#430 | Inside My Shell, I Wait and Bleed

20:26Dustin Furman:Wow. Not quite an hour, but there was a,

20:28Colin Moriarty:Brad said it was flooded with writings there as well. about it and uh i will i'll be honest between summon sign my own stream i'm getting i'm getting slightly fatigued by it it's just my own fault i brought this to myself it was i i tweeted out the score which i don't normally do so it really is my own my own doing on this one but ironically all the things that chris said uh i agree with was none of those things were like I don't want a Leon S. Kennedy movie. And I'm fine with a Resident Evil movie that's adapted to take place modern day instead of 1996 or whatever. My issue, I had other issues with the movie, which I go over in some inside so you can listen to it there.

21:17Colin Moriarty:So I see what you guys are saying.

21:18Dustin Furman:It accelerates the moment of the T-virus from 96 to now? Yeah, it's a sliding timeline, basically. Interesting. Yeah, because that's interesting. I guess I didn't quite comprehend that. Okay, I understand. because what I was saying was that I thought it was interesting. It's like The Last of Us, where like really anything in the world is a story at this point, right? Like you could just go in any corner of the world and some fucked up shit's happening. So that's the thing, Colin.

21:43Colin Moriarty:Yeah, that's actually maybe one of my main gripes with the movie is that this is not a story from the Resident Evil video games. This is a story that is inspired by the Resident Evil video games that really has very little to do with the games other than some key terminology so in other words why is it resident evil yes as opposed to like some other zombie yeah that's kind of how i feel and i understand i think the idea of adapting the how it feels to play the game is interesting but it was also dude it's so it's like it's a comedy movie which is funny because that crager beforehand was like i just cut out i cut out 90 maybe he didn't say that but he was talking about how he cut out most of the jokes from the movie and i was like dude this movie is jokes the entire time so but yeah i was just i think mostly disappointed the fact that i and it might be an expectations are the thief of joy type thing but i was like this is gonna be sick i love the fact that there are there's no resident evil characters in it i think would be so cool to see like this is what happened this civilian on the day of the outbreak right right that's what i was thinking it was yeah i thought that would be awesome yeah um and that's barely half true i would say yeah so well i'm

23:04Dustin Furman:never gonna see it so i'm gonna i'm going to uh i'll leave it up to you guys to have your your divisive you know opinions with it but um yeah i'm i'm happy it's apparently doing really well so yeah I'm happy for it's it's it's really fun man it's an hour 32 which I appreciate like there's so many I don't know sometimes I go out I go into a movie and I'm like two two and a half hours right what the hell are we doing here and this is like an evil dead kind of pacing movie it's like very evil dead not even there's even parts of it that are like kind of like that's evil dead ass fucking thing you just did which I appreciate but yeah the briskness of it is good you can't leave those things lingering too long my favorite thing about it though is like it's just something that would spoil the movie for anybody who hasn't seen it but ah dude I think it's anyway here's what it is we could believe it I guess but I don't know I don't know if it's worth it yeah then Dustin has to do things we don't want him to do that

24:06Colin Moriarty:you wouldn't want me to have to work

24:07Dustin Furman:God forbid God forbid it's funny have you ever seen a movie long enough in the theater where there's an intermission? Yeah. I can't remember what but like I remember having that experience. Oh, Hateful Eight. Hateful Eight. Yeah, that was Hateful Eight was the last one I saw as well in the theater. One I always think about though is Gods and Generals. Do you guys know that's like a trilogy of Civil War movies that came out over like 20 years. It was like Gettysburg was one of them which is an extremely famous movie and then Gods and Generals I think was the second or third one but I remember that clearly being like you got to go in and then it's just like yeah like go pee we all know you got to piss your pants how long 1862 we got three more years all right how long was it uh it was like three hours and change or something like that and i could be wrong but i think it was gods and generals was like a major one that three hours 39 minutes yeah oh that is pretty long yeah and that's really

25:08Colin Moriarty:okay this is a little bit of a side note duke showing us up a little bit recorded five hours

25:14Dustin Furman:yeah good for them i'm sick of fucking recording we're working this show is gonna be two hours 15

25:18Colin Moriarty:nice but what i noticed they were on terrible track for them they recorded it in one clip one entire clip there was no multiple zencaster segments oh No, no brain.

25:35Dustin Furman:That's flying close to the sun. I like that. I like that. That sort of energy. Yeah, it's risky. Yeah.

25:40Colin Moriarty:Apparently, Maddie did get up to go to the bathroom, but Cog didn't. So my question is, Cog, you know, health is wealth. Are you staying hydrated? Yeah. Well, man should go five hours without having to pee.

25:51Dustin Furman:Maybe he was going to explode by the end of the show. It's funny you say that, though, because I agree with you generally, but like I've streamed for four or five hours and just not gotten up. And then and the time just flies for me. and I was like yeah I guess I just haven't gotten I haven't gotten up I have fucking bed sores now

26:10Dustin Furman:I can't do it man yeah no I totally understand and I'm more from even from just the technical angle of like when we bank you know halfway through the show it's like alright at least we won't lose that but we have redundancies as well alright so Kyle are we going to do a Resident Evil spoiler cast probably not you probably just got it right there yeah sacred streaming continues mondays at 1 p.m eastern time on our youtube channel uh we went on psn and uh well i did anyway went on the playstation store looked at some some games and we said actually i found a couple i wrote them down a couple of things that i was interested in trying out some smaller indie games but a lot of it was spent just so many super chats talking about this that and the other thing a lot of fun over there.

26:58Dustin Furman:I called it perusing the PSN or whatever. So P-E-R-U-S-E. And I was telling the guys that someone left us an exit survey because he posted on the video, like we was chatting and he's like, do you mean pursue? And then I just brought up his chat on the screen. I was like a literacy alert or whatever. And then he's like, I'm out of here. You're too mean to everyone or whatever. And I'm like, I'm sorry. I thought, I thought just joking, but now he's gone. He's out to the wind. He's listening to min max now.

27:33Colin Moriarty:Ah, I like how you're like, that isn't even the top 10 meanest things. I said 25 meanest things.

27:39Dustin Furman:I said, that's true. Also, I, I don't know, man, if you don't understand what I'm doing on the, on there at this point, I don't, I don't know how to explain it to you, but I'm having a great, a great time. We did our airing of grievances recently and talked a lot about Wolverine, obviously covered the state of play. The next stream will be me returning to the sidelines as the coach of the New York Jets to play more Madden. People really liked the last stream we did, and I have more to do. We're almost caught up with my schedule now in terms of the parallel between the real NFL and the fake NFL, so we'll get that done next.

28:10Dustin Furman:Jeff George, oh, I'm sorry, merch. LastStandMedia.store. T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, stickers, etc. Keep Micah busy. Jeff George wrote in, who I'm pretty sure was the quarterback of the, what was he, quarterback of Tennessee Titans? what's up Dexys Midnight Runners what do they sing Dustin

28:32Dustin Furman:neither of you know I'm surprised I have no idea you definitely know the song come on Eileen oh yeah get her a towel oh last week on the show Dustin was talking about how he went to an Iron Maiden concert wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt breaking down the culture of the Iron Maiden fan base and defending why wearing the band's merch to their own show is totally acceptable I was as I was listening to this while driving I instinctively looked down at my chest and realized I was actively wearing a stand down t-shirt while listening to sacred symbols so I have to ask is this acceptable in the sacred symbols community am I committing a fan faux pas or am I just showing proper corporate loyalty to the network looking forward to a pithy response I think that's okay yeah it's not an event you know you're not going somewhere it's not a thing that happens rarely in fact I would argue a lot of people would say sacred symbols happens too much so you have you have to deal with your you have to deal with your whatever you're happening to be happen to have on your back at that time you're going to intersect at some point i'm fine with it

29:34Colin Moriarty:personally yeah yeah i i mean when we have events i like seeing people in the shirts there i think it's nice it's a little celebration i'm like well i wear our own merch chris wears some of our merch yeah i think everyone but colin wears our own merch yeah i don't have any i don't have any last time i like i mean i just i don't know i'm not taking it that serious i'm like oh this is a cool shirt i helped make it i'm part of it so yeah that's fine i'm not judging anyone for

30:02Dustin Furman:doing it i just i just i never wore beyond stuff either really i think i had i have one of the original beyond shirts which is cool just like a relic and i would wear that on occasion my favorite piece of like my own merch that i had was uh you might remember this dustin kind of funny sold these blue like really beautiful sweatshirts that were like a sky blue almost and it had the smiley face logo on it they were like zip up sweatshirts like one of our earliest pieces of merch i still i got rid of all my kind of funny stuff after i left except for that sweatshirt um i kept where to go what'd you get did it go to goodwill yeah dude imagine someone picked up they're like dude

30:37Colin Moriarty:sweet i love kind of funny and no idea yeah that it was mine that it was yours we had a thing on the snark tank where we thought about i probably shouldn't say this at all but we we had an idea to print a bunch of uh snark tank merch and then just go to a homeless encampment yeah that's a good idea everybody everything because we have a running gag that everybody who listens to our show is homeless might be true just to imagine just a sea of people in skid row with our with our merch on it tickled me so deeply

31:13Dustin Furman:that's a great idea you should send some all over with like you know how they send like the losing team Super Bowl teams merch to Africa so like right so like right you know whoever loses it's like all this shit that never happened you should send some of your stuff over there too and you'll see some like pick you know someone will go over there and build a well and in the background will be like a guy with a stark tank shirt on

31:31Colin Moriarty:the kill yourself yeah yeah wait was it kill yourself or kill me kill me That's it. The friends kill me shirt. That'd be great. What about a shirt that just says kill yourself? That's a little too much even for Chris. Yeah. I think I tried that once. I couldn't do it. They didn't let it pass. I was like, that's fair. Yeah.

31:51Dustin Furman:Serge wrote in and said, hey, fellas, any update on the Allegheny hogs? I recently moved back to Connecticut from Southern Virginia, and along the way, I decided to pay my respects at the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania. Along the way, I saw a sign for Camp Allegheny and chuckled. what started as a somber and quiet drive turned into a humorous reminder of fictitious softball team created by a gaming podcast thanks thank god i was driving alone thanks for making the long travels a joy never forget not a softball team baseball minor league baseball uh i don't know if i said this i i'm i just talk too much and i on these different shows and i have no idea where i say anything but and some of these things i just say privately and i think i said them publicly but we uh we got feedback back from our lawyers so like we submitted the trademark and the trademark was kicked back by the government itself under the assumption that certain people would have problems so we've then which is like a protective thing in other words it stops them from then having to like have the companies deal with all this so one of them was harley davidson which i think is hysterical um so again it's not harley davidson saying they have a problem it's the government assuming harley davidson is gonna have a problem with it so then we submitted like documents being like these are totally different things and so it should be straightened out soon we should have just sold the shirts yeah yeah but yeah um but i also think that there's a i think two things i think we might have gotten in trouble at some point and that would have sucked because then it would have we wouldn't have had to pay anyone i would just like it would have been killed and so this we're playing the long game here and i think it's going to pay off i really do yeah in time for the next baseball season perhaps all right let's get into topics of discussion and then we'll get into the news and then we'll get into what we're playing and then we'll get into listener inquiries and then we'll go and no longer be on the show for the rest of the week you can't do this to me i work 40 hours a week wrote in i love how that's becoming a joke that's like because that's like the thing that's like such an obscure weird thing that mike and i think it's funny you could i tell the story on this show about that i think i did i must have if you maybe it's like that we had like this this like a lesbian couple that not uh there's a few lesbian but like this couple that was like and one of them was like mega loud all the time and always screaming on the phone and like screaming at people and like having fights and yeah they moved um and we didn't even know they moved like one day there were just other people in the house it was like one of those private sale things so like there was no sign on the yard or anything and i'm like the fuck did these people go but yeah once she was arguing with someone and the guy yelled back you can't do this to me i work 40 hours a week we were just like in the backyard like listening to it and we just thought that was hysterical so that became a joke that's something

34:25Colin Moriarty:someone would say on like um arc raiders after getting taken down i work 40 hours fucking week

34:33Dustin Furman:it must have been about their kids or something i assume but i don't know yeah i don't know he writes hey cdc this week's episode will be released while i'm on my honeymoon and i was wondering if you could give a shout out to my wife samantha we will be in rome the day this episode is released before jumping on a 14 day Mediterranean cruise. I figured with all the divorces, this show causes that it would be a great time to give a sacred symbols blessing for a new marriage. Thanks and have a great show boys. I don't, you wrote in, man. I'm going to, I put that energy out there for you. If that's what you want.

35:02Colin Moriarty:Are you going to do the blessing Colin? Like the,

35:04Dustin Furman:yeah,

35:06Colin Moriarty:there you go.

35:07Dustin Furman:A little bit of that. Bless this marriage. Spend some time in Rome. Sounds nice. Be safe. Mediterranean. that's interesting float around the Mediterranean like an old Roman sailor very fascinating for Americans it's very exotic you know because it's so far away but for Europeans I feel like it's like Lake Superior or something like that oh yeah

35:37alright

35:38Dustin Furman:happy marriage good luck we'll hear from you in about a year or two I'm sure Dimitri E wrote in and said, hello, gentlemen, I have a story about a meeting about meeting a fellow listener to preface. My wife and I would regularly go on walks with our corgi around our neighborhood, waving and making small talk with others while where we could. Our neighbor Aaron was someone I saw with some regularity and always enjoyed our conversations. Fast forward about a year or so. And my wife and I welcome our daughter home on Tuesday. Aaron comes down to deliver a gift. I invite him inside so the dog doesn't wake her up, up, up, her little sister.

36:11Dustin Furman:And he sees all the dog doesn't wake up her little sister. And he sees all the gaming posters and collectibles throughout the house. We begin to talk gaming and he mentions that he plays on PS5, which prompted me to ask if he listens to Sacred Symbols. And I was shocked when he said yes. I never thought I'd meet a listener out in the wild, let alone be three houses up the street. Shout out to Aaron and his wife for the gift. And I hope that he and y 'all are having a great day. Very interesting. The world is small, is it not? Yeah. Very small indeed. Good for you. I'm very excited about that I hope you guys become the best of friends maybe you even have a little love Trist the wives don't have to know wow it's 2026 baby yeah Trist when's the last time you used that word exactly I was like that's such a fucking ridiculous word to use in any context I don't think I've ever heard that word ever in my life actually I just know it because I think I read it somewhere but like it's I've never heard it spoken I'm reading um I was looking I was looking up the date of it yet I'm reading this book right now from 1764 called the castle of Otranto and it's uh here I'll put it in the chat in case you guys are curious it's considered the first gothic horror book or novel and uh but it's taking me a long time to read it not because it's difficult like you understand what they're saying but just the way they speak and like the the way it's written is so it's very old different yeah it's modern English but it's it's you have to be very deliberate and think about it it's like proto-modern English you know it's like yeah yeah so I had somebody had somebody message I don't remember if it was a it was during a stream or what but like somebody was like don't you hate it like isn't it annoying to read uh books where you don't know a word in it or something like that and I was like that's like half the reason I I think it's like discovering new words right that's one of my favorite parts of reading so like it blew my mind that like somebody was like that's my least favorite part of reading is like finding a word i don't recognize i'm like what that's the that's the fun part that's at least like that's a high percentage amount of the fun that i have when i read a book it's like oh i've never fucking heard this word in my life and i look it up and i'm like oh it's like very hyper specific it's cool yeah yeah yeah you have a good vocabulary i think i think i i think i have a good vocabulary too.

38:32Dustin Furman:And I think a lot of people, you get it, yeah, just through, through osmosis from reading and writing. One of the, I never took to, you know, I tried for, as I've said, for a couple of years, like 2010, 2011, when I had iPad two or whatever it was, and I downloaded the Kindle app and I was downloading and reading digital books. And I eventually abandoned it and went back to physical books because I wasn't that, I didn't like it that much. But one of the great things about that was you could just look up anything. And people, one of the other things I like too, was you could turn on the thing where you could see what other people were underlining or interested in in the book but there's a lot of cool things so it was a cool function to understand the words without having to like flip over open addiction well no one's flipping open addiction anymore but like going on your phone and yeah did you guys have parents that my parents did this to me where they like made me look things up yeah they were like go look it up yeah and i wonder if in hindsight i'm like you don't know what this means yeah you just won't tell me because you don't know what it means it's something i would say to my kid if i if i just wanted to seem more intelligent right you know but at the time i was like i just thought they were being annoying but now i'm like you just didn't fucking know yeah for sure especially back then and you don't want to tell your eight-year-old son that you didn't know my favorite though i mean a good dictionary i mean i'm on the dictionary all the time online but i use it the source all the time are you guys the source users i mean i i used to be yeah i mean if you're not writing i guess you don't really need to but like when i'm writing things i'm like yeah i need i need a different word for this yeah there's because certain words mean the same things but they they carry the weight of it differently or like they they deliver differently and so it's good to have a flexible uh like like a weapon wheel of the same word right if you will like this is a long range version of dumb ass you know here's some victorian word calls you gay right exactly all right let's see um dimitric aaron may your love affair live forever he's a feather stepper oh man it's like lobster back remember i used to use that word right that was like so offensive insane del griffith wrote in and said good day to you you beautiful bastards this is a comment specifically for dustin i just wanted to thank you for turning me on to iron maiden i don't know why but i always wrote them as off as cheesy and never gave them a chance after hearing you talk about them so passionately i finally gave them a shot and they quickly became one of my favorite bands i'm letting you know this because i saw them in concert last night for the first time and it was outstanding thank you for inspiring me to find a new old band that I adore.

41:16Dustin Furman:That's a pretty big deal to us since someone's gotten one of their favorite bands now because of you.

41:20Colin Moriarty:That's fantastic. I love like it's cool when people are like, oh, I checked out this game because of what you said and I love it now. It's like, that's always great. There's something a little more personal about when someone says like, oh, I checked out Jimmy World or in this case, Iron Maiden. I mean, that's that's awesome. So, yeah, I highly recommend a lot of people when they think of Iron Maiden, they think of like the classical era, you know, peace of mind, number the beast power slave don't sleep on the post-2000s stuff brave new world is my favorite iron maiden album so give that a listen del and uh enjoy do they change their

41:56Dustin Furman:set list up or they play like the same shit every night they have the same shit every night i hate that stuff man yeah but bigger productions like we've talked about this before the bigger production the more necessary it is to do that because i i remember seeing like uh when i saw green day in like 2004 on the American Idiot tour they would like switch up one or two of the songs but everything else would be in order so then they'd play like some obscure I think they played King for a Day or something when I saw them which is like a random song from Nimrod but everything else and the the bummer about shit 311 is almost in this group now too but it's like there's so many singles where it's like you see them and so it's like well we got to play Amber we got to play Down we got to play All Mixed Up we got to play Creatures we got to play Beautiful Disaster we got to play come original we got to like and then and then you're like all right how and it's like we got like eight eight places now to to put like everything else and i'm like god damn it i yeah i i think some bands do this but i i i personally love album shows i'm a huge fan of those i've only been to a few um but i would love for bands with huge discographies and song catalogs to tour and say like we are only playing obscure like the more obscure stuff on our albums like no like the no singles tour or something like that i think that would be awesome yeah like get your hardcore fan base there because that's what's fun about seeing bands that play different things every every night and bands that i've seen many times in the past or of course they're 11 but like when i saw zebra head a bunch of times or i saw incubus or i saw corn or whatever they would play different things you know um and i yeah i feel like it's a breaking benjamin's another great example that they always play different shit it's like um or they did i haven't seen them in many years did you see that guy the breaking benjamin the lead singer how he was on stage talking about how like uh people on the fallout for modding community don't know shit yeah he's a huge nerd i love that about that guy man yeah he's ben burnley or whatever his name is burley or um so anyway yeah that's neither here nor there i just i understand the production necessities of it but i'd be so excited if i was in a band to be like we're gonna play like different stuff all the time obviously you're only practicing certain things you can't know all of your songs at the same time it's probably impossible to do that but you know you go in with like 50 or 60 year songs and you're like we're gonna pick from this pool that we're ready for but based on the lights based

44:08Colin Moriarty:on everything yeah i remember when i was in high school a couple of my friends went to new york city because the band coheed and cambria they took up they just like had a venue for four or five nights and they played an album a night and they played their entire discography like man that's actually i would love to see more bands do that like it would be very it would be like okay this is a big ask and it's only going to be like the most hardcore of hardcore fans are going to fly out wherever they do it but you're going to get everything like that's that's pretty cool there's certain bands where i would like deeply consider something like that like yeah i mean five nights five albums it's awesome you know that would be sick yeah dredge used to do album shows and uh i

44:53Dustin Furman:saw them play lclo all the way through and that was which is my favorite album of all time and that was incredible with 311 i had this idea since they have so many albums but in different eras it's like play like and you know you want to have like a two-hour show or whatever it's like play have this it's like the album tour and like every night is a random permutation of like one of our albums from the 90s and one of our albums since the 90s or whatever and it'll just be some random

45:18Colin Moriarty:grouping of them i think that'd be kind of fun but yeah this iron maiden tour specifically was not mostly but the first three or four songs were from the first two albums so it was kind of it's the it's the band's what 50th anniversary this year it's crazy they're celebrating those first two albums which was just cool it was a nice little like angle to the tour yeah i don't know

45:40Dustin Furman:anything about iron maiden really like i've told you is that dagan's best friend pj who comes up all the time yeah he was a huge fan and he has massive like iron maiden tattoos on his body like the what's his name the guy with the flag yeah oh yeah it's eddie their their guy yep um and it was like it's on his like shoulder and on his chest on his back and stuff um that's awesome but i've like never i've just never been into it i mean i'm looking yeah this is pretty dope i mean it's like kind of like the original lineup still or at least a lineup that's been together for a long time right since the 90s they have well current members 75 to present 76 to present 80 to present 81 to present 82 to present 90 to present so yeah there's been a gap like their

46:24Colin Moriarty:singer was gone in the 90s uh which there was two albums released that people don't really like with the other singer but then he came back uh and also the guitar player left and came back and now their drummer uh their drummer had a stroke like a year or two ago so he's not touring anymore they're getting old you know any any tour could be the last tour which is why my dad

46:47Dustin Furman:go every time yeah i don't blame you that's yeah that's cool my dad is going he's flying out to

46:53Colin Moriarty:texas with my mom to go to the show in san antonio because they want to see anthrax oh i've never seen

46:59Dustin Furman:anthrax i am i like anthrax like back when i was younger they were kind of rad they're like a few um what was that other band biohazard which was more of like a kind of like a thrash metal even rap metal kind of band um they're like although because anthrax is from new york city right there there was a few i don't have no idea um if i'm if i'm remembering correctly let me look here anthrax band wiki yeah so like in that grouping of there's like a few bands that came out of that like that metal new york city metal space at that time which is pretty cool but anthrax did um bring the noise and that's how i became which is a rap metal anthem and that's how I became familiar with that when I was younger.

47:48Dustin Furman:I wonder how many times has you, what's the band your dad has seen the most? I wonder if it's getting into my like in 311 territory where it's like, it's not, it's nowhere near necessary to have seen anything this many times.

48:01Colin Moriarty:My dad was trying to list out every time he's seen Iron Maiden. And I want to say that this most recent show was 11.

48:09Dustin Furman:11, okay.

48:09Colin Moriarty:And then he'll, it'll be his 12th show this weekend. I think maybe 13. but yeah i'm guessing that's the band he's seen the most but i don't my dad dude is a is a fiend when it comes to shows we came home from harrisburg from the iron maiden show he's like yeah might i might you know go take your mom out and go on the kayaks for tonight i don't really there's a show i kind of want to go to too and then later i found out he got home mowed the lawn and went to another show in Pittsburgh that night. I'm like, dude, like he can't he can't chill out. Yeah, it was a show like almost every not every week, but at least three or four times a month.

48:52Dustin Furman:I would go more if they were. Richmond is kind of like a B tier city, so like a lot of bands don't come here or they do, you know, sell them maybe every other tour, every three tours.

49:03Colin Moriarty:Yeah.

49:03Dustin Furman:And then and they go to Virginia Beach as well often, but that's just far away. um but also i think like a lot of the bands i love like they don't tour or you know they don't play and so i'm not gonna like there was a time in my life from probably age 16 to 30 where i would go to almost any show like you want to go to this show or i would only be vaguely familiar and i would go to like all these random things those days are behind me at this point i'll go to see certain and i would i would there are bands if they toured or like even played a show where it was even remotely possible for me to get to where i would go like if the police got back together like but they were only playing like west coast shows or i totally go to that dredge i've said a million times if dredge ever gets back together i'll and they play one show i'll go wherever it is go i'll go like 100 but then like breaking benjamin came here last year and i was like i looked i actually was gonna go and then i looked at the sets and i was like i don't really want to like i don't care about this shit you know like i like it to see like you know maybe a third of the songs that i even know at this point because i don't i only know their first three albums um yeah well and the price is insane what is that the price the pricing

50:10Colin Moriarty:the price is not the the night that i went and saw iron maiden which the tickets were with fees 99 not bad for a band like iron maiden turnstile played in pittsburgh uh and it was 130 for general admission that's i mean that's bonkers like no that's bonkers no no no and i was looking at the uh gorillas are coming to cleveland i was like oh that'd be kind of cool i've never seen them that's gonna be insanely expensive yeah i was like no nope not doing it now i think the tickets are maybe sold out so it's like a resale market now but i had some of these shows man it's just

50:47Dustin Furman:crazy yeah i mean that's a that's a 130 for a turnstile show no offense is fucking preposterous they're nowhere near that good i i like them my my nephews really and i and i i listen to some of their stuff and i'm like they're really good but i'm like let's let's take it easy right okay um especially since we start when we're doing our live shows for all the time and we really got insight into how much these venues cost it's like these guys are making a lot of money

51:13Colin Moriarty:yeah more power to them good for you but i was talking about this somewhere and my friend jt which his him and his wife or i think his wife worked in like show promotions and stuff he said it's not the band's faults it's the promoter's faults because a lot of times unless bands like really put their foot down they don't really have control over the prices right that

51:35Dustin Furman:might be i mean pearl jam i i mean not i don't want to i don't want to make turnstiles seem to be like a pearl like they have the power pearl jam a pearl jam broke the back of that shit in the 90s when it was really difficult to do like i think any band could do it if they want yeah you know um anyway it doesn't matter the pearl jam it's it's i look at the pearl jam thing because when they did that i was like that's cool but it's kind of corny you're kind of isolating yourself you're playing random ass venues no one can get to these places but it reminds me of how i feel about lars ulrich and metallica and napster now as opposed to then when everyone was like what an asshole and really he was right and it's the same thing with them like they were right and no one else wanted to come and kind of join them so that they never broke the backs of these but i think that the pricing of things is just going to become so onerous probably that something will have to give and these ticket companies are fucking evil yeah oh yeah yeah you know like these are the worst yeah what did you say something chris i'm sorry i said unquestionably oh unquestionably it's ridiculous if i come in the woods does god hear me scream rodent okay okay says, hey guys, can we talk about what bullshit jury duty is?

52:49Dustin Furman:My wife just got selected for jury duty here in South Carolina. We had to wake up early and change a bunch of stuff at work and our lives around. We only have one car and the compensation for jury duty is$15 a day. My problem is twofold. People are missing out on wages until the trial is done, if they are hourly or time off, if they are not. And what they get in return does not make up for it at all. Second, how are people supposed to get a fair trial when it's a bunch of people who don't want to be there and only making$15 a day. Our justice system has a lot of problems, but how little you get paid to be on a jury honestly shocked me.

53:18Dustin Furman:A cool$1.88 an hour to determine the fate of another human being. Anyway, I would love to hear what you guys think. $15 a day is insane. I was on a jury in 2006 when I was in college and we were paid$50 a day then. And that was a nasty. That's ridiculous. What the fuck? And I was amped because this is like more money than I make. that's like let's keep this trial going like let's hang this jury i'm lincoln um so but i will say this and i have this conversation with random people every once in a while i think that you should go to jury duty with bells on trial by jury is an incredible system that stops you from punitively and onerously getting fucked by some random judge or some random bureaucrat and we should all be willing to do it once in a while you know what i mean like i understand it's inconvenient i understand there are realities and you and by the way like hardships and something you can get out of it if you want like no one's holding a gun to your head it's pretty trivial to get out of jury jury jury duty i hate to tell you like it's it is incredibly easy just even if you get chosen to like get interviewed you can just be like just say something fucking crazy and they're going to throw you out.

54:36Dustin Furman:You're not going to get in trouble. So I hope people know not to do that, that like you should be willing a few times in your life. I think you sit on a jury. And should you be paid for it? Yeah, sure. Like whatever. But it's so important. And I just want people to understand that in many parts of the world, there is no trial by jury. You don't have to worry about jury duty because the secret police will just come and disappear you. You'll go before a government judge who will just say whatever and then you'll go to some you know prison forever and no one will have anything to say about it i i think people underestimate the trial by jury thing and so i just wanted to throw that out there i'm not trying to be a an asshole about it i just think we should be open-minded about serving if we have to understanding that most many people will never serve and that

55:25Colin Moriarty:it's it's important it might be now yeah so i've never had to serve for jury duty and i think maybe one of my parents did when I was a kid, but is it not like if you are hourly and you need to, if you need to take time off of work, shouldn't your employer be required to pay you for the time that you're away? Like it should be.

55:48Dustin Furman:I don't know. What I think is required is that they can't be punitive and fire you, but I don't know if they have to pay you. If you're salaried, obviously you're going to get paid. Right. But I don't like, I don't know how that works. And yeah there's something i just think i don't know i hate when i really do hate when people complain about jury duty because i'm like man the system's so fucked up there's so many bad things about the system it's one of the great things of the system about the system is that like people around you determine your fate and everyone's like yeah you people don't want to be there and all the rest i'm like that sucks because it's important um and if you what i always say to people is if like if you're in trouble one day, if you have a civil suit or you got accused of something or you're accusing something, you better hope those jurors want to be there.

56:37Dustin Furman:You know, so just kind of putting that energy out into the world, I think is important, but easier said than done, of course, like I have never been called for jury duty. Like I've never even gotten a solicitation in Virginia for jury duty. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that, frankly, there's just not a lot of crime commensurate to the cities I've lived in where like there's just a lot of shit happening. But in San Francisco and Chris, you probably experienced this in L.A. I think it's probably the same system like I got jury summons like four or five times when I lived in California but all that happens is like you call a number they're like on this day call a number and then it'll tell you if you're needed or not and then you'll call the next day and so on and so forth for a week and then every day it'll just tell you you're not needed and then you're out yeah so I I'd never had I never had I never got called here um I got called once in new york and i was like i think i was working at sears at the time and i couldn't get time off and i was like well i'm not i'm not doing this so i just said i was racist um well that's what i'm saying like just tell them you're racist or something and you have to be like all right see you later sir it really was that it really was that simple like it sounds exaggerative but it's like it really it really was that trivial um and then i just got out of it it was like no no big deal i was like 17 or something like 18 i can't remember how old i was i was like young i I was like, I'm not fucking, I need money, you know?

57:59And by that point they were, they were paying less than my minimum wage job. And I was like, I'm not, not doing this.

58:06Dustin Furman:I've probably told him about, talked about it before, but I was the foreman of my jury at 20 years old because the judge that we had, like specifically the person that's on seat six or whatever is automatically the foreman of the jury. And I was, it was a civil case for like hundreds of thousands of dollars in back rent of like a business. And I don't really remember too many of the details to be honest anymore. What I remember is that I had the original DS with Super Mario like the Super Mario Brothers. This is who's deciding your fate when you're... And yeah, like we go on break or have lunch and I just be playing that.

58:47Yeah. That must have been wild. I'm sorry, Chris. No, that must have been wild to witness. Just like you take a break deliberate do you go on like get your lunch or whatever and you're just playing what what warrior where touched yeah it was a uh it was an interesting experience i was glad i got to

59:08Dustin Furman:experience it once i don't know if i'll ever get to experience it again um and again it was a civil suit not a criminal suit so it's it's even a little it's i mean it's weighty for the people there um but yeah they like interview you like get interviewed and ask questions by the the lawyers And I think they like get a certain number of people where they can just throw them out for any reason and stuff. And I got through. One thing I remember is that the judge told me that I should I should wear nicer clothes because I was coming in like jeans and a T-shirt. And then I just did. And then I just kept coming into jeans and a T-shirt.

59:39Dustin Furman:Because that was I was like, no, I'm good. First of all, I have no money, no clothes. This is reality. This is me. In my. In my New York Yankees shirt, whatever the fuck I was wearing. Who knows? all right paulie wrote in final inquiry says according to psn profiles you meaning me have earned a total of 15 trophies during the 2 p.m hour versus 1 843 trophies during the 5 a.m hour this is nearly 20 years of trophies i know you're a serious night owl but this is still fishy i thought you were a portal during football gamer surely power wash simulator spits out more trophies during the afternoon than just 15 surely you had to play games during the day for review at ign or in freak circumstances any time since 2008.

1:00:23Dustin Furman:15 is just such a freakishly low number as a proportion of your total trophies that I wonder if something sinister is going on. Does the Jets always playing at noon mean the portal doesn't get broken out until late games? Please explain. Well, that is a big part of it. But here's an even more important thing that you need to keep in mind, Pauly. For most of that time, I was in California. So actually, what you're talking about is 11 a.m. and 2 a.m. for those particular times too, which I think frames it a little bit better. But it is funny that during the entire hour, that hour, I've only ever earned 15 trophies.

1:00:57Dustin Furman:Like when would I, yeah, I'd play things at IGN occasionally, but even when I played things at IGN, I would be in the afternoon. Because you'd come in, you'd deal with meetings and emails and like all the writing some things and doing some things. So it's a funny observation. I wanted to acknowledge that. Yeah, 1 ,843 trophies during the 5 a.m. hour. I'm doing my best. I platinumed Wolverine at like four something, I think. So the timestamps are all fucked up on my trophies, but thank you for noticing. All right, my boys, are we ready to get into the news?

1:01:29Colin Moriarty:Yeah, let's do it. Big ones this week for us to sort through.

1:01:33Dustin Furman:And it begins with Bungie. This actually happened while I was streaming and I never got a chance to, on the stream, to like really look at it. So Bungie, which of course is the Washington State studio Sony purchased some years ago, earlier in the PS5 era to help them with multiplayer gaming. Obviously, it didn't work out very well. Bungie is kind of a, I don't want to say a shell of its former self, but they've laid off many people. Destiny 2 was put away, although we're going to hear more about that in a minute. And Marathon seems to be struggling. It's a good, if not great game, but seems to be struggling in a very crowded market where people's time is of the essence.

1:02:11Dustin Furman:And so, you know, we said over and over again, right? I just said it last week, actually, on the show, I believe. Sony's got a decision to make you either give Bungie a bunch of money to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars invested into them or you close them there really is no in between they're not a small double A studio they're not going to be some small you didn't buy them to turn them into 130 person team making the next blood of Dawn Walker or something like that it's like it's Bungie so I am here to tell you guys and I'm curious to know what you think once we get through some of this Sony's made its decision I think and it seems like Sony's made the decision we're going to invest money into these guys and let them make games and I think that might be the wise decision although we'll talk more about that so they released a statement on Bungie.net called the next chapter for Bungie they also released a five-minute video called the next chapter for Bungie they kind of say the same things so the video and the post come from Poria Torkin and Josh Dean Poria Torkin and Chris can speak more to this but Poria Torkin is the head of the studio and Josh Dean is the head of product and the GM of Marathon and I was doing a little bit of research on these guys who they are Poria Torkin has a production background and I actually didn't you probably know this Chris but I didn't know this he worked at Gorilla that's where he comes from and he was the producer of Killzone mercenary killzone shadow which was really an external game killzone shadowfall and then horizon zero dawn so um interesting person and he joined as a marketing producer bungie in 2015 so actually before horizon even came out and then um he was uh before he became studio head he was the lead producer executive producer and an operations guy and in june became the studio head from the VP of operations.

1:04:11Dustin Furman:Joshua Dean is the head of product, like I said, and the GM of Marathon and joined Bungie in 2019 and was originally their franchise director and head of publishing. He comes from Bethesda. 2014 to 2019, he was the marketing manager at Bethesda. And I thought this was interesting for you, Chris. Before that, he was a buyer at Sears for many years. So product is weird through and through. Yeah. So that's who these guys are. And they wrote a post that I thought was very interesting. Here's what they write. For those that don't know us, I am Poria Torkin, Bungie Studio Head, and I'm Josh Dean, Head of Product and General Manager of Marathon.

1:04:54Dustin Furman:Together, we are responsible for leading Bungie and shaping the future of our games. Today, we want to talk candidly about where Bungie is, where destiny and marathon need to go, and how we intend to earn back your trust. This is not only an update of our immediate plans, it is the beginning of a more consistent conversation about the future of our games and our studio. First and foremost, and they say that they went and did this video, which you guys can watch, but they basically say the same things here and there, so do either. Bungie's been creating games for over 30 years, they write, and we have welcomed the communities that have formed around them.

1:05:21Dustin Furman:Over the last few years, we lost sight of that, and there have been real consequences. We lost trust, we lost incredible colleagues, and we lost sight of what we should be prioritizing most, our players. As a new leadership team, we must own that. We aren't just listening to feedback. We understand your disappointment. We are not asking you to trust what we say today. We know that trust has to be earned through the quality of our games, the decisions we make, and how consistently we show up for players. So here they write, Destiny is foundational to our future. Bungie would not be what it is today without Destiny and that vibrant community that has rallied around it for more than a decade.

1:05:53Dustin Furman:When we announced the Monuments of Triumph would be the final content update to Destiny 2, you responded in force. Your voices mattered, and the way you showed up made a real impact. You reminded everyone how much this world, its history, and its future still mean to you. Destiny is foundational to Bungie's future. We have more stories to tell, new worlds to build, but we have to do it right and give our teams the time they need to do justice to this amazing universe. All of this is to say we are not done with Destiny. We want to return Destiny to its original promise to recapture the qualities that have always made it special.

1:06:21Dustin Furman:The awe-inspiring mystery, meaningful discovery, and a community of guardians coming together against impossible odds. that begins with restoring important parts of Destiny 2's history that players can no longer experience today. We understand that removing these experiences has had a lasting impact on player trust and enjoyment of Destiny. Destiny 2 is more than just the content itself. It is a place where players have built memories together, formed lasting friendships, and shared experiences that have stayed with them for years. We cannot change the decision we made, but we can acknowledge its impact and do the work to make it right by restoring these important parts of Destiny's history.

1:06:53Dustin Furman:As we shared in the video, we are beginning to work to bring vaulted Destiny 2 campaigns, destinations, and raids back into the game, where they will be available to all Destiny 2 players. Bringing this content back is not as simple as restoring old files. Changes made to Destiny 2 since Beyond Light require us to update lighting, encounters, combatants, and other underlying systems. That work will take time, but it is necessary to ensure returning content meets the stability and gameplay standards of Destiny 2 today. When we look to the future of Destiny, all up to this restoration is the first step to lay the foundation for how we reforge into new stories and games, plural, that you all deserve.

1:07:27Dustin Furman:We'll have more details on our unvaulting efforts in the coming months, and we're very excited to share more about our vision to celebrate Destiny's legacy and build its future with you as we can. And then, Marathon. And I know this is going on, but let's lay the groundwork and we can get into a large conversation. They write, Marathon is an important part of shaping where Bungie goes next, but it was never intended to replace Destiny. The game launched a strong critical reception, and the players who embrace Marathon connected deeply with what made it distinct. At the same time, it did not reach as many players as we had hoped, and we also know and understand that the game needs to evolve.

1:08:00Dustin Furman:So we're going to anchor on what makes Marathon special, but evolve it beyond the genre constraints we placed on it. We're going to expand Marathon to a deeper survival experience that gives players more ways to take on this dangerous alien world. Through the remainder of Marathon's first year, we will continue strengthening its combat world and competitive tension while giving players more agency in how they engage with the game. That means creating meaningful experiences, whether you prefer cooperative pve competitive pvp or the unpredictable tension of marathon pvp it's important to us that no matter your play style or your skill level we find better ways to hear you from you as we get back to where we need to be making games you want to play um

1:08:38Dustin Furman:so that's it they say where do we go from here and it's just kind of a resurgence of everything they've already said build a stronger long-term future for destiny evolve marathon to grow community and build a sustainable future increase transparency around development priorities communicate more consistently, especially when plans change. Chris, I know everyone's really eager to hear from you about this. It's one of your favorite studios. Yeah. What do you think? Man, this was surprising to me. I can't pretend like I saw this coming. I would have assumed just based on how things were going and just also just based on how fraught the economic realities are and how expensive AAA is.

1:09:21Like, I thought this was kind of a done deal at this point. Like, I thought it was like, I thought maybe

1:09:28if there was a decision made, it would be, okay, Marathon goes free to play. Maybe the studio gets shut down or maybe it gets like turned into like a skeleton crew or something and they just maintain free to play Marathon until, I don't know, the wheels get spooled out. I did not expect them to bring back destiny 2 vaulted content that was like the last thing that i would have expected especially with the amount of people that they have you know like these are like you said like you didn't want to say that they're a shell of their former self but like at this point yes like this is a this is very much a ship of theseus um as far as like what bungie was or what bungie is now uh so i don't really know how to feel because this is kind of a situation where it's just like yeah okay this is cool this is a good thing for the players i suppose like it's good to restore all that content that you arguably in some ways arbitrarily nixed that's that does a great deal of good uh of uh you know earning goodwill but the people who built that out aren't there anymore if i'm not mistaken i'm pretty sure like if not the entire destiny 2 team the damn near the entire destiny team was like a like a while ago so you have a bunch of new people who've not really a lot of experience with that building out content that had existed before and figuring out a way forward like this is going to be like what like five six years minimum you would assume so work so that's a massive commitment it says something about sony and what they want to get out of this i really did not expect this this was a complete shock marathon a little bit more understandable i think marathon is just good but it also does need to like not be just what it is i love marathon but like i've not had the urge to like feel that stress of an extraction shooter for months you know because it's just like you hit a you hit a mood for that and you're just kind of like okay yeah i'm really really into it and then you just kind of want to relax or not relax, but like play like a little bit more low stakes.

1:11:45And there's really no option for that. And it feels so good to play that it is kind of a shame that there's no other ways to play it. So I always kind of thought that maybe some TDM or some PVE was going to come in some way, shape or form. So it's good to see that kind of recommitted to. I just wonder, I don't know. I just wonder how long this is going to take. Like they're making this promise now. this is 2030s, you're going to see Destiny. If Bungie sticks around that long, because that's years and years and years of output with no real... Are they going to be making something else alongside this?

1:12:25Yeah, it sounds like... Do they have the resources?

1:12:26Dustin Furman:They keep using the plural games. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe? I don't know. It is obvious, though, that there were a lot of people... I'm glad they said it because even though it was obvious to anybody who was paying attention that marathon was never really intended to supplant destiny or take its place. I think if they had their druthers, they would have had both of them going simultaneously. One kind of catering to a more PVP hardcore crowd. And the other one, you know, catering towards a more, uh, PV oriented, like world of Warcraft oriented kind of audience. And they would kind of either, maybe they would, maybe they would do some cross pollination.

1:13:06Maybe there would be some symbiosis there. Uh, But Marathon was, in my opinion, from the get-go, was always intended to be the smaller thing and not intended to be this pillar of the studio. And so with them only being left with that, no Destiny, and having their Gummy Bears project ripped away by Sony and brought in-house, they were kind of left with a situation where it's just like, hmm, I don't know what we do here. And so I wonder if maybe Sony acknowledges the fact that they kind of ripped away a thing that they had. And maybe they're just like, okay, well, look, you're not doing well right now.

1:13:42We did kind of steal the thing. Maybe we're being fair or maybe we're being very charitable and letting you guys continue because we know we kind of ripped that out from under you and took it. And apparently, by the way, that's presumably going well. I haven't heard anything negatively about that in the rumor mill about gummy bears. So from what's that? LFG? Yeah, LFG. So I don't know. This was shocking news, though, man. I thought it was pretty much all but done. But OK, so Dustin, let's do you agree with Chris?

1:14:20Dustin Furman:Is it shocking to you as well? Or where's your mind on with all this?

1:14:24Colin Moriarty:yeah it's definitely shocking to me thinking about these uh these new studio heads like these guys have to be master negotiators with sony to be able to be like listen um the stuff we can fix all the stuff that happened uh we the the previous leaders were fucked up everything and so uh we actually we want to be able to do more destiny and fix marathon and I'm just like I'm thinking about this from Sony perspective putting on the Sony hat I'm shocked that they're like okay uh what is like what is vaulting what is adding back this vaulted content gonna do actually for the bottom line you know because I while I think it is important and valid for a future of destiny in order to onboard new players um i don't think that unvaulting this content is gonna move the needle for destiny currently but i think it is an admirable thing where they're like in order to do this right we need to right our previous wrongs i'm just shocked that sony would be like yeah that sounds good spend all this money that isn't really potentially going to do anything in order to set a path forward.

1:15:49Colin Moriarty:I find that kind of crazy. Marathon, I actually could see Sony being more interested in because I am willing to bet that they know that they have something. They know that while the player numbers, particularly now, are worse than ever, they saw how many hours people put the people that liked it were into it. but obviously the game had a problem that it's, uh, it's target player base was way too small, way too hardcore. And so taking it and evolving it into something that has all these different game modes, I think is the right move. And I liked that. They made clear that it's not, they want to make sure they have what's currently there for people, uh, Like the very hardcore extraction PVP mode is not going away.

1:16:44Colin Moriarty:So that's exciting to me. Back to Destiny, though, I just am. It's harder for me to speak on just as someone who hasn't been into Destiny for since the Witch Queen, I think. That it's always been interesting to look from the outside where it's had these ups and downs. but it's clear that they shed all of these players by the end and that's why i mean that's partially what put bungee in this whole mess is that uh the expansions really weren't making as much money as they should and so it's always been interesting that there's this demand for destiny three but i at the same time like well where were you guys when they needed you and i guess the argument is like well i didn't want that destiny or what destiny became i want what destiny was and it's clear that they've received that message uh what that means i i feel like what like if you ask destiny players what they want from a new destiny i feel like you're going to get different answers and i think that's going to be tough for them because it's like for me that part of the reason i fell away from destiny was like it got way too fucking complicated like the i i respect the fact that they were like no we are an mmo fps that's cool uh but then when i would log in and be assaulted by like oh well now you can do you can make your own weapons you can change your weapon like this all your gear there's this you can do this kind of activity do this we build a whole module in the game to be able to try to tell you what to do uh and by the way catching up on the story is is impossible it's like they got lost in the sauce in my that's just my opinion yeah so i would agree where they go with destiny there's gonna be some players that like that insanely hardcore experience because they've been there for 10 fucking years and they are they are into those systems kind of like how i'm into marathon and i'm into the very hardcore nature of it so how do you balance in the future of destiny keeping it engaging for the people that have been there so long but also you got you kind of got to take a step back in order to bring some people back as well i think i have the same concern as chris that when i saw this which i don't think i hold this opinion anymore that i was like ah really smart for them to say they're wanting to make more destiny before PlayStation shuts them down.

1:19:20Colin Moriarty:Like, that's going to make them, you know, the heroes. But to be fair, I don't think they would have said something like this without some level of backing from Sony.

1:19:31Dustin Furman:Oh, yeah. No, there's no way. Sony, Sony controls the company. Right. I want to be clear. Sony's always controlled the company since they bought them, but they literally like control the board and stuff now. So like nothing's happening without them anymore. It's very different. go read the announcement in 2022 of the purchase and how that was written then go read this one where like the second or third sentence was like we're multi-platform very different now they're now sony controls them completely the last thing i'll just say

1:19:57Colin Moriarty:about all this and this is what we said before is that as marathon evolves and as the destiny as destiny brings back this vaulted content if you want a new destiny game you must be there if you hated marathon and they add new updates to try to make the game more appealing to you you got to show up you got to at least try it uh because those are the types of things with the uh ever with the ever increasing drive of the spreadsheet that i would argue from sony the numbers are going to say everything so you can't just wait until you get destiny 3 if you want that you got to show up for these other things uh because they're saying like i agree like totally sony has the backing they control the company but they're not afraid to pull the plug no not at all i mean it seems like this isn't isn't working out so you gotta show up they've already taken multiple impairments on the acquisition there's still more to take if the

1:21:00Dustin Furman:value continues to go down because the impairments are based on the projected value of what you own and it's not worth what they paid. So I'm glad you guys were able to speak on the games. I mean, I played Destiny 1 a little bit, but otherwise I played the original Halo games, but I don't know dick all about what's going on in the trenches with Bungie. So it's good to have you guys talk about it from that perspective. What I want to talk about this from is kind of a higher level perspective of unwinding mistakes and something you actually touched on, Dustin. And there is no going forward without unwinding previous mistakes, like you said.

1:21:34Dustin Furman:And I think that just builds trust. It is probably not completely necessary, but if you want people to buy in, especially on a new destiny, then fixing what is old and making it readily available, I think makes a lot of sense. Yeah. We all make mistakes in our lives where it's like, and we understand this, where it's like, I wish I can go back and change this, but I can't. You can't change this thing that happened. you can't change this choice you made or this road you went down. You can't do it. All you can do is fix what is ahead of you now and say like, this is the decision that was made. And that's kind of where I've gotten with my own analysis of the situation is I've spent years being like, why did Sony buy them?

1:22:16Dustin Furman:Why, why, why, what did you get? And it's like that, that argument only goes so far. It's like, well, it doesn't really matter at this point. Because now you, here we are, what do we do with the distressed asset? and all things being equal, I kind of don't hate it. It's like if you want, let's take a few things as assumptions, right? Sony needs to have games as a service. We all know this. We talked about it a million times. Multiplayer gaming and these perpetual games is where everyone plays their games now. The games that we all play, well, you guys play some of those games, but like the general games we grew up playing and the types of games, the tenor of games, these are not driving the industry forward anymore.

1:22:55Dustin Furman:These games sell, if they're really great, a few million copies. while these other games churn sometimes billions of dollars in revenue. So they want to be there. They've got to be there. They understand that. Period. If you look around for every... Dustin, what was that game we were talking about last week that came out of nowhere, that multiplayer game that everyone loves? It's like the anti-Call of Duty. Oh, War Dogs. War Dogs. It's like for every War Dogs or for every whatever, there are going to be all these failures. and these games that kind of come and go. And it's why I've kept using the kind of terminology of war and opening a beachhead and like landing on a beach and controlling and being like, all right, we're in.

1:23:40Dustin Furman:We're here. We can get pushed back into the ocean and drown, but we're here. And I think that Sony kind of looks at Bungie like that. They're like, all things being equal, if we look around, we could try new things, and some of them will work, and some of them won't. but like Bungie is Bungie. And even if it's a ship of Theseus, which it obviously is, it's still valuable. It's still got pole. People still care about their legacy. Why would we necessarily give it up? In other words, I think they understand at Sony, they should have never bought the team, but considering that they did and they can't unwind it these years later, which obviously they can't, you kind of make, you got to make lemonade, dude.

1:24:20Dustin Furman:And I think that the best way you do it is to move forward. And so I think the question I've been asking for months now has been answered. Will they invest in them? And it's yeah, they obviously are. I mean, they obviously are going to dump a lot of money into this. And I don't all things being equal. I don't hate it. Go ahead, Chris. Yeah, I mean, I don't hate it. I think it's I think that's cool. I think it's great. It's a better outcome, I think, than the alternative. It's just. This was not telegraphed by what they were doing. you know like this is clearly their minds have changed very recently because if you really are if you really are in this situation where you're like well bungie is a good name uh they do have a reputation we can fix but land people still care about that uh people we do have to be in these games as a service i think i said when they initially announced that the destiny 2 was shutting down and that like um and they were going to lay the team off it's like this is kind of your only real foothold in this space so why would you do this the only reason you would do this shut them down or or you know end development is that you don't want to do this anymore your games as a service stuff is not working and so like a couple months later to be like actually no well you got rid of everybody who knows how to build this now so you're in a worse position now than you would have been if you just kept business going as usual you probably hurt marathon a lot also by making the decision that you did to shut destiny down early that probably didn't help yeah that's true so that's kind of what i'm thinking is just like well what is this scatterbrained decision making where you fuck up marathon by undoubtedly you fuck up marathon by announcing that you're you're done with destiny even though you know you need live service and you know that destiny is your biggest foothold in that and by the way i know hell divers exist but it's i'm talking about like strictly first party like you own it and then like a couple months later it's just like well all right we're gonna we're gonna redo this now without the talent or without the majority of the talent uh after all the goodwill has been spent we're going to try and reclaim some of that but it's just it just kind of strikes me as just like very irresponsible if this was going to be the outcome anyway and i get it like i mean cool like this is a good outcome i think i want to see bungie do well even if it is a completely unrecognizable team and maybe a lot of this work that's going to be done into reintegrating the old red war and forsaken campaigns back into destiny 2 as it exists now all this vaulted content maybe a lot of that is prep work and practice to get ready for building new stuff maybe it's like all right we're gonna rebuild and we're gonna we're gonna retool and we're gonna fix all this old stuff because that'll give us a handle on what how to how to play with this now right because we're not the same team that did this uh and we need that hands-on it's almost like uh with 343 remaking halo every single every couple years where it's like oh we got to practice to make sure and to make sure we know how to do this um maybe that's kind of the play where it's like okay we can make good on a promise we can build goodwill we can regain trust we can do a thing that is not necessary but it but will look good for us by reinstating the original destiny 2 in its entirety and we get to practice with the tool set and we get to kind of see what makes destiny tick by working on that content that we haven't seen in X, Y, X number of years.

1:28:04Maybe that's the play, and maybe they think that that's valuable enough that they can get the ball rolling on future stuff quicker if they do that first, as opposed to just kind of fumbling around in the dark and trying to make new content right off the bat with a team that doesn't really have familiarity with it. Maybe there's strategy there. But there is a frustration from my part because it's like, you kind of you doomed a really good game with this decision that you made initially and now it's like for no reason i was really under the assumption that like maybe march the studio would shut down or like early next year and you know i was like you know it is what it is no skin off my you know i mean i don't i'm not an investor or anything but i was like okay that that is what it is i'm fine and so like and now we're back and it's like it feels kind of i don't know it feels bittersweet like it doesn't feel as good as it should to have bungee back in this capacity i guess and i know that they at the time that we're recording this they were they put out a uh like a developer insights video doc like a vi doc um that's about an hour ago i haven't seen it it's 13 minutes presumably i would imagine it goes over a lot of stuff that we've said here and maybe it's a little bit more um fleshed out maybe maybe we see a little bit more of what they're trying to do but yeah i don't know it's just a it's very messy i'm i'm happy to see because i don't want anybody to lose their jobs i want good studios to continue making good shit and quite frankly destiny and marathon even as much as they faulted are really great games and it's good that

1:29:40Dustin Furman:this is happening right man isn't annoying well that's the big thing that you touch on there at the end chris that i think is vital is like it's the beachhead analogy the games are good like that's more than you can say about a lot of things so it's like okay we we can deliver it's it's about how we deliver it's about timing and space and i think they anticipate some of the things that you're saying and dustin was saying too and just that they have no choice but to do this but to say like don't trust us that's i've never really said i've never really seen a company say quite that which is like we're not even asking you to trust us like because we know that that would be kind of a preposterous thing for us to do instead we're asking you to kind of just ride with us and we'll show you and maybe it blows up in their face i think the bigger problem i have if i have any problems about this is just i and again this goes back to things like spilt milk that you can't unspill is what does it do for playstation right what like when when when bungie does well or if bungie ever does well again it's like what does it mean for playstation we're going to get into this later with the xbox stuff and in listener inquiries that someone wrote in about like they're kind of shuffling around studios and i think that that's the reasons for that is obvious if you have open eyes which is that they're i think they're commoditizing their things and making them available and i look at something like sony and i'm like smaller entity very dependent on playstation to have this thing that really can only ever survive as a multi-platform entity anyway, what does it do for you?

1:31:18Dustin Furman:And how is it really helping you? It seems like it's an albatross. As I said last week, thinking of the fungible nature of all of the resources that PlayStation has at its disposal, they might not be literally connected, but something like Fizzint not being worth it for them anymore comes from decisions like this. And so this is a decision that doubles down on that in a way. And if you wanted to make an argument against it, you can say like yeah this is good money after bad like you've got to just own that this isn't working but i don't hate the perceived wisdom and saying like we might have something here at the very least people really care about destiny they really showed up to play it in recent months and maybe it's good it's good for companies for them to say like maybe we were just straight up wrong And like you said, like their decisions hurt, had splash damage on Marathon.

1:32:10Dustin Furman:So Marathon doesn't didn't even, which is a great game, doesn't even really get its fair shake. And on the other side of that, the thing I'm actually most personally as a gamer interested in is what they're going to do with Marathon. Because there's one thing about that game, from my perspective, that is undeniable. And it's got an incredibly intriguing aesthetic, story, world, feel. It's like, yeah, what a shame for you to just throw that in the garbage. the pve stuff is a cool place to start but i'm wondering like are you going to make like campaigns are you going to make like new entire modes and modalities about the way you approach this game because it is super cool and and a lot of i might be speaking out of school here compared to what a lot of people feel like but i think marathon is 10 times cooler than destiny as far as just what it looks like how it plays although i'm like this is way more intriguing and i'm glad from my perspective that they seem to understand that i remember when i watched you guys play and was watching play for a few hours like this is fucking dope but again i also understand that when i see games like that because i feel that way like when i see project espresso or something right which is like fair games i'm like i think this game looks good i understand that it's not for me that like they're not trying to capture me they're not going to capture me and it's really someone else has to speak to this but if they're going to get into the single player like campaign like structural content for PVE or just things for single player players, which I think is frankly what they're suggesting with some of the things with Marathon.

1:33:40Dustin Furman:I'm like, that's dope because you, a lot of the work is making something pleasing and aesthetic. You've already done that. So like, how can you twist it around? It's like making a sequel almost. So I guess the other open question is like, is there something else? And my assumption is is that maybe but that would probably be a division too much of a division of your an old bungee with more than a thousand people working there might be able to tackle three projects at once but and obviously they were because they had marathon destiny and gummy bears at one point but it's it's different now so so i i'm i'm i'm more than neutral on it i'm like yeah okay all right you gotta get you gotta throw the fucking player base a bone at some point you can't just have bad news all the time it's hurting sony optically and i think that this is also a good move for them and good comms i think from from sony and from bungie as far as i watched the video that five minute video and i was like this is good um people seem to be positive about it in the comments the ratio of thumbs up to thumbs down was good all the things that you And so now they have to prove it.

1:35:01Dustin Furman:And I don't think there's any guarantees. I think Sony can pull the plug on this thing at any time, especially depending on how other things do. I do think Sony, though, understands a couple of things, which is that it's going to be flush. It's always flush with cash. They're always making money. But like Grand Theft Auto is going to be a massive boon. Free money by the hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's time to reinvest in some other things. like you're not going to get another fall like this really from the outside and then next fall is going to be ps6 so you're kind of off to the races at that point and maybe maybe they even have shit ready to go for that um you had said earlier it's like with with hell divers it's like the problem with hell divers is that sony owns the game in the ip but not the studio the problem with this is that sony owns the studio but really has no ip that anyone cares about right now other than reinvesting in something new or getting something old off the ground again and so they're just flat hell divers is a bigger problem in the long term because arrowhead clearly i don't know what their contractual obligations are and i'm sure they're making a lot of money from hell divers too as a studio but they obviously want to do their own thing so one day that's going to be over i would imagine but not anytime soon we were talking it's like the third most played game on steam or something it's like what it's crazy it's like a whole nother world to a whole nother world to a whole nother world out there.

1:36:24Dustin Furman:Like we're play, we do a PlayStation podcast and even the Helldivers success two and a half years later is totally alien to me. Where I'm like, what are you talking about? How is this still going? And people just fucking love it. And I got to say, man, I think that emboldened Sony. Because as I've said before, they look at that and they're like, we can do it. Here you go. You know, we did it. To their credit, they did. So I think like, in other words, imagine a world where hell divers didn't hit that was gone and then you had the situation and it's like yeah maybe it's just not in our DNA at all but I don't think they look at it because of hell divers I think hell divers emboldened them and we'll see how that goes because of course they were emboldened by Concord as well fair games horizon there's a lot of shit coming up and they're rejiggering horizon changes afoot all right let's get through some of these inquiries we might have answered all these already but let's see michael the wrote in and said good afternoon dudes on the episode of summon sign dustin made a comment that the hardcore destiny fans should show up for bungie because they unvaulted their content as a person that platinum destiny 2 and was there for all their expansions and probably 7 500 hours into destiny 2 alone i think their decision is stupid and a slap in the face of all the people that were there with destiny since d1 beta destiny 3 should be out sometime next year not these half measures to cater to those that abandon the game by adding hundreds of extra gigs of dead content that was vaulted for a reason this is what i'm saying though like you can't cry over spilled milk at this point there really is only one way forward the reality is destiny 3 probably should be ready soon but it's not it doesn't even exist and so that's just that's it just you got to accept it sucks yeah right but we can only spin our wheels so much i think i i think again i i really do think the because this is undoubtedly going to be a very very strictly managed product you know they're not going to get a lot of leeway as far as like pushing deadlines for this thing you know there's there's thin ice here and so i would imagine if if you kind of give yourself the space as a studio to be like all right well listen if if we make destiny 3 right now if we start making destiny 3 right now we're kind of in over our skis a little bit we're um we don't have a lot of we haven't worked on this ip in god knows how long the original team is gone um we're a smaller studio now than we've ever been well not that we've ever been but like certainly in in the modern context uh we can maintain you know deadlines and if we're working on if we're working on getting stuff back and also we're getting practice and so that way when we start destiny 3 we have a better when we start doing destiny 3 which is assume assuming that's what they're going to do uh we can at least progress with the understanding and with the framework of what we've been building to reinstate destiny 2 that we can more confidently maybe hit those deadlines and and maybe not bungle this thing that's that would be my assumption because if they start making destiny 3 now like that dude that thing's gonna it's gonna be a lot of like we should do this we should do that and we should do xyz and then there's not gonna be a lot of like you gotta you gotta lock in you gotta acclimate yourself to what you're making i think and i don't know i understand what he's saying by the way like because i don't care but the i don't i didn't give a shit when they vaulted this stuff because i had played it endlessly and i was like i was like i don't they want to evolve the game and by the way like the gameplay of destiny evolved so drastically that i would actually imagine that porting everything like backporting and like i'll put it this way having a character move the way a character in destiny 2 moves now in the original version of destiny 2 where players could simply not move that way would probably be an it'd probably break the game entirely yeah they acknowledge that in a way don't they in their letter yeah yeah and so like i i got it and i I was like, yeah, we don't use these planets anymore.

1:40:33They're not really that interesting. Cut them out. It's just taking space on my hard drive. So I was never somebody who gave a shit. But the majority of people do. And it's not even necessarily. I shouldn't even say the majority of people do. The majority of people care when they hear such a thing happens. Right. You know, the removal of choice. The removal of choice. And it's really a principle issue. Even if, by the way, people don't actually have those principles. It's just a very easy thing to say, like, don't take away the content that you pay for. even if the people who play that content could not give a fuck um what most people hear is you paid for shit and now you can't get it that's insane yeah um and it's just a bad look so like i think i think this is more about pr i think this is more about brand uh repair and i think this is more about goodwill than necessarily it being the best thing for destiny to have the original red war campaign in there like i don't think that's going to move the needle but it is going to expunge at least a pretty big thing from bungie's long list of uh you know egregious errors which is you know that that reinstating of that cut content that was paid for which is which is huge actually it's so huge that i just did not expect that to ever happen like i was like i wrote that off a long time ago so this is again this is just all that's shocking i feel like for michael's right

1:42:00Colin Moriarty:in here it's like i think about if someone if someone comes to you and is like hey i have really fucked up with a lot of people i'm acknowledging that and i'm going to start by making it right and i'm not asking you to trust me um but i have to start by doing this thing you know the the the making it right of the vaulting of the content. I think what Michael has to understand is that like other people don't have the same perspective as you. Right. Some people really want that content back and this is going to be a big step for them. And so I get the, I'm just surprised that he said, I feel like their decision is stupid and a slap in the face.

1:42:46Colin Moriarty:It's a bit much. That's a bit much. You know, I think that I get it that you feel like if everything was in the in the world where Bungie didn't fuck everything up. Yeah, Destiny 3 might be coming out next year or something like that. That's not the world we're living in. And I'm kind of repeating the stuff I said just a little bit ago. But like Sony has shown this generation to care very, very much about numbers. and so yeah you may not care about the vaulted content but those are the signs that are going to show that it's working the investment should go forward and continue but i get it like you know sometimes someone fucks with you and you they maybe try to apologize and you're like i appreciate it but i gotta go and maybe that's you but you're never getting destiny 3 in that case i will um

1:43:43Dustin Furman:I speak as an outsider. I will say that just as a player of games and worked on games and have been in the games, I personally like the idea of ephemeral content. I don't want most or everything to be like this idea of, oh, it's going to go away at some point. But the idea that things just go away, I think, is kind of cool. Like, you have this moment. It's a moment in time. It's like a live show for a for like a for a band or something right exactly like it's a pro i get it like i totally get that it's kind of antithetical to how we approach games that we like these things that are available forever especially when they're robust and they're going to be playable so it's not like some online map of games that aren't populated anymore but it's destiny like you're always able to find someone that can go and run these raids with you and all but i like the idea of them disney vaulting it kind of and being like you know what you had your moment it was out we wanted you to come and And there's a marketing presence to it of being like, we mean what we say, you know, like, and now I think that's the one thing that I think they understand in their comms is like, you're undoing that.

1:44:51Dustin Furman:You can't ever go down that road ever again. It's over. And I'm like, yeah, that kind of sucks because like in a perfect world, you would have threaded the needle better and been and communicated that and people would have understood it more. I've been like, yeah, these are seasonal sort of things that exist and then they disappear. year and maybe and maybe we bring them back in the far flung future or we kind of tease them and tease them out and make them available in little bits and bytes. But the idea that everything has to be available once it's released, that works 99 % of the time. And I understand that, but there's got to be a room for an exception.

1:45:19Dustin Furman:And I don't know, I don't I just I'm confused why more people don't understand why that's cool to leave things in the past sometimes. Right. But again, I speak as an outsider. I am not a player of the game. Let's see. Anthony Pallerino wrote in, said, hey, CDC, the Destiny fans seem very happy that Bungie is going to wheel back out Destiny 2 like it's Mitch McConnell. I don't really understand why they are so hopeful. No new content has been announced, so I see no reason to believe that Bungie is now less likely to be shut down by this time next year. I love Destiny 2, but they ended it. Sony needs to nut up and fund Destiny 3 or shut down what remains of Bungie.

1:45:55Dustin Furman:I don't see another new IP being met with open arms given how Marathon was received. Keep up the great work, guys. Well, this is the whole thing, and this is why I just, I take especially written or produced content very seriously. I wish I could remember what this is like too vague for you guys to even probably tickle anything in your minds. But like, remember when I was really obsessed with like some things, someone's like, there was like some video or press release where like someone had said something and I was obsessed with this one way they put it. God, I wish I can remember because I don't remember the specifics of it because it's like when you're talking off the cuff, I can imagine you saying games when you meant game, right but when you're producing a press release that goes through five levels of sony bureaucracy and the bungee board and everything and you say things like that i'm like no you mean it like there's more games and i don't i i think you can read into that that like destiny 3 is the is the end goal in my opinion it's like we're revving the engine back up the nuclear power plant has to like get going it's going to take fucking time and yeah we're going to do tests and and make sure it's safe but like ultimately we want to get this thing up to full production and make electricity again or whatever and i look at that and i think they destiny bungie was bungie had outrageous bravado in a lot of ways i think bungie's bravado was unearned because it it was so many orders of magnitude higher than the output which was prolific and popular, but not to the degree in which they were carrying themselves.

1:47:28Dustin Furman:And so again, I think this is an unwinding of mistakes to realize like, yeah, Destiny 3 should be announced by now in closed beta by now, but it doesn't even exist. But I believe it will. I believe that if they've continued on, well, I don't want to say I believe it will. I believe if the plan that they're executing works and people come back and stay and stick around, I think that Destiny 3 is the result of that. I just think it's many years away. And by the way, I should say this as well. I do think it's a big risk to do this because simply for fixed cost. The studio is Bungie has to be one of the most expensive studios in the world to run on a per capita basis.

1:48:09Dustin Furman:It's in Washington, staffed by extremely veteran, many of them, extremely veteran people, even people that are still around. They have demand for talent and can pay. it's not some studio in Seoul or Prague or something where it's like yeah alright like let's take a rider on it like I don't know if you saw Jason Schreier reported that Dawn Walker cost 40 million dollars

1:48:36Dustin Furman:Sony's never made a game for that in I don't fucking have any idea since the PS3 era probably you know what I mean so that's the one thing is like it Bungie's if one thing is working against Bungie it's that they're in the wrong geographic place. And I wonder if they're going to embrace now, I don't want them to embrace this too much because this is what undid 343, but like external contract that will keep things cheaper if you can get like overseas talent or even open a studio overseas, like a satellite. Because they're going to have to keep costs down. That's going to be very difficult to do in that place.

1:49:14Dustin Furman:So that's one other concern I have. Anyway. Ty Dameroy didn't say, hey, fellas, this question is mostly for Chris do you think a Destiny 1 remaster would be a good idea for Bungie I feel like it would be a relatively low effort endeavor for them that would probably sell 5 plus million units you could follow a similar blueprint to WoW Classic with a slow release of D1's content to maintain engagement as a team then turns to the development of Destiny 3 that's interesting because Destiny I don't even know how the Destiny fan base feels about the original Destiny that's what I played so that's how long ago that goes but is that in the cards you think I think that would be cool what I think would be cool is just to see that game ported to PC honestly like I think uh destiny one is really cool and it's still very it's such a it's so different from destiny 2 and in ways that is I didn't even really realize until I went back and played a little bit of it uh earlier this year and it's like yeah this is like a very different thing and it hits a different spot and it is good I do think there is value and maybe like assessing that and seeing like well can we get this over to pc do we have this do we have this code like do we have this material do we have these assets because a wow classic kind of thing for destiny i think i think a lot of people would be down for that i think i think it surely would be more nostalgic uh than something that would be like a big flash in the pan but i still think like that would i mean dude we see how destiny 2 performs when there's nobody even working on it and And it's, I would imagine that Destiny 1 would do fairly well.

1:50:50I don't know how you would price it or how you would structure it or if you would kind of put everything out at once or if you would want to have like a live service roadmap. I think that would be maybe too much. I feel like in some way, I don't know, but to recapture Destiny 1, you kind of have to, that's a tricky thing to do, but like it would be something that I would have considered or pitched. I wanted that a while ago though, to be fair. so i don't know if that's just me looking for confirmation by so like yeah you should have you should have did this thing that everybody's suggesting now but destiny one classic would

1:51:21Colin Moriarty:would be cool i think they went and added some destiny one raids to destiny two right like you could do vault of glass and maybe crota's end yeah you could i think there's a couple there's stuff that's still on like wrath of the machine is still on destiny one and um there's locations that are still trapped on destiny one and obviously destiny one again like the just the gameplay framework of that game is so different like destiny one is actually more like marathon uh not specifically but like in comparison to like destiny one to destiny two is so different um that like destiny one is way is is closer to marathon and marathon is way slower and way way way more plotting and i remember playing destiny one earlier this year and just being like yeah you feel heavy and you feel like like you don't jump as high and like it's it takes more rounds to kill an enemy and things like that it kind of destiny became kind of not dynasty warriors but kind of adjacent where you're just kind of like mowing down like dozens of enemies and like in a in a flash of a second whereas like original destiny was like no this is more like classic this is more like uh you have to fight and you have to aim and and these are uh every individual threat is a little bit more potent.

1:52:37So even though there is that Destiny 1 content in Destiny 2, I would argue it still doesn't really do what Destiny 1 Classic would do. But that would be really cool. My concern for that is that if it was hard for them to get the Destiny 2 content unvaulted to the point where they had to wait until they were on the brink of death to do it, I wonder what their handle on destiny one even is like i wonder if they even can bring that forward in a way that like doesn't bust it up is that game tied to is that like for example does that game have animations that are tied to frame rate in such a way that making it a 60 frames per second experience on pc is undoable um or so on or so difficult that it would take like a lot more time than we assume those are real questions the final inquiry about this before we move on to the next story

1:53:28Dustin Furman:is from Arian.yn says, Hey CDC, hope you're all having some great end of summer days. After Bungie's recent announcement and video, I've been wondering, am I the only one seeing some of PlayStation's recent moves as potentially positive? Obviously, there's still plenty to criticize, but I'm wondering if we're actually seeing a bit of a PlayStation reset, bringing Destiny back to the forefront, seemingly scaling back some of the live service ambitions, like the reported changes to Rise and Hunter's Gathering, and putting more focus back on single player games and the IP and studios that they already own.

1:53:55Dustin Furman:Could this be a case where we don't necessarily see the fruits of these changes in the short term, but PlayStation ends up becoming more sustainable and focused in the long run. Anyway, I'll hang up and listen. My answer, my short answer to this is yes, obviously.

1:54:10Dustin Furman:Sony, PlayStation's like a huge ship, like a fucking, like a, I don't know, aircraft carrier or something. And you have to turn it and it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to turn this thing and to move it. But I do see positive signs of them trying to do something. I mean, some of these decisions we're not going to agree with and some of them we have to describe through the corporate lens but not necessarily agree with it as a player right like i said this a lot about about fizzit is like i get what they're doing i wouldn't have done it but you know i was thinking about this and i don't know if anyone's expressed this anywhere else but people are so worried about playstation exclusivity and like they want playstation exclusives and games like for playstation that differentiate them and you could kind of look at the fizzit decision as sony being like, yeah, like we don't want this thing if we can't own it.

1:54:59Dustin Furman:We want something on our platform. We'll just invest this money on something we can own. And to me, I feel like that is kind of what people have been saying they want, or at least a lot of the core fan base. So even if the decisions are painful, and like I've said about Fizzin, it sucks, but Fizzin is going to be on PlayStation. You're going to be fine, right? Like it'll be fine. I feel like maybe if you look at it more objectively and try to give Sony the benefit of the doubt for once, which we never do and reasonably so it's like yeah maybe the ship is starting to turn into a new direction and like the decisions being made and the seeds being planted for better outcomes now we have to see if these outcomes sprout into something fruitful or if they're just fucking dead plants i don't know man but like yeah certainly the decision with horizon is a big one we learned from that reporting too that like it i mean from separate reporting it seems like kill zone is in the works in the second party and that that's associated with gorilla and so they're going to assess that project as well.

1:55:55Dustin Furman:I mean, that's what people have been asking for Killzone back for years. Horizon going back to our more single player non games as a service thing is what we want, right? Like marathon going PVE and giving us more of the single player cohesive experience that's not so sweaty. I don't know. Even stuff with Project Espresso and break in or whatever they're calling it now, it's like they are trying to change it like they're trying to make it work. And there are some things that i think are kind of doa unfortunately like that game for loop i think that game looks cool but it seems like no one gives a shit about that game and there's gonna be other things that are gonna have to come out in the wash yeah but there's no doubt in my mind that like things seem like they're they're trying to make different decisions and we have to just wait now and see like really we can only prognosticate so much but this is a checkpoint that we've reached now especially with bungie where like yeah we can save our progress and like we know where things stand but i guess like everything else is just kind of soothsaying at this point it's like i don't know but but i i do feel like honestly like these decisions show an intro like that sony is not so intractable and actually i really feel like that began with concord if you want to be honest it's like they've literally they literally blinked concord out of existence do you have any idea like what those conversations must have been like behind the scenes and how much money they ate on that shit, hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain.

1:57:25Dustin Furman:But that's not an easy choice to make. There were certainly people there probably like, oh, we can stick with it, stick with it. Like we can make it work. We can make it free. We can do this. We can do that. And they were just like, let's just fucking get rid of it. Like, let's just know what time it is now. And that's good decision making. So I just I don't want to beat them up too badly. The physics stuff. And we're going to talk about that next. The more I've thought about it and the more I've tried to kind of and reading the stuff that Washington Post and Gene did and IGN did when interviewing Kojima.

1:57:54Dustin Furman:It's like, yeah, it's not when you realize like what the game was and where they were with it. It's like, it didn't even exist. You can't, you like, at some point you kind of look at, and at Sony's perspective and you're like, what are you doing? You know, maybe, maybe Sony had to meet them on a zoom call as we're going to find out because he was traveling to like a French fashion show or something and wasn't around. when they wanted to talk to me. It's like, you got to like, kind of like, go a little deeper and like, try to at least give the benefit of the doubt to the conversation around things that are happening.

1:58:29Dustin Furman:We'll get into that now though. Anything left to say about Bungie before we move on? No. I have the perfect name for today's episode. Because I always, I always try to write down names of, so you guys know Slipknot. Inside my shell, I wait and bleed. Pretty good, right? Yeah, your marathon shell. That's good. Yeah, you know. You're injured. All right. Let's talk a little bit, as I said, about what's going on with Fizzant kind of getting this out and moving on with our lives finally, since we're not going to see this game for many, many years, clearly. So we had. Let's catch everyone up. Fizzant is a game that was supposed to be a Metal Gear Solid continuance, like a spiritual successor.

1:59:20Dustin Furman:Kojima was going to produce this with Kojima Productions. The deal was announced in 2024 with Jim Ryan.

1:59:30Dustin Furman:And yeah, things seem it was going to be some second party game. And we were just kind of anticipating it was going to be a PS6 game. We learned from Bloomberg that and and and well, no, we don't learn from we learn more details from Bloomberg. Xbox, PlayStation and Kojima all have statements one night about how Fizzant is canceled at PlayStation. So Fizzant was taken back as an IP and the product by Kojima and he shopped it for a few months and he found a partner with Xbox. So Xbox is now publishing Fizzant. And then we got reporting from Jason Schreier talking about the game kind of being over budget and Death Stranding not really selling very well.

2:00:15Dustin Furman:I mean, all things we've kind of known and kind of things going slowly and glacially. So now that brings us to here. So Kojima Productions releases a statement and they say the following, quote, you may have seen a recent article that mentions Kojima Productions speculating on the reason for the change in publishing partners for Fizzin. Normally, we would not comment on unsubstantiated speculation on the internet, but these aspersions around our relationship with PlayStation, the commercial performance of the Death Stranding franchise and the broader production planning and investment for Fizzin have reached beyond the studio and have touched our fans, our creative partners and colleagues we have worked alongside for three decades.

2:00:50Dustin Furman:None of the claims written came from any official or on the record source and as such, we encourage you to take them with a dose of skepticism. Make no mistake, this was a serious situation for the studio with a range of potentially significant implications. While we recognize that the article may have caused alarm, we want to reassure you all for the record that the studio is in a healthy, profitable state. Development for Fizzin continues to move forward with Xbox and our relationship with PlayStation to remain strong. Thank you for your continued support. So that's what Kojima Productions, probably Kojima himself, wrote.

2:01:19Dustin Furman:I want to stop here and just say something really quick. Nowhere in that statement does he or they say that the reporting was wrong. Because I'm sure it's not. Right. We'll talk about it a little while later, but Jason talks about after the interviews with Kojima, the on the record interviews with IGN and with Washington Post go out. He releases a statement on Blue Sky saying, amongst other things, like they don't even dispute anything we reported. Because they don't. so it was a little weird to watch people kind of um turn on jason's reporting or whatever and i'm like i just you can feel how you want about jason as a person or whatever like i don't know man like that's up to you but like he's not making things up bloomberg is a very serious public i think bloomberg i want for people that don't understand how serious bloomberg news reporting is i want you to just look up what a bloomberg terminal is and i want you to look up how much people pay for them.

2:02:22Dustin Furman:And then I want you to take, I, then I want you to understand that the things that go through Bloomberg as well as many, many other outlets, just because they're talking to people anonymously doesn't mean those people are anonymous to the people writing this story. Obviously he knows who all the people are. That's how it works. So it's like kind of a strange little thing. And can I just say something real quick, just as an aside, it's not gonna be popular with some people, but like I read some of the things, um, people write about Jason and it's like a lot of it is anti-semitic like that's why a lot of people don't like him or at least some people don't like go after him it's always like some very personal shit and i think he's like not even really like a practicing jew or anything like that so it's just like i read this stuff and i'm like damn it always descends into that shit i don't i wonder if you guys see that as well i always see it in the comments so i don't like that i think people should check themselves on that a little bit but criticizing him based on just his reporting or whatever um i don't know why you like i can't think of anything jason's gotten wrong and i don't know why people would would second guess that

2:03:28Colin Moriarty:hold up though because i was specifically in kojima's statement it says we encourage you to take them with a dose of skepticism so it's not disputing it but it's saying you should be skeptical about what's been written right but oh it is telling you that it's like yeah we don't you should be skeptical about what you've read yeah that's fair i think that is

2:03:54Dustin Furman:to some degree yeah well i guess i was looking for more specificity like what do you dispute because so this is what jason says he says i saw the statement from kojima productions today it doesn't dispute any of our reporting so i don't have much to add there but i will add that as i said a couple weeks ago the fizz and cancellation came after several months of negotiation between kojima pro and sony wasn't exactly out of nowhere um i think that's the show like the zoom call reporting stuff was specific like this came out of nowhere and it's like this seems like it was like part eight of a conversation or whatever you know whatever that they were having about what was going on and then jason later says the article i wrote was based on conversations i had with multiple people across sony xbox and kojima productions so i just i know what it's like that have people dispute your reporting it happens to me when i report everything that i've reported and it's like you're just not making these things you have no idea who we talked to and i just trust that the people at sony xbox and kojima productions so like one of kojima's own people right it's not even like some some snakes in the grass at sony trying to like sabotage him i just want to be fair because i just feel like people just turn on reports space like i hate this i hate to be the guy that has to say this to you but like you're believing you're believing like the monolithic source that will tell you whatever you want to hear but not the reporter that's trying to report the truth by protecting its sources at the same time that's the shit that always bothers me is like it's not on the record reporting i'm like are you fucking stupid like you ever read the newspaper like like who's reporting things off like my source john general john smith at the pentagon tells us that we're out of bullets it's like is that is that really the way it goes or does it say like a high-ranking source at the pentagon says that we're out of bullets

2:05:48Dustin Furman:i just don't understand like what people don't get i hate that shit you know like you don't you don't get on the record people don't talk on the record that's just not it doesn't happen you know not generally not unless they're trying to sell you something or manipulate you in some way um anyway so there's more texture to this though boys before we get into it so like i said our friend gene park wrote a story over the washington post says hideo kojima explains the surprise split with sony there's also a much longer interview at ign called hideo kojima reveals what happened with Sony in exclusive first interview since PlayStation ditched Fizzit.

2:06:27Dustin Furman:Washington Post obviously doesn't publish, it's a newspaper, doesn't publish verbatim like back and forth Q &A. But if you want to get even more detail, you can go there. But Gene wrote, quote, in a Zoom call in mid-June, Sony delivered bombshell news to Kojima Productions. The tech giant would stop funding the studio's next project, the highly anticipated espionage game Fizzit. After the call ended, studio president Shinji Hirano marveled at how quickly director Hideo Kojima returned to work. He said, quote, I just went totally blank when they told me. The biggest surprise was Hideo's actions after that.

2:06:58Dustin Furman:He went back to his room and started working, end quote. Kojima is one of gaming's most celebrated directors. Two years ago, Sony PlayStation announced it was funding Fizzant, his return to the genre where he created his most influential famous games. The split in June didn't become widely known until earlier this month, stunning the gaming world and some of the studio's own staff. Kojima said, through an interpreter, quote, I was just shocked and surprised. I didn't have any anger or sadness. I was just thinking, what should I do? It's a big problem for us, and I couldn't tell the staff at the time, end quote.

2:07:26Dustin Furman:His thoughts often return to the nearly 200 people he employs at his Tokyo office located right across the street from Sony headquarters. Awkward. Kojima said, quote, we're an independent studio. That means if they can't fund us or our studio could collapse. And they've since found a new publisher in Xbox, Gene writes. So Gene goes a little bit into Death Stranding and kind of the history of things, and that ultimately Kojima was often requested to go back to Metal Gear. Gene writes, quote, since 2015, fans emailed Kojima regularly asking to create another Metal Gear game. He's always wanted to move on from that genre, but when he fell seriously ill in 2020, he thought about his mortality and how much time he had left to make games.

2:08:04Dustin Furman:He changed his mind and discussed the idea with PlayStation's former chief executive, Jim Ryan. Kojima recalls Ryan being excited and the pair shook hands. Kojima and Herman Holst, his friend and head of PlayStation Studios, announced the project together in January 2024. In June, Sony called for a meeting attended by Hirano, Kojima, and his longtime translator Aki Saito. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Sony's withdrawal reflected concerns about budget, missed deadlines, potential profitability, and lack of exclusivity to the PlayStation platform, citing people familiar with the project.

2:08:33Dustin Furman:The report also said that Death Stranding games fell short of PlayStation's revenue expectations. And then he talks about Kojima's challenge to that. and so they continue and I'm sorry there's a lot here quote after the meeting Kojima said he resumed revisiting the game's concept but also struggled with how to inform the rest of the company he said he initially gathered team leaders and told them he intended to continue the project and find another publisher he fretted over losing employees and so they ultimately ended up going to Xbox they have a relationship with them he seems to like Asha which makes a lot of sense she seems very aggressive and was probably there with bells on I would imagine when they realized Sony had abandoned this.

2:09:16Dustin Furman:Kojima had, Gene writes later, quote, Kojima said he spoke with other publishers. He declined a name. I want to know who those publishers are. I wonder if we'll ever find out who do you guys think it would be? I kept saying Capcom because I thought that was interesting. Capcom really doesn't publish external games, but there are certain things that like Bandai Namco is another one I was thinking of. Hmm. Um, but anyway, but that he also quickly approached Microsoft thanks to their existing partnership. They were eager to partner again, he said. Xbox told Bloomberg the move was a quote-unquote easy call.

2:09:48Dustin Furman:Kojima said the full staff learned about the change the day before the September 9th announcement. Sony's cancellation has shocked and disappointed him, Gene writes, but his lifelong affection for the brand remains. Kojima said, quote, Corporations are like living things. I still have this relationship with Sony. I use Sony cameras, Walkman still. We're not in dispute. We're not fighting with them, end quote. some fans and some angry fans falsely speculated the split had something to do with sony's decision to stop creating physical media for playstation games starting in 2028 kojima said that even though the all digital future is popular he grew up on analog media the subject of his recent product exhibit and will continue to use it etc etc etc but it has nothing to do with that obviously all right we'll stop there we'll get into the ign stuff next but let's get you guys on the record dustin let's go to you first does this change anything for you i'm like does this give any new insight to you or is it just more texture to a story that's kind of already gone and dead

2:10:35Colin Moriarty:uh i feel like it's just more texture um i think kind of the the main stance that we had a few weeks ago was just like uh this is the this is the game you were building up to like i think is it in gene's article somewhere where he's like this is this is the game that would be the most profitable like i'm making it now right right and now they don't want it You know, so yeah, I'm not sure this this changes how I feel or anything I said, like it definitely adds more texture to the Sony context.

2:11:15Dustin Furman:Well, yeah, let me let me add this to this before I go to Chris then on this as well. You guys might find this interesting. This is from the IGN interview. This is verbatim what Kojima says through a translator quote. I've borrowed money from the bank for funding as well. At first, when we established the studio, they didn't listen to us at all. After a while, when we got the title out, they were like, we'll lend you money. If they find out that a project has been stopped or canceled, we'll be in big trouble. So my mind went blank when SIE told me. I don't remember so much of that meeting, to be honest with you.

2:11:40Dustin Furman:And my colleagues probably don't remember as well, so I can't really answer if you ask me what exactly they said. Nothing could have prepared me for the decision to step away from the project, so I thought, what am I going to do from tomorrow? But from my side, I love Sony, and I don't have bad feelings against them because I know it's a tough time in the games industry. Here's where it gets interesting. I've been working with them for like 30 years. Mr. Ken Kutaragi, Mr. Harai, I was close with them. but it's not like that recently I realized that okay this is the reality it's the 10th anniversary of my studio my studio might collapse right it's interesting but it's not like that recently I wonder what that's he had a good relationship with Jim Ryan I wonder if he doesn't get along with Nashina I don't know what that means anyway Chris anything you want to add to this I mean I don't know I just think it is I think Dustin really kind of said it where it's just like this is just a lot of interesting texture but this doesn't change like how I feel about Fizzin or like whether or not I'm excited about it like I'm still really looking forward to whatever the hell this is going to be but that was the thing that I picked up on was like it's not like that recently it kind of implies well I don't know if it implies anything specifically but like it does it gives reason to feel like all right well things at PlayStation are not exactly titan it is the wrong word i guess but it's not what it could be or maybe even what it should be um if you're if you're losing people like kojima you know

2:13:14Colin Moriarty:i thought can i oh yeah good good jump in i just want to read the exact quote that i was referencing from uh gene's article it says quote this is the biggest selling title i could possibly create he said waving his hands in the air quote i don't think fizzant would be on the list i didn't think fizzit would be on the list of being canceled yeah he probably felt pretty confident right he's like oh you want you want the money maker you don't like walking around with a baby strapped to your chest oh chris is done with the show oh there he is oh he's back oh chris you disappeared for a minute but it's all right everything's fine no you're fine i think it's just the internet yeah that was all right that was the that was the strangest cut out i think i've ever seen let me check my recording which okay that's still going all right all right but yeah this you know he made he made his death strandings he made his weird ass game with Norman Reedus and a and a baby in a you know little container walking around with all kinds of weird shit he was ready to make something that at least he felt like would sell

2:14:18Dustin Furman:I think it is and I want to read one more part of this as well from the IGN interview it is clear that like this game is is barely exists and yeah it is so far off like so if sony if he had a conversation in 2022 where he and jim ryan shook hands they announced it in 2024 i want you guys to keep that all in mind right about that time frame obviously death he said he was the production would begin kind of earnest they were making death straining 2 at the time they're not that big so like you have to give them some forgiveness and of course od has been in development as well but ign asks did production stop at any point?

2:14:58Dustin Furman:And this is what Kojima says. Quote, so the work didn't stop. I'm still doing the concept. How I create the game is a little unique. The world, the game system, the scenario, the visuals, the design, modeling. I'm still doing that. I'm still casting and also doing scans for the actors. But the game system for the new technology, like enemy AI and stuff, I'm still experimenting on all of this. I have to change the story depending on how the game experiment works. So it's not like we're ready to go or like it's even a big team already. It's more like a very small team that remained for the crucial parts and all the others moved to OD.

2:15:27Dustin Furman:There wasn't much of a delay or anything because it was a very minor change. Of course, if I had a full team on the Fizzin project, it would be faster, but the animation team is mainly on OD, but the animation, the motion, and things like that will, of course, change later to the actor's movements once we start doing performance capture. So right now, it's in there for the sake of experimenting. I'm working on it still every day. And quote, IGN then asks, do you happen to change any engines or anything like that? Kojima says, quote, well, I haven't really decided yet. I'm still experimenting, end quote.

2:15:58Dustin Furman:I mean, if you look at things from Sony's perspective, they're probably like, what? You know, like, it's not, I mean, we want to beat PlayStation up, and I get it, and everyone's upset about PlayStation. But you look at this and you're like, what are you doing? And it really reinforces my opinion that, like, this probably makes no financial sense for xbox either it's something that they can do to kind of stick it a sword in and twist it in sony's ribs which is good but like the we're talking about the the cancellation of a project that was announced almost three years ago publicly that was sealed more with sony more like four years ago and is still not even that's not even pre what What he's describing is not pre-production.

2:16:49Dustin Furman:Right. That's like concepting and like the phase of like we were figuring out what it is. Pre-production is when you have something you want to do and then you're preparing to make it. So. I don't know, like I look at that and I'm like, I don't know, man, like I don't even know when this thing would have. Maybe after OD comes out probably next year or something, then like maybe everyone is all in on it and they get it done in three years or something that's possible. but I would imagine no sooner than 2030. And I think that that's ambitious. And that's why I say like, who even knows what Xbox looks like at that point?

2:17:23Dustin Furman:And I'm just totally confident that because he does, they do ask him, we'll come to PlayStation and Kojima says, quote, I don't know the answer to that. That would be a question for Xbox, but I don't know for sure. In previous updates from Xbox, I thought they had this kind of stance where they want to deliver to as many gamers as possible, no matter what the platform is. I think all of that will be announced at a later time. I'm not sure yet. I can't really say end quote. I mean, I think that kind of says it all. If you want me to be honest, you know, like his assumption is, yes, of course. And he knows his audience is on PlayStation.

2:17:53Dustin Furman:He just is looking for money. He's not a console warrior. I don't think he gives a shit. I just think he wants his game out there. I love Kojima. I'm rooting for him. I love Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2. I love Metal Gear. I even love Zone of the Enders.

2:18:14Dustin Furman:but I don't know maybe in a different time where Sony like where maybe the disc thing didn't happen and Sony was in a more strategically sound place with its core audience maybe something like this wouldn't have been such a huge deal and I also think that it was made into a much bigger deal because the cancellation was announced and Xbox's publishing rights for it were announced at the same time so i think it's a complete shock for a lot of people and i'll just reiterate that i just don't think sony even considered xbox and when you when you when you think about it's like why not they're already making a game with them and they want your scalp you know like yeah because i i just the game is going to be so expensive and it's going to be so ambitious with all the TV and anime and all the shit they want to do with it.

2:19:07Dustin Furman:There's just... I just think people that are worrying about it not coming to PlayStation are worrying about things for the wrong reason. What you really should be worrying about is whether this project really does see the light of day at all. Because if it does, you'll play it on PS6. But if it doesn't, I wouldn't be surprised. And they're not going to cancel it this year or next year, but I wonder. I'm also curious what happens with OD. yeah that's been kind of in the dark for a while they're certainly in no rush over there i'll say that all right hey gene if you're listening good reporting yeah i was curious what you guys know about this our friends at video games chronicle wrote about this the last of us director apologizes to god of war allow fay team for citing it while saying triple experiences are boring.

2:19:59Dustin Furman:They write quote, Bruce Straley was that naughty dog for 18 years, during which time he served as game director on the last of us. And it's left behind DLC as well as co-art director on Uncharted and game director on Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 4. In a recent interview with Edge magazine, Straley gave his thoughts on the state of AAA games, saying he struggled to get enthusiastic about why they were off what they were offering these days. Now, this actually happened before last week's episode, but I didn't include it because I was like, like, it's it's fine. You You know, it's not something really necessarily worth reporting on.

2:20:26Dustin Furman:But this is what he told Edge at the time. He said, quote, I think the verbs and experiences we're delivering in the AAA space are, I want to say, boring, end quote. And then he continued, quote, God of War Laofay, I look at that game and every pixel is mind blowing. The amount of work and skill that's gone into every single frame. I've made those kinds of games and I'm still blown away. But when I actually look at what you're doing in the game, I'm not excited. And that's nothing against the God of War team. just across the board in AAA, it feels like there's no opportunity to inject fresh, innovative ideas.

2:20:57Dustin Furman:So he ended up, this ended up being circulated. This is another good reason why no one does interviews anymore. Although maybe he, maybe put his foot in his mouth a little bit. I don't know, you know. I feel like he didn't really say anything out of turn, but he wrote this multiple post thread on Twitter and he said, quote, I want to apologize to the Laofay team for dragging you all into this uninvited and unnecessary negative attention. I was trying to illustrate an industry concern and my mistake of naming your game is being used out of context for clickbait. You don't need this. I'm sorry. A journal asked me about the state of the industry.

2:21:34Dustin Furman:I mentioned a few concerns, one being the lack of innovation and risks taken in the AAA space, though this isn't the team's fault. My fear is that our player base is getting tired of playing the same verbs for the last 20 years. My hypothesis, our medium is unique because players are doing a thing. There's a different psychological response than viewers who just watch a movie. This requires us creators to continue to push and create new experiences where we run the risk of diminishing players' dopamine. Half-Life 2 was released in 2004, Gears in 2006, Bioshock in 2007, Uncharted 2 in 2009, The Last of Us in 2013.

2:22:04Dustin Furman:I feel like those games and more set the modern AAA mold. Each felt like they were trying to create a new experience within AAA. This is only one side of my concern. Unfortunately, the platforms that need to bring stability have eroded the ability to innovate. The quest for games as a service and wanting to create the next Overwatch, Fortnite, Roblox, etc. is not a viable strategy and frankly shows these industry leaders don't know their own brand. Hot take. There's a lack of good leadership, clear direction and conviction from the people at the top in charge of the money. Money equals stability.

2:22:31Dustin Furman:I believe if they understand their brand, they could have honest, inspiring conversations with creators to steer our medium to innovate. Anyway, blah, blah, blah. I have thoughts about what's wrong and the possible serious harm done to our industry and how we might be able to fix it but in trying to have a thoughtful conversation i stuck my foot in my mouth and mentioned lao fei and that was my mistake finn for now end quote if anything i'm glad that it kind of blew up because we got some more out of him about what he was simply meaning but chris i wonder did he have anything to apologize about to begin with he's not at sony first party we don't really know what happened between him and naughty dog but it seems somewhat acrimonious um yeah they basically don't even mention him anymore he was an incredibly important person there.

2:23:10Dustin Furman:I mean, arguably just as important as Amy Hennig was in a lot of ways. And Uncharted felt the way it did a lot because of him. And he was the game director of The Last of Us. So a lot of what you love about playing The Last of Us was him. But yeah, that was a long time ago. Right. I just don't know if he had anything to really apologize about. I think everyone kind of understood what he meant. What do you think? Yeah, I kind of don't think so either. I would imagine. I would imagine a lot of people on these teams know that this is true. You know, I would imagine that many people making these games, especially if you're making the same game for five straight years and it's a sequel to another thing that took five years to make and you're just kind of in this thing over and over again.

2:23:54Yeah, you're going to notice that the verbs, as he puts it, are similar and they've been similar for a while. I'm very sensitive to this because I'm bored very easily. I'm like a very fickle player. like if if I feel like I've seen and done something a million times not even a million times I feel like I've seen and done something like three four times I'm like I'm kind of like all right I get it that was kind of with me I played I tried playing a little bit um I guess this would have been last week and I wasn't I wasn't here but I tried playing a bit of a plague tale the new plague tale game and I was playing and I was like yeah I've played this I've played this many times and I think I'm just good and a lot of the triple a mold especially in Sony first party actually is you know I it's it's an early gag at this point like even on the show I think I was talking about the the over the over the shoulder you know the same like a third person over the shoulder sad dad kind of game it's just like hey all right sad mom now I guess but like where we've been here a lot and even if things look cool by the way things look can look great things can look polished um and way better than anything we've seen but like the the foundations of what you're doing are identical to what we've been doing for a while now and in some cases are even less robust than they used to be and i think that the people at these studios making these experiences know that but are hoping that they can make up for it with narrative or fidelity or any number of great kind of set piece moments that might make you think that that's not what's happening.

2:25:43Because games at their core are repetition over and over again. There's no more repetitious art form, really. It's the same thing over and over again, repeated in different ways and in different orders for like tens tens of hours sometimes hundreds destiny is shooting heads you know and you could do that for 1700 hours because there's a lot of great art and there's a lot of great narrative and characters and all this stuff distracting you from the fact that it is repetitive but like it's becoming a lot harder to distract yourself from that now especially when everything looks great and so there's no real visual standouts anymore either there they could there could at least be like that graphical showcase but now everything looks fantastic i i haven't i can't remember the last game that i played that i thought looked like oh man well that's not exactly true we'll get to do it later but i will get to do it a little bit later maybe actually i just realized but you know on average just like the yeah i i i don't think he had anything to apologize for i would bet most people that were that say they were offended by this probably agree with it on

2:26:49Dustin Furman:some level yeah they know right they know what they're making i think you know i wrote my notes here to remember to say it it's like i felt that i will talk about wolverine in a little while but sony grass it's like i bring this up all the time because i'm like wow it really is in everything like this idea of hiding in the grass and stealth killing and then i try to like back up and i'm like okay like i like it it goes into like the idea of like the order in which you play the games as opposed to the order in which they're made kind of thing 100 you know 100 like if pizza is never going to be as good as the first time but you know what i mean as you've experienced it's always that's always going to hold something special um and it doesn't mean it's bad or whatever but it does mean it it is indicative of like i don't know it's just like all right we're doing this again like is there in is there no other way because really i haven't seen many other ways that's what's crazy it's not just that the sony grass is everywhere it's just that like there's there's been no attempt in my mind or in my memory i'm sure maybe there's something that like maybe is is a little bit more innovative but there's been no attempt to maybe play with that a little bit Right.

2:28:06You know, and yeah, it's becoming. A little bit much. Not bad, necessarily, but much.

2:28:18Dustin Furman:I wonder what you think of this, Dustin, I'll kick it over to you, but you can say whatever you want. But I want to get Kyle Network administrator in here. He says, gentlemen, any thoughts on Bruce Straley's comments about boring AAA games? Apparently he apologized for bringing up Laofay. I think Bruce is not wrong and I love how messy he is. If he thinks your game sucks, he will tell you. after this story there's no doubt in my mind he is the one who killed amy's uncharted yeah i should that story be true and i have no insight into that at all um i'd believe it yeah i think i think a lot of people blame neil because he's just there still but right yeah i think bruce maybe is the less diplomatic of the two but i don't know yeah i don't know

2:29:02Colin Moriarty:that I don't think that anything he said was incorrect, but I can understand that when you say something like that, that's like, oh, there's a little bit of drama that we can, that press and people or whatever can use their advantage. Bruce Straley says God of War Lao Fae implies God of War Lao Fae is boring. That's a headline.

2:29:29Dustin Furman:Yeah, definitely. I mean, definitely.

2:29:29Colin Moriarty:And the thing is, people don't, it sadly the context to many does not matter they could just see that he said that in a tweet and be like haha yeah fuck those guys you know and so i can i can understand his apology that he's like yeah you know what i could have made my point without putting the focus on one particular game just as effectively. So did he need to apologize? I can understand being in his position to be like, man, I put some heat on people that probably didn't deserve it. And I want to apologize for that. And I think that's totally fair. Because I think it's clear that he's not apologizing for what he meant.

2:30:14Colin Moriarty:Right. He went and explained it. Right. Right. So I think that was a very admirable thing for him to do. And I wouldn't give him any shit personally for apologizing

2:30:22Dustin Furman:in that way. It's also important to remember that there is probably a personal angle to it too. Naughty Dog is a Santa Monica based studio. Santa Monica studio is a Santa Monica based studio. He probably knows many people there and he doesn't want to insult them. You know? Yeah, sure. Yeah. I don't know if his new team is in Santa Monica. I assume it is. So yeah, just from a business standpoint, you don't, that's like your pool of people. There should be a little, there should be a little bit more awareness about like how interviews work. That, that I think is valid, but. I agree. I think part of me is like, this is what I said earlier.

2:31:00Dustin Furman:It's like, this is why people don't give interviews. But at the same time, it's like, yeah, you said it. So you got to kind of own that as well. But yeah, I think this is kind of the perfect marriage of accountability and standing behind what you said and explaining it and actually giving us more insight into what I think. I have a very difficult time squaring the admitted sameness of many games with the small things that differentiate them like what differentiates resident evil requiem from something that does something like it like a lower budget or worse horror game like that game is a very recognizable survival horror game and yet it is excellent you know and it's i don't know so like i i i like the same old thing the thing that bothered this doesn't bother me but the thing i'm trying to figure out too is and this is true for the three of us and many people that listen to the show as well is like we play a lot of games so the more you play the more likely it is you're going to encounter the same shit right as opposed to the fewer games you play you're you're going to get inherently fresher experiences i just don't know if the argument about things being the same really resonates because people are simply not ingesting this many games and so if you have 10 survival horror games that all feel the same the person might not know if he only plays one or two of them and it doesn't matter that is true that's that's true and valid but it is also like i mean like if who else is going to talk about games if not the people who play a lot of right you know like it's it's kind of it's kind of built into the very framework of how this works it's like yeah people i would imagine that your average seven out of ten experience even your average six out of ten experience if you give that to somebody who doesn't play video games they're probably going to really like it they're probably going to think it's really interesting and really cool and really unique and they've not seen anything like it and so like they're going to appreciate it a lot more um than somebody who's experienced a ton of those but then that person who doesn't play video games is also then not going to talk about how great that experience was and he's not going to like they're not going to they're not going to do a review right they're not in charge of the conversation the conversation is skewed to a higher to a higher standard i think which might be hard to hear from i guess critical reception standpoint but like as long as their game sells well they shouldn't necessarily care about that right because like there are the whole point is to sell to as many people as possible and the majority of your audience will be that casual crowd who doesn't really play a lot of games and will ultimately be fine with whatever the fuck you you throw out in front of them you know yeah you're right there is a conundrum too you know what game came to mind for me chris because i was talking about resident evil was that alone in the dark reboot.

2:33:44Dustin Furman:And like that, I bet you that game is perfect. That studio went out of business. You know, that game is perfect for someone. Right. And I'm like, I was gonna say, I was like, I bet you that game is perfectly good. But the irony is, is that the people who would find it have already played a bunch of games that are better than it. And the person who doesn't play a lot of survival horror games is going to buy Resident Evil or Silent Hill, not alone in the dark. So they're never even going to know that they might have liked it. So there is a little bit of a conundrum based totally on the volume of games.

2:34:07The biggest example of that for me is like, I look at Pal World and i'm like this shit obviously sucks yeah i agree this this is so clearly i don't even think it's exaggerated to say this is easily like the worst game that i've seen in in modern context uh in the in the context of its success you know like fortnight's not for me but i get it yeah i mean i can i can appreciate like what people like about it oh iron giants shooting i don't know ariana grande yeah david lynch and ariana grande with a crossbow from evil dead or whatever like fine whatever cool it's neat yeah um or army of darkness i should say but yeah i i don't know i just think it's inherent it's an inherently complicated conversation to have because like the only people involved are going to be the people with the standards even though that's not necessarily the pool of what like the audience is so i mean wolverine's a great example like wolverine is going to satisfy a great many number of people more than it's going to disappoint but the people that's going to disappoint are going to know why

2:35:20Dustin Furman:it's disappointing to them yeah yeah you're right it's interesting yeah i appreciate his insight like

2:35:30Dustin Furman:there's almost like a spectrum of like how much you love or want to invest your time and ingest games that it's like i don't i like knowing what i like it's like going to the movies and be like i'm gonna see the new action film or i'm gonna i'm gonna see the new thriller it's like you just kind of like what you like and i don't really want them to reinvent the wheel but then when you see something that really does reinvent the wheel and feels truly special and profound like uh like pragmat is an example of that for me where i'm like this game is truly unique there's truly nothing like this it's like yeah i would have never asked for this and yet you delivered something that i like a lot more than what i would have asked for um right and and the thing that i think is lost on people is like those weird offshoots and those like weird innovations that do reinvent the wheel are other opportunities to get more of the same of that you know and then you have it happen again and then you get more of the same of that and then it's like it's it's a cycle like there's nothing wrong with more of the same it's just a matter of like more of the same usually comes with at some point something else and it does feel like it's been a long time since we've gotten something else truly yeah yeah it's well said it's well said i was so glad people bought pragmata enough to it's certainly gonna get a sequel and that that That to me makes me happy in and of itself.

2:36:49There's so many games that I wish we got more of the same of that we just don't. Where's my other Shadow of the Colossus, man? Like, that's like, for me, that's mine.

2:36:57Dustin Furman:I'm just like, why has no one ripped this off yet? Yeah, no, I've thought about that too with that game and a few others where it's like it's unrippable. It's unrippable in a way because it requires, so we always say about Cuphead and that's with the aesthetic, but it's like, it just requires such a specific touch that it's going to come off as ham-fisted and stupid because you're just not, you're not a Ueda and you're not going to be able to do it. That is true, but that is one of those things where it's just like, it's like Dante's Inferno with God of War. I remember Dante's Inferno came out and everybody was like, this is a God of War clone.

2:37:26I was like, yeah, it's awesome. You're like damning people. You're absolving people mid-combat. This is fucking sick. Yeah, it is God of War. That's fine. I would like more God of War. That's not God of War. I'm fine with it. So, yeah. I guess you get what you asked for because now we just have a bunch of bunch of fucking over the shoulder slow walk video games.

2:37:55Dustin Furman:Oh, man. Well, Bruce, we'll talk to you in another 10 years when you give another interview because I'm sure you're going to be quiet for a little while now. All right. A few more small pieces of news I wanted to bring up here. Our friend Genki, when he's not spoiling what's going on in Astro Bot, I'll never let it go, Dustin. He'll never let it go. Yeah, yeah, clearly. he wrote quote naoki hamaguchi says final fantasy 7 and this is on twitter by the way final fantasy 7 revelation will have an option at a certain point in the game to automatically raise your character's level to a recommended level to progress for those that only want to play the main story he says he got a lot of feedback from players only wanting to play the main story in rebirth and skip the side content that they were under leveled and struggled he said he wants players who want to skip the open world experience to have a similar linear story driven experience the final fantasy 7 remake so they will include an option that pops up at a certain point asking do you want to automatically raise the level to the recommended level he says players don't want to explore the open world and just want to play the main story can select the option to automatically adjust the level end quote uh this is a controversial thing he said this in an interview um with uh some japanese oh this was with ig in japan so that's where that comes from and it was translated by genki which we appreciate um dustin i gotta know what you think about this

2:39:07Colin Moriarty:yeah i have no problem with this um in fact i was thinking about this i'm like man this would actually be kind of sick for uh onimusha not with leveling but there are points where i'm like man i i feel like i need to do some of the open world stuff to like level up my armor and my sword and

2:39:23Dustin Furman:i don't want to yeah it's because you're a fake gamer it's just not no no no i'm just a different

2:39:30Colin Moriarty:gamer than you i know that's that's crazy that's crazy you're differently abled yeah so I really don't see an issue with this like I don't know we've talked about before with you know Dark Souls and how people want there to be an easy mode or something it's like no they designed it the way they wanted to and you might not like that and that's okay and for this he's like okay we got a lot of feedback that people didn't want to run around searching for chocobos or putting up cell phone antennas 5G and so they just kind of want to play the story so let's let them do that

2:40:11Dustin Furman:yeah yeah i chris you have any i mean you're not a final fantasy person but i mean i'm totally i'm totally on board with this i'm 100 the the the overworld stuff it's like that's cool for like i always think that stuff especially in a game that's just not i mean final fantasy 7 remit uh final fantasy 7 originally it's like that's a very specific kind of game it's not designed And that wasn't an open world game initially. Or at least in the way that modern context would describe an open world game. So, like, I mean, if people just want the experience of Final Fantasy VII, it would be nice to just have the option, especially on, like, replays and stuff, to just skip some of the tedium.

2:40:51Or not the tedium, but, like, just the extra stuff that is clearly not moving the primary story forward. there's a lot of games where like i feel like that would benefit from this because exploration should be a choice not like it shouldn't be compulsory the world should should naturally call you to do to to fuck around with it and explore and and want to see it and if it fails to do that then it's failed to do its job but then you can't be like well we're not we're going to gate your progress until you do this stuff because now i now not only do i not want to do it now i'm now i'm like resentful of it so now it's kind of even worse whereas if you just gave me the option i probably would be a lot more um willing to check it out honestly just knowing that i have the option is a good thing but i get on a principle level like hearing that hearing that phrase like oh do you want to raise the level to the recommended level i get why that in a vacuum would be an irritating thing to read but i think in the context of what this is and what rebirth was now i'm i'm far more likely to play this game now that i know that that's in there or at least that that's something that was discussed yeah were you gonna say something doesn't well yeah i wanted to

2:42:05Colin Moriarty:clarify a little bit in that i think part of the problem too and i get final fantasy uh 16 is a different game but i think part of the problem too with maybe final fantasy modern final fantasy is that it's like i can't stand that cert the quality of side content is so varied sometimes when i think of 16 i did a bunch of the side quests and i was like man this feels like a waste of my time and then i think there were people that are like no but there's this side quest at the end of the game that's so important and i'm like well the game taught me that the side quests were boring so that's why i stopped doing them in final fantasy 7 rebirth there were some side quests that I think were awesome and worth doing.

2:42:54Colin Moriarty:But at the same time too, like can you only do the meaningful side quests and still be leveled up enough to proceed in the game? I don't know. So I do feel like if you were to just mainline Final Fantasy VII Revelations, I'm guessing that probably you're going to get an overall lesser experience because some of these side quests do really enrich the experience. So... I don't know where I'm going with this at this point. Other than I feel like it's good, but I wouldn't recommend it's like just mainlining it through it. Like there has to be a mix. Ultimately. I think what Chris said though, is that it's like, it is kind of a problem that you're making the content that now you're giving the people the option to skip.

2:43:44Colin Moriarty:Like it says something about the quality of the side content. Yeah. Yeah, it could.

2:43:48Dustin Furman:Yeah. I mean, I think that that's a reasonable read of it. I think it, I think this says a lot more. I mean, this is an interesting one to me because I fundamentally don't have a problem with it either. Usually we even talk about things like trophies and stuff, but it's like you can't possibly get all the trophies if you're skipping the content. So like there's no there's no real way to even break the metagame, you know, and plus the Final Fantasy games are now giving you a way to just play through the game really easily anyway. So and get the trophy. So there's no saying to do that. It's inherently a single player game.

2:44:17Dustin Furman:So you're not like it would obviously be a problem if it was affecting other people, but it's affecting you and your experience. I think the bigger question that I have is what does this say about Final Fantasy's fan base? What does this say about how Square Enix perceives Final Fantasy VII's cultural relevance? Because it's obviously a more mainstream product that is attracting people that might not play games or have the time or inclination to play the game all the way through. And I'm interested in that because it actually all began with what I just said, which was that they released those easier modes for Final Fantasy 7 remake and rebirth where it's like you can kind of just blaze through the game I get that and I think that will be a fun way to experience it again and I'm going to do that I said that earlier is like it would be a cool way to just play through them and not have to to leisurely sit through everything but at the same time I don't really understand why you'd even bother playing a game like this like that and by the way the big thing and someone wrote about that wrote this in the in like as a response to Genki he said why pay why pay a hundred dollars for a game to hold your hand when you can just watch the movie for free on YouTube.

2:45:21Dustin Furman:And that's the bigger thing to me is like, you don't really want to play it. So just go watch it. Why are you even buying it? That's the bigger conundrum to me is like, if you're just running through the main campaign, leveling your character up automatically because you're not playing it enough and you're not doing the combat enough, you're more invested in things that have nothing to do with playing the game. And you live in a world where you could just go watch it. I'm not saying you're wrong for another word for buying it and playing it that's awesome support square enix i'm just more considering the question of like why you know just go watch the fucking cut scenes give it five minutes someone will play through the entire game and upload it to youtube and then you can skip around to your heart's content and then you don't even have and then so in a way it's like it's kind of a wise move from square enix to encourage people that would otherwise maybe be on the fence about how they would interact with final fantasy 7 revelation to say like yeah we're gonna we're gonna lower the barrier to entry to the nth degree like to to an almost comical degree and i have no problem with it as long as we understand that when the shoe's on the other foot it's like the other the other way is also okay to say it really should be up to the developer and publisher with no standard and what they think is best and we bring up elden ring all the time like the elden ring is so huge that the most trivial thing for them to do would make it easier and yet it was attractive because they were intractable and uh would i would i prefer an intractable square enix i guess but it really doesn't affect me to be upset about this is to be upset on someone else's behalf because i don't have to play it like that and i'm not going to you know what i mean right so what do i care but i do like the argument you guys made about how like it says something about the game if you're just letting people skip it but i don't know if that's i think that's an unfair interpretation but i don't think it's that i think it's they know who their audience is and it's more casual than you think they they have all the numbers right like all the data about how people play and how they skip around and if they skip cut scenes and if they do this or if they're playing this side quest or if they do this thing a gold saucer or whatever and they're reacting to it and i don't think it's necessarily a bad thing i just uh i wonder well there's all and this is also in addition to

2:47:37Colin Moriarty:the thing where you can fast not skip but you can make the cut scenes go at like double speed

2:47:42Dustin Furman:it's remember that yeah yeah exactly and it's it's brain rod-esque i get it yeah it definitely is and you and you don't want to see i think the one thing that's disappointing about it if there's anything that you can say it's disappointing about it is that i really do think the final fantasy 7 the two i don't want to speak for revelation we haven't played it but the first two Final Fantasy 7 remake games are masterpieces in my opinion. They're fucking excellent. And why are you undercutting them? Just continue the way you were doing things. But I think they're just nibbling around the edges and trying to extract some value and margin from people that otherwise wouldn't invest in the product.

2:48:18Dustin Furman:And I don't blame them. Again, if this was a multiplayer game or it somehow hurt me, I guess that would be different. But it's not. By the way, the other thing I wanted to bring up here real quick is this comes from a Japanese a Japanese post from the game director in his Japanese account. He says, quote, on PS5 Pro by leveraging PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, PSSR, we have implemented a mode that will deliver both 4K image quality and 60 frame gameplay. What do you think of that, Dustin?

2:48:46Colin Moriarty:Yeah, that sounds great. I mean, Rebirth with PS5 Pro was like, it's one of the biggest upgrades of between PS5 and PS5 Pro. so like to see that pisser in action hell yeah

2:49:03Dustin Furman:alright guys I just thought this was funny this came from Video Games Chronicle they write Sega wanted to cancel the entire Sonic series but the first movie saved it said Sonic Team Head so I just wanted to read this real quick to you guys we don't have to linger on it I just thought it was funny tragic um Takashi Izuka is the Sonic Team Head and he gave an interview with the I don't know dot ph i guess that's the philippines so a filipino website one more game that game that video games chronicle translated and azuka said the following he said quote it has been 35 years which means it has been longer than actually my children so i look up on the franchise sort of like my own son there has been good times and there has been bad times during the worst times i was told by the higher ups that we should cancel the entire franchise i had to fight within the organization to keep the franchise as long as possible and then he said that the Sonic movie which came out in 2020 basically saved it God we were close huh we were that close I know it really is so sad they fixed the Sonic movie and they saved it like if they didn't fix it it would have been the end if they released that like creepy uncanny version of Sonic remember that

2:50:22Colin Moriarty:oh yeah horrible so if they just stuck with that version it might have been over what did it what an

2:50:31Dustin Furman:incredible inflection point that's kind of a casual way he said it i'm like yeah that's interesting they want people at sega wanted sega wanted to kill sonic i mean who doesn't it's just like it yeah i mean that's fair i would i would murder him giving it what give it a chance yeah you know was that tweet about et where like if me and my friends ran into sonic the hedgehog we would hit him beat him to death with hammers yeah i just thought that was kind of an interesting and casual admittance that sega right before covid was looking to kind of scrap it and i wonder what that world looks like and i assume it would have been temporary like you reboot it later but yeah you move on because they have a lot of other big hits they're not really sonic dependent and really they haven't been sonic dependent in a long time but obviously it's their mascot and and buttress them so i just wanted to acknowledge that i thought that was funny yeah um lisa i don't know who that is i do i looked her up i was like she's like a k-pop star okay she got her own controller lisa cross playstation arrives this october first look Look at the DualSense wireless controller, Lisa limited edition and all new Lisa merchandise.

2:51:47Dustin Furman:They did tease this in a state of play, right? It was not the last state of play, but two states of play ago, I think, that they teased that this was coming. Listen, it's easy for me to make fun of this. I'm going to make fun of it a little bit, but because I don't know who this is, I'm like way too old for this. I'm not in the K-pop or anything like that. I have no problem with it. It's just not my kind of music. But the reality is, is that this is a huge move for multiple reasons and reading about her and how big, what is it black pink or whatever that band is that she's in or that group it's like this is a cool way to approach an east asian market and a female market so i don't hate it i don't know how it's gonna do it's not a bad looking controller it's got like her eyes and like eyelashes or whatever on the uh on the touchpad it's white it's got some whimsical little flourishes and then there's there are these um there's this merch line with like her eyes and the sacred symbols and a bunch of other stuff so i don't know i i don't i don't know anything about this i just feel like i have to acknowledge it uh october 2nd you can begin pre-ordering it on on playstation direct if you want it costs 85 bucks dustin are you getting your lisa controller i don't think so but i'm

2:52:59Colin Moriarty:inspired yeah should we make a merch like we can get an artist colin to draw your eyes and hairline right yeah and have it we can have you right out calling right that would be good big money maker i'm gonna have to ask my mom about this because she like she's a big bts fan but i don't know if she knows about this uh blackpink this young lady lisa so yeah lisa dual christ are you gonna

2:53:26Dustin Furman:get your lisa dual sense what's going on here i think i'm all right i think i'm set i think i'm yeah I already have too many controllers as it is yeah I have a lot as well I do I would like to get another one I keep saying that but I haven't committed yet I just want more options there used to be so many options during the PS1 and PS2 era like when DualShock came out and especially for PS2 DualShock and all the memory cards there just seemed to be I don't know there's more flavor at that point but these controllers are more expensive to make and they're probably more robust and sturdy maybe people don't need to buy as many people are also playing a lot of multiplayer games remotely.

2:54:04Dustin Furman:That's an interesting thing. You don't really need more than one controller. Most people don't play games locally. They play online and that requires other people to have their own consoles and controllers, obviously. Why isn't this loading? The final story. Can I get it to load? I don't know. Let me see here if I can get this.

2:54:29Dustin Furman:Okay. I'll just bring it up here. Dustin this one's for us although I don't know if you really care about this I just thought this was interesting news Lufia 1 and Lufia 2 are being re-released alright so Lufia 1 and 2 the Sinistrals saga has been announced by Taito they're going to be publishing these games alongside Clear River Games which is a European outfit that is also behind the Terranigma re-release of that other kind of Quintet Enix published role-playing game now Taito is a subsidiary of Square Enix and has been for 20 years and are you familiar with these games I wonder how valuable these games are for the Super Nintendo let's look it up I'll pull that up Lufia 1 and Lufia 2 Lufia and the Fortress of Doom was the original one and then Lufia 2 was Rise of the Sinistrals

2:55:23Colin Moriarty:okay for Super Nintendo a loose price for the cartridge 63 bucks which actually not that bad yeah i wonder how much how

2:55:34Dustin Furman:many of these they made um i was i was just really excited about this i wanted to acknowledge it lufia one and lufia two were made by a studio which is defunct now called neverland which is this japanese team they're best known for um the rune factory games that would come out later with Natsume and they went out of business at some point. Lufia and the Fortress of Doom came to SNES in 1993. Lufia 2 Rises to Sinestrals came out in 1996. And I remember that one because it came out like right before the N64 came out. I think like a couple of months before it was like a Nintendo power and everything.

2:56:09Dustin Furman:And the Lufia series was published by Taito, which was interesting because Taito is best known for like Space Invaders and Arkanoid and shit like that. So this was like a role-playing game that they actually localized and sent to the West. And when Square Enix bought Taito in 2005, they acquired the rights to these games. And there have been other Lufia games. So there was like Lufia The Legend Returns, which was a Game Boy Color game in 2001. There was the Lufia The Runes of Lore GBA game, which came out in 2002 or 2003. That was by a different studio actually called Atelier Double. And then there was a Lufia 2 remake called Curse of the Sinistrals that was on DS.

2:56:45Dustin Furman:and that was one of Neverland's final games before they went out of business. And they made Lufia 2 basically into an action role-playing game. The interesting connection I have with Neverland, though, is I bring this game up every once in a while, is Dagan and I were really obsessed with this Super Nintendo fighting game for Ron Mahath called Hard Battle, which must be a valuable game. They probably published five copies of that game in the West and Dagan had one of them. But they made that game. Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge this Lufia 1 and Lufia 2 re-release. It's a big deal for us, old school role-playing game.

2:57:15Dustin Furman:excuse me, fans and shout out to clear over games. I want to reach out to these guys at some point because they're doing a lot of really cool work, getting things back out.

2:57:24Colin Moriarty:Is this, so this is a game you had on super Nintendo, right? Yes. Did you happen to have the strategy guide for it? Did it come with it? Cause it came,

2:57:33Dustin Furman:I think it came with inserts. Like I, I recall maybe it's Lufia to Lufia one. Um, I think it came with like a Dragon Quest style like thing you opened with like the characters on it and stuff like that I think but I don't think I had a strategy guide for it I don't remember that the strategy

2:57:54Colin Moriarty:guide is the rarest piece in all of this stuff on price charting loose well with the poster recently sold for $1 ,300 the Lufia and the poster no the strategy guide with the

2:58:08Dustin Furman:poster I see I see I don't

2:58:10Colin Moriarty:know something about this guide is I don't remember

2:58:12Dustin Furman:this. Lufia 1 strategy guide. Oh, it's for Lufia 2. Oh, Lufia 2 strategy guide. Lufia 2 strategy guide.

2:58:22Colin Moriarty:Here. This is what it looked like.

2:58:29Colin Moriarty:It's like it looks it's like a blue and it's got the box in the corner. I don't remember this. The official player's guide.

2:58:38Dustin Furman:I have no memory of this person. I have no. I have no memory of this place.

2:58:46Dustin Furman:What I remember what I said, what I said, what I remember at Lufia 2 is that it was like.

2:58:53Did I?

2:58:54Dustin Furman:I might even bought Lufia 2 from Funkoland, which might explain that. It was right before N64. Like, I remember that because it was interesting to see the SNES games that were colliding with the N64. And SNES kept getting games because when I don't want it's not fucking punching up. But like when Nintendo 64 came out, it had two games. I don't know if people that weren't around realized that had two games for a while. So like there was nothing to buy. Like, I think Turok when Turok came out, I think was the fourth game or something like that. Like there was just, can you imagine launching a console with two games?

2:59:37Dustin Furman:So like the SNES, like it was necessary. I mean, we were on PS one at that point too, but PS one wasn't really ramping up for me until 97. That was like wild arms, final fantasy seven, Castlevania symphony of the night. And then I think even like prep of the rap of that fall and so on and so forth. So, um, yeah, lufia 2 though i'm trying to remember where we got that one from i don't really remember because that that was so that's such a late game where i might i might have bought it used i didn't buy used games until i was in like late middle school i i would sell some things but i didn't really like buying used games i still don't i even i never really liked buying these games i like the idea of having them but dagan was really like when we had ninja guide in one two and three on us on nes we bought those all used like dagan was a big proponent of buying used games and flipping them so that might have been one of those ones we did with because i don't remember that strategy guide at all i don't i have no memory of that and i feel like i would remember that because lufia one i remember came with like an insert um anyway it doesn't matter why are we talking about lufia like it fuck like we're spending like how many fucking minutes on this all right that's all we have for the news all right guys let's get into what we're playing um i will go first i platinumed wolverine he did i beat it over a four-day period i beat it over a four-day period it's a lot okay um so i've seen the entire game all the way through and uh i liked it a lot I gotta be honest um I don't I I talked a lot about about I mean I hadn't beaten it at the time but um I talked a lot of so people that watch sacred streaming I've talked about it there a little bit about my feelings on it I am confused to be pretty honest like I don't I went in cringing because I was like what did they do like what like the way people are talking about this game and I'm not talking about us here on the show or even in like media I'm talking about just the response this visceral anti-wolverine response to the game you know and I was like damn they must have fucked this thing up and I was waiting and waiting and waiting for like it to get bad and I just don't think it ever did I think I don't think I prefer the Spider-Man games they're much more Collins style open world check box side quest laden optionality game I like especially and I think all three of us agree like I think Spider-Man 1 is like borderline a masterpiece game based on think about like think don't think about like now but think about like when it came out and how amazingly pleasantly surprised everyone was and everyone's like this game's kind of fucking awesome and i loved it it's so fun to just play right to swing around it had some maybe masterpieces a little bit too much but you're swinging around and you're having a good time within it's it's quippy and quirky and interesting and colorful and you know I think Insomniac games especially in Spider-Man have gotten more derivative for people and I've liked all of them I thought Miles Morales was really good a little woke in some of the writing I think I agree with that but like whatever and then I like Spider-Man 2 a lot and Spider-Man 2 has sold almost 20 million copies so it's done very well but I it seems like people don't really like it I was like I like this game a lot I think I like those more than I like Wolverine but I think I like Wolverine and I'm a little confused about, like I said, about what is like wrong with it to the degree that people are taking the piss out of it so badly.

3:03:49Dustin Furman:I can see someone giving it a seven or 7.5 or something like that. Like, but the the crazy level of vitriol around it, I guess I just assumed that it would be rooted in some sort of reality. And frankly, it isn't. I mean, not not from my perspective. like i think the biggest shame about the game is that it is built on the bones of something else there was another game here and you can see it everywhere and i'm fascinated by that it was obviously going to be a hub-based open world like with multiple open worlds with side quests and things to do in a non-linear fashion as you moved from place to place and there was almost certainly going to be another playable character it seemed like too like i i i think some of that might even been the insomniac league that like jean gray might have been playable at some point and stuff and you can tell because there's so much work into making her interactive with combat and everything so i think the biggest shame is that there could have been something else here and something more maybe something better maybe something more on the line of what i think a spider-man game was and i don't mean another spider-man game i mean something of that quality sure but I also am like a little confused because everyone always says like they want tighter experiences that you're not like we're talking onimusha for instance where like it's like go do some side quests and fucking upgrade this and do that it's like yeah but like maybe I don't want to maybe I want to play like the original onimusha where it was just like I just I'm playing like a game I can be in a little while and I'm like Wolverine seems like it's catered more towards a casual and maybe that's why people, maybe more core people don't like it, but a more casual player that doesn't want to spend more than 15 hours with it at all, ever.

3:05:35Dustin Furman:And I'm like, that's cool with me. So I want all sorts of different kinds of games. It's, I think, a good looking game. It runs really well. The load times are insane. If you like go into the cabin and like go to old missions to find things you missed or anything, like it's just like so snappy and awesome. um but i think that there are some problems with it and it's what holds it back to like from true greatness for me it's like the movement it's not even i think the combat's awesome the movement is fucked up the way the camera deals with characters as you're interacting with people during combat is messed up there's a lack of readability in how you can climb up things and why you can do certain things and can't do other things like you can tell there's a lot of artificial barriers placed around these open world maps that they were making so there's a lot of things about it that bother me but i liked the story i thought the uh performances were really cool i'm a huge fan of i didn't i i paid so little attention to it that i and i don't really know much about it but i always loved that character mr sinister or whatever he was on like the cartoon in the 90s and i had an action figure of him with the little diamond the red diamond on his chest and shit and i didn't realize that that was like who that was because I don't know my comics.

3:06:52Dustin Furman:So it's like, oh, this is or whatever. And then eventually, like I started like looking at him and then the coffin stuff and I'm like, wait. And then I went and looked and I answered that question for myself on a Wikipedia page or something like that. That's not spoiling the game, is it? I don't think so. Maybe it is. I don't know. We've all we've all beaten it, right? So yeah, yeah. Is that the game that people knew that he was a bad guy? Maybe we should. I feel like if you if you don't comics, you know, it is kind of one of those. It is kind of one of those things where I didn't know, but I also I also just didn't give a shit which is kind of the problem I think Wolverine is like competently made I just think like for me I just like I just came away with it didn't make me care about the X-Men in the way that I think I mentioned that 007 made me care about 007 XYZ I just think it's like a little bit lacking there 007 is way better than this game I'll say that I mean there's no doubt about that yes they're different but but yeah i mean i don't know i i said earlier like i really do think that your average person will not have a problem with this you know it's it's going to be of a a reasonable amount of quality but and maybe it's just because i played ani musha like right around it too where i was just like this combat is like i don't know man i kind of feel like i'm mashing and there's something about it there's something about it that's not quite as fine as spider-man and i understand that it's a different character whatever but i mean like my claws don't like the claws don't do as much damage as you think they would do and and i i don't know it's it's it's fine but like i just did not like it it did not work for me at all yeah i understand i mean teach their own like to me the combat and i i had said this on sacred streaming it's like it it just feels like arkham combat like there's really nothing like a very gravitational right yeah very convenient you know what I mean like what I mean by that is like you're you're getting dragged towards enemies like you're not really directionally fighting you're reacting blocking things that are kind of like behind you and it's just predicated on that in my opinion yes it's it is Arkham combat but the the pre and I don't know how people feel about arkham combat but as somebody who likes batman arkham asylum and the arkham video games arkham combat is kind of a was like a term of endearment i guess because it's like it's referring to a combat system that is shallow but it is but is made up for by x x number of other things like batman just like flipping around the screen and pressing b to you know do the cape thing and and do a dodge like none of that is like inherently interesting what's interesting is that it's happening in in the context of like oh this is like a really well thought out world with characters that are really well acted in a story that is really well done with it's really about like the entire set because you can have a combat system that is like arkham's which is like kind of kind of like bare minute it's like fine like there's nothing really incredibly challenging about it.

3:10:09It's kind of rhythmic. So you kind of get into a loop of like, you know, but it's not deeply challenging. What makes it work is the setting and everything around it. Like why it's happening and like the way that everything looks and the way that everything flows. And, and the fact that Batman has gadgets and like these different things, he's got more opportunities. Spider-Man has gadgets as well. Wolverine is kind of like limited in that sense. It makes the repetitive Arkham stuff shine a little bit more when you know you can't do anything else. and there's no satisfying traversal to speak of so it's weaker on that and then the world isn't as fleshed out as the arkham games is so you don't really feel as rooted so there's a lot that kind of contributes to it but i agree that it is arkham combat and you could maybe make the argument that like well people aren't mean about arkham combat but i would argue that like people aren't mean about arkham combat because the rest of the game exists around it right the hard game combat by itself yeah sure dog shit like it well it just seems but like dark combat by itself is like not it's not really the star of the show if anything i agree with i agree with you i totally

3:11:14Dustin Furman:agree with that i i i want to be honest too i never played origins but all of the games are better way better than this game too i'm not i'm not i mean arkham asylum especially is like a favorite of mine and and i also have a huge affinity for batman but i also like the x-men Like I don't, you know, don't not like the X-Men. So I'll leave a lot of my thoughts for the Wolverine spoiler cast, which we're going to do in a review discussion where I can get more into like specifics that I think will let me outline things. But there are a few funny things I wanted to bring up to just Micah and I were talking about this because she watched me play a lot of it where it's like.

3:11:47Dustin Furman:It's really violent, which we knew from the from the the trailers and everything in the gameplay stuff. And I think that that's fine and that's cool. And they kind of explain it away. It's kind of human violence, but it's kind of like Android violence. I don't know. I'm not even bothered by any of that. what i'm more interested in is the violence perpetrated on wolverine and i don't it is interesting what the rules are around his like ability to heal himself and i think that it i didn't realize because again i'm not i'm totally speaking out of school because i'd never really read the comics i read some x-men comics when i was a kid but i don't really know this character and wolverine was not the character i was really into i liked a lot of the other guys it's like what are the rules here because it it is almost superman-esque in his ability to withstand damage wherein we were wondering mike and i were wondering i'm like so how do you kill him like do you have to obliterate him do you have to get him in the brain like there are things that happen to him that are so violent in this game that it is comical and it probably happens literally 20 times where like you're like what the fuck and it's like it almost comes off as like horror porn in a way it's weird like i like violence in video games i don't mind it but like it comes off as insane and then i all but i also understand that like if you're gonna have a wolverine game in high fidelity with those fucking claws protruding from his knuckles then people are getting stabbed and he's gonna get stabbed by samurais i like when he gets stabbed by the samurai sword and there's a move you can actually unlock where he takes it out and stabs like we'll take it out put it in someone else and whatever i just think there's a level of unintended humor in the game about how fucked up wolverine gets and uh i think it's i think it's funny and i don't think it's supposed to be so that's like that's one thing that i that i think is is true and another thing is i think there's part of me feels like the game could have even been shorter which is interesting but I feel like this would have been a I'm sorry I agree yeah like I feel like this would have been an interesting$40 game or a$50 game like a Miles Morales level and I know that that's not really going to square the books for them but like I don't really have a problem with the$70 price I guess but I it's easy for me to say in some way I suppose but I feel like I'm like there's no reason to play it again there's nothing and i have to assume they're going to expand it in either freeways or paid ways because there's just it's what i said at the top it's a shame that there is so much they built this really compelling world these these worlds are kind of awesome and you and you go around them and maybe you find a whiskey bottle here or a a container of components there but there's nothing really happening and i'm like damn i would have been so interested to see where you were going originally and the one advantage is that the game in my opinion almost comes off and i don't again i don't want to make it seem like it's a quality level but it comes off as uncharted like wherein there's a lot of moments that they're able to take advantage of because they're like well we have this huge space why don't we just fucking black cut right through it with something and have a little uncharted drake's fortune sequence and that happens often and i think it's kind of cool wherein those moments never happened in spider-man the reason that spider-man 2 intro was so notable was because it was a it was really the first time in the series there was like an actual moment like a thing that was happening in the open world you know yeah like right making the world the set piece as it were you know like that like going all over the burrows and stuff like that doesn't really happen in spider-man they often like send you inside or to like these isolated locations that are basically enemy arenas it feels very much like a stunt a stunted open world and that's fine because that's what it is but wolverine felt more like there was a cinematic quality to it that i really liked because it was because of its linearity because of its driven nature so do i think it's like the greatest game this year no not even close there are a bunch of games i would recommend you before i'd recommend wolverine but i do we we the three of us just disagree on this game i think it just in that and i know a lot of people are gonna be like colin's biased and he's a fanboy and all the rest it's like i i i'm just trying to be honest with you about like what what the easiest thing for me to do would be to tell you that it's you know yeah you're right yeah i i agree with you but i actually don't you know like i i think that i think it's the one thing that i think is interesting right we use or I don't say we, we,

3:16:43Dustin Furman:a lot of the community calibrates the feeling around these anchors and these markers that they feel like are reliable. And I think Steam reviews are one of those things where people are like, yeah, the person bought the game. There's a level of accountability to that. They leave a score, they leave a review. It's got some sort of value. The game, Wolverine has an extremely high user score on PlayStation. and so i think the people that are buying it and playing it are liking it maybe not a huge surprise since you're going to be more likely to have bought it maybe you pre-ordered it something like that but yeah i was surprised by that too because when i went i always look at the score and i like to score it myself after you know i like to leave reviews on playstation network because i feel like it kind of calibrates what you like so i gave it four stars and i looked and i'm like holy shit it's like a 4.75 with like 50 000 reviews and i'm like i don't know man there there There seems to be a bit of a bit of a disconnect.

3:17:35Dustin Furman:And that happens sometimes. Yeah, I think I don't know, because I got some people because I think somebody was asking me a question the other day on Instagram. I was like, what's your what was your least favorite game this year? And I said Wolverine because it was. And so he was like, it's sad to see you buy into the hate. It's like, guys. I played this before there was. Yeah, you you. Yeah, that's an interesting point. And that's kind of the thing where it's like, I think it's worth noting where it's like, it's like, man, I played, I played the game and the people who reviewed it, they're, they're really off base.

3:18:13And it's like, no, you just heard about what we complained about. We're prepared for it. played the game and realized that it didn't bother you as much as it bothered us. I went into that game expecting none of those issues. I was expecting like a Spider-Man quality game. Which I think even people who like Wolverine have to argue that it's like, that's not a Spider-Man quality. It's definitely not.

3:18:39Dustin Furman:I will freely admit that my expectations were not met. Like I thought Wolverine would be a strong game. and I don't think it's I would describe it as a necessarily strong it's like competent it's good it's like yeah it's good I think it's good I definitely think it's good it's like a it's a like a high quality middling game in my opinion like I think like in my opinion and I didn't expect it to be linear in the way that it was or hand-holding in the way that it was or I expected a little bit more combat variety I expected a little bit more movement variety I expected a number of more things than were there and so when I voice it and people hear about that and then they play the game and look for those things themselves and find that they're not bothered by by those things that's not me lying to you you know about my perspective on the game that's you preparing yourself and ultimately understanding that like oh this isn't as bad as i thought and you're probably gonna like it more because of that i actually wonder man i almost wonder like what it would be like if there were no reviews if it was just people just like going on base expectation all the time and everybody had to do it i wonder how people would feel about certain things because i do feel like reviews paint your paint your picture a little bit regardless well they set a baseline of expectation and you're either gonna and then you're either gonna come in above or below it or at it but

3:20:01Colin Moriarty:right yeah well and that's the thing about the reviews and chris what about what you and i say said about it because i think that our conclusion on that two episodes ago or whatever it was was that we were like it is fine it is a fine game and arguably you could especially in comparison to somniac's previous titles and maybe playstation studios in general you could say that it is the literal definition of mediocre of middling quality yeah literally yeah and i think we maybe we didn't say this I know I said this in my video that I was like I think there are people that will pick up this game and have a really great time with it but I think too that with the whole conversation around Wolverine and I don't think I didn't fully watch Skill Up's review but he really is at the epicenter of a lot of this so I don't know I know that he was very negative but regardless of what he said people clipped out his review and sort of use that to kind of curve the whole conversation around the game.

3:21:06Colin Moriarty:When in reality, the critical consensus was what?

3:21:11Dustin Furman:78? 76, I think at this point. 76? Yeah. Not good for Insomniac, but totally fine. Right. Right. Exactly.

3:21:20Colin Moriarty:That's where I would put it. The whole process around this game has been so funny because I think when on Sacred Symbols and in my video, I got some hate initially because people were like, you're being too nice to this game. and then after i came out people were like you were too mean to this game i'm like i don't know unfortunately like we you know with without we unfortunately recorded our episode after the reviews came out so we can't be like well we said this before the reviews came out we played it before the reviews came out but like chris and i had the general critical consensus on the game um i literally messaged or i was i was going i was typing when i finished the game i i went to go message skill up i wrote it in and i i wrote it in the in the little discord chat box and then i was like actually you know what i'm not gonna say anything only because i'm like i don't want to i don't know what the etiquette is i don't want to like taint somebody else's like i don't want to be another voice while they're trying to do their own thing but i wrote down like you know am i crazy or is this like bad like i really like i really didn't like it and i think i came away with it just being like yeah this is like middle it's like 76 is like exactly kind of where I think it would it would be right you know when I think of like the experiences I played this year and where some of the eights are and where the nines are like yeah I know we know like um using numbers and shit like but for the sake of convenience and conversation like yeah high 70s is like about where it where Wolverine is in the modern context yeah I don't

3:22:53Dustin Furman:even know if I disagree I think the bigger thing is is that I I feel like that what the verbiage around it is doesn't even meet the number and i i will say this and it's like i do believe this is that like i do think wolverine and again i don't know if the score reflects this but again the nomenclature that we're using or not we but the greater communities using to describe wolverine i think is affected by the way people feel about sony that i do believe potentially i think i think those things bleed yeah they like and and fluids mix i think that that happens all the time i frankly i think xbox has been victimized by that and i've talked about that right that i think like they actually don't get the benefit of the doubt ever that's why i'm really curious about gears because i think they're going to right because like now that now it's like the first time they're launching an exclusive game into a different universe where like it matters and i think they're going to benefit from that.

3:23:50Dustin Furman:I don't think it might change the number or even the text of the review, but rather the way people receive it. And I think that's the way, I think that from my perspective, I mean, I've been in this, I've been in the PlayStation ecosystem as a content creator for a long ass time. Like the feeling around Sony is not good. And I don't think Wolverine was going to be the game to bend the arc. If anything, it was going to bend the arc against Wolverine.

3:24:15Dustin Furman:So, so we'll see. I mean, that's, you can't quantify that. Yeah. So anyway, we'll have more Wolverine on Sacred Symbols Plus. So go check that out. Patreon.com slash Last Day Media. Please support us over there. We need you. Silent Hill Town Falls, the other game I'm playing. So I had beaten Wolverine the night of the 22nd to the 23rd. And I was like, well, all right, I can play Onimusha now, but Onimusha, I want a platinum that game. And apparently that's like a 70 hour platinum. So I'm like, that might go last, unfortunately, because I'm really excited about it. So I was like, all right, Silent Hill or Control.

3:24:48Dustin Furman:and I'm like, well, I really want to replay Control. I'm just going to play Silent Hill. So I pre-ordered it, downloaded it. Now it wasn't ready until midnight last night. So I was like, I love my house plants. So I was like, I was wait, we ate dinner. It was like nine o 'clock and I was like, all right, I'm going to burn three hours. And I like went and like replanted a bunch of house plants and just dicked around the house and did some preparation for the show and stuff like that. And then midnight comes and I start playing it. And I played it for about an hour. I was tired, so I didn't want to give it too much time.

3:25:14Dustin Furman:I'm going to get back to it tonight, but after Thursday night football. but um pretty cool really pretty ambient mechanically i'm digging it like the crt like the little portable tv you have and one of the things i really like it's it reminds it's like a it's like a subtle horror metal gear thing where like there's a system of with a pay phone where like you call numbers that you find and you like talk you can talk to different people or reach different things and one of them is like and like much like the codec like you save with like dialing a certain number and stuff and i'm like it's pretty cool um but i'm very early in it there are a few things i really want to compliment though early on it's like the ui is super neat like the there's almost like thought boxes like like your internal monologue appearing on the screen which is neat so like if you pull up a map like try to pull up a map in an area where you don't have a map yet it'll say like i don't have a map for this area on the screen kind of thing in front like first person um i know it's very combat dependent it's first person also which is interesting i i still don't know obviously how to feel about that but i'm pretty sure i'm right about this that it's only 40 bucks

3:26:34Colin Moriarty:uh yeah i just bought it um and i was like what oh yeah that delivered and so it was physical 40

3:26:40Dustin Furman:as well uh let me check because they're making dick on that my walmart i'll tell you that much

3:26:47Colin Moriarty:oh no my total my total and the delivery was free was 52 50 so maybe it's 50 anyway it's

3:26:56Dustin Furman:some sort of discount price and i was like i was surprised by that because i was like oh okay um a lot of replay value i was reading a little bit about it i don't think it's a spoiler it's very silent hill thing to have like multiple endings and stuff so there's a lot of reasons to replay it you can apparently beat it in a couple hours if you just run through it so it's not it's but it's very much a deliberative game just like silent hill especially silent hill 2 where you're just in these lonely places you're in like i'm in this one you're in a scottish town and you're just kind of poking around and i love that kind of shit just being in the space kind of frozen and be able to read letters and look at the environmental storytelling and see how people lived.

3:27:34Dustin Furman:But again, very preliminary, very early. I'll have much more to say about it. I'm sure I will have beaten it by the time we have we record next. So, yeah, Silent Hill Townfall early on with that. All right, Chris, let's go to you. You're playing Big Walk. This is the this is a phenomenon. It's on PlayStation Plus, I think, as well. Yeah. Extra. Yeah, I played a little bit of Big Walk. We're going to be playing more, I think, in I have a friend who's out of town. Right now that we've been playing a little bit of it. So we're going to pick it up when we get back. But yeah, I put, I think like maybe two hours into it with like some friends of mine.

3:28:12And it's cute. It's cute. I like it. I like there's a lot of. You have very distinct control over how you emote. Like you're each like there's. buttons that control like arms and like where they go and like so you can like gesture really effectively and there's a bunch of cool like clever puzzles it gets there's like a day of night cycle and it gets like really pitch dark so you need like to find glow balls and like flashlights otherwise and do the proximity chat is hilarious because it's like it's you have to be really close like it's kind of it's kind of wild how how quiet people get when they're genuinely like far away like you just have no hope you can easily get lost we gotta get a megaphone yeah we gotta get the megaphone and like i like the puzzles so far that we've only cleared we just cleared i think the tutorial island i think and we spent a couple hours just kind of dicking around and trying to figure out like getting all the different uh keys to i think the first puzzle is like you sure you have to build a key out of a out of a template and you go through to a bunch of different things and do a bunch of different puzzles you can stack what i like about is that you can grab shit out of people's hands and then just kick kick it like real far and it like feels appropriate like physics physics physics wise so it's fun i don't have a lot i don't have a ton to say about it because it's again two hours and and it's this is one of those games where you got to schedule and you know you got to make sure that people can play so i can't just pick it up whenever but i enjoy it i think i'll keep playing it once uh once the gang's back together it's a cute game i like it cool man did you get the ps plus version did you buy it i just bought it on steam because it was just i i kind of with those games i kind of just want to be at at at my computer with discord and stuff like we didn't use discord but just in case like you know it's It just seems more like a PC game to me.

3:30:15But yeah, so I bought it.

3:30:18Dustin Furman:Dustin, let's go to you. You're playing Fire Emblem Fortunes Weave, which Micah played a little bit of. I watched her play, but she's been addicted to that Cold Stepped game, so I don't know what's going on with her.

3:30:27Colin Moriarty:Cuckold.

3:30:28Dustin Furman:Cuckold Saga?

3:30:29Colin Moriarty:Yeah, Cuckold Saga. Yeah, I heard Micah wasn't really into Fire Emblem.

3:30:35Dustin Furman:Or like what she played, she was... Yeah, which is weird because she usually likes them, but I think this one is different in some way

3:30:41Colin Moriarty:that she doesn't like or in certain ways yeah well my experience with fire emblem is simply from the switch era with three houses and engage i love three houses one of my favorite games on switch and i didn't really like engage but to my understanding engage was more traditional uh like older fire emblem games so um i from what i can tell fire emblem fortune weeds truly is the successor to three houses and i am digging it a lot it is kind of overwhelming actually the beginning of this game is crazy and uh went in a direction that i did not expect at all so nintendo did a good job keeping that out of the marketing i think i didn't see some of the later stuff but the cool thing about this game is that there are four distinct characters that you can play as uh and their journey in the heroic games and what's cool is that you play through their intro and then you can kind of hop around and experience these different characters all during this time period and uh it kind of has i don't want to just because a game has a clock and calendar system does not mean it's like persona three houses was more so like that because it took place in a school but there is you know this calendar system where basically it's like okay you have uh this is the day that you're going to compete in the games and so you have two weeks to figure out like what you want to do whether it's uh train up your characters go and do side quests uh explore the world map things like that and there are so many different ways that you can improve your characters and spend your time uh and this also this world map is huge and so i'm still feel like i'm i have a little anxiety i've calling anxiety actually because i'm like am i spending my time efficiently while i am playing why do you care the it's a little different persona because it's all it's more about your stats like am i making sure that i'm keeping myself leveled up properly am i wasting time by doing this so i'm just kind of feeling it out as i go oh you have to track your calendar you do dude i'm checking the calendar

3:33:15Colin Moriarty:um but yeah i like it a lot holly is also addicted to this game which is unfortunate because I had only one copy of the game. Oh, yeah.

3:33:23Dustin Furman:Well, that's gone now, I guess.

3:33:25Colin Moriarty:I corrected that. Someone, who was it in the last stand Discord? What was their name? Buffalo Trace posted in our Discord that he was selling his copy in our buy-sell channel for 50 bucks. Must not have hit for Buffalo Trace. So I said, I will take that. Cool. And he shipped it to me. Of course, I paid him. So we'll have two copies. And then because it's a physical game, guess what? When I don't need two copies anymore, I can sell it and get my money back. Beautiful thing. Beautiful thing. But I like it a lot. I think it's going to end up taking up a lot of my time. Also, last note, I'm surprised how dark this game is.

3:34:04Colin Moriarty:I'm playing as this girl that's a dancer that her dad was like a Viceroy or something like that who's brutally murdered in front of her. And so now she's like going full Ghost of Yote and has a list and she's murdering every person involved with the death of her dad love that uh so i'm i'm enjoying that a little little dark for nintendo yeah but cool it's good i i'm liking it a lot so uh we'll see as i i still feel like i'm very early into it uh but it's just a very very big game let me let me see here

3:34:43Dustin Furman:okay because you wrote it and i'm not making fun of you you wrote fire emblem colon fortune's weave but without the apostrophe and i was like is this some like is this some bullshit where it's like multiple fortunes weave you know like in other words like how do you how is this reading but it

3:34:57Colin Moriarty:actually is fortune apostrophe s oh okay yeah because i was like well it is multiple fortunes weaving together through the four characters well that's what i was saying like like fortunes weave

3:35:07Dustin Furman:it would be would be a noun right right like the fortunes weave right right it reminds me of i got caught up in this so bad when demon souls came out i'm like i hate i hate i yeah demon like a demon singular possessive souls i'm like okay but now it's just like we just know it but back back then i was like demon souls no one really says it right no they say people say demon souls it's easier to say that yeah but it's demons souls like you can't even say it

3:35:45Colin Moriarty:before we get into questions colin i just i saw a little bit of hyper specific colin breaking news i just sent it in the chat prepare to be sad

3:35:58Dustin Furman:oh really armed fantasia wild arms spiritual successor armed fantasia canceled by 505 games parent company

3:36:08Dustin Furman:weren't you weren't you like super pumped for this yeah i i i think i gave them like 100 bucks or something but you ain't getting that back yeah so you don't i've never had this happen to me

3:36:16Colin Moriarty:before so i'm out i don't know i mean it seems like this is just really fresh like someone found this wait i didn't get to read the article because i just saw it come up and i'm like oh no that's

3:36:28Dustin Furman:that's colin because they they they did put it up with penny blood which was another kind of thing they were trying to do and i know that that game ran into some substantial trouble um that's disappointing i i don't care about the money i mean i would say well i wonder how much did i arm fantasia and so let me see how much i gave it i don't know if i'm going to be able to find out

3:36:53Colin Moriarty:um that's always so interesting with i mean that's the risk of a kickstarter is that i always find it funny people are like oh they i'm sure there are kickstarters where people get you know it's a fake thing but yeah that's the first time that that's ever happened to me

3:37:10Dustin Furman:let me see I gave them 11 ,000 yen so that's

3:37:18Dustin Furman:what 100 bucks I guess

3:37:20Colin Moriarty:11 ,000 yen to USD is $69 oh okay that's not so bad

3:37:23Dustin Furman:wow it's bad at this point really bad so yeah I guess I got like the special maybe like one of the normal games or one of the little special editions but I've not sponsored but I've

3:37:39Dustin Furman:oh no I got this one so I can say got it right so I've I've supported a bunch of things well not a bunch of things I've supported seven things and that's the first one that's fallen through one of them hasn't well two of them are still on the way to be delivered so and I this ironically so this is where you gotta stick with your gun stick by your gun sometimes because I made fun of kickstarter so much for for game development specifically and had such a huge problem with it because I felt like it was weird. But I can't. I got over it as time went on. But I never gave any money to one. And then the first one I give money to, I lose my money.

3:38:17Dustin Furman:The first one, OK, you guys are like, OK, you're right. You're right. This is good. Yeah. How hard is it to remake Wild Arms? Are you fucking kidding me? Jesus Christ. All right. Let's get into listener inquiries and wrap this show up. Six questions, comments, concerns, thoughts, and ideas from the audience over on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Last Day Media, where you can support us at all sorts of different levels. But at certain levels, you get to submit your inquiries to the show on the threads in the newsfeed each week. They go live on Wednesdays and are deleted Thursdays. And you've heard them throughout the show.

3:38:52Here are six more, beginning with Daddy Diwali says, hey, guys, Colin, when Xbox acquired

3:38:58Dustin Furman:ABK, you said the best thing Xbox could do would be to put ABK management in charge of everything. Well, it looks like Asha agrees with you. Halo is now under Activision, Obsidian is under Bethesda, and Playground, The Coalition, Mojang, and Exile are basically the remaining studios outside of the ABK Bethesda structure. What do you guys think about these moves and this apparent Xbox reset? I'm seeing a lot of negativity around Halo moving under Activision, but frankly, I see these changes as smart and, more importantly, necessary. Xbox clearly needed a different management structure, and this feels like an acknowledgement that the old way wasn't working.

3:39:28Dustin Furman:Obviously, I'd love to hear Chris's thoughts on Halo specifically and what old dusty sheets Furman thinks about the broader restructuring to. As always, stand down and hashtag see you online. Thanks for writing in. Good to hear from you as always. I think some people are not going to like my thoughts on this. But

3:39:50Dustin Furman:it appears to me that there is at least some semblance of reality and this comports with reporting earlier in the summer from reliable sources that Microsoft is open to selling pieces of the company, whether it's Xbox itself or the publishers.

3:40:12Dustin Furman:It seems to me that they are relinquished. They are slowly peeling off the studio structure around Xbox itself to make it one of the pillars that would potentially be available and maybe one that they wouldn't even mind unloading if they look at Bethesda and Activision and Mojang as the other three kind of pieces of the structure that are all kind of software developers and they fit much more into Microsoft's normal culture. I don't, I don't think there's no, there's no, it's not a coincidence that the only studios that remain on Xbox's structure are the ones that haven't launched yet. And I will be interested to see what happens when Coalition will release gear soon.

3:40:51Dustin Furman:and then um i guess fable will come out next playground and then clockwork will come out after that and those are the last three and that would be with an exile the last one and i assume they will be distributed maybe even i don't know if you want to do it one at a time because it's obviously going to then telegraph to the other studios this is going to happen to you too but maybe like once the third game comes out i imagine an exile goes to bethesda that makes a lot of sense um playground probably goes to activision and i don't know the coalition i don't i don't know what's gonna happen with them because they've already laid off people from the studio before the game even came out so um and if gears isn't well received commercially they might just go out of business i don't i don't really know but i think that new gears game will be good i think the bigger question is whether anyone's going to give a shit um so we'll find out there but it seems to like there's no doubt that there's there's a bunch of different reasons why you would do something like this.

3:41:44Dustin Furman:And of course, Obsidian makes sense with Bethesda. A smart outfit would have done that years ago. And a smart outfit would have had the making Fallout years ago. Right. So to me, they're fracturing the Xbox game studio structure, distributing the studios where they make sense. By the way, I think Halo makes a lot of sense at Activision. And I think that's going to be good for it. It's going to be years before you see anything out of it. But he's right. You know, when he wrote in, he's like, I was saying this from the beginning and they finally did get there. Like the real game heft in Microsoft's family is Activision, not Xbox.

3:42:18Dustin Furman:Activision is the one that ships games. Activision is the one that demands all the money. Activision is the one that has big hit product. And so giving them stuff like Rare and Sea of Thieves, that's good for them. You know, it'll allow them to mature that they know how to do that. And Bethesda being much more story driven, single player driven, generally speaking, even putting um i think they sent like microsoft game microsoft has its own small gaming like casual gaming vertical they gave that to king um they put uh what's that what's the um world's edge which makes like the strategy games they go to blizzard um so all this makes a lot of sense and i think it gets a lot of a lot a little rid of a lot of bureaucracy and middle management and things that they don't really need between all these products and it's gonna make for better games.

3:43:05Dustin Furman:I think the bigger question is, what does this mean for what they're trying to do? And to me, I think it means that they are squaring these things off to see who might be interested in this. And I'm not saying they're going to sell or they even want to necessarily sell, but at least people will approach them and they'll have more cohesive packages. Remember, Xbox is not run as a subsidiary. Sony runs PlayStation as a subsidiary. It's a totally different company. Xbox itself is integrated internally as part of Microsoft. Activision and Bethesda with ZeniMax remain separate. So sending things to them to make them more palatable.

3:43:47Dustin Furman:That's the way I see it. And then you have the you have the other side of the coin, of course, which is like, yeah, that it makes us kind of cleaner for acquisition if that's what if that's what comes up. But yeah, this will be better for us. It's better for our games. It's cheaper. It's it's more cogent so i have no problem with anything they did i just i i look at it and i'm like why are you doing this right other than for my conspiratorial reasons i guess where are you on this chris i don't know i think you're probably right i i think uh i think it just makes sense that these things go other places obsidian as a you know i know a lot of people are curious about how i feel about the halo at activision stuff and i saw a lot of people I've seen a lot of takes about like oh man you know what a what a disaster but I mean Halo's been in the gutter for like 15 years you know in comparison I shouldn't say in the gutter in comparison to the original run this isn't really what we want to keep doing you know 4 and 5 are competent good games they're like Wolverine games in my opinion they're like they're good but uh they could be a lot better and infinite i thought was was pretty great if if if not particularly compromised but that can't be the strategy and then and then campaign evolved was just kind of like man i don't know this this does not fill me with excitement for whatever halo studios is gonna is gonna be doing so activision taking halo to me is just like yeah hats off have fun do something with it anything i think it's a great home for it like i i know some people have a problem with it but i'm like i think this is like the best you could possibly ask for this you know yeah really they were basically killing it they were basically killing halo yeah this might be what they need it might be uh it might be a shot in the arm it might be cooler than anybody expected i i get the protectionism of it but at the same but at the same time like dude like it's been so long it's been like it's it halo's been not worth protecting for longer than it's been worth protecting at this point you know like as far as like a like a a heavy hitting like 10 out of 10 consistent hitter it's been a long time since those days so anything to shake it up i've been telling them to do like you know hacking slashes and tactics games and all this other weird shit for ages and if they're going to throw it over to Activision and have them do just a different take on it like I'm more curious about that than whatever it is Halo Studios was going to be doing because at the very least there's a prospect that it's going to be noticeably different and there's going to be a different culture there presumably I don't know if that's necessarily true but one would fucking hope yeah the you know the Halo the Halo studio stuff is they had their chance like this it's sad to see people lose their jobs but like they're not particularly a competent group you know like your your friend your marquee franchise needs to be treated better and you've done so badly with it it was kind of what we were making fun of with Sega and Sonic earlier where it's like you you mismanaged so bad that you basically almost killed it like the best this is the best chance you have now to revive it and what i understand from reporting is that like they're gonna just reboot it which i think is that's awesome yeah you know absolutely yeah yeah do that do it completely different everything new um no connection to the old stuff just and and it will allow halo to go away for a little while like because it's not gonna be ready till the 2030 so yeah but it's good that will be good for Halo and people will be excited about it again and and it'll be right in the nick of time I think Gears is kind of in a different trajectory where like they don't know what to really do with it because I know I know that because Mike is a mega Gears fan and you know she's annoyed that they won't continue the story but I'm like I wonder if they ever will you know like they might they might be trying to form this around like rebooting this as well and just kind of getting away from this other stuff they'll do it in a book yeah right they'll make you read some fucking comic book or some novel dustin where are you on this what are your feelings on everything going on with xbox anything stick out to you i feel like my biggest thoughts

3:48:07Colin Moriarty:are about the activision halo stuff and yeah i i totally agree with chris that it's like i feel like almost anywhere is up at this point and i think with asha what we've seen is that she's correctly looked around and been like hmm okay uh fallout is one of our biggest ips we have not had a new Fallout game since 2018 why is that the case why why would we have a hit tv show and there's no new Fallout game yeah I mean really like what people would consider a Fallout game too really it's more like 11 years right you know exactly so I think having her you know she's put, um, uh, why am I blanking?

3:48:53Colin Moriarty:Obsidian on fallout was a wise decision and moving them over to Beth, Bethesda just makes that even more concrete. And I think she looks at halo and is like, okay, well, we've had games from three, four, three slash halo studios, but not many and not very, uh, well received either. And if you look at Activision, I think there I can understand some worry that people are like oh they're going to make Halo like Call of Duty and I think you'll see some of that not necessarily in terms of gameplay but in how they're going to hopefully turn Halo into an actual successful live service game because they know what ropes in players and keeps them around for I mean in Call of Duty's case I mean at least for a year in some cases but people are still playing older Call of Duty games too even after the new one comes out uh and in their write-up they specifically said that they are there's a new team that's being put together not necessarily a new studio but a new team so i'm curious if i don't know i heard it saw something that maybe it's sledgehammer where they're putting together a team together to make a new halo game and i think the big point too is that she's looking at it like Activision knows how to release quality products every year.

3:50:22Colin Moriarty:And to be fair, not everyone thinks every Call of Duty game is a good one, but they come out consistently, they review well, and they sell.

3:50:31Dustin Furman:You know what? They've never missed a year like since between Call of Duty 2 and 3, I guess, or whatever that was, or 1 and 2. There's never been a year where the worst they did was just strip out a campaign once because it wasn't going to be ready in time.

3:50:44Colin Moriarty:well and modern warfare 3 was like a half-assed campaign with the same multiplayer but isn't it

3:50:51Dustin Furman:impressive i'm kind of just impressive by like they're like yeah we literally do launch there's no like pulling out oh there's no pulling and even they always they always launch and i think that

3:51:06Colin Moriarty:the worst thing that has happened is creative decisions such as the last black ops game did not resonate with people for a multitude of reasons. So I'm open to it and I'm very curious on what that's going to having new blood with Halo. And I think also the idea of rebooting it is absolutely necessary at this point because I don't think Halo Studios knew where they were going with it. They were obviously incompetent.

3:51:34Dustin Furman:That's my whole thing. I just don't feel like they had the comp. 3-4-3, it all started with them. And they're the same team. but it's it just from the outside i'm like this is so incompetent you know like why like where is this this would be so urgent you would think that like you would frame everything around this series and your treatment of it and even the show that came out like that no one likes it's like it just seems so half-assed that's why kind of the fizzing stuff with the cross media stuff i'm like yeah good luck but um i just i to me i i i get the moves they're making and i'm glad that they've embraced where the talent lies because i've long said that but that's obviously has an enormous amount of talent too but they obviously just kind of do whatever the fuck they want and i think that that era is over for them um but people looked at me like i was crazy when i during the during the ftc stuff where i'm like you would think that the xbox people not even the xbox people but the microsoft people would be smart enough to be like those guys have talent yeah why don't they run it and we and they kind of got there in the end they basically vertically integrated in that like all of their resources are getting integrated into activision or bethesda like that's why like the thing that if i were an xbox fan i'd be a little nervous just from the perspective of there will be no first true first party anymore you will have these other publishers now that will act i guess on accordance to their own on their own behalf but i imagine they're just going to be these multi-platform publishers and they're sending everyone to them as opposed to incorporating more into their structure which would indicate that they were really going to stick to their guns and continue beyond clockwork and they're probably also just waiting to see how these games do i i can tell you right now if you want to know but we can wait we can wait for it um so i think these are good moves because because again even if they're not for the purposes of consolidating and selling or at least making themselves saleable which i think a lot of it has to do with that and again that's based on you guys might remember that i think it was the publication the information released that earlier this summer that like sony or microsoft's totally open to it yeah um and i and i believe it so i think part of getting rid of some of the studios they got rid of was to streamline and then the things that made the most sense to them like obsidian is kind of like their insomniac you're obviously not going to let them go so you send them where they're more safe and where they're going to do things that make more sense but the bummer is i think from from xbox's perspective is that i just think it's it's way too late yeah like you're not making tchotchkes on a factory conveyor belt or something like that like these everything they're talking about here is five plus years away from from phyzzin to halo to all these other things.

3:54:19Dustin Furman:They're nowhere near being even real things. And so you're going to launch them into what environment and you're going to promise what in between. It's just not looking good from that perspective. It's just not. If they made these decisions, honest to Christ, if they integrated like this when they bought ABK and we're like, this is what we're doing. We're sending Halo to them. We're going to split up Xbox Game Studios and send them to the appropriate places and they're going to kind of run the gaming software side, they might be in a much different place now. Because even if the console wasn't, it was doing exactly the same, they could show now they would have things to release that would make more sense as opposed to promising something in the future.

3:55:01Dustin Furman:And I'm like, that's so far away, dude. Like, I don't think it's going to work out for you.

3:55:05Colin Moriarty:Do you think the problem was that Phil Spencer was just too nice?

3:55:09Dustin Furman:Maybe. He just believed too much. He was, I think he was married to a series of ideas. and I think I if to his credit I think he understood that there was no going back you know like the things they are doing or talking about now so like taking call of duty out of game pass was totally necessary but I'm not even sure he would have done that and then the idea that like games just are they're eventually gonna the rumors are they're just gonna change game pass to have no day one games anymore and or way fewer and none of their own and I think he understood it's like well that's the end that's not even a strategy that's literally just the end we've it's what i said this on the stream a lot of people are writing here me say this is like the problem with xbox's strategy i think at a grand level is they're asking for the antithesis of what they were presenting for many years and it's it comes off as unbalanced and i understand why audiences are not going to be receptive to it it doesn't really make any sense but it's what's necessary for them to make economic sense of the situation so like they were the entry level console xbox series s which constitutes a majority of xbox xbox series consoles sold is the cheapest weakest and most affordable entryway but the rumor is is that helix is going to be this like pc mega powered thing that's going to be substantially more powerful than ps6 it's going to be the most expensive machine right they got people involved in this like game pass value gaming you can't really blame people for not buying a la carte games why would you have the service of a thousand games available to you day one releases from this robust first party but then they're gonna be like wait never mind now you have to buy everything and it's like but what like you but you were just saying that so now we have to buy the most expensive hardware and then we have to buy the games but you just sold us the least expensive hardware on a subscription service and the in the 10 years in between because this goes back to the xbox one era of course we don't own we have no libraries we have no games we didn't buy anything we don't own anything so we've kind of fucked ourselves in a way too and i'm like yeah i mean but i think phil just thought that that was the strategy and as i've said ad nauseum i don't think he was necessarily wrong i think the execution which is awful yeah in a different world like that a gaming in a different world a gaming subscription could still work it's just like about the confluence of how you make that possible and how you get people there and they just they needed more people they it just flatlined and it flatlined maybe a third of the way to where they needed to be to probably even be sustainable in any way nonetheless make money so like it was and we again dude that the the fdc leaks were so devastating to them because we know what they were thinking we know exactly what they thought they were going to have at all these different times and they are off by crazy amounts remember i think it was 27 so next year they were like 100 million yeah it's like yeah right you are you are maybe at 25 million maybe probably less so i don't know so they're making the right moves but i don't think it's gonna i don't think it changes anything i i know people get tired of me saying this and saying like well you know the death by a thousand cuts at some points it changes something and i'm like no because certainly things that could happen that can change things but time is working against them have you ever even considered like what do they even have in development beyond what we know with all the teams that are gone you ever think you ever like sit and think really think about that it's like we kind of know the games that they have it's like fallout elder or scrolls probably something out of it at some point in the next five years another forts of horizon game rare will probably keep doing sea of thieves you'll get call of duty warcraft you know what i mean and that's not a that's not an unwise strategy to go to the big stuff but like what is going to be the interceding stuff that lets people wait patiently for by the way another future not unlike the one that was already promised and never came to fruition so i think my opinion hasn't really changed at all from six months ago when i said like i give like their their possibility of changing and becoming like a force again in like in the console hardware spaces to like somewhere in the single digits percentage i don't think that changes at all we'll see a bit of a side note but do you think with rare

3:59:44Colin Moriarty:going to activision i think see if these is the the obvious thought but activision knows a thing or two about reviving old ip yeah woody hawk and spyro spyro and crash yeah yeah could could this be i mean and rare is like i mean specifically banjo kazooie is what everyone's thinking yeah

4:00:05Dustin Furman:i mean that would be cool rare well there is there a wasn't someone making a banjo game no they're making a spyro or crash game uh toys from bob yeah it's a spyro game yeah um I actually don't hate rare being in with Activision like I to me that kind of works for me yeah I'm like yeah that's fine um they'll it's interesting because Everwild was canceled obviously so they really haven't made anything in a long time like they really are riding on Sea of Thieves and that's fine but eventually they're gonna have to do something I wonder if they do like a sequel is it so popular that you could just do it again or do you do something else or you go back to the single player routes, you try to have it both ways.

4:00:51Dustin Furman:I'm also curious about Blizzard. I know they announced a lot of stuff with like Starcraft and Diablo and Diablo, right? Diablo, which is coming so much quicker now for the first time, really. So I think they are just. I mean, it's fairly obvious. I mean, I don't think there's almost any disputing it. It's like they're just framing themselves around big franchises, which which is not unlike what Sony's doing. It goes into like the whole Studio Japan argument. And it's like, yeah, at both sides, you're doing this. They're retrenching into what works because it's too expensive to take risks anymore.

4:01:28Dustin Furman:And the games that are risky don't sell. It's, I mean, it's what Bruce Straley said. All right. Jeremy Jones wrote in and said, good morrow, gents. He said, good marrow. Good marrow. Actually. If everything is a battle for time and attention, do you think sony and microsoft messed up by adding apps like youtube and netflix to their consoles i catch myself getting caught up watching youtube for hours instead of playing games should they just go back that should they just go back to straight consoles no i don't think so in the time battle you watch i hate that i hate to have to like be granular but i think this is definitely true it's like if they know you're going to watch youtube they'd rather you watch it on playstation because then at least they get them a monthly active user or a daily active user Plus, maybe you cancel out and go and play a game as opposed to watching it on your phone or whatever.

4:02:20Dustin Furman:I actually think the exact opposite is true. I think it's not unlike what happened with PlayStation 2 and the DVD. And that was more of an analog thing, literally, based on discs. But the integration of Netflix, for instance, beginning with Xbox 360, which was exclusive to Xbox 360 for a long time, I think was a stroke of genius. because it understood where things were going and was like, we should just make it as easy as possible, as frictionless as possible. If you're going to spend your time doing this anyway, why not just be present on our platform? And you guys might remember, and this is so crazy to think about, but I don't think we even, because we're so used to having smart TVs, is that when Netflix went digital and these other things like Hulu came out and stuff like that, like you either had to watch it on your computer and the console was actually the only way you could really watch it on tv other than like running an hdmi cable it was actually like the unique kind of like selling point it was like you could just do it here um and i think so i think we kind of take that for granted in a way that like actually the ubiquity of the streaming services began not on smart tvs which didn't exist but on xbox 360 and later on PlayStation 3.

4:03:32Dustin Furman:And so it's kind of tradition. And I hate smart TVs. I use mine in my bedroom. But when I'm in my living room, I use my PlayStation 5 as my media player. Yeah, I do the same thing for everything. Yeah, so I don't know if you guys have anything you want to add, but I think this is actually smart and good. Yeah, I agree. Kristi Noem's dead dog wrote in from beyond the grave. said Secret Symbols crew if you could ask any PlayStation executive one question and they had to answer fully what would the question be that you would ask them and to whom keep fluffing that chicken why are you gay why are you gay I'd have to ask about Concord man yeah that would be my biggest question like why I don't know who I would ask I guess Hulst yeah he would be like what did you see here exactly that made you want to do this?

4:04:28Like, where's the Star Wars in this? I gotta know. It's interesting because, like,

4:04:36Dustin Furman:he is just not available to talk to. Like, you just don't see anyone really interviewing him. And when they do, it's like in this rare occasion, it's like very controlled because I think the questions are tough and the answers are going to be uncomfortable. So, yeah, speaking to Herman Hulse about anything would be fascinating. and I've never spoken to him as an executive role like the last time I ever spoke to him in person was like when he was still at gorilla so yeah my question I don't know same thing I don't know who

4:05:05Colin Moriarty:this would be too but like I want to know what are the games that were passed up on or even canceled in order to fund live service because certainly there has been yeah I do wonder that because

4:05:22Dustin Furman:remember there was interesting stuff that Jim Ryan said and I I we say this a lot but like I do take the fiduciary obligation stuff pretty literally because companies get in a lot of trouble so like when they speak I kind of do believe them maybe that's a little foolish but they did say in a in a when Jim was still there in a um in an earnings call I think that like it was new money remember like that in other words like they didn't they just in they ingested in an enormous amount of money from Sony to do this and that like it didn't technically cut into anything and I think that that's probably true and that's why it sucks because imagine that infusion of money being used fruitfully to the tune of billions just down the drain but maybe he's lying I mean maybe he was lying I don't know or I don't want to say lying but like obfuscating the reality that it's a little more complicated than that because that was a common question remember when they announced the 12 games as a service thing people were like well what about the single player games and he's like well their answer to that was like it's not affecting that at all and when you think about it it's like maybe that's true i mean we've gotten a fairly decent cadence of single player games not unlike what we were getting at that earlier in the generation like two to a year something like that so and again i think saros this is a we've beaten this dead horse but i i think saros just suggests that like there's no bulletproof like single first person single player or I'm sorry single first party single player games like they don't just sell by virtue of existing yeah clearly I am so fascinated by Saros like what is going on here it just seems like it just no one cared it's weird very weird different word different era than Returnal as far as like what I would ask I have no idea I think similar things to you I think I think Herman would be the most interesting person to talk to right now but it's just because we have the hardest questions for him and and the hardware is great it's the software that's the problem you know so like talking to nishino about services or something it's like who cares about any of that like really the the getting into the weeds about the quality or lack thereof and really just the lack of a cadence and a coherence from the first party i gotta say though guys like i feel this way about matt booty as well on the other side.

4:07:40Dustin Furman:It's like, you say this thing for years about how like the incompetence must come from somewhere and it does, it must come from somewhere. And the accountability has to rest somewhere but then like years go by and you're like, maybe the theory is that these guys are like the prevailing wisdom internally and are getting overruled and outvoted. Maybe that is the answer but I doubt it. Only one way to find out is talking to these people and they never talk. All right. Angry Michael Richards wrote in, uh-oh. says hey colin and crew i just want to point out that you guys still have not acknowledged that this month is the 30th anniversary of crash bandicoot the franchise and mascot is very important to the history of playstation and it just doesn't seem right that you are a playstation podcast and yet ignore the milestone thanks and keep being awesome i guess i just kind of missed it i we've said this before chris is really the crash guy on the show crash was a fun mascot but i didn't care about the games at all so i i have no affinity for that franchise so i think it probably should be a bigger deal isn't it a sign though chris of what sony's saying about fizzin and some other things it's like how did that work out you know like how did the whole crash thing work out for us right we were too stupid to own i think they were it's kind of interesting when you think about their insistence on that sort of thing at least until recently being rooted in that era for like beyond a shadow of the doubt when we're like why did we do this why don't we own this so yeah happy 30th anniversary to crash you have any words I didn't even realize this was happening I did not this completely skipped me and I'm a big crash guy yeah I don't know crash is interesting like that that fourth game was really good and really hard and really challenging and then and then that was it and maybe that's that's fine you know I don't need these things to stay around forever.

4:09:34In fact, I wish more things would go away. Yeah, go away and come back later.

4:09:39Dustin Furman:Yeah, come back later. Like when Uncharted inevitably comes back, it's going to feel so refreshing because it's already been 10 years. So even if it came out tomorrow, it's already been gone. It's been gone for a decade, you know? Right, exactly. But I think we're going to get more of that. We've said that we're just getting to get more of that by virtue of the fact that everything takes so long anyway. Like you don't even have to try to keep things away. You're just going to. Yeah. Dustin, you have anything

4:10:02Colin Moriarty:you want to say for crash crash bandicoot warped was my one of the two games that i first owned on my first playstation so very important game um i hope for the anniversary that they do a 60 fps patch for crash team racing they won't it'll be stuck at 30 fps forever it's so it's the worst thing about that game it's so it's tragic yeah it's a good game and it's just stuck like that I don't know why and no PC port either no PC port it's so strange it's such a fast game too I guess maybe that's it it's like so fast because it's an unreasonably fast car racer by by like Mario Kart standards anyway but yeah I don't know yeah I will I was talking about this the other day because I think Brad was playing the insane trilogy how disappointing was the insane trilogy very to me it wasn't fantastic the spyro trilogy was great yeah i like the spyro trilogy a lot but

4:11:05Dustin Furman:i played the spyro games i never even played crash so i had nothing to compare it to you know i like those were like rentals for me i had no affinity for it spyro was perfect so like yeah

4:11:14Colin Moriarty:the crash insane trilogy it's like all you need to do is make it feel exactly like the original and then give it new graphics and they're like ah but what if we made it so it was like a pill shape so he slipped off everything yeah he's got the unity great the unity pill thing going on which is such a bummer thank you thank you for that yeah they're still good but they're it's definitely worse uh than they than they used to be that spyro trilogy though was like that was really good shit i think yeah trefferoth wrote in said sup fellas i never got to call into sacred

4:11:50Dustin Furman:streaming and air my grievances like the bob head guy did for 20 minutes so i thought i'd give a shout a shot through a write-in. I wanted to take you to a task on something, take you to task on something I've heard you say many times. I disagree heavily with the sentiment. If you haven't played X by now, you don't get mad when someone spoils it for you. It's X years old. Really, it should be Y years old. Right? X is what you played in your mathematical equation. With a seemingly unending cascade of quality games releasing as well as the mountain of critical hit must plays over the period of 40 years, even the most enthusiast of gamers can't get to all of them.

4:12:22Dustin Furman:I just played Bioshock for the first time this year, which I know is near and dear to all of your hearts. And somehow it had remained largely unspoiled for me. And I'm so glad that it was. Thanks for the constant quality content for my measly five buckaroos. You're very welcome. And I don't think you're wrong. I struggle with this. And I think we struggle with this even on the shows. how much do you tie your own hands by an arbitrary set of rules to wreck to to protect the sanctity of every experience forever right and i don't really know the answer to that it's funny because i always say because we've had a lot there's been a lot of consternation around you guys like accepting early codes which i have no problem with i don't care the reason i don't care is because i want everyone to do their own thing but i also think that like the talking about the games we're playing is like the least important part of Sacred Symbols, in my opinion.

4:13:16Dustin Furman:We talk about the industry. We talk, we bullshit about what's going on. Like getting into the weeds about individual games, I think is best catered to the specific places where they belong. Like Summon Sign, where you might get a little more spoiler-ly and then of course spoilery. And then of course on the spoiler cast and review discussions where you go all out and you opt in to those experiences. So like I want to treat the games with the sanctity they deserve, but I also kind of acknowledge that from my perspective as the host of the show, I don't really see the gameplay discussions or the game by game discussions as the bread and butter of the podcast.

4:13:51Dustin Furman:And so we don't often have to even confront the question. But I think that there are moments where like Final Fantasy sevens, big twist. That happened 29 years ago. Like Bioshock's big twist that happened 19 years ago. how long should we never be able to talk about would you kindly and would you even get the reference if you had not played the game and really been familiar with it to begin with so they're also like overt and not so overt ways to spoil a game but i struggle with this and i don't think you're wrong like yeah i want to be as mindful of it as possible but i also believe that sometimes it's it gets to the point of absurdity and even if there is a huge volume of games available if you have not played time to play bioshock in 20 years i understand we have a lot to do in our lives and like a lot of things demanding us but if you really wanted to play a bioshock it would have jumped to the front of the line at some point since 2007 right like that also is true somewhere in the middle is probably what's real what do you guys think of this Yeah, I think I think I agree.

4:15:07I think the way that I would describe it is like there are certain experiences that are so seminal that those are the ones that I have kind of like a permanent kind of like, OK, I won't spoil it for you. Like I wouldn't spoil Bioshock for somebody, but if somebody was like. I don't know if somebody expected me to not spoil like, I don't know, Spider-Man Miles Morales or something.

4:15:28Dustin Furman:But also, isn't it true, Chris, that you can't really spoil Bioshock without explaining it. right like there's no there's nothing you can really say you can think of something pretty quickly yeah which we won't say because it's bioshock but like there's there's there's brilliant games out there that i think uh and to be fair like i think most games are shine because of the gameplay part of them i don't think like narrative is really that big of a deal for most video games so like i don't really care about spoiling a lot of a lot of that stuff but for the games that are the exception of the rule where like yeah I mean I wouldn't want to spoil Bioshock for somebody because that's such a big thing to steal from someone but I don't give a shit about like I don't know fracture or like or like even like I don't know the Guardians of the Galaxy Square Enix game like there's stuff to spoil in that game but like it's not material it's not a seminal thing like oh I can't believe I had this experience robbed from me it's like you'll get over it it's fucking it's fucking guardians of the galaxy where are you on this doesn't you have anything you want to

4:16:35Colin Moriarty:add yeah i feel like it's no one can play everything in fact it's hard to even play all of the greats if you're playing new games and there's a lot of people that you know even if they listen to this show gaming isn't the thing they can do all the time uh or maybe someone's just you know getting back into gaming after being away for a period or something like that and it's like i am totally with chris where it's like i would never want to rob someone of the experience of bioshock and the twists and turns that takes and there's plenty of other things to say about bioshock that aren't spoilery that i it's it's easy to talk about that game and not spoil it that's how it is i feel like for like 99 of things so it is interesting calling you bring Final Fantasy 7 and the one particular spoiler that was once so common that it was like an early meme almost like jokes were made about it

4:17:34Dustin Furman:yeah to the equivalent of like Vader's and Luke like that to that level in my opinion right yeah

4:17:39Colin Moriarty:but there were some people that didn't that don't know which is surprising but it's like okay well yeah I

4:17:46Dustin Furman:don't want to go out of my way to spoil it for them right right

4:17:49Colin Moriarty:so I think it's always important to be careful but there's certain it's funny because I feel like on this show when we talk about the last of us part two there's still some degree of not wanting to say what happens I think we have at certain points but now that like the show is out and it's like okay can we say what happens at the beginning of last of us part two I don't know do we want to say do we even though it's like surely everyone who's listening knows or at least if they care to any degree they know. But it's like you still feel weird about saying what happened.

4:18:27Dustin Furman:Yeah, yeah, it's it's. I think what I want to convey to the audience and I think you guys agree is like my I never want to with any sort of intent spoil anything for anyone. Like it's it's one of those things like I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy kind of shit. I hate that shit. I really do. Like I hate spoilers. I hate when people do that to other people and ruin things for people. So like there's never malice in us saying something openly that you might consider a spoiler. It is based on an assumption of what we think the audience, where we think the audience is with certain something. But I try to be cognizant of that.

4:18:58Dustin Furman:If anything, I think I've been told that I've been too guarded, like too ridiculous about some of things. And I'm like, yeah, but I just don't want to be that guy. I've had people be that guy. I've said before, someone, there was a show called The Killing. You guys probably don't remember it. It was on AMC for a few years. And it starred the guy that played Cole McGrath. who was late, who was later in Mad Men as well. And Cole McGrath, of course, is a character in Infamous. And someone spoiled the whole ending of it for me, like on Twitter once. And I like it always stuck with me. I'm like, why did you do that?

4:19:36Dustin Furman:Like, I stopped watching it. It's like, it's why I always say when people were like, when all the stuff with the GTA leaks were going on and people like, what do you have to watch? I'm like, you are so dumb. All it takes, you can't unread, unless you're illiterate you can't unread what you're reading on a like you you know what it is by reading it and it's too late to back out and that's how they get you so i i want to be cognizant and kind to people in that regard and i but but i do think there is a limit because i don't like the whole thing of like with the seemingly unending cascade of quality games releasing as well as the mountain of critical hit must plays over the past 40 years it's like yeah fair enough but Bioshock The Last of Us these kinds of games it's like they go to the top of the list man come on what are we doing here don't you listen don't you have ears how many times do I have to say this Trevor I thank you for writing in finally Sexbox One wrote in with a quick one he says do PlayStation fans it's not really quick but I can answer quickly do PlayStation fans care about gold silver and bronze trophies historically an 80 20 Xbox PC player I made my first entry into PlayStation roughly two years ago with the PS5.

4:20:44Dustin Furman:Horizon Zero Dawn was the system stellar, believe it or not. I do believe it because that game is fucking awesome. I have since enjoyed acquainting myself with the great games under the PlayStation umbrella, along with the surrounding ecosystem. One question has remained. Do trophy hunters care about the counts of bronze, silver, and gold? Comparing platforms, I definitely prefer the ever-increasing aggregate that is gamer score. I liken it to watching the balance of a brokerage account go up, yet it certainly lacks the feather in your cap quality that the platinum trophy brings to PlayStation.

4:21:11Dustin Furman:If recent reports are indeed true, I am already shuddering at the time I will lose to mythic hunting. How about you three? Do you pay mine to bronze, silver and gold as you collect? What changes would you make to PlayStation's trophy system? If any, would you enjoy gaming more or less if trophies were not a featured part of the platform? I appreciate your thoughts. All the best. I don't expect you guys to answer this, but I wanted to, I want, and you can if you want, but I wanted to sound out, sound off on this for two reasons. Number one, that mythic achievement thing is interesting. Have you guys been paying attention to this?

4:21:36Dustin Furman:So finally, they're copying the platinum trophy. I don't know what took them so long it only took Sony a year and a half to copy the trophies or to copy of treatments but it takes them so many so long to people have long been obsessed on Xbox with a thousand gamer score and giving them nothing to like show that off I always always weird so they're finally doing that that's an Asha thing no doubt um in my experience people generally don't give a shit about the bronze silver and gold trophies I care a little bit about golds just not about the amount of them but when I get them because they are rare there are some games um i think it was uh alan wake 2 doesn't even have one like it has a platinum trophy but no gold trophy which is interesting so um no on playstation it's about your platinum count and your leveling and i do like the level system what's more interesting is comparing and contrasting what um where you would be with achievement points versus your online playstation score and your score and experience points on playstation versus xbox achievements but to answer your question it's Xbox One no people really don't give a shit it's all towards the platinum and most people don't care about trophies at all and you're obviously going to have way more bronze trophies than anything else completion percentage is another big thing for me but again that is also true on Xbox as well I'm trying to look right now yeah like I have 16 ,790 trophies and 11 ,964 of them are bronze but only 1 ,203 of them are gold.

4:23:06Dustin Furman:So I always notice when I get a gold trophy. It makes me happy. Back on PS3, people might remember the gold and bronze trophy icons looked really similar. So you can like barely even fucking tell, but that's not the case anymore. All right, my friends. It's time to go. Let's get the hell out of here. Let's go around the horn and say goodbye, as we always do. Chris, goodbye to you. Be well. Anything you'd like to say before we go? no man it just uh is control out now or is that it's out now today from recording yeah that's gonna be that's gonna be the night i think so i'll be all over that but uh normal day that's one i got to avoid spoilers on although the remedy verse shit is so hard to spoil anyway because you have to explain it over like 17 documents.

4:23:56Exactly. But yeah, that's going to be my day. It's a pretty chill day, I think.

4:24:02Dustin Furman:Cool. Sounds good. Yeah. Dustin, goodbye to you, my friend. Be well. Anything you'd like to say before we go?

4:24:08Colin Moriarty:Well, after this, hang out with Leon for a little bit. It's weekend, keeping it chill. I already mentioned going to the movie. And then I have this, another game to start. But I think this is pretty short.

4:24:22Dustin Furman:Yeah, it is supposed to be. Yeah, it's supposed to be short. You got to play it a few times for the Platinum. I'll try to do that. But yeah, I think you can beat it in fewer than 10 hours.

4:24:30Colin Moriarty:Maybe I was seeing that it was like seeing the some certain things that people complained about for this game. I'm like, oh, yeah, it's a Silent Hill game. Like Silent Hill games. Honestly, they're like kind of better in your memory of playing them than actually playing them. But I still like them all. Like even if they aren't great. It's like an arduous road trip where it's just like the experience is good, but like I don't know if I'd do this again. Yeah.

4:25:01Dustin Furman:We'll see. I'll have more to say about it next week as well. We can get to that and we'll probably do a spoiler cast for that at some point in the future as well. Alright, my friends. It's good to be here with you. Thank you for being here with me today. Thank you all out there for your love, kindness and support. For all things, sacred symbols and last day media. Patreon.com slash last day media for early ad free access. Last day media dot store for merch. I'm going to go walk the dogs, I think. And then work out. And Thursday Night Football is on tonight. So we're back into it. All right. We'll see you next time.

4:25:27Dustin Furman:Until then, goodbye. See ya. Take care, guys. Sacred Symbols, a PlayStation podcast, is a product and trademark of Last Stand Media and Colin's Last Stand LLC and is proudly recorded in the USA. The show is conceived by, is written by, and is directed by me, Colin Moriarty. My co-hosts are Chris Raygun Maldonado and Dustin Furman. The show is produced by executive producer Dustin Furman. All of Last Stand's theme music is by my best friend, Ramon Narvaez. As you know, all of Last Stand's shows, including Sacred Symbols, are fan-funded on Patreon at patreon.com slash laststandmedia. The following names are at the producer level on Patreon, our highest tier, and we're grateful for your thoughtful and kind contributions to our independent endeavor.

4:26:13Dustin Furman:Thank you. Aaron Betke, Aaron Temple, Adam Refriended, Albion, Alex Cabrera, Alex Gates, Alex Lapierre, Alex Monez, Alan Tiniak, Alan Tremblay, Alan Einer, Anthony Akure, Anthony Vazquez, Anton K, Antonio C, Asak Paredes, Austin Riley, Betty Ann Moriarty, Bjorn Campbell, Blackjack, Boots, Brad Cooley, Brad Lohman, Brandon Runiger, Brian Williamson, Cannonball Jones, Captain Verde, Carlos Algaret, Chad Lewis, Chris Galvin, Chris Morton, Chris Ritchie, Christopher Devayo, Christopher Moore, Christopher Morgan, Cody Benin, Conrad Pennyfarthing, Corey Beacom, Dan Nolan, Dan Root, Daniel D 'Amour, Daryl E.

4:26:53Dustin Furman:Naaman, Dave Alvarez, Dennis Usel, Denny Would Never, Don Lee, Donald Difford, Donald John Vaders, Double Duty Dirk, WTF, Eddie Smith, Electric MD, Ellis, Emmanuel Perez, Enrique Perez, Entishas, Frail Cabbage St. Matthews of the Diocese of Brig, Gabe's New Gabe Cube, Gary Cavallo, Gavin, Ghoststorm672, Geo Corsi, Grayson Maxwell, Gregory Slavinsky, Gus, Hush, Jad Rita, Jake C, Jamie Fraley, Jason Arzon, Jay Getter, Jean-Francois Forzy, Jeff Mercado, Jerome Ferreira, Jimmy Rodriguez, Joe McPartland, Joey Gondaliger, John Schultz, John Zile, Johnny Waffles, John Cordero, Jonathan Coates, Jonathan Cortez, Joosh, Jorge Pal, Joseph Baker, Joseph Lopez, Josh Godfrey, Josh Gravelick, Josh McKinney, Josh Schullinger, Joshua Smallwood, J.P.

4:27:45Dustin Furman:Lynch, Justin Payne, Justin Wagaman, Cam Wallace, Keith Richards, Kendrick Caius, Kyle Hagel, Kyle Martin, Lizard King, Logan Little George, Madmoc Media, Miranda Grubba, Martin Beck, Mason Bouchard, Matt Flowers, Matt 20, Matthew Ash MattMGS24 Michael Buffel Michael Gates Michael Mash Potato Michael Vecchio Mr. Tom Morgan Ashley Mr. Finkler Mr. Molf My Name Is Mayo Nate Izod Nathan R Neil Amon Nick Amato Norse Nuts Ali Fritz Omar Omar Rosa Orchard Organic Produce Out of Focus Bigfoot Patrick Leslie Paul Joyce Peyton Stone Phil Crone Qualia Freak Randall Holsey Rallo Relentless Rex

4:28:40Dustin Furman:Thank you.

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