1Upsmanship: Horizon: Forbidden West (Feat. Jason Pargin)

Aloy's pushing her way ever-deeper into what we're pretty sure is a tiny-sized representation of the contiguous United States, and we're right along for the ride! Michael and Adam welcome long-time friend Jason Pargin back to the show to discuss the follow-up they've been explicitly waiting for ever since Zero Dawn dropped. Did the promise they sensed from this franchise pay out?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, hello, all you beautiful folks, gather around, come on in.

(00:26):
It's time for another one upsmanship. I'm your host, Michael Swain.
And there's another one. That's right, there's a second one.
Say hey, hey, he's me Adam Gazer, second host, glad
to be here, prithe be unto you, Adam Ganzer and um.
Sometimes we have a guest. Sometimes we don't on this show,

(00:46):
but here to discuss video games today with us. Is
you guessed at this time? Yes, a third person? Indeed,
please introduce yourself our very special guest. I am Jason Pargon.
I've been on the show a couple of times before.
I used to write under the pseudonym David Wong back
in the crack dot com days when these guys also
worked there. I'm getting my book plug in White at

(01:08):
the top in the Heart radio air. At least I'm changing.
I wrote a novel called John Dies at the end
they got turned into a movie. That's the thing I'm
probably most known for. The next book in that series
is up for preorder now. It is called if this
book exists, You're in the Wrong Universe, And you can
just go to any bookseller and type that in and
it will it will come up or your local your

(01:30):
local bookstore. But more relevant to this show, I have
been playing video games for forty three years since I
was four years old. My parents bought us a Pong console,
and despite that, or possibly because of that, I have
very strange opinions on video games. Some of the most
beloved games of all time I hated and vice versa.

(01:53):
What was the second What was the second game you
got after Pong? Like? What when? And when was that? Well?
Pong came with like a battery. Yeah, yeah, I have
not played in the games between. I have been playing
that for forty three years. Um, like Pong came with
the battery of of like tennis ping, Pong like a
bunch of metaphors for a block that bounces another block

(02:15):
back and forth. And then after that, at some point
we got into t and that just blew my mind
because you could actually see people and do stuff, and yeah,
games that now are like the most infamous horrible games
of all time. At the time, I was like, oh
my god, I'm controlling et making him do things because
you didn't know, like you know, you're you're six years

(02:37):
old or whatever. I would have been at the time amazing,
It's God, what a time. Uh. Alright, so passing our
first checkpoint because we were in a tight ship. Now
that we're with I heart, they've s some parshal memos,
they said some memos. They've made it clear. They've had

(02:58):
people knock on my door, which I thought was a
bit much and said on the rails, a podcast cannot
be podcast listeners do not tolerate that. So that brings
us to our first segment. We've squatted by a fire
and lost consciousness for a few moments in order to
freeze a point in space time that we can now

(03:20):
return to um, a power that we never mentioned, but
most video game characters have nowadays. Uh. And this segment
is now called tell me like I'm ade bit and
tell me like I'm ad bit. I hesitated, you know,
just for effect, not because I forgot the name s
um and tell me like I'm a bit adam. Listen up,

(03:40):
this are vaunted, are much vaunted. Guests, Kindly if they
would explains the game in in simple brass tax terms
to someone who's some theoretical straw man who has only
played pong and et someone who's not like, let's let's
even throw out zero Don. So, Jason, if you would, um,

(04:02):
what are the important takeaways of Horizon Forbidden West. If
you're starting from scratch, tell me like I made bed, Yes,
proceeding with this explanation with Joe rogan esque efficiency these games,
This one, as you mentioned, is the second game. First
one is called Horizon Zero Don. This is Horizon Forbidden West.
So I guess Horizon is the name of the franchise.

(04:27):
The word Horizon does not come up in the games,
but it doesn't matter. It's an open world game in
which you play Alloy, a woman with spectacular hair who
exists in a complete ecosystem, this vast area of robotic animals.
Some of them are gigantic. Each machine is kind of
designed after some real world creature in our world, from

(04:47):
elephants to tidewarners, mirnosaurus Rex's and they are kind of
wondering the landscape, interacting with each other. You as part
of the primary gameplay loop, you must hunt these machines
for parts and that create It's what is the most
unique part of these games, which is that each machine
is made up of a bunch of components. They're all

(05:07):
fully animated and they function together like a machine, and
you can remove them with attacks, and as you remove
different parts, it changes how the machine behaves. So the
entire strategy of fighting some huge creature is this big, complex,
multi stage process where you may, for example, if it's
capable of digging underground to hide from you, it has

(05:28):
a specific limb that lets it dig, you can hit
that with an arrow or some weapon blow it off,
and now it can't dig anymore. But it may switch
to some other attack that you like even less, so
you have to think through and it adds tons and
tons of variety to the combat. All of this, including
the environment, is rendered in graphics so amazing that to me,

(05:50):
I think they look a generation ahead of any other
game I've played. I think I thought that that about
Horizon Zero. Don I think the same thing about this one.
There's not another game on my PlayStation five that looks
like this anything like He's played many iterations of Ponds, so, um, yeah,

(06:10):
back back when the games, the graphics were in your
imagination and now it's uh, they can actually show it
to you. But the game is set in a post
apocalypse about a thousand years into the future, but it's
not a post apocalypse where everything is gray and brown,
which has always been my impression of like the Fallout games.
This is uh. You get lush jungles and snowy mountain
peaks and tropical beaches with waves that glint in the sunlight.

(06:34):
It's a beautiful landscape and everything about it is very
striking to look at. Um And then there's the story
element of it is and this is where I think
my opinion is probably weirder than anyone else's. The story
behind the Horizon games and the lore is one of
my favorite science fiction stories in any medium, in books, movies.

(06:59):
I the whole backstory and as details as it is
in the way, the whole like the society is that
exists in the timeline of this game. Humans a thousand
years from now exist as like tribal societies coexisting with
these very advanced robots. But they don't know how things
got like that, so they developed all of this complex
mythology that's wrong that each of these tribes has like

(07:22):
their own idea of how the world got that way,
and they all have their own kind of like their
own rituals and culture and all that, and that's kind
of what you have to navigate in between when you
are killing robots and stealing parts from them. Ding ding,
I think, yeah, well without the timers line tape breaking,
yeah about that time or it's very formless. I do um.

(07:46):
I appreciate the brightness. I appreciate you bringing that up.
I feel like it's more of a George Miller uh
post apocalypse, almost like the creativity of a Mad Max universe,
for example, George Miller. I think so. For example, one
thing that Fury Road did, so much of the storytelling
about the culture in that world was done in the

(08:06):
costume design and in the design of their homes, their rituals,
the type of how they decorated their vehicles. It didn't
it wasn't verbally told to you were all in this game,
all of the like in these tribes, their warriors, their priests,
they all decorate themselves with parts from these machines. And
then the more like upper status there and the tribe,

(08:27):
the more rare the parts. And the costume design is
fantastic because they've they've harvested these parts over time and
then created this elaborate like jewelry and headdress and everything,
and nobody ever calls attention to it. It's something you
just have to see. Um, and you can see how
these people try to make themselves look very like powerful
or imposing or whatever, and they're in some ways ridiculous,

(08:50):
but in other ways that's kind of what the game
is about. It's about how like humanity rebuilds itself when
it's totally cut off from its its history. Well, I'm
going to immediately invite you to expand upon that, because
it's time for the next big swath or segment or
chunk or hunk or help me out ad him a

(09:11):
few more. We're not ready to move on from this yet.
What are other synonyms for Fort Parcel? Uh? Parcel acreage
of the podcast, which we call the Rants. No video
game tie into the name, it's just the Rants. I
feel like that that just betrays you haven't played enough
Call of Duty, because you'll hear plenty of rants if

(09:32):
you play enough Call of Dude. Oh sure, I just
waited through a video game common culture generally, Um, they're
no stranger to rants. So uh, I think we'll do
should we do? I think we should actually let Jason
go for the first time because he's kind of on
a roll, so we freestyle the order of the rants sometimes, so, um,
please expand upon that, Jason, why is this such a

(09:55):
fabulous sci fi story you said in any medium? Etcetera, etcetera.
What are you sort of your more emotional personal takes
a capsule review, if you will, rather than telling someone
who's never heard of it before, what's up? And uh,
your player one in this scenario, so if that affects
your role play at all, your player one, take it away, lights,

(10:18):
dim curtain parts I went into last time we I
was on here that I'm very careful to never phrase
this is the best game ever made. I always have
to phrase it as this is my favorite game or
my least, because I have very particular tastes and I'm
a very big believer in that different games hit different

(10:43):
brains different ways. Um. Like, there's a lot of games
that I perceive as having like addiction mechanics that I
don't enjoy. Games that have like a bunch of different
where they have like ten different endings based on choices
you made. I hate that. I hate thinking that I'm
to miss Nyanta out of ten in these where other
people that's what they live for. I'm not objectively right

(11:05):
about that whatsoever. This is so, this game is these
this franchise is my favorite game franchise ever. Um that
I would never call it the best game ever made.
Like the some of the criticism we're going to get into,
particularly things like how they handled difficulty in not letting
the player like salt things themselves. They're all those flaws

(11:28):
are there. But it's kind of similar to if you
talk to somebody who what's some game people get obsessed with,
like Fall in New Vegas, like a game where people
play for a thousand hours where for them yeah? Or
Skyrim like like any skyrom player, Like it's like, oh, yeah,
I've got two thousand hours in Skyrim. It's my favorite
game ever. And then if you ask them, well, are
there any flaws in Skyrim? They will talk for the

(11:51):
next two weeks about the millions of jenk and stupid
things that don't make sense, and oh yeah, one time
I failed the mission because I got caught in a
doorway behind an NPC. Like, they can go on and
on about the flaws, but the game casts a spell
on them in a way that it's like I will
forgive anything this game. I love the look of it,

(12:14):
I love spending time in this universe so much that
I'm extremely forgiving of the flaws, Like the design of
these creatures, the animals, all of them, and not just
the way they're designed, but the way they move, the
way they behave, the way they fight. I think it's legitimate,
great art. Like I can't believe it. I can't believe

(12:34):
it exists. It's not just creature designs, the entire ecosystem
design and everything about the way they move, the way
when they're wounded you feel bad for them because they
like starting lumping away, and um, they get scared and
some may different animals react different ways based on their
disposition or whatever. Um, it's just I love it so much.

(12:54):
I like the main character. I like how Aloi is
kind of a dick a little bit. She's she's not
patient with people, she's not humble, um, but she's in it.
It's the entire story, and like being an open world game.
The curse of these games normally is is that you
get you know probably what, two missions if you add

(13:14):
up story side collection stuff. There's so many of them,
particularly like ub Soft type games are kind of just
mindless and it's just something you're doing just to be
doing this game. Handles it more like The Witcher three,
where every mission pretty much has story attached to it,
and it's usually got some sort of a either a

(13:37):
funny or a flamboyant character or something that's interesting tied
to what you're doing, to what you're collecting, and so.
And then the central driving point is that you are
having to go from tribe to tribe, from culture to culture,
and these people are farmers, these people are warriors, these
people are metal workers, and having to navigate like she
needs something from them each time she needs access to

(13:59):
this piece of the land or she needs this tool,
and they're gonna make her do something, and she's always
having to intervene in sort of some sort of political
conflict or something. And it all ties to the central
theme of like humanity trying to rebuild itself in the
way we invent cultures to help us survive in a
hostile environment. Because the premise of this is it's a

(14:20):
post apocalypse and due to the way it came about,
like all record of history has disappeared except for what you,
as the main character fining and you piece things together.
So everything about the story, the combat, just the environment
hanging around it just plugs perfectly into my head, like
I can't believe that this game isn't all anyone talks

(14:41):
about all the time. I was shocked that Horizons Zero
don didn't spawn thirty imitations of that combat loop. Or
you're taking parts off of enemies and then how you
what you take off effects how they behave, including like
possibly making them more aggressive, like if you do it,
you know, And I never saw another game that did that.
I don't know if like the Monster Hunter games do

(15:02):
I don't. I don't play those, But that's what Jason's
watching Ukraine news being like why not more Horizon food?
Why are we not still talking about west uh? But
but like for example, people who know the context of
the follow up games and gaming news, this game came
out right at the same time as elden Ring, and
elden Ring completely blew it off the front page like

(15:25):
a belding Ring is everybody I knew was playing. Elden
Ring is a full time job. That is a game
that does not appeal to me in the slightest I've
never seen one clip, one trailer, one screen grab, one
gameplay video that for one second made that look like
something like a world I want to spend time in.
I just don't want to spend time there. Anything you
tell me about how sharp the combat is, Oh, you know,

(15:47):
how vast the map is. It doesn't mean anything. I
don't It's not a world I want to spend time in.
It's a completely subjective thing. Yeah, that's fair. I think
I speak for a lot of our listeners and myself
when I say, when Jason's on, I he almost has
like a gold blue mass quality. I just want to

(16:07):
listen to. Like I could let him go for the
whole hour, but I gotta I gotta respond. Can I
be players? Yes? Please? I didn't want to go next? Right? Good?
I didn't want to go I want to go what?
All right? Well, that's a fun little treasure. That's a
fun little mystery box, the little arc. We can get
paid off later, all right, So player to plugging in. UM,

(16:28):
I just want to say, you know, sometimes here in
one ups Ville, we get jaded. We play a lot
of games, and we analyze those games. Were often discussing them,
uh in comparison to the best games of all time,
and discussing whether something holds up to a pretty high bar,
which in our mind has something to do with being

(16:48):
a seminal influence, um, innovating a mechanic or system that
is then influential or carried on, or just some thought
provoking in some kind of artistic dialogue with the audience
or commentary on interactive you know, the the interact medium.
And so I really appreciate when someone with almost a

(17:10):
George Bailey esque optimism about a game comes in and
reminds me of what a miracle. Some elements that make
this series unique are, for example, that with that we're
only two in, like, I'm not fatigued with this yet,
and that's something I need to pause and cherish for
the time being, because I do agree that, um, it's

(17:32):
a fresh I p that really has a miraculous, captivating
world ient of this game. I spent about a hundred
hours in it, and now I am playing elden Ring
like it's my full time job, because it kind of is,
because we'll be covering it later on this show. But um,
but I will say elden Ring doesn't come as naturally
to me, so I'm I'm more on the spectrum. I'm

(17:54):
leaning towards camp Jason Ware. I fully understand being captivated
by the positive elements of this world. UM, I think
where this becomes a rant is that I do have
issues with what I perceived to be ways that it
didn't live up to the potential I had in my head.
And I need to I need to huddle up with

(18:17):
my game bros. And figure out whether that's a discordance
in my soul or something that actually speaks to uh,
the execution of the game. Because I do have problems
with this game. I feel like the very thing that
is so revolutionary about it. I'll put it this way.
Adam and I covered the first one, and we both

(18:38):
famously on this podcast put our reputations completely on the
line by saying we're not going to keep this one.
And if you're a long time listening, you know what
I mean by keep, uh put it on the celestial
hard drive of games that we enshrine as the best
of all time, are the most important of all time.
And uh, we said we aren't going to keep the

(19:00):
but we'll probably keep the sequel. And I'm very curioused
to see if that's true, because that that means that
it's in some way lived up to something that we
were expecting from it, that we thought it would do.
And I don't know if anticipation is the best way
to interact with art, because if I go into a
movie expecting too much out of it, ah, it often

(19:22):
fails to deliver right, and then a game can be
the same thing. But that's all a long caveat before
I say that I found the combat to have serious problems,
and I'm excited to talk about them, but they also
deeply troubled me. I'm troubled by the combat problems in
the game, and I thought, with the brilliance of the

(19:43):
systematic view of enemies and enemies as a collection of
parts that fall apart um, I think you could perfect
that even further. I don't know, I don't I have problems,
all right. I want to hear from Adam. I can
elucidate that in more detail, but actually just want to
get to the meat of the things. So I'm gonna
stop my rant there, Pipe sound, Pipe sound, and Adam

(20:06):
take us along, okay, player three Adam games are plugging in.
So look, I agree with every descriptor that Jason made
of this game, but I didn't really like this game
that much, and I wanted to. I really wanted to
like it, and Uh, I just kind of thought it
was good, but not amazing. Now here's things I will

(20:28):
say that are amazing about it. It's the best looking
game I've ever seen, far and away. Are there better
looking games out there, maybe, but I haven't seen them. Like,
the world is incredible, the intricate design is incredible. The
I'm gonna call them costumes, but they're not really costumes.
Glad we talked about costumes costume designs. And the outfits
are like not only outfits you can get, but the
outfits just on a random person out in the field

(20:50):
somewhere are all just astounding. They're so cool. Um So,
the attention to detail in general is astonishing like that,
it's clearly through a gantic number of staffely a giant budget. Absolutely,
And to add to that, the the acting and the
motion capture like as in like the cinematic quality of

(21:11):
this game is unparalleled as well, like it like just
from a how do you capture a performance of an
actor and render it realistically? This game has achieved something
no game has achieved before it. Like imagine, for instance,
of El Noir had this engine, and like what that
game would feel like if you could see it done
that way, it be incredible, so it deserves all the

(21:31):
acclaim it's getting for being a great idea, for being
well executed. That said, I don't like the combat. Here's why.
It always devolves into a melee chaotic dodge fest. Although
every time you do a boss fight, like an actual
boss fight where you meet a new animal and basically
have to destroy it. Um, that's when the combat is

(21:53):
the thing they promised, which is sort of the strategic
and thoughtful like picking a part of the animal, encountering
its moves and stuff. If it was that way, inexperience
all the time, I would have said this is one
of the best games ever made. Just that alone would
have done that. But it doesn't. Anytime you have to
fight two or more animals, it devolves into basically melee combat. Now,

(22:15):
in their defense, melee combat is so much better in
this game that it wasn't the first. They added so
many things like Destiny style supers and you can pick
your favorite. Uh. They added all kinds of extra like
combos and then ways to sort of set up an
arrow explosion with your melee attack and stuff. So there's
a lot of cool stuff they did to mitigate that

(22:35):
but the truth the matter is it's not that great
of a melee combat game, and I don't think it
ever will be, Like the idea isn't great for melee combat. Um,
So other concerns I have that I don't want to
spend forever on, but one of them is Alloy. Jason
perfectly described Alloy. I think she is kind of an asshole.
She is a little bit uh condescending, and for me,

(22:59):
although we did saw from her towards the end, I
think that the addition of the beta character kind of
made her gross some emotionally, and I think the developer
knew that that was a problem and addressed it as
a character arc and I appreciated that. But um, I
think a l A is a problem character because I
don't believe a person could have the insight into the

(23:20):
way things work that she has as in, like I
understand she has the focus and that that gives her
insight into how the world works, but she seems to
retain none of the culture or tribe or world that
she came from, and that pulls apart the sci fi
threads for me, Like this person is not a person
born of her time, and that troubles me, because I

(23:42):
think I would prefer her if she was like if
she didn't always understand what was going on on like
a macro level uh, and instead kind of struggled to
figure it out, Like, say, Varl, did I think I
would like to It's also hilarious, yeah, because Varral will
be like, um, the grade metal bird is exactly yeah,

(24:04):
it's it's a it's a sun Wing. Dumb funk. I'm
gonna take it all the sun Wings sinking with the
bluetooth and and like I'm not And look, I understand
why there needs to be an omniscient character because the
designers don't want us to get so bogged down in
the lore of the world that we can't tell the
larger story. But like, in my opinion, I think that

(24:27):
might be better for the larger story. Like I'm not
particularly enchanted with the Zenith, but I do think they
would have been cooler in the next game, Like if
we didn't even know there was a thing, like this
game could have just been about the Forbidden West and
the problem with the plague and Regala, who was an
excellent bad guy who kind of gets shoved to the
side once we find out who the real bad guys

(24:48):
are spoiler, they're humans from a different planet that survived
and came back here. I kind of feel like they
sort of jammed a bunch of stuff together to make
this feel like it's as important Zero Dawn in terms
of the world building. And I don't know if they
needed to do that. Um, I think that might have
been the wrong way to go with this, Like it
might be more fun on a smaller level. I know

(25:11):
you want to say a bunch of stuff. I know
you do it, so hold on, let me make this
last point. Uh, the last point is, and I know
we're gonna argue about it. I didn't connect to or
care about the different tribes. Now I'm I am happy
to hear Jason explained to me why that is ignorance
on my part or why my brain didn't get it.
I'm happy to I really am, because I wanted to. Um.

(25:32):
I thought they looked cool. I thought their cultures were
kind of shallow and based on dumb, sort of dumb extrapolations,
and like none of these cultures are at all curious
about the world they live in. And that doesn't seem
true to me. Like, I just kind of felt like
things were static culturally in a way that I don't buy.
And I know that's a high level criticism, but it's
a high concept game and it sort of invice those criticisms.

(25:55):
Other than that, I thought it was amazing. That's my rant.
You're right about so much and wrong about stuff too,
and we'll make for a very good episode. So we'll
get onto that episode. Um right after an ad break,
which we have right now. Buoyaka shaw yeah yeah, yeah,

(26:20):
I whoop, and we're back from the adak um. It's
game on? Are you going to do it? Every time?
And I love it every time? It's boy sha all
the way down. The game on is when anyone can talk,
we can and we can relax, turn out to scream

(26:40):
over each other. We all just ran simultaneously. There is
too much. I could do two episodes about this game.
I'm realizing, Um so ship, where do we start? First
of all, in reversal use it's fresh on my mind.
I liked that. I think the plot is one of
the in terms of being a traditionally told open world

(27:02):
video game plot. I'm fully with Jason on it being
one of the strongest in the history of gaming because
and this is so hard in an open world game. Um,
it's so much easier in a game like Death Loop
to tell a story that you walk away going. I'm

(27:22):
just saying, like, you know this, you know this to
be true in your heart. You play an open world
game that's like eight twos, tell me you you don't
walk away most of the time going. I followed the
gist of the plot, like I understood the stakes, but
I forgot big chunks in the middle of like Ghosts
of Tsushima your Assassin's Creeds, because it's just too long.

(27:44):
It's too much for human brain to retain. I was
thinking about climbing around and stabbing stuff, and if I
can get eight feathers to upgrade my thing, I forget like, oh,
who's that guy again? Oh yeah, blah blah blah. They're
killing him for some reason. And it it did the
best to mitigate that of any open world game I've

(28:04):
ever played with a very and the developers have talked
about this, um and it's not the only open world
game to use this design, but I think it works
so well, and you can contrast it with something like Cyberpunk,
which doesn't do this, and I feel like to its
detriment um they created a plot, so they I'm just
saying the plot is so smartly developed because every side

(28:28):
quest comments upon either the theme or builds directly towards
the events of the main plot, and the main plot
is honestly felt inspired more by something like The Avengers
than anything else a little recent pop culture history. It's
like a slow assembling of all the main characters who
are going to play key parts in the final event,

(28:49):
and then through them like the each character was the
living embodiment of one leg of the plot. So you
kept being reminded of, Okay, this is going that's right,
this is going on. I'm just saying I left the experience,
I left the ride, so to speak, with a clearer
idea of the plot in a this happened than this happened,
than this happen and why than almost any open world

(29:12):
game I've ever played. And I liked the plot. If
it was maybe it would have been a good movie.
And what they did in order to create they did
this Russian nesting doll thing where they said that the
signal from the Zenus is actually what woke up Hades
in the first game, which I don't know how many
times you can pull that trick, but it works once,

(29:33):
like to make that made the second game. You know,
it's always a challenge when you have a series like
this to say, right, but this time is the most
important because this is happening. And I actually bought their
reasoning behind that, that the Zenus signal is why Hades
was awoken in the first place. I don't know how
they'll do that for part three and how it will
always be true that whatever aloys up to is the

(29:56):
most important it's ever been. But that's a problem all
successful franchises like this have, right, Marvel has that problem.
What's the next Danos? What have you? But um, there
were just so many ways in which I was like,
smart game plan, just such a so smartly put together.
So part of the issue with writing science fiction like

(30:17):
the first game, obviously these are science fiction stories, and
the first game when it starts, you have no idea
why that world is the way it is. And then
the story you're uncovering in that game. I realized, there's
some people listening to this who have played the first
one but not the second one, so we are spoiling
some things. But um, the mystery you're uncovering is what happened,
and what you eventually wind up doing is you find

(30:39):
out that Alis her kind of mother in a way,
UM sacrificed herself to as part of this project to
preserve humanity after this apocalypse and robots took over, and
it kind of brings together all of these themes about,
you know, what's her responsibility to the world and what
her mother's sacrifice from what these previous generation, the mistakes

(31:02):
they made, and how things got like this. So there
are several moments in that first game where it's kind
of like like a shocking twist, like the bottom falls
out of the world, where you realize it was this
one stupid software mistake that ended civilization, Like it's this
one thing where they didn't have a kill switch for
the machines and that was it. And so they're like
having these meetings where they are mapping out the scenarios, like, oh,

(31:26):
we have like eight months left of civilization, like it's
can't be stopped, and so they have to start putting
together this plan to try to preserve the species somehow.
UM that all of that is revealed laid in the game,
and it's revealed through like these legitimately like shocking twists. Now,
when you're writing a part two, you have the same
problem they had when they tried to write Apart two

(31:48):
to the matrix. The matrix is it's plot pivots around
a gut punch twist. When you realize the nature of
the universe. That's not what you thought. So you're writing
part two, it's not just Okay, now we've got this universe,
here's more stuff that happens. But rather we have to
recreate the gut punch surprised me again, even though I

(32:12):
was just surprised and I'm exactly a surprise, right. That
is incredibly difficult. I am saying this as a professional
author of horror and sci fi novels, that you're coming
back and it's like you have to keep surprising people
and so here to spoil the story. And if you've
not played the game, stop play the game for one
hundred hours and then we always to the shocking twist

(32:38):
is because the whole thing with these games is you
have this juxtaposition between these tribal societies and these robots
that are incredibly advanced like AI s and in these machines,
and these weird like people you're shooting them with bows
and arrows, and it's just it's like, that's so bizarre
that the humans are like at a tribal level and
these robots are clearly highly, highly advanced. So to create

(33:01):
that similar like gut punched twist, you find out part
way through this game, and they hid this on all
of the trailers, all the promotion materials. It was part
of the it was banned from any reviews mentioning it.
They're just sorry. Just in the lead up to this
game being released was sort of my last week's at
working at I g N, and I just want to

(33:22):
say it was fascinating to behold the draconian severity with
which uh they would be like, because we got codes
for this game to play it early, and they were like,
you cannot mention beta, you cannot mention the word zenith.
You can't like if we see you tweeting anything that
has the word zenith in it lead the lead up

(33:43):
to this game, if we will assume it's about forbidden
with you know, they were very careful about the plot,
thank god, because when that happens, when suddenly like you
think you're at the point of the game where you
think you're okay, I'm doing the stuff. I fought some machines,
I'm retrieving the thing, and then oh, Hades is back.
I gotta step Hades. Yeah, the ceiling explodes. It In

(34:07):
float down, these people dressed like they're from the year
four thousand, wearing like nanotech force fields, and they have
superpowers and they're unlike anything that exists at universe, anything
you've ever seen before, and you have a totally third
different time period. And it turns out this is a
group of rich people who escaped the planet a thousand

(34:27):
years earlier and called themselves the Zenuts, and they basically
have been they left and now they've come back. But
in while they've been gone, they've continued to advance. And
it is dislike for me, somebody who has totally bought
into this games, this universe, that was a shocking, shocking twist,
Like they have these robot minions that you cannot fight

(34:48):
and they're totally different and weird, and that you have
to go running from them in this blind panic because
you can't stand up to them. Your weapons don't do anything.
It is just totally turns over the table. So when
they sit down to write horizons, you're done. Three which
is probably already done. How many different kinds of robots
that fundamentally feel different can you come up with? It's

(35:09):
amazing because you're right, the Pharaoh robots feel different than
the Zenus Specter robots. They feel like designed differently. Uh
and I don't know how you yourself, but they feel related.
I think that's like that's the kind of detail work
that just briefly that makes the game special. Is that
like those feel like robots that are two thousand years

(35:31):
older but based on the same idea anyway, Sorry continue, Jason, Yeah, exactly. Well,
it's just when they sit down to right part three,
they will start with, what's the gut punch twist this time?
That's how you start writing that story, and then you
build up around it because but it has to be there,
or at least they've decided it has to be there,
because if not, they don't just wanted to be Okay,
it's we're just hunting more robots for another hundred hours,

(35:53):
like it's not. They will feel like that's not enough.
It's got to be taken to some other level. Now,
for me personally, if they had just kept really you
seen DLC for Horizon Zero, don that was just me
doing more stuff. I would have been fine with that,
but for people who take the writing as seriously as
these guys clearly do, because they could easily have just
written a bunch of more missions in that universe, but

(36:15):
trying to come up with a whole different layer of
the lore, a new set of enemies, and new terms
of what you're trying to do and how you define
defeat and success. I I know a lot of people
do not like the story, like the fact that it
takes such a hard turn into like hard like sci fi,
like a weirdly sci fi. If people from You went
to another star and came back and there are a

(36:37):
thousand years old and they never age like a lot
of people. That turn people off because it is a
different tone. But I think if you're if you're a
writer who kind of values creativity and trying to like that,
you are going to try to challenge yourself. So I
I will never like discourage that. I thought it was great,
but I understand that's that's totally perfectly makes I just

(36:59):
wanted to see Silence get got. Well, that's the problem
Silence and Regala are. I say that as a Lance
Reddick fan, right, wrong. Silence and Regala as characters, well yeah,
but they both get shoved to the one side because
of the Zenith thing, you know what I mean. Like,
and that's so I agree that emerges as the thing

(37:20):
at the end, right, And I agree with what Jason
said that if we're trying to create the same experience
in a sequel, which is what a lot of sequels
do that the first game had, you have to have
a twist. My argument is that I think Horizon would
be better served to not feel like it needs to
create the same kind of plot and embrace some of

(37:42):
the loose tendrils that they've sort of put into this
world and uh, and just go with them. Like, for instance,
one interesting idea that they kind of threw out there
but then dismissed very handily in the first act is
the idea that a Lloy is now a supernatural figure
to the people who she saved in the first game,

(38:04):
and they kind of wanted to be like queen of
that world, you know what I mean, Like, that's a
whole thing that would have been interesting for her to
have to deal with while she's still trying to play
clean up. They're like, yeah, but we want you to
be the queen and like all this other stuff right like,
and I'm not saying that's a better story. I'm just saying, like,
it doesn't always have to go into and then here's
the worst bad, because the end of this game foreshadows

(38:26):
a worst bad at the end of that you're going
to face in the third game whenever that happens. And
that's the part where I started to feel like, hmm,
maybe this story is not going to be that meaningful.
You know, I do think I'll start to get fatigue
if that's the goal. But I no one's found a
way to fix that. Well, that's why Star Wars has

(38:47):
this problem, Marvel has this problem. Um that's why not
not that we shouldn't strive to solve it, but um,
I will say you're allowed one or yeah totally because
because it's only the second beat, I'm fine with it.
You're right that Nemesis, Yeah, if they keep trying to
do this like and then outside that there's a bigger box,

(39:09):
and outside that there's a bigger box of story, and
outside that there's a bigger story that will like that.
And so I'm going to go to one of my
favorite sequels, of all Time, Empire strikes Back. Empire Strikes
Back did the opposite thing. Instead of making the conflict
of that story gigantic, like let's do another Death Star,
which is what the third one did, they were like,

(39:31):
let's tell a more intimate story with the main characters.
And I think that they had that here. I think
that the Son King of Odd is an interesting character
they totally left behind. Um. I think the to Knock
chieftain whose name just flew right out of my head,
but he was fantastic UM. And their Galleas story was
also interesting. Like, I just think that they're in such
a hurry too. We got to do more of the

(39:52):
big world sci fi stuff. You're not an Errand bro,
you don't love Errand. I like him, Well, I don't
like that he became and comic relief. I was a
little bit like, hey man, he was. He was a
more dignified character. Let's all settle down here. But in
any case, Yeah, she was amazing. That's the thing, Like
they have these cool people. They seed the whole seed

(40:12):
pouch costume design concept for a culture. It had a
star trek E feel. See I did. I did like
the different tribes, not necessarily for the political machinations, but
for the idea of like because I love Star Trek, Like, oh,
each tribe has a little thing. Ah, they wear the
seed pouches. That's their cultural thing. I love that. It's

(40:34):
like almost familiar to It's a video game thing too,
you know what I mean. It's like they have to
give you a short, little trick a broad brush, like
even Fallout. I mean New Vegas had the various but
they get away with it by always using something that's
recognizable today in a funny way, like that's one of
the best things about Fallout, whereas this is so far
in the future that that's not really true, and they're

(40:56):
like where the Elvis is or whatever. Yeah, I thought
that Tana had a out of potential and and in
some ways really well executed. But then they sort of
introduce you to them by like walking through their mythology,
and their mythology was very silly and I didn't care
about the ten or whatever. Yeah, and it's but it's
also like you're going to spend a lot of time
caring about the ten and they seem so curious about

(41:18):
it and so resolved for like I guess a thousand
years on this mythology that seems dumb to me. I
don't believe that. Okay, you have listeners saying have you
heard of a thing called religion? Yeah, and I'm so
people that's not true. People do take like characters from

(41:39):
mythology that we're just badly misinterpreted, and they just add
and add an add to it and build them up
over time because it's what their culture needs. And yeah,
like yeah, well, it's just that, it's of course, it's
very it's simplified in the way that like, yeah, like
Star Trek is and there's an entire planet of blank
it's the hippie planet. It's the Andard of hippies, And

(42:01):
it's the entire tribe of you know, these guys are
all warriors? Are these guys are all farmers? Are they
in here? What he's talking about with the ten people
have not played the game. You have it a tribe
that's built their entire culture out of They found this museum.
They had this cheesy like hologram, this like this military
recruitment goofy hologram thing about these heroic tin soldiers, and
they just saw that they have like fragments of it

(42:24):
and they've just built their own mythology around like, oh,
these are the heroes of old who saved the world,
and then you children must be like them, because ultimately
that's what mythology is. It's in a stet of instructions
for the next for the next generation. And so it's
like this minor, dumb little thing that we see is
like corny or whatever. That's something that's repeated throughout the

(42:46):
game because you will find artifacts from the old world
that they will find them and and it'll be like
it'll be labeled ceremonial receptacle, but when you look at it,
you recognize it as like this goofy coffee mug from
like a tourist, like a gift shop. Writer'll say ancient
wind chimes, and you're like, that's someone's house keys. They're

(43:07):
not consistent with how they do that, true, And I
don't want to like, I don't want to sit there
and like because you're saying like yeah, here cut, yeah,
because which is like a lloy would know what it is.
Therefore it should be labeled properly because it's her inventory, right, yes.
And also, as a person who studied no no, no, no,
well I'm sorry so why does one person's opinion about

(43:29):
what belongs to the game value more than others. Come on, man, no, no,
I think what I really think we need. What I'm
doing is looking at the clock and wanting to talk
about them. That's finely discussing story, that's okay. I just
want to make one counterpoint. As a person who studied
religion extensively, I think this is a little bit of
a simplistic idea about how it arises, not the one

(43:49):
that Jason said, which is a little bit more robust,
but the way the game deploys it. Again, I keep
stressing this, nobody in this game seems curious and also
a lloy is not time bound enough make it an
interesting commentary and religion. That that's my and that's what
they want to do. Very clearly they wanted to do that,
and as I just think it's a little shallow. Honestly,

(44:10):
I don't know if they're commenting upon religion as much
as just using the functionality of mythology and the mythologizing
of events and be they should be a little more
curious and adventurous about that if they want to export.
That's what bothers me about it. It's like it's a
little bit uh, but they want to talk about the
Zenus in Badas and I keep telling you, and that's

(44:32):
why I don't think they should. That is exactly what
I'm saying right there. That's just sideship. That explains how
their universe came to be, you know what I mean, Like,
I don't know. I get your point is that Star
Trek itself is culturally reductive, and that point is absolutely valid,
So I can't really push back. I don't want to
waste forever on that. So we all heard it. We

(44:52):
can all agree or disagree. That's right. You want to go,
like any art where you go, Well, the Klingons are
the warrior race. They're all warriors. Is of course reductive, yes,
obviously right, but not to life. And That's where I'm like,
I think there is kind of room in this premise
because I agree with Jason that I like this sci
fi premise of this so much, Like I kind of

(45:12):
wish they would get into the weeds of some of
this a little bit more and like actually make me
care by flushing out some of these societies. I think
they don't think that stuff matters enough, Like they're sort
of split commitments on this, so they're playing it. They're
playing it safe in the sense that I, who am
a weirdo who likes, you know, the indie side of

(45:35):
the tracks, whatever your metaphor maybe uh, I will admit
I love. My enthusiasm went down as the Acts three
solidified to what I must as a Marvel asked sort
of storyline. Yes, And also I went, oh, that's the
direction they went with. Interesting not super hard hard sci fi,

(45:57):
but like hard sci fi that yields to big, exciting
team adventure movie. And I was like, okay, and interesting choice.
That makes sense. It makes total fiscal sense. Not only that,
I think they cut some stuff from the end game,
because the entire game, you're pushing your way towards the
West coast, and you finally get there and you see

(46:18):
the ocean, like San Francisco, the ruins of the Golden
Great Gay Division, all that. There's nothing to do over there.
There's very few missions over there. There's a couple of
like relic missions. I think a lot of content once
you reach because the game takes place heading west as
per the name. By the way, was this like destraining
where the world map represented a compressed version of the

(46:39):
United States because you've got like Las Vegas is an
you can it's like a ten minute walk from San Francisco,
and it's it's just assumed that, well, we're we're mentally
assuming that she traveled a great distance. But in reality
it's yeah, it's all it's yea hoover damn. Everything represents
something in the real world. But so I yeah, that's
all completely fair, and in effect, the ending feels a

(47:01):
little bit abrupt, like you kind of. I mean again,
I have a hundred and twelve hours in the game,
so it's not you know, um, but if you want
to talk about the mechanics, which I know where we're
trying to keep to a rigid schedule. Uh per the
radio yet radio days, when do you have to throw
to an ad break? Again, we don't even have to,
I said, I just think, Jason, whatever you want to say,

(47:23):
go for it. I want to hear it. Seriously, anything
you want to say on what we just talked about,
I want to hear it. So yeah, this game, the
first thing that I should be talked about more is
the most customizable game I've ever played in terms of
and it's when you go into the difficulty menu. It's
not just easy, medium, hard. You've got a custom and
a lot of it is accessibility stuff. It's things like

(47:46):
do you not like does this bother you? It would
instead of having to hold this, would you rather just
toggle it and you lets you go through like a
dozen different options for turning on and off how loot
works when a just seen how difficult the game is.
If the thing you hate is that the enemies feel
too like bullet spongey, you can turn just that down

(48:07):
and leave everything else the same, like you're just as fragile.
But it's just like I, I don't want to spend
as much time, and you can turn it all the
way down to where everything dies in one hit if
you just want a tour of the game, which some
people will play it that way and love it. It's
got an easiest guy basically a story mode where you're
just one arrow will will kill basically anything. And it's
just I don't want to mess with all that other stuff.

(48:28):
I just want to enjoy Aloy interacting with all this stuff.
I want to watch like a big long movie. Yeah. Yeah,
Because you've got like easy, medium, hard, and if you
click on custom it expands out to a sub menu,
have like a dozen different things. For example, if you
don't like the thing where to gather, if you have
to gather six um whatever t rex testicles, you can

(48:53):
switch on easy loop modes instead of having to shoot
its testicles off its body with a pinpoint shot. They're
just they're on it's you can't accidentally destroy them. You
just clear them if you don't. If you find that annoying, Now,
I like, I have so many hours in this game.
When you tell me that I need the tusks from
the things from whatever they call their giant snake, I

(49:14):
love shooting the things off of I love hiding, getting
into bushes. Um. So for somebody like me, yes, somebody
somebody like me. Where I don't like. It's not that
I don't like difficulty in games. I don't like doing
the same thing over and over again. When somebody tells
me they played Elden Ring and they had to fight

(49:35):
a boss thirty times to beat it, or fifty times
or two hundred times, it's like, I will never touch
that with a ten foot polls because I don't. I
have a low frustration tolerance and I don't have that
many hours in any one particular day to play the game.
I want to move on. So once I've seen the boss,
I know how to beat it. Like I know I

(49:57):
have to hit this thing to kill it, but it's like, okay,
I have to hit that thing seventy five times. I've
got the idea. I'm gonna let's just assume that if I,
if I tried hard enough, I could do that. Let's
move on to the next thing in this game. If
you if there's one boss fight you don't like, you
can go in turn the settings down to nothing killed
in one shot, turn settings back where they were, and

(50:18):
move on. I think they added that customization because they
knew that the combat mechanics were flawed, because because what happened.
I think in play testing it's the same thing with
like giving you a lot of instructions to basically solve
every puzzle for you. I think there's something in play
testing they ran across, and I don't know what it was.

(50:40):
But the issue is this game gives you a vast
number of tools and ammunition types to kill things from
a distance. It also gives you traps, It gives you
a bunch of If you have you can have any
kind of strategy you want in theory. When you actually
fight the creatures, the a I all of them do

(51:01):
the same thing. They instantly closed the distance to melee range,
and they can do it in seemingly one frame of animation.
Like so you're in bushes, you're in bushes, you're kneeling down,
You're doing your plane stealth style, which is my thing.
I love stealth charging up a huge shot using that
range shot where you're kneeling down the exploding arrows and

(51:22):
you hit it and you take off eight of the
standwich and then it will be on top of me
far before I can hit, dodge or roll like you
just it's there. So now it's a Maine fight and
you're mainly he doesn't do any damage. It's a collapse.
It's like a collapsible series of concentury circles. Because let's
say basically every fight for me boiled down to I'm

(51:44):
trying to prevent melee for as long as possible, So
you would do some traps. They would hit the traps
at the time same time they hit the traps, you
do a stealth strike or some kind of arrow, and
then you shoot a couple of arrows as they close
the gap and then they're on top of you. And
once they're on top of you, just had nothing to
do but mash the button and do the very disconnected

(52:08):
feeling spirit attacks. Um. I think where I differ from
Adam is the solution that I foresaw is there were
a few moments in the game where they had levels
or areas laid out such that the environmental traps were
perfectly It was almost like a puzzle room if you
could never make for whatever reason. I could think the

(52:31):
most badass I ever felt was when I would like,
glide into an area that happened to have a lot
of environmental effects. Glide into that area, fall on something,
zap something else, shoot the logs, shoot the barrels while
the barrels in the air, shoot it with lightning so
it explodes. Then go crip, hit that thing. And those

(52:52):
moments were so precious and few. That was my big
miss That's my big take, hot take for this whole
episode was like, why not more environmental traps that were
cleverly placed in such a way that it invited interesting
innovative usages. I just felt that was a big missed opportunity.

(53:12):
That's as far as spicing up the style of combat
that's already on the table. I just want to say, like,
I really appreciate the flexibility built into this game. Like
everything Jason laid out first of all, the settings thing
blows my mind. That would have changed my experience if
I had if I looked into that and done that,
Because there are a few times I died, like five times,
and I was like, you know what, I don't like

(53:32):
this enough to die eight times here. I just you know,
I want to move on. Uh. I think the game,
but I think most people feel the way Jason feels that,
Like the fun thing to do here is plot of strategy,
and like execute that strategy and bring it down, you know.
I mean, like that's what you want to do, and
the game won't let you really do that, except for

(53:54):
when you finally get fully leveled up, then you have
the experience that you sort of wanted to have the
whole time. That's kind of how they chose to lay
it out, like like being badass hopping from yeah, which
is sort of what you that's what you really want.
And I guess it's okay to me that a designer
is like, yeah, yeah, we're gonna give you the thing
that you want, but you have to earn it in
the meantime. You're gonna struggle because that's what that's what

(54:17):
these games are. That's what all games are. You have
to learn how to master it. And it's like while
we play games, that's why they're called play. It's like,
I'm going to be a guy later on as or earlier,
depending on when this episode releases. Who was a big
advocate for elden Ring Because I really liked it, and
it's I can't be a hypocrite here and say that
the difficulty is a bad thing, you know, I mean,
because elden Ring is much more difficult. But I but

(54:40):
I feel like it's a tedious thing when the thing,
the way I want to play the game is actually
not immediately available to me, like I have, especially stuff
when they clearly are promoting it and pushing it as
you the whole fun as approaching it however you want,
but especially early on you are highly you will absolutely
find yourself basically cheesing these fights, like getting to some

(55:03):
spot behind a ridge, doing damage and then running away. Now,
this game does something that I value highly in games.
I loved it about the Batman, the Arkham Games, which
is it's a stealth game, and the stealth provides tremendous benefits,
like if you sneak on something, you can do a
one hit kill, or you can take it over another
mechanic we've not talked about yet, but it's the type

(55:26):
of stealth where I cannot tolerate stealth games where if
you get caught then it's just comes up. Game over.
We try it kicks you back to this. This is
the type of game where stealth has tremendous benefits, but
if you get caught, your punishment is you have to
kill everybody, and you can do it. It just it

(55:47):
creates these wonderful panic moments where it's not panic like,
oh I have to do all that again, Oh God,
I gotta sneak up that matter, I gotta crawl through
the thing. No, it's it's like, oh my god, the
entire compound knows I'm here. There's twenty seven guys coming
at me. And in this game, except for very specific
levels like in the Dungeons Slash Cauldrons, you can run

(56:09):
away from any fight you can get. You can buy
it off. Something that's more than you can chew, you
can hit a creature that's bigger than anything you've seen before.
You don't know what's attacks. Suddenly it has launched a
an orbital satellite that is following you around and hitting
your ladies that you can run away, and if you
run away long enough, it will not chase you. The
creatures are territorial in this game, so you can reset

(56:30):
any fight no matter how wrong it goes. You can
run your ass out of there, go collect a bunch
of healing plants off the ground, go recraft a bunch
of arrows, and reapproach it. It doesn't lock you in
a room again, except for in very specific circumstances, boss
fight things like that. So like anything you run into
you can get away from. You can rethink it. If

(56:50):
that approach was wrong, and if you stay away for
a moment, they'll forget about you. Not realistic, but that's,
you know, according to video game rules, where they will
forget you are ever there, even though you just killed
eight people they went four minutes later, they're like, well,
I guess that's over. Um. So it's it does a
lot of things that to kind of help you around. Well,

(57:11):
I think is some stuff they know maybe doesn't work.
The way as supposed to like it should be. Yeah,
and like my favorite weapon from the first game was
the rope caster because I would use it. You you,
you hit like four ropes on the thing and now
it bogs it down. You can go to a critical hit,
get away, take care of something else while it's trying
to get off of it. It's ropes. Well, in this game,

(57:32):
it just doesn't work that they can. They can still
just jump on you even though they're tied down. Like
I just couldn't use it. But they have the highlight
tron disks now, yeah, which is which is sort of
a shotgun to counter like the finger banger. What did
you just make that? Hey, it's time for another ad

(57:54):
break here on one fsmanship Um. I'm sorry to to
sure man, we really could. I feel like we could
do a three hour in depth special on Horizon Forbid
and West because there's much more to discuss. But we
do have to take a quick break and when we
come back, we'll have to get our final thoughts in
before we determine whether this game makes the Celestial hard

(58:16):
Drive stick around for that after this, Oh, I forgot
to do the thing where I reverse the sound. Oh well,
but we're back. That was one job. That was my
one job. I'm too engrossed in the conversation, y'all. But

(58:39):
this is our ultimate section. Keep or delete. I'm gonna
fudge it and say, let's also get some final words
in edge west because there's just too too much to discuss. Um,
But this is where we basically say, on a celestial
hard drive, we've we've since codified this right, so Adam
helped me out. There's one for one hundred games. I

(59:00):
think that's what we decided, a hundred games, and uh,
we have updated it so that it says we've we've
rectified some of the sins of the past, but we
still haven't filled our first hundred. When it fills, we
will have to start knocking stuff off. But for now, um,
there's still room for fresh games on there. Does this
deserve to be on a celestial hard drive that can only,

(59:21):
in theory hold a hundred games of all the video
games ever made? That is supposed to represent an almanac
of like here you go, this is video games. These
are the important ones to know. Uh, you know, however
you measure that rubric. But I'll start I'll just say
I have notes I want to rattle off because I
didn't get them in in the episode. Climbing up stuff

(59:44):
and then gliding off of it should be in every
open world game, and sad I did that. Um I rarely,
like really rarely changed my outfit or even my weapon
load out once I had everything fully upgraded and a
full compliment of weapons, and I wish I had more
of an incentive to play with more different uh load outs.

(01:00:07):
It just felt like there's no reason to. I did
feel like I got the system that worked, and I
just did it over and over, which is my biggest
grape with the whole game is a comment. Ultimately seemed
so there were so many options on the table, but
in reality and the practice of it, I only use
two or three things always. I have this complain about
every game I played, by the way, I think no

(01:00:27):
open world game that exists. And maybe you guys will
say elden Ring does it well, but I think that
Sushima did it well. But even they're like that game
seemed to act like it wanted me to change my
outfit based on situation, Like I'm not going to do that.
It's like, well, this is your traveling outfit and this
is yourselth outfits and it's like, I'm not. And the
same thing where the the economy of how you upgrade things,

(01:00:48):
Like in this game, it's like, well, gather for trimmor
tusk tusks, which will mean traveling around the entire world
and up several extensive battles, and this will make your
arrows literally two percent better. It's like, that's not worth it.
It's it's the same thing. I said the same thing
about God of War picked the best games of all
time the upgrade. I think Borderlands now has this problem

(01:01:08):
where the upgrade economy doesn't really quite make sense because
there's such diminishing returns and they want you to continually
be have a reason to continually be finding things that
it can't be that big of an upgrade. Also would
break the gameplay because you would very quickly have a
bow and arrow that kills everything in one shot. And
I think it's one of those almost unsolvable problems. Every

(01:01:29):
game tries a different way, but they I don't think
anything does it perfect. I think the best version of
that so far is when they decide outfits are purely aesthetic,
Like when they do that, you're more incentivized to just
change things up because it's fun. I like that. Yeah,
I do too. Anytime there's stats attached to the outfit,
you end up getting locked into something, including elden Ring.

(01:01:49):
By the way, I got my outfit and elden Ring
pretty early and I was like, I'm not changing it. Um.
And my last note is that I hate the system
where it requires three buttons on the D pad in
order to laboriously navigate through fifty different potential items you
could use and then press oh, I just didn't use
those items, and I just did the potions. I just

(01:02:11):
didn't use them. That's like, I don't such a weird means,
which speaks to some kind of clatterer. It's a bad
piece of usign because you're skipping. You can't. It's difficult
to drop things off there, so you're skipping past stuff
you never use. And No, it was very very strange.
Apparently you can customize that so that it doesn't include
items you don't want. I didn't find that out until

(01:02:33):
I was googling it after I finished the game. It
definitely doesn't make it obvious that it's kind of a
pain in the ask to It's like, take several button
presses the one one by one by one, and you
can't like reorder stuff. It's not into it of at all.
But it's another thing where I don't know if it
was left over from the first game and they just
didn't know what to do with it. But I I
can prove you can beat the entire game and play

(01:02:54):
for a hundred and twelve hours without using anything over there.
All right, So I do want to say I think
that the inner Hole limit the interface stuff that they
did with that, even though there's too many options, they
really streamlined how it looks and whether it intrudes on
the game experience or not, and that was cool. Sorry.
I love the thing where you can just craft arrows

(01:03:15):
on the fly, Like you don't even have to leave
the main you have to go to a menu. You
just do it while you're running, while while you're shooting.
You can do it totally. Sorry, go ahead, Mike, Oh,
I had nothing to say. I'm deleting it. Those you're
deleting it. Oh wow, Yeah, I'm really surprised by that
you're going to delete this game. Interesting after the tenor

(01:03:37):
of the whole episode. Well, I thought that, see, I
thought I was being relatively hard on it. I think
something has to I want to say for the record
that it was incredibly close, very very close to But
I think a keep has a special auspicious vibe to
it that I'm not getting off of this game. Ultimately,
it's amazing at the end of the day, very close

(01:04:01):
the way to keep for me. What about you? Uh well,
I think maybe Jason should go right, Oh, I can't.
I can't think of twenty games I would keep over this.
It's pretty pretty diffect perfect. I think it's I think
it's a legitimate like achievement. I think it's a technical achievement.
I think everything that the way everything came together, the art,
the voice work, everything they did that it took this

(01:04:23):
many people to make that long and then it all
works this well. Like we've not even mentioned. Ashley Birch's
performances was also Tiny Tina and Borderlands. She is having
a year hell of a career, right yeah, yeah, yeah,
no that that. But this game again, no one should.
No one should take their purchase decision based on how
much I liked to listen to what we said. It does.

(01:04:45):
Do these turnoffs sound like they would be an experienced
ruiner for you? But honestly, if you want a PlayStation five,
what else are you gonna get? Like that? That is
truly a looks it feels like an ext gen game.
I'm I'm assuming everybody's got hours. It's even prettier, prettier.
It's not close, It's not close. This this is the

(01:05:05):
best looking game ever right now. Like it's still think
The Last of Us two. Okay, that's sure, that's a discussion,
or Red Dead Redemption two is another one. But those
are discussions, or or r d R two. But it's
a discussion, and it's not the discussion we're having. Adam,
are you keeping here in deleting this thing? So I
do want to make one point that explains this a

(01:05:25):
little more so. The problem, one of the biggest problems
I have with this game that we didn't talk about
is the fact that it's sort of putting all the
mechanics that you kind of liked from other games into
one experience, which is a thing we've argued about about
Grand Theft aut of five. That that's a bad thing. Um,
I am deleting it, yes I am. But so this

(01:05:47):
game is taking a lot from Assassin's Creed and from
the Batman games and from just a lot of those
sort of third person action genres and sort of mashing
it together and doing a good version of all of them.
It it becomes very overwhelming because it's like, here's all
the games you like in this one package with this
one skin. And I think that trend in gaming is

(01:06:10):
becoming counterproductive. And I think this game actually is a
proof for why it's good and why it's bad, because
it's it creates this experience where it's like, yeah, I
gotta play for a hundred hours and get all the
you know, Mount Race is done, so I can get
this one upgrade thing to make my stick a little
bit more powerful. Sure, I like them too, you know

(01:06:31):
what I mean? But also, like, what isn't in Horizon
Forbidden West? Really? You know what I mean? Like that's
the question I think fishing, isn't it? You know what
I mean? Likens right them? You just grab them up.
I don't think games should be all games, Like I
don't think Triple A games should be all games. I
think they should lean into this is what this game is. Um,

(01:06:54):
that's a personal opinion. Some people might disagree that. I
think that's a bad trend in gaming, and that's one
problem this game has, even though I think it was
an interesting area to explore, but I feel like it's
been enough of that. Yeah, I'm ready to for more
curated Shorter pined about this on a recent episode. I
think could also be shorter, and I don't think that
would be a problem, um for to a degree. But

(01:07:17):
like the last game we spoke about when I was
on here was Resident Evil Village, which was the fact
that that game in this game are the same price.
Is uh like that that game should have been five
dollars compared if you take the amount of just stuff,
not not even just hours of play, but just everything
about it. Um, it should not like the amount of

(01:07:41):
game you get in the amount of experience and everything
with the world, the characters, everything you put into it.
It is crazy that, you know, because I think I
felt like I had gotten everything that could be gotten
out of Resident Evil Village in like ten hours. That's
I mean, that's about how long it takes to run
all the way through it. Anyway, it is it is
a little fair that this game costs the same as
Resideval Village, and I liked Resideval Village. UM, I might

(01:08:05):
have had more fun playing it than I've had playing
this game. Quite frankly, but this game is much more
of achievement, There's no question, you know. It takes about
ten hours to experience, and is creepy art and is
probably more coherent than the plot of Resident Evil Village.
I can't confirm, but I have to. I have to assume.
So Jason's new book, Jason, why don't tell everyone about

(01:08:27):
your new book? I know where you were going with
one more time before we get out. No, yeah, since
I was, I jettisoned myself from Cracked. I'm a full
time author now. So yeah, the book that is up
for preorder comes out this fall. It is far enough
way that if you order it now you will forget
about it, and then in October it'll be like a
gift you got for yourself, like what is this? I

(01:08:49):
don't remember or anything from Amazon or Barnes and Noble
or whatever, And it would be my book. Um, if
you have not read any of my books, they're all
out there. Just google my name. I've written this, how
many of A written five? Something like that, So this
will be the six, but any of them can be
not really, it's all just a blur. It's all a

(01:09:10):
blur in my mind. Um, but they can be read
in anywhere. These these are This is not a Game
of Thrones thing where if you jump in on book
three you're gonna be to be totally lost. It's they
are independent stories, that are all. They feature the same characters,
but they are self contained. If you have read one
of the other books and you realize you started with
book two titled this book is full of Spiders, and

(01:09:32):
you're like, wow, that was incredibly confusing, I promise you
reading the first and will not help you. It's that's
just the way they are. You are firmly in the
wrong universe and there is no escape for you. Sorry,
you're aware of the book now that it's done. This
is your the title, the title. If this book exists,
you're in the wrong universe. Just search for it any

(01:09:53):
cut and drag transaction. Thank you so much, Jason. It
has been a real pleasure. Always good to catch up
with you until next time when we shot upon another
of your favorite games. But I'm so glad the listeners
like it when you disagree, or they do. They get
upset when you disagree. They like to get it. Let

(01:10:13):
us snow and chat. Do you like it when we disagree?
I think they get invested in their own opinion and
they like it when Yeah, I also, well they hate
one of us, right right. I would never bring a
guest on who didn't like the game if I knew
that I loved the game, because I think that would

(01:10:35):
be a bad experience for the guests dynamic. Yeah, yeah,
you know, like like yeah, I just think you have
to operate in some good faith with that where it's
like it's more fun when there's some disagreement, where the
guests doesn't feel ambushed, you know, and the guests shouldn't
have to hate on the game the whole time either. Anyway,
Those those are podcast philosophies for Madam Ganzer. We did

(01:10:57):
it okay by we're complete eight? What's you know? You
still don't have like a catchphrase that signals the end
of the show. You got for the heart Radio. I didn't.
I said, work comes only a couple of years. We'll
get it one day. Work m