The Besties - No Man's Sky, All Rats' Earth [The Resties]

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

A Plague Tale: Requiem is an exceptionally beautiful, technologically modern video game built with a blueprint from a different era. The Resties discuss the comfort and frustration of Xbox 360-era video game design, the power of graphics, and what makes a great tutorial. Then they empty out the remainder of the mailbag, talking about the future of games, media, and games media. Discussed on this episode: A Plague Tale: Requiem, No Man's Sky, The Invisible Man, House of the Dragon. 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!

Hello everybody, my name is Christopher Thomas Blank. I'm Russ Froshtick. Welcome to The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. This week we are talking about Plague Tale Requiem, the sequel to Plague Tale, a game that I feel a lot of people loved. And yet, I haven't heard a lot of hype about this one for some reason, because I guess maybe too many video games, but I'm looking forward to talking about it. We should probably talk about something else first, though. Yeah.

Do you know what that is? What? probably talk about something else first though yeah do you know what that is what okay so i don't talk about my kid and my dog a lot on this podcast but i feel like i i need your console consultation consular is what you need sure sure sure sure so uh this evening uh hang out with mosey and uh before this podcast i was like hey can you you want to watch a movie while i record the podcast he's like totally cool i'm like great got well they set up i was like what do you want to do after this and he's like watch one more movie i want to watch sonic too oh i'm like you know what you're being very cool you give me some time to record you got it and he's like okay i'm

like i love you and he's like i love you and as i'm leaving the room he says and i shouldn't put the dog in a headlock out of nowhere i can't help but notice there wasn't a question mark there no and i don't know if he i've never heard him use the word headlock i've never seen him put the dog in a headlock the dog's asleep next to him so i didn't get the dog's reaction you know like i thought you know maybe the dog could give me a cue like yeah is there something i've been missing and i was like no you shouldn't and he was like no headlocks. So now I've just left my child with the dog. Well, he said no headlocks, so you're good, right? I mean, yeah, and he doesn't lie to me.

But it's like a shirt that says, you know, like people keep asking me questions about headlocks, you know, that sort of thing. Like, I don't know it's like yeah someone comes to you and it's like i'm not gonna stick a needle and a needle in your ear while you're sleeping yeah and you're like the first thing you think they're gonna do is put a needle in your ear right yeah so i i i'm just wondering if is my child the devil I mean, it might be a burgeoning, you know, AEW star. Sure.

Or maybe just, you know, very great, thoughtful, empathic person who just wants to let me know I will not be choking on her dog. Is it a headlock, a choke, or is it it more of a i feel like it stabilizes in positions yeah like it's more about getting like the grapple started it's not like the sleeper where where you're cutting air supply off sure sure sure so what you're saying is i'm probably good for now and he's like hey i'm not gonna give the dog a pile driver that's my yeah well you just need to listen for the tap out if you hear the dog tapping out then you run in piece of cake um real 1980s am radio vibes here today um okay how about we take a break and we talk about this video game okay plightale requiem here's the basic premise as far as i can tell and correct me if i'm wrong here

you play as uh i guess like a 20 something woman probably i thought she was a little younger maybe a little younger i could be wrong but and she reads like a 16 17 year old sure and her like younger brother and you are in you're living in europe in the age of the bubonic plague yes and there is some like sci-fi mixed in here not sci-fi actually i guess kind of fantasy yeah fantasy powers looped in but the big thrust of this is you and your little brother sneak around uh doing stealth missions uh avoiding you know evil plague cultist basically um avoiding the plague itself and avoiding actual ocean-sized waves of rats yes like it like rats in this game it's not like 10 it's not like a thousand it's so many that they are a liquid that pours through walls and down and like fills hallways and stuff like that. Yeah, that's accurate.

You know, I should correct you on one front. You said stealth missions and like, you don't you shouldn't get the impression that like these two are working for like the Middle Ages version of Metal Gear Solid's solids organization whatever foxhound these are just like stealth scenarios so like they get knocked off of a cart and they're being chased by some angry villagers and then you have to hide the important thing to note is like there's not i mean there is some toe-to-toe stuff in this game, in the series, but largely speaking, you can't really hold your own against more than one person at a time. So you have to like hide in bushes and stuff. Yeah, it is not a violent. Well, it's a violent game in that you can see people get eaten by rats, but it is not a game that wants you to participate in combat a whole lot. Yeah, you're mostly avoiding and using stealth and distractions

and stuff like that to sort of work to your own ends. Yes, it's interesting. So the kind of like, I don't know, the puzzle for me with this game is it looks like the future. Like the visuals here I think are fantastic. It's very pretty. When they're pretty when they're not busted but it's very pretty it beautiful lighting these absolutely stunning landscapes uh across europe and we should mention the team obviously the team worked on the previous

plague tale game but they also notably worked on the flight simulator game for microsoft yeah it's team asobo is their name not to be confused by team asobi which makes the astro robot game on playstation thank you it's yeah i mean it it's a beautiful game but then the weird thing is the game itself to me is like xbox 360 to me is like xbox 360 era game design yeah so that's the thing is it feels like this stretch between you're right like visuals and gameplay and these days i feel like there are tons of like indie examples of people tackling narrative and in those instances they're not trying to match the fidelity of a game from naughty dog or something like that they're usually like maybe it's side scrolling or maybe it's overly simplistic to make sure that you they can still nail the narrative beats but here this development studio is trying to match the like

technical prowess of a naughty dog game cannot, like the game was not built or they don't have the budget to match the scale of the game design at work at a Santa Monica studio or a Naughty Dog. So it is a weird dichotomy that makes you feel like you're playing an indie game, even though that studio is like 250 people. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll be nicer to them and a little harsher to Naughty Dog.

I think this is a problem across AAA games in general, where the visuals have far outpaced the like game design in terms of like people's ambitions. So I think like Last of Us 2, it does some interesting things. It has like improved AI and whatnot. But the core idea is still something that could be done in the 360. I would say that's somewhat true. I think The Last of Us 2, and we've talked about in the past, I don't love the narrative. It is one of the best, if not the best third person action experiences I've ever played, bar none, not even a question.

Like, it is so head and shoulders above the field of the amount of, like, versatility and, like, those combat scenarios are, like, so ahead of their time that playing this, which feels very much like last of us like it has a similar pace especially when you're stealthing it out but the second like there's any combat or any action or you can't like vault over a rock that's like two feet off the ground yeah you begin to really see the difference between a naughty dog and a and a game like this that's good point. And I guess what I would say is, well, again, that core loop was doable a long time ago for a Last of Us 2 type, you know, stealth, knock people off, yada, yada, yada.

I guess the scope of the world that they're creating, I just wouldn't have loaded. I think the scope and also just the diversity of the stuff that you can do at any given moment in Last of Us 2 is wild. You know, stuff that you can do at any given moment in last of us 2 is wild uh you

know the idea you can go prone or crouched or walking or running or i'm aiming a bow and arrow i'm crafting this thing like there's just it is and it's all seamless like the animation looks like someone actually doing those things right exactly it's not nothing nothing that could have been pulled off in the 360 era like you could conceive of it in the 360 era but no one could ever pull that off in a game not only because of technical limitations but also just like people weren't thinking in that frame around like the idea that you could just have a 3d open world game in that era was an accomplishment let alone having like a really intense amazingly well refined thing so i mean again not to pull us away from this game but i do think like that's the big

differentiator here is this this the game design feels very much in the era of like the early like gears of war like that's what you could pull off. Or Uncharted, like the early versions of those games, but cannot really go toe to toe with like the newer versions of those games. That said, if you like those sorts of games, I think you'll like this a lot. Like when I say Xbox 360 era, that's not inherently a knock.

Yeah. Like I think each era of video games did its own thing well. And sometimes a problem with like the modern era is it gets so obsessed with open world that it leaves behind some of the great ideas of the past, right? And I think there's some of that here. I like the simplicity of kind of the stages here. They're open-ish, but not really. I mean, they're much closer to levels.

They're pretty directed. Yeah. but not really yeah i mean they're much closer pretty directed yeah um and i like the simplicity of the story and how it connects into what you're doing i mean yeah it really does pair nicely with kind of that uncharted era um the uncharted 2 uncharted 3 kind of era of of game design yeah i i also think that the like environmentally like the setting um is not something you see a ton of in these sorts of games you might see it in like a strategy game like a or even like a game like chivalry but for narrative games you don't see a ton of like middle ages france yeah and it's kind of diverse in even that, right? Like you start out with almost kind of Death Stranding, kind of almost Scottish bluffs.

I don't know. That's not right. I don't know enough about European topography. But these really lush, hilly greens, and then you get into this, you know, kind of like almost like acrid red, dirty, you know, almost looks like parts of like a dried out spain yeah it's it it does a lot of different visual styles um that gives it that kind of good touristy feel that a game like this often should have um we also have not mentioned the fact that you can control rats that's true And that's like a real win. And that was, for what it's worth, if you played the original game, which I didn't play it, but I did a breed up on it just like so I was up to speed.

Basically, the original game, the idea is the little boy that you're basically taking care of of he's only like five or six you find out that he's like the chosen one and he's got this like evil blood power whatever that basically gives him control of rats and i am the rat king basically not only did i read up on it i also watched the final boss fight of the original game which if you you're not going to play it, go ahead on YouTube and watch it because holy shit, I'm going to spoil it. Sorry, it's just too fucking funny. So he gets this power,

but there's like a rival guy who's trying to steal his power, who's dressed as the Pope or like, I guess a Cardinal. And you basically confront him in a church and you've got like your normal rats and then he is now able to summon these white rats and you basically have this like black rat white rat like war where they charge at each other and eventually he turns into like a giant column of

rats that has to like slam down on you bayonetta style it is fucking bonkers i was not expecting it given the like you know it starts out pretty tame and and kind of grounded in reality to some extent and it goes totally buck wild so real resident evil uh seven energy right it is very very much that i you know we you were talking about the art design i think the art design is like definitely the strongest part of this game um i think whoever is doing the art design they've managed to recreate those spaces in in-game environments so incredibly well that i can like see what the concept art was and the fact that they were able to like transport that into the game.

Total huge accomplishment. And I like want so much good to go to this art studio because if you just want to see like beautiful settings, bam, this is the thing to do it in. Yeah. I also mentioned just nailing a certain era of video games. The tutorial segment in this game. I like it. Do you do i do i well so i i admire it and that i think i think they did it i don't think we ever need a tutorial like this ever again because they did the perfect version of it really well so yeah so let me just let me well let me describe how it works for people the The beginning of this game is the tutorial arc of all tutorial arcs, which is you are walking around and having a nice, fun time.

And then you learn how to perform combat by pretending to be having a fight. So, these little, well, they pretend they're ships but they're like just sticks or whatever going down a creek yeah pine cones and then you like you attack at those pine cones so you're learning how to do combat right and then uh then uh-oh you go sneaking around and you find that there are bad dudes around yeah so then you have to learn not just to sneak but to sneak to evade and then tensions get uh ratcheted up even higher when you realize like oh these people are killers like this is really really dangerous so then gradually you start learning combat and then an escape scenario begins and suddenly on the combat training that you learned in like a very

not tense setting you're learning at like maximum tension sure do i think that is like exciting fresh or new not in any way possible okay do i think it is like the perfect build of how you do that of like again seeing that type of thing in uncharted i think um last best part 2 did a version of this it was just like far more protracted they just added a lot more story in between all of those elements but this one i i i admired it in that it is it's everything and there's like no filler it's just all the phases of a tutorial yeah said i do feel like we're kind of now moving on to a different period in games where it it truly just assumes a certain level of competence when you play video games now um

it's kind of incredible how little tutorialization there is and if if you do want that, they offer it as an option. I think the latest Gears of War did this where there was like no tutorial in it. But if you wanted to play a tutorial, they had an entire custom story tutorial available to you. Yes. And yeah, so I'm kind of mixed on it.

It wasn't especially fun or compelling, but I admired like, wow, they really set out to make a thing, and they nailed it. I mean, I, yeah, I don't really understand what you're admiring. Like, I found it slow and, like, frustrating. I'm trying to think of, like, another way of putting it. Like, do I like eating taco bell tacos yes no they're the taco bell taco the perfect distillation of a fast food taco yes but yeah this is not the first time anyone has like distilled like a tutorial has been distilled in a 15 to 20 minute

span yeah i guess i just feel like it it's done well enough here that it didn't make me mad. And now I feel like if I come across any of these in any other games, I feel like I'm just lowering and lowering the bar here. I guess. I thought Last of Us 2's tutorial did it well. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair. Anyway, I think it makes for like, I think it's a fun enough 20 minute intro in that it got all of the exposition out of the way.

It taught me how to play the game. It did everything it needed to do and it did it very quickly. It's just, here's what I'm gonna say about the tutorial and like of the game that I played, I haven't finished it yet, but of the game that I played, it's so overwritten that I get a little annoyed.

It's like, so every two seconds, there's like a whispered voice line of, yet but of the game that i played it's so overwritten that i get a little annoyed it's like so every two seconds there's like a whispered voice line of we have to run away from them that's clear they have axes and they said they're gonna kill you you don't need to say you have to run away from them you know what helped me was the design of the bad dudes here i think it's awesome i like the design of the bad even beekeepers and they wear like like uh woven baskets on their head yeah very cool no i completely agree but no i i i know what you mean and it does do that thing that again it's just like so of this era of video games where it does the tutorial and they're like great i am so ready to go play this game now you know like

i'm let me lose and then it's like okay but what if first you go and do a lot of like walking around in like a town where you can't interact with things and get sorry but then after that it does open up i think quite a lot and it becomes a lot more enjoyable. Yeah. Who should play this game? Chris plan. I guess it's like going to be on game pass. So like if you have game pass, there's no, not a reason not to boot it up.

Yeah. If it's, if it's on, I got to see if it's actually on game pass, but it will be, it will be. Yeah. I'll lift it up.

It will be. Yeah. Like I think this is again, like a perfect example of the Game Pass game. It seems like people should play the first one maybe, though. I mean, I don't know. There's like a lot of narratives. I mean, they bring you up to speed,

but... I think you should just watch that final boss fight. Yeah, that is the best part. The giant rat towers. I mean, yeah. You know everything you need. Any other thoughts on this game? towers. I mean, yeah, that's everything you need. Yeah. Any any other thoughts on this game?

No, you know, again, I think there are. Versions of this game that I think I'd be way more into. I think, again, they nailed the visuals. They nailed the like art design is so cool in this game. I just like I'm not super into a pretty prescribed insta-fail stealth situation. And there's a lot of that in this. Yeah, I think it kind of gets to just our personal taste and how you and I, I think, have both kind of distanced ourselves from this type of design. I think we felt the same thing with Horizon the sequel, which is a different game entirely.

thing with um horizon the sequel which is a different game entirely that obviously it's an open world game but it's still just playing with a lot of the same tools from a decade old toolbox yeah i think this is way more of an extreme version of that yeah i i take your point yeah which is to say that i think that there are a lot of people out there who are going to love this game uh even more than we do um cool how about we take a break okay we are back we have a lot more mailbag to empty uh we did a ama call for this past besties filled up the mailbag and now i want to i want to clear it out but before we do that it's the sixth year six is that right six year anniversary of no man's sky 2016 it came out so i guess so holy moly is that wild that's wild and you've you've been playing a fair amount yeah i i want to mention one thing a little backstory on on no man's sky when it first came out.

So when it first came out, Sony was handling the, the, I guess PR for the game and it was an exclusive on PlayStation and they were basically refusing to send anyone early code for it. So, which is fine. Like it's their prerogative.

They want to do that. What they didn't really factor in is that we were going to be able to go to a random store in new york city and just buy it and uh so that was really our first experience playing it and no one had really seen a lot of i don't think anyone had gone hands-on with it by that time so it was essentially out and as we all know no man's sky was not in a great state when it launched a lot of the features that were promised or at least hinted at from multiplayer to base building to whatever were just not there. tiny studio has somehow pulled this game which was arguably the biggest disappointment in recent memory uh in terms of game releases probably next to cyberpunk pulled it out of the ashes and turned it into not only the game that was promised but a game that is far more ambitious than it was promised at launch and it's gotten countless free updates including

the most recent one which just came out last week uh it's 4.0 basically i forget what the they have names for these updates yeah but i hadn't really played a lot of it since i played a little bit when like creative mode got added just to like mess around with it. But in all honesty, I haven't played a lot of it since launch. So this is like my first time diving into it and really messing with a lot of the features since launch. And wow, it is like a super fun, very entertaining game. But only because of this most recent update, so i'm talking about talk about that now this most recent update added the ability to basically fine-tune the difficulty to your

heart's content so things you can do you can turn the uh combat difficulty way down and or off if you don't want any of the animals to attack you or the robots to attack you, unless you attack them, you can do that. You can remove any need for currency. So if you want to just buy everything for free, you can do that. You can add every recipe in the game to your inventory instantly. You can do that. Now, what I did was I wanted a middle ground. When I booted up creative many years ago, i kind of found it like oh i've got everything now this is not rewarding it's just sort of like overwhelming so i still wanted a power curve to the game so i included uh you know i had still had to find recipes i still had to pay for things but at a diminished rate. So there was still like stuff that I was unlocking and like I was still experiencing the loop of the game.

One huge feature that they added, you can remove the need to constantly refill the fuel for your spaceship, for your bases, for your mining tool. Like one of the biggest issues I had with this game was that so much of it was dedicated to, oh, I need to fill that meter again. Resource management. Constant, constant meter filling over and over again. Every time you wanted to do something fun, no, you can't. You have to go find cobalt or whatever

to refill your meter. And you can turn that off, and I did, and it makes the game so much more enjoyable because you can just keep to focus oh i'm going to focus on doing missions or i'm going to focus on finding a freighter or doing you know various other things without the need to constantly stop and be like uh-oh i'm out of carbon so that was a bit of a rant but i just want to say like if you've been holding off on experiencing no man's sky maybe you bounced off at launch,

or maybe you heard the negative reports in launch and didn't even try it. It is in such a good state right now. I think you'll really enjoy it. I will remember to tweet. I'll tweet on my account what settings I have. These settings have been great for me. I've been very, very happy with it. Still adds some like challenge.

You still have to work for things, but it's just way less grinder than it was previously. And I've just gotten so much more enjoyment out of it. This sounds great. I feel like each one of these mega updates, people are like, no, no, this is the time to go back. And almost every time I give it a try and it's not bad any of those times yeah but it's always like oh this isn't quite what i am looking

for yet um the tutorial that would the two the intro i mean speaking of tutorials the intro to this game was notoriously rough yeah um and it got better and better and better yeah yeah yeah that's been tightened up but also now that you don't have to worry about fuel the intro is like cut in half because half of the intro was like oh i need to craft a fuel cell and then i need a fuel cell to power my antimatter whatever the fuck and that's all gone uh if you turn this setting on so i wonder if they have a sequel in the works. I don't think a sequel. They are working on another game. We recorded that at Polygon.com.

They've said that it is scale-wise comparable to No Man's Sky. Yeah. But that was probably a year or two ago, so it's been a while. Yeah. This feels like the thing that you do when you're like about to you know finish up a game you know i'd be surprised i think if i had to guess i think they're going to support this game for 10 years and then wrap it yeah because they've built something that is so modular and scalable yeah with a relatively tiny team that i and and i i'm sure they continue to get sales on sales whenever

these updates come you know this is the model these days is these free updates maintain the player base while bringing in new people it's yeah it's really smart well it's also the minecraft model in the sense that there are always new young people who like science right so like you can keep doing this because you know that you know six years ago there's an entire audience that was just way too young to even give this a try um which is wild and so antithetical to the way video games have worked in the past you know it used to be like if you wanted to get those people involved you just had to keep making call of duty every year um for sure yeah it's pretty cool uh the big question the big x factor right now where does this put starfield because

bethesda's starfield is coming out in theory what is it uh march of next year yeah yeah and and uh a we know that bethesda games tend to launch kind of messy to say it lightly yeah uh and b like the amount of options you have in this game i did a mission last night where i boarded a derelict freighter and did like a dead space style like haunted mission huh there's just so much variety here it'll be interesting to see if starfield can match that at launch or whether they're gonna have to ramp up to it uh i'm sure starfield will be prettier but they won't have the procedurally generated stuff in starfield i'm sure a lot of it's gonna have to be handcrafted not the planets but like the enemies you face and the missions and stuff like that so yeah i mean at a certain point it's also just marketing right like starfield just has a

marketing budget that's infinitely larger than oh yeah starfield will be fine i'm more talking like oh no yeah as artistically i that makes sense but i'm saying you know it's like in film right like the best superhero movie the last 20 years could have been an indie film you know it could have been like an indie superhero but at the end of the day, the vast majority of people are going to see the one that is advertised during Monday Night Football. But yeah, I agree. It's a question that I'm very curious about. I mean, I just expect that Starfield won't be the game

that it's supposed to be for another two or three years after launch. That just seems like the model at this point. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. I'm not apologizing for it. I think it should be held to expectations at release, especially for reviews and whatnot. But I just think that they know that players will buy it, and if they don't, they'll catch them down the line.

Let's empty the mailbag really quick. Let's do it. First one from Windmill Warrior. Don Quixote right here. If you could pitch a Halloween game design idea, what would it be? I want Among Us X The Thing immediately. What? Let's play Among Us, right?

Right. Like that idea but for for the like add more combat that is akin to john carpenter's the thing because among us the premise is basically the thing like right right right shape-shifting whatever running around killing people i would love something that i mean i guess more the better way of putting it is like i would like a the thing multiplayer game like the dead by daylight people i would like them to do something like this where it's like a 3d game where i yeah you want a 3d action survival game yes not the like indie like among us is obviously a very boiled down version of what we're talking yes and that combat can actually be triggered where you can fight against the thing and that there can be multiple the thing. Like, you know, eventually, like most of the people in your match should be the monsters. If there were multiple things, how would you indicate them?

Would you say thing one and thing two? Oh, damn it do you have a halloween game idea um yeah i just like the thing one thing too no no you did good i knew i knew that i caught you off guard after that there was you weren't gonna have anything ready um use up all your brain juice this one's from Daniel. If the original Mario movie had been animated instead of live action, what 80s or 90s stars would have been cast? Oh, so voice-wise. Yeah. I mean, the truth is nobody we know of would have been cast because until like Shrek era, most voice actors were separate from like popular actors.

It's not like today where, you know, a DreamWorks movie or Illumination stuffs the movie with like famous names, right? But if we were using kind of the modern motif of casting where, you know, you just get as many famous people in there as possible, I mean,im carrey would probably be one of them who would he be luigi i mean probably king koopa like that that yeah his version of king koopa yeah um and then if it's like 80s i feel like like bill murray and dan Aykroyd. Oh, yeah. Something like that, you know? Yeah, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd. Yeah, Mary Luigi. That works well, actually.

Because Dan Aykroyd already has the, like, timid thing going. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do I think that would be good? No. Not at all. But, like, that's not the question. Here's one for you.

Dustin asks, would you rather never have to worry about money again or live in a world where Pokemon are real? Okay, let me see. Good question, Dustin. Would I rather have infinite money or would I rather live in a world where Pokemon are real? There's a problem with this question. Is that one of these things is seemingly pretty good, and one of them is pretty bad.

Which one's which? Do you know which one it is? The money one sounds good to me. The Pokemon are real sounds fucking terrifying. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no no no no no no no no i think this your answer is selfish because i mean it is selfish but it's also like i don't know for the best of the world because the world can't sustain fucking toros running around shooting

fireballs at people no no no no no look at what happens in all pokemon societies they're idyllic they're borderline utopic so i think i think the lesson is that by having pokemon around life improves for everyone no here's the thing though uh-huh think of pokemon games and like the towns in the game so the towns themselves idyllic you're right they're great the second you step outside of the of the outskirts of the town, it's a fucking shit show. You walk into a little patch of grass and you get attacked by a Mr. Mime. It's terrifying. It does suggest that maybe this is post-apocalypse.

Where most of the world has been destroyed. If you can find a sanctuary, you're good. But there's not a lot of people around. That's a good point. Not only that, the housing situation is terrible. There's like three houses per town. Good luck getting one of those. That's true.

And it's not a lot of people living in them. You know, like your house, huge. You think that you can share it, but no, not at all. No. Let's see. This one's from ignarius with games coming out broken then resurrecting cyberpunk no man's sky etc and the rise of early access how do you define when a game is worth your money uh oh gosh i mean the idea of defining when a game is worth your money is so different from person to person. And, you know, realistically, for me, I have a job like I'm not going to buy every single game, but like I have enough money to buy a game if like I want to. So it more becomes a is it worth my time situation?

And. I mean, in a lot of these situations it's like so no man's sky obviously i already had and it was just like felt like a time sink to me so i bailed and the fact that they cut out that time sink a lot of it i was able to come back to it so i don't know i i guess it it it's yeah it's just so different for everyone. Yeah. I mean, a big thing at Polygon is we try not to do this, at least not on the reader's behalf, because we understand, like, everybody's financial situation and availability of money is unique, right? So if you start to do this, like, in terms of criticism, it's really tricky really fast.

And I think personally not that helpful. So that's why time is often something we think a lot about. That said, for me, let's go back to when I was a teenager. I didn't have, one, I wasn't working in this career, and two, I didn't have like grown up money. If I was a teenager now, I think a lot of it would be, hey, is it on a subscription service? Or should I just wait for a sale, especially if I owned a gaming PC? Like, it would be really hard if I was really being careful with how like how many game purchases I made a year. And by that, I mean, you know, like, let's say my gaming budget for the year is $150, $160, right?

Three big AAA games. I don't know if I would buy anything new at all. You know, outside of, like, the most exciting. I mean, it would have to really be something special. Mostly because there's so much else to play that it's like, why bother? Like if you can wait six months, you'll get it for half off.

And in the interim, there's literally a trillion interesting things that you could be playing instead. So yeah, I think about that a lot. Like if you're willing to not be at the forefront of gaming like if you can again six months behind you can get so much entertainment for like gaming is already a really good roi in terms of like money you're spending versus how much time you get out of it and it becomes outrageous like comically outrageous how much bang you get for your book if you just wait

and get a game that's like older so like even if you fuck up and like buy a shitty game by accident for 10 it's 10 hours like realistically like you could probably swing it whereas 60 70 dollars that's a lot of money yeah um and on one hand for like developers i feel i'm like almost reluctant to say that because like hey you know that's how studios stay afloat on the other hand as we move to all digital it's still a trillion times better than how it worked in the past which was if i told you to wait until the game was on sale what that really meant was buy it used yeah and the developer didn't get any money so now like yeah i mean now yeah studios build their income around doing like a steam sale or a nintendo switch sale like their income skyrockets when they do those so they're basically getting they already have the people that like

needed to play it right at launch they've got that group and now they're getting people that were like on the fence maybe maybe not oh here's this sale i'm gonna pick it up now so you get another round of it and you're right like all of it is going directly into the pockets of the developers it's not well with the split of the console but it's not going to like with used game sales they got zero dollars after after that resale i i feel like buying a game at launch right now, again, if you're like being very, very money conscious, is like buying something at Kohl's at full price. Like you can do it. There are people who do that. But anybody who knows Kohl's knows that you've got a 20% discount code somewhere that you can go use, right?

Bed Bath & Beyond, same thing. You know, if you're familiar with the space, you're not going to be spending full price on your next garbage can. You're going to be getting a deal. One final question before we wrap up. A games industry question. This one's from Directional Joy.

How do you see video games media evolving in the future? We have websites, podcasts, YouTube videos, and social media as examples of how to put out info. Is any form of this more promising than others i asked because of the recently awesome games media which uh it's been a rough time to say the least yeah uh i love the besties so um do you have any initial thoughts on that i think the value of games media is on a few fronts i think there's a curation certainly a curation aspect to it there always has been but even more important now as we are there are fewer and fewer of these publications uh but it's also a uh you

know through either a critical or cultural lens, viewing games that are doing something interesting or doing something unique or the way communities are covering these games or existing in these games. I think there's a lot of approaches that video games media can take that isn't, you know, 10 years ago, it was a very standard like do a preview do a review interview the developer like it followed these same beats over and over again and i think everyone has moved on from like for example previews are like way more way less important than they used to be but i think there is this whole post launch cycle that we are constantly uh keeping our ears in and listening to and and paying attention to and that's what people care about is like oh i play this game 300 hours a week i only want to read about this game we can provide some insight into aspects of that that like we couldn't if we were covering 300 games a year so it's it's different um how much does that scale across like can there

still be 16 huge video game media organizations probably not i mean you know it's definitely shrinking but we you know there's been a lot of discourse about like mainstream media and how it hasn't like picked up this torch and you're right they haven't so uh we we still have uh you know room to play in this space yeah and i i mean we always will and that like they call it enthusiast press but like every every medium has that right like there's always going to be hardcore sports people who just want to read a hardcore sports publication. Same thing with games. I think what we're seeing right now and we're going to see even more of is just there's more competition than ever before. You know, when Frush and I got into this business, there were a lot of magazines, but there wasn't Twitch. There was, I mean, kind of just in TV.

There was a very, very, very early days of YouTube. There were podcasts on places like oneup.com, which were, you know, kind of the proto gaming podcasts. And now there's just so much. There are, you know, I mean, just on YouTube, you can have, you know, video essayists, you can have guides creators, you can have people who do previews. You have people who are streamers. You have people who just make careers off of streamer drama and gossip. Like, I mean, it's just absolutely massive.

absolutely massive. And I think, you know, 15 years ago, if you wanted to get into this space, it's not like there was a ton of money, but there also wasn't a lot of competition. So you could kind of like try a bunch of different things and see what worked. And maybe that could keep publication afloat. Now, I think there's so much going on that you really have to know what your expertise are. Like what's the thing that you are selling or doing that other people can't do well? What, you know, for a site like Polygon, what works really well as text versus what works really well as video? And how do we play to each of our strengths? And I think that is what we'll see with like games media evolving. I don't think games media, I mean, I think it will only get bigger. I think there's only gonna be more resources coming into it. But at the same time, as competition happens, that that's going to lead to some some rough times too.

Overall, I'm optimistic. It's a place that I still enjoy working in. So I think that's about all I can say. Does that seem fair? That seems fair. Cool. Let's wrap up. We have our recommendations of the week.

Anything that you were recommending? I saw your recommendation. I was like, I don't think I saw that um i've been watching the game of thrones show it's pretty good i'm a little i'm a few episodes behind i won't give spoilers but uh it's kind of amazing i uh it's called house of the dragon it's on hbo i'm sure you've heard of it and i went in expecting like after a huge disappointment from the original Game of Thrones ending, as I'm pretty sure everyone was, that is a pretty tough thing to come back and be like, no, we're going to do this again, obviously, with a different creative team. And they've done a very good job and I'm very pleased with it. You know, I think it's very well acted and performed and production wise. It's very good.

So, yeah, it takes a little bit, a few episodes to get going, but once it's going, it's definitely going. I love it. I watched The Invisible Man the other day, again, which, have you ever watched the original The Invisible Man? No. Like the Universal Monster movie? I've seen Chevy Chase's memoirs of the oh no

oh no no no no no i have seen that i'm sorry um no the original invisible man rules it's so fun i love it because we're like the other um universal monster movies they have like pathos and like meaning and like morality you know frankenstein is like this beautiful tale and uh just the the beauty and cinematography of a creature from the black lagoon the invisible man is just about a huge asshole like it's kind of like tony stark back in the day like he's just very much a jackass scientist who suddenly has way too much power and then he's just a jerk and that's the movie him being oh so it's like hollow man jerk yes but i um not he doesn't go as far as hollow man hollow man is like oh thank you yeah hollow hollow man is a tough hang um this is more like oh it's fun like it's fun to watch this guy be a

jerk and we're not cheering for him by any means but like we also don't feel like we're committing a crime by watching him we're not complicit um so i definitely recommend that if you need um if you're wanting to watch a real classic horror movie this season i mean i always recommend spanish language dracula that's my number one but if if you've already seen that before um invisible man is a hundred percent worth a watch. I think that's it. I think we did it. That is it. So we talked about Plague Tale Requiem. We talked about No Man's Sky.

We talked about House of the Dragon, The Invisible Man, and my dog's losing her mind, if you can hear it. I'm actually kind of wondering if she was in the headlock. So we should probably wrap it up. That is it. I'm Christopher Thomas Plant. I'm Russ Fr wondering if she was in the headlock. So we should probably wrap it up. That is it.

I'm Christopher Thomas Plant. I'm Russ Frushtick. This is The Rusties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. We will see you next time. Rusties! You forgot?