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S2 Ep185: RSS - December - Mike
73 Plays4 years ago
Join Dave, Jake, and special guest Mike as they talk about what they've been playing recently, rogue-likes, Elden Ring, and probably more Dark Souls 2 than anyone other than Jake is comfortable with in this week's episode!
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Banter
00:00:41
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake, and I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? It's going good, but I want to have the combined, well, the average score of how I'm doing with how Mike's doing. Hey, yeah, I'm doing just fine as well, so I guess we are fine across the board.
00:01:03
Speaker
All right. We match at fine. We're doing, we're doing okay. Yeah. If you guys didn't have the exact same answer, I was going to ask you to quantify it like on some sort of scale. So we actually could have an average cause I'm not going to like average fine and great. You know, I mean, you really have to just do the math of like the worst chance I've ever had on the podcast and the best chance I've ever had in the podcast. So I'm probably saying terrible and I probably said amazing. So this is like right smack dab in the middle. Yeah.
00:01:31
Speaker
I feel like fine is lower on the scale. It's not the average between terrible and amazing though. I feel good or great would have to be the middle.
00:01:42
Speaker
Well, great's more positive than good. Yeah. I feel like fine could be good, but it depends on inflection. Fine. Yeah. If I go fine, I get technically counts. Right. So does, does fine exist on either side of the medium? It might,
Napping Habits and Sleep Inertia
00:02:00
Speaker
it might. So what's in the center? Okay.
00:02:03
Speaker
But then again, same thing with okay. Inflection. I'm okay. Yeah. Okay. It feels low to me. If you do a damn girl, you find that's definitely a positive. That's also telling someone how they themselves feel, which is weird, right? You feel good. Depending on my inflection. Yeah.
00:02:29
Speaker
Damn girl, you fine. Just drag it out until they walk away. She's more of a tougher step, not from taking a compliment of like describing her physical appearance. It's me forcefully telling her her move. Assigned value, fine.
00:02:49
Speaker
That's fair. Well, I'm glad you guys are doing fine. I'm also doing a little bit, a little, a little well, um, to borrow an expression that doesn't exist. Had a nap at some point. That was enough. You don't know when the net was. Well, if you take, if you take enough naps, they kind of just blend together. Occasionally there's a longer nap. Some people call it sleep. Ah, the big nap. Hell yeah. Big Koonenberger.
00:03:19
Speaker
How long do you usually nap for? Probably like 15 minutes, maybe 20. Really? Is that too long or too short for his answer, Mike? To me, that feels short. I mean, I know that's what they say you should do. You should only nap for like 15, 20 minutes. But if I try to nap, I usually end up sleeping at least two hours.
00:03:40
Speaker
Yeah. I haven't been known to, sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say, uh, and then immediately feel terrible upon waking up. That's the breaks. It's the sleep inertia. If you sleep too long. Yeah.
00:03:53
Speaker
That's why I don't nap because like it feels so nice to lay down when your body's like a little bit tired. You rest your eyes. You're like, I could just drift off, but then I'm going to fuck my day up because I'll be like 2am. I'm like, why am I not tired? Yeah. And I'm always afraid of that happening.
00:04:13
Speaker
The secret is to just always be tired in advance and just always be tired. And then the nap doesn't hurt you as much. Oh yeah. And deprive yourself. It's easy. But now there's a lot of ways you can optimize for it. You can have shorter naps that helps with sleep inertia. You can ingest caffeine prior to laying down that, that works too. Yeah. Unfortunately I am.
00:04:39
Speaker
largely immune to the effects of caffeine at this point. Right. You could set an alarm, which is like external caffeine in a way. Yeah, it's less pleasant though.
00:04:53
Speaker
Yes. It physically targets your senses. Yeah. It's still, it's an improvement over being beaten awake, but it's like not that much. It's beaten awake by sound. That's what an alarm is. I mean, if I had to choose between a sound beating and a physical beating, I think I would choose a physical beating.
00:05:13
Speaker
Did you beat Michael Wick? Yes, and I did a sound job. Yeah, a sound beating I think is my takeaway term from this episode. I don't know. Now all of this talk of beating and sound jobs, that's just
00:05:26
Speaker
Edging a little bit too much into risque territory Believe you me. I have a joke or two queued up if the opportunity strikes I was gonna say risque isn't really doesn't really apply. We're well past risk of gay Obviously Dave and I are
00:05:48
Speaker
Dave and I are together, so yeah. All of the innuendos for anybody who's not listened to previous episodes have been targeted towards, like, 100%. The running gag, I mean, obvious truth. I mean, we don't run anymore when we gag so much.
00:06:10
Speaker
I was going to say that Dave and I have known each other since childhood and Mike and Dave have known each other since adult. That was the inflection. We're going back to it. Yeah. How are you doing right, Dave? Okay. Okay. I think that's Donkey Kong. I think that's where that came from. But
00:06:38
Speaker
I want to posture a question to the group.
Exploring 'Gunfire Reborn'
00:06:41
Speaker
What have you all been playing recently? I was going to ask the same question if nobody brought it up. And then you did. I mean, we were talking about this a little bit before we started, but Dave, you got me into gunfire reborn recently with the 1.0 launch. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've probably put in 20 hours in the last week or so. Damn zone.
00:07:09
Speaker
Yeah. I've done one kill on the boss, which is fun, which has opened up more areas afterwards. Spoiler. But yeah, it's got a decent progression system, you know.
00:07:26
Speaker
Unlocking more characters by leveling up your current character. Unlocking more characters by spending in-game currency that is readily collectible. Sans microtransactions. And yeah, combat feels good. There's a, um, there's a Delta rune joke here, just as an aside, cause I think Sans is a shopkeeper. So Sans microtransactions. That's, that's the punchline that you're not going to actually make the joke, but yeah.
00:07:56
Speaker
That is the name of his next shop. Sam's Microtransactors. Gamers love them. What do you got here? Pending candies mostly. I'd be curious to try out Gunfire again at some point.
Game Difficulty and Humor
00:08:14
Speaker
It's been a long time since I played it. I think we all played it a little bit at launch of Early Access. Is it still in Early Access? No, it's 1.0. Sweet.
00:08:25
Speaker
sweet sweet like how many because i think there's three characters around when i played has there been like significant additions to the game since then we had an episode on it for the listeners you can go back and listen to it after this i mean there's up to five now yeah i was gonna say five or six
00:08:40
Speaker
And they added a new area, uh, new weapons. They kind of balanced out some of the secret rooms. Cause if you remember like certain ones were like, Oh, a platforming challenge or hated that. Yeah. So those are very rare. Um, I think they're only on the harder difficulties by default. Um, I haven't done the hardest difficulty, so there might be certain things that also got moved out there. And now they also have some bosses you can do in the challenge rooms as well. So it's a nice breakup of stuff.
00:09:11
Speaker
I love the idea that they have a platforming challenges just on harder difficulties. Cause you know, like sometimes when you're selecting different difficulties in a game, it's like easy. Enemies have less health and deal less damage. Normal, the intended experience, hard. Enemies have more health. They do more damage. And then it's like, there's an additional line at the bottom. It's like, the game is less fun. Parentheses, you like super meat boy, right?
00:09:40
Speaker
or the transition from hard to ultra hard is. Ultra hard is now with platforming elements in hidden rooms. That's the only change between hard and ultra hard. I like when games do more unique things with the difficulty, even if I'll never partake of it.
00:10:02
Speaker
I know this is an aside.
Community in Game Development
00:10:03
Speaker
This isn't really related to gunfire, but the reborn particular entry in the gunfire series. But in Doom, like they had Ultra Kill, which was like one death. It was a it's a hardcore run, like one death and it's done. But it and that's fine. Tons of games have that. But it like leaves a little tombstone where you died. So if you make it back to that far, you'd be like, I'm better than you pass me. You take one step, get a head shot.
00:10:32
Speaker
You started hiding behind your tombstones. Don't get me, fucker. Yeah, I've also been doing a little bit of that again, but then also I've dipped my toe into satisfactory because Justin, friend of the show, got that for me and just been chill with that a little bit. This is the one that surprises me.
00:10:57
Speaker
Hmm. This surprises me cause I, I we've for a long time played logistics games and satisfactory is well into that space. So I'm curious how like it's grown on you.
00:11:14
Speaker
I mean, I'm not, uh, an efficient person. I'm very much, I will brute force my way through everything. So there's a lot of spaghet, uh, but it does feel kind of good to go back and refactor something to refactoring it, uh, just to make it less shit. Um, but I mean, right now I'm just doing single player, so I don't care if it's shitty, but in the future, I would enjoy probably playing with people doing a combined factory or like sending resources to like a common location type thing.
00:11:46
Speaker
Yeah. I think it's a, it's a very different dynamic when you're playing games that can have efficiency with other people. Um, even when we've played like Minecraft or something, if it has any sort of mod or system where it's like, there's some organization process or something, it can become a rift in the community really quickly. Yeah. Cause everyone have different levels of, uh, how much they care about a given thing. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
00:12:15
Speaker
Yeah. That's true. That factory is a good one, though. Yeah. I will say, when it first came out in early access, it didn't really pique my interest. It just didn't seem like something I would want to play. But when Dave was here for Thanksgiving, he played a little bit of it. Or no, you streamed. I streamed before I came down. Yeah, you streamed a little bit of it. And I was watching it.
00:12:46
Speaker
I don't know that there's been so many big changes that I would have noticed because, you know, if I'm not following it, I'm not going to know what features are new, what features are existing. But it definitely did peak my interest more than the initial early access. So maybe I don't know if it was, you know, just because it's, oh, it's another early access game, but I would probably be inclined to get into it sooner rather than later.
00:13:16
Speaker
Yeah, it definitely doesn't hurt to wait for that one. It's got kind of a slower development cycle. That was one of the ones that launched as an Epic Game Store exclusive. Um, and, but now it's available on Steam. Um, and I think it's had like a multi-year, you know, development cycle at this point, but it's doing one of those develop with community sort of kicks. Um, yeah, I mean, uh,
00:13:48
Speaker
It feels like that's probably the best way to keep your community around, make them feel like they're part of the process. I mean, sure it's going to slow things down. Nuclear Throne did that. They very much were. Community feedback was important and they were engaging the community to get that feedback.
00:14:16
Speaker
But they did have a much quicker release cycle. I mean, their game was also very buggy. I think they were doing updates like every two weeks. Again, game on a much smaller scale.
00:14:31
Speaker
Development as a service is kind of just a thing now. I mean, like obviously we've covered Hades, which is an amazing example of getting the community involved. But like Subnautica had a button during development you could just press to provide feedback at any point in the game. And I guess with the rise of early access, it should be expected, I guess.
00:15:01
Speaker
Yeah, it definitely feels like more of an indie studio or a small studio. I mean, you can't really call Supergiant an indie studio anyway.
00:15:13
Speaker
I guess if you consider company size, they're still an indie studio. Yeah. Is it employees or revenue? Right. If it's revenue, then they're definitely not an indie studio. They're making money hand over fist. Which is one of my favorite weapons in that game. Hand. But it's above a fist. Follow your fist, put your hand over it, and then use that as a weapon. It would be nice to see
00:15:43
Speaker
that kind of community, community work or that's not the right phrase. Community service. Yeah, mandatory community service. Just that that whole back and forth with a community to provide feedback of it might be nice to see that come to, you know, bigger studios. Yeah. Granted,
00:16:09
Speaker
your EA is not going to be all that interested in player feedback until after the game has come out. And even then, it's a, why did you not want to buy these loot boxes? Why did you not want these microtransactions? Why did you release a game that's going to take three years of updates to have the same features as the previous one in the series? That applies to multiple titles now, thanks. We had to model the newest NBA player faces on there, all right?
00:16:40
Speaker
For a second, I thought you were casting aspersions upon No Man's Sky, but then you quantified it with- I mean, I could as well. I like No Man's Sky though. I wonder if you guys were both playing that post, like the four years of fixes they put into it. Yeah.
00:17:04
Speaker
For me, I was never on the train. I had no interest in the train. And then they said, I'd recognized so many other people who were on the train. Then that turned out to be a lie and it disappointed a lot of my friends. So I'm just very, I keep it very distant. But it seems like since that four year period, they have actually added a bunch of stuff and made it more enjoyable.
00:17:28
Speaker
Yeah. I could have an episode just on No Man's Sky flaws and benefits, but I mean, it's hard to argue, I think, that Hello Games has
00:17:44
Speaker
done anything other than try to win back the support of their community. Legitimately expansion size offerings repeatedly for free. The last achievement I got for I had to check while we were talking was back in October, end of October, but I got the achievement for
00:18:07
Speaker
reaching the center of the galaxy and survival mode, which is basically kind of the default game ending. There's a couple, but it's like one of them. And it's literally a 1% achievement. Like for all of the copies of No Man's Sky on Steam, 1% of people have gotten that. And that's a sign for you're not the only one who hasn't come back and given No Man's Sky look. Damn. Do you think it's better to
00:18:36
Speaker
I guess have a failure like that and then have that redemption in the same way that like Cyberpunk did where they're like, hey, we fucked up.
Failures and Redemption in Gaming
00:18:45
Speaker
And then they made a lot of fixes to it to try and re-ingratiate themselves with the community. Or do you think it's better to just be like, oh, it was good from the start? I mean, that's kind of a trick question. I'm gonna have Mike answer this one. Yeah, I mean, I can see it both ways.
00:19:04
Speaker
You know, as a consumer, I want the thing that I'm paying for to be what you promised it to be immediately. There have been a lot of game studios that, you know, on a failed project would just give up on it. So... Starcraft Ghost. So yeah, it would be remiss of me to say that, you know,
00:19:34
Speaker
for an indie studio to go out of their way to re-ingratiate themselves with the community. It's almost like it's applying a band-aid to a womb, but at least they're applying the band-aid. Right, yeah. It's a lot of band-aids at this point. Maybe they should have had gauze and like a full treatment and surgery, but there are a lot of band-aids. There are a lot of band-aids.
00:20:03
Speaker
They could have used the Gaza Strip. The facial expressions I'm making are much more funny than my jokes. But yeah, it does really say a lot. Obviously, you want it to just be good from the start because that's what's expected in that consumer relationship.
00:20:23
Speaker
But at the same time, everybody's flawed, companies are flawed, and the fact that they're showing the willingness to do that versus just the cut and run, which a lot of companies have also done. They could have. Yeah. Very much. They could have just disbanded the studio. Just be like, hey, it's not working. It wasn't good. Let's call it.
00:20:45
Speaker
Sean Murray's next project is spearheaded by legendary spokesperson Manchuri for Goodbye Games. It was like a good 10 seconds on my head of like, oh, is that some person? Oh, oh, there it is. Okay. That's the cover. It was the Goodbye Games that triggered that for me. Yeah.
00:21:15
Speaker
Now it's, I mean, intent means a lot making up for your mistake ever. Like you said, everybody makes mistakes, but, uh, what you do after your mistake is what you do after launch for a game is increasingly becoming really important, particularly as there's so many games out there that are like, nothing's like we shipped a CD. Okay. Bye. Like we'll have a online patch when someone admits the internet, you know, like that's not the way games are made anymore. So I feel that there's.
00:21:44
Speaker
there really is an expectation that games will be improved over time. It'll have patches, things like that, even beyond sometimes the early access type title. Yeah, it's important. But even with that, you still have to have some sort of base functionality. Even if there's the expectation that there's going to be improvements over time, I would say, again, Hades probably did that
00:22:13
Speaker
really well, you know, the early access. Initially, the functionality was there. I don't know Dave, were there many issues with crashes or like soft locking bugs or anything like that? Not that I encountered.
00:22:31
Speaker
Like I know they were pretty rigorous with their local QA testing, because they're always playing the game as they made changes. So I didn't personally encounter anything broken like that. It was more so just a little more bare bones in some of the earlier patches. But I can't recall any major issues. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, with early access, you would expect bare bones, but functional, and still get the improvements over time.
00:23:02
Speaker
It's, it's just, especially with no man's sky, it was, you know, there was no early access. It was just, here's 1.0. Yeah. And the 1.0 was barely functional. It was stickers on the back of the multiplayer logo on box bad. Yeah. Well, it's like, it's like being told you're going to inherit somebody else's car. You're like, Oh, cool.
00:23:26
Speaker
And you're told that the person put like a lot of bumper stickers in their car, go, that's fine. But they're like, no, no, no, it's like a lot of bumper stickers. You're like, okay. And you see it and it's covered in stickers. You can't even see like anything else. You're, gee, dear God, so many stickers. Then you get in, you open the door and you realize it's all stickers and there's literally no chassis. And that's kind of what they delivered, it feels like. Yeah.
00:23:49
Speaker
You did compare it to like Cyberpunk though, and I might be misinterpreted what you said, but started to give perhaps the implication that CD Projekt Red is repairing Cyberpunk. And I think it's unfortunately always basically going to be a disappointment because
00:24:07
Speaker
There's just core things in the game that even if they remove the bugs, the way the game is meant to be played, it still has deficiencies. And that's stuff you can't, outside of actual feature overwriting
00:24:24
Speaker
nature of things, which is basically what Hello Games has done with No Man's Sky. Like, that's not really a problem you can remedy. You can't be like, ah, the crafting system's kind of shallow. It's not a bug. It's just a shallow crafting system. You know what I mean? Yeah, I wasn't trying to say that they were like fully
00:24:42
Speaker
trying to do that. I just remember within like a week afterwards, news was like, hey, they said they're sorry, they said they're working on stuff. And then I kind of just tuned out from it because I still have my older graphics card at the time. I'm like, I'll come back to this later. Yeah. I guess that's the question then. How many how many actual patches have they released?
00:25:09
Speaker
Because I know they were saying any new feature work was going to be put off in data biases and pass or something like that. Yeah. Because they initially had plans to add multiplayer to the game. And they scrapped it entirely, the last I heard. They're just like, what if we don't? That was pretty ambitious. And we couldn't make a single player game on a multiplayer game. They may have imagined it differently. Imagine two people driving cars. Is it night? Is it day?
00:25:35
Speaker
Yeah. Are the cars on the ground or are they flying? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was two major, I, I, according to the roadmap, two major patch cycles for bug fixes, but I mean, I can, I criticize the game about as much as one can having put like a hundred hours into it at lunch. So like that's where I'm at. But then.
00:26:01
Speaker
I'm going to be a better vet about it forever, but that's just where I'm at. Jake, I realize that we kind of snubbed you out of a question. I want to give you a chance to have a bit of a platform.
00:26:17
Speaker
Maybe not above us, but maybe kind of a little bit below us. Beneath Nexus. Beneath Nexus. I was going to say, what have you been playing recently? So I played in the vein of Satisfactory. I've been playing Dyson Sphere Project recently, which is kind of like it's Factorio-esque, but with all of the combat removed.
00:26:47
Speaker
and it's more like, I haven't gotten to the galactic part of it yet, but that's the goal. The Dyson Sphere theoretical project is gather all of the energy from a solar system sun, right? And it's very like just upbeat in logistics, purity, optimized, fun, and I enjoy it, so. I think I played a little bit of it when it first hit at Pearly Access.
00:27:12
Speaker
I heard that it wasn't received as well when it launched, but right now it's overwhelmingly positive on Steam. So it was on sale and I picked it up. Once I hit the 10th level of crafting resources and
00:27:34
Speaker
resulting products. I was like, this is just too much for my brain. And I don't think I can handle this right now. So I'll definitely have to go back and check it out. Because like you said, it is very much Factorio satisfactory. And I enjoy Factorio. Conveyor belts and buildings and harvesters and manufacturers. You say conveyor belt. I say moving sidewalk. I'm going to stand here and I'll be back.
00:28:00
Speaker
But yeah, I can't speak to the late game, but early game seems good. I've been playing a certain Dark Souls mod that I won't get into details here about, but I put a lot of hours in that. And
Unique Game Mechanics
00:28:16
Speaker
I had some PTO and I played bullets per minute also a lot. And I don't like rhythm games. And I put so much time into this game.
00:28:30
Speaker
Yeah, I kind of remember seeing might've been SGDQ. Somebody was doing a speedrun of it and it was just insane to see what they were doing with within the bounds of the game.
00:28:46
Speaker
Yeah, is it akin to like an FPS Crypt of the Necrodancer? Well, yeah, to do things on rhythm. Exactly. And like different. There's a bunch of it's a first person shooter sort of binding of Isaac ask rogue like nature room by room treasures type game with different playable. You play as Valkyries, different Valkyries have different starting kits and quirks and things like that. And the different weapons will fire on like different
00:29:17
Speaker
beats, essentially. So a slow firing weapon will fire on full beats, and then certain weapons that are faster, like an SMG may fire on half beats. And then you reload in multi-part beats, too. So you're like, jing, jing, jing, jing, jing, jing, jing, jing, jing. It doesn't come through in a podcast.
00:29:38
Speaker
It was really fun, although I got to basically the part where the game was like, are you a true gamer difficulty? Because the next two unlockable characters die in one hit. And it's like, no. No, I'm not.
00:29:59
Speaker
I'm very much the get more heart containers type Isaac player. I'm just like, Oh yeah, I'll just have the health bar. I filled the screen. I have good attack. I've got tons of health. And then these characters like don't have a hit point bar and they can't get extra health. And I'm like, Nope. It's funny you mentioned that I'm struggling through that right now with with Isaac with repentance, playing a character that
00:30:26
Speaker
has very limited defensive prospects and if you get hit one time without any defensive projects, you're done. So it's been great going like three, four, five levels and then dying to something stupid and almost breaking my keyboard. But it's interesting the comparison to Necrodancer there. If I remember a Necrodancer, if you missed a beat,
00:30:53
Speaker
you would lose a multiplier and sometimes take damage. Is there anything like that in BPM?
00:31:01
Speaker
So like the enemies also fire on the beat, but like WSD, WSD moving around, that's not on the beat at all. It's like a boomer shooter style, quick, quaky type shoot. As far as movement's concerned, it's literally reloading and firing, using abilities, things like that. Those are all on the beat. So the penalty is you could lose a multiplier, but the points are made up and don't matter unless you really care about the high score at the end.
00:31:30
Speaker
you don't take anything like damage. And I think in NecroDancer, if you missed a beat, all of the enemies would still move because they're moving on the beat. But since the movement is detached from the tempo, sometimes it's better to just stop shooting until you're confident you can get back to the beat and then resume. That sounds way more manageable than
00:31:55
Speaker
the Necrodancer. I think there was one character I could play and it was the one who didn't have to stay on the beat. There's the bar, right? Yeah. Yeah. I gotta say, I don't do a lot of these rhythm games so much, but like when I have played DDR, there's very much that like, let me just give me a sec. Okay. And then you come back in, like you literally like step off for like, you kind of like count yourself in your one, two, three, and then you go for the,
00:32:23
Speaker
I like the feeling of getting back and like actually getting it instead of just being overwhelmed like fuck. Yeah. It also helps that like the music and most of the levels is like they're different variants of this kind of like pounding metal that like has an out of combat like tone and then like an in combat tone and anything you do is also like to the beat. So if you dash that has to be on the beat.
00:32:52
Speaker
And it makes sound effects that'll play into the song. So sometimes I found myself just going between rooms. And you can just sprint. Or you could dash repeatedly to the beat. And I was just adding to the music these little dash sounds. I don't know. Monkey Brain appreciates it. But yeah, that's mostly what I mean. Oh, Barotrauma is the other game. I don't know. I was expecting you to say that first. Yeah. Yeah.
00:33:23
Speaker
Yeah. You can leave it there if you want to. Well, I guess my question, I'll turn it back on you guys, because I've been talking for a little while here. Like, do you know what barotrauma is? And would you be interested or not interested in playing a disaster simulator type game like that? I mean, I know what my answers are in which order they're in. That's fair. And I know vaguely what it is that
00:33:51
Speaker
You're on a submarine. And that's about it.
00:33:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of inspired by Space Station 13 type games. Fans of Mandalore and Seth will have seen those videos, but very much load into a game, have a role, doctor, assistant, captain, mechanic, whatever. And then you can help out with generalized tasks. You know, everybody's okay at repairs, but you probably
00:34:22
Speaker
do way better at your given task. And then how do you keep everything from going to crap when you're like 3000 meters below the surface of Europa and Cthulhu attacks? That's the game.
00:34:40
Speaker
Also sit around and do nothing for a long time as people do inventory management. Really? Yeah. But I've invested in the inventory management. That's the problem is the game's very much like, yeah, you're right. We probably should move supplies like into the ballast in case we need them. Is that, is that your favorite role in the game? You know, a stock keeper.
00:35:05
Speaker
I try to help out. I refuel oxygen tanks in the diving suits. But we did have a disaster last night related to that. And I'm pretty confident it wasn't me. So there's a mechanic where oxygen tanks can be in these diving suits, right? And without it, you'll blackout pretty quickly. It takes like maybe seven seconds or so. The screen goes dim as you lose oxygen and you'll blackout. But if a welding fuel tank
00:35:34
Speaker
is inserted into a diving suit. You die in like three seconds because you're breathing welding fuel. And Dan, who was the captain of the ship actually, was like, all right, we're like under attack. We might take on water. Let me go get a diving suit.
00:35:55
Speaker
through one on and just straight up died instantly. And we didn't ever determine who did it. There were some NPCs on the ship, so they might have had a traitor. Or one of us misclicked terribly. I mean, at that point, is that whole situation a source of like frustration or levity?
00:36:22
Speaker
It's definitely frustration in the moment, but it's the same, the game's stressful. Like things go to crap. That's why I mean like disaster simulator. Somebody might have, like we've been, there's been times like a hammerhead giant like monstrosity hits the bottom of the ship. It depressurized the utility compartment or reactor room where Ian was, and he died instantly. He just exploded because of the games.
00:36:48
Speaker
you know, moniker barotrama. Um, and now we wear diving suits a lot more of the time and especially when we're under attack. But although that was super frustrating for him in the moment, now it's kind of like a war story. You know what I mean? That's cool. When everything goes fine, it's less interesting. You know what I mean? Yeah. Um,
00:37:17
Speaker
I did watch the video on Space Station 13 by Seth and it was insane seeing some of the shenanigans that they would get up to and it very much sounds like it's in the same vein.
00:37:31
Speaker
It's the same thing with Space Station 13 where you make your experience. Exactly. I can't imagine playing this with a bunch of randoms that are like, don't do anything, don't touch anything, don't do anything wrong. Way better game with friends.
00:37:51
Speaker
But what was your answer, Dave? Oh, I mean, fellow owner of the game. I hopped on because someone's like, hey, do you want to play? I'm like, I'll be social. And it's definitely not a game for me. And also, I think the first two hours were just kind of idle. Yeah. And I didn't really have anything to do. I didn't go through the tutorials. That's a little bit on me. And it didn't really draw me in. It felt like everyone was kind of doing their own thing.
00:38:21
Speaker
And I was like, I'm just, I'll let them have their fun and I won't be lurking here quietly, awkwardly. So I pieced. Yeah, it's very much a time where like the moments of if this was like a heartbeat graph, there's like the patient is flatlining.
00:38:42
Speaker
for like 70% of the graph. And then it's just all the way to the top, all the way to the bottom, like seismic shakes as something terrible is happening. But the problem or like, if you can get invested in the game, then it's interesting, even in that middle part when people are like, we docked at port. All right, let's spend eight minutes figuring out our next missions and selling stuff off. But.
00:39:10
Speaker
I completely, I get it though. Like if you, it's very much the type of game where if you're not there, you're like, I'm just sitting AFK, like waiting for anything to happen. So that's fair.
00:39:22
Speaker
If it was something more like a, I haven't gone on that ship yet, but if it was like Sea of Thieves, like something is actively always happening and you can always be, we're not necessarily like designated a specific role, but you could help out with anything. You could man the guns, you could get water out of the ship, you could fight people. There's always something going on. Yeah.
00:39:48
Speaker
There is a role for that, though, in Barotrauma. It's the assistant and your icon. That's the one I'm playing as now. Your icon is a baby pacifier. And it's intended for new players because they get a bunch of skills that just like help other people out in the crew or they learn skills faster. There's literally a tree that's like you get 75 percent more mission experience if someone else in the crew is two levels ahead of you.
00:40:13
Speaker
And there's a whole gray shirt tree, which is like a Star Trek red shirt reference, where one of the skills is literally if you die, and it's not a crew member that killed you, this is an important thing, it's not a crew member that killed you, but if you die in the course of a mission,
00:40:33
Speaker
The crew was paid out, 700 marks, which are like the credits for every mission that's been completed since the last time he died. So it's literally life insurance fraud, like for the newbie dying in a terrible situation. That's great. Yeah. And then they have a clown tree.
00:40:51
Speaker
And that's how there's a whole tree for a clone. Uh huh. Yeah, I was just I was happy for the brief moments when I was granted a horn and I could just honk the horn next to people. Yeah, there's some ridiculous stuff in there. Like AJ was getting pissed off at me because I kept like walking up to him and I'd like point the horn at his head. You hold right click to like aim.
00:41:11
Speaker
like move your arm up and down, point it like right at him. I was like, and he was like, stop doing that. I'm like, I'm literally giving you an experience. I mean, that that definitely sounds like a role that I could get into just messing with people, but actually helping them out.
00:41:32
Speaker
It's one of the capstones. There's like three trees. I think it's kind of similar to like borderlands, the way that the perks work. One of the capstones is literally once you've unlocked this, if you remake your character at any point, you have all of the experience from the assistant. You don't make a fresh character. You get to start like maxed out essentially. But it's also early access. So how long has it been in early access?
00:42:01
Speaker
So I feel like I've heard the name for a while now. I feel like if I look for a release date, it's going to be slightly incorrect. 2019. So it's not too bad.
00:42:15
Speaker
I definitely spent the most time talking about my games though, but you've got to go back to other games. To be fair, you did have a number of games you were checking out over PTO. True. Yeah. And you are generally more passionate about things than Dave or I. How'd
Revisiting 'Skyrim'
00:42:30
Speaker
you like to say it? Yeah, it's good. It's good. Yeah. Goes back to where I talked before about, how are you? Oh, fine. Yeah.
00:42:39
Speaker
I will say that this is the last thing I'll say about barotrauma, but we've literally sat in discord with like Landon sharing his screen or like me sharing my screen. And we're like wiring different components of the submarine design. And we're like, okay, we can like put more whole space here, put some shelves. Let's rewire things down here to the junction boxes. Like it's the most stupid, boring, nerdy stuff. And there's like three people watching this stream.
00:43:09
Speaker
I mean, some people like that. They just like to either like live vicariously through somebody else nerding out and it's just a chill experience or you yourself find that to be very relaxing on a certain things that are like brain off are like very, very entertaining. It's one of the reasons I've enjoyed some stuff with satisfactory is cause there's no pressure for me to do anything. And again, I can just stand on a, on a moving sidewalk essentially.
00:43:39
Speaker
I think that's fair. I don't know. That's about all I've been playing, I think. Oh no, I played Skyrim. But that's it. That's as far as I'm going to talk about Skyrim. It's exactly what everybody expects when you bring up Skyrim.
00:44:01
Speaker
How many times have you played it before though, right? I have many times. But every time you thought how it re-releases it, Jake's like, okay, shell out the money. It might be the most boring, good game that I play. Legitimately, this last time I was playing it, I had some goals and things. And you know how sometimes you throw YouTube up on the other monitor and you're like, just background noise, some video or something.
00:44:28
Speaker
I found myself like turning away from Skyrim and actually watching the YouTube video. And that was my tell that I should just close the game. Yeah. Only because I've become aware of it recently. I'm pretty sure you've played Dragon's Dog, not right? Yes, Dark Arisen, yeah. And that was basically a blocking simulator, wasn't it?
00:44:53
Speaker
It definitely had a lot of that. It also had like a weirdly in-depth combat system, but a whole lot of walking.
00:45:03
Speaker
Can I say that I'm happy that I know what Mike's referencing? I actually don't know. When I went down for Thanksgiving, we were watching some YouTube stuff. So Mike got introduced to Seth videos, which is where the Space Station 13 came up. And we also watched a lot of Zero Lenny videos. And Zero Lenny is always memeing on Dark Souls 2 and Dragon's Dogma.
00:45:31
Speaker
Makes me happy. It's good stuff. That is fair. Although I hear pretty soon here, Dark Souls two two is going to come out. Um, the latest from soft game and I'm excited for it. I mean, I am as well. I think Mike, you've been, you've been sitting looking over the fence for Dark Souls or from soft games for a bit, right? Yeah, I think I've played it about 30 minutes of, of Dark Souls remastered.
00:46:03
Speaker
Do you have a hardcore run?
00:46:07
Speaker
Well, he beat it in that 30 minutes. It was a speed run. Oh, dang. Not glitchless, obviously. It's just going through walls and shit. You can do that. Do you have interest in Elton Ring? You've linked me a couple of videos and it looks pretty and it looks expansive. I know enough about Dark Souls games to know that they're generally kind of
Anticipation for 'Elden Ring'
00:46:33
Speaker
corridor-y. Neither of those things actually. Neither pretty nor expensive. I think I spent most of the year hearing about all of the Elden Ring fanboys just losing their shit because there was supposed to be an announcement this year and then that's about been the extent of my interest.
00:46:59
Speaker
Yeah, it got pushed back. Yeah, at least. Yeah, the last the last game that did this was cyberpunk. I say making eyes toward the camera like. I don't think it's that bad, though. They had the play test like. Yeah, and they also have like a better track record than CD Projekt Red does. I mean, have you seen Dark Souls 2, though?
00:47:25
Speaker
This guy lives now. You've triggered my trap card. No, it's it's it's it does have issues. It's issues. I would concede that. But amazing build diversity, though. Here we go. Here we go, Texas. Again, Steve, Dave's been playing the model. I'm not even going to attack the point. I'm I'm going to let the Dark Souls two things that I will say that, like,
00:47:51
Speaker
From what we've seen from Elden Ring, it does seem to incorporate a lot of good things from all of the previous titles.
00:47:58
Speaker
one of which would be Dark Souls 2 where they have like you can just essentially have two of the same weapon in either hand and just power stance that shit, which is a big thing people are really into. Also, there's like going to be such a diverse magic space in comparison to I don't know, like Dark Souls 1 magic is like the peak because it didn't really ever improve that much from there. Yeah, that's true, actually.
00:48:25
Speaker
Magic missile. Two had good hexes. Two had a very good hex build diversity. Well, it's like the magic in Dark Souls is like shit until you're like at like the last year of spell and it's like, yeah, insanely fucking broken. That's true. And the bosses don't know how to deal with it. You're literally like, I'm just going to stand on the other side of the pillar and it's doing all these dramatic, like throw itself at you attacks straight into the pillar, doing literally nothing to you.
00:48:53
Speaker
That's got to be part of the fun of it though, to struggle for so long and then to suddenly hit that OP phase. Oh yeah, it does feel good. Because a lot of it is learning as you go. And between basic enemies and bosses, you're like, oh, this is where you're weak. This is where you have frames that I can punish. Here's how I cheese you type thing.
00:49:20
Speaker
Also in defense of Dark Souls 2, because I'm still on this. It gave us the best meme that Dark Souls has, which is you should have leveled ADP, which was literally a stat in Dark Souls 2 that increased your iframes. What does that even stand for, ADP? Adaptability.
00:49:43
Speaker
Again, talking about like zero letting goes into like very, very good in depth on this. Like he has like a 40 minute video on it. Um, but basically the way they designed Dark Souls two is they expected the adaptability of your character to increase over time, which is why some of the hit boxes and like frames get like a little seemingly wonky later on is because it's, it's assuming that you're like putting points into that. Mm-hmm.
00:50:11
Speaker
going to Dark Souls 3 after doing a playthrough of Dark Souls 2, it feels like easy mode on rolling. People have seen that con cosplay of the guy who goes as the knight and just rolls all over the floor. It's entirely because of how many frames you usually get in Dark Souls, but 2 made it kind of egregious. If you put a bunch of points into adaptability, you're just like, I'm not even here.
00:50:40
Speaker
I mean, was that, was that a viable way to play the game? It's just dump points and adaptability and just never get hit. I mean, to a certain extent, you still needed to like dodge through moves, but it's really easy past the point. And Dark Souls is like.
00:50:57
Speaker
If you're just playing single player and you find a good way to get souls and level your character up a bunch, you'll find yourself bypassing all of the normal PvP stopping points for how many attributes you have to allocate. Literally every single Dark Souls has some crazy soul farming way. So.
00:51:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think this is not a Dark Souls. I was just gonna say, I think my roadblock with the game was just it felt like I hit a ball like I couldn't get parrying down. So yeah. And I think I was in the mindset where I had to fight everything. I probably didn't. Yeah. And then I was tricky mindset for Dark Souls. I was probably also going in the wrong direction.
00:51:49
Speaker
You said this was Dark Souls 1 Remastered. Yeah. Yeah, there's like four pathways and three of them are death. Yeah. And like a lot of that, again, it's just it's experience over time. But like I'm sure like when I did it, I watched a video or like explored and like found like the death ways. I'm like, oh, not that way yet. And you just you kind of feel around until you find like the path of least resistance. Oh, I seem to be doing OK here type thing.
00:52:18
Speaker
Um, it's a y-hander then on dead bird. This is the order But yeah, it's very much like uh
00:52:27
Speaker
Kind of like hard gated early. I don't think it's bad to get into. I just think like there's been so much. Oh, it's the Dark Souls of whatever that's been in gaming mythos for so long that it's kind of like a weird barrier for entry. But like, I feel like the games are actually really good and fun. It's just finding that entry point. I'd like Dark Souls 3 or Sekiro, I'd say for most people.
00:52:54
Speaker
I mean, that leads to a cheeky and sarcastic question that I have. What is the Dark Souls of Dark Souls? This is for theologians. Wow. I guess I'll rephrase. Of the three Dark Souls games, which do you two prefer?
Favorite Dark Souls Game
00:53:25
Speaker
Like if you had to go back and play one today, I would again just pick up and redo yet another play through Dark Souls 3. Dark Souls 3 is the best Dark Souls. Gotcha. It's smooth as butter in comparison. Like one and two are both still solid games, but they definitely feel like they've aged more.
00:53:49
Speaker
They made so many concessions for three as far as like try it hardness that the game is surprisingly playable. Like legitimately Dark Souls 1 had a mechanic where you can only invade people or co-op within a certain level range.
00:54:08
Speaker
one way or the other. And Dark Souls 2, they're like, that was working fine, but then like griefers decided to like never level up and they made it to like the end of the game and they got all the best gear. And then they went back to the beginning of the game and they're killing all the newbies and we'll fix that. And the way that we fix that is soul memory and no one liked that.
00:54:32
Speaker
And that was literally just the same concept, but the game records every soul that you ever pick up, even if you die and lose them. And then Dark Souls 3 was like, put a password in at the menu if you want to go up and you can do that forever. Yeah, it's a much better system. They just gave up. They didn't put thought and complexity into it. They just made it accessible and it's better.
00:55:03
Speaker
to elaborate on what Jake was saying, like for the griefing, they did the solo everything as like a gate, but then if you wanted to do co-op in two, if you had like a really high level friend or somebody who'd just been playing more than you had, it was very possible to not be able to play with them just because they had played more than you and that was it.
00:55:21
Speaker
So there's a theoretical root pain. There's a theoretical punishing mechanic for newbies, which is like, if you had a bunch of souls and then you died and you lost those souls, like you died twice, so you couldn't recover them. Um, that's all still in your soul memory. Like that's non-actuated power that you'll never get back. That makes it harder for other people to go up with you. Nobody liked it.
00:55:47
Speaker
Eventually they actually added an abyss ring that just absorbs all of the souls you would get, which is basically giving up and going back to like the Dark Souls 1 model. Gotcha. The one thing one has though is it has the best area design out of all the three. Three has cool areas, but none of it feels as connected as one did.
00:56:16
Speaker
But we have to now qualify and say like the first half of one. There's, there's some areas later where you're like, what the actual fuck. Um, the, uh, the mythical Dark Souls second half. Yeah. And people love bed of chaos. It's a boss fight. It's worth mentioning that. Um, people have the whole area, frankly, lots of guys live. Yeah.
00:56:42
Speaker
Nothing like a running through lava. This was literally Miyazaki chasing down the DVDs coming off of the assembly line and putting in his own bootleg versions with Lost Izalith completed. That was what happened for that area. It was a good game. We should make a podcast roughly based around it.
00:57:09
Speaker
I feel like the more you love something, the more you can complain about it and have like deep seated opinions, but still love it. But still be very opinionated about it. Like my relationship with food.
00:57:27
Speaker
also soft plug the sauce I made turned out great nice and now I want to do it more but I still have to work through pounds of sauce what kind of sauce so Mike showed me how to make a really cool red sauce when I was down there it was like a
00:57:45
Speaker
Big old pot took a couple hours like cooking simmer down everything So I did that but then added some other things to it. I thought would be cool and It like the pot I have sucks, but still turned out okay, so I need to get a new pot If anybody can get me pot some good pot, please hit me up I'd love if that was like the whole joke the whole time, but I actually do need a new pot
00:58:13
Speaker
I might go ceramic, like a Dutch oven or something that's steel so I can actually use it on the other element because my stove is garbage. Yeah. I wasn't going to say anything.
00:58:29
Speaker
Because you've used my stuff so much. And I'm such a critic when it comes to cooking appliances. Jake's like, this doesn't even beat to let you know when it's done cooking? What the hell? Right. It's not even spinning the thing. How is this going to cook anything if it doesn't spin the thing?
00:58:53
Speaker
I would love if the rotational energy actually added to it. It spins insanely fast. That's why cotton candy just going like that, you know? Dave walks into his own kitchen as I'm cooking and I'm letting him just like rotating the pan around the oven. Living in the past. Yeah. Speaking of living in the past, if you want to send us potentially
00:59:23
Speaker
an email, that's a past thing. And also by the time that we see the email, it will have arrived in the past. Thank you, Mike, for coming on to show this episode. Yeah, yeah, it was good to see you guys. Good talking to you guys. Yeah, it was good to have you back. Yeah. It's, we have remarkably chill, kind of like laid back conversations here, I think. So it's nice.
00:59:53
Speaker
Unlike all of our other guests who, while friends, are far too enthusiastic about all of this. There's one thing you can say about me is I am very mid-level energy. There's no up, there's no down. It's just mid-level energy. Taking us back to the beginning. Average. Fine.
01:00:16
Speaker
But yeah, always appreciated. If you would like to send in suggestions, feedback, comments, perhaps ideas I can use to further defend Dark Souls 2, please send those in to soapstonepodcast.gmail.com. Or you could join the discussion, again, almost exclusively about Dark Souls 2 on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night. Have a good one.
01:00:46
Speaker
you