#57: Dreamstate

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We on the other hand, will keep making Tuesdays great again. But enough chatter, how about you, on to the show? Greetings and salutations, welcome back to Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast. This is episode 57.

My name is Colin Worryard, I'm joined as always by the returning from New York, Chris Reagan. Yeah, I survived the plane. How was it? It was great.

It always is. Nice little red eye flight. Yeah, I managed to sleep though. So this is entirely, entirely productive in that sense.

I see, I can't really sleep on planes, typically. Yeah, it's just too much. It isn't comfortable. I can't trust the people around.

You don't even want these people. You don't know these people. Yeah, but you're not even pretty safe on a plane. Well, relative safety, I guess.

Right. Safe for them driving a car, they say. Yeah, they say that and I agree with it, but I also, you know, also kind of don't, my brain doesn't. It's kind of wild to think about these hulking many tonne machines just hauling ass through the sky.

They don't want to be in the air. They're constantly being torn down by gravity. It's pretty crazy. And I think it was Louis CK that had some sort of routine about air travel a long time ago and how people need to shut the fuck up because it's so amazing.

Everyone's like, catching when airplanes are playing. And now they're late and he's saying these metal birds are hurtling through the sky. Yeah. So pretty funny routine.

Although I don't think it's okay to talk about Lucy anymore. I don't know. Did any other controversy of some sort? Yeah, but it wasn't like a like a Weinstein controversy.

I think he, what did Lucy Kade do? I think he masturbated in front of some women. It's pretty extreme. It's pretty extreme.

But it seems like people were trying to read it though. It's crazy. It's crazy people who were like, yeah, yeah. I heard someone was like, yeah, it was just like casual.

I was like, what's happening? It's a little weird. The comedian world seems a little strange. Definitely strange.

Well, welcome back from New York. I love New York as well. You have your Kill Me shirt on that's in the style of the Seinfeld logo. You give me a sticker.

I really enjoy this merger. I'll let you pimp it here on our show if you want to tell people about it. I have a vanity link yet, but it's the pin tweet on my Twitter at Chris at Chris Argon. It says Kill Me in the logo in front of Seinfeld.

I did this a couple years ago with a friends logo and it did pretty well. So I figured it would work well again. I see no reason why it wouldn't. It's great.

I love it. Go support Chris. Appreciate the free sticker. I'm going to keep reminding people.

We're going to Pacs West, Chris and I are going to Pacs West. We'll be there Monday, September 2nd at 11.30am in the Hydra Theatre at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Seattle. This is our panel, the Sacred Simple's panel at Pacs West. Please do come and support us.

Again, 11.30 in the morning, Monday, September 2nd. You'll need a Pacs Pass, I believe, obviously, to get in that day. That episode will be streamed on Twitch, on their Twitch channel. We don't have a Twitch channel, obviously, because I don't like live things, even though we're doing this.

I still don't like them. Yeah, I mean, it's tricky. It's a different environment altogether. And yeah, so that will be not a standard episode.

The standard episode will be delayed that week, but we will put that up at the Sacred Simple's plus episode. If we can get the audio on, I assume we will be able to do that. So again, Monday, September 2nd, 11.30am, Hydra Theatre at Pacs West, Sacred Simple's live. Come see us.

I just mentioned Sacred Simple's plus, Sacred Simple's plus is now, we announced that a week or two ago is now going to be kind of the second episode of Sacred Simple's each week. It's only for CLS patrons, rolls out August 9th for $5 a month patrons, and then August 12th for $1 a month patrons. So basically, to get the podcast at all, you just need to support us for $1 a month and you get that and you get other perks as well depending on the levels you go up. And so really excited about that.

And I wanted to throw this out here. I have not told Chris this, but my plan for the first episode which will record next week is going to be a first party developer draft. Now, what I mean by that is that drafting and sports means that all these athletes are available in teams pick the player. It's kind of like picking, you know, recess.

You pick your baseball team, your kickballs away. I want this guy. I want this guy. So what I'm going to do, Chris, is I'm going to write a list of the dozen or so developers that Sony owns and write up what they've done, where they come from, where they are and be really thorough about it in the beginning of the episode, explain it to everyone so maybe they can play along at home or they can play with friends.

And then you and I will flip a coin to see who goes first and we will pick our teams so to speak and see who comes up or make an argument for who has the better first party studios based on that. So maybe you want to know any dog because of this, but maybe you want Sony San Diego for this or you want sucker punch for this and you can't have probably no any dog and Sony Santa Monica. You probably have to pick one. You probably will have Pulp if in the end, Studio Japan or whatever.

I think it'll be a really fun episode. That sounds interesting. Yeah, I like it. And so that will be a fancy football almost.

Exactly. So it'll be our first episode that will roll out on August 9th for our beloved patrons. We appreciate your support. Now, real quick, a few other things to get into that aren't going to be covered in the news, Chris, but I wanted to touch on.

There's the story going on about the Order 1886 getting a sequel as outed by sucker punches writer, one of the writers on Ghost of Shima named Jordan Michael Lemos, who apparently was on some podcast and said that the sequel is in development, whatever. But that's not what he said. And if you go read his Twitter account and read the actual verbatim quotes, that's not what he said. So in case people are curious why we're not covering that story is because it's not probably true.

Although, Radio Dawn, a Santa Monica based company recording in Santa Monica, did recently move studios and into a brand new building. Yeah. And I don't know where this money is coming from. As I tweeted out, the Order 1886 came out more than four years ago.

They don't own it. They made that game to formers with game trust that probably sold 25 copies. And then they made a bunch of Oculus games that I guess are pretty popular, but you can't possibly be making that much revenue on Oculus games. Yeah, yeah, I would be shocked by that.

So I think that Radio Dawn is partnering with someone on the next gen game. I don't know that it's Sony. I don't have any inside information, but something's going on. It could be 1880s.

That could be interesting launch title for PS5. It could be one of those things. It's like, oh, look at that. Maybe it'll be good this time.

I guess so with all of Sony's are a lot of Sony's big first party studios having gone recently or still having gone. It means that they're not going to be ready to go in the PS5 hour for some time. Oh, naughty dog, sucker punch, even Sony Santa Monica are probably years out. I mean, two of those three students haven't released that last PS4 game, so they're going to need the contracts of second party studios.

So certainly the environment is right for or for a radio that don't want to come back in, but I just don't think that Sony needs a sequel to the Order 1886. As much as I think that that would be cool, I don't think you invest in that enough where they've got a new studio in lots of space. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's someone like Activision or something like that I might be working with them. I don't think it's Oculus money, we'll see. Yeah. I think you could probably write it.

But I wanted to throw that out there because I know a lot of people are interested in that. from the audience, Chris, is that there's this other story going around, I think, from a smaller website that interviewed people associated with Naughty Dogg, and some of the claims, this is another push to unionize story with a lot of its stuff buried in it. QA testers at Naughty Dogg, I think one of them claimed that they were working 24-hour days. I think we did not that I simply do not believe that, and I think that there needs to be more scrutiny placed on these particular stories that are claiming workplace abuse, and I think we need to start separating workplace abuse from working hard in an industry that requires hard work.

So, I'm not saying that nothing went toward one on a Naughty Dogg, I'm simply saying that we're not interested in reporting on that story or really relaying it in full because I think a lot of it's fucking bullshit. And I'm not saying that just because I like Naughty Dogg and Naughty Dogg, it's just the claims are outrageous. These are outrageous. We have the 24-hour work day.

24 hours? I've been awake for 24 hours before, obviously. I've been awake for a very long time. But I don't even...

That seems so implausible. Actually working for that amount of time seems genuinely impossible. I just don't like working. Working, working.

I had some people tweet at me saying, I worked 24 hours, I worked three days shifts basically on this program, and this thing, and I'm like, I've been there. I was at IGN for 48 hours, sometimes, too, but I was not working 24 hours a day when I was there. It's like an E3, which is fucking horrifying for anyone in the press. I worked 16 or 18 hours a day, but I wasn't even getting the 24, so I'm like, there's like Black Friday for like retail.

I remember I worked a ton. Every Black Friday was like horrendous. But like, it was never anything even approaching that amount of... It was insane, still.

It is insane. That's the thing, it's like 24 hours is so insane. It's just so wild. This is the argument that I made right about the 100-hour work week, just thinking about a claim of a 60 or 80-hour work week, which I think is much more plausible.

And then think about what you have to do to get to 100 hours. It's a whole other day in the week, basically, like a full day to get to that. So what I'm saying is that maybe it's possible they work 16 or 18-hour days, sometimes when they're leading up to launch, especially in QA. Yeah, I can see that.

But I just highly doubt Sony or the third parties that they're working with, what allow QA testers, which are hourly employees, by the way, they got paid time and a half after, I think, 10 hours in double time after 14 or something like that. They want these guys to say 24 hours, pay them out the ass for all this stuff. There'll be time shoots that would, by the way, render this true or not. So I simply wanted to throw it out there.

We need to be more critical, and not all this stuff bears repeating. Yeah, we just talked about it for three minutes. Yeah. So what can you do?

Chris, let's consult with the audience, shall we? Okay. As I always like to do, we sort of record this podcast for 24 hours one day and see if we can see what we can do. We should.

By the way, when you said that we should record the podcast, I was like, oh shit, I forget the record button. I actually looked down really good. Chris, as the audience knows, we support on patreon.com slash hollens. I say one of the tears there is your ability to submit questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, and ideas to our show.

We put up a thread every Friday. I go through it during the weekend as I'm writing the show and we pull out from there. By the way, pull out that was a little sexual. I didn't mean it that way now.

I will say that we do the sacred symbols plus episodes. Some of those will also have accompanying threads. So make sure to differentiate between those of your supporters. We appreciate you all around patreon.

Aaron Davidson wrote in to us, he said, Hey, see, I have one simple question for you. Now this actually gave me a little bit of pause at first. I was like, this is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. But then Aaron, you threw me for a loop.

He says, you crabs think fish are flying. Love the show. Keep up the great. I've had this conversation with my roommate before.

I think on Twitter. Because crabs, I don't think they can't like jump and like gain some points. You're right. So they're on the ground.

They're more like people on the moon, I guess, where they can because water is obviously, you know, it's water. So they could probably like get up for a little bit and then before they come back down. I was talking to my roommate about this like a couple weeks ago, maybe a month or two ago, we were talking about this and like, yeah, from a crab's perspective, which is a ground animal in water, basically, they don't swim really. They get like drafted by some rogue stream from their perspective, the fish are flying.

So God knows what the hell they think. What a fish thinks. Like a bird. They're probably like, why?

I don't even understand. Do crabs have gills? No, crabs breathe air, right? They don't breathe.

Well, this is my problem with the ocean. Everything in the ocean is just love crafting and horrifying. Like everything about it is when you look at HP, love crafting and everything it's like, it's like, it's not even like, it's just all stuff in the ocean. Like, I feel it was literally just a squid.

It was really afraid of. It's kind of wild that there were hundreds of years worth of these wives tales from brigands and pirates and sailors of these massive sea creatures that they would encounter. And I don't think it was until a hundred or so years ago that the giant squid maybe even sooner than that was actually like found. And I was like, oh, these motherfuckers weren't these crazy drunk sailors in the 16-hundred and the age of discovery weren't lying.

They might have actually encountered these gigantic hulking seabees. Yeah, it's gross man. It's disgusting. By the way, that picture, I don't know what it was between that a picture.

Yeah, it's the video of the worm that eats with a white vein-tendral looking thing. The fuck, man? I don't know. Everything in the ocean is like, every time I see something new that comes out of the ocean, the more propolution I get, like for real.

Like it's starting to get to this one. It's like, let's use as many plastic straws as possible to quell whatever the hell that is and whatever it could evolve into. It's like that asteroid that almost hit Earth a couple of weeks ago, right? Did you see anything?

That's an asteroid that got really close to Earth, like, scarily close between the Earth and the Moon. Damn. And it wasn't on NASA's charts. NASA claims that it has a pre-thorrow chart of near-Earth asteroids and objects and this one wasn't on it.

And it got close. It was fucking agony. All right, let's jump into some more serious things. Jake Whittaker wrote in and said, howdy boys, I just finished watching your Titanfall 2 gameplay.

He's talking about our Let's Play with Go. I must say that I'm astounded you stopped when you were mere seconds from getting the trophy. Why don't we see this completed as Chris for the challenge? Listen, I was not mere seconds away.

I've done a lot of research on this. I've done some practice rounds on my own time. And it is a whole different ballgame. The Source Engine, which is what Titanfall 2 runs on, has a very interesting way of propelling a player character through an environment at high speeds.

I'm sure some of you, maybe a few of you, have seen some videos on YouTube of counter-strike surfing, where characters are just flying through on diagonal walls. It's really tricky. I was definitely not close, especially after knowing what I know now about it. But I'm definitely down for the challenge.

I just got to, I don't want to do it until I have a pretty solid understanding of that engine. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, you had told me, and I was surprised by this. I guess maybe I inherently knew this back in the day, but I guess I didn't take it with me.

I never knew. You were saying that it runs on Source, which is a Valve Engine. And I always assumed it was a frostbite game simply because Respawn is in EA family. So it does actually, from that perspective, require a little bit of just different skills and more flirty.

The engine just works really weird. It works the way counter-strike works. And if you know the way counter-strike works, it's quick. I wonder if, well, I assume that maybe I already thought about the Jedi last order game that they're making now Respawn.

That must be on Frostbite. I believe it's on Frostbite, yeah. So, I'll be shocked if that was on Source. I will say, although by the time people hear this, the vote will almost be over that, the let's play vote that we do every month on Patreon is going in Titanfall 2 Redux is winning by a mile.

So we're going to go back, but let's give Chris a little bit of time. We will do it, but that's a practice one. That's a heavy practice. For now, you can go look at our most recent let's play, which is for Crash Team Racing on YouTube.com slash Collins last night at SideQuest.

I say the word insane 50 times in it. Did you watch it? I think it's a very important thing to estimate the difficulty some things require in our lives, right? And then they really underestimate some other things.

And I think talking while playing video games is incredibly difficult. I mean, just think about if your spouse comes in, they want to talk to you. Like, that happens to me all the time. I mean, I can't really pay attention to what you're saying.

So, yeah, it's hard. It's just like podcasting. It's way harder than me. Yeah, way harder than me.

I remember when I was doing the livestream for the trophy. They were just like long periods of silence. I was like, listen, I have to focus. That's a focus heavy game too.

That's why I think I like doing less plays by myself sometimes, but I think it's important to have a co-pilot often as well so someone can talk. Why are people upset over this? How is this different from any other microtransaction? Is it being used maliciously to prey on gambling addicts?

Are people overreacting since gambling and games is a sensitive issue as of late? Would you like to hear your thoughts on the matter? Hope all is well and that the weather isn't too hot. It's getting hotter, actually, in your summer setting.

Yeah, for sure. This is like really tug on Superman's cape style. Like really, like you're really, really prodding to just throw a casino. Because it's a real casino.

You put real money in so that you can win fake money that you can't spend outside of the game. It's gambling with gift cards. Yeah. It's such a weird, I mean, hey, man, anybody who's insane enough to do this, go ahead.

Go ahead and bleed yourself. But like, my God, you should have some kind of foresight. I think that people are mad about it, Chris, to Anthony's point. Because a lot of people are just mad at microtransactions in kind of these new modes.

I actually appreciate the overt nature of what Rockstar did here. Like you said, there's no facade over this. It's a casino where you gamble. I mean, that's what Vegas.

And so I appreciate the forthrightness of it in a way where it's like, okay, I mean, you can accuse us of gambling, but this is literally gambling. So you're a fucking idiot at this point. If you go into this and then complain on the back end. Now, is it taking advantage of gambling on itself?

I just do not buy this line of thinking gambling addicts have to circumnavigate the world and I guess navigate around the world in a way that alcoholics have to navigate the world. We don't go to restaurants and have dry restaurants. Maybe there's something that exists because an alcoholic might come eat there. The alcoholics problem ultimately.

No offense. It's a gambling addicts problem if they're not able to be on a video game console without spending money in gambling. Again, I know we talked about this kind of ad nauseam at this point, but I just don't buy any angle of this that doesn't require or stress the personal responsibility angle. It just is what it is.

Again, I am a gambler. I like gambling. I go to Vegas multiple times a year. I gamble on sports, et cetera.

I don't get out of control. In fact, I do it kind of for fun and I don't spend a lot of money at all because I have control. And if you don't, then don't put yourself in situations like that. Yeah, I think my issue is less about personal responsibility and more about just like, I just feel like it just makes the product worse.

And I hate that. That's really it. I don't give a shit about people. That's fair enough.

Chris, it's fine. It's fine. It's not a big deal. You know, you got to be honest with the audience.

And that's what we're being right now. Save your money. Don't be crazy. Get an education.

Up to a degree. You don't need to go to college. Work hard. Sometimes you do.

Sometimes you do. You go to college, please. I learned by ear. I learned by ear.

I learned by ear. Based on the screams of the various people. Chris, by the way, last week we talked about trophies changing. We talked about Rainbow Six Siege's trophies changing.

I inquired with the audience, Chris. Could they come up with any other examples? Because I couldn't think of it. And not surprisingly, our very nerdy audience that come up with some examples.

Space Dog Road and by the way, he typed his name's SPVCEDAWG. So very Roman. Very Roman. He says, Hey, CNC.

First time, long time. In regards to your recent Rainbow Six Siege trophy conversation, I wanted to shine in another major game that did it as well. Destiny 2. They have changed some of the late game trophies to have different requirements.

As an example, I have the gold trophy for beating the raid on prestige difficulty. Something I've never even attempted because before the change, it was simply completed perceived strike mission, which pales in difficulty and compares into the prestige raid. Thank you for all you do. Keep Tuesdays great.

I guess I just don't pay attention to the achievements on Destiny. So that's one. That makes sense. One in life service.

Another in life service, by the way. Indeed. That's just to be the trend. Actually, all the games we're going to talk about here are life service games.

Yeah, that makes sense. Moist Conroy and then said, Hey, Colony Chris, on last week's episode, you asked for a game strokey requirements for a change post release. The biggest example of this that I know is Overwatch. Each hero in Overwatch has specific trophies tied to them that require players perform challenges based on their powers and abilities.

However, many of these heroes have been changed a lot and some have had their powers change so drastically that the original trophy for them would just be unachievable. Blizzard would patch these trophies so the requirement would match their updated powers. If you would earn a certain character trophy, though you kept it, even if the requirements changed. So that's not a huge surprise.

Again, the list of trophies and their values, I don't think can change. I think literally all they can change are the triggers and the text. So, and obviously the name of them. Yeah.

So I just didn't know this was happening so much, but it happened in an even more recent game. Yeah. John Opeck wrote in one of the topic of changing trophy requirements, Ubisoft has done this before to a smaller degree with massive entertainment. I platted in the Division II earlier this year and was preparing for a particularly tough trophy when I noticed the name and description had changed.

Originally, you needed to extract some amount of loot in the dark zone during a blackout, giving the amount of variables involved to make this happen. I imagine Ubisoft decided to make it a lot simpler and thankfully I didn't have to grind for the original trophy requirement. I thought this was bizarre back in March, but the seed changes are next level. I agree, the siege ones are totally different.

Yeah. They've changed a lot of trophies, but it seems that it's not only possible, but it's happening as Chris said games as a service are adapting. So. Yeah.

I mean, that makes a ton of sense. I guess trophies would change too, I suppose. Because there are trophies, there are plenty of trophies, especially on PS3 that are unattainable, because systems are shut down, like you can't get the mag trophies anymore for instance, because it doesn't work. Yeah.

So I don't think they're going to change that stuff, but I like that they're paying attention to that. And by the way, Chris, this really does feed the narrative that I've been pushing, that more people care about trophies than you think. And I hate when people dismiss, you know, oh, no one cares about this. This is a subsection of people.

I'm like, I'm not so sure. They're literally going through changes that have to be certified and go through QA, just to correct their trophy list in these games. You would assume that that wouldn't be important at all, especially with games as a service. So I encourage people to think again if they think that trophies and achievements aren't as important as I think they are.

It's probably somewhere in the middle. Not as important as I think and not as unimportant as a lot of you think. And you could probably run on that. Chris, let's talk about what we're playing.

Let's hear you're playing Witcher 3. Still, yeah. I mean, obviously I've been in New York for like last week. Sorry.

It was really just like that Monday night that I was playing through it again. It feels old. I bumped it down to like the lowest difficulty because I just don't care about the combat of it. And from what I, I ever tweeted out on Twitter, I was like, is it weird if I play this on like just completely easy because I just don't like the combat at all.

And everybody unanimously was like, it's not good. It's not good. The combat's not good. Which is like, what?

Yeah. That's wild. Yeah, the combat is I recall I tried to play it on hard or very hard, whatever it was, and I was getting my ass kicked. And I knew how big the game was.

I was like, I'm not gonna do this myself. So I bumped it down the normal. But I remember the combat took me a little time as I recall to get used to in the game. It just, I don't know, man.

I feel like from a gameplay perspective, I'm really interested in the story. I'm hooked on it. Like I want to know what happens, but just the fighting is just it feels something about it feels delayed and it's not input lag and it's it's not anything like that. It's something about it that feels a lot less fluid than a lot of stuff that I've played since, which I guess makes sense because it is an older game.

But I don't know, they started to go through it, but I feel like it's gonna be a lot more manageable now that I bumped it down. Yeah, you couldn't get to the pieces of the game. Sorry, it's the part of the game that shines anyway. So I figured I'm not gonna bust my ass on the difficulty of this.

And your map is just one big question mark, right? Just like mine was. It's just really fucking fantastic. When you go to a question mark in the game and then it's small and six more question marks.

That doesn't have, that doesn't do anything bad to people with OCD at all. I was like actually like screaming into a pillow at some point playing the game because it was doing that to me. I'm like, I need to get back to it. I can't believe how much of it I played.

I do this again. I've said this last week. I do this all the time. I get to the end of the game and then I'm like, fuck it.

I don't want to be. You put like 40 hours in? Yeah, at least I went to Momo Con in Atlanta that year in 2015 and I brought my PS4 with me so I can play it in the hotel room. So, you know, I'm a real winner.

Now, Chris, I was playing Wolfenstein Youngblood, which I want to talk about in a moment. But the first game I want to talk about is about a secro because this is a game that I actually started this week, I was looking forward to it. And I do not like it. I'm getting into it.

I'm getting into it. I need to see it more, I think. And then I started to play it. I don't play for a couple hours, a few hours probably.

I kept dying over and over again. I've really hit the roadblock where I'm like, this isn't fun. To me. I understand that a lot of people love this game.

So, it's not an insult on the people who like you, who love it. I just, I think what I didn't like about it was that it merges this very Arcadian kinetic gameplay feeling, right? It doesn't feel like a FromSoftware game. I was comparing it to, it feels like an old team ninja game in a way, the way it moves around.

It feels like a giant in a sense. But it doesn't play like that. So, there's almost a betrayal of your mind where you have to re-engineer your mind. You move fast, it feels like Devil May Cry or something.

You want to go in and slash and slash and you just can't do it. And I couldn't override this need to play the game like that. I just couldn't, I'm like, it feels too quick to play it so deliberately. And I, so I think for me, it created this real conundrum where I'm like, I just don't want to play this game the way it's asking me to play it.

If it wanted me to play the game like this, why is it making it feel so good? You know what I mean? Yeah, no, that's, that's, I think that's the drive for it though. I think for me it was like, this feels so good.

Imagine if I could actually, imagine if I could get to the point where I could just go in and slash these guys. Just clean house. And you get to a point where you just can do that. Like the first like area of the, of the game, you can just mow through.

And it becomes, it's a weird game where it starts off as like a really challenging, like really frustrating, punishing experience. And then slowly as you go through it, everything before becomes this arcade wonderland where you could just have a blast. It's, so I could see why there's a bit of a disconnect. But I think that's exactly why I gravitated to it so heavily.

I just challenging, but it rewarded you by just making everything that you had gone through. Just so much more fun to just kind of play around with. I will say this to your credit. When the game came out and we were playing it, I kept saying, I don't want to play another Souls game.

And you kept telling me it's not a Souls game. And I was like, it's clearly a Souls game. Right? Well, it's obviously not.

I mean, now that I played it and really sat with you, we're absolutely right. It's not a Souls game. I know a lot of people were getting mad about that with me, so I want to acknowledge that. What I saw in Twitter was this, and I think you'll follow this.

I think other people will follow this. Sekiro is from software. What Neo is to Team Ninja. In other words, Team Ninja made a Souls game.

They're used to making Sekiro games. Ninja Gaiden games. Right. In some strange way.

And all because of the setting of it, this Tenshu like Japanese setting, the only thing that I wanted to do, I was playing it, I was like, I just want to go back and play Neo. Because here's the major thing that I wanted to bring up about Sekiro. It doesn't give you enough power over how strong your character is. So I just felt like there was no way for me to get better unless I was getting mechanically better.

And clearly I just wasn't syncing with the game. Like I was reaching these, I guess, minor boss. That means like these human, first of all, why is there a ball in the game? Every samurai's ball.

I know that they tie their hair back, but everyone has a receding hairline in the game. But apart from that, I'd reach these guys with like two or three orbs next to their name, like Generals or whatever. And I was just having like a really difficult time. Like I just don't understand what I'm supposed to do.

It's mechanically hard. It's mechanically intensive, for sure. So I walked away. That makes sense.

I'm out. I love it. Ryan Lemu wrote in. Said, Hey guys, I was actually glad to hear that Colin gave up on Sekiro because I had to as well.

I'm not the most talented gamer in the world, but I usually play on hard mode for most games, and this game just infuriated me to no end. Apparently it wasn't enough to brutally kill me over and over again. So the game actually had a punty fee more by slowly infecting all the characters around me. That's constantly reminding me how much I suck.

I'm convinced that FromSoftware actually hates all gamers, and the Get Good Crowd just has a case of Stockholm Syndrome. This brings me to my question, am I being a baby? Love all the shows and thank you for keeping Tuesdays. Great.

I don't know what he's being a baby, but I was surprised though Chris that a lot of people don't seem to like this game. This actually seems to be the most divisive of FromSoftware games recently in the kind of the From Era, obviously they've been making games for 25 years. What do you think of that? Has that always been true in your mind?

I guess I was just seeing so much positivity about this game that I didn't realize that when I said something about it that many of the comments I was receiving back were like, Yes, I'm a big soul fan. I couldn't stand it or I just don't like it. It's not a soul game. Exactly.

One thing that people did say was, and it's to your point is that the game gets easier if you just get through that opening segment of the game. I don't know if that's true, but people were saying it gets easier in the sense that you've spent some time with it so you know how to play and you've kind of understood the basic rhythm of combat, but it doesn't literally get easier. I think that's just like, it gets easier in the way that a game would get easy. You know, it's just you spent time with it.

It literally actually is designed in the way that makes it easier as you go along. I will say that I'm a little disappointed just in the sense that this was one of two games with Metro X's being the other that came out this year that I was kind of stashing away for a rainy day. I'm definitely like, so, and then I finally got to it and I sat down. So it was disappointing from that sense, but I will say it just reminds you that you really got to parse through even the criticism, even our words and the words and other podcasters and experts that you like to see what works for you.

And I would have easily spent $60 on Sekiro, and I think I did actually. I don't know if I should have gave it to me or not. And I bought it like a while ago. It was in my downwind list, so I don't know where I got it from, but I would have spent $60 on it and been pretty disappointed.

So it's just a reminder that you got to calibrate your own tastes with the very specific people that share your tastes and go from there. But I wanted to acknowledge that I did play it just not for me. I got to get back into it. I haven't finished it.

Yeah, probably. Chris, the other game that I'm playing is Wolfenstein Youngblood. Yeah, how's that? I've seen some interesting commentary about it.

I'm really torn on it. So I reached out last week several times a bit that said they never set us the game. They just ignored us. Not a huge surprise.

I guess I went and bought it. I was glad that this happened. The reason I bring that up is because I was glad that this happened because I assumed it. I don't know why I assume that this would be a $50 or $60 game.

It's a $30 game. So I think you first have to look at it through that lens at the $30 game for sure. And I really have had an up and down experience with it from, I really like the gameplay. I think that people are being really hard on it from a certain perspective.

It's definitely not. Everyone's using that term way too much. There's no loot in the game. So it's not a looter.

Yeah, I heard that too. I haven't seen anything. I don't think people understand this is why we need to be really specific with terms. It's not a looter shooter.

There's no loot. You're not getting better guns and shit like that. You're literally ukraine your guns with money you find just like lots of other games. So it's not a looter shooter at all.

But it doesn't feel like a Wolfenstein game in a lot of ways. Now some of this is really cool. It takes place in 1980 in France. This is an atmosphere in an environment we've not seen before.

The Nazis are someone on the ropes. They're dealing with an inner leadership crisis, which is kind of cool. So there's like an upper upstart general that's kind of taking power. You only learn about this really through documents that you find.

And you play as BJ Blaspitz's twin daughters as we know, Jess and Soph in there. I think late teens are early 20s. And they go to France to kind of discover what happened to their dad who in Wolfenstein war is called Terror Billy. And in the 60s he obviously went crazy and killed a bunch of people.

And so they have this all this war about him where he came from, where he came from and all this stuff. So I like it, but I don't understand why they doubled down on some of the worst features of Wolfenstein II, specifically the hub world. The Wolfenstein II's hub world sucks. It was on the submarine I think.

I didn't remember. Any time a game that didn't previously have a hub world throws in a hub world, it's always so terrible. It's bad. This was Splinter Cell 2 and Blacklist or whatever.

They put a hub world and they're like, why do you do this? I just want to play. Right. It's like the Croft Mansion, but you need to be there all the time.

So it's not optional. And it's just fucking annoying. I just hate the hub worlds in these games and I don't understand why. As far as I remember, Wolfenstein II was the ride for its hub world.

So anyway, they doubled down on this. So this was one negative feature, but the characters are really interesting. Lots of female characters, which I think is pretty cool. And the major complaint that people seem to have about it is that it's like this kind of repetitive grindy game.

And I hear that. But at the same time, Wolfenstein has been doing stuff like this for a while. And I'm wondering if people just haven't been playing Wolfenstein games. Maybe they haven't, but machine games started the whole go to a map, try to beat it in a certain amount of time, try to get a good score, whatever it is.

They started that on old blood, I think, like in 2016. This isn't a new thing. It's just that the whole game is this. I don't like repetitive as a criticism because I just feel like every game is by definition repetitive.

And the only thing you're saying is that the game isn't fun enough to distract you from that fact. Yeah, that's a fact. I mean, you're right. The mechanics in a lot of games are inherently repetitive.

I mean, if you play your original Mario Brothers or Super Mario Brothers, which is a classic, I mean, it's very repetitive. It's just really fun. And so I agree with you. That's not really a valuable critique to me.

But I did write down some notes because I didn't want to forget. I wanted to be a little more thorough. So I like games just like Doom that are health and armor based. I don't like making it out of it.

And so I really dig that. And the game gives you so many things to pick up like armor and gold and whatever. There's this real sense of like, you're here like clicking noises that you're picking everything up and running around. Something very satisfying about it.

You're building your characters up. There's a nice upgrade system. It's a little overbearing sometimes. But I don't understand why the hub world came back in.

And even though the game is co-op centered, you can play it by yourself with a co-op AI partner. And now you have to have an AI with you? Yeah. And it's annoying because she's fine.

It's kind of like Ellie in the last place where she's not going to be seen by enemies unless you make yourself seem. So she's not going to give you away. But it did distract the shit out of me several times where I'm slinking through. And I see this character.

I'm like, oh shit. And I start shooting a tar. And then it gives my shit away. I'd rather just be alone.

I don't understand why I have to be with you here. So there's little kind of things like that. But I think the major complaints from people ring hollow with me because Wolfenstein II, the old blood and stuff all had these repetitive missions that you would do over and over again in adjacent rather to the main storyline. Now we just don't get that story.

I don't get these kind of worlds, these various places in Berlin and whatever that we go to over and over again to do different things. I understand that that is inherently repetitive, but I just think the game is actually over ridingly fun. If anything, it's just too dense with nonsense. Instead of a hub world, for instance, why couldn't we just get missions from fucking lists, right?

It doesn't really change the nature of the game. We're playing the game because it's fun. We're not really playing the game for these various characters. You can show us and cut scenes if you want.

But why do I need to go back to this underworld, the underground setting, go find this person, talk to them and go back to where I need it. It's just annoying. So that's my major complaint with the game. But I think it's fun.

And I think at $30, it's somewhat reasonably priced. So I think that the Metacritic score is a little off on this one. I think it's a little better than people think it is, but it's frustrating for sure. How's the difficulty?

Because I remember I was kind of in issue with me. The difficulty feels much better. Yeah, Wolfenstein 2 was hard as shit. I mean, that game was...

Like, unhorn hard. Dude, people... So I think people know that to beat the game on the hardest difficulty level, you need to not die. And that's the only way you can get the gold trophy.

So you're playing on the hardest difficulty level and you're not dying, and there are videos of people doing it, and they're insane. These videos are so tense. You can literally die ten out. You can't stop the game, by the way.

You can't spoof it. So you can't send a save to the cloud. So I think that there's a little bit of dishonored in this game. That's cool.

And arcains the French studio, so they have a little bit of insight into the French setting. It's not about French text and a lot of French speaking going on in the game. So they bring a little bit of authenticity there, I imagine. But this only gives me hope that maybe this is an id avalanche situation where machine games really didn't make this game at all.

And they just produced it and they're working on the real Wolfenstein sequel, which I hope they are, and it's more robust than this. All right. That sounds pretty... All right, I think I'll probably check it out.

Kayla Hagler wrote it in West Coast. You said, Greetings, gents. How much did Wolfenstein young blood catch you by surprise? I had no idea that I was releasing so early and that I was a looter shooter.

I thought it was just a standard machine game Wolfenstein game with co-op. But then it dropped the ball with marketing this game and what are your impressions on the way machine went about or went with the game? So again, I don't think machine games really went anywhere with it. I would imagine arcains drove the ship.

But the game didn't come out of nowhere. Yeah, I kind of forgot entirely that it was coming out. And it came out of side cyberpilot, the PS VR game, which is supposed to be not as good as young blood. You can take that for what it's worth.

I haven't played it yet. But it did sneak up on me a little bit. The biggest surprise I had though was quite con was this past weekend and they released Doom, Doom, Doom, Doom 3 on PS4 Switch and Xbox One. That was confusing to me because I'm like, why would you do that?

Why are you releasing these... Why are you releasing two Wolfenstein games and three Doom ports in one week? The fuck are you doing? Really weird.

This is the stuff that really annoys me. Really weird. If you want to have this big pop of the Doom games at QuakeCon, then just delay Wolfenstein. You can't release all this stuff at the same time.

Or just release all those Doom games with Eternal. Because there's no way it's going to get, obviously anybody interested in Doom is going to get Eternal anyway. Like they're not going to be like, oh, whoa, Doom, Doom 3? Whoa, I'm going to buy that in place of Eternal.

It's very weird. I just didn't understand the timing of that. Very strange. If they only did it on Switch, I would have made a little more sense to me.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. It's weird too because it's already playable on... Somebody was like, how'd you get the new Doom? Like all the Doom games run Xbox One now?

And I was like, they were already there because they've been backwards compatible since the system last year. Yeah, I think now that I think it's a... Because I have the 360 arcade versions. So on my console.

Yeah, I have Doom and Wolfenstein 3D on PS3. Yeah. I would like them to release Wolfenstein 3D with Planet of what's happening with Bethesda. I think he really has an interesting point here in that we're talking about Fallout 76.

We're talking about Rage 2. We're talking about Wolfenstein Youngblood in the Cyberpile game and the Doom re-releases. It's kind of a soft time for Bethesda as a publisher. Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. I don't know. It's just such a weird environment that they're in because they seem to be making every wrong move. Like, I don't know who the hell is steering the ship really.

It feels insane. This is what I keep saying about reacting to the market trends and how games take so long that by the time you react to them they come to market in their sale. Fallout 76 is a clear example of that. They should have just never made that game.

But actually, like, Wolfenstein is an example of that too because with their co-op centric kind of thing in the hub world and the replayable missions and kind of the grind that goes on with upgrading your weapons, it's not a looter shooter by any stretch of the imagination, but it takes that spirit of replayability and kind of injection in Wolfenstein. And I understand why people are upset about that because Wolfenstein is traditionally a linear or semi-linear single player first person shooter with these options of replaying maps and doing time trials and stuff as an aside. So Bethesda and Rage 2 is another, like, I don't even know what Rage 2 really is. The more I think about that game, the more I don't know what the fuck this is.

Really? Like, I understand it's an open world shooter, but why is this game? Why was it made? And so, I think that isn't a strange kind of period right now, and I'm certainly not impressed with their overall offerings away.

I was impressed from the, you know, whether you like these games or not, but the Skyrim dishonored Fallout, maybe not Fallout 4, but, you know, that kind of era in there with Wolfenstein, they were, like, really coming up and, like, around when they had their first E3 press conference. And now I feel like they're kind of in Stasis and need some help. Yeah, that's weird. I feel like a lot of it's writing.

A lot is writing on Doom, eternal. I feel like that's the last really, the last hope that they have. And what, Starfield? Yeah, that's a ways away anyway.