Mmmmm. The time is now. The place Los Angeles, California. The
me Jeff Gersman from giant bomb dot com. Hello, welcome. The day
one of the E three twenty sixteen is complete in the bag. Two more
to go, but we are here tonight for the next several hours. I
am starting off with the editors, the people of giant bomb dot com.
Brad Shoemaker's here. Look, hello, Hi, Dan record. I love
Austin Walker down there, Austin borrow any carvel on the back. Thank you
calling me a person. I appreciate that. Yeah, video, yeah,
video. I'm sitting here, I'm saying that that's your E three title of
Like, are you an editor? Yes, yeah, yeah, definitely let
me into this thing. Yeah, exactly. You know, I don't I
don't involve. I don't know that those terms curry as much favor as they
used to around here. At the fair point, I'm an influence. We're
influencers. What I see to see, we're wind fluencers. WHOA, that's
pretty good. Huh pinfluencer it's I you're bowling influencer. We did not have
our own entrance at the Microsoft No, no, we not. We did
not the influencers did, but we did not. All right, So,
hey, E three happened, We saw some games. We did. So
before we get some guests in here and talk about let's talk to them about
stuff. Why don't we talk to you guys about things now? Alleged of
Zelda, Breath of the Wind. Uh, you guys saw Breath of the
Wild. Breath of the Wild. The thread of the Wind would be a
good name. There's already wind waker. Yeah, wocome now a legends okay,
one of the best, one of the best. Okay, one of
the best, one of the best. You could make the argument, you
could make the argument, would I would entertain it? Top top five dinner
Alive's your favorite links that are dead alive? All right, I'm so good
getting where you got it. That's Scott. Oh. So you guys played
that. You recorded a separate thing that we'll go up not long after that,
so we we don't maybe we won't go into too much depth here,
A big long thing. It's like a sixteen minute things long giant. Yeah.
Yeah, we sat down on the floor and as long as the Thrones
cast check this out. You want to hear about the state of E three
we sat down on the show floor and recorded this thing. Yeah, there
was so much empty space on the edge of the West Hall E three is
crazy. Whether it used to be an activision booth. It was empty and
quiet enough that we could sit down on the show floor and record and record
a podcast. It's near the t mobile booth. It was near the like
exit to the like food truck Corp. But it's just it's a ghost town.
It's real weird here this year. It seems like like a lot of
space between booths, Like the walk ways between booths really tried to like kind
of stretch things out, but they're still like at the edge of this it's
like there's just nothing here. There's just not as many people. Yeah,
not as many people there booths. It's it's weird, Like it's kind of
nice, yeah, but you know it's yes, that's uh, you know.
I everyone I talked to I kind of said like, oh, how's
the show going, you know, and and the show just started. But
still people were just like, yeah, I don't know why I'm here showing
gay Like it was like a lot of people from publicers going and I was
like, man, okay, Like I tried not to prompt them and say
like this is bad, right, and they were just like this seems weird
and maybe I don't know that this is gonna happen like this or the show,
like give it a couple of years, the show was gonna look completely
different. I walked both halls before the doors. I would just kind of
get the lay of the land, and I felt like I had missed some
giant chunks, like there's some like something kench a hall or feel like there
were huge things that I was missing yea. And it's like, oh wait,
no, there's just no giant activation or a or anything. The Nintendo
booth is fucking rack. Yeah, it is really nice. It's like Disneyland
Amusement, right, set this up. So they take they take this into
like close my eyes. You just you can wait on the line. You
wait on the line, and they let us into the theater. We're in
a theater. We watched basically the trailer they showed for the Breath of the
Wild, right, Uh, then the projector that's showing the theater. You're
forgetting the like whole like theatrical intro from that Girl you want to It was.
It was a lot of like you know theater, high school theater,
someone you know awakened to the wind players be ready. Yeah, you're a
lot into the world of the legend of Zelda. Right and then all right,
so they show the trailer and then the all in the projector. A
stone door opens as the projector screen goes up and reveals the booth behind.
It's being Disneyland. On the screen is the same thing as what has been
built behind the screen, so as the screen rises, it look like seamlessly
meshes with the stone wall. The door opens there, and then you walk
through a tunnel into the booth, which is decked out in trees and the
forest and whatever guard towers. I wouldn't guard there with moblings up there.
Didn't have you walk that are sent to where you are that like lightning go
off. Yeah we didn't, we didn't. We didn't. We didn't have
time to see much of it. But they're supposed to be like animatronic shit
in there. It's chucky cheese and this is what it's a day night cycle
in the EXPERI this smell like this, smell like the happiness joy okay,
smell like Redmond, Washington. Then we planes, although it was okay,
it was really come on, you were it's neat. Yeah, it's real,
it sounds cool. Yeah, there are things that are weird about it,
and you're gonna have to get used to like control scheme stuff because Nintendo
always just fucked zero control scheme stuff. Not bad control stuff here, Nintendo
always just kind of says fuck you to the conventions of like control methods or
you know, layouts and stuff like that. So, like, a,
which is the bottom one is dash? And why which is the top one
is jump? So at one point I wanted to run and try to jump
and get on this plateau thing one would be b on a Nintendo right,
okay, okay, so right next to the side, yeah, spring and
remember that. Okay, And so I had to do this like claw thing
to do a run jump, But like, I don't even know if that's
the type of game where you need to do that, right, because that
was totally not the right way to get to those treasure chests anyway. So
yeah, just pause it and select codfish and then everything's okay, Yeah,
it'll be right up and just easy to understand. Okay, A right,
trigger, there was totally a moment where I got to the top of a
tower and it went to my map screen and a much icon showed up and
it said regional map extended. H oh yeah, it said that on the
screen like that. I mean, you've got a tablet in a Zelda game.
That's already weird. Yeah, he's getting Android. Yeah, yeah,
I saw the interface of that. It's not We mentioned this in the thing
he jumped off the towler in the podcast and reg dond he died, just
get sucked up and rolls down a hill, lifeless corps bouncing down the hill
into someone. It was you shouldn't have seen. It was weirdly disturbed,
weirdly un Zelda like about that. Anyone'd be like, oh, the Bill's
not supposed to do that, So I think, make that noise and it
seems really laughs and you hold in these Yeah, it seemed really cool.
But it does that thing that nintoo e three demos have been doing forever of
having an invisible timer running. And then it was fifteen minutes and when you
hit it, it just thanks for playing and interrupts whatever you're in the middle
of. And that was just not enough time to grapple with, like the
systems on systems that existed because there's cooking and crafting. There's like that temperature
meter affects you. Like I went to I ran across the map to a
snowy area and they were like and they were like, don't go in there
until you put on your green tunic. And I went in there and the
description on the green tunic straight up said cold resistance on it. So I
put that on and then I could go in there without taking down. There
was like some hot food you could eat that would also keep you warm in
those situations, spicy meat. The one of the things that I heard going
around is that like they're going to different sites and showing every site like a
different unique item or something. And the one that that Chris Waters was telling
me about was like a fire rod and it's basically just a torch that never
goes that never goes out and never need to replace. And that got me
thinking about like the survival mechanisms and like the fact that things break means that
like you just get a thing that doesn't break and that's super magical basically.
Yeah, and that's really interesting. Yeah, with any of your swords or
weapons or whatever. I was just kind of messing around the controls. You
can just throw it at a thing. And when I realized that I threw
my main sword, I thought like, oh cool this it do like a
boomerang thing and come back. But it just dunked off the guy's head and
fell in some tall grass and I had to go like find my sword and
pick it up. You can just lose your sword that way. Yeah,
that's cool real life. Yeah, so you guys all have more on that.
Yeah, I'm gonna try to get that after this, after we're done
here. So I went and checked out titan Fall two yea, and Austin
did as well. Yeah, he snuck into E A play. I felt
like I snuck into even though I was on the list. Like that whole
thing felt like this week was like the state of E three. It's like,
on one hand, it's this huge space, was like a giant.
Yes, it has its own thing going on, and I think today's last
day for it. Yeah uh, and then they are showing it's just it's
battlefield titan Fall and the three sports games uh, FIFA, NHL, and
Madden, and then they're running a Madden turnament. Anyway, I went over
to that thing and they had like a little red carpet there and it's like
play all this other stuff and they're blasting electronic music. Yes, definitely,
and that thing was empty. Yeah, like it was weird. Like it
was really good if you were there and you wanted to play a lot of
titan Fall, because you could stand in line to play titan Fall and then
go all right, I'm gonna walk back around and play more titans have amusement
part. So basically what I did, Yeah, yeah, I played it
once and then I was like, okay, I'm gonna go I played it
twice. Smart because that game seems real good. Game seems real cool.
It was grappling, grappling, that's really good. Yes, multiplayer the load
people inten at a time, or however many people it is to play.
Yeah, one map, one mode, and mode is called Bounty. It's
like a captured and control point thing, but instead of just like being in
the point, it's about killing NPCs that are in that point or getting killed
in general. I think anything in that point progress as your meter until you
control that point and then it spawns in like a super boss. Like in
this case, it was super tight and basically and over gets the kill and
then like like gets on that tighten or finishes it. Yeah, it's like
you have to point. You have to like doom the titan and then mount
it and take it to claim the bounty or do the execution in a tight
Oh. Right, reminds me that Halo thing was it war Zone where they
would drop the super powerful things. That's it's very similar to it. But
a man, that game feels good. Grappling hook, you know, like
you know you about like jumping on a titan in Old Titan Fall, like
you had to get up on a building first and kind of land on it.
You had to kind of position you you could get going and double jump
and kind of get on it sometimes. But the grappling hook, you just
grapple it. You can grapple yourself into your own Titan and their animations for
that. You can grapple the rodeo and a Titan is now a multi step
process, like you kind of pull the thing off and fly off and if
you get back on to finish it. If you fly off every time,
yeah, this's like can't animate. Yeah, but the thing that you do
is you're grabbing like a battery from it when you come on. Ye and
you can't use that battery to boost your own titan friends titans? So do
you still do the shooting into the stuff? Back on? You just back
on in there an open hole and then you throw right okay and take it
out that way, and that's that's real good too. So when you when
you use the grappling hook, does it automatically really you win? Yeah?
It can because if you hold the button down, is it not some of
that some of the footage that they showed made it look like there was a
swinging expect So this is the thing's like, So I've been playing a lot
of Overwatch. This is not Widowmakers grappling hook of like hook zip. Yeah,
because what you can do and what I did a couple of times it
was like I'm running, I do a double jump up. There's a titan
here, like in front of me, where there's lights in front of me,
you're running towards it. I do a double jump up. I hook
onto this like big tower here and then swing around the back of the tower.
Because it's just it's a grappling hook. It's a line that you're on
and so it's shooting you up, shooting me up. Unless I like double
jump and like move towards it. It can be a thing that just gets
you up to a place, so it's not like the Batman like the Arkham
thing where just no, it's not by default, but it can't be,
but yeah, it'll sort of do that. And then like, so I
was jumping onto doomed enemy titans with the grappling hook, getting up on there
and then immediately launching off, and when you jump off of a titan you
seem to get a boost, so it was like this really good way to
just go fuck it. I'm getting in the air and then you're like and
then I'm landing on another titan and doing the same thing. Like there's some
really cool mobility stuff. I never felt like I didn't know what I was
doing, like, and that's the thing with something that feels so analog against
the way the grappling hook works, It's like it was never like, oh,
I really love it. I could just get up there really quick.
I was able to do that. Or if I was like, oh I
want to do something weird and like catch here and then swing into this open
window, I could do that. It felt really natural. The movement feels
so goodby felt so good, and the last one like that's so cool they
hate Yeah, yeah, but you can always make it better. And the
grappling hook is is a load out item, so you don't have to take
it, but you can't like trip a titan or something like that. It's
it's not like made to like running out. I don't know, I bet
not scorpion people though, right, yeah. Yeah. The other abilities were
like send out a hollow clone of you or like do a thing that pulses
and ask people to the map, which like, okay, you don't want
to grappling hook, I guess why wouldn't just take The Titans are also feel
really interesting. They're only two, they're going to be six in the full
game. They have like unique abilities beyond just like having form like a speed
core or damage core. Now it's like laser cannon coal yeah, and that's
just like, oh, you're fucking dead. I got a big chest laser
and it feels really powerful and good when it's like it's like three laser beams
converge and then it's like yeah. And they kept the on that titan they
had they had preconfigured loadouts there, so on that Titan, it also had
the the shield that absorbs bullets and fires them back, which is you know,
still, well there's another one. There's another one that was like a
heat shield. It melts bullets or people. I found out, can you
be like bash them? You could just walk into people on the ground like
humans, It would make sense that a person wouldn't melt against the heat shields.
Yeah. Yeah, pleasant, really exciting and really yeah, they were
showing it on PS four or I guess I should say it was PS four
controllers. Actually that was not actually a PlayStation four, but it was running
really well on whatever it was. Whatever it was, it ran. I'm
excited to play more of that this year. Yeah, definitely that that felt
really good. It's just you know, and and they seem to be saying
all the right things about that game in terms of like, hey, the
progression is going to be blown out, and like it just more stuff,
more stuff, This is what that game really needs. And the single player,
which I'm excited to see it was not there sadly but right, but
again, so that was over a play right, yeah, three both yeah
played Yeah, and yeah, and that thing like they were selling merchandise and
if you wanted to spend one hundred and eighty bucks on a shirt they were
selling like fancy time mass effects stuff, and there's a four hundred and fifty
dollars titan stops. If that's the sort of thing you're into, Yeah,
does it work? Can you get into It's small though, so you have
to be tiny to get into it. Oh okay, like babies can get
into it. Babies for babies. Jason's kind of baby one's baby's a little
bit too big, so it's unfortunately it plays over, so we're not gonna
be able to get one. They'll probably never seth them again. That's I
wonder how many. I wonder how many those they sold over the course of
this time. Yeah, I saw it because when I was playing with like
business people and they like, we're shitty at that game, but they liked
it, so I bet you they weren't let's buy a Titan that's a business
So that it was rota. Yeah, going to this thing that was like
theoretically open to the public and then playing against them, like you know,
they had all the chat headsets and all that stuff, and there were people
being real shitty. Fuck those fools up. Yep, D be a real
shitty top player in the entire games has an asshole. Uh, and so
that was that was an extra level of like, yeah, all right,
fuck y'all, hey Brad, you you went to a thing that I got
bounced out of. Yes, I did, Sony, you know what is
amazing. So you know what's amazing is that they said, oh, it's
a real small room, we can only take one. So then he took
off and then I got in there and there was an empty chair. For
the demo, you had to leave one empty chair. There were not enough
Kiosks though for you to have jumped on to play Horizon Yeah, which they
showed. They they did the press conference demo again, except way more where
they ran around a village talking to uh like quest givers and and vendors and
stuff. Weapons in that game have rarity. Okay, I don't know that.
They don't think they dropped from enemies or anything, but like when you're
buying them from vendors, they were green and purple. Okay. Costumes there's
not armored per se. It's more like they had their handling armor like a
new tumb Rat did, where they're uh predesigned costumes. They're full outfits that
have like set attributes on them. Okay, so you'll just buy it once
and have it. Like it's it's not a full loot system necessarily, but
it's kind of close to that. Does it change your aesthetic? Like yeah,
this's like totally you look totally different. But also it'll be like,
well you get plus ten uh like electrical damage resistance or with this or something
like that. I'm trying to think those kind of it. Otherwise, they
did the same demo again. Yeah, right, But I got to play
it and it was like what they let us play was just a combat sandbox.
There weren't any like quests turned on. It feels good, It feels
really good, Like the character movement is good, like the dodging, the
running, like you feel, you feel nimble, you feel like you can
maneuver around those big lumbering robots. It actually, like I thought about what
that game is built out of, which is on paper, sounds like exactly
the worst kind of game, which is like bow combat against aggressive melee enemies.
Like right, Like on paper, all it is is to use ding
big monsters that are constantly trying to rush you with a weapon that you both
have to aim precisely and also charge up to get damage with right. But
it's still even with all that, it still felt really good. It was
super satisfying to play like I'd like there you can certain enemies you can like
kill with like one shot kill if you hit them in the right weak spot.
Did you did that a couple of times where you like wrap them to
the ground. Yeah, I did that. So it seems like if you
sneak up on him, you can just tether them, like you don't have
to disable him first, you can you have to hit him with either two
or it seemed like maybe it depends on the size, like you had to
get them with like a minimum three tethers before it would fully pull them down.
But once they were in that state, you could run up and hack
them. Okay, that's what they did in the press conference with the ox
thing, which so in that case that became a mount. But then I
did that against one of the smaller like wolf like kind of robots, and
in that case it became like a combat buddy nice like it went and started
helping the attack stuff. They said, there will be upgrades for you,
so you can start hacking the larger robots and making them do stuff, but
they wouldn't say, like every type of robot will have a different function when
you hack it, but they didn't say what that was. Like tons of
different like bow types, you know, different types of damage, different like
trap arrows and stuff like that. It played super well. It looks really
nice, cool, like I think we're all we're all super justified. And
you know that game is it wears what it is on its sleeve. It's
an open world game. Was totally that's the next year, that's it.
The second half of that right, super promising was it was Days Gone.
Yeah, I checked out Days Gone? What is it? They're still not
talking too much about it. They played the demo again from the press conference,
but went through some different routes through that lumber yard, okay, to
show off some of the other stuff you can do. Like there were multiple
points where you could like trigger something in the environment to stop a bunch of
the zombies chasing you, like like he was running along and like sort of
I mean, you know, I assume the guy playing knew it was there
obviously, and like hit a trigger point where you could pull out his knife
and cut a rope that would drop a bunch of logs on zombies that were
chasing him. I don't know how you know that stuff though, if you
hadn't like designed that area, say, that's a game that's probably very much
about going through those areas times and looking for can you set up those traps
like they're still they still weren't talking a whole lot of details. It is
an open world game. They did say, So you're a bounty hunter.
I am bounty on it. Yeah. Uh yeah, you're you're in a
world where like people people like living very secluded like fortified settlements because of the
zombies. Yeah, but you're a guy who goes out there and kills zombies
and takes jobs. Are they zombies or are they not zombie? I guess
I didn't. I didn't ask. Okay, they seem like zombies, they
are zombie, Like I was gonna ask minimum, I was gonna ask if
they even like had a justification for why they're zombies or if that's even like
meaningful in the story. Yeah, so you did, but you didn't necessarily
get an impression like like here's the hook of this game, here's the thing.
Not really, I mean, here's why we're making this, what this
is all all I can say is like, like I said, that same
demo from last night with a little bit of other stuff, and then like
it's it's open. They said, they're trying to encourage exploration and and you're
basically you're basically earning money by doing jobs for these settlements. Okay, going
out and killing zombies. That's that's kind of all they were talking about.
It seems pretty early. Still cool, Alex, you who checked out some
stuff at two K, Yeah, Austin and I went by there. We
went and saw both Civilization six and Mafia three. S six was hands on
Mafia Thia. It was just a demonstration how hard is it deplace? Sive
three? Really hard? They give you sixty turns. I mean, that's
That's been every demo of a SIEV game I've gotten at Eddie three as always
like here's the first sixty turns of a game. It was like a clean
room. Also, it was like it was it was extreme. It was
like curtains, guys in hazard suits. It was very weird. I'm not
sure what was going on, but we did get to play Sieve and you
know, I mean getting into the nitty gritty of the mechanics of that it
is maybe a little dull, but have a cool art style. Yes,
it's it's reminiscent of I would say, like siev Rev, but a lot
more detailed. You zoom out in the map kind of the fog of war
map area becomes kind of like a hand inked map, which so yeah,
anytime you go to a territory that you haven't been to before and then you
move a unit out of it, it keeps that like round paper map look
to it as opposed to like just darkening what was already there. It's nice
looking. You know, they're adding some smart stuff in there with diplomacy systems,
uh, flushing a lot of that stuff out. The cities feel cool.
Like the big thing that they're trying to sell is like, hey,
it really matters where you build your cities now because of the way resources on
tiles allow you to district if you're building districts, and the districts get adjacency
bonuses, and like it's like I built a religious district or some story that
was like, hey, you're gonna get a bonus whenever this is next to
a mountain or an unused forest basic like a forest that you're not already like
hunting in or built right exactly, and so like, Okay, I could
see how different cities will feel like they have different character yes, game in
a way that in the past, you can specialize them in a way that
Yeah, how about Mafia. So the thing with Mafia's cool. Yeah,
the thing with Mafia is like it's exactly what they've presented that game as it
is very much a pulpy revenge story set in the late sixties and a faux
New Orleans. The city has I think they said, ten distinct districts,
including like the Bayou section as well. The main thing that they talked about
other than just like the here's your open world crime story stuff, is there's
actually a like you have mob lieutenants that work for you, so like you
you were originally part of a mob that got mostly wiped out. You are
rebuilding your own sort of criminal empire while getting revenge on the Italian mob,
and so you have these three different people who are like associated with you,
and you can actually like your relationship with them kind of matters, right,
It's like the setup is basically those ten different districts you're going in and you're
trying to take control of them. And the way you do that is it
munds me a little bit of like mercenaries in that like, yeah, there's
a boss that you want to take out here, there's a pimp in this
district, go fuck up his club and kill him, right and or like
before you. But you're doing that to like basically do enough damage to open
up a mission to go like the big Story mission in that district, right,
And so it doesn't seem like the other side stuff. That stuff still
seems kind of handcrafted. Right. There's something they showed from there didn't seem
just like boring repeated or repeatable, Like it wasn't randomly generated over again.
It felt like, oh, this is a unique firefight situation or a stealth
situation, and you do enough of those, unlike the big story thing.
And then once you do that, you have to sit down. You have
to sit down with your crew. Okay, they're like, listen, I
don't care what the other the other two people get other throughout the rest of
the place. This place is mine. You know, I have history in
this district. Give me this district. And the thing they showed was a
scenario where one of your lieutenants had basically been asked out of everything up to
that point, right, Uh, And so you have to make the choice
like are you going to please him by giving him the section that maybe doesn't
really belong to him, or are you just going to say, no,
this doesn't make any sense for what I'm doing. And the result of that,
like if you pissed that dude off too much, he will go to
war with you and you will have to go through and fight him. And
that's a that's a scenario you might never see if you actually maintain those relationships
and keep them on the up and up. Would you say that there's like
a full strategic layer to it. Isn't that I wouldn't go that complication.
It's story. It's just you know, story choice mattering to that degree,
right. And you know what it felt like to me was like the sort
of system I wish had been in Mad Max, which is like, give
me something at the strategic layer once I once I liberate these places. Make
it pretend as if this isn't just a switch I'm flipping, right, you
know, that's a different upgrade based on whether or not I give it to
this lieutenant or that lieutenant. If you're fighting the Italian Mob. What mob
or you part of? So like you were originally part of the Black Mob
in New Orleans. They wipe you out and then you group up with like
a disenfranchised Italian the Haitian Mob, and then this Irish guy was associated with
the Italian Mob for a while, right, So it's like you're building your
own thing. The other last thing I'll say about it is just like there's
music playing in that game constantly, like like non diegetic, like yeah,
like quil soundtrack. Like there is a sequence where you are creeping through the
swamp while stalking like a mob lieutenant and like Credence just starts blasting through that.
Yeah. The definitely some like some like two Detective season one style,
like you know this she gets in the corruption the visual stylings mixed with just
kind of like the bayou was creepy. Yeah, and it's pretty during sunset,
but like the second it's dark, don't be there. So there's apparently
a ton of license music in that game, and it also has a really
interesting framing device because it's all told through a series of interviews and a documentary
style thing with people who were there, and so there's like one that's like
an interview from the seventies. There's one with a guy who was like,
you know, very old at this point, like in the early two thousands,
Like not exactly, but like more like the thing that was mentioned to
me was cocaine cowboys. Yeah, that style of documentary things. But it's
a really neat hook to it that sounds really cool. I'll see like some
of the animation looked a little jankie. Yeah, I mean it has a
lot of the open world James an open world game. Yeah, but like
I think that there's enough there between the style and like some of the combat
stuff they'll put in EAT and the meta structure, so it pressed. It
was way more interesting to me than any Mafia game has been up to this
point. Sure looks like I'm gonna get to kill some KKK guys. Like
that's all right, do not shy away from touching on that way. That
sounds cool. Viny you were you were around you, I know you saw
Zelda. Did you check out anything else or Zelda? After I got ejected
from Sony should eject you got booted out? And we can probably could play
that if you want to go check it out tomorrow. I want to play
Horizon, And we tried to go to the EA E three Live Yeah,
but it wasn't open the public E three Yeah. It sounds like it open
at five o'clock tonight and then it's open the all day tomorrow. I guess
it makes sense. Friday afternoon, I walked past that thing because it's between
the EA things and Property three, and I was like, I wonder if
they took over the whole inside and I found a map of the show,
It's like, oh no, this little county fair ass looking like this looks
like they should be selling corn dogs here, but instead it's like fairs are
pretty big. It looks like the section smaller of a county fair where it's
like I'm throwing ping pong balls into goldfish bowls and then there's like, you
know, pink popcorn full game. Yeah, no do that. No,
I don't do the years. That is a really there. No, it
didn't look like there was any food in there. It's just a leg where's
y can we get some funnel cake? That thing looked real weird, like
it was like two game publishers HCC, which had had a vibe area that
looked like it might have held like in their tents, and the tent looked
like it was maybe big enough to hold one vibe maybe two. There were
like two tents like okay, yeah, we could see them like squeezing in
like eight or ten. We talked to a representative over there, and there's
five hundred people at a time. Is what they're looking at? Okay?
That okay, yes, it looked it looked like it would. That's not
large. No, yeah, so cycled people through pretty quickly. But what
you saw stuff this morning? Right? Uh? Did you go to I
went to Activision and I saw All Duty? Okay, how is that?
So they showed the piece from the press conference and they showed another piece the
piece from the press conference looks like it did in the press conference, just
a little bit longer whatever, but uh, they played or they showed it.
Uh, they showed it. Okay, they showed it, and they
showed a bit that was taking place on the ground. Uh and you know,
kind of more standard all of duty looking type stuff, but you're you
know, you're kind of fighting against enemy soldiers and robots and like all this
crazy stuff. And then you know, you you know, key trucks along
like that for a while, and then kind of gets the call of well,
for a while, you're calling in uh, you know V tolls that
are coming down and taking out enemies. You're painting the targets yourself and doing
that sort of stuff. It's looks like some call of duty type stuff.
Nice looking stuff, really nice looking stuff. And then you know, a
V tall lands like, hey, we need you up here. You're like
okay, and it looks like, you know, you walk up, hold
down square, get in the thing, and then fucking fly to space and
it's you know, you're just like you know, they it was from a
gameplay demo, so it was showing prompts like you know, hey, hold
up, hey, push L three to launch and like all that sort of
stuff, and you just like go and then you fucking go and fly to
fucking space and you see booster fuel dropping and you see you go through the
atmosphere and then you're in space and as soon as you're up there, you're
just in dog fights. And it looked like, you know, hearing them
talk about it, it sounds like it is, you know, kind of
off rails. At that point, you know you're not you can't just fly
wherever. It's not like I'm going to Saturn, you know, but it's
like the Valkyrie style kind of like here's a here's an area that you can
fly around a dog fight. Is it lasers? It's no, it's like
cannons. Like that's That's kind of the cool thing about the way the combat
looked is that it all seems really fucked up because it's not lasers. It's
it's like, you know, ballistic weaponry and like flat cannons in space,
and you think about that sort of stuff in terms of what Yeah, because
there's the velosophy getting your space suit torn open, that fucking flat you know,
there's like it made it seem dangerous in a way that the space like
sci fi stuff doesn't. Like it made it seem like rough feel. The
premise I got was that like this is relatively early into the notion of space
combat, Like this is not like they've been doing this for decades and decades.
It's like, yeah, they're still there's still like they're still kind of
working some of the ships of that stuff in the stuff from the press conference,
whether you're putting like charges onto a glass window on that ship and you
see people in they're going fun the space, but you know, it looks
really nice and it looks like it's its own thing while still having some very
kind of grounded in Call of Duty specifics, and I think it's they're doing
something cool with it. They also showed the first mission from Call of Duty
Modern Warfare, which was a lot of fun to watch. Like that remaster,
it looked it looks really are they I mean, are they redoing like
all the assets? It's really, I mean, as far as I can
tell, Like, you know, it's it's noticeable. Well, it looks
relatively modern. There's some animation stuff that maybe you know, you could be
a little tighter, a little better or something like that, but like they're
putting in work like the lighting, the models, like all that sort of
stuff. You know, it's it's just a really nice looking game. It
was nice to see. You know. It's like it's been nine years,
uh since that game came out. It's been nine years since we saw that
demo at E three, like roughly to the day. Yeah, and like
saw yeah and saw that, like you know, someone came back. Dasonal
Campo came back to the booth after seeing that demo and said, fucking you
need to see this ship. I remember that was coming off a Call of
Duty three, which was yeah, which but yeah, And I remember all
of us were just like, yeah, the Call of Duty demo and then
went and saw it and we're like fucking holy shit. And seeing it this
many years, I mean obviously like so much has changed since then with that
franchise, but it felt good to be sitting in a room ADY three watching
Call of Duty four in a weird way, sure, Like I sat there
watching that demo and reflecting on my life. I was like, man,
this is real weird. This is real weird. Is it really nine years
ago? Ye when it came out? Yeah, And when that was the
E three where they showed it too, there was so there are eleven year
olds who are now twenty yeah. Yeah. So that was actually like talking
to someone who handles pr for Division. That was actually something that he brought
up. He said, you know there are people who were like eight when
that game came out, and hopefully they were playing that. You know that
now they can now maybe they can check it out. And I think it
helps with if people look at that and go, I don't want all this
space. There's this other thing that is kind of just want Yeah, but
also I think that space stuff looks really neat too. I Mean, they're
not talking about the multiplayers, so we don't know if maybe the maybe space
will fuck up the multiplayer in a really weird way, or maybe it'll take
it to its own thing. I guess the thing with me is that,
like I feel like I this is like, Yo, you've heard this from
me a billion times. Do something new and interesting. Imagine that game wasn't
called Call of Duty Infinite Warfare, which is a thing that was like a
space game, like a shooter that happens to take place in space. Yeah,
but but then putting the words call of Duty on that thing means that
they get to spend like a lot of money on making it. And the
thing I'll say about that demo, it looked expensive, right, Like every
little bit of that. You're like, man, you got has spent some
you guys spend money on this fucking thing. It looks like they did really
cool they'll spend their money on. Do you see anything else? I checked
up Scott Skylanders. Uh you know watched you know, a little crash bandicoot
in Skylanders. He spins around, he breaks stuff, make your own Skylander.
You can kind of you can set it. There's a phrase that you
can say whenever it gets on there, and you pick from two lines of
phrases. So I think the one that was was I'm crazy about my emotions,
So it's like, I'm crazy about my emotions. Was was that was?
But it can be I'm crazy about my missiles, or you know,
it's like all this other stuff. You can kind of fit these phrases together,
which is funny. Uh, Like all the customization stuff is cool.
It's it's a crystal. It's like trap team, which I wish that you
were snapping together a Skylander and building a thing. But like with the number
of parts that looks like they're having and a thing, that would just would
be unrealistic. You'd be buying parts packs for the rest of your life.
It'd be stupid. Did be crazy? They wouldn't want that. Yeah,
I'm well, dude, they're already selling tiny crystals and like all these Skylanders.
Sen says, that will unlock more parts, so yeah, they'll have
some something you can buy it all work. Yeah yeah, uh all right,
it looked neat for what it is. Uh, you know, I
came away from it going like that's that's a cool twist on this stuff.
Uh, but you know you kind of know what that is at this point.
We we kicked off the show with Agents with Mayhem, we did yeah
like that. Yeah, that's uh, that seems interesting. We're gonna wrap
up here pretty quick, so maybe we'll talk about it quickly. But it's
you select three characters and then you can choose between them and you kind of
one teleports out when as one teleports in. It's not like a Lego game
where they're all right there, uh, and they have individual abilities. So
like Hollywood, that guy he's got a grenade launcher, Uh, does he
do the thing with the stunt double? That was not So when you charge
of a meter, you get Mayhem, and when you do that, he
puts on glasses and then they're just explosions everywhere, like he's like it's action
movie time and then your gun shoots faster. So the zone sounds very same
for those characters level up, so maybe you're unlocking different abilities and different stuff.
So I would hope the stunt double thing would be in game because that
that seems like it should be there. That doesn't felt pretty early to me,
Yeah, well, so I turned up the uh camera sensitivity because the
default setting on that thing was like very sluggish. It just kind of everything
about the shooting and movement felt like it hadn't been tuned much. Definitely,
definitely, But I think it looks nice and the tone is there. It's
not quite it doesn't feel it's hard to tell from one mission, right,
but you know, like it is irreverent like it wasn't. It wasn't it
wasn't as biting as a Saints for as the last two Saints Row games.
Yea, And I would say, yeah, does it feel like a parody
of anything, particularly from Saturday Morning cartoon style stuff? And you know,
kind of a little bits here and there, but nothing, it's not like
a specific parody. Okay, it it looked promising, yeah yeah, yeah,
you know, yeah, but but I think it's you know, like,
yeah, the the gameplay has to come kind of a long way,
I think in that in the on the tuning front, cool I saw gwent
real quick. It's a new interface. There's like kind of three D art
on some of the cards, and like a lot of the art actually reminds
me of something like like the Telltale stuff like the like the Wolf among Us
or the Walking Dead. Stuff really stylized like cool look for the Witcher,
Like I would play a whole Witcher game with that art style. There's a
campaign where you like explore a map from like an isometric perspective, with side
missions and stuff. Okay, it's all voiced. It's like a ten hour
long campaign. There might be multiple ten hour long campaigns everyone through like puzzle
quest or something where it's got a fight. I guess this monster who's disability,
and now like I have to build around that. I'm sorry. Did
they say anything about platforms? I played it with a control or they did?
It's coming this fall. The beta's coming this fall out the game there's
a beta coming this fall two Xbox One, n PC, and then later
for PS four, and I think it releases next year. They didn't say
anything about mobile. That's got to be on the horizon about mobile, I
don't remember. The only other thing I'll say about it is that like it
was cool to play a game with guent with like a well developed Gwent deck
that because like what's you are? I haven't had time to get a good
wet deck, And the game's pretty good. You know. I think that's
it's it's there, all right, Yes, and the Wall Uigi Ambo is
coming. You're welcome, congratulations. Shut down the three. All right,
We're gonna shut it down and let these guys move on with their lives,
and then I will be back with you pointing it. I guess it looks
like I'm pointing my deck. Just pointing it is definite thing to dude.
Man he named he named it Wall Luigi. No, what's his name?
It's little Walluigi. We'll be back little Wall after this break. God damn
it. Hello and welcome. Here we are. It's time for giant bombs.
After hours coverage of E three twenty sixteen. I'm Jeff Gerstman. Hello,
it's Tuesday night. One of the three is over. The press conferences
are distant memories, they're in the books, they're gone, and now it's
time to reflect upon everything that's happened. I'm joined bar our first rack of
guests from eight four. We've got Mark Zonald, John Riccardi, how you
doing, Hey, good, welcome, good, thank you, ratchumacker down
there with thanks for having me. Yeah great, yeah, we would try.
I've watched all the time. Uh, yeah, you guys, it's
a it's another E three three. Did you come all the ways country for
other stuff or just like just coming out for you three and come back going
back. John is sticking around and doing some guess some work right after this.
But yeah, we know we're here for three. That's on that you're
doing. I don't know, so maybe not probably probably say for not to
cool game, but I can't talk a cool game. Yeah all right,
I like wonder we're actually genuinely interested in that's right, that's exciting. Nice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so, uh, you know, you
guys have been around and in the video game business now for a very long
time. Twenty three. Yeah, nice of me and me and you're both.
Yeah. I skip those two like rinky dink ones where they went like
the one and one went to like a garage or something. I don't know.
I was the garage here was fun. I missed Robbie this year,
which was actually I'm so happy I missed that because I got to experience it
wrong with everybody else as history made. I honestly feel like that year was
better experienced on the net. Was that rather than actually being here, was
that that my body was ready year that was. I think it was my
body was a Cammi Donaway Robbie drums together after a while. Yeah, it
really does, like you know, because there were there there were a lot
of years that I wasn't actually attending any of the press conferences and I was
back in the booth just doing stuff, and then you know, I started
going for a while and yeah, it's just at some point all of it
has just become this this blur. I will say one of the things I
about the Sony Press conference this year is I felt like it appreciably made a
difference being in the room, whereas normally I feel like it's like watching a
football game, where it's like this, probably I'd better watching this at home.
Yeah, that's what I've heard. Like the big like video stage four
in the orchestra and the video stage which I don't even know how much of
it you could see on the stream. I feel like a lot of the
floor stuff was lost. Like there were the crash bit they had a high
shot for that. Okay, I want to get that in and you know,
Hideo walking down, but that was Yeah, we got ahead of the
he got ahead of the lights. Man he needed to pace it a little
bit like that if he didn't have an ego before that, like that,
how do you like come down from that? Like giant applause, people cheering,
and then the stage lights up as you walk down it. It's like
I am a golden I was the only non Sony person in this press conference.
I was like, his ego was going to develop nuclear capability if he
keep going. Have you guys talked much about that the trail we washed it?
Yeah? What did you think? So? So I had I had
two thoughts about it. Well, I had one thought and then a friend
had another thought that I'm going to just steal and say on here. So
uh, the one thought is that it's so it's got to be so early.
I mean, he was just on his big engine tour, right,
and then you know, an hour before that, was was on Keiley's things
saying like I have an engine yet, which maybe he was. You know,
I think that maybe I had someone applied to that, right, and
then he had him a Keiley had him right afterwards too. So I think
it was a little like Jorgan whatever bandage face fun, Yeah, Jeff Keiley,
you know, Kajimacambo. But and I should say like, we have
no special knowledge. We've done some stuff with them before when they were back
in Economedy, but I have no like insight on us at all. But
I was thinking back to do you remember the first time they showed middle Gear
Solid four and they had that video where it was like snake and it was
like it was really abstract and it was just like some walls and him running
around and kind of you know, it was just kind of like more wanting
to announce the thing, and it did kind of match the fidelity that the
final game ended up looking like, right, so wasn't but it wasn't.
It was like, we don't have anything, but we want to make an
announcement, and so here's the thing. The other thought that kind of reinforces
that one that I was actually watching with. Ryan Payton used to work at
Cogipro and so he also doesn't have any special insight except that he worked there
for a while. But he pointed out, which I haven't read any of
the online stuff. I don't know if this is already the stuff everybody's talking
about, but like, so guy wakes up, he's had his baby ripped
from him, and his baby is now dead, and he is like,
oh okay, yeah, this is kind of just him about like what's going
on and their hands all over him there you go, and like trying to
get a piece right exactly so, And I don't know what those four or
five like floating figures, what that means. Maybe that actually is part of
the game. Maybe that all factors it. But he was handcuffed to something
and now it's broken and he's free. But at what cost? At what
cost? That was solid snake from all five different you know, the snake
from all the five different middle gears up in the sky there there was five
of them, was true, so you know, you know, yeah,
I wondered, like, you know, is is that representative of a game
or is that just his like mood piece about like, hey, here's here's
where my head's at with this stuff. You know, obviously we are going
to make a game with Normritas one of these days, but right, you
know, all this stuff, here's the fidelity that we're going to do,
here's the like the facial whatever motion. I mean, maybe that stuff actually
is part of that. But I mean it did what it needed to do,
and it got everybody talking about it already, and everybody's super excited.
I do wonder, you know, if you know that first Metal Gear trailer
was a long time before that game came out, So I'm expecting it'll be
the same. He says it's going to be a big Triple A game.
He's not going to do like a smaller thing, right, So yeah,
I don't know. Twenty eighteen, that's my guests think, Yeah, that
sounds early to me. Yeah, okay, all right, I say,
well, I remember when this all happened and they started talking about him delivering
a game. It was like, well, this is gonna be a PlayStation
five game. But now all of that's changed so much that you know that
the generation stuff doesn't really mean anything. Yeah, and to your point about
twenty eighteen, I mean they are now using somebody else's engine. Presumably they're
using other people so they don't have to build everything from the ground up.
They're going to keep their teams small. Maybe that's a new you know,
maybe that's something new for him, is now that he's controlling the budget.
Is him right? It really is just Coachybo Productions. Maybe we'll see something,
and you wonder, you know, if if they do end up needing
some kind of assistance or you know, maybe they wouldn't have to like blow
up their own team to some huge size. Maybe at that point, Sony
as the publisher goes like, hey, you know, we know some guys
to come worry. Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm wondering if they'll
go Santa Monica starts working on it or something yet, or you know,
the the naughty dog route where you have a lot of outsourcing. Like those
guys are right amazing at outsourcing. You see the credits at the end,
they're like a Chinese phone book because they're like taking every but you can't tell,
like I mean, it's just the fidelity is amazing. Sas there technical
producer I think, or something like that. Yeah, so, and what
do you think of the name death stranded stranding death stranding? Sorry, yes,
I've forgotten it, like it seemed utterly It seemed utterly like just incomprehensible
or nonsense cale to me. But somebody tweeted at me the Wikipedia page,
Yes strantranding. Yeah that beach wales, Yeah, whales beaching themselves. Okay,
yeah, that does it does make I had heard that it made more
sense when you heard the definition of it. I definitely got some transferring vibes
from that out, like I think living and nobody nobody like yeah, stuff
just rolls, right? Did they did the or you just look at it
and go like, oh, that's the name of like an energy drink or
something. Death that's Stranding, Like that's just maybe he's too there's no one
to basically, no one's everyone's afraid Tommy Lee Jones, Jeff Stranding, he's
just his face on the vending machine. But I mean awesome that they did
that and kept it, you know, secret, like Sony can actually keep
secrets these days, which is impressive. Reside Evil fucking seven games playable in
VR like that was also like yeah, and a completely different look for that
game. So does that Is it basically safe to assume that entire game is
now in first person or I think that's the case, right, That would
be the implication, I think, And that's you know that demo's out there.
I know people download and play it. But then evenly we saw the
VR version being played and and yeah, it was the first person game with
a controller, and you know, it moved like a first person game with
a controller would like not a lot of view Bob because it's VR from R
the view Bob, right, but you are VR a side like they can't
have missed the frenzy around PT, you know, well the appetite for that
stuff. I've heard and I haven't. I haven't played it. I'm dying
to play it, but I have heard that it's there are like PT like
overtones to it. They gave their demo like a separate name and everything.
It's like resid Evils seven, the Dark something begins, you know, trying
to brand it as a separate thing, the way Final Fantasy fifteen has apparently
you have to go. It's really difficult to find and it's plus only.
I think, yeah, that makes sense though, but you had to go
to the page where, I mean, it's not featured on the E three
or anything. Maybe it is by now. It went up late so and
maybe it just had a weird roll out problem. You had to go to
the actual page and then scroll down to the free I don't know, it's
a it's a weird thing, but yeah, I've heard. I've heard it's
actually good. We ran into like CVX Freak you guys know him, Alex
Okay, crazy Residual fan, and he's he was cautiously optimistic about the new
direction. But that's that's good to hear. I mean, like, I'm
a guy who is never really liked Reside evil, so you know, but
but I was able to look at that and go, like, you know,
even like four era, did that not capture You're never the shooting never
felt quite right? Yeah, so good. Yeah, I four didn't get
you. I'm just like, that's where all exactly. Yeah, So it
just it was just it was always tough for me. So yeah, it
just but I appreciate that, like in the face of those last couple of
games really not getting it done for them, that they were able to,
thank God, to actually do something major, Like I think that's that's huge,
right, Like it was kind of headed. I don't I don't know
if I would call it like Gears direction, but it was definitely like way
more action. Parts of six were absolutely chasing Gears, right Yeah. And
it was just so which is weird when you consider that four kind of four
is the game was the game that made Gears happen. Gears. Yeah,
that flip flip descript I've always felt to me like like they saw four and
didn't actually understand what made it good and just took what they saw and like
went in that direction, you know, and then it sort of fell down
the dude bro slide, like did you play a Yeah? I played.
It wasn't bad. We didn't. I actually watched Mark Flay through five,
like it wasn't bad. It just to me it wasn't resident evil anymore.
At that point, it had become a new thing, you know, right,
Yeah, I do feel like five was trading a lot off of I
mean, that was the first one that they made without McCammon two, so
it was kind of like what are we where? What do we do with
this? And I feel like six was completely lost absolutely, So I do
think gets I'm really happy that they're taking kind of like a ballsy It seems
like new direction for the thing. Credit to them for no one want to
throw in the towel and like, right, try something different or here,
you know, like like horror has changed, Horror games have changed, right,
VR opened some doors, like being YouTubers have opened doors, like looking
at that stuff and making something that might appeal to the type of people that
are playing those sorts of games today as opposed to just going like, well,
let's take it back to the tank thing. I mean, we have
enough games did that they can reissue now that you know, they can satisfy
the people that want classic Resident Evil so right, yeah, you know they
seem like they can hit both ends of it. Absolutely. Yeah. And
the seven the logo, I gotta get them prop beautiful. Did you see
the Japanese logo is just as good? I haven't. I haven't seen it,
but I did hear the So it's biohazard, right, it's the name,
So the Z is seven, the number seven. It's a little yeah,
do what do I understand that it's Resident Evil seven Biohazard here? So
when they they stand out of press release and it's it's resid Eval seven and
then biohazard in all lowercase, right, and then in Japan it's it's the
Biohazard seven Resident Evil. Yeah. Yeah, and then maybe when they get
to the next game, they just at some point, just like the Castlevanian
thing, where they'll just remember Castlevania Japan was. It was like it was
like people Castle Dracula and finally they're like, fucking Castlevania done. It's just
worldwide branded. Yeah. I almost wonder if the seven was even necessary or
if it was time to like fully go back fully reboot. They already have
two just Resident Evils, right, So at this point, though, if
you really want people to consider it like a mainline with all the sub the
side Resident Evils they have and everything else, you're gonna have to throw a
number on it. And I think, like, you know, they're putting
a number on it also kind of says like we take this very seriously as
this is the next Resident Evil, not just some side thing, not just
some weird move like I guess. So they're they're almost they're almost getting up
in Final Fancy territory at this point, and I'm like, I remember remember
talking to some of the people that were on r E six about like,
man six, that's a pretty high number, and they're like, yeah,
I don't know if we at some point we should probably take the numbers off
because we don't want to be like Final Fantasy and have like Resident Evil thirteen
or it. And here they are, you know, well not them,
I guess, But did you guys get to do any of the PlayStation VR
stuff like this the Batman Star Wars stuff out, But yeah, I'm really
curious about that stuff. I'm happy, as you know, we're we've been
helping out like the res Infinite Miss Gucci and that stuff, and so I
was like super happy to see that stuff, just like that very name brand
Final Fantasy Star Wars Batman. But I'm I just want to know, like
what the actual experience is like, because that will get people in to try
it. But then if the experience is shitty, it could kind of back
Fantasy looks like a really bad shooting gallery look really yeah, it looked like
a weird reuse of assets kind of thing. Yeah, and and Batman kind
of you know, there's like a detective mode thing, but you know it
just it seems like a similar approach. I don't know. I don't I
don't think I want, like I want those big brands to go all the
way in, right, and I understand why they don't. Wesiden Evil seven,
Yeah, like really the entire game playable and that is that's crazy,
like but like that's what I want out of it. If you're gonna make
a Batman game, make a Batman game, don't have criteria and knock out
one battlefront mission, right, uh, you know, like really go for
it, sure, and because I think that that does it a disservice where
you get people like, oh, all these big names are here, I'm
gonna get one of these. Oh wait, these are twenty minute, bite
size things, and now I'm stuck with nine versions of Pong or whatever it
is being, you know, like like that's that's a weird that feels like
a bait and switch. Not to say that there are some very good Pong
games. There's a lot of nothing against Palm No, I mean, but
Final Fantasy never struck me as something I'd want to play in VR, though,
did you like? I don't, but you can ride along with that,
you know, girl mechanic. It almost seems like half the reason they
made it was experience. It seems like that's what people were way into.
So this is something we were talking to somebody about last night. One kind
of maybe helpful frame of reference for that whole thing is like in Japan,
cameras will just straight up ogle women. Yep. Like there's a morning variety
show that is actually like respected and watched and they talk about politics and they
talk about whatever's going on in the day, and the camera like two or
three times a show there's always a model as always part of the different one
of the nine thousand panel shows that are on exactly, yeah, one of
those millions of variety shows. And the camera will just like look around.
It's like it's like hunting for a target, and then I'll go zoom and
it will like right in a hundred feet and then it'll go and like literally
up to curves of her body and then she has to comment on something and
then it cuts away to the next thing. It's like, I don't know
how. I don't know how they do it, but it's somehow it's okay.
And another shows too, they'll just zoom up. There's no like it's
a face shot, but the boobs are in the It's just it's just right
here. And so I think you were seeing a little bit of the cultural
like yeah, when she was grabbing the camera like, oh, it's in
VR right, Like, yeah, there a few years behind. I mean
they'll get there given time. Yeah, you know, it's they've they have
come along way. Yeah, definitely, So a legend of Zelda. Yes,
you got to check it out. So the one game that we got
to play today, in the one game we really wanted to play, I
think most out of this entire show. We're flying flying to see for sure.
Yeah, so we got to play. So there's two you played it
as well. I played the first, like the free room demo okay of
the story books and stuff. So there, Yeah, there's like two.
I guess two demos are open to the public. One of them starts,
it seems like, at the start of the game, which is basically what
they showed in the first stream this morning. Yeah, we still we caught
that guy. Yeah, you know, I thought, uh, the controls,
there's a lot to do in the controls, surprisingly comp but you're right,
And so like the screen on it's the screen the we you second screen
is not inventory. It's not you know, a quick menu or anything.
It is telling you what the controls are at all times. Do you think
that's going to be in the real game too, or that's a good ques.
I'm sure somebody's asked that question, and maybe the cyntrals out there already.
But like I'm just sitting there thinking, like that's got to be for
demo purposes only maybe there's something they don't want us to see yet, right,
or maybe there's just like it's just like they figure out the show they
just want to make sure people can play it, or is it so designed
around NX, which is the system most people are gonna be playing it on
that that's really that's totally value of really weird. If it's really weird,
if it's an integral part of the game, and they just said, you
know what, for E three, the first time anyone's gonna be playing it
anywhere, we're just gonna not have it. I mean, he's got a
tablet like his little what do they call it Chica something or other that's basically
like his iPhone, and he's walking around with an NX pretty much, right,
that's it. We've solved it. If he really does seem like I
mean, there are times where it's like that's a smartphone, Like he keeps
putting it down and the map gets like down, and it's like he's just
straight up like swiping NF. See you to open this upon what you find
ambo in that game? Can you you know like they had Ambo at the
devocation? I know, I know that the people will work with the game.
I want to find the games and find a little Wall Luigi out there
and tap it. They have the Assassin's Creed Towers which I know you guys
were going to be excited. I didn't see what it was, but I
heard heard. Yeah, it was like, well, straight up filling icons
on the map. It fills in fills in your map, and then I
think it's a fast travel point. It's like, that makes sense. There's
like a logic to that that you can't deny. But at this point,
so many games have done that mechanic that apparent. As soon as I saw
him climbing, I was like, right, that's where this is going,
you know. Apparently the the one of the things that they're doing, which
I think is a good idea, is so when you were wandering the world
in any other previous Zelda games, it was like little things sprinkled throughout that
you would just step in and find a chest or whatever. But you were
just killing things. Uh. And then you go into a dungeon and there's
where your puzzles are, and it's just like shitload of puzzles, and then
you leave and then it's nothing until the next dungeon. Then puzzles Apparently they're
taking like little one off one or two puzzles we got we got straight out
before. Yeah, so those are part of those little things that do away
point, which I think is a really smart idea to kind of spread that
out a little bit more. You're talking about the shrines that you those.
Yeah, so the shrines, uh, those also become fast travel point when
you complete them. Their underground you take a little whole latter down the one
I did. I saw two and then I got the thanks for playing just
as I was starting the second one. But it took me like two minutes
to finish it. It had like one short puzzle in it, right,
and I didn't get any item or any kind of like progression stuff out of
it, but you know, I guess it becomes a fast trazzlet just kind
of did it make you feel good? Yeah? Sure, okay, I
used it. I used that magnet magnetize, but the magnet run I didn't
get that yet. Moved a big slab of iron and made a bridge with
it and ran across and that was the puzzle. How did that feel?
How? Okay? You can use the gyroscope. Okay, use the deep
pad too. So it's you have these runs. They're like magic spells.
They're like a different system from your from your gear, and the magnet one
lets you lets you lock onto and manipulate any metal object and you can move
it back and forth the deepad and also use the gyroscope to move it around.
And there's one that many of those time. I didn't see that one,
okay, but but I would believe it. Yeah, yeah, it
seems like they are going just like all out, let's throw everything. Yeah,
there are systems on systems in that game. You know, there's there's
the temperature stuff, there's the little sound metering, there's cooking. Like the
cooking was described to me in a way that made it sound like Monster Hunter
cooking. Because the Nintendo rep that was there talking like so we were we
were hoping like, oh, you know, maybe you upgrade your stamina later
because you can't sprint very long as it is right now with the short stamens
to happen, right because that also when anytime you're climbing and you can climb
on anything, that meter just you pull up it like Monster Hunter. For
so, the Nintenda rep was saying like, yeah, you can cook certain
recipes to get more stamina, and if you cook a perfect recipe then you
can double you're staming a meter. And I was like, that's what it
first sounds Monster Hunter is like the temporary extra hearts. Yeah, that's exactly
what it seemed like. It was a temporary boost if you get perfect perfect
they said. We asked, they said it was temporary. Huh so yeah,
that's you know. Sorry, I'm not a Monster Hunter guy. I
I just don't think I ever will be. But Farcry had all of its
syringes and stuff like that, and like a lot of games that have those
kind of temporary boosts, I feel like I never want to actually rely on
them, right. I have always had this feeling of just like I'm gonna
save those materials and just get good and get through it. So the end
with like, yeah, it's like, oh I could fire rockets for the
next nine hours. This feels everything. I mean, you know, we
just saw it today for the first time, but it feels like a game
that wants you to keep engaging with those systems though, because you know,
like like your your weapons break, like you're gonna have to constantly go out
and get a new weapons. You can a sword and you get four of
them or something, and then I was like immediately like, okay, these
must break if you're getting multiples of things. But I think the weapons switching,
I don't know what you thought. I really liked it. It was
it was super easy and fast, Unlike I mean, one nice thing,
even if it was on the touch screen. You know, you have to
stop look down while you're in the middle of combat or coming into a situation
where like I want a different weapon. You're just basically like pushing on the
dpad and then or I think it's see it's the dpad and then moving over
in the right stick the right stick and then letting go. And it sounds
probably a little more obtuse than it actually is. It just it goes.
It happens really fast. It's accessible. And then arrows are just their own
thing, so you can at any time you have the bow accessible to you.
So when you see that you know, explosive barrel, or you see
that that shot they show that thing in the demo with it hanging over,
or you see the the live stock or whatever you call it, the wandering
animals around that you're going to get food or whatever, you can just quickly
like whip out the arrow. I really liked that part of it. Yeah,
it's it's nice to see Nintendo embracing complex controls too, because like what
I was saying earlier, like the controls to me at first were like daunting
because there's like every button does something else and you have to like you know,
like if you want a snowboard, you have to get your shield out.
Then you gotta be running, and then you jump, and then while
you're jumping, you gotta hit another button to put it under you. And
like it's just it all feels like it'll it'll make sense after like ten minutes
of play whatever. But traditionally they've been like averse to that, right,
They've always kind of tried to keep it overly simple. So I'm glad that
it feels like if you want to really get into it, you'll be able
to do like cool stuff in this game and do stuff with like, you
know, just the kind of basic controls instead of like, yeah, you
know that might be something they would you know, relegate to like the touch
screen and be like, you know, tap here to go in to snowboarding,
right, right, something like that, So exactly, yeah, yeah,
but I feel like, I mean even that, so like you've done
that in previous sell the games, right, like you've snowboarded not the way
that you do in this game, right, But I feel I kept thinking
that a few times through it. Part of it's probably like the wolf that
you get if you unlock the ambo. You know, it's or you seeing
me able to unlock it. I kept feeling like they took this from this
game. It took this from this game. It took this from this game,
and it's just like they're like, fuck it, let's just throw everything
into this and like everything you have, kind of like they did with Firearm
Lum where they're just like this is the greatest hits hits thing and it's it's
over world now, let's just throw everything we got into it. Where you
have like all of the systems, yeah, like the like cold you have
new things too, but it felt like, you know, like your wind
Waker kind of combat mechanics, which were my personal favorite of the of the
series. There's there's shades of that where if you jump at the right moment
when something's attacking you, you get like access to a special attack, you
lock onto something, you can kind of jump around. I mean there's the
actual jump button. This time you can you can just I didn't even yeah,
but then you know you have like the the wolf thing going on from
Twilight Princess, even though I know it's completely different, but you have like
a time mechanic from you know that that could be its own kind of Zelda
game and any other universe. There's just like it just seems like there was
a ton of different stuff going on. I will say the one thing that
I that I noticed from the demo is it didn't seem like the world felt
like just a little bit empty to me, like we were running around looking
for like, oh, I want to fight more, right more? You
know, if this is just like this starting plateau, if it's going to
be like, hey, here's a little more like kind of get your feet
wet, because watching the ship door stuff mountain, if you want to get
real and right, that's where the ship's watching them playing. They played stuff
on the streams that wasn't available for play for us, and like some of
the sections they were and were really cool. I mean more enemies, you
know, they were showing like how the enemies kind of have their own camps
here and there, and like you know, you go to certain places where
you're going to get in more fights than you would otherwise. And at night
like the staffos come out, you know and packed their heads off and stuff
like that. But my favorite part of the whole thing, I think was
just the fact that now there's this whole new system of taking the enemies weapons
and using them, and there's so many kinds of weapons, and that to
me is really interesting. Like they had that one where like with the skeletons,
you can like have their arm and like use the arm against them and
like while the like in your back pocket, it's like dangling and everything.
It's like the hands are still like moving and stuff. It's really cool.
It does well, that's what it looks like. It's like back there doing
this. I like. I like the thing I like about that is immediately
you get attacked by an arrow and you get excited because you're like, oh,
if I kill that guy, now I can get a bow, right,
Like so you have that which you get in games. You know,
it's very much sending for yourself. It's emergence there, you go, sure,
yeah, it's doing all the stuff that I feel like we've been asking
for, like we all have been saying for a while and that we want
like a Zelda that doesn't hold your hand, that like starts you out basically
with nothing like the first game. The good on them, like that demo
or the you know the thing they showed look like the intro of the game,
and like within two minutes of that, you're very little. You're just
out in the field running around doing stuff. Well, we're gonna wrap it
up a sec. But one more question for you. Yeah, I mean
it's not there's a little bit of speech in there. But more importantly,
they showed Link talking like this. It's not spoken dialogue, but there was
like a dial trio. Who are you never mind first speech of Link?
Like what controversial? Yeah? John, what do you fall on this?
I didn't even think of that until you mentioned it. I mean that's fine.
It's not like he's have going on like long die tribes. I mean
he's just basically like saying the basic. In fact, one of them was
just dot dot dot. It wasn't even what I was talking. Which do
you think of the voice acting? And because you are you were up until
now at the rumor that there was going to be voice acting or you want
of those people, Yes, unless it's going to be great and it's hard
to do good voice acting. I have to do it myself. Sometimes I've
had to direct it myself and it's really difficult. But I gotta say,
the one voice that we heard sounded great. It was really good, and
they had you know, it was a like, I guess a British accent
or a classic accent or whatever you want to call it. A fantasy sounded
yeah, fantasy act. But it sounded great. Like if all they get
acting in the game sounds that good, I'll be fine, which seems like
everybody because the old man was not. I don't think, I'm sure,
or maybe they don't want to show us. There's it seems like there's a
lot of things they didn't want to show us yet, right, Yeah,
But the look of it too, like the whole studio Ghibli thing that they're
doing, I think they like they've experimented here and there, and they went
a little too far this way with a Skyward Sword. Maybe they went you
know, I mean, I love Windwaker, but maybe it's a little too
cartoony. And now I feel like they've found like this really sweet spot with
the look of it, where it just looks so good. Even the logo
looks like a Ghibli logo, like it looks like NASCAR, Like you know,
there's the part in the beginning with the when they showed like the Guardians
and they were like kind of they were covered over with dirt and stuff.
They looked like they've been there forever. But they have like the technological kind
of looked to them. That was very like Castle in the Sky, like
super influenced there obviously. Yeah, and they don't have the horsepower and you're
seeing stuff like God of War and stuff like that where you're just like,
oh my god, I can't believe, like, like games look this good
on consoles, but they so they have to make it up in art direction,
and I think they that they're doing it. You know. So I've
heard some stuff about like just in the interviews in the last couple days saying
that the NX version is exactly the same. I do hope that it at
least like there's like a little bit of frame raise stumble wasn't super smooth and
just like hey, you know, like maybe there's a spot here too,
we could you know, get some extra lighting, you know, to do
do a few things. Yeah, maybe it's smoothed out a little bit or
stuff like that. But but yeah, like first, like, good on
them on actually going back to the first Basically it seems like delivering on what
everybody's been kind of asking for. Is it's like less hand holding, more
freedom, more like trust in me, the prayer to figure it out.
Structure, Yeah, more stuff to get away. I just got to get
it out because what is it nine months away? Maybe that's a long time
before I get to play it again. Yeah, well, you know,
maybe they'll have some other event where they could show it off or something.
They have other things to announce that you know, that would be a game,
they could show that version you play. You'll play the Space World.
That's right, Space World, all right, John Mark, thanks so much
for coming by, Thanks for having us. Always a pleasure to see you.
Have a good time and have a great show. All right. We
will be back after a break, and we're going to get some more guests
here to talk, so stay tuned, we'll back. Welcome back, everyone,
It is time for our post show E three, twenty sixteen night one
coverage. Words to continue. I'm Jeff Gersman, and I'm joined by a
new couch full of guests from for Axis. I've got ed beach. How
you doing, sir, great, great, thanks for coming. Greg Asvin
of Supergiant Games. Good to see you again, Palmer Lucky from Oculus,
Great to see you again. Good to see you man. Yeah, we
are back here in this hotel, a different floor, a different bit of
a motif, but we are. We are back here again, and it
seems like it's a bit of a different show this time. Palmer, this
a lot of change. You're gonna go right, right, right, A
lot has changed since we last spoke. I mean, you've now shipped product,
you've got, You've got hardware out there in the world. How's it.
How's it going? When you said it was a different show, I
thought you were going straight to the to the where's E three going? Angle?
I was like, whoa, right, No, that's the stuff that
like we can get into. But I think I think we all know where
ye going, right, I'm so excited to be here at three and yes,
and uh you know we're so Let's see. A lot has changed.
We finally shipped our own consumer product. We've worked with Samsung before to ship
Gear VR, but that's their hardware product. It's powered by Oculus. Our
platform works with it, but it's not actually our hardware. So we've but
we've shipped the riff now and we're shipping that. We're getting caught up on
pre order soon, so that's nice. Yeah, we're showing off a bunch
of games for Touch, which we're shooting shooting for later this year. And
we've got a bunch of a bunch of games that are going to be launching
with Touch and a few that are few that are a few that are going
to probably end up further out. Cool. Yeah, I'm I'm coming through
on Thursday to see the Touch stuff. Like I was seeing the prototype controllers
last year. It was really exciting. Those things just they're a lot,
they're a lot closer to done, Like what you're going to be trying at
E three is if they're very close to final engineering samples, Like what you
try is very very close to what people are going to be getting in a
few months. Great, great, Greg, you're here with with Pire.
Uh? Is it in the Sony booth where it is the game? We're
not We're not here in any years? Okay, Okay, you're set.
Yeah, you're here anstead of working on Pire something. Yeah. I suppose
that is nice, That is true. You probably are I imagine that like
you're up in the room every night, you know, up and somewhere kind
of still working on it. Indeed, yeah, we're Yeah. We just
showed the game for the first time a few weeks back at at PAX's East,
which which was very lovely for all of us. Always like a relief
to put the thing out there and see that people are are excited for it.
And now we just got to knuckle down and finish the rest of it.
But yeah, take a take a brief break to check things out at
E three. It's a show I I love dearly, even though that I
suppose not everyone who goes to E three year after year feels that way.
But I have always enjoyed the show myself. I always enjoy as well.
But it is of those things where I think like the relevance of the show
is kind of was one of those fluctuating topics. And this year just seems
like there's a lot of open room on the show floor. That was an
interesting experience. I've not spent too much time on the show floor, but
that was an interesting feeling that I had as well. It's like, hey,
these aisles are used a room here. Edition six is in the works
out here kind of showing it off for the first time, and we're in
a pretty similar situation because we just showed it off for the first time.
We just announced yeah a month ago, so sort of a second round of
everyone getting a chance to take a look at it and reactions good. So
we're you know, really excited we have. Yeah, I've been back in
my hotel room looking and see what's going on. Backs like people like are
people like checking and co You're just like looking at the Actually I broke the
build last night, right, Yes, achievement unlocked. Yeah, but it's
actually my first E three two So it's you know, eyes wide open,
just taking everything in. I've been to plenty of g DC's bit the packses,
all this kind of things just for whatever reason, I was never sort
of like front and center in the marketing of anything. So it's fun to
take it all in. So you have you been lined up pretty much just
to kind of talk about the game for all three days? Have you have
you been able to get a you are you going to be able to get
on the tuned a bit? We had some time kind of before everything opened
at noon today, so I think I've walked by just about everything. I
haven't really checked out a full demo. You know, Oculus stuff is looking
super interesting. So I'm going to try to sneak into a few things here
when I get a chance. But pretty much it's you know, interviews and
yeah, getting ever An excited about SI six school and uh and Palmer,
how about you? You know, last year it seemed like you were given
a lot of demos, seemed like, you know, it felt like I
was one of is he just locked in this room the whole time, virtually
just communicating with people one at a time through that demo or last year,
I was locked in the room basically the whole time giving toybox demo yea by
Choy. I had the keys, Yeah, I give them away or something.
There's something locked the door from the inside instead of just bring them to
me one at a time. Well, yeah I don't, I will launch
fireworks. I didn't need they didn't even need to come in my room.
It was actually my room and then the room I was playing with them rightly,
and so yeah, I was just in my room the whole time.
I barely saw a person all of e three. It was just me alone
in a room talking to disembodied heads in Oculus to that was last year.
Watching that demo was a real profound moment for me. So I didn't do
the demo. Dan Cher did the demo, but I was in the room
with him while he was doing it, and I was able to kind of
watch him interact with you, and it was it was a moment where a
lot of stuff about the notion of like presence and telepresence in a way really
clicked in this kind of like in this very social way. Sure. Uh
And that's just that's been one of the things that that has really stuck with
me, is like one of the E three things, having been to every
E three, just going like that's that's one of those like game changing moments,
world changing moments. Uh. So I just wanted to tell you that
it was just like I couldn't say it better myself. I mean, like
tele I think VR is going to be huge for telepresence, Like you know,
even outside of games, that's going to be huge to be able to
have a digital communication that's as human as real world communication or obviously not there
yet, We've got a long ways before we get there. But and then
like the controllers that we have today, Like the goal is to provide a
sense of hand presence, like feeling like your hands are really in the game,
tracking your hands posed so that you really feel like you're interacting things in
some way that's roughly equivalent to how you would interact with them in the real
world. Right. Obviously we're not even close to being able to actually simulate
everything that we want to be able to simulate, but uh, well we'll
get there eventually. Yeah, And now that the rift is out there and
more and more people are getting their hands on them, uh, you know,
it's that stuff is happening, and you know, we're we're covering VR
and we see mixed reactions from people. There are the people that seem very
excited about it, and then there is still this kind of like wide array
of skeptics who you know, in many cases, you know, they haven't
access to a headset yet. I don't think that they're skeptics about VR.
I think there if they're skeptics about the progression of VR. You talk to
most people, ignoring people who haven't tried VR, people who they used to
be in the eighties and nineties. The people who are most excited about VR
were the ones who hadn't tried it. They were people who had read about
it or seen movies, but and they didn't understand how limited it was.
People who tried it, they're like, oh shit, we're actually really far
behind, whereas today it's kind of the opposite. People who try it are
usually the ones who are excited. But when you talk to people who have
tried it, there are some pessimist where they say, oh, it's not
good enough, the resolution isn't good enough, it's too expensive, there's not
enough content, blah blah blah. Those are all reasonable arguments. VR isn't
for everyone today, and that's that's just totally true. But you know,
if you talk to those same people who say, well, wait a second,
what if you could put on a pair of glasses, like the pair
that you're wearing anyway, and what if they were only fifty dollars, and
what if it was like matrix quality virtual reality you truly feel like you're anywhere
with anyone? Then would you be interested in They're like, well, yeah,
i'd be interested in that, but that's not what VR is. Oh
but then but that will never happen or oh that's like a hundred years away.
I'm like, okay, but you're saying they're clearly you are interested in
the concept of VR. It's just a matter of the quality versus the price
versus the content. And I think we're gonna get to the point where it
makes sense for every like everyone's gonna want VR and be able to get it
much well before we get to the fifty dollars matrix classes. It's just figuring
out where that point is. I think there's very few true VR skeptics where
they say no, VR will never take off. They're just pessimistic about how
long it will take to get to the matrix class. I think, you
know, like we see it in a different way because like from the gaming
angle of it, you know, where you see people to go like,
you know, well, this is very much like this is like connect,
this is like the Weight And they're looking at a lot of the early games
that have come out. Now, you know, there's there's stuff out there
that's like they're not all good. It's a lot of early access games out
there that are a form of pong. And that's not to say that's all
of them, Like some of them are actually pretty good, but it's these
bite sized experiences that are sometimes being sold for too much money, and I
think it's it's seems like the sort of thing that is kind of souring people
on these early days. How much do you care about like that perception stuff
or you just kind of like long view, like whatever, we'll figure that
out, Like we're figuring it out. I mean there's a wide range of
things, like i'd say, you know, be a little sympathetic to the
devs and you say, oh, they're charging too much for it, and
it's like, well, what if what if too much is not enough to
make back a tenth of their budget even if it's especially it's really tough for
people to take on that rift. So like, I mean, that's one
of the reasons we work with so many devs. It's not because it's because
there's so many devs that that want to need that help. I mean,
like it's very hard to charge a reasonable price for a lot of these games,
especially if it's if you're putting any significant money into it. I think
consumers are pretty pretty savvy, though I don't think, like I don't worry
about the handful of bad games ruining the perception of VR for everyone. I
think for the most part, the things that get demoted are going to be
the things that are compelling and the things that people say, hey, you've
got to check this out. They're gonna be it's gonna be the good stuff.
And up there's, of course, here's some danger. I think more
on the hardware side, where you have companies that are saying, oh,
we're going to use our muscle to you know, push this either this piece
of hardware or maybe like like I've seen advertising experiences. Advertising experiences are the
bane my existence. There are a few good ones, but they're like,
hey, look we're going to spend money to advertise this this this fast food
chain or something. We're gonna use VR and they don't care about the quality.
They don't care about anything except getting the press and rushing the project through.
Those are the types of things that will give people a bad VR experience.
But when it comes to like the Pawn game, I don't I don't
think it's going to turn anybody off of VR unless somehow there's some moneyed interests
that's making sure everyone only plays that game their first time, and that's probably
not gonna happen. Yeah. Now, ed with the with the franchise like
Civilization. Obviously, you just have this huge fan base already, you know,
it's it's SIEV years of fans. Yeah, So I mean on some
level you've got that that base of people that are always going to be interested
in what you have to say about what's next, but sometimes they can be
your harshest critics, the very commund as well. Yeah, how do you
how do you walk that line when when it comes to designing a new Sieve.
I think one of the really cool things is the SIV community is really
really active and there is so much you know, even between cycles of our
games, you know, there's still people playing it multiplay player. There's still
actually it's all it's been on the top ten most played games on Steam ever
since we're Ships of five, So there's still a ton of people talking about
it and playing it. And actually the reddit community for SIV is just blossom
Sensive five came out and actually it's like one of the biggest communities we have
out there, and that's just always people posting new shots about what happened in
their game and talking about it. And so that community is so bought in
and so active that we have a really good sense of kind of what they're
looking for and what's excited them about to five and then maybe what maybe didn't
hit the mark. Sure, So that was sort of how we approached things
when we're going with SI six, it was like take a really not just
a like a postmart modem post mortem of what we did right and wrong developing
it, but we just sort of went through the game step by step and
like, okay, let's take the combat system, what was working, what
wasn't working. Let's take the diplomacy, what was working, what wasn't,
and then then we threw in new ideas, just like brand new approaches to
things. By the time we've done that, we had plenty of ideas on
you know, what's going to be a worthy new iteration for this, And
you know, from that point in time was just trying to mount and we
like to try things out early and throw away the things that don't work.
We had some successes where things like worked right out of the gate and they
were like, you know, plugged it in and like this is something we're
going to build around right away. Yeah, and then there are other things
where it's like throw that one out, like we're not even going to iterate
on that thing. Just systems where we've thrown out four times, you know,
and it was number version five that we finally hit what we were going
to stick with. So it's kind of fun to do that. And I
have worked on a ton of projects where I've come in and close them out
or done expansions or like SIF I was a good example where I was involved
in the base game, but I wasn't the lead designer until we got to
the expansions, and then on the expansions, I took over that. But
this is the first one where I got to like be the lead designer right
from the very beginning and kind of see it all the way through. And
that's just really energizing and being able to throw things away. It's like fun
because you know, you don't sometimes you're stuck and you can't throw things away.
But when you can say, Nope, that's not good enough, We're
we need a new take on this, let's just go for it. Yeah,
you know that we're able to do that, and it's cool that you
have that kind of breathing room to be able to make those decisions. We
don't anymore, Yeah, I guess. Yeah, at this point you're far
enough along, it's like you have announced date, it's time to go.
Yeah, but we're happy with where everything's at so great. It's it's a
fun place to be. Yeah, and Greg, you know, Super Giant
hasn't made a sequel, so you know, like where where SIV kind of
at least has a very similar game to kind of look at and jump off
from. How how do you go from you know, from Bashton to Transistor
to now higher How how does that process? Like what what kind of feedback
can you get from the previous game that informs the next one? Yeah,
I mean, I mean, I think that the feedback is mostly you know,
the part where people have responded well to our previous games, and which
we think is a lot just due to the fact that they are they're kind
of new kinds of games there. We think people who've even taken a chance
on our games like Bashington and Transistor, people are probably fairly open to new
experiences, you know, because they're not they're not sequels to anything there.
You had to you had to take a chance on them in the first place.
So we think our audiences is pretty It's crazy, first of all that
we even have an audience is like a small independent studio, but yeah,
we we have people who have responded well to new ideas from us and ourselves
as a team. Just to keep ourselves energized creatively, we like to push
ourselves out of our comfort zone, and that means trying to do something new
that we haven't done before. That makes us, you know, a little
bit afraid initially and not just be filled with a sense of uncertainty about how
it's all going to play out, because we get very both afraid and also
excited about that of like, well, how's this going to work? And
we start kind of theory crafting it like crazy, and that you know,
ends up being a design after a while. I think a lot of students,
you know, it's so rare for studios to achieve any success at all,
and often when they are successful, they can, yeah, they can
become bound by their success, right, It's like they can still find really
interesting and exciting ways to make new versions of games that they've made before.
But in our case, at our at our scale, it's been really cool
just to be able to essentially kind of do whatever with each new game.
And for as long as that keeps working, you know, we have enjoyed
continuing to do that. It's not it's not that we you know, we
love the world games that we've created. It's not that we would never go
back to them or whatever if we Yeah, I mean, you have no
mandate to never make a sequel, right, the right idea struck? Would
you consider revisiting No? I mean we get yeah, like we don't.
We inherently like don't know what the I think For us, it's like,
continuing to surprise people and continuing to surprise ourselves is what we would most like
to do. And that may mean something like that, because if if you
know, if we become too predictable in making something new and different every time,
then hey, we're going to make the same thing now and throw you
off or something. I don't know. That probably doesn't make any sense.
But now what if you just were able to combine It's just like a Smash
Brothers style, bring all the characters from these games. Together. Hey,
man, I'd make a fighting game in a freaking heartbeat, right, yeah,
but of course you would. Yeah, of course I would. But
hey, you should make a trilogy, but then you make the make the
third one next? Yeah, exactly it's it's funny you should say that.
I like that. I like to I like to approach things as though I'm
already making the sequel to something that existed before. It's like it's kind of
it's kind of works turns out to work nicely. From like a storytelling standpoint,
It's like there's already applied backstory, Like so like there's a thing that
everyone already knows, and it turns out that that like leads to better characters
and the system empire with the you know, being able to highlight text and
get that description seems like it really serves that, you know, you can
kind of draw out a lot of these terms that you know, a lot
of other games would explain the hell out of up front and Jeff, ever
since you and I, ever since we were brothers and you used to you
used to defy my father and whatever, all this kind of yeah, that
kind of like dialogue and exposition. It's like we can sidestep all of that
and make it feel like a world that's been around for a long time and
and just we've always we we've been fortunate to just sort of have these games
where we shove people in at the deep end, and it makes us again
a little scared. During development. It's like, our people gonna understand what
the hell is going on here, but it's we cross our fingers at some
point and it's it's it's worked out. Well. Yeah, I always it's
like there. I think there's a good reason to give game players a ton
of credit for their sort of intelligence and ingenuity. They are like capable of
really insane accomplishments, so it's like, give them the benefit of the doubt
to figure like, if something is interesting, they're going to figure it out.
They're gonna want to dig into it and understand it. Have you read
an I don't think it's it's it's a It's a book that does like a
lot. It's the same. It has assumes the reader. It has lots
of references as if the world already exists, and it's just hard to figure
out. And one of the things in the intro is the writers like you
have to assume that your reader is intelligent and smart, because if you don't,
you're not going to be able to write who anything? I think it
was Neil Stevenson, but I'm not sure. I actually haven't read I have
not made it and made it through it. I started a long time ago,
and then he might have given me too much credit in the middle of
you. I don't know what any of this is, because if someone gives
you too much credit, it still feels good to get any credit at all.
When because of that stuff, Hey, thank you for making me.
You think I don't I don't suck or whatever. And whether it's like Dark
Souls or or a challenging book or something, well, now I get to
name drop it and be like, oh, I have ever read that similar
concept. See, you don't even have to finish the book to do that.
Is now I know that, and I'm going to take it over here
and diet. Yeah. So when it comes to iteration, uh, you
know, obviously you've got your first consumer desktop. I mean obviously the gear
of VRS as well, and now it seems like the touch controllers are next.
I think one of the things when you talk about the fifty dollars matrix
classes the far flung future that maybe isn't as far flung as people think it
starts to beg the question is what do you see as like the cadence for
updates for like a rift to a second generation of hardware, this sort of
stuff. And you know, I'm not trying to get you to spoil hardware
plans, but just like I just what do you think the right answer is.
I know that's that's got to be. I think the right answer.
The right answer is going to depend on what the like. I don't think
that there's necessarily going to be a fixed cadence that you've seen with every year
we've got a new you know, like with consoles, not to not that
they've really been totally genericized, but they basically are like you know, it's
basically like you know, we're getting more more power, more power and more
power, and whenever you get enough power you can kind of move up another
generation. VR is not going to move into cadence like that. I think
that there are going to be some really obvious leaps like lighter weight, lower
cost, high resolution, better optics, wider fields view. But when it
comes to things like let's say haptic haptic haptic feedback, you know, how
do you actually feel like you're touching things, or things like the vestibular mismatch,
the balance between what you see with your eyes and what you feel in
your inner ear, those aren't going to come along, and regular predictable steps
are going to come along as huge things that are going to radically change how
VR works, and those are probably going to be put into the technology as
soon as they're viable, kind of regardless of whatever cadence exists on a pure
know, content development or business to kind of as the problems get solved or
it is, these solutions come and so I think you're going to see a
cadence of you know, sometimes you'll see earlier things that happen where it's a
lot of these obvious winds, and then sometimes when these things come along,
you know, maybe it'll take a little longer to get them in, or
maybe it'll jump into the same product. It's it's not one hundred percent clear,
sure, but I think yet the easy winds that we're going to see
are you know, high resolution, lighter weight, lower cost, wider field
of view, and those are going to happen. I think officially we've been
saying somewhere between a phone and a console, which isn't very helpful. Yeah,
sure, especially with the way consoles are now well, and what is
a what is a console? What is a phone? Right? Yeah?
Exactly, you know, when we get into the especially now that the major
consoles are just being built on the same platforms that the PC is, you
know, like and the same operating systems, right, yeah, you know
that stuff starts to get really strange. So you guys have done your partnership
with Microsoft Overdoculus for getting controllers and the Box seemed like there was a very
prominent mention of the project Scorpio Xbox one being capable of high end VR.
Does that mean do you think that do you think that that means that the
Oculus Rift will work with the next Xbox one hardware. We have a really
good partnership with Microsoft. I mean, there's there's a controller that you know,
we bundle with the Rift, but also like Minecraft is also on GARVR
and on Rift, and we've we've worked a lot with them on a lot
of different optimizations that allow us to make for a better Rift experience on PC.
So we get along really well with them. We have a really strong
relationship there. But I'm not going to announce anything on this couch. I'm
not going to announce anything on this couch today. Even even if I even
if there was any tears, it's not gonna happen so you know, I
mean, I'm just riding on the board if you want to. You know,
sometimes we have to ask these things, you know. Yeah, well
we were having We're having Phil Spencer in tomorrow. I'm sure I'll probably ask
him the exact same question. So just you have to gotta get out there
a little bit. Yeah, So what have you guys seen at the shelf
so far? Having time to get around? Anything jumped out when you walked
around this morning that that stuck out at you really heavily. I did kind
of notice that. You know, there were certain areas that lots of activity
packed, and then there were some dead spaces in the back, so dead
space here. They're finally making dead space for right, that's where they should
have put their booth. I know, key, just it's like dead space.
But we've got we've got a lot of cool stuff right around us.
We've got the lego stuff right behind us. That's just fun. Yeah,
you know, and I didn't see what happened with it, but there was
a capcom booth there that was like all bundled up and oh right, so
they had all the Resident Evil seven stuff cover right, So I gotta go
look at it now. That it's been you know, unveiled, but didn't
make it back over to there later in the show, but I'll make sure
I check that out tomorrow. Yeah, there's a lot of it seems like
there's there's just enough exciting stuff around the show that as much as you might
want to talk about the show being weird, like it seems like there's their
software were at that point in the cycle. Uh Grave, did you make
your way around the floor at all? You're just kind of like hanging out
with people. Yeah, I've been unfortunately spent most of my time outside of
the halls. But but the like, I think if I could, if
I could play one game and would probably be the Zelda game looked really interesting.
Yeah, a lot of stuff going on there. It's like it's funny
because it it looks like Zelda for sure, but the like from a design
standpoint, it's so different in a lot of ways that kind of it's just
just a change of format and so many more things that it seems like you
could do and more than just scope, you know, just in terms of
just like mag hey, here's a big, bigger world. It's like,
okay, we're changing just fundamental things about weapon acquisition and dirtability and all.
Yeah, yeah, it just seemed really exciting. I was just really I
don't know. On the other hand, I can like wait and just just
play it when it's out. I know, I know I want to play
it so but but it seems I was just excited to see more on that
game. I don't think Gun of War isn't actually playable, is it.
I don't know. Yeah, but that that that that kind of blew me
away yesterday at the time. I was very very excited to see that game.
Yeah, in a in a way that that I was actually sort of
taken aback by it. I didn't I didn't think I cared as much as
I did. I have never been able to care about a God of War
game, just that style of character action and just I just the Cradle's character
is always just been kind of like it just he's just his whole thing is
just like he mad mad, Yeah, he mad, but he's like he's
action hero but like in ancient times. Yeah, there's definitely that. I
just I don't know, it just everything about him, just like I'm this
mad guy and now here's this mini game where I'm gonna get it on and
now I'm killing and it just it just never worked for me. So so
I never thought that, like we kind of had an inkling that maybe there
would be a God of War game here. It's just you know, some
stuff I leaked out a while ago, like oh, Norse Scott of War,
Like I don't even know what that, like, who care? And
then they started showing that, and it's like, oh, wait, okay,
you're this is kind of an open world. You're showing like an experience
point pop up. There's like there's things here that you're like, Okay,
this is a much bigger game. You could almost see like well, it's
it's hard to say without playing it, but you know there you could almost
see like a dark souls like influence on just kind of the pace of the
combat or even just that stuff, even that that kind of like behind the
character of perspective, even just like a residual four type of things instead of
the like cinematic camera the previous games. Yeah. Even I was telling Alex
just before this actually that like even the part there are plenty of games with
like these themes of fatherhood or plenty of dad games or whatever. Game developers
getting old hen kids and thinking they're making games that resonate and whatever. I
like that for and and I myself and I'm a father now whatever, But
none of those games will connect with me on that level. Typically it's like
whatever, I don't I don't care. I can't relate to this. But
for some reason, Kratos being like a bad like a just like clearly just
a pretty bad dad. I love the idea of a game where he's just
like ruining his son like the whole, like here's how life works. Yeah,
and it's there's something that was really cool to me about that that it's
not it's just kind of like about kind of a dysfunctional relationship seemingly. I
don't know, I'm just reading that into it, but that seemed way more
interesting to me than most like what most dad games are are doing. I
just can't help it look at that and just think like, well, you
know, either you're going to play the back half of this game as the
Sun because Kratos will be dead, or the Sun will die in Cretos will
get really mad. He's like ten times as mad this time. And the
mini games are going to be filthier and there's gonna be more murder. Yeah,
I'm curious to see either way. Yeah. Yeah, and I guess
that's you know, that's weird praise. Well, you know, that's that's
one of the I think the most impressive things about it is that I definitely
want to see more. Yeah, and every other God of War game i've
seen it something like all right, you you kind of think, you know,
the you know, the drill after they made just one of these,
and I haven't really liked it all along. Yeah. The only other like
random thing I looked at was the next King of Fighters game. I've actually
as an old SNK fan, over time, I've gotten more and more excited
for that. At first, as like, dude, man, I don't
I don't know old the cold models kind of look. Yeah, it's like
whatever, I don't want I just want SNK to make two two D two
D games forever. So it's I'm skeptical of like a three D game,
but that game has just kind of looked better and better to me for whatever
reason. Over time, I got really indus Street Fighter five and stuff.
I like that people continue to make interesting fighting games these days. Yeah,
they're they always have a level of uh, you know, there's no,
there's no you know, League of Legends level fighting. Fighting games have always
been kind of scrapping along on on on some level like no one they haven't
really broken through super Crazy yet or whatever. Yeah, I kind of I
kind of liked that they haven't, maybe on some level because I get to
have my own part of a secret little club that feels like this kind of
underdog that I guess I would actually say that like Smash Brothers is kind of
like, you know, that's true if you take that as you know,
a fighting game. It's very different being a four player thing. I know,
Palmer, are you do you have any time left to play Smash at
this point or now that you've got stuff out? Is it? I've just
I've only been smashing casually in sixty four for for the last few weeks,
like occasionally just doing a match or something because we haven't in sixty four set
up in our living room. But I have not been smashing seriously for for
some time. The distinct lacked of smashing in my life. Is it there
like a feeling in the back of your head where it's like we just need
to get once once this happens, once we get this out the door,
then the smash can shash and can commence again, or or do you think
it's if you think it's your time has passed, My time hasn't passed.
Problem. The problem is you get out of practice, and actually the more
out of practice you get, the less your design like, the less yeah,
yeah, the less passion there is so like jump back in because you
want to be like, oh, I'm gonna jump back in on to be
so good, and like you play like, oh man, I'm so out
of practice, I'm awful at this now, and it makes you almost not
want to play. Like I like feeling like I'm part of the club of
people who are better at smash than the average person. And when I'm no
longer part of that club, it's almost easier to just say I'm just gonna
act like I'm a member of the club. I can talk and talk,
but I've been so busy. Yeah that's that's that's yeah, that's that's the
real truth. I don't have to actually play smash to get the cred of
being smashed. Players. See, I know to ask you about smash,
so obviously you know we've had multiple conversations about it. It's out there Palmer
love Smash, So I do love it. It's already done, and it's
obviously like a huge competitive aspect to SIVE. How much how much attention do
you have to Is it just kind of an even split these days in terms
of just like figuring out like how you're going to handle that aspect of the
game versus kind of just people that want to play by themselves. And it's
important to us that we really get a good solid start with multiplayer this time
multiplayer. The way I've been looking at SIF five is if five went out,
multiplayer had sort of a rough launch on it, and we had to
kind of really get everything in shape before the multiplayer took off. And here
at the back end of things, I'm seeing just lots of people that are
still playing at multiplayer. We're still seeing live streams where every week they have
SIV matches. We're seeing you know, my nephew plays it every single day
after school with his fifteen year old friends, and I get long emails about
what should be in SIEVE six speak from from my nephew, just you know,
volumes. We had a meeting of all of our people are a multiplayer
group, and we've decided these are all the things you have to put in.
So it's been fun to see how like how long the tail is for
fsive game in the multiplayer world. That I mean, there's still people playing
SIP four crazily all the time in the MultiPar arena. But I think if
we can establish right away that we can do some new things with SIV multiplayer.
We're looking at shorter matches right out of the game. We're both speeding
up the tempo of things and also making it so that you don't have to
get all the way to the end of history to have a have a victory.
And we're having some like really interesting matches doing exactly that with our QA
group internally and everything. And so we think when it comes out, you
know, we're going to have a chance to really capture a lot more of
the multiplayer interest of everybody. Now the single player, you know, there's
still going to be the dominant, you know, part of of our fan
base. And SIV is one of those games where you want to be able
to spend a weekend playing through one session of it and that just be your
own experience and you know nothing's going to take away from that. So you
know, there are I'd say it's not too bad in terms of how those
interests compete with each other a little bit. Like the multiplayer people are are
keenly aware of balance of things, and it's something that we can get away
within single player, just as like a fun element that maybe he's a little
op in that one particular game, that's fine for single player. We have
to think about those things in multiplayer. And one thing that it took a
while for the multiplayer community and five to really latch onto was that, you
know, we didn't have really mod support directly there, but there were ways
that they could reconfigure the setup files and they could get modding available, and
we had like a whole sieve no quitters, league and mod that all got
set up, and that sort of helped multiplayer take off. We have much
better. We have mode support for multiplayer right out of the gate this time,
and so it'll be very easy for the multiplayer community to come up with
exactly the game rules that work for them. You know, they can be
slight variants what we have in the base game and you know, for for
the single player audience. So we can do fun things for both and both
sides can have things set up exactly the way they like it. When you
talk about faster matches, like how what what kind of speed we play?
Average game length are you're kind of looking to Obviously, people will be able
to have to get a SIF game in under an hour, right, but
I don't want I mean, the five or six hours it really took for
a CIV five game to complete is totally unacceptable. So we're looking at things
that take less than two hours. We're experimenting with things that only take an
hour, and so we're you know, finally tuning all that right now,
and we have a bunch of different things we're going to launch with gets speed
sieve out there, and at some point it's just that's you professionals in esports
like SIV has a real slow you know, ramp up, and there's no
reason you have to have that in a multiplayer match. And so there are
a lot of just obvious things that you can do to get things going right
away. And so we've really attacked that hard and it's fun. Yeah,
Greg with with Pire that the gameplay and Pire does have kind of a naturally
competitive aspect to it. You know, you're kind of resolving situations in a
I've been referring to it as a sports like manner, which it's it's you
know, like some people straight up would mention NBA jam. We're talking about
it, and you know, obviously you're you're building a campaign, you're doing
all that sort of stuff. Has there been any what's the current thinking on
whether that might be something that you consider doing multiplayer form? Yeah, it's
something that is is quite quite interesting to us, I think, yeah,
by by virtue of the kind of game it is. The like the single
player solo experience is definitely our our focus as as with our as with our
previous games. Uh, though the multiplayer is something we are continuing to investigate
to see if we could do it properly. And by properly I mean uh,
both not at the expense of the single and also just sort of well
in its own right. We know what we would do with it if we
could achieve it, but it's something that we don't don't sort of approach lightly.
So we're we're wee. We definitely see a lot of potential in it
in this game, and it's something that like we we ourselves on on the
team of like we we've we played ourselves like locally and so on, and
when when it comes to designing the characters and like tuning the gameplay and even
figuring out what the the what sorts of things we want to see, the
the kind of AI opponents, the different characters that you're going to come up
against, what what do we want to see them do? Like a great
way to model that is to just sort of play with it ourselves. So
so yeah, we're you know, we're still technically pre alpha. We're it
just despite what we've shown, we're relatively early in development, so we're in
that in that juicy point where we still get to figure out those those kinds
of things. So yeah, it's it's been great hearing hearing people's interests.
That is like a component in the decision making that that people are intrigued by
that aspect at all. But yeah, well we'll see if it's something.
It seemed like there was definitely a lot of interest just in the game generally
you're coming out of packs. Yeah, it was awesome. Yeah, was
there was there? Did you did you get that question a lot? Yeah?
We did. I think I think that you know, you, yeah,
you get into these competitions that are set up as these like symmetrical looking
competitions against it's it's like essentially teams pitched against each other. So we're not
we like weren't surprised that people ask We expected we expected people to ask us.
And we talked about how what are we going to say because because we
don't know yet, But what do we say other than we don't know?
And it's yeah, the part where we're looking into it and if we could
do it properly, we would, we would love to do it. We
have you know, we have the or you know this, but we have
the chops for it. It's like Andrew Wang is one of our engineers,
our CTO. He's like he worked on Modern Warfare before he came to Super
he worked on Modern Warfare one and two. So we's been at the at
the top of the food chain when it comes to really solid multiplayer experiences.
So we we know what it takes. But with that comes a lot of
respect for what the challenges of doing that properly are and being a being a
small team. Yeah we don't we don't go into that lightly, but yeah,
well we will see how that goes. It would be cool. How
many of your game design decisions are driven by eating emails from teenagers? Uh
not not not a lot, thankful thankfully for us, Like since we don't,
since we haven't like sort of iterated on successive games and our franchises,
Like we don't get a lot of people like backseat designing our games in the
way of something something like a SAP because I get lots of em Yeah,
we're lucky, like we we do sometimes, I mean we do sometimes,
But the thing is, like our each of our games has just been some
whatever different, out of left field thing compared to the last thing we did.
So yeah, we like the words of encouragement that we get from people
who've enjoyed our games like mean a lot to us sort of spiritually and really
keeps us going. But the part where people like tell us to make a
game exactly like we we occasionally got like, oh, you should just make
a you know, transistor or whatever multiplayer game or something like that, but
we don't. We don't really put a ton of stock into that. It's
cool. We appreciate it because it's like someone who's like engaged with our games
and super enthusiastic, and we try to sort of pick it apart for like,
what is this person excited about really other than this very specific idea,
if there is something like that. But yeah, thankfully, our fans of
generally let us alone and let us do our thing. Thus, so you're
saying I should stop just texting you all the time. Just Transistor Champion edition
man from you anytime? Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, Okay,
I'm amazed at how much game design can be packed into one tweet.
Yeah. Oh yeah, there's there's quite a bit. Yeah, there there
there are. There are a lot. You get a lot of tweets about
how to run a video game websites. Yeah, you should, you know,
fill in the exactly how reviews should be written and all the characters.
Yeah, then they can just just get it right out there. I mean.
And and how how much feedback have you gotten? I mean, you
talk about getting a lot from I get feedback all the time. It seems
like it seems like a lot of feedback heading your way lately. Always.
Yeah, And and how's that, like, what can you pluck from from
a lot of that stuff? Is there is there? How much of it
is valuable? I guess I would say, I mean it's all valuable,
like there is there there's always something you can learn, even from the worst,
most uninformed feedback. A lot of times when someone says something that's just
nasty and mean and uninformed, you're like, hey, you know, we
might not be doing a good job and good enough job, like making sure
that people like have access to a certain piece of information or something. So
even even even that is valuable in some way. I think it's important to
always, you know, listen to your community and listen to what they want
and make sure that you're being make sure that you're listening to them. At
the same time, I think you guys would probably agree, there's a lot
of things that are not apparent to people on the outside, of people who
don't necessarily have experience you're actually working on sure, and you know, any
given thing, and so it's important to not make your priority, you know,
trying to make every single one person happy, because you can never make
everybody happy, and you really need to prioritize, like you need to figure
out and make a list of what's important to us, what's important to prioritize,
what are people telling us as important to them, and then see how
that fits into actually doing the right thing, because a lot of times,
you know, the right thing is not necessarily the most popular thing, especially
in the short term. I mean, there's so many examples where people have
thought that something They've said, oh, this is crazy, I don't get
Actually, they don't say I don't get this. That would be admitting that
they might be wrong. They'll say they don't get this, they should be
doing you know, X, Y and Z, and then it turns out,
oh, hey, actually, I now, maybe now I understand what
that decision was, why it was made, or people will just not agree
to disagree and just keep disagreeing. Sure, yeah, it's been you know,
it's really you just I mean, you have to balance that. I
wish it was an easier, easier issue. Yeah, there is easier way
to handle it, for sure. And there've been, you know, points
as the rift has has gotten out of people there there've definitely been points where
people were like, I thought that was gonna happen. I thought this was
going to happen. And it's been one of the things that I've been kind
of sitting watching going you know, you know, I bet I bet that
deal with Best Buy got made a long time ago, and that's why that
had to happen. Well, so actually the deal with best Buy, like
I'm going to point out there peep that were articles saying, oh, Oculus
just decided they're going to ship people these units the Best Buy. So we
actually announced that at CS We announced that we would be shipping limited quantities to
retail. There were even stories written about it with headlines, and some of
the outlets that wrote those stories then later wrote that Oculus reveals that they're shipping
them, like you wrote an article about this, I was in the interview,
and so like that's one of those things where like you look at your
like that's dumb, and but then you as well, we obviously needed to
do a better job of of of communicating that like that is probably one of
the biggest stumbles we've had, as you know, not being able to meet
meet the demand and you know, we are catching up soon. We've been
Yeah, you're saying, production lies right around the corner. So the other
thing is, you know, like not necessarily the Best Buy situation, but
like you know, we had issues with a component shortage and people saying,
tell us, what's going on. You gotta tell us, And the reality
is that Oftentimes what people really will desperately want or think they want, like
ultimate transparency and full explanations of exactly how things goes, that's actually not the
right way to achieve the optimal outcome, which is, let's work with this
partner, let's get this all resolved, let's get manufacturing. And it'd be
interesting and cathartic to be like, I'm going to write an open letter explain
to everyone exactly what's going on. Nine people under the bus here to think
it's like everyone will say, oh, this is so great, we know
what's going on. It's like, yeah, and guess what now you don't
get your rift for another few months because completely screwed everything up, and so
what people. That's an example where yeah, it's not that people are dumb,
it's just if they don't have access to all the information. Sometimes it
can be really easy to think that the thing you want is the right thing
and not necessarily understanding the bigger picture of what's going on behind the scenes,
with the various different interests of all the different parties and trying to achieve the
optimal outcome. Yeah, and I can only imagine with with something as as
you know, crazy and new as shipping these headsets out, there's a lot
of interesting problems to solve. I mean, it is, but like I
can't even I can't even attribute it to like just oh, it's hardship heads
It's like this is true everywhere in the games industry, probably everywhere in business.
I just don't know much about many other places in business. But like
when I talk to game developers, it's it's it's it's most many of the
of the same stories I've heard storms about middleware providers that I'm like, that
story is just like our component shortage. From what I can tell, I
really feel for those guys. Yeah, well, we'll definitely privately have people
to us kind of on the side, throw some of their middlewear or engine
companies that they're working with under the bus. But obviously they're never going to
publicly get out there and say like, well, this decision we made a
long time ago as well. You know, ultimately, the consumer kind of
doesn't care and shouldn't have to, right, I mean, you know,
they just kind of want to know when the when things are going to be
the buck stops with you, and you have to take responsibility even when Yeah,
that's not always the funnest thing to do. Definitely not, but that's
how it goes. All right. Well, we're gonna let you guys go.
Thanks so much for coming through. Uh, this has been fantastic and
we will return shortly with another batch of gas. Stay tuned, we'll be
back. Hello and welcome back. I'm Jeff Gersman. Day one of E
three continues. The show floor is over, but this is the new show
floor. I'm joined by it. Just a full as many guests as we
could fit. We've got Lord Landing here with me. How you doing,
sir, I'm doing great now that I'm here. Yeah, welcome back,
well, thank you. Back here, we've got from Hanger thirteen. We've
got Hayden Blackman, how you doing great? And Bill Harms down there in
the end. Things fantastic, awesome. In the back, we've got Hit
Detections own Jeff Green, Jeff, good to see you. Good to see
you too, and we've got Alex n. Varrow. I don't know,
yeah, you don't. You don't have to or anything. I'm just here.
It would just look weird if there was only one person sitting in the
backs. I'm literally a body. Yeah, quite a little. Yeah.
The body anyway, So we're here another year of E three. Uh,
some some stuff being shown off. Obviously, you guys are are bringing the
Ends Mafia here at the show. Huh. How is it feel getting that
out there in front of people? You know, obviously the game has been
announced and known for a while, but you know, kind of being able
to really get out there and show it. How how's it been going?
It's been great. I mean you said earlier was what when are your most
emotional? Yeah? I actually got a little emotional today at the booth and
you know it's like the we had the jazz band playing, Yeah, and
it's just you know, we've been working on this for three plus years now,
roughly or thereabouts, and you know, just seeing the booth, seeing
all the people, the excitement of everybody lined up, you know in the
jazz band. Yeah, it was you know, this is hands down the
highlight of my career so far, which is which has been great? Yeah
for me? I mean, and I think we all probably can relate to
this. But the team has been working kind of, you know, almost
in seclusion for so long, and obviously we announced the games calm and we
were able to show bits and pieces of the game, but to actually have
a huge, you know, extended portion of game play out there. The
team works so hard on that. To me, I think has been really
meaningful. So yeah, it's been that just helps telling the story of the
game and kind of like helping people understand like really what you're making. Absolutely,
yeah, and just and again it's just the team's hard work being put
front and center now is just for I don't know, for me, is
a big milestones. Yeah, and now, Lauren, you've brought plenty of
games to two e three over the years. We're bringing another one. But
we weren't on the big floor. We were in a corner somewhere just trying
to, you know, find a plug. And it shows the occasional person
that would walk by here, Wow, they've got a great publisher, but
we got the you know, we'll work for a game development. How much
of the control do you really want to give away to a public? Well
that was that was always our problem. I guess we had some issues through
the years, but I've been there. You know, here we are,
you know, we survived. Here we are, but we're so we're secretly
showing something because we're ahead of where we thought we would be, which is
really a first, Like wait a minute, you say that doesn't that's not
how game development works. You're supposed to be. You're usually like totally nervous
wreck what you're showing. You hope it doesn't break, but you know it's
shaky, yeah you know. I mean, you know it's a junk with
with bubble gum and code hangers holding the game together, and you're like,
it doesn't break. You know, you demo it, but you know how
to avoid everything. But it actually was running. So we're like, hey,
hey, guys, should we show this this year? Like we weren't
prepared, which is completely the opposite of how it always goes, you know,
which is can't we don't wait, don't know as the time, so
I can't complain, but you know, publicly, we're really not out there
yet. Yeah cool, yeah, Jeff Green, yes, sir, in
your days now as consulting, and obviously you know in the press, how
many E three builds have you broken? Would you say? How many?
How many times time? If you crashed a build at a trade show?
Well? Many? Yeah? And when I was at E as an employee
builds, of course I crashed many builds many builds. Yeah, I played
a bunch of game. We're talking to my games yet? Can we want
to talk about Yeah? I want to talk about some videos? Was some
hits? Alright? I detected a couple of hits today. Okay, okay,
what are you thinking here? What's up? Actually? You know what
I really liked was Titan Fall two? Yeah? Same Yeah. Field one
looks amazing, it looks great, But I'm not convinced. Do kids even
know that there was a World War One? I mean they only they know
there was a two? Oh yeah, two was the one that everyone's talking
about. Does anyone know what happened in? Like three TV channels devoted to
World War Two? Right at any given time. One that's short wave radio.
You gotta tune that. And I think it was like Liner part six,
where there was basically it was starting they started to six. This could
be the moment, like this could reintroduce World War One to a whole new
generation. Like those Kaiser helmets could be huge. They could they could replace
like the thing. Yes, we're getting way into the pointy helmets totally.
Obviously. I was wondering because they didn't show it in today. When I
saw it, Ada player. Are they gonna have things like the like mustard
gas and chemical weapons. Yeah, apparently there are gas masks in that game.
And and yes it's intense. It's it's war. The thing I want
to do is fly around the biplane. Yeah, chuck grenades out, because
that's how they used to do bombing runs back then. Yeah, just really
Yeah. They would just throw stuff out of the plane and open landed on
something. It's like, I don't know what you what you got up here?
I got two grenades in a brick? All right, go down.
It was the three build of war. It was just like you hoped it
worked, Yeah, and invariably you crashed the build. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, that's titan Fall two definitely stuck out to me as I really enjoyed
the first game, and there's just so many like the grappling hook feel so
good. We're talking about earlier. Gappling Hook feels really good. And just
the mode they're showing I think is really smart, and yes it is.
I think they kind of kind of boned with titan Fall one, you know,
it just like crashing, and I think it might have been daxbox ones.
The fact that it was only on that platform probably didn't help. Yeah
at the time. Yeah, yeah, and that's this. You know,
it's funny. We we started a series where we're looking at old b roll
where we're pulling you know, because we're you know, being owned by the
same company that owns Game Spot. Like we there's the game Spot tape library
goes back to two thousand and two thousand and one. You know, the
site started ninety six, but you know, no one had tapes them,
uh and we found some ps two uh munches roll like them, all that
all that early tech stuff, and yeah, I had I had to sit
there and go like, wait a minute, this isn't at all. This
totally never came right, of course, because this was the game that eventually
became. I never told that story publicly how that footage got there. But
if we want to take a minute, yeah, yeah, I would love
this. This is gonna is it? So there was without naming names.
There was publishers acquiring publishers, and you wound up with partners you didn't have
any say in, and all of a sudden they're your partner. And then
all of a sudden you find out they're cutting all their budgets. But they're
a public company, so you're like, so we just got a partner we
don't want, and they're cutting every budget that they say is above this much,
and that's only about seven million below ours, so we're pretty much on
the chopping block. It didn't take a genius to figure it out, so
it's wow, well, how do we prevent that? And I was like,
wait a minute, let's take all the assets. And at the time,
you gotta remember PS two, Sony, if you had a def kate,
you had an agreement that said you couldn't release any footage on the PS
two so you couldn't even tell the public what you were doing. And I
was like, but I came from aerospace where we used to do visualization on
Star Wars projects stuff like that, and I was like, we can visualize
the footage and then we can poison pill the budget cut. So we produced
all this footage. We said this is visualization of the PS two game,
but no one else was able to release PS two footage, so everyone's like,
look at all this PS footage. And I saw Dave Perry do it
before with Earthworn Gym, and you know, and the new systems coming out.
It's like, wow, we totally wrote that. So I'm like taking
surfing lessons and I'm like, okay. So we produced this whole CD of
quick Times that was basically all the assets that we were building for it,
but we preventered it all in three D Studio Max and we called it Visualizations
of the PS two. Next thing like Phil Harris's called what are they doing
there? What footage? This isn't off? The visualization says it clearly like
that, what is it? And everyone starts freaking out, But the public
company, and I'm talking, we got news Week, we got we got
everywhere with that footage, right, and then now cut our budget and see
what it does to your public stock. That's where that footage came from.
Nice and that's the story. I'm a minting Ada and I remember at the
time that that was like the I mean, you know, obviously not not
real, but you know that was kind of we got a hold of that.
I was like, this is like the first PlayStation two footage. Like
I was like, you know, right, so we we we It was
really kind of slamming what we did, but we did it. At some
point. You got it honest, It was honest, but you know,
we didn't get our budget cut, and we were we were hearing across the
countries of the different developers that were showing up with pet locks on the studio
door. No. Yeah, you know, there was a lot of a
lot of those just unwritten stories, but we we've heard them all, you
know. Yeah. Yeah, you were saying, nice, that's super fascinating
game. Yeah, that's uh. And you mentioned that you did spend some
time with Lucas doing stuff like that. You know, Lucas seemed like a
studio that was was always up and down. What what period of of I
was there, like thirteen years? Okay, so yeah, right through like
when I first started, they were just transitioning into console. You know,
it kind of had had been obviously a PC company for so long and really
focused on a venture games, and we're just now starting to realize the value
of Star Wars and Star Wars games and then the importance of the consoles.
So I was there through that whole transition then you know obviously onto the Xbox
three, sixty and PlayStation three and right now yeah yeah, yeah, so
but yeah, and you know, I think it's like anything, there were
lots of ups and downs. I think the time I was. There was
probably more ups and downs, but it was we never had anything like that.
Yeah, it just seemed like a really exciting time for that for that
studio. Yeah, well, you know it was so interesting. It was
it was like every two or three years it was the new exciting time,
right, like, and it's just again because it's cyclical and you go through
these changes, right, So I felt like, you know, my last
couple of years there, Jim Ward came in as president at one point,
and that was an incredibly exciting time time and we had Battlefront and we were
working on Force on Leash and some other stuff. But that wasn't the only
exciting time, and it wasn't you know, there was times before that and
there were times after that, I'm sure, right, So it was just
like you said, it's very cyclical. So yeah, definitely, did you
have to be quiet on the ranch? Do we have to be quiet on
the ranch? Oh? Quiet's right? Where they're definitely areas. You know,
it's it's really it's a beautiful place, right And it's like I always
say, it's deceptively idylic, right because everybody was working really hard, right,
and we weren't actually on Skywalker Ranch. We were down down the road,
and then we were at the Presidio. Say it was in like the
Marine Tech Center, like out in that that spot where we just used to
be around there. We're off of Lucas Valley Road, which you know was
down the road from from Skywalker Ranch. But you know, like LUCASFANM Licensing
was up at the ranch, and then at one point the animation team was
up at the ranch, Lucas Fanm Animation. But you go up there and
it's beautiful, right, and it's like deceptively idylic because you know, once
you start talking to people there, they're all, you know, working incredibly
hard, right, like, look at this beautiful place. No I don't
have time too yeah right, yeah, but yeah, but it was I
mean, the window I was there, it was a really great time to
be there because we were growing the you know, the kind of games business,
you know. So yeah, that's awesome and now you know, staying
in the area in Nevado. Yeah, yeah, doing the doing Hanger thirteen.
So this is this will technically this will be Hanger thirteen's first game.
Like some some of the people, how much of the team was there previous
exit I'm trying to think like games that came out of Nevado was like the
Bureau, Yes, we had It's interesting. So when I was hired,
I was hired to found Hanger thirteen. Well we became Hanger thirteen, and
I wasn't really sure what I was gonna work on. You know, we
knew that, you know, I knew that I wanted to work on open
world games. I wanted to work with proprietary tech just because that's what I
know, That's what the proprietary tech side of It's when I'm most comfortable with.
And then after a couple of months, we started having the conversation about
the Mafia franchise. So when we built Hanging at thirteen, we brought over
a bunch of people from the Czech Republic Mafia too. Yeah, so that
was a good infusion of folks. And then there were some folks that actually
like Bill, who actually been working with the brand for a while and they
were kicking around other ideas for you know, Mafia three. So we brought
Bill on board, and then after the Bureau shipped, a handful of folks
from you know, two K Marine came on board. So we grew uh
oh, and then when Lucas Arts, you know, kind of folded because
I had worked there for so long, I knew so many people. We
went in and you know, we invited invite me. I don't know if
that's what you do. Yeah, you go look in the veil. There's
gonna be an invite join us, but please, we want to get a
good We were able to bring over some folks from from Lucas Arts too,
so we actually had these like it was really interesting time because we had you
know, we had these contingent check guys, contingent of of you know,
uh, the Bureau kind of two k Marin folks and then Lucas folks,
and then you know, new hires or you know, folks hadn't necessarily worked
in colliding at once. And it's like four different are three different cultures and
then kind of these one off. Sorry, I don't know how it's to
sit all hitting at once. And we went from I mean, you know,
a relatively small team to a large team almost overnight. So that was
it was challenging, but I think it worked. You know, it worked
out, it worked. I think it worked at great Like I think when
I started, there was maybe twenty people. Yeah, okay, something like
that. Like we took up like this tiny little corner you're just like running.
I had a quiet mafia corner where you're like, one of these days
we're gonna get yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's you know, there's other
people in our area who weren't affiliated with us. And then, like Hayden
said, all of a sudden, you know, just over time, very
short amount of time, suddenly you grow out. But I think the culture
and everything, you know, it's it's great. Like I think we all
really jelled and yeah, you know, well because we had the project right
like around we had that one thing in the Mafia, and people with like
different experience. I mean obviously like the check guys, you know, coming
in with like Mafia Twosta, but you know, this seems like a very
different game from from Mafia too. You know, it isn't it isn't like
and I get some of this my experience. We're gonna Lucas. But one
of the things I did when I came in was how do I put together
franchise pillars for the franchise of our media agnostics. So you know, if
we were going to get not saying that we would necessarily, but if we
were gonna do a comic book or a novel or a movie with the brand,
what would it be. So and there are things like, you know,
again, the strong sense of time and place, the kind of idea
of like a gifted anti hero, and they are consistent across all the Mafia
games, So we wanted to make sure we enabled that and the strong story.
Obviously that's what the game was known for. But then everybody agreed like,
well, we need to you know, we need to make it more
of an open world game. We need to make it more of a uh,
you know, less of just driving from mission to mission or you know,
exploration, keep costs low. Yeah, exactly, Yeah, I mean
we do joke about that. We could have done anything more ambitious, probably
an open world game for our first title. Yea. Now, now,
Jeff, you're a gifted anti hero yourself, how does the how does the
show go for you? These is kind of just it's clients that you're working
with that you then need to see their games here, or sometimes it's a
matter because sometimes we've helped them, you know, figure out what they should
show and sure, okay, yeah, so in those cases we you know,
we see if our advice actually was good or not and that was sorry,
you know, you guys misread the email. This is all wrong,
right, But for the most part, usually we just get to check stuff
out. So it's awesome because there's like no responsibility at all, Like you
guys, like you know, it's not like you to do so much because
being in the press, I remember E three was very very stressful. Yeah,
you got a lot to do to cover all the time, and it's
impossible to see everything. I remember. Every day would feel like how is
the day over already? Because I've seen like two games? How that happened?
I needed to see like twenty games. So now I can just see
two games and it doesn't matter because I don't have to do anything with the
lack of information that's been that, I don't have the awesome transition away from
like we have to cover every single game to what we're doing right, because
it lets me actually see two or three games. Right. The downside is
I don't have a press pass anymore, so if I do want to see
something, I have to wait in line like the civilians. Yeah, welcome,
you can't play the landing card. Don't show you're not getting an it's
telling me you're starting to blog. It works every time, Yeah, exactly,
a YouTube channel. But it's also interesting that even if we didn't like
tell them what to show it three, it's also you know a lot of
times since everybody's first look at a game that we've seen for a while,
and we, you know, we may have said we think this is promising,
or we think people are going to go crazy over this, and or
maybe you shouldn't show it yet. So it's always interesting to see how that
pans out, you know, and it's not predictable, and it's not predictable.
So wait, you're saying, as someone who is officially supposed to predict
things, Yeah, it's not predictable, all right. Well, the number
of times that we've had to you know, we often get asked to provide
a uh, you know, a metacritic, a predictive metacritic scorer. And
sometimes we'll see these games, like when they're basically just like white boxes,
you know, and they still want to score eighty five. We can give
you a number, we can if you really want it, but this number
is really bullshit. Yeah yeah, well, as long as you say that
to them. In other times we can make a sort of informed decision.
You know, there's other you know, examples or concepts and you know,
the games that they're using as comps, right, or there's you know,
it's a franchise, so there's been past versions or whatever. So we can
and you know, we do have a pretty good record for generally nailing it.
But every once in a while we're just being asked to put a number
on something that's impossible. You know, like, I guess that sounds game.
That's how I wrote as far, so whatever, now, Bill,
you also, you know, it spent some time in the press. I
did, and and Trent we worked together for was it about two weeks and
as part of the scene, Yeah, the game Center game spot and we
were expelled. Yeah, that was a weird day. They said they called
us all into an office, and I was convinced that we were the ones
getting out. So what's funny is I was actually late that day. Oh
wow, and I and we had the staff meeting and I wasn't gonna go,
and then I was like, well, you know, I'm the executive
editor. I should probably go. And so I walked down there and I
see some people come out and they were laughing, and I was like,
Okay, I don't know what this meeting is about, but people were laughing.
And then I go in there and Michael Brown, who was my boss,
right, yeah, goes, well that's it. They pulled the plug.
We're done. It was just like, uh, okay, okay,
and we're here till through the end of Fronday. And then I think we
had pizza with you guys that day. Yeah, I think that was.
Yeah. I think I literally think like we had the most awkward pizza party.
It's like, okay, Street of the World. Well, I mean
that was I feel like that was such an awkward thing anyway, because it
was like, Okay, here are these two sites that have kind of not
you know, like been rivals in a lot of ways for long time,
and now it's like we're being smashing at the same space. And it was
just like, all right, I don't, okay, that's I don't.
I don't know, Like I knew Riccardo, you know, because I had
seen him out at at events and stuff like that, because you know,
I was only on console stuff and most of you guys were recovering the PC
beats well, and you knew Glenn too. Well, Okay, yeah,
I know we yeah, we know, Glenn. Yeah, I wrote for
your site for a little bit freely. Answer went wrote through Glenn, and
I wrote through Brett Rector. Yeah, so had been previously because this was
in that building a Townsend Street right in San Francisco, which i've I believe
it is cursed Sea was in there before. Did you ever find your way
from the parking lot today office in that building? Ever? I was on
the roof and you had to go down and then remember the elevators, you
had to like go over here and then walk around because it was like some
weird pseudo mall thing. Yeah, but Brett had been Brett worked for ye
sucks. Yeah, it's a nightmare. But Brett worked for Insight, so
he moved down stairs there. He got to lay it off from there and
he came back. So when we were told that we were to lay it
off, he literally went back to his his his desk, through all of
his ship in a box and said good. He just said I can't remember
what he said, but it was like this sentence of profanities and walked out.
Yeah, and that was it. That was it, and then went
on to Star Wars Insider, Yes, right, I hired it. It
basically Lucas arts as as an assistant previous and then the next time I saw
him was a comic con where you guys had like this life size X wing
on the show four and he was there like running around. This is great.
So I was like, okay, but I love Brett. He you
know, he's a big hockey guy. So it always were his hockey jerseys.
And we would go to lunch, yeah, downtown San Francisco, and
there's a hockey player. I think his name is actually pronounced like Satan yeah,
but Satan yeah. So we're walking walking around. This dude was like
Satan on the back of his back. I think I might still have one
of the scene at game Center hockey jersey, have one? I have one.
This was crazy. My wife and I recently moved about I don't know,
a month and a half ago, and I found mine and it's like,
oh my gosh, it's like from what that was two thousand yeah,
so it was like, holy crap, it's still in perfect shape. Yeah.
So I because I you know, because I had known Glen for years.
At that point, the wind c Net bought ZD net. I went
over to his house and got his hockey jersey and wore it to work that
day because I'd heard about the announcement before i even got into the office.
I'm like, oh shit, So I went and got it and it just
showed up wearing the game center jersey, like, what's up, guys.
So the best part of that, as I don't remember his name, where
we had this intern on the day that was announced that c net was buying
zd net. He was going on all these game sites and going on the
message boards and saying, well, I don't know what the future of zd
net is, maybe liquidation, so like, and so I had to spend
that entire day like email and everybody and saying this is our intern, like,
please take this stuff down. Yeah, and banned him so he can
never personally be beating him with an intern exactly crushing him into dust man.
Yeah. And then after that, I went back to pc gamer because I
before before games, I worked at pc gamer for a couple of years,
and then I went back to pc Gamer. So then we're arrivals were,
yeah, a lot rivalry going on, and I worked there for a couple
of years and then I Rick Goodman who had a company Stanless Steel Studios,
right, yea earth. He knew because I also wrote comic books on the
side, and he knew I knew strategy games because we were buddies from you
know, me covering his games. And he just called me one day and
said, hey, have you ever thought about moving into game development? And
I said, yes, yes I have, And that was over twelve years
ago, yeah, roughly thereabouts. So yeah, and now yeah, just
this this huge, huge project, now, yeah, it's crazy. And
then with this guy, yeah, I mean that has to be like,
you know, just exciting, like especially like being in on the ground floor
of this smaller team and watching this thing. Like how many of the ideas
from the those early days do you see manifest in it now? I mean,
obviously games are iterated, things change, but how many He's laughing because
I joke like sometimes I go on my hard drive and like open up old
files just so I make myself cry on this story version eighteen you know that
two and a half years ago. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's great,
Like I, like Hayden said, I think one of the things is
like since we knew our project, like it was even though we have all
these people coming in. You know, it's very easy to rally behind it
and say, hey, this is the game we're making box like that.
Yeah, boxes. Yeah, we had some parameters and you know, being
as an old press guy now being on the other side and going, holy
shit, like you realize what an ass you were. Totally, we're really
bad. My specialty was not being an asshole. Was the poker face.
So I was the do or it's walking out of a demo going or some
people call resting bitch face. But yeah, it's like the flip side because
you know, you go around and you know, on the press side and
you see that man, yeah, I just yeah, but you know,
you guys the kid, you know, it shows a lot of promise.
Yeah, it was my thing. Was it looks promising? Yes, that
was my Oh yeah yeah, if you do enough work to make it'll get
there. But I noticed your submission build, so no, yeah, no,
you that looks promising. When when the when the developers would ask what
do you think? Right away, I felt too, like on the spot,
like I want to tell you what I think? Yeah, Like,
well, give me let me think about That's the thing is, like the
developers live with it for a long time, and I've literally just been introduced
to it and seeing I don't know, I've to ten minutes of it,
right, And I'm the kind of you know, I know some people are
just like but I'm the kind of guy who likes to process it a little
bit. Sure, right, So think about it. So, yes,
it looks promising and be good. It's an impossible question too, because you
don't want to say, like, well it looks like shit. Yeah,
Like you can't even if you think that, like, you can't say that.
So it's also rough question. I get why you would ask that question.
I've definitely gotten, you know, And I think it's it's something that's
changed, you know, as I think that our end of things has become
a little unglued, and you know, it's a little weird out here on
this end of things with just the way the traditional press is has gone is
going and kind of the it feels like the kind of YouTube twitch stuff is
rising up to crush the websites the same way the websites rose up to try
to crush print. You mean tried to okay, crush print. You know.
The Minnesota still still doing something. There's still a magazine still, and
so you know, like we're kind of straddling this weird line between those two
things in a lot of ways, with you know, as much video stuff
as we do now, and it's become less about the here's what the publication
thinks about this, and it's become a lot more about like, well,
here's what I think about it. And it's given me a lot more leeway
in situations like that to say things like this game is not for me.
I think that there are interesting things you're doing, but you know, like
like I wish you the best of luck, but like you're still working on
this turn based strategy game that you know, like like you are, you're
working on a game that is very much like Dark Souls, which I just
can't really connect with. And that's been weirdly liberating to be able to kind
of say that sort of stuff because the fear on the press and at least,
you know, with the way it went with me was you would get
ask that question a lot by pr coming out of a demo, and especially
EA was really good at good at it for a really long time of like
showing you the games and then just having some publicist kind of standing. Actually
you goes, so, what did you think of this? What do you
think of this? And literally like writing all that down and storing it away
somewhere, And at some point it was like, I'm not a consultants,
Like I'm not here to do that, Like it's not you know, I'm
here to kind of report on stuff, and I don't want kind of my
flip off the cuff thing than weighing in that heavily on a game that I've
seen for nine minutes. Those notes went to a dev team that's yeah,
exactly, these press guys are as exactly, And you know, it's it's
a situation that I hate being put it even when I like a game,
you know, it leads to me going like yeah, and then walking out
of the room and going like that looks fucking great to you know, whoever
I saw the demo with or something like that, and yeah. So so
a little bit of that has changed to where I feel a little more comfortable
saying that, because you know, it's it's less about representing a publication and
you know, trying to be all things to all people the way that the
big websites were, and being a little more focused on us as people,
which is seeing the way it's changed, because like I feel like like the
question like did you like it from a developer standpoint, at least you know,
whatever ten years ago came from. You know, we're working in isolation
and nobody else is seeing the game, and we know that at least journalists
are gamers, right, and then they'll be able to provide some kind of
you know, saling input that you know, maybe a PR guy or somebody
else from the organization doesn't have that same viewpoint right right, And now I
think it's maybe a little bit different because we do you know that as the
organization or as the industry is matured. Now we you know, we do
get a lot of user tests and we get a lot of that feedback earlier.
But I can remember, I mean again ten years ago, just being
desperate for any kind of not even like positive validation, but just like just
tell me what you think because we attraction. Yeah, we don't know,
like you lose sight of like is it even good anymore? Because you're so
you're in the weeds on it. Do you worry these days that because there's
so much feedback about unreleased games coming in at all times, does it you
know, do you worry does at some point does it feel like you're just
focused testing everything even if you're not running a focused test, like if you're
looking at all that feedback on what you're working on, does it do you
worry that it can poison the process? Yeah? I mean it depends on
when you do it right, Like I think, well, I'm not a
big fan of doing you know, focused tests early in the process, like,
oh, you know this concept or this concept resonate because nobody knows,
or like does this feature set resonate? And like people don't. I mean,
you don't know what features you want sometimes until it and you can't you
can't articulate it necessarily as a consumer what features you think are missing until they're
there right like or you know whether or not a feature is gonna work when
you're looking at like a one sheet. So I think that part of the
process I'm I'm not really supportive of. But later in the process, like
I mean, even where we're at right now, right like you knows,
we're we're in kind of the final stages. Obviously, can you release in
October? But so we're looking at you know, obviously you know how many
bucks can we fix and trying to get as many you know, meaningful bugs
done. But we're also still doing user testing to tune and stuff, and
that's like absolutely invaluable and that and I don't think it poisons the process at
that point because we already kind know what we are, and we know what
the strengths and weaknesses of the game are and like, and now it's just
about, okay, how do we you know, how do we capitalize on
the things that we know are really strong, and how do we you know,
improve upon the things that like, you know, on the tuning side
or whatever that we know need need that help. But we need that feedback
because we again we're so close to it, we can't we can't be objective,
right, So we need those you know, we need people to come
in and sit down and play the game. So I really value it from
that standpoint. But it's all about the timing of when you do it and
how why did you go and who gets that information? And you don't you
know, you don't want to send the team into a tailspin if something comes
back negative, right, right, yeah, or they're converse, right,
you don't want if something comes back really positive you're like, oh, okay,
well our jobs done, right, It's like, well, yeah,
no, we still we still stuff we can work. Or you get people
that are just taking that data and just using it to like try to win
arguments about a game. We imagine. Yeah, yeah, that's time where
you come in a lot where like a team will have an argument and you
step in and go like, no, it's a console mobia make a console
mombient. You're just come in and say that every time, because we actually
won't know what the conflict is. In fact, we may not even know
there is a conflict. We'll maybe figure it out while we're there. You
know, the publisher will bring us in and they'll you know, they don't
tip their hands at all, which is good, and they'll say, come
and look at this game. And then when we're playing it, we'll play
it for a few days, and it's usually on that last day then some
you know, someone on the marketing whatever, we'll call us in and say,
so, what do you think you know? And then it becomes cool
like, okay, there was they were trying to get something specific out of
us, and often it will turn out that maybe we actually do agree with
them, right, And and so they will use that to sort of buffer
the argument. But other times it's it's the other you know, it goes
the other way and rethink the developers were right. So, yeah, sometimes
we are settling conflicts without realizing that that's what we're doing. Yeah, and
how often do you ever get into just like recommending features of like you know,
this would be because I hear that a lot that you know that there
are people like, oh, if this only had this one feature because this
is very now and very with it like this, it has to have it
has to have PvP, it has to have this graph if you suggested,
because we're seeing a lot of them there. It's awesome. You want you
want opinion, pay tell me nine dollars and I will write back, put
a graph on. We just have a bullet we put in and every report.
But but has there been you know obviously like trends happen in this business,
and like well, like one trend that that has come up a lot,
you know over the last two years that I've been there is when they
ask us about uh PR and marketing is you know, they ask us a
lot more about twitch and YouTube sure than they did before. And a lot
of our recommendations are around that, you know, as opposed to where it
would have been about the press. You know, how do we reach the
YouTube guys? How do we get twitched to streaming? You know them like
it's literally really you know, and give them ten grand and they do the
the twenty grand for some of them and it's pay tell me nine dollars for
this consultancy. Now that Lauren, uh, you seem like the sort of
guy that would want to go against almost all of that. But you see,
I'm the kind of guy that wants to learn more about that, you
know, and be smarter and less pained along the way. But I think
it all kind of goes to to all the all the points we made.
But at the same time, if there's an inherent vision of something original,
you're not going to get a focused test that says this is what we want,
right, they don't know yet, so so and I think what happens
is it's the same thing in Hollywood. The bigger the budget. And then
now now you basically you know, it's real simple, right, the bigger
the budget, you've got public companies involved, you've got shareholder concerns, you've
got all kinds of different divisions trying to ensure the safe bet. So what
is that those are summer block blockbuster, tent pole mediocre films, right,
And we see it all the time in games, the same thing. And
what's happening a lot of times ago? You are going to be in charge
of the vision at this you know, branded license, right, and someone
good like I'm going to be yeah, and now all of this upper echelon
is going to tell you what how to make it great? You know,
And so we wind up with a lot of things that are kind of they
don't have the heart that of someone who would be would have been like at
different times, I find myself like, look, I get none of you
believe in it, right, but it's going to work. But we gotta
at least get to hear before these things can prove it. And the reason
you don't believe it is because you never played it before, you know.
And I can get that. So you gotta no matter what if it's a
big brand you're working with, the bigger the budget it is. I mean,
it's easier for us today because we're indie. We're not going to lose
anyone else's money will go broke but h so, you know, so we're
responsible for your own decisions. And at the same time that that actually made
me I think better in terms of sticking less to your own vision specifically and
listening more. And in the beginning, you're you're borrowing money, you're really
out on a limb. You gotta be right, and you're being told,
look, you gotta kill it this time, you gotta kill the C three
and you're like, oh god, it's not running, you know, you
know, whatever it is, And so a lot of things happen. We've
seen it blowback on a lot of designers. I totally understand the spots they
were in. They said the wrong thing, don't follow through, they get
crucified. It happens. But you gotta have whether it's a team. You
know, Pixar had a great saying egg CapMan, where I think was a
cultural genius in terms of keeping cultures together and figuring out how to make in
his word, art a team sport. And that's really games too. You
know, there's that it's less about an individual director, but there has to
be a vision, and if that vision is retained by a committee, it's
got to be a really good small committee and a few week eggs there,
like what happens all the time. You get an acquisition just to ramble a
bit on it, right, You get an acquisition, and then the buying
company, depending on how wise they are or not, sends in a mediocre
lackey to now be in charge of that whole company that they just bought.
And now that guy he's terrified to make a decision, so now he wants
a consensus. So you get you know, you get the camel out of
the committee design right, even though the well there'd be like, look,
man, I'm telling you what to do. Okay, I got these rewards
on the wall. You don't, but you gotta. You're gonna listen to
them now because you don't know the decision to make. And that's the game
we're going to deliver. Thank you very much for wasting three four years of
my life. It's there are a lot of people out there that are better
at all. I'm the guy who always had creative freedom, you know,
which is kind of like, well, you know, that could bite you
in the butt. You end up in a position where there are a lot
of people in those decision making roles that are really just afraid to lose the
job. Yeah, you know, it's an expensive world, understand I feel
like yeah, no, I totally yes, totally got But the fear,
the more money there is, the more fear there is around a project.
The project comes to the show and gets promoted as though, look at how
excited we are, but half of it is look how terrified we are.
Better get the right reception, we'll fund the stuff, you know. And
there's all different spectrums of how big it gets. But basically, the more
money is involved, then the more fear is gonna I think, you know,
the more fear orbits around the project, which means the core group,
like you talk about four teams coming together, right, what a what a
cultural you know? Orgy that was right and uh? And you can imagine
how tense that can be because there's lots of different fears that will emerge,
egos that emerge. But when you can synergize a vision and you have a
few people who are like, look we we no matter what the bank,
what did this, we have to agree that we're going to make the decisions
based on what's best for the player right at the end of the day,
and they're gonna we're gonna hear all these voices, but we're gonna have to
sift through and you know, and and and really try and figure out what's
what's reactionary, what's over reactionary, what's on what should we listen to?
Where do we need to be smarter? How close are we are we to
it? And how how little do we actually know about our own game now?
Because to their points, you know, you're too way too close,
which is you know, these are all common How do you work on some
twelve hours of days, you know, six days a week, year after
year, especially if you know it comes it comes together right at the end
and have clarity, you know, and it doesn't work most of the project
is most of the cases. But it seems like Hangar thirteen is a different
kind of studio, uh from from hearing about it, you know, I
hope so I guess, yeah, yeah, you know again part of it
is so part of it's two K right, Like when I when I when
I decided joint two K was I really wanted to go to a place that
made games that I like to play and that you know, I had a
string of high quality titles, right, so at the time, you know,
there's Borderlands, which and BioShock and these other titles that I was really
you know, a huge fan of so and even so just you know,
like around the time, like even just some riskier like a spec oup to
the line and send some fascinating stuff. You're like, Okay, this is
something that like most most big publishers you wouldn't think would even you look at
border Lands rights like, it's not a it's not a not a risky title,
right like that, I mean, you know, between the art style
and the fact that you know, the four player co op and all that,
like, there was a risk there which I was exciting to me and
it was one of the things that drew me there. So I think part
of it's two K as a publisher, you know, has given us I
think, well, Mike keep losing it has given us a lot of freedom.
But at the end of the day, I always feel like I have
the weight of the company at my back instead of the weight of the company
on top of me, which is you know, yeah, I don't think
it's always the case in the industry. So there so it's not that they're
not pushing because they are right and there and you know it is a big
project, and you know, it's it's obviously you know, we wanted to
do well, and so you feel but it feels like everybody's pushing the same
direction. And I think for me, the thing that has kept me really
going is the fact that even though we have disagreements sometimes right and not everybody,
you know, we can disagree about what we need to do to make
the game great, but at the end of the day, everybody is focused
on not well. It was my idea, the one who was how do
we make the game great? So that that, to me, I think,
is what's really valuable. And then again I think because we had those
crush of culture and again not just like game development cultures, but like like
culture cultures, right like you, I mean, you know, and understanding
that those things we're all kind of colliding at once, and that the way
that things that worked at LucasArts was different than the way they worked at you
know, on the bureau, which was different than the way it worked at
two K check and different than the way I wanted to work in, different
than the way some of the guys we hired worked. We had to very
quickly say this is who we are and this is what game we're building.
Otherwise we've all fallen apart, right because we've got everybody pulling in different directions.
So I think almost like and again, I was like deer in the
headlights to be honest, right, like, you know, but I had,
like, we had to rally the team around that. Otherwise we wouldn't
have survived the first three or four months together, right because it was,
you know, slamming all these people. And now you're at E three showing
a game that, yeah, it looks promising that No, it's it's it
sounds it sounds like now I can't even say anything that sounds like a dick.
We're gonna wrap it up. Kill Hayden, Lauren, Jeff, Alex,
thanks for hanging out, Thank you, Thank you so much for coming
by. Let's do this again next year. Right now, we'll be back.
We got more guests coming up. Stay tuned. The evening rages on.
The Darkness grows originally outside, now it lives in here and you're here
with me. As Giant Bombs. E three coverage continues, we're joined by
members of the Square n X family and Brandon Dan, who were proud to
announce I've joined. Yeah, well yes, part i'd ass I don't know
how the corporate roll up happens from io Interactive into the parent coming. Okay,
let's get an ORG chart going here. Absolute minimum. Yes, Torbent
from io Interactives here we've got at the end was working on Dasex Go and
and Jen also Square x Montreal. How are you all doing good? It's
been a very interesting E three so far. Absolutely yeah, what do you
think you're showing a mobile game here? Like? Sometimes it seems like the
traditional kind of game industry will overlook mobile games a lot. Obviously, the
Go franchise has been been really big. But is it is it hard sometimes
to show a mobile game, even when it's high profiles Dasex Go in an
environment where you've got these gigantic billion dollars budget games and stuff. Well,
there's there's that for sure, Like people tend to overlook some mobile games.
But I think at heart what we make are like great games, and people
have come to recognize that we're the different titles that we did. So we
have bought some for ourselves to show that even though we're making a mobile game,
it's not going to be like a free to play like I don't know,
like a a transaction fest or anything, just like quality game. At
first. It's on mobile because we want to have like great games on the
platform, which means like we want to be the best game on mobile is
always the same thing as the best game on the console, right, and
we really want to hit that spot. So I think we we've bought some
credits for we're building some hat factory. Yeah, but I mean, well,
I guess anyone would love to actually have built TODA in somewhere. Yeah,
basically the best game, so we don't have to go in that direction
for making games. It's already over. Some other companies are trying. Oh
sure, it's not working. Yeah no, that's I only bring that up
because Brad mentioned before the show that perhaps that you and he had played something.
Yeah, we completely trust him repeatedly play. It's an interesting choice of
words. People don't play doughor they live it. Brad, that's the problem.
And then, and then, and then a very snide Christmas card shows
up from Montreal a few months later. I'm sorry, behind quite uncord.
We barely wished you a merry Christmas, very polite season's greetings. Yeah,
yeah, season You're right, season's greetings, uh Tormen responsible for for hit
Man, which is just I remember prior to release, there was some uneasiness
surround there's like some some late changes. It was like, this is gonna
be this, there's gonna be episodic in this way, this way. But
man, it seems like that thing has just caught fire a lot of fun
caught fire in the good way, right, Yeah, Yeah, definitely definitely
caught fire. Yeah, a good kind of running and screaming. Yes.
Uh wow, it's just been you know, like the the episodic nature of
it just seems to be just tapping into hit Man in a way that I
don't I don't know that anyone expected. Was that's something that inside Io you're
like, you know, actually, as we make this episodic, this is
gonna make people want to replay these missions. Was that a big part of
it? Or I mean, get the marketing nonsenside of the way first time.
I mean we set out to do this right from the beginning. We
looked at absolution, We looked at the stuff that was weird and busted that
we couldn't fix scoring but ify the economy completely busted the disguise system not very
good at all, and we fixed what we could, and there were so
many things that we couldn't fix, because, I mean, chipping a game
like Absolution is like packing to go on a really really long trip, he
said, losing his headphone again. So imagine you've got your trunk and putting
your stuff in it. You're filling it up, you're filling up, and
you're filling up everything's in there, and then you get your friend to sit
on it so you can close the lid and you never touch it again because
it will fucking explode if you open it. And that was kind of the
state of Absolution. It was fine, it was packed, but if we
tried to fix anything in the trunk, it would just and you would have
your luggage everywhere. So building the new game, we thought about, well,
how could we actually be able to improve things or creating new experiences or
look at an elusive target and then too elusive targets later actually completely attack all
the strategies that people were using. So Episodic was like a really nice match
into that. Maybe our communication wasn't great at the beginning, but it was
a thing we wanted to do, and it's super awesome that people are really
embracing it and having so much fun with it. Speaking of elusive targets,
yes, I'm sorry, a big idea of putting out as target in the
middle of these three. That's true. We can do it. Okay,
I'll coach you through it. We don't have dances coach. Yeah, that's
true. That's true. You know, those guys are really Sometimes I think
that maybe they should start playing on all three platforms just so they get more
shots at the target. But we'll see if it sinks to that. Yeah,
is the is the like the tempo with that stuff going to ramp up?
It's seems like because they were coming like on on once every two weeks,
so now there was one last week and now one this week. And
well I could be again Super nine and say, well, they're elusive,
so nobody knows. But I mean the point is that we're trying to keep
like a weekly cadence of visis. So this could be elusive targets every week,
maybe not every week. It could be escalations. But the whole idea
is that we've got these big beats, which are the new episodes, and
we've actually got one coming out in July, which is kind of the mid
season episode where we put out two new missions to new locations. But the
whole idea is that for the length of the season and maybe a little bit
afterwards, it's all hit Man, right, So whenever you want to,
you can go back to this game and play some more Hitman. Yeah.
Yeah, And it seems like that that just kind of games is a service
thing is increasingly important across everything, right, Like that's it just seems like
across there, you know, day sex with reach mode, and you know,
like just adding that sort of stuff to games is like really big now,
yeah, because you want the game experiences to be much more you know,
not accessible, but open ended, because you don't just want to purchase
one or like play one game experience that's very finite and then just drop it
and move on. And that's kind of for us. It's funny because I'm
bridging who heards our own challenges with the Go Games is we would release this
super carefully crafted package that our team of six had spent eight months building levels
for, and then four hours later people were like, we loved it,
we just burned through it. Can we have more? And then we're just
crying in a corner, like we just finished, can we have like five
more minutes? And then the funny thing with the EXCO that we just announced
last week is we're tackling this challenge by bringing another layer, another layer,
but expending the game un experience by allowing people to make their own puzzles and
challenges. And that's going to be really fun because there's already a dynamic at
the office where we're challenging each other at I'm sure you cannot beat that level
under thirty seven steps or something, and then we lost an entire afternoon.
It's actually we have very unproductive days sometimes, especially the best time, unproductive
days because you do that and then you realize there's actually value in that.
Then people create their levels and bet basically against each other that you're not going
to be able to do more than like, less than thirty two steps,
and then the other game plays your level and sends you back like twenty seven
steps, and like how did you do that? And you you create that
loop of like trying to find the best uptimal solution. And when we had
one of these afternoons, we were like, all right, how do we
make that a thing? And by by by developing these like mad creation tools
the puzzle Maker, we realized that it was actually a bigger task than just
like slap it on and ship it with the game, right like, like
there's more work to do on that. But and that's why it's coming out
after we ship the game. So the game is going to ship at first
with the camping and everything, but once that's coming out after, Like we're
really confident that people when they create a level, they're kind of betting on
themselves that other people can beat actually what they did with their puzzles. No,
and it's not going to be something that's overbearing with features. We made
it really really straightforward so that you would build something that's fun, that's quick,
and then that you don't have to think about it. That was in
different parameters because when we took our own level editor internally, we just stripped
all this stuff out that was not necessary for a common player or like somebody
who just wants to make something compelling and fun immediately, And so that's kind
of how it happened. Essentially, has that process kind of informed the levels
going into the shipping game at all, Like as you kind of challenge each
other on these levels, you're like, Okay, we actually need to change
make some changes to these levels too, you know, because now this one's
a little too easier, this one's a little too tough, and it's it's
part of it, but it's also like what we want to ship in the
game. It's usually different than just like make it evil. Yeah, I
guess yeah, you guys are so top level at this thing. At this
point, you're just like, so, there's there's some of the ways the
mechanics work with each other that that is really awesome, but that basically is
evil, and it doesn't like we don't want to ship like we want to
ship a nice experience that people go through and experience the game difficulty ramps,
but then like some of the levels are like, yeah, this is awesome,
just like put it on hold for now because this is going in the
Herd puzzle challenge things because this is insane and we basically we find out those
things. We're sure that the week after the game's out, like the community
is going to find like twenty more of that at least. And that's really
interesting because it kind of shifts how we make the game and how we code
every feature because in the past, it wasn't it wasn't a big deal to
actually make a feature work with nothing else, but like in that situation.
So we have a very specific situation that works that time, and it's fine.
But when you code the game so that other people can do whatever they
want act everything, yeah, you kind of have to build it so that
it works in any situation, even the weirdest ones. Right, And then
when you have this in the game, our game is still like way simpler
than say, like the Hitman game that came out. It's like six directions
and like only one move at a time, and like the enemy reacts turn
based. But still you get this complexity that you have to open doors instead
of close them when you create these features just to support like maybe someone is
going to have some idea of doing something weird that it's going to be supported.
So it's kind of shifts what you cut out and when you cut in.
When you create a feature, it's really interesting to see what it changed.
Yeah, like the level editing, like it's it's something I've rarely gotten
into, but we got into it so deep last year around Super Mario Maker,
where it just became just creating nightmares for each oldren or creating nightmares for
the community or with the community, and just like, Okay, let's let's
take these tools and use them literally in the worst way for evil, for
actual point, and it's the yeah, exactly. It's the sort of stuff
like if this was in a shipping game, but be the worst game ever
made. Absolutely, But to have that ability to go there when when you
have you know, friends that are like minded friends like, yeah, there's
definitely a big difference between what its shipped in the game and what can be
made with the game. Definitely. Yeah. So with with Hitman, how
easy is it to react to I remember seeing the presentation at the event prior
to E three and hearing about you know, kind of like like these speed
Runner challenges and kind of tapping into what the community is doing with the game,
Like how reactive can you be to like or I guess how much data
do you have coming in and how reactive How quickly can you react to that
data and tap into something that's very hot in your community? Well, we
can react extremely quickly, is the short answer. The more nuanced answer is
probably to say sometimes you shouldn't if you see like a particular thing that's happening.
Your immediate reaction might be, oh, no, we got to fix
that, that's a bug. But sometimes you just need to breathe and let
it happen and see if it's a actually bad. So just an example of
that, we his new item came into the game in the episode to the
Breaching Chart, which was designed as a thing you put on a door safe
or something to blow the door open. But people very quickly worked out that
because it was not lethal but still had a high impulse, if you placed
it underneath someone, you could shoot them out of the level. Fantastic.
It's wonderful until you think they can land outside of the navmesh, and then
suddenly you've got living characters standing up being unable to path find. It's like,
oh dear, we better fix that because but so then it like mutates.
So now this wonderful tool is being used to move items around the level.
For the Cardinal. A guy decided that he was going to kill the
cardinal with a katana, and there is a katana and sapience, so he
decided that he was going to move the katana from the mansion over to the
church without being in the mansion, so he was standing down by the church,
spamming the launch button on the breaching charge to shoot the katana through the
air and landed at his feet by the by the by the church. It's
like awesome, Yeah, like that, that doesn't sound like there's anything wrong
with that. That just sounds likely A good, weird and perfect crime would
be to make the katana land. Well, I kid you not. The
first elusive target was killed in that way, not with a katana, but
with a fire extinguisher. The fire extinguisher was placed on the breaching charge and
then shot up so it flew through a window, hit the guy in the
face and explode it. It's like accident kill, like hit. Kind of
kind of data you got on cancel with spaghetti sauce. Mostly they get used
as throwables because it works. It works well as a sedative. I find.
Yes, people keeps them occupied while they are communing with the Great Poulson.
It's that that sort of stuff is so fascinating, Like I feel like
it taps into you know, like people really dissecting games. Uh and in
a way that you know older games that are you know, being emulated and
picked apart in crazy ways. But you know, there was a video recently
with Super Mario sixty four and like picking apart parallel universes and so all these
all these speed running techniques that just lead to like really understanding every little bit
of clockwork, you know, like every little piece of that game. And
with with Hitman being just so big and offering so much variety, it seems
like people are That's exciting for me as as a player, being able to
see all these videos of just people doing the wildest fucking shit imaginable. Yeah,
uh and and yeah, I guess like does it take a really steady
hand to know what to fix? And when you mentioned that that that you
do have that gut reaction of like, oh no, we gotta fix that,
we gotta fix that. But you know when you end up with,
like say, a pedestrian outside to that navmash, do you fix it all
the way or do you just kind of like go, okay, if they
reached a certain point, kill them. What what we did was we actually
amped the damage on the bleaching charge, so it does kill them, okay,
But then again, maybe we've made a problem for ourselves. And I
probably shouldn't even be saying this. I will it's entirely possible. It was
super explosive because it's doesn't doesn't have a big bang, but it has a
lethal bang. Right yeah, So what do you think, coach? But
we can try it out, Okay, the beginning something we can work with.
I mean, weren't you guys blowing up like a huge mountain of bodies
with the dropping a toilet? We put a bunch of minds on the toilet.
I was going to drop a toilet on that man's head. I mean,
one way or the other, you did, And lots of other guys
said that only took two hours. That's more than that. That was part
two of the videos. True. That to me is just beautiful. Yeah,
that's and and I pay these guys to do that. That's that's like
poorly on me, I think. But if anything else but a people seem
to like it, Brad, that's how you got to do it. So,
you know, with this kind of cadence, with with hitman, loose
target's escalations, all that sort of stuff, it seems like that it really
is been been pretty successful so far. I mean it's we're the scary thing
with it is we're like going first, right, the first triple a game
that actually does this episodic thing. And maybe our communication wasn't great, but
it's it's a new thing that needs to be understood and for good or real.
I think Hitman is really well suited to it because the levels have always
been deep, Right, even in Absolution, which was a solid game,
but it was fairly linear in in the ways that you could play it.
Even that had an enormous amount of depth. A level like the King of
Chinatown, there were so many ways to kill that guy. There was even
a challenge in the game called if this guy was a cat, he would
still be dead, right, because they're at least nine ways to take him
out. Yeah, So these games have always had it, but there's something
about this, this format of saying here's an episode and you couldn't go deep
because the better you get at it, the more ready you are for when
the forges and the Cardinals and others arrive. Yeah. On top of that,
I feel like, you know, once once you complete that Golden Path
or you know, whatever that critical mission is, you know like once you're
presented with the opportunity to move on, Yeah, you feel the compulsion to
move on, you know, Like I'm gonna finish that mission once and then
let's see what the next level is, you know, and then I potentially
never go back and look at the other eighty percent of that map that that
I didn't tap into. Yeah, it's kind of worked. We're giving you
the time to really drill into it super well. Is like shocking really well.
We were actually discussing that they're like just ten minutes ago, but as
a person who never really got into the other Dana, but it kind of
made me understand that better inside, because I see, all right, the
other games had that vibe too, It's just like they weren't presented as such
as I could play for months and then get the new one when it comes
out after having gone through everything in the level. It's kind of a nice
thing. It's been like a nice monthly reminder, you know. It's like
you spend your week or so with the new map, and then you kind
of forget about it, and then the next month it's like, all right,
hit man, what's happened. It's it's nice. Yeah, with the
with the game, like dax Go, like adapting this kind of franchise that
is just this huge, huge game and trying to adapt into this kind of
smaller turn based thing, Like what are the things that you looked at?
Is like you know, like what in your opinion is like here's here's the
core like moments, the core elements of das X that absolutely need to be
in a DA SX go right, Uh, Well, the obvious sensor is
like the augmentations, like they're cloaking all of that. Also, like the
hacking is a huge part of the game, and like even the narrative side,
it's it's a big, sprawling action RPG basically shoot the RPG, which
was a really new genre like in back in two thousands. So these are
the things that we look at and think like, this is what the sex
is. And basically the process of goifying a game basically like we did with
Headman and Larcraft, is like what this is? What is this game?
Like? Making you feel as you play them that's way more important than the
actual things that you do. And that was true again with the sex goal
because what you feel when you play this sex game is like you get in
a hangar. There's a bunch of guards everywhere, there's some computers, you
see some turrets, cameras. You look around and you're basically asking yourself what
am I going to do to actually use all of these resources? Basically during
like the resources the level, how am ikay, how am I going to
use that to get to the other end of the hangar or find the intel
or kill that guy, which translates I'm sorry, which translates really well to
puzzle game mechanics exactly. It's basically a puzzle in a free form basically,
So when we look at that and make like we prototype a lot of different
mechanics for this game, but what we landed on was, like the core
thing is like becoming invisible for a while, so using line of sight,
these kind of things being detected, being undetected, hacking different objects on the
level, so you have different things that you can hack. You can act
turrets, you can hack like new things that didn't really exist in the Sex
because this is another game. But like there's literally like parts of the puzzle
that are inactive until you hack them. It becomes a line that you can
walk on. So these are all elements that we feel answer like they respond
well into your the sex kind of feeling when you play them. They're not
literally one to one explanations of what the sex is. But when you play
the game, you really feel that feeling of like you get to a new
level, you try and see how it's going to work together. You lure
a guard away, you kind of luck him back by hacking a note behind
them, and then you use the other hacking station to connect turrette that's going
to kill the other guard, and then you cloak and like vanish behind the
turret that you would never be able to hack. And then you get these
kind of flow where you get this flow where you play the game and basically
you're you're faking it, Like people think that they're playing this x right,
but but it's a puzzle turn based game, which they wouldn't expect to feel
the same things. It's really interesting. Yeah, I think the Hitman Go
and Lara Kraftco Like captured the feel of those games really well. It's been
interesting to see like these games that are you know, pretty wildly different across
the three Go games in their original form just being able to be adapted in
this way, the still manages to just maintain that vibe and feel of the
original game, like like Hitman is a Hitman Go is a board game about
killing, but then Lara Croftco is a board game about going on an adventure,
you know, like they absolutely and the feeling those things. You know.
The board game part was again a job. Yeah, it was part
of the like cold, austere kind of like calculated thing was really bored gamey
for Hitman, but in Larkcraft it kind of became just like exploration and discovery
and like the camera which was static and Hitman became followed started following Larcraft and
Larkcraft goal because it was more about discovering even what the level was, and
that's really unfolded play with like distance kind of seeing the next level way off
and off on the horizon and stuff. And this is the thing that because
we draw so much from the franchise, like we draw so much from Hitman
and then and then Tumrator and in this case they're sex it means that even
like without trying, because it's not without trying, there's a lot of efforts,
even like without trying, the starting point is so different and the intent
is so different that you end up with a different product that plays differently,
that looks at feel and feels a little bit like the same type of game.
But when you play them, like the fact that you had the same
process starting somewhere else completely leads you to a game that feels unique when you
play it, which is really a point of pride for us the sex goal,
but the challenges that come with that are completely different. Like if you
look at the Sex Go, the thing we are kind of figuring out right
now is the entire layer of narrative sex. It's a huge thing in the
universe. So in a Go game that is generally speaking, entirely non verbal,
how would you tell a story? So Hitman Go had non verbal storytelling
by the Ponds in the scene. They didn't actually do anything, but they
told a story about a very contextual story. Lark Off Gil you had this
very low key animations in the back that we're happening and telling the story of
the Queen of Venom. But the Sex Go it's it's you need to convey
that story about conspiracy is happening in the game, and still you need to
hack terminals and read emails period. I feel like I feel like this demands
the question of like, what is the next it that your company owns that
would be your dream to make it go? I guess yeah, I mean
or do you think that there are any franchises that you definitely could not go
AFI? Oh gosh, I'm not even sure that that could. Like,
I don't think there's a thing we couldn't do, No, honestly, Like
I think if you take that process and are smart about it, if you
go and cross your t's and that's your eyes and like do your job,
I think there's not much like even like in the industry that we couldn't goify.
It's just a matter of like where we want to go. Like it's
a small studio. There's thirty five forty of us, a couple of teams,
like three teams. That means if we're making like let's sit in a
game, is another go game, there's something else that we're not making at
that point. And it's more of a question of it. It's a credive
decision. Right now, the teams are so small and we make things in
a very handcrafted way. We need to make the best investment of our time.
So is it going to be a go game? Is it not?
Which IP are we going to work with? Right we at this point we
can't really say. But what's been great is everybody in the group is recognizing
the work we've done with him and golav Go and the guys that e'da us
for day sex Go have been requesting the x GO for months before we launch.
Actually, like this was GF was asking for Hitman for this sex Go
Jeff to go other the executive director, he was asking for that even before
Hitman Go came out. It was like, okay, is that and like
the like I remember because we still like work pretty closely with them. We're
we're not the same thing. We're not like following what they want to do
with the game or anything, but we do like we do go to them
and like you go to them all right, Yeah, go On was like
three blocks away from us and Montreal, so we can just walk there and
we did, and we do them all the time. Yeah, we bring
them new bills and actually and turned it does that. But we have meetings
with them, like we we we discuss what some things could be, what
other things like would be preferable to see to be different and stuff like that.
So we did have this input of like just steering making sure we have
their right vibe at the right moment with what Jensen is about is yet is
very much like it takes place in their universe, so they have like they
have to have, so we do. We do come up to them and
we're like, okay, guys, it's gonna be a little weird, but
here's what we're gonna do. Open And they were like a charm to work
with because they were so and twos about the fact that we were actually making
this game. But yeah, it was. It was a really good,
good relationship and like figuring out with Io, working with Crystal, working with
them, everything has been so nice. Everybody is very excited to see new
takes on their universes, and we we came up with such weird little things
that everybody was like, oh, okay, all right, we're gonna it's
weird, but go ahead do your thing. So it's been just mobile games
whatever, whatever of the year, whenever, where's my Apple design you were
just carry just pull it out. She actually does like it was. I
accidentally lit out design thing for most on the table by accident. I left
to drink an interview and the guy tweeted about it. It was like,
oh, nice of you, scorn ex on you all to leave your Apple
Design award in the middle of this would run back and grab that and everything.
It's super heavy to it. Yeah, it's really hug there's we don't
know how to turn it off, but there's a there's. It's a really
nice thing. Yeah. Anyway, I you know, recommended it before we
started put it out there into the world. Just Cannon Lynch go, I'm
working really hard to do gets goo. Actually, yeah, you're talking well
now now now the mental problems also with the oh yeah comes back all the
time. Tweet at us about the work. Wasn't mister fresh game of Fresh
games? That was the Fresh Game Games, Miss Mosquito and the Mad Maestro
mister mosquite gone nailed it all right? Yea, Crystal Dynamics did a port
of Samurai Show Down to the three D O could you do? Now?
Yeah, that's so how much crossover would like, I guess I don't know
how it's structured, but would there then be an opportunity like are you kind
of like it sounds like you're only thinking about kind of the idoss esque properties,
whereas obviously like Square NX has this whole thing in Japan where they make
all these other ips h that you know, get their own sets of games
and all this other stuff, but you know, like, would there ever
be a reasonable opportunity to even get into something like a final Fantasy Go.
That's not me saying like, hey, are you gonna do it? But
like is that something that would even be on the table. I mean we've
been definitely and very obviously cutting our teeth on the Western franchises. I mean
the japan Japanese franchises are definitely something that we would love to work with,
but it's not a given. Again, it's we're still such a small studio
and we're growing and we're evolving. So it's a pitch process, right the
right Even for the Sex Go in the beginning, it was like can we
if we were going to make this as what would it be like? It
wasn't like, okay, this is the order right now, we are making
this right right, It's like would it make sense? What would it be?
All Right, it's cool, let's do it. And I don't know
if you remember, but before we even pitched and this is like completely unreleased
stuff, but before we pitched the Go game, we pitched a card game
for days. Yeah, it was a different kind of vibe and we were
playing around and it was not some sort of tactical thing as much as we
wanted to, so we just dropped it. Yeah, but it was we
we we go through all kinds of different ideas. If you look at Hitman
Go, the initial idea was it went through. It came out of an
entire incubation process with a bunch of different teams. We're pitching ideas around a
mobile Hitman game, and it's just stuck. Like when everybody saw it,
we were like, oh ok, it has to stay. Yeah, and
if the if the pitch is there, if the like, if the will
is there, if something gets pitched that's really cool and uses like a franchise
from Japan. I guess we're gonna make it work. No exactly, but
it's just yeah, sure, it's really through that that we believe we can
make the best game basically. Yeah. Yeah. And so obviously you know
you're here with unreleased software, so you know, like newly announced and all
that stuff. So you know there's the demos likable with with Hitman, it's
a little different where you know, it's it's a game that's out, and
obviously this new content like how how's it been, uh, like showing off
like showing off new stuff here is is episode four or right? Numbers are
fun. So we said six locations, seven episodes, and people are like,
oh my god, what's the un announced location. Well, the whole
point was there wasn't an an announced location. There was a mid season double
feature which in which Hitman Season one is two missions, one in Sapienza and
the other one is in Marrakesh. So in Marrakesh, it's Marrakesh by night.
It's more calm and more pleasant really than the big riot that's happening in
episode three. Sapienza, though, is the entire flip side of this.
This is almost like a modern version of Curtains Down from Blood Money. The
setup is that troubled actor director Dino Bosco is filming his sci fi superhero epic
in Sapienza, big film set, and it's like the third act of the
movie where the alien overlord has attacked Sapienza and he's fighting it. Right,
but it's it's a film set, so he's doing all his own stunts.
He loves practical effects, pyrotechnics, he loves that. In forty seven is
on set too, So that's going to go wrong, right, Yeah,
it sounds like you've got a lot of interesting objects to work with the situation
like that. So it's it's just, uh, it's us being a little
bit free, right, because the first three episodes established the story and bringing
some new players into into the franchises published fiction, and then we take a
break and we do our Halloween Treehouse of Horror in this case, so in
Sapienza and Marrakesh, and then when we're done with those, we'll move on
to episode four, which will take us through the rest of the storyline in
the first season. Okay, do you have any plans to make the elusive
targets way easier so these guys can actually get one. It's actually something.
It's it's so difficult, right because we build them and we have ideas about
how doable they are. But I remember when we were doing the first one
and we were kind of sort of trying to get a sense of how we
should design them. Sat down with the creative director of Ayah, Christian Elblam,
and he said to me, looked of when you design these things,
remember you're up against the hive mind. And that's true because even something like
the cardinal that was really tough to get into because he was wrapped in rings
and rings of security. Within about three hours, people had cracked a hole
in his security and found a point where you could quite easily just snatch him
away from his bodyguard and to sign an assassin. So we're kind of we're
kind of pulled between these two poles, right, the one hand, they
do need to be approachable, because I think the tension might be unbearable if
you, for example, had to take out five targets. Right sure,
not saying that they won't be a five target lose a target, but the
whole, the whole challenge is to kind of balance between making it something that's
fun but tense and exciting to play and something where you think, I don't
even dare touch this because it is just had right. Yeah, yeah,
that's a that's a tight rop. But I guess there were some stats.
Was it was it? I was trying to remember. Was it fifty three
percent on the first elusive target were completed. Yes, that's over half.
That's over half. Sounds easy and escape too or just killed. We saw
it, and and okay, the spirit and escape flaming a moral victory,
and we actually see that number rising a little bit as we go through them,
but signing Assassin, it's flashed around about five percent effective frisky. It
seems like, you know, you have to be a specific type of person
to really chase down those sorts of challenge. I mean when we when we
stream them, we don't try that. Yeah, just guys, did you
guys frontload the production schedule with a lot of that stuff, because like when
those targets started rolling out, I was shocked to find they have like unique
vo attached to them and like each each one has a like a FMV intro
and stuff, and it like sounds cynical, but like it there's a lot
more work put into each one of those for like a weekly challenge than I
would have ever expected. So it's it's one of the things that I just
feel is so awesome about the support we've gotten from from Square, That we've
gotten the support to build this content, knowing that this is a mission that
is going to be there for forty eight seventy two hours and things gone.
This idea that right now there's a target in Paris, the Sensation, and
there are a bunch of people who will never have a chance to play that.
But I mean, I mean it'll exist, it'll it'll be immortalized on
on on YouTube and video streaming sites, but some of us will miss it.
So it's it's absolutely fantastic. So to kind of more directly answer your
question, yes, we frontload. We were We had some we had some
ideas about how quickly we could bring them into the game, but it's the
saying goes no release, No release of a game ever survives contact with the
enemy. We delayed it to kind of get on top of get on top
of some some challenges that we had, and then we started bringing them out.
So yes, we produce ahead of time, but we are already going
back to some of the ones that are in the bank and kind of adapting
to what we've seen. For example, things like poisons are very much easy
mode in these games, because if you work out whether or not they're going
to drink something that you can poison and you can get to it. You
can basically just sit by the exit and weight and boom and you've done it.
And if you time it really fast, you can do it before the
AI updates and spots the body. Right, yeah, right, So some
of those we work on them too, maybe entirely remove the poison set up,
or like be really nasty and say someone else is going to drink it
as well. And we also work a lot with randomness, which is not
normally something we do in the Hitman game because you need to learn the patterns.
It's to be very predictable, But in elusive targets, we actually aren't
afraid to be a little bit random. So if you text someone like the
congressman, he had four different locations that he could go to, but at
any point you didn't know which one he would go to next, because he
made that decision when he was at the point. So you could work out
the places that he would go and think about what opportunities those offered. But
even like the wine tasting that he would do in the basement, it was
only about a one in four likelihood that he would actually drink anything on a
given cycle, so it was I mean, the goal with these things is
really to encourage people to think on their feet. There was a long time
when you couldn't actually restart an elusive target. Once you were going, you
had to finish it. It was a while when we played around with the
idea of a running quick safe so you could leave it and come back to
the point that you got off. But for now, I think we need
to leave it where it is so you can restart if you want to.
And some people will scum that that's fine, and some people will do one
and done and get the laurels for that. Is this the way it will
always be, to be honest, I don't know. By the time we
get to the end of the season, they may actually be running in a
slightly different ways and the way they are now, which is the fantastic thing
about being a live game, right. We see the metrics, we see
the experiences, we see attach rates, and all of these things that are
very much the language of free to play and mobile games right that we're being
forced to embrace because there are so many things that that have been learned the
hard way that we need to do as well. Great, even taken out
of the mobile and free to play context, these are still things that are
super worthwhile. Absolutely, as a developer, you want people to play or
game. You want people to keep playing your game, and you want to
make the bus game possible for people who really love your game, and that's
all part of that. I mean, there's like evil words like retention and
like users and like average revenue for paying users and all of these that data
can be used for good or evil exactly. That's because at the core of
it, if you make a game, you just want people to enjoy it
as much as they can. And those who enjoy it, because there's always
going to be a core fraction of your players are like actually and saying about
your game and love it so much. These are the players that you want
to serve the best. Basically, Actually, we set up APO metrics where
we put time in instead of money, so the money that you spent the
micro transaction you made in that game was the time you put into it,
and all for that we could start detecting what were the things that kind of
made Saints using these metrics in these KPIs that have been developed to use in
different games. That's that's super fascinating. I whish we could talk about that
stuff all night, because it's just because we live in a crazy data world
too, you know, just being on the web and all that sort of
stuff. But we are going to wrap it up. Yes, Tarban,
Eddie and Jen, thanks for so much for coming through. We're gonna take
a break. I can come back with our final segment for the night,
So stay tuned for that mess someone lifting weights out there. It's just the
standard. That's just the standard. Hello, I'm Jeff Gersman. Welcome back
to our final segment of the evening for night one of each twenty sixteen.
It's time to wrap it up in style with the classiest group of people I
know. I can't even that illusion for a second. From Sony Interactive Entertainment
America. Yes, four to four John Drake, John T. Drake,
that's my name. From Adult Swim Game. Sean Baptiste is here. Hello,
Hoya, how's it going. Good to see good to see you.
Yeah, we got Dan T's all have no goblin fame fame. Yes,
that's a very famous. Yeah. We got Ubisoft to the French Canadian Eric
Pope. We it's as far as I've gotten in my French classes. It's
the we you now good dance games. Finally you get to work at a
company with a good Yeah. I guess I was thinking that when that press
conference was on. I was like, I wonder if it's weird for you
to work for the Just Dance company. Now it's it's weird on that level.
Yeah, not that you're like near it. They're like trillion different country.
Yeah, understand, we're doing we're doing games. We're doing games.
Striking with people with canes, very intense. That dude seems awesome. He's
amazing. Jason Vandenberg Weird Guy, Cane Guy. He looks really like weird
Guy. Cane Guy is his full les. It's actually accreditation in Canada.
Guy. He looks super intimidating and kind of scary, and then he has
the amazing voice too. But he's the nicest guy in the world. It's
the when he when he last year, I think it was the same deal,
like just just the voice and you're just like, man, that guy.
He seems classically trained, and then he can kind of like shift into
like, hey, what's up you guys? Now, I'm just working like
and that's the best. He's the best. Yeah, and he knows what
he's doing too. He's working that room. I bet yeah. I'm trying
to and he's down for him trying to organize like some sort of event with
the other game industry people where he just dms a giant that happened seems that
I would be in on. Yeah, I think a lot of people would
Yeah, that seems like it would be cool. Uh so, e three
night one is over. You guys are in wildly different parts of the business
these days. At one point, you all work together at the same company.
Boy, Yeah, did we work together as a stru you were employed
a similar space. Yeah, but at the same time. Yeah, we
were all there at the same time. Dan, we didn't allow him near
us at any point. Well he did he earn that, right? Yeah?
Like I feel like that's something I've learned for like that two and a
half weeks with Yah. I feel like I probably wouldn't know any of you
knuckleheads if he hadn't gone to work there, because we're thinking like, oh,
Alex would go work for the rock vamp, right, okay, And
then then he would say things like, oh, yeah, this is what
I don't know. I think my boss is gonna quit and go write TV
shows at some point. Uh yeah, and uh yeah, so that work
out for you. Alice got out, couldn't pull out of orbits I think
where you're like terminal lot No, and then you just crashed back in there.
But right, TV shows, would you have such flash shoe? No?
Man, I got my PlayStation air Force ones on what get yeah right?
The brand all day every day Positively three? Put this Mica, I'm
blowing the funk out of this compression and how is good? Okay, all
right, stupid Drew knows how to use a mixing boards. How's Positively three
going? It makes Dave Lang so mad and it makes everything so much it
makes it so much more positive. He literally he said two things to me
and said, hey, I saw how positive you were being on Twitter,
and I thought you were having a stroke. And then b I saw how
posy you were being on Twitter and made me super pissed. And I said,
yeah, man, that's uh, that's that's pretty much why I'm doing
it, and I will never stop now. And then the next game we
started playing was I just started working names of Cheryl Crow songs into common conversation
until it made him and one of my co workers walk away from me.
Literally they could not talk to anymore because I was like, here's the thing.
But you know, I'm only here. All I want to do is
have some fun, and you know, I want to stay out all night
until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard. And you'd be surprised at
how many Charyl Crows songs you can work into a normal conversation. Every every
day is a winding every day is a winding road, you know. Hiring
air Pope my favorite mistake. It's I have to leave. I can't,
I have to go. No, it's just like this, I feel this.
You should go outside and soak up the sun. Just really get out
there. Wow, it makes me so happy. Did you make happy?
It can't be that bad. Now I'm back in Jesus Christ. Now I'm
angry. This is yeah, Sewan Baptiste. You're out at an adult swim
games in beautiful Atlanta. Beautiful Atlanta, Atlanta is great. I didn't realize
I had to live somewhere shitty for like thirty eight years. I don't have
to shovel anymore. It's amazing. All those Braves games. You can go
to, all those Braves games. I will never go to all the Coca
cola you could drink. Oh yea yeah, inforced to try to find PEPSI
try to find that was shot on site. Those are like the three things
I remember about when E three was in Atlanta. Drink a lot of coke,
it's uncomfortably hot, and ted Turner. There's a place called Buckhead.
Yes, yeah, yes, I know. That's the only thing Pope knows
true. I saw a movie in Buckhead once a nice part of town.
Apparently now all the movies are shot in Buckhead. We call it yalli Wood.
I don't just a stupid name. It's a stupid name. You always
said, it's to judge it Yep, Dancysdale, the Pacific Northwest best.
Great. How is the Kickstarter calendar business treating you? I want to make
that fucking full time? I want that. I thought you were. I
thought that was pretty full time to me. Actually that we have so our
first like actual like person we've brought onto the no Goblin family. Even to
say, is calendar one percent full time calendar Wark, It's ridiculous. Yeah,
you own a game company and your first game company media company Media.
We work in VR experiences. We are in print, so full time.
To do twelve pictures that ship have different towels, I have to nus pads.
So day did Dan put my face on all these towels and sent me
a bunch of them? And when my parents, when my parents came to
visit recently, my wife made great, great joy and putting them out as
often as pussible? Would you like to dry your hands? Did that just
lead to questions that you just could not answer? It was It was a
sitcom esque situation of me trying to find them and hide them before they could
Well, I mean, at least you're not mostly naked in the back of
a car, true yet yet? Yeah, the night's young. Yeah,
that's uh. That picture of Lang is haunting yep. Oh yeah, yeah,
that mouth's bad that I use every day. At least gave his consent
for that. You promised me a photo, like I'm gonna be in your
calendar. You're an overwoman of Game Devilment calendar. And then like, oh
it's time for you to give me a photo. It's like, oh,
I'll get you one soon. I'd like three weeks ago. Oh we need
to in these calendars right now, other wise people are gonna be pissed,
like oh yeah, totally totally gonna get them and nothing. It's like,
fuck it, I'm gonna find a naked guy and went to running down the
road and I'll think Eric's face on it, and I think it worked out.
I think, yeah, I think that that photo worked out. I
think it's highly erotic. Yeah, yeah, that's my goal. Yeah yeah,
that's that's fantastics. But you are you are also making a video game,
virtual reality golf thing, one hundred foot robost golf. Yeah, what's
that game about? Its one hundred robot Okay, cool, super Red,
You have once again roped in bona fide journalists to provide content for your video
game. We have the McCary brothers as a commentary team. That's the bonifid
journalist. Though I can't say oh, because it's just true. Man.
Yeah, that's uh, that's uh, that's big, that's crazy, that's
fun, crazy news. I feel like everything we do on this project is
like, it would be awesome if we could get X and but that's never
going to happen. But let's just send an email and see if that happens.
And then we have the mcarroys doing commentary and like this amazing fucking art
we don't deserve for robots and characters and releasing on PSVR and all that crazy
and PlayStation four on a TV that's works with television? Is that is that?
Is that just gonna be printed on the back of the boxes for PlayStation
four sticks on TV stickers every every game. Oh well yeah, just just
for your television TV compatible And you're showing off the game here in a in
a virtual reality sense. When you brought it around, it was in a
non it was in a a TV sense. It was a real reality.
It was a real reality sense. Yeah, and then I guess we had
to show it at VR at some point, so just to make Drake happy.
So, and how how has that been been going? I checked in
on it. I actually sunny, You've been running a lot of stuff.
Yeah, it's great. I show up like an hour later after the after
the show starts, some check in see how everyone's doing. They're doing better,
fucking spiels and I am ad. I'm like, great, I don't
need to be here. I'll just watch a couple of a couple of run
throughs. We got a whole meeting trying to figure out what was happening in
the game with that staff was gonna operate it, and we came up.
But we figured it out. We've explained it to Dan and it seems like
he's now on board with how the game works, which is great. Great,
someone had someone had to get into it. Yeah, it's just Kessler's
job at that point. This. Yeah, well it's basically what I did
at Harmonics when Dan was designing rock Band. Was just explained to him and
how the game works. It's like, okay, they're buttons on a guitar.
He's like, I added these eight things that I didn't tell you about,
and then I tweeted all of them to be fair. Every time we
do an announcement, I have that fucking John Drake fia like someone's gonna company.
Yeah, yeah, no, you're fine. Chris Foster sick deep rock
band design joke. Wow, No one is awake watching the show on that
in that office. They're all, no, it's boss in the morning.
Yeah yeah, uh, Eric Pope Hi recently, you're so far away.
I know Alex told me to sit here. I mean like I wanted to
touch some sort of grudge. I think I like your sky shoes. Yeah,
I got these, Jesus. It does what's moving to Canada? Like,
it's really complicated because it's just so what I guess I didn't really realize
until I had to do it. Canada's fine. Quebec is like a country
within a country, like in a multitude of ways, so that you become
a separationist, now, are you? Like yeah, uh yeah, no,
like it's it's it's the real deal. So they have their own social
systems, like the socialized medicine is better in Quebec because it's their own system.
And like you pay sales tax to Canada, uh, and you pay
up bigger sales tact Quebec. And like there's all this stuff, and then
there's the whole political thing where where the French speaking population wants to secede from
Canada and be its own country. Uh. And if you if you're if
you're speaking English, you might get yelled at for speaking English all the time
when I go to Montreal. Yeah, that's here. All the all the
great things they say about living in Canada are actually true. Like everyone apart
from the few who are separatists who I want you to go away? Actually
super nice. Have you met Drake yet? By Drake Drake needs to be
you know, because he doesn't have another name. No, he's there at
the border, he greets you. Okay. You know the number of like
confusing conversations I've had over the years about hip hop artist Drake. Yeah,
where I go Like what John? What? Yeah? It's my favorite way
to chime into a dumb Twitter conversation is someone talking about Drake and me being
like, oh, thanks so much, man, I'm really glad you dig
the music, and they're like it's not that funny. I'm like, I
know, I know, but I'm sitting here anyways. Roll out, nice,
Yeah, just wheel right out. The really cool thing to me about
Montreal is the there's a massive gamed community, like every big company is there.
There's no joke that and that's a Quebec thing. Yeah, Quebec's very
socialist. Uh, and that's the fascinating thing to me. Like politically right,
it's like they're very liberal progressive except for that one issue about the language
is like get the fuck out unless you're speaking French. But have our healthcare,
have free, free daycare for your kids, but don't bring your car
here. The car was the worst part. The car I have. I
have a two thousand and five Prius and uh, it cost me thirty five
hundred dollars and fees, fines, taxes and repair to bring it across the
border. That total the car basically at that point, Yeah, that's the
thing. You cross the border and they just assign a value and that's what
you all these fees on and they said it was worth eleven thousand dollars just
not not not after you got your hands on. But you have no,
you can't say anything. Okay, you should have like once they assessed that
value, just be like, I'll take two for it right now. It's
gonna take to put you into this prius, right take me to just walk
away from his car and maybe you set it on five. Should have done
it. Yeah, unbelievably. The car was the hardest part of the whole
process of moving an entire family to another country, buying a house. The
car. Yeah, no, that's I I have still never been to Canada.
You should go. It's nice. I've never been to Canada. Yeah,
well there was there, I know, but that's our hat. There
was an era of like video game trips where everyone was going to Canada all
the time. People were going to Cancoon. There's all kinds of weird dune
shit, and like, we were working reviews at the time, so we
never went anywhere. We sat in San Francisco and said, fuck those guys.
Games show up, we say they're bad. So much has changed how
the games don't show up. We go. Uh, you should come.
It's great to Canada. Don't drive your car there otherwise. So if I
were to drive my car there and just say like I'm just hanging out,
that's fine, they'd be fine. But if I'm like this car staying here,
yeah, you have you have to. It's unbelievable and it's unbelieving.
So so you first you have to export it from the US, and so
they send you to this website. It's like, oh cool, an online
system. It's a website built only for people who do uh shipping, like
shipping companies, okay, uh. And to register for the website, you
would normally use a social security code, but they decided your social Security number
is not safe, so you need an employer ID number, which average citizen
has. So I had to create a sole proprietorship to create a loggin for
the system, which I then spent three hours trying to fill in, like
all the terminology, shipping terminology, great, fill it out, and then
at the end it's like, we've updated your system. You have to go
to this other website and do it on a different system. That's right.
And and that was just the export portion. Then you do the import portion
of the Canadian side. Did you consider driving the border, putting the car
and drive and just ghost riding your whip like snow my car, sign my
car, and then getting back and driving away. I really wish I should
ride that way. Let's ride a little whip, so weep weep. Moving
to the Pacific Northwest was that? Was that similarly difficult? Yeah? I
had to. Uh. I drove for seven days none style, okay,
from Australia to the VIC Northwest. And I set up a company, which
is it's actually pretty much the same thing, so an actual company, not
just Erica. The thing you forgot is to then not like just do the
company as your thing. You're just setting it up as a shell organizations.
It's like a pyramid scheme of like fake shell companies. Yeah, we'll say
it's really easy to set up the company. I did it in like ten
minutes. Oh yes, you can just there are just you fill out the
forms and say yes, of course I'm from Delaware and that's that. Yeah.
Now I'm terrified next year at tax time, I'm going to be taxed
as some sort of corporation. Oh yeah, no one's watching us. Wow,
Wow, so adult swim games as just like caught on with all this
crazy shit that like weirdly, well not maybe not weirdly, but it fits
into the adult swim brand and it's like pretty good games. And like,
how is that? I imagine you just get pitched a bunch of fucking weird
shit that kind of sucks all the time for people who think they that's exactly
how that goes. Yeah, you wouldn't believe it perfect. She's like,
you're not funny at all. We get like these manilla envelopes and some we
got one that was like done in crayon, like literally in crayon. And
it wasn't like ironically done in crayon. It was like my game design.
You guys can't believe this. And I would say, Steve who, Steve
g who who? He's the one who has to look at these games first.
I mean, some of them are amazing, but yeah, yeah,
but he guess a lot and we we we we've put brought down to like,
you know, like ninety percent of the things we get either involved butts
or doing drugs or my favorite one, butts doing drugs. I say,
it's really like and that's like ninety percent of submissions that they're like, this
is exactly like adult swims, like all your butt drugs stuff, and we're
like, assy McGee was a while ago. Yeah that was, and that
that was there was at least like a twist on that. So that was
a thing. It wasn't just about doing drugs for twelve minutes. Yeah.
So I mean there are people who are like, yeah, we totally get
your brain, and you're like, you do not correct, you don't ye,
that's not you signed the best and brightest of yea independent video game development
in the world. Yeah, and make that your brain. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's that we're like, yeah, let's go find really awesome people
who make awesome ship and then let's get Yeah, let's put out Jazz part.
Then yeah, let's put out Desk, Gambit and rain World and everything.
Yeah land. So yeah, it's it's it's it's kind of fantastic to
just be because I've never like it's great to work on a whole catalog of
games. Would be like I'm literally excited about all of these and not ironically
or not, like I don't have to pretend to be excited about Chinese democracy.
I don't know if any of us presented to be never a few days
I did and Crooked X, should we get rykerd out here and now talk
about this gun. You can sit here and say it's okay while these fuckers
beat the shit out of it. Let's tell the Ryker earlier. Do you
remember when we had to put out that that garbage high school musical rip off
that MTV did that was like a rock camp and we had put out I'm
sorry, you mean camp rock, that one's gonna rock camps tune about kid
rocks like no times better. No one would survive that movie, that terrible
movie. No, but yeah, we had to Like FMTV was like,
yeah, we're doing this rip off of high school music. We can't allow,
we can't say rip up. And then they would just like have to,
Like we had to put out like two I think two DLC packs that
was like basically all of the guys this week going to rock band some movie
on Nickelodeon. Yeah, which was also the timee of like the angriest people
of putting out a DLC announcements on Fridays and then like me going up to
the blinds in my house and like looking out the window to see there are
people ready to kill. The death threats feeling. We got lots of death
threats. Yeah, it was mostly death threats like that week or just no
most of the time, who has not had at least a few death threats.
It was a threat that we're all saying, like we're joking. Yeah,
yeah, music fans are very But then when the week was like,
yeah, we're totally not selling out. Here's here's rock camp Camp Rock,
here's some thirteen year olds that one of our VP's got to know that Mayer
may not be involved in some really sketchy ye grove. Oh, she was
selling the name of Miranda Pure sweet Amanda Miranda. Yeah, no, talk
about someone else. Yeah, there's a whole series of videos, right,
Yeah, but it looks like it's awesome, getting like excited about everything with
like really great people. So yeah, it's yeah, I'm like way into
even though most of the games are way too hard for me to play.
Yeah, way too hard. Well, I was thinking, like, you
know, I had a couple of game ideas that maybe I would bounce off
you what about instead duck game? It was butt game? Tell me where?
Okay, Well, sometimes you need like a speed boost so the butts
do drugs to move faster. Second, Yeah, this is yeah, okay,
well okay, maybe I can twist it and maybe I can, you
know, pitch it to more than one of you. There's a skeleton in
it. We we already have our own skills and exclusivity. Yeah, sure,
we can't really double up. I can't believe we haven't gotten to one
hundred butt robot golf robot. It's a dangerous territory because we're fucking dumb enough
to actually put that. I know, I'm aware that that's a new title
screen or something. It's it's the Dave language. Well I'm sorry. Yeah,
the guy who made the fucking iOS game of me flying around the country's
a threat to make a thing that you shouldn't make. Phone can't delete it
whenever it comes back. But I feel like I feel I spent a lot
of time on that spreadsheet. I feel terrible about it afterwards. I really
there was a shared Google doc that he wanted. Yeah, I came up
with the idea of let's fill out a shared Google doc with everywhere that John
Drake is flying. And then my idea was like, and then we'll just
eventually present it to him as like, John, you gotta star Intervention st
come on this is and then it just you know, my girlfriend broke up
maybe because of all that, but you know it was great. It worked
that way, right, But you know, at the time you're home A
lot more of these days, I just don't post about where I'm calling anymore
people of sens and that means we all win. Yeah, everyone wins ultimately.
Also, I think if you posted where you were going now, it
would just like tip spoiler, too many hands on, too many deals.
At this point, You're right, it's like, oh, we's find Marylyn.
What else would be in mary I don't know. Yeah, never post
about that. Yeah anyway, Yeah, do they still make you go to
Destation PlayStation? Yeah? Oh you mean do I still get to go to
Destation Place? Yes, that's what I mean. Are the best event?
Yes? Positive positive three. I like Destation PlayStation. It's fine, it's
a it's a weird special. You don't have to play the same three beals.
Going as someone who's working in the show for rock band was not as
fun. And then we got lost and it's a giant circular resort and we
went left to go one building to the right and walked outside in the dark
and the desert for an hour, going around the long way in a sole
Uh, and I thought we were gonna die. And there's a video of
that. There's Yeah. The first thing I did when I joined the team
was ended a video of night vision of them stumbling around this Arizona trailer park,
Scottsdale, Baby and Alex doing some weird creeper voice the whole time,
shout there like screen training style. Back in the day we covered destation plastage.
You're not supposed to do that, and we put a video on our
website. We're like loops, oh right, yeah whatever like that was yeah,
old harmonics. We didn't care. That was Uh, how do you
guys end up going on a TVC trip? Oh? Boy boy? Three
of us? Yeah, I didn't go. Yeah, I was on another
way less interesting three of us. It was a cat right, yep,
yep, I remember that. I remember how many How I don't how many
of you? Yeah? Yeah, I remember watching that and being so excited.
Yeah. It was like having having to post the video about house.
Yeah that's right. Yeah, like like having had it, having known Alex
for a long There was something about like, man, that kid made it
this weird pride about Like, fuck yeah, Alex is out there doing it.
Look at and playing the drums on QVC. This is so fucking weird.
It was like you have ae o'clock in the morning, yeah making it?
Yeah, yeah, well down from there. It was definitely one of
the weirder things. So they don't tell I mean, I think we've maybe
talked to this before, but to briefly say it, they don't tell you.
They said, Hey, you're gonna do some seconds on QVC. We're
gonna have three shows. We have a show at like four pm. We
have a show it's gonna air at three am. We have a show the
next day at like noon. We're like, that sounds great. We'll go.
We'll take the four o'clock, we'll go to sleep, we'll go to
dinner, and then we'll come back. We'll shoot the noon show to a
different for the scond day. It sounds great. They don't tell you.
All the shows are live almost like I think one hundred percent of the shows
are live, and so they're like, oh, it's four o'clock and they're
like, okay, well we'll see you at one thirty for your call and
we're like, no, no, tomorrow shoots at one. They're like,
no, one thirty am. You're on the air at three and we were
like, I don't understand what you mean. That's not a time. So
then we got done at like four thirty and then I was like, well,
we have to be back here in five hours. Sood like no one
slept and we drove around in a minivan and we talked about Carvel ice cream
cakes and uh, well, it's a super weird that. What's the name
of the town that it's in Millit noowhere, Pennsylvania. So there's there's a
town center, Pennsylvania. But that town is built entirely to support the monstrosity
of QVC, right, and and I think you pointed up, Yeah,
the town itself is essentially run by the children of the people everywhere children the
corn ship where like there's like these teenagers like serving you at every fucking like
smoking cigarettes. It's the most bizarre thing because all their parents are at QBC.
Yeah. Yeah, the air got into watching Japanese QVC is just live
streams is not a thing. Yeah, you can watch you can watch multiple
versions of VC and multiple nations at the same time live on the internet.
Uh fuck no, well not from there, Okay, well live truth,
tell me about it. I never see anything that would be super exciting to
actually buy the products more interesting though than the than the US windsor it's just
a presentation. It's yeah, it is just the presentation of just like you
know, t foul or whatever, you know whatever on the time Diamond l
what quack quacker Factory's cracker factory. Yeah, no, that would be weird.
H Yeah, that was a really long trip. And also that's where
we're going if there's ever a zombie apotheps because it's literally and I don't I
don't use that word accidentally. It's literally like a square mile concrete building with
heavy rolling metal doors, no windows, and food and refrigerators for the cooking
shows, okay, knives for the niow source for the nive shows, and
like cameras on every surface you can see more out of the building. You
could live there for years and basically one entrance. It's yeah, I will
say, the knives might not get you very far because I think you'll probably
do more damage to yourself than to anything else. Based on the QVC shows
I've seen them the sorts things. Yeah, it's not ladders, ladders and
knives things. They just don't live. Knives is a great Twitter account.
Yeah, yeah, it's been. It's been great seeing the Cutlery Corner adapted
for the modern age new media live nights. Yeah, that's that's been.
I like the Knife Show a lot, and it's not as good as it
used to be. Ye should do a knife show you absolutely, Giant knife.
Yeah, it's been off side. Yeah. No. We started a
Game of Thrones podcast a couple days ago. That's been going to listen to
it because it sounded super uninformative and I didn't like none of you ever watched
the most information you will ever get in seven minutes of a podcast, Game
of Thrones Experts. Yeah, and maybe when Giant Thrones Episode two comes around,
maybe you'll change. I mean, Dave Lang watched Game of Thrones of
my house. He'd never seen an episode before. He was very confusing,
upset the entire time, Right, who the fuck is that guy? Why?
No? Why would you do that? To be fair, if he
wasn't for himed, he still would have been yelling it angry. So I
think the one and a half episodes of it I've seen, I'd share his
experience. Yeah, that lady seems real mean. Yeah, why is she
being so mean? Why is she so angry? Or kid is a kid?
The kid is a king or something. Why does she have to be
so crazy? It's like a good gig. I don't know. Is this
lady immune to fire? Yeah? I don't know. She made a fire?
Who knows? I don't know fire type, I don't know. It
was an hour long demo for on the internet. If you had a song
of fire and ice, which one would win? It would just be water.
That's just water. Song of ice is just water? Would it just
be song of water? Song of water? Water songs? All right,
and it's my new book series, Song of Water. Cheryl Crow presents a
Song of Water. Oh no, no, no, that was in that
album. I was leaving Las Vegas. Uh, the what's what? What
are we talking about? Now? It's not this Let's get away with Sony
PlayStation yea, the out there with the PlayStation four something showing new games video
game console Spider spider Man, Yeah out there. Yeah, we're making a
Spider Man game. Yeah yeah, like some talented smart developers. Announcements at
that show I know, you know, like you as one of the behind
the scenes wheelers slash dealers man out there, Like I imagine like every year
a ton of work goes into that show. Yes, smarter, more talented
people than I. Casts of hundreds, and I'm just like in the audience
sitting there chilling. I actually I get to go to rehearsals and then provide
no value, like walk partners in and be like, let's review your segment,
and then they have notes and I'm like, okay, talk to that
guy. He's a smart guy. And they're like, what are we doing
now? And I'm like, let's go outside. We're done, and they're
like, why are you here? And I'm like, I don't know that,
you know. I walk up and down the stairs real good. They
like they like to watch me come and go. It was a really good
I thought this year was kind of crazy. I've heard very very impinions on
this website, but that's okay, uh and on this website on the website,
Uh, the we had a good time. I thought it was a
kind of a crazy show. And Spider Man is my most exciting moment.
I was just really excited to see that kind of out there. We've that's
been cooking for a long time, and uh, it's out there in public.
Now we can talk about it and not in any detail, but people
up Marble and Sam Nick, we'll talk about it in great detail. Yeah.
I mentioned, you know, like like I live behind the walls.
You know that the guy, the Magician's secret guy wore like the shitty mask
and he was like, what also smoke? And I'm gonna tell you why
just put that on Netflix. I'm very excited watching that right now. He's
nice, He's nice man. Yeah, so I'm that guy, but like
for business, I'm like, tell me your secrets and I'm like a bad
Netflix show. So yeah, No, I don't talk about what I do
at all, but I get to help and it's fun to help. And
Spider Man, yeah, hashtags, pider maps, four, hashtag other things.
WHOA I don't know, yeah three three yeah, you know. The
first room number when you come off the elevator here was four twenty and I
was like, hashtag weed three. I was, so I was. I
actually walked up to the sort of that room and I was, no,
I was gonna take a picture of the like the room number and then post
it as part of our illustrious E three coverage. Yeah hashtag skate four Yeah
a myster grand account where I recently posted a picture of me riding on the
Horizon zero Dawn bike. There's petty pettycabs like they're giving free rods with dud
dude in a Horizon T shirt. Is a bike like in the game where
you were in the game, I was riding a bike with a thing attached
and I had to get here to start this show tonight, and I was
like, where the fuck is the cab line? And I ran into one
geo course. You said you should walk to the j W, and I
was like, man, I don't want to fucking the fucking JW. I
looked and saw this bike here said free rides, My free rides. That
sounds great. So I had a ride this bike with me attached to it
to this hotel. I don't like the image of you attached to it,
like it sounds like a very local cycle to I'm working a huge yeah,
huge, gigantic anyway, And then a woman sat there with me and there
was an iPad attached to the bike. It's like, we're gonna watch the
trailer. Check it out. Seriously that they show the Horizon trailers on this
thing, and I was like, this is this is insane. You should
have so much glare. Yeah, I was. I had originally planned to
like just periscope the whole thing. You also should have just like predict it
what was gonna happen the trailer right before it happened over and we're gonna be
like, I mean, I had no video games. Let me tell you
what. I think. She's gonna slatter that robot ansaurs leg and then should
explosive vera and the woman be like are you are you like a designer?
That's me? That's right, I made this game. Yeah, that robot
thing that she's riding robosaurs rex get that's me. That's actually me rendered in
the game. My shirt un hundred butt robots and then the orange parts of
the parts you shoot. I thought that the trailer was really surprising. You
get your game now. Yeah, the going Game three transport will be used
to promote your game, Dan, oh my god, golf cart golf cut
Yeah, yeah, dumb questions. Even I would think hovercraft. I wanted
you to say so they would know I'm trying to help you your brand.
You see this the video for Special Eds. I got it made and they
got hovercrafts in it, well tiny like personal hovercrafts. Whatever happened. I
always wanted one of those hovercrafts. Are is cool? Like the street?
No, I don't think they're on the WAT. What the they're doing man
physics there? Yeah, it's just it's Special Eds. It was his only
big song, I think. You know. And if I could get a
golf car, would you drive around tomorrow and show people your game on an
iPad? I would do that while someone Paris I would be I would be
absolutely, but I would be excited to produce. Tell you're gonna if you're
gonna show it on an iPad, bring something to like block out the glare,
because I like, just like and everyone everyone is involved in this story.
I'm telling perfectly nice and doing their jobs super well. And I was
like stoked because like this is like a fun, weird thing. But like
it was like check out the trailer and I'm like, it's this is glare
and fingerprints that I'm looking at right here. I've seen the trailer. Sarah
down. It's a great game. Awesome, it looks, it looks fantastic.
It does Brad. Brad had nice to say about it earlier. Yeah,
yeah, that's a that's a nice looking game. Video games. Yeah
yeah, so Pope, I mean, you know your time previous two you
be soft, you know, like you were, you were on a handful
of different things. There were not music games as Harmonics kind of spread out
and did a few things. But for Honor is a music game. It's
rhythmic. It is actually rhythmic. You're right, I mean, but it
seems it seems the deadliest, wildly different in a way that is I feel
excited for your career because you know, it would be very easy to type
cast and Eric Pope as the music man he's played. Like when I was
interviewing, I explicitly said like I don't I don't want to work on rock
smith or does dance because That's what I've been doing. And they're like,
oh, this is Montreal, we don't do those Like oh yeah, great,
No, we have better people for that. I don't know what that
means. Yeah, So so so that was something that was exciting to just
have some like branch out and do understand it's totally different, Like, yeah,
ten thousand person company, they have resources, things uh so, I
don't know if you remember Packs twenty ten, we had to build our own
booths, well more accurately the fans. I remember that garbage Yeah yeah,
like an actual literally like people just showed up with ship. Yeah. It
was like a little garbage city. It was like our mail bag feature people
booths. Yeah, functional booth to demo video games. Yeah, we were
cleared, function cleared the budget to buy the booth space, and I think
that was it. We were given ten thousand dollars, yeah, which was
enough for the booth space, a twenty by twenty and two televisions and like
power and because at that point MTV was like, you know, they were
trying to suffo kid. Yeah, I've already got you the booth space,
but you're on your own. Yeah, good luck. And launching rock Band
three and Dance Central one with ten thousand dollars. Yeah, at the biggest
consumer convention, we got to what should we do? So we brainstormed a
list of literally the stupidest things we could think of. Yeah, just like
trying to one up each other, Like what does suit of a full suit
of armor, full size hansul and carbonite people full of balloons? Yeah,
yeah, and uh, we put it on the forums and people are like,
okay, claim a thing, bring it to the show, we'll give
you a reward. And within a couple of hours and every single thing was
claimed. Okay whatever, And we get to the show and every single item
on that list showed up, every single one. So yeah, that was
amazing. But also just like what we did a lot, I think in
those days was making making the most with what we had. You're scrappy.
Yeah, And Jeff came up to us at the show he said, hey,
this booth is like really fun and kind of crazy. Are you okay?
It's still okay? And I was like no, no, no,
I started like sobbing uncontrollably. Yeah. No, video games, that's that
was I feel like one of my jobs because of to make you sob them
games has gone on, right thing. So yeah, MTV is just doing
wonderfully right now, right Yeah, yeah, MTV Games News it's huge.
Yeah, No, it's uh yeah, that's that kind of scrappiness and stuff
like that. I mean, you know, like the we we were a
startup for a good number of years, and you know, like it's it's
you do a lot of really fucking crazy shit. And I think I think
you probably learned the same lesson that we learned. Uh, and maybe it's
not the right lesson, but but it is for me, like what I
took for a lesson, I've learned over the fasten the wrong less Like what
I took from that that booth example is like a lot of the times,
the stupidest thing you can do is the right thing to do, Like people
love stupid shit. Like entire career in this day is built a game company
around like the stupidest ideas that are hilarious. Ability to pay rent and eat
food depends on the stupidest plus yeah, yeah, yeah. Calendars with nearly
nude pictures of day laying in them. This is all my life has become.
I'm in my mid thirties and have to print, you know, huff
Naked Man. Calendis is five spinning limos, spinning limos about right now.
Paximania was again it was just like, what's the stupidest thing we can think
of to do? And that's making all kinds of money. It's Aaron tried.
He's not here at three, he's too busy making But I was on
a video call to discuss Packs Wrestling and Packs West. The day before I
left for E three, I had a multi person video fall these calls.
When did we get cut out of the loop? So that interest Aaron organizing?
That is because he'll do stuff and he doesn't I don't know if he's
oblivious or just doesn't care, yes, both, whether it's not inviting people
back from a previous show or things like that, where like people really want
to be involved and he's like, Oh, I thought they wouldn't care.
Oh we thought we were involved. This I will say, this is not
going to have a major impact on the Well, okay, a video calls,
pretty professional multi person video. That's what happens when you get the Chicago
folkstion. They want to do video calls and put together pitches and all this
other stuff. They're so business like out there with their card game. Uh,
keep the business out of Paxsimania. I say, yes, what with
the ownership up in the air, Uh, you know, the who owns
Packs Wrestling? We will probably could have been resolved in that show because should
have been said maybe Thomas Cliffhanger in the history of maybe we got to do
a bit whatever. Well, they were supposed to be music at the end
of an industry though. Robert KU's no, he's leaving, and I don't
know what that means for us. We are not going to be allowed to
do it. He was like, he's the one that kept us in like
fucking the smoke machine thing, fig machine whatever, fire alarm, and he's
like, yeah, it's fine, come back and do it again. And
he's not gonna be there anymore. I don't think other people would say that
to us. I shouldn't. Well, if the folks that read that put
together the show, I'm sure you know that they love right. Yeah,
yeah, no, it's I spent some time talking to some some other folks
about that stuff back at Last Packs, about the how dumb all of this
our lives some Yeah, no, sometimes it feels, like I mentioned sometimes,
I feel like we were running a rogue Packs within Packs. I'm just
like, like all of our panels have become this connected nightmare. There was
a yeah, yeah, there was a wild Packs Wrestling cinematic. There was
a while there that we were like literally in Twitter conversations with Sir Mix a
lot, specifically to have him interrupt the harmonics panel. Yeah, it was
just like, no, we probably need Sir Mix a lot to come out
there and have him to put put him on the glass, like we don't
him do no, no, not that jump on And I loved it.
Yeah, uh yeah, all right. My favorite thing about the group of
people you've gathered this segment is how much all of us turn on Alex.
We're gonna have Sir Max lock mountains didn't do. I checked my bank.
Yeah, and everyone will love it. Can we get the President's United States?
We'll put together subset, We'll get him to come out. But then
that wold he'll do the first cut as the deepest and uh huh yeah,
all of it has some fun, all the great civiccess hotly uh and and
then he that whole conversation got weird in a way that it was agreed that
we were going to stop talking to Sir Mix. We stopped pranking the panel
because it was costing so much money. Yeah, it was like Dave LaGG
and I were like hemorrhage and cash to like rent cash boxes and make T
shirts and murder people that we're getting in our way. And it was really
expective. Yeah, I bet hiring, yeah, hiring marching bands and we
had all we you know, we used to do production meetings like this is
how all the rolls Harmos got at some point is that no one in our
team gave a shit about promoting the games the show. All we care about
was like, well, what are we doing during the giant bomb panel?
The best thing, Well, I don't want to give away an idea that
we have the kids, we ever want to go back to it, but
I'm not like one the panel on wheels, ye peel that that was.
Someone mentioned that at that point that that is a great idea that you should
still do, even having set it out right. Put put a put a
table and folding table on some chairs on casters, and a sound system with
a really long tension table table with four microphones on that and just wheel it
out in the middle of your show and just start doing a different panel in
the different sound system and don't leave ever. Yeah until you leave. Well
we'll leave when you drive drive me out. It's good that you've said this
out loud now because the looming threat is always there. Yeah, the shoe
will drop. Yeah, Yeah, we talk about though, what do you
guys play to talk about it the next pack? Yeah? If it's anything
like Paxmania, it will be just competitive monologueing for an hour and a half.
The video games don't work, so we have to see who can talk
the longest. Becomes a slam poetry thing. Yeah, yeah, definitely comedy
packs. Yeah, I would definitely slam into that inching its way there.
Yeah, it's there, and it's there. I've I've been saying for a
while now that the video games are actually the worst part about There are people
who disagree with you about that. They're wrong. Okay, the last time
we played a video game, I can't believe they didn't play the wrestling game
to see. I even think that guy was playing it right. No,
yeah, yeah, sorry for not having the curtains. Yeah, this e
sports level fucking w W. It's like saying on Twitter about packs wrestling.
I can't want the fans thing playing the wrestling game we brought. Are they
burying wrestling? Yeah? So throwing a lot of shade at Aaron. He
doesn't really hard on that. He does three. He's not a D three,
he's not as Yeah, that can be negative. I wait to see
the flip side of this. Yeah, the darkest side. I just feel
like that's actually yeah, base level. Yeah yeah, rest of the year.
Oh man, you guys, ye so uh this is day one of
the show. We've got two more days to go. Teesdale. It sounds
like you're just kind of hanging out. Yeah, I'm flying home tomorrow.
Said awesome, something goes wrong. You guys got its different actually ship a
game, so I kind of hang around and yeah, that's the that's the
right that's the right way to answer that question and not just like under go
home and just sit around my underwear. But if you haven't checked out robot,
yeah, go watch, go watch anything you can find the hundred robot
golf because it is Banana's weird crazy, it's fun in a great way,
and the game is also very fun. Ye, please please check out one
hundred robot Golf. Also man of gamdev dot com. Well, let's focus
on the game. The other thing makes the money for your company. It's
like yeah, it's like, oh, you know, we're a multinational conglomerate.
We have charity and I'm like, right, but what about the oil
in the mercetaries, Like we don't talk about those things. Those are the
dark things that make us the money. Yeah, and uh, what does
adult swim games have at the show? Are you taking meetings for people that
are wanting to show you drawings butts or that? Mainly that mainly that bring
up bring your butt photos drawings. No, don't bring you but photos of
Jesus. That's what's at Sean Baptists on send those butt photos. Williams ask,
did you get any butt chugging U pitches? I know a guy.
I'm pretty sure that's gonna happen. Now we have in at Sony's booth we
have Rainworld and Headlander. I think actually they're going and uh that both men
awesome. Rainworld's just adorable, Like it's really really incredible. And then over
in Microsoft's booth we have Rise and Shine, which is the best game.
I can only make it about three minutes into before I'm just dead, Like
I can't, it's too hard for me. But it's amazing. It's like
really really beautiful by some Spanish developers so very excited about it. And uh,
pope's are you like, do you have to stand near for honor for
showing with like being at a company with resources, I'm not working a booth
for the first time in my e three lives great, right, it's amazing.
So like I'm hanging out with community people in medieval times tonight, Like
yeah, once, I've never been more angry. We could have voted for
different nights. Also, Portillos is like right across the right now of car
No Son, But yeah, I don't have to work a booth and it's
amazing. So I get to just do community stuff. Uh, and which
is the thing they hired you to do? Right, So that was what
I was getting at. With the resources, Like Harmonics, all of us
did so many different jobs, which was cool. You get a lot of
you into a lot, Yeah exactly. Yeah, of course, I just
have to focus on community now, which is awesome. And they have the
resources to do a lot of cool things. So it's it's a pretty exciting
time. Yeah. And then Drake, I just I just always assume that
you're in nine thousand meetings, uh, you know, shooting business guns,
Yeah, making up making up terms. I got to see Injustice too today.
Yeah, cool, it was cool. I'm checking out in the morning.
It's it's it's a pretty awesome presentation. Yeah, Superman does some really
intense shit. I saw that I caught like a couple of minutes of like
gamespots like stage demo when I was in their room or whatever. So it's
just you know, it saw its full screen of the gameplay and watched a
little bit that wasn't Daniel Dwyer. I was gonna say, do you want
to look at that face? It's just shoes. It's just shoes. They're
filthy, they're disgusting, and yeah, that thing looked that thing, it
looked pretty cool. Yeah, So yesterday I got to I got to watch
the press conferences. I had lunch of some people, and then I went
to our show and I was there for we we did the press conference from
like six to whatever, seven thirty or so, and then I we we
had a VR event afterwards, actually, where we showed fifty four stations of
virtual reality, and Jeff Keeley was doing his show in the middle of that,
and I couldn't hear what he was saying, but it was like there
was a show happening silently, like a like a haunted orchestra, no speakers
for the people that I was upstairs. So it's just like Jeff Keeley sitting
in the giant circle under a giant PlayStation thing, just talking to himself from
what I could tell, look as BlackBerry. Yeah. Uh the so that
was cool. And then yeah, and then today I mostly was just in
meetings and saw in Justice Too. I got to one of Rothers, was
like, hey, while we're here for this meeting, do you want to
see Injustice Too? And it's like, yes, a video game. I'd
love to see a video game. That would be really nicely three great,
I've seen one video game today. And then I went in that Chinese food
and then I came well, I came here, dropped off Giant Jenga,
right uh, and then I went and had Chinese food and then I came
back right See the rest of the week, I'm just doing meetings of people
like who you never hear of, like me as I, as I Drift,
like Marty McFly's family on that people in the shadows make the video games
happen, and my identity as I Jason Bourne, my identity out of existence
exactly. Yeah, I'm here hanging out, and then Alex is showing rock
band Unplugged. Yeah it's coming back. I got a rock band PSP demo
on my living room floor. Sends my right, which I wasn't supposed to
get no ye whatever, but any press. Yeah, please show this game
to anyone who will listening. Actually money for this thing, don't it?
Oh God, I want to give you a chance to really level up with
this organization. I want to make you the lead on a game that's sounds
great. Really excited that you're doing rock Gun Unplugged with the PSP. What
did I what? What are you doing? Yeah? I think I took
that with good human Yeah. Good at first, After the first meeting,
you ran with it. You did a great job the first meeting. You've
seen reticence about it, but which is completely fair. Yeah, I think
we have like multiple excited one. Drew Scanlon worked on a little bit of
that game. Yeah, that unites the rock band rock band and plug brings
together. Yeah, in a way that's hard to explain. And then Alex,
what are you doing for the rest of the show? What's yea other
than Rock Band Unplugged? You just getting around seeing some games? What's uh?
Yeah, I think I'm gonna go see some video games. I might
actually talk about them on this show. Here, this was this show right
here? Okay, that sounds good. Well, maybe we'll see if that
happens. Tomorrow. Yeah, you never know. Yeah, suggest you guys
like explore the part of the South Hall that that that they just you could
tell they rushed to fill in. You mean the geodesic dome. It's secret.
Kensh my my Kensha. Pick up pick of twenty sixteen is this via
control of That's a wheel you put underneath your feet and so like a bad
we balance board, like a lazy Susan. Essentially you put your feet on
and then you put a thing on. You can't see the whole thing is
you're controlling. I think it's your controlling rotation with it, which is like
a terrible thing to do with. Yeah, this is a good idea.
I like to live on myself and then spin around with So you can find
that. I believe it's right next to two different companies that make prepaid cards
for retailers. If you can find that there's just a random band playing and
it's not the two k bands they different. There's also a random orchestra just
set up the golf. Seven Verst orchestras outside the cavet Cent are unaffiliated just
playing this morning. I was like, yes, orchestras. Everywhere I go
there's another random orchestra at this press conference that I watched is the most unemployed
philharmonic bands. It's a good we're making wet band. The moorcasters roam the
streets. You have to fight your way everyone. Yeah, yeah, it's
crazy. Like these guys went and saw the Legend of Zelda and then I
sat down to record some audio about it and literally recorded audio on the show
floor and it was fine. Yeah, Like it wasn't loud, crowded,
and that's scary that you can play a game of Sucker in the back like
area. It's like football, but oh okay, okay, yeah, okay,
so I know it's football, so or sometimes association football. Could you
get us in a seat for honor? Can we come see you? Are
you at the booth at all? Are you just day? Okay, there's
play that game. That game is super fun. Yeah. Austin came back
from the Monday Night event saying that it was pretty cool. It's a hard
game to explain in like two sentences, but playing it it is like legitimately.
I feel like when you when you look at it and see the UI,
you go like, oh okay, I have to match this. Okay,
yeah, this is this is the left right around mat stre I get
it. I get match three. Yeah, it's finny playable with controller.
I get yeah. Uh yeah, so that's uh, that's going to do
it for us here tonight. Thank you guys for coming to hanging out.
Thanks shift, Yeah boys. Yeah, anytime we're gonna take off for the
night, we'll be back. We're back tomorrow. Is are we are we
five pm tomorrow? No? No, we're six. So first segments around
six thirty. First segment around six thirty, show production meeting. Okay,
we're starting six later, yes, okay, And then we're doing the yeah
it's there's a guest, and then we're doing our editor check in. I
decided that would show up and sit here. True people are yelling what we're
doing the opposite of what we're doing. We've turned giant arm against you.
Special guest editor check in? First? What time are wet? What time
will will be on the internet? Five? All right, So I'm just
like you know, I'll be streaming at at four o'clock from giant knife dot
com, which Steve lindbought while we were on the air, So we'll just
be doing a competitive stream on that side of the room. Yeah, totally.
Okay, Yeah, I have no I have zero problems get in now.
Yeah, CBS Legal may eventually like get involved in something like John Rictella
said about her mocks. It was like catching a catching you said that on
the record. Not a nice thing to say. It's terrible, all right,
said twenty sixteens, like catching a falling knife. We'll see that's true.
At five pm, we will talk about some video games. I think
I'm gonna see some Injustice and some other Warner stuff, and then some I
don't know, I have appointments. I'm gonna go see some video games.
We're all gonna see some video games. We'll come back and talk about them,
and then we'll bring in some guests to talk to them about them or
about whatever. Have a great night, everyone, Thanks for sticking it out.
See you tomorrow.