The Besties - Open the Baldur's Gates! We Have an Xbox Series X!

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

The Besties have gathered at the digital tabletop to review Larian Studios’ recent launch in early access to Baldur's Gate 3! Plus, Chris gives an in-depth report on the Xbox Series X! 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!

Chris, you want to repeat the news that you just told us? Because I think it's important and I think it's going to inform a lot of the content of the besties moving forward. So I am just going off of some reporting I saw on theverge.com. But the headline... Can't trust it. Can't trust that rag. You can't trust that rag. The headline is Spotify will let its original podcast host include full songs in their show. And we are an original podcast of Spotify.

Right. So I guess we could just break them off a little piece of And I don't want the world to see me cause I don't So I could sing the whole thing and no one could, the Goo Goo Boys, the Goo Goo Boys couldn't do Fuck All About It. Can't do anything.

That's strong. I like that. This show's about to get fucking good. Everybody who's been listening to this show since the beginning, it's about to get good. Yeah, get ready because it's about to get fucking good. Finally. Are we going to be singing karaoke style or do you think it will become more of a musical parody act?

Okay. That's fun. So we can do it, like we can mix in, like we'll be singing Superman by Third Eye Blind, but we might mix in some stuff about Blinks the Time Sweeper in there. I think we should do, let's do the original tracks,

but do like, you know how celebrities are always having fun with lip syncing? Yeah, sure. We'll do that on our podcast. Right. So we'll play the original track, but we'll lip sync it. And you're thinking, but how's that work?

We can't see you. We're going to make very exaggerated lip, tongue, and mouth sounds. Yeah. So that you know. That ASMR is going to get you. We're going straight to the wild, wild west. This is a punchy episode. Come for me, Cisco.

Come for me. Baby, make my booty go. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best, like, 15% of a game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best video game console of the week my name is christopher thomas plant and i know the best video game console of the week my name is russ varsick and i know the best d of the week and it's dnd okay well welcome to the besties where we're going to be talking about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment it's a game of the year podcast that goes all year long it is a book club, book games.

It is about Baldur's Gate. This week we're locking the gates and then we're unlocking the gates and we're opening them up. And it's Baldur's Gate three, the triple, finally. The wait is ogre. Ogre's in it. Chris, what's Baldur's Gate? I've already forgotten. forgotten Chris how much did you prepare for this because you didn't really play Baldur's Gate we all three of us played but you didn't really play so I can

give the description if it's easier no I mean like there's like elves and monsters and then you like collect swords and shields I'll take it away, Baldur's Gate 3 is a game made by Larian Studios. It is based on the original Baldur's Gate series. Both Larry and his studios pitched in on this one. Made by that studio. And so that studio did not work on the original Baldur's Gate games, but they did work on the Divinity Original Sin series of RPGs, which are very popular and everyone loves them, including your very own besties

uh balder's gate 3 takes a lot of the ideas that were introduced in divinity original sin and integrates them into the actual legit rules of uh dungeons and dragons 5e is that correct yeah fifth edition um so uh yeah it's just like kind of a very open-ended you decide how your character builds out and adventures and who you meet and who you uh romance you know you name it it's it's just one of those giant classic uh rpgs made by a studio that is right now maybe the best studio for making RPGs. It's also in early, early, early access and we'll talk about that too.

We're going to talk about that and so much more right after this quick break. Y'all, I have a question because I didn't play the game so I have a lot of questions. I'm going to play the game, don't get me wrong. I've just been a little busy but something else we'll talk about later. my question is is this a is this even a video game because i've been on twitter.com and some people have been mad that this is not a full video game

yeah so i yeah it's not i mean well we should we should it's a video mean, it's a video game. It is. Let's talk about what it is first, right? It's a Dungeons & Dragons game. I mean, that's what it is. It's your isometric role-playing game, CRPG, with dice rolls, literally. I mean, much like Dungeons & Dragons, when you come up against a challenge, much like Dungeons and Dragons, when you come up against a challenge,

usually initiated by conversation, you will roll on that to see whether or not you succeed in a challenge. Some of those also happen automatically. For example, Dungeons and Dragons has this idea of a perception stat. And when you walk by something hidden in the environment, the game automatically rolls in the background and tells you whether or not your perception roll uh succeeded or failed uh and then if it succeeds

you'll see something in the environment that you wouldn't have seen otherwise if not no dice uh the combat is also on dice rolls in just using dungeons and dragons rules i mean and you see a lot of uh small thing what's cool about that is desert dragons has a lot of nuance in terms of the way you interact with the world that you maybe wouldn't see in a traditional crpg that was built specifically with the game's own mechanics in mind for example um you see things like uh a shove uh in in there which is just like i'm gonna shove that guy and maybe he'll fall off a cliff uh that kind of interactive stuff that can happen in the moment that maybe you wouldn't see uh because it it wouldn't be designed from the ground up with

those uh yeah one of the things that i've noticed so i i've played a lot of crpgs but not a lot of d and d crpgs not to bludgeon us with acronyms. And something that I've always been very familiar with, because I've played the classic Fallout games and stuff like that, is the idea of action points, right? So like, I'm going to take this special attack, and it's going to use three of my 10 action points this turn, and then maybe the remaining seven points I'm going to use to run away from this guy. Because this game uses D&D rules, that is completely different to the point where you've got Griffin. Can you explain the like how how like a turn plays out and what you can do in a given turn?

Yeah, I mean, this is a turn based take on D&D, which is different from I am not the most experienced with the old Baldur's gate games but i'm pretty sure they operated in that sort of pseudo real-time combat thing uh the best example of this i think is probably a more familiar touch point for everybody is um uh kotor knights of the old republic used i think advanced dnd or maybe like 3.5 or some some dnd rule set but it was in real time right like the fight was happening and and it was not turn based there was just like a period of time that passed before you would execute your next action so you would queue them out uh this works in uh balder's gate 3 as it did in divinity which is just straight up turn-based combat there is initiative roles

uh which is very dnd and you and on your turn, you have a set amount of movement, so a more sort of live character can move across the battlefield a bit more easily. You have a standard action and a bonus action, and a standard action is something like attacking or using a big spell, or a bonus action is something like trying to hide or jumping, or there are some spells and abilities that don't take your full action, like some buffs and some heals are just bonus actions. And then you also have one reaction, which can be something like an opportunity attack if somebody moves away from you. That's how it works in 5e. Juice and I have been playing 5e for six years now, and that is very, very, very familiar.

six years now and that is very very very familiar and i i mean it's why i i replayed uh or rather i played through all the way for the first time divinity original sin 2 this year on switch and really got into it because it was very very similar in that you had like action points and you could only move a certain amount and you could do a certain amount but what divinity did that no other dnd game had ever done was that sort of lateral thinking experimentation improvisation physical based stuff you could combine surfaces or um knock people around the battlefield into traps that you had set and balder's great three is super super good about that stuff or stuff like um i'll give you one you there's a spell that you can get early on if you poke around where uh you can talk to the dead yeah any dead like if you see

a death because that's a dnd thing right like you can cast a spell and talk to a corpse to see if it's got anything for you um and you and the stuff you're doing feels like really meaningful every time i was dying constantly i mean like yeah you get wiped a lot like it is savage i started again with 10 hit points so you start at level one and a level one dnd character is a fucking toddler like they are they are they can't do a whole lot and if you just run into the middle of a battlefield even if you're playing like a fighter, you're going to get shad racked. It feels less like a game design and more like,

well, why did you attack that thing? You know that you're a child. Why did you attack? You should have stayed away from it. It seems dangerous. You shouldn't have done that. That was a really bad idea. There was a look at that thing.

It's called a mind flare. It's got 70 hit points. Just because it's there doesn't mean you should attack it you should run away because it gives you the ability to do that right i'll give you another example there was a there was a uh storyline going on where oh man i don't want to get too deep into it basically you got a parasite in your brain uh and if you don't get it out bad thing's gonna happen um and there and the the if you meet these mind flayers around they're kind of like demonic alien type cats if you meet them around sometimes they can try to like control

you with their mind so i got in this bad scenario where this mean alien was stuck under some rocks and he convinced some other people to try to help him out by pretending he was their dead daughter and i went over and helped them out and then he was like mind control and he might control me and i got killed right so i reloaded and i just stood eight feet away and he's trapped on the rock i'm like arrow and he just died it's like well yeah of course you can do that sure why not it's dungeons and dragons you can do whatever dumb crap you want um but it feels sometimes less like a video game and more like just a uh uh i don't know i it's not realistic obviously but it's flexible let me rephrase my question because i i think hearing all this uh i have a different perspective now what does it benefit

the player right like the average person releasing the game incomplete when it's a game that is like clearly about story like this right like is there is there a reason that that it is good for the player i get why it's good for a studio right you get some money you get a lot of data on like how players play i imagine you can use that data to figure out like where you what you want to invest in in the future. But for the player, is there is there like an obvious benefit to the game being available right now? I honestly think there are people that want to play these games as early as humanly possible. I am not necessarily one of those people. I prefer to play something that's more finished. But I do think people get get super super jazzed at something and want to feel like they're part of the evolution of the game i think this game is in a better uh

not certainly not complete because there's still a lot of issues with it but it's in a better state than rogue legacy which is which is another early access game we talked about earlier this year um to the point where like it like the core the core of it feels pretty baked right like it works effectively how it should work the issues that you run into are like cutscene issues or um you know random crashes stuff like that but the core feels very baked and that core i think is something that players want to mess around with so i i kind of get that wait can i can i address chris plant's question before i move into the issues because there are many of those um i also think that for something like this which is dungeons and dragons there are people for whom having a like for

starters dungeons and dragons is a is a game that evolves with a lot of feedback from uh the community i mean it's almost developed hand in hand with the community giving feedback on the game. Uh, and that's why they've had so many additions, right? You could, uh, I think there are a lot of people for whom having a really solid functional Dungeons and Dragons sort of like interactive simulator for, for lack of a better term, could be down the road really uh valuable like could be really important to have something that could like really do a good job of emulating dungeons and dragons in in this format and i think there's people who want to like they enjoy being involved with that like they enjoy being being involved with it and and getting to to weigh in on it

i wanted to check out this game knowing full well that it was you know who wants to play the first act of a big rpg like that that in and of itself like if you put the bugs aside like who wants to play this massive grand fantasy storyline knowing that you're going to reach the conclusion of the first part of it and then not be able to play the rest of the story so i think you have to have a there's a certain type of person that knows what they're getting into when they play this for me the prospect of playing a genuine fifth edition video game like a genuine dungeons and dragons like experience with which i've not played with the multiplayer but i think that also has the potential to be something like super super cool uh being able to recreate the table sort of goofing around experience.

The biggest thing I feel like that is going to be the, the, the main thing that the main rough edge that they have to work out is quest progression and worlds like continuity, which is the biggest bug hurdle that I think people are facing. I, I have definitely reached like a point where i was doing a quest and then like i just wasn't able to keep going on with it or the person that i was supposed to talk to

wouldn't talk to me anymore uh and when you have a game where like you are given as much freedom as this game gives you in in almost that sort of like uh arcane studios like that dishonored like way where it's like oh i could go through this whole dungeon or I could just use this jump spell to leap on top of the roof and skip all that shit how do you keep this how do you keep this one storyline that you were on going when you can do shit like that which is like the Skyrim problem where Skyrim's been out for a thousand years and it still fucks that up yeah yeah I imagine it like uh visually as a juggler just adding more balls in the air, right? Every time you give it a new thing to remember that you did, that the odds increase that they're all going to come crashing down,

especially this early. Yeah, it is. Just to give, in case people are sort of like, we should try to be clear about the scope of this for people who are thinking like kind of debating unfortunately i think the term early access has been done a disservice with people who want to release a game with bugs in it and not have to uh be accountable for those bugs uh i think there's a lot of early access games that are like that i think this and rogue legacy

are in a category of early access where it's just like no listen it is i will let you walk in here but like the house is being constructed around you you can go and look around but like it it's not a fully functional like video game you can play and get an idea of kind of what they're going for but like uh i had i had the main storyline quest of like getting this uh thing out of your head uh the guy i was supposed to talk to about it is like, I'll meet you out in the caves. I'm like, okay. So this is in some like druid enclave. He's like, I'll meet you in the caves.

And then I left and I come back and he's still there. He said, I'll talk to you about the caves. I was like, well, can you go to the caves? Because I would very much like to talk about this parasite in my head. I'll meet you in the caves. And he never did I'm sir I'm dying I'm dying sir no listen this is a cave thing trust me take it from me zevlor this is a cave look at this this is a tentacle this is a tentacle in my mouth

that is coming out I got all my tentacle shit in the caves so we got to hit the caves real quick and I I just got a few more things to wrap up here, and then I'm going to be caving it, my man. Can I also, I want to critique one other aspect, and this is an aspect that will probably make it into the final game, and I don't know how to fix this problem. I walk into fire like a lot, like a lot. Yeah.

Too much. A lot, a lot. For someone that knows I should be afraid of fire, I walk into fire a lot and i don't know how to fix that problem because all it takes is like clicking on the wrong pixel that looks like maybe it's not on fire but it actually is on fire and then you lose like all your hit points and i don't know how to address that problem i i had a party wake today this morning caused by ensnaring roots like i wanted them for to go from a to b

and they were like walking through the roots and they get stuck they're like ah fuck roots i'm like okay we'll go walk away and then they walked the my you know wizard guy walked away he's like oh fuck those fucking roots man watch out and then the rogue walks right into the roots and the rogues like ah roots they got me this is really hurting and then the wizard is like ah roots right hold on i know just the thing let me help you with that walks back into the roots to hang out with thief guy everybody is in the roots will not get out of the roots um there and there's there's stuff like this very mundane like that even getting around the world sometimes there's like a gap where you have to jump over it and it's like rolling on your jumps right like you have a

jump range and you can jump and when one character jumps your main character jumps not everybody like jumps over to follow them so i'm like manually going through it's like okay now you jump over okay good next person all right now you walk over. Okay, good. Next person. All right, now you walk over, jump. Okay, first guy, you need to move because you're not giving them room to jump. Come on, kids. Play together nicely. I think that it's important to kind of compare this to Divinity Original Sin 2,

which I cannot recommend highly enough, and I feel like you see the DNA of what they are going for in Baldur's Gate 3 so clearly in that, where the big thing in Divinity Original Sin 2 was the idea of surface interaction. So much so that like the entire sort of game classes were built around that. So there was like the Aerotherge and the Hydromancer and the Geomancer. And like so each of those had the ability to transform the environment into different things, almost in like a puzzle game style. So geomancers worked with poison. They could spread this poison gas throughout the battlefield and then a pyromancer could set it on fire with a fireball or a hydromancer could take a pool of water and the aeromancer could

strike it with lightning and electrocute it. That is happening here in Baldur's Gate 3 you can cast the grease spell on the ground and create like a slippery trap for enemies or set it on fire with uh you know a fire arrow or like there's so so so so many different interactions like that but it's not necessarily it's not necessarily like D&D is not necessarily exactly built for that exact system in mind. And so it was almost always good in Divinity Original Sin 2 to have somebody with the rain spell who could just like, if you ran into a dungeon and there was this huge crazy fire trap in it, you could rain on it. Or if there was some bad surface, you could rain on it and nullify it.

Without that option, like always at hand, it's kind of a pain in the ass when you do like go into a room and it's like there's a big treasure chest in the middle but the room's covered in grease well fuck that because i don't want to spend the next five minutes just yakety saxing my way to this to this tomb um i yeah i don't know how they fix that but i also after playing divinity original sin 2 and seeing what they have done in this early access build and adapting 5th edition rules to a video game in a way that I've never really seen before, like, I have more faith in Larian Studios to pull this off than, like, really any other developer on. Yeah, I agree with that. a fine it is a fine proof of it's more than a proof of concept it is a fine like uh structure a fine lattice work for for what i think can be a really really really substantial cool rpg y'all

want to talk about xbox yeah yeah let's absolutely do that but uh go ahead chris start whenever you're ready no wait chris we're gonna take a commercial break i'm sorry to cut you off extremely rude extremely rude wow who is this guy i pre-ordered a playstation 5 i didn't pre-order an xbox when i had the chance now there are no more i felt very good about this decision and the way things shook out and now here comes ch Chris Plant to make me doubt myself. I like it. I like the Xbox Series X. How did you get one?

Because they're not out until November. Did your uncle steal one? My uncle, Todd Microsoft. You met him, right? I thought he came to your wedding. Plant's uncle works at Microsoft. He holds it over his head all the time. He knew about

Halo 7 part of the Bethesda acquisition actually was that Todd Howard had to change his name to Todd Microsoft which seems like weirdly possessive so the Xbox Series X it is effectively

right now the world's best Xbox is that is my selling point which means that its appeal is for a very specific type of person but the thing that i am loving about it is uh it turns out being able to uh just instantly have an entire catalog of games that i had already purchased for the original Xbox 360. And then you turn on the Xbox Series X. And it's like, hey, remember all those old games that you like just forgot about for like the last eight years while you were busy playing games everywhere else? They still exist. And they're pretty good. And they actually run really well

now. And they look gorgeous on your 4k tv would you like would you like to play them you're like yeah yeah i like to play them they're like cool it's actually it's already on because loading times don't exist for these games it's like what oh oh cool and then it's like actually uh 15 minutes of crackdown i'm kind of bored i want to play hydro thunder now and they're like oh you do good because it's already loaded just hit this button you're like what i'm already in hydro's already loaded just hit this button you're like what i'm already in hydro thunder and i'm already beating everybody's top scores and like yeah you are i'm like oh man i did one race but you know what now i'm missing crackdown probably gonna be

a while before that game starts right and they're like no it's just waiting for you right over here just click this button i'm like what now i'm back in the air and i'm stomping criminals as a suddenly very problematic um cop character uh probably was always problematic but now uh i am uh keenly aware of it as plant continues to talk i'm just imagining him wearing cargo shorts that have increasing numbers of pockets just the more he talks the more pockets his imaginary car it's good it's good um and that that's the pleasure of it i wrote about this a little bit at polygon but i am it's really hitting me with this generation of video game consoles that my hype is not for uh the world's coolest graphics um because you're not going to get them. Like if you want that,

I guess go buy a PC and spend, you know, about two grand. But finally getting the ease of use that has been available on PC for the last, I don't know, five years, and getting that on console, getting really, really fast hard drives getting uh the frame rates that just work getting kind of the promise of the previous generation it feels good man i i like it yeah so that i think that all makes sense and i and i totally like get that selling point but it is kind of weird that like all you're really saying is like hey this new console runs these old games really super duper well is that enough for people like of course it runs that sounds like novelty to me a little bit like i the scenario sounds cool but it's like how quickly like and of course it runs

well like these are games that are eight years old like they damn well better run well right no actually that's not an of course because most consoles don't run them at all right like that that's the big difference and the consoles that did like had to get custom patches to make old games run better so like this isn't an assumed it's an assumed if you have a pc it is not an assumed here and even with pc how often do you go and try to play old games and it has to install an old version of direct x or some other just doesn't work right at all like i think there's a lot of things that a lot of pc gamers will say well we've already had that and it's like ish yeah if you want to troubleshoot it for a while sure you have a lot of things i love my pc but there is a real pleasure of playing some of my favorite games of all time and playing them instantly and they look just fantastic the

other thing that i'll say about the novelty of it and do you need it now no of course you don't need it now you don't need any video game console launch except for maybe the switch like that's the reality of it what i think is good about this is you actually do have some incentive to own xbox series x or series s at launch like there actually is stuff for you to enjoy um i'm sure that the counterpoint here is that the ps5 plays uh spider-man or whatever which i guess also plays on ps4 i guess demon's the one exclusive which is great i mean i also have a ps3 um but i i don't think there's i with either console a like a necessity to buy one of these right now that said if you are and i think there's like a number of people who listen to the show who fall

into this category if you went with ps4 for the last generation and don't have an xbox i would consider a series x or series s now especially because game pass means you can play lots of games and we've talked about it a trillion times on the show and i obviously am a huge like stand for it but I I think that is a pretty sweet deal uh right now yeah I mean there is a part of me that's like because I was able to pre-order a series x as well and I've sort of been like vacillating on whether I need it or not well need it but wanted or not and one of the like things that is making me hesitate is because i played predominantly on ps4 and focused on like buying digital games like if it was a cross-platform game i opted for ps4 because it ran better there so now while you're right i will i will have a lot of 360 games that

are digital that i own i will not have a lot of digital xbox one games because generally speaking i went with the PS4 on that. And whether that is a detractor or not, I mean, you're right. I could sign up for Game Pass and pay a subscription fee. And I totally agree with you. It's a tremendously good deal.

But I think there are also maybe people that like feel a little pot committed because of the last generation and don't necessarily want to lose those games. And a lot of those last generation and don't necessarily want to lose those games. And a lot of those last generation games will run on PS4, but you won't be able to play PS3 games will run on PS5. You won't be able to play PS3 games predominantly, but a lot of those games, the PS4 games will run on PS5.

So I don't know. I'm kind of torn on it, to be honest. I have a couple questions. Chris, one, do you have, and can you talk about, like, do you have actual launch games, or did they just send you the hardware to mess around? Well, what on earth did that mean?

What on earth did that mean? I've played two. I've played Dirt 5, which is actually interesting, because I'm not a huge Dirt fan, but it's made by the studio that did Onrush, which was also, like, largely the leftover people by the studio that did onrush which was also like largely the leftover people from the team that did motor storm um and it's like pretty arcadey um races and it's all

about like surfaces so you like are on mud or just this like weird like watery surface is there another surface that you might be on uh ice oh ice anything else uh rocks okay yeah yeah i can go all day what about small small super ground up rocks yeah gravel i think that's what it's called okay damn it uh um um pavement no no that's sand small rocks held together by cement. Sand? No. What about like brown sand? Dirt. Oh, dirt! Five! Got it. Okay.

So, anyway, it looks very, very good. Their games have always looked fantastic. It is the game that has 120 frames per second mode, which is very cool. It works on one TV, the LG, well, I guess the new LG CX, also the old LG C9. I have one of these C9s and I tested it.

Very neat. Do I think anybody should rush out to buy a next-gen console so that they can play games at 120 frames per second no can you see that only not can you see it what is it visible can you like it is it is noticeable um but it at a certain point it is diminishing returns after you get past 60 frames per second for for like the average person i would say i think if you're competitive esports obviously that's very different uh so that's that's that the thing that is way more interesting uh is i started playing the new yakuza which is the turn-based yakuza yeah it rules it is i cannot wait for all of you to play this game so we can talk about it on the show it rules so much it is so

funny it is so charming and i was really skeptical i'm not a big turn-based combat fan i liked the more like uh just smash buttons break people's skulls uh combat of the previous yakuza games turns out i was wrong um turns out it the game is much better as a turn-based combat game because you travel with your entire party, which is a ton of different characters. And now instead of it just being you going around town, getting weird jobs and having odd fighting things, it is an entire squad of people.

So you become a gig economy worker. You spend a lot of time picking up uh recycling cans you uh travel across yokohama taking photos of uh kappa uh statues um one of my uh this isn't great uh but the the woman in my group uh she is well put together and she has an attack with a hair iron that scolds people. You have a person who, yeah, you have a person who has a frying pan as a weapon.

It's all very, very, very, very silly and very wonderful. I'm looking forward to that. Let's, well, but why don't we,

I mean, I had one last, I had one last follow up about, and this was like the thing i actually give a shit about is the like system architecture like the actual interface of it because that was like anytime i would turn on the xbox one which is very rare to like play a game and i was met with the like squares the the act the squares and the extremely slow loading main menu of the xbox one i it was a a big hurdle yeah so i don't know if you can talk about that for i don't want to say a ton just because i know that they're like still updating it and there's still like a little bit of time between now and then the things that i can say it runs fine smoothly i have had zero trouble finding my games i did not have the same

reaction turning it on that i did when i turned on the xbox one which was why did you do this to me um i mean i think it's important to remember the xbox one user interface was designed with connect at its center that's why it was so opaque because they just wanted you to just say what you needed and then they had to retroactively remove all of that piece by piece and it made for just i think a terrible experience for most of the xbox one's life cycle the honestly it's funny that i say that i wonder how much my love of this console is like oh yeah finally like a true sequel to the xbox 360 like it's just a great video game just put fucking blades yeah give me a button i can press just turn on blades it up um also uh it looks not so bad i was i was a little worried

about this um little pc looking funky in the living room. It's not as hideous or untraceable as I thought. It doesn't look hideous. It looks like something you can ignore which you can't really say about the PS5. The PS5 makes a statement and that statement is inverted ice cream sandwich on your TV. Yeah, it looks like

a yoga block. Like a black yoga block. Which you can ignore. It just fades into the background, which is honestly my preference of how gaming consoles should be. I don't want Sony or Microsoft to decide how my living room looks. Let me do that. It's magic eye posters all over the walls. It's great.

Yeah. Just one more thought to go back to Justin's point, which is more about how do the games play versus what the games are, I think, when you asked about next gen games so they microsoft has i don't know the very jargony velocity architecture is their like response for like how their nvme ssd works really well which is your storage and i will say the load times on the next gen games are small on yakuza there like is a load time but it's not bad on dirt 5 i would be in like the select the race select mode hit a button and i'm just like in the race um which is wow not to be like a total skeptic about it but i do think a lot of this has to do with the fact that we are obviously even before the generation has even started and it sort of seems like these are

features that will over time as with any generation over time be less and less precise right like three years down the road a halo game or whatever fable is not necessarily going to load in an instant because it's pushing more of the hardware i i would wager first party games are for sure going to leverage that for me it's like games that are going to be made sort of system agnostic it is harder for them to like build all of their shit around a certain like uh hard drive infrastructure on a on a console i don't know i that that is i feel like fable is going to absolutely have the fast load times because they are making it for the fast load

times for the x and also like if you again think about previous console generations that was not the case with the xbox one i mean i remember zoo tycoon or whatever it was called having some serious load yeah sure even at launch i do think you're right it's the same thing like you know a lot of people have asked me about um you know is it loud it's like no of course it's not loud like it's new my ps4 pro was a whisperer the the day that i turned it on for the first time and now it it screams at me but with all your with all your smoking that you do it's built all your vape directly into the ps4 pro um i had one last question regarding file sizes how big is dirt 5 how big is yakuza uh i i honestly i i i do not know i know they're large i i i mean it's all in memory card block right so it's like 64 the reason i ask is as i understand it the xbox series x out of the box has 850 some odd gigs free once you account for the ui

and the interface and everything like that so like enough space for call of duty war zone and maybe like one other game right yeah capital crashers and call of duty war zone i think though that obviously is gonna fill up pretty quick. The one thing that I thought was interesting in Digital Foundry made a video about this is for backwards compatibility. It doesn't seem like it's using the high end velocity architecture or whatever. Yeah. For load times, you can get pretty good improvements just off of of i guess it's because of the cpu

again i i'm going off of things that are outside my brain um but you can get an external um sata ssd and just plug it into the back of uh your xbox and put all of your backwards compatible stuff on that and you still see significant improvements over the xbox one load times um like significant significant significant so i think like that's what i'm planning to do you know rather than even getting the fancy custom you know direct into the motherboard uh thing uh just getting one of those it's like i don't know two terabytes and putting most of my stuff on that and just putting any of the new uh next gen games onto the onto the custom hard drive yeah well has anyone been convinced i'm just curious to wrap this oh okay um have i been convinced um i think that i probably am still okay waiting but i think that well i, it's kind of out of my hands, right? Like, I'm not going to go through the hoops that I would need to do pre-order one before launch, I think.

But when the time comes, I think I'll be a little bit more. Let me tell you this. The plant is describing that I've gone back and forth on which console is my main console in the past few generations and i think that this like i was primarily xbox 360 and i'm primarily ps4 plan is listing the kind of things that would make me inclined to make this the predominant console uh but not necessarily one that i'm like sure rushing to yeah and and to be clear i don't i really don't want to convince anybody i i think for most people you should probably wait like i think we'll know a lot more about both of these consoles in early to mid 2021 and if you have a current

generation console it will more than enough get you there unless you're the type of person who just really likes to play games that they're like maximum graphic potential like i i don't think anybody needs to rush just yet uh do we want to do mail we want to talk about what else we've been playing do we have mail we have some mail uh i'll just i'll give do a couple questions really quick uh this uh question is from dylan uh can i play baldur's gate 3 if i've never played any baldur's gate games before yes yes yes i never have so i think i mean there's there's a certain amount of like tone that you learn about uh with with playing the past baldur's gate games but i think i've only played Baldur's Gate one and like the first few hours of two

and I don't feel like I am missing anything. Here's something for you. I don't even know what Baldur's Gate is. I've heard a few people in the world like, God, I miss Baldur's Gate. The fish were so good. I'm like, I don't know what that is. What is it?

Is it a gate? Is that a place? I think the analog is the Elder Scrolls series, which is to say most people have not played all the Elder Scrolls games. There are things that carry over, like there are mythical god-like creatures that might show up,

and you'll be like, oh, I remember him from the last game, whatever. But generally speaking, no, it doesn't fucking matter. I'd say the bigger institutional knowledge is 5th edition. Yeah. If you've played, I felt genuinely from the start,

like I did not really need to do most of the tutorial in balder's gate 3 if you know how to play that's interesting griffin i didn't really think of it from that perspective there's gonna be a lot that that ui is gonna look pretty wild to you if you're like well why would i do a sneak how can i do a sneak attack if i'm not sneaking up on yeah i was actually a little overwhelmed because of that because i haven't played a ton of fifth edition so it was that is definitely something that i don't know it will take some learning if you haven't played that uh the other thing can i say one i should have said it back in our brawlers gate discussion but the other big thing that will throw you you will see percentages on ranged attacks that and also

on melee attacks that you would associate in almost every other game for the percentage, oh God, how can I explain this, Griffin? The likelihood that your weapon will connect with the target that you are trying to hit. And in D&D, those percentages more reflect how good the target is at- Dodging? Dot. Really?

Right? I mean, like, yes. It's not- So when I see 95% when I'm shooting an arrow at someone yes it's not when i see 95 when i'm shooting an error at someone it's not 95 chance to hit it is 95 chance to hit yeah but it's chance to hit is okay chance to hit if you take that as a as a static thing right in almost like in if you're playing um what is it um x-com chance to hit is my bullets's got to go over this, you know, through this grate and he's 100 meters away from me and it's

going to be harder for me to hit them. In Dungeons & Dragons, chance to hit also factors in like how good they are at dodging and their armor class, which is like the amount through which they can, like, the chance that they have to not get hit by their attack.

But it can also be increased with things like advantage, which is an important system. But I will say, to the game's credit, they are really good at explaining those numbers. There's a little pop-up box that, like, if you're aiming at somebody and you only have a 30% chance to hit, it'll explain, like, well, you're too close,

they have higher ground, and you are currently threatened by another attack. So if you can remedy those and you can get high and now you have advantage, that number's gonna jump up to like 96 yeah i like that i think that's smart uh here's a here's another question for y'all what else are y'all playing right now um i've i've been playing a game called cubism uh which is a vr game it's on on oculus quest and i believe it's on main oculus as well, but it's really excellent on Quest. It's very hard to describe without it sounding very boring,

but effectively it is, you know, like Tangrams. The idea is you've got this cube and you're trying to fill it with different pieces like Tetris blocks, basically. And that's the entire game. But the presentation of the game

is so simple and clean and there's some classical music playing in the background and you really just sit at a, you know, in a normal chair. the presentation of the game is so simple and clean and there's some classical music playing in the background and you really just sit at a you know in a normal chair you don't need to do like crazy vr somersaults and just slowly and methodically like spin the puzzle around and solve these puzzles and i just found it really soothing i think a lot of vr is designed to be transport you to another world or be a total like, you know, mindfuck. But in this case, I think Cubism does an excellent, excellent job at just being like, hey, here's this like kind of meditative, thoughtful thing to take you away from maybe like a stressful day or something like that.

So highly recommend that. I've been spending my free time playing Animal Crossing. Yeah, it's been nice i don't know that the stuff they've added has been so transformative that like there is that much of a reason to get back in if you've fallen off but for me it is seeing what the community has been making like there are these these town genres that have like organically been created things like oh well this is a cottagecore island and this is and you now have like it is much much easier to go out there and find inspiration for how to design

your shit which makes it sort of apparent the pitfalls that i fell into when laying out my town like i made it so orderly that it now it looks weird to me how orderly it is so i've just been going through and like pretty methodically destroying the town like pretty methodically knocking down mountains and filling in rivers so that i can have a clean slate to start over uh and that's been really uh satisfying for me it's a slow fucking going but it's you know i have 300 flowers growing in this one field that i want to just tear out that takes like forever but if you can get in sort of a zen-like flow about it it's been it's been pretty enjoyable uh i've been playing hades which i know we've talked about a couple times

but wow that game uh good fucking game man hey bud i'm still playing the best game of the year and it is just keeps getting better i've now completed it uh four, I think, with different weapons. It is... It's a good game. Superb. I just want to go play it again. It's fantastic. What's your favorite weapon at this point? Oh, man. I really go back and forth. I just finished upgrading the

Chaos Shield, where after you do your Bull Rush, you throw five shields uh and it is it feels completely completely broken it's fantastic also the uh the the heart seeking bow where you if you hit someone with your regular attack when you fire your multi-shot special all of the multi-shot will home in on that enemy um and it is get them get them magnet fists the magnet fists i will is still the absolute best time getting the splash boons on that so you like knock them away and yo-yo them that is just just beat the game with that with that run last night

that's so fun juice you've been playing anything uh mainly hades i talked about solitaire conspiracy i finished that um very good very enjoyable i can't believe mike bethel made a if i can say a cd game about solitaire in the year of our lord 2020 and a dominion but it is very very good i downloaded and played 15 minutes of ginseng oh boy yeah bud. And I may go back just so I can... I may play it just so I can force you guys to listen to me talk about it. Even if I don't enjoy it, I think it would be worth it.

I would go on that journey with you, I feel like. Yeah. Same. Let's get in there. I know you finished Paradise Killer, too. Oh my God! Yeah? Paradise Killer.

Thank you, Griffin. We talked about it last week a little bit. We talked about it last week, Chris, when you weren't here. Game... rushed dick have you played it i have not played it now oh fresh dick it's it's so good oh god if you uh here's griffin mentioned obredin and i think it's very close i mean it's like it's it's very different in terms of like the aesthetics and the the tone but like it i have never played something that like imagine if david lynch had payoffs for things and it's like and it's like

wow this is really weird i hope something happens with it and it's like oh my god something is happening with it that's so wild i loved it he hates payoffs that is that is a satisfaction that you want yeah from his stuff it is the daytona usa team made obra den it is the like the weirdest sega energy and they got weirdly weirdly very very horny in the middle of making it and so horny extremely horny and also i don't know what vaporwave is, but it's extremely vaporwave. And enough said, I think,

about that. Period. End of sentence. It is definitely going to be up there for me. I think it is a contender by its tone alone, and you should play it.

Next week, we're going down to talk about some spooky games. New spooky games to give you the shivers and scares in this most frightening season. Oh, no. Because we didn't want to do

a whole episode about Genshin Impact. Or Crash Bandicoot. The bad Bandicoot. He's back uh you guys bought this last game so hard that they accidentally everybody bought it as a goof and then they're like you like this fine here go uh we are a spotify original. You can follow and listen for free on Spotify. And it would mean so much to us as we, as we round, uh, we're headed into the home stretch of this year.

Uh, the future of whether or not there will be more besties depends on you, our beloved listeners, uh, sharing the show. Besties dot fan is the link to, uh, share. You can also send us some mail, mail at besties dot fan is the link to, uh, share.

You can also send us some mail, mail at besties dot fan. If you have a, you know what? It would actually be really helpful if you have a genuinely spooky game. Um, uh, not like,

Oh, it's so scary. How good Fortnite is, you know, like a real scary game that came out this year. Uh, let us know, give us a shout mail at besties.fan

that's going to do it for us for this week so until next time thank you for listening besties and join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. Besties!