The Besties - Hammerwatch II, and Much More Baldur's Gate 3

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

This week, we're pivoting a little bit, which is honestly what us Besties do Best. First off, a little bit about the perplexing choices of Hammerwatch II — but then, who's that coming over the top rope?! It's Justin, who missed our first chat about Baldur's Gate 3, and is ready to dunk down with his own opinions!Also discussed: The Nonary Games, The Sexy Brutale, The Forgotten City, Outer Wilds, Minit, The Legend of Zelda, Wool Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

Justin, you were away. You were at the beach. Yeah, babe. Do you have any beach pro tips for the people at home? Because I feel like beaches, they can be fraught. You can make all sorts of mistakes at the beach. Yeah. I have a pretty foolproof beach system.

Okay. Surprising no one. I have a foolproof beach system. Is this something you subscribe to? Are we getting a preview to the- This is my exact strategy for beach. Okay. Go down early. Get your spot. How early? This is my exact strategy for beach. Go down early.

Get your spot. How early? How early are we talking? 9, 30 to 10. That's not very early. Yeah, that's not early. Okay, get down. I'm saying early compared to the other people in the house.

Where should the sun be when you get down there? In the sky. You go down to the beach. You get in with the kids first, right away're loving it they're loving it two hours later time for another sunscreen application the kids don't want to do that no they don't and you you say in like the most like self-sacrificial tone you can i'll take them inside uh That's it. So good. That's your beach day right there, baby. And then you fire up the steam deck.

You jump into the incredible world of Faerun. And there's your beach. So that's amazing because I thought you were going to say, I'll take them inside. And then the kids would be like, no, no, no, no. We'll let you put on sunscreen. No, they want to go inside too. Everybody wants to go inside. It's so hot out here.

It's so hot. And so people don't talk about this yeah the beach is so dirty it's like everywhere there is you can see dirt the dirt the dirt of the ocean we call sand it's weird with the dry dirt of the ocean yeah where we're like normally dirt no thank you yeah you get but you then people talk about, like, sand between your two. That's dirt. That's dirt. That's big dirt.

That's not small dirt. That's big dirt. Let's make a dirt castle. Can we not? I don't think so. It's everywhere, man, this sand. I'm only out there, I'm at the beach 90 minutes max,

and I've still got this stuff everywhere, every crevasse i think you're doing it right yeah man i mean barunica save itself you know My name is Justin McElroy. Now to the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy. I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Fresher. Now the best game of the week.

And Chris Plant is out on assignment. He's at Mario's house trying to uncover whatever's going on there uh so good luck to him and uh good luck to us because we're going to talk about this game uh hammer watch was it well it was we'll get into that hammer watch 2 is the game that we discussed discussing this week uh but i think we're probably going to spend most of our time talking about ballers gate 3 again because justin wasn't here for the last one yeah and everybody is still talking about it and playing it and so we're going to get into that uh you already know what Baldur's Gate 3 is so we're not going to describe it again we're just going to take a break and we'll come back and talk about it who like steered the show

while I was gone who was like the Justin I usually step into that role i've never would never this is this is what's tough about this conversation yeah you should have listened to the episode would never in a million years i mean not the thought wouldn't have even crossed my mind to listen to you guys and what you said about it oh that's interesting not even a passing thought huh okay well that would have been probably great just to have another conversation about it well okay i guess i guess what we can do is just russ and i if you start to say something we said last week we just start shrieking at you yes yes just start making a loud sort of clack i have a dog clicker for this very purpose so that's perfect um okay let's let's

talk about hammer watch 2 because we we discussed uh last week making that the sort of main game if you're not familiar with the franchise and i imagine there's just quite a few people out there who are not because it's you know kind of a indie darling uh hammer watch is uh a gauntlet inspired uh sort of a multiplayer co-op action game it's very gauntlet yeah and that's sort of very very uh simple hack and slash dungeon divey sort of top down pixel art tons of monsters coming at you out of like monster spawners that you need to like whittle your way down it's fun man it's fun it's pretty old school not a lot like it's very harkening back to a certain era but very well tuned yes uh hey the hammer watch was very

much just sort of that just straightforward but you know beat up on some monsters with your butts heroes of hammer watch took that format and did a roguelite sort of uh multiplayer experience with it and that just sang baby that was good shit that is one of my favorite games on the switch period i go back and play it a lot because it it the idea of a hack and slash multiplayer sort of thing where your characters you know are are progressive there's lots of different things to unlock you have this town you're upgrading there's these huge dlc expansions that add a i've put probably over 100 hours into this game and have not like cracked like there's one entire dlc thing that i haven't even gotten to yet uh did you mention though for both of these the graphics

is trash like no they're. The graphics are very good pixel art. They're gorgeous pixel art. I love the pixel art. They're gorgeous, gorgeous pixel art. Yeah. Reminds me of Low G Man. It's good. So it looks so much better than Low G Man. You have no idea what you're talking about. I love

Heroes of Hammerwatch. I liked Hammerwatch 1 a lot because it just did this one thing very well i didn't realize you played the original hammer watch uh yeah i didn't realize it was an original hammer watch i kind of picked it up at heroes of hammer watch i think i think that's i think that's a fine way to do it yeah i think that that if you have if you've not played heroes of hammer watch you can get it on switch for i don't know or steam if, if, yeah. Or Steam, if you want, but it is a very good portable sort of game. Hammer Watch 2 came out this week.

I've been looking forward to it for a long time. I know Russ has as well. It is the most baffling game that I can remember playing in a grip. Can I just try to like breeze through? Yeah, sure. Because again, we're not going to, most of this episode is going to be on Baldur's Gate 3,

but we were planning on talking about this game and I think we weren't super jazzed about spending. I have to get these thoughts out somehow. Okay, real quick. So what they decided to do, which is not like a terrible idea, is they changed the format of Hammerwatch and Heroes of Hammerwatch into more of an open world RPG, almost like a Diablo 4 or like a Skyrim almost, where you're instead of just going through dungeons that like go from floor to floor to floor, there's an open world and you go on quests and you do like, you know, various stuff like that. There's a day-night cycle.

There's like a billion vendors. There's a story. There's a whole loot system and like rarity and loot. And that's all stuff that was never- There's crafting. There's all kinds of shit. And again, take it on the surface, like all this stuff kind of sounds appealing because they're just expanding the game that I really liked. kind of sounds appealing because they're just expanding the game that i really liked it turns out that i don't particularly enjoy what they turn the game into because they made it into more of there's just like a lot more downtime like previously we're just fucking up monsters

very quickly and quite a bit of them and now there's a lot of like oh where do i find the person to talk to to get this quest and then i have to find the cave that they're pointing me to it or not pointing me to or vaguely pointing me to the case yeah yeah so i think the core loop is a problem and then on top of that if you wanted to play multiplayer they kind of created an unfortunate multiplayer system where let's say i make a character uh like a multiplayer character and i want my buddy to join me and we play for an hour and then i can play solo still playing that character but my buddy will never be able to play his character or her character again unless i am already playing so his character her character is tied to my save game which is a baffling decision i'm sure there were technical reasons that

prevented that but it really discourages like the drop in drop out stuff that was so good in heroes of hammer watch they do some stuff to get around it like if you join a campaign in progress like it'll boost you up to be about the level of the thing the the like main character who like owns the campaign on their local save file but like there's random matchmaking in the game i don't know why you would do that to just like hop in with someone and then that character's just gone into the ether as soon as you disconnect from them there's that sucks that like almost immediately fork of your character that it creates no no no okay um you have to start a character from scratch for every save game that That sucks. That like almost immediately. Is it a fork of your character that it creates? No. No. No. Okay.

You have to start a character from scratch for every save game that you join, for every other campaign that you join. Why? Which is, to be fair, what Baldur's Gate 3 does, right? Correct. That is how Baldur's, but also. On Diablo 3, Diablo 4, 3? 4. Diablo 4 is like that too, right?

No, it's not. No. For the new. For the new seasons. When you make a seasonal character. But then when the season's over, that character gets folded into the eternal server. So it's not exactly one-to-one.

The difference is between this game and Baldur's Gate 3 is that Baldur's Gate 3 is a masterpiece. And this game is a lot of running around on fetch quests that sometimes just expire randomly. telling you and they don't tell you where to go i don't want to spend a ton of time because i think we've like convinced people that maybe this game is not ready for prime time but i would say if you're interested you have two approaches you can take if you're interested in playing like a more multiplayer centric version of this that is like friendly or on the multiplayer side uh heroes of hammer watch as griffin mentioned is

great also on the same day that hammer watch 2 released they put out hammer watch anniversary edition which is just the first game but it includes all the dlc and um they actually included the campaign of Heroes of Hammerwatch in the original Hammerwatch. So if you wanted to experience that loop without having to worry about multiplayer or any of the other stuff, you can do that too. I went back and played the Anniversary Edition

and I actually found it to be still as enjoyable as I found playing it through the first time. So if you just want Gauntlet, play Hammerwatch or Heroes of Hammerwatch. Hammerwatch 2, I just don't think is... I don't think it works, man. I don't think you can take Gauntlet and make an open-world RPG.

Like, I just don't think there's enough... It didn't really work, unfortunately. But we are optimistic that Heroes of Hammerwatch 2 will still happen. I would love that, man. Please. Okay. Did they fix this? Did they fix what? Could they could they fix that i mean i haven't touched it could they fix this to where you guys would get like

excited about it i don't think so i don't think they could fix the multiplayer choice of like maybe having you know the right now there's like it feels pretty deep doesn't it there's just a lot of problems but i think the core loop of it like i just don't want to be walking through an empty field not fighting monsters that doesn't appeal to me um so i don't know how you address that problem um you know there's a lot of time uh adding mod features to this so you can really like make your own maps and stuff of the community you can make their own maps so maybe the community will like make more traditional hammer watch maps but at that point just play the original hammer watch yeah loot is also not instanced so like you're competing for loot if you're playing multiplayer i did hear that that will be i heard that will be addressed the loot thing will be bosses don't respawn you just get to fight the boss the one time and so like if it

drops a cool thing yeah okay well i don't i really don't want to i i think we've done this franchise i'm hugely disappointed in this one but let's let's rock what was that bummer watch two let's not just talk over justin's bummer watch oh sorry so good this is turning into bummer watch two there it is thank you um all right juice bg3 where you at yeah balder's gate three uh i've played about i guess about 15 hours or so. I am- So you've made a character. I made a character. I'm poking around.

I just picked one of the characters. They already had characters made up. You did an origin character. Oh. Yeah, why wouldn't I? I mean, they're better at it than I am. They're professionals. Which one did you pick?

Why would I think that I- Will? Okay. Justin, you're a professional you're a professional tabletop game like a point yeah which means that if you want me to create a character you better pay me yeah fair i'm not gonna do it i'm not gonna do it for free for myself you know i'm a pro no uh i just picked one of the origin characters i feel like i don't know they no shit i have like dnd character creation fatigue like i'm just not interested in

doing it so i just picked one of the origin characters because they they had like a cool story and he was like he seemed like an interesting dude uh and so i just went with him he's a warlock which i have zero experience with warlocks uh unimpressed by way, so far with Warlocks. I'm sure maybe there's a way to, maybe they get there eventually. But as a main, it's a little weird. You can respect him though, right? I mean, you can go to Withers and change your classes. All right, man, did you guys talk about Withers? Not a ton, I guess a little bit.

Withers is a great, as closely as this hues to D&D, Withers is a really interesting, so he's this old zombie-looking fella that lives at your camp. He's just always there. Well, originally he lived in a casket, and you found him. Oh, yeah, right. And then he's just in your camp, and you roll up on him, and he's like, hey, don't be weird about this,

but I can bring people back from the dead for 200 bucks and you're like what he's like play it cool i can bring back people for the dead for 200 bucks and you're like why and he's like nope nope nope no no it's not a question thing it's a give me 200 bucks i'll change your class or bring someone back from the dead and it's like this great concession to like hi my name is withers i'm video games like you do have to do some video game things so they just made me up and i can bring people back for 200 because like nobody wants someone to stay dead for good um they do seem very generous about you know i know in traditional dnd the idea of like reviving a character is kind of a no-no and they do seem

very generous about giving you a lot of levers to pull if like one of your party members dies dies like fails yeah saving throws yeah like those scrolls and spells yes that could happen quickly yeah yeah extremely i was in a fight in the the underdark area which is where i am now and some big beefy boy just came and shoved me off the bridge right down into a chasm dead no questions oh man questions asked i have to share my favorite part that i've seen i've played like 40 hours of baldur's gate 3 at this point so i was also in the underdark uh part of my uh party is gail who's like the default wizard uh companion that you can find or you can i guess

play as him. Gale, I guess, got a little too close to one of the exploding mushrooms in the Underdark and got sent flying off the edge to his instant death. And then a second later, a hologram of Gale showed up and said, So good. If you're seeing this, I've died. But it's extremely important that you revive me very quickly or else bad things will happen so i'm gonna give you a set of 16 instructions on how to revive me and then he gives you the 16 steps on how to revive him and then asks you to recite them back to him

it's so fucking funny i had the same thing i was trying to rescue people from a burning building and gail just got a gail gail blacked out in the booth a little bit and uh and then in the middle of this burning building this hollow gail appeared and started doing this while just fucking chaos and you know uh flaming wood beams were just falling down all around it's so good the okay things that i think are interesting about this that they have i'm sure you guys talked about a lot of this stuff like in terms of dnd this is a i mean if you're looking for like how to get into it there are many worse ways i could think of than playing balder's gate 3 and like at least learning like basics um because it is really really well represented here um But the things that I think are interesting

where they have brought something over from tabletop games that I think is not in a lot of video games, and that is really making narrative stuff open-ended and nonjudgmental in a way that video games don't really do a lot give me example you have these like weird little tadpoles that live in your head right and the nature of these tadpoles is not really like they they do not pass a like uh uh jedi or sith filter over it it's very much like, I don't know,

man, it seems kind of messed up. Right. But they are giving you power, but I don't know. It seems kind of weird, but it's not, but it's withholding narratively in a way where I feel like tabletop games

often are because they're encouraging you to like explore and take a lot of agency. Yeah. And like games don't necessarily usually want you to have that agency even in open world rpg games i mean i used like uh knights of the republic or or mass effect as an example but like even with those you're usually some judgment is being made about your actions you're an asshole or you're a good guy exactly and the characters are usually along those same lines um the where you know they're very strict about like i feel this way

about this thing and if you do the different thing then i don't like you anymore but even here has some flexibility in terms of like well let me talk to you and build a relationship with you and try to change your opinion about stuff like change the way you think about stuff if we're going to be traveling together um which i think is like really cool the amount of agency almost to like i think i found kind of overwhelming at first like i was looking for those sort of um those sort of hooks or those sort of like narrative like clear paths you wanted like a nudge in the direction of what the right choice was i guess yeah exactly or like even more of a like understanding the repercussions of your choices which games are big on right they want you to know are you really sure you want to kill this guy because it's gonna be really bad this

game will just let you fucking pop somebody mid-convo like no problem pre-con pre-convo yeah well they also are i think they do i think they're more subtle than almost every game i've ever played about nudging you but they do nudge you so so an example you were talking about the tadpoles and as you're exploring very early in the game you'll find like specimens of these tadpoles that you can basically suck up into your brain and they will be like yeah i'm not sure but if you for example if you were to use one asterion who's like the vampire in your crew will be like hey man i damn i want some of that power indicating that like someone who may not be the most up and up character is like approving of what you're doing which is to say you could maybe infer that it's not the coolest thing in the world to mind trick people into doing what they don't want to do but even that even that

is not like black and white right no sure asterion i don't rock with in my party i i have more or less saving him for my next playthrough which is i don't know gonna in my party i i am more or less saving him for my next playthrough which is i don't know gonna be in 2029 yeah uh at the rate that i'm going through the game now um but even like when he makes a power grab like that when he like says i i just hit a point with him where he's like hey listen like we could take this big bad guy down right like we could do that or we could try and take control of this like psychic network that is being created and um you know use it for our own purposes and you know try to change things in the world like make a genuine huge change in the world like what batman does basically like what batman does and it it was so flabbergasting because it's like man the choices you make are not great asterion i do not necessarily meld with

them but it's it is a far fucking cry from you know uh the the devil like it's not it is not someone who is i mean the devil is in the game the devil is fully in the game yeah um i uh i really thought at the beginning especially i needed uh and this is not necessarily a knock against the game you're a level one character right you kind of suck um but it is tough it was tough at the beginning for me to accept that like i'm going to take like especially early on i'm going to take some losses i'm going to lose some hit points i'm going to use some potions i'm going to i'm not going to optimize yeah each fight and that was kind of hard for me to get my head around right like i wanted like the exact tactic that would let me avoid you know and i know you don't like spending resources so

like i know i think that is a design decision to be like, no, no, no, you got to, otherwise this is just never going to happen. Yeah. And what's cool about that is like,

even in narrative parts, they like, I was in a, the, the field of like exploding mushrooms and I needed to rescue a guy. And I, he had a pack there and I could like, I had a scroll of misty step,

which is kind of like teleportation that I could just like chuck to him and he used it. And he's like, Oh thanks. That was very chill of you. But like having that resource there, let me, it was like using a narrative resource narratively,

which I thought was very cool. It also has the best talking about the tadpole still. It has the greatest, like if you were looking to trap me into doing evil shit they're like okay uh you have these evil tadpoles and they're in your brain and they're like a parasite and it's like oh no that's terrible and they're like yeah they're like mind control shit dark magic mind flayers even mind flayers are kind of freaked out about it they don't understand them and they're like oh that sounds terrible and then i was like also there's this one menu where you can plug the tadpoles into your brain and give yourself superpowers.

And he's like, huh, what? Come again? The whole menu of my brain where I can plug in the tadpoles to get superpowers? Like, I don't know. That sounds very good to me. And they're so good. They're really i have not i i one of the times that i did a deep dive back into my quick save history because i i had like three to drop in and it's like well okay so now you can

fucking fly whenever you want like they are so insanely broken i was like there is no way this is not going to come back and completely bone me in the, like, I'm going to wake up in the middle of the night and be like, I have tentacles now that's wild. So I went back and did help me though. It helped make my play through a little less, a little more flexible because when I was faced with the moral quandary, like I want to do the right thing. There's this other part means like you do have four tadpoles in your brain though didn't you yeah you nasty little boy you like to get a little nasty sometimes

maybe you have some moral flexibility here so i am still a pure boy i have not no one in my party has taken any of them inside their brain mostly because i just want to see how the narrative plays out without it but i do feel i mean i just want some sort of like i want everyone around me to be fucking like all your party members to fucking explode and die while i'm just like chilling over here being like a pure little boy my party won't take them so it's like more for me uh yeah it's great it's funny i i just dipped into a few youtube videos of like people giving like hey here's things to like make sure you're doing to like get the most out of your balder's gate 3 playthrough and people were like walk around with three boxes and then right before

every fight make a stack of them so you could just jump up on the boxes to do like advantage shots like so that person sucks to play dnd with you do not need to be doing this i know you can good work you can do that but like the game is very well designed to allow for you to play like a normal human being and not like a min maxing freak i did struggle okay this is my biggest struggle with the game and i this is mainly with me and i don't know um i i i it is really hard for me to fight the compulsion to if i'm in the middle of a fight and you just get that string of bad luck you know like several bad things happen at once and really like bone you in a really bad like not where it's going to kill

you, but it is definitely going to like slow things down and make it like rough for you. It is really hard for me to fight the compulsion to just like quick load. And I, and I do find that a struggle for myself. I don't know how you would solve it and still be like a pleasant experience. And I know that this is really about my own restraint, but it is hard for me when I'm playing something like this. And I know that there are a million different ways something could go, especially narratively when it's like, I really want to do something with a character. Right.

But I need to pass the role to like, yeah, make it work. That is hard for me. I don't know if you guys have struggled with that. I have found that when there's a role, that's like a really like a 20 plus role and you feel like, oh, I need to do this role. And this is the only way I'm going to be able to accomplish the thing I'm trying to do is by hitting this role.

And I'm not talking about a lockpick. I'm talking about like like there's a necromancy book in the in Act one that I'm trying to read to the last page of. And I'm like, like fuck i ended up spending like all my inspiration points which allow you to re-roll if you fail just trying to get to the end of this book thinking like oh i'm gonna read the end of this book i'm gonna get like a badass spell and it'll be totally worth it and i succeeded eventually in getting that role but the the end result was really just like okay you made it to the end you didn't get like cursed but there's still more about this book and i think they're very smart because they really very rarely lock you out of incredible experiences just because you weren't able to do the insane 25 or 30 role

for how have you guys been playing it mainly uh meaning what like on what platform oh uh almost all steam deck but that's only because my wife has dominated my gaming pc yeah i do it mostly at my i've done some she's playing balder's gay as well yeah she is oh that's fine i i have done some on steam deck but i mostly play on my um on my computer i would okay then i would like to hear your thoughts specifically for you too because i played almost exclusively on steam deck Deck and I got very used to the controller configuration. So I went ahead and, you know, stuck with that on PC. I think for controller, especially inventorying thing for me is to do it the way that I would like to do it in the careful sort of thought-out way where the stakes really matter. I need to be able to move around equipment and inventory easier, and that part on controller is a big bummer yeah it's better in pc but like that is a very non unpleasant way of of spending

my time is like scooting these different like pieces of equipment between the two characters and seeing what everybody has picked up and trying to remember who had what and then resorting by recency and like that that part is not working so so two things i want to mention one and i don't know if this is really going to make things much better, but I have heard that the patch that will come out when the game hits PS5 will include better controller support overall. I don't know if that means inventory specifically or what, but I think it will make some of these aspects a little bit better. Thing two, I agree with you 100 about the inventory even

despite that i think it's still way more engaging to play in a controller because just moving around the characters through the world like using an analog stick to like walk your characters versus like clicking to move them around just feels like i'm moving actual characters and not like I'm a god you know overlooking I think that I'm agreeing yeah but I wish that like as like part of that had been because it's not as easy at like I I was at my computer right so I could have like switched switching between controller and keyboard it's really cool because it the entire ui changes yeah yeah like everything changes to an extent where i was in a trade window and i was like loading up the garbage that i had picked up um which is also like still way too annoying um and on uh and it like reset the trade i was doing like i put all my

items back when i switched from controller to keyboard like it started the whole thing over because it's literally like remapping even that ui even the trade window ui it completely redoes it when you're on keyboard versus controller yeah it's i just i just want to say team mousing keyboard uh i feel like that omniscient perspective is better on mouse and keyboard like i think that um a crpg especially one as like big and rich as balder's gate 3 is like i i like the feeling of moving around my little guys uh from from this you know very uh god godlike perspective i mean you can you can pull the camera back on a controller all the way and like yeah an overhead view i think the controller i think the fact that they got this shit working on a controller at all is miraculous i think that that's a lot of stuff but again

larian has like the i played um divinity original sin 2 on switch and it worked great i'm curious to hear juice because you you don't usually like crpgs right like i feel like you've talked about trying to do like divinity and you thought you were gonna play this for like an hour or two and be like peace i'm curious like what what it what you think it is that is oh it's it's easy it's it's i mean first of all it's all extremely well done i mean it's just like it's easy. I mean, first of all, it's all extremely well done. I mean, it's just like really, really good. But I would say that for me, the amount of D&D understanding that I bring to it made like those extremely dense windows and all the things you have to learn. It lowered that barrier for me because I have like a basic understanding of, I mean, as listeners to the Adventure Zone

will tell you, not a great understanding, but like a basic understanding of Dungeons & Dragons and the way the rules work and what the different stat high mean and stuff like that. I wish, oh man, that's another thing that is irritating my controller. It is, I wish it was easier to figure out

what like a status means. Like there was these turrets that were sturdy yeah and as i understand it i think sturdy means that any damage under 10 damage doesn't count yeah oh i didn't look that up on internet because i kept like hitting these turrets and sometimes i would just just demolish them and sometimes it would be zero sturdy and it's like what does that mean like why is it what does it mean I guess you can inspect them you can inspect anything yeah so on on mouse and keyboard you just hover your mouse over something and hit t it brings up this inspect window and then like you know I move my mouse cursor over sturdy and a pop-up explains all

yeah there there is an inspect window on controller as well I've never used it and I didn't know that about sturdy I did uh come upon a wall, and I had a similar consequence. I was just like, oh, damn, that's just really strong. So I just threw grenades at it, and it blew up. So that worked. I mention that only because it is imperative that you do that shit. Because especially, I'm in Act 2 now. You'll run across some real bad boys who have some unique mechanics that are

not present in the rest of the game that if you do not clock them and find out what they do with those mechanics you are going to get fucking shad racked um so so use that as much as you can talking about the power curve a little bit, something I really dig about this is that when you do get those slightly more powerful abilities, there's a tier at which if things go your way, you are really, really dangerous. It doesn't scale in the way of like well i know you cast uh fire out of your hands but this guy's like really tough so he only took like two damage a lot of times even if somebody's like a a big bad if you set someone on fire with your hands like it's there it's not gonna go good for them like they are gonna take a lot of damage from that and that works both ways right which really ups the stakes like you're not just gonna run your tank into a group of people and like eh they'll be fine that's a tank they can take a

bunch of hits like pretty much anybody you get you get a good you know a good roll on them and you're going to be able to like put it down one good shove yeah it's really all it takes sometimes yeah i think they are smart about uh soft as you progress these characters it kind of like takes the edge off some of the like really bad roll stuff where if you roll like a one or a two it doesn't count as like a critical miss stuff like that but it requires like leveling up i just like the fact that you know the most dnd moments are like could i do this and you can like i was fighting a bunch of like super huge spiders and the spiders were like chilling on their web. And I was able to shoot the web out from under them and they fell and took like 44 damage.

And it was like fully, fully killed Carlock doing that. Oh, no, I fully fucking I dropped Carlock by shooting a web that her and a spider was on. And they both fell into a different world. Like they fell into the underdark there was a loading screen what and when the load was done carlac had passed away sadly in the underdark yeah oh my god that's fucking amazing it's so good i do i mean okay i have another this is again my personal experience i started with this warlock. The first character that I brought with me was Shadowheart, who's a cleric. And that was my party for a good amount of time.

And that was not an easy duo to try to navigate the wilds with. So it was just you, your main character, and Shadowheart for like hours, basically. Yes. And it was just me and Shadowheart. And I was really in a bad way because like and and i don't know i mean again it's pulling direct from dnd rules but i do think it's tough early on when you don't have a big party and like your characters can't do the the spell casters feel really limited yeah because of the slots and like when you're up again like needing to do some

damage to people you could be in a situation where it's just like I have nothing like I don't I don't have anything for you. Right. And it does feel a little bit imbalanced that Carlock can, you know, do attack and frenzied attack turn after turn after turn and just do tons of damage. And like these spell casters are very much like, you know, ineffectual a lot of the time. Right. But I would say like I think spell casters way more useful when it comes to like anything else, anything else. So non-combat stuff, whether it's persuasion or whether you're like do like casting charm on someone or something like that, like they have very powerful spells. I almost never use their prepared spell slots for that stuff the like super powerful high damage stuff it's all like turn invisible or like feather fall or whatever

it is yeah i think what you're describing is why party makeup is important yeah very very much yeah you still do get into situations where it's like i need to i need to fight my way through this and um you could just not be able to. You just don't have it, because you don't have anybody who can actually do damage. Now that I have Karloff in my party, it's the three of us now, and that's a lot easier,

because she's a barbarian, and she's doing a lot of damage. So I've really been trying to not say anything to my wife, who's playing. She's like a little bit behind me. She gets mad when you distract her. Well, it's mostly just like she doesn't want my pro tips, which I totally get. I understand.

What's wrong with her, man? Your pro tips are so good. But she was playing for like. You got me through so many games. She was playing for seven hours and only had two people like you. And I watch her and she's like going into a fucking spider den. And I know how hard that spider den was with four people, let alone just two. And it's kind of crazy because you can, I mean, as I did, like within the first five hours, I had a full party. I know it depends on where you walk. Yeah. Where are these people? I'll go back and get them they're very early on there are two people

that you somehow completely missed that are like within spitting distance of like the first place you land in in the wilderness so so are they waiting for me they are just waiting they're so sad juice both of them will have a cut scene if you get in within spitting distance of them can i get back there for them yeah go, go back there. Yeah, man. There was somebody else with me on that boat, the squid boat at the beginning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was somebody else up there.

There's actually three party members that you've somehow missed. I don't know how you pulled it off. It's wild. This is a bug. I think you're talking about a huge complaint for this game. This is a problem. It's not a problem.

This is a problem. If you were more thorough about inspecting the environment... I have eight hit points. If I fall over a shell, if I fall over a sharp shell and die, I was being really careful.

This is all great. I'm glad you're enjoying it, Juice. I'm totally in love with it. I don't know if I am going... Okay, I'm currently at an inflection point where I've really enjoyed the time that I've, I've put into it. I don't know if I'm going to like in, if I didn't do anything,

if I didn't do this show basically or anything else, like I, I think I would definitely just like keep focused on this. But I don't know if i'm gonna like stick it seems like such a big time commitment i don't i feel like i'm kind of at a point now where i can step away from it and still have a you know a decent idea of what it is but yeah i'm kind of on the fence russ russ pointed out i i am i am having the most fun playing this game. I can't stop thinking about it. I want to spend all my free time playing it. I am worried about leaving it and coming back to it.

Just because my journal has, at any point, 60 fucking quests and little stories and shit happening at any time. It's about to get a little dicey games release wise by which i mean there's some like starfield's out in a few weeks that's wild that's not gonna that's not gonna go great for me uh i i am worried about this game either sucking up all the oxygen in the room or like me having to make some very difficult decisions about how to divide up my you know admittedly pretty limited free time sama de amigo party central i mean say no more i mean i'm yeah it's gonna get spicy i i i think i'm gonna try to i mean i'm at the beginning essentially the beginning of act two and maybe i'm gonna try to beat act two and then

take a break but you're right it'll be really hard to like remap my brain to remember like who's good at what and what items i have and stuff like that trine five colon yes we're still making them that's coming out august 31st there is no tron five trine five oh trine trine trine trine i Trine. Trine. Tron. I'm flaunt. Welcome to Trine. It's in a computer. Trine, save me.

My plate fell. I tried to throw my plate, Trine. Let's take a quick break, and we'll talk briefly about D&D when we come back, and also we have a bunch of very good reader mail questions wait i have a very important question for you russ frushtick oh boy it's context i need dungeons and dragons where are you at what does that mean how how much dungeons and dragons have you played oh very very little that's little. That's one of the more shocking things. You know what I mean? Because I'm nerdy, it's heartbreaking. Yeah. See, I need to have friends also. That's like the other aspect. You need to be a nerd and have friends.

You know, if you tap into Start Playing, it's a new service that helps you find people. Start Playing Games will let you find a party online. You can meet up with people that way. I think we're jumping ahead. We'll let you find a party online. You can meet up with people that way. I think we're jumping ahead.

We've partnered with them to do some stuff, FCC. Please, I'm so sorry for my brother, FCC. I'm so sorry. FTC, also, I don't know if you give a shit about that kind of stuff. I'm just mentioning it. It's good service. I don't know. It's just going to be useful.

Anyway, so you're not bringing a lot of context. Well, the first time I played D&D was in college. Well, actually, I didn't even play D&D in college. I played Cyberpunk Red in college. And I did, like, one campaign and had a blast with it, but it was really just one campaign. And then the first time I played D&D proper was, like, early 2000s. Chris Plant and his, like, college buddies had a game,

and I was in that and that was a lot of fun but but again i don't even know what version of dnd that was it certainly wasn't 5e so what was your character's name what was my character's name yeah you gotta remember yeah no you remember if you say you don't you're lying all i remember honestly all i remember is that i made a guy that was basically yosemite sam, who was like a drug addict, who was like obsessed with collecting like ore. And so anytime I'd walk into a room and there was ore in the room, I would drive everyone else in the party nuts because I would just raise a head and grab it regardless of the situation. Rock and stone. And it turns out that like people don't like it when you role play like that, like to the extreme of role playing, which I was doing, people got kind of upset.

So sorry, those people, but I was just being true to the character. What was your guys, what was the first time you ever played D&D? Ours has been chronicled inside and out. Yeah, it's called the Adventure Zone. No, but that was that you'd never played D&D before the Adventure Zone? I played once in college before then. But I bring a lot. No, but that was that you'd never played D&D before the event was on? I played once in college before then. But I bring a lot.

I have always done... I've never done D&D as a game master, or dungeon master, so there's a lot of stuff in the systems that I've just never engaged with. I understand things like being a wizard pretty well. I understand the classes that I have played decently ish but um this is certainly like i mean unparalleled if for understanding like all the different systems it's just like all of it without the math pretty much what what i think the game has done most brilliantly and what's funny is i would leverage the same sort of respect towards the Dungeons and Dragons movie that just came out. Oh, I still haven't seen that, but I'm dying to see it now.

Oh, fucking hell, man. I'm so excited about it. It's so good. Great. The, like, dumb shit that you get up to at the table in the same way that the movie kind of recreates that a lot uh with the like dumb decisions that the characters make that pan out and you know get them into high adventure hijinks i feel like the game does that so much um but justin mentioned carlack the barbarian is like this damaged powerhouse i don't use her right a lot of the time in battle because she is also i have a little thing in my campaign i call

carlax delivery service and that's if my um my my you know swordsman needs to get up close and personal with a bad guy but is maybe a little too low on the ground to get up there himself oh carlax give him a boost up there because carlax can throw any fucking thing pretty far. I have filled Karlak's inventory with throwable items as well. And she has equipment on that boosts her throwing damage. So sometimes she'll get in there. She'll use her rage. She'll do her barbarian shit. But sometimes she's getting people where they need to go.

Can you use them as a missile? Can you use your fellow players as a potential weapon? When you're raging, you can pick up an enemy and throw the enemy at another enemy or a friend you could do that i guess i shouldn't do that not ideal um but the the number of just goofy things that i have been able to do uh are with with the just systems in this game are staggering and at all i've never had any idea that i had that i was not able to achieve in some manner uh and that is that's just magic man i will say the one critique i have about balder's gate 3 that i feel like is not the case in um traditional dnd is I have my dedicated like talking person right Gale is like

fucking maxed out and persuasion all sorts of other stuff like that there are moments where you like don't know that you're going to start talking to someone because the cutscene just starts and the person that like happens to be the one you're controlling at that very moment ends up being the talking one and I kind

of wish that there was an option to be like hey yo you should actually be talking let me talk it'll be past you know what's really great though is sometimes i do wonder into a conversation with carlack and then it's like and carlack sucks shit at that but it's kind of amazing though it's kind of hysterical to me this idea of like the face didn't go in first yeah so instead you get carlack and that never goes good for the party it almost always results in a fight but like i i feel like respecting that no that's true result is like a really great thing that this game and few others can actually do that is true um i want to ask just to close this part out uh like what is the like quickest if you have a group of people that are interested what is the like go here and start

a game of dnd like if you if you have a group that's interested just get one of the dnd starter kits and just have the person who's dming it have the book in front of them reading from it. And that just does a lot of the heavy lifting of what they needed to keep track of. And then it's like, you can do your own shit. That's literally what we did with Adventure Zone is that's how I did the first episode and then we just did our own thing off of that. But that first step is always the hardest and scariest

and you can make it. Man, I still kind of feel like it's not the best place to start even if you're getting into it from like if you're if you're getting a bunch of people who've never played together before and there's zero experience i would probably pick a game that's a little bit lighter lift um stuff like quest or some of the one sheet rpgs like um lasers and feelings and stuff like that uh johners and Feelings and stuff like that. John Harper's Lasers and Feelings, stuff like that. I think would be a better place to start just getting into the groove of playing together and the whole idea of like the creativity and the vibe, making it a fun space for people.

I mentioned Start Playing as like kind of a goof, but if you go to startplaying.games, they have a bunch of like DMs that you can hire. But if you go to startplaying.games, they have a bunch of DMs that you can hire. You can also join games that people are doing online. So either way, if you have – that might be a really good option too to pay a GM to help you and your group either learn a game or get through it. What is that website called? It's startplaying.games. But you can go there and like Griffin said, we do work with them, but it's an honest recommendation.

They're not paying me to do this specific recommendation. I'm just saying it's a good service. Cool. Okay. We have some reader mail that I'm going to read through now. This first one comes from Adam. I absolutely adore Baldur's Gate 3. CRPGs are my jam.

And I love how this game really captures the magic of D&D experience, and it got me thinking about the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons games in the late 90s and early 2000s, specifically Neverwinter Nights and its ability for players to create their own completely custom modules. My question is, do you think it's possible, and if so, a market, to develop a CRPG with a tool set to allow that level of user-created content, or has that ship sailed i know neverwinter nights has an enhanced edition released a few years ago but it really shows its age not to mention using a 20 year old rule set uh love the show wish you all the best thanks adam so i i think the question is basically is it possible for like modding tools to be integrated into balder's gate 3 or something that is that complicated, I guess.

Are they not? I honestly assumed that they were. Well, I guess the question is like, does Divinity Original Sin have like user campaigns? Yes. So Divinity Original Sin 2 had a like DM mode. Right, but you were still going through the set campaign you couldn't like you know like new man no i believe that the gm mode let players create and and and control

the environments it looks like the quote on uh bg3 from larian is that they won't have any sort of dm creation tools but there will be like post-launch mod support right i i i do think though like this has been it feels like enough of a phenomenon right now that if they could resell it with that, I think that is not an impossibility. You know what I mean? I don't think this is based on nothing other than a lot of people seem to be into it. If they wanted to do a re-release, Game of the Year edition or whatever, it seems like a way to get people to buy it again. I was also going to mention, it it's not dnd but it is pretty damn close to dnd uh wildermyth is a game that was specifically designed to do exactly what

you're talking about which is the whole campaign system can be created from the ground up with you writing all the texts and creating classes and doing whatever you want placing enemies so if you're okay with it not being formally dnd wildermyth is an excellent option it's on steam and it rocks i also want to give a shout out to the neverwinter mmo uh that had a that had like gm mode support it was like an mmo that you could also make your own custom like quests and campaign lines, uh, that players could play and get experience and treasure and shit, which is, was such a like staggeringly awesome idea for a,

for an MMORPG. Um, yeah, man, I, it feels like I honestly with, with the tools that are out there, like,

uh, roll 20 and what's the other one? Arm, armory, I think is another one uh that are like online rpg tools like it feels like it would not be that difficult to sort of make one of those into a i don't know video game like proper video game format but who knows that's well above our pay grade i think we have another question unrelated to dnd this comes from mike a time loop puzzle game should be 100 my jam but despite repeated effort attempts i can't seem to commit to outer wilds can you give me some tips for

sticking with it yeah so justin you still haven't really gotten into outer wilds right oh i mean i that's a that's a very charitable way of putting it yeah you hate it my advice because i was in this boat where it couldn't click for me is very simple go to the moon there is a moon that circles the starting planet land on the moon and the moon itself is i think was designed for it to be like the starting location for all of the like mysteries that come out of that and what helped me grip onto it was just like chasing down the little threads that you find on the moon and then following them through there it was able to like wet my feet into the rest of the game without feeling like oh shit i have nine planets i can go to and they're all like overwhelming and crazy so that would be my advice uh obviously i think it's totally worth it because

i think it's one of the best video game experiences i've ever had but i also realize that it can be a very steep learning curve to get into it you know the game may not be for you there are lots of games in this genre that are great like uh minute and zero scape and sexy brutal and uh what was the one that was like a timed oh forgotten city is oh yeah awesome you're doing what i was gonna do like death loop uh is that's really good not 12 minutes 12 minutes is a bad game but like several several of those other ones are quite good. Majora's Mask. If you want. Okay, we have...

The Zero Escape games are great, man. Fuck yeah, man. God, those are good. They had a new one of those lately? Well, I mean, they had that whatever it is, Labyrinth, Rain Code, Master Detective Archives, Rain Code. It's so hard to track this thing anymore. Zero Time Dilemma in 2016 was the last actual one.

So kick-ass. Okay, one last question before we wrap. This comes from Taylor M. Hi, besties. Love the show, and I got a question for y'all has anyone returned to pokemon sleep i have found it actually helping me make sure i get a good night's rest and be more regular about my bedtime patterns has anyone felt the same way i haven't actually played that uh pokemon sleep has anyone else i've never heard of it i have no idea what

that is it's a sleeping game no i haven't played it played it. Listen, gang, I love Pokemon. But I don't need them to help me sleep. I have other tools that I use for that, I suppose. But I don't understand why I need to involve them in the process. I don't involve hot dogs when I exercise. I love hot dogs, but there's a time and a place for them. Do you know what I'm saying? It seems weird to me to incorporate Pokemon into my sleep.

Counterpoint. Jigglypuff. I mean, an ASMR Tinder rendition of Jigglypuff on my Calm app would be i'll watch over you all night i'm jigglypuff um i will say hours of that yeah it's like wake up and then like towards in the last hour jigglypuff's like time to get pumped come to work those muscles let's fuck up the day together come on griff. Let's go. I will say I've been playing, I've been doing some more, you know,

walking around the neighborhood trying to get my steps in, and I've been playing a lot more Pokemon Go, and that game is still good. The end of my Poke Report. The end. Do we have any honorable mentions real quick before we wrap? Yo, you gotta read this book called Wool. If you've seen advertised to you, there's a TV series on one of the streaming services

that's part of this franchise. Then I'm not, it's based on this book series that I'm not going to plug because the ongoing stray actions, but the book Wool is part of the Silo series and it is fantastic. It's about a silo deep in the ground where everything outside the silo is a blasted landscape uninhabitable by humans. And they have forged a new society in the silo, and the one rule of the silo is you can never

express a desire to go outside and if you are you're forced outside to clean the cameras that the silo uses to like watch the outside world uh and that's how you're sent to your death um and there's a lot of stuff that happens after that, but that's sort of like the, the, the setting of it. Um, and it's sort of a story about, uh, a woman named Jules, uh, being named the sheriff and not necessarily wanting to go along with the way things have always been, uh, run, but it is absolutely gripping, uh, start to finish. There's more books in the series that I'm excited to read.

Um, but it's called, and you should read it. Cool. I've been playing, actually finished playing, the original Legends of Zelda on my original NES hardware with the original cartridge that I've had for 30 years. That's wild. What prompted that? I'm kind of doing like a Zelda replay thing replay thing and i played through minish cap and loved it and it had been a while since i played the original zelda and i wanted to see if i could beat it without looking anything up and it's kind of amazing how much my brain remembers like

bomb this fucking random wall in the middle of nowhere because i know there's a heart piece in there or like light this bush on fire because i know there's a dungeon in there like i was actually able to get through it i you know so between the zelda replay and 45 hours of baldur's gate 3 are you comfortable with your son's memories of you being more of just like a blur like a general shape like in my defense zelda yeah i mean i i sort of did it uh on on on the move while he was sleeping. So no worries there. I also wanted to call out a movie called Brigsby Bear, which came out a few years ago. Have you guys seen this movie?

Oh my God. There's like an SNL tie-in, right? Yeah, so Kyle Mooney wrote it. I don't think he, I forget if he directed it, but he definitely wrote it. The less you know about it, the better. But while Justin was talking talking about wool it actually rang a lot of bells it's basically a guy who's living in like an apocalypse bunker with his

parents his parents are uh played by uh luke skywalker what's his name mark hamill mark hamill whose name i blanked out on um and another woman who plays his mom. And I just can't really say anything else. Claire Danes? What? Was it Claire Danes? No, Claire Danes was not his mom. Pretty sure, yeah. Don't even look at the cast, but Claire Danes

was not his mom. Greg Kinnear's in it, by the way. Anyway, it's on Hulu streaming. Remember, Greg Kinnear. Don it by the way uh anyway it's it's on hulu remember greg kinnear don't know fucking mark hamill and flair dang greg kinnear we don't even let work anymore greg kinnear's not a lot of movies he's still doing good work uh are you are you talking about wipe of genius is a movie about the guy who invented windshield wipers and his projected cork battle a real movie starring greg kinadir anyway break to be there

is great uh and very unexpected and tonally very unexpected like there's really not a lot of analogs to it but i think if you like um things from the daniels for example the the guys who directed uh everything everywhere all at once you will find a similar experience here. So definitely check it out. I don't really have anything else I can talk about. Okay. Griffin lives an empty life. We wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the Besties on Apple Podcasts.

Thank you to Zach the Third, Nettie Roosevelt, and Seasick Fish. Thank you for writing reviews for the Besties on Apple Podcasts. Thank you for subscribing to the newsletter, which is at besties.fan. If you haven't done that yet, just a reminder, we sometimes give out free codes for games.

We recap a lot of the stuff we talked about. Plant was on this episode. He usually takes better notes than I do. So we'll try to be thorough, but we'll see how it goes. And no, it's great. It's definitely worth subscribing

and there's a really great community of people that are in the mix. We also get our questions from there now. So if you want to ask us questions for the reader mailbag, that's the place to do it, besties.fan. Next week, I think we are doing a grab bag episode, which is the last one for a while

because we're about to enter the shit zone that is the game release season so that's a very negative way of describing this i guess it's as somebody who's full-time in the in the world it is a bit more of a headache it's a nice shit zone it's a creatively engaging shit zone do you guys have any idea what you're going to play just to give in case they want to check it out. I think I'm going to look at Stray Gods. It's a musical adventure game that was just released on Steam. I have enormous amounts of things to say about Blasphemous 2, which I'm pretty sure I can talk about starting next week. So look forward to that.

Might dip into Sea of Stars. Will that be out by the time let me see i think we are actually planning a dedicated episode to sea of stars oh are we okay well i'll find you guys ever play revenant 2 no remnant i never played remnant 1 so remnant 2 you might dig griff it's like a it's it's kind of soulsie but with guns yeah yeah yeah we played it on resties and talked about it on resties and had kind of a miserable time but i would say the response has been so good i know i think we just didn't have the like proper guide to lead us through the experience because we were getting

very stuck on very early game things like imagine if you were playing dark souls one without any guidance and you just just kept getting housed. I think that was probably our experience in playing it. I think that's what happened to me. I hear it's very good. You'd like it, Griff. I think it'd be worth checking out if you needed a break. A palate cleanser. Cool, we did it.

Yeah, good. All right, be sure to join us again next week for The Besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends get the world's best games Besties!