Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S3 Ep190: Talkcast - January 2022
77 Plays4 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about whatever they want to talk about and catch up on news in the first Talkcast of the new year!
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/
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/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Humor
00:00:49
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave?
00:00:56
Speaker
It's going right. How are you doing? I'm doing all right. For listener awareness, Dave is trying his darnedest to get me to laugh or break character, as you know. This is all a persona that I have here. It seems to be like within the last two weeks, I've done a bit right as the countdown happens, and then I stick to it silently while miming.
00:01:19
Speaker
And I don't know why, but I might make it a thing. You might see the bits come out at some point. I wouldn't actually do that. I'm going to close my eyes during the intro just for safety at this point. I think it's safest.
Exploring NFTs: Skepticism and Humor
00:01:39
Speaker
All right, now we talk about a lot of things here. Talk about food, talk about games. This is a top cast. We can talk about anything. How do you feel about NFTs?
00:01:50
Speaker
I want to say NFTs nuts. Right. Mr. NFTs. They're stupid. So in general, I understand forms of currency overall, as far as this isn't agreed upon value for a given denomination. And then from that, you base an economy, et cetera, et cetera, right? Yeah. Like everyone's had Econ 101. We all buy into this. That's what gives it value. Exactly. Yeah.
00:02:19
Speaker
religion. Anyway, but with NFTs, there's not value. I know NFTs are kind of changing from the form of initially just a hyperlink to other stuff, or maybe it's still hyperlink, but to my knowledge, you can just
00:02:40
Speaker
replicate it by copying it, taking a screenshot, which is like one on one how I downloaded pictures back in the day. Yeah, that's because you're thinking about it in a concrete way, though, like the underlying NFT transaction is a reference on a block chain somewhere saying like, hey, a person this person bought this for this much money or whatever. And this was the thing that they bought. And it could be literally so like
00:03:08
Speaker
The comparison I think about is, I don't, you're probably familiar with this, but do you remember like, it must still be a thing, but I heard about it a long time ago.
NFTs: Value and Comparisons to Snake Oil
00:03:17
Speaker
Like, but people would adopt stars or like people would buy stars. And it's just like that star up there in the sky, if you pay a hundred dollars or whatever, that's your star.
00:03:29
Speaker
Yeah, hey, as I'm sure you're about to say, but I'm going to steal the proverbial thunder. You can't legally do that. Nobody owns space, so you can't really give that away. It's essentially like a snake oil salesman type pitch where it's like,
00:03:49
Speaker
Hey, do you want a star named after you? Okay. You can take the same picture of any given star because who the fuck's going to know and give it around to a billion people who've now paid $20 each for it. Cool. Yeah. And that is the fault of my stars. That's good. I was just sitting on that for like a while.
00:04:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's exactly it's it's basically the same thing. If people have a certificate saying that they own something and it's unique enough, it's literally just the pure principle of rarity.
NFTs: Rarity, FOMO, and Speculation
00:04:23
Speaker
Like if you were to mine diamonds out of the ground and
00:04:26
Speaker
You had a hundred of them and you sold off 99 diamonds. Those would all go for significantly less money than that last diamond where you're like, this is the last of its kind. It's that fear of missing out that lands NFTs any value. Like the thing is like.
00:04:45
Speaker
All right, going back to Diablo II economy, right? Sure. There was an agreed upon value of like this is the metric of baseline. Let's call it the equivalent of a dollar is the stone of Jordan or a sarge ring.
00:04:57
Speaker
a given item's value is based on how many sages it was. And that was agreed upon thing. But later on, as item duplication became a thing and the market got flooded by other things, it now costs more for a given item because that item has more rarity than this other item is being duplicated a whole fucking ton.
00:05:20
Speaker
It feels weird to buy into a made up economy for something. It's like I'm rummaging around in my pockets. I find some lint. I'm like, now, Jake, this is the only lint that there is and I will sell it to you. Right. That is pretty accurate.
00:05:41
Speaker
I think it's because there's so much money and people just want to spend money in speculation right now. They're like, this will be worth something in the future. It's literally just like...
00:05:53
Speaker
You just take your trash and you put it out in a garage sale, and these are all unique pieces and people buy it. That's kind of what NFTs are. One of my favorites is New York Times wrote an article on NFTs, and they created an NFT, a reference to any article, and this is the NFT for this article. And as of last week or something like that, the amount of money that it sold for in cryptocurrency is worth $700 plus thousand dollars in cryptocurrency.
00:06:23
Speaker
and like...
00:06:26
Speaker
Yeah, right. It's all made up and the points don't matter. Yeah. But the thing is, I will definitely say while I was talking about pocket lint, because I'm me, nobody's going to buy that pocket lint for shit. Yes. But if I was somebody who is super duper famous, I could say, my name is Matt Damon and this is my pocket lint. Right. And they'd be like, oh, okay. That's Jason Bourne, yeah.
00:06:53
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And they can do that. So I know there's been toss around the discussion of, oh, NFTs help smaller artists and stuff as a reason for it. But everybody who's seen art, purchased art, heard art said out loud knows that to be bullshit for that reason.
00:07:15
Speaker
Because if you're just Johnny Sue on the internet, which weird name by the way, judging you a little bit, but if you're doing your art and you're not known, people aren't going to ascribe value to your thing just because it's unique. It's an interesting place to discuss value because it touches in on the value of copyright. NFTs and copyright live in a similar space of
00:07:44
Speaker
we've decided that you own rights to this to some degree. NFTs are like even way more vague and non-legally enforceable on anything that they, you know, profess ownership to, but it's in the same sort of space. No, no, you guys can't use that picture. I have copyright on that picture, but like, it's super easy to copy it though and paste it everywhere.
NFTs in Gaming: Predatory Practices?
00:08:05
Speaker
And you're like, yeah, don't do that. Right. But you could say, Oh, it's not the same one.
00:08:11
Speaker
Right. I feel like you could rubber band on that argument if it came into a claim issue. Right. Well, I mean, they'd exist for things like photography. There's examples of people who have used celebrities who have posted their own pictures that were taken by paparazzi and posted somewhere or whatever.
00:08:30
Speaker
and then been sued by the paparazzi because they didn't own that photo of themselves, but it's more of a concrete sort of example than something like NFTs where there's not that real relationship. I understand the example and I don't want to backpedal, but also fuck paparazzi. No, it's the whole thing of paparazzi thinking that like
00:08:54
Speaker
obviously your identity and your privacy is your own. So for somebody to abuse that in any way, shape or form should not be illegal and it's just shitty behavior. So if somebody took a picture of me without my consent and then I use that, you can fuck right off.
00:09:14
Speaker
Right. I mean, yeah, so in most states you would be legally, unfortunately, illegally or illegal to use it if it's under their copyright. But I don't know. There's plenty of examples you can use in that space. Wedding photographer takes a bunch of pictures. There is no prior agreement. Those pictures all belong to the photographer until they're signed over. Things like that.
00:09:38
Speaker
This is not a copyright podcast, but like these are all questions around what NFTs purport to represent, which is some manner of ownership. It's just, it's so vague and it's just such a sign that there's so much money in tech that people are willing to throw money around for music, for art, for pictures on the internet, for video games.
00:10:08
Speaker
And then I leaned in. Is there been something recent about a video game and an NFT? Oh my gosh. There's actually two. I linked one of them in the notes, but there was a previous one that I also want to call out. This shouldn't surprise me. So do people like Konami? They've made a lot of good things, right?
00:10:33
Speaker
Nope. No? OK. That's fair. But anyways, they announced the Konami Memorial NFT collection containing 14 Castlevania images consisting of scenes, music, and new visual drawings from the series. Oh, visual drawings? Hot damn. Yeah. I thought I was going to have to listen to those shits. So just to describe, make sure we're all on the same page for NFTs.
00:11:02
Speaker
You'll get probably a download to the actual resource, but the part that's expensive about this is the token. They would go to blockchain and they'll have like either an auction or something like that, or an entry for the people who buy it that gets put to blockchain. And there you go. That's your place up on the wall saying that you purchased this product, no matter how many times it gets sent around on the Pirate Bay or whatever. If that's still around, I don't know.
00:11:28
Speaker
OK, so like what do you as the person who has now for some reason spent money on this, what do you get
NFTs: Bragging Rights or Real Value?
00:11:38
Speaker
from it? So it's there is the actual product, I imagine, that give you a copy of it. But again.
00:11:45
Speaker
This is just music or a picture or something like that that can be shared across the internet really easy easily but then also and this is the part people are actually spending money for a Notification somewhere on a blockchain saying hey user Dave's got a big penis for 2004 Has purchased this Castlevania scene And you'll be like sweet that's a good deal $200,000
00:12:16
Speaker
Okay. Like are you salt? No. Okay. I probably didn't explain it well. Like that's the thing. Like I don't see what anybody would get for it outside of theoretical bragging rights to say I have this and you do not. But as anybody who's been a part of a community, I don't give a fuck what again, I'm going to pick on Johnny Sue here. What Johnny Sue's doing. You can't have bragging rights over me for something. If I don't know who the fuck you are.
00:12:46
Speaker
bragging rights works with smaller groups of people, like a group of friends. Like, if I always beat you in Smash with one character, I could hold that over you. And it means something because we play a lot, right? Right.
00:12:59
Speaker
But if I'm telling a person on the street, hey, I beat Jake with Yoshi all the time, they'll be like, what? What does that mean? Exactly. Should I call the police? It has no meaning or value to them at all. Yes. I mean, it's a little different in this case. People know what Castlevania is. And that's why I think if they go ahead with this, yeah, someone's going to buy it for a lot of money. The problem is like,
00:13:22
Speaker
This is very predatory lowest bar profit generation, essentially, because you're buying into something that's associated with crypto, which is all harm the planet waste of energy. Literally, people just make my PS five. Anyway, yeah, right. But I mean, I suspect this will be successful. It's just it's not going to get it's not going to garner any goodwill for Konami and it shouldn't because
00:13:52
Speaker
They're not making a game. They're not, you know, having a collector's edition of something or a remaster or anything like that. It's just, here you go. Put your name up on a blockchain. Give us money. Yeah. It's just the latest hype train to literally buy into. Yeah.
00:14:12
Speaker
The other one's Square Enix. So president of Square Enix was like, 2022 will be the year of the NFT. And he acknowledged that, well, they were kicking around ideas for it, I guess. He acknowledged that there are people with reservations, I think is the way he put it, towards NFTs, which is...
00:14:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's like a backhanded sort of way to nonbelievers. Yeah, I got you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They haven't been convinced yet. But that's how I say to Prespential, Prespential Jesus to look that perspective. I was going to say I was combining perspective and you guys probably don't even dating opportunities. They haven't seen the light yet. Look at look it up. Prespential on Samsung dot com slash term save made up slash Prespential.
00:15:04
Speaker
But yeah, that's how they're conveying it. It's the same any game that has some association with NFTs. There was another one that took a step back from NFTs after like an outcry. Can't remember exactly what it was.
00:15:19
Speaker
So good on them. They don't, they're not here on the, the shameless, I guess they're just not on a good list or we'll, we'll mention their name because that's the default. Don't put enough teams in your game. Most people are here. Yeah. I don't know. It's, I feel like it's a, it's a trap for dumb people.
00:15:43
Speaker
Again, religion. I feel like it's more so... It's on both parties, right? Obviously the person who's providing this and trying to get susceptible people to waste money on a thing.
00:15:58
Speaker
It's also on the person who's being susceptible. Yeah. Um, like it's not something that they're forcing. Um, it's not like pay to win or something else or like buying save slots. It's very much an opt in thing. Yeah. But again, if you provide somebody something stupid, there will be people who are stupid enough to do it. And that's still on you at the end of the day.
00:16:24
Speaker
Buying an NFT is basically the closest you can come to just donating money to someone without just giving them money. That's the easiest way to quantify it, I can think of. And it's the same for game developers, or anyone in that space. You're just giving them money, essentially.
00:16:43
Speaker
Not that giving people money is wrong, but like maybe allocate it to somewhere more useful. I don't know. Right. And when soup kitchens have NFTs, that's, that'll be a weird day. You wouldn't download soup. But I would. That would be awesome. Yeah. Maybe print some soup. It creates the bowl first and then just
00:17:09
Speaker
I'm imagining the paste that's used to create some of these substances or whatever is literally just extruded into the mold. Here's your protein soup. Here's your $30 worth of liquid plastic. Maybe not. We're not quite there yet. There will have to be a separate soup canister. Get on that tech entrepreneurs. Stop investing money in NFTs. Let us print soup.
00:17:34
Speaker
Real talk because we haven't talked about food yet. I think I had like a can of like some generic Campbell's like creamy chicken noodle thing. And it just hit a nice spot because it's been it's been cold these past couple of days. Oh, yeah. I was feeling unwell a while back, not recently, and had some I think it was chunky brand Campbell's Chunky.
Nostalgia and Gaming Communities
00:17:57
Speaker
Um, uh, chicken noodle soup and it's good. It's like a million percent of your daily value of sodium, but it tastes good and it warms you up and it has more important than all of that. All of those positive childhood connotations with chicken noodle soup, which is like, it's good for the soul. Okay. Jot that down. It's not good for your body, but the soul.
00:18:25
Speaker
Do you remember putting like a fuck ton of saltines in like chicken noodle soup? Oh, yeah. Mm hmm. And now I'm like, I don't want to touch saltines ever again. And I do. And less tuna salad. I might give you a pass. Yeah. I'm kind of a fan of chips and crackers and saltines work for that. I mean, it's no ritz, right? It's not the ritz of crackers, but it still works.
00:18:50
Speaker
I can't imagine putting cheese or anything on a saltine being like, this will be the vehicle for this nice thing. When the vehicle has flat tires, it's been lived in by mice for years, it's rusted out. You may be over presenting the case for the cheese in this case because you say nice thing, but it's just like,
00:19:12
Speaker
It's like store bought cheddar slices or something like that. Just rip a piece off and put it on. So it's about as basic as you get for cheese without going like craft American singles. But I thought when you're talking about the blockchain, you're talking about like a nice block of like smoked Gouda. Yeah. Invest in cheese is basically what we're telling people.
00:19:32
Speaker
I mean, not to go into it too much, but you, you can do that. Like they'll put those giant wheels of cheese in wax and like, it's not going anywhere. Right. Yeah. Smogruda every day.
00:19:49
Speaker
That was a reference. Another thing, Titanfall 2 community is creating servers for the game. And the community literally came up with a launcher and was straight up like, hey, so for awareness, Titanfall 2 still has multiplayer. What? They didn't turn it off. It's just the community was like, hey, let's also set up dedicated servers.
00:20:15
Speaker
Did some reverse engineering and pulled it off and that's awesome more games should do this prior to the servers officially being shut down So they can tie the community over But Titan Falls great. So this doesn't work out. I think was a big one. Yeah where they want to keep vanilla around They literally in Warcraft's case in World of Warcraft. They had so much interest in community service that Blizzard was like
00:20:43
Speaker
You know, we could just make money by giving people old versions of the game. They're like, yeah, let's do that. And so that doesn't sound like Blizzard to be predatory, though. Oh, yeah. It does, though, unfortunately. Fuck Blizzard income. Yeah, there's there's a fair number on that list. That is really cool, though, that like
00:21:08
Speaker
a community is actually spinning up multiplayer servers like dedicated like I don't know if you remember I mean obviously you did play Titanfall 2 back in the day have there been other games where like you you wish it stuck around because it just lost dedicated support from oh yeah immediate immediate answer is a tribes descent
00:21:31
Speaker
And so I was talking to, we've never even mentioned them on the show, but our cough, uh, earlier about it and like the, uh, is a person on discord. And we went on this little rant about tribes descent and, um, it's immediately that like high res shut it down. And it had all of this competitive and land potential.
00:21:56
Speaker
And it's just this massive absence where there is no modern good implementation of a tribes game.
00:22:04
Speaker
And there hasn't been a good replacement in that genre at all. The speedy, shooty, open world, go fast. For anybody who missed this era of stuff, this was, I think, a bit after UT, but it had a lot of things like UT, like hit scan shots, and then lining things up with rockets for slower projectiles.
00:22:28
Speaker
But the whole thing is like you kept the momentum if you slid and jumped in certain ways. So it really had much more diverse gameplay than something like Halo where like you're on the ground or you have a vehicle, but you're still on the ground for the most part. And it's very weighted in comparison to something like tribes.
00:22:46
Speaker
Yeah, so technically I looked this up and Starseeds tribes was the first one in the series and it came out in 1998, one year before Unreal Tournament. I just never got as big as Unreal Tournament because Unreal Tournament was an arena shooter and tribes was not. And the fact that you could ski on the ground and go real fast, that was a glitch. That wasn't supposed to be in the game that just screwed up how
00:23:08
Speaker
collision worked and velocity. And it was a happy accident that turned into the most noticeable feature about all of the games. Well, that they had that in UT. It's just it wasn't really exploited too much until like custom maps. Do you remember bunny hopping? Right. Yeah. You mean like with rockets or just in general for speed momentum like preservation?
00:23:33
Speaker
I would just be preservation for grinding on a slope. Oh, yeah. There'd be specific levels or custom games for that. And they'd even have a little tutorial at the beginning for babies who didn't know what they were doing, me. Here's how you do this thing. And I think I got, I made one jump after an hour. I'm like, I'm not getting it.
00:23:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think the first tribes had a similar setup where it was like, it was input tech in order to actually ski. And then later ones, they're like, hold space bar. I mean, like, okay, I can do that.
00:24:09
Speaker
Yeah, like a lower barrier barrier of entry for stuff like that. If I need to do any tech, let it be accidental and smash. Thank you. Yeah, exactly. Not giving yourself enough credit there. They've actually is fairly, fairly proficient at teching. I tech everything, but when I parry, I still make audible gasps. Did you see that? Just put the controller down. My gosh.
00:24:37
Speaker
Do you have any game like that, anything from your childhood where you're like, man, I wish that there was still a multiplayer community for it or that the community was able to take it over? Looking back, I think the one thing that really stuck out to me, this is to all around like miss Blizzard opportunities back in the day. Yeah. Was Hellgate London, because I think I missed the boat on that entirely.
00:25:03
Speaker
because I really enjoyed Diablo 2. And then Blizzard North went off to go make Hellgate London. And I was like, oh, it's going to be so cool. And this was like an early idea for a FPS loot and shoot. But I'm like, oh, it's going to be so fun because it's Diablo themed or whatever. Yeah. And I don't think it did too great. And I don't think it was online that much. And by the time I got around to having a machine that could run it, it's like, we're dead. I'm like, OK, let's not.
00:25:31
Speaker
I'm sure it wouldn't have been a good game, but that's something that I was looking forward to as a youth that I did not get to experience. Yeah, I think that's fair. There's been a lot of games I've played where they ended early for some reasons or another. And one thing I've noticed is that people tend to look back on them fondly. Not going to dedicate this entire episode to Star Wars Galaxies, but when it launched,
00:26:00
Speaker
Like it had tons of problems. It also had very novel systems and the community never had enough time to get super bored with it and just move on to the next game. Instead, SOE, Sony Online Entertainment, changed the system because they were like, we have to make this more accessible. People hated the changes and everyone forever for the next hundred years will have rose-tended glasses about what Star Wars used to be like.
00:26:28
Speaker
Even though if you really wanted to play, you could go play on a private server right now, which I don't abdicate, obviously, because, you know, legal reasons, but you could. And nobody, like very few people do by comparison. So I think there's a lot of games like that out there. Who knows if Helgate London would have been competitive in like a modern setting, but you missed your fun for the time and that that can wrinkle for a long time.
00:26:58
Speaker
nodding quietly. Yeah, it's great for podcasts. That's why I said it out loud. I think that's really the only one though. That's fair. There weren't too many multiplayer games that I grew up with. Like I did a shit ton of gun bound back in the day, but I know that's still around and just probably has more microtransactions because Korean multiplayer game. Hmm.
00:27:28
Speaker
I think games tend to stick around for a bit longer now. People find ways to monetize them, you know, microtransactions or battle passes or something like that. So it's less valuable to have a game that just launches and then goes away and maintains a multiplayer component.
Evolution of Multiplayer and Co-op Gaming
00:27:46
Speaker
Like it happens with FPSs sometimes, but, um, I don't know.
00:27:52
Speaker
You know, I don't I'm not one of the people who super enjoyed like the Bioshock multiplayer. I don't know if I ever really engaged with it. I'm glad you said multiplayer is going to slap the shit out of you. Yeah, I've never played Bioshock. What are you talking about? It's not like we've covered every single one of the games.
00:28:09
Speaker
But, uh, yeah, like multiplayer, they could have left it out of the game and I've been like, great. Smaller install size. I'm happy with it. Yeah. I feel like that was the era where multiplayer just kind of got slapped on to a whole bunch of things. You have an FPS, you have to have multiplayer. Yeah. There shouldn't things just kind of.
00:28:28
Speaker
baked in because that was the current hotness. But then it doesn't really get played that much. I feel like so good. I was going to say for Far Cry, was it three? Which one was Far Cry 3? Far Cry 3 was after Far Cry 2. Far Cry 2 was in Africa. Thank you for that one. Far Cry 3 was the island. No, there's like Far Cry 3 primal or something.
00:28:55
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that one actually wasn't a numbered. Far Cry Primal is not in the numbered series, but Far Cry 3 is the one on the island with Voss where you're building a tattoo with Voss. Yeah. Okay. And the spinoff was Blood Dragon.
00:29:11
Speaker
Ooh, Blood Dragons don't think. So I think Far Cry Primal, I remember playing the multiplayer of that for a whole 15 minutes because it took just so long to actually load the game. Like even just running on the Xbox, it would not really start up. And when you did, it was like laggy as fuck. Yeah.
00:29:36
Speaker
Which I mean, it shouldn't be if it's a locally running game. Whatever. Yeah, I know they've been including multiplayer. Like co-op is the way they went with Far Cry for more recent ones, where it's just like, it's kind of like Dead Rising, where they're just like, yeah, there's another Chuck. He's also a reporter. We're not explaining anything. Go for it. Like, it's the same approach. Yeah, they literally just have like an extra person there. Yeah. I feel like that's the way they do it. Yeah.
00:30:04
Speaker
I feel like if you're doing co-op it's, you can still care about the story, but you don't need to have like character two has like a certain story arc. I don't really need it. It's another Millhouse, right? Yeah. It's just, I want to be able to play this game that I'm enjoying through the story with a friend. Yeah. So just put another floating cam in there, maybe allowed me to see my hands and we'll call it a day, you know? Yeah.
00:30:29
Speaker
Man, I wonder if we've ever had a co-op episode. We've talked about a bunch of different co-op games. Potential idea for a future topic is talk about how different games have actually handled co-op, because I don't think we've ever really gotten into detail on that. And I'm immediately just thinking of all of this.
00:30:44
Speaker
I like how there's one person who's listening who they're like, they really plan a lot of the podcast in the podcast. When else are we going to do it? We're busy. But yeah, I think overall games usually do a better job of
Mass Effect and Gaming Technology
00:31:02
Speaker
at least maintaining multiplayer now, unless they straight up like Crash and Bail, Biff, whatever the term is, and die in a fire, which happens occasionally, unfortunately. So you're saying if there'd be a way for a game to essentially make more money without really spending more effort of multiplayer or a service or something else, maybe in the form of like, I don't know, just
00:31:26
Speaker
As minimal as possible. Yes. Ideally just get money. Maybe just like a JPEG at most. If only there was a way. 2022 year of the NFT. Thank you, Mr. Squeenix. Oh, NFT would be a great idea.
00:31:46
Speaker
In other news, continuing along, I'm just going through my list now, because I don't know, I like our rabbit trails, but we use these as just the prompts. Well, this is like the week that Jake gets to go over his topics that he's outlined. Whereas in like previous things, he will outline like 20 items, and then we never cover them. And at the end of the episode he's like, we didn't even touch on any of these. Delete. But so there is going to be another Mass Effect game.
00:32:10
Speaker
Um, which for me personally, I mean, I, I like that. I, I don't think Bioware is as good as they used to be. Uh, most people would agree that Anthem was a bit of a misstep. People weren't super hot on Andromeda for a lot of good reasons. The, the bad face animations were.
00:32:28
Speaker
That's where so many people get caught up on, but the game had a bunch of other problems too. But an actual continuation of the Mass Effect saga. And this is actually the core of the article, which is the least interesting part. It's being created with Unreal Tournament Engine.
00:32:46
Speaker
or Unreal. Instead, why did I say Unreal Tournament Engine? My brain just went vastly. We said Unreal Tournament earlier. Yeah. Technically correct. But what am I talking about? Yeah, Unreal Engine. Instead of Frostbite, and for the astute amongst our listeners, Frostbite might sound familiar. It's the engine EA tries to get everyone to use.
00:33:08
Speaker
They were like, use Frostbite for Anthem, use Frostbite for Andromeda, use it for Battlefield, use it for everything. Why? Because then we can have other studios help you with all of your problems. And it's never worked well for that. Weird. Yeah. Unreal Engine, as most people know, is pretty fucking common. Unreal 3 anyway. Unreal 4, though, is being used, I think, on some next gen.
00:33:36
Speaker
And it looks spiffy. If you played a shooter, there's like a 50% chance it was unreal if it loaded quickly. That's basically it. If you played a game and you load it in and then there was LOD level of detail updates on all the geometry as it loaded it in the background, it was probably unreal because it loads you in so fast.
00:34:01
Speaker
But for a game like Bioshock, for action games, first person or third person shooters, yeah, it makes sense. Doom is an unreal game. So that's all you need. I thought it was actually pretty realistic.
00:34:16
Speaker
Shout out to AJ in the chat. Get my one dad joke in. But I know you're not a huge fan of Mass Effect. This is setting myself up for people. I don't give a fuck about it. But I am curious to know, because I know there was a lot of issues with the end of Mass Effect 3 initially before they retconned and patched the ending. Quite literally changed the ending.
00:34:40
Speaker
Because I think it went initially from like, hey, do you want good ending, bad ending or the other one? Yeah, it wasn't even that it was comically colors. Oh, do you want the red ending, the green ending or the blue ending? Which is even more egregious. Yeah. Like, yes, they were different outcomes, but there was the same animation of a mass effect relay lighting up and it would be the red, green or blue, you know, depending on your decisions, I guess.
00:35:08
Speaker
which is weird for a game that's very focused on social interactions of your characters and they all have storylines and they can die type thing. So a way to make your choices not feel like they matter at all. So I'm curious to see if they actually have learned from that and then they will step off on the right foot, also with Andromeda being a shit show. Because anytime it's a major publisher, if it's EA doing AAA, I'm like,
00:35:39
Speaker
I try to get as many E and A sounds in there. I'm very wary, because I know other people will be interested in this outside of you, but I don't want to, for other things that have happened, like with cyberpunk, I don't want to see you get your heart broken again. I do not have the same level of investment for mass effect as I did for cyberpunk.
00:36:04
Speaker
Which is good. But yeah, hopefully it's good. It's definitely not a pre-order type situation. It's probably years out at this point, but it's also a wait and see how reviews do. You should do that for all games. Except Elden Ring. Thank you. I'm not talking about it. I haven't actually, I don't think I pre-ordered it, but that's the one where I was like, I'm going to get it no matter what.
00:36:29
Speaker
I may, and I'm ready to be flogged by our audience. Um, I may pre-order Elden Ring just because if I get it on like green man gaming or something, I'll probably get like 20 bucks off retail. I'm going to buy the game. It could be a literal virus that destroys my hard drive. I'm still going to buy it. I realize that it sounds stupid to say this right after cyberpunk, but like, it's not the same.
00:36:56
Speaker
It's right. No, it's not the same. If it is, like it's past couple of years, we've already been a little bit rough. You're talking, you're recontextualizing the catastrophic release of Elden Ring with the global pandemic. There was COVID and then Elden Ring, man, that was a shit show. I am very optimistic about it. So I mean, if I'm putting eggs in a basket, that's the basket.
00:37:22
Speaker
But yeah, people actually have fucking played the game, which is definitely more than some others. They explicitly again to
Anticipation for Elden Ring
00:37:30
Speaker
compare. I don't know why I'm trying to compare Elden Ring and Tigerpunk, but they explicitly reduce the amount of time reviewers had access to Cyberpunk prior to its launch compared to Elden Ring, where they're like, yeah, let the player base and they can play around with the network test. We'll see if the servers will crash on launch day. There's a huge difference. So the audacity. Yes.
00:37:52
Speaker
Let's see anything else on this list stand out as particularly interesting or something I mean we started talking about Mass Effect and we ended talking about Alden Ring in Cyberpunk So like who knows where the next one could go. I will say for my brief research Because Elden Ring comes out like February 25th ish
00:38:12
Speaker
I'm not going to be able to correct you. Which is weirdly around my mom's birthday, so I will have to distract myself enough to call her to say happy birthday. Oh, okay. I thought you were going to get it for you. She couldn't appreciate that. Anyway, a week before that, I saw that Horizon Zero Dawn Forbidden West, or I guess Horizon Forbidden West, will be coming out.
00:38:37
Speaker
So I can't get Horizon because I'm not going to beat it in a week and then just context switch. There's no fucking way. So Forbidden West again might be a we wait a little bit. We then go check it out. But probably on PlayStation.
00:38:55
Speaker
That is fair. I wonder, I'll have to check to see when it's launch cycle is. It is the type of game where I'm going to play it probably with a controller that has amazing PC controls. It'll likely be PlayStation. But there's a reality where I would play it on PC.
00:39:12
Speaker
I mean, I would definitely play it on PC if it like came to that. Because I think for most games, it's usually a year ish. Yeah. It's like I would be fine waiting. It's not a I have to play it the day it comes out type. Yeah.
00:39:29
Speaker
Yeah, we'll have to, I mean, upcoming episode, we'll talk about some of the, uh, things coming out next year that we're looking forward to for sure. And try not to make it 50% talking about altering again. No promises. It's hard. Um, so we've talked about some controversial studios or studios that have made.
Ubisoft's Challenges and Industry Scandals
00:39:50
Speaker
They've had employees that have done terrible things. There you go. No painting or glossing over it. Yeah, just the employees and management's good. Yes. Management's good. They're all employees, right? They all work for somebody, even if somebody is the board. And who knows what the board does. But I would never make allegations against the board because those are powerful people.
00:40:11
Speaker
But Axios reported that Ubisoft is amid a great exodus of talent. And they cited creative direction differences for the people leaving, low pay, and then going back to some earlier allegations of abuse and covering of abuse that went on last year. Not nearly as big as everything that went on with Blizzard.
00:40:34
Speaker
But they were one thing which coverage of abuse versus covering of abuse. Yes. Yeah. This is we're talking about like news articles came out about it last year. Right. But the news articles were about people who were covering up abuse. Yes. And those. Yeah. Good clarification. And then just sort of as a heuristic or a litmus test here, they noted that five out of the 25 people
00:41:01
Speaker
The top people that were listed in the credits for Far Cry 6 have actually left the company. Far Cry is obviously really big with Ubisoft.
00:41:13
Speaker
I thought that this was particularly interesting because this is yet another giant studio that is, it seems like there's constantly controversy or issues going on with like the big studios. And I don't mean to comparatively belittle everything that's going on with Activision Blizzard, that is, you know,
00:41:38
Speaker
That's different than when EA charges you a bunch of money for loot boxes. I'm not going to pretend that it's not. But my gosh, the bigger these companies get, the more embroiled and scandal they seem to be. Yeah. I think part of it is just a numbers game, where the more people you have, the more likely it is. But it's also the culture that's kind of bred there. As a company, I don't think they've
00:42:08
Speaker
grown as individuals, so to speak, as far as if you look at the games they keep putting out, it's very much the same thing. So if you have somebody who's very old school mentality and usually with that comes a degree of sexism. Yeah. Typically you're going to be looking for more people with that mentality when you hire. So like a bad seed sown for like 20 years will grow and contribute more to that.
00:42:40
Speaker
That's my guess. Anyway, I, yeah, it could be because they're games, your shit. I don't know. They're just abusive because the games that they make are terrible. Probably not the correlation. It's probably, it's a bigger company. That's much more results driven than people. Yeah. That's fair. Like they want to make money. What's the easiest way to make money? Risk in the same game. Be shitty to your employees. Give them crunch. It'll get done anyway. We'll make money. We'll do it again. Do the next one.
00:43:11
Speaker
Yeah, it costs money. It costs time, which is money, to focus on employees to actually bring awareness to issues, to do trainings. I'm sure there's a lot of people with various opinions upon how effective trainings actually are. I suspect sitting in front of a computer and being like, is sexism bad or good? Bad is probably not useful. But you can engage with people and be like,
00:43:38
Speaker
Here's some examples of how behavior should be molded in the workplace. And like, hey, we're going to make it safe for people to come forward with things like this. And a lot of that doesn't happen in those old school style basement dweller startup gaming environments, like what you're describing, where they're just like, yeah, just burn people out and let them do whatever they want. And then something ships at the end of the day.
00:44:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's the second part you said of offering a safe space. You're saying, hey, we're here for you if you need to talk about whatever. Definitely useful, more so than a training. Because every time I've had a training, I'm like, yep, that's a fishing scam. I know what this is. Maybe it's because I've been around long enough. You're like, yeah, I get it.
00:44:29
Speaker
But the same way like sexism is bad and don't abuse people are like, yeah, yeah, I fucking know. It's obvious, right? So in the same way, I think people know that it's bad. I don't think just saying like, hey, do this training and here's some scenarios is really going to help as much as
00:44:47
Speaker
condemning the action. A lot of time when these things happen, they're like, oh, let's go into a PR frenzy and just sweep everything out of the rug, not tell anybody about it, whatever, and then just cover up the mistake as much as possible, which shows like, hey, there's not going to be any consequences for this action.
00:45:08
Speaker
Right compared to condemning it and firing people Yeah, they're like actually setting an example. I think the action does a lot more than just the words of saying This is bad. Don't do that. Yeah
00:45:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think like, I mean, no one should be surprised by this, but the potential risk and threat of actions taken against the company or news getting out or, you know, stories of abuse or anything like that.
00:45:42
Speaker
The companies react commiserate to how much the risk exists to themselves. Once you become big enough, that's just the reality of it. If you're positive, if you think there's going to be a positive outcome for some of the exposure that's been placed on these companies recently around this space,
00:46:03
Speaker
You probably are of the opinion that that risk has just grown so high in the industry that people would be like, hey, if you sexually harass people, you're out because we are not going to be put through the crucible of public opinion once more. And we fired a bunch of people the last time this happened. Absolutely not.
00:46:25
Speaker
Um, so that's why, that's why I hope it ends up being like, and it's not just the eye of Sauron shifts and people go back to same old, same old and HR covers it up. Um, that's all hopefully in the past, but we'll see, you know, I feel like.
00:46:48
Speaker
Maybe it's just our society in general. And I don't mean to make it like our society. But I think for a given person or group of people, it's so easy to just deny or feign ignorance about something. And I'm going to throw somebody under the bus for my example here. My downstairs neighbor is, in my opinion, a piece of shit. They've had like screaming and shouting matches and stuff.
00:47:17
Speaker
I can't really go into the details of the topics because I haven't fully heard all of it. But the other day, I went down to say like, hey, I've been hearing for literally the past month, almost every day, somebody's screaming, do you know anything about that? Which is the play way of saying like, hey, here's an out, right? And they said, I don't know what you're talking about.
00:47:38
Speaker
And they immediately went on to like the, you have to prove that I've done this thing. And I technically had ways to do it, but let's not escalate at this point. But figure out whether Pennsylvania is a two party or a single party stain. Well, I wasn't going to record it without consent for sure.
00:47:57
Speaker
But it's just instead of just saying, hey, I'm sorry, try and keep it down or just just accepting what it is and then taking the blame. It's very easy for somebody like I've been in situations where I've done that myself. I'm sure we just say, no, that's not me. Like you can't you can't physically pin it on me. You don't have the time and energy to do so. Right. How much are you willing to push it? Yeah.
00:48:27
Speaker
And this all correlates back to the, uh, you're talking about this in context of, uh, abuse and how companies handle this issue. Yeah.
00:48:37
Speaker
That makes sense. Pennsylvania is a two party state, by the way, not legal advice. So don't report your neighbor. Not admissible. Could get you in trouble. OK, but yeah, I don't know. We'll see. I hope New Year's resolution.
00:49:00
Speaker
fewer incidents of all of this absolutely terrible stuff happening in 2022. Clean it up. 2022, EA, Activision, Ubisoft, anybody who has this stuff going on, whether it's come out or...
00:49:16
Speaker
or not at this point, clean it up. I mean, it's a new year. We'll check back in next year. It's a new year, man. Everything's being fixed this year. We're talking about. That's true. Day one, they're just like, all right, racist. Get out of here, sexist. Get out of here. Abuses everybody out. Hello? You are. Hello? You're right. You're a 2021 problem. New meta. I mean, fingers crossed, as always, but
00:49:46
Speaker
That's fair. What else we got on the list here? I see a perhaps a prompt about the most played games on Steam. I'm not highlighting anything in text. What are you talking about? Yeah.
Gaming Trends and Surprises in 2021
00:50:00
Speaker
For last year. Do any stand out here for you? Halo Infinite for me, I was surprised by how much it took off. Right. I understand that Halo is a very big franchise and I'm very much a
00:50:16
Speaker
hateful old man at this point. But the multiplayer was free. Obviously, it's going to drive a lot of interest and get people to check it out. But from everything that I kind of saw with it, a couple hours I played with it, it wasn't for me. And I just didn't get a whole lot out of it. So I'm surprised to see that it took off that much compared to a lot of other existing things like Apex Legends, which has been played a metric fuck ton by everybody. Right.
00:50:46
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot on this list. I'm going to go through some of them right now and qualify them. I think New World. So this is breaking 200,000 peak players at some point last year. New World doesn't surprise me. It's an MMO launch. I doubt that it's anywhere near its peak now for a lot of reasons. PUBG. It's a battle royale game, no explanation. Same with Apex Legends, right? Battle royale game is popular.
00:51:10
Speaker
I'm surprised that I haven't heard about PUBG in a while at least. Apex are here about a lot as far as competitive. And then Fortnite's the other one, which as much as it's memed upon is fucking huge still. Yes. Not on Steam, so it can't show up on this list, but it would if it could. It is one of the biggest games. Full stop being played. So this one was surprising to me. Cyberpunk 2077, as a brief reminder, this didn't come out this year. It came out last year.
00:51:40
Speaker
Maybe after all the fixes people were like, let's give it another shot. That's the working theory. I think is like after a major patch, a bunch of people dropped in because this is 200,000 peak players at a time, right? Like if everybody was taking turns playing cyberpunk, it wouldn't have really worked here. At some point this year that popped back up and that one was surprising.
00:52:04
Speaker
Um, CSGO, no surprise game as a service essentially is going to continue forever. GTA five. I didn't realize this one was as big as it is, but apparently people have been playing GTA forever.
00:52:18
Speaker
I know it's been like an existing staple in games since like PlayStation days. But again, I very much wrote that off as a it's something that people occasionally like play around with, not it's active. But it does have like pretty big multiplayer servers where you can have hundreds, thousands of people like in a city just fucking around.
00:52:45
Speaker
Yeah, I've seen clips of people like on from Twitch or something like that, like they'll play like role playing GTA, where people just literally play the role of like cops or whatever. And it's just it's crazy. That game came out in 2013. So GTA five GTA five came on 2013. It's been a long time. And my gosh, Rockstar is making a lot of money off of it.
00:53:13
Speaker
That is insane that it has that much. I want to say population or density. What's the word I want? Stained power saturation. Yeah, OK. Yeah, no, it's it's pretty ridiculous. Let's see what else we have on the list here, we have a couple of Valheim.
00:53:37
Speaker
So Valheim officially launched in February, but did we not play it last year? Sorry, last year is 2021 at this point. No, it did. We played it that year. That one doesn't surprise me. Valheim was massive and continues to be really big. At some point, we'll check out the updates. JK, not really.
00:54:03
Speaker
But yeah, I see the appeal of having a bunch of people going on to play a survival crafter. That's finally not Minecraft, which minecraft still holds up in my book because you can do so much with it on top of like with the mods. It's a grandfather. Exactly. Yeah, it's the OG. But I did enjoy Valheim when we played it.
00:54:25
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Until we found wasps. Then the game was no longer fun. Does it? And then you can farm them with a bow and arrow. Predictable trajectory. They probably got nerfed at some point. Rust is also on the list. Haven't played Rust in several hot minutes. That's Jake's term for six years. Yeah, several hot minutes. I'm an old man. What are you going to say? It was fun. I have no idea what the game's like. I see it's completely different at this point.
00:54:55
Speaker
I'm sure they've changed a lot. I've seen the occasional Twitch clip of some bigger streamers playing with other streamers. So I do think they have added a decent amount of content to it. But obviously, if it's being streamed, I'm sure that also gets it a lot of groundswell. Oh, yeah.
00:55:14
Speaker
Yeah. And the last one, pretty surprising. Dota 2. Trash game. Trash game. Not even a pro scene anymore. Literally just prints money for Valve. They haven't even released NFTs. They don't need to. This game just continues to. They literally have made other games as a joke with the money they made of a Dota 2. Yes, this is another dickhead artifact. Yeah.
00:55:45
Speaker
And those were those are some of the top most played There's also some big performers in gross revenue valheim shows up again again. It took off at a massive time There was a lot of games that were hot at the moment People play Mass Effect legendary edition back for blood makes the list Sold really well good.
Success in Multiplayer and Strategy Games
00:56:06
Speaker
I I enjoy that game and I want to play it more often with people and
00:56:13
Speaker
If you're listening, you probably won't, but I still would like to play with you. Yeah.
00:56:21
Speaker
an open call to the internet to play with Dave. So I guess take that how you will. It's like three or four people who I know play, but I don't know if they listen. No, that's fair. A lot of the same titles. I'm not going to go too too much over the ones we already know we're most played. But Farming Simulator 22, apparently, was some of the highest gross revenue. And that's doesn't surprise me, really. Those games are terribly expensive with all the DLC.
00:56:49
Speaker
Can I make a joke here? Yeah. What the crop? Oh, yeah. Thank you. That was a joke. Additionally, we have so Outriders, which a game we skipped over. We played like the demo and we're like, thank you, demo. Demo is trash. Real talk. It's it falls under AAA. Yeah.
00:57:10
Speaker
I played it about as much as I could have played the demo. I even did a little bit of farming in the demo for items and things. Not really necessary. But none of it was like, this is really the staying power that I want. And I kind of got the impression, if I was going to play this game, I would just buy the latest expansion for Destiny instead.
00:57:30
Speaker
Eh, you know, don't do it. You're going to make five other people then buy the expenditure for destiny. Right. I mean, Ian's just waiting. He just Twitch. He needs an excuse. That's it. Um, it literally reposts. I was talking to him about this. He reposts the same picture of Wolverine, like in the bed with the extra of destiny every single time. Um,
00:57:53
Speaker
Uh, battlefield 2024. This one was kind of funny because nobody liked this game from what I've heard. But I think at launch the multiplayer, I say at launch, like it's magically been fixed since, but it's just been super buggy. Yeah. So I made a lot of money for him. A lot of people still bought it and they're like, yeah, I'll just not play it. That was good. I guess. And then age of empires four, I didn't realize until I was reviewing this list that there was a new age of empire. So that's on me.
00:58:22
Speaker
But apparently, I'm outside of that no, because everybody else made this game one of the highest grossing on Steam. So good on them. I do know some of the background. They earned it by remastering and re-releasing all of these Age of Empire games and making sure that they worked on modern systems. And then they're like, great. Now that we've done all that and we've proven our street cred, let's make a new Age of Empires game.
00:58:51
Speaker
Good on them. Yeah, like Blish was doing a Starcraft. Now they're going to make a Starcraft 3. Right. Yeah. No. I mean, my gosh, this would give it a decade, maybe. And they'll have donated all of their money to charity or something. And then they can make Starcraft 3. So do these statistics make you more interested in checking out any of these games? Or is it just kind of life metadata for you? It's kind of just funny. Or it's not funny. It's interesting.
00:59:22
Speaker
analysis standpoint, just be like, oh, like some of these just stood out as what I would expect. Exactly. Forza. Yeah. People buy games.
00:59:30
Speaker
And then there's Naraka Blade Point, which is a Bruce Lee battle royale game. I've literally never heard it. It's not Bruce Lee. He's a cosmetic that got added recently into it. That's all it takes, though. It makes it Bruce Lee. But yeah, Naraka Blade Point, it screams. These are on Steam, right? Yes. Yeah. All of these are Steam games. It screams one of those like Unity engine type
00:59:54
Speaker
games where it's just all Japanese characters. The description is all Japanese and you're like, what is this? And it's like mixed reviews. That's what that screams to me.
01:00:05
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I a lot of these, I just had no idea what they were beforehand. OK, the reason I thought it was directly related to Bruce Lee is because the title in steam on the top right starts with Bruce Lee and his iconic nunchucks now have joined Naraka. They changed the description, the base, most prominent description of the game to start with Bruce Lee.
01:00:32
Speaker
I mean, that's a pretty good hook. And it's a picture of Bruce Lee in the game. Yeah, might as well be a Bruce commercial. Anybody, anybody? Yeah, I like brisk. But yeah, it's mostly from an information standpoint, the older I get, the more I kind of just like.
01:00:52
Speaker
Oh yeah, the industry's doing this. I wonder why that's the case. You know, like you could go make a blog spot or whatever WordPress blog about what's going on in the gaming industry. No, no, I don't want to do that. It's too much effort. Why type it when I can just say it? Exactly. This is just speech to text and we've never completed the phase of actually getting it down to text.
01:01:20
Speaker
We need a stenographer. Can we put that in the budget? No. I'm going to be a homeowner. I don't have time for a stenographer budget. That's going to be crazy. Oh, is that something? One hour mark. But now I think that's about it for news. I think we've covered everything in the world.
01:01:49
Speaker
We did. And also I'm getting my lecture reminder to drink water, which I will ignore. This is a reminder to our listeners to drink water. And then Dave is lifting up his arm and he's wearing a shirt that says stay hydrated. It's a skeleton with a water bottle. That's pretty good.
01:02:08
Speaker
Check us out. Yeah, drink water. If you have advice that you'd like to send us about techniques for most efficiently drinking water, you can send that in to soapstonepodcastatgml.com, or you can join the water-based fan club on Facebook at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a moist evening.