We Talk Over: Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase

EVERY DAY'S GREAT AT YOUR GAME PASS

I really liked what they showed here. Shout out to Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty which is not in the show tags.

I did such a strong 180 on this as soon as the Persona announcement came on. The rest was fine, but that last section really piqued my interest and enthusiasm.

Starfield looks incredible.

I think I've never agreed with Jess as much as when she made fun of how awful Justin Roiland's voices and jokes are. It felt very cathartic, thank you Jess!

im a weirdo, i will admit it. i watched the first summer game stream here and then later watched it on the nextlander twitch.

For today i watched the waypoint stream which featured brad and alex, and will come back and watch the giant bomb stream, so again i know im weird.

I'm curious what the GB crew had to say about Starfield. Waypoint was negative in a very snarky way, basically wrote it off because it had aspects of No Mans Sky and then also complained that the sky combat wasn't as good as like best in genre space combat. And finally they were presuming that all the extra planets would not be as interesting as the extra planets in NMS and Mass Effect.

Maybe NMS fixed this but wasn't to whole complaint about that game that every fucking planet was like the same just different minerals but the same sky robots came to harass you depending on how valuable the minerals were on the planet. And Mass Effect(which i love) is literally like lets visit 5-9 planets in space and do a bunch of quests and visit with the people but the rest of it is completely nothing, maybe some space mining, in the case of ME1 maybe a space worm pops out and you pick up some tech or mine something.

Longwinded post to say im excited for starfield and hope that they do infact put some cool weird stuff on random planets. Time will tell i suppose.

I get that you don't like rick and morty but shitting on the game felt so mean.

I never realized the YouTube versions of the videos are longer. There is a whole preamble with Jan. I always use the GB player.

Xbox and Bethesda are just best friends now!

I am all for Jeff B busting Dan's chops, but I wish it wasn't for everything he said. Some of the things he says that Jeff has a reaction to aren't that ridiculous and he should save it for the baffling stuff. Kind of makes it lose its luster.

Who knew that Bakalar had an ALF impression he's been keeping from us.

CHIE CHIE CHIE

You can sync this video up with the Xbox youtube video so you can watch in better resolution. Just mute the youtube video and use the audio from GB.

Pretty good show, IMO it did lack some hype factor because it's all stuff that's out relatively soon and mostly known about, but like Jeff said it's hard because they have so much stuff in the works already that's 2023/2024.

Ever since the Szechuan sauce thing, anything R&M related has been on the outs in terms of pop culture as people rush to make distance so that everyone knows they aren't "one of those" fans. It became one of those properties that's more popular to dislike than it is to actually engage with, and Roiland's style is permanently tied to it.

The Borderlands comparison falls flat because while they're both in the same vein of very random, rapid-fire, in-your-face sort of comedy, the R&M writing is actually pretty clever and funny most of the time.

Why does Jess feel the need to berate games she isnt personally into? the GoTY vendetta against Deathloop and now racing games. I understand not every game is for every person but some people are really excited for it. No need to dump on it for its 5min presentation.

Finally! Someone had SOMETHING to show!

CHIE

@oc92: i havent seen the video yet, but she's made it clear since at least GOTY that she doesn't like racing games, and in the last sgf stream she was like oh racing game is coming time to go pee.

Im not even a racing game fan, but like its not even close to the worst or most boring part of gaming. i love the current crew, but fuck were gonna get alot of bad takes on games and nothing but defense force on platformers. nintendo anything, and all things metroidvainia. Also i love dan(ive spent alot of time on his twitch) but good luck expecting him to enjoy anything with a story that doesnt get going within 10 seconds.

@muddy_cheeks: To add something positive to this, I have been loving the revitalized content y'all. Got such a solid core of people again. Looking forward to spending many more hours watching what you make!

DAN/JAN PERSONA 3 ENDURANCE RUN PPPLLLLLEEEEAAAAASSSSEEEEEE

LMFAO! Those headphones are the Sennheiser HD800 or HD800S, some of the best open-back headphones you can buy, and the cost is over 1,000 dollars. Sennheiser itself is one of the top headphone brands on the planet. I myself rock a HD6XX, a custom version of the HD650 from Mass Drop another great legacy headphone.

EDIT: I don't know what it is, but I'm just not feeling these shows this year. Maybe it's because many of these top games are set to come out next year, but they will likely be delayed again, so there is no excitement there. It's nice that people finally get to see what Starfield is about, and the spaceship segment reminded me of Colony Wars which is cool. Also think the Xbox owners getting a chance to play those Persona games is pretty awesome. They won't regret it. Those are some of the best JRPGs to come out in the last couple of decades.

As a gaming dad, I just gotta say I love when Grubb/Bakalar/Jason's kids wander into shots.

@youngshields: people think THIS was negative. I honestly had to stop with Waypoint because I'm not convinced they'll like anything but a Rob war game or Citizen Sleeper-type stuff (which I love). And the Brad factor at Nextlander is, well, it was a bummer here and it's a bummer there, and often Vinny and Alex get in on the action. Their podcast can be a slog for that reason, though I love their videos where they're goofing around. This is my long-winded way of saying I got pretty hyped for Starfield and was bummed that everyone else seemed to have knives out for it.

And is your name a reference to Casiotone for the Painfully Alone?! Used to be a client of mine and a great band.

Well hot damn, actual Starfield gameplay! I think it’s gonna be a perfectly cromulent game at worst, although I need to see more of the leveling / skill tree. I’m weirdly excited to scour a barren planet in the hopes of finding something, anything worthwhile. In short, I’m ready to be hurt again.

Also despite living in Pittsburgh for a decade, I have absolutely no desire to play more Fallout 76 to see what they do to it.

@beggary: haha yea you're like the 2nd person to ever make that call out about that reference. I made my Xbox gamer tag in summer 2007 and was listening to alot of casiotone for the painfully alone.

We'll stand together in the hyped for starfield crowd!

@youngshields: I was their/his publicist at that time, for Etiquette. Owen is a great dude. Best lyrics on that album.

@beggary: that's bad ass man, thats a really cool job. I heard him interviewed a few times around then, kinda pre being exposed to every artist via youtube and twitch. He seemed very soft spoken but exactly how id expect him from his lyrics.

@oc92: I kept thinking the same thing. I shut the stream off and watched the KF watch along instead. By the time it got to the Riot section I was already getting fed up with everything being negative. I understand not all games are for all people but no need to keep dumping on the ones you don’t like for extended periods. Say you don’t like it if you feel the need to and move on.

I'm happy for everyone who thinks Starfield looks interesting.

how do you make travelling in space (known for being pretty empty) interesting?

I wish I could get excited for Starfield, but unfortunately it's still a Bethesda product. I don't see a way in which it will release and not be full of immersion-breaking problems.

EDIT: Also I no longer look at these "[x] million players" stats with any sort of belief. There's a gulf of difference between "This many people have downloaded the game" and "This many people regularly play the game", but for these stats this difference does not exist.

As someone that watches multiple football games per week and cares enough about the sport to call it football , i can say that FIFA segments are extremely boring and uninteresting to me.

That Beyond Good & Evil 2 demonstration came at a time that Ubisoft was fighting tooth & nail to not have Vivendi do a hostile takeover of the company. To do so, they made a big announcement, pulled Michel Ancel away from his indie-studio before that studio had even released a game, and said that they were making the new BG&E. This was one of those games that fans wanted to see a new one of for a long time, and helped to make the stockprize rise, which dissuaded Vivendi from taking Ubisoft over. Now that the Vivendi threat is gone, there's simply no push for Ubisoft to work on this thing any longer. Michel Ancel straight up left the industry to go work at a Wildlife Sanctuary.

I will say it's a bummer that people are trying to police the tone of the crew. Typically people watch these things to get to hear their real opinions. If you're not enjoying the commentary, there are about 100 ways to get different commentary or you can watch the footage without any commentary. I want to know that Jeff G & Dan don't think Rumbleverse has much potential or that they don't like Hollow Knight all that much, and then get hyped for a game like The Last Case of Benedict Fox.

@perpetualoutput said:

As far as I can tell, you have two options here: you make it non-scientific and fantastical, or you have really interesting characters. It's the difference between an asteroid belt in Star Wars and the asteroid belt in The Expanse. I'm not a game designer, but it feels like the latter is much easier to do in a book or a television show that has transitions between settings and scenes than in an open-world game where the player might do the same actions over and over and over again.

@oc92: Jess' tendency to be dismissive of genres she doesn't "get" isn't much of a problem on its own, but when it's amplified by Dan (who does it even more) and not counterbalanced by anyone on staff, it can be a bit grating. This stream could have used more Jan or Tam.

I like the site's new direction overall, and I don't think they need to manufacture fake enthusiasm. But streams like this kinda emphasize the crew's blind spots.

Geoff lost his privileges to Kojima scoops.

That XP popup in the middle of Starfield UI needs some reworking

I had an annoyed post about some users reactions in this thread but I deleted it as I actually don't want to engage about it.

I thought this was a fantastic show and the crew did a great job too. Very fun, and its fun to watch Grubb's Grubbometer go off when he spots something that he knew was gonna be there ^^

And while I like R+M, the over saturation of Justin Roiland's voice would make that alien shooter game unplayable for me. It's fine in a 20 min R+M episode, but a whole game... no. Jess was 100% correct in the tone of that being super abrasive and unfunny. It's a shame too, because its colorful in a way a lot of games are not these days.

I bet Starfield will be uber-jank out of the box but mod support will make it a juggernaut on PC. Hopefully the console version looks in any way decent- the frame rate on that trailer was terrible for most of it.

A lot of positives though over all and MAN game pass is a fantastic deal.

Grubb mentioning announcements before the actual announcement is a bit of a bummer, most noticable was for DIablo 4 when he mentioned it's release next year + consoles right before the trailer. I'm pretty anti-leak in general though cause it ruins surprises and some of the fun, so hey. But for Diablo 4 in general: The necromancer trailer was pretty boring and I'd probably be more interested if it wasn't Blizzard.

Also, another difference between musous and diablo: Musous got significantly more enemies. They're great casual games that take more thinking at the higher difficulties. Lotta battlefield management. They're great!

Ok, Wo Long is the best looking game from this hands down. I'll gladly get that asap whenever it comes to Ps5, assuming it's not day and date.

I don't quite get why people, at least ones that already have a playstation/pc, are super hyped for them on xbox like Jan is?

The Kojima announcement was just nothing and I wish stuff like that'd stop. Just announce stuff when you actually have something and, preferably, when it's coming out within the year at most! Fuck off otherwise. Whatever it is I hope it'll be on PS5 too though.

Starfield is a Bethesda game so y'know what to expect. Only place to play it would be pc so the community can fix a lot of the issues it has. The gunplay seems quite underwhelming though? Like it looks like it'd feel pretty flat and sounds pretty flat. If the planets are all created and not just randomly generated that'd be real neat though, if they pull it off.

Lmao Jess' Morty impression. Great stream, thanks y'all!

One of the single most annoying things about game announcements is when people make fun of the name of a thing before they even know what that thing is. It's so obnoxious and pointless. All video game names, removed from context, sound dumb. And you know what? It doesn't matter. At all. I remember when the Wii came out and people talked about how dumb the name was. You know what didn't matter at all in the long run? How dumb the name "Wii" sounds. Everyone does this at some point, and it's just so tiresome.

I think that that hype is mostly because it's part of game pass which means that even people that don't think a 100 hour RPG is for them, now get the chance to at least try it out. And i know that there were a lot of newcomers to Persona with Persona 4, that never had the opportunity to play Persona 3. It's cool to have all those games be part of the same package now.

That said, Jan himself is a big Persona person, so i figure he already has ways to play these games for himself, so the happiness might be mostly directed to friends that now get the chance to try it out?

Other topic:

I will say, something about the Starfield reception irked me. I interpreted the crew seeing some good potential on the size of the world and the ability to make your own spaceship, improved faces, jetpacks and a decent UI, but was also somewhat down on how it looked and how similar the on-foot gameplay was to the Fallout games of yore. But given it's part of Gamepass the verdict was that it's cheap and therefore something that everything could (and probably should) give a try.

And that's totally true naturally, but at the same time.. aren't they 'editors' because they are able to point us towards quality and steer us away from things that are a waste of money or time in their view? Naturally you can't have too much of an opinion on an unreleased game that asks you to put 50+ hours in, but here it felt very much like they wanted to be more critical of the game before they realized that this game was going to be cheap to play for them and therefore it was no longer worth criticizing as much.

The price of Gamepass has been cheap up to this point, but at the same time there have been plenty of games outside of gamepass that i bought for less than 5$ or 10$ in the past and a massive RPG like Starfield is something that you'll spend easily more than 70$ on subscription money on before you're done with it. Especially on gamepass, time is limited and there are plenty of other games asking for your time. In such situations, discussing the quality of the game itself is paramount, as there's no price difference between spending time on Starfield, Persona 4 or Hollow Knight Silksong. I think it's totally legit to criticize Starfields combat and world-design if you feel like it's somewhat dissapointing instead of pulling all the punches because everything is accessible and cheap to try.

This car segment is killing me. "Cussy" "where do I put the gas" "car virgin" my lord. Funniest I've laughed in a long time.

@yogurtboy: I thought the same thing! It blocks the most important part of screen real estate!

I agree with the (few) comments about Jess' (and Dan's, but we're used to him by now) shitting on games she doesn't actively have any interest in.

It's genuinely rude, makes them come across badly and there's absolutely no need for it. It doesn't add to anything.

great video!!

my two cents is i would like to see not having closed captions turned on.. these ones werent too bad but somtimes they are so big and obnoxious.. just to day "SAD MUSIC PLAYS" lol... id love for them to not be turned on for these types of vids honestly.

Also, the framerate / audio quality on this particular vid really took a crap near the last 20 minutes or so. Hope Jan's computer isnt melting over there. stay safe man!

:-)

once again thanks for the show!