The PC Gamer Show 159 - Star Wars Jedi - Fallen Order, Fortnite World Cup, Rise of Shadows

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### The Podcast Begins: A Roundtable Discussion on Gaming

The podcast kicks off with a lively conversation about gaming, featuring insights from the hosts and listeners. The discussion is wide-ranging, covering everything from game giveaways to E3 predictions, and even delves into the intricacies of competitive gaming.

#### Assassin's Creed Unity Giveaway

One listener asks whether the team would consider giving away *Assassin’s Creed Unity* for free as a form of charity. The hosts discuss the idea with mixed reactions. While they acknowledge the game’s potential as a donation tool, they also bring up the challenges of balancing public perception and practicality. The conversation touches on how *Assassin’s Creed Unity* was received upon its release, noting that while it had stunning visuals and a detailed world, it was technically unstable at launch. However, with patches, it has since become more stable and remains a showcase for the series’ architectural detail.

#### Predictions and Hopes for E3 2019

The hosts shift focus to their predictions for E3 2019, an eagerly awaited event in the gaming calendar. They speculate on what Microsoft might reveal about *Halo: Infinite*, expressing curiosity about how the game will stand out in a crowded market. They also discuss the potential return of *Resident Evil* with a new entry, hinting at the possibility of a remake or continuation of the franchise’s rich lore. Meanwhile, they express skepticism about *Borderlands 3*, questioning whether it can bring something fresh to the table after the success of its predecessors.

The conversation also touches on *Watch Dogs 3*, which is rumored to be set in London. They speculate on how the game might handle the iconic city and whether it will continue the series’ tradition of blending open-world exploration with social commentary. Despite their enthusiasm for these titles, they admit that the gaming world is saturated with releases, making it hard to predict what will truly stand out.

#### Listener Questions: A Glimpse into Gaming Culture

The podcast takes a turn to address listener questions, offering a fascinating insight into the broader gaming community. One listener asks about the hosts’ biggest disappointments and surprises in gaming so far this year. The hosts reflect on * Anthem*, noting its initial hype and eventual underperformance. They acknowledge that while it didn’t meet expectations, there’s still hope for future updates to redeem the game.

Another listener asks about standout city-building games, prompting the hosts to share their favorites. While none of them are hardcore fans of the genre, they mention titles like *Frostpunk* and *SimCity*, praising their unique approaches to urban planning and strategy. The discussion also touches on *Command & Conquer*, a series known for its blend of city-building and real-time strategy.

The conversation concludes with a lighthearted segment where the hosts share their preferences in unlikely pairings, such as * Anthem* or *Mass Effect: Andromeda* versus *Lawbreakers* and *FALLOUT 76* versus *Star Wars Battlefront*. Their playful banter highlights the diverse tastes within the gaming community.

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### Conclusion: The Future of Gaming

As the podcast winds down, the hosts touch on upcoming events like E3 and the potential for new releases to shake up the gaming landscape. They express a mix of excitement and caution, acknowledging that the industry is at a turning point with rapid updates, competitive esports, and the ever-evolving nature of game design.

The episode closes with a call to action for listeners to engage with their content, whether it’s through joining their Discord server or tuning in to their Twitch streams. They leave the audience with a sense of community and shared enthusiasm for gaming, encouraging listeners to stay connected and share their own experiences.

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This article captures the essence of the podcast, offering a detailed exploration of the topics discussed while maintaining the casual and engaging tone of the original conversation.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everybody and welcome to the PC gamer show for April 1720 teen and you met you may have noticed I did not say twenty grind teen it's because the bulk of releases are out it was a busy busy first quarter of the year but now we got a soak in all these releases just let them wash over us and let them sink into our skin until we are completely won with these games and understand them completely at least until the next busy released season in November I think but with me to brine today is a Tim Clark brand director of PC gamer how you doing Tim excited to be back James I thought maybe I'd better maybe up in bunt you're always welcome but then we'll be talking well guess what Tim we'll be talking about with us today can you take it West you know I mean there's there's two there's two possible avenues to go here it could be for X Games nice Tim's here to talk about sins of a solar Empire I'm gonna guess some hearthstone we got that new expansion yeah Tim's talking out here pretty good here it's pretty good that's good if Tim is happy I'm happy Wes Finland features editors here with us as well yeah and they did not know I was signing up to sit in a stew with you James I'm just telling them quite but it wasn't quite prepared a tasty all of our original thoughts and all these amazing games that came out was a really really nice couple of months we got a like four or five 90s I think you know in a few I'm just totally ballpark in there but I know we had Resident Evil and and Devil May Cry from Capcom Bobby is new sucker Oh apex legend so yeah I wasn't with it was a gradation to visit boo damn it's a great year great year so far uh Wes what the hell are you talking about today a little bit of Star Wars maybe ours it was the celebration weekend in Chicago so we got the trailer for was it called rise of the rise of Skywalker the final in this latest trilogy yes is that the new movie title i I think so do you want to hear something sad about the plum Navy before we get to the game sure yes when the when the trailer broke at the weekend my initial reaction was what the there's another one I genuinely thought like if you'd have asked me I thought that last one was the end like you know what happens to Luke happens to look like obviously when you think about it no there was threads clearly left on pulled and resolved but in my mind it was finished and I was like really that's it I would have been honestly that would have been alright it wouldn't have been the worst the worst thing in the world yeah yeah yeah that new trailer didn't do a lot for me honestly as a big big Star Wars nerd but I think the movie will be pretty good we'll see who's directing this one is it JJ Abrams JJ is back he's back baby is unless someone or don't want him to retcon rays I'm just a regular fan go back story lots of people saying both I'm sure yeah it's gonna be oh oh we lost him we lost him Tim will come back Hilary banks but that's not the reveal we're gonna be talking about today from Star Wars Celebration we're gonna be talking about Star Wars okay so Star Wars Jedi : : fallen order on or is it that fallen or eight it's fallen or you got it gotcha would you get the : in the right place and everything ha perfect this is respawn and if respawn apex legends titanfall developer it's their single-player story based Star Wars game set after episode 3 I think yeah yeah so they showed off a trailer and kind of spoke mmm kind of vaguely what a nightmare panel that was but spoke pretty vaguely about what it will be so we'll be talking about that and and some other stories that sort of came out of that weekend in the news that came with it and I'll be talking to you all or I guess preaching and maybe bothering talking at us a living at you about fortnight's I'm doing it again everybody I'm gonna talk about fortnight it's a good time for fortnight it's an interesting time for fortnight whether you play or not because this is the summer of the World Cup the very first fortnight World Cup and Epic Games has invested a hundred million dollars in prize money in total so it's not like first place is getting a hundred million bucks but in total for four weeks of qualifiers some sort of supporting events and then the final shindig in which country is the favourite James which country is the favourite right now it's really hard to say we're only into week one of the the qualifiers for solo play and yeah it's anybody's game right now it's it's just too - it's way too early to tell I have some favorites but your solution America be the best it's a country of 300 million people and presumably were a lot of fun our audiences I think so that I mean that's what I'm gonna guess and that's not what you wanted to say but you didn't want to seem like one of qualifiers and it like it was not it didn't go down and as I predicted really but then again I haven't been I'm gonna say so it will be a national disgrace if America doesn't win bringing shame on your once great nation I wouldn't be surprised if they they didn't quite honestly because it's a lot of a lot of interesting players coming out of the woodwork because these qualifiers are held in the client it's remotely so you're not going to a you know a local LAN to tryout you can play and try out from your desk so what's the format of the matches used for the World Cup qualifiers uh it's it's gosh I can't remember exactly the time limit or you have a game limit you have a set amount of games you can play while the tournament is live so you just go into the client and you click like I think it's just the fortnight World Cup qualifiers and it'll queue you up with other people trying to qualify and you'll get points based on your performance related to kills and placement and survival and after all you complete all your I'll tally up all your points match him against everyone else and the top six I believe move on to the actual Cup so wait suicide pin to the whole community everyone can try I can try right now you all you try no no maybe I should but it's a million bucks each week just in qualifiers too so yeah pretty wild lots of lots of break down there especially the changes epic was making to the game in the lead up has left a lot of pros pretty sour on the game as a whole they didn't you just post a story about them finding a new thing under loot like yeah yeah so it's right meanwhile the narrative keeps on ticking and epic keeps up the pace of updates that they've kept up for like over a year now it's pretty wild when you think about it there's gonna be a new in-game event soon and a big vault was unearthed under loot Lake and that's exactly where the cube was laid to rest so people are suspecting that the key was gonna make a comeback which I'm all for because I like the big dumb MacGuffin rather than last season's volcano and the season before that like an ice castle yeah little boring little boring just give me give me a big mystery but before we just imagine imagine if the curiosity cube had been as interesting as for tonight's year of just strange stories have you played curiosity hell no no yeah I did I played quite a bit of it I did do if you don't know like listeners this was what Peter Molyneux is like experimental how you did was tap right portable name-o game it was a giant MacGuffin yeah so it was a massive cube and it was the same cube for everyone on their shared across the world and it what the whole goal was like everyone would tap on pieces of the cube to break him them away and it would call a all this data and like break away the the Kuban somewhat real time with the rest of the world and there was some secret at the center some some prize and it what was the prize exactly oh the price this the pro the prizes was to be the god of their next game right this was yeah got us won by a person who then I think I was exposed by Eurogamer like the guy he did a got almost none of what the actual price was and then kind of ended up really sad and kind of in this running battle with on a new studio I don't want to out myself as a credulous peasant but I feel like I've been gold by like multiple Mali new projects I mean like a lot of us have I remember reading about fable which I guess I think one of the less less scammy games that they put out I remember reading the initial like preview properly an edge and then kind of go yeah you'll grow up and if you like cut down a tree when you come back it'll still be a stump and you'll you know if you kind of scab your knee the skull will be there when you're older and just you just really go I sound amazing and think about like the technology that game was being produced on like even the notion that that was going to be a thing he's like absolutely preposterous yeah next like next gen fever every time this yeah totally knocks people over but imagine he's working on a pretty exciting ps4 project right now put it that way yeah yeah hey right right tracings I think now prime rate racing is the thing it needs let's just briefly break that down so was it yesterday Sony's sort of let loose the initial hardware specs vague hardware specs related to the PlayStation 5 and I think I don't know I I didn't read the article itself I kind of just I was too busy but the impression I got from everyone talking about it was that it was a little too optimistic about the capability and price of some of the hardware listed or detailed in the spec including a like a ray tracing capable GPU listed it like a ten thousand dollar value Hey well I was yeah I just compared it to like you know Oh previously to this you know recent generation of hardware you could only do ray tracing on like $10,000 Hollywood you know super computer hardware just like really not a good comparison it's like a pointless college ex-cons were like dude I'm doing in Metro right now yeah it looks great Metro doesn't cost 10 grand hollywood's ray tracing is baked so it's like rendered yeah Sony's always had you know I say this as someone that he worked on a Sony magazine for some time they've always had like a little bit of creative license when it came to claims around their new machines I remember interviewing Phil Harris in a circa whenever the PlayStation was that released a controller that didn't have haptic feedback didn't have Rumble and I went into the interview with Harrison after had been announced I was like people really like rumble isn't that gonna be a problem and he was like we he said like with a straight face I say as well because God blessed Phil really can deliver really can deliver without blinking he just went that's a lost generation feature and I was like and then I sure enough like a year later we're delighted to bring back now that some legal issues have been resolved that's it that's the next-generation mouse feature we got mouse and keyboard Rumble it's gonna show up one of these days right the floating idea of a mouse at Rumble - where's and he no yeah II sick in his mouth I mean imagine imagine the aim imagine the aim with that keyboard though let's let's Rumble those keys let's do it clickety clackety well I've got early onset arthritis enough without the keyboard moving yeah police station five is happening it's just it's just always interesting we have this big article if you want to go out like we won't talk about it much longer but I'll link to the article sort of breaking down what's in there Jarrid breaking down what's in there and how it compares to PCs and and other there sorry what's that I mean I guess the one the one like talking semi seriously reminded the one assuming this is something that's going to come out like next year or whatever that I guess if it moves up the baseline in terms of technical performance for kind of multi-format games then SEO news will probably benefit yeah I think we definitely do benefit it's always nice when the ceiling is raised I get excited just so I I know we're gonna get some slightly better looking games on the PC I mean it's pretty much gonna be a PC in a either curved or like a trapezoidal box right you know I mean this is it's AMD hardware right pretty much I love those chips so less bespoke than they used to be because he used to be they would put in what was what was the engine that the Sony made was just almost emotion the emotion engine motion ADL's to and then sell on the ps3 yeah and like no longer get a head around that's a pro program for it like the emotion engine is a goodness is a good name for it sir pretty good it sounds like the kind of thing that Don Draper would have pasted in Mad Men who just got we call it just like cigarette beautiful PlayStation 5 coming soon let's talk about our highlights of the week and our highlights of the week or anything that stood out to us in what we play or read about in the world of personal computer gaming so why don't we start with the Wes your highlight this happy to start as I as I wrote in our show notes here I am a mayonnaise making machine now I'm gonna need some context so I've been playing stardew valley finally for the first time when that game before it came out I was following the blog for it and I was like oh I'm really looking forward to playing this never really gotten into a Harvest Moon this one's on PC this seems like the game for me and throughout the entire development they were talking about having co-op in the things that you could have a farm with your friends and to get the game out they decided or or he decided that developer eric barone decided like i'm gonna delay that do it later it's gonna be a lot of work let's just get the game out and then it took like two more years for them to get co-op out and they finally did that last year and I've been playing it with a few of my friends we got a whole farm set up together and we're now like about a year into our farm and we've gotten to that point where we have money now like at first we're just really poor and our farms like we have like a little corner of crops planted and you know we're making a little money from them and now like the money's rolling in we're selling artisan goods like I'm making mayonnaise or the mayonnaise machine turning my chickens eggs into mayonnaise and we got a lot of a lot of fishing going on and a lot mining and selling stuff and making money upgrading our tools and defending firms that sounds so like wholesome like most farms especially a group farms I assume like you spend a couple of nice days there then you're kind of indoctrinated into the sex cult or like burn in a wicked man or something but Fenland emilich seems like that might not happen to you well it's we named it Blood Gulch so take that okay as you will but yeah that's a it's a it's fairly wholesome we're good at sharing we're good at sharing responsibilities and taking care of our crops and our and our animals so you a pretty friendly place you have to try this xform a nice occasion or combine them I mean like there's a good potential there my god one of my friends is playing so like you can do a little create a character like change your hair or than you know shirt and whatnot and he like clicked the button I don't even know if he clicked randomize or if it just the first random character it gave him was just like a perfect Bob Ross so he's playing as he named his character Bob Ross and that is his that is his character and it's it makes me laugh every time you guys ever get like mad with each other there's someone's like goofing off on the farm and not being enough for the kind of chores that could happen but I don't think it has yet because we were definitely in that phase of like we have no money and we want to you know do as well as we can to like get the resources to upgrade our equipment and stuff but there might be a point at which somebody just like just sells all the the crops and then just off and does whatever they want or something and the rest of us is like come on you gotta help replant so we'll see what happens we've got a couple other people who pop in and out less frequently so there's there's definitely some potential for shenanigans as we as we move forward but in the meantime a lot of mayonnaise I've have you come up with a brand I feel my I have not I have not done that but now I need to that's not bad beautiful I'm really happy you're making big stuff so that's the power of PC gaming for you what about what about you Tim what's your what's your what's your highlight what you've been doing I've been playing a to the surprise if no one the the springtime Destiny's event which is cooled the revelry it actually lost for four weeks so it means that the tower was covered in like lovely spring flora and fauna and this kind of assaults on Ian as birds and stuff and there's they've read kind of they've redone the haunted forest to now be the springtime forest is kind of like a wave base mode where he has kind of clear wave after wave and then do kind of boss rush thing at the end and you have to grind out and do a bunch of tramps and then you can get this new exotic weapon called the herbalist you wrote about yesterday James it's like a linear fusion rifle so it's kind of like it's like a kind of rail gun the five slug rounds you put in your kinetic slots your primary it's actually not very good the gun I yeah I played like from pretty much when I knocked off work at like half five o'clock through til like late last night to get it with the guys I play with and we all got in it was fun playing with them but the gun is like the gun is kind of so-so it's not trash but it's also like it's a really weirdly niche weapon like it's hard to know why you would use it because it takes on your exotic stop why do you use it over one of the big big kind of meta power weapons but that's not playing it is not my highlight well it is my I like and the most fun we had was part of the grind you had one of the tribes had to generate lots of orbs of light forgetting kills and stuff in the gambit prime mode or gambit and so we went in there as keyed in as a force attack team and we matched up just towards the end of our play session with one of the kind of quite well-known destiny streamers called professor broman and we absolutely bodied his team which was really excited because like we were really phoning it in until that point and then as soon as like one of our guys noticed it was someone we'd heard of like everyone like stepped up we had the guy who was doing invading on our team is a guy called psycho llama and he's really good he's like a kid in Australia who doesn't sleep he just plays on like North American hours with us and it's basically ruined his life but he's very good at shooting people and he was invading them and they they twice with the guy who's streaming twice whiffed on like the Thunder crush move where he did this kind of like Superman smash thing and he landed like 1 meter away from psycho and then so I could machine-gunned him in the face hey you know I'm 40 years old James but this was a great moment for me this we will watch the stream back in a laughs when they were calling cyclone beautiful that's great that's great yeah all your making time destinies paying off taking back what's been taking down the icons and stars right on yeah I hopped into it yesterday to whip up that gun do any college and it's really it's it's a fun I think I like the cadence like as much as many complaints as inevitably players are gonna have about these live games I am really enjoying the cadence with which they're putting stuff out and like substantial things to even if it is like a sort of like a reskin of that haunted forest mode it's still fun and it still excites me I have something new to do some new waiting I think it's not perfect Daniel past model they've gone I think they would admit that as well but at least it gives at least it means just something to do on a fairly regular basis whereas before that game had like huge periods but there was no change at all whether that gets them through another year until they get to like d3 or not unless certain but kind of interest is is is the plan or I don't know what's confirmed and what's not is the plan another big ish I mean no one knows the plan so at the moment at the moment what's on the roadmap is that there's one more of these annual pass drops which hits thinking June I call penumbra which which has a ride with it so that should be good it's kind of themed looks like it's gonna be themed around returning for the Leviathan spaceship so that it should be great for law as well and then after that they've always had a release in September but that was when they were being financed and and run by Activision they usually do it kind of like that was when forsaken came in September and they had rise of iron previously to that so like no one quite knows what's gonna fill that gap my suspicion and I think a lot of the community suspicion is they're just they will roll out another Annual Pass but maybe with a maybe with a bigger drop there to start it but I think they really need to create like another planetary destination at the least so there's just somewhere need to explore one funny thing before we move off this I'll say is that so that the mechanic is the way the revelry event works is you can drink these tonics you get the tonics from the vendor and you can buy more of them as you kind of earn the currency from just doing any activity and they give you like a massive cooldown either to your melee ability or your grenade ability or what's your class ability but but these buffs work like globally in the game so they even work in PvP and they even work in the competitive PvP ladder so people have absolutely like the few people who play that line because it's really sweaty and see make go ahead you have gone absolutely crazy I didn't know that yeah there's there's some actually some really cool rewards locked behind that ladder which I don't want to reveal how I acquired this season maybe for another show James okay Tim I like how you you called my farm a cult and yet you're playing in an event called the revelry with a guy who doesn't sleep so that he can it is actually more wicked man not for I feeling about it but yeah I'm undef enjoying the the tears of the competitive players drinking drinking them right down love it love it I'll just go over my highlight sir real quick I got two quick ones I hop back into sass ins Creed Odyssey because I thought I beat it apparently I wasn't even close I did like one ending there's like there's like a return in a king situation where it just keeps ending over and over again kinda like there are like sort of three different branches in that games like narrative branches one is like wacky sci-fi fantasy one is just the family story at the center of in your your sister and your excuse me or your brother and your mother and sort of reuniting the family and and how that plays out and that's the Spartan Athenian conflict and then there's just like taking out the entire cult and the big boss who I still I still don't know who that is so I beat LA I mean I quit playing when I beat the sci-fi ending which was fun but then I just I hop back in to check out some of the DLC let's come to the game in the months since and I was like oh I didn't finish this and hopped right back in to it and like 20 hours melted away the game is incredible has it gone either way DLC like I think it was the one before the Egyptian one that had that Final Fantasy crossover that made no sense nothing that bizarre nothing that jarring that stuff is like sort of more naturally there is some of that wacky but it's more naturally it is naturally introduced into the story it's it's myth myth myth mythological figures coming to life fighting they should do they should do like an American mythological figure DLC pack where it's just like what's his name Paul Bunyan and his in his bowl and Wild Bill Hickok and Ilya and and who was the guy who hit the the train spikes real good oh ledge hammer what's that movie tall tales the trunks yeah there we go why do you why do you know me because there's the songs Ohio song rejoice and milena sings about John Henry swinging a hammer down that's a great song listening it's a good tall tale so I've been hopping back there that's been a lot of fun and the other highlight is playing and writing about Netflix's latest interactive series you versus wild starring Bear Grylls and and if you don't know who Bear Grylls is you might remember it's too quick Google search but man vs. wild you it was probably like 10 years ago at this point when he was really sort of big and his Netflix series introduces choices into the mix so when bear is faced with climbing across a ravine you can take the old trolley that's there but I was put installed by the natives or you can repel down and try and go around most options usually put bear in some kind of distress what what satisfies me the most about it is that these aren't real survival scenarios but bear is often in these scenarios like acting them out in a real setting so one example is you have to cross a frozen lake and it's a real frozen lake they're out in the wilderness doing this and he's like alright should we should we run across it because we need to save time or should we crawl because it's safer and we can distribute our weight better that way and I'm like oh no run that's gonna be like can you die can you die babe and so I say run across it and like he takes a couple steps and just falls into the lake he falls through the ice and so it's just there's a weird pleasure I have knowing that most people are gonna be I'm not nothing against this guy I don't know much about him but there's just no everyone's gonna torture this guy and that's like the real joy you can draw from this this otherwise really hokey simple series it reminds me of a when I was at this is slightly on a long anecdote not about games enjoy when I was at Primary School we had like a movie Wednesdays thing where I guess so they didn't have to teach us they would just show us like an educational film and then sometimes they would show us like King Solomon's Mines and stuff that weren't educational at all I won Kim farming's mines that's pretty good one of them was like a safety on the farm film because they were often like these government films and in safety on the farm this like group of like seven or eight kids goes to the farm and is one-by-one killed in accidents and you see them like quite graphically like one kid like falls into like the grain sorting machine you just see my hand going into the grain another one like reaches up and touches like a bare wire and is electrified and another kid is like balancing on puddles slips and brains himself on one of the other files you honestly see like a hunk of like head matter like like glued onto the pole we were like about like seven or eight years old women lived anywhere near a farm we lived in South London farms yeah between that and the time they showed us watership down I was absolutely traumatized dance you make a lot more sense no man the most the most traumatic like school experience like that I ever had was in preschool in preschool so I'm like four years old they decided to show us a Steven Spielberg's hook okay which is which is not like a super graphic or super violent movie but it's kind of its kind of weird it's kind of twisted and a dude gets eaten alive by scorpions are stung alive by scorpions in the first 20 minutes of that movie I was not ready for that at 4 years old I gotta say like it was not a good nap time and I think that is that kind of thing well that kind of thing probably won't happen to the same degree with this series it feels aimed at younger people but you're not like watching bear like - his head against the rocks and his limp body fall into a ravine he'll often like get out of a situation even if you make a poor decision and let you try again and be like why did you do that idiot or maybe this may be the sequel though we'll be a little more hardcore yeah I would love it on one hand it was like wow I really want a a more hardcore version of this kind of like mixed like reality TV plus fictional scenarios that's like a really interesting thing but on the other hand I just love how dumb it is as a result of like having to be okay for younger people there there's so many contrived solutions to surviving in the wilderness like you you need to get through this jungle that is clearly being proud by a Jaguar and you can either roll in mud to mask the scent which sounds smart or dress up as a giant in a giant Bush suit which is the most visible thing you could possibly do cats have great vision if you ever like you're gonna get spotted and so watching him like because when you choose something he has to like act like that's he has to go with it and he has to act like yeah we'll do this and you can see like his lips tighten a little bit in his eyes sort of that little squint a bit more when you picked the wrong choice and he's like trying really hard to put on a show for ya even though he looks like a total so yeah that's that's you versus wild and it's just like I'll link to my article but it's it's it's a hoot it's a hoot another time another time when I was a kid my mom sent me on this outdoor pursuits trip with my sister but she did have to do this because she was younger and these two ex army guys took us kids out into the woods I did it's like survival training on us and it was their last week there the army guys they decided to go like hog wild on these kids they were doing stuff like they would roll us in puddles like muddy puddles to get us like covered in mud to be like camouflage and if the kid didn't want to do it they would like literally put a boot on his head and push his head under the water we were like yeah it was really like I mean I'm old so this was like back in the olden days it was pretty sketchy like we were having to cross this river like on a log and like one kid fell off into the river when he came out he was wearing like a Sou'Wester he'd caught a fish in his pocket like that like he had just a fish in his back health and safety law wasn't a thing back then hafsteinn yeah let's uh well hey well let's let's do Star Wars real quick I got I got hearthstone for the middle of the show alright good chief for the law but talk about this Star Wars reveal respawns single-player Star Wars game Star Wars Jedi : fallen order so you know we talked about a little bit at the beginning it's the skis been in development for I think four years now or maybe even in lauder I was at respawn for like an early titanfall to preview and they had a whole wing of their studio just like locked off for it yeah so it's been works for a long time we haven't really known much of anything about it until I guess last year at e3 they kind of I was that when they revealed the name I can't even remember maybe it was it was when they cut really awkwardly to like Vince Zampella in the crowd and my Vince tell us about your game whose I asked my soul's Falana like all right good reveal yeah and that's about all we've known we knew it was gonna be a single-player game but and kind of figured it was gonna be like a light saber kind of combat focus game and honestly we still don't know a lot more than that because the big reveal at Star Wars Celebration this weekend was all cinematics so we still haven't seen anything gameplay from this game we haven't really seen what it's gonna play like but they did kind of give a brief synopsis saying it's a light saber focus combat game it's gonna be you know sort of easy to learn but hard to master have enough depth there you're gonna move a customizr lightsaber to some degree the main character is kind of on the run after the end of Star Wars Episode three where all the Jedi get or most of the Jedi get killed by the kind of the rise of the Empire and he is now in hiding and trying to I think kind of either restart the Jedi Order or see one of the links yeah I'm not sure if he was Montgomery was supposed to be a youngling or if he was just a young Jedi at the time I don't yeah they haven't said exactly how many years have passed my guess is he was probably like a teenager or something yeah around the the time of that movie I think we know from the video that there's gonna be like bull running right there seems because that's like quite heavily I don't think you put bull running in there as the studio who did bull running notably in its previous FPS by accident that's that's fair yeah otherwise I use my powers yeah yeah he's he's pulling some stuff with his hand but it the whole the whole trailer has this very kind of dark like anti Jedi kind of vibe running through it he's saying you know oh don't don't stand out don't use your don't use your powers you know you have to stay hidden so that they can't discover you and obviously the theme of the game is gonna be him reversing that decision right and you know being standing triumphant saying no I am a Jedi I need to help people and yet it feels fairly telegraphed to me here's a question for you was this Resident Star Wars expert all the midi-chlorians is that still canon no I don't think so I feel like it was never referenced ever again but it was such a like a heavily explained bit that unless like Liam Neeson was on this huge wind up his character of like I can make these idiots believe anything I think it's canon in the sense that it's in the movie and therefore it has to be but in in the way that they are never going to reference it again like they're never gonna use that explanation it's no one's gonna ever say midi-chlorians at another Star Wars movie base basically the Jedi have all got like interstellar HPV I could just they could they could they could retroactively Lee write it off as bunk science but yeah it's it's there it's there my guess is they will try to pretend that never happened for the rest of the rest of Star Wars but who knows maybe they'll maybe a little joke about it or something what what how we feel about this trailer I guess like what our what's our needs Tim I you're notoriously don't give a about star wars uh it's it's not that I don't care about it why I don't care about it I mean it's more like like I like everyone I enjoyed the original trilogy when I was a young man I like very much so like I had the toys like everyone else and I guess I just think the other films were basically bad and like any attempt to pretend otherwise his feet are okay even even even the more recent ones I kind of go and I go watch them while they're on I enjoyed them and then when I leave it's exactly like one of the in like a McDonald's I feel nothing I just feel nothing like I can't remember it I can't tell you what like all of them solo rogue one the spin-off ones like I couldn't write down on a beer mat what happened in and maybe that's like my failing memory let me leave they just leave no impression yeah no way so I'm guessing stuff like yeah there's some good spaceship scenes we there's some good space fights well well I like the universe still so like I'm gay okay I think I've said before like respawn would would have been my pick if ever I could have had a dream pick to make like a Warhammer 40000 game so the thought of them doing pure sci-fi working on a cool license I'm definitely here for it I like the fact it's single-player and just a campaign that I can play through and don't have to you know invest $1,000 grinding for a gun that turns out to be bad and Effie here for it because I just I think like a developer who really deliver on the feel of combat see I think it I think it's cool kind of rough on poor old Amy Anik because they said like yay so but not in single-player all those things anymore she just must be looking into a guy what the yeah that's it she's she kind of things we wanted to talk about a little bit was they came out and made this statement about this game which is great for this game them saying it's a single-player game no but just a year and a half ago or whatever they were saying like there isn't a market for this kind of game anymore therefore we're not making it because you know FIFA makes us all this loot box money what kind of loot boxes you're gonna have in your game none okay well let's cancel that one and I think that was more of the basement probably more of the business excuse at the time for them to kind of sweep under the rug like okay this projects a mess it's having these issues but maybe those issues were also largely caused by direction from up above that it needed to have certain features needed to do this and then Lucas home saying no you can't do such and such and licensed game problems yeah yeah but this one so far seems like it has managed to avoid falling into the falling into that trap it looks like they're they have a game anyway well that what do you think way this year would you guess III I think I'll be right I think that's why they didn't show gameplay in this initial reveal because they want to blow it out at e3 which kind of disappointing to me I would have liked to just see a little bit of what this game actually is gonna play like but guess we'll will get that pretty soon but if it's if it has even like the spirit of old you know Jedi Outcast Jedi Knight game's dog versus dark forces like if even though it's not gonna be a first-person shooter if it still has that kind of that feel I will be did they confirm this already said post in the nor was it first-person I believe they confirmed third-person yeah and my hope is I think there's a quote out there I'm paraphrasing and obviously saying the combat is much more deliberate like you're gonna have to really size up your opponents which gives that's cool to me because I mean we've wrote an article about I think Tom senior wrote an article about how like Sakura's combat system makes sense for lightsabers there are these crazy unwieldy dangerous things that if they touch you you die essentially or the thing it touches comes off so it'd be really cool to see that captured like the the consequence of that thing even coming near you that really violent beam of light in your I don't see I don't see how you can actually cuz wasn't I were talking about this before a meeting the other day in saying like if you had like an actual lightsaber fight where the lightsaber wielder was like just plowing through waves of enemies there just be this windmill of like arms and legs flying off and just geysers of blood but it look at Takashi Miike film well you know it cauterizes the wound Tim there's no blood that's the whole that's the whole gimmick is it's instantly just like severe burn I mean I'm no doctor but I'm just saying I think that's there'll be some blood it's it's I mean like that's my hope at least compared to like the last couple games it was Force Unleashed the last like third-person Star Wars game actually game we we had it's the last one in in this kind of vein anyway I don't remember if there's been anything and since that was really about like the extreme power fantasy I just don't want to be like a a godly Jedi I want to be a scrappy like barely know what I'm doing Jedi that sounds fun but yes so another thing that's sort of standing out based there like immediately hit me when the trailer was shown off was that that protagonist is like he could be anybody it's it's it's probably like Wes you wrote a big piece on this like of all of these these creatures and aliens and places and interesting people they could have chosen for the face of this like second coming of Star Wars single-player story based games they chose it just a guy who could be just the most unrecognizable character yeah you know I I think his character design is is really bland and it's not even just that he's like a white guy character but that they went for the hood to make him look kind of cool they went for this like you know brown hair but then he kind of looks like he's got like when you got the hood on you like doesn't you kind of look like a skinhead and then the voice-over is very like I don't know how good an actor this guy is he's probably fine he's been on Gotham he's been on some a couple other TV shows I think I'm sure he's gonna do a fine job in the game but the writing of the voice-over also I think is really it's just like really predictable I think and is not interesting and his delivery of it doesn't elevate it to some great art so I was kind of just bored listening to this character and looking at him and there's like there's like hundreds of weird alien cool alien species that they've come up with in Star Wars maybe just go off the beaten path and use one of them you suggested a number was what was what would have been your number one pick for for an alien mm-hmm I listed out about a dozen that were ones that I felt like yeah these these would actually work like these would be cool let me look back through and see which one would be my my my favorite good morning God at least in the top five I was anything I did link one that's I would not go for actually I just put it in there as a joke called awesomes who look like really fat like dogs with over bites wearing doing cloths and wearing white white white too fat and dog shame in one comment with Jesus I would say that would not have been the most you couldn't really put that on the box art you know that was why aren't there more games in which you play aliens is quite uh just in consideration right and then when you were told me like the Covenant in halo that was cool I would say either a Deveraux nyan or as a Brack these are like two of the ones that put in you just might win you just making these out there I mean there's a there's a musical form called jizz in Star Wars I don't need to make no I didn't need to make this up myself it's all out there it's just but it's sexier yeah there you go but the Zab rack are like Darth Maul from his race you know mum's gone out he's gone crazy and the makeup cabinet yeah there you go I think he was heavily tattooed they don't all look quite quite like that but they have the horns and stuff so like you just have like alright this piece of concept art is someone who has sort of tan skins I couldn't tell you if they all if they all have the same skin color what I think there's a character there's a character like this in coat or to ID sealer public to of this race so like yeah that that would have been a fine race to do a protagonist and there's many many other possibilities but they went with the most boring choice they could which some people are already trying to justify by saying like well he's trying not to stand out so it makes sense that he would look like that like a okay sure yeah I'm not into it but that doesn't mean again this is criticism folks this is a we're not we're not gonna boycott the game because of it just it's just disappointing it's weird it's just like I've really stood out anything else about Star Wars I mean we're still waiting on gameplay which will probably see at e3 did we talk about the no loot boxes statement that sort of EA put out and sort of just just a bit yeah no loot boxes was sort of their marketing thrust or their surrounding the announcement which is just kind of hypocritical considering the like I like I read someone saying I can't remember who was I so I apologize for not crediting but someone's saying it's not an EA game is a hell of a way to pitch in the a game yeah it's coming up is it November 15th or November this year yeah yeah that's it's exciting it's cool twenty grind team will continue thank God in the meantime we got out I don't know are there other games we'll see we'll see there's hearthstone hearthstone is a game that still have money I'm not sick what you got for us card game I've been playing hearthstone the the rise of shadows expansion came out last Tuesday and it's the it's the first big expansion of the year which what does that mean James I don't know it means card rotation time so yeah at the same time three of the older sets I think was at journey to one Gary notes of the Frozen Throne and cobalt cobalt and comes oh my god that was an America or what they all left like the standard format at the same time so you lose three card sets effectively from standard play which sounds bad but actually it has like a really positive effect on like switching up the kind of archetypes that people play the new set is cut it's I think it's landed really well it's the first thing I would say the game beforehand as it always does usually towards the tail end of an expansion had got pretty stale and it was really dominated by these hero cards and hero cards are ones which transform your hero and give them a new hero power and they'd release one for every class with the notes of the Frozen Throne expansion couple years back and they would do stuff they would they would essentially give you in different forms infinite values like the hunter one men there each turn you could like draw two beast cards combine them and play that that card so like on in a long game you would infinitely create these like super powerful RNG beasts so there's like almost no debt can live with that pressure and each class to varying degrees of power had one of these cards so a lot of games would kind of devolve to who draw who drew those first or and everyone kind of build around them and blah blah blah now the meta game now is it's kind of shaking out has meant that without those cards there is a big caveat to that that I'll come to in a second without those cards it's much more kind of value driven and games kind of grindy and more mid-range II and it's kind of about who can get on board first and then kind of making clever trades and blah blah blah rather than going just for like this one big blowout you you find it you win the the caveat is that there was some other hero cards introduced later on during har stones life which haven't rotated out so warrior has one that's a version of dr. boom who can make like robots or that have rush which means they can do immediately when they hit the board super powerful this shaman has a card where whenever you play a person a creature you draw or just a random spell so again it's like the theme of infinite value and Hunter has a really cool one where it replays every spell you've cast that game which as you can imagine like all at once and one go yeah it's worth it's quite good so you build you so that you can't control what they're targeted but then you kind of you include a lot of spells which kind of it doesn't matter what the target they're always going to be good so there's three classes which have still those hero carts and the meta game is definitely kind of especially the warrior one warrior is super dominant and warrior as a class is like I don't to say it's boring because some people really like those drawn-out control games that warrior specializes in because what he does is like stacks a ton of armor removes all your staff it just draws the game out until you run out of things to you run out of threats basically there's a lot of kind of warrior mira games rogues really good after the expansion as well rogues the class I've been playing most because it got a number one it's the only class I don't have golden which means I don't have five hundred wins on it so I'm kind of trying to grind down rogue got the card that synergizes best with the new lackeys lackeys of these they're generated by other cards and there's like at the moment five of them but there's gonna be more as the year goes on they like all one one creatures with a really powerful effect and rogue does really well with having super cheap things that can kind of combo off each other and it has a card called heist Baron tog waggle which is this like super fat King cobalt look at where's literally there is a great name for a card yeah so what tog wangle does is if you've got one of these lackeys in play when you play him tog waggle gets to choose from one of four magnificent treasures and the treasures do like feel you draw a card and fill your hand with copies of it or draw three cards and they will cost 0 or summon two two copies of a random legendary that you get to pick from one of three so like it doesn't sign things so I crafted that in golden on day one and rogues been a very kind of fast rogue has been really really popular although again it it's bad against warrior the the thing that kind of concerns me a little bit is you know I don't play house on at a super high standard like I kind of bounce around like ranks one to five but for the really competitive players they've done something this year which is or they're about to do something which is switch the eSports format to be it used to be best to fight with you would bring multiple decks multiple classes now you bring one class the new format is called specialist and you bring one deck and then two versions of that deck with slight changes that you can change up to five cards so it's kind of like side boarding and Magic the Gathering where you can kind of make tech choices to try and count what the other person is doing now this won't be used in the World Championships which is happening not this weekend but the weekend after we're sending one of our writers to actually somewhere else well some cover but it will be used thereafter and the worry is that with some classes really dominant everyone's potentially gonna bring like warrior or maybe one of a couple other classes and then you're going to be watching like the same mirror matches go on I mean a warrior mira can take 40 minutes one going on your planet by stuff oh yeah like it's living there already holding like pre tournaments community tournaments open cups that's what they're called they're already holding open cups for people to qualify for you know the next round of big championships and people are saying they'll like they'll start the tournament like 4:00 in the afternoon and it'll only be getting to like the quarterfinals in like 2 a.m. so like if you've got like a job or like after school like good luck completing because and also like they've changed to this this format I think there was a sense that the old format had got a bit boring and had kind of been figured out and they wanted to do something that shook you up and I think they wanted to do something where they could put it you know more of the events would happen online rather than it lands you know this will park the kind of the general changes that were happening at Blizzard they've made it they made changes across eSports but you know I don't want to say that it's is bust before it's even happened yet because to be fair they have not been running beyond luck I think one so Tom we haven't seen much of this yet but I've looked at like the lineups for some of the early tournaments and they were like very very skewed I mean the counterpoint is that if you're really smart then and you find a deck that's gonna just destroy warrior maybe you bring that and clean up and then maybe someone else is even smarter and counter picks against what you're doing so the hope is perhaps that look on a long enough time line you know lots of lots of those kind of strategies emerging right now we're just in a phase where everyone's bringing the best thing but I'm a little nervous about it it's interesting is it obviously different totally different types of games but like some of my favorite moments from fighting game tournaments like Evo are where one player just gets destroyed with their character they're playing who's you know like a top tier pick and they instead of just going back in the match they change it up and choose a different character that maybe they're not even as good with but just throwing off the opponent creates this really exciting moment and the whole crowd is going oh they went for there they went off their main you know they went for this unexpected pick and like I love those moments so I don't know if that really applies the hearthstone but it's interesting that they're kind of limiting the variety that you're gonna see out of these I I wonder if maybe like enabling people to change more cards rather than just the five would help because then they could bring things that were like more radically different flavored the other I just say one more thing that's amuse me so far is that the the pros are getting annoyed about is there's also this card they've printed which some are saying it's like the worst card that's ever been printed for the competitive scene they do tend to be a bit hysterical but it's a car called archivist alice jana and we so with a lot of these games going super long what this card does is it takes the cards that left in your deck throws them out and then lets you pick five new cards which it puts two copies of each into your deck so you get ten cards right but they're chosen completely at random so what people are doing is they get right to the end of the game they've used up all their cards they're about to go into fatigue where you start taking damage because you're drawing from an empty deck then they pay they play this Eliseo no check refill their deck and potentially you know pick things that are suited to closing out that game now where it gets really ugly is there's a number of cards which can bounce alleys iana back into your hand or back into your deck so you can do it more than once so both the reason pros are mad about it is both players can do this they'll they'll play perfectly up until you know at the end of the game when no one's got any cards left and then it kind of comes down to just who gets the best picks awful easy honor so they feel like that's not necessarily but either good playing experience or a good viewing experience although I had to say I love it when she goes plays I think it's funny but it but that's something that is potentially contributing to like some games have been going to the turn limit the tournament is like 45 turns or something like that yeah and then because it had has a number of like criteria for who deciding who wins like who's at the lower life title if you're both at the lower life title who's taking more damage I don't know there's a bunch of stuff but that doesn't make for like exciting viewing necessarily but we'll see I don't wanna rule out what I will say is like like Luke who's writing a piece for us for tomorrow about the kind of the best exit the expansion so far I've been having a ton of fun in Luke and I both been playing a ton of different decks I think like there's some goofy stuff there there that's better than expected there's like a bomb hunter deck uses a long max it's really fun I've been playing like a paladin deck which uses secrets that you know there knows clearly aren't the meta decks but they are like good enough to be played and it's tricky like whenever you're in this way there's this honeymoon period where you should go home I'm so fun I'm seeing something new every day and then like two months from now you'll be going holy if I ever see another bomb in my deck again warrior has these cards which shuffle bombs into your deck which blow up which of course because they're like super trolly like everyone was doing on day one there's a my favorite card in the expansion I said I'd stop talking and I haven't my favorite card expansion is this little dude three-three Moria who puts bombs in the other person's debt and when he arrives on the board he's a robot goes did somebody order a bomb and you're like dude nobody orders bombs why would anyone order a bomb well that's pretty uh it's pretty fascinating that was your ally James but I think I got distracted by by some outdoor business was making loud noises and covering up your interesting insight but I like I like to end these card segments with just a summary of where the game is at and how personally game the game is in a good spot and in a couple of weeks time so a month from launch so I probably three weeks from now the single-player will launch as well and this is is paid for this time but but not hugely expensive and you get a bunch of complex if you do you pay for it and it's a it's based on a wing structure sort of kind of roll out over a number of weeks and it's the most comprehensive single-player I think they've ever done there's shade just like the spire in there in terms of you being at that's really cool yeah and it's like each class laughs like multiple different hero powers you can select from multiple kind of seed decks you can leave use I played it and down a visit for like a whole day and really enjoyed it and I say that was someone who like did not get on at all with the shrines mode they did last time or the puzzle mode they did that before that I think this is easily the best incarnation of single-player so even if you get bored of the matter I know you love to matter generally even if you get bored of it I think the single-player is gonna be really well-received I mean I love the single-player modes I always dive in and play them for a couple hours each that's my that's my way to play and it's I think you'll have it yeah you'd have to drop a little bit of money on its time but I think it have a bunch of fun yeah it's really nice let's move on to our next topic one that it also involves angry prose you'll be happy to hear and that's the fortnight World Cup qualifiers they are kicking off now they kicked off this this last weekend if you don't know the fortnight World Cup is a it's epochs first massive like it is they're top tiers they're Super Bowl a fortnight it is a hundred million dollar prize pool for all of the competitions leading up to and ending in the final World Cup and that's a big prize it's it's huge it's huge it's also it pretty wild because fortnight is a game you know when you have these these big eSports events you're typically thinking of csgo and these games with that that are much more compact and built around this idea of balance and they have much more static Medes or at least like more comprehensible Meadows but fortnight is still doing the thing where they update every two weeks and that version of fortnight is largely the version of fortnight warts and all that pros are playing with and so leading up to the fortnight World Cup pros have sort of been vocal about how the game is in maybe the worst spot it's ever been it's in the worst shape it's ever been at least in terms of competitive play and there's a couple symptoms at the center of this and I'll put up some gifts and videos for everyone watching at home one of them is the baller do you guys know what the baller is we heard of this vehicle no okay not it not a cool guy it's it's literally a hamster ball like a giant well okay you know Jurassic world the boy in the bubble kind of yeah deal in Jurassic world there's a spherical balls they drive around in and you can get up next to the dinos it's literally that with a grappling hook attached so you're running around in this excuse me rolling around in this glass sphere that with a grappling hook and you can boost and bounce all around you cannot shoot out of it and you cannot be shot while you're driving it you can't shoot through the glass it has 200 HP which was nerfed from 300 so it effectively works like 200 extra HP and and super mobility and in those last like three to four circles of competitive fortnight there are usually anywhere between like 20 to 40 players left alive yeah it's it's the state of fort competitive for tonight is already pretty rough because everyone plays super conservatively so in those last final moving circles they stand a chance you know you want the goal in by that point is to be have like one mobility item whether it's like a vehicle like the baller or a rift or whatever like a glider redeploy or whatever it might be so you can build up or quickly adjust to where the circle is moving to or get out of a sticky situation you also want all the resources you can have because turtling is a huge it's like the tactic and competitive fortnight where you basically build snaking tunnels you never really expose yourself all around you as you move and the result is you thought so I could watch is it if you know what's going on it can be but and I'll put I'll just for the the viewers at home I'll show an example of what it looks like because it looks like a nightmare it's just these these big tall towers and you have like if you're watching through the spectator you can see the silhouettes of every player and there is something like 40 players moving around interacting with each other casting that kind of thing is a nightmare because at any given point there are like six encounters happening within that mess of one by one's and it's it's hard to kind of know where you are at a glance because usually all players are like boxed in by their own buildings or editing quickly or moving around it's and disfiguring the terrain it's uh it's it's not a great watch if you don't know what's going on even if you knew do know what's going on it's sort of not in the spirit of the game in my opinion Battle Royale it's just sort of a a that is largely dictated or at least swayed by luck because you never know which direction the next circle is gonna move in you don't know if you're gonna have a good position to be able to rotate anyway so there's and you don't know if you're gonna be able to the stuff you picked up on the way you looted is gonna be what fits your situation or is helpful in that moment so a lot of is still really sort of luck based and it's exacerbated by this at the end even worse these ballers when they come in you you get these situations where they're they're basically like the safest a very safe way to play the the the last few circles if you see other ballers out there so because you get 200 extra HP you can swing around you got easy mobility so you can get to the next circle and you don't have to use any resources you have to spend any resources so it's it's it's a good like first push into those final circles because you base it essentially delays spending those resources spending ammo spending health spending other mobility items it's a buffer and so you're getting these situations where these final circles are just filled with like eight or more balls just bouncing around aimlessly as they wait for the circle to close and everyone is sort of forced to do something either get out of the ball or or make some kind of wacky play there they're not too easy to counter I'm gonna put up another gif here for viewers that shows one of these final circles which is just all these like balls ping pong around while some people don't have one are just frantically building trying not to get knocked out of the circle as they move around it sees is there a kind of a common community sentiment or what what needs to be done what's the solution the solution overall is just get rid of the ballers because as we leave just get rid of them get rid of them epic has done things like like I said nerf they've they claimed they were gonna allow players to shoot through the glass which they then rolled they stepped back from and said nah it's not cool it's not fun that way and the baller is like a totally it's a perfectly fine vehicle in public matches but it's it's so easy to see I mean you can watch these games on the weekend not all of them and didn't like these cluster flux of ballers but a lot of them did and and it and on top of what is already a problematic end game with all this turtling and the other random elements that that play into that it's just it's just it's just not I mean it can be it can produce interesting moments but I don't think and a lot of the pros I wrote this article are just pissed off and think it's just like a mess if the fortnight World Cup and these qualifiers are supposed to show who is the best battle royale player the one who was most capable of adjusting to their situation on the fly and sort of thinking about positioning and thinking about team communication if it's a squad player do a play who has it was great aim who has all the skills to like survive and in in this sandbox it's kind of compromised by this just this vehicle that it's sort of it's just kind of muddies what skill they're testing here and what skill they're testing for a hundred million dollars in total it's it's it's a really bizarre to have it in the game right now still and especially might be especially bizarre if they're not removed before the end of qualifiers or if they are removed before the end of qualifiers because then you know who really deserves to get where they're at reviewing some of this footage who really is the best it's possible to totally get by in these matches and survive until the end just by playing passively or getting in a ball and just like rotating you know in lucky ways it's just it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't really it just it's hard to grind it all down to or you know skill down to a fine point and you sort of never can with Battle Royale it's like sort of the point is it's gonna be muddy it's almost almost as if this wasn't intended to be a nice pool I mean that's that's sort of the thing I like I'm coming around to is like 490 is a lot of fun to watch but I have the most fun when it competitive fort and I excuse me when it like it's sort of assumed that is gonna be a in that like when epic leans into sort of the game show like surreal game show qualities it has throwing items in and out and like watching players adjust to that stuff if you know if their careers aren't on the line is more interesting so they really should take like animate like an American Gladiator I'll approach to competitive fortnight huh or like that no random like kids game show or it's just like and this round like you're gonna have your hands tied behind your back and you have to hop on one foot and whoever is best at doing that I mean million dollars and they've honestly done some of that in skirmishes leading up to the World Cup over the last year they've they've had like creative competitions creative mode competitions they've done things like races or or weird like one of my favourite formats is just like kill counts so like a duo team or a squad team will go into a public lobby and then try and get the highest kill count total they're not competing against other players in the same lobby they're just trying to like tactically strategically try and eliminate as many players as they can in this public lobby and that's like fun because it's easier to keep track of the action it's a bit more straightforward and you know it leans into the whole it leads into the strengths of the sandbox I think like destiny for tonight would actually well scuse me not exactly like destiny but epic is like not ready to do this but I think they really need to consider if they want for tonight to be an eSport a legitimate you sport to balance competitive modes separately and create new rule sets that are that are that are more balanced and a bit more maybe bland compared to the public modes like it's fun to see these ideas introduced at such a rapid pace but inevitably they're not gonna all make sense in with how competitive players play and the argument against into it yeah unfortunately argument against Torino because the same conversation you're right one when Destiny's PvP was popular and not the graveyard it is now was always that the developers tend to not what not happened because one of the fundamental functions for them is that eSports or services the Trojan horse for like getting new people into the game or yeah and also people want to watch it and it'd be reflective of what their own experience is so when you suddenly start removing like the wackier weapons or abilities then like you say it becomes a slightly more benign but you know more perhaps more skillful version of the thing but it's not the same thing yeah and I've always thought all that was and like I don't know like if you like my kind of view on the battle royale stuff is like think the thing is so popular that people would watch it anyway but I might I may be worldwide of the mark there yes I've always thought it would become an eSport just because of the sheer volume the people who were interested in it like it would kind of find a way but then when you described like people building like zigzag tunnels that doesn't tease ya interest wanes at some point yeah and epic is like played around with placing more score like wait on the score you get per elimination or like certain types of bonuses or in-game types or last year but right now for the World Cup they're not really leaning much into eliminations as the should with the current state of the endgame which is just the kind of a mess and yeah I mean a lot of skillful players can survive that and and show that they are capable of handling a you know a shrinking ring of balls coming their way but you know that's that's rare that's rare it would be nice at least to have like a two-week buffer or something for these items to be in public play for a while so you can test them out and pros can dink around with them and see if they make sense or produce strategies counter strategies so on but I don't know it seems like sort of like an unsolvable problem for what fortnight is if it's you know if it's trying to go the traditional eSports route and it's gonna be I think the moral of the story is that no one knows what's going on and that the fortnight World Cup is almost assuredly gonna be interesting to watch either because all this will coalesce like they'll make some changes that make the ball or fit perfectly and they'll it'll it'll all make sense before the World Cup comes around or it's just going to be a total total mess and disaster and pros are gonna leave the game if not temporarily forever like a lot of them have said they're gonna try two different games after the fact because they're so upset with these changes but again foreign exchange is so rapidly and often that I think I think I've seen pros get upset as upset we're close to as upset as they are now and come back around it's it's sort of just the nature of how quickly they update the game I just do think that there's got to be some sort of change they make and how they roll out these updates to competitive players if they're gonna be hosting a hundred million dollar tournaments regularly heaven heaven the cube will save us I have faith I hope so I hope Kevin comes back I'll be back it's funny they have a history of doing these in-game events Wow some of their biggest tournaments are going on and I go over this in the article I wrote but it's it's just wild it's just wild like when I was saw it live I went to the summer skirmish at PAX West last year and they like deployed an anti gray do you filled that Kevin the cube activated Wow like the finals were happening and it bugged out and everyone got caught in this like loop of falling up and down following up and down during like a million dollar tournament and but that goes back to our thing it's like I feel the audience like cool like yeah that's it was like it was I know that we with Harsens balance patch is they've tried in the past to be very careful but when they roll out like nerfs and stuff yeah but even with with worlds coming up like I said in a week's time from now or we can harvest time from now the players would have only had like two weeks essentially with the new cards and to me that's great because then that like that sorts out like you know the wheat from the chaff in terms of peas are really creative deck builder and who's able to read read they're kind of matter encounter counter it really well so I don't know is I think it's gonna be an eternal conundrum for competitive service games burn the more coaster the bear as far as I'm concerned I think I'm with you I think I lean towards your side I just do wish that there was a I don't know better communication from epic would maybe solve this like here's why we're doing this here's why we have the ball are still in that would be cool but hey no I'm gonna watch it either way I'm gonna laugh and have fun either way so uh we'll see how it plays out qualifiers were running from now until I think early June so it's it's gonna be interesting to see who makes it who doesn't yeah that's for tonight it's still happening still massively popular but let's move on let's let's let's get this show on the road and move on to our listener questions if you're in the chat just tag PC gamer with any question you have about computer games and we'll get to if we can but we do prioritize questions from our PC gamer Club discord if you don't know I'm talking about go to club PC gamer comm to find out more you'll get an invite to our discord and you can ask questions and get them on the show almost guaranteed if you join alright let's open up with did it uh not really much of a question what she got James Jan Rin asks you play as giving away AC unity for free because of the Notre Dom is a Notre Dame or Notre Dom hunchback no none should dump what you've done okay anyway I haven't said it out loud in a long time disaster opinions I mean that's nice yeah when I first saw this when I first saw the story I just saw the oh you beast after giving away a C to commemorate and I was like you should maybe throw a little bit some french francs down to help with the renovation but they have so you know that there wasn't there was a different story which Andy Cali on our team was sharing last night which was he was saying that he wasn't saying the story was suggesting that the renovation work could be helped by the internal 3d diagrams that the AC our team had done of the church but when you dug in for the story is seemed like basically a negligible wishful thinking we just were we didn't write about it they said I think we did run but it's interesting though because gosh AC unity was sort of I remember it being the good graphics Assassin's Creed like there next gen leap or something like that you know and it was really buggy on release but it has since been patched up and is fairly stable but the detail on in the architecture and in that city is pretty astounding so even if you don't you're not a big Assassin's Creed person I think it's worth checking out just to like ah GLE the detail in the architecture of of their version of Paris so I think like still of any of the game since then in the series right that's the one that has the the greatest scale like closest to actual size level of detail in this one's you know in one city versus having a larger world just like echoing as super super granular on that setting it was kind of a shame that the game itself was kind of the the you know not the not the favorite of the series we say that but just like rush was I don't think it was trash I mean the PC port had the crazy like skin missing bug stuff from launch it was technically bad yeah yeah I think the look it was only Assassin's Creed with co-op wasn't your co-op in there that was the sequel the next one that nobody bought right the London one what was that one called brothers and sisters sitting together yeah cool yeah go check it out son you play just click a button and it's yours Nick manly asks what are each person on the shows predictions and hopes for e3 this year so that's a loaded question that I haven't even thought about I'm just realizing you guys have any like any sure bets or Hail Marys you're hoping to see and maybe Tim you're a little too close to all this I think our show is gonna be good been working on that ever no working on that pretty much constant at the moment so uh some some good stuff in the pipeline for that elsewhere I figure Microsoft will probably show halo infinity I'd be curious to see what that looks like even if probably don't have room in my life for another kind of grindy space game but and still be kind of keen to see what it looks like don't know what else I would like to see Demon Souls remastered finally yeah but it will not be coming to PC unless something very strange happens and Sony funded that game or co-developed it or I don't quite know what the relationship between from software and and Sony was on that but yeah probably will never see it on PC but it would be great to see a remastered 60fps version of that game playable on ps4 the only one haven't finished in this whole series so I'm hoping to finally play it someday without having a ps3 did they got a ps3 maybe we'll see something on this alleged this rumored Assassin's Creed Vikings game maybe there'll be another FIFA who can say I don't I don't like a risk on that one I want to push the bow out to like fingers crossed guys watchdogs 3 we'll see I'm almost sure we'll see but what isn't the rumor that's set in London yeah hmm that could be cool I hope they like people said they take the gun I like to watch so I reviewed watchdogs to for us and gave it like a 60 hi 60 something because the story stuff was just really repetitive and bad but those open worlds are just some of the liveliest coolest or at least watch likes to is one of the liveliest coolest open worlds whatever game is brexit themed I played the getaway game and I am NOT ready to go back to long breaks at the game is quite a strong pitch though once like are you causing it are you trying to prevent it are you twenty days late hopefully see something Resident Evil it would be nice to get like the next just just be told that another one's coming to say Resident Evil 8 put the title on ok give me just a minute James G they're gonna make rezzie have which with most people there get my trizzie for next fun thing remake rescue they got these three before that no they'll skip and go fool how do you remake resi 4 is what I wonder like what is that I've bought that game so many times and I'll buy it again yeah I mean there's a lot to look forward to I think we'll see a lot of more Borderlands 3 and plenty of stuff that we already know about but I'm just hoping to get some left-field stuff in there too yeah that's our our vague answer for yeah let's work through these last ones real quick Maniac asks we're already three point five months into the new year what has been your biggest appointment biggest appointment biggest disappointment in gaming and the biggest surprise so kind of like what our highs and lows like to call this the anthem award yeah I think anthems only really a disappointment if you're expecting anything else which I was not it was weird because I went to that gosh it was surreal because I went to that early not early preview was like a couple weeks before the demo came out and there was a vibe in the room like everyone was looking around confused like is this good or is this garbage like no one could quite tell it was like the most talky I've ever a demo room has been I usually like games journalists are kind of like it was fun cool I don't know but everyone's just like constant chatter is this did you like this the comments good anyway we don't know how that played out but yeah I think for me anthems a pretty big disappointment based on like that that final that excite I previewed positively for me but what was the other criteria surprise biggest surprise I'm just gonna take that it's like a high something that you you liked a lot maybe didn't expunge you leaving out a commission for me yes that was I was delighted what was the most surprising epic exclusive like I can't even wait out of worlds worlds or was that an ounce into laughs I think taking Metro off steam was big yeah moving again yeah there have been several waves of surprises in that in that category it's been a busy ass year there's been like a I can't even like parse the thoughts passing through my brain when I imagined because it feels like every week something controversial happens or we found a new reason for people to be mad at epic or I don't know I don't know my biggest disappointment is that final Boston Sakura not very much fun tell you what but Wes did you have a big surprise everything hit you um I mean and epic things my surprise in terms of disappointments I haven't met any games that have like really disappointed me this year I guess that I was expecting something out of guess war groove didn't grab me as much as I kind of expected to but I didn't give it a ton of time either so yeah that's partially on me yeah nothing nothing game wise really stands out to me is a huge surprise I guess everyone is really into Supra super land which is a pretty robust Metroidvania oh I've got another surprise oh yeah I come back to playing this week another card game which I used to play which is Elder Scrolls legends and all I thought when they switch developer they'd actually killed that game because it was a lot really disaster for a while like it was they switch from direwolf digital to Sparky pants she's not name that instills faith anyway and the client initially because this rich client as well was now absolutely like it was just the most buggy thing I can really recall seeing in CC jeez but I think it turned it around in the new set which came out this week quite why they release within a week of hearthstone absolutely blows my mind but it seems like a really good set they've got a guy he's an ex Magic the Gathering or ISM at Magic the Gathering hall-of-famer doing carts and nice it seems really fun they've been playing it quite a bit kind of that game is able to stay alive yeah I mean it's got like fizz competition the Magic the Gathering game is the one that's really got online I think to become or is going to become the one that is arrival to Busan has this has really like good viewership and is putting on tournaments now and stuff and obviously it has huge heritage behind it but I think like I would really like elder scrolls to keep ticking along because I think it's a cool little community let's run through a couple and twitch real quick stab emic stab stab 12 and you guys try a no 1807 a review said real good things about it yeah yeah it's supposed to be pretty darn-tootin as far as I know I've never played that series at all so I don't really know what it is to be quite honest city builder is all I know but stabby make stab stab goes on to what kind of silly city builder or management games do you like any standouts in your history I was always a command & Conquer guy which is not exactly a city builder but you know that that vein of strategy that was always my yeah I don't thing I've ever gotten into really ever like dug down into any particular city builder SimCity has always been great frost punk I think was amazing a really cool way to do a narrative-driven city builder Tim any management games to go your fancy just just that's on me myself for a second I like to I haven't played enough of it by really like t-point hospital recently I I even played the ER I'm not like a big Sims sim guy but I did play them the maligned EA see city in quite enjoyed it and the one that wants to be but um great music it was rocky at lunch admittedly but I really like the total shift camera thing it did oh yeah it looked really nice yeah it was pretty I had a good honeymoon era or period with that game where it I didn't know any better I had not played a city builder in a long time and I just it was baseline a very rewarding to make a city up here and then the backlash happened and I realized you know I maybe was a little shallow but I enjoyed it for about a week or so city skylines is is a hell of a game for sure if that's your that's the kind of city builder you're looking for alright a couple here Mitra no murder asks why are you guys so positive about the sims 4 when it tortures the core audience so badly I don't know are we I don't think we have like an editorial stance on the sims 4 but I don't think any of the three of us play sims 4 Maya and what I will say is my other half plays every Sims game and expansion and I think she enjoyed it quite a bit she's playing whatever the latest expansion is now is is quite critical when they're bad but yeah I mean I've heard things about its troops back some stuff like I can't speak to this specifically but there's enough there to have fun with for sure I can't speak to the core audience but Chris and Johanna they put out great Diaries there's obviously enough there to put out great Diaries with and and and have at least some kind of madhouse fun so I you know I don't know sorry guy yeah sorry uh let's see here Oh hot men around will close out with acid Wolf's usual hot maid around no explanation required just pick one okay pick one of the following from each of the three pairs anthem or Mass Effect Andromeda Oh Mass Effect Andromeda anthem could still be saved and drama to come be so geez lawbreakers or radical Heights lawbreakers that's a good video game la burgers is great I'm lawbreakers I haven't played either but I heard okay things about lawbreakers and I've met cliff a couple times he seemed like a really nice guy all right last one fallout 76 or Star Wars Battlefront - I don't front - it was perfectly fine game it's fine I'm done to you destiny okay TVP Tim yeah yeah of course a PvP when I'm not having a Russian boy help me play who never sleeps you know that's like an Australian that's gonna mix that okay easy I people all around the world network of people using my jobs and with that we're out of time for this week you can catch a piece of gamers show I've gotta be punchy Wednesday at 1 p.m. here on twitch.tv slash PC gamer you can find Avadh on youtube.com slash PC gamer after the fact or go to PC gamer comm / tag slash podcast if you want the audio version you can also find us on Spotify anchor fm Google Play still trying to get that iTunes feat converted moved over but you can still listen to us on iTunes so long as you plug our new RSS feed into the app or any podcast listening service that you you prefer yeah so until next week gosh I don't really there's not really any new games coming out nothing new going on is raised - coming up sometime soon we're kind of in a lull so if there's anything you've been playing or recommendations for games you think we should check out news whatever send it send it my way and I'll take a peek if I can but that's gonna do for now until next week don't forget to what Wes and Tim this him know it's a cape 20 groin painting it's gay it's game on mom game on thank you a mom we saying game on now we're saying this is this is the thing James has has turned me into a person who says game on we can't not do it it's for the it's for the fans game on all right youhello everybody and welcome to the PC gamer show for April 1720 teen and you met you may have noticed I did not say twenty grind teen it's because the bulk of releases are out it was a busy busy first quarter of the year but now we got a soak in all these releases just let them wash over us and let them sink into our skin until we are completely won with these games and understand them completely at least until the next busy released season in November I think but with me to brine today is a Tim Clark brand director of PC gamer how you doing Tim excited to be back James I thought maybe I'd better maybe up in bunt you're always welcome but then we'll be talking well guess what Tim we'll be talking about with us today can you take it West you know I mean there's there's two there's two possible avenues to go here it could be for X Games nice Tim's here to talk about sins of a solar Empire I'm gonna guess some hearthstone we got that new expansion yeah Tim's talking out here pretty good here it's pretty good that's good if Tim is happy I'm happy Wes Finland features editors here with us as well yeah and they did not know I was signing up to sit in a stew with you James I'm just telling them quite but it wasn't quite prepared a tasty all of our original thoughts and all these amazing games that came out was a really really nice couple of months we got a like four or five 90s I think you know in a few I'm just totally ballpark in there but I know we had Resident Evil and and Devil May Cry from Capcom Bobby is new sucker Oh apex legend so yeah I wasn't with it was a gradation to visit boo damn it's a great year great year so far uh Wes what the hell are you talking about today a little bit of Star Wars maybe ours it was the celebration weekend in Chicago so we got the trailer for was it called rise of the rise of Skywalker the final in this latest trilogy yes is that the new movie title i I think so do you want to hear something sad about the plum Navy before we get to the game sure yes when the when the trailer broke at the weekend my initial reaction was what the there's another one I genuinely thought like if you'd have asked me I thought that last one was the end like you know what happens to Luke happens to look like obviously when you think about it no there was threads clearly left on pulled and resolved but in my mind it was finished and I was like really that's it I would have been honestly that would have been alright it wouldn't have been the worst the worst thing in the world yeah yeah yeah that new trailer didn't do a lot for me honestly as a big big Star Wars nerd but I think the movie will be pretty good we'll see who's directing this one is it JJ Abrams JJ is back he's back baby is unless someone or don't want him to retcon rays I'm just a regular fan go back story lots of people saying both I'm sure yeah it's gonna be oh oh we lost him we lost him Tim will come back Hilary banks but that's not the reveal we're gonna be talking about today from Star Wars Celebration we're gonna be talking about Star Wars okay so Star Wars Jedi : : fallen order on or is it that fallen or eight it's fallen or you got it gotcha would you get the : in the right place and everything ha perfect this is respawn and if respawn apex legends titanfall developer it's their single-player story based Star Wars game set after episode 3 I think yeah yeah so they showed off a trailer and kind of spoke mmm kind of vaguely what a nightmare panel that was but spoke pretty vaguely about what it will be so we'll be talking about that and and some other stories that sort of came out of that weekend in the news that came with it and I'll be talking to you all or I guess preaching and maybe bothering talking at us a living at you about fortnight's I'm doing it again everybody I'm gonna talk about fortnight it's a good time for fortnight it's an interesting time for fortnight whether you play or not because this is the summer of the World Cup the very first fortnight World Cup and Epic Games has invested a hundred million dollars in prize money in total so it's not like first place is getting a hundred million bucks but in total for four weeks of qualifiers some sort of supporting events and then the final shindig in which country is the favourite James which country is the favourite right now it's really hard to say we're only into week one of the the qualifiers for solo play and yeah it's anybody's game right now it's it's just too - it's way too early to tell I have some favorites but your solution America be the best it's a country of 300 million people and presumably were a lot of fun our audiences I think so that I mean that's what I'm gonna guess and that's not what you wanted to say but you didn't want to seem like one of qualifiers and it like it was not it didn't go down and as I predicted really but then again I haven't been I'm gonna say so it will be a national disgrace if America doesn't win bringing shame on your once great nation I wouldn't be surprised if they they didn't quite honestly because it's a lot of a lot of interesting players coming out of the woodwork because these qualifiers are held in the client it's remotely so you're not going to a you know a local LAN to tryout you can play and try out from your desk so what's the format of the matches used for the World Cup qualifiers uh it's it's gosh I can't remember exactly the time limit or you have a game limit you have a set amount of games you can play while the tournament is live so you just go into the client and you click like I think it's just the fortnight World Cup qualifiers and it'll queue you up with other people trying to qualify and you'll get points based on your performance related to kills and placement and survival and after all you complete all your I'll tally up all your points match him against everyone else and the top six I believe move on to the actual Cup so wait suicide pin to the whole community everyone can try I can try right now you all you try no no maybe I should but it's a million bucks each week just in qualifiers too so yeah pretty wild lots of lots of break down there especially the changes epic was making to the game in the lead up has left a lot of pros pretty sour on the game as a whole they didn't you just post a story about them finding a new thing under loot like yeah yeah so it's right meanwhile the narrative keeps on ticking and epic keeps up the pace of updates that they've kept up for like over a year now it's pretty wild when you think about it there's gonna be a new in-game event soon and a big vault was unearthed under loot Lake and that's exactly where the cube was laid to rest so people are suspecting that the key was gonna make a comeback which I'm all for because I like the big dumb MacGuffin rather than last season's volcano and the season before that like an ice castle yeah little boring little boring just give me give me a big mystery but before we just imagine imagine if the curiosity cube had been as interesting as for tonight's year of just strange stories have you played curiosity hell no no yeah I did I played quite a bit of it I did do if you don't know like listeners this was what Peter Molyneux is like experimental how you did was tap right portable name-o game it was a giant MacGuffin yeah so it was a massive cube and it was the same cube for everyone on their shared across the world and it what the whole goal was like everyone would tap on pieces of the cube to break him them away and it would call a all this data and like break away the the Kuban somewhat real time with the rest of the world and there was some secret at the center some some prize and it what was the prize exactly oh the price this the pro the prizes was to be the god of their next game right this was yeah got us won by a person who then I think I was exposed by Eurogamer like the guy he did a got almost none of what the actual price was and then kind of ended up really sad and kind of in this running battle with on a new studio I don't want to out myself as a credulous peasant but I feel like I've been gold by like multiple Mali new projects I mean like a lot of us have I remember reading about fable which I guess I think one of the less less scammy games that they put out I remember reading the initial like preview properly an edge and then kind of go yeah you'll grow up and if you like cut down a tree when you come back it'll still be a stump and you'll you know if you kind of scab your knee the skull will be there when you're older and just you just really go I sound amazing and think about like the technology that game was being produced on like even the notion that that was going to be a thing he's like absolutely preposterous yeah next like next gen fever every time this yeah totally knocks people over but imagine he's working on a pretty exciting ps4 project right now put it that way yeah yeah hey right right tracings I think now prime rate racing is the thing it needs let's just briefly break that down so was it yesterday Sony's sort of let loose the initial hardware specs vague hardware specs related to the PlayStation 5 and I think I don't know I I didn't read the article itself I kind of just I was too busy but the impression I got from everyone talking about it was that it was a little too optimistic about the capability and price of some of the hardware listed or detailed in the spec including a like a ray tracing capable GPU listed it like a ten thousand dollar value Hey well I was yeah I just compared it to like you know Oh previously to this you know recent generation of hardware you could only do ray tracing on like $10,000 Hollywood you know super computer hardware just like really not a good comparison it's like a pointless college ex-cons were like dude I'm doing in Metro right now yeah it looks great Metro doesn't cost 10 grand hollywood's ray tracing is baked so it's like rendered yeah Sony's always had you know I say this as someone that he worked on a Sony magazine for some time they've always had like a little bit of creative license when it came to claims around their new machines I remember interviewing Phil Harris in a circa whenever the PlayStation was that released a controller that didn't have haptic feedback didn't have Rumble and I went into the interview with Harrison after had been announced I was like people really like rumble isn't that gonna be a problem and he was like we he said like with a straight face I say as well because God blessed Phil really can deliver really can deliver without blinking he just went that's a lost generation feature and I was like and then I sure enough like a year later we're delighted to bring back now that some legal issues have been resolved that's it that's the next-generation mouse feature we got mouse and keyboard Rumble it's gonna show up one of these days right the floating idea of a mouse at Rumble - where's and he no yeah II sick in his mouth I mean imagine imagine the aim imagine the aim with that keyboard though let's let's Rumble those keys let's do it clickety clackety well I've got early onset arthritis enough without the keyboard moving yeah police station five is happening it's just it's just always interesting we have this big article if you want to go out like we won't talk about it much longer but I'll link to the article sort of breaking down what's in there Jarrid breaking down what's in there and how it compares to PCs and and other there sorry what's that I mean I guess the one the one like talking semi seriously reminded the one assuming this is something that's going to come out like next year or whatever that I guess if it moves up the baseline in terms of technical performance for kind of multi-format games then SEO news will probably benefit yeah I think we definitely do benefit it's always nice when the ceiling is raised I get excited just so I I know we're gonna get some slightly better looking games on the PC I mean it's pretty much gonna be a PC in a either curved or like a trapezoidal box right you know I mean this is it's AMD hardware right pretty much I love those chips so less bespoke than they used to be because he used to be they would put in what was what was the engine that the Sony made was just almost emotion the emotion engine motion ADL's to and then sell on the ps3 yeah and like no longer get a head around that's a pro program for it like the emotion engine is a goodness is a good name for it sir pretty good it sounds like the kind of thing that Don Draper would have pasted in Mad Men who just got we call it just like cigarette beautiful PlayStation 5 coming soon let's talk about our highlights of the week and our highlights of the week or anything that stood out to us in what we play or read about in the world of personal computer gaming so why don't we start with the Wes your highlight this happy to start as I as I wrote in our show notes here I am a mayonnaise making machine now I'm gonna need some context so I've been playing stardew valley finally for the first time when that game before it came out I was following the blog for it and I was like oh I'm really looking forward to playing this never really gotten into a Harvest Moon this one's on PC this seems like the game for me and throughout the entire development they were talking about having co-op in the things that you could have a farm with your friends and to get the game out they decided or or he decided that developer eric barone decided like i'm gonna delay that do it later it's gonna be a lot of work let's just get the game out and then it took like two more years for them to get co-op out and they finally did that last year and I've been playing it with a few of my friends we got a whole farm set up together and we're now like about a year into our farm and we've gotten to that point where we have money now like at first we're just really poor and our farms like we have like a little corner of crops planted and you know we're making a little money from them and now like the money's rolling in we're selling artisan goods like I'm making mayonnaise or the mayonnaise machine turning my chickens eggs into mayonnaise and we got a lot of a lot of fishing going on and a lot mining and selling stuff and making money upgrading our tools and defending firms that sounds so like wholesome like most farms especially a group farms I assume like you spend a couple of nice days there then you're kind of indoctrinated into the sex cult or like burn in a wicked man or something but Fenland emilich seems like that might not happen to you well it's we named it Blood Gulch so take that okay as you will but yeah that's a it's a it's fairly wholesome we're good at sharing we're good at sharing responsibilities and taking care of our crops and our and our animals so you a pretty friendly place you have to try this xform a nice occasion or combine them I mean like there's a good potential there my god one of my friends is playing so like you can do a little create a character like change your hair or than you know shirt and whatnot and he like clicked the button I don't even know if he clicked randomize or if it just the first random character it gave him was just like a perfect Bob Ross so he's playing as he named his character Bob Ross and that is his that is his character and it's it makes me laugh every time you guys ever get like mad with each other there's someone's like goofing off on the farm and not being enough for the kind of chores that could happen but I don't think it has yet because we were definitely in that phase of like we have no money and we want to you know do as well as we can to like get the resources to upgrade our equipment and stuff but there might be a point at which somebody just like just sells all the the crops and then just off and does whatever they want or something and the rest of us is like come on you gotta help replant so we'll see what happens we've got a couple other people who pop in and out less frequently so there's there's definitely some potential for shenanigans as we as we move forward but in the meantime a lot of mayonnaise I've have you come up with a brand I feel my I have not I have not done that but now I need to that's not bad beautiful I'm really happy you're making big stuff so that's the power of PC gaming for you what about what about you Tim what's your what's your what's your highlight what you've been doing I've been playing a to the surprise if no one the the springtime Destiny's event which is cooled the revelry it actually lost for four weeks so it means that the tower was covered in like lovely spring flora and fauna and this kind of assaults on Ian as birds and stuff and there's they've read kind of they've redone the haunted forest to now be the springtime forest is kind of like a wave base mode where he has kind of clear wave after wave and then do kind of boss rush thing at the end and you have to grind out and do a bunch of tramps and then you can get this new exotic weapon called the herbalist you wrote about yesterday James it's like a linear fusion rifle so it's kind of like it's like a kind of rail gun the five slug rounds you put in your kinetic slots your primary it's actually not very good the gun I yeah I played like from pretty much when I knocked off work at like half five o'clock through til like late last night to get it with the guys I play with and we all got in it was fun playing with them but the gun is like the gun is kind of so-so it's not trash but it's also like it's a really weirdly niche weapon like it's hard to know why you would use it because it takes on your exotic stop why do you use it over one of the big big kind of meta power weapons but that's not playing it is not my highlight well it is my I like and the most fun we had was part of the grind you had one of the tribes had to generate lots of orbs of light forgetting kills and stuff in the gambit prime mode or gambit and so we went in there as keyed in as a force attack team and we matched up just towards the end of our play session with one of the kind of quite well-known destiny streamers called professor broman and we absolutely bodied his team which was really excited because like we were really phoning it in until that point and then as soon as like one of our guys noticed it was someone we'd heard of like everyone like stepped up we had the guy who was doing invading on our team is a guy called psycho llama and he's really good he's like a kid in Australia who doesn't sleep he just plays on like North American hours with us and it's basically ruined his life but he's very good at shooting people and he was invading them and they they twice with the guy who's streaming twice whiffed on like the Thunder crush move where he did this kind of like Superman smash thing and he landed like 1 meter away from psycho and then so I could machine-gunned him in the face hey you know I'm 40 years old James but this was a great moment for me this we will watch the stream back in a laughs when they were calling cyclone beautiful that's great that's great yeah all your making time destinies paying off taking back what's been taking down the icons and stars right on yeah I hopped into it yesterday to whip up that gun do any college and it's really it's it's a fun I think I like the cadence like as much as many complaints as inevitably players are gonna have about these live games I am really enjoying the cadence with which they're putting stuff out and like substantial things to even if it is like a sort of like a reskin of that haunted forest mode it's still fun and it still excites me I have something new to do some new waiting I think it's not perfect Daniel past model they've gone I think they would admit that as well but at least it gives at least it means just something to do on a fairly regular basis whereas before that game had like huge periods but there was no change at all whether that gets them through another year until they get to like d3 or not unless certain but kind of interest is is is the plan or I don't know what's confirmed and what's not is the plan another big ish I mean no one knows the plan so at the moment at the moment what's on the roadmap is that there's one more of these annual pass drops which hits thinking June I call penumbra which which has a ride with it so that should be good it's kind of themed looks like it's gonna be themed around returning for the Leviathan spaceship so that it should be great for law as well and then after that they've always had a release in September but that was when they were being financed and and run by Activision they usually do it kind of like that was when forsaken came in September and they had rise of iron previously to that so like no one quite knows what's gonna fill that gap my suspicion and I think a lot of the community suspicion is they're just they will roll out another Annual Pass but maybe with a maybe with a bigger drop there to start it but I think they really need to create like another planetary destination at the least so there's just somewhere need to explore one funny thing before we move off this I'll say is that so that the mechanic is the way the revelry event works is you can drink these tonics you get the tonics from the vendor and you can buy more of them as you kind of earn the currency from just doing any activity and they give you like a massive cooldown either to your melee ability or your grenade ability or what's your class ability but but these buffs work like globally in the game so they even work in PvP and they even work in the competitive PvP ladder so people have absolutely like the few people who play that line because it's really sweaty and see make go ahead you have gone absolutely crazy I didn't know that yeah there's there's some actually some really cool rewards locked behind that ladder which I don't want to reveal how I acquired this season maybe for another show James okay Tim I like how you you called my farm a cult and yet you're playing in an event called the revelry with a guy who doesn't sleep so that he can it is actually more wicked man not for I feeling about it but yeah I'm undef enjoying the the tears of the competitive players drinking drinking them right down love it love it I'll just go over my highlight sir real quick I got two quick ones I hop back into sass ins Creed Odyssey because I thought I beat it apparently I wasn't even close I did like one ending there's like there's like a return in a king situation where it just keeps ending over and over again kinda like there are like sort of three different branches in that games like narrative branches one is like wacky sci-fi fantasy one is just the family story at the center of in your your sister and your excuse me or your brother and your mother and sort of reuniting the family and and how that plays out and that's the Spartan Athenian conflict and then there's just like taking out the entire cult and the big boss who I still I still don't know who that is so I beat LA I mean I quit playing when I beat the sci-fi ending which was fun but then I just I hop back in to check out some of the DLC let's come to the game in the months since and I was like oh I didn't finish this and hopped right back in to it and like 20 hours melted away the game is incredible has it gone either way DLC like I think it was the one before the Egyptian one that had that Final Fantasy crossover that made no sense nothing that bizarre nothing that jarring that stuff is like sort of more naturally there is some of that wacky but it's more naturally it is naturally introduced into the story it's it's myth myth myth mythological figures coming to life fighting they should do they should do like an American mythological figure DLC pack where it's just like what's his name Paul Bunyan and his in his bowl and Wild Bill Hickok and Ilya and and who was the guy who hit the the train spikes real good oh ledge hammer what's that movie tall tales the trunks yeah there we go why do you why do you know me because there's the songs Ohio song rejoice and milena sings about John Henry swinging a hammer down that's a great song listening it's a good tall tale so I've been hopping back there that's been a lot of fun and the other highlight is playing and writing about Netflix's latest interactive series you versus wild starring Bear Grylls and and if you don't know who Bear Grylls is you might remember it's too quick Google search but man vs. wild you it was probably like 10 years ago at this point when he was really sort of big and his Netflix series introduces choices into the mix so when bear is faced with climbing across a ravine you can take the old trolley that's there but I was put installed by the natives or you can repel down and try and go around most options usually put bear in some kind of distress what what satisfies me the most about it is that these aren't real survival scenarios but bear is often in these scenarios like acting them out in a real setting so one example is you have to cross a frozen lake and it's a real frozen lake they're out in the wilderness doing this and he's like alright should we should we run across it because we need to save time or should we crawl because it's safer and we can distribute our weight better that way and I'm like oh no run that's gonna be like can you die can you die babe and so I say run across it and like he takes a couple steps and just falls into the lake he falls through the ice and so it's just there's a weird pleasure I have knowing that most people are gonna be I'm not nothing against this guy I don't know much about him but there's just no everyone's gonna torture this guy and that's like the real joy you can draw from this this otherwise really hokey simple series it reminds me of a when I was at this is slightly on a long anecdote not about games enjoy when I was at Primary School we had like a movie Wednesdays thing where I guess so they didn't have to teach us they would just show us like an educational film and then sometimes they would show us like King Solomon's Mines and stuff that weren't educational at all I won Kim farming's mines that's pretty good one of them was like a safety on the farm film because they were often like these government films and in safety on the farm this like group of like seven or eight kids goes to the farm and is one-by-one killed in accidents and you see them like quite graphically like one kid like falls into like the grain sorting machine you just see my hand going into the grain another one like reaches up and touches like a bare wire and is electrified and another kid is like balancing on puddles slips and brains himself on one of the other files you honestly see like a hunk of like head matter like like glued onto the pole we were like about like seven or eight years old women lived anywhere near a farm we lived in South London farms yeah between that and the time they showed us watership down I was absolutely traumatized dance you make a lot more sense no man the most the most traumatic like school experience like that I ever had was in preschool in preschool so I'm like four years old they decided to show us a Steven Spielberg's hook okay which is which is not like a super graphic or super violent movie but it's kind of its kind of weird it's kind of twisted and a dude gets eaten alive by scorpions are stung alive by scorpions in the first 20 minutes of that movie I was not ready for that at 4 years old I gotta say like it was not a good nap time and I think that is that kind of thing well that kind of thing probably won't happen to the same degree with this series it feels aimed at younger people but you're not like watching bear like - his head against the rocks and his limp body fall into a ravine he'll often like get out of a situation even if you make a poor decision and let you try again and be like why did you do that idiot or maybe this may be the sequel though we'll be a little more hardcore yeah I would love it on one hand it was like wow I really want a a more hardcore version of this kind of like mixed like reality TV plus fictional scenarios that's like a really interesting thing but on the other hand I just love how dumb it is as a result of like having to be okay for younger people there there's so many contrived solutions to surviving in the wilderness like you you need to get through this jungle that is clearly being proud by a Jaguar and you can either roll in mud to mask the scent which sounds smart or dress up as a giant in a giant Bush suit which is the most visible thing you could possibly do cats have great vision if you ever like you're gonna get spotted and so watching him like because when you choose something he has to like act like that's he has to go with it and he has to act like yeah we'll do this and you can see like his lips tighten a little bit in his eyes sort of that little squint a bit more when you picked the wrong choice and he's like trying really hard to put on a show for ya even though he looks like a total so yeah that's that's you versus wild and it's just like I'll link to my article but it's it's it's a hoot it's a hoot another time another time when I was a kid my mom sent me on this outdoor pursuits trip with my sister but she did have to do this because she was younger and these two ex army guys took us kids out into the woods I did it's like survival training on us and it was their last week there the army guys they decided to go like hog wild on these kids they were doing stuff like they would roll us in puddles like muddy puddles to get us like covered in mud to be like camouflage and if the kid didn't want to do it they would like literally put a boot on his head and push his head under the water we were like yeah it was really like I mean I'm old so this was like back in the olden days it was pretty sketchy like we were having to cross this river like on a log and like one kid fell off into the river when he came out he was wearing like a Sou'Wester he'd caught a fish in his pocket like that like he had just a fish in his back health and safety law wasn't a thing back then hafsteinn yeah let's uh well hey well let's let's do Star Wars real quick I got I got hearthstone for the middle of the show alright good chief for the law but talk about this Star Wars reveal respawns single-player Star Wars game Star Wars Jedi : fallen order so you know we talked about a little bit at the beginning it's the skis been in development for I think four years now or maybe even in lauder I was at respawn for like an early titanfall to preview and they had a whole wing of their studio just like locked off for it yeah so it's been works for a long time we haven't really known much of anything about it until I guess last year at e3 they kind of I was that when they revealed the name I can't even remember maybe it was it was when they cut really awkwardly to like Vince Zampella in the crowd and my Vince tell us about your game whose I asked my soul's Falana like all right good reveal yeah and that's about all we've known we knew it was gonna be a single-player game but and kind of figured it was gonna be like a light saber kind of combat focus game and honestly we still don't know a lot more than that because the big reveal at Star Wars Celebration this weekend was all cinematics so we still haven't seen anything gameplay from this game we haven't really seen what it's gonna play like but they did kind of give a brief synopsis saying it's a light saber focus combat game it's gonna be you know sort of easy to learn but hard to master have enough depth there you're gonna move a customizr lightsaber to some degree the main character is kind of on the run after the end of Star Wars Episode three where all the Jedi get or most of the Jedi get killed by the kind of the rise of the Empire and he is now in hiding and trying to I think kind of either restart the Jedi Order or see one of the links yeah I'm not sure if he was Montgomery was supposed to be a youngling or if he was just a young Jedi at the time I don't yeah they haven't said exactly how many years have passed my guess is he was probably like a teenager or something yeah around the the time of that movie I think we know from the video that there's gonna be like bull running right there seems because that's like quite heavily I don't think you put bull running in there as the studio who did bull running notably in its previous FPS by accident that's that's fair yeah otherwise I use my powers yeah yeah he's he's pulling some stuff with his hand but it the whole the whole trailer has this very kind of dark like anti Jedi kind of vibe running through it he's saying you know oh don't don't stand out don't use your don't use your powers you know you have to stay hidden so that they can't discover you and obviously the theme of the game is gonna be him reversing that decision right and you know being standing triumphant saying no I am a Jedi I need to help people and yet it feels fairly telegraphed to me here's a question for you was this Resident Star Wars expert all the midi-chlorians is that still canon no I don't think so I feel like it was never referenced ever again but it was such a like a heavily explained bit that unless like Liam Neeson was on this huge wind up his character of like I can make these idiots believe anything I think it's canon in the sense that it's in the movie and therefore it has to be but in in the way that they are never going to reference it again like they're never gonna use that explanation it's no one's gonna ever say midi-chlorians at another Star Wars movie base basically the Jedi have all got like interstellar HPV I could just they could they could they could retroactively Lee write it off as bunk science but yeah it's it's there it's there my guess is they will try to pretend that never happened for the rest of the rest of Star Wars but who knows maybe they'll maybe a little joke about it or something what what how we feel about this trailer I guess like what our what's our needs Tim I you're notoriously don't give a about star wars uh it's it's not that I don't care about it why I don't care about it I mean it's more like like I like everyone I enjoyed the original trilogy when I was a young man I like very much so like I had the toys like everyone else and I guess I just think the other films were basically bad and like any attempt to pretend otherwise his feet are okay even even even the more recent ones I kind of go and I go watch them while they're on I enjoyed them and then when I leave it's exactly like one of the in like a McDonald's I feel nothing I just feel nothing like I can't remember it I can't tell you what like all of them solo rogue one the spin-off ones like I couldn't write down on a beer mat what happened in and maybe that's like my failing memory let me leave they just leave no impression yeah no way so I'm guessing stuff like yeah there's some good spaceship scenes we there's some good space fights well well I like the universe still so like I'm gay okay I think I've said before like respawn would would have been my pick if ever I could have had a dream pick to make like a Warhammer 40000 game so the thought of them doing pure sci-fi working on a cool license I'm definitely here for it I like the fact it's single-player and just a campaign that I can play through and don't have to you know invest $1,000 grinding for a gun that turns out to be bad and Effie here for it because I just I think like a developer who really deliver on the feel of combat see I think it I think it's cool kind of rough on poor old Amy Anik because they said like yay so but not in single-player all those things anymore she just must be looking into a guy what the yeah that's it she's she kind of things we wanted to talk about a little bit was they came out and made this statement about this game which is great for this game them saying it's a single-player game no but just a year and a half ago or whatever they were saying like there isn't a market for this kind of game anymore therefore we're not making it because you know FIFA makes us all this loot box money what kind of loot boxes you're gonna have in your game none okay well let's cancel that one and I think that was more of the basement probably more of the business excuse at the time for them to kind of sweep under the rug like okay this projects a mess it's having these issues but maybe those issues were also largely caused by direction from up above that it needed to have certain features needed to do this and then Lucas home saying no you can't do such and such and licensed game problems yeah yeah but this one so far seems like it has managed to avoid falling into the falling into that trap it looks like they're they have a game anyway well that what do you think way this year would you guess III I think I'll be right I think that's why they didn't show gameplay in this initial reveal because they want to blow it out at e3 which kind of disappointing to me I would have liked to just see a little bit of what this game actually is gonna play like but guess we'll will get that pretty soon but if it's if it has even like the spirit of old you know Jedi Outcast Jedi Knight game's dog versus dark forces like if even though it's not gonna be a first-person shooter if it still has that kind of that feel I will be did they confirm this already said post in the nor was it first-person I believe they confirmed third-person yeah and my hope is I think there's a quote out there I'm paraphrasing and obviously saying the combat is much more deliberate like you're gonna have to really size up your opponents which gives that's cool to me because I mean we've wrote an article about I think Tom senior wrote an article about how like Sakura's combat system makes sense for lightsabers there are these crazy unwieldy dangerous things that if they touch you you die essentially or the thing it touches comes off so it'd be really cool to see that captured like the the consequence of that thing even coming near you that really violent beam of light in your I don't see I don't see how you can actually cuz wasn't I were talking about this before a meeting the other day in saying like if you had like an actual lightsaber fight where the lightsaber wielder was like just plowing through waves of enemies there just be this windmill of like arms and legs flying off and just geysers of blood but it look at Takashi Miike film well you know it cauterizes the wound Tim there's no blood that's the whole that's the whole gimmick is it's instantly just like severe burn I mean I'm no doctor but I'm just saying I think that's there'll be some blood it's it's I mean like that's my hope at least compared to like the last couple games it was Force Unleashed the last like third-person Star Wars game actually game we we had it's the last one in in this kind of vein anyway I don't remember if there's been anything and since that was really about like the extreme power fantasy I just don't want to be like a a godly Jedi I want to be a scrappy like barely know what I'm doing Jedi that sounds fun but yes so another thing that's sort of standing out based there like immediately hit me when the trailer was shown off was that that protagonist is like he could be anybody it's it's it's probably like Wes you wrote a big piece on this like of all of these these creatures and aliens and places and interesting people they could have chosen for the face of this like second coming of Star Wars single-player story based games they chose it just a guy who could be just the most unrecognizable character yeah you know I I think his character design is is really bland and it's not even just that he's like a white guy character but that they went for the hood to make him look kind of cool they went for this like you know brown hair but then he kind of looks like he's got like when you got the hood on you like doesn't you kind of look like a skinhead and then the voice-over is very like I don't know how good an actor this guy is he's probably fine he's been on Gotham he's been on some a couple other TV shows I think I'm sure he's gonna do a fine job in the game but the writing of the voice-over also I think is really it's just like really predictable I think and is not interesting and his delivery of it doesn't elevate it to some great art so I was kind of just bored listening to this character and looking at him and there's like there's like hundreds of weird alien cool alien species that they've come up with in Star Wars maybe just go off the beaten path and use one of them you suggested a number was what was what would have been your number one pick for for an alien mm-hmm I listed out about a dozen that were ones that I felt like yeah these these would actually work like these would be cool let me look back through and see which one would be my my my favorite good morning God at least in the top five I was anything I did link one that's I would not go for actually I just put it in there as a joke called awesomes who look like really fat like dogs with over bites wearing doing cloths and wearing white white white too fat and dog shame in one comment with Jesus I would say that would not have been the most you couldn't really put that on the box art you know that was why aren't there more games in which you play aliens is quite uh just in consideration right and then when you were told me like the Covenant in halo that was cool I would say either a Deveraux nyan or as a Brack these are like two of the ones that put in you just might win you just making these out there I mean there's a there's a musical form called jizz in Star Wars I don't need to make no I didn't need to make this up myself it's all out there it's just but it's sexier yeah there you go but the Zab rack are like Darth Maul from his race you know mum's gone out he's gone crazy and the makeup cabinet yeah there you go I think he was heavily tattooed they don't all look quite quite like that but they have the horns and stuff so like you just have like alright this piece of concept art is someone who has sort of tan skins I couldn't tell you if they all if they all have the same skin color what I think there's a character there's a character like this in coat or to ID sealer public to of this race so like yeah that that would have been a fine race to do a protagonist and there's many many other possibilities but they went with the most boring choice they could which some people are already trying to justify by saying like well he's trying not to stand out so it makes sense that he would look like that like a okay sure yeah I'm not into it but that doesn't mean again this is criticism folks this is a we're not we're not gonna boycott the game because of it just it's just disappointing it's weird it's just like I've really stood out anything else about Star Wars I mean we're still waiting on gameplay which will probably see at e3 did we talk about the no loot boxes statement that sort of EA put out and sort of just just a bit yeah no loot boxes was sort of their marketing thrust or their surrounding the announcement which is just kind of hypocritical considering the like I like I read someone saying I can't remember who was I so I apologize for not crediting but someone's saying it's not an EA game is a hell of a way to pitch in the a game yeah it's coming up is it November 15th or November this year yeah yeah that's it's exciting it's cool twenty grind team will continue thank God in the meantime we got out I don't know are there other games we'll see we'll see there's hearthstone hearthstone is a game that still have money I'm not sick what you got for us card game I've been playing hearthstone the the rise of shadows expansion came out last Tuesday and it's the it's the first big expansion of the year which what does that mean James I don't know it means card rotation time so yeah at the same time three of the older sets I think was at journey to one Gary notes of the Frozen Throne and cobalt cobalt and comes oh my god that was an America or what they all left like the standard format at the same time so you lose three card sets effectively from standard play which sounds bad but actually it has like a really positive effect on like switching up the kind of archetypes that people play the new set is cut it's I think it's landed really well it's the first thing I would say the game beforehand as it always does usually towards the tail end of an expansion had got pretty stale and it was really dominated by these hero cards and hero cards are ones which transform your hero and give them a new hero power and they'd release one for every class with the notes of the Frozen Throne expansion couple years back and they would do stuff they would they would essentially give you in different forms infinite values like the hunter one men there each turn you could like draw two beast cards combine them and play that that card so like on in a long game you would infinitely create these like super powerful RNG beasts so there's like almost no debt can live with that pressure and each class to varying degrees of power had one of these cards so a lot of games would kind of devolve to who draw who drew those first or and everyone kind of build around them and blah blah blah now the meta game now is it's kind of shaking out has meant that without those cards there is a big caveat to that that I'll come to in a second without those cards it's much more kind of value driven and games kind of grindy and more mid-range II and it's kind of about who can get on board first and then kind of making clever trades and blah blah blah rather than going just for like this one big blowout you you find it you win the the caveat is that there was some other hero cards introduced later on during har stones life which haven't rotated out so warrior has one that's a version of dr. boom who can make like robots or that have rush which means they can do immediately when they hit the board super powerful this shaman has a card where whenever you play a person a creature you draw or just a random spell so again it's like the theme of infinite value and Hunter has a really cool one where it replays every spell you've cast that game which as you can imagine like all at once and one go yeah it's worth it's quite good so you build you so that you can't control what they're targeted but then you kind of you include a lot of spells which kind of it doesn't matter what the target they're always going to be good so there's three classes which have still those hero carts and the meta game is definitely kind of especially the warrior one warrior is super dominant and warrior as a class is like I don't to say it's boring because some people really like those drawn-out control games that warrior specializes in because what he does is like stacks a ton of armor removes all your staff it just draws the game out until you run out of things to you run out of threats basically there's a lot of kind of warrior mira games rogues really good after the expansion as well rogues the class I've been playing most because it got a number one it's the only class I don't have golden which means I don't have five hundred wins on it so I'm kind of trying to grind down rogue got the card that synergizes best with the new lackeys lackeys of these they're generated by other cards and there's like at the moment five of them but there's gonna be more as the year goes on they like all one one creatures with a really powerful effect and rogue does really well with having super cheap things that can kind of combo off each other and it has a card called heist Baron tog waggle which is this like super fat King cobalt look at where's literally there is a great name for a card yeah so what tog wangle does is if you've got one of these lackeys in play when you play him tog waggle gets to choose from one of four magnificent treasures and the treasures do like feel you draw a card and fill your hand with copies of it or draw three cards and they will cost 0 or summon two two copies of a random legendary that you get to pick from one of three so like it doesn't sign things so I crafted that in golden on day one and rogues been a very kind of fast rogue has been really really popular although again it it's bad against warrior the the thing that kind of concerns me a little bit is you know I don't play house on at a super high standard like I kind of bounce around like ranks one to five but for the really competitive players they've done something this year which is or they're about to do something which is switch the eSports format to be it used to be best to fight with you would bring multiple decks multiple classes now you bring one class the new format is called specialist and you bring one deck and then two versions of that deck with slight changes that you can change up to five cards so it's kind of like side boarding and Magic the Gathering where you can kind of make tech choices to try and count what the other person is doing now this won't be used in the World Championships which is happening not this weekend but the weekend after we're sending one of our writers to actually somewhere else well some cover but it will be used thereafter and the worry is that with some classes really dominant everyone's potentially gonna bring like warrior or maybe one of a couple other classes and then you're going to be watching like the same mirror matches go on I mean a warrior mira can take 40 minutes one going on your planet by stuff oh yeah like it's living there already holding like pre tournaments community tournaments open cups that's what they're called they're already holding open cups for people to qualify for you know the next round of big championships and people are saying they'll like they'll start the tournament like 4:00 in the afternoon and it'll only be getting to like the quarterfinals in like 2 a.m. so like if you've got like a job or like after school like good luck completing because and also like they've changed to this this format I think there was a sense that the old format had got a bit boring and had kind of been figured out and they wanted to do something that shook you up and I think they wanted to do something where they could put it you know more of the events would happen online rather than it lands you know this will park the kind of the general changes that were happening at Blizzard they've made it they made changes across eSports but you know I don't want to say that it's is bust before it's even happened yet because to be fair they have not been running beyond luck I think one so Tom we haven't seen much of this yet but I've looked at like the lineups for some of the early tournaments and they were like very very skewed I mean the counterpoint is that if you're really smart then and you find a deck that's gonna just destroy warrior maybe you bring that and clean up and then maybe someone else is even smarter and counter picks against what you're doing so the hope is perhaps that look on a long enough time line you know lots of lots of those kind of strategies emerging right now we're just in a phase where everyone's bringing the best thing but I'm a little nervous about it it's interesting is it obviously different totally different types of games but like some of my favorite moments from fighting game tournaments like Evo are where one player just gets destroyed with their character they're playing who's you know like a top tier pick and they instead of just going back in the match they change it up and choose a different character that maybe they're not even as good with but just throwing off the opponent creates this really exciting moment and the whole crowd is going oh they went for there they went off their main you know they went for this unexpected pick and like I love those moments so I don't know if that really applies the hearthstone but it's interesting that they're kind of limiting the variety that you're gonna see out of these I I wonder if maybe like enabling people to change more cards rather than just the five would help because then they could bring things that were like more radically different flavored the other I just say one more thing that's amuse me so far is that the the pros are getting annoyed about is there's also this card they've printed which some are saying it's like the worst card that's ever been printed for the competitive scene they do tend to be a bit hysterical but it's a car called archivist alice jana and we so with a lot of these games going super long what this card does is it takes the cards that left in your deck throws them out and then lets you pick five new cards which it puts two copies of each into your deck so you get ten cards right but they're chosen completely at random so what people are doing is they get right to the end of the game they've used up all their cards they're about to go into fatigue where you start taking damage because you're drawing from an empty deck then they pay they play this Eliseo no check refill their deck and potentially you know pick things that are suited to closing out that game now where it gets really ugly is there's a number of cards which can bounce alleys iana back into your hand or back into your deck so you can do it more than once so both the reason pros are mad about it is both players can do this they'll they'll play perfectly up until you know at the end of the game when no one's got any cards left and then it kind of comes down to just who gets the best picks awful easy honor so they feel like that's not necessarily but either good playing experience or a good viewing experience although I had to say I love it when she goes plays I think it's funny but it but that's something that is potentially contributing to like some games have been going to the turn limit the tournament is like 45 turns or something like that yeah and then because it had has a number of like criteria for who deciding who wins like who's at the lower life title if you're both at the lower life title who's taking more damage I don't know there's a bunch of stuff but that doesn't make for like exciting viewing necessarily but we'll see I don't wanna rule out what I will say is like like Luke who's writing a piece for us for tomorrow about the kind of the best exit the expansion so far I've been having a ton of fun in Luke and I both been playing a ton of different decks I think like there's some goofy stuff there there that's better than expected there's like a bomb hunter deck uses a long max it's really fun I've been playing like a paladin deck which uses secrets that you know there knows clearly aren't the meta decks but they are like good enough to be played and it's tricky like whenever you're in this way there's this honeymoon period where you should go home I'm so fun I'm seeing something new every day and then like two months from now you'll be going holy if I ever see another bomb in my deck again warrior has these cards which shuffle bombs into your deck which blow up which of course because they're like super trolly like everyone was doing on day one there's a my favorite card in the expansion I said I'd stop talking and I haven't my favorite card expansion is this little dude three-three Moria who puts bombs in the other person's debt and when he arrives on the board he's a robot goes did somebody order a bomb and you're like dude nobody orders bombs why would anyone order a bomb well that's pretty uh it's pretty fascinating that was your ally James but I think I got distracted by by some outdoor business was making loud noises and covering up your interesting insight but I like I like to end these card segments with just a summary of where the game is at and how personally game the game is in a good spot and in a couple of weeks time so a month from launch so I probably three weeks from now the single-player will launch as well and this is is paid for this time but but not hugely expensive and you get a bunch of complex if you do you pay for it and it's a it's based on a wing structure sort of kind of roll out over a number of weeks and it's the most comprehensive single-player I think they've ever done there's shade just like the spire in there in terms of you being at that's really cool yeah and it's like each class laughs like multiple different hero powers you can select from multiple kind of seed decks you can leave use I played it and down a visit for like a whole day and really enjoyed it and I say that was someone who like did not get on at all with the shrines mode they did last time or the puzzle mode they did that before that I think this is easily the best incarnation of single-player so even if you get bored of the matter I know you love to matter generally even if you get bored of it I think the single-player is gonna be really well-received I mean I love the single-player modes I always dive in and play them for a couple hours each that's my that's my way to play and it's I think you'll have it yeah you'd have to drop a little bit of money on its time but I think it have a bunch of fun yeah it's really nice let's move on to our next topic one that it also involves angry prose you'll be happy to hear and that's the fortnight World Cup qualifiers they are kicking off now they kicked off this this last weekend if you don't know the fortnight World Cup is a it's epochs first massive like it is they're top tiers they're Super Bowl a fortnight it is a hundred million dollar prize pool for all of the competitions leading up to and ending in the final World Cup and that's a big prize it's it's huge it's huge it's also it pretty wild because fortnight is a game you know when you have these these big eSports events you're typically thinking of csgo and these games with that that are much more compact and built around this idea of balance and they have much more static Medes or at least like more comprehensible Meadows but fortnight is still doing the thing where they update every two weeks and that version of fortnight is largely the version of fortnight warts and all that pros are playing with and so leading up to the fortnight World Cup pros have sort of been vocal about how the game is in maybe the worst spot it's ever been it's in the worst shape it's ever been at least in terms of competitive play and there's a couple symptoms at the center of this and I'll put up some gifts and videos for everyone watching at home one of them is the baller do you guys know what the baller is we heard of this vehicle no okay not it not a cool guy it's it's literally a hamster ball like a giant well okay you know Jurassic world the boy in the bubble kind of yeah deal in Jurassic world there's a spherical balls they drive around in and you can get up next to the dinos it's literally that with a grappling hook attached so you're running around in this excuse me rolling around in this glass sphere that with a grappling hook and you can boost and bounce all around you cannot shoot out of it and you cannot be shot while you're driving it you can't shoot through the glass it has 200 HP which was nerfed from 300 so it effectively works like 200 extra HP and and super mobility and in those last like three to four circles of competitive fortnight there are usually anywhere between like 20 to 40 players left alive yeah it's it's the state of fort competitive for tonight is already pretty rough because everyone plays super conservatively so in those last final moving circles they stand a chance you know you want the goal in by that point is to be have like one mobility item whether it's like a vehicle like the baller or a rift or whatever like a glider redeploy or whatever it might be so you can build up or quickly adjust to where the circle is moving to or get out of a sticky situation you also want all the resources you can have because turtling is a huge it's like the tactic and competitive fortnight where you basically build snaking tunnels you never really expose yourself all around you as you move and the result is you thought so I could watch is it if you know what's going on it can be but and I'll put I'll just for the the viewers at home I'll show an example of what it looks like because it looks like a nightmare it's just these these big tall towers and you have like if you're watching through the spectator you can see the silhouettes of every player and there is something like 40 players moving around interacting with each other casting that kind of thing is a nightmare because at any given point there are like six encounters happening within that mess of one by one's and it's it's hard to kind of know where you are at a glance because usually all players are like boxed in by their own buildings or editing quickly or moving around it's and disfiguring the terrain it's uh it's it's not a great watch if you don't know what's going on even if you knew do know what's going on it's sort of not in the spirit of the game in my opinion Battle Royale it's just sort of a a that is largely dictated or at least swayed by luck because you never know which direction the next circle is gonna move in you don't know if you're gonna have a good position to be able to rotate anyway so there's and you don't know if you're gonna be able to the stuff you picked up on the way you looted is gonna be what fits your situation or is helpful in that moment so a lot of is still really sort of luck based and it's exacerbated by this at the end even worse these ballers when they come in you you get these situations where they're they're basically like the safest a very safe way to play the the the last few circles if you see other ballers out there so because you get 200 extra HP you can swing around you got easy mobility so you can get to the next circle and you don't have to use any resources you have to spend any resources so it's it's it's a good like first push into those final circles because you base it essentially delays spending those resources spending ammo spending health spending other mobility items it's a buffer and so you're getting these situations where these final circles are just filled with like eight or more balls just bouncing around aimlessly as they wait for the circle to close and everyone is sort of forced to do something either get out of the ball or or make some kind of wacky play there they're not too easy to counter I'm gonna put up another gif here for viewers that shows one of these final circles which is just all these like balls ping pong around while some people don't have one are just frantically building trying not to get knocked out of the circle as they move around it sees is there a kind of a common community sentiment or what what needs to be done what's the solution the solution overall is just get rid of the ballers because as we leave just get rid of them get rid of them epic has done things like like I said nerf they've they claimed they were gonna allow players to shoot through the glass which they then rolled they stepped back from and said nah it's not cool it's not fun that way and the baller is like a totally it's a perfectly fine vehicle in public matches but it's it's so easy to see I mean you can watch these games on the weekend not all of them and didn't like these cluster flux of ballers but a lot of them did and and it and on top of what is already a problematic end game with all this turtling and the other random elements that that play into that it's just it's just it's just not I mean it can be it can produce interesting moments but I don't think and a lot of the pros I wrote this article are just pissed off and think it's just like a mess if the fortnight World Cup and these qualifiers are supposed to show who is the best battle royale player the one who was most capable of adjusting to their situation on the fly and sort of thinking about positioning and thinking about team communication if it's a squad player do a play who has it was great aim who has all the skills to like survive and in in this sandbox it's kind of compromised by this just this vehicle that it's sort of it's just kind of muddies what skill they're testing here and what skill they're testing for a hundred million dollars in total it's it's it's a really bizarre to have it in the game right now still and especially might be especially bizarre if they're not removed before the end of qualifiers or if they are removed before the end of qualifiers because then you know who really deserves to get where they're at reviewing some of this footage who really is the best it's possible to totally get by in these matches and survive until the end just by playing passively or getting in a ball and just like rotating you know in lucky ways it's just it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't really it just it's hard to grind it all down to or you know skill down to a fine point and you sort of never can with Battle Royale it's like sort of the point is it's gonna be muddy it's almost almost as if this wasn't intended to be a nice pool I mean that's that's sort of the thing I like I'm coming around to is like 490 is a lot of fun to watch but I have the most fun when it competitive fort and I excuse me when it like it's sort of assumed that is gonna be a in that like when epic leans into sort of the game show like surreal game show qualities it has throwing items in and out and like watching players adjust to that stuff if you know if their careers aren't on the line is more interesting so they really should take like animate like an American Gladiator I'll approach to competitive fortnight huh or like that no random like kids game show or it's just like and this round like you're gonna have your hands tied behind your back and you have to hop on one foot and whoever is best at doing that I mean million dollars and they've honestly done some of that in skirmishes leading up to the World Cup over the last year they've they've had like creative competitions creative mode competitions they've done things like races or or weird like one of my favourite formats is just like kill counts so like a duo team or a squad team will go into a public lobby and then try and get the highest kill count total they're not competing against other players in the same lobby they're just trying to like tactically strategically try and eliminate as many players as they can in this public lobby and that's like fun because it's easier to keep track of the action it's a bit more straightforward and you know it leans into the whole it leads into the strengths of the sandbox I think like destiny for tonight would actually well scuse me not exactly like destiny but epic is like not ready to do this but I think they really need to consider if they want for tonight to be an eSport a legitimate you sport to balance competitive modes separately and create new rule sets that are that are that are more balanced and a bit more maybe bland compared to the public modes like it's fun to see these ideas introduced at such a rapid pace but inevitably they're not gonna all make sense in with how competitive players play and the argument against into it yeah unfortunately argument against Torino because the same conversation you're right one when Destiny's PvP was popular and not the graveyard it is now was always that the developers tend to not what not happened because one of the fundamental functions for them is that eSports or services the Trojan horse for like getting new people into the game or yeah and also people want to watch it and it'd be reflective of what their own experience is so when you suddenly start removing like the wackier weapons or abilities then like you say it becomes a slightly more benign but you know more perhaps more skillful version of the thing but it's not the same thing yeah and I've always thought all that was and like I don't know like if you like my kind of view on the battle royale stuff is like think the thing is so popular that people would watch it anyway but I might I may be worldwide of the mark there yes I've always thought it would become an eSport just because of the sheer volume the people who were interested in it like it would kind of find a way but then when you described like people building like zigzag tunnels that doesn't tease ya interest wanes at some point yeah and epic is like played around with placing more score like wait on the score you get per elimination or like certain types of bonuses or in-game types or last year but right now for the World Cup they're not really leaning much into eliminations as the should with the current state of the endgame which is just the kind of a mess and yeah I mean a lot of skillful players can survive that and and show that they are capable of handling a you know a shrinking ring of balls coming their way but you know that's that's rare that's rare it would be nice at least to have like a two-week buffer or something for these items to be in public play for a while so you can test them out and pros can dink around with them and see if they make sense or produce strategies counter strategies so on but I don't know it seems like sort of like an unsolvable problem for what fortnight is if it's you know if it's trying to go the traditional eSports route and it's gonna be I think the moral of the story is that no one knows what's going on and that the fortnight World Cup is almost assuredly gonna be interesting to watch either because all this will coalesce like they'll make some changes that make the ball or fit perfectly and they'll it'll it'll all make sense before the World Cup comes around or it's just going to be a total total mess and disaster and pros are gonna leave the game if not temporarily forever like a lot of them have said they're gonna try two different games after the fact because they're so upset with these changes but again foreign exchange is so rapidly and often that I think I think I've seen pros get upset as upset we're close to as upset as they are now and come back around it's it's sort of just the nature of how quickly they update the game I just do think that there's got to be some sort of change they make and how they roll out these updates to competitive players if they're gonna be hosting a hundred million dollar tournaments regularly heaven heaven the cube will save us I have faith I hope so I hope Kevin comes back I'll be back it's funny they have a history of doing these in-game events Wow some of their biggest tournaments are going on and I go over this in the article I wrote but it's it's just wild it's just wild like when I was saw it live I went to the summer skirmish at PAX West last year and they like deployed an anti gray do you filled that Kevin the cube activated Wow like the finals were happening and it bugged out and everyone got caught in this like loop of falling up and down following up and down during like a million dollar tournament and but that goes back to our thing it's like I feel the audience like cool like yeah that's it was like it was I know that we with Harsens balance patch is they've tried in the past to be very careful but when they roll out like nerfs and stuff yeah but even with with worlds coming up like I said in a week's time from now or we can harvest time from now the players would have only had like two weeks essentially with the new cards and to me that's great because then that like that sorts out like you know the wheat from the chaff in terms of peas are really creative deck builder and who's able to read read they're kind of matter encounter counter it really well so I don't know is I think it's gonna be an eternal conundrum for competitive service games burn the more coaster the bear as far as I'm concerned I think I'm with you I think I lean towards your side I just do wish that there was a I don't know better communication from epic would maybe solve this like here's why we're doing this here's why we have the ball are still in that would be cool but hey no I'm gonna watch it either way I'm gonna laugh and have fun either way so uh we'll see how it plays out qualifiers were running from now until I think early June so it's it's gonna be interesting to see who makes it who doesn't yeah that's for tonight it's still happening still massively popular but let's move on let's let's let's get this show on the road and move on to our listener questions if you're in the chat just tag PC gamer with any question you have about computer games and we'll get to if we can but we do prioritize questions from our PC gamer Club discord if you don't know I'm talking about go to club PC gamer comm to find out more you'll get an invite to our discord and you can ask questions and get them on the show almost guaranteed if you join alright let's open up with did it uh not really much of a question what she got James Jan Rin asks you play as giving away AC unity for free because of the Notre Dom is a Notre Dame or Notre Dom hunchback no none should dump what you've done okay anyway I haven't said it out loud in a long time disaster opinions I mean that's nice yeah when I first saw this when I first saw the story I just saw the oh you beast after giving away a C to commemorate and I was like you should maybe throw a little bit some french francs down to help with the renovation but they have so you know that there wasn't there was a different story which Andy Cali on our team was sharing last night which was he was saying that he wasn't saying the story was suggesting that the renovation work could be helped by the internal 3d diagrams that the AC our team had done of the church but when you dug in for the story is seemed like basically a negligible wishful thinking we just were we didn't write about it they said I think we did run but it's interesting though because gosh AC unity was sort of I remember it being the good graphics Assassin's Creed like there next gen leap or something like that you know and it was really buggy on release but it has since been patched up and is fairly stable but the detail on in the architecture and in that city is pretty astounding so even if you don't you're not a big Assassin's Creed person I think it's worth checking out just to like ah GLE the detail in the architecture of of their version of Paris so I think like still of any of the game since then in the series right that's the one that has the the greatest scale like closest to actual size level of detail in this one's you know in one city versus having a larger world just like echoing as super super granular on that setting it was kind of a shame that the game itself was kind of the the you know not the not the favorite of the series we say that but just like rush was I don't think it was trash I mean the PC port had the crazy like skin missing bug stuff from launch it was technically bad yeah yeah I think the look it was only Assassin's Creed with co-op wasn't your co-op in there that was the sequel the next one that nobody bought right the London one what was that one called brothers and sisters sitting together yeah cool yeah go check it out son you play just click a button and it's yours Nick manly asks what are each person on the shows predictions and hopes for e3 this year so that's a loaded question that I haven't even thought about I'm just realizing you guys have any like any sure bets or Hail Marys you're hoping to see and maybe Tim you're a little too close to all this I think our show is gonna be good been working on that ever no working on that pretty much constant at the moment so uh some some good stuff in the pipeline for that elsewhere I figure Microsoft will probably show halo infinity I'd be curious to see what that looks like even if probably don't have room in my life for another kind of grindy space game but and still be kind of keen to see what it looks like don't know what else I would like to see Demon Souls remastered finally yeah but it will not be coming to PC unless something very strange happens and Sony funded that game or co-developed it or I don't quite know what the relationship between from software and and Sony was on that but yeah probably will never see it on PC but it would be great to see a remastered 60fps version of that game playable on ps4 the only one haven't finished in this whole series so I'm hoping to finally play it someday without having a ps3 did they got a ps3 maybe we'll see something on this alleged this rumored Assassin's Creed Vikings game maybe there'll be another FIFA who can say I don't I don't like a risk on that one I want to push the bow out to like fingers crossed guys watchdogs 3 we'll see I'm almost sure we'll see but what isn't the rumor that's set in London yeah hmm that could be cool I hope they like people said they take the gun I like to watch so I reviewed watchdogs to for us and gave it like a 60 hi 60 something because the story stuff was just really repetitive and bad but those open worlds are just some of the liveliest coolest or at least watch likes to is one of the liveliest coolest open worlds whatever game is brexit themed I played the getaway game and I am NOT ready to go back to long breaks at the game is quite a strong pitch though once like are you causing it are you trying to prevent it are you twenty days late hopefully see something Resident Evil it would be nice to get like the next just just be told that another one's coming to say Resident Evil 8 put the title on ok give me just a minute James G they're gonna make rezzie have which with most people there get my trizzie for next fun thing remake rescue they got these three before that no they'll skip and go fool how do you remake resi 4 is what I wonder like what is that I've bought that game so many times and I'll buy it again yeah I mean there's a lot to look forward to I think we'll see a lot of more Borderlands 3 and plenty of stuff that we already know about but I'm just hoping to get some left-field stuff in there too yeah that's our our vague answer for yeah let's work through these last ones real quick Maniac asks we're already three point five months into the new year what has been your biggest appointment biggest appointment biggest disappointment in gaming and the biggest surprise so kind of like what our highs and lows like to call this the anthem award yeah I think anthems only really a disappointment if you're expecting anything else which I was not it was weird because I went to that gosh it was surreal because I went to that early not early preview was like a couple weeks before the demo came out and there was a vibe in the room like everyone was looking around confused like is this good or is this garbage like no one could quite tell it was like the most talky I've ever a demo room has been I usually like games journalists are kind of like it was fun cool I don't know but everyone's just like constant chatter is this did you like this the comments good anyway we don't know how that played out but yeah I think for me anthems a pretty big disappointment based on like that that final that excite I previewed positively for me but what was the other criteria surprise biggest surprise I'm just gonna take that it's like a high something that you you liked a lot maybe didn't expunge you leaving out a commission for me yes that was I was delighted what was the most surprising epic exclusive like I can't even wait out of worlds worlds or was that an ounce into laughs I think taking Metro off steam was big yeah moving again yeah there have been several waves of surprises in that in that category it's been a busy ass year there's been like a I can't even like parse the thoughts passing through my brain when I imagined because it feels like every week something controversial happens or we found a new reason for people to be mad at epic or I don't know I don't know my biggest disappointment is that final Boston Sakura not very much fun tell you what but Wes did you have a big surprise everything hit you um I mean and epic things my surprise in terms of disappointments I haven't met any games that have like really disappointed me this year I guess that I was expecting something out of guess war groove didn't grab me as much as I kind of expected to but I didn't give it a ton of time either so yeah that's partially on me yeah nothing nothing game wise really stands out to me is a huge surprise I guess everyone is really into Supra super land which is a pretty robust Metroidvania oh I've got another surprise oh yeah I come back to playing this week another card game which I used to play which is Elder Scrolls legends and all I thought when they switch developer they'd actually killed that game because it was a lot really disaster for a while like it was they switch from direwolf digital to Sparky pants she's not name that instills faith anyway and the client initially because this rich client as well was now absolutely like it was just the most buggy thing I can really recall seeing in CC jeez but I think it turned it around in the new set which came out this week quite why they release within a week of hearthstone absolutely blows my mind but it seems like a really good set they've got a guy he's an ex Magic the Gathering or ISM at Magic the Gathering hall-of-famer doing carts and nice it seems really fun they've been playing it quite a bit kind of that game is able to stay alive yeah I mean it's got like fizz competition the Magic the Gathering game is the one that's really got online I think to become or is going to become the one that is arrival to Busan has this has really like good viewership and is putting on tournaments now and stuff and obviously it has huge heritage behind it but I think like I would really like elder scrolls to keep ticking along because I think it's a cool little community let's run through a couple and twitch real quick stab emic stab stab 12 and you guys try a no 1807 a review said real good things about it yeah yeah it's supposed to be pretty darn-tootin as far as I know I've never played that series at all so I don't really know what it is to be quite honest city builder is all I know but stabby make stab stab goes on to what kind of silly city builder or management games do you like any standouts in your history I was always a command & Conquer guy which is not exactly a city builder but you know that that vein of strategy that was always my yeah I don't thing I've ever gotten into really ever like dug down into any particular city builder SimCity has always been great frost punk I think was amazing a really cool way to do a narrative-driven city builder Tim any management games to go your fancy just just that's on me myself for a second I like to I haven't played enough of it by really like t-point hospital recently I I even played the ER I'm not like a big Sims sim guy but I did play them the maligned EA see city in quite enjoyed it and the one that wants to be but um great music it was rocky at lunch admittedly but I really like the total shift camera thing it did oh yeah it looked really nice yeah it was pretty I had a good honeymoon era or period with that game where it I didn't know any better I had not played a city builder in a long time and I just it was baseline a very rewarding to make a city up here and then the backlash happened and I realized you know I maybe was a little shallow but I enjoyed it for about a week or so city skylines is is a hell of a game for sure if that's your that's the kind of city builder you're looking for alright a couple here Mitra no murder asks why are you guys so positive about the sims 4 when it tortures the core audience so badly I don't know are we I don't think we have like an editorial stance on the sims 4 but I don't think any of the three of us play sims 4 Maya and what I will say is my other half plays every Sims game and expansion and I think she enjoyed it quite a bit she's playing whatever the latest expansion is now is is quite critical when they're bad but yeah I mean I've heard things about its troops back some stuff like I can't speak to this specifically but there's enough there to have fun with for sure I can't speak to the core audience but Chris and Johanna they put out great Diaries there's obviously enough there to put out great Diaries with and and and have at least some kind of madhouse fun so I you know I don't know sorry guy yeah sorry uh let's see here Oh hot men around will close out with acid Wolf's usual hot maid around no explanation required just pick one okay pick one of the following from each of the three pairs anthem or Mass Effect Andromeda Oh Mass Effect Andromeda anthem could still be saved and drama to come be so geez lawbreakers or radical Heights lawbreakers that's a good video game la burgers is great I'm lawbreakers I haven't played either but I heard okay things about lawbreakers and I've met cliff a couple times he seemed like a really nice guy all right last one fallout 76 or Star Wars Battlefront - I don't front - it was perfectly fine game it's fine I'm done to you destiny okay TVP Tim yeah yeah of course a PvP when I'm not having a Russian boy help me play who never sleeps you know that's like an Australian that's gonna mix that okay easy I people all around the world network of people using my jobs and with that we're out of time for this week you can catch a piece of gamers show I've gotta be punchy Wednesday at 1 p.m. here on twitch.tv slash PC gamer you can find Avadh on youtube.com slash PC gamer after the fact or go to PC gamer comm / tag slash podcast if you want the audio version you can also find us on Spotify anchor fm Google Play still trying to get that iTunes feat converted moved over but you can still listen to us on iTunes so long as you plug our new RSS feed into the app or any podcast listening service that you you prefer yeah so until next week gosh I don't really there's not really any new games coming out nothing new going on is raised - coming up sometime soon we're kind of in a lull so if there's anything you've been playing or recommendations for games you think we should check out news whatever send it send it my way and I'll take a peek if I can but that's gonna do for now until next week don't forget to what Wes and Tim this him know it's a cape 20 groin painting it's gay it's game on mom game on thank you a mom we saying game on now we're saying this is this is the thing James has has turned me into a person who says game on we can't not do it it's for the it's for the fans game on all right you\n"