Profits vs. Play: The Fight for the Soul of Gaming ft TheBatman2837

Foreign.

We're a weekly gaming podcast where our mission is simple to bring to light and discuss topics that have an impact on our gaming hobby and at the same time highlighting our diverse gamer community.

Also remaining dedicated to our origins.

Guardian Down Join me, Todd the Gator and my co host Kingsley Mack as we invite a rotating list of guest co hosts every week to join us at the Guardian Down Roundtable.

And now, let's get to it.

What's up Guardians?

Welcome to episode 348 of the Newly branded Guardian Down Roundtable.

We've spent nearly seven years as the Guardian down cast show focusing on Destiny, but we're now taking a more broad overview of the entire gaming hobby.

Every week my co hosts, Mr. Kingsley Mac and I will sit down with two rotating guest hosts to tackle topics of discussion and we're covering everything from the gaming industry and tech to social media or whatever.

The guest co host wants to talk about whatever they have on their mind for the week.

Our mission is simple though.

It's to create a dialogue with topics and news that impact our gaming hobby, all while keeping the focus on our community.

We go live every Thursday night, 9pm Eastern on my Todd the Gator, YouTube and Twitch channels.

That is T O D D T H E G A T R as well as our Discord Live stage.

Once a month we invite a new member from our Discord community to pull up a chair and share their own story with us.

We are a live video show and an audio version is available every Monday morning, midnight or actually 1202.

I tried to.

Anyway, we love the live shows but we love interacting with our chat even more.

So jump in, give us your input tonight, those of you who are live in our chat.

And let's get things started by checking in first with my co host from the great state of Utah, Mr. Kingsley Mack.

How you doing Mike?

How you doing to this week man?

Hey, I'm doing great.

Glad to be here.

I feel like my brain is a little scatterbrained tonight, so apologize in advance to anyone but no, I'm glad to be here.

So I'm looking forward to it.

How was.

How's the heat?

I mean you guys have been warmer than Florida this week.

Yeah, if we're going to get into that.

It is crazy.

The whole west right now, it is nuts, man.

Is breaking records like in over 100 cities and over 5 states or something like that.

And up in Utah where we should be having snow on the ground still.

Well, maybe not the ground in the city, but close around everywhere and Probably a Snowstorm.

We had 82 for the high today.

82.

And we know what our high was today.

68.

Yeah, it was a perfect.

Hotter than Florida for a bit.

Landon will tell you it was a beautiful day today, man.

It was like the day.

Oh, I know.

And see, I like to compare.

And for the people writing in the chat, I know it's even hotter in other parts of the West.

I know, trust me.

But like I do, my funny little competition against Utah should not be hotter than Florida.

And it's been that way for like a month.

Kingsley.

Crazy, man.

She's like up and down, up and down.

It's like a rope down.

It is.

Florida's been nuts, man.

It has been nuts.

That's for sure.

Well, I did want to mention before we get started tonight, due to some family reasons, Elmer Fudd Games and Fluffy Fingers, Maryland, unfortunately cannot make it tonight, but they have been rescheduled for future shows.

So we'll see both of them on a.

On a new show very soon.

You know what?

This is what happens when you're a gamer, dad.

Family comes first and then gaming and podcasting.

So, like I said, we have the.

We'll have them back on the show very soon.

But let's introduce our guest tonight.

I have known this gamer for over seven years now.

I dare to say almost a decade.

We played so take kings.

So 11 years.

Jeez, man.

I was just going to say, back in the days of Destiny and Destiny 2, we would run King's Fall every week at Reset and other Destiny Raids.

I mean, we learned all of the various encounters in the Leviathan Raid.

Remember Raid Layers?

I hate to admit it, but when I went back, you know, in our past episodes, I couldn't find them.

Then it dawned on me that he has never been on our show.

See, this is what happens when you have such a diverse community.

Great people fall through the cracks and we never hear their gaming stories.

But I'm so glad he said yes to be on the show this week.

And you are going to find out how awesome this guy is from the great state of Florida.

My fellow Floridian, it's my friend, TheBatman2837.

How you doing tonight, Landon?

I'm doing yay.

The start of my weekend.

I just got off work, like three hours ago.

Nice, man.

Yeah.

And he.

He works at the brand new Epic Park.

The Universal Epics.

Epic was Epic Studios or Epic.

What do they call it?

Epic Universe.

Universe, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

The park where the guy died on the roller coaster.

Yes, that.

That park.

Yes, I was actually there that day.

Were you really?

Oh, geez.

God, man.

Yeah.

So glad I wasn't at Disneyland the day when Sondra, if anyone knows, we.

I worked in amusement park also.

But yeah, yeah, I remember.

You derailed a couple cars, didn't you?

That's the one thing I remember.

That's the one thing I remember.

That conversation right after somebody clipped that.

Yeah, no, that.

No, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

You.

That's what happens when you share stories with us.

Everybody remembers.

Well, here's.

Here's what we got on tonight's show.

It's kind of a scrambled show.

We.

We got so much to talk about tonight.

First, we're going to start things off proper by interviewing my friend Land, my friend Landon here.

We're also going to put him through the paces of our Speedrun segment, which is a random list of 25 questions submitted through our community over the years.

So I'll be curious what his answers are on that tonight.

And of course, I handpicked those next.

I ran across this story from a YouTuber about two months ago and I really enjoyed his video, his vid.

His channel is called Internet Education and he covers various topics in the gaming industry and has some curious takes.

I'm going to share one of those takes tonight and I'm curious what side of the fence everyone clings to on this argument.

So we'll look forward to that.

Next, we're going to take a break from the discussion.

Check in with our weekly Destiny roundup where we'll highlight any news and information concerning Bungie, Destiny 2 and Marathon these days.

Then it's on to topic number two.

Kingsley Mac's going to jump in and first discuss any recent news in the gaming world or anything he has on his mind for the week.

But then he has a list of five current gen games that you can finish in under 10 hours.

You know, since some of us are on hold on the Destiny 2 game at the moment, for the final topic of the show, I am going to discuss an interview that PC Gamer had with a little studio that reinvented themselves and why many games don't have that chance these days.

And that might be a problem.

After which point we'll shift into our catch up segment, wherever you know, with everybody, and share our highlights of our week.

And at the end of the show, if time allows, we'll answer questions from our community as well.

So if you do have a question for us, make sure you enter them in our podcast Questions channel in our Discord community and we might read it aloud live on the show.

And remember, if you want to send us a voicemail or an email, go to guardiandowncast.com to find out more about that.

So if everyone's ready, let's roll.

Hey Guardians.

Even though we're now the new Guardian Down Roundtable, all the ways you can contact us are the same.

Just go to guardiandowncast.com or you can email us, write us a review, send us a voicemail that we might air on the show, by the way, and even listen to past episodes where you can also search for a particular gu of the show.

You know, I use this every week to find past episodes that our guest round tablers are from so you can go back and hear them and hear their story.

Guarding downcast.com.

Landon, I've known you forever, man, but I want everyone else to kind of discover what you're all about tonight.

I, I think you're a special dude, man.

You've always been.

You always make everybody laugh when we got in our, our, our games, our raid crews back in the day.

And yes, you're right, we, we go all the way back to the original Destiny game.

So start by this.

I think we kind of alluded to it already in the break, but what do you do for a living, sir?

I work at Universal's Epic Universe, the brand new park.

I work in the entertainment department.

Oh, now what does that entail exactly?

So I work as a, I help Pete, the, the characters get ready.

I work their show times and do all that kind of stuff.

That's pretty cool, man.

I've always wondered all the roles in a theme park.

I never worked at a theme park.

You think I would have, you know, lived here all my life, but I never, never got into that stuff.

I was too busy doing hard, a

lot more than I originally thought because like, I was like, oh, it's a theme park.

How big can it be?

And then I first started working at Disney and was like, this place is massive.

Well, yeah, Universal like to say too, because I have that experience.

I worked at Disneyland, but the Disney Corporation, I know a lot of what's going on and, and just I didn't know exactly.

I think I kind of in theory knew about that position.

But boy, I'm like, it would have been fun for me because I wouldn't ever want to be like an entertainment person, but the logistics of putting it together seems way fun and interesting because it sounds like something different's always going on.

I like variety.

Yeah.

My daughter Was she just got out of school, and she wanted.

For the longest time, she wanted to be a set decorator.

She wanted to design the themes for each ride.

There's a big art department that puts all that stuff together, prop department and stuff.

She had an in with the manager of the place at Universal.

And then Covid hit, and I was like, well, all that just went away because that just kind of killed everything in Florida at the time.

Timing was terrible, I guess, but she's doing other things now.

But I've always.

Just always been curious, you know, so what.

What is a day in the life of the Batman in Universal other than the other Batman?

But, I mean, what's a day in the life, man?

What's your.

I mean, what do you usually do day to day?

Depending on what time I get there.

Yeah.

I either set up everything, make sure everyone's set ready to go, and just make sure everything.

Everybody runs smoothly.

The main thing is, obviously, you have more than one actor.

So, like, we have a character named Igor.

You don't want the same two Igors coming out at the same time.

So you coordinate all that, make sure there's no overlap.

That's pretty cool.

You ever get.

Well, I guess I will get you in trouble.

I don't want to say.

I'd say there's just some backstories about some really nasty guys in those costumes.

But not nasty, but, like, mean to kids, making them cry and stuff, like they've had a long day or something.

Igor is character.

I'll just leave it at that.

Yeah, I think.

I think you have to be a character to get in those costumes.

You have to kind of act like the characters.

I would think if you come to Epic Universe, meet Igor, and you'll.

You'll know what I mean by him being a character, man.

They got a ton of characters, too, man.

I mean.

Yeah, like the guy who plays as.

What is it.

Is it Rodimus Prime?

Not Rodimus.

You know, in the Transformers ride, there's a guy.

I think he.

I think they have to be on Optimus Prime.

You can tell.

I. I really follow that franchise.

So there's.

Oh, man, that's like this.

I know Optimus, Bumblebee and Megatron.

Yeah.

Each one of them have to be on stilts.

It's crazy, man.

I see how tall these guys are.

I'm like, how they.

It's nuts, man.

And you see the.

The parades and stuff they do.

They get all these guys on stilts and.

Oh, man, at Halloween horror nights, they go all out.

Oh, there's people on still.

There are people in like, harnesses hanging from the roof.

It's wild.

And those damn strobe rooms just kick my ass, man.

I get out of there, I'm so discombobulated.

But I went with my daughter one year and my God, that was fun.

And Mardi Gras.

Mardi Gras events are fun too.

Yes, Mardi Gras is fun.

I go to HHN for the food because their food booths are always top tier.

Nice, man.

I like it.

Yeah, well, okay, let me ask you this.

I know recently you got married.

Plan on having some kids soon or what?

We are planning on going back to Georgia first.

Okay.

Why would you want to go to Georgia?

What the hell's in Georgia?

You're in Florida, man.

All of families up in Georgia.

I'm trying to, I'm trying to gaslight somebody.

It's not working.

All right?

No, I, I, my man, I have been on i4 long enough to know that I'm tired of it.

I know.

I hear you, man.

I hear you.

I4 corridor.

They call it a corridor for a reason.

Well, what was your earliest moment getting into video games, man?

I mean, when did it all start?

How far back does it go back?

Well, it all started with my gamer tag when I went into GameStop and picked up Batman.

Arkham Asylum.

Yeah.

And absolutely fell in love with it.

That's a good game.

And then played Arkham City right after that, and then played Arkham Knight to finish out the whole trilogy.

Nice, nice.

So, and not trying to date you, but if you're, when were those, like, those years that, those games.

Because I don't even know those games as much.

Arkham Asylum I'm pretty sure was PS3 because origins three.

Yeah.

Back a bit.

Yeah.

So you're a late bloomer into gaming then, did you game?

Oh, I've been.

I played on my dad's Atari.

Okay.

And his 64.

Okay.

So you, you, you've got, you've go all the way back then.

Okay.

What age were you when you first started, you remember?

Seven, eight.

Okay, all right, cool, cool.

Because I played Kingdom hearts on the PlayStation 2.

Nice, nice.

How did you find this game called Destiny?

Entirely by accident.

Me and some friends of mine were in our senior high school and we looked up games to play in co op and they were like this awesome new game coming out called Destiny.

It's a looter shooter and I came from the Borderlands series and I was like, you have me a loot, let's try it.

And absolutely fell in love with it.

I know you love Borderlands too.

Looter shooters, man.

I get it.

I get it now.

And another game, which we'll talk about later.

Yes, we will.

Yes, we will.

I'm trying to stay on the rails here.

Kingsley's trying to derail me.

What's going on here?

Yeah, he's supposed to be the other way around.

No, no, dude, I love you.

I love that you're interjecting.

I love it.

Tell me a time in Destiny 1 or Destiny 2 that just brought a big smile to your face.

It was probably when we formed Fake TV Friends for the first time, because that was the first time I actually had a set raid group to run raids.

And that's my favorite part of Destiny is the raids, the teamwork, all that kind of stuff.

Nice.

Yeah.

Good times, man.

So many good memories in that.

Now, you want to explain what fake TV Friends, how we.

How that clan came about?

So we, me and a bunch of other friends, including Gator, all were like, let's just make our own clan.

It was like six or six.

Nine of us, actually.

Yeah.

And we were all like, let's just make a clan together.

And we were doing a raid with an LFG person, and someone in the background was like, you just want to sit there and play with your fake TV friends?

And, like, all of us collectively were like, that's our name.

That's an awesome.

That's it.

That is an awesome.

That is amazing.

Dude.

That would make a good podcast, to be honest.

Fake TV Friends.

That would be an awesome, awesome podcast.

Think about it.

Yeah, I remember those days.

I was late because 300 bowler, which is my buddy I bowl with on my league, he's the one who brought me into that clan because he knew you guys first.

And I don't know how he met you guys, but.

But I were a part of a Super Troopers clan.

That's right.

Called team Team leader of Cola and me, Muffin and Bowler.

All three would, like, do prison of elders and stuff like that.

So we were like.

We all three played together, so we just like LFG Raids.

And then he was like, I got a guy and then messaged you and then you joined it.

That's right.

That's right.

Well, I think I was in between.

I have to remember, too, how I joined you guys originally, because I. I don't think it was through Gator, because I wasn't rating with.

No, no.

We didn't even know each other Kings.

How did I find you guys then?

Batman I distinctly remember a very, very long Garden of salvation where we were doing a div run that you were a part of.

I think that was the first time we raided together.

But you can't do it randomly.

Or do you think we would just through some discord talk from up One

discord to another discord?

Because I was part of GDC before Guardian Hub.

Yeah, okay, so that would make sense then.

Yeah.

Now, you came from the Derp clan, though, right?

Kingsley, one of the Derp Clan.

Destiny reset.

That's what I thought.

Yeah.

Not the Derp Clan.

Oh, I know.

Drp.

They used to call it Derp.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They tried to say drp, though.

When did Benny get in the picture?

I'm trying to remember when Benny joined.

When did he join in?

I like Benny because I gotta.

I gotta tell you.

Benny, I have stories about Benny.

So.

Kingsley.

Kingsley.

You know why, you know where.

You know, I'm sorry.

I'm just reminiscing.

But Benny.

Benny would always.

Benny loves to explain step by step what he's doing in the game.

All right, I'm going over here now.

Okay?

I'm going over here.

And Kingsley rags my ass every time I'd say that.

I'm trying to let everybody know what's going on, but Benny was always so cool about that.

He'd always say, okay, I'm.

I'm getting this set up.

And he.

He just loved the gator.

If you're going to talk about Benny, you got to say Kingsley's name correctly.

Huh?

That's what I was going to say.

Do you know how my name actually is?

Said what?

Kingsley.

Mack.

Kingley.

Kingly.

Kingly.

Oh, he'd always.

He'd always say it wrong.

Benny has adopted it from on high.

That's right.

My name is Kingly.

Kingly.

That's right.

I remember that now.

All right.

I mean, hey, I. I somewhat agree.

We gotta.

We gotta go by those rules.

What do you.

Now, have you talked to Benny in a while or is.

I have not, man.

I haven't seen him in forever.

I know.

He was.

I know.

I think he.

I actually think he's still in our.

Our Discord, but I hardly see him anymore.

Do you remember what his gamer tag was?

Damn.

I can look right now.

Actually, I tried to.

I tried to think of it, too.

I couldn't remember it.

It was based on Deathstroke.

Deathstroke.

How can you forget Deathstroke?

Yeah.

Yeah, good deal.

What character do you like in the game most in Destiny?

Are we talking, like, class?

Or just all characters.

No, no, not.

Not class.

I'm talking about, like, the NPCs in the game.

As much as I hate his game mode, I love Drifter.

Yeah, everybody likes him because he doesn't.

He doesn't play by the rules.

Now, are you a solo player or do you prefer to play in a fire team these days?

It kind of depends on what I'm doing, but I love, like, grouping up, doing dungeons and Raids.

But, like, if I just want to, like, chill out, listen to music or a podcast, I'll just run some stuff in the portal, so.

Nice.

Well, I know, I know.

I took a break from.

Of tape.

Fake TV friends I had.

I.

That's when Destiny 2 first came out.

Reality TV?

No, no, no.

For when Destiny 2 first.

No, I'm talking Forsaken.

I remember when Forsaken came out.

You remember how much the game changed in Forsaken?

I remember my ADHD was off the.

Off the charts, man.

I would look at all this shit flashing at me, triumphs and stuff, and I just fro.

I literally have never done this ever in a game.

I literally froze and I just didn't know what to do next.

And then so much to do.

And you guys were cramming, trying to get ready for the new raid.

The last.

Was it the Last Wish?

The Last Wish Raid.

And I was so stressed, man.

I was like, I don't want to be forced to play Raid if I'm not ready yet.

And it got a little.

Probably got a little whatever.

I probably got a little bitchy and I took a break.

And then somehow you came back to Guardian down cast.

Do you remember how you found our community?

Was it.

I found it accidentally because I was playing.

I stopped playing Destiny for like a year after the dlc.

After Forsaken.

Shadow Keep.

Yeah, yeah.

Shadow Keep.

Shadowkeeping.

Because I just didn't.

I was kind of like one of the.

In that mood of like, I just don't want to play that right now.

And then three se.

Two seasons into that.

That year, I found you playing Gambit, and I was like, let me see if he needs an extra person, and just hopped in.

Yeah, you've always.

You've always been real cool, jumping into games and stuff.

So.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

Are you a Titan Hunter or Warlock?

Main.

I started Destiny 1 as a Hunter, but ended Destiny 2 as a Warlock.

Nice.

That's right.

I keep thinking you were a Titan one time because we had a.

We had a.

We did a.

We did a what is it a what?

Was that thing where you look for a.

You could be a seeker.

You could look, someone could join your.

It was a beta.

What's that?

Yeah, but prime.

No, no, no.

It was, it was a pro.

It was where you could find like.

Oh, to help people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a beta program that in game

RAID group up, old version.

Guided games.

Yeah, guided games.

I remember we had the guided games and this, these people, I mean, if they were a seeker and they were looking for a group, they had to wait like 45 minutes.

That's how long you had to wait to get into a group.

And I remember he came in and we were doing the raid layer where you go through the platforms, where the water platforms are that sink in the water at the Leviathan.

And I remember this guy, brand new fricking shoulder, charged me off the edge into the water.

And I've never been so fucking mad, man.

I was so mad.

I said, this guy's out.

Get him out, get him out.

And then just like, just take a chill pill.

Chill.

Chill out.

He's just having fun.

I get you.

I feel you.

But I feel bad too, because that probably gave that raid a bad experience for you.

And that's one of my favorite raids that ever comes back.

No, I mean I. I love.

I love all Leviathan layers.

They were a lot of fun.

Eater worlds.

That's what it was.

Eater of worlds.

Yeah, it was very.

It was a lot of fun, man.

But.

Sorry, I'm kind of reminiscent halfway through the interview here, but there's so many memories, man.

What activities do you prefer to play when you're.

When you're in the game?

Obviously the razor dungeons, because like they're the.

The best piece of content.

But I don't mind a little Crucible now and again.

Yeah, yeah, you're not bad at Crucible.

You're pretty good.

I would say decent.

That's a callback.

Now according to what's scale?

The Gator scale.

I'd always say someone is decent if they kick my ass in Crucible.

There you go.

What one weapon in your vault will you refuse to delete and why you can use Dem if you need to.

I am actually on the game right now, looking through my vault scene.

Probably my year one ghost primus with 50k kills on it.

That's the auto rifle from Leviathan, right?

From Leviathan, Yeah.

That was a great rifle too, man.

Those rifles were so ornamental.

They were so adorned with gold and stuff.

It's the inaugural address for me, obviously.

But yeah, Dabod Hero.

We wish Leviathan will come back because there are so many good things to play in that.

That's for sure.

If Bungie assigned you a small but versatile dev team just to you, you're in charge, what would you work on for the game?

Better strikes.

Yeah, strikes are.

I mean, I think people quit playing strikes a long time ago.

Unless they have to play them, they're

over in like two minutes.

They're like, if you want something that's difficult and fun at the same time.

Yeah.

Bring back the original difficult nightfalls like Shield Brothers on Solar Burn.

God, I miss that raid.

I mean, that strike that.

That was.

That's one of my favorite strikes, man.

Because that last.

You hide in that one, though, Todd.

I.

Some.

I would do the cheese sometimes.

I would do the cheese where I could hide underneath the edges and the edges where he couldn't, you know, put the mortar on you.

But I remember playing that solo, man.

I was freaking out, running all over the place, and I finally got it done.

But you know me, man, I like to push and try to do stuff solo if I can, but that was a man.

That brings back good memories.

That's such a fun strike.

Yeah, that.

That's.

That's what we're missing in destiny right now.

Things like that.

Just that strike.

Just that one.

I mean, just the whole thing we

saved, but just the whole world.

The whole world.

That was great there.

Do you have any other hobbies outside of gaming

other than working at a theme park?

Not really.

Okay.

And you're married too, so it's.

It's Mrs. Batman time too.

I get that.

How long you been married now, man?

Little over a year now.

Good deal, man.

That's awesome.

I'm happy for you, man.

What?

I have a feeling I know this answer, but.

What?

Dude, what is up with that gamertag Batman 2837?

So I.

When I played on PlayStation 3, I was originally just a random gamertag that I thought of.

I don't even remember it now.

And then when I upgraded to PlayStation 4, I couldn't get into the email of that account, so I was like, yeah, I'll just make a new one.

And I was like, I've played all of the Batman games.

It's only fair that I named it that.

Yeah, yeah, I got you 2837.

Just a random number they put behind

is actually the mailbox number of the house I grew up in.

Oh, nice.

Okay.

So it does have meaning.

It is symbolic.

I like it.

I love gamer tags that are symbolic.

It kind of tells you about somebody, but not really unless you know the person.

Yeah.

Do you have a motto or mantra that you live by these days?

Eventually it'll be all right.

That's a good way to live.

Definitely.

Well, I appreciate you telling a little bit about you, Batman, but of course we have to put you through the Speedrun.

Let's do it.

So this segment is called the Speedrun.

I've hand packed.

I've hand packed.

Why do I keep saying that?

I'm going to reword that I've hand picked.

I've handpicked 25 questions from a pool of over 1100 questions submitted by our community all these years.

These are quick, simple answers to get to know our guests at an even deeper level.

No time limits, no contest.

Just quick questions and quick answers.

So if you're ready, Landon, let's begin.

Number one, what would be your ideal career or job?

The one I'm in now, actually.

I love entertainment.

Awesome.

Dude.

What is the best cheese on a cheeseburger?

Pepper Jack.

Okay, I could go with that.

What is your favorite Destiny?

Exotic from either game?

Hawkman.

Really?

Okay.

You and Kingsley with the hand cannons.

All right.

If you could choose, who would voice your ghost?

I want to bring back Dinklebot.

Okay.

All right.

Void solar arc stasis or strand solar pulse hand cannon.

Scout or auto rifle hand can.

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Not in Florida anymore.

Probably on the.

On the.

On the coast somewhere.

But just not in Florida.

Okay, gotcha.

What was your first music album?

There's a thinker.

Lincoln Parks a minutes to midnight.

Very cool.

All right.

I think you.

I think you'd think a little longer on that one.

What's the worst job you've ever had?

GameStop.

Shout out to GameStop, everybody.

Man, describe yourself in one word.

Hyperactive.

Okay.

What's the best sandwich?

The best sandwich is a meatball sub.

Oh, I can go with that.

Okay.

Sweet or salty?

And what's your favorite snack based on that answer?

Sweet.

And it is the Reese's peanut butter cup.

Thins.

Now I'm hungry.

Okay.

If you had more time, what would you do with it?

Make.

Try to make my own video game.

Okay.

What is your favorite Destiny planet and why

it's not there anymore.

But it was IO Everybody likes IO it was cool looking.

Especially had the Whisper mission.

Plus you had the Vex like giant, giant citadel right there in the middle of the place too.

That didn't fit in at all.

But had one of my favorite Destiny 2 Strikes.

The Pyramidion yeah.

Yeah.

It's a good strike.

Very ornate.

Destiny makes beautiful games.

Man.

What is your wife's eye color?

This is a marriage test.

Blue.

Yeah.

All right.

Damn.

Okay.

I thought you'd take longer on that, too.

I'm thinking.

I'm thinking.

Last night I said, what can I stump them with?

If you could take any one famous person to dinner, who would it be?

Christopher Nolan.

I like that.

Okay, do you pull into or back into a parking spot?

Pull into people that.

Back into it don't make any sense, especially when I see it at work.

Dude, I have a big pickup truck.

It's too hard to back out.

All right, I might have overshared if.

Have you ever had a nickname?

It's Batman.

Because in high school, I wore something Batman related every single day.

So even the teacher started calling me it.

All right, so you've been familiar with that name for a while.

Nice.

Okay, can you drive a stick shift?

Yes.

Very good.

You pass.

Who is your favorite?

I already asked you this.

I'll ask you a bonus one.

Do you eat your leftovers or do they spoil in the fridge?

It depends on what they are.

Okay.

What weapon slot do you use the most for an exotic weapon slot?

Probably primary, because it's either at the moment the practicing blade or one of the hand cannons.

C3PO or R2.

D2.

R2.

Okay.

If you had infinite money, would you still choose to work?

Yes.

Name one thing that you would change about yourself.

I already did, and it was my teeth.

Oh, okay, Let me see.

Nice.

Nice.

I need.

I need to work on mine.

You would never know.

But I'm missing two teeth right now.

I'm missing all of mine.

What?

How'd that happen?

So when I was a kid, I had this weird thing where, like, my teeth already had cavities in them.

So, like, my teeth were riding outside of my head, and there's nothing I could have done, man.

So my dentist was like, you either get them taken out now or later on.

And the same thing happened to my dad.

He got his at taken out when he was 26.

So you have.

You have implants.

The implants.

How hard was that?

I'm.

I got to do.

I was the worst.

I don't recommend it.

Damn it.

That's not what I needed to hear.

Okay.

All right.

I'll ask you a question that I forgot to ask you on the first part of the interview.

What is something about you that our community may not know about you?

Yeah, that I have fatigue?

No, come on.

Fix something else that I really want to be a voice actor.

Okay.

And I am a DM for a lot of D and D campaigns.

I could see that.

Okay.

You got a good speaking voice.

I like that.

All right, Batman, I'll let you off the hook.

Thank you for completing the Speedrun.

Thanks for playing along with us tonight.

Okay, just a little announcement.

PSA for all of our community out there.

If you got a question out there that you want to ask for a future Speedrun, you have a Speedrun question that you think would be good for our feature guests out there?

Let's hear it.

Just go to our 2027 speedrun channel and submit your question there.

And at the beginning of 2027, we're gonna have two more drawings for a 25Amazon gift card.

We had two winners this past January.

What do you have to lose?

Let's hear it.

Remember, there's one entry per member will go into the drawings, but you can give us as many as you like and we'll put them in our database of future Speedrun questions.

Thanks and good luck with that.

All right, I think it's time for our first topic and that is me when we return.

Okay.

As I.

As I mentioned in the intro, I found this YouTuber about two months ago and he had a pretty hot take in the world of gaming.

And I want to share his views and see what you guys think about this.

And that hot take is that very soon or even maybe now, more and more players have stopped buying video games.

You may say what didn't slay the spire just hit half a million concurrent players last week.

What are you talking about?

Let me explain his takes here and you guys can chime in.

Here's the breakdown of what he says is impacting our hobby right now.

The first one is called the Architect of the Nightmare.

The video traces our current mess back to John Riccatilio.

He's a former EA and Unity CEO and his philosophy was built on designing games as money extraction machines first and entertainment second.

Remember that infamous 2012 speech where he suggested charging a dollar just to reload your gun in Battlefield?

That mindset became the gospel for a lot of AAA executives out there.

The next thing he talks about is how the generation is being priced out.

It's not just a protest.

Gen Z is literally being priced out of this hobby.

With seventy to eighty dollar price tags, microtransactions, and the rising cost of living, younger gamers are being careful with their disposable income.

In fact, 36% of Gen Z gamers now spend nothing on new games.

The third thing he talked about was that ownership is dying.

We've talked, I mean, we've talked about this on the show before.

The crew situation where Ubisoft shut down servers and made a paid game unplayable.

It's a huge red flag.

Executives are even saying out loud that the players need to get comfortable not owning games.

So you're just buying a license these days.

So you don't really, you can't.

If they close the online portion of the game down, you're pretty much screwed.

You can't go back and play it like the, you know, the hard games that we would put like a CD Rom that we'd put into our PlayStations or whatever in the, the Xbox or whatever.

But more and more you're buying a license and I think that trend's going to continue, by the way.

AAA bloat versus the indie heart.

While AAA budgets have ballooned to unsustainable levels, leading to disasters like Concord or the half baked releases like Star Wars Outlaws.

I know, Kingsley, you said it was good.

The money is shifting to indies.

Games like Hades 2, Palworld and Lethal Company are winning because they focus on being fun and respect the player's wallet.

You can get four unique indie experiences for the price of one quote gamble of an AAA title these days.

And then the, the last thing he talks about is the lesson for the industry.

The takeaway is pretty simple.

Monetization shouldn't be the goal here.

It should be the result of making a great game.

AAA studios are losing the back end of the market because they've forgotten to ask the most basic question.

Is the core game actually fun?

I mean, it's a, it's a tough look that he has on the industry, but it's a dialogue I think we need to have here.

Because if the big studios don't start respecting the community again and we're just money making machines for investors, they're going to lose an entire generation of gamers for good.

But I'm curious what the live chat thinks.

I'm curious what you guys here in the, in the, in the show think about this.

Are you, are you finding more joy in those $20 indie gems or, or do you still buy the $70 blockbusters?

What do you guys think?

Landon, I'll start with you, man.

What do you think about all this?

A lot of the times when I look at a game, I look for gameplay first.

I don't look at trailers, I don't look at story.

I look at the gameplay.

And if it.

The Gameplay looks fun.

Then I'll dive deeper and look at story and see if it's interesting.

Right.

Like, I have a lot more indies on downloaded right now than I do like aaa.

Really?

And you're considered.

You're.

Are you millennial or gen Z, whatever 96 is.

You're millennial.

Gen C, I think.

Started with 98.

99.

99, I think.

No.

Anyway, so you're, you're, you're, you're a young millennial, basically.

Sounds like.

Okay, so you're buying mostly, mostly indies now.

Yeah.

And then there are obviously the big releases that everyone will be talking about.

Yeah.

One we'll talk about later, which I'll.

I have thoughts on.

And then Starfield's got announced on PlayStation.

I'll probably pick that up because I've been wanting to try it.

Cool.

How about you, Kingsley?

What do you tend to.

To go toward these days?

I know we're.

Well, yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah.

We're kind of the white whales, right.

We're the ones that have the disposable income.

But I'm just still curious what you think about it.

Sure.

Yeah.

No, on that.

I was going to put that in the equation and then.

And then I'm definitely interested to answer the other questions too about.

On the article.

But yeah, like for video games, money, luckily for me, at this point in life isn't really a concern.

It doesn't mean like I buy everything just haphazardly.

I don't buy that many video games probably compared to Todd, you haven't played as many.

But anyways.

No, no, the point is, is like I don't really care if it's indie or big.

Now, of course I'm going to be a little more skeptical these days on the big companies.

I'm not just going to buy it because.

But there are plenty of big ones I will still buy on day one.

And I have, and I did.

Recently.

Yeah, very recently.

This is so funny.

We keep dancing.

Go ahead, just say it.

Just say what we.

Because I bought it.

No, no, I bought it too.

Last night.

All right,

well, whenever you want.

There's this little game called Crimson Desert that reminds me of my early days of Dynasty Warriors.

And once I saw the gameplay on this game and I did listen to a couple people who are Destiny players that play this that have tried this game before it was released.

They got an early copy, they were blown away with it.

And that's all I needed to hear, man.

And I know I still need to play Elden Ring and like dad, Bodhiro was saying they're saying 300 hours to complete this game.

Oh, yeah, that's what I want.

I want something to invest in time.

Todd, you know, what you're saying is true, but also the opposite's true.

I hear, too, like, yeah, Crimson warriors, but it has a wide variety of kind of like almost annoyingly super hard stuff, too.

I mean, so it's going to be.

It's going to be a potential big mix.

I'm a little scared.

I bought it today, too.

I even look, with how long the game is and how much exploration there is, even if I don't complete the full story, I would actually be happy, probably.

Of course I want to complete it, but I'm a little concerned.

Like, it has, like, some really good reviews, and then a couple of people are like, there's some bugs.

But suppose they came out with a huge patch today and they're.

They're.

That studio supposedly fixes bugs faster than most.

What do you know?

What do you know about this studio?

Do you remember what studio is making this?

Oh, Pearl Abyss.

Pearl Abyss.

I don't know anything about the studio.

They did another game, Black Desert, in which I didn't play that, but Black

Desert Online, it was a military shooter, I think.

Oh, wait, am I thinking of something else?

Sorry, go ahead, Batman.

Maybe I said the wrong name of the game.

I'm super.

It was Black Desert.

Black Desert.

Okay.

Yeah, but.

But it's an MMORPG.

These are action RPGs, not a military shooter.

Okay, I'm thinking of something else.

Yeah, I'm interested in it, but the.

The one complaint I have seen about it is it's a slow burn, so it takes a little bit to, like, get into.

So I'm interested to see if that'll grab me because I had the same issue happen with the first Horizon game, Horizon Zero Dawn.

The first time I played it, I just could not.

Like, the story was cool, the gameplay was cool, but something didn't click for me until I played it the second time and just got through it.

And then when the world, like, opened up to, I was like, okay, I see why people like this game now.

That's exactly the way I played it.

I first got it.

I was like, I don't like this game.

Hacking into Beast.

I don't like.

I don't.

This is stupid.

Where's.

Where's the guns?

This is all bows and arrows.

What the heck?

And then I came back and said, all right, you bought the damn game.

Let's go.

Jump in and play.

It's a PlayStation exclusive.

Jump in and oh my God, once I started playing the story, I was sucked in.

I was good.

Same way I came back to it after I initially bought it and loved it.

So Black Desert Online.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Okay, that might still be different than the Black Desert game.

I haven't looked up.

I'm probably thinking of another.

Another shooter game that I'm putting too much together.

Speaking of which, dad bought here.

Had a couple comments in chat.

He goes, I also miss getting my month issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly magazines.

It was always exciting to see what would be coming soon.

It feels like the element of surprise is gone now because of content creation.

He also says, and I'm not saying content creation is a bad thing.

If anything, it's made video games more popular.

I just missed the old school way of introducing a new game.

Yeah, and he said he bought it too.

So actually, what's that?

Game Informer.

I miss.

Yeah, I do too.

Bring it back to the gamestop days, dude.

I'd learn about the new Destiny stuff coming up.

Well, before the YouTubers got hands on or were able to release videos, I always got an early view on Game Informer.

So I distinctly remember Game Informer having a Forsaken cover because I had it somewhere.

You know, I remember the one for Rise of Iron.

For some reason, that Game Informer.

And it's when I was getting into the game too and it told you about all the aspects ahead of time.

I was like, that was like my bible for like a week.

I was just reading all great illustrations.

I mean it just showed you the UI and everything.

It was so fun to look.

I just, I. I dive into those magazine articles.

Rodimus says indie gems are my staple now.

Friend Slops, Deadpool, Will Mert.

Indie games are more fun than AAA games now because they focus on what the gamers want versus trying to make money on everything.

Crimson 300 hours straight through.

Or is that doing every side quest?

I'm not sure, Kelvin, what they're saying

there, but you know, crazy numbers.

I think that's if you want to platinum the game.

I think that's what they're talking about there.

So that means probably all the stuff, but I think you can get through the.

If I remember correctly, the person I was watching the video on said he had a hundred hours in so far.

He says you could breeze through the campaign if you don't.

If you just skip everything.

But he says he's a hundred hours in and there's so Much more to do.

So it just sounds like an old fashioned video game and it's a single player game.

You play it, you sell the game, you buy the game, you play the game and you move on to the next game.

Well, so they're trying to.

It's not going to be like Witcher style.

But look, anything that kind of comes out these days that are close to this, I.

This is my bread and butter and I don't care.

I don't have to have a Witcher level every single time or things like that.

So.

Well, when, when the, when two reviewers both said Dynasty Warriors, I said take my money because I love Dynasty Warriors.

Don't get me wrong, I've played all, I played so many of those games, those hack and slash games.

But the problem with Dynasty wars is they, it's, the story's the same.

It's all about Chinese history and all these great warriors and stuff and they play out the same scenarios and there's a little strategy or little objectives involved, but other than that it's the same game.

They really never iterated anything, they never made anything different.

And now when I saw this game, and of course the graphics are fantastic, so I bought it for PS5 Pro.

So we're going to see how it plays.

But that's probably going to be my game of the month, maybe for April.

Marathon is it right now we'll talk about Marathon, but any other comments on these other parts?

I know Kingsley, you wanted to maybe pick this apart.

Well, I mean the story in general is funny, of course I agree with it all.

But also it's kind of like we could have said this two years ago, the exact same story.

Right.

But they're all good points.

I'm not knocking that.

I'm just saying the thing that I find that's most interesting.

Let's talk about how much things have changed.

I really think it's that Gen Z component and I talked about it even on the last week's show.

Like it's not that people don't want to buy games, it's just mostly they can't afford them.

And you could say that was always the case when we were younger, Todd.

But I really think it's worse these days where it's harder to have the funds for whatever reason, obviously, even if you have enough money.

We all know inflation and prices have

gone up and we talked about this last week about how the younger generations aren't really.

I know you didn't agree with me on this, but they're, they're Identifying themselves by the game they play, not the fact that they play a lot of games.

And you can say maybe that's.

Oh, that point I had no comment on, actually.

But.

But the fact that, that, you know, Roblox is just millions and millions of people playing that game.

I never even played that game once.

And it's just a totally different generation.

But anyway, going back to this article, you know, the.

The bloat, the ownership problems, the generation, of course, we talked about being priced out.

And then of course, this.

This guy, John Risatello.

Risatello, you know, he's the one that got this mindset into all these AAA executives that everything seems to be so built around picking your wallet apart, you know, and you get.

You hear about these kids on these free to play games, spending $2,000 on this game with using their mom's credit card and stuff.

You hear about these nightmares all the time.

But any other.

Any other comments on this?

This was just a kind of a callback story a little bit, but it was something I did want to still mention because I really liked the video, thought it was really good.

So.

Any other comments on this part?

No, I'm good, Landon.

Good.

Okay.

All right, well, let's take a break and check in with Bungie.

And boy, do we have an info dump this week.

We might be here a while, but we'll check in with that right after this.

All right.

This is as an homage to our roots as a Destiny podcast.

We check in with Bungie every week, see what's new, if anything, in Destiny 2.

And now Marathon, of course.

So here we go.

First it is Marathon.

We've got a massive update from the team over at Bungie regarding the future of the Tau Ceti grind.

And I wanted to break down exactly what's heading our way here.

First, we're looking at the debut of Ranked Mode, which is hitting beta for season one starting this weekend, the 21st.

If you've hit runner level 25, you'll have your first shot at climbing the ladder through six different ranks, all the way from bronze to that coveted Pinnacle status.

Now, I want to dive into this new Bet on Yourself mechanic they're introducing with holo tags.

Essentially, you're picking your stakes before you even drop into the map.

These tags set your score target and your loss penalty.

So you've got to decide exactly how much skin you want to put into the game.

It is literally a risk it for the biscuit kind of scenario where you need to hit your loot target and then exfil to earn the rank points and you got exfil.

Then there's two different matchmaking pools.

You're going to have a low stakes pool and a high stakes pool.

To keep things fair, there's gonna be gear ante.

You have to be at least 3,000 credits in your loadout for the standard queue.

Which means no more matching with teammates running naked knife builds.

Did you do that?

Landon, you run the naked knife build free loadouts?

Yeah, I do free loadouts all the time.

I do too.

So you gotta bring the heat if you wanna compete.

Geez, did I just make that up?

Okay, for the.

For the final bit of news, the next bit of news, let's talk rewards.

Bungie is focusing on your highest rank achieved during the season.

So whenever you peak at the highest rank for the season, you'll get rewarded with all the different rewards they have.

So you can push for those exclusive emblems, the gun styles, without the constant fear of tanking your standing right at the end.

This is what I always hated about comp is you'd have.

You'd have great games.

You comp.

Your comp score would start flying up and then you had one bad game.

It would bring you.

It's like.

It was like two steps forward and one step back.

It was just a.

Just a fricking nightmare trying to play comp in Destiny 2.

The next thing is Bungie just dropped another patch 1.05 for Marathon.

And the biggest news is that the Cryo Active or the Cryo Archive is officially in the game now.

They're being pretty cryptic about how you actually get there, but they actually dropped a story today.

And I'll get to that.

There's three new random rolled implants you can convert Recovery for faster heals and smoke.

You have Freeloader for ability energy on knife kills and panic response for a cardio kick buff when you're low.

There are also a few new mods like Punishment for extra damage against redacted enemies, Testament for massive add range boosts and Hurricane for better air stability.

The most clutch change though is definitely being able to activate exfil beacons while you're downed.

That's great.

They also finally increased vault stack sizes.

Thank you for consumables and ammo.

That was nuts.

It was taking up all my damn stash or my vault.

It's a massive win for the inventory management side.

On the balance side, the WSTR shotgun got a hit with a nerf to its aim assist and its damage fall off.

While the Misria 2442 got a recoil buff.

Plus they cleaned up a ton of codex bugs, fixed achievements and added new challenges for the Archive.

Basically it's a pretty big update for the grind and marathon these days.

They did drop an article for the Cryoarchive and I think this is what you guys are referring to as far as the drama, but let me just give you the.

Well, it's.

It's both the ranked and cryo, but we'll talk about when you're done.

Well, let me give you the highlights of this.

The new cryo archive that just dropped it is in the game now.

It's an in game activity.

It serves as the game's first raid style PvPVE endgame experience set within the labyrinth depths of the UESC Marathon ship.

The one that's, you know, stabbed into a.

A moon.

The entry requirements to participate, players must reach level 25.

We talked about that.

Unlock all six factions and bring a loadout valued at a minimum of 5000 credits.

Okay.

Limited availability.

The Archive is weekends only event accessible from Friday through Sunday.

The map structure, it's a zone that features a central hub connected to six distinct wings.

You have Cargo index, Steerage, Revival, Bio, Biostock and Preservation.

And it's a very, very much a high stakes gameplay.

Runners must navigate the intense UESC security and hostile rival crews to shoot frozen vaults and uncover the quote dark secrets.

They have exclusive loot, players can earn unique mods and implants.

We talked a little bit about that.

Such as Punishment and Testament, which are specifically designed for very high level play.

And the sponsored kits to help players manage the high risk of gear loss.

Bungie offers a one time sponsored kit for their first foray into the Archive.

And the objective basically relies on your tactical coordination and risk management during an increasingly difficult extraction process.

So what?

Okay, you guys mentioned there's a bunch of drama around this.

Now that I've laid out what the cryo archive is, what's the drama?

What's going on right now with this?

Well, can you guess at all taught?

I think I know.

I think I know.

In Destiny 2 a new raid comes out.

Brand new raid, everyone's excited about it.

That's only available on weekends.

I can hear McMaximo screaming at the at the wheel right now.

So are you also ranked?

The ranked mode is also only available on weekends.

So why are we having two events on only on weekend?

It just didn't make sense to me.

Well, I mean I'm even confident enough to go one further and say that I don't think Most of these things should be all weekend.

Yeah.

And if you're going to do something, have it rotate a full week at a time or if you want to occasionally have a really special couple day thing the first time, have it on the weekend the next time.

Having a Monday, Tuesday the next time.

And then all the people the other way will say oh wait, you know what I mean?

Like so make it fair.

Have it be rotating or just have it all the time.

You know, there's people that work the weekends.

There's all sorts of reasons why you and I think, look, I know you want to get people excited and stuff but there's got to be better ways to do it or have the rotating thing.

I promise having it in the whole time, that's not going to be necessarily a reason why less people would play your game.

That's for sure.

Yeah.

If anything it'd make you play more.

And like with this I feel like no secrets are going to be solved so quickly and I think that's why they're doing it.

Yeah.

Is because they want people to take their time to the secrets because it's only available on the weekends.

So you're going to get in, find something and die and not be able to find it again.

But it just, it's a weird decision.

I, I'm not a huge fan of it.

I, I, I hope everyone's feedback is.

Yeah.

What do you think?

Well, I, you seem like you don't almost don't care but like I'm curious, you know.

No, I do care.

I do care.

Weekends aren't an issue for me.

That's usually when I have time to game on the weekends.

Crazy enough.

Well, they aren't for me either.

But I'm trying to be fair.

I'm confused.

Here is the, is the ranked and the cryo activity two separate events?

Yes.

Okay.

They're two separate things.

I want to make sure of that first.

Okay.

I think I'm just thinking about all these people who are PVE players that are been really working at this arg and they finally solve it to unlock it in the game and now there's all these, these requirements to get in there.

I understand that.

You know, this is kind of like the end game.

It's like, it's like a raid.

Right.

You should be at a certain power level to be able to go into the raid.

That's fair.

I mean that makes you grind these beginning areas which I'm well into the beginning still of grinding this game.

And I mean I like that part because it's something you work toward.

Not crazy about the weekend thing, though, because I know there's a lot of people who.

Especially younger people, man.

My daughter works in a restaurant.

Her.

She works all weekend.

There's no way.

If she was involved in this, she'd be able to play it.

She's.

She'd be exhausted from work and I don't know, maybe even let it go to reset.

Like, maybe like have a reset.

Like Tuesday, like Wazir and everything.

Well, they.

They are doing that a little bit on some of it, but Sunday.

I see that goes to the point.

See, I'm fair where fair is fair.

I don't think trials should be like that either.

I mean, imagine if Iron Banner was that short.

You would be pissed.

It's very much.

There's other endgame things.

We have precedence with that.

I think try hards don't just play on the weekend.

There's plenty of try hards that play during the week, too.

And I promise there's ways they can do this to keep it exciting yet still have it all the time.

I think they'll change it, to be honest.

I think they want this game to be ahead.

I think they'll have late breaking news.

Sorry.

Oh, about Zo.

Joe Ziegler already wrote back and responding to a lot of this.

Okay.

Do you know.

Do you have the tweet?

So.

Yeah.

And first of all, there's one other part to this too, also.

People are.

Some people are upset that you.

You have to go in with the team.

I mean, I think that kind of makes sense.

Again, with rage.

You have to have a team.

You have.

I don't know.

What do you think, Todd?

Oh, the solo issue.

I think it's too difficult probably for a solo, but, I mean, you're so 100%.

Yeah.

I think there's people like, you know, plus.

Plus you don't want to have uneven since there's the PvP element.

Even if someone's God mode, I still think it's better having three versus three,

you know, I think.

So

how difficult cryo is going to be?

There is a challenge in the game already right now to kill a hundred UESC bots in one run.

Wow.

That many bots gonna be in there.

Holy crap.

Well, okay.

I'll put it in perspective anyway.

So, yeah, so basically they're already.

They're already looking into it, which is super cool that they respond this quickly.

He said.

We also acknowledge that there are likely some who cannot participate on the weekend or are excited about the experience.

And want to know life it for weeks and we appreciate that.

We'll be looking into what we can do to retain these considerations and potentially accommodate this in the future.

We could stagger ranked and cryo cues more so they overlap less.

Look at changing the days.

We do either cryo ranked, changing the ante values of cryo ranked or looking at other conditions like crew fail experience, solo experience.

He even said the solo thing, you know, and iterating on it.

So they're kind of considering and hopefully they're not just faking this news.

But no, I think they're listening.

I think genuinely this is their in game.

Yeah.

They want people to.

They already.

So there was videos earlier today that I saw about slide canceling and not even two hours later they were like, it's already getting fixed.

Yeah, don't enjoy it now.

This is crazy, but amazing.

This is Bungie's hardcore PvP game and newer engine.

I'm telling you, the technical things, they can do things better.

It's the same engine but newer.

It's the better.

Well, they probably had all these, you know, they probably Learned from making Destiny 2 when they built this game that they probably already started doing some improvements on that Tiger engine.

So not to mention dedicated servers.

That's a big deal, man.

That is a really.

Everything gets just so much better here.

I'll give you a comparison.

The Solo versus the 3v3.

It's like if I was to go into play solo in trials, there'd be no chance, man.

Just three guns shooting you versus one.

It just be would be too difficult to do.

I'm sure there's someone who would love to try it, but.

And I've seen people that jump in these Games and their two buddies leave because they want to 1v3 somebody and it's just like a stunt.

I think Generally, I think 3v3 is fine and you need to be coordinated anyway.

It's like a raid, right?

Why would you go into a raid solo if you can't even do the encounter?

Because the mechanics involve multiple people doing different things.

And I know people will bypass that too with skating and all kinds of different tricks, but.

Oh yeah, but like it's supposed to be meant for three.

I mean, maybe if someone finds a way to glitch in solo, whatever.

But I think they do want to actually have 3v3 fights.

Even if you have a God mode, one person just make it even, you know.

Yeah.

Scarlet, Maddie had a comment here.

He's a.

He's.

He loves this game, man.

He every Time I jump in, he's like, hey, you want to group up?

Let's play.

He says, they want you to obsess over your marathon runs.

I'm going to go insane.

Lmfao in a good way.

It's.

It's a trials of a sire situation.

They did stagger the days so rank doesn't start until Saturday and it ends on Tuesday and cryoactive is Friday through Monday.

It's a weird decision.

I hope they respond positively and feedback and give us a little more time in there.

Ranked is Saturday through Tuesday and cryo is Friday through Monday.

I want to spend all my time in there.

I know that's going to be something that want to prevent probably because if they were people like me would have to go to other maps.

Played a lull but the game should be popular enough where it's a non issue.

Here's what I'm going to love about this.

I'm going to.

I'm just starting out at, you know, I'm like I don't know, 13, 14 maybe.

I've, you know, I played probably a good maybe eight hours in this game now.

It's going to be great because all the hardcore players are going to be doing that.

I want to jump in the regular ranked or cryo.

I'm going to do the regular runs and I'm going to just get all my bounties done.

You know, get your bounties done, get paid.

So that's.

I'm looking forward to that part because it won't be as sweaty in those maps.

But, but no, that's.

I mean I, yeah, I could see.

I, I think they'll.

They'll do right.

I, I'm.

I have faith that they'll do right and get that taken care of.

So the next thing I want to talk about is Bungie.

We have a.

At least somewhat of a twab this, this week.

So this week you meant Destiny.

You said Bungie.

I mean.

But Destiny.

Yes.

Sorry.

For Destiny 2 there is a new this Week in Destiny article out.

So this week in Destiny for March 19th it covers basically the return of Guardian games and they have a massive crossover with Magic the Gathering and several sandbox balance updates.

The breakdown basically is this.

The.

The Guardian games event will feature a new Rush down remix.

It's a mode with random boss encounters.

Players can earn three new exclusive weapons.

The Triple Laureate which is a stasis hand cannon.

The Beacon which is a solar fusion rifle and the Kranios, it's an arc trace rifle.

I think I remember that one from last time.

Then they have this magic.

The Gathering collaboration the new armor sets are inspired by the planeswalkers are coming to the universe.

The Titans have the Chandra's Nalar the Flame Collar set.

Hunters have the Jace Beleren the Mind Sculptor set.

The Warlocks have the Liliana Vess the Death Majesty set until I play this game.

Additional items include a Phyrexian themed ship Sparrow and an Imrakul ghost shell.

They do have some sandbox and ability changes.

Warlocks the handheld Supernova bug the stacking weaken effects is fixed.

The Wanderer tangles now deal full damage.

The Hunter Ascension and combination blow now trigger lethal current Titan's roaring flames now stack from weapon sourced ignitions and the rewards new rewards economy the new rare Vanguard orders during Guardian games will grant 50 bright dust per completion up to a thousand weekly cap and the active modifiers.

The heavy ammo surge remains active in the portal activities until March 24 providing ammo regeneration for power weapons.

And they had the the community event the Postcards from the Frontier that continues this week and it's rewarding.

Creators of selected screenshots with their Golden Age emblem and there's some neat postcard pictures in there if you want to see those.

But I did want to show this armor that they have coming out for.

For the Guardian games which is why I will be playing it.

I want to share it here.

This armor looks really good, man.

I don't know about you guys but you have the.

The lion face.

Yeah.

This is probably the most class themed armor we've seen.

And you have the snake.

Oh my God.

The hunter snake.

It has the fangs as the fangs.

You can see them a little bit.

And then of course the.

The kind of the.

The hawk like kind of look for the.

I mean that's a.

That's a nice set, man.

I'm definitely gonna.

I think you can buy this for 6000 bright dust or I think like 1500 silver.

I think for these Just like the old, old days.

But I don't know man.

This.

This looks really cool.

I'm.

I'm impressed with this set.

It looks like they put a lot of time in this so I'm looking forward to it.

I mean look at the fangs on.

On that.

That is.

That looks really good.

So anyway, I wanted to show you that this is the.

The ship, the sparrow and the ghost shell.

And then these are the weapons.

Show the pictures of them right here.

Look pretty good.

Liking those.

But that's it for Destiny this week.

That's it.

For this week in Destiny.

So I just wanted to show you that because they were really, really impressive when they put them in the twab.

And thank goodness there's something in the twab this week.

My Lord.

Man, it's been really rough.

Anyway, that's all I have for.

I believe that's all I have for.

Oh, I'd wanted to.

I wanted to.

No, I already talked about it.

Okay, nevermind.

My bad.

All right, let's get into our.

Is that on my side?

Yeah.

What's that?

Sorry I cut out again.

Was that on my side?

Yeah, it must have been.

Oh, other people in the Discord chat are saying they're having issues too.

There might be like a router, like a main routing issue in the US right now.

No, I hope not.

Dang.

Okay, see, well, I'm.

I'm locally recording it, so we'll still have a recorded on here.

But no, we want to turn now to our next topic for tonight.

And Kingsley Mack will be jumping in.

We'll be right back.

All right, we're on to our second topic tonight, and it is Mr. Kingsley Mac.

Mike, what do you got for us tonight, man?

Hey, how's it going?

Yeah, I just have a little short article per se, and then some news coming up.

But this kind of spoke to me recently because of course, you know, there's been so much talk about we like big video games or the analysts like big video games or whoever, whatever, you know.

But you know, generally if the game's made right, of course we like big games, but like, there are times where we can forget how good a short game can be or we don't know what short games may be good or maybe we don't have time for a big game.

So this is just a kind of an article to remind us.

Recent ones.

Now, most of these recent ones, I haven't played kind of any of them, but I know about a couple.

But I want to give some examples of ones that I played in the past that I've really liked.

I want to hear from you guys also.

Okay, so basically it starts off with.

These are basically games you can finish in 10 or 10 hours or less.

So not too bad, right?

It's not bad.

First Cocoon.

Has anyone heard of this?

No.

Nope.

I've only known one on that list.

Yeah, it looks like a puzzle type game and it looks like cool like 3D animation style.

And it's.

It's a short game, free of dialogue and features, minimal cutscenes, but offers players an immersed experience and it kind of won game awards prize for best debut indie game when it launched in 2023.

So I don't know, I. I should have known a little more about this game.

Okay, next one's hi Fi Rush.

It's kind of a very cartoon art artsy style, basically rhythm based action game and clocks in right around 10 hours.

Okay, this next one, Stray, I've heard of.

Didn't we know some people playing Stray Batman.

Yeah, Remember that game?

Oh, I think, I think I got it.

I haven't even played it yet.

I think I Got it on PlayStation plus as a PlayStation, hi Fi Rush

is so much fun.

If you haven't played it, it's so good.

What's the objective recommendation then?

I'll actually consider it.

Basically you are.

You get captured by robots and you're just trying to overthrow the bad robots.

Oh, okay.

Tldr.

There's a lot more to it, but that's basically it.

Okay, cool.

No, seriously, I'll.

I think I want to try all these games, you know, especially after reading the article and what.

But yeah, Stray, that's one about a cat, right?

And you're kind of exploring around.

I picked it up on PlayStation Plus.

It was free that that month.

So I said what the heck, put it in the.

Oh I wonder.

But I definitely want to play it either way.

Next one.

Jusant J u s a n t 2023 game puzzle platformer.

Quiet introspective indie title.

It's about the climb and tasks players with taking control of a lone wanderer as they attempt to reach the top of a massive tower.

Okay, so didn't know about that one.

And then one more they have on the list.

Citizen Sleeper.

They just received a sequel in early 2025, but many gamers may not have checked out the original installment in 2022.

It's a role playing game that features a really interesting dice rolling mechanic.

Players have to manage their dice assignments to complete activities, to progress the narrative and to maintain the degrading robot body.

The system will likely appear to gamer likely appear to gamers who are also fans of TTRPGs.

Okay.

Tabletop, you know, so yeah, yeah, I mean all these sound good enough to me.

I want to talk about some, you know, my favorites though from back in the day because this is like I always tell people too friends, if you want a short game.

Anyone remember the super super classic amazing PlayStation game Journey?

I remember it.

Journey.

It's amazing.

It's that kind of wispy art style where you're like you look like You're a little cute spirit or something with, you know.

But you're going.

You're climbing mountains, you're going through buildings.

At the very end.

It's like call interactive.

It's like this amazing story.

It's in the background.

It kind of makes you feel all emotional at the end.

Yeah.

An amazing game.

And then one other.

I don't know if you guys.

This one less people knew about, but I really liked it was called Firewatch.

If any heard of that.

It was basically a short game where you're in the mountains and you know those Firewatch towers, like in the mountains out west.

I've heard of that.

So I was like, aren't you like in a Firewatch tower?

Yes, but you're actually not in the Firewatch tower very long for most, 99% of the game.

And you're exploring through caves.

And it's kind of like a little bit spooky at times too.

But really fun game and a short game.

Yeah, we have some people in the chat.

Zombies tried.

Hi Fi.

Rush says it's fun.

Firewatch was fun.

So do you guys have any other games to add that I was just

starting to think of.

I was just looking up past games.

I mean, there is one game that I haven't finished playing yet though.

But in Astrobot, a pretty, pretty short game.

I've heard that it doesn't take that many.

I think maybe 20 hours or less maybe.

Oh, we lost.

We lost Kingsley.

We lost him again.

Dang.

He might be having Internet issues.

Go ahead, man.

Yeah, the one that I will always recommend, it's a little bit harder, but if you haven't played Remnant from the ashes or remnant 2 yet.

Remnant 2, I have highly, highly recommend.

Very much like a Destiny.

Phenomenal game.

Yeah, I heard it's very much like Destiny.

Love those games so much.

Okay, I have that one.

Mine.

I'm back.

We got you.

We.

Yeah.

I have Remnant two in my.

My library because it looked really good, man.

Look really good.

I think that was a PlayStation plus game as well.

But I think Astrobot is considered a.

Under 20 hours.

They're saying

we'll include that one.

Ratchet and Clank.

I mean Rift apart.

They said 11 to 12 hours to finish that one.

Fallen Order.

I should have finished that game.

15, 18 hours.

That's not that bad.

Why didn't I finish that game?

That was a great game, man.

Oh, they added layers levels a bit later.

Dad bought.

I got you 99 different levels.

Holy crap.

Can't wait to play with my grandson.

He's gonna love that game.

Yeah.

Well, anyways, you know, short games are great, right?

And something we can look forward to.

And if we can't, you know, there's plenty of old ones.

I'm sure you all haven't played that are good, so keep em on your list.

Well, there you go.

We just.

Well, we provided some information for everybody.

If there's some games you want to check out that are short, especially with a little break we have in destiny right now.

That's why I figured it'd be a good thing to talk about.

Well, and with that, there's always tons of more division news and things that are going on and exciting things to look forward to coming up.

Okay, so I don't know where we want to start with this.

There's so much.

But I'll just start on the administrative company side first.

You know, there's.

And there's even late breaking stuff today, and I'm not up on all the details.

But what's most important with what I care about right now is the way they're structuring the studio houses and the way division's all in there.

It's kind of a golden goose along with Assassin's Creed right now.

And so we don't have anything to worry about with Division.

I mean, they already are working on planning, like, DLCs that are coming out soon and Division 3 and all these things.

Sure.

You know, anything can happen two, three years down the road, but right now it is full steam ahead.

Okay.

Yeah, I'm probably gonna jump in and play it.

I'm gonna go ahead and probably buy it.

I. I don't know when.

Not recommend that game enough.

I know, but dude, I got so many games to play.

I mean, I'm still trying to level up a marathon right now, but I mean, well, you.

You decided to do one new one a month.

Exactly.

You could always change that.

Two months period.

One a month is already a lot.

But.

No, no, I mean, like, yeah, one every other month.

So you can space it out or something.

Yeah, I. Dude, you should see my backlog.

I got so many games I want to play.

No, I like that.

I like the once a month.

Cause it forces me to try a new game every month.

Yeah.

And that even if, you know, obviously

even if I don't finish.

But you get it sampling.

Yeah, yeah, I get it.

I'm giving it a good at least eight, eight to ten hour playthrough.

And that's.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, with Division, the very 1st of April and also, well, kind of that March 31st, 1st of April kind of time frame.

Also, this isn't interesting to me, but they are coming out with their mobile game finally.

They had an other older, which we were talking about a little bit earlier, like Heartland, I don't know.

But their main.

Their main mobile games actually coming out end of this month.

Okay, what's it called?

What's it called?

Batman.

I'm trying to look that.

And even though I'm not interested in.

Is working out pretty good for them.

And they're timing it perfectly.

See, Destiny never did this with Destiny Rising and Destiny, but they are timing it perfectly with a big drop in Division 2, which I'll get to here in a second division.

Resurgence.

Resurgence.

I wanted to say Resurgence, but I don't know.

I'll probably download it, but I probably won't play it.

But maybe a little bit.

But Division 2's Year 8 seasonal model, where they usually have still about, you know, three or four seasons per year, they actually stay on track.

I don't know how they do it and come out with new stuff all the time.

But Year eight, the big update, which isn't even the dlc, we're also getting a DLC later this year, but this is just a big seasonal update where a bunch of things are changing, basically.

I'll try to keep it short, but seasonal modifiers, instead of just.

You get them from doing certain little quests.

They still have those quests for people that like that, but now you can just.

It's like a currency.

You get doing anything.

And the seasonal modifiers can stack.

And it's so funny, Todd, you'd love this.

The way they described it, they said it's like Balatron, where you can, like, you have to have them in a correct order.

I heard that they were going to add modifiers like Balatro had.

I love their modifiers, man.

Yep.

And so they're doing that and you do them the correct order, and if you do it that way, then they can stack and stuff.

And so this is new to me too, because they haven't had this in the game.

But this is coming 1st of April in the big update that was also.

They're having a new weapon type, a whole new type above Exotics.

What is it called?

It wasn't mythic.

Mythic is Diablo.

Now.

I forget the name.

Do you remember the name Batman?

Just looking it up right now.

You can be my live correspondent to look that up.

I know you're playing.

I know you're playing both games simultaneously right now.

So I Know that's probably why the terminology is tough.

I see you playing Diablo and well,

yeah, I'm playing Diablo more right now.

And then I'll Switch to Division 1st of April and then I'll switch back to Diablo end of April because that's when the Diablo DLCs.

Batman's loving this too.

He's pretty similar with me on.

On this stuff.

But I always joke the.

The.

The 3.

The 3DS are my main games.

Destiny, Diablo and Division.

But I think if I jumped in Diablo I would never return.

Yeah, there's a lot.

The grind there is amazing.

It.

Yeah, if you want to grind you can, but you don't have to.

Anyways, I'll try to shorten this up but the whole new weapon archetype that's higher than exotics and higher than legendaries and they say it's worth but it's very kind of endgamey.

Try hard to get these generally.

So they're adding a new difficulty on because the game has gotten a little bit easier over the years.

But they're going to keep that for people that like that and add this new difficulty on and they're purple type weapons.

I forget the names.

But if they're also going to have like 10 additional level tiers for doing activities also that again this is all optional.

Opt in only if you want.

Mostly it's for a little bit the higher levels for getting this new tier of gear.

But the thing about this tier of gear is like it's not required by any means.

It's.

They're doing in a really good way where you don't feel like you're totally losing out if you don't want to do that.

And then one other thing that's probably boring for people that don't play it a lot.

But they're adding Black Tusks into the.

The control points and the.

The retaliations which I think is super cool, but you wouldn't know what that means.

Black Tusk are those enemy types or

something that's an enemy type but they were never in the public zones.

So Division has a really, really live public place space.

Like you run around the streets and there's public events going on way better than how Destiny does it and all sorts of things going on.

And.

And you can set your world tier level but also there's different enemy faction types that are actually, you know, close to each other.

And Black Tusk couldn't take over control points ever before.

Well, not really.

They kind of had like a sub control point before.

It but now they can actually do more things in the world.

All right, so you know, geeky stuff for people that have to play.

But it's a big update coming out first of April.

Okay, sounds good.

What else?

Yeah, and I know like we've done a lot of the things in the game, except I think you said you've tried the raids at one point.

I have done one raid and it.

I just got in a backpack and got carried by an LFG group, so I didn't know anything that was going on.

But the raids seem fun.

Do one of those and get.

Try to do the incursion.

Right on.

Okay.

Any other news about division you wanted to talk about, Batman?

Speaking of incursions, they are doing a new incursion with season eight as our year eight as Also the survival game mode, which is one of the first extraction shooters is coming to division two.

And I love.

Right.

That's coming too in division one.

So you're gonna have a PvE also

cross play a lot of people.

Okay.

So in division one you could choose between PvEVP or just PvE, right.

You can choose between dark sounds.

Yeah.

The new gear type is called prototype grade prototype.

But.

But also like this is primarily.

And I think they should keep the PvP lively.

But this is a primarily a PvE game.

There's just so much to it.

I think they just.

I hate to say this, but rightly so put a little more development into the PvE side.

But I'm not saying they should.

If PvP's in there, they got to keep it going too.

They said they're working on balance changes.

I don't think I've ever done PvP game.

I think it's called conflict.

I've never done it.

Some people are way hardcore about though.

They would hate to see it gone.

I mean, you know, like, obviously the game's suited more for the PvPve type stuff, but like Dark Zone.

But boy, some people would be upset if they got rid of the actual PvP zone.

For sure.

It sounds like destiny.

Right?

It's almost like we're saying the same thing.

I mean it's probably why you like the game, because it's very much like destiny.

Oh, in a lot of ways.

Well, and, and, and then the build crafting and the seasonal stuff is way better on the end.

Way more in depth with build crafting.

Way better with builds.

See, I, I think I played.

I think I played.

I think I played the first game.

I don't think I played the second game.

I'M pretty sure I vaguely remember us playing the first one.

Yeah, there was a helicopter at the end.

Yep, that's the one I played.

I remember the helicopter was a big disappointment.

It was like, oh, that's it.

The first one is fun.

Yeah, it got a lot better over time.

Yeah, they did.

And same thing, same thing with two.

Because when the game first came out, it didn't look anything like it did now.

Like there weren't any.

So now you have either armor damage or skill to spec into.

Put on your armor that didn't exist as in depth as it does in when the game first came out.

Okay, I'm probably gonna try it eventually.

So the amount of building and complexity you can get into and you don't have to, but you can get into is so big in Division 2.

You'll see when it opens up.

Okay.

All right, cool.

Good to hear.

Anything any other news to speak of?

Not really.

I mean, still, the MacBook Neo is getting really good reviews.

People that are getting in their hands going to the Apple stores again for being a 500 to 600 computer.

They're like, it actually feels luxurious like a MacBook Pro, like feeling it.

The corners, the build, quality control.

So like you're not getting that much less of a computer for a way, way less price now that Apple has a $600 computer.

It's a smart thing to do.

Apple was trying to get people into their ecosystem and you know how it is, man.

It's funny, I'm Apple through and through, except PC because of the gaming aspect.

But of course, yeah, I have to have PC games.

I am totally in there and totally in their platform.

Everything I do revolves around Apple products.

So that's probably.

It's a smart move, man, because you get people who maybe can't afford the $3,500 VR setup, you know, and can jump in and get familiar with the Apple system with the Mac Mac pros and stuff.

And with the Mac, the entry level Mac that they're talking about there, I don't know, I just.

One PC at a time for me, I can't.

I'd probably cure.

I mean, I have a laptop.

I have a laptop.

I never opened the damn thing because I'm always in here playing on this.

So I live on my laptop for sure.

I wish I did, but yeah.

All right, well, thank you, Kingsley, as usual.

Thank you, sir.

We have a one more topic before we get into our catch up segment and that will be me closing out the show.

Hang with us.

We'll be right back.

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All right, our final topic tonight is it hinges on an article I read from the PC Gamer this past week.

And it's they talk about a gaming studio that had the opportunity to reinvent the game before releasing it.

And because of this, they have become a very popular live service game today.

And that studio I'm referring to is Embark.

I want to pull the article up here because it's a very short article, but I wanted to read it verbatim because there was a lot of good information in here.

PC PC Gamer was interviewing Kyo Braga.

This is the Arc Raiders production director and with Embark and he, you know, you know, everybody knows it emerged as a really, really popular PVEVP extraction shooter.

And we even played in the the tournament FUDS tournament last week.

And I had so much fun, man.

And the worlds are so inviting.

I can get lost in that place.

I could just see it.

The only thing I hate, it's got a damn timer at the top of the screen.

So you got like 29 minutes to do whatever you're gonna do and get the hell out of there.

I'd love to have it where I could just go in there like Destiny and just go through the world and just look around and take it all in.

They actually.

Well, I was going to say.

What's that?

I hate to tell you, but the timer is an Extraction shooter.

I understand that it's an extraction shooter.

I get that.

But I'm telling you.

Well, what's funny is this was actually going to be a PvE game.

I want to see that game because this is probably the hottest take I have.

But I don't like Arc Raiders.

I've tried it Four times and I just don't like it.

Well, he, when he was talking to.

And this is by the way is Lincoln Carpenter.

He does a lot of PC Gamer articles in the gaming industry.

And when he was.

After the interview was finished with PC Gamer, the, the director said that the, the.

The high profile live service launch failures that followed Embark's big hit.

It leaves him wishing other projects were given the space to reinvent themselves that Arc Raiders enjoyed.

He quote says this I try to hope that they were given the same chance we had because it's so hard to put a game out there having the trust and the time to improve those metrics.

It's just something that not all studios end up having.

They get canceled.

They're forced to launch something that was not yet good.

I feel for it, to be honest.

He says part of the difficulty of the games industry is that the studios are expected to treat the, to treat the hit game launches of other studios as a roadmap that can be followed for their own success.

Embark's development process on Arc Raiders for example, once one where the 100 strong staff had all considerable autonomy in pursuing their own vision for the game.

Sounds like another studio wouldn't be feasible at many other studios.

And they said, he says, quote, this participation that we have is something that every company can do, especially size wise.

It's very inefficient to have 22,000 people.

If all of them want to participate, we are 100.

Right.

I mean even then sometimes we have trouble with that.

And he said that game development isn't an exact formula.

It's one that works best when a studio can adjust or repurpose to meet its circumstances.

A creative freedom that Embark was allowed but that many other studios aren't instead.

Are.

Aren't.

Aren't instead.

What we usually see is the High Guard scenario.

An unproven game is presented to the world with the expectation that it'll be an immediate phenomenon and acts before it can even find its footing.

He says looking at production as a little formula that you can follow, it usually does not work.

That was, that was the article in a nutshell.

So here's my take.

I mean I know there's a lot of drama right now with Marathon.

The numbers aren't probably as great.

Obviously you cannot compare the numbers for Marathon to Destiny because no one cares about the numbers.

They're two different games.

But what I'm.

What I'm really.

The people that care about the numbers are the people that want this game to fail.

Yeah, exactly.

Those are the haters.

And what I really hope is that Sony gives Marathon time to cook a little bit.

Because we all know if you remember back to the original Destiny game, remember they scrapped the entire campaign and rewrote a new one.

They.

They.

They had to totally do a 180 and turn around and make something else.

I, like I said I wanted to share this article because I think Sony needs to let Marathon cook for a while.

They.

Before declaring it a success or a failure.

And according to a lot of my fellow gamers in the discord, they're really enjoying the game, including me.

So that's just an example.

But what do you, what do you guys think?

I mean, they're.

Guess what?

They did actually.

And even with all the issues we have with Sony and stuff, they did whoever's decision it was.

Marathon did this too, to an extent.

Remember Marathon changed a bunch of things.

They did, and it was all for the good.

And if it, if people were generally liking the game how it is right now, then thank God they made those changes because the game may not have been good at all if they didn't make those changes.

I guarantee you, if it was like the alpha that we were invited to play, I would not have.

I wouldn't have played it.

Not at all.

I didn't play it for very long and Kingsley played it for probably even less time.

I just did.

I hated both the alpha and the beta and I was like, I don't know if I'm going to play this game.

And then a friend of mine bought it for me and I was like, well, I have to now.

And I love it so much.

The problem with Marathon.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I was just gonna say the problem with Marathon is it takes.

It takes so much time that players have to invest and learn how the systems work.

And I actually learned even more this past week playing about all of the different consumables and stuff and what they do and how you.

I didn't know that if I took cardio kick or debug, if I'm a healer, that it actually spreads to the rest of my teammates.

And then there's this one, there's this one consumable where you actually become pixelated and it's like a really, really good perk in the game where it's harder for other players to shoot you and for the PvE enemies to shoot you.

And a lot of times you can just breeze right through them if you have this.

I can't remember what it's called, but it's a really strong consumable right now, but.

Well, yeah, so it's good news that we're getting pretty good news so far with how Marathon can work with that.

Because here's the wild card with the big companies, it could go either way.

Yeah, probably most of the time they don't have the freedom to change as quickly as the smaller companies.

But it can happen.

Doesn't mean it's always going to happen.

We saw that with a little bit with Marathon and also we're seeing this potentially and it could all be talked, but we're seeing this with Ubisoft also.

What they're doing, even though they're laying off a lot, is the creative houses below them.

They're giving them more autonomy, more freedom.

We'll see what that really means.

But in theory it's the right decision.

It's, you know, as long as they can just make money in general.

They don't.

Before they had to prove like game decisions too, not just like money decisions.

Well now they can at least make game decisions and only get the money decisions approved.

I mean in Concord nobody wanted that game.

I mean the sales right off the bat were so bad.

I mean it was obvious no one, this was not what players were looking for.

And, and I don't think people wanted high, high guard more, if that makes any sense.

No one wanted high guard.

High guard was a little different though.

They, they were kind of, it was kind of like a gambit game almost to a certain degree that I was watching people play it and it was like phases to the game and I was like, didn't have to cross love high guard.

He did at first.

Yeah he did.

He was playing with his teammates and he actually enjoyed it.

But man, did it drop off fast with player, you know, player counts and stuff.

So like there's just a lot of things in that game that just didn't make any sense.

Why would you make it 3 VP3v3 and a big empty map.

Add something into it to make it more of a threat.

It just, there were a lot of choices and again this didn't make sense.

It goes back to these studios or, or maybe the publisher's fault.

They're pushing out these games before they've really been thoroughly play tested and I, I think, I think they're just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks these days.

And if it fails, it fails.

You know, okay, well that's a hundred million dollar write off.

We'll move on to the next game.

And my, my biggest thing in, in the gaming industry right now Is that this cookie cutter mentality where.

Especially on shooter games.

This is why I'm really excited about this Crimson Desert game, because it's the opposite of that you're getting.

You know, usually when you get a game that has very good graphics, it's usually very shallow in other areas because they have to.

They have to focus all the memory and all the processing power on the graphics and they can't add a lot of depth to the.

To the game.

I don't know what if that's a technical issue or it's by choice because how much money they're spending on the game to get those really good graphics.

But I've played a lot of games that have really beautiful graphics, but there's no progression to the game.

And I mean, Battlefront comes to mind because the first Battlefront that came out right after.

I think it was.

It was the.

It was made by the people who made Battle.

Battle Battlefield, I think.

And.

But the very first game that came out, it was.

It reminded me very much of Battlefield 1, the one with the World War I planes and stuff.

The.

I.

If you came from Battlefield 3 or Battlefield 4, you got spoiled with the deep progression and all the selection of weapons and stuff and all the huge maps.

I mean, we had.

We didn't realize how good we had it back in those days.

And then you saw the more recent battlefields and they just didn't compare, man.

It just wasn't the same game.

There was no grind.

It was just all pretty.

It was a pretty game to play.

And then they had problems with.

You couldn't pick out the enemies coming at you.

And it was just a mess, man.

But I feel like we've heard this story.

I know.

Sorry.

Tend to go back onto it.

But yeah, I mean, that's just an.

That's.

That's the example I can use because I lived it.

But yeah, I mean, I just, you know, I really thought of Marathon when I read this article about arc raiders because I think Marathon is going to be kind of a sleeper game.

If people can just spend the time and once you understand how the systems and everything works, you really.

The wheels start spinning and you start understanding.

Oh, man.

Okay.

I know I need to go to this location to get these materials, to get this built, you know, and.

And get this satisfied and I can move over here next.

It's all strategizing what you're.

What you want to do with the.

The factions and stuff, but I just really hope that Sony gives it time.

I really hope they do the one

Thing that I absolutely love about Marathon compared to Arc Raiders is it doesn't take ridiculously long to get back to the level if you died.

So like I have all blue guns that doesn't take hours upon hours to get back to.

Maybe two or three runs if you're lucky.

Yeah.

I was worried about losing weapons and losing gear and stuff with Marathon, but I've kind of.

I've kind of got a different mindset than if I'm playing Destiny.

Destiny.

It's about collections.

It's about collecting stuff and getting.

Getting loot.

Right.

It's a looter shooter Marathon.

Almost all the guns do a lot of damage.

They're all pretty good.

And what makes them different is just the attachments you're putting on them.

That's really.

That's really.

Yeah.

The mods.

Yeah.

But like I said, as I more I play and deep dive into this game, the more I see the love and attention that Bungie put into this game that I. I just hope that everyone else can experience.

And I'm coming wonder.

I'm coming from a. I'm a Crucible player.

I love playing Crucible.

You know, it's been forever since Iron Banner's been out, but I love the gear that they released last Iron Banner, the ones with the gold mask and stuff over them.

I mean it's just beautiful art pieces.

So.

Yeah.

That's why I wanted to mention the story because I figured we'd kind of end on that note because it's so many games these days are either just thrown out there to see what sticks or they.

They just don't.

Aren't given a chance to do well.

I don't know.

You can tell a game is source grouped and then a game that's made with love nowadays.

Yeah.

And it goes back to what makes a actual game fun to play.

And I miss that.

A lot of games just don't have that anymore.

I don't know.

I've been kind of disappointed with a lot of games lately.

But I can see the love that Bungie put into Marathon.

It's just.

Is there enough people that are going to stick around long enough to play it to.

To realize that?

So the one tell that's going to tell if people are going to stick around is when the next season starts and the Bolt the vault life happens.

Yep.

When you have to repeat the loop

that's going to be the tell is when you.

Everyone loses everything and has to start in square one again.

But here's the thing, man.

Let's go Back to Destiny.

Let's compare this to Destiny.

I know it's not the same game, but it's about weapons and gear and stuff.

What's the one problem that Destiny had?

When a new season would come out, they had to one up everything you already had because the guns looked the same.

The guns were just a painted version of a previous gun that we've had before.

There wasn't anything new or innovative.

But the thing I like about.

For me.

Well, I know.

But I was the.

I was the.

I know.

It was more.

I think we have too many weapons.

I know.

It's more about the story.

Yeah, yeah.

I always used the new stuff and forgot about the old stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

I was very nostalgic every time.

That's why I like resets and that's why I like Diablo, because it kind of forces you to.

To start over if you want to

do the seasonal stuff Now.

Now, Division does keep everything like Destiny, so don't worry.

If you play that game, even when you do the season, you'll have everything.

Here's the thing too, about it's like Destiny.

Here's the thing too about Marathon is I just finished the new Caloric campaign.

You know, you do all the priority missions and they.

You read all the story or it's told to you or you have a cutscene.

It's three different ways.

Is wild.

It is, man.

I got into the new Caloric.

I'm like, these.

These people are all about making food for people.

And.

And they.

There was a really chilling entry in one of the logs where something was taking over the AI and the AI had a brain fart.

They didn't even know what took it over, just like some.

Some wild entity.

And I guess we're going to find out what that's going to be.

But I want to go back and finish all the priority campaigns with all the other.

With all the other corporations, because each of them.

It is so cool, man.

It's just.

I've never played a story this way before.

You literally are playing a PvP PvP EV, you know, PvE and a PvP game with that risk of getting shot.

And actually, as you progress through those missions, those.

Whatever you want to call them, you're actually learning the story as you're playing and as.

As you have that risk.

And by the way, I have not teamed up with other players, but I've used the dialogue wheel in a few things playing solo.

And there's been a couple guys there.

There's one I was up against a guy who could.

A recon guy.

And he scanned.

He knew I was on the roof above him.

And I just said, hey.

I don't remember what the.

What the wheel said.

It was something like.

You flipped him off.

No, no, no.

He said, he said.

He said.

He said, wanna team up?

It was a preloaded dialogue in the wheel.

Cause I didn't have a mic on and he didn't have a mic on either.

And then I did my agree or whatever.

And my character's so slick.

He's like.

I suppose.

I mean, really, the speaking voice.

The speaking voices of all the shells are so innovative.

They really are.

And then you skip down the yellow brick road holding hands.

But we didn't do that.

What we decided to do was just leave each other alone.

I actually shot at him first.

Yeah.

And he dashed away.

And that's when he said, hey, you want to team up or, you know, I'm.

I need getting stuff done too.

And we both understood we're there to get missions done.

And we just decided just to leave each other alone.

We went.

I went one direction, he went another, and we just looted in a different building.

It was the coolest thing.

Minority.

I never thought that would ever happen in this game, but it does happen.

It's still going to stay a minority.

Maybe if you're.

Maybe when you're playing solo, you have a better chance because teams, it's all just.

It's so frantic when you have teams.

And by the way, they did Nerf back the.

The third party where you could hear other shots being fired and stuff.

Remember that?

They.

They.

The initial patch.

You could hear it across the whole fricking map.

But now they've reduced it back.

That was a bad.

That was a bad thing they did.

But they did fix that, by the way.

So you don't hear people in other areas, you know, firing their weapons.

Not as bad anyway.

They also added a duos that.

Thank you.

I heard about that.

Thank you.

I want to mention that because people had been asking, hey, we'd like to have a.

You know, I have.

Me and my buddy want to play, but we don't want to bring in a random third person who's going to probably.

Oh, man.

We had a random third person in our game.

Me and War Cry were playing Monday night.

I know this is in the catch up segment, but the guy immediately went in there and started firing at all the UPC uec and I'm like, dude, what the hell are you doing?

This is a stealth game.

And he dies.

Of course, then.

And War cry tries to go in and pick him up.

He dies.

And then I'm like, I'm not gonna die for this.

But then I ended.

They end up ambushing me in the back because, I mean, it was like a big alarm bell, big dinner bell.

Everybody come, come feast on these runners.

And I'm like, see, this is the problem when you get a random third person.

It is only on perimeter right now, but I really hope they expand it because duos.

Yeah.

Is really, really fun.

And perimeter is kind of the beginner map.

Yeah.

If destiny had duos from the beginning that quickly, that would have been pretty cool.

Yeah.

It seems like they can make definitely change quicker changes on the fly, and that's a good thing.

They can be flexible like that.

They got a shot.

They got a shot at becoming a long term game.

Anyway, I'll quit kissing Marathon's ass tonight.

All right, let's get into our catch up segment.

I'm curious to see what everyone's been up to this week.

Be right back.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, it is getting towards the end of our show tonight, but first I want to catch up and see what's been going on with everybody this week.

And of course, we'll check in with Landon first, since he's our.

Our brand new guest tonight.

Landon, what have you been doing?

What have you been playing?

What's going on in your life, man?

I have been working a lot, but I've also been playing Borderlands for getting ready for the new DLC next week.

Tell us about it.

What are they.

What are they bringing on that?

It is called Mad Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned.

Okay.

We are getting a new Vault Hunter.

His name is Cash.

He's kind of like a shadow voodoo man.

He can throw cards and roll dice.

That's pretty much all we know about him right now.

Okay, that's cool.

I got two characters to level 50.

They're also increasing the level from 50 to 60.

Okay, I.

That's another game I got to put

a lot of time in, man.

So many games.

Any Borderlands game I'll play.

I mean, but that's the thing.

It's a one and done.

I mean.

Yeah, it's not really.

Is it really considered life service or is it pretty much you're just playing?

I would say so because there is, like, when Borderlands 3 ended its cycle, there were so much content in that game.

There were two takedowns, which is basically a long raid to them because a raid boss to them is just a big boss with A lot of health.

And they added two takedowns, a raid and Slaughter Shafts, which are basically gauntlet modes.

And they're going to do the exact same thing for four.

So they already added a raid.

They're doing another raid and a takedown next month along with the dlc.

Nice.

Pretty cool, man.

All right, good.

I mean, I'm glad they're putting out some DLC that.

That game.

I had to put it set aside because Renegades cranked back up and I got back into Destiny.

It's like I'm bouncing back and forth, but, man, there's so many games to play now.

It's a dilemma because I have such limited time.

What else you been up to, man?

That is pretty much it.

I started playing, obviously been playing a bunch of marathon.

I am level 27 as of right now.

Nice.

And me and my friend have just been playing duos because Duos is a lot of fun.

I'm gonna play it.

I definitely want to play it.

Now that we can do duos.

We.

I couldn't do it Monday night.

They hadn't patched it yet.

And me, like I said, me and War are playing and we get this random person who didn't know what the hell they were doing, and they ended up just getting us all killed.

So.

All right, cool deal, man.

Thanks for being on the show tonight, man.

I'm glad you said yesterday.

It's good to talk with you.

I cannot believe you have not been on the show before.

But, Mr. Kingsley Mack, what's going on in your life this week, man?

Yeah, I'm back right now.

It keeps cutting out on me tons.

I don't know why, but hopefully I'll stick around.

You get the problem I had last week.

It's your turn tonight.

Yeah, fast, fast.

But I've been really hitting Diablo hard right now.

They have a smaller season before their DLC late next month, but I'm having a lot of fun with that.

And I love rating.

Of course, I do that about once a week with people.

Division is spending a little bit less time, but I know I'm going to hit Division hard.

First of April.

Yep.

And then the Diablo again hard after that.

That's okay that Destiny doesn't have anything until, you know, June, so.

Well, not that they don't have anything, but stuff that I would be interested in.

So, yeah, I'm going to play.

I'm going to play Guardian games as I. I play all the events every year.

They're a lot of fun.

They're.

I've never liked the events.

And that's not because of playing Destiny a lot.

I even had that opinion in year one.

They were just always more boring to me compared to all the other stuff in the game.

I get that.

I get that.

But I think they're great to have.

I'm not saying they shouldn't have them.

Okay.

Anything else?

No, that's basically it.

I mean, if I'll.

I can add in anything later, if I think about it, but I'm afraid I'll cut out here.

Yeah.

Rion says he's not hearing anything either through Discord.

That's really strange, man.

Oh, I mentioned everyone was cutting out a little.

Well, not everyone, but, yeah, some people are cutting out.

Rion, just try to jump in and jump out, jump out and jump back in and see if that helps, because I think, Maddie, you can hear, right?

Scarlet Maddie.

But it keeps happening again and again, though.

For us.

For those that are having problems.

Yeah.

What the hell was going on?

Something with Discord.

Internet routing.

I don't know what's going on with Discord right now.

It's having issues, that's for sure.

Okay.

For me, we did not.

My wife and I did not go see a movie this week at the theaters.

My wife was off for spring break, and we have been.

She's been very busy, and I've been kind of sucked into the vortex of work to do.

We have been updating our master bedroom.

We put new cabinets and sinks and mirrors and repainted it.

In fact, we were up till midnight on Tuesday just trying to get it all done all the while, you know, having to go out and work and during the day to boot.

I have to give most of the credit to her, though, because she got a lot of stun.

She was hanging lights, the new lights and stuff above.

If she's really learned, she really did a lot.

So I have to give her most of the credit there.

I had to run the plumbing and put the sinks together and, you know, put all the.

All the.

You know, the drains and stuff in and all the good stuff there.

But she didn't want to mess with that.

You don't realize how nasty you are as a human being until you've cleaned out a drain in your wall.

You're like, that is disgusting.

How the hell did that grow there?

So that was a fun experience.

Needless to say, I had all my gloves on.

Have to give a shout out to Elmer Fudd games.

Putting on what's in your wallet.

The arc raiders tournament last weekend.

My buddy, native Raider, and I Competed and we did really good.

I think we came in second or third.

I was impressed.

We banked from very.

We.

We decided to take the low risk.

We decided to just do the Buried City runs.

We went to the high loot areas at Buried City and just rinse repeated, rinse repeated, rinse repeated.

And we piled up over 400000 in two hours.

So.

But congrats to one of our members technical and his teammate.

He cleared over a million dollars of valuables.

Now he did the opposite.

He went to all.

He got the, the damn keys and all the special keys and went in all those higher loot areas and you know, I guess they were successful against other PvP, you know, players that were probably doing the same thing.

But that was very impressive.

I mean they started slow.

We were in first place like the first first hour maybe and then they just came steaming ahead and it was crazy.

But Fudd always puts on a great tournament.

He had a, like a live scoreboard where he was updating everybody's.

We took before and after of our screens and we sent it to a special discord where he would grab them and start adding the points, adding the values to it.

And man, I know he was frazzled by the end of that because he says next time I will have someone else do that because it kind of took him away from what he likes, what he does best and that's being a host of a, of a tournament.

So.

But kudos to him, man.

I'll definitely be in the next one.

Fudd, if you're listening, I had such a great time, man.

Maybe I'll have a little more experience in arc Raiders by the time we do it next time.

But yeah, we did really good.

I was really, really, really happy I decided to play that.

Of course because we played the tournament, we didn't have our.

We had to postpone our Raid team that we usually run on Saturday nights because that's when the tournament was.

But I think we're going to be coming back this Saturday to play, to play some.

Hopefully that will happen.

Another jump into another Raid and get some stuff done.

Hopefully.

Yeah.

No, I did play a lot of marathon.

Shout out to my teammates for helping me out.

I think Scarlet, Matty and his friend jumped in, we're doing some three player runs for me for a couple hours and I think I talked.

I gave a shout out to you last week, Batman for helping me out on a few things and of course me and War Cry jumped in and War Cry is greener than me in marathon.

He's an old he's an old I only play Crucible player and he just trying to learn everything.

I could see he was a little uncomfortable and he probably wanted the more PvP action where we were like no man, you gotta, you gotta move carefully around the maps because you're not only fighting another team, but you're fighting the PvE enemies which are no joke.

I'm still trying to learn everything but man, this game definitely has those hooks in me.

I'm just trying to get all those priority contracts done so I can finish the story out and then hopefully I'll be level 15, you know, level 25 by then where I can find two other people who want to jump in and try to attempt the the end game stuff.

But that's pretty much it for me.

It's been pretty simple week.

It's just been a real busy work work week and we've been redoing our house some stuff in our house.

So been a crazy week there.

So let's do this.

Before we go tonight, let's see if we have any questions from our community.

Hey Guardians, if you would like to ask us a question for the show, head over to guardiandowncast.com to send us a voicemail or email us with your question question.

However, the best way to send us a question is to write it out in our podcast Questions channel in our Discord community.

You can access it on the Discord app on your phone or on the web.

It's Discord GG Forward slash Guardian Downcast.

Don't think about it.

Just do it.

Do it right now.

The links are in our show notes Later Guardians.

All right ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is the last segment of our show so where we ask, you know, we we turn to you guys and see what you guys have for us question wise.

And I want to turn to our our Destiny questions part of our show and Taserface 2732 had a question for us.

Why do you think it is that the Talk of Destiny 2 immediately turns to server shutdown work on a Destiny 3 when the numbers of players dwindle down but another MMO such as World of Warcraft would be forever eternal.

What's when the name when the game hasn't hasn't been relevant in years yet there's no news about their numbers or stats.

Also love the show and community.

You guys have created peace.

Thanks Taser Face.

Appreciate you man.

What do you guys think?

I think they are obsessing on that, aren't they?

The I don't think it's that simple, actually, but go ahead.

I don't either.

And he, as much as I agree with his point, he used a bad example with comparing it to wow because, like, there are way too many people that play WoW on, like, a daily basis.

Even though, like, not many.

Not many people, you know, play it, there's still a ton of people that play that game.

Here's the thing.

It's not true that we immediately turn to talk about server shutdown when the numbers do them go down a little bit.

No, it's been going on for years.

It's not about what you look.

The other examples they're giving these are games that, yeah, they're low, but they're not doing this graph down.

Like what Destiny is.

Destiny has a graph that keeps going down, down, down, down, down.

And that has much more appropriate talk for saying there might be issues than other games.

You know, that, sure, they're low, but they're staying low.

And they may even go up, like, Division goes up some or wow goes up some at times and things like that.

Destiny just isn't doing that.

So, yeah, it's a good point in general, for sure, but Destiny, I think, unfortunately, is kind of earning its reputation at least a little bit.

And I know and hope it'll get better.

I'm curious what Guardian games will do next week.

I'll keep a close eye on it.

But, yeah, you're right.

We do obsess about the numbers on Destiny, and probably because, you know, we're worried about it, the game being shut down.

I don't.

Yeah, I don't obsess.

I just tell the truth.

Now, I will say this.

Go ahead, Landon.

I don't think it's gonna get shut down because Destiny one is still.

Yeah.

On.

Yeah.

Still going.

And, like, something would have to happen really, really bad.

Granted, it's not great right now for them to be like, all right, we gotta start turning off some servers.

Yeah, I don't.

I mean, yeah, these conversations don't even need to be had.

Like, they're not showing off the servers or like.

But like.

But it also can be true that Destiny's in a different situation than a game like wow or Division.

Let me ask you guys something.

If Destiny, If Bungie tomorrow tweeted out, hey, guys, we're.

We're moving on to the next Destiny game.

We're going to make it.

We're going to make it, but we need time to make it.

But here's what we're going to do.

We're not going to really support Destiny 2 anymore.

Except we're going to have our events team put out the events four times a year like they do right now.

The Solstice, the Guardian Games, the Halloween event, and then the Christmas Dawning event.

Would you guys be happy with that?

And would you come back and play those events or would you just forget about the game altogether?

Or should they still be supporting it?

And can you hear me right now?

Yeah, we can hear you.

Yes.

Then I'll go fast.

Yeah, I'd be happy with the news and I wouldn't really play the content because I don't love the seasonal stuff anyways.

But I think it'd be a smart decision and I. I would be happy with that.

I. I wouldn't play.

I mean, obviously I do like raids and stuff when, like we want to do raids or do a dungeon night or something.

But like when Festival of Lofts comes around, I get the new ornaments or the new costumes and then probably don't touch it again.

Yeah.

Because I'm the same way as Kingsley.

The events don't really do anything for me.

I. I think I'm still wearing the armor ornament set from the Solstice event.

The Wolf.

The Wolf set.

I think I'm still wearing that.

It's such a badass set, man.

And I did what I needed to do to get it.

Now, that being said, I didn't play the Halloween event this year because it was based on playing with other people.

And I like the Lost Sectors.

I know people didn't, but I like just something I can go in solo and grind and grind and grind to get what I need to get the rewards.

And it wasn't solo friendly.

So I said, pat, I'll pass on it.

For the first time ever, I passed on the Halloween event.

I hardly played it at all.

But the Solstice, the Dawning, the Guardian Games, it's.

It's always a lot of fun.

Isn't Guardian games a team thing?

It might be.

I'll look into it.

I mean, I'm.

I may just.

I had a boss Rush mode, isn't it?

Yeah, the thing they did last year, but a new version of it, they

said it just depends.

I think you have to play in a group.

I could be wrong.

We'll see about that.

But they usually have a firewalled version where you can jump in by yourself.

But the main thing is I love the ornaments and gear.

They put a lot of time in those and for that reason they put their time in for the content.

I'll jump in to play it.

All right, Kingsley, we got one more question.

I'm going to let you tackle that one, buddy.

Oh boy.

And if I cut out, I we'll tell you.

This will be the worst time, but okay from dad.

Bod Hero.

Hey, the Roundtable Friends, I don't really have a question this week, but instead like to share an opinion and reflection of more recent gaming experiences.

There's a theory I keep coming back to when thinking about New Life Service games.

Many of them struggle, not because the games themselves are bad, but because investors are obsessed with early metrics, launch week, player counts, engagement graphs, revenue spikes becoming measuring stick, et cetera.

Those numbers don't explode right away.

Competency disappears, funding dries up, and a game can be labeled a failure before the community even has time to truly form.

Sorry, I'm going fast.

There's tons to this.

See if I can the live service games were never meant to be sprinted through like a traditional single player campaign.

The more like living worlds that grow and evolve over time.

The healthiest scenario for New Life Service game is one where players feel comfortable engaging at their own pace, exploring systems, discovery mechanics, enjoying the social aspect without feeling pressured to keep up with the fastest grinders.

Ironically, that slower and more organic pace is exactly what builds stronger communities.

When players take their time, discussions last longer, strategies evolve naturally.

New players don't feel locked out because they join too late.

The experience becomes less about racing to the end game and more about being part of a shared world.

There's also a mental health aspect that often gets overlooked.

The pressure to keep up with the Joneses is finishing every battle pass, unlocking everything immediately.

Chasing every new meta can turn something meant to be fun is something that feels like a second job.

Taking a step back and playing at your own pace removes that pressure and lets the enjoyment come back naturally.

Almost done here.

I admit it that I'm late to the Destiny 2 party, but honestly that might be the best part.

I'm thoroughly loving every single morsel of the content the game has to offer.

Instead of rushing through it, take my time exploring everything and appreciating just how much time there is experience.

And he says like you know, join the community is amazing.

Random fire teams and all that stuff.

It's about connecting with friends.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, look, I get get what he's getting at.

I don't think though it's helpful because I'm almost getting the impression like some people think like if you go through content too fast, that's bad.

Almost like we want a time gate and I don't think that should be true at all, especially for a life service game.

Obviously life service games are meant to be played more for people and if you don't like that, then you try a game more like a single player game.

But of course it's true that investors just want to find the cheapest way to do these things.

So it's not so much how much content, we should still have a lot of content and things come out more often.

It's just they're doing it in bad ways.

Look, I mean there's two things to be a life service game that you have to have to stay healthy.

You do have to have new content from time to time.

And so you definitely don't want to have a situation where like, oh no, it's coming out too quickly.

Like you know the, the seasonal model once every three months.

And it'd be nice to have a lot of content when a season comes out, not just a little bit of content.

Right.

Destiny's been having the opposite problem for year after year.

Keep less, less, less.

At some point it's not going to be a live service game anymore.

And then also a lot of games do this well, like Division and Diablo where they have the main story seasonal stuff that 90% of people can finish.

Even if you're not a hardcore player, but you still want to have other stuff in there that the grinders like and there's nothing wrong with that.

So in Diablo you're going for the Mythics, you're going for the uniques, things like that.

In Division you're going for these new weapon types and stuff and you know it.

There are ways where you can have kind of both models where people that aren't try hards enjoy it and the other don't too.

So I, I, I like the point, but I just want to make sure we're not thinking like we should be having less stuff or people are playing too fast.

It's okay to play at whatever speed you like.

And you know, if for people that have less time, they'll enjoy the story part and the people that have more time, they enjoy the super grindy part

way England,

it's hard to say because like a lot of the, like what he said with the, the new live service games, a lot of them are trying to make money instead of being good, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, yeah.

When you look at the, the DC Live service, the Justice League, Suicide Squad 1, yep, it was, the gameplay was fun, the story was not and the End game was not.

But.

And you can't have your gameplay.

Gameplay can be fun, but everything else can't be fun.

That's not.

That doesn't make a good game.

Yeah.

And that's the only live service game that I remember coming out of recent.

Yeah.

The.

The one thing I hate, because I'm playing several games at once now, which is unheard of for me.

I mean, I only play Destiny used to be my motto.

I think Marathon is doing this.