Let's Spoil Beyond: Two Souls

Really great conversation, by the way. I hope you do more of these! You guys had an ease of conversation that seems like you'd been doing these spoiler videos for ages.

haven't finished the game yet so won't watch this until I have...

also.... Justin McElroy is a legend. Have him involved with as much as giant bomb stuff as possible please!

If he says 'like' again, I'll shoot myself...

i love Justin McElroy so much that im literally thinking of buying this game just to watch this piece of content.

I really liked the game and can understand why maybe some didn't like the whole jumping around the time line and that it didn't make the story flow ect and I did feel that way until I saw the "Live" choice ending.

i'm not saying that is how David cage wrote it to be, maybe it was, all i'm saying is it made more sense at least to me having seen that ending and i kind of liked the game more for that.

How so? Polygon is pretty good, Kotaku is well, Kotaku, and Patrick rocks. :)

More spoilercast like this, always fun!

The image for this video is pretty much why I've not played Beyond. Those models are just creepy. Not close to reality creepy, just bad creepy. Page should sue them just for making her look so bad.

I support this crime.

I love it. Hopefully we will see more Let's Spoil conversations in the future!

I had no idea Justin and Kirk singlehandedly assumed all those identities and ran Polygon and Kotaku all by themselves. That's crazy! You guys are crazy! And this commenter I'm replying to hates everything! That's crazy too! NEW CONSOLE NEXT WEEK? I'M LOSING MY MIND HERE!!

I completely forgot about the underwater base. haha wow.

Great. Kotaku.

justin on that STICKIEST OF ICKY DAT DANK PURP BRAHH-AH-AH

I played Heavy Rain first, and I legitimately enjoyed what it was trying to do. I think that game was good enough to make the faults forgivable at the very least. And then I watched a playthrough of Indigo Prophesy.. and thought David Cage was out of his goddamned mind; what a dishonest, derivative, senseless story.

To hear that Beyond goes into the direction of Indigo Prophesy instead of the direction of Heavy Rain is extremely disappointing; one would think he would have taken the mistakes of Heavy Rain and learn from them rather than build an entire game off of those mistakes.

It's very clear that (at the very least) he should never touch the paranormal. I definitely agree that Heavy Rain just being a murder mystery made the story "small" enough that his attempts at creating some actual emotional connection in a narrative worked to some extent. Heavy Rain was actually supposed to have some paranormal stuff, but they made the smartest decision to cut it out of the story entirely, and it was much better off for it (despite the plot holes that decision created).

I'm still curious as to what he will do after this game. Despite his failings, I'm glad we have people like Cage in the industry. I think we only really "hate" his games because of how close they get to actually being amazing (and how easy it would be to correct some of those mistakes), in contrast to countless other game stories that pratfall right out of the gate.

More Justin McElroy as a guest in things would be great. Love his sense of humor and taste in video games. @alex Get him on the next powerbombcast! :)

"polygon's oldest brother" made me crack up pretty good

I was expecting this to be Vinny, Drew, and whoever else at GB that played it talking about the game.

Didn't Justin McElroy call Heavy Rain a giant piece of shit? I'm not interested in seeing him talk about Beyond.

This could be about anything and I'd still watch it for Justin.

Very cool video but I have to admit it was a little funny seeing the contrast between Justin and everyone else in how nimble they were with their words as well as their overall charisma when being recorded. Justin has understandably got this podcast-style shit down. Not meaning any offence to the other three guys of course.

Great conversation guys. Really enjoyed that. Couple of points I want to address:

-Cage actually did hire two other writers for his next game on PS4, so things are looking up. He said a while ago that he wants to keep having the ideas and the vision, but writing everything alone in one year is just too much work for one person, so he admitted that he needs help. I think most of the writing issues come from that fact, considering his shorts are pretty well written IMO (Sorcerer, Casting). He just can't keep up that level of quality over 2000 pages and a branching narrative with only 1 year available for writing. That's why he builds a team of writers now. He even said something along the lines of "people that are more talented than I am". There is an article on Destructoid and VideoGamer talking about it

-The teaser at the end likely doesn't lead to a sequel. Cage said specifically that he doesn't like making sequels, so I doubt this was intended to hint at a follow-up. I interpret it more as an open ended thing

-The grandma at the end of Navajo is indeed her spirit. They actually always look "alive" and not ghostly (Stan's wife in Homeless looks alive too), so this is consistent in the game. If the father dies he appears in a similar fashion, but he stands in a completely different spot if you save him. So this isn't a bug, it is just their spirits. When they appear Jodie already rode off, so that's why she doesn't react to them

I think I would have appreciated this more if it didn't feel like the "let's shit on David Cage spoilercast"I can quickly and easily admit the issues his games have but they are far better than the hot garbage everyone on the cast tried to make them out to be. They are also far less pretentious than 95% of the indie games I play and even less emotionally manipulative than something like the recent game Brothers (which everyone is now gushing over).

Justin's comments about writers possibly not introducing all of the information inside of a story might want to look up Hemingway's "iceberg theory". I'm not comparing Cage's talents with Hemingway's but the idea that you need to be given every shred of evidence is ridiculous. Also, there is a line of dialogue in the hospital where you are told who started the fire outside of even the newspaper...so again, sometimes I am not sure what game people actually play when they complain about certain things.

I will admit the chapter with the native american family felt out of place and almost like some form of extra DLC episode or something that should have been cut. In fact, I am wondering if that episode wasnt largely supposed to something that took place after the end of the game (See her hair, etc). Also, people weren't dying right and left: one person dies.

Cool video! I love seeing faces from other sites I frequent on Giant Bomb. :)

great show, interesting conversation. Thanks for the audio podcast version - way easier to deal with on a very spotty 3g connection.

Hellos Spoiled Games

"She can die, you know.

She can die.

She can die in the game."

Oh yeah...someone in this video is rocking a pair of Audio-Technica ATH-M50 head phones. Glad to see someone else with absolutely excellent taste in headphones! Best damn headphones I have ever owned.

Please don't tar Kirk Hamilton with the "Kotaku" brush. That dude has written some of the best articles I've read on videogames, and has brought a lot of his longer-form criticism along to Kotaku with him.

Oh, "us". I'd been excited all night about hearing Vinny's thoughts on the game.

I didn't play Beyond and I didn't know any spoilers (before this video).

This was really interesting.

I think it could have been even better. The starting point of the conversation was everyone's general impressions on the game. However, I think it could have worked even better, had someone (probably Patrick) laid out the major plot points of the game to get everyone on the same page, *before* start talking about the general impressions.

The most interesting bits were the ones where people addressed some details or problems of the game, but had a scene or a segment to back up their reasoning.

Good stuff.

did not enjoy Justin's input at all in this discussion. He seemed very pessimistic and close-minded about aspects of a story driven choice based game when talking about Beyond, but was totally open to those ideas when discussing The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead. It's like when talking about Beyond he decided that the fact there was a branching storyline was garbage, but liked that his choices mattered when they concerned character relationships in TellTale's games.

So glad you guys did this. Listened to the audio version today and really loved everyones take on the writing, the mechanics, and the sort of anaylsis of player choice in games in general and what you guys seem to want out of it. I love it. GB should do this more often, even if it regularly requires roping in a few outsider writers.

Good SpoilerCast @patrickklepek and @alex, was hoping someone would do this and i enjoyed hearing your thoughts on Beyond.

Speaking of the nonlinear aspect of the story, i was never a fan of how Lost jumped around in time but i kinda liked how it was handled in Beyond. I think maybe because this just focused on one character's history(Jodie) where Lost had a whole cast of character histories that you tried to keep straight in your head.

Of course in Beyond there were some segments that wondered why they placed them so early(other than it's a video game and they're showing you how to play).

They look pretty great overall. Without context that screen shot is misleading. She's supposed to be in pretty f'ing rough shape when that shot is taken. Homeless in the dead of winter.

That being said, the game is a good mixture of "very interesting" and "total trainwreck" as they largely agree on. Definitely an interesting game, but one that has to be recommended with quite a lot of asterisks attached.

It comes in around 5th or 4th for me. And I was honestly surprised how much I ended up really liking this game. I definitely recommend that people give it a shot.

I really enjoyed seeing this level of discussion on Giantbomb. Especially since it involved points of views not usually on the site. I already knew I loved Justin McElroy, but Ill be reading more of Kirk Hamilton's work after this.

MORE PLEASE!

That was very cool! Hoping for more of this kind of content in the future! And have Justin more often, maybe invite him for a Bombing the A.M.?

I know this was just one of your tangents, but the notifications during the Walking Dead were fine with me. In fact, if you turn them off, you miss one of the best gags in the entire series.

Lol, awesome.

I would love to see an in-depth discussion/story on this. It seemed there is a really story to pursue there in regards to good storytelling. It seemed to be agreed that if it was so seamless they didn't even realize they had made a choice, it was a negative. If it was too obvious they had made a choice, it was a negative. Where is the middle ground? Do a lot of gamers just need to get over the "i need to see everything" mentality?

I really need to play Heavy Rain again. I really don't remember it being so bad, or perhaps I remember it being absurd but thinking it was funny. I don't really remember. I recently played through Indigo Prophecy and I enjoyed the start to a certain degree. Then it just started getting more and more crazy and the last third is the game just throwing insane shit at you one after the other. It was a drastically different experience for me. I'm wondering if that is just typical David Cage symptoms; the first game you play is pretty interesting but the next one is just too crazy.

I hate Kotaku as much as anyone, but this video was completely fine and enjoyable.

"Justin McElroy...Kotaku"

It would be hard to put together a more wrenched combination of gaming 'journalism'.

Some of you could have been slightly more inviting to our two guests in these comments. :\

I can't believe it took me this long to hear Heavy Rain being called racist. To me that was the defining issue with heavy rain and it astounds me to hear from someone else years after it was released. That game was billed as the next step in video game narrative. Whether or not it climbed to the great heights promised is almost beside the point, but some game that conducts it's characters as irresponsibly as Heavy Rain, should not be what we as an industry put as our best foot forward.