The Besties - Xbox Series X Launch Spectacular ... Also Vikings!

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

Just days after the official launch of the Xbox Series X, the gang offers a comprehensive evaluation including how this generational leap compared to the last and upcoming exclusives. Then they enter the Animus and are transported back to the age of Vikings with their review of the new Assassin's Creed Valhalla. 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 I've been in the Skalduk Spirit doing all my Norse poetry and practicing it, and I like it a lot, the flighting of Assassin's Creed Valhalla. And I was wondering if anybody wanted to step to me and challenge me to a flighting battle and do a little slam. I guess it's kind of like slam. Absolutely. It's a referee. We got to do this.

Russ, get him. Russ, yeah. So Russ, do you want me to start or do you want you to start? Why don't you start, and I'll come back at you with the with the flight okay i am the best at the rhymes there is no better step to me griff and you'll get wetter hey don't fucking talk to me like that hey shut up you can't talk to me like that okay now you know i know where you went wrong there what's wrong no meter to that and there, now I know where you went wrong there. What's wrong? There was no meter to that, and there was no rhyme to that.

You're right. Russ, why don't you give me another prompt, and this time I'll do it way better. Okay, sure. And I definitely won't do it bad as a joke again. My name is Russ, and I'm super cool. Step to me, Griffin, and you'll get wetter. Do you want to fight me? Physically?

You can't talk to me like this. You think one day historians will say, probably the funniest besties intro ever was the one that required a knowledge of obscure minigame within another video game that had just recently been released. I think that's what the historians will say. Or like proper skaldic literature, which I assume all of our listeners know a thing or two about.

My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best... You know what? I'm not going to step into that. I know one of the two consoles that is coming out this generation. My name is Griffin McElroy. I'm going to just call it from PlayStation 5, baby. We did it again, Cass. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best console of the week.

My name is Russ Series X Frush Dick, and I know the best game of the week my name is russ series x flush dick and i know the best game of the week welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in video gaming entertainment uh it is a game of the year show that goes all year long king of the hill book club for video games it's this show but this week we have it's jam-packeded. Honestly, it's hurting my brain. We have so much to talk about. I'm not going to take a long time. We're talking about the Xbox Series X and Series S.

The Xbox Series is and Assassin's Creed Valhalla. Chris, what's the Xbox? They already did one. It's another Xbox, but it has a little more power. The Assassin's Creed that we're talking about it's another assassin's creed but it has a little more power

this episode's like a one of those dual pack boxes of nerds and that comparison actually works on so many levels we'll be right back after this and we're gonna dive deep inside an xbox i bet it's hot in there who's got one who's got one who's got the xbox plant and i both have used the xbox series x quite extensively at this point uh just just to clarify do you have one on the way do you have one pre-ordered or are you waiting no i am a am a Sony crony, by which it means I couldn't pre-order an Xbox. I could not find one either. I checked this morning my Amazon pre-order for the PlayStation 5. Still saying I'm going to get here tomorrow before 10 p.m., but it hasn't shipped yet.

So not feeling great about that one. Jeff Bezos, if you could fast track me, baby, that would be great. I used to do a podcast called The Joystick Podcast, and I emailed my local host. great about that one jeff bezos if you could fast track me baby that would be great i uh i email i used to do a podcast called the joystick podcast and i know my host uh ludwig keatsman my fate i thought we were good friends still uh did email him say send me one of those boxes i'm an influencer didn't get didn't get a respond Will. No response on that one, which he is well within his rights to do. That is probably the same decision.

So no, I do not have one. I do not have one coming. Let's talk about... So I'm going to be pretty down on it. So I'll feel better, because that's a console wars, baby. Chris and Russ, y'all got the X, right? I'm assuming, not the S?

Correct. We've talked about it, I think the past couple episodes, but I feel like the limiters are off, and we can really talk about whatever, because now everybody can have one. Well, can we talk about almost everybody? Can we talk about the box itself first?

Sure. I think it's a fine place to start. I spent a lot of time, I think it was the last episode or the episode before, I spent a lot of time talking about the PlayStation 5 tower, the enormity of it, the curves, it's an ice cream sandwich, I talked a lot about it. So I was expecting something at least quasi-comparable when the Xbox showed up. showed up i don't i can't say that i love the xbox box design but put it next to the playstation and it is like like a warm cup of cocoa for me right it's a box like you know it's just a fucking box it's just a fucking box what about the box that it uh arrives in what tell me about

the xbox box but It's so nice. This is a stupid thing because none of this matters because you forget it 10 minutes after you've opened the boxes. The PS5 comes in a box and it's like, I don't know, wrapped in plastic. Congratulations. Wrapped in plastic.

The Xbox Series X, they spent so much money trying to make it feel like luxury brand it very much is influenced by this new trend of like oh you are the elite you've opened this and it kind of lifts towards you and sits in this perfect little chamber i'm gonna have it's uh surrounded by a little marketing pamphlets it's like the best fucking trapper keeper ever like yeah it's got those little pockets it's got little tear points it just love this now very high quality they ship it did they ship it in something separate

in a separate container when it came your way so the xbox came in the xbox box which came in an xbox xbox box so is it x so you got it in an Xbox, box, box, box. This is hysterical. I know I probably shouldn't spend so much time in the review on this, but that box was not as good. Okay. Our audience is going to turn on us so quickly

if we don't actually talk about the box within the box, box, box. When the truck was transporting it, when it was in a shipping crate right over from china would you say it was in an xbox box box box box well it was you know how amazon uses third-party companies sometimes it was actually shipped and al's bigs box xbox box box um and then they pulled it out anyway here's how the xbox box works now if you attempted to fight the truck that was carrying them over would you would that would you be boxing an xbox box box box box here's how the xbox works

the xbox series x is a considerably more powerful xbox one effectively right now they both play all the same stuff here is the selling point for the xbox series x hey would you like to have all the amenities that people have had in pc gaming for the past i don't know three to five years and you'd like to have it pretty comparably cheaper uh and just have it plug into your tv and work that's the xbox series x it does it sorry by amenities you mean from a performance so i mean things like uh ray tracing i mean things like ray tracing. I mean things like 4K that is actually reliable. I mean up to 120 frames per second speeds and definitely 60 frames.

I mean like super, super, super fast load times. And there are a few things that honestly it does better than my very high-end PC. The big one being switching between games. Yeah, the quick resume quick resume is all i hear about which as somebody who has a short attention span and loves to bounce between games especially more arcade games uh over the course of an evening i love it um yeah but i'm curious fresh what do you think because i i don't think it's a secret that I'm pretty high on this console. Yeah, you're an ex-bot. I know. I'm aware. Okay, so before it arrived, I was definitely questioning,

hey, who is this for? What is the purpose? I think I would second Plant's statement, which is to say it's actually kind of perfect for me. We've talked about it before, how I'm running on a 1080 graphics card and Watch Dogs shit the bed when I tried to run it. I played Watchdogs last night uh unlike assassin's creed which we'll get to uh watchdogs runs at 30 frames per second but it's

like a buttery 30 frames per second like doesn't series on the series on the series x well it has ray tracing on like yeah it's got like a lot of belt it looks very nice but that is really the like use case for me where i know for sure that my current computer cannot run um new 3d games it just can't um or at least not well and now i have this thing that i know for sure for the next three probably four years i'm going to be able to run these new games maybe it's not as good as like the nvidia 5000 series that comes out in two years, but certainly stably and smoothly, I'll be able to run all these games and I'm paying $500 versus like-

The value proposition seems like out of this world. Like, so for what you get for 500 bucks, it's compared to what it would take to create a similar PC. It's like not even close. Oh yeah, no, you're looking at, I would say $1,300 to make like something comparable. At minimum, and you have to build it. what is i'm so i want some perspective from the two of you because

i think this is the thing that will and i've heard different takes on this for both consoles and i imagine we'll be talking about the ps5 next week once we all hopefully have our hands on it what is can you compare the jump from the xbox one s to the xbox series x jesus christ can you compare that to the jump that we had from the 360 to the to the xbox one right like it's a what is the generational leap like this time compared to the generational leap last time it's smaller i think it's a lot smaller okay that's interesting because I've heard a lot of people say it's bigger. Chris, what do you think? I would say the opposite.

I think that the general... I mean, they're almost impossible to compare. And maybe I should... Sorry, I'm on a tangent and hopefully that answers your question. I think what we're seeing with PS5 and Xbox Series X is a fundamental shift in like what is the value and purpose of a console

and i think ps5 gets at the general like generational leap that you're talking about right like that's the whole point is to be a big significant generational leap that powers a certain type of games where i think xbox series whatever going on indefinitely is more about choice um and i do think the series x will be comparable to the ps5 um but it's just not even aspiring to that sort of thing like it's not putting games on it that are meant to like flaunt that is meant to be a more powerful means of playing all of your games and for them to look better in the same way that when you update your phone every other year you're accomplishing something very similar it's like a really nice kia like a really nice kia which is to say it is a workhorse it might not be a splashy workhorse but it does

the trick i drive a i drive a key yeah a really nice kia really nice kia um i do think that the big difference between the 360 to xbox one versus xbox one to this is i prefer all these quality of life improvements i prefer the faster frames i prefer the faster load times that the obsession with like oh it's just more graphics that doesn't do it for me as much anymore well you have a pc that you have a pc that does that stuff well not even even that though like i just think games look good like at a certain point we're hitting diminishing returns look good like games look good you know we've come a long way gun to my head like if there isn't a puddle reflecting something i can't tell ray tracing is on i just can't i've tried i've really tried uh i agree with plan Plant. I think performance is the star of this generation.

Running games smoothly and well is the star. I also agree that it seems like Sony is trying to push those boundaries a little harder in terms of what their hardware can pull off. But it's the features that I actually... Because I'm in the same boat. For me, performance in terms of frame rate is more important to me than how games look um but it's the features that like i actually because i'm in the same boat like uh for me performance in terms of like frame rate is more important to me than like how games look because that's the thing i can actually like it's very discernible the difference between a 30 and a 60

and 120 like game uh for me it's like the feature set of them and that's where i think the comparison gets interesting because the playstation 5 doesn't quite have that like quick resume swap between games feature necessarily but it does have you know the the integrated uh hard drive and the like wild fast load like i feel from what i have heard obviously we'll have a better picture this next week but that is like the more sort of standout feature for ps5 and because they have you know first party launch games they have games that are better at like uh showcasing that stuff what was the first thing that you guys did when you got your uh xboxes that actually goes to to what griffin is talking about and a thing that i do like about the xbox a little more than the ps5 and we'll talk about the many things that

are excellent about the ps5 next week here's the point backwards compatibility on xbox is closer to a pc which means that it will actually upgrade how it works yeah it's not how it works on the ps5 yes games on the ps5 will effectively need to be patched to really make use of it whereas there are a lot of games on xbox that just like automatically the fact that really crackdown came out in what 2005 was 2007 something like that and the fact that really crackdown came out in what 2005 was 2007 something like that and the fact that like it upraises automatically and unlocks the hdr crazy that's because it's coming from like the you know microsoft pc world like they have the infrastructure to handle uprising like that where it's more of a sort of specialty case i feel like on on on playstation i think that i think that actually discounts like the work that was done there's also years of work on backwards

compatibility yeah to actually make sure it works i think it's just a prioritization of resources i know about the consoles um i'm a game i'm a gamer uh i was not specifically aware of that distinction you just made. It's weird to me that in the lead up to these devices, especially when they knew the floor was falling out on the games, that they weren't hitting those marketing notes harder. Those would have been my beats that I was circling around. And I know that it's hard to do that because you don't want to be backwards looking

when you're trying to sell a new box. But I feel like that's a pretty big selling point especially since like for a while we don't have new stuff what's on the horizon for for xbox like what's the oh yeah what what is like the big what's like the next first party game like what's the thing that people have to obviously like you know you got your your halos and what have you but like i feel like i as a person who is fairly plugged in, like I don't even know, like what is the killer app that people are looking forward to

in the near, near future? I think, I don't think anyone would argue the fact that like Microsoft Studios game development has been very light, which is obviously why they did that Bethesda acquisition, such a huge deal,

which solves a lot of their problems. But you're right, outside of Halo, there aren't a lot on the horizon that are like, quote, Xbox games. And Halo will be fall. Yeah, but not even, everything that you see about Halo, though, doesn't get me that inspired about Halo.

So even that is, hearing about the- Yeah, but Halo is Halo I mean like Halo is a massive thing everybody's gonna play but that doesn't guarantee that it's gonna be it I very little has inspired confidence in me about about Halo because of what you know the turnover at the studio and what they've shown off not being like especially ambitious I think even forgetting Halo I think this is true of both Sony and Microsoft. And honestly, Nintendo right now, until the pandemic is under control, and we know how markets are going to work, and we know how timetables are going to work for development, I think you're seeing everybody staying buttoned up about committing to anything.

So I don't think we'll know what's coming out for any of these consoles until basically the markets stabilize and these companies feel comfortable i mean again the same reason we don't know literally anything about nintendo beyond like december 12th yeah but they couldn't even but they couldn't i mean they couldn't even get one like that's that is the thing i keep coming back to is i will get a series x at some point like i i love you know me boys i love tech you but like for playstation 5 it could just be demon souls like it could just be and that would like something to hang my hat on just like i am getting this box so that i can play this thing and while i will certainly play

the hell out of some old you know 360 games uh when i get that series x it's like not it doesn't feel imperative in the way that ps5 does this is, but this gets at the point of it for me, and this is why I think that it kind of makes sense. I was thinking about this because the iPhone 12 is circling around the world currently. The mini, I think, are going to start coming out, well, this week as you're listening to this. There is not this pressure of a killer.

People view, and i know this is like a dumb comparison but like people use the upgrade their phones constantly and it's it's never for it's almost never for like this giant thing they couldn't do with the old phones it's just to be viewing the device as part of their you know digital life for lack of a better term. And the big, big, big quality of life improvements are the selling point. I mean, if you contextualize this like a phone, all the things you do on it will be faster and better. That's the selling point.

And that has been enough for people to keep upgrading their phones for a day. And this is for cheaper than any phone in existence. Yeah, of course. Right. They still play, you make the calls, you tell the time, you look at tweets on the toilet. Like it is the same basic experience from the beginning.

It's just like the quality of life stuff is constantly improving. And like, that's, I mean, that's what these boxes are. I also think for our audience, for a lot of our audience, PS5 is5 is like the clear choice right if you're somebody who listens to a video game podcast and you play a variety of games you're probably going to do what griffin is talking about and like go pick up another xbox at some point maybe it'll be the series s or x maybe it'll be a next generation but right now getting these like exclusives is well worth it but if you are like i would assume the majority of video game players and you play call of duty fortnite madden maybe grand theft

auto and maybe a few other things what's the difference right like that's that's the big thing i keep coming back to and it's like i i'm excited for playstation 5 and i think about it as like that's probably going to be the console that I play games with my friends on. Like, that's probably where we're going to land just because we all landed on PS4 this last generation. And ultimately, like, that's the thing that matters to me. But all I play and all anybody plays for the most part is games of service games.

And I think Sony shot themselves right in the foot last generation by proving like, hey, you guys might not be the most dependable ones to like put all of my life hours and stock into playing Fortnite or Destiny or whatever if you're going to be like hyper protective in a weird old fashioned way about that stuff. Because if the Xbox plays that shit like really, really well and has like all of these quality of life features

and also is not going to lock me down arbitrarily, like maybe that is the better option. I feel like launch lineups for the future, or at least the foreseeable future, will feel more like this, what's happening right now, than we, I think about VR a lot where like VR couldn't get traction because it never got the, you know, that one thing that you had to play on it. And I feel like we are going to start. And why is that?

Cause it's like very expensive and the base isn't there. And it's expensive to make a AAA game with, with the base size not being there. I feel like the, the, the reason we don't have the huge launch lineup is probably in part COVID for sure. But like, also it's really expensive to make games for a console.

And when the console base isn't as big, it doesn't make sense. So like these games that like bridge the gap and those being the experiences that you look forward to, I feel like that's going to be, cause games are getting so expensive to make. I mean, and just getting more and more expensive.

I feel like that is the launch lineups for the future will look more like this where it's like you people start focusing on the quality of life improvements versus the like what new games is the are the other people left out can i can i talk about the controller um because yeah please yeah please please please, I... Do you have it? I wish you'd start bringing this stuff, Russ. What? Do you have it with you? Oh, you want me to, like, hold it in front of the camera?

I would like to see it just for me. I mean, I imagine it looks indiscernible from a... It looks like an Xbox controller. Well, okay, so... I don't believe that you have it. But that's the point, is, like, it looks, I would say, very similar to an Xbox controller. There are definite improvements. They add like grippies on the back

and the D-pad is much, much better than it was in the last generation of Xbox controller. And I would say like that controller, I use on PC all the time. It is a workhorse. You plug it in, it works like guaranteed. It's like very on brand with the rest of the Xbox lineup. It does feel though,

especially having used the PS5 and we'll talk about, I've talked about it before. We'll talk about it more next week. It does feel like after seven years, Xbox could have maybe reached a little further than they did. It feels like very safe.

It's a very, very good controller. It's a controller I'm happy to use, but it's, I was good controller it's a controller i'm happy to use but it's i was thinking of other like past generations and in terms of like generational leaps controller wise it's maybe the smallest generational controller leap i've ever seen um if you compare it to like you look at like gamecube to wii to whatever those are pretty weird but even like ps3 to ps4 ps4 added like a touchpad and the glowing light and other little doodads and this is really just a slightly redesigned xbox one controller which again not bad but i do think the hardware improvements that sony made to their controller

is going to be a big deciding factor in some of these like really experiential games, especially if third parties start taking advantage of those features, which as a matter of fact, they seem to be like adaptive triggers and stuff like that. Just real quick. I wanted to go down because we, we touched on it, but I think it's worth mentioning.

I'm looking at a list from um the imagine games network about uh from the imagine games network about um the uh xbox exclusives so like here's the stuff that we still know almost no time frames on and these are all coming to pc as well i'm pretty sure right i would assume yeah as dusk falls which is like um it's like a Quantic Dream style thing. Hell yeah. Avowed, which is a new Obsidian Entertainment IP. It looks kind of like Skyrim-y. You know the one?

No. Okay, they did it at one of those showcases. Echo Generation. Don't know what that is. Everwild. That's from Rare. It's a new rare thing everwild um x01 xomeca we are the both of those are things um fable maybe at some point it's made by playground games who has made fantastic uh forts again have they actually announced that i think they did finally announce it last

e3 forza probably at some point puyo puyo tetris 2 uh state of decay 3 sasuna saga hellblade 2 scorn tell me why the new don't nod thing the medium from bloober team that's it i feel like a lot of halo and halo i think a lot of those could be really cool like this is how i feel about it xbox series x i feel like has a lot of potential both from like the hardware side and the infrastructural side but also like i didn't know most of those games existed and but there's some big names attached to them so like maybe we'll get maybe this will be the console of surprising unknowns and surprise killer apps, whereas the PlayStation 5,

I think we all have a pretty good grasp on what's going to be coming out on that in the next year or so. Sorry, there's a few more on here I just wanted to mention that I missed earlier because they were highlighted green for some reason. Crossfire X from Smilegate. If you guys know what any of these are, please tell me.

Crossfire X is the weird remedy multiplayer slash shooter thing. Yeah. Okay. please crossfire x is the weird remedy multiplayer slash shooter thing yeah okay um i don't think we need to read any more of these i think psychonauts 2 uh yeah sure i mean yeah sea of thieves yeah i mean just to like put a bow on it the ascent i think with these games and with game pass which we've talked about a lot is a very very good deal, especially if you're a sort of person that like is not going to buy a game every month, but just wants to like stay in the loop on things. I think the Xbox is like a very solid, dependable choice. I don't know that it's necessarily going to be the like you're going to get it and it it's gonna blow your mind the second you plug it into your tv um but um especially if you don't have a decent gaming pc right now it's a great spot

and plan is making all sorts of emoji faces yeah we gotta we gotta move on moving on uh we're gonna talk about this that's the creed valhalla right after this. Stay tuned. The Creed is back and we're taking it to Viking country this time. Well, sort of. We're taking it to Viking times and then the Vikings leave Viking country to go eat England. Their big mutton legs

and their axes. Okay, can I start? Because I played a lot of it. I don't know. Assassin's Creed Valhalla is i would say if you're looking if you think of like i tend to chunk off the assassin's creed games into like big sort of like swaths of them there's like there's big steps and then there's little steps i would say this is a uh uh very much in the spirit of assassin's Creed Odyssey, where it's much more of an action game. It's action-focused,

obviously still like a big open world, lots of different storylines. Action RPG. Yeah, I'd say there's a lot of role-playing. Yes, exactly. Yeah, a lot of upgrading skills and gear collection and what have you. Yeah, a lot of armor with numbers on it

in a way that is sort of a pet peeve of mine, but I think is yeah a lot of armor with numbers on it in a way that uh is sort of a pet peeve of mine but i think it's handled a lot better here than it is in say like god of war or honestly the past assassin's creed games um it is a i'm trying to think of the best way like if you wanted to like know i feel like you kind of already know if you're going to play one of these um i would say it is much more an evolution than a revolution in terms of Assassin's Creed, but a lot of stuff has been refined, I think, in a way that makes the experience a lot smoother.

The combat, I would say, is one of the big things that I felt like was a big step up. There are, in addition to your stealth know your like self uh stuff there are abilities that you can map to the different face buttons uh if you pull pull left trigger they're like ranged abilities and right trigger they're like melee abilities you can have four map there and you have to find these skill books in the world and those really do and you basically fill up adrenaline by doing a bunch of attacks then you can do one of these specials uh these special abilities and i thought that was a cool way of really mixing up combat to make it feel uh different there's like a skill where you can highlight a bunch of enemies

and then let it go and you'll shoot arrows at all of them or like uh you can just chuck a bunch of axes at people or uh do a ram and where you can can knock people off the thing. There's even a little scorpion pull. Yeah. You want to fling your scorpion thing. Just on that specific, just speaking to the combat, I haven't played an Assassin's Creed game since 4. It's probably, it's been like 7 years.

You missed Odyssey? I skipped Odyssey. I didn't play Syndicate. There was a bunch of Assassin's Creed games I didn't play. So it's very weird for me to jump into one and see like what's changed and what hasn't. It's been very interesting, specifically on the combat. And I agree with everything you said about the abilities. They're very, very cool.

One thing I remember about combat in four Assassin's Creed and like a lot of the older Assassin's Creed games is you basically stand in the center of like a bunch of guys and you wait for them to attack and you counter their attack and then you do an assassination to insta-kill them that was like the combat and now what they've basically done is made the combat much feel much more direct and um in uh like you're more in control of the situation so as a viking I can charge into a room with a giant hammer and just like slam guys down. And that is like an actual strategy you can use.

You are not penalized for using that strategy. In fact, you're almost encouraged because you earn more agility. What is it? Adrenaline that way to use your abilities. So you can really whirlwind your way through. And I think based on the theming, because it is Vikings, the combat feels very heavy and very intense. Like you knock guys like off ledges all the time or into walls all the time. It's like so heavy and makes me feel like much more direct, directly in control of what's going on, which I really like.

Yeah. Can I talk about my one big favorite addition to the combat really quick? yeah can i talk about my one big favorite addition to the combat really quick um so i love uh using the bow and arrow uh but in this game you are like as fresh said heavily motivated to pick up a very heavy object and just bludgeon people with it um but each character now has weak points that when you aim the bow at them kind of like you can almost kind of see into them like there's like a little sun glowing inside of a different body part and if you hit that or some of the larger enemies they have multiple they hobble to the ground and then you can deal effectively like a finishing blow on them which is basically essential as if you are going into areas that are outside your current ranking of all of your whatever weapons and gear. And being able to go into a really tough area and just wreck bosses that are way outside your range by diving into combat, firing an arrow at their toe, and then like one at their shoulder,

them falling down, and then you just taking their head clean off. Yeah. Feels pretty good. It's nasty. It's nasty. It's nasty. To continue to stick with like gameplay mechanic type stuff,

before we get into more narrative and world stuff, I feel like stealth is harder than it is ever it does not seem designed for a stealthy approach into a situation i feel like i get spotted constantly i feel like it is not wanting that sneaky like and as far as i can tell there's no gameplay incentive for like go clean out this base without triggering any like alarms are very de-emphasized as far as i can see it still happens but it's not like when you got spotted in previous assassin's crew games you there was kind of a running timer in your head like i'm gonna have to find the guy who's trying to call reinforcements because i know it's gonna be a problem here it's kind of like

yeah bring them i'm a viking so i'll probably just chop all your heads off well it also has that ghost of tsushima thing of just like challenging like when you roll up to raid an outpost like there's not gonna be sneaking that's going to happen that time it's just basically a bunch of yelling people with axes just charging forward at that point like stealth isn't you can try and be sneaky about it but yeah wicked don't have to you actually have choice in a number of missions the game just doesn't make it especially clear it kind of like signals like raid that's what you want to do right well i mean if you if you wanted to get off your boat and then just try to go out on your own you

can do that but but wouldn't you prefer to raid with like 20 dudes with hammers the answer by the way is yes but the crew the crew in this game is better than it has been assassin's greed has usually been kind of a lonely game you know what i mean it's like me versus the world the the thing this does cool is like you have this horn that you can blow it's like hey i need some more vikings up in here and they'll just roll up like eight dudes and then the raids where all your vikings are like doing stuff and trying to help you roll the territory it feels like there's other stuff going on like you run through a battlefield and it feels like there is a fight going on that you could influence and that is actually like not completely dependent on you there is

sometimes those those situations where it's like there's one guy you need to kill to finish the mission and like you know you have seven dudes over there and they're just kind of like messing with the guy i guess until the boss comes over and gets them finally i would say i think it's very cool that you can mix those two i've played like tried to do missions stealthy and tried to do missions aggressively so i did one where i had to sneak into a monastery and basically assassinate this guy and i was able to get you know up into the rafters to above the guy that i was supposed to assassinate without anyone spotting me, and that was great. But he had a bunch of guards around him. So while I was up there, I called my raid people, my other fellow Viking friends.

They show up from outside. The guards around him leave to go fight them, and I can kill this guy without even being bothered. So you really can mix and match, which is extremely, extremely cool. Another mechanics thing that i i wanted to touch on um and and i would love to get your guys thoughts on this um the i feel like the skill tree as it is skill web perhaps in this game is truly terrible and i cannot imagine that it was

released in this form it is one of the worst of these I've ever seen in my entire life. Do you like the sphere grid from Final Fantasy X? Because this is kind of a bad version of that already pretty bad system. Here's what's wild about this thing, is you get experience points, you get two ability points when you level up, and you can spend those ability points

to unlock this skill tree, and the skill tree is really a web of like mechanical upgrades uh that are less substantial like health increase one percent or you know range defense 0.5 percent whatever um incremental stuff health and then every once in a while along this web you encounter a larger thing like uh you add another thing to your adrenaline bar or you get new abilities right except you can't see what all these abilities are until you're fairly fog yeah exactly there's a fog of war on your ability so you can't tell you get close to them also there's three paths that you can go down there's like a red

that's like melee and there's ranged and you know that kind of deal but like there is not a clear delineation of what that means or where you should spend your points because it's not like all the melee attack upgrades are up here and all the health upgrades are down here it's not like that you encounter both along the path so you're just guessing yeah but wait let me let me just address that real quick it is i'm not saying it's great it is a very clumpy clumsy system it's not ideal but they do do one smart thing actually two smart things one uh you can respec at any time for no cost it's completely free you can just respec always a show of confidence in your upgrade system still and two which was smart once you reveal areas of the map and then you respect the uh

those areas stay revealed i don't see no if that's true i think after you turn off i don't know if this is still the case but we were having people test it and after you turned off the game and restarted it would go back to having fog of war over the areas that you didn't respect against oh so i i don't know anyway here here's my point about it i i think game designers and i oh i hate being giving instructions to game designers i'm just sharing my experience of what i see from being with polygon you have to recognize that people play your game beyond your game and by that i mean if you make a system like that and the entire point is well we don't want you knowing what's ahead people are just going to google it you've already lost so like sorry

that's just not a choice and now you have people who are playing your game and are getting pissed off because they're googling to figure out how your system works rather than embracing this like mystery that you're trying to create and i think you do have to like you have to compromise the mystery is a problem but it's also very frustrating to like know that there are like for instance i would see you know you things that reference an additional ability or additional adrenaline bar which i didn't have and didn't know where it was and so i'm leveling up and wanting to customize to the style of play that i am using which should be the entire idea with a skill tree right and i can't because i don't know where the adrenaline thing is that i'm trying to get to it's and it doesn't and it's it's so unintuitive it makes

no sense it's truly off even without all that stuff even with all the mystery and the unnecessary fog of war stuff i'm gonna bang this fucking drum anytime that a game does this the first uh skill point you get you can go in any of these three directions right and the first nodes on these three branches and a majority of the nodes on these skill trees will say something like and this is not like a goof like stealth plus 1.6 yeah and it's like guys i don't know what the fuck that means like i guess it makes my stealth better but you have not i have no context for what this number means or why it needs to be so granular that it goes to like the tenths of a percentage place it drives me up a wall when it's like and i have just started playing this game and the i feel like a good rpg or action rpg has to at least hide this like primordial desire to watch the numbers go up

and they're not even cloaking it anymore the weird thing is they got rid of it with weapons odyssey you know odyssey's whole thing was oh every time you kill somebody you get a new weapon and they got rid of that which i think was a great choice i actually don't agree on the weapons i've also struggled with like i found a set that uh kind of complimented me and i haven't switched my weapons or armor for that's fine like i think that's a fine outcome of that like i think if i think that's no because i want i want to be able to i want to be able to experience other stuff without feeling like I'm handicapping myself because I don't have the thing level up. And I also don't want to waste a bunch of points

leveling something up if it's not going to be something I enjoy using. But you at least know what it means and you know what it does, which is not something that you can say for a range plus 2.1. And it's such fluff. It's so unnecessary.

I want to get into the story, but really quick, one thing I it's so unnecessary i i want to get into the story but really quick one thing i want to talk about and then we'll get into the story the violence in the game this is considerably more violent than any assassin's creed game i'm curious how it all hits you yeah not great there's a assassination uh not even an assassination, it's like one of those stun final blow hits, where the guy reaches his hands up in front of him to block himself, and you bring an axe down into his head,

cutting off both of his hands in the process. I literally have this in my notes. It is not. And not only that, they also... You loved it. You're nasty. The one that i thought was like truly horrific actually was an animal there's uh lynx which is like a wild cat right the time yes the time sweeper and uh you kill the the lynx but every single time that i have killed a lynx

it initiates the same kill animation which is the lynx jumps at you. You stab it in the neck with your, in my case, my little axe. It realizes it is going to die. So it tries to run away from you. You grab it by its back and stab it again, at which point it appears that it loses its its connections to its legs and now it is pulling itself away by its front arms at which point you grab it by the scruff of its neck and bash its head in it's we're it's cool we're all agreed on that the um all the violence is awesome we need

to get to like story and world so we can talk about like overall because that is actually where i'm okay struggling the most um the story is nonsense i mean it it's like you're trying to fight somebody there's like a very viking tropey kind of story which is to say you're gonna you're basically building an alliance but with that they have not very super clearly established like the villain and why you hate him so much and why you need an alliance there's also not a moment where this is actually very interesting a lot of games like this begin with a sort of all is lost like huge attack on you and yours where you're wiped out and it's just you this is an interesting twist on that where like you leave your house to go fuck up other people's houses and that is your plan like i'm gonna go over there and mess things up for them uh because i'm a viking and that's how we do it which feels like yeah natural like i would say

broadly speaking the story does not do a lot for me because it feels too tropey and uh non-specific um i think the only times where that deviates and this this is kind of a Witcher thing, is in the, like, some of the, like, ISO side missions get very weird and funny and interesting, and they're, like, self-contained. But the second I'm doing any of the main story missions, it's like, oh, this king wants to take over this king. And I'll be honest, like, after 10 hours, I just started hit-slamming B to skip through dialogue.

And I know they work super hard i feel bad about that i didn't review it so it's fine but uh it just like the the like very serious viking stuff doesn't do it for me one iota i do think that the moment to moment dialogue is very well written i i think the moment i am well performed yeah it's very well performed yeah i agree i think the thing that it's missing that odyssey had one i think od moment the moment i am well performed yeah it's very well performed yeah i agree i think the thing that it's missing that odyssey had one i think odyssey's villain well not revealed till much later in the game was still somewhat clear but odyssey also had the cult pulling you through the game and i think the cult was like for me enough to keep me going through everything

where i was like this doesn't make sense but i'm sure it's the cult um they do have a similar idea in this game but it feels very mechanical um and it actually touches on the other thing i want to say which is like the assassin connection in this game is so tenuous yeah yeah y'all it is i'm not this is not a spoiler there are some assassins in it and they're like do you want wrist blade and vikings like hell yeah and they're like anyway you put it underneath your wrist like this so you can sneaky and the viking which i actually kind of like this beat he's like fuck that i'm putting it up here so everybody can see this fucking gas wrist blade i have which is hilarious also this is more of a connection to assassins than both the previous games right fair right yeah so it was odyssey and origins origins oh they don't care about it all

what world was origins origins was also egypt right origins egypt yeah uh justin just made me think of something when he said he put the wrist blade on uh this game does something really interesting in the same way that uh odyssey let you choose uh to play as a man or a woman as the assassin. This game does that as well, but it also offers this hybridized option. Did anybody go with that? I did not. It sounded fascinating. It's not made specific, but...

It switches between the two characters based on what makes the most sense or has the most sort of like impact or has the most sort of like different stuff because of the character you're playing so it'll constantly switch you between the two characters throughout the campaign i thought that was a fucking wild idea yeah it's it's i wanted to switch but i actually just sort of default started with the guy which i don't usually do um especially since the the female character has been better for the past few games but I started with the dude and his performance is just great like it's like a very he's like the performance

is really really good I'm sure hers is also I'll probably switch at some point because you can switch at will you can switch at any time which I think is cool I do want to mention just the brief and you mentioned side missions but there's some of those are really good there's some that are on an even smaller scale than that, which I really dug this.

They're like world events is what they call them. And they're just like little weird shit that you come across. And some of them are so bizarre. Like, I'll tell you the one that I thought was so strange. You meet this Viking couple. Did y'all do this one? I don't think so no okay you go to this house there's this viking woman and she's like hey i'm feeling kind of down

you're like what's up she's like well my dude it's just not the spark for sex that you used to have and she he's like oh it's a bummer and she's like yeah it does suck it when we used to raid and stuff it used to be like very horny and we used to bang all the time and that was so kick-ass but that's not the case anymore and this dude's like against all anything we know of this character to this point this character's like i'll help you fuck come on and he takes them in their house and they're like yes yes set this house on fire and he's like uh okay and you start burning their house down and she's like this is working we're getting horny and he's like it is it is kind of working i am kind of getting

horny and it's like smash everything burn the house down and then they're eventually like we're so horny we're gonna do it do you want to do it with us we can all just kind of have sex and it's like i'm loving that i'm actually loving the energy right now but i am gonna go ahead and move along and they're like okay bye, bye. And you leave. That's a side mission. I mean, that's the mission. They're all very, very weird. It's really great.

They're great. You meet a dude sleepwalking who's just walking around sleepwalking and you follow him and you get to the end and they have this thought about this discussion of anxiety. Like how it's important to have restful sleep. Apropos of nothing nothing no connection to anything

else and he's like oh there's a chest over there if you want it i kind of led to do a chest okay cool great i'll grab this chest before i go those are really neat and make feel they make walking around the world feel uh interesting um but overall okay this is what i want to say the thing i'm struggling with and the thing i need you guys to weigh in on is um with all these components I still feel kind of more milquetoast on it than I thought I would I feel like they're real uh peaks and valleys real ebbs and flows where I'm in it I'm enjoying it I feel like the pace is kind of messed up like there's it's too often you'll get like 30 seconds of action and then like I need you to go over to another place and

like the flow is kind of constantly interrupted in that way I feel like there's way too much uh traversal in this big open world that isn't always like the most fun to uh wander around it doesn't have that kinetic sense that like city-based assassin's creed games have had where it's like just fun to to run yeah i want to i want to talk about the world real quick and i know we're running a little long but please this is this was the big turning point for me uh when i started playing the game i was like holy shit you start the game in norway uh huge like fjords and giant spiky mountains, and it's, like, an outrageous map, and I was, like, super jazzed about that, but I knew that there was another map coming, and there is, spoiler alert,

you go to England, uh, you know, within the first, like, six hours of the game, and the, when I was playing in Norway, it was, like, wow, this is, like, Breath of the Wild, like, this is more about the environment than it is, like, the individual like assassin's creed stuff um and then you go to england and england is predominantly like rolling hills and maybe little mountains here and there and then like little cities but generally speaking like it's pretty say i've been like all the way north all the way south it is very very similar throughout and you don't even have those like in early assassin's creed games those like cities that were like very different from another florence versus wherever you don't really have

that there are cities but they're much smaller and kind of more uniform and it a lot of marshy areas too that are like a bummer not to traverse just not fun i was just really disappointed that like the environmental diversity didn't match what nor sort of promised, which is like, holy shit. Like climbing mountains in Norway feels amazing. It is like you're on this spiky precipice in the middle of nowhere and you could see for miles and miles and you just never, never get that in England, which is kind of a drag. Can I real quick? I would love to hear just overall how it's working for you. Like, that's what I that's what I was trying to get at. I don't know. It's kind of fun,

but it peaks and, you know, I think it's like a very good game, but does not feel like I was hoping for more of an evolution over the Assassin's Creed model. And really, once I got to England, it felt like a return to games that i've played many many times before if we hadn't played if we hadn't played odyssey then i think that this game would like really knock your socks off but i think that it's it's just not i think that's the problem is i think the game that russ is wanting is odyssey i think i think this game tries to tie together what odyssey did with the assassin's creed formula And like that is in the camp that you grow. It is in the environments that you go around. It is in like bring back weird things from

previous games like the chasing the flying tattoo sheets, like the music sheets in previous games. Even the there are VR platforming puzzles, which are done in third person in this game but are very clearly uh inspired by the first person version of it in assassin's creed revelations like this is a assassin's creed game for people who like the entire series uh for better and for worse um all right amethstuff is very light too that's what that was one of the things uh okay one of the questions that we got from a few people and jim redding on uh twitter asked basically like how do you feel about the split timeline stuff and how it is integrated in this game i've felt terrible about it literally from the first assassin's creed game and continue to

do so i i do not give a fuck about desmond miles and all the other people in modern day do not give a fuck i think it's one of the things that could make this franchise really special and they haven't capitalized on it in probably five six seven years um i feel like the problem with this one and it's been i think recurring for a while is it's so infrequent that the animus is in any way mentioned or brought up or visited or taken out of that it feels like an absolute momentum killer it doesn't feel like you cannot keep up with the characters there when you're checking in on them every six to eight hours like it's just not yeah it's not something that i am an anomaly you know you're constantly i've always liked this stuff oh my god i even even the revelations thing which is the weird first person like trying to do a john

updike short story stuff i love it i think it's much better now um because it is so much it's not used nearly as much the other thing though is i think they're they're smart assuming they're doing with bahala what they did with odyssey which is they know that not everybody loves this stuff but the hardcore players do so they save a lot of it for the dlc the odyssey's dlc is where you really get into um what is happening outside of the animus um werewolf lesbian on twitter also asked uh any lgbt plus content and yes yes quite a bit actually but the game is kind of sexless in a weird way yeah compared to odyssey yeah just told a short story about fucking that's the thing is it's like silly but not like anything else than that most of the time. There have been a couple of LGBTQ relationships that have been either alluded to or directly referenced

that are treated very matter-of-factly, I would say. It's not like they hang a lantern on it. I mean, it's just sort of, it gives the Vikings, and I have no idea if this is true true but it makes them feel like sort of progressive in their uh uh their values in the sense that like there's not a lot of mores yeah it doesn't feel like there's not a sense of like oh you like boys like there's and when i say sexist i mean across the board i'm not just talking about like lgbtq stuff i'm saying I just think it's just kind of, it doesn't seem to be the interest of the game.

Yes. I love the slider. There's a switch in the menus that say nudity. Do you want nudity on or off? And then there's a descriptor of it. And it says, decides whether or not characters are fully clothed, as in naked females.

It's like, or topless women. Okay, got it. Oh, that's what naked... On the slider thing... There's no dongs. Really quick. There's no dongs, don't worry. Caroline asked,

how approachable is the new AC for casual, not very good players? I like the old AC games because I can pick them up, play without spending hours feeling like I'm awful at it. There are so many sliders in this game. Whether it's making stealth easy or making difficulty easy, turning off the gore, turning off

variations of gore. If you are looking for an opportunity to get back into the series, I think this is the most accommodating. I'm playing on a default difficulty in terms of the combat, and I honestly have considered turning it up a default difficulty in terms of the combat and i i honestly have considered turning it up a little bit because it's just and i'm rushing in and just smashing

everybody with axes uh and i'm finding it very i turn the stealth all the way down like to the easiest level because frankly it's just kind of annoying to be spotted by enemies and not really know like what their vision cone looks like exploration difficulty yeah choose right up front which i thought was kind of cool. Like how much information you want. What else are you playing right now? I'll go real quick because I've only had it for half a day. Or I guess 24 hours now

is Destiny 2 Beyond Light. New expansion just dropped yesterday. And I haven't finished the campaign. They added a whole new basically element type on top of the three that were already there and have been there since the launch of Destiny 1, which is pretty ambitious. But like I haven't even unlocked that class yet on my main character because you do that when you finish the campaign.

So I'll probably have more to say about it. But it is it's always so fucking nice to return to Destiny because that game is still the best feeling shooter that exists in the world. And even without like getting a full full deep dive into what they've done differently with character customization and everything which seems like they've opened up the gates even more and let you define how you want to play and make your character uh just playing that game after taking a break and just like popping the heads some aliens and like jumping around and throwing abilities around is like so fucking fun.

So I'll probably have more to talk about, but that is out. I played Control on Switch last night. I just like found my way into the eShop and noticed it there. And I remember hearing about it because it runs off the cloud and I hadn't really tried anything like that

on Switch before. It was the best cloud gaming experience I've ever had in any video game ever it is unbelievable sorry i'm confused it's on it's on switch but so so you play it on switch but it is powered by a cloud connection like you would you know with any other cloud service so the so the install file is not on your switch you're basically just you're streaming it streaming it you're streaming it this is yeah it um playing a like full-on triple a console beautiful console game at 60 frames per second on your handheld switch is a bizarre trip yeah i i tried it too is it cost full price it 60 bucks? I think it's 40 something.

But there's a demo. So if you want to just try it out, you can just try the demo. So this is what I wanted to ask Russ is because I tried this too and the demo is free to let you see basically if you have a juicy enough internet pipes to make it work. I could not,

there's like a little, you know, like wifi icon in the top corner to show you like how strong your connection is. And it goes up to four bars. For whatever reason, I couldn't get it past three and I have like a really good connection and it introduced just enough like input lag

that I did not pick it up, even though I would be interested. Yeah, so I would say definitely test it out. I think it's heavily dependent on how close you are to the servers. I'm sure there's a server in New York. There might not be a server in Austin and that might be the differentiator here here do you think west virginia what there's

oh yeah no that's where actually the server farm is in west virginia so you're fine y'all i've okay well we finished 13 sentinels i'm not going to talk a whole lot about it we will talk about it on the game of the year episode and somebody else needs to actually play the game please i played. You guys all played it. I played it. I read. I should say I read it. The ending is absolutely fantastic.

I... Yeah. I bet you couldn't... I hear it's a real page turner. You just can't put it down. It's an RTS game at the end. Sure. Reading this shit.

That is going to do it for us for this week next week we're going to be talking about the playstation 5 let me do a quick tracking update from Jeff hasn't shipped yet supposed to be here tomorrow by 10pm hasn't shipped quite yet

he's putting the finishing touches on it old jeff yeah thanks jeff uh but we'll be back with you if you've got questions about playstation 5 send them to us mail at besties.fan besties.fan is the uh url you can choose to share the show uh we're on twitter at the besties pod that's also where you can find a link to our mailing list uh please share the show with people um we would love to do the besties pod. That's also where you can find a link to our mailing list. Please share the show with people. We would love to do more besties, but that relies entirely on you letting everybody know about this program. So if you could do that, it would mean a lot to us,

but that is going to do us for this week. So Russ, you had double horns up. You're just about to rock. I'm genuinely excited for you guys to actually play the PS5. I'm like really curious what you guys think. Sure. I'm looking about to rock. I'm genuinely excited for you guys to actually play the PS5. I'm really curious what you guys think. Sure. I'm looking forward to it.

Assuming Jeff makes it happen. That is going to do it for us. 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? games. The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch.

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