. We've been there.
Death Stranding: Trailer Discussion
00:44:43
Speaker
Also recently, there's been a new Death Stranding trailer.
00:44:48
Speaker
That's true. We watched it immediately prior to this because I had heard about it, but I hadn't seen it with my eye sockets and the eyes therein. And the trailer makes about as much sense as what I just said.
00:45:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of a mishmash of some of the other previous trailers over the past two years Yeah, but a little more and been very loose quotes exposition. Mm-hmm Random pieces from the game They kind of I think like the more they show you the more confusing it is That's the thing
00:45:25
Speaker
Well, I understand like the overall plot of the game kind of I just don't understand every other piece of it, but it looks Fucking dope. Yeah, cuz like I said, I'm not a big open-world guy all the time in certain instances I like it Witcher 3 Choice. Yeah, MGS 5 really enjoyed Minecraft I Don't know if Minecraft counts
00:45:51
Speaker
I'm still working through horizon zero dawn. He says I just I just own the game, right? It's on a list But this looks really good as far as like it has that nice crisp ps4 graphics. Hmm, but it's also seems very very open a lot of scenery appreciation and
00:46:12
Speaker
Um, and it's a Kojima game. So I'm interested to see where the fuck that goes. Proper phrasing. I'm actually, this is his first game as his own studio and not under the umbrella of Konami. Thank you. I was like, who are those cuts? Um, yeah, Konami, who have kind of.
00:46:34
Speaker
Ruined it for that and stole the MGS IP to make a zombie game where you paid for save slots. Yeah. Everyone loved that. I think that was well received by the industry. Yeah. They'll, they'll always have Pachinko. So, you know, that's, that's what they want. Um, it looks, it looks hecka weird. Like there's a lot of X, like exposition and character interaction and.
00:46:59
Speaker
I almost started to think maybe I was getting an idea of what was going on and then like the second half of the trailer is just like, let's just throw all that out and things happen. I think it's, it's all psychomantis actually. This whole thing is just a psychedelic, like trip by psychomantis. It's actually going to be the next entry in MGS and it's going to blow everybody's mind.
00:47:25
Speaker
I would love that. Oh man. It looks good. I'm going to get it when it comes out, which is actually pretty soon. I'm pretty sure it's a baby delivery service game. I think that's basically the genre.
00:47:41
Speaker
I thought it was like the early days of Amazon delivery, the four drones. Back when I was your age, we had to walk across the country delivering babies. I don't know exactly what the timeline is for PlayStation 5, but I know like people have been talking about it and I feel like it was announced at some point. I didn't really pay attention.
00:48:02
Speaker
Probably around the same time, whatever Project Scarlet was at like an E3. I'm almost, I'm kind of surprised that this wouldn't be pushed back slightly. Did it be on the PS4? Yeah, since it is like an exclusive, like you would think Sony would want something to really push those units out the door. And I'm sure they have other things lined up, but I mean, I don't think, so there's this and there's The Last of Us 2, part two. Girl. That are super hyped.
00:48:31
Speaker
I mean, Ellie, I'm going to play as Ellie boy girl. I mean, Ellie. No, that also looks super good from the trailers that I've seen. I think they were at E3 as well. Yeah. Or at an E3. So I wonder what they're, what they're, what they're holding in reserve for PS4. Cause those are both those like go back five years or whatever. And these are the games I expect to be trying to sell consoles, right?
00:48:57
Speaker
Yeah, but like other things are also slated for ps4 like the new Final Fantasy 7 remake whenever that happens, which is the initial reason I got a ps4 is like Why not someday? That will be a final fantasy remake. Yeah. Well, I mean it was announced at that point I guess it's been in development for a while. Yes, it has
00:49:20
Speaker
But yeah, I'm not sure what they're going to hold out for for PS5, because it seems like a lot of the good popular IPs already have titles that are on the PS4 or slated for PS4. Yeah. It's a very healthy console, and it's game collection. Yes. PlayStation has always had that. It'll be death 2 stranding. That'll be the next one.
00:49:48
Speaker
it's not even the silliest name kajima's used i still think revengeance is is the best there a non-existent word yeah that's why the most over the top it's been great i love it by the way uh do you remember that crazy music from
00:50:08
Speaker
Devil May Cry 5, where you fight that demon dog. I think so. That came up on my Spotify the other day. I was like, no shit. That was actually pretty hype to hear that. Did we ever talk about DMC5? Did we have?
00:50:22
Speaker
Um, I think we talked about a little bit because I think both you and jenny had played it But I had not really followed this series so much But I had watched some playthrough and checked it out because it looks cool. Yeah I don't know if she ever played five she was gonna like catch up on the series and stuff and then I think that was all talk Wow, I know
00:50:39
Speaker
What a quitter actually wait she bought that game I have to ask if she beat it cuz I remember like I bought the game text your wife real quick and then like Turned around and she'd also bought it. I was like, did we just spend a hundred and twenty dollars on this game? That you could have also played on my account Okay, I'm gonna buy something called a YNAV and
00:51:03
Speaker
Yeah, they don't, they don't have that on steam anymore. Unfortunately it's decommissioned, but yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'll, I'll play death stranding. I kind of thought about it after the fact. I was like, maybe I should have taken time off for this less to like play the game and more to process. What is going to happen in the game after the fact, what has happened in the game after the fact, speaking of processing, uh, plots of games after the fact, near automata.
00:51:33
Speaker
Mm-hmm Recently had a raid in Final Fantasy 14 that dropped like two days ago. There's like it's like near faint themed or Yeah, it's like a whole near raid and it's like a 24 man raid instead of eight man. Oh, yeah Yeah, they have like they have the full double party raids. It's crazy 24 is a lot though. I don't remember if I've ever done a 24. I
00:51:59
Speaker
So I've only heard things about it because my direct boss at work, uh, plays 14 and has a group. You're never going to escape that, are you? It just fucking follows it. Um, but here are good things about it. And a friend of mine plays that as well, but I'm, I want to see actual like footage of a boss fight. Oh yeah. So I can experience more near.
00:52:21
Speaker
People always put that up too, like, um, especially since the songs and 14, like some of the boss fight songs are legit. Uh, so people will upload them with all of the other sound turned off, except for just music. Um, cause they do that cool freaking, um, multi phase fade for tracks.
00:52:41
Speaker
so like there'll be the first phase of the track and the music's like building up and then it gets to like a Plateau kind of of holding until you get to the next phase of the fight and it's crescendo into the next This next arrangement. It's freaking great. I love it Sorry, I realized I just went off on like boss fight music mechanics, but Look up some of the songs in 14 boss fights
00:53:06
Speaker
No, I think certain, well, in general, music will always be good to accompany certain experiences. Like everyone knows about like fucking Gwyn from Dark Souls and how like the slow piano is kind of like a somber ending to the whole fucking game and everything that led up to those moments and events. At the same time, it's awesome to have something that's like really builds the hype and just sets the mood for whatever you're trying to convey.
00:53:33
Speaker
Yeah, there's there's one boss in 14 where it's just like there's the the lead up and the camera kind of goes up the boss and then she like turns in the air and smiles at you and then the lyrics come in and it's like now fall and then goes into a rock song as the actual fight starts and it's freaking great. Nice. It's so good. Yeah. I'll have to show you that later. But that's cool that they have near in there. I didn't think about the crossover potential.
00:53:59
Speaker
I didn't either, but then I saw like an announcement like a year ago or something, I was like, no shit. Yeah, time to get into foraging. So you can do the near raid that'll be around for like two weeks. That would have been my only drawing because I can't MMO.
00:54:16
Speaker
Yeah, the nice thing is if it's a 40 or 24 man raid There's probably very little individual responsibility because all the mechanics will just be handled by people that know what they're doing Or nobody's allowed to fuck up You can't do that with 24 man raids. It's just like if there's personal responsibility You'll never succeed but apparently you go through like um
00:54:42
Speaker
I think they said like five bosses like from the actual game.
Final Fantasy 14 & Epic Store Freebies
00:54:45
Speaker
Oh, wow. So I assume that Simone is one of them in some capacity.
00:54:55
Speaker
But yeah, I'm really interested to see some of that content on YouTube, probably. Yeah. It's probably by the time people listen to this. Check that out after you go through our entire backlog of episodes. We need it. As is Lore. For the money. We don't make money when you listen to it.
00:55:14
Speaker
Speaking of money, if you don't have any, there are some free games on the Epic Store as of the time of this recording. One of which I've talked up great deal is Costume Quest. A little cute Halloween RPG from Tim Schafer. And then also a game that we actually have covered on the podcast.
00:55:35
Speaker
Jay, this is for you. Oh, Soma. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Quite like, uh, quite like Soma. Um, the horror elements you can get past, they honestly don't come into play that much really in the game. It's more atmospheric than anything. Yeah. Um, so even if you get spooked, like we do, uh, on this episode, we recorded on Halloween still recommend Soma, especially for zero dollars.
00:56:02
Speaker
And hopefully they're still on sale when you listen to this, cause I don't know how long the sale goes. The Epic Halloween deal though is like every, every week they're doing two games instead of one. It's weird how like many things are like, Hey, it's free. I'm like, no, no thanks.
00:56:17
Speaker
Yeah, I have been picking them up because like it's like three button clicks So I just don't opt in for the can't be ours That's that's too too many button clicks uh, yeah, there's There's some there's been some good stuff there and some games that probably In my mind would go back and play Yeah, but in reality as an adult, I likely never will
00:56:43
Speaker
Like remember like World of Go? It's like, hey, it's free. It's like, okay. I played for five minutes. I'm like, I'm not feeling this. I actually played World of Go. It's a good game. It's just, I beat it. I don't know. Not my current interest.
00:56:57
Speaker
Yeah, if something's like a genre miss it's pretty much impossible to get into at the time. Yeah, sometimes I'm just like the colors of eternity Isometric RPG love them sometimes if you're not feeling it cut that off Cut that off immediately. I'm going back to whatever I was doing. Hey you kids cut that off
00:57:19
Speaker
I think if you Find yourself in a situation where you can say the phrase cut that off to a kid and it can be interpreted as circumcision There's many things wrong with this situation And on that note
Closing Remarks and Listener Engagement
00:57:39
Speaker
Thank you guys for listening to another episode of Soapstone. This is over 70 that you guys have obviously listened to. All of them. So we don't know why we recommend the previous episodes.
00:57:52
Speaker
I don't know why you do. As always, if you want to send in your feedback, you can do so at soapstonepodcast.gmail.com for your personal thoughts or suggestions for future episodes. Or if you'd like to converse in the pool of people who at least have liked the podcast, you can do so at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And occasionally people leave comments there.
00:58:22
Speaker
You could be one of those You could be one of those people You could be the first you can comment first. That's true. You should be the first to comment on this Particular episode as soon as you listen to it as soon as you hear me. I don't know why you haven't gone already Just go go and comment will be those people and then we'll remove your comment for just saying first Because that's the worst thing you can do on the internet
00:58:48
Speaker
We now sound like one of those Spotify ads like, hey, check us out. Hey. Hey, I know you can hear us. You're still listening. We paid money for the spot. Check out our stuff. We have ways of knowing that you're still listening right now. Anyways, that's it. So till next time, we'll see you in the next one.
00:59:19
Speaker
It's all in your mind The storm maker says it ain't so bad The dream maker's gonna make you mad The spaceman says everybody look down