Man that Immortality discussion was painful to listen to. Main critiques I gathered from Jess is it doesn't embrace the 'campiness' (which is fair) and that's he 'keeps making the same game'. Also a fair criticism, but considering so many games play similarly (especially within a genre), the criticism reads more like 'I don't like this style of game so it just gets monotonous to me', which again, is fine. But for me, I feel I'd see that, accept it and move on.
I think my main issue with the discussion is beyond that, Jess's "criticism" of the game doesn't really feel it's actually about the game itself. It's a lot of complaining about 'why do people praise this game I clearly don't like' and 'I don't like the praise Sam Barlow is getting for this game'. The former just feels like a very old and tired brand of internet criticism, and the latter just feels like some personal vendetta against Barlow, which I don't really get. I may be misremembering, but I think at some point she does say she doesn't follow Barlow outside the games he makes, as a way to make it seem like this isn't meant to be a 'personal attack', but honestly, it makes the discussion feel even more bizarre to me as to why it feels like she still has such an axe to grind here.
If she doesn't like the game and feels its overrated, and doesn't like Sam Barlow for whatever reasons, that's fine, but it's just tiring to hear her go around in circles stating the same thing again and again during that discussion.
I don't think this is her intent, but the argument starts feeling like her saying 'I'm the only one with the intellectual prowess to see through the flaws of this game, and everyone else praising this is too stupid to see the wool being pulled over their eyes'. Again, I don't think this is her intent, but it just comes off as feeling a bit condescending, especially when the actual criticisms she's bringing about the game specifically don't seem to match up with the level of vitriol she's spewing against it.
At least that's just me. I don't really have a 'dog in this race' as it were. Sam Barlow's games aren't really for me personally, but that discussion was just hard to listen to.
Heh, weird to hear Bakalar complain about some of the acting in Stranger Things. Watched all of Season 4 and can’t say I have a clue about who he’s talking about being that bad on the show. Maybe he confirmed who he was talking about and I simply missed that part.
Maybe it’s just me, but feels like Ready Player One gets way more hate on Giant Bomb (specifically from Bakalar) than anywhere else. I’m not even the biggest fan of that movie (haven’t read the book), but hearing them say it’s on the same level as ‘Pixels’, and looking at the RT and IMDB scores of both those movies respectively, I’m just like ‘oh come on’ lol. I don’t know, I guess Ready Player One seems pretty inoffensive to me (neither great nor terrible), and otherwise an entertaining enough movie. So to hear folks have such strongly negative opinions on this of all movies just cracks me up a bit I suppose.
Kind of weird to see those Far Cry 6 emails become such a big deal to some people. I'm not saying I loved them, but personally I thought it was a bit funny (like Danny said), if not a bit silly and 'dumb' as well. To see some people on Twitter get so up and arms about it and steering the conversation into 'Look how Ubisoft is trying to guilt you into playing their games!!!' or some such just felt so over the top to me. Felt a bit like a crowd that's 'looking to be offended'. Not saying Ubisoft doesn't deserve criticism for other stuff they've done, but man, this ain't it.
I'm not sure if Ben was trying to start something more by bringing up this story again (honestly felt this story had already blown over well before this Bombcast aired), but I was kind of glad to see the rest of the crew quickly pivot it into just talking more generally about Far Cry 6 and sales speculation before moving on, instead of 'faux outrage' on the email itself. Just such a benign issue.
I don't think I really understood Jan's comparison of FFXIV to Destiny 2. To be fair, there is A LOT of content in XIV (which I agree can be overwhelming for a lot of players), but the actual onboarding of that content is fairly straightforward, due to how story focused the game is. The general advice to new XIV players is to 'stick to the main story' (or MSQ), do your class/job quests, and follow that through the expansions all the way to the current endgame. Now if you want to break off from that path to do optional dungeons, side quests, or older Endgame content from prior expansions, you can do that too, but if you want to follow the 'main part' of the game (i.e. the MSQ), it's a very linear path that the game makes very easy to follow.
I think Destiny 2 in it's current state is just in a completely different situation. There's story content that's existed in that game before that's no longer there due to 'the vault', and that experience for new (or returning) players is completely different today than say someone who played around launch time. As a result, if you don't keep up with the game, it can be confusing what 'content' you should be doing, and prior advice can now be outdated.
Not that FFXIV hasn't changed significantly over the years since A Real Reborn launched, but by comparison, XIV's approach of 'just follow the MSQ' is fairly easy to understand, and has been the same advice new players have been getting for years as a result. So I just don't see much comparison there between both games.
This is probably unfair, but there was something about Jan, being an American, and not knowing about Wichita that threw off that whole overrated/underrated segment and his answers for me. As soon as they got to Witcher 3 I was like, 'yeah, dude like that probably would find it overrated' lol.
@hayt: Thanks! Haven’t listened to this yet, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess this is another game they’re ‘lukewarm’ on as a group. And that’s totally fine, not saying that’s wrong or anything. But personally I’d rather play the game myself first before listening to those impressions. So thanks for the time stamp.
Lol, on the last episode didn't Jeff say he wasn't going to play Animal Crossing? Maybe I mixed him up with someone else, but otherwise kind of funny to see him go from that to casually 'so yeah I picked up Animal Crossing'. Honestly seems like a good pick up for him to play with his kid, so I think it was smart for him to change his mind.
Looks good. I'm curious what the Beastcast crew thinks about it. I remember after Half Life:Alyx was first announced there was a lot of whining from that podcast on why this game was VR exclusive and who it was really for (mostly from Jeff B. and a bit from Alex if I recall). But looks like Valve put out another quality game and at least from what I can tell, VR is integral to the experience. Curious to hear if they have a change of heart about it now.
Didn't really understand Vinny's comments on The Witcher show looking more low budget and not 'high fantasy'. It's too bad we need to compare all fantasy shows that come out these days against whatever gargantuan budget GoT had. Honestly the show looks good to me, and more importantly to me, very well acted IMO. Incidentally, I think the first couple episodes of the season were the weakest, but if feels like the group already made up their mind on the series. Also I just kind of rolled my eyes at the part Alex declared the show will get cancelled in 2-3 season anyways, so none of it really matters. Guess we'll see.
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