The Besties - The big game announcements of the summer [Resties]

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

E3 is dead. Now what? Without one video game event to rule them all, video game publishers are trying a variety of approaches. This week, Sony held its big digital event, showing a bundle of games coming to PlayStation hardware, including a lengthy gameplay clip from Spider-Man 2. Ubisoft also released a trailer for its new Assassin's Creed. What should we make of this news? And what we can expect from the upcoming announcements from Xbox and others? The Resties have the answers! 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 Plant. My name is Russ Frushty. And welcome to The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. This week is video game season, baby. We're talking about all the big announcements the ones that are actually out in the world and the rumored ones to come we have the playstation games event that happened last week we have a new assassin's creed and we have some predictions of what people will be talking about over june and july maybe even a little bit of august but before we get into that fresh i

i needed help oh Oh, no. No, it's not serious. Or maybe it is deadly serious, depending on how much you care about the video game industry. I think we've hit the end of gamers. Like as a concept? No, I think we need a new word. The new Zelda game is out in the world, right? Sure.

More people are happily buzzing away on their nintendo switches than ever before gaming you know the new york times writing about it i did a hit on npr i don't want to brag but i did you're always on like bbc or i don't know you know as the world turns, we're all spreading the gospel. But we have to keep talking about gamers. I mean, we don't have to. But we do, right? Like everybody's like asking us questions about the gamers. And nobody asks about the movie-ers.

The movies. The movie-ers. They're the TV-ers. You know, they're just people. Yeah. Right? Maybe you're a filmgoer or a cinephile okay but but as a gamer it doesn't work for me so i thought maybe you could help me come up with a new term

sure uh gamers with a z that is good i was thinking gamers an S, but the S is a money sign. Ooh. Yeah. We could also do something like an acronym, like GINO, like gamer in name only. Oh, God. That's more like, yeah, I don't know, man. Does that feel like it's like an Asus product that I just launched? It reminded me of, yeah, politics is what it did. Oh, yeah oh yeah yeah yeah

i could see how that's actually a pretty big problem i hate labeling things is like why does it your your point about move like no one says i'm a cinephile with any sort of straight face maybe you do but most people don't so i hate the idea that we feel like we need a like single word to identify a person who plays games should we just call them people yeah but people with a z okay we did it everyone your people with a z you i'm sure everyone can sense right now that this is the uh the voice of people who've been playing way too much zelda yeah oh yeah look at that people yeah that must be it oh there we go and um and that we're we're going to still muscle through we are here to have a very exciting and entertaining podcast and it starts right after this commercial break

okay we're back and i have like a thousand times more energy now that we solved one of life's great questions of how do you rebrand gamers. There was a PlayStation event. And speaking of gamers, this to me was an event for gamers with a capital G. It was for the people with a Z. It was for the people with a Z. There was so many shooters, so many extraction shooters the return of some big franchises so i've put together a few different topics that i want to run through and kind of pick your brain on okay one what do you think about playstation's i guess e3 replacement

into what it kind of tells us about the state of games um because that's what E3 used to do for us. You used to be able to go to these and be like, hey, I have a fresh idea of the direction video gaming is going for the next year and change. Yeah. The first thing I noticed from this presentation, a lot of new looks for old things. So taking like a thing that we're familiar with and being like, what if we do that again,

but different this time? Yeah, but that's been happening. I mean, so the example that springs to mind is what? Metal Gear Solid 3 being remade. So that, yes, I'm familiar with that, right? Marathon. Marathon is coming back. But I also mean like Helldivers,

a top-down like co-op shooter thing yeah now a third person shooter do we know for sure it's a third person shooter is it just i mean like is that just the trailer that really looks like a third person shooter i thought maybe they cut it in such a way to make it look like that but you could be right no i think i think so or or another one is um one of the uh people behind journey is making what looks like journey on a sword right that was the abzu abzu uh developer right right right right right right um there is like so your your point is there are games that are being that are coming out that are using other popular games as sort of launch pads to come out and be successful. Well, I guess what I'm saying is it's like we can't do the thing we did last time for any variety of reasons.

We can't do Helldivers again the exact way we did because top-down shooters just aren't sellable. Sure. We want to keep that franchise so it's third-person now. We can't make Journey 2 because we quite literally don't own the rights to it. So we're going to make something that looks an awful lot like Journey. Yeah, an Abzu with sand. But it does look like, yeah. Yeah, that's true.

And then there is Jade Raymond has a new game coming out. For folks who don't know, Jade Raymond was one of the producers on the original Assassin's Creed games. And this is- Has a game that I thought was a sequel to Watch Dogs. I was confident it was Watch Dogs, and it turns out it is not Watchdogs. No, it's called Fair Games with a money sign S at the end. Yeah.

And this is also interesting because talk about a new look for an old thing. So Jade Raymond has been, I think this is the third project that she has been on since leaving Ubisoft. Yeah. has been on since leaving ubisoft yeah she was working on projects at ea and then uh now defunct stadia and now this um so this is yeah right looks like watchdogs and and who knows what else i i really have no idea what to make of this game other than it's like heists where you steal from the rich and give to the poor yeah that was my interpretation as well yeah i don't know it it's i i guess maybe what i'm searching for here is we're not just in the era of the remake of metal gear solid 3 or the reboot of marathon we're in the era of we will bend ip to our whim uh to eventually get what

we need um yeah i mean i it just feels like you know when when gta came out saints row came after it and i think this is not uncommon where you know popular games or even like critically acclaimed games like journey act as like eventual springing off points for new franchises or new ip were you surprised to see this happen with splatoon though yeah that was shocking i my immediate thought so this there's a game called foam star which i guess is a multiplayer shooter where you shoot foam. And my immediate thought was, I thought it was like a battle Royale, like Fortnite knockoff,

but no, it's actually closer to Splatoon, but with foam. And I just like, I'm trying to imagine a scenario where I'm at a party and I'm like, oh yeah, I've been playing foam star. I mean,

Hey, it looks good. I'm definitely curious. It's very very silly and i like how bright it is yeah the characters look more like anime idols um i'm curious about it okay let's talk about something that i guess is like way more familiar spider-man 2 this this to me was like the big showpiece of the episode. Of the presentation. Yeah, yeah. And how did this hit you? What did you think when you saw this? Because I feel like I have a very different take than most people here.

Okay, so Spider-Man shows up. My immediate thought is it looks very pretty. But my second thought is I kind of feel like I played this game already a little bit, which, to be fair, it's a sequel. But it, you know, works on a lot of the same building blocks of the previous Spider-Man game. Obviously, more features. And yeah, you get like a glider. features and yeah you get like glider but then my third thought was it's going to be really really hard for me to get into another open world game as much as i've been into zelda because it allows for so much freedom i think i will love this game i think i'll have a lot of fun with it but i it's hard for me to imagine like staking as much time into another open world game now, which maybe is moot because this game isn't going to come out until the fall anyway. Yeah, I mean, I think it does one thing completely differently in that it goes for the uncharted cinematic approach, right? Yeah, but the Spider-Man games, like the first one and Miles Mor morales did that too to some extent oh yeah yeah but i'm

okay so what i'm saying is in this trailer we see one you can swap between spider-man right now sure you can swap between peter parker and miles morales peter parker is now symbiote suit spider-man yes so like the black suit that's like gets to be points for venom yeah evil evil ish spider-man and um they are fighting or i guess competing with craven the hunter who i guess has come to new york city to hunt like all the super villains and superheroes and he's trying to protect the super villains that's the sense you get from from this excerpt uh craven hunter seems to be going after um oh my gosh the crocodile the lizard liz sure um i wanted to say doc croc which is 100 not right um close but but but but yeah where there's a little bit of open world

stuff that they show and and now it seems like basically spider-man can basically fly i mean wingsuiting all through the city um so much faster than the very just. Very just cause. Very just cause. But then once we get to the kind of showdown, it triggers this very cinematic on-rails sequence in which Spider-Man is chasing Kraven the Hunter's henchmen who are flying aerial drones and, I don't know, helicopters and boats and all sorts of stuff through the hudson um and it looks i mean it looks like a uncharted cinematic sequence it does not look like a open world moment yeah and again i would say like like the beginning of miles morales has like a 10 minute long one of those yeah i think it's the only one in the whole game so it wouldn't surprise me if maybe there's one or two of these in in um spider-man 2 but i don't think it's going to be a main focus you see the reason i wonder if they'll go for that more it's like that is what distinguishes it from the zeldas i i personally this is not my like taste i don't really like the play a movie type of video game

sure but that said a ton of people do i am definitely the minority there and i know this is a problem that we've actually run into with horizon zero dawn and and the other naughty dog games on this show um is that more people than not prefer this sort of thing and i think there are obviously a ton of people who love Zelda, but I do think there is a very large audience that is maybe bouncing off of Zelda, if they've even tried it yet, because it is so open

and because it does ask so much of its player. And to me, like, Spider-Man 2 represents the quintessential AAA game that asks effectively nothing of the player. Like it is it is candy. And I say that like the kindest and most flattering way. Like it's really good candy where you just zip around New York and it's you only need to hit a couple of buttons and it'll take care of the rest for you. Yeah, I mean, well, it's funny.

buttons and it'll take care of the rest for you yeah i mean well it's funny first of all it's funny you mentioned horizon because i don't consider horizon to be like a playable movie because a lot of that's like when it does do cut scenes they're non-interactive when you're playing the the gameplay is pretty consistent so yeah i wouldn't necessarily like put that but uncharted definitely is like in that milieu i think Spider-Man will do some of that. But here's the problem. Those sequences are way more expensive than just the traditional like open world mission where you have to like catch a guy who's driving away and blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's really you have to like triage pretty heavily unless you're making like a fully linear game like an uncharted where you can do more of those but i you know it's possible because they're working with an expanded map

that they already made they'll have more bandwidth to do that sort of thing but i don't think there's going to be like tons of them i think maybe three or four over the whole game yeah i'm very curious how they play with a map this time around because i I think Zelda has been a really great example of repurposing an established map, but also, you know, modifying it quite heavily and then being something kind of different. And I don't know how much you can fuss with the landscape of New York to make it feel like you're swinging around a different place. Maybe also that doesn't matter. of New York to make it feel like you're swinging around a different place. I mean, they did a little bit in Miles Morales because it was around Christmas time, so they were like branded with the snow and everything like that.

And obviously here they're introducing like Queens and so there's new areas. Yeah, and if you can fly and stuff like that, maybe it's more about like the feel of getting around is so different that the actual geography in the landscape, the topography, there we go. It doesn't matter if than the actual geography in the landscape. The topography, there we go.

It doesn't matter if it's all kind of the same. Yeah, I mean, I certainly am a little worried about that as well, because I've spent so much time playing games set in New York City, especially like the original Spider-Man and Miles Morales. So it's hard for me to imagine like getting as jazzed about it. But again, maybe they have something here yeah i'm very curious what the investment is on spider-man 3 after this because sony now has finally made good on the thing that they've tried to do for decades which is make video games that become ip that they can turn into movies and TV shows, right? And they have Just This Year, Last of Us, and, oh, geez, Twisted Metal coming out soon, and the Gran Turismo movie.

And I don't know what they're getting from the Spider-Man IP by doing a game like this when it's not an IP that they necessarily own forever i mean they kind of did there's that's all its own funky thing but like i can't imagine they're going to convert the spider man games into movie adaptations of those games no i i don't think they will i think if anything the next spider-man game could be a spider-verse game which would make total sense um i don't think it's an issue because spider-man is such like a ubiquitous character that the mcu spider-man might as well be this same spider-man even though it's not um it does you know it all kind of promotes the same thing and obviously they get a chunk of the spider of the mcu money

so they don't really care so long as spider-man's in the zeitgeist they're winning yeah yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense but i would play the fuck out of a spider-verse game holy shit like yeah you know i i liked miles morales a lot but like seeing the aesthetic of spider-verse and not only that they just added spider-versese characters into Fortnite so I've like seen it in a video game how good it can look and it would it would totally fucking rule yeah that that is a very good point um I'm unfortunately probably like four or five years away um okay Project Q yeah how does this not have a name I don't know i may uh is it going to come out as project q okay for people who don't know project q is the streaming only handheld playstation handheld but it's very confusing because it streams off your playstation but yeah does it stream from anywhere else uh i don't think

i think the whole idea is that it's creating a direct connection to your playstation like locally i think but maybe it allows for an internet connection to like hook into like in the way that remote play you i can like hook into remote play theoretically over the internet anywhere. Yeah. The connection will be bad, but so, but I think this, the intention of this is to basically recreate the experience of that you

have on the switch, which is I'm in my living room. Maybe the PS five is around the corner and maybe I want to watch something on Netflix. So I'm going to play PlayStation 5 games in my hand without dominating a TV. This is absolutely bizarre to me because the weird thing about it, and I think you can play your own PlayStation games

via Wi-Fi outside of your house. I think like if- You can. I mean, right now you can do that yes you want i think you'll be able to on this device yeah what's weird to me about this device is it does so much less it seems to be doing so much less than like your phone which you already own and which you can put control sticks on um because everything streaming from your your playstation library to a screen you can do that right now you don't need to wait for this thing and you could also stream ps now you could stream

xbox game pass you can stream any number of things i'm gonna make a bold statement and say does the vita do more than this thing does it It's a very fair question. Very fair. Because the Vita can run games locally. It can play remote play. I guess it doesn't have two triggers, so there's that. Yeah, I do not know. It is baffling to me. It looks kind of cool. I'll give

it that. It looks neat. But like Logitech has, is it the Jeep something? Yeah. The G-Cloud or whatever it is. Yeah. The G cloud or. Yeah. There, there are already systems out in the world doing this exact thing. Um, and that is why I'm just very, very confused. There's kind of a long history of Sony doing this where they're making something very expensive, but it's really unclear who the audience is.

And I say expensive. I don't know the cost of the Project Q. So who knows there? But in the past, they made like the PlayStation 3D TV or any of the PlayStation focused headsets, which they also announced a new pair of those earbud versions. And it's this weird idea of we're going to sell you something that you could just buy a normal version of that has more features or you can buy it basically designed with your playstation in mind and like people do that like people like the playstation branding and and will buy just for the brand in the way they do supreme or whatever any of those products done that well i don't know yeah i don't

i don't know i i just found this this whole pitch extremely weird here's what i'm gonna say if it if it worked like flawlessly to the point where there was no connection issues and it felt like i was playing playstation 5 games in my hands it's something that I'd be like kind of interested, obviously price dependent, but kind of interested in because a lot of my time on the couch is with the Steam Deck and the Switch and not with the PlayStation, even though I could theoretically set up the Steam Deck

with whatever apps to like stream it in. But if it was flawless on this device, I'd be kind of interested in it but i've had like a ton of issues with the remote play in general getting it to move getting it to work like smoothly so i'm very skeptical but i'll check it out i mean i like it kind of conceptually but i would also like a vita too at this point yeah i that's the bummer is it seems safe to assume that that's not coming no yeah um uh any any stuff from this that you're like especially looking forward to oh yeah uh i mean we kind of briefly touched on it but the metal

gear solid 3 remake which i guess is now called metal gear solid delta i think so yeah it's a triangle it's i guess that's delta um i don't know why it's delta because i guess it would be like three sides alpha right three sides vendor go solid three oh yeah that's interesting maybe um yeah so the for people that are not aware metal gear solid three is snake eater which third game obviously in the metal gear solid franchise Yeah, so for people that are not aware, Metal Gear Solid 3 is Snake Eater, which third game, obviously, in the Metal Gear Solid franchise, but the original game from a timeline perspective for the franchise.

So this is the dawn of like Big Boss, his origin story. It's my favorite Metal Gear Solid game by far. It's tremendous. And even the original, which they're re-releasing in August finally like actually coming to storefronts again um I think holds up really well but there's also a ton of ways that this game could be evolved in like really sick awesome ways and I'm super super pumped to uh see more of it i don't know who's developing this

which is kind of interesting yeah that that is the question around it is konami but the konami but like is there a developer right but i mean so when i say konami i mean uh hideo kojima is not involved yeah which is i get like he's not going to be working on any metal you're solid games right um but i i would be more skeptical of this project just because you know they have not made konami has not made a lot of new big games in a while right but the new um the new silent hill looks so interesting that yeah i right that's true i'm i i feel like i can't least see this being promising like maybe they will put it together maybe it'll be something special i'm looking at a list of konami releases and going back yeah it's been a while oh boy yeah i mean

look they've been making a lot of pachinko money so good on them i'm happy for them um but yeah they haven't been in is involved in the video game business uh i mean they're making video games they're just making the ones that make them gobs and gobs of money right right um stuff i'm interested in i dragon's dogma 2 i feel like dragon's dogma has become this cult hit over the years. Yeah, it's a very weird... Tell people what this game is because it's very odd. I don't even know how to...

I mean, it's a fantasy role-playing game, but it was kind of poking at, I would say, some of the ideas that Elden Ring loosely got at later on in terms of its openness. I really don't know a good way of describing this game i was not able to play more than 10 hours of it because it's like difficult to get into it was rough around the edges um yeah but i think i guess and got pretty into it maybe i know justin got into it i think the the differentiating factors were about the idea that you could like

hire and create these very detailed like custom characters that uh had like personalities and you could like customize them in the way you could the player character and like you had a lot of control over that and also it did um like giant monster battles really well so you'd be fighting like a giant dragon or something and you'd climb on it and and stuff like that but yeah i never played a ton of it but i do know that a lot of people are very into it and honestly it's cool to see capcom taking more swings they've been i think hitting on a lot of really great cylinders the last few years. And I'd be really curious to see how they can sort of convey that into a franchise that effectively has been dead for 10 years. Yeah, yeah.

which yeah i loved watching the twitch chat when this game was shown because uh everyone was assigning their favorite franchise to it before the title's name was revealed like i saw people been like wow this is definitely sakuro oh no no this is definitely the next souls game oh no no no no actually this is like a bloodborne game and it's moving to i don't know feudal japan or something yeah i thought it goes to shishima at one point. Yeah, people are bouncing all over. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, about all I feel like we can comfortably say is it looks like a Souls type of game with really, really cool combat.

Yeah. Especially the group combat. There's a number of like sword animations where the character, I guess is a samurai is like lunging between multiple enemies at the same time and like parrying off of a series of attacks in one swift animation it looks just really impressive i have no idea how they were pulling out some of the animations yeah it looks very very cool um i don't, you know, it reminded me of, what was the game we just played that was like a Souls-like game on Game Pass?

Oh, yeah, that game. I enjoyed that game. What was that called? You know, that game. It'll come to me. Oh, boy. Best Games of 2023. Yeah, it was on your list.

Just looking at it reminded me, the pacing reminded me of that game because it was very fast. Yeah, that was Woe Long, Fallen Dynasty. Woe Long, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm very curious about it. But, you know, we'll see. hop to the next segment because i it kind of fits into a larger question i have about what the hell is going on with the video game industry without e3 so how about we take a quick break i'm gonna

get some water and we can come right back sounds good okay we're back e3 is dead the summer games fest waits with knives ready to carve up the carcass and make the most of this opportunity jeff keely's smiling you know trickles of cheeto blood dripping down his lips um what a weird time it is that's that is my honestly huge takeaway from both the sony event and what we see coming along what really struck me in the sony event was how many mid-budget i don't know if we can even not indies but just mid-tier games i mean you're talking about we've talked about this in the past yeah talking about like the devolver tier of game yes and that is devolver but also so what i jotted down from from just the playstation event we have everything we talked

about already we also saw um the plucky squire which was like a 2D platformer that becomes a 3D platformer. We saw Teardown, which is a game that you and I both love. Neva, which is a new game from the Grizz team. We saw two sequels, Talos Principle 2 and Ghostrunner 2. And then we saw the kind of spiritual follow-up to Night in the Woods, which is Revenant Hill. Now, all of those games look really great. They look very, very promising. They also look like the sort of stuff that even five years ago would have been in the PC Gamer Showcase, you know, of E3.

That's a burn is what that is, Chris plan i don't know and no but let me let me let me be clear that isn't to say like sony can't get good things that is to say these are becoming the dominant players in video games yeah because you can't sustain you know sony isn't putting out eight exclusives a year anymore they're putting out maybe three and these these games are making money yeah you know like when when ghost runner one or whatever appeared in pc gamer assuming that's where it appeared you know it doesn't have all the money it made off of ghost runner one right now these games you know are considerably more ambitious i mean ghost runner opens with what looks like a cgi trailer right yeah um it's interesting to see these sorts of studios getting real money thanks

to the kind of digital marketplaces and then putting it back into more and more ambitious games and then yeah at the same time seeing triple a be in a position where wow it's really hard for them to make any investment you know that we uh alongside this saw what i would call the great shrinking of triple a which is there was no ea game during this event there was uh was there an activision game and there is destiny stuff but that's now owned by sony right and then there was one ubisoft game which was assassin's creed mirage which i mean that's a whole different weird thing for us to kind of unpack um yeah i don't know it it watching this just felt like I was again we've we've seen this change coming

but this for me is when it felt very real like oh this is just what the future of of video games look like the other thing I would point out is there just weren't many exclusives in general for Sony on this I think practically like the vast majority of what we saw is going to be on any platform i think it's spider-man might have been the oh and hell divers probably is exclusive i think that might be it yeah and and i know spider-man is now on pc the original spider-man eventually yeah and this will definitely come to pc as well yeah yeah it's i mean this is just the way things are changing i think part of it was the that presentation was just like very weirdly structured such that like very little context was provided like you

know if you think about a uh nintendo switch direct or something like that you always have someone like a host coming on and explaining like here's this next title and that happened a couple times during this presentation but not very often and you also didn't get the like jeff keely like world exclusive or whatever so you didn't necessarily know what was you know stand out not. And the order of it was all over the place. So, like, you would have, like, Revenant Hill coming after Marathon, which was, like, a huge surprise release,

with, you know, another indie backing it up. So, like, the structure of the whole presentation, I think, left a lot to be desired, which isn't to say, like, the actual games were bad. It was just, like, very confusing to know like when you should be paying attention versus not yeah yeah i think that's a good way of putting it and i wonder and you know i kind of just wonder what's going on like like it's not like nintendo

has an established uh formula for this this yeah everyone'all, just copy the direct. The way they do the directs is the way to do it. I want to come back and talk more about Assassin's Creed, but on that copying the direct. Xbox Games has its showcase in a few weeks. They straight up

call it Xbox Games Showcase and Starfield Direct. It certainly seems like somebody else got the memo and that that will be the approach. That it's called Direct, yeah. Well, that's called Direct, but also that the way that this is going to be presented, I would be shocked if the Xbox Games Showcase

isn't exactly like two Nintendo Directs back-to-back. One being that, hey hey here are the 20 exclusives that we have coming out or 10 or whatever i i'm not saying 20 because like wow xbox just so great at exclusives compared to sony i'm saying that's literally just their formula they bought up a gajillion studios yeah so that's you know where sony is investing in a few really really expensive properties it seems like xbox focus has largely been a whole bunch of smaller to bin size stuff yeah i think they'll also humanize it a lot you know you'll see a lot of phil spencer in this you'll see a

lot of todd howard in this as a way to like again provide context i i think nintendo goes a little too far in the context where i don't need to see every single little indie explaining how much their game meant to them when they were you know starving in a gutter or something sorry but like that's half of the nintendo direct presentations is like sad indie person talking about their game i don't need all of that a little bit is good. And I think Sony probably could have used a little bit more. Yeah. For the Xbox, what sort of stuff do you think that they will show?

Because I feel like Microsoft has announced a ton of games and then they just like disappear. Yeah. I mean, like Fable is like a good example of a game that like hasn't seen the light of day and god knows how long um yeah i mean i on on the starfield side i think we're gonna see like actual like an actual gameplay gameplay loop which we haven't seen yet um so that'll be neat um but in terms of like other stuff yeah probably some forza uh and and probably

some more of these like little these franchise games that like have been announced but have essentially been cooling their heels avowed ever wild contraband you remember these games these iconic games uh yeah that contraband i i am curious if we will hear from any of those. It is deeply weird that we have heard about these games and know practically nothing else about them. Then again, there has been a pandemic, and I'm sure a lot of delays with that. And also, I will never complain that people want to announce

what they're working on rather than maintaining needless secrecy. So I don't mean to dunk. I just want to hear anything about them. Here's a question for you. Do you think the word Halo will be said during this presentation? Absolutely not. There is no world in which, unless it's Halo Season 2 is being announced. The TV show you mean wolf no i think that they are in full reboot mode right now yeah wow um i do wonder if we will hear the word persona

three remake three words um that is my favorite rumor of e3 not e3 2023 um but i i don't know we'll see yeah i mean i was the metal gear solid remake was definitely high on my list of things i wanted to see um and a bloodborne reboot but we all have our own our own things our own things yeah um let's go back to assassin's creed really quick before we wrap yeah um what the hell is going on what what is this so for people who aren't aware assassin's creed mirage is the next assassin's creed game it is a prequel of sorts to valhalla their last game but it looks like a reboot of the very original assassin's creed it does he's he's got like the white cloak and he's swinging through the streets and much more like stealth and assassination yes not not just like role-playing game combat and i just don't know i do not get what what

ubisoft is doing it is deeply weird um i i think was this the game that started out as dlc of some kind i don't know the origin story of this game quite honestly i i know that it is you're playing as the guy who was the main bad guy in assassin's creed valhalla which was the last assassin's creed game and this is i guess his origin story because it takes place before but but maybe not because it's you know future time travel brain stuff yeah so yeah it's best not to think about the lore of the assassin's creed franchise it gets too messy yeah but there's there's supposed to be there's uh the like mega assassin's creed is it assassin's creed infinity yes infinity yeah yeah and that is still i guess being made there is skull and bones which not an assassin's

that will know but looks like it was like pulled from an assassin's creed game from a long time ago yeah um that is supposedly coming out in 2023 i i believe we're supposed to get another splinter cell eventually that's like kind of been the rumor forever um i don't know it's just very weird it feels like ubisoft has not followed through or been able to like get a lot of its games to the finish line for for an unusual amount of time i mean i'm i'm interested in this game if only because it's been what is it two years since valhalla and they are no longer on the like annual cycle of assassin's creed games and maybe that means we'll see some more innovation in that franchise. I certainly hope so.

Though I do wonder if that is just more going back to the very beginning and running the playbook all over again. And it's also, to bring it up again, it's hard playing Zelda and then having the desire to climb another tower for no reason. Yeah, that's true. I mean, technically there are towers in Zelda, but like you just shoot up them. It takes two seconds. I just want to know where my Avatar game is. Not the last Airbender, the Pandora exploring Avatar. That came out, didn't it?

No. For the first movie, it came out. Yes, but there's like a big open world modern Avatar game that Ubisoft has been working on. No, it is real. It exists. There is footage of this game in the world. It is in the same warehouse as Beyond Good and Evil 2. Oh, yeah.

That's a very good place. Yeah, I don't know. It's a weird time. Yeah, I don't know. It's a weird time. That is kind of like my big takeaway with this whole season kicked off and going into it. There's one way of looking at it is, hey, this is kind of weird and not great. There are a lot of big name games that are just remakes or reboots, and we're not actually seeing a lot of those games. And then the stuff that is coming out looks like a lot more of the same. That's one way of putting it. The other way of putting it is one, a lot of people like more of the same. The other part is all of these like mid-range studios

now having money and having opportunity and having some like runway to get their games out and not have to compete against Ubisoft and Activision like it was you know what 10 years ago where basically you just couldn't ship something between September and December that seems like a pretty good win for a lot of new players to like get into the space yeah so I don't know I am encouraged here's what i'm gonna say i i don't think i don't think anyone should be worried if they watch this presentation or any presentation over the next few weeks and they don't see the game they're obsessed with because as we've learned and it's

happened over the last few months it's having the last few years as we've learned there are titles that you have never ever heard of and they will come out and be your next favorite game ever and you've never heard of it you don't know what it is right now but a week from now it's going to be out and you're going to be blown away by it and that is where video games is at right now and it's very exciting and it can be like a little worrying that like you don't know exactly what next week's obsession is going to be but i find that very thrilling and so just like let it roll and you will find the thing that you totally love that sounds good it's good advice i'm going to take it for myself do you have any honorable mentions before we go i mean i've just been playing a lot of zelda i'll tell you what i what i'm currently doing.

I found a way to enhance your horse. I'm not going to offer details beyond that for the sake of spoilers. But you can essentially increase the stats of your horse. And the way you do that is by cooking meals. So, for example, someone might ask you, hey, I need a seafood risotto to enhance your horse. Now, if people have been listening to the show, know that I have not been looking anything up for this game. But you know what I have been looking up? How to make risotto. Because that gives me clues in how to make risotto in the game. You won't even search for like how to make risotto in the game.

You won't even search for like how to make risotto in the game. You look up the real recipes. I'm looking up real risotto recipes and then trying a bunch of shit. Is it just milk, rice, and cheese? No. Well, rice is a big part of it. I think butter and fit. I mean, I guess a fish.

I'm trying a lot of stuff like I'm just like experimenting and you know what that's like role playing as link trying a bunch of stuff standing in front of the cooking pot for six hours throwing everything in there it's so true I don't know it's I'm being a

total crazy person with this game but it's been really delightful and you know there's still a ton more to go so we'll see how long i stay on this train but for right now it's been very rewarding yes that is great i have been playing two things that we can't talk about until a week or two from now oh boy and i can't wait to tell people more about them. So instead of that, as my honorable mention, I'm going to recommend Fresh Air because it's springtime. And it's great to open those doors and do a little bit of cleaning. Oh, you know what?

Also NPR's Fresh Air because make yourself a little richer in the brain. I think that's it. I think we did an episode. Yay. Yay. Yay. Hey, thank you all for listening. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant. His name is Russell Freshdick.

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