Gaming Steve Episode 77 – The Secret History of Titan

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Giving the news to the next generation

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He got games! What's the save?

What's the save? What's the game?

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Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for the hardest working man in the game industry

The one man vortex of gaming information

The man who taught Mario how to fix pipes

Ladies and gentlemen, Gaming Steve!

Hey there, welcome to Gaming Steve, the home of intelligent game discussion

I'm your host Steve Glicker, and in this week's show

I go through the latest gaming news

I have my big talk about my time in history and interaction with Blizzard

As well as some information on what Titan was and how it influenced Overwatch

I have some show mail

And then some final thoughts

So let's jump right into this week's news

Gaming News! Gaming News!

So considering I thought it was a really slow news week

I seem to have a huge stack of papers in front of me

I don't know how that happened

Well, let's just get right into it

So first up is Persona 5

The release date was announced for Japan

And you can see the trailer online

So Persona 5, coming out September 15th, 2016

In Japan for, looks like, the PlayStation 4

And, what looks like is it also?

Coming out for PlayStation 3, that's what it says here

Why would it, maybe it is

So yeah, PlayStation 2, sorry, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3

So, those of you who have not seen or played or know anything about Persona

I would say, check out the Persona 5 trailer

Just do it, it's in Japanese

There's probably no game that epitomizes Japanese culture and gaming

More than the Persona series

These games are fantastic

If you like Japanese role-playing games, Japanese RPGs

You really, this is it, this is the pinnacle of Japanese role-playing

Even more than Final Fantasy

Some people will say the Final Fantasy series

Final Fantasy, I'd probably say yes

In terms of fantasy Japanese role-playing

But, the thing that Persona has for it

It has the anime

It has the JPS

It has the pop music

It has Japanese culture seeping from it

I've learned more about Japanese culture playing these games

Than all other games combined

It has romance in it

Which is a big part of these Japanese gaming

It has weird, strange, bizarre monsters that you only see in Persona games

It even has sort of a monster building universe

Almost like Pokemon

Where you can take existing creatures that you summon

And combine them to make new creatures

And of course it has grinding

Because there would be no Japanese game without some grinding

And also it has some crazy stories

And it has high school kids

You put all that together

And you have, you know, pretty

It's almost horrible

But almost every cliche of Japanese gaming and culture

Is kind of in this game

But it embraces it and it's beautiful

It is great, these games

The Persona series has been around a while

It really got popular with Persona 3

That one is where it sort of like broke in

And then Persona 4 is just absolutely fantastic

I would strongly recommend you get Persona 4

Persona 4 Golden is probably the best one

It's for the PS Vita, unfortunately

It's 20 bucks

I mean, it's practically worth it

The game is gargantuan

There's a lot to it

The story is incredibly deep

And you basically are

A Japanese student at a school

And they all kind of have the same story

Where you're a student at the school

And strange things are happening

And then you start exploring sort of a shadow world

And then you get stronger and stronger

And then you build up Personas

Which are alternate

Alternate personalities

That you can summon as monsters to fight other creatures

That are really bizarre creatures

That in all the Persona games actually

Sound like the Final Fantasy games

You start seeing over and over again

But take a look at the trailer alone

And that is what the game looks like

The Persona 5 trailer looks just absolutely gorgeous

It's one of the most beautiful trailers I've ever seen

I imagine

Unfortunately it's coming out in Japan only in September

So when it'll come out in the US

Is probably not until next year at the soonest

The good news is it will probably

Most likely 99.9% chance come out in the US

Because these games do very well here

They also get higher ratings

Highest honors

They usually always win a billion awards

So I can't see any reason why they wouldn't come here

They sell pretty well

Nothing like Final Fantasy

Not even close to those numbers

But if you haven't played a Persona game

And you like even a little bit of Japanese gaming

And Japanese role playing

You gotta try these out

You owe it to yourself

Next up is

Uncharted 4 comes out next week

And comes out May 10th

The reviews have been absolutely outstanding

This is a funny little game

If you go back way to the original Gaming Steve

Way to the early episodes from like 10 years ago

I reviewed Uncharted 1

And it was one of these games that no one ever saw

It didn't really have any press to it

It kind of came out

And I was stunned how good this game was

Especially really was the voice acting

I thought the voice acting in Uncharted 1

Was better than most movies

I mean it was

And it still holds up to this day

People always talk about how amazing

The acting and the characters are

The quips and the funny lines they have in the games

Obviously the Uncharted series has grown quite a bit

Since Uncharted 1

But Uncharted 1 was truly like an organic hit

It just kind of came out of nowhere

It grew by word of mouth

And just how good it really was

If you look at it now

It's a bit rough around the edges

But Uncharted 4 is getting ridiculous reviews

This is the last game in the Uncharted series

So good news is it's coming out next week

For those of you who have never played an Uncharted game

I would recommend you try it

Just for the set pieces alone

Uncharted 2 has one of the best openings

Ever made for video games

Uncharted 2 is fantastic

It holds up really well

Even today

I mean it's an older game

But man it still looks

It looked gorgeous back then

And it still looks gorgeous now

That's one thing also the Persona games

Persona

The Uncharted games have

Is that they just look out of sight

So far so good

Looks like the reviews are out of sight

And it comes out next week

Next up

EA yesterday on Star Wars Day

Announced that the makers of Titanfall

Are making a new Star Wars game

So Respawn Entertainment

The guys who made Titanfall

Are making a new Star Wars game

All they said it's an all new

Third person action adventure game

Set in the Star Wars universe

That's all we know at the moment

So this is the funny thing

I'm one of the biggest Star Wars fans

Of all time

I love Star Wars

I could talk about Star Wars

At the end of time

I know everything about the universe

I saw the original movies

When they came out in the theater

When I was a kid

And I grew up with Star Wars

From you know the 70s on

But I tell ya

It's almost

I was talking to a friend of mine

Who's the same age

And he's like this is too much

There's actually too much Star Wars

It's like there almost needs

Breathing room for new Star Wars

That's what made the Bioware games

So fantastic

Is that they

Explored the Star Wars universe

In a way that was familiar

But it was completely new

It would you know

Went back thousands of years

You got to see

You know

You got to see Jedi and Sith

At their height

You got to interact with

Star Wars-esque characters

But it wasn't

Oh there's C-3PO again

And R2-D2 again

And I'm really sick of it

I mean I

Battlefront

You know

Was a good idea in concept

I find it kind of boring in theory

Because it's like alright again

I've seen this my entire life

And I'll even be sacrilegious

And say the new movies

Same thing

It's like alright it was fun

To a point

But enough is enough

I want to see new

So eh

As much as I'm excited about

A Star Wars game

The last time I saw

A Star Wars game

That was really well done

Was the Bioware games

So we'll see

More new games

Call of Duty Infinite Warfare

Was announced

Big new game

In the Call of Duty franchise

Of course

Is going to make

A gazillion dollars

Comes out November 4th

For PlayStation 4

And Xbox One

And of course the PC

Something that made it look cool

Takes place in outer space

Which was like

The worst kept secret

These games do get

Kind of more ridiculous

Each time

But what seems to

Generate more excitement

Than anything else

Was that

The Call of Duty Infinite Warfare

Will come with

Call of Duty 4

Modern Warfare

Remastered

So that is often considered

The pinnacle

Of the Modern War franchise

People still recognize

A lot of the characters

And the action

Even though they seem to copy

Most of the lines

From Aliens

Which bothers me

To this day

But it's still

A great game

It has some amazing

Set pieces

It's a lot of fun

And at the end of the trailer

When they show

A little piece of it

I was like

Wait

That's Call of Duty 4

Immediately I knew

Within two seconds

You knew what you were

Looking at

That's how iconic

Call of Duty 4 is

And it looks like

From what I've been reading

People are much more

Excited about

Replaying Call of Duty 4

Than actually playing

Infinite Warfare

It looks like

To get the Modern Warfare

Remastered though

Which has both

You have to

Buy it

And they start at

80 bucks

And it goes up to

120 dollars

So you can't buy

Call of Duty 4

By itself

You have to

Buy them together

And it looks like

It's an additional price

So very smart

On their part

I guess EA

You know

That's the problem

It's like

Each version

Of Modern Warfare

Has to do better

Than the last one

And there's just

It gets harder

And harder

To sell

Not even

Gameplay wise

But money wise

Because

Their investors

Will expect

Each version

To do better

Than the last version

In terms of sales

Doesn't matter

If it's better or not

It just needs

To make more money

So

Hey

Let's take

An old version

Of a game

Update the graphics

Update some

Of the gameplay

Update some

Of the net code

It's probably

Not too hard

To do

Yeah

So

If you're

Looking for

Some of the

Old models

Update some

Of the skins

It's definitely

Not cheap

I'm not making

It sound

Like it's

Ten bucks

To do this

But it's

Going to be

A lot less

Expensive

Than rebuilding

A game

From scratch

Or making

A new game

From scratch

And if

They could

Add an extra

Twenty dollars

And if

You can

Jump on

It's a

Fun game

It's a

Very different

Type of game

If you don't

Like pvp

Type shooters

That are

Team Fortress 2

Based

You probably

Won't like

It but if

You do

There's a

Lot in

There

They have

A competitive

Mode

Which they

Were going

To be

Using

For like

Esports

Or any

Updated version

Or any

Window when

The release

Is

That's one

Thing I

Find

Blizzard is

As amazing

As they

Are

They do

Sort of

Have some

Issues

Finding a

Balance

With

Competitive

Play modes

In some

Of their

Games

And I

Heard some

Rumblings

Of the

Game

That caused

Some issues

And obviously

Blizzard agreed

To the point

That they're

Removing it

It's tricky

Though because

It's hard

To introduce

A competitive

Play mode

And you

Can't go

Back on

It

Like once

It gets

Started

Everyone's

Using the

Same system

They can

Reset it

But it's

Not an

Easy

Valid e

Sports

Type game

And something

That's going

To be

Sort of

In their

Cadre

Of gaming

For events

But you

Know

They're

Also not

Going to

Rush it

Although

Maybe they

Will

Who knows

But I

Imagine

Hopefully

We'll

See it

By June

Next

More

Blizzard

Is going

To be

A little

Better

Than the

First

One

I think

It's

Going

To be

A little

Better

But I

Think

It's

Going

To be

A little

Better

Than

The

First

One

I think

It's

Going

To be

A little

Better

But I

Do

Think

It's

Going

To be

A little

Better

Than the

First

One

But I

Think

It's

Going

To be

A little

Better

Than the

First

One

I think

It's

Going

To be

A little

Better

Than the

First

One

That's

Going

To be

A little

Better

Than the

First

One

I think

The

First

One

Is

Going

To be

Nervous

But I

Think

It's

Going

To be

A little

Better

Than the

First

One

890 overwhelmingly positive reviews it has an average of a 97 on steam 97 positive and it is

it is a great little game it looks absolutely gorgeous it's a farming simulation relationship

simulation dungeon simulation fishing exploration game it is it's really fun it's a beautiful

beautiful game if you are into the sort of the simulated life games you know whether it's the

animal crossing type games or anything like those types you'll like this a lot the graphics are i

really like when they've been doing with these 8-bit graphics but they're done using you know

24-bit 32-bit color schemes so it's like 8-bit graphics done with modern technology so it just

looks that much more vibrant and colorful there's a lot of mods for the game

it's just it's just a fantastic game it's really a lot of fun i imagine the multiplayer aspect is

going to bring a lot of people to it and then once it gets to the console even more people will jump

on it i've even been telling a lot of my friends to start playing it who aren't big gamers and they

like it and their kids like it because it's sort of a game that anyone can play it's very easy to

get into and it's very addictive and it has sort of a low impact and you can play it for a couple

of you can play it for 15 minutes you can play for a couple of hours

you just sort of go in play a little bit and then leave definitely check it out next up more

blizzard news so i talked a lot about this last week that there was a illegal wow server that

had the alpha version of wow the very very first version of wow on it it was uh it was a nostril

nostril llamas or no nostril ramas yeah whatever i can't pronounce nostril ramas server and it was

being run illegally it was shut down people went crazy it had something like 700 000 people on the

server and i went through extreme detail if you want to listen to my last podcast why blizzard

will never really have the ability to make a vanilla wow server there's just technologically

way way too complex however according to this that the team behind unauthorized server is going to

meet with blizzard and i'd be very fascinated i wish i was a fly on the wall in that because i

do this it's it's a question of how do they do it while maintaining the same level of support

that they do for the main wow game keeping patches updated keeping security updated

as well as keeping you know the help system and all the admin functionality in the game

while being able to charge money and one of the things they mentioned is that they were

toying around with the idea of almost like franchising it out

to another third party and having them do it so i would be curious to see if they can figure that

out is that sort of the best of both worlds that way blizzard can have someone else manage the game

for them while they make all the money or they make most of the money and maybe there's some

modified it modified it modified um in service agreement that when you sign up for um one of

these servers that you don't expect the same amount of money and you don't expect the same amount

of functionality that you would on the full-fledged servers maybe there's restrictive ways you can

play it but i tell you there's a big difference between 700 000 people playing on an illegal boot

you know bootleg server for free versus people playing on something that they're paying a monthly

subscription for that they expect things from and they expect services from and that's the issue is

that blizzard can't do this for free and they're not going to be able to do it for free and they're

not going to do it just to do it the amount of effort and money that they have to have to sink

into maintaining this is massive and it recreates a whole new team that would have to do this in

you know all the other languages most likely unless they say okay we're just going to do it

in english we're just going to have a small number of servers and that's it again i doubt anything

will come of this i think they're more just talking to them to find out how they did it

or what they found it's more of an exploration talk than they actually turned us into something

um serious but curious next up we have there's new xcom 2 mods from the guys who did the long war

studios if you have played xcom xcom is great xcom 2 is even better although it's weird xcom

2 kind of came and went xcom 2 had tons of excitement came and then it's just gone and

you know it's one of the things i like to do is i like to go onto steam not on the steam sorry i

to go on to um some of the streaming platforms um whether it's twitch or youtube and just see

like where games are ranked and sometimes you'd be amazed what games are ranked really really low

like on twitch and twitch there's like no one playing x-com 2 and this game just came out

i see that all the time like games that just came out that are brand new that are like no one is

playing which either means that no one wants to watch it which is most likely or you know people

are just flocking towards like the hearthstones and the mobas and that's all people want to see

but it's kind of disheartening when i see a brand new game that's been out for just a few months

that is actually quite fun to watch other people play like 300 people are watching and then there's

a hundred thousand people watching dota so anyhow back to the original story is that x-com 2

um

there's a studio called the long war and what they did is they took x-com and they added mods

to make the game really really long to make the game take much longer and make your characters

level up very slowly and it made it sort of a grind fest but a fun grind fest and they were so

the makers of x-com were so enamored by what they did is they brought them on board to make

official new mods and so they're going to be coming out with brand new mods just going to be

um 10 new enemies alien enemies there's going to be soldier class construction kit there's a tool

toolbox with new options there'll be all these new things you'll be that to it i actually

i weirdly purposely play games and then i kind of stop halfway because i want them to come out

with new tools and new you know new mods and new items and then i continue playing it x-com 2 i

almost finished it but i'm kind of almost did this on purpose i kind of want to wait for new

mods to come out and download them and then pick up my game unfortunately a lot of the mods are

out of this times you can't do that it will invalidate the game but give it a try but um if

those of you haven't tried x-com 2 and if you like um strategy games i would strongly recommend you

check it out it was a fantastic awesome game i was playing for months at a time next up is

battleborn launched um if you liked the borderlands games you would probably like battleborn i have

not played too much of it i found the beta very boring when it was available a couple weeks

ago i do like the gearbox games i like borderlands 2 quite a bit but i just there's something about

it it just turned me off although i have some friends of mine some very reputable sources who

love the borderland games said it's really great i'm definitely going to give it a try i'm just

sort of getting as much overwatch in this week as possible and then i'm going to jump on to the

borderlands and give that a try borderlands battleborn from what i know you know the game

is kind of strange it's getting lumped in with um overwatch but

nothing like it it has some aspects there is a moba to it and there's sort of a pvp type aspect

but there's also a large single player aspect uh there's about nine hours of gameplay from what i

hear and it can be replayed with multiple characters something else battleborn has 25

characters overwatch has 21 characters they both have weird characters they both seem to have the

same types of characters whether it's snipers and tanks just each one does it so it's one of those

two ideas

that are similar that came out at the same time within weeks of one another sometimes you see that

in the movies you know like when two volcano movies come out at the exact same time or two

disaster movies come out at the exact same time now you have two games coming out at the nearly

exact same time that are similar but yet they're very different um i would check it out if you

liked any of the borderlands games i know my friends that love borderlands love this game so

far next up we have fable the developer of fable

lionhead officially closed this actually was a pretty big deal so for those of you who don't

remember lionhead was originally made by peter molyneux in 1996 peter molyneux was probably one

of the top three rock stars of gaming he's been very quiet recently but man when you would see him

live at a talk at gdc i mean he would capture the room like he would walk in and he can he

could capture the room he's sort of like the steve jones

of gaming uh he always had some crazy ideas he always had some really good games really wacky

games back in the day when a long time ago he made populace which was one of the most popular

games at the time he made this other game power monger which was i just loved that game when i

was well kind of a kid he he just made really bizarre games to say the least his games just

were just kind of out there that just kind of did bizarre things

he was

also known as writing really good ai he came out with um black and white if you want to take a look

at that game wow the game came out almost maybe 15 years ago but you were a god and you had an

animal that was your representative of yourself on the on the world and it could be like a cow

and the people would worship the cow and the cow would do things and then if you were good the cow

would become more angelic and if you were bad the cow would become like more demonic

it was a weird weird game but it was unique i'll give you that they came out with the fable games

which everyone knows the fable games again very unbalanced but had a completely unique look to

them completely unique feel a lot of uh blue language uk type language which is fun english

language not english american english uk english it's just bizarre games also i can't remember if

fable 2 or fable 3 has one of the best

plot twists of all time of gaming it really i almost don't want to spoil it it was fable 2

it had a really really good plot twist when you played that game and the movies which again really

strange game where you would it probably would have done very well now more as an ipad type game

where you would well run a movie studio and make movies using some kind of predetermined sets and

actors really strange game if there's one consistency between lionhead is that they made

really weird things they were the definition of out of the box so they were bought by um it was

founded in 1996 microsoft acquired lionhead in 2006 and molyneux left microsoft and he started

lionhead um sorry yeah sorry um he started um and another another um company after he left in march

of 2012

um

he left lionhead and since then they were going to come out with fable legends which was really

not good i played it it was not a good game it was like one person was the bad guy and a couple of

the people were the good guys and it was the bad guy trying to kill the good guys it was set in the

universe it was multiplayer only it seemed really forced it was bizarre it was fun for like 10

minutes

and then you never wanted to play it again uh the game was canceled the studio was closed none of it

really comes as a surprise and yeah they just kind of moved on from there next up we have nintendo is

selling the majority ownership of the seattle mariners baseball team so i'm a huge baseball

fan gigantic gargantuan huge baseball fan i go to something like 40 games a year um big new york

fans so there you go that's my team

so i like anything baseball related and there was something fun about knowing that nintendo owned

the seattle mariners but they did pretty well get this in 1992 nintendo bought the seattle mariners

for a hundred million dollars think about that they bought a baseball team for a hundred million

dollars that is ridiculous it is now worth 1.4 billion dollars today so pretty good return on

investment and in fact i'm not going to go into the details of that but i'm going to go into the

nintendo is still going to own 10 of the team so you know they bought it for 100 million they're

selling it for 1.4 billion approximately that's what it's worth they'll probably still get around

that they'll probably get more than that because it's not like baseball teams come up for sale that

often so people often pay way more than they're worth just because if they really want that

baseball team they got to buy that one that's going up for sale because it's extremely rare

so nintendo i guess they're really hurting for some cash or they just don't want to deal with

it anymore um

but yeah sorry to see nintendo go because they always had some pretty funky things going on

with the seattle mariners when they when they owned the team oh i got a few more stories and

we'll wrap this up we got cyberpunk 2017 is more ambitious than the witcher and every front

cd project red has been saying so cg project red if you haven't played the witcher 3 there's a new

expansion coming out the screenshots are ridiculous witcher 3 i talked about it last year

it is one of my favorite games the game is obnoxiously large and i mean that in the nicest

way possible but man this game is huge i mean i've seen everyone goes on about fallout 4

fallout 4 is big witcher 3 is is just obnoxious it is such a big they're both big games i'm not

going to say i don't know which one's actually bigger but they're both really really big games

and then they went on to say that cyberpunk 2077

which everyone's looking forward to is their game coming out after witcher 3 is destroys which are

in every way possible it's more ambitious here's the exact quote the game is more ambitious than

every single front in the development on the marketing side it's even bit it's even better

even bigger and more revolutionary than the witcher and that is a huge game now the witcher

3 is obnoxious it is so big i know many people who play the witcher 3 and i know many people who play

this game for 50 hours and realize they were still in the first chapter and realize there's still two

more to go and they stopped playing because the game was that big it is a big big game i don't

know if that's such a good thing it's like you know what well maybe release the game instead of

having to make a game that is a 500 hour game it's gonna probably do pretty well if it's still

a i tell you a 200 hour game we'll probably still be able to do it but i'm not sure if it's going to

do pretty well uh you know used to do this also bioware bioware was the kings of making games

that were just way too big for their own britches when they came out the baldur gate series baldur

gate 2 baldur gate 2 is insane i remember i went to a talk at gdc and they said there's something

like 1.4 million interactive objects in that game you know what if you're going to be clicking on

1.4 million objects that's too many objects okay yes you're trying to make a real world but it gets

to a point of we get it okay every bucket can be opened we don't need to open up every single

bucket in the game so the game is supposed to come out somewhere between 2017 2021 we'll probably

start hearing more about it because the witcher 3 when the last um dlc comes out and it's going

to probably you'll start hearing about this because i'll have nothing else to talk about

and

they have to make money somehow so hopefully it comes out more a little quicker than we then they

say the other thing is the witcher 3 the new download the dlc that comes out in a few weeks

i think it's like blood or wine i'm trying to remember it the graphics look gorgeous and

supposedly the dlc is bigger than most games so you know if you want a game that will last you

forever just download witcher 3 with some with the dlc that will last you months trust me and

it's worth it that game is one of my top favorites

games ever the story is really really good the graphics are great it twists and turns in ways

you can't imagine and the bloody baron is one of the greatest stories i've ever seen in gaming

period very very very well done next up dishonored 2 is getting release dates coming out november 11

2016 so this is one of those ugly stepchild games bethesda came out with dishonored a few years ago

and it was a first person shooter game

um it's actually was developed at arcane studios um uh that it was released by bethesda it came out

like in 2012 it was the game of the year it did really not so great i mean it was one of these

games that didn't really seem to like latch on to anything but the reviews were fantastic the game

was really fun i know people who hate first person shooters who love this game and there

was a lot of expansions there was downloadable

content that came out for it um game of the year edition and so forth it just sort of

came and went but i'm glad bethesda decided to come out with the dishonored 2

they're going to hopefully do kind of go down maybe the same route that um uncharted was

is that uncharted if you remember as i was saying earlier kind of came very good game a lot of people

loved the game didn't seem to make a lot of waves then uncharted 2 came out suddenly everyone was

talking about uncharted like this game has been around forever and it was

the end all be all and everyone was playing it this might happen maybe dishonored 2 comes out

everyone starts talking about it starts saying how amazing dishonored 1 was people jump back

start playing it so looking forward to that uh next up we have ubisoft is coming out hard

down hard on division cheaters this week so the division here's another game that people will be

studying for years to come it was a game that everyone couldn't wait to come out

it comes out it does really well gangbuster sells a gazillion copies and suddenly everyone is

cheating i mean i've heard more cheating in this game than probably any game i've ever seen this

game is just rampant with cheating people and the game is ruining the game there's all these issues

and problems so it's weird it's like a game that sells really really well that has really a lot of

problems and from what i've heard and this is rumor and speculation that they have a trusted

side model which basically means that the server essentially accepts what the client send is

correct so if you're if you say that your your system if your system tells the server hey i got

infinite health and infinite ammunition the client decides to accept that um that is weird because

that's not really the way you're supposed to build these things you never have client trust side

that's nuts you have a server

side model where the server acts as the main hub of the game and everything the server says is

accurate and it almost basically never trusts the client i'm super super simplifying this i don't

want to get into all the details of how these work but supposedly the rumor is that's true

if that is true you can't really fix this game that easily you can't just go in and decide okay

we're going to change from a client side model to a server side model you can't just do that it

just requires rewriting the game and then you can't just go in and say okay we're going to

change the entire game from scratch so hopefully this isn't true but right now

ubisoft is so fed up with so many people cheating from the division they've decided instead they're

just going to ban everyone permanently so they if you get cheated once you're handing out a warning

if you get cheated if you're cheating again then you're banned forever so it's kind of a weird

thing to do it's like okay everyone buy it buy our game but if you cheat then you're

banned for life i get it i get that you can't play and it's ruining the experience for everyone

else and that shouldn't be allowed but you know if you're going to build the game you should

probably do a little bit better job of making sure that people can't cheat in the first place

i would think a better model would be that you make two servers and you make the cheating server

and the normal server and that way it's like okay you're not banned okay everyone who's decided you

have cheated twice you're not banned you're not banned you're not banned you're not banned you're not banned

you now have to play with other cheaters so all the cheaters play with each other and then everyone

else is clean plays with each other um again there's no perfect answer to this i just find

it strange that a game that was so heavily um talked about and so many people were looking

forward to and it sold so well was done like this and last but not least this is the last news story

is xenoblade chronicles is coming out for the wii u virtual console it's 20 bucks

if you have not played xenoblade chronicles uh i would say get it especially if you have a wii u and

if you like japanese gaming role-playing games this is a really fun game it is kind of a wacky

game it sort of takes place on again this is why i like japanese games they're wacky there's two

gods that are fighting with each other and you are a creature that lives on one of these gods

these gods are like the size of worlds and these two gods are kind of frozen in time

and you have adventures while you're on one of the gods and you sort of run around the god and

it's really neat just the way if you look up in the sky you can see the outline of the god and

you can see like where his head is and you see the other god and then as you move through the game

you see different viewpoints of where you are on the god's body it's it's really a cool game

it's it's has a whole style to it unlike anything you've probably ever seen it was a huge hit in

came out in america it's one of those games that no one could ever find you're there to buy it and

if you didn't buy it right away you never got a chance to get it it did come out on the 3ds

but it was portable and 40 bucks i don't know that it seems like the type of game that really

needs a big screen i didn't even bother buying it or playing it on the 3ds because it sort of

needed a grandiose scale so kind of a weird decision for them to do that but if you got a

wii u and you have 20 bucks and you're interested in japanese role-playing games

and want to get something that was a big here a big um big to do at the time definitely check it

out it'll take you a while it's a long game it's a good 100 hour plus game so wow for a slow news

week i sure had a lot of news maybe too much news so let's go into game talk

so game talk this week is i'm going to go through

kind of a little bit of my history with blizzard as well as what i knew about titan and how it

became overwatch so again this is a lot of this is just sort of my experiences as well as what

i've known from talking to various anonymous sources of people who work at blizzard and who

used to work at blizzard so with that i will just jump into sort of my background to sort of tell

you some of the fun little anecdotes as well of things that i did

blizzard some of you guys have heard some of these stories before for many of you this is

probably brand new but in the beginning i was first exposed to blizzard in the year of 2000

at the time they were hiring some people for a new top secret game and one of my friends was

basically got contacted for an interview at the time he was a 3d designer and he was designing

levels for quake just for fun and he was designing really crazy levels and out of nowhere literally

out of the blue he he was sort of in a clan that was designing his levels he gets a call

saying hey you know we'd be interested in flying you out to blizzard and talking to you because we

have a game and we want to talk to you so he went out there he talked to them it was all hush hush

it was all top secret and he told me about it and he said yeah i'm going to take the job and he

he left he went there he moved out he quit his job he quit his whole life he moved out and he

went to join blizzard and that's kind of how i started to get into the game and i think that's

involved is through him and then other friends who i met afterwards and at the time it was world

of warcraft they were looking for 3d level designers and this is important because i just

want to give you an idea of the type of people that play and work at blizzard that these guys

are gamers and this is pretty well known and a lot of these guys love first person shooters they

were very big into first person shooters they'd make a lot of the games you've heard this before

that a lot of people like to make games that they like well

this is no surprise a lot of the guys at blizzard they liked uh first person shooters and they also

liked everquest again this is nothing new they wanted to make their own everquest so they went

around they saw who was making at the time the tools were very limited for wow not for wow for

for doom and there was people who were doing really strange things and this my friend was one

of them is that he was making gigantic characters using doom tools he was making really big

levels and that's something they wanted world of warcraft to have they wanted to have really big

models and if your example is when you enter stormwind and those gigantic statues everything

in stormwind is huge and at the time and now you look at it and i mean you probably still think

it's pretty big but back then that was a big deal to have really really big gigantic screens have

all this gigantic architecture just everything majestic and huge

really wasn't possible everquest had very large view distances but it was very plain it had a lot

of like trees and grass and sky it was nothing like what you would see in world of warcraft so

they wanted to really transform the industry not just from a gaming point of view but from what you

expect from a game and that's what they were looking for so they flew him out he got hired

they couldn't really tell me anything about what he was doing but eventually uh he told me a little

bit about it and a few years go by and i come in for e3 and it was the summer of 2002 and i actually

was able to play the game for the first time i have a fun story is that i'm in his apartment

i'm playing world of warcraft and this is a it's not even an alpha it's like pre-alpha and all that

was available was northshire you could be a human um you can go to the

mines um the highest i remember i got up to level seven that was it you were getting it was totally

unbalanced i was walking around spiders were absolutely destroying me gold shard was there

but things like stormwind was sort of there and i remember aspects i remember some things that

were pretty cool what they did is that the cities that weren't built they just had big swaths of

land where the city would be and then they would have

all the vendors from the city standing outside in lines so you can actually go up to the city

and go to the various vendors and buy things if you wanted to um it was pretty cool only

very little of the game was actually working again really only the northshire area was sort

of up as i was wandering the map you would actually see police barricades on the map itself

where they just had um you know where they stopped uh development i actually went past

those kept going and it was just land i mean it was just land there was nothing there there was

no creatures the map was sort of working the map was really really rough um but i remember walking

around just as much as i could because fighting the monsters was very very unfulfilling once you're

getting killed constantly but i always said the story of like i was playing the game when it was

and i was literally the only person on the server at the time the only time in my life

you ever played world of warcraft and i was the only person in the entire world

playing it um so that was fun in addition while we were there uh i was actually playing world

warcraft 3 and i remember warcraft 3 was about to come out it was being released in july 3rd

and we're hanging out and we're just fooling around i was playing the game i was going through

the missions and then they said hey you guys want to play a multiplayer mission um it was

let's do an ai we're about to actually go out to dinner and they said hey yeah you know what

let's test it out

these are the guys who wrote the ai and this is this is funny he said it was just me my friend

and two other guys from blizzard so it's four of us and like hey let's do four verse four

so we do four of us first four of the ai and we got absolutely destroyed the ai killed us so fast

so we're like okay let's do four verse three so we did four verse three four humans first

three ai we went up against the ai we got destroyed again we're like

you know what we said i remember them saying they were laughing about it we're all in the same office

like yeah you know what we can write the ai but we can't play the game that great and then okay

let's play four verse two so we went four verse two four humans verse two ai finally win

finally kill them then we went out to eat uh i don't know at least a fun story for me it's just

i remember that these guys as you know as much as they wanted to play they were talking about how

you know they have to concentrate so much on balance and game design mechanics

that they're not going to be able to do it they're not going to be able to do it they're not going to

actually not even that great at playing the game and had that of course that they would do is go

to outside sources find the best players find people in clans find people who are really good

at the gameplay competitively and have them tested because that's what they were interested

and that's one of the secrets blizzard's really good at doing is that they will find the actual

people that were you know the masters of the game for example another story i remember is with world

of warcraft is what they did is that they found all the leaders of the top guilds of of everquest

at the time and they actually gave them invitations really nice invitations to come play the game and

so they would get their entire guild over to world of warcraft and have them not just play it in a

private setting but then get all their you know to get a lot of information of how the game should

be built i even remember that was at gdc game developers conference and a couple of my friends

from blizzard were there and we're talking these guys were working in world of warcraft at the time

and we went to a

talk of like lessons learned from everquest and i remember i remember this specifically

that they were talking about things about they did testing on some of their maps in everquest

and they did they showed this amazing map of where everyone was walking in one of their main cities

and they there was two auction houses in the city and one auction house was always being visited

more often than the other auction house and they couldn't figure out why they did all this

math and after a while they finally figured it out that the one auction house was exactly two

steps closer to the entrance than the other auction house and people are so adept and so

so good at figuring out the little nuances of maximizing their time in these games

that even subconsciously that they were able to go and they would rather go to the auction house

there was two steps out of hundreds of steps it was two steps a millisecond

closer than the other one but people were able to pick up on that and they they decided and they

rebuilt the game so that things were equal distance or if they if they had you know two

auction houses they make them as far away i'm sorry as close or as the same distance as possible

because they were trying to split up the game and not have everyone in one area so the server for

server balance um but one thing i remember specifically they said is that one of the

issues they had was quests and having people give quests and they wish at the time they were able to

build everquest that they had a better system and something like putting a question mark over the

person's head and i remember that and also a tutorial telling people specifically how to do

certain things and i swear to god the next when i was in friends and family alpha of world of

warcraft those same exact things from the talk everything they said in the talk that everquest

said they wished to do was showing up in the game coincidence or not who knows but a lot of these

like the question marks over the head were probably from that talk at gdc because everything they said

all appeared in the game weeks later everything it was it was really funny i should always ask

them and i never asked them if that's exactly where they got it from i think it is just my

opinion so with that is next 2003 um i think it was late 2003 that we me and my friends we all

got invited to the friends and family alpha for world of warcraft at the time

we only played alliance because that's all it was available i think it was um you could only get up

to level 20 and then over the course of a year they would slowly add more content you would

eventually have different races you can play different classes eventually you went to the

horde i remember each time they would open up a new section like the undead i remember everyone

rushing to the section it was completely unplayable and i mean you think you think

launch days were bad it was like you got one frame a second if you were lucky

really really hard to play the game um it was a really slow grind because every you know it took

them quite a while to get up to the max eventually it was up to level 40 then level 50 then level 60

eventually get up to the top it was actually more like like level 40 than 45 than 50 55

slowly slowly they kept adding more and more so we got to play the game for pretty much an entire

year in the friends and family alpha or beta uh before it eventually came out on november 23rd

2004 at the time

one thing we actually did is it's funny because as people who play wow know when the game first

launched it turned out that people didn't really like to play monsters so there was many more

people who play alliance than they do they play horde that's actually one of the main reasons why

they added beautiful horde creatures like the like the blood elves and such is they wanted to

balance out the prettiest of the races because you know what especially in asia people didn't

want to play trolls people did not want to play

orcs um they really wanted to play humans and and elves that's the characters they wanted to play

so it unbalanced the rate of the races uh quite a bit in the game in the beginning

but one thing we did is that my friends at blizzard said that the out the alliance was

built first and then horde so a lot of the quests were much better for horde and a lot of the

experience was much more fun for horde because when they first started to make the game they

make alliance they didn't exactly know not that they didn't know what they were doing but they

were you know starting that's what they started with and then when they when they got the horde

they had a better feel for everything so we all went to maugana server and we all had um

all the blizzard people were there and all my friends and i we all went there with them

and sure enough that's the at the time of launch and i think still to this day there was more horde

than alliance it was like one of the only servers that had more horde than alliance and not just

by a small amount of time it was more horde than alliance it was more horde than alliance and

by a huge amount and that's kind of why is that the people in the know all went to horde and they

all went to the maugana server because they all wanted to be together so that's where we started

out then you had things like the goon squad and you had aftermath and hit some of the most famous

guilds in the world they were all still on the maugana server one of the top servers at the time

but if you ever wanted to wonder why that one was the only one that seemed to have more horde

than alliance that could have been the reason again completely unconfirmed why

that happened but according to what i know that's exactly what happened um something interesting

happened in mid 2005 and if people don't remember this about the original vanilla servers is that

wow was not completely done if you played the game there was a lot of content that was missing

not necessarily missing but if you went from level 40 to level 60 there was a lot there wasn't a lot

of quests there was a lot of grinding there was an

entire sections of the map especially in the 50s that were just empty it was literally just

grinding through you have a couple quests and then just killing things to get your levels up

and unlike now where i hear people get up to like level 100 in a weekend you know back then from

getting level 1 to level 60 was hundreds of hours i mean it was a slow slow process i know people

who would take months to get up to level 60 and they're not they weren't doing like you know oh

just a few quests they're doing a lot of quests they're doing a lot of quests they're doing a lot

of quests it was a lot it was a big game and they wanted to maximize as much time within the game

as possible there was rumors at the time in the mid in mid 2005 that nc soft who moved into the

irvine area started to suck up wow employees they at the time they made things like lineage 2 they

made city of heroes they milled guild wars and some of that is definitely true the guild war

guys for example and i met with them and actually have an interview with them if you

go back way back to one of the earliest gaming steves these are some of the original guys who

worked on battle.net way back when they wrote the original code this is well known and they did they

the nc soft guys were coming in hard they were doing tons of mmos and for various reasons people

were burnt out on wow they were working on it at that time by the time it came out it was already

being worked on for four or five years and there was still a lot that had to get done i remember i

was talking to my friends there and i was like oh my god i'm going to do this i'm going to do this

they thought if this game sold half a million copies they'd be happy and if they sold a million

copies they'd be ecstatic absolutely ridiculous well as we all know it sold a little bit more

than a million copies and i think for some people decided that the pressure of success was too much

or having to deal with all the pressures of having to make the game as good as millions of people

wanted it and there was a bit of a brain drain i remember it really took i'd say people don't

but it took like a good year and a half two years for it feel like the game was completely fleshed

out and done um by no means did this undermine the enjoyment and fun of the game if anything

people still as you well know have fond memories of quote vanilla wow but i also have very fond

memories of grinding through vanilla wow especially levels 50 to 60 man it was rough it was rough so

the whole point of that was a just give you a little bit of my history of what i went through

but also give you an idea of the type of people who i work at blizzard you know these are people

who like shooters that like mmos so that's what they decided to make um in fact they were such

big fans of shooters if you don't if everyone remembers they started working on something in

september 20th 2002 something called starcraft ghost which was a shooter at the time it was

designed by nihilistic software it was going to come out for the first time in the world and it

came out for the gamecube the xbox and playstation 2 and the game was mostly built and finished they

actually had it demoed and then you could play at e3 you could have played this game if you look on

youtube there's videos of people playing it i played this game and it was okay um i mean i'm

not going to say it was it was like the best shooter i ever played it definitely had its

it definitely had its i don't know high points but as you know um eventually well

those of you who do know eventually something strange happened to ghost it moved over it went

to a new studio called swinging ape studios who worked on the game they were then bought by

blizzard and then very quietly around 2005 2006 it disappeared and it was no longer being developed

but here's a game you know it's like this is this is the type of game that they wanted to do like

the people at blizzard and if you watch some of the recent documentaries these guys

love shooters they love the shooting type game so they've been wanting to do a shooter for a long

time a lot of the people from the wow development community were shooter fans a lot of the people

who you know came on to blizzard played these types of games so that game here it is a demo

it was put in indefinite hold in 2006 but here was a game that they tried and you know it just

didn't have that mark of excellence so that's no coincidence blizzard's done this before there was

a game way back when warcraft

adventures that was supposed to be like a point and click anime type game never came out

you could find lots of information on it in screenshots it actually looked pretty cool to

this day i wish i could try it and play it i bet you it probably isn't so good in retrospect because

it was almost 20 years old but it had a good idea and i guess world of warcraft sort of became that

in a way another example is heartstone heartstone is i remember my friends at blizzard they would

tell me that they would have game nights and in fact if you go to

blizzard they have a room filled with games tons and tons of games it's really cool it looks like

i haven't been a little while but it looks like a medieval castle and it has all this you could

probably find pictures of it online it has all this medieval type settings and um it had the

door looks like a dungeon door it's really cool they have tons of games in there and these guys

play games all the time well one thing they used to do is have magic gathering night and hey no

surprise these guys love collectible card games they used to have in these have tournaments in

the house they used to play games and they used to play games and they used to play games and they

used to play all the time um i know these guys play a lot of poker as well and they would have

magic um tournaments uh every so often casual uh tournaments and hey what do you know the wow

collectible card game if you remember came out um if that was done by third party you know it was

an actual physical card game but i remember they were fooling around some of the guys uh decided

hey you know what we have all these wow

assets at that point in mid 2000 they had so many assets um not mid 2000 late 2000 like 2010 or so

they have so many assets so many options that they can use let's throw something together and

they just sort of put something together small teams started to fool around with making the game

they built a little small prototype in flash it did really well people seemed to like it and they

sort of were fooling around eventually turned into heartstone and you know

here's a company that was really deciding to do you know at the time they were doing really really

really big games think about it they did like world of warcraft one of the biggest games ever

starcraft 2 although starcraft itself starcraft is a pretty big game for what it is starcraft 2

so big that it was released in three stages diablo 3 huge huge game and that's a very big

game they still release more content you know they're really into big type games and heartstone

was a very different approach for them it's kind of a smaller type game and they're really into

that is based on a collectible card game who would anyone want to play this and they had to

make something that was easy and fun to play but again this is something they liked they obviously

were something that's something they wanted to do they wanted to play so they started down the road

as we all know it just did really really well i remember talking to my friends there and they said

people were spending so much money on the beta that they couldn't believe it and they thought

man and and they knew they were going to get their cards back they weren't going to get

the exact cards any money they spent in the early beta they were going to get wiped out their decks

but they would get all the the decks back and they can reopen them they said if people are spending

that much money in the early beta of the game then this game is going to be a huge hit um and

they were right they were absolutely right the game has now 50 million people and it is again

under that easy to learn hard to master category but you know uh from what i know from talking to

my friends it's like i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know

there was some um people weren't sure because magic is a fun game but it's kind of niche

you know it's hard it's not a game you can just look at and watch it's it's it's difficult to

just pick up and watch it and see people and have any idea what's really going on but they did it

with heartstone they managed to hit all those goals that they wanted to make a game that was

easy to pick up easy to learn easy to play fun to watch and very difficult to completely master

and with that we'll get to titan so all that leads up to titan so with titan it was well let me

back up a little with titan is that they wanted to make a game again similar to the type of games

that they loved they love the shooter type games they like the sims type games they like the grand

theft auto type games one game they were playing a lot of at the time at least my friends were

was team fortress 2 i would log on these guys were playing all weekend i mean all weekend i'd seen

hour days on the weekend and these are blizzard employees that i'm friends with and these guys

were just playing it all the freaking time i remember way back when it was sometime in late

2000 that my friend told me that they were having an internal meeting to go through a new mmo that

they were going to be doing um and he was real excited of course he wouldn't tell me anything

about it um till the project was officially canceled and most of my friends or all my

friends ndas were up but they didn't know that they were going to be doing a new mmo and they

say um you know they're working on something and obviously titan mmo came out people knew it was

going to be a big game but really what was the game what was it actually going to be well there

has been some information that's been leaked you can look it up um some information kotaku some of

you know other sites here and there and i will say it's fairly accurate from what i understand

um i'll go into a little bit new things but there was a part of the game where um it was basically

theft auto part sims part pvp part minigames it was going to be from what i understand it was going

to be one large server they were going to try to do something where everyone was kind of in one

world it was taking place on the earth after an alien invasion so the cities that were built

were real cities they were going to be cities like new york or san francisco or beijing and

they were going to be sort of tweaked if you will um they were going to be you know

modified in such a way so that it had sort of the same cities but completely different

again kind of like grand theft auto there was they were going to add new parts of the world

as the game progressed so not everything would be open at first there would be a car you would

actually have your own car that you can update and customize um again kind of a grand theft auto

aspect to it there was also sort of two aspects to the world there was a sims part of the world

this part was called alias and this is where you had a mundane job where you're like an engineer

a butcher etc and this was going to be similar to the sims now again something i have to mention

this is very fluid like the design and functionality and the amount of people

working on this game nothing was kind of set in stone and this sort of came and went so it's not

like oh this is exactly what the game was like no this was a game in development things change

in development all the time i also remember when world of warcraft had less races and less

classes but then over time they decided to add more to it and they actually put in the diablo

build like system for as you leveled up classes they added more races because you know again

development of the game so at the time there was a time where the game was a very much a sims type

game um and within the world you would interact with the city you would actually fully interact

with it you can run businesses you that's where you would also get a lot of your crafting material

you would have to go through the businesses

get your crafting material things like that the second part of the game was the agent part of the

game and that's where you would go on missions and that's sort of kind of the action part of

the game where there would be there was two factions uh there was overwatch which was the

alliance faction kind of like shield if you will in the marvel universe and then the horde type

faction which according to various they gave me different names one person said venom one person

chaos one person said talon i think it's talon now in overwatch probably but that would be the

terrorist or the horde type faction so it's much like wow there was going to be two factions

um and that is where there would be mini games that's where you could do pvp and that's where

you can sort of do the action part of the game so again there was sort of the alias part and the

agent part well one of the games many games that was mostly done that they were playing a fair

amount it was a game that was like a game that was like a game that was like a game that was like a

team fortress 2 minigame and this was again just a lot of these games were built uh for most

companies these games are built to test the physics to test shooters to test like the accuracy

of guns just to test the tools of the games themselves to make sure they work correctly

and this was one of them they built and at the time you had oh different character classes that

you can become and each class had a unique ability again kind of like team fortress 2

there was tracer

which at the time actually let me back up it was jumper who became tracer you had juggernaut which

became reinhardt you had reaper which became reaper um there was titan there was ranger i

wasn't exactly sure who they became but these are all different classes that you can be and they

would fool around with the game but at the time you know and they would come back and play this

minigame my friend said they played it quite a bit and it was good it was fun it was like a team

fortress like type game but that's kind of as far as they got there wasn't full assets and

everything the levels were just kind of like a game that you could play and you could play

anything that you could play and you could play and you could play and you could play and you could

just sort of built and it was made um really just to fool around with the the physics the guns all

had the same type of guns they had very small bullets um there was very the the the bullets

were very tiny there was actually um the the guns weren't fully fleshed out like they didn't have

the different types that they had now and again this went through many levels of development

um but the overwatch if you see now a lot of what's in overwatch is from titan a lot of what's

a lot of the elements you can see actually came from it because people are wondering well is

titan ever going to probably come out in a way it did because overwatch has a lot of these same

elements whatever happened to titan and why it collapsed and failed i have no idea um there was

a lot that was trying to be done there was a lot of aspects to the game as you can see just by the

description it was a big game there was entire you know it it had a lot of aspects to it and

sims online if you remember was a huge failure um one of the big problems with the sims online is

there was no conflict the game was a kind of a very boring game it was a game that you would play

and when there's no conflict there's no story you know video games get a lot of flack for having a

lot of you know a lot of violence in them well that's because conflict makes things fun in real

life you don't want to have conflict in real life you want to go from your

day-to-day job you want to wake up have breakfast go to work or school have lunch go home watch tv

do your homework play games go to sleep like you don't want to have stressful days but games and

movies are fun because of conflict conflict is wakes and makes them fun well you have things

like the sims the sims is fun because you can do crazy things and there's lots of conflict in the

sims game the sims online was kind of a boring game because well there's no conflict there's no

conflict there's nothing there was you know they had to manufacture separate conflict if you had

what was rumored to be a game that was half sims like and half pvp minigame like then you have half

of a game with conflict you have a game with minigames that could be very fun very much like

world of warcraft where you could have pvp arenas heck you could have hearthstone you know it's like

anything you want in these like minigames but you can't have conflict because there's nothing

but then with the real world if you're just working a job working job isn't necessarily fun

now i'm sure the masters of blizzard would have figured out what was going on and figured out

ways to make those aspects more fun but just the size and scope of the game was so massive and just

the way the industry has changed it has gone from really really big games that require tons of

updates gigantic teams and huge infrastructure

to small games like mobas where the game is basically built and then for the rest of your

life you just release small content updates and you have one basic game and they're making a

fortune off that and you know what that's kind of how hearthstone works and that's probably the new

you know that's the new way games are being built i mean this is no secret um so anyhow overwatch

did come from the bones of titan this is well known

there was minigames the one of the minigames basically was overwatch in there it's obviously

been polished way more the game is fantastic it is a lot of fun and that is pretty much the story

of titan and what had happened to it um there was a big team i do know that at some point there was

maybe approximately 100 people on the team it was around a long time but i'm glad that blizzard was

able to take titan and make it work and i'm glad that blizzard was able to take titan and make it

work and be able to repackage it into overwatch so we can all still see and some of the lore that

you see in overwatch i've understood to have come from titan in many ways obviously the word

overwatch itself some of the bad guys um just the concept of the structure so and i'm sure this will

be explored quite a bit over the next coming well years as they continuously release new cartoons

and release new anime and comic books i mean they're really

going crazy with this and again this comes with from blizzard's love of these type of games you

know they love these type of shooters if you again if you watch any documentaries or hear

any interviews with these guys they say how much they did it how much they used to play

obscure mods from shooters from 20 years ago that no one has heard of but yet these guys would play

you know constantly and now they're making their own so with that let's go into show

mail so in show mail i have a letter from patrick o who wrote me he said hey steven previous episode

you said you'd be surprised how many games are released based on legal obligations not if the

game is done i myself and fellow um formite inkling raised our eyebrows at this would you be willing

or able to elaborate on this statement also has the practice of releasing a game before the game is released

finished worse nowadays than it was in the past or modern class modern cases simply higher profile

or are modern cases simply higher profile as always patrick so yeah um there's lots of games this isn't

just you know this is just a game industry i mean lots of industries release movies books tv shows

lots of stuff that's before they're fully ready to come out um games though games are really tricky

because you have a

deadline for a game that might be set 18 months a year two years ahead of time and that game has to

come out for that day period you have manufacturing you have advertising you have you know all you

have um trade shows you have all this stuff and the thing with games is that games they're really

hard to make and they take a lot of man hours they take millions of man hours to make so to

shoot and hit one of those targets perfectly is incredibly hard so yes a lot of these games have

to come out for legal obligations some of them like as i said star wars that had to come out

and if you look this up there's licensing deals where they only have licenses for certain amount

of times that if they don't come out with the game before that period of time you lose that game

sony has very similar things with the marvel universe i believe the way it worked was if they

had to come out with a cycle of game pummeling and shooting and hitting one of those targets

so if they don't come out with a split in the beginning of the course then i don't have the

ability to shoot and hit one of those targets perfectly is incredibly hard so yes a lot of these games

Spider-Man property movie every five years, and if they didn't, then they would lose the

license and it would come back to Marvel.

That's why they keep coming out with new Spider-Man movies forever.

And same thing with Fantastic Four.

Fantastic Four, they need to come out with new versions every couple years or the property

goes back to Marvel.

So these games and movies and other things will be released for legal contractual obligations.

One of the most obvious reasons that games get released is like if they're movie properties,

you're not going to have the Ghostbusters video game come out a year later.

You just won't.

You're going to have the game come out when it's coming out with the movie, whether it

is ready or not.

Although I do hear the Ghostbusters game, the new one that's coming out is a lot of

fun.

I have heard good things about that game.

But these games, you know, they will come out whether or not they've been done, whether

or not this has been more rampant now than back in the day.

It's hard to say.

I mean, most games.

Now can be patched infinitely.

It's much easier to patch a game.

I would say it's how do I say this back then in the day when a game was released and it

wasn't done.

It was bad because it was bad forever.

Okay.

If you had a bad game, that game was never updated unless it was on PC.

And even then it wasn't like today where they're coming out with patches and downloadable

content.

Unfortunately, I would also say that games today.

A lot of them are smaller.

Type games, not all, but smaller type games that a little bit more limited scope where

a good example is first person shooters.

If you look at first person shooters nowadays, they're a lot more linear.

It's sort of like you do have the multiplayer.

I'm talking about the single player campaigns.

I'm talking about the multiplayer where you have the single player campaign to go from

point A to point B to point C point D.

And that's it.

If you look at a lot of the older games, you're given a playground where you are just sort

of okay.

Get the point A and point B.

You figure out how to get there and they give you lots of ways.

What's a Deus X is a great example of this.

Probably one of the best or the thief games where you're just given a level and you have

to do stuff and you figure it out.

And yeah, there's like 10 different ways to do it.

Now, again, nowadays, a lot of these games is like you get to point A and point B and

yeah, you can go through five different ways through that building, but you got to go through

that building and everything else magically has walls on and you can't go through it.

So.

They make the games much more linear and they try to make the games experiences a little

tighter so that they don't have these issues with the games missing out on the dates.

But with that being said, is that, yeah, this is going to happen all the time.

I'd say this happens more often with properties that are attached to games.

Also big sequels.

I mean, if you can saw, if you remember when.

When Uncharted was delayed a few times, people were upset.

One time you'll also see games released a lot is at the end of quarters.

If you look at the end of March, there's a lot of games that are released.

Well, there's an old saying, the way games sell is it's like what they sell in the first

three days is kind of what they sell in the first three weeks and then the first three

months.

So they make all their sales in the very first, the first few weeks when almost all games

sell.

Unless they're like.

I don't know, underground classics or hits or something, they sell all the games the

first week.

So that's why the release games at the very end of the month, because what they want to

do is they want to straddle two quarters.

They want to have the game come out like right when the quarter say one and two for their

spreadsheets are out so they can distribute the earnings throughout two year over over

two quarters, over six months instead of three months.

So that's something you'll see.

And these games have to make those.

Deadlines, because if they don't, you have to wait at least three more months and it

messes up actually their whole year.

So that's something you'll see quite a bit.

If it's no coincidence to end the March that a lot of games would come out.

Also, same thing for Christmas.

Like you can't have a game come out in December.

You just can't.

Your Christmas games have to come out in October, November period, because it has to be there

for Black Friday.

It has to be there for the November rush and so forth.

So who doesn't?

Who doesn't do this?

Well, there's a few companies who don't do this.

I don't know.

Like Blizzard.

They don't do this.

Blizzard has so much money and so much time that they can make games and release them

when they're done.

There's a few other developers that do this.

Let's see.

Take two does this.

They're also good at this.

They will take as much time as they need.

Yeah, they still got to make certain deadlines.

But when the game is done, the game is done.

And that is when it was released.

And that's also why their games are so good.

These are also companies with a lot of money.

So they can waste thousands, hundreds of millions of dollars, not hundreds, but they

can waste millions of dollars on a game and just sort of fool around with something to

make it perfect.

And that's actually also why I like playing games from those type of companies is because

they have the time to polish it.

They take their time.

They're not rushed by a schedule or arbitrary dates.

They just do what they want and they release it when they want.

So sorry for the rambling answer there.

But there you go.

Hopefully I answered it somewhere in there.

If you have any questions, you can write me at feedback at gamingsteve.com and I will

read and answer your show mail.

So with that, let's go to final thoughts.

So this was a long show.

One of the longer ones, kind of like my old shows, which would go on for like two plus

hours.

But there was a lot to talk about.

Hopefully you guys learned.

A little bit about my experience with Blizzard and kind of what I know about some of their

games and how they develop their titles and, you know, sort of their thinking behind those.

As for what I'm playing right now, I'm playing Overwatch, as everyone knows.

The other one I'm playing is Duck Game.

Duck Game.

You're like, what?

Some people are telling me, Steve, you should talk about games like no one knows about and

or older games.

Last week I talked about Battlefront Battlezone.

Battlezone 98.

Battlezone 98, a game that was released 20 years ago that no one, 18 years ago, that

no one really played.

It's been re-released.

It's a really fun game.

It's cheap.

You get on Steam.

It's really hard and really bizarre.

Well, here's a game that's pretty new that was released by Adult Swim Games that also

is a fun, wacky little game.

It's called Duck Game.

That's right.

Duck.

That's D-U-C-K.

Duck Game.

You play a duck and you fight other ducks.

It is a multiplayer only game.

That is the whole game.

If you get hit by a bullet, you die.

That is it.

There is thousands of different levels, hundreds of different weapons, very simple controls.

It is a goofy, crazy, insane game and it is way more fun than it should be.

It's not the type of game you'll play.

There's no like intricate story.

The intricate story is that you're a duck and that you can put on silly hats and you

can take silly guns and you can shoot other silly ducks.

That's it.

You can check out on Steam.

It was free last week for a couple of days.

It's pretty cheap.

I don't know what it is, like 10 bucks or something.

It's fun.

If you like those type of games, there's actually a lot more like any of these games.

There's a lot more skill to it than you might think.

If you're like me, you'll probably get destroyed at least in the beginning until you learn

all the moves.

There's lots of secret moves.

Some of the levels do repeat, so you do learn the levels.

But yeah, if you are into little fast shooter games, Duck Game is something I would definitely,

definitely recommend.

And also, Stardew Valley.

I'm sure everyone who wants that game has played and picked up that game.

But if you haven't, I would strongly recommend it.

At least check it out if you like relaxing type games where are very similar to Animal

Crossing.

So with that, I'm going to call it a show.

Again, if you have any questions or comments, you can always write me at steve at gamingsteve.com

or feedback or almost anything will come to me.

Other than that, send me some show mail.

I'll read it next week.

Otherwise, have a good gaming week.

I'll talk to you later.

Bye.

I'll talk to you later.

Bye.

You've been listening to Gaming Steve.

If you have a question or comment for Steve, please drop them a line at gamingsteve.com.

Gaming Steve!

You've been listening to Gaming Steve.

Until next week, viva la Dance Dance Revolution!

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