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S3 Ep195: Vampire Survivors + Lost Ark Preview
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Join Dave and Jake as they talk about food, Vampire Survivors, and Lost Ark 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
Remote Brunch Chaos
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 is always Dave how's it going today Dave it's going pretty good so far did like a remote brunch with some friends and it's it's that weird time of like
00:01:02
Speaker
My body's like, did we, did we miss lunch? I'm like, yeah, technically, but we kind of had like an early lunch and late breakfast. It's like, so what are we eating next? I'm like, I don't know. You let me know when that's a priority and we'll, we'll take it, take it seriously then. But it's all, it's all thrown for a loop at this point. It's wacky land chaos. Yeah. That's why I don't like sleeping in too much or anything like that. It's going to throw me off schedule. Are you the same way or?
00:01:26
Speaker
No. Oh, OK. I mean, so I woke up at like noon. I know that's not true. I woke up at like eleven thirty, but I did stay in bed till noon. Thanks, Reddit, for another show. And my food was a nice, relaxing celery and peanut butter and energy drink. I mean, I agree. That sounds like a nightmare because they're poison sticks to you. Celery a la poison.
00:01:56
Speaker
Well, yeah, it's like the needing to mentally crunch. And then there's also the peanut butter, which I'm allergic to peanut butter, not peanuts, just peanut butter, weirdly enough.
Unusual Allergies & Food Choices
00:02:05
Speaker
Can have everything else peanuts, except for peanut butter. And then the energy drink on top of that, it's like make me more anxious. I'm going to be so anxious.
00:02:15
Speaker
It's gonna be great. That was convincing. Thanks. Well, I'm not anxious yet. Wait for me to get there. But no, it's nice. The celery is kind of like a nothing food. It literally is. It's convenient to just...
00:02:32
Speaker
It's like one of the most basic things. So we answer the log, right? For people who are familiar, it's like celery, peanut butter, and then you put raisins on it. We don't have raisins. I don't really eat raisins. I don't know who the fuck does. I don't know who's like, oh, we have some raisins in the cupboard. What? Right. Like it's a fine food. I just feel like it's so uncommon. Right. In a similar way, like a lot of people don't typically have rice pudding. Typically, Rachel, dear God.
00:02:58
Speaker
We had some the other day. It was really fun. What else is really uncommon? What is that?
00:03:06
Speaker
I'm blanking here. That's right. I'm going to buy you time by saying raisins are basically just worse grapes. Like a grape tastes pretty good. It's like a fruit. It's noticeably a fruit. Raisins are just preserved grapes. One, I'm going to say fuck off. Raisin bran is delicious. It's all sugar though. Raisin bran is actually like 100% sugar. Yes. If you look at like any other cereal that's like
00:03:28
Speaker
Hey, we're a fruity pebbles. You're like, oh, it's got to be more sugar than Raisin Bran. No, that's a lot. That's the surprising thing. But I'm thinking of like apple butter or I can't remember the other white component that goes with it. Turkey, the other white. It's not cream cheese.
00:03:48
Speaker
I'm going to Google apple butter and apple butter and bread, cottage cheese. That's the other ones like super uncommon. Um, wait, is there a relation between apple butter and cottage cheese? You can mix them together. Huh? Okay. I don't like that. It's not bad. Like it's something you can mix together and like put on like toast or just have it on its own. Hmm.
00:04:15
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I like cottage cheese, but my, so let me tell you what I use cottage cheese for and you'll understand why the idea of mixing it with apple butter sounds like anathema, um, cottage cheese and then salt and vinegar chips. Delicious. Huh.
00:04:32
Speaker
But not apple butter. Those are those are the opposite of how things work. Right. So is it just like the the rich creaminess you're looking for? It's it's kind of I don't know. It's a nice it diffuses like you want this with like strong salt and vinegar chips. It helps like diffuse a little bit about that together.
Raisin vs Grape Debate
00:04:55
Speaker
One salt and vinegar chips should be strong. Otherwise, it's just fucking chips. Right. Mm hmm.
00:05:02
Speaker
But like, have you tried like like a whipped cream cheese? I guess I haven't. I don't have a follow up to that. I have not. Have you tried milk? All right. Let's go through the dairy products. I have tried different types of milk recently, though. We so we switched over to almond milk years back. Hell yeah. But oh, we're going to try and open up more to start interrupt. But like, you know, you're good. I found out almond milk can go bad.
00:05:31
Speaker
Oh, how long does it take? A while. That's one of those things. It doesn't have the very short shelf life that milk does in comparison, because it's not dairy. Not from the teat. Yeah. Well. The teat of the almond.
00:05:50
Speaker
Are you saying these are almond colored? Never mind. Anyway.
Nostalgic Food Memories
00:05:54
Speaker
Sorry. Continue. You were doing some almond milk, and then you were checking out oat milk. Oat milk, yeah. Although oat milk we haven't purchased is an actual keeper in the house thing. It's just like, oh, wah-wah drink. I'm getting something that's a coffee, milk variety type thing. Let's try the oat milk. It's all right. It's all right.
00:06:14
Speaker
They never recommend it though. They're like, hey, do skim. And I'm like, I don't remember liking the skim. I remember that being like a milk colored water. And I was not a fan of that. At least granted this was like 15 years back when I had it. The milk days. Yeah.
00:06:32
Speaker
Yeah, I used to. Because it's like drinking from other nature's teeth. Right. And it's delightful. Instead of a cow, the unnatural beings that they are. Yeah. Have you heard the noises they make? No thank you. Yeah.
00:06:46
Speaker
I love ground beef tacos. See, that's the funny thing. I guess I do. I do eat beef and things like that when it
Nostalgia in TV Shows
00:06:55
Speaker
comes to like Mexican food. But like we were talking about Taco Bell not too long ago and I was like, it's not really meat. There's there's some in there for sure. A lot safer to bank on with like things like chicken or steak. Just fortified by sawdust.
00:07:13
Speaker
Yeah. Good, delicious, nutritious. I just want to fill my belly. Have I got the thing for you?
00:07:24
Speaker
There's actually, um, saw this as kind of funny as a kind of like old style thought for filler. And this concept has brought me back to a particular episode of the Andy Griffith show, um, where they like, uh, um, bought a used car. Who was the, uh, the deputy's name? Um,
00:07:47
Speaker
He was a character actor. I forget who it was though. Oh my gosh. I have to look this up. Also, is Andy Griffith the one that's like, I don't want to try and whistle on here, but it's like, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude. A hundred percent. Yes. Um, who were deputy?
00:08:09
Speaker
I love the word that's literally stolen. Barney Five. The name of it. But he's buying a car. And it's like, oh, it's a form of this old lady. It's like, only driven on Sundays. And it's got barely any use. And it's a really good price. But I just don't have time for it anymore and stuff like that. Anybody's in the car, and it seems like a great deal. And then it breaks down night instantly. And what they found out is that they put sawdust in the wheel well. Not the wheel wells.
00:08:37
Speaker
the axle, uh, basically to make the ride smoother temporarily. It just hides the problem. And I was like, is that a thing? Yeah. Anyways, that was that time thing. Yeah. So it's both good in Taco Bell food. And also if you need to hide the fact that your car has, uh, has trouble, I guess. Yeah.
00:09:03
Speaker
The only weird add to car thing to be destructive is if you put a sugar in the gasoline tank, that fucks up some stuff. Jeez. I don't remember which way,
Vampire Survivors Gameplay
00:09:17
Speaker
but that's one of those fun facts you learn in high school. You're like, oh cool, hold on to that. That'll never use. Well, I mean, hopefully. That would actually cause problems.
00:09:29
Speaker
It was sawdust in the transmission, Barney's first car. Episode aired April 1st, 1963. Don't ask us how old we are anyway. Podcast going on for 60 years now. I have no mirrors in the house for reasons.
00:09:51
Speaker
But I can actually cross that off my soapstone bingo. I got to mention the Andy Griffith show in the middle of the episode. That was a hard one. That's been around for a while. Yeah.
00:10:06
Speaker
I was just making the mirror joke to make a vague illusion to use vampires. Vampires. Yeah. Vampire survivors is good. I know we're not talking about it here. We literally titled the episode something completely different. Actually, you guys don't know what we, I mean, I guess at this point, you do know what we titled the episode. We don't know what we titled the episode. I like how Jake's getting metal wall recording. He's like, what do you know? What's today's date?
00:10:32
Speaker
That's the trick. If you're going to edit and record, though, you're like, wait a minute, what context do I actually have here? It takes us back to when we were like we had suppositions about like what would be shown at like a game show and we've guessed at what awards games would get. And it's got to be really hilarious to listen to a podcast that just came out and see people be so wrong about everything.
00:11:01
Speaker
That's how we do though. It is, you know, we're the relatable podcast. Should we talk about vampires fire views or actually talk about Lost Ark? What do you think? Uh, both. Okay. What do you want to start with? Vampire survivors. That's easier to cover. That's fair.
00:11:20
Speaker
It is a $3 game. I was going to say Dave bought me this full retail price game. But you cut me off at the preamble. Oh, sorry. Yeah, bought it full price because I'm a generous guy. I also bought it for Jenny because some people were talking about it in her Discord. I was like, yeah, it's fun. Check it out. But yeah, for like $3, surprising amount of mileage out of it.
00:11:48
Speaker
As I kept saying initially when I first got it, and I would literally hide myself playing it on Steam, like this is such like a dumb time burning game. But weirdly, I'm like, no, we'll leave it on that I'm playing Bloons Tower Defense versus, which is like a mobile game for babies. But it's like a really good turn your brain off, just have fun type thing, because you're a character and you have different starting weapons or abilities. But these are things just kind of fire automatically over time.
00:12:18
Speaker
based on your attack speed. It might have a whip that just attacks in front of you. If you upgrade
Strategies in Vampire Survivors
00:12:23
Speaker
it, it can attack in more directions. But as you go, you level up. You can improve your skills, pick up different skills. The way it's a little bit harder over time. We should establish the premise of the game, too. It's a top-down, side-scrolling, not platformer. But you're being attacked by monsters all the time. Yeah. It's like I made a game with zombies in it, but much more progressed. Yeah.
00:12:49
Speaker
It's a rogue light too. I had to like look up the definition between rogue like and rogue light again. Um, and it is light. Very few inputs just move around. Yeah, that's literally it. You're just kind of dodging enemies. You're trying to line up depending how your weapon attacks. Um, that's pretty much it, but like the music's pretty banging. Mm-hmm.
00:13:13
Speaker
It was actually used as a part of a previous episode. And then you can actually combine some of the active abilities. I say active, but like your weapon attacks versus just passives to make an upgraded version of a weapon. And that feels cool.
00:13:30
Speaker
because it usually will do some type of stronger effect in the same vein. Usually amazingly stronger, actually. Like the damage goes through the roof. It'll be much more useful. Usually has way better coverage, things like that. They're evolved weapons is what the game calls them. I mean, it's true. Some of them are like stupid. Yeah, it's a prerequisite to make it to actually clear a level because you get some evolved stuff.
00:13:57
Speaker
Like one of the basic ones is like throwing knife. Throws a knife in front of you. And it's straight at where you're facing. So a lot of times it's inconvenient. But as you upgrade knives, it's like, well, I'll throw more knives. They're a little bit faster. And then there's an item or passive you can get called Bracer, which makes your projectiles go faster. But then you get the Evolve knife, where it's just like stream of knives. It's one of my least favorite weapons, too. It's better than whip.
00:14:26
Speaker
It's technically true. Yeah, it's technically better than WIP. But they're both really, I consider both of them quite bad. Yeah, they're pretty shit. I was literally looking at a tier list earlier and I was like, do I agree with some of these? I don't know. I should weigh in on some of the Steam comments just to be that guy. Yeah. It's like an early access game. There's not a whole lot of content. I think there's technically three stages you can unlock and play on. But the last one is kind of just the first one without terrain.
00:14:57
Speaker
and random enemies, I guess. But like, it's not super hard. Like once you get some upgrades, once you get some of your meta progression filled out, which is just, you know, persistent upgrades using the gold you get in the mission, it becomes, it's not like a traditional roguelike where there's really a massive chance of failure or like your build is going to vary up a ton between each run. Like that amount of content isn't in the game yet, but there are unlockable characters and
00:15:27
Speaker
It's fun to go through and play through. I told people I was like, I'm basically done with the game at this point. And I had 10 hours in it. And then I played probably another five hours on top of that, just because as you approach the end game, it's basically an idle game. You can literally just move across the screen, killing everything with your AOE weapons. And it just feels good.
00:15:51
Speaker
No, it feels good because you are essentially like the bullet hell for all these forms of enemies. That's how they marketed it, right? Yeah. And you find like little ways to kind of, air quotes, cheat the system. Like I was telling Jake about, oh, in the second map, the inlaid library, if you use Mortacio, he starts out with like a bone ability to kind of like bounces around if it hits the surface or an enemy will bounce off, depending on how many bounces it has.
00:16:17
Speaker
But I was like, oh, it either bounces off of a wall, which inlaid library has enemies or the screen bounce. But if you kind of move to like the top or bottom to kind of hug, you have the screen bounce and then you have like the library wall kind of like mid screen. So there's less range for things to bounce. Yeah. So that works for bones. It also works for rune tracer.
00:16:44
Speaker
So you can use that to close the amount of available space it has so you have a more concentrated area of attack. And again, I'm talking about strats for a $3 game. But it was fun to find little things like that. And last night, I sent Jake a screenshot. I'm like, hey, check out my run results. So normally at 30 minutes, if you get that far, a Grim Reaper flies to you and kills you super quick.
00:17:11
Speaker
unless you have a shield active to protect you from an instance of damage and you have something to freeze an enemy to kind of like lock them. So I survived to like 31, 30 ish. It's really long. So it spawned like a second Reaper and I eventually
00:17:29
Speaker
wasn't able to line up my freeze attack in the right way, and they eventually got through and killed me. But I was dealing damage to them for a straight minute, and they never died. So I don't know if
Introduction to Lost Ark
00:17:38
Speaker
you can kill them. Yeah. No, it's pretty crazy. I haven't seen any instances of it. The game has a lot of potential. It's also a game that released to early access. There's been a couple updates, which I guess is a good sign. Some of the evolved weapons, actually. At least one of them was added post-launch to early access, from what I saw.
00:17:59
Speaker
I think that there's still it's a casual game, right? Like it actually is a casual game. It's like an arcade game, but not like a sweaty one. Unless you're literally looking up to your list, it's like we are. But I think it does have room for improvement. There's a bunch of defensive items that the game has, and they're almost all bad. Like they literally are only useful until you have some other upgrades and then they become a trap because you don't have more damage, which is the only thing that currently matters.
00:18:28
Speaker
For like late game because when the games throwing thousands of enemies at you and You don't have enough damage to like keep up with the enemies you lose you've lost you've already lost you can't run through the enemies so Not building damage is just a trap kind of But I don't know that's all stuff they can figure out through early access I
00:18:51
Speaker
Yeah, I would say the only other thing on top of that is for some of the things that are more directional, like the wand will auto attack at the closest enemy and knives, as we were talking about, fire wherever you're facing. So you can kind of like cut a swath through enemies. If you're feeling too swarmed overall and you can't just stay in place, you can kind of like maybe cut your way through a little bit safer for a path.
00:19:18
Speaker
But yeah, some of the passes that are more defensive like, oh, we'll gain X amount of life over time. It's so small, even when it's fully upgraded. And the only real reason to get it is to upgrade or get the evolved option of another weapon. Right. But it's only one weapon. So it's like, do you really want it that bad?
00:19:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think I was looking up the empty tome or something like that. It's the one that reduces the cooldown on your weapons. And it's a passive. It's specific to one weapon that it actually impacts. I'm not going to spoil the combination, because the game doesn't tell you what they are. So you can figure them out, or you can look them up if you want to.
00:20:05
Speaker
On its own, it's OK. And the weapon that it evolves is like, OK, I think it's not the best tier. But the empty tome itself is basically it upgrades pretty much every weapon because every weapon has cooldown and is like a net 30% or 40% DPS increase for all of your weapons.
00:20:24
Speaker
Which is insane like this is a passive that's so good That it's almost like you kind of just always want it even if you don't want the evolved weapon that it goes with
00:20:36
Speaker
And so there's a lot of this is the end game. This is the end game, right, is playing around with some of this stuff and figuring out how you want to run it. But but also three dollars. Yeah. But it's not like you can kind of pick and choose what you get. Anytime you level, it's like, hey, pick from three or possibly four choices of what you want and you have to pick one. So sometimes you might get like, hey, I really don't want this option. Yeah. But sucks to suck. You kind of have to pick and opt into it.
00:21:05
Speaker
I abandoned runs at the first or second pick because I don't have an option I want. If they're all something I don't want, I should say.
00:21:13
Speaker
So that's that's the nice thing. Say like contrast this to like Hades or some other game where you have like you have a first item spawn and it's like, OK, this is your build essentially. Right. The fact that you always have like three options and then you get like it's something like six weapon slots. Maybe it's seven. I'm not sure it's around that. I think it's six.
00:21:37
Speaker
Maybe it's seven. Anyways, you don't have to have like the perfect pick every time and it has a higher chance of something showing up that you want, which is nice. Yeah. And also like there are ways to kind of play around with what you have. Maybe you can like sell something off or be like, Hey, I know you have this.
00:21:58
Speaker
epic level bloodshot tied to this deity, but what if we gave you a legendary of the same type of thing for another god instead? How about that? Right. And so maybe, like I've done that to say like, hey, this will be my burn on my dash, maybe I'll find something better later.
00:22:19
Speaker
Because usually, they'll try and bait you out of like, hey, you trying to do this build? But what if I offer you this instead? Yeah. Here's something two tiers above if you want to pivot your build. Exactly. What Vampry's survivors currently is like, if you have something, you have it forever. So very much I'm trying to avoid locking myself into something as much as possible. But it can happen too. And you have like, it's something like six or seven weapon slots. And there's like 10 weapons in early access right now, right?
00:22:49
Speaker
There's a good chance that you're finding options that are good for you. So yeah, it's quite fun. I actually recommend it heartily for pretty much anyone who has even passing interest in the game because it's three dollars. Yeah, you have to have three dollars, though. What if what if you don't have
Lost Ark vs Other Games
00:23:06
Speaker
three dollars? What other games could you play on Steam right now? Let's see. Let me go to the free to play section.
00:23:13
Speaker
Oh, Jake, that was, this is, no, it's a T-ball question. I realize that this is a segue for Lost Ark, but I'm still, you never take segues. Free to play. Top game right now looks like Lost Ark. Sorry, sorry guys, I didn't realize he was doing a bit, that's not bad. But yeah, Lost Ark.
00:23:34
Speaker
opted into like a founder's pack a while back, which allows you to buy one. OK, that's fair. You can buy multiple. That's what he's saying. Oh, OK. So I just got one founder's pack, which gave me like a bonus. Allow me to play a little bit early. We'll get into that shit later. But it is a free to play game overall. MMO slash ARPG.
00:23:57
Speaker
Yeah. And I have episode will be me trying to convince Jake to play with us. It's not going to require a lot of work. I don't think spoilers. I already kind of intend to play at some point. I just got to get some stuff done before I jump into like another literal MMO.
00:24:14
Speaker
All right. Thanks, guys, for having me on the episode. My work is done. But I could be talked out of it based off of the answers we received to some of these questions. So I've set up three categories of questions for Dave. Oh, shit. And he gets to pick after each answer whenever we're prompting for the next question. We might have some follow up, but when we prompt for the next question, he gets to pick between a softball, a hardball or a kill shot.
00:24:41
Speaker
for just generally level of cynicism or difficulty to answer. And I might come up with some more throughout the course of the episode, but I may also just run out really quickly and then the segment will die in a fire. But I will also preface by saying Jake has more MMO experience than I do overall.
00:24:59
Speaker
I've played like I got to level 20 on WoW on my cousin's computer because you can make a free account to do that up to level 20 and this over like some like three summers and I've played let's say 20 hours of Lost Ark and that is it. I also did a FF14 demo very briefly on like a free weekend and
00:25:22
Speaker
But you have played a lot of FFXIV. Yes. Have you played any other MMOs? All of them. OK. It looks like City Heroes. It's mostly true. That's Star Wars and Star Wars Galaxies. The Old Republic. I had WoW for like a day. Guild Wars won. Insert Owen Wilson. Every other Korean MMO that's ever been made until I turned 14 and then no Korean MMOs that have ever been made.
00:25:51
Speaker
Does Gunbound count as a Korean MMO? Because technically I spent a lot of time on that. Yeah, I don't know. It's no Maple story. I'll give you that. It's much more of a tank. There's a lot of MMOs out there. We've covered like none of them. For reasons on this show. But did we actually I just never considered covering an MMO. I put it in the blanket of like JRPG and like not touching that shit. Yeah. But you don't want to play a thousand hours or a hundred hours prior to
00:26:20
Speaker
recording an episode. This is all just burning time into olden ring. But I just want to premise about Jake has the MMO experience and I'm much more so a newbie into this world. So I still have fresh eyes. That's why the MMO questions are all under the kill shot category. Because Dave will just have to be like, no answer, no comment. All right, so let's start off with probably like a softball question and get us warmed up a little bit. Sure.
00:26:44
Speaker
How would you describe the game of Lost Ark? What kind of game is it? Good. Next question. Yeah, I take your question. So it is an MMO slash ARPG. MMO being that there are a lot of people playing. There are like different areas. There's some trading, other MMO elements that you definitely see in other MMOs.
00:27:06
Speaker
But it's also, it plays a little bit more like an ARPG, where you have like mobs of enemies and you're using different abilities to clear them. You kind of have like distinct classes, think more of like a Diablo or a Path of Exile.
00:27:21
Speaker
Right. So it's definitely a nice energy of those two. Yeah. It's kind of an interesting space for that as well. Like I don't know many, I guess path of exile is also a memo. There'll be some comparisons
Lost Ark Gameplay & Co-op
00:27:35
Speaker
here. What's your next question? Pick a category. Let's, let's move it up. Let's do a hard ball. All right. Is this game better than Diablo two? Oof. Um,
00:27:51
Speaker
Yeah. A lot of Diablo 2 is definitely tied to nostalgia and me just quietly air guitar-ing the instrumental version of Tristram. We've all been there. Tristram that. But I have to get out of here because my name is Deckard Kane.
00:28:10
Speaker
I mean, so one of the things I really liked about Diablo 2 back in the day is you have like your character tree and you have like three different ability trees you can kind of go down for each class. And I liked kind of playing around with those and then getting the bonuses from like gear or sets or runes. That was very much my first step into all of that. When you look at something like Path of Exile, it's immediately a trade up.
00:28:36
Speaker
So I will say that this is definitely less complex than Path of Exile. Bold statement. Because things are a lot more. No, Eve Online is the only game more complex than Path of Exile. So as far as like the skill progression stuff, I think it plays a lot more like a Diablo 3, where you have like a limited number of abilities that you can have equipped at a time that you can kind of upgrade into like three different simple trees.
00:29:04
Speaker
But as far as playing with people and doing stuff, it's definitely a step up from Diablo 2. Gotcha. Sounds good. Some of that answer might touch on some of the others. So if I ask you a question that you can just briefly answer yes and no, because you basically have already covered it, then feel free. As per my previous email. Right. What's your next category?
00:29:31
Speaker
I'm probably gonna go to kill a shat, probably gonna keep you know, going one, two, three, one, two, three. Okay, that's fair. Unless number three scares me so much. Related, is this game better than Path of Exile? Fuck no. Path of Exile, like, I love a good ARPG. I'm very excited for Path of Exile 2. So for me, Path of Exile does like a lot of cool, crazy, awesome shit. A lot of which I haven't even explored or touched into yet.
00:29:59
Speaker
That said, it's very much like a Christmas light show as far as all the bullshit going on. And it's very hard to get in like to end game, to ask to make it viable outside of like, I need to follow a guide. Right. But it has so much fun stuff that I always feel like kind of like pick up and play it. Right now, what Lost Ark has going for it is me enjoying a lot of like these new things because they're not touching MMO related stuff.
00:30:28
Speaker
But also certain things feel very dumbed down in a way. But I'd still rank Path of Exile above Lost Ark. Right. OK, I'm going to actually add one question to my list. Do you want to do that? Well, no, that's fine.
00:30:50
Speaker
We can come back to it because I want to keep the format going. You don't know what tier it's been added to. Immediately asked the next question regardless. So softball, hardball, or kill shot? Let's take a step back down to hardball. Why is the game dumbed down?
00:31:12
Speaker
Interesting. So there are a lot of quests along the way. So one boon to how it's laid out, you might have kind of like a, I'm gonna say an ARPG type map, where you have to go to different points, talk to different people, do different little quests along the main quest.
00:31:30
Speaker
So thankfully, when you get a lot of these smaller quests, you talk to me like, hey, we need you to do a thing. It's usually on the path of the main quest. So you don't feel like you have to go out of the way to do it. That part is really nice as far as design. But some of the quests might be like, talk to somebody like, hey, can you talk to another person? They're like three feet away. You're like, hey, I talked to this person like, hey, you completed the quest.
00:31:51
Speaker
Right. Or the max amount you have to do is kill five enemies in an area or left-click a thing and be like, I'm reading this tome. You've read the tome. Right. A lot of those things you're very simple. I don't think they need to be overly complex, but from some other things I've seen from other games, it definitely feels dumbed down in comparison.
00:32:16
Speaker
Now, from somebody who has MMO experience, is that the case or am I way off base? I think that that's mostly, so it varies from game to game. Like a good experience is relatively easy at the beginning.
00:32:34
Speaker
Challenging as the game goes on you ramp up the challenge and then once you get into optional content then Then you really are free to make it as difficult as you want, right? Yeah, like I think that's pretty standard progression for a lot of games Spoilers I've done some reading already on like Metacritic reviews and other like review sites and things like that on Lost Ark at this point my impression is the game is like
00:33:01
Speaker
And you can actually correct me if I'm wrong on this. You have firsthand experience. But the game is almost pitifully easy at the beginning for a while. I want to say at this point, yes. Because we're rerunning through some stuff on a new server because of reasons. But all of this stuff, even when I did the initial playthrough, I'm like, oh, this feels like baby stuff.
Challenges in Lost Ark
00:33:26
Speaker
Because I have to kill five enemies. They weren't really a challenge.
00:33:29
Speaker
But as I've gotten to some later stuff past like I want to say a quote unquote midpoint that I reached, like they open up more stuff and like they are giving it to you kind of piecemeal so you're not overwhelmed by all the systems, all the mechanics, all the possible difficulty. Right. But like I did a dungeon and it was a hard dungeon and I did matchmaking so I was playing with other people.
00:33:51
Speaker
Yeah, pubs. And that was actually really fun. And it was challenging in comparison. And they added new cool mechanics. And it didn't feel like a static, go in a room, kill some mobs, kill some mobs, kill some mobs, kill the boss. So it definitely is building up. And I do like that. But I've definitely not seen enough overall to fully gauge. But it definitely starts out pretty easy. And then it has been ramping up.
00:34:20
Speaker
Yeah, if I can step out of the bit for a second, like based off of what I've read, one to 50, I think it's 50, it's 50 or 60. I believe it's 50 though, is considered like the story sort of beats like you're getting through, essentially the tutorial. And you can literally get items that make it so subsequent characters, like skip most of it. Yeah, I think after you get your first character 50, you like, you can get two other characters to just like level up to 50. Yeah.
00:34:49
Speaker
And that's because that's where the end game starts and all of the content, it opens up a bunch of the systems that have been added to the game. So this is the US release. We're recording this the week of the US release, but it's been released in Korea for like six years. They kind of have the advantage of being able to launch and then say, hey, look, all of this content, which is like,
00:35:16
Speaker
really hard for MMOs to actually do because you usually don't get to launch with 60 years worth of content. Um, which is promising, but, uh, the content starting at 50 is where there's variable difficulty. Some of the stuff supposed to be really hard. Um, and people were actually reporting that on release in Korea, like some of it was so difficult that no one could clear it and they had to literally make it easier. Oh, wow. So.
00:35:44
Speaker
That's a lot for Korea. Shout out to Starcraft. Um, but it's usually like a country who takes their gaming very seriously. Yeah. So if they're reporting that it's too difficult now, when they're in that grind set, uh, that's saying a lot. Yeah, exactly. All right. Softball, hardball or kill shot. What's the next question? Uh, give me a softy softball. All right. Is it a fun game to play with friends? Yes.
00:36:14
Speaker
This is 100% so far been a thing that I did a lot solo. I think a lot of people were doing solo things kind of separately, talking about it in chat. Um, but this time around we've been playing together. Typically it's like you do your own stuff for a lot of quests, but then if there's a dungeon, people like group up and play it together and be like, if somebody has already done it before, they might point out some secrets that they found, um, or something. But it's been a lot more fun playing with people. Cause that's really the reason I wanted to play it in the first place.
00:36:44
Speaker
outside of the shiny, sexy ARPG elements. But it's really been a good time, I think, all around. Also, we've not had anybody who's been like, maybe it's like the difficulty of the content currently, but nobody's been really shitty about, you're playing wrong, man. You can't handle mechanics, we all died.
00:37:02
Speaker
Apparently it does turn into that. This isn't Destiny. They say that there are some things like that in the endgame where it's like, hey, one person screwed up. Everybody's going to get punished for it. But that's in the much more difficult endgame. I think Destiny is actually, you mentioned Destiny. As far as raiding is concerned, raiding in Destiny is actually considered relatively easy compared to top tier raiding in other MMOs.
00:37:27
Speaker
I think that's fair. I just remember we struggled a lot with... Yeah, we're bad. Or there's people in our group that were bad. Mostly me. But they could have also been others, he used to say.
00:37:42
Speaker
I mean, it's fun to play with friends, cheating the format a little bit. What do you say the split is between solo and co-op content right now? Because I've played a lot of different games, a lot of different MMOs that have completely different ratios to the amount of time you're spending playing with other people versus just yourself.
00:38:02
Speaker
So if I'm playing right now, I can invite somebody to my party. If they're my party, that doesn't mean they're default playing with me. It just means I can kind of see them on the map. Right. Exactly. But you can join the same channel and then you are playing in that same instance together. Okay. So if you have quests in a certain area where it's like, hey, you got to kill 10 dudes.
00:38:23
Speaker
both your kills and your friend's kills will contribute towards that same quest goal. Gotcha. So that part's kind of cool. But a lot of times if you go to a cutscene or something else story based, it might desync you guys from playing on the exact same channel. Yeah. So typically we're not doing a lot of go talk to somebody or kill these things type quests together. We're really just grouping up for the dungeons. Right. But that's not to say you can't do that smaller stuff together if you want to.
00:38:54
Speaker
Very specific follow-up question.
Mechanics & Improvements
00:38:56
Speaker
Can you share quests in it? I know that played some of the most where if one person has a quest, you can just like hit a button and say like, okay, this quest is now available to everybody else in the party and it will be added to their journal if they accept, or is that lacking?
00:39:12
Speaker
I've not looked into it explicitly. It's typically more of like, let's say Landon and I were playing together. Yeah. We're like, oh, we're at the same point. Let's party up. And then we were going through killing the monster's request. We both get completion on it, but I'm not explicitly sharing it with him. He was just at that same point. So that's really the only part of it I've tested right now. That's fair.
00:39:38
Speaker
That's fair. All right. I'm out of followups. Softball, hardball, kill shot. Kill me. All right. Kill shot. Uh, do you think it's moral to play a game published by Amazon? Sure. Like I understand the knee jerk or even like the feeling morally compromised for certain things because we've talked about this with the blizzard. You don't want to support shitty behavior, right? Yeah. At the same point though.
00:40:10
Speaker
like everybody's done something shitty and I don't think it directly always is going to correlate between
00:40:17
Speaker
giving them money or doing something else because like, let's say Jeff Bezos is a piece of shit. I feel like that's kind of, he's a super billionaire detached from reality. He stated an absolute fact. Okay. So let's say that, right? Does that mean you're not going to ever use Amazon because it's super convenient because it employs other people? Granted, we're not saying like we support all of Amazon's practices and other things, but like,
00:40:44
Speaker
I think it's up to each person for where they draw the line. If I'm getting, let's say, sneakers, I'm not going to look for specifically ethically sourced sneakers because that's going to change things for the people it's being shitty to.
00:41:02
Speaker
Like, and that's for me personally, it might be different for somebody else. But I think certain things are just kind of blanket fucked. I don't think we can, for the way capitalism is currently, entirely break out of it. Right. And I don't think one person's, oh, I'm not going to play an Amazon game because it'll give money to or support Jeff Bezos in some way. Congratulations, you haven't magically fixed anything now.
00:41:32
Speaker
Yeah, and this was actually a Jeopardy! unlock. This was actually a cancel shot in disguise as a kill shot because it literally is a question of like, where do you draw the lines with ethics? It's also a straw man on my part because like I ordered a ton of stuff from Amazon.
00:41:47
Speaker
Um, and I give them a lot more money than I would for a free to play game. And I'm supporting the mega corporation and soon to be government leader that Amazon is. So like, right. Like I have, I have no, I have no room to stand on. My castle is made of sand.
00:42:07
Speaker
And it's purely arguing from a hypothetical situation. But I do think it's kind of interesting to talk about it occasionally because people get really pissed off when it's like, hey, Blizzard abusing its employees.
00:42:22
Speaker
But we know Amazon also abuses warehouse workers. It's different. I don't think there's as many allegations of sexual misconduct and things like that. But straight up, you don't get bathroom breaks. We're working people till they pass out, firing them, revolving door of employees. It's a labor law travesty that Amazon gets away with what it does.
00:42:43
Speaker
And it's all connected. So that's where this question came from. That's the reason it's a cancel shot. This guy's just a kill shot. I think some of that comes down to like, as a sinner, can you call someone else a sinner? Right. Take the log out of your own eye, plank out of your own eye before the splinter out of another's.
00:43:07
Speaker
So I think you can, to a degree. I don't think you need to be completely faultless to accuse somebody else of something else. It is weird though, if like, let's say
00:43:21
Speaker
Let's say you murdered somebody, right? Right. Hypothetically. Hypothetically. Hypothetically, Jake. Stop linking me to that article. But let's say you're then accusing like, hey, somebody else murdered somebody, but you got away with it type thing. Right.
00:43:40
Speaker
Like maybe you came to terms in like a tone for your crime. I don't know. But it seems weird for you to be the person who's up in arms about that. You know, right? You've kind of you've lost the moral high ground. But at the same time, you didn't have it to begin with. Yeah, I don't think you need the moral high ground in general to call something out. But I do think you should kind of check your own shit before accusing somebody if it is like for the exact same thing. Right.
00:44:10
Speaker
It's weird. We'll talk about moral relative relative relativism next week. Uh, the recurring moral relativism episode that we have set up as one out of four of our monthly episodes. And these are my relatives that I consider moral. Uncle Bob. That's it. That's the phone. All right. Softball, hardball, kill shot. Probably not as philosophically interesting as the last question.
00:44:38
Speaker
What was the last one we did? Is it moral to play a game published by Amazon? We'll do a softball. Okay. Oh yeah. Softball. Uh, what sort of content have you experienced in the game so far?
00:44:48
Speaker
I did a character creation, which isn't like the most in-depth, but it's kind of choosing between a lot of cool presets. But I made a sexy lady with heterochromia, so I'm down for that lady with heterochromia. Because I'm hetero.
00:45:08
Speaker
But outside of that went through the kind of tutorial had been going through, let's say several different areas for like main quests and side quests, some spin off dungeons here and there.
00:45:20
Speaker
I did in my first playthrough kind of get into strongholds a little bit, which is kind of like your own personal Animal Crossing island, where you can do some upgrades for stuff and crafting. And I'm sure there is some stuff for guilds that we've not been able to really access yet. As far as like shared group content or doing like raids, or making like a guild hall, a lot of that stuff still, I'm sure it exists, I just really haven't come across it yet. Right.
00:45:49
Speaker
So so far, I've just really accessed a lot of like the main straightforward day one gameplay, I'd say. That's fair. Next one.
Is Lost Ark Pay-to-Win?
00:46:01
Speaker
Oh, you're asking me. Yeah, this is your prompt. Let's do hardball. OK. What's the mechanic you think is missing from Lost Ark?
00:46:12
Speaker
mechanic. You played a lot of ARPGs. You played some MMOs. We were talking just recently in Discord about how sometimes playing an MMO or it's missing key features of a previous one, you'll distinctly feel the sting of its absence. Is there anything like that for the last arc? Not yet from an MMO standpoint. Um, I haven't really gotten into more of the community aspect and like trading or just group stuff in general.
00:46:43
Speaker
I think from an ARPG standpoint, because I come from a basis of Path of Exile, I would like to see a little bit more of skill complexity and being able to modify stuff. So far, all of the weapons and gear that I've had have been numbers increase for stats. So you just pick the better one or if you want to trade off in a given stat.
00:47:05
Speaker
But it's not like, here are your stats. And it does like 5% damage increase and 5% mobility. And, um, there's a bit of a trade-off where you take more earth elemental damage. Like I would like to see more complexity in those systems, but I'm guessing that's probably just for a later point in content that I'm not at yet. Right. So I'm going to write that off as a, it's probably fine.
00:47:31
Speaker
Yeah, I have my own pre-experience answer to this question because I looked up a very specific question that impacts the way I play Mimos and it was, does Lost Ark have the Trinity? And the answer is no, it does not do Tanks healers and damage characters.
00:47:51
Speaker
And I personally consider this a little bit of a con for this series, but I also, I don't think it has to be. I would say like a little bit of a con, not a major con. Destiny also didn't do the Trinity, but I specifically played Warlock because they had the ability to heal. I eventually got Well of Radiance, which was a massive defensive ability, which was super useful in PvE.
00:48:15
Speaker
There comes a time where as you've introduced some of these things, I know that there's characters that have support roles in Lost Ark, but they all do damage, right? Yes. I know Bard is a support class. I'm sure there's maybe one or two others. I'm guessing Paladin is the other one or Holy Knight or whatever it's called.
00:48:36
Speaker
I assume that most of the supporting is probably in the form of CC, less so than healing. There might be some damage mitigation with Bard. Again, I haven't really experienced all the classes and abilities and whatnot. But yeah, there's definitely not a designated one person does this. Yeah.
00:48:54
Speaker
But it does seem like I'm playing Shadowhunter, which that should have been the first awful question. Who are you playing as? Who's that sexy lady? I mean, they're all damaged characters, so it didn't actually matter if I asked it. It seems to me like I don't really have as much in the way of CC as much as like I'm trying to kill them. A lot of myself seems more damage focused right now.
00:49:18
Speaker
It might be that way for other classes as well. I don't know. Yeah. To undermine my own argument, I do know that there are some support buffs from Bard and like Paladin gets like an AoE heal or something like that later, but it's not something that's the contents not balanced around in the same way in Destiny. You couldn't really balance content around needing a warlock with well of radiance that's constantly healing everybody to max health and overcharging their shield. Like,
00:49:44
Speaker
because maybe someone doesn't have a warlock. And this is one of the problems games have when they kind of play lossy on whether they have the Trinity or not, is in-game content sometimes is made trivial by people who do dedicate themselves to defensive abilities or healing or whatever.
00:50:01
Speaker
But you can't balance content around them having that. Yeah, it would be like, well, we can't do this raid because we need this one specific class to have this one specific ability. And they're just they have to press that one button at that one time. That really sucks as far as gameplay, because then you just become a Phil who that's the one thing you have to do.
00:50:20
Speaker
Yeah. And everybody else is like, yeah. But you're like, ah. It's just the one thing you have to do to make everybody succeed. And it doesn't feel good from a gameplay standpoint when you'd rather run around and shoot stuff and use your abilities when you feel you need to versus if you didn't, everybody loses. Right.
00:50:41
Speaker
But I tangented off of that question probably enough. Pick your pitch. Oh, we're going kill shot. Kill shot. All right. Are you committed to recurring raids in Lost Ark at high levels? I haven't tried any yet, but I mean, as long as this is like a fun group game, I would like to.
00:51:07
Speaker
It's nice to have a weekly recurring thing like, hey, getting together with friends, going to try and do some game stuff. I don't know if that's in the form of group content or raid. Cool. Yeah, I'm down.
00:51:19
Speaker
Cool. There'd have to be some like heavily, heavily mitigating factor for me to be like, nah. Like maybe somebody's like being really shitty or it's just not fun anymore. Or it's just way too difficult and stressful. Right. The group's not up to it. Yeah. Last wish type situation. And as a, as a disclaimer, there's only one kill shot left. So you can say that if you want to. Okay.
00:51:46
Speaker
Unless they think of another one. Let's go back to hardball. Hardball, okay. In what ways is Lost Ark frustrating you right now? All right, so we're going to talk about the elf in the room.
00:52:01
Speaker
They fucked up. So I got the founders pack. I got to access the game content three days early as did a lot of other people who in our play group. And then because of the server we chose to play on and how many people they have playing, they said like, hey,
00:52:18
Speaker
No more people can make characters on this server. So anybody who didn't get that three-day early access, who we possibly want to play with, yourself included, and some other people, wouldn't be able to play with us on that server. So we said like, hey, all right, let's switch servers to where there's going to have that as an option. But there's been some issues of like, I now have to make a character from scratch. Sucks. I can't really transfer my character from server to server.
00:52:45
Speaker
My name is locked. I can't reuse that name. The guild name is also locked. We had to make a new guild name. The other bonus that I got from like the founders pack didn't transfer over to my new character. Yet they might fix that. But like I was able to start with a pet before. I was able to get like this passive bonus for 30 days. So like there's been some issues and struggles with that that don't feel great.
00:53:12
Speaker
I'm hoping that they get that shit sorted and they're like, hey, sorry, here's some stuff. Here's your back. And I'd be fine with that. But it's kind of been a bit of a wrench in the works and just has not, not been the best. Yeah.
00:53:26
Speaker
I actually learned about all of this last night because I wasn't checking the Lost Ark chat for two days. Oh, they checked the Lost Ark chat? And there was a lot. So I caught up on it last night. I was very surprised by the pivot to lock servers entirely without the capability for server transfers. Apparently, they're planning on enabling server transfers in Korea sometime this year. Which means in America, it'll be a bit
00:53:55
Speaker
It'll be a bit probably but it's really this is one of the things that like I don't fully understand why games don't allow this and we were talking kind of extensively about it the short of the conversation is a lot of games work around this by having
00:54:12
Speaker
either server regions or Guild Wars has the most amazing system. It has mega servers where you literally just join the server and then you can play with anyone on any instance. And the only trade off is sometimes if you're the only person on an instance in a map, it's like, hey,
00:54:31
Speaker
There's like nobody else here and we're gonna shut down this instance. We're gonna migrate you in place to another instance that actually has people. But the benefits to that are like, you just sign in.
00:54:43
Speaker
Yeah. Right? It's all the super cluster of servers. Eve does the same thing. They have one sign in for their entire game across all regions. That sounds really nice because I have this play group or friend group, but then I have other people from other places who maybe I want to play with.
00:55:06
Speaker
but I haven't coordinated with every single person who might possibly play the Lost Ark to say, hey, which one are you going to play on? Do you want to play possibly with us? So they are kind of locked to whichever server they're on, and I'm locked to whichever server I'm on. So if I want to play with Tony, for example, he'd have to make a new character on my server or vice versa. Not the best. Yeah.
00:55:29
Speaker
Even Final Fantasy, they had like 14 specifically. They have a better, not as good as just the solutions I was just describing, but they have server regions. So like North America is the Aether region and there's a bunch of different servers there and you can travel, you can visit any other server in your region. And when you're queuing up for content, things like dungeons, raids, whatever, you can play with anyone from your region.
00:55:54
Speaker
You all just enter it. You can be in a cross-world party, which is with anyone else in North America, regardless of what server they're on. There's just been a lot of improvements in this space, and it doesn't seem like Lost Ark has incorporated really any of them. In fact, to mention one other point real quick here while I'm on a tangent, I kind of dislike that names are region-specific and not server-specific.
00:56:23
Speaker
names in general. I actually like Guild Wars for this. You have an account ID. Exactly. And it looks exactly the same as Battle.net's accounts do. And then you can have whatever name you want, because it's just a display name. Steam has had this since the early 2000s. Yeah. As somebody who's played other games or developed any bit of code, you're like, those don't need to be directly tied together. Just saying. Why is it a unique ID? Yeah. It doesn't need to be it.
00:56:51
Speaker
So let me ask you a question before I get asked to be asked the last kill shot. Sure. From what you've currently seen of Lost Ark or what you've grained from like reading the chat or just talking to me on the side or other people, what are you most concerned about or most excited about? It's on the books. It's on the books, yeah.
00:57:17
Speaker
I'm going to leave the concern question, because it's probably related to the last kill shot. But I'm most excited to play a fresh MMO with friends. I personally think, I could be wrong, but I personally think that there's probably better ARPGs that are pure ARPGs out there. There's going to be games that value your time a little bit better, because this is an MMO. Not Path of Exhaustor.
00:57:45
Speaker
And there's probably going to be games that have better answers to some of those, you know, gripes I just talked about, character names, terrors, playing with friends, things like that. But I mean, I don't know of many actual ARPGs that have good end game raid-like content you can play with friends, you can organize for, and I'm very excited for that.
00:58:07
Speaker
I'm very much dungeons, raids, co-op content. If I wanted a single player experience, I basically suspect I could have more fun in other games. Yeah.
00:58:19
Speaker
Although I'm sure it's good. I haven't played it. From what I've played of the Shadowhunter, a lot of my abilities feel pretty badass. It feels good. I know specifically as a design decision, they're like, hey, we're scaling everything so you fight a bunch of enemies and you kill them quickly. And your abilities are
Episode Conclusion
00:58:39
Speaker
meant to kill them quickly. Taken to the extreme of one reviewer that was like,
00:58:44
Speaker
Combining with the early games quests being relatively easy It's like so I get on a horse and I run over to kill a pack of mobs I get off the horse I use two abilities and then I get back on the horse because they're all dead and I hit the kill cap, right? Yeah Yeah, I'm not saying that's not what's happening right now But again, it is very early for where I'm at in the game and I know it gets more challenging and
00:59:09
Speaker
Yeah. And it is more satisfying than like the opposite of this is bullet sponges, meat sponges, like enemies that have tons of health and any MOA played where you're just sitting there pounding on an enemy forever and it's not a challenging boss. You're probably having a bad time. You're just wasting people's time. So this is the better of the two. Hopefully that answers part of your question. Oh yeah. Hit me with that last kill shot though. Okay. Is this game pay to win?
00:59:40
Speaker
Um, from what I've seen so far for what you can buy, it seems to be cosmetic. Um, if there are other things outside of that, I know there are like some bonuses you can get to make some things cheaper in-game as far as like maybe you get teleport and you have to like pay a little bit of silver, which is like an in-game currency you get really frequently. Um, so for now I'm going to say no, cause I'm not aware of anything. Right. There might be some elements that.
01:00:10
Speaker
Well, okay, I will say this. As far as what little I've done in the stronghold, which is, again, your Animal Crossing island, you can research some stuff. So some upgrades to your island to maybe allow you to craft stuff or send some people out on a mission to get you some resources. Monster hunter. You can use a type of currency in game to make it go faster.
01:00:35
Speaker
Where you're like, hey, instead of doing this research for 10 hours in real lifetime, do it instantly. And I will bet you money that you can buy that currency. So that stuff, I think, yes, but I'm not sure how much that makes a difference as far as making it pay to win versus just getting you through that gameplay faster.
01:01:00
Speaker
Yeah, I have some impressions again from the research I've done. And a lot of it comes down to the definition of pay to win. Like in Korea, apparently, in the game's defense, like people don't really consider this game pay to win because pay to win equals PvP power, for a definition, and a lot of people's minds in Korea. So it's like,
01:01:22
Speaker
I know that you can buy high level gear, but you have to get to the level where you can use it. But beyond cosmetics, I think you can buy high level gear in Lost Ark. And I take that back if it's something that's incorrect, yada, yada, yada. But that's what I read at least. And I know that there's like some subscription things like pets gave a bonus, an attribute bonus. And for the people that bought the founders packs, they got one month.
01:01:49
Speaker
of the subscription in quotes that like unlocks that bonus. I think you can earn that in game, but you're incentivized. Usually this is how pay to win works. You can get it free, but people want to do something quicker. You pay for convenience, right? Hello, mobile games. Yes. And in the US and the Western world, pay to win usually is just anything beyond cosmetics, right? Like that's how we like to define it.
01:02:15
Speaker
anything that gives a mechanical advantage, but in Korea, that's not the definition they use. It's like, am I paying to kill other people better? Yes, no. And so because the answer was no for Lost Ark, they're like, okay, the game's not paid.
01:02:32
Speaker
But it's interesting. We'll see how it unfolds. I mean, it's literally owned by Amazon. Just going back to that or published by Amazon. So we'll see if it doesn't make them money. I expect that they'll introduce more of it. But even just off the founders packs, we know they made a crazy amount of money. So that's surprising. And I mean, as 30 bucks from me and I didn't even know anything about the game, I was just drunk and like, this looks pretty.
01:02:58
Speaker
It wasn't actually obvious. If there was a grape I had, it wasn't obvious on the Steam page that the game was not free to play. It wasn't obvious that it was free to play. I will say that, yeah. Because everybody had talked to you, I was like, oh, it's a free to play game. Like, really? What did I buy?
01:03:16
Speaker
Yeah, but that's the last kill shot. I mean, for people who are playing the game and enjoying it, I'm not meaning to be negative. Well, I am actually meaning to be negative, but it's part of the bit. Everything downhill is softballs and hardballs.
01:03:30
Speaker
I mean, I can take a final softball. Okay. Final softball. Um, so this one actually, I'm going to, I'm going to force you to ask one more question. Is this game better than Diablo three? Cause I wanted to complete the trifecta I had Diablo two Diablo three and path of exile at three different difficulties.
01:03:48
Speaker
Yes. I was not big on Diablo 3. I thought it was fine enough, but I was very much comparing it to two. I didn't like how they went from what felt very wide as far as options to like, you have four abilities. And then your trees were like, does your spin go faster? Is your spin stronger? Is your spin blue? I'm like, what the fuck? Mm-hmm.
01:04:10
Speaker
I'm like, let me make the spin level 20 and then have my entire build be around this one thing. Which, weirdly enough, might be even more narrow now that I think about it. But I just did not get the same amount of enjoyment from three as it from two. Again, some credits in nostalgia there. But Diablo 3 did not stand out in my memories at all. I think I played with one or two friends.
01:04:40
Speaker
I enjoyed it. I definitely put a lot of time into it, but just running rifts as the end game or continuing to beat the story at higher and higher difficulties was not really what I enjoyed. So.
01:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, it was more of like a path of exit approach of like doing maps at that point, but without any progression really. Yeah. It's like you want to prestige to get an extra 0.00001% attack speed? Cool. OK. And the seasons turned into, do you have a particular set? If you have that set, your build needs to be exactly this build around that set.
01:05:11
Speaker
They kind of back themselves into a corner. I'm hoping they clean it up for Diablo 4, but who knows? All right, actual last question then. Hardball or softball? Hardball? How dumb is it that classes are gender locked?
01:05:29
Speaker
I don't care. Like I'm a guy and so I'll say I have the bias of like I don't think about this stuff very much. It would be nice if they just said like, hey, it can be whichever because I really don't think it should matter. Just like reskin them and call it a day, you know? Yeah.
01:05:46
Speaker
So you have different animations to defend the game for a second. The ladies have a very hips way type of walk animation versus guys. So like they would at least need a base walk animation, but I assume they do. Right.
01:06:00
Speaker
So I mean, like then you're getting into like how effeminate all the female characters are versus how masculine all the male characters are. Yeah. And it's a Korean game, right? Yeah. And they're not, to my knowledge, uh, the most progressive in that space, but like,
01:06:18
Speaker
I think it's one of the things like just do it and call it a day who gives a fuck. But it's not something I spend time thinking about. Right. Should they do it? Yeah. Do I care? Not directly, but I still think they should do it.
01:06:36
Speaker
That's fair. That's a good answer. That's probably not the best question to end on, but we're going to do it anyway. Well, yeah, I mean, I personally my my perspective on it is like I usually play guys in games. I basically just do not for any particular reason. And I know that there's people who are just like, I'm always going to play a female character because if I had to stare at somebody's butt, yeah, I'd rather be a female character. Right. But I'm just like, but I would rather stare at a guy, but obviously.
01:07:05
Speaker
Glad we don't have your wife on this episode. She understands. She probably also would rather stare at a guy.
01:07:15
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's not, it's not the biggest thing. Uh, but it is also like pretty normalized in the West now. I think that, um, this is much more of a Korea versus Western game thing. Like it will talk about Guild Wars male, female character. It doesn't matter. You could be a tree male, female tree. Doesn't matter. Non-binary tree. It doesn't matter. Like, um, and it is a little bit weird where it's like, Oh, if I want to play the mage, I gotta be a chick. Right. Cause now you're like.
01:07:45
Speaker
Why are these associated? Relatively minor and again, it's another thing that apparently is on the roadmap. Because again, like the West cares more about that in general. Oh, yeah, I agree with that. Korea. But again,
01:08:03
Speaker
Like, as we move forward with accessibility and inclusiveness, it doesn't seem like it's a crazy hard thing to do, so just do it and call it a day. Like, nobody's gonna- Do Amazon has enough money. Right? Who the fuck would complain like, hey, how come I have the option to be a guy or a girl for this? What the fuck? Mm-hmm. Like, the opposite's not gonna happen, so just allow that to be a thing and call it a day, you know? Yeah.
01:08:29
Speaker
I don't care if I have like an effeminate guy. I'm sure a lot of people would like to play effeminate guys. Cool, do it. Make it all options. I actually like when games take the laziest possible approach to that too. And it's just like Saints Row, actually. From the time we barely tried it, you can just pick any voice you want for your character, regardless of what they look like. So you can have like the deepest, most masculine voice possible.
01:08:54
Speaker
be a Barbie girl. I would have loved if you like changed your voice for that impression instead of just already having the most deepest manly voice. What game was it that I played a game as a female character, but I picked like the deepest guy voice I could. No, it was actually cyberpunk because you were able to swap those. So I went the doctor girlfriend approach. I was female presenting, but then like had like a smoker's voice. I'm like, Oh, this is great.
01:09:23
Speaker
Yeah, cyber, say what you want about cyberpunk, but it had a huge variety of what are your bits and what's your voice? Do you want a dong? Do you want your dong inside or outside of the pants? Actually, it's not an option, it's outside. Yeah, do the bugs. Oh, man. But it does sound good. And going back to the spoiler, I will be playing Lost Ark. So we look forward to playing with you.
01:09:48
Speaker
It's got to find time for yet another MMO and all the stuff I have going on right now. But hopefully you guys, we can see you guys. What server are we playing on? If listeners want to. We are currently playing on Zosma, I believe. It's Zosma. Okay. I don't even know how to spell that, but I'm sure phonetically, if you look it up and you type in Lost Ark, you can find it on Google and that's probably good enough. Yeah.
01:10:13
Speaker
All right, cool. Well, thank you, Dave, for being both the guest and co-host for this episode. Um, we kind of like buried the lead waiting to talk about last I get to look the midpoint, but a vampire spiders is also really good. So.
01:10:29
Speaker
not a waste of time at all. If you have $3, you can technically play two different games. That's true. Actually, if you have $0, you can play one of the games that we talked about. Thank you guys for listening. If you have any feedback or ideas for future episodes, you can feel free to send those in to soapstonepodcastatgmail.com, or you can join the discussion on Facebook, which is not yet owned by Amazon, at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one.
01:10:59
Speaker
Have a good afternoon.