The Besties - Whale Watching in Diablo Immortal

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

Join us as we bust out our phones and apply for a high interest personal loan with Diablo Immortal! How does Blizzard's hack and slash RPG hold up on phones, and how close has it brought us to abject financial ruin? Find out within. Games discussed: Diablo Immortal, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy XVI, Soda Crisis, Sniper Elite 5, Super Auto Pets, V Rising 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!

So, strawberries. Okay, finally. Finally, strawberries. You know, how do y'all... Let's go around the horn. How do y'all eat those strawberries? You don't have a bit, do you? You ate some strawberries this morning,

and you thought, if I say strawberries, I bet the boys are going to take that prompt and run with it. You know how I like a strawberry, like a nice shortcake, and then I pile on the cool whip, and then I pile on some sliced strawberries fresh from the garden.

You know how I eat my strawberries? Tell me how you eat your strawberries. Slowly. In aggregate. What? I eat them in aggregate. Is there a joke there? The strawberries are aggregates.

Do you not know this? Something else, please. No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. Do you know how I eat my strawberries? How do you eat your strawberries? In aggregate. Different intro is required.

Here's what I wanted to talk about. I've been eating strawberries with the stem for basically my entire life. What? Jesus Christ. Now, that's actually the first. Now, you need to be careful. No one will have context because those will be the first words of the cold open.

So you need to just slow it down a little bit. I mean, what more context do they need? I've been eating strawberries with the stem for basically my entire life. Why? Because from a just pure cleanup standpoint, i take the leaves off for what it's worth but i leave the stem and i just eat the whole thing and then i'll have to like deal with like a stump of a strawberry wait wait wait wait wait no no no no by this logic that means you eat the apple core and you just eat the whole banana no i don't eat dirt you dirty donkey do

you eat the apple core one time actually i went to dinner with russ to a local apple bees and i finished eating my pasta with chicken in it and i looked over and he had eaten his steak and fork and spoon and knife and plate and cup and his chair because he said he looked up at me and i was like, what are you doing? And he whispered, leave only footprints. And I was really confused why he would say that about the Applebee's. You cannot make a comparison between the apple core and the strawberry stem. One is like a little tiny piece of whatever, fibrous stem, and one will make you choke and die. Why have you been allowed to do this your entire life?

It's so much more convenient. What do you guys end up with? This is goat logic. This is the logic of a goat. This is goat logic. Yes, thank you. This is goat logic. A bunch of stems and stumps.

Not greatest of all time. What do you do with those stumps? Compost them. Compost. Then you got to find a compost. You got to find a bin. You got to find a guy that'll do the work. Instead, you turn your body into the bin.

What guy? What guy? Why do we talk about video games on this show? It should just be about Russ. It's all I want. I don't want to talk about Diablo. I want to talk about what guy Russ thinks he needs for composting. I mean, what, you know,

you put it in the bin and then what? Something's got to happen. I'm just saying I realize it's not. If it does happen, it turns into compost. And then what do you do? Hey, guys. Yeah. hey uh hey guys yeah do you know how i i eat my strawberries i eat them in aggregate yeah i think everyone's firing on all cylinders today today. My name is Justin McElroy and I,

and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I spent $25,000 on special magic rubies this week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and this podcast is going to hell. My name is Russ Froschek and I know the best game of the week. So welcome to the besties where we'll talk about the latest and greatest

in home, interactive, inter-gaming. It is a video game club. And just by listening, my friend, you are a member. And we're not even going to charge you a battle pass or a premium battle pass or an exclusive premium battle pass. You do need legendary rupees. It should be noted.

You need legendary rupees. Those are freely available, if you mind our cryptocurrency. This week we're talking about Diablo Immortal. Chris Plant, what's that? Diablo Immortal is a follow-up to the Diablo series where you kill things in dungeons with friends and you collect loot. But this time it's on your phone, and they want you to just keep paying for it forever.

The real hell. Hence the name. Oh. So Diablo Immortal. Let's talk about game. Like, let's just talk about it like a video. Can we talk briefly before we talk about video game? Can we talk about the history of the game as it was announced?

Sure, go for it. So I don't have the year in front of me it was probably 2018 diablo coming to mobile was announced at blizzcon 2018 when conferences were still a thing and let's just say the response was um tepid to say the least uh people or or to be more accurate, actively hostile. Actively hostile. People were throwing chairs. It was seen with jeers. Yeah.

It was real bad. And I guess, you know, not to say that all fan rage is justified or even reasonable, but in this case, obviously mobile games had something of reputation for being predatory

and not very fun so people were kind of bummed because this long-awaited franchise that they love uh instead of getting diablo 4 in that case it hadn't been announced at that time it was getting a mobile game um so many years have passed since that announcement and it also it also that that announcement marked the iconic phrase uh i believe it was wyatt ching uh a developer at blizzard who when received the news was received with jeer said do you guys not have phones which is maybe the worst reading of a room i've ever heard of or encountered in my life, they probably should have been prepared for the reaction and just got totally blindsided. Then many years passed,

and Blizzard and Activision had become even more publicly evil, I would say, as corporations. A lot of great people work there making these games, but I think the name Blizzard is somehow much worse than it was then it is now today. Ethically and in terms of the quality of the product that they release in the interim,

they put out the Warcraft 3 remaster that was pretty awful. A couple ho-hum wow expansions. It's, yeah, it's been rough. And they got sued by the state of California. Sure. And now the game comes out. It came out just a week ago, I want to say. And from a gameplay, from a pure game perspective,

it's actually really kind of amazing. As like a mobile game experience, I can't think of another mobile game that is so well replicated the sense of like a big top-down open world you know loop base like it just feels really good to play on mobile the the controls are really intuitive um the way you kind of direct your attacks with the right thumb stick and then move around with the left uh thumb i guess not thumb stick but just you know thumb um the the the buttons are big and vibrant and not easy to miss you don't end up like hitting the wrong thing all the time and i'm playing on a 13 so not like one not the biggest not the smallest just sort of a regular uh size screen i have tried it on uh a pc and interestingly

i think it's worse like the controls feel like they were mobile first and then ported to pc and it doesn't feel particularly great on the pc end of things, especially moving around the world. It just feels weird. It's just weird. There's weird stuff where you have to be pointing at the person. Your mouse has to be on the person that you want to attack if you're using keyboard and mouse. So that feels bad. It feels bad. You have to pay a lot

more attention to what's going on on the screen. Yeah, I even plugged the controller into my phone. So I completely agree with everything you've said. I think the touch controls i even plugged the controller into my phone so i completely agree with everything you've said i think the touch controls are some of the best for this sort of game that i've played on mobile unquestionably i plugged a controller just to see like was it going to be better into my phone and you're right it is not better it's actually considerably more fun to play with touch controls for for the simple matter of like some of

your spells you need to aim and the way they do it on touch controls is very smart because you push the button and then you kind of drag your finger in the direction you want to fire the spell you see it you see like a ui indicator of where your spell is going to go exactly uis is it for for all of this game's like uh you know complexities and menus within menus within menus, I think that the fact that it works as well as it does on a touchscreen is nothing short of miraculous. Yeah, and it's fun and it's satisfying. And it feels like Diablo.

I mean, it has some minor tweaks to the Diablo formula with ultimate power attacks and stuff like that. But the core of it feels very very true to diablo um yes if you if you played diablo 3 it is essentially a very good mobile port of that yes like same same same classes same aesthetic of a lot of the same stuff from diablo 3 which is the diablo game that by far i have spent the the the most the most time with yeah and and i would say like there's some we're gonna get into the like monetization stuff in a second and it's gonna get very complicated before we do that the roller coaster hill right now and we're gonna peak the top i can't wait i

will say um if i have just again from a gameplay perspective i would say that i haven't found anything i've done yet and i've probably played i don't know six or seven hours i mean i played a good amount i'm at level 32 i think um i'm not i don't think i've died once like the very little i i don't understand how the potions work like i just always seem to have potions ready to go. And I have not died yet. There's a cooldown on the potions. It may be because I'm playing a guardian, a crusader named Bible Man,

and he's strong and hard to hurt. Yeah, I think it is designed, as many mobile games are to make those first several hours totally like a power fantasy like you can just crush everything in front of you and it is that i'm playing i'm doing a necromancer and same deal i don't feel particularly challenged then again like when when everything's humming in diablo that's kind of like common which is to say like once you have your build going you're supposed to kind of steamroll through everything um because it means you're i don't know it makes you feel good at the game so i get where that's coming from

um i uh yeah i haven't really run into any challenge at all so far either i'm a little bit earlier than where you are justin um in a way it feels good though because like i have four different abilities and they all cool down pretty quickly and it's really fun to just run into a room full of 20 dudes and just wreck and you don't have to worry about mana which is nice uh it's just cool downs which is like a nice simplification of the diablo formula um and like you know and the these spells are like really the the a lot of the abilities are really innovative you can pick from a few different ones that you have equipped at any one time so i've experimented with a few different ones the guardian has one where uh he gets into a chariot and runs around like rides

around this chariot and any enemies you pass get hooked to a chain that he then starts dragging behind and doing damage. So you're like rolling around with like eight goblins or whatever just like being dragged behind you. It's really funny. I also really like the fact that

and this feels new for Diablo I could be dead wrong, but the fact that I'm just playing and doing quests or whatever it is, and random other players are also doing quests and running around like it's an MMO. Whereas I feel like in previous Diablo games, you would have to like join a server to ever see anyone. Yeah. And that's like...

And that is the direction that Diablo 4 is supposedly going. Got it. Is that more sort of always online living world thing, which is like, great. That's great. I think that makes a lot of sense for Diablo 4 is supposedly going. Got it. Is that more sort of always online living world thing, which is like, great, that's great. I think that makes a lot of sense for Diablo. Yeah. I will say the one sort of hiccup, and I don't know if there's a good workaround for this

considering the like mobile first nature and also the always online kind of thing. But anytime that you navigate away from the app, it logs you out, like you are kicked out of the game. There was maybe one time where I left for just like a couple of seconds and came back. But like by and large, and that thing about how often that happens on your phone, right? You get a text message. You're like, oh, let me respond to this real quick.

You go back. You're logged out of the game. And I have lost like not much. It seems to say pretty frequently, but like lost a little bit of progress besides the fact that i have to like go through the login screen again um and that's kind of a pain like this is not something where you have like you know 30 seconds in or you know a minute in a line and you just want to like hop in real quick this is really like a my kids are playing at the balance house and i need to sit down for 10 minutes plant do you have any thoughts on specifically like any gameplay stuff or well

yeah i mean this is kind of transitioning into the monetization thing but this game is my personal nightmare and that doesn't mean it's a bad game at all and it doesn't mean that anybody who likes it is bad i'm not saying that i think it who likes it is bad. I'm not saying that. I think it's honestly very well made. So you're not saying that. What I'm saying is I already have issue with games like Diablo because I feel like they're designed to eat time. And now it's a game that's designed to eat time, which it does very effectively.

And it's going to now also eat my money. So it's going to eat, like, my two resources. And to be fair, eating time isn't bad. Like, the appeal of Diablo is it's like having a scratch pad by your old telephone where you could doodle while you talk to someone so that you, like, you know, have something else to do. It is such a great game that you play with friends. That's really an excuse for people, especially men who do not get on phones historically to talk to each other, right? Like that was the old appeal of early Diablo is you could hang out and you could quite literally call someone on the phone while you played together. Now you could do it on

Discord. And I feel for me, I was spending less time doing this playing with others. I was just, you know, grinding for the sake of grinding. And then at a certain point, you hit a threshold where it's like, well, we've eaten up your time. But now what if you give us some dollars? And I was like, oh, man. And again, it's so well made. And again, it's so well made. This is one of those games where once I got enough for the podcast, I had to delete it because I know that I would – I can't resist it. Yeah, I actually personally will do the same thing as soon as we're done recording. Like I did want to – before we get into the monetization, I did want to give credit to one more area of the game. Presentation-wise, there is a lot more fully voiced audio that is actually pretty well performed than you, I think, would assume there's going to be. The narrative parts are kind of nonsensical, but they do feel like you get a sense like the story moving forward and the quest that you're on and like they do a good job of setting up mcguffins throughout like you need the three pieces of this spear and they're in these two three different areas but they have

like pretty good voice performances and uh there's more of it than you think that there is going to be um yeah also the game just looks good. Like the art design, the visuals. It's fucking huge. Yeah, and that they're able to make it all read on a very small phone. Again, I'm just, as a work of craft, it's incredible. Yeah, it is. It does not look great on PC. It looks bad on PC, actually, weirdly.

It does, because it's designed for mobile, very clearly. And they very clearly kind of hacked it onto PC to get it working. You know, we'll see if they ever update it with higher res textures and stuff like that for bigger screens. But right now, play it on mobile because that, you know, everything

about that feels more in line with what they were trying to do. Or another option, don't play it on mobile. Or just trying to do or another option don't play it or just don't play is another option i let's i griffin can i set the stage for yeah please because i've never experienced a more confusing monetization model than diablo that isn't that is completely intentional yeah uh there are a lot of different ways to spend money on this game. Some of them are familiar. And I want to say, like, I think it is not a particularly brave position to shit on Diablo Immortal or Blizzard stuff, right? Sure.

Like, there's a cottage industry of that exact exercise that exists on YouTube. And I think that it can get hyperbolic at times, but I genuinely think in this case, it lives up to the hype. There are a lot of different ways to spend money on the game. There's a season pass, right? That refreshes what? Every month or so? Yeah, it's a month. And you play the game to rank up. You complete these little codex missions and you get points to fill up your season pass and you get rewards or you can get better rewards if you have the premium season pass or even better rewards if you have like the super premium season pass that's like okay whatever and the rewards that you are

getting and and this is sort of the this is the i would say least egregious of the things you're getting like upgrade materials for your gear which is already like you can make that pay to win argument if you if you i mean it's not hard to make that argument there is aesthetic stuff too there's uh cosmetic items that you're unlocking also but most of the time it is it is the materials you will need to upgrade your gear okay that's the season pass the first time i beat or the first time anyone beats a dungeon uh in the game which happens pretty early on you beat it you get some loot you're like oh great and you pop back into the main hub and then a prompt pops up that's like hey for 99 cents

we can boost the rewards of that dungeon by 600 and it's like well okay i don't really know what any of that means yet because i just started playing but whatever and then every time you beat a dungeon you you get that uh prompt there's a way to spend money so that you can unlock uh like 30 days worth of daily rewards uh if if you want to although you do have to keep playing to get to get access to that stuff um it's it is non-stop in the ways that it it is sort of shoveling that stuff at you and there is one one system in particular that is like outrageous before you get into the relics real quick all the other stuff the upgrade materials what have you have you played enough

griffin to get to the point where you would want desperately that stuff such that you would shell money out for, let's say, upgrade materials. No, I've played a little bit less than Justin. I think I'm playing a level 27 Barbarian. Sure. And you get through those early levels wicked fast. Yeah.

But no, I haven't. You hit a big wall around 30. Okay. 30, it slows way down. Mostly because I'm finding so much gear and replacing that gear and diablo if you're not experienced with the franchise like it that is the name of the game until you hit end game and when you hit end game now you're grinding for these like legendary armor sets that give you bonuses uh if you complete the set and they have sort of like augments for your

powers as opposed to just sort of statistical upgrades i haven't hit that point yet um and i do not think i am going to because of the last system that is in place but yes i'm going to delay you just a little bit more i have to comment one thing about this as i think i guess i've probably played the most um the the systems are plentiful and they're kind of clumsy, but they're also like, they're implemented in such a rush. They're so quick to get you looped into these

that they really kind of fuck themselves because they show you like, the first time you do a dungeon, they're like, here's how you could juice these rewards or whatever and they're laying out all these incredibly complex upgrade systems before you have any and asking for money before you have any idea of the context of any of it like it's so early you don't even get a chance to like it would be like this it would be like if the first 10 hours

of a game you have a horse and then 10 hours in, they're like, do you want a car? You have to pay $8. It's like, yeah, I hate this fucking horse. Please, absolutely let me buy the car. This is like you're about to get on the horse, and they're like, do you want a car? It's $8. Like, well, I don't know. I haven't even tried the horse yet, but now I'm going to feel immediately sort of like well am i wasting

my time with the horse and the answer is yes yes you are i to okay so like fire emblem heroes is probably the game i've spent the most money on i am like well i i'm fine spending money on a free to play mobile game but because i run the value proposition in my head of like well i'm spending a lot of time with this thing and i can spend a little bit of money and enhance my experience with the game, right? That's the name of the game for most mobile games at least. For that Monster Legends game I've been playing with Henry, I'll get the season pass because it's like we play that game a fucking lot and it enhances the experience for me. Fine. The main system that wants your money in this game are legendary gems.

So there's three sort of like measurements of your character's power. There's your character level, there's your gear, and then there are the gems that you slot into that gear. You can run these things called elder rifts, which are like mini dungeons. And you can put crests into the like gateway into those rifts to guarantee yourself rewards there are rare crests that you will get a lot of while you play the game and those have a very very very small chance to drop legendary gems which are the strongest types of gems that have like bonkers powers on them that help sort of differentiate your barbarian from every other barbarian in the game right so there's

like one that uh lets you build up this lightning that after a while chains to a bunch of enemies and looks fucking sweet uh like those legendary gems like effectively change the way that your character goes through the game right but they are not guaranteed when you just use a regular rare crest that you use just from playing the game. Legendary crests do guarantee a legendary gem drop at the end of one of those mini dungeons, right? You can buy them with, like, this special currency if you're, like, a free-to-play player. You can buy one of them a month without spending actual cash. Cool. So that's one guaranteed legendary gem a month uh without spending actual cash cool so that's one guaranteed legendary gym a month okay

or you can spend money on on those legendary crests and then all of a sudden you can slot in you know however many you want i think it's like three if you're playing solo but you can slot in 10 if you're playing in a big group and so you guarantee yourself 10 legendary gym drops and they're like i want to say like a buck fifty two bucks i don't know the exact amount of money for each specific crest right um legendary gyms when they drop they can either be one stars or two stars which is all that you can ever get if you do happen to get a legendary gym drop from the rare free-to-play grass right or they can be five stars which is weird uh and those five star gyms obviously have

the most buck wild effects like those are the ones that are really going to give you some super strong like extra powers in the game and boost your stats uh but even if you do get a five star gym to drop all five stars might not be filled in so you may get like a five star legendary gym that's only operating at like three star like potency right the odds of you getting a five-star legendary gym that's only operating at like three-star potency, right? The odds of you getting a five-star gym with all five stars filled in is something like one in 3,000 chance. Like super-duper, duper-duper, duper low. And then there's like a system where if you spend 50, a pity system where if you spend 50 of those crests, which is over $100, you are guaranteed one five-star gem.

Jesus. But again, all five stars might not be filled in. There was a story yesterday of somebody who spent $4,000 on the game and did not end up getting one of those five-star, five-star gems. Here's my ethical question about the game, right? So Kotaku did a story that was basically like, hey, it's amazing that this game is free to play. I don't know why people would be upset.

Because you can enjoy this game if you just choose not to spend money. If you play until you get to the point where you need to spend money, and then you stop, congratulations, you enjoyed a free game. And on one hand, I get where that's coming from because I think giving access to people who otherwise could not have afforded this game, I get it. On the other hand, that's the entire model. It's the whale system where it's like, yes, there are people who have self-control. Not everybody has it. Right. everybody has it right and yeah the way that these games make money is predatory of people who are going to become so obsessed that they spend four thousand dollars on the game and don't

even get what they want so yeah on one hand yeah it's free for people who have that that capacity to say no like i said i myself know i don't and that's why I have to delete the game. And yeah, I just, it makes me uncomfortable participating in that and enjoying something again for free when I know, hey, the reason I can enjoy this for free is because somebody else is footing my bill. Not just that there's all kinds of these like manipulative systems that are hidden and cloaked behind several levels of obfuscation that make it hard to tell what you're spending and what you're getting and all that stuff. I don't mind to spend dumb money on a game. Like I spent a stupid money on Fortnite before buying dumb shit, like really dumb shit. Yeah. But like just I'll be Obi-Wan. Like, I don't know. You know what you're here's you know what

you're getting you know what you're getting and i and i feel like the problem with diablo really is like the value proposition isn't there even if you want to classify it as like well this is a dumb thing that i bought you very rare i have not yet like been able to fill up a dungeon party with like people to play with like it is not they are not really that concerned with you doing that the game is not that hard so i don't need the the like uh gameplay bonuses that spending money would provide and and as good as the game looks my dude is small like i'm not gonna tell if i buy him a cool hat like i don't know i don't know he's eight pixels tall what the fuck do i care so like none of it is like tempting to me like and that and

that i feel like they could have implemented it in a way that like made it made a lot more just get just say like hey if you give us ten dollars you have lightning powers like okay fine yeah here's ten dollars yeah well let me let me address the big thing that keeps me from saying oh this is a game that i'm going to play forever you y'all know me you know griffin mentioned firebomb heroes i still play that game i've been free to play for quite some time fortnight obviously i still play that game i've been playing fall guys also free to play uh or soon to be free to play in this the reason why i do not feel that same draw that same urge is because i spent probably 200 hours playing diablo 3 immortal edition whatever it was the the console version with all the expansion packs and stuff

like that probably 200 hours in total i played with my wife and i played online with people and i've played a ton of that game it is a fantastic game it is amazing and it has i would say 99 of what this game has in terms of content in terms of stuff uh the only thing it doesn't have you won't see random people running around you have to join a multiplayer game but otherwise it has everything and right now i just checked i checked deco deals which had like the e-op prices, which is generally like one of the higher costing game platforms for the eShop. You can get this game for $30. And for $30, you get 200 hours. You get as many fucking legendary crests as you want.

They are in that game too. And you could get amazing ones for $30. One price. you get all the classes you get all these cosmetics you get seasonal gameplay you get fucking pets chasing you around now i i realize as we've discussed there are people that don't necessarily have the 30 to spend or they don't have the console so but they do have a phone and for those people yeah you could experience a seven hour eight or eight-hour fun, free thing and kind of dip a toe into Diablo.

But you will just hit this wall where it's like, oh, there's nothing left. And if you hit that wall and you have urged to be like, well, I'm going to start spending money so there is more. I'm going to spend $5 a month to get the Battle Pass, whatever it is. Trust me when I say you will get so much better return on your investment if you just buy Diablo 3 on any of the many, many platforms it is on. Because it's a fantastic game. Not to mention Diablo 4 on the horizon. I will play a shitload of Diablo 4.

I pray to God that they do not have anything quite as insanely, you know, complicated and unnecessarily monetized in Diablo 4. I'm sure there will be some gross monetization stuff. Absolutely. But I hope it is not quite this bad. Can I ask you a question, Russ? Yes. Because I spent a ton of time playing Diablo 3 on the Switch also.

Of those 200 hours, about how much of that was like long tail end game grind for legendary games? Yeah, probably 20 of those hours oh really okay most of it was just playing through on the different classes and like enjoying learning each of the different classes i did not get super like obsessed i could have i could have just played like necromancer or whatever a witch doctor and only gotten like focused on getting that character's crest but and people

can do that it's up to you how you play it it that that long tail is what has always uh attracted me to the diablo games yeah is the idea of like you beat the game you beat the campaign and then it's like how hard a difficulty can i push by finding these very specific things that i need for my character's build that's great if you want to do that in this game i'm not exaggerating people have run the math and again it's it's it's hard to separate the truth of the matter and the statistics of the drops and people's like unadulterated rage toward blizzard and everything that they create but like if you want to like okay so if you uh max out a gym you can awaken a piece of gear which unlocks more gym slots for it which means there's more opportunities for you to go in

and try and get these five star five star gyms and some like people have run the math and gotten a lot of different uh answers for like if you wanted to fully max out your shit with five star five star gyms like and there have been a lot of different numbers that have come out of that but they're all about six figures and it's like i don't know that obviously there's probably some sort of rich you know uh prince or something uh somewhere in the world that's like yes i will spend four million dollars on uh lightning but for everybody else it's like yes i don't know anyone who would do that i would spend ten dollars probably a month if i was really enjoying the game though like it's that's very

specious logic like it's not designed for you to spend six figures on like that is not the the end goal of it i mean i guess it would be a goal right stretch goal even that talking about what the goal of what you're in what you hope to get out of the game by playing it is also like impossible to know. I am saying. There needs to be a tier of this game that is above free, but below whale where you can stop thinking about microtransactions for a while. I want like, let me pay a flat fee and get a good return on that and then you know what that is i'm playing the that's the fortnight battle pass and that's what i would desperately want from something like this where i know exactly what i'm getting why i'm

getting it and that's enough i could spend no more dollars and feel satisfied that i got fucking darth vader indiana jones that is not in this game what they get what they have for a battle pass is like fucking various currencies and stuff that maybe would be useful to eventually power you through to spending a shitload of money and uh that's just not appealing to me i it might be appealing to other people but it's not for me and this is this is for me i think the the big reason why i'm just i'm probably not going to play this game like anymore is that this is a game all about the progress right it's not like a fortnight battle pass fortnight's fun at every point that you play

it yes you pick up fortnight it's fun 100 matches in it's fun like it's fun and the money that you spend on it is stupid is you're buying stupid stuff for fun, right? Yeah. In this game, it's all about getting stronger gear and making your character stronger and all that shit. And you can see the almost sheer cliff face of what awaits you at the end game. And it is these legendary gems and the grind that you have going for it.

Which again, if you spend no money, you get one a month. Like it's the way that the numbers are tuned is fucking bonkers. Like it's not like tempting me like I'm going to get to the end of the month and be like, wow, I spent $50 on this game. want to crack into that shit you're going to have to drop an amount of money that i do not think 0.001 percent of the people who play this game would ever be willing to drop and so when i see that it breaks the spell of games like this a lot of the games that blizzard makes which is like games that are all about progress and and and loot and uh you know somewhat mind-numbing gameplay at times in search of that loot, is the moment I feel like I'm wasting my time,

that's it. The shine comes right off the apple and you can see that wall very clearly from the start. And so it's like, why would I keep playing this game that's all about making my character stronger when I know I will reach a point where other people can get ahead of me by dropping stacks on stacks on stacks of cash?

Yeah, I think that's probably a good way to sort of wrap it and just say, I think if you're listening to this, you have a very clear idea of whether this is something that would appeal to you or not. It says a lot that griffin captain of progress and progression through games uh is sort of even put off by how egregious it is

so take that and to to also sort of tie together everything it's a it's a good game i think it's a good game that's a good game it's it's it is a good game and i think i could get i've been waiting for a game like this i think i could definitely get into a game like this but like that wall is always on the horizon and knowing that i will not i have zero interest to to scale it makes me feel like well then why would i spend so many of my life hours on this this exercise in progress when i know that that progress will be moved way out of reach at a certain point in the game. And the answer is there is no reason.

And I don't, you know, nobody can guess the whims of Blizzard these days. I would be shocked if they did not adjust the shit because it seems financially wrong. But there's also like nothing stopping them a year from now from being like oh we're gonna add fucking six star gems and enjoy like yeah they could they could definitely gonna get worse they could go in a more evil direction but i would be surprised if they did not do things like put more legendary crests into the season pass right that's that

that makes sense or like make it so that you get more than one free legendary crest every month like something to tempt me because i'm not even tempted right now yeah if i may be so bold we've spent um um more time on this than we have on many games that are moral exercises so maybe we should move on to other topics yes play nobody saves the world it's basically diablo but way fucking better can you feel it can you feel the crackle in the air the energy in the air well that that's e3 can't you can't you tell duh it's like a banshee at your window scraping i like the analogy that it's just energy in the air because it has no corporeal form anymore. It does not occupy, E3 does not occupy physical space,

but it's just sort of all around us. And that's beautiful. I will say, so while it wasn't, you know, officially called E3 or anything like that. So Sony had their state of play press conference, I guess a couple of days ago. And they did show some dope shit as part of that thing.

I don't know if you guys saw anything that you were excited about, but the Resident Evil 4 remake, which I know we talked about recently, I don't know how they're going to update that game, but it's going to be fucking sick. All of their remakes have been quite good. They showed a bunch of

Street Fighter looks good. Yeah ps street fighter looks good stuff yeah street fire looks good final fantasy 16 looks whatever that game continues to move in a direction that i don't love uh but it you know yeah i i the other game that sort of jumped out at me was a game called the callisto protocol which is from a branding perspective kind of makes me nauseous but from a game team perspective i mean it's basically correct me if i'm wrong the dead space team making another dead space game is just not called dead space they just like wasn't that yeah it's like a year ago no yeah well also it used to be part of the pub g universe i believe and they finally were like

you know what it's not that bad. I didn't know that. As if the title wasn't good enough. Yeah. There was a game they announced called Eternites that's like an action game dating sim that I thought was like a Persona 3 remake

until they showed the title of the game, which was disappointing. But yeah, it had some okay stuff in it. I don't know that anything so huge has come out of E3 stuff so far, though. What about that cat game? I mean, that wasn't announced.

Stray is out, I think. It comes out this year. It's not out? No, it comes out this year. It's always at the top of the Steam charts because people are so horny to be a cat. Pre-order whatever. Meow.

I mean, there's a new Joker. Oh, God. Was that an E3 announcement? Is that an E3 announcement? I don't know how to find these E3. I don't know how you guys are finding these E3 announcements. I'm just Googling hot news. And that's the hot news right now.

Did Todd Phillips just walk out? What? What? we watched i'm just googling hot news and that's the hot news right now just did todd phillips walk out what what what jokes are bigger and funnier than ever before the laughs are back the fun is back the jokes are back it's joker i like to imagine todd phillips walking out on an e3 press conference stage and just like standing there for a second and then jumping in the air and saying joker 2 and it starts playing the fucking peggle music i should probably know oh de joy i can't believe i just called oh de joy peggle music it's called joker beautiful i don't know how you'd pronounce that oh boy it's gonna be I'm so excited for

another round of this. I think there will be some big announcements happening on what is it Monday is the

or Sunday Summerfest. Well I meant the Bethesda Microsoft press conference. Which is happening this

coming weekend. That'll be nice. That'll be fun. Can we talk about what other games we've been playing? Because I have a thing that I want to talk about. Sure, go for it. We had to record things a little bit

out of order, so there's a Resties that's going to come out next Tuesday that's about Sniper Elite 5. Oh my gosh, sorry. When we recorded that, I had not played the third mission because I'd been too obsessed with the first two. My mistake, y'all, y'all, everybody here, you all need to play Sniper Elite 5

and the third mission in it. It is one of the best levels in a video game ever. And I know I'm a hyperbolic little boy. I'm serious. It's unbelievable. Why would I play a sniper? No, no, no, no. Here's the good news. When you start it,

there are a ton of accessibility features which you can use to zip through the first two stages. And all of the gore, like the x-ray organ stuff, you can just turn it off. Turn it all off. It's great.

And then it just becomes this weird hitman game where you're also a sniper. And the third mission is called Spy Academy. You start out with this panoramic view of basically Spy Hogwarts, this huge castle estate. panoramic view of basically spy hogwarts this huge castle estate and it's like every type of stealth game in one at first you're doing like long range you know sniping combat across these massive chasms then you're doing like did you say mid-range out what did you say chasm? Chasm. You can say chasm. It's fine.

They both work, right? Yeah, I think they both work. On like a roof and a crick. Oh, boy. You do cross a crick, and there's like this mid-range combat, and then you go into the castle, and it's all this like very tight corridors, sneaky, sneaky, and every bit of it is so good.

The art design of it is stunning there is a kind of a twist at the end that i won't spoil but it is just you could make a whole course on how video game design works off just this level and i i cannot wait for y'all to play it i don't want to talk too much more about it because i I really want everybody to play it so that we can talk about it on a future episode. We also spend a pretty considerable amount of time talking about it in the Tuesday episode of Resties coming up. So that's something you can look forward to.

I'll try to get in there. Justin, you, I promise you will love. It's $50. It's on Game Pass. Yeah, dude. Oh, okay. Well, sure. Fine.

Fine. I wanted to talk about a game called Soda Crisis. Is this a fallout to Soda Dungeon? Wait, hold on, guys. Here's the back of my neck standing up. This is a really good start for the J-Man. Let's see if he can nail the landing. Now, I know, Justin, what you think.

Based on the name Soda Crisis, you think... Oh, God god I want to be the impresario of a soda empire and I have eight different factories and they all drain my battery I know you think it's a clicker game it is not I'm sorry Justin it is a basically

3D Metal Slug game action like Contra style or Metal Slug it's on Steam you get it for like 11 bucks and uh it's like just like a really fun mindless brainless cool looking action game um and uh i've been looking for kind of something that could like capture that magic of contra which i always loved uh and this uh kind of does that in a really fast-paced way. So if that's of interest, I know, Justin,

I'm sorry to disappoint. It is not Soda, whatever that was, Soda Brewery 2 that you became obsessed with. Soda Dungeon 2. Soda Dungeon 2 fucking beats ass and you should play that.

Yeah, it's a great game. I won't have this slander. No relation. I have been sticking with V Rising. I think that I'm getting to probably a natural stopping point for now until there's more. It's still a very good, if you listened to our episode last week, my friend, you should know it's still a very good game and definitely one that you should play and check out. I got to a point where there's just some hiccups in the progression there have been too many points where the next thing i need to do is way too like challenging for me and or the levels

are just completely out of whack the next boss i need to kill is a vampire hunter who is literally 15 levels lower than me in in in this game system and who houses me every time and who i've not had any problems with like other bosses of similar um levels so I think that there's a there's a there's some work that needs to go into smoothing that experience out but um it's still really good and I think that like I'll probably return to it once they've done some some updates but apparently it's done really well and so they'll have the opportunity to do that but um that i have stuck with that quite a bit probably played about 30 hours at this point but i think i'm probably going to take a quick break and i will say one thing that's interesting

that i didn't touch on last time when we talked about it um it does sort of like communal living in a way that is like i don't think i've seen other games do where anybody can walk into your house. I don't know if they have to be in your... What is the word they use? It's like clan or something like that. Clan or whatever. I don't know if they have to be or not, but anybody can walk into your house

and just use your stuff. They can get into your chest and use your stuff or use your tools. They learn recipes. If you have recipes they they don't have you learn them when you check out their stuff very counter to the rules of vampires that anyone could just wander in well the vampire it's all vampires so vampires look out for other vampires so humans can wander in if you leave your door open that is actually very funny thing that happens from

time to time it's like you'll go into your living room there's just a deer there it's like what the fuck oh god damn it joseph gordon levitt why did you leave the door open that's my one of my servants i have travis griffin and joseph gordon levitt and those are your three brothers those are my three brothers it's a fun game um we henry and i polished off uh kirby in the forgotten land uh by which I mean there's a tournament mode in the game that's kind of like a boss rush, and we beat the very hardest one, which has like a hell mode, like a bullet hell shooter boss

that beat the crap out of us a few times, and so we had to go out and like grind for resources, but we finally managed to beat it and it and again this is the same year that uh elden ring came out it was my favorite boss fight of any game that has come out this year that game has mechanics in it that i don't think most people even realize like there is a um almost bayonetta style uh bullet time dodge you can do like you can there's a dodge button that you can get by holding down block and sort of moving and if you do it just the right time it slows time down and gives you a chance to like counter with a super strong attack and you basically

have to do that constantly in this final boss fight and it was thrilling especially because i had my five-year-old son next to me like, get him, Dad! It was very nice. But we have beat that, and now we're kind of looking for the next great game to play. Star Wars? You guys should check out Star Wars. I thought you said Lego Star Wars kind of went over your kids' heads. Yeah, but like, not over my head.

I'm a man. Yeah, we just started playing. I downloaded Castle Crashers because I thought, you know, that simple style of beat-em-up thing would be good and, you know, it would be meaty enough for him to play. And then I remembered, oh, that game's pretty violent.

It is very violent. But there is a option to turn off gore. So I turned that off and like played by myself to see what it did. And basically it makes it so that you don't like decapitate every enemy that you fight against.

But in the background of all the scenes, there's like, you know, soldiers covered in blood and their own poop. And it's like, okay, so not yet with this one. Not yet.

Cool. I mean, you could probably do a, what is it? Scott Pilgrim would be a good, but I was going to say, that's what we're playing right now. Yeah.

Pilgrim. And, and man, that's, that's still a great little beat them up. Um, but when i bounced off diablo and was super disappointed i have been like desperately searching for another phone game

to play and i got into super auto pets oh he has done that yet oh man be careful uh that's a rough it is a very sort of um streamlined sort of auto chess experience where you draft animals essentially to your team of five and you can if you get like copies of the same animal you can stack them to increase their power and each animal has like different abilities that you have to kind of synchronize in order to come up with like these these builds and there's it's a very well-made well-balanced game with lots and lots of different ways to like put together a winning team and you know you only get to draft from a handful of animals each round so you really have to be flexible and not just try and go for the same thing over and over again but it is it is

basically every uh you know if i'm pumping gas i'll get in a couple rounds of super auto pets uh and i have played that game a fuck ton that's just multiplayer correct you can't play it like it's just multiplayer yeah every every fight that you do is against another player's team um and i've been playing that game non-stop and i've spent no dollars on it so that's stark stark contrast the reason you'd want to spend money is the the other characters you can unlock basically completely changes the game and you you get paired with people who have that new content so it's kind of like most of the spinoff most of the meta like decks if you will of like animals that

you can draft are come from the free to play deck. Yeah. Like I have not actually even seen a single suggested deck using the things that you pay for. And again, like when I say pay for those extra decks, it's like two bucks. Yeah, I think it's an entirely different player pool when you use that deck. Oh, interesting. Okay, well, it's on mobile and pc and i'm having some browser fun with it it's kind of an older game so i know that a lot of people who are hearing this have

probably played it already but if you've not um yeah i don't think it's hit 1.0 yet so i think oh really that's like this year i yeah they are constantly updating it and yeah yeah yeah yeah if you go on youtube and search for it like every day people are putting out new build videos which is wild because like it's not it's not hearthstone there's not like 600 cards to choose like it's you're talking about like guys i got this new uh this new elephant blowfish hybrid deck that you guys are gonna freak the fuck out about it's like this is uh this is this is very pure this is very uh This is very wholesome. Yeah. This has been a great episode.

I've had a lot of fun today. I hope you guys have too. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. Nate Great, Albino Brown Pig, Mystery Wizard, Doodad345, and MurderBear71. Thank you for writing reviews. And the games that we talked about today are Diablo Immortal we talked about a bunch of E3 stuff

Stray Resident Evil 4 remake the Callisto Protocol I think maybe Roller Dumb Final Fantasy 16 and then honorable mentions

were Soda Crisis Kirby and the Forgotten Land Super Auto Pets The Rising and Sniper Elite 5 which we will be talking about on the upcoming episode of the Besties Elite 5, which we will be talking about on the upcoming episode

of the Besties. And then next week, we'll be talking about Mario Strikers Battle League. Mario is back on the pitch. And I'm going to have diarrhea that week, so I won't be able to play

that Mario soccer game. Yeah, especially with Mario soccer games. I tend to get a lot of diarrhea at those times. Thank you so much for listening to the besties. Be sure to join us again next week for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!