Allcraft with Bellular! MMOs in 2021

for five years we've waited for this episode of all craft for five years and if you told me five years ago that we would be having bellular on and we wouldn't only be talking about world of warcraft but we would also be talking about final fantasy 14 well i i would say the chances of that are about as high as me going bald but hey look time happens and things change and i could not be more excited to talk to bellar about everything that's going on this is one of the best times to finally have this episode because belle it's pretty obvious that the world of mmorpgs is going to be changed forever with all of the new games that are coming out and everything that we see players doing yeah i i waited so long it's now a final fantasy stream yes or maybe that was the giga brain plan all along yeah we originally wanted to come on back whenever this was a wow stream you know back like years ago you know it was a long time ago oh man this is it's like such a watershed moment like just man like waking up and seeing like pc gamer polygon and kotaku are are doing their [ __ ] and just seeing like wait what 4chan's agreeing with polygon what what is this clown universe what universe is it yeah it's a little bit crazy have you seen the google trends by the way of the final fantasy stuff versus uh world of warcraft oh yeah yoshida's been he's been sneaking up oh my god they've they've taken us right it they we have been taken we we have been taken and it's incredible to imagine that honestly because like wow has been it's been the dominant mmo ever since 2000 ever since the day basically it came out it's been the dominant mmo and that's really only changed and it it's really kind of hard to say whether it's changed or not because like the numbers are all very unknown but there's a lot more enthusiasm for final fantasy i think that everybody can agree with that yeah blizz have lost the narrative like it it's as simple as that and it's it's so weird because like traditionally you think of you do think like the the big japanese companies and like their you know efforts in western communications and pr and typically speaking they have not been as like hip to it or whatever absolutely so it's so [ __ ] funny seeing like the company that did gas like games as a service first like doing live services managing to lose their own like ah they've lost i mean they've lost to the home field right and it's so [ __ ] sad oh man yeah i mean there are so many different places even with what was just said there are so many different places to start but i i think one of the best places for us to start our trek right now that's going to be this episode is to dive in with something that you said belle in one of your recent videos i believe it was in the video i believe it was in the video that was titled no no king uh rules forever i believe that was what it was called i'm not 100 sure but yeah uh the idea that you had was playing final fantasy right now uh besides pvp because pvp is not there but the game itself feels like a complete game and when you play modern wow you do not get that same feeling when you were talking about that idea what really were you looking at in final fantasy what do you think makes it feel like a more complete game than 9.1 so well if you're going to go for 9.1 specifically i think it is about seeing the hand of the designer where it is just quite transparent in world of warcraft so like that's that's one thing system design can be quite blunt uh in wow and overtly gamey in a way that kind of pulls you out of the world and like it's not to say that ff is perfect and i'm not even in enough of a position of authority to like to perfectly talk in the issue it's just that thing when you fully when you fully look over it and you play it when i say it feels like a more complete game i think it's just it's quantity of content they perhaps don't have as down as they would like um like i'm pretty sure yoship has talked about like kind of wishing there was a you know a wow sized budget in his hands yeah um but the thing with the thing with wow is like it just feels fragmentary you know like if you're a pvper i mean god help you right like the thing that i'm interested in when it comes to pvp yeah it's like i want some ubgs yeah you hope that like every expansion you get one thing it's like please give me one thing this expansion it's awful well literally in your video you're like hey look um obviously if you sub right now you're not gonna be able to play everything in the sub because it's time gated but if you wait a little while to sub maybe you'll get a month out of all the content that's going to be there and then i watch asman stream and i'm playing final fantasy and you're playing final fantasy and asman's doing completely different things than i'm doing when i play final fantasy like he's wiping and i'm learning about uh the story you know and when i talk to you you're doing completely different things as well and i think that that's where a lot of that completeness comes from and i'm curious belle if you feel like one of the reasons that happens is because final fantasy does such a good job at actually making the old content still feel very valuable and feel like it is legitimate content not something that you're just kind of like looking through rose tinted goggles trying to make an old like a new rule set to make it feel like it's actually a challenge so what you're saying is that roulettes that involve scaling down should be a weekend only event and fairly useful to anybody that it's that thing like my first dungeon i was doing you know i like called out to the fc and bam a whole bunch of people came in it just made sense right so yeah like time walking is a whole kettle of fish that absolutely it does my head in because there is so much potential like if they just did a mythic time walking uh you know so that there was like a level of difficulty typically was there yeah they have to tune it differently yeah yeah so they could fix up the shooting [ __ ] like i would hope so easily enough and uh i mean man just think about the rewards like it's it's it's pretty damn obvious what they could do there and then if you really wanted to go into that you could build it around more content the caverns of time which would appeal like to a bunch of historical players i mean come on we all we all saw out the back of the tb uh tbc box and kind of you know got a little gamer hard on like oh [ __ ] hell the caverns of time that's the coolest [ __ ] ever yeah um so yeah it's just that thing like in in ff they have they have invested in like the systems and stuff to uh just to make that all work such that just that ability to play with your friends is so much more there i think that she used to be so much more open and flexible and then in wow it's like their equivalent of you know you mentioned that like their equivalent of that is just time walking weekend they get to a bit of normal mode like normal raid gear i'm like man is that it why does it feel like blizzard is cash-strapped what's going on yeah it's like they've only got like they've got a small budget it's a small it's a multi-dollar company and you know they don't have as much resources as everybody else and so you know it takes them nine months to do something that these other development studios can do very quickly right and i understand the scope of wow is so big but i think blizzard's engineered these problems for themselves so whenever they want to make a change in the game they've got to balance it across like a dozen different verticals you've got pvp pve conduits covenants talents and like all of these other things and it's like of course it takes them forever to do anything because how could anybody ever possibly test all that and then whenever the testing actually gets done and it comes out it's not ready because how could it ever possibly be ready it's crazy it's like they've created the problem themselves it's something that happens in so many levels because it's like well i don't know much about the ff-14 engine i know it has issues and it's very much not perfect but it seems like there is something going on with production issues at blizzard like i don't know what challenges they face there but certainly if you're using a non-pro like a not off-the-shelf engine then when people are on board with that team it's going to be a bit harder to onboard them maybe you're going to as an example like well in terms like your staff recruitment and stuff uh you're going to be prioritizing people within engine experience because they can get uh you know they can get up to speed a bit quicker i wonder like does that end up prioritizing you know sort of hiring from within the company like i don't know exactly what's going on but there's there's some stuff to be concerned about there on the systems it's like yeah they like covenants basically an impossible design goal and like they kept on saying with confidence like oh you know if there's a specific issue with a confident or something like that we'll balance it later and it's like no you won't we never you really won't yeah i'm a hunter right we just got ten percent uh basically 10 buffs this reset now hunters from what i understand are doing really good in pvp already so now it's like okay we're balanced up a bit more in pve that's not thrown off pvp and then the layers and layers and layers of systems that it's like you look at a domination shirt you're like dude what does this do how's this fun how is this interactive what is is this just a more complex way to uh you know to give me the same amount of power that i get every single tier in which case why are we like why are we designing oh what was it called rat race rat escape you know that like a board game you'd play uh oh yeah yeah yeah what was it called crap mouse truck yeah yeah yeah it's like why is every new like system and thing like a version of mousetrap that sits on top of the other versions of mousetrap that they've done it's like it's so complex i don't get it like it reminds me the thing is people people are mentioning poe in the chat and you you know the thing that i'll say about poe having these more and more complex systems building on top of each other is the game actually has a vision the thing that i feel like with wow that is so absurd is it's so even without knowing what's actually going on behind the veil you know we can't really pull back that curtain and see what the wizard's up to but it seems like he's smoking meth and it seems like there are two very different visions going on at blizzard the the idea is hey let's spike engagement as much as we can around expansions that's where we make our money then we shove a six-month cool mount down their throat to boost the numbers as much as we can and we just don't give them any content ever hahahahaha look at my helicopter but the thing is is it seems like they would be able to spike that engagement around patches so much more if there was actually like this clear idea of something to get the players back whether it's tier sets i mean that used to be the thing that would get me back i would see a cool looking tier set and i'd be like i need to have it i'm going to come back but now they're throwing in these weird systems like shards of dominance you know what it reminds me of it reminds me of it's like you know the the the the engineers at twitter and it's like every six months we gotta have to deal with a new way out of twitter yeah it's like they have to have a reason for twitter to continue to have them employed and so they just create a new problem every six months for them to solve and it feels kind of that way with wow where it's like okay it's a new tier well the systems designers need a reason for blizzard not to fire them so we have this new chains of domination system or shards of domination system that most people don't understand how it works it seems completely unnecessary but here it is anyway and that's kind of the way that it feels like it feels like they're adding these things into the game for really no reason and i think that whenever they've moved to simplicity i think one of the positive things about uh about shadowlands is the fact that they made gearing and pvp much more simple and oftentimes i think blizzard's efforts towards simplicity's sake and not having the unnecessary complexities has actually been met with a lot of positivity and so it's weird that they just continue trying to add in more systems but what it seems like to me is that it's kind of like an element of like not understanding the way that people think because they just want to make it more complex to give people more content and they don't have the intuition to understand that sometimes less is more i think intuition's a big thing like it's it's hard to speculate as to like why it goes down like this a bit of me though does think that you've got a problem right and you throw a system designer at it it's like you know a hammer is going to see a nail yes that it's the it's just the way that you know they'll operate and i think i i think it's likely some sort of institutional thing like i i i genuinely don't think they go ah okay we won't give them tear sets we'll give them shards of domination and we'll deposit them slowly and slowly and slowly and give you little bits of gear here and there just to string the players along like i don't think that's why they do it you know what i think i think that it actually is them genuinely trying but not getting it i agree with you but i would go a step further i think you have a company where people are scared and they're doing anything that they can to try to keep their job security so when you have a system you sit around in a room everybody's in a circle everybody's voting everybody votes for everybody's uh everybody's idea and then tries to get the rewards attached to their system to boost the player number so they look like a good systems designer and the thing that i want to say to all of those employees who are so desperate for that job security if you want to feel security you should download nordvpn because that is the greatest feeling of security that you will ever feel i do not care if you are a blizzard designer or if you are just watching the show right now you can go download nordvpn uh the mods can spam the link in the chat and when you go there you can either use code all craft or code bellular uh just be sure to to support the people on this show and uh yeah i really think that's what the blizzard designers are going through right now i i i wish it was just that easy i wish it was just as easy as downloading nordvpn and using code belly where it cos called all craft because that is so easy to do and if it was that easy world of warcraft would have been fixed years ago yeah and by being able to choose from their 4 000 plus servers anywhere in the world and of course they're panama registered companies so their country can't get them to steal their game design it's the obvious choice who would want to steal that game design right now yeah i i wonder about that i really do i mean we see all these new games we see all these new games coming out there's ashes of creation coming out uh and there's new world coming out there's final fantasy that's trying to not really even reinvent itself but just continuously you know put out the same content and even you see people playing old school runescape too and it does seem like there's much more of like there's many more options because i think for many years wow was like if you wanted to play an mmo you were pretty much stuck playing wow or whatever the flavor of the month pump and dump game was going to be where it was going to be aeon terra whatever like all these games were pretty much dog [ __ ] you know archeage and then it was over and i think now that you actually do have some competitors with staying power it's actually shown how much people don't want to deal with a lot of the i think it's like failure what you said with like you can see the the hand right you can see you know the guy behind the wizard behind wizard of oz you know you can see the the man behind the machine and after that you can't see the machine in the same way anymore and you look at these systems and it's like it's very clear i think the worst the most egregious example of this was the corruption vendor on the rotation how is it that the rotation is a little bit more than a month did we just get smarter than kidding me we just get smarter because the question i have like very much playing well back in the day it felt like the first time you go to disney world right you're like holy crap this place is actually magic this is real wow look at tinkerbell she's flying and then you come back you're a little bit older and you can see all the strings you you can just see all the scaffolding you understand how the world works better did we get smarter or did they get worse or do you think it's a combination of the two both both the game is smaller it's like you used to go in there you're in main street usa and you're like oh [ __ ] look at all of these realms i can go to and all the little bits of disney but now i i know this is probably a controversial thing what i do think is um there's just a big conveyor belt on main street usa which i think is or is it magic kingdom whatever the first bit of disney and uh street usa a lot of a lot of that like other stuff that you do between your raid logging is not really supported as much like reputations since warlords of draenor world quest counters yeah what dude i oh i lose my [ __ ] marbles every time uh world quest comes up or what's going to come up because i mean the way that they're done they're deposited by an algorithm or just some [ __ ] like that they don't really relate to each other and that means that like okay when you're playing a game it's super [ __ ] important and this is like what gets all the poe people and all of that [ __ ] you get into a state of flow and the problem with world quests is it's weird because the random nature you would think that would make them you know more interesting and more varied they're random distribution but the same content so you don't really get as much of a mastery pattern over them is which is like kind of one thing um they're not that thematic not super thematic i think and you know patch 5.1 right you do your dailies you hit a new reputation threshold you get a story quest you've pushed uh you're going in more of a journey with that faction the wild hunt i mean what's going on with the wild hunt like i i get to a new reputation that it's less of an rpg and i think what has basically happened you get your box you you are on books yeah there can be a happy fun box oh boy but that's the thing like i mean even the be saying full of loot it reminds me of like i think it was the ian preach interview when they they were talking about the mage tower right yeah and they were basically saying that we had all these cool rewards and we needed a way to give them to the player so we made the mage tower and like if you go back to it is the most ass backwards way uh to make a game i mean if you want to completely just create the um like the over justification effects and stuff like that yeah design rewards first um obviously people have been wanting a mage tower for for ages so the reward bit doesn't matter figure that out later focus on the content that people want and but as for the reps they basically used to feel like their own distinct little bits of content now not all of them were great sure whatever but they were their own distinct little things interspersed you know across a patch such that it's patch 5.3 you're doing a bit of you know some stuff in the barrens it's not the most hype ever but hey order the cloud serpent there's 20 days of gameplay in that so off you go and you do that and it feels like a separate side activity and it's a separate side activity that will feel different to going back and doing you know another rep whereas now they're entirely homogenized into one system and they all feel the same i mean world quest two at blizzcon they're a bit longer now well the world the 2.0 is that multiplier on the time it takes that's that's what it is and so what they did like i loved legion world quest straight up like you could go in there it was like kill ten pirates i said okay i can do that i round up ten pirates i press my one ability and based off of the hours and hours and hours i spent wiping on mythic botanist at one in the morning i was able to one shot the entire thing and i do the entire world quest in one poll i'm done and i move on to the next one and that felt good and now it's like all this like there's like a three-phase world quest to get two anima globes who the [ __ ] wants to do that do you want to play flappy bird in the year of our lords 2021 to be honest with you i think that's one of the better ones but that's one of the ones that i like it's not it would be if it worked properly okay you can go into the spike your knee can hit the spike and you still don't lose and then other times the tip of your wing hits the top and you're dead it's crazy man yeah i don't know what to do about that man it's just it's so crazy it's awful it's we uh so bellular and i were talking about this a whole bunch before we even went live and it was just like the the idea of blizzard used to be polish right like that was what you expected when you walked into a blizzard game do we feel like the polish polish has really been lost and if so why i don't want to dive too deep into it but we could talk about all the conspiracy theories that have been floating around uh on the internet over the past couple of weeks about what's really going on behind the scenes like uh the only thing that i'm sure about from those conspiracy theories with like blizzard leaks and what blizzard employees think the only thing that i'm actually sure about is the fact that asthma gold is an [ __ ] that's the only one i'm sure about everything else you know it could all be [ __ ] we have to take it with a grain of salt but what do we think is going on that's that's causing these these feelings of polish to not really be there anymore i think that it's just this simple i think they don't know how to make a game that feels rewarding it is literally that simple because how many times have they gone up i think ian has gone up and tried to explain to us why we should be having fun that should never happen it's like they're explaining like oh well it's not that big of a deal because it'll work out in averages like they're using statistics to justify the way that people feel or to invalidate the way that people feel and that's just not the way you design a game you know one thing that ian's always been good at though if that was the way you designed the game none of the gambling websites would ever work ian's always been a good encounter designer though and i do feel like encountering mine is the one thing that doesn't completely like art and encounter design tend to stay pretty decent and well they're amazing i have to wonder if that's because they're like quite production friendly and like there's there's definitely going to be plenty of you know unknown unknowns as you're like doing encounters but they have that [ __ ] down um for the lack of polish i think it's because well what happens when you make something that's hard to polish it's going to be harder to polish like it's one like it maybe it feels like a little bit close to the bone for me like we burnt through a we burnt through too much money on basically an overly ambitious systems driven game that required a bunch of systems to be right for the overall loop to make sense we did a whole bunch of [ __ ] ass backwards and it was that thing the design that we went for was fundamentally way harder to get right than the other thing that we're doing now and i think when you look at world of warcraft you see a whole bunch of that um they just go for these ambitious i call them schlieffen plans uh for like the history nerds out there uh there's this dude like whatever anyway it was this like plan right it was like hey this is the most banging plan we do this plan right it's going to be a total winner but it was a plan for victory you don't make a plan for victory right so you know the likes of the covenant system if it's perfectly balanced there's zero player power concerns no player friction everyone gets an incredible you know incredible everything then sure it's great i definitely it's the chance of that happening i i see the schlieffen plan for sure i've been schlieffen while alone get it oh that's good dude that's good okay good job rich i'm proud of you thanks really great thank you look i i agree with that i think that yeah oftentimes it's designed in a way that players will not abuse it and like corruptions is another example right how they have to nerf like twilight devastation in arena by like this massive amount it was like 50 on week one like how did you not expect that to happen and there's just so many cases where it seems like testing and planning for the game has just like really not happened and whenever that happens so often and then you have like these massive overreactions where they take something like echoing void or whatever it was and they just nerf it by half and they make it completely garbage those kinds of things i think are really frustrating for players because people are trying to figure these things out and then they spend tons of gold on them and then they get changed completely because blizzard decided not to test them properly beforehand and anybody could have seen these things happening because they became evident on the first day of the patch and i think these same things happen with covenants too whenever you see boys are talking about oh well players are going to pick the one that they want to play with you know based off of like lore or whatever and the reality is the breakdowns are it's like 90 of people 95 percent of people don't pick one covenant like there's one covenant that like only five or three percent of people pick for some classes and specs that's crazy yeah but people came back in the past right shadowlands best-selling pc game of all time for a few days until whatever that other game was that but i think it is a sort of thing where it's the the incumbent has got their advantage but also the blindness that comes with that and i i think that they've they've been more okay maybe it's just that their their tolerance for what is shippable has maybe decreased a bit but i think this is the big but their tolerance for that is decreased but also their focus on gameplay-oriented content where those things have got to be right early has increased so you know if we think about like let's just say how i play the game in mr pandaria or maybe in wrath of the lich king or something like that if something was busted as [ __ ] like it didn't really matter to me because there was a bunch of other stuff to do it was like early enough on in the game's life that you know getting him out was still an exciting thing and you know a goal to work towards so as that stuff has melted away and the three pillars of mythic plus raid and pvp have taken over well if more of your game's relying on those pillars and those pillars require that level of polish imbalance and then you start to make a game that is fundamentally harder to polish and balance because you've created multiplicative complexity then yeah you've just kind of built a you've built your own prison and i have a worry that they have an institutional focus on those kind of game systems perhaps learning the wrong lessons from legion or something like that to the point where they can't see the forest for the trees i mean essentially i i think everything that you said you know it rings true with everybody in chat i i do want to bring up something though where you almost can't blame him i'm going to sound like hassan here but the system kind of seems like it's the problem because these guys are making more money on just shipping expansions locking people into their six-month uh their their six-month subscriptions and selling them out then they probably have been before like shadowlands did great the expansion is terrible it's not gonna come to play to be fair no i think shadowlands honestly if they had released 9.1 when 9.1 should have been released i think half of the complaints and frustration about the game would be gone but they're not incentivized dude they're incentivized to do it every six months right that's very true and that's why they as soon as they bring out a patch that's whenever they bring out that cool new looking mount that's like this [ __ ] articuno thing and meanwhile the game gets like four different versions of the same mount which admittedly does look cool but it's still frustrating whenever you can see obviously so much more effort went into the store mounts yeah that's what i've got oh god yeah go no go ahead what i've ever seen i've got to bring it back to our very first stream ever during worlds of draenor right that three-way discussion we had with that yeah so you're uh you could make a reputation like the order of for some reason i talk about mountain reps but whatever you could make a reputation around the drakorium in uh in shadow moon valley right yeah and you know your players could get 25 days of reasons to log into the game and do things which warlords of draenor sorely need it yes you could do that or in the 5.4 content route you could add the fae dragon to the in-game store and make a lot more money and i'm not necessarily saying that they choose not to develop in-game content around some rewards like mounts so that they can put them in the store but i mean you look at those incentives like the thing that would have been the most healthy for the game is the dracorium turns into a reputation you get the dragon mount in game that obviously didn't happen look at the silverian dreamer players and i think that whenever you get a point where the game developer is rationalizing game design decisions and things like that by business and saying like well this is better for business so the game is worse players don't give a [ __ ] about their business it doesn't matter players want to have fun they want to enjoy the game yeah like i i don't think that it's necessarily the game designers making those decisions though uh because when you actually look at what's happening might be right this model is the exact same like because look i think the game designers are bad i don't think that they're very smart in the current like with what's going on right now i don't think that their mastermind is trying to extend player numbers i think that they're making mistakes for other reasons so i don't want to kind of give almost credit to them for the the mistakes being bad being like an evil super genius plan i think when you look at the model that blizzard's trying to do right now i look at that model and it's literally call of duty call of duty sells its title every year you have that clock and then now i think they try to come out with battle passes as well it's not a new model and i've always in the past i felt like a lot of conversations like this were very much tinfoil hat but it just seems very obvious especially with the six-month rotation that they put on the extensions that they put on in corruption so you wouldn't be able to do it in time it seems very clear that they're just trying to boost those numbers and sell copies so i think the issues in game design that lies in the camp of the game designers whether you think that they're incredible at their job or you don't think they're doing a good job right now i think that a lot of the financial models i think it's coming from somewhere else and that pressure might be affecting game design slightly but i think it's two different decisions being made yeah on the financial stuff it's like what gets measured gets managed and if you have a bunch of people who are working on that stuff and they're producing incredible returns by coming up with things like the six-month mount yeah that's going to be great you're going to put more resources into that for the game design thing it's like i totally see how you know you're a game designer you're looking at the corruption stuff and you know that certain things are best for certain situations you are going to think to yourself okay well if we just give the players all this [ __ ] at once they're gonna go straight for the thing they like the most and then they will disengage with the system and then the system won't matter anymore and they won't give a [ __ ] about the currency that they're getting like i can totally see how you know you could you could totally miss the point and rationalize it that way and i mean that's i think what you mean when you say you know game designer problem or a player problem like that's a a philosophical designer problem and it's that sort of thing where you can have a very water watertight internally logically consistent uh design philosophy but like yeah it's like it might not be fun you know you could have a perfectly constructed car or something makes complete sense it's not fun to drive yeah there's no certain person i think no i think you're right it's basically where they are they're solving problems that game designers see with the game and that players don't see with the game and i think like for example i watched like a uh it was some like seminar or something like that whenever a guy was talking about the problems they had with rather the lich king where there was a bunch of different uh currencies in the game and this was like this big issue that they needed to solve this was really not an issue to players i think most players didn't really care about this this was something that game designers identified and thought that it was a problem because they're looking at it through the lens of being game designers rather than being players and i think that's really where a lot of the things happen is that game designers think this is a good idea because they're not actively interfacing with the content they're not actively playing these games and there are some things like that and i will say it i think that a lot of them don't [ __ ] play the game and i think that eve if they do play the game it is in a way that is so removed from what the average population does that they have no idea what the average population's pain points even are like you don't even know when i went to game design school the they teach you two things very early on the first thing that they tell you is they go you're making a terrible mistake please do anything else then the second thing that they teach you is they go hey when you look at the player they're an agent of chaos you do not know what they are going to do make a system that allows for emergent gameplay like that is what you're supposed to do and with wow i always feel like recently not always but it always feels like the developers act like they know exactly how the player is going to play the game and the game is designed with that in mind this fake player that doesn't actually exist and they're assuming what our moment-to-moment decisions are going to be where when you look at final fantasy and this is one of the reasons that i've been so positive about final fantasy there is a world there there's a bunch of [ __ ] to do and if you play triple triad all day that's fine if you go and you go and you do the raids if you do it with mid-eye level if you do it synced if you do it with echo no matter what you're gonna feel like you accomplished something if you just sit there and play the story by yourself it's a fulfilling experience with wow if you go off the rails it feels like you just jumped off of a roller coaster and you were free-falling but it's not it's not designed for that kind of stuff right like wow isn't designed for the same type of gameplay that like let's say i do like i'll give you an example okay and bellevuer i know that you probably do not subject yourself to the same level of degeneracy the transmog farming that i do but let me explain to you the way that shadowlands rares drop transmog items so the way that these shadowlands rares drop transmog items is that those transmog items are only available on the loot table if you are killing that rare on the class that could obtain that item naturally and have it be an upgrade for that character that they are playing on knowing full well the players play the game for transmog people love transmog and what do you have to do you have to go over and if i want to get all the different scythes from uh arden wheeled i have to go over on a special caster character and kill them on that caster character and this is the exact same [ __ ] system that it was i believe in the 8.3 rares as well so if i wanted to go and farm out the dagger from the uh the oldham rares i would have to go and do it on either a rogue or a caster that could equip daggers and this is insane like why is this even happening and i recently got done with do you get remember remember the chess back in legion in like the different argus zones oh yeah okay so uh in each chest there is a possibility that it can drop a purple item that is a transmog set and the entire thing is a just a re-skin of the uh the words draenor shatari sky guard uh reputation and so i got all three of those sets and it took me probably collectively 100 hours some of these things that you have to do some of the goals that blizzard has for players to work towards in the game are just so monumentally ridiculous that it's just not even fun to progress in them because even whenever you complete it you feel like an idiot because you know you just wasted 100 hours yeah it's because that's not content like i i would contend that that's not content it's like i think about corthia you know some of the stuff people do with rares and in my head corthy is like a bunch of seasoning but no meat in that i i feel like there should be a lot you know a lot more there and you know if you want to get that stuff from content i mean you could develop a wrap around it you could develop some sort of various things like they've done in the past you know of course they could do new things as well there was one thing that interested me though because that gds i think it was gdc and was the talk about the over justification effect do you feel that for mounts in what way well i mean is they keep they've kept on rewarding you with mounts for so many years now are you still excited about getting new mounts i mean like it depends on the amount but like overall not not as much as i used to be right i mean like getting your first like 50 or 100 mountains is way a bigger deal than getting your 500th now and this is a problem like i generally think it's a problem with the game in general because in wow's reward structure there's just so much bloat like whenever you only had ashes of a lar ashes of war was [ __ ] awesome but now whenever you have invincible the pureblood fire hawk and eight different storm amounts that look better and then there's also the purple version from the cataclysm guild vendor and there's 15 other versions of the mount too that look way cooler your ash's vlar is comparatively not as special because you're not as unique anymore and i do think that there's a point of diminishing returns and a point where people don't feel as special and they don't stand out as much because everybody stands out and everybody is special because there are so many things that are super easily available now i would love if blizzard i know that this is like one positive thing that they've done is that they've added these you know like these back uh pieces instead of cloaks you and like that's really cool because that's a brand new thing but there are some problems with that as many of the back pieces are not unique or special there's just four different versions of them and one of them you get from a rare the other one you get from completing mythic plus 20 or something like that i mean i don't think that's what it is but it's like something similar and like the the difficulty level of obtaining the different skins is widely varied to the point where it doesn't feel like an accomplishment whenever you get one of these or you see one that has the cool skin or the cool color because you see the same other colors all the time and i would have loved to see blizzard with bfa this is like my dream was that if bfa had done some sort of like ship expansion where you could actually go out on an island expedition and you could augment your ship you could change your ship or what if they had a mount you know like in in the witcher whenever you could ride around with like the griffin head or something like that what if that was a nixia's held and you could like have these like base mounts like a base horse or a base wolf and you could augment these mounts based off of different achievements or accomplishments you have like that would be so cool and they don't really innovate or change the rewards they just add more and more and more of them because you're right there is a diminishing return because everybody already has their favorite mount everybody already has their favorite pet their favorite title etc and there's so many in the game that the ones that exist are very few and far between that are special because many people don't even know what they are everything that you said i agree 100 with everything that you said but i think another thing that's missing beyond the saturation which is really evident for me after playing final fantasy this there there isn't a good way to display your rewards anymore either the saturation is still a problem right even if there was a way to display it saturation would still be a problem but with the way that world of warcraft feels right now there aren't as many shared spaces where you know you're not looking at the same mailboxes where you see somebody on that the ashes of alar like you used to like people aren't congregated in local areas and i actually used to be against player housing before i played final fantasy and before i played some other games with player housing because i was like wait this is just going to take players further away from each other like old school stormwind old school ironforge that was really what i looked at as peak shared space where you could see people showing off not only their mounts but also their gear and you're like that guy right there if he was in front of me right now i'd suck his dick and then i would ask him how the [ __ ] he did that and i'd let him coach me you know uh and now you don't really have that well and i think that shared space and having good displayability on rewards is really important and in final fantasy you know you walk into a city and there are a bunch of people dancing and they got their t weapons on and i'm like that guy right there is good at the game that is cool uh sorry they're usually a viera so i say that girl right there is good at the game that guy that girl right there if she got bunny ears she got their bunny ears as a girl okay sure don't don't shatter this for him yeah i'll do my best i love this game i don't know why so many more girls play final fantasy in a while like and while it's you know a lot of guys play well but final fantasy majority of the player base is female because you could play way hotter characters man like they're so hot so you think that makes girls want to play the game more yeah of course like look at the look at the what do guys want to play they want to play a guy that looks like he's ready to have a a bare knuckle boxing match with a silverback gorilla okay they don't want to pay play some you know balding middle-aged man with a beer belly who wants to do that no they want to play somebody that looks awesome man they want to play like a short cute badass with like a big weapon they want to be lala pilled yeah i don't know about that yeah i'm not i'm not sure about that maybe i'm just speaking for myself but that's part of the potato gang i'm from ireland lapels look a bit different [Laughter] i i don't know all the way [ __ ] you guys there you go there you go absolutely that's very very true i totally agree with that but yeah i mean i think that like with many people like that i think example this is the uh uh what do you call it the solo queue with solo q i think that that's like a symptom and not really the disease i think the reason why people need solo queue and the reason why people want solo queue is because there is no shared space for pvpers to interact with each other you guys remember back in mists of pandaria when everybody would be sitting on the wall people would be dueling and they would do each other and then you'd do a priest and he'd mind control you off the edge or some [ __ ] and that's just where pvpers would congregate and i think it's the same thing with a lot of the other zones in uh in previous expansions like ironforge back in like vanilla wow and outside of stormland in like cataclysm and you always had this place that pvpers would go to and see each other and interact with each other and that was their queuing system is they would duel each other and be like oh this guy beat the [ __ ] out of me i wonder if he'll play with me and that's the way i saw tons of people back in the day like you used to see all of the old like oh a lot of the legends you see on twitch right like mitch jones athene swifty you'd see them outside of stormwind just dueling people and that was so cool and now you don't have that shared space anymore because of sharding like i went over to uh to stormland and there's like five people in the city how does that happen in an mmo it's crazy i feel like sharding is i get why they do it i totally do but it's it's dangerous dude because it's it's like i mean you think about like imagine say uh just fight actually guild wars 2 does have a bunch of in-zone events and also loads of sharding but and i guess then it's you can't even do things are horde versus alliance because server pops are so screwed so i totally emphasize it with with blizzard in that one but like you know if you want corthia to be corthia like on your server and there is no sharding the the design space there and what you can do it just is so much larger right um so that's like a large thing and generally it's even like the thing about the mounts the example from earlier yeah engineering is i think a challenge with blizzard because it's an old engine and they have done a [ __ ] marvelous job of keeping you know bits of it up to date like wow feels great to play when it's working but yeah you want to put nixie's head in the side of your mount that's hard that's actually yeah deceptively hard to implement especially i mean okay i can think about how we could implement that fairly easily but with a few issues in like unity or unreal or something but uh i don't know what the wow engine's like right so engines literally they added an extra row to the backpack an extra row of what four four slots and the entire game crashed for like a month straight after they did that you can't tell me that that's not a coincidence that's this this uh that that is a coincidence rather like that is spaghetti code to its core they changed the backpack which you know has been coded into the game since the very beginning of time and everything was [ __ ] after that yeah so it's the beginning of the end they've they've got those problems but then i mean see when you're doing [ __ ] with making making a new model is expensive making a new rig is really expensive new animation sets really [ __ ] expensive you then start i mean you guys should see how much money it costs to do um it's a company i've been like doing a little bit of like working around with i can't say too much but they um you know they were pricing out like we're going through spreadsheet and stuff they were pricing out the cost of doing different character customizations on uh i guess a number of body plans for which you know you need a new version of that t-shirt a new version of you know whatever it is so [ __ ] expensive and then graphical fidelity keeps on going up and up and up yeah and the problem then is well you feel like oh [ __ ] we have now set the bar we've set the standard because the art team's [ __ ] awesome but oh wait [ __ ] it's really getting like it's getting more and more expensive to make things as stuff looks i mean goddamn look at that fish right so it's incredible it's it's this like combined thing of they i think have a bunch of engineering issues and i think they have a bunch of production pipeline issues like i can't say that for a fact but it feels like that considering that in the face of knowing they're going to be i don't know giving people their 700th mount soon enough they're still trying to give people more amounts instead of diversifying them and stuff man the the thing with the mounts but there's no the the biggest mount reward is 400 400 you basically get that by logging into the game like where is the 450 where is the 500 where is the 550 where is the 600 mount achievement that nobody can even get now except for one guy in russia who bought a bunch of gladiator accounts 10 years ago there's nobody else that has this but this one guy and everybody sees this dude and everybody is amazed that's the kind of stuff that i would love to see in the game i think that is so cool like where people are able to break through and like blizzard doesn't have those like aspirational achievements they're just really cool like they're so lazy with it man like what if think about this right what if they had the 550 mount 600 mount achievement mount was a golden chariot pulled by winged golden horses yeah but then if i didn't have it i would be sad so they can't put it in the game put that in the store then yeah they put in the story then i can just go get a job and pay for the game i do want to i agree with everything exactly that you're saying but yeah um i want to go back to the the server thing really quick because i actually think that this is th this is like the sad realization that i had i've said it quite a few times like i actually you know no fault to world of warcraft for having an old engine right the game has an old engine that's the reality of the situation it is a 17 year old game or whatever it is now but the thing is when people say we want a world of warcraft 2. we want an update to it we want a world of warcraft 2. i have always said we don't want a world of warcraft 2. it's going to be made by the same developers it's going to be even worse these devs making a world of warcraft 2 would be terrible what's the point of a new engine uh it's just you're going to make the same [ __ ] systems in hd when you look at final fantasy that game also has a terrible engine i love playing final fantasy right now that engine feels so bad but if there was a new final fantasy 14 on a new engine all of the systems that are being put in the game are so good that i would have faith that they would actually be able to utilize that engine and that dissonance between how i feel about a wow too and how i feel feel about final fantasy getting a new engine i think is the biggest indicator to me that there is something terrible going on at world of warcraft right now they changed the engine in final fantasy 14 from the original game into a realm reborn and that's actually a really good point and also like belgium i remember you said this in one of your videos you said that wow basically has been a while too and you said like yeah wow three right and it was like yeah like vanilla wild to wrath was like wow one cataclysm to warriors draenor was wow two and legion to now is wow three and i think that's true right because each of those expansions was a huge break point in quality and a huge break point in fidelity and just like everything in the game is massive and i i do think that's true but at a certain point i do think that wow is to a degree held back by its uh by its engine it must be because why is it why do we have so much lag in games where you have equivalent things happening and there isn't that lag why is it where the ashes of creation technical demo can run more people performing actions than a massively multi-billion dollar company after 20 years it's crazy good systems are good systems though like look i i mean bell i'm not sure if you play did you ever play dream quest because i'm pretty i'm pretty sure yeah okay so a game made by peter whalen it is one of the most janky looking unity games i've ever seen but you have all of these games which spun out out of it like uh like slay the spire and a lot of these these rogue-like uh kind of dungeon crawler deck builders they all come from that game like that is the pedigree that started the whole thing off peter whalen actually i'm not sure if he still does incredible game designer i'm pretty sure that he was on the hearthstone team i actually think he's one of the best game designers who as far as solo projects went incredible like literally five-head game developer that game was made in yeah this is the game look how janky that game actually looks now that that game was made in unity it is one of the ugliest things you will ever see i think he made it while he was at mit working on a combat commanderonics degree i can barely even say it my brain is so smooth but when you play that game the game is undeniably a good game you can still have good systems regardless of an engine the the problem right now with world of warcraft yes the engine is not ideal but the game itself the systems itself the rewards itself are flawed yeah this is the game this is one of my favorite games of all time by the way i i promise you if you played it you would literally be like wow dude this is pretty [ __ ] good dude they've just learned all the wrong lessons like yeah yeah you're dope [ __ ] you're you're right like they've been doing the same [ __ ] again and again we're getting a slightly different flavor of the same thing like i would love to know what their internal view of that's right is or something like that you uh you said in your video you were like 9.1 if you've liked wow recently you will like 9.1 because it's more of the same uh and yeah yeah [Music] but it's soup right it all just turns into some big broth and it's this that's just yeah they're doing fundamentally i think the same design goal what they're basically i think they have an idea that if they get one of these little systems right it will be like it was with say maybe you know maybe titan fortune comes out the first time in you know really goes ham and legion legion's got a bunch of content all the stuff's good it's novel so it all goes boom pop and they're like oh [ __ ] okay we're going to recapture that and then they've just continually iterated on the same thing and the same thing and the same thing and maybe they haven't understood that legion was a little bit of a shambles from a systems perspective but it didn't mind our players didn't mind too massively because i mean it was legion it was fun right like it was fun garbage yeah they'll give they'll forgive all kinds of garbage as long as the gameplay is good and the legion gameplay was [ __ ] good yeah that's it even like oh man the collection stuff it feels like we're just getting lower budget attempts to recapture the legion magic now i i do have a few theories there like i'm fairly sure that legion kind of entered pre-production like way early yeah well you know pre-production i mean like i'm actually quite sure that in mists of pandaria era they basically were making a choice between the two things that they could have done and a lot of legion design ideas were there um i mean i'm fairly like even if you think about like path of the titans there's like some similarities there to our artifact weapons and stuff so i feel like with legion they had a lot more lead time they also sacrificed a major patch so it didn't matter that you know your lego acquisition sucked in a bunch of issues like that there was just a [ __ ] load of content and a bunch of cool new [ __ ] to collect so people were happy um and then with bfa i think what happens is you get a bit of a changing of the card you know people leaving stuff like that and then some trying to recapture the magic and then you i mean i don't know the types of thinkers who think that warfronts are good ideas as implemented which is absolutely baffling like i don't think there's any way you could fundamentally say the warfronts were you know it's like they they were kind of i remember like very early in the beta when you actually could lose uh and this they were like a little bit of fun because they were like a weird like a weird challenge in beta but then by the time they come out you know sans the heroic ones they're just such a cakewalk that there's there's no gameplay there's no mastery loop the best you can do is try to speedrun the damn thing on that i think was a bit throttled we tried to lose the warfront once it took uh longer than it would take to win it like we had to sit there for like 20 minutes and if one player was out there fighting i'm pretty sure he could he could have taken on the horde all by himself man he could have done the whole thing all by himself that's how ridiculous it was and i had to like make everybody stand right there away from everything else it was just so ridiculous and it was so bad that whenever we actually lost it was very clear that like the losing screen was not even really programmed like it was like it wasn't really very well designed i think like the edges were just like messed up because they're just like oh and this is never going to happen anyway like you can't lose this who cares so we just don't need to worry about a losing screen and it's just it's crazy like i think that like the warfront stuff like i remember whenever warfronts were announced and i was more excited yeah i was more excited it was defeat yeah like there's no like reward or anything like that to it it's just like wow okay there it is and i felt like they just put warfronts was one of the things where they could have made them better and i think that like in blizzard's credit they are making tour guests better like i don't know if you guys have done tour gas at all in 9.1 but i genuinely think the tour gas to 9.1 is a massive step up in quality and depth and just game play in general from tour guests originally and it's in its best state that it's ever been in it's even better than the way that it was in alpha because an alpha would just get boring after 10 floors and the reality is that's awesome i'm so happy for that that's great but warfronts they didn't do that with at all and they just immediately just gave up on them they added another one and then that was it they never tried to fix them they never took feedback into consideration they just said oh you don't like it okay never mind yeah it's still shortcast though yeah you're going in for the wrong reason i really want to hear your take on this because i i know you you play a lot of roguelikes as well right very good played song yeah because i've heard you talk about them in your videos before but how the heck do you make a roguelike system that has no variance and expect it to feel right like that that's my biggest problem with tour guests as well i don't know if the change has somewhat made that feel better but every time i went into tour gas not only did it only feel like i was doing exactly what you just said that i feel like i was going in there to simply get the reward and leave but i also knew everything that was going to happen because the powers that you were taking the anime powers that you were taking they they pretty much always led to the same result you weren't creating like a clear-cut path through this dungeon to get through yeah the the way that so right it's a very fundamental thing with world of warcraft um one of the things that i think people like in classic and tbc is that it is so based on not so based but part of the combat model is that a lot of it is white damage and that can make like you know you have you know these times where you've got like such a a small amount of abilities and things you can do in your character but it makes it very clenchy because there is there's just some hits you got to take because it's white damage right um so you're really trying to squeeze as much as you can out of out of a relatively small pool of abilities now you have this situation in torgast where there's still a lot of white damage right now that there's white damage and then they increase the difficulty by scaling health and damage now this ends up creating i think and this must be something that like credit to them this is just like dead heart you know for a problem to solve where to do well you need to scale up in line with uh with the tour guest floors and the layers um in terms of what you pick and that's going to mean that you're really going to just want to pick the straight damage and health things as you're going unless you're one of the lucky classes that can have some sort of crazy busted build that is super fun so they have this weird little thing where oh i was saying like white diamonds and yellow damage so you know damage versus like all the way honestly it's just it's a systematic issue in the game uh so it's this weird thing where it's quite hard to challenge a player in world of warcraft with how their combat model works so doing a roguelite system within world of warcraft is fundamentally like quite challenging to do from a combat design perspective so that's like a fundamental issue like that's just an l that they kind of have to take um which you know they it must be doing their heads in right because they're they're certainly going to know that and i think you can just see some of the design issues they've ran into there um with the anime powers um now there are times and especially when things get super busted and like alpha beta but like when i'm playing tour guest i'm mostly thinking about my health and damage and not really super special tactics so that's how it is now if they had way way way way more in the way of animal powers and they were willing to let the animal powers just be busted and stupid fun because like you know you're playing binding of isaac right what's the run you remember it's the run where all of the stars aligned yep and you were busted for a while uh they don't have as many of those in tour guest there was a time where you could get this one buff and this one buff would if you destroyed a hundred pots it would make your slam do four thousand percent extra damage and then you could get five of these or four of these and you could get four of these buffs at the same time and then you could get another buff that made the target take like you know 200 extra damage if you did like a charge or heroic leap and you can get another buff that allowed you to do like a piercing howl that would make them take another 200 damage and these are all multiplicative and so i applied all of these and on like layer five or six of the twisting corridors the last boss i hit it for 13 million in one shot the [ __ ] yeah that was one of the coolest moments ever it was so awesome man well i still remember it the thing with roguelikes is what is the reward to roguelikes typically yes there are these these more like the the rogue legacy kind of the evolution of roguelikes where there is an overworld progression and all of that like yes that does exist now but the real reason you play a roguelike is for the gameplay and it creates that flow that bell mentioned at the very beginning of the episode when he was talking about poe you get into a game state flow where you're like okay i'm gonna go for this run again i think that i want to do this but i'm presented with different options and now i just went down a route that i didn't even expect to see before the game actually started and you are aiming for those memories like the one that you just mentioned asman and you want to have that feeling and i think that this just shows once again the when you look at tour gas it is the worst critical game play through that you could possibly have on what it means to be a roguelike genre it's just completely off base and that's why i don't have that much faith in the game really anytime soon improving is because if you can't play a roguelike and and understand what is so good about it and then put the blizzard polish on it then you're not blizzard anymore that was what blizzard was good at doing blizzard would look at a genre and say this is the reason why it's fun let's just make it better we're gonna put we're gonna put a bigger budget on it we're gonna make it feel even smoother and it is going to be the best of the genre that's what wow was that was what diablo was in a lot of ways and look that was what overwatch was too and over time i just feel like they've really lost their grip on it and they're not able to look at a genre understand why it's fun understand the gameplay loops create that game flow state and just do it with more polish and i think that's why blizzard gamer doesn't exist anymore it's a tricky one to apply because like let's just say you're making a roguelike right maybe you've got a dodge roll with iframes you can design that's a core part of your combat uh maybe you have a you know swing your sword to deflect a spell back there's all of those different things that tie into the intricate nature of you know a roguelike combat model the problem with world warcraft is they don't have those tools i mean sure like a mage can blink and stuff like that but you guys know what i mean like as you know generic just character movement and core character kit and i think that means that doing a roguelite's really hard for them and i'm not exactly sure what could fix this from a combat model perspective but it's just that sort of thing like you know you're you're going through maybe you've only got so much in terms of interrupts on your character and uh you know it's like yeah there's multiple interruptable abilities you kind of feel like you should interrupt all of them but you just don't have enough stuff in your character and then maybe right you you could interrupt something but this is something probably people had um if you know the one if it's one of the torments if you fall below 40 hp you are feared for three seconds or so i love that one that's cool so it's that sort of thing where you're trying to engage the game system but because of that torment and the fact that you are taking on all this unavoidable white damage which might take you below 40 that torment then robs you of your ability to engage with the game system and yeah you can just say yeah well don't you know don't go below 40 hp five hat and i think if this if it was in a game where there was more avoidable damage um via player skill or something like that and then you could say that button wow there's so much unavoidable damage that it basically just it makes a combat model really hard in my head tour gas would probably be better if it had fewer enemies it was less based on you know trash and stuff like that and it was more like sets of highly engaging mini bosses and environmental challenges because your core kit that works really well in world of warcraft is like you know your core class utility and movement so doubling down on that instead of you know a whole bunch of packs of mobs that each have a unique little way to dick you about but you know you don't always feel like you got the ideal tools and it doesn't feel intricately designed because they've got to make that gameplay work for every single spec in the game which is fundamentally hard and why some people have a far better time in tour gas than others depending what they they play so it's a bit weird again with torgast it's like did they set themselves up to fail i mean i know i was guilty of getting excited about the idea of torgast and you know we've all we all got our busted bills and alpha and bait and we're just kind of like oh my god this is so cool but uh you know maybe there were just fundamental design things there i mean certainly for me proficients were a bit more good in my opinion i don't think that the alpha was good either like i think the alpha was just fun at the very beginning because it was really hard and the choices that you made mattered but you would snowball so fast and then at that point you would just get to like it was like 72 fours or something you started at 25 and at 454 you were just running through spamming any ability that you have on your keyboard one-shotting everything on the screen it was actually the most boring thing ever and in my opinion i agree with you like there's so many trash mobs and so many other like just basically wastes of time that it's boring like that people want to see mage tower bosses in tour guest and like i went and i did the adam and vaults and i finally went up against the corrupted trash can itself the big purple thing and i killed it and it did like three different things i'm sorry but that's not good enough like you have to make a better boss especially like after i've been playing a lot of these final fantasy bosses that are just like super [ __ ] intricate like they're really intricate they've got a million different mechanics to them and they have different phase changes etc there's just nothing to it man like these bosses have like two or three abilities how is that like yeah and then it's that weird thing where you can get in these situations if you haven't got good animal powers so you haven't scaled in line with the floors you have a boss where it's not mechanically interesting but it just takes ages and because you haven't scaled as well you can die really easily and that's a situation that will just breed frustration it's kind of weird like there is definitely blame to put blizzard for this because you know they there they ultimately did ship it and like a back of the box feature has been kind of screwed for ages but at the same sort of i don't know the same or the other side of the coin or whatever is they probably thought it was a great idea in principle and i i think it was a good idea in principle but i i think like the cat was out of the bag it was a core feature they announced they kind of had to ship it and getting it right is just taking a long ass time and then it's the sort of thing did they green light that system really not being super aware or maybe not being able to intuit all of the design challenges that we know it has had since and then that makes you wonder if you're going to do some sort of risk analysis and whether you green light that feature versus doing something that's a bit more simple well could you just do the simple thing and that has a higher percentage chance of successing instead of all these schlieffen plans or schlieven plans for rich that's the thing like think about like this so you know like the subjugator guy in tour guest where like he puts the purple things and you hit the purple things they diminish like your power and you have to like use power that is so good that is such good design and the reality is that they actually already had mobs that were more engaging than a lot of stuff that we have in tour gas back in timeless aisle and the mobs those ordos mobs do you know why they were really engaging is because if you [ __ ] up one of the mechanics you were dead that was it like it would hit you for like 400k and most players had 300k it was insane and those kinds of mobs were great because they were engaging because you actually had to avoid the mechanics but usually the meta for tour gas does not uh it's not how do i avoid these mechanics it's how can i out gear this mechanic to where it just doesn't exist and it's basically like a good example of this is like it's a classic wow with world buffs if you watch any boss in classic wow with world buffs you're going to think that it's even easier than it already is like uh you know prophet scaram dies in 20 seconds he doesn't cast any arcane explosions nobody even gets them seed and they just auto attack him down and that's it of course that's not going to be fun to play regularly it's just crazy and i think the problem is some of it comes down to white damage again like you know those you had the shieldy boys at the first rise of the ordos area oh yeah yeah the shieldy boys with the frontal slam thing you had the the fire raining about the place they didn't rail you with white damage with auto attacks not as much and that would mean that on your fresh alt you could go and you could fight them being a bit under geared thought you could play around their mechanics and that was super satisfying especially as you then went through the timeless house gearing loop um whereas that just doesn't happen as as much now i mean take like you go to tour gas right and you see you know you see so many mobs that are just hard casting damage on you now imagine if there was less mobs but they were actually casting you know a frontal cone or attack patterns right you get one and then even for the melee guys you had some of the similar things and you just take away some of that white damage you put more of it onto abilities you try to ensure that there aren't torments like that 40 one that are just doubling down and you getting [ __ ] and sort of denying you from from counter play and then you can have a combat design that works i think a lot better there but i think with with torgast there is too much signal to noise the bits where i found the signal i have quite a quite a bit of fun and i like it but there's too much noise in the combat design yeah i i agree with you with the with the white damage and i think the uh the difference there is massive i remember whenever people would do what was the guy on like the bridge on the way over to ordo so it was like cinder something yeah yeah yeah yeah the toy that flings you around yeah yes i have one stack of it yes that's another one and so i remember back whenever he came out and you would see every boosted warrior and he would cast that cone and the boosted warriors would just die but all of them would just fall down and it was so cool because he did these abilities very fast and you had to react to them very quickly you couldn't think you just had to react and like now with tour gas like they don't really have that anymore there's not that type of that type of gameplay and it's so weird that we had this game play in time missile we had this game play in the mage tower and now somehow we don't how is that possible and i do think that blizzard i think by the end of the expansion by the end of uh shadow ends torgast will be genuinely good i really believe it i think it's on the it's on the right direction at least i can say that but what i worry about is whenever the expansion after shadow lens comes out and tour gas is just kicked to the curb and that's it and we have to also expand we have to spend the entire expansion playing through and beta testing a system and it finally gets better and then they throw it in the garbage yeah like our experience is the cost of their risky bets yes and i'm i'm no longer you know it's it's like i think my my willingness for benefit of the doubt or whatever has just went down and down over time because i i think the mistakes they make are thematic and it's really weird and it i mean it's a bit doomery but i almost just want them to be a bit more conservative with it like a bit more just kiss keep it simple stupid right like ah man i think that's basically the core event with and then it's that thing where it's all these expansion build around features and it's the sort of thing like you know even if you could scale to tour gas stop well tour gas hall like reward loop was designed around soul cinders and soul ash so would that really make a bunch of sense in the next expansion um whereas from what i understand the palace of the dead or whatever it's called in in ff is like matt was explaining to me that you know i could if i say get up to whatever level i want to roll a new job i could level that new job in that thing now i'd really hope that they leave torgast you know in some sort of position where blizzard basically say you know oh yeah tour gast well we dealt with that problem in the shadow lands now the covenants have banded together they've controlled the whole thing and tour gust is now basically used as a training proving ground or whatever and then they basically change to our gas stop to make it an evergreen feature where if i want to level up a fresh alt i can maybe do some tour guest stuff right you know make a new little reward system and then i'd rather do that than level like i'd rather do that than what's that that [ __ ] where you have to fill up the bar that takes forever what's it called again there it is oh so much potential but they ah they crammed that in at the end of beta yeah and it's like man if you're just like diablo adventure mode inspired stuff they get it on so much more but again that comes back to like production issues right i mean they clearly like you know that meme small indie company multi-dollar company yeah multi-dollar company why the [ __ ] are we saying that their quarterly takings was like what 400 and something million that's a lot of cash sorry bro can only do four recalls man we can only do four records the same amount man we can't we can't hire new people what do you mean how you do that they fire they fired a lot of really good people too they sure did they sure that's what's weird there they're um i understand like morale is basically in a very bad spot on the wow team and they've had like you know challenges or whatever there's a bunch of people leaving that said if we're to listen to our our favorite guy in the universe bobby coddick which by the way we've looked into the we did this for like another video we haven't done yet but we looked into his backstory it's actually [ __ ] fascinating dude has been hustling so damn well for so long it's very cool but anyway so i've i've met i've met uh uh mr codec uh man maybe maybe twice he's probably a nice guy isn't he he's the [ __ ] man i'm gonna be honest he he i will say when i met him i was like wow like i'm actually inspired and which doesn't happen very often um when he came in to actually back at the mlg days when we got acquired by by activision um he was a very you know as a boss or whatever whoever he was he wasn't obviously the person i was directly answering to but he did a good job at getting everybody really excited and back then uh activision blizzard was on like the forbes top 100 companies to work for you don't usually get to stay on the list when you fire like 25 of your employees or whatever the heck it was so i don't think they're on the list anymore but it was one of those things where you know you can tell that he's very intelligent and you he knows how to make money the problem is blizzard and a lot of the gamers that were playing the games come from a completely different style of production which was mike moraheim's vision and the vision of a lot of the original employees of wow where it truly was gameplay first gameplay first for a triple a studio and this is why i don't think aaa studios are going to be the way of the land forever i don't think that you need a triple a studio anymore because distribution has changed so much but when you look at aaa the best way to make money is not to put gameplay first it's to do what wow is doing right now and that's why i can't see wow coming back because one of the questions i wanted to ask you over the past five years the past five years bellular is what would you do to change wow and i know no matter what you say it will not make as much money as pumping out an expansion with new features that aren't tested because that gets box sales you see a new thing and you go wait this might be good let me try it they put the new shiny toys on there on the box to get people to buy it who cares if they suck you already spent the money on the box and then you want this [ __ ] mount that you're trapped for six months they laugh their money to the bank they're probably making more money than they've ever made before why the [ __ ] would they want to change why would they want to change it's like even if you are making the worst content ever even if it's morally not right you you move to a different country to make the same thing if you're getting the bag anybody would do that i don't care if you're an individual i don't care if you are a triple a studio they are making more money making a game like this and you can't you almost can't blame a company right but they're not our friends they're not our friends we shouldn't be blizzard gamers anymore they are a company and they are doing what they can to grab the bag and that's it what's happened right is feedback loops i think you know like the engineering concept of the feedback loop real [ __ ] important thing is oh never really had i think much of a feedback loop because even if they messed up all the people would come back they were an incumbent they were dominant in the market they had i think a very well moated player base um yeah moted basically you know being like that kind of the defenses around the player base and it's one of the reasons why ff won't completely kill wow because a lot of people want the wow style of fantasy so there was encumber for the longest time to the point where they basically never felt the sting of their losses and that basically means that there was less of an incentive to i i think anyway less an incentive to deeply engage with um you know with issues i think this is something that has happened more and more and more as times went on um because i think it's one of those things right if you try to objectively say you know wrath of the lich king versus you know a new expansion it's a bit of a pointless statement because they're all products of their time and what matters is how good they were in comparison to everything else so it's that thing where right now in the past they were doing their thing the best right now they have made the game smaller and smaller and smaller i think it's you could say maybe more focused but it is that very gameplay-oriented sort of top-end progression content there's not as much room for the transmoggers the rpers the collectors things like that and there's not a lot of new what would you say massive engineering projects going into giving you guys cool new features you really care about like let's just say they're like hey hey there asm gold tintable armor you get to unlock the dice and you get a whole bunch like a whole new system but not you know it's not some big new content thing it's just something that fundamentally stands to wow forever um so basically your issue is games got more focused over time other things in the market have been bubbling up and bubbling up and bubbling up and i think with while it just finally got to the stage where they had accumulated enough thematic losses i think saying thematic is super important because you know humans we recognize patterns and you know we we feel themes emotionally right and when the the theme the underlying theme of the wow team's mistakes has been kind of consistent in spite of player feedback then people start to look elsewhere and i think your big difference is that final fantasy 14 has finally reached a stage where off the back of shadowbringers it's just [ __ ] incredible and we're finally at that stage where world of warcraft i think is going to have a viable feedback loop because there is viable competition like pvp mmos were yeah like a pvp and it wasn't crowfall was never going to take out world of warcraft right i don't even think ashes of creation would be taking out world of warcraft for what modern wow is but what ff14 is is big theme park mmo it's it's it's a different flavor of the game while i was playing but it it is the same game it's really [ __ ] good so finally we have the feedback loop so i think that just means that whatever you know pressure because you're actually going to feel it i think we're finally at the stage where they're they're going to feel their losses i mean we've been doing preliminary work looking into basically just a bunch of participation metrics and like one of the things i saw was mythic plus and i'm fairly sure that the first week of season two saw less mythic plus participation than season four of bfa which is like late into an expansion which is that's [ __ ] spooky dude that's very bad that should be happening i mean i do want to say too and this is coming from somebody who probably loves final fantasy right now more than most right i i love the game it has the biggest advantage ever um right now like imagine if the tables return and final fantasy was king right now uh that or had been king for a really long time and we were going back to world of warcraft and you had all of classic all of tbc all of wrath and all of these things to play through uh final fantasy for a lot of people it's the first time they're looking at it and they have so much content to go through the one thing though that i will give credit to final fantasy that is really special about the game is the fact that that content does still feel valid and if the tables were turned and you went through and you started the wow journey at the very beginning everything's invalidated why wouldn't you get a boost of course you're gonna go and get a boost the content from seven years ago was more relevant than wow's content from seven months ago yeah it's crazy uh imaginable is this the case imagine how fun it would be if if you did a uh a time walking dungeon and if time walking was relevant and you actually got to play the old rotations and like you got to play like old demonology warlock or you got to play like that how about how about this you just get to play a boss that isn't a [ __ ] joke like the bosses are just jokes man like you you go back and you do coal guard oh wow there's two green beams you have to walk away from why don't you add in some new mechanics make them do some more raid damage and then you'll see an actual fight then you'll have some fun but you just sit around in this lfr zombie garbage [ __ ] conveyor belt to just get shitty gear that you don't want and yeah big [ __ ] surprise nobody cares about it like it's so sad and the thing is you had a little inkling of that with the old war time locking because you could activate the hard modes and i think that was really cool but the fact that i could go in there on the first day and just completely clear it with a random pug kind of goes to show that it wasn't really as hard as it should have been and i would have loved to see them do that especially like with some of these old raids like i always thought like one of the best ideas would be you know how they got rid of original necks add back in original next for the anniversary for one week every single year put back all the old gear that the game used to have make it ridiculously [ __ ] hard and then make it to where the only way you can get that loot is through master looter imagine that that'll never no everything else could happen there other than master loader yeah you'll never change that one you're probably right yeah well they don't have they they had to fire the gm to deal with those tickets so i mean like yeah i can't do that anymore right but like dude that would create so much content imagine waiting all year for it i even have that [ __ ] ninja oh my god and then like figuring out like what oh my it would just be so so good and they don't really even try to do anything like that and it's sad there's like a simple thing an expansion shouldn't be subtractive and like in final fantasy 14 and expansion is not subtractive yeah imagine if we could just go into a rock-hard version of i don't know shadow moon burial grounds that'd be sweet that would be sweet like what we said about tour ghast earlier on so i mean i don't know exactly how they do it but i mean come on the caverns of time exist you have the narrative framing to make it happen well they just say like elicit they're like hey look uh it's like with the primals and and uh in final fantasy like uh yeah uh so they're back again and what's so crazy about them this time is that they're more powerful we don't even know why it happened but you've got to go deal with it and it's like okay all right that sounds good it's like you're playing whack-a-mole with these like you know [ __ ] like world-defining forces of nature you're like oh [ __ ] e fritz up again you know garuda and you're just knocking them back down and it's ridiculous whenever you think about it but nobody gives a [ __ ] because the game's fun actually it's not it makes a lot of sense in the lore but one of the things that i will say about how the entire thing is set up with final fantasy i beat arr like two days ago or something like that and my experience for beating aar was relatively similar to the experience that people had all of those years ago when they beat it you know i when when i went through the story and had those moments i could share that experience with players who've been playing the game for such a long time and have a shared experience and we could understand each other and i felt like i was part of the community and wow when new people come in the conversation is now you have no idea you have no idea what i went through to get here to get this neck beard you have no idea what i had to do this is what my experience was like you don't have that shared experience and i feel like that's one of the reasons the wow community is so divided because they have already broken us apart we're all on our own placid island of ignorance with the different experience and we can't even relate to the new people who are trying to come into the game so why are they going to try to join our community the community doesn't exist anymore there definitely isn't one it's sharded there's three people in every community yeah it's a completely different experience people don't get to feel what we felt the first time that we played yesterday oh like here's another one right is it like i i saw the 1.0 and i think that we should also like i want to talk about some of the other mmos because obviously final fantasy is like the front and center one but we've got a lot of other ones coming out but one thing i wanted to say was that the 1.0 uh that the extinction event right the apocalypse you could see it happen and then that [ __ ] played a huge cut scene imagine if wow did events in game like fortnite imagine if sargeras stabbing azeroth was an in-game event and sargeras was literally the [ __ ] sky box and you could see the sword getting closer and then there was a moment where the sword would hit the ground and everybody in silithus would just immediately die that would be incredible and you could watch it from the mountaintops of like all around kalimdor and then afterwards it played this crazy cinematic of it happening etcetera that would be so awesome man they could have the metallica concert in game and they could have the dude kick over the sword something crazy like that and there's no reason why they can't do that but everybody knows why that wouldn't happen because if they had that many people in the zone it'd crash it would die they'd be done i don't know like if you gave some of their engineers like hey what is your wish list of [ __ ] you'd like to make by the way it's really expensive you need a bigger team you know whatever what what would that actually look like um because it seems like there is so much virtual world stuff that it's like all of wow's efforts have went into instanced content but it's like less and less and less as went into the world bit which is a bit friggin funny when you uh think about the title of the game right yeah yeah it's a little bit weird i think that like really it's like if you're in the top 10 or you're in the bottom 10 of players wow is just your game but blizzard has this idea that you either are a top 1 player or you're just some guy who plays the game you know you've got five jobs 10 kids and three wives and you've only got 15 seconds a month to play the game and they have to somehow make it to where you can kill kill still kill the n-boss and this happens and you see these guys the content loop that these people have to play through of course they're quitting the game of course they're not gonna play that and all of the people in the middle just like your average semi-hardcore players like the classic wow players that get all up in arms about three spell power upgrades and molten core who gives a [ __ ] but they do and it's because it's character progression and blizzard has convinced themselves that only the top top top players care about making their character better whereas the reality is that i think almost everybody that plays rpgs wants to make their character as good as possible and that middle chunk of 80 players those are the people that aren't happy and i think that if you're like a top-end mythic raider i think that shadow ends probably isn't as bad as if you're just an average player depending on your shard of domination drops there are some rwf people right now who are basically being put in the bench for bad rng but yeah i i i get your yeah yeah i get it it's like if you're just in that that general middle i mean like man you've got corthia and it's like what's what's going on what's the hamlet of secrets the suburb of secrets not the city of secrets you know um it's just like that middle of the road content that optional i guess that optional evergreen feeling content as well it's like [ __ ] like deaths or chromie was really cool i did it in ptr so i haven't done it in life which is totally me being stupid but like it's awesome that's chromie's awesome more things like that more reputations more things that are progressing your character in a way that is not just a mount a pet in an item level and i think an issue there is blizzard have basically fundamentally under invested in new ways to progress your character i mean you look at say guild wars 2 and it's mastery system where you know in that game when you expansion comes out it doesn't add a new level cap you just get new masteries and those masteries can you know be important things you need or they can be like you know fun utility things you know what if a world of warcraft ends up properly codifying that you know i'm a hunter right but no i'm the [ __ ] hunt master of of true shot lodge and that is a thing that happens just between expansions uh to the point where you know i do stuff for them in the various different expansions and i can get new generic hunter abilities or powers or things that i can access you know evergreen fantasy-based progression because this is an mmorpg in a fantasy setting it is not you know it's what they're making right now is is a slice of what world of warcraft should be i think so that's why i can still log in you know going to sanctify domination right you know it's a great play smith have fun kind of raged at a few people who do dumb [ __ ] and paint smith do some dumb [ __ ] myself have a great time right that's [ __ ] awesome they're so good at that stuff but it's like they have lost focus on the broader world of warcraft i wonder what the cause of that shift and institutional focus is at blizzard i mean i i know that i i i think about it right it's like who are they hiring they're going to hire the people just like the casuals nah man they're hiring the people that are like the top end raiders so get big surprise you hire a lot of top end raiders top top end players and then they make content that's top end raider top end player centric yeah theory crafters and you get stuff that is spreadsheet content yeah big surprise i mean look at the difference between how the developers are interacting with the community in final fantasy and how they are in world of warcraft right i mean back in the day in world of warcraft you have like the elite torn chieftains right like the dead like they felt like they were our boys back in the day chris metsen came on the stage everybody's like oh my god like ripping off their shirts begging them to sign their tits like it was [ __ ] insane um and now you look at the final fantasy devs and i'm watching fan fest i'm watching all this stuff and it feels like that still all of this time later you know they're doing they're doing the twinning dance like and our devs are saying hey don't you guys have phones it's so absurd how different it is asmin runs into a problem in the game what happens the devs try to help and they try to make the experience better not only for asthma but the hundred thousand two hundred thousand people who are watching because they care about the poison blizzard doesn't give a [ __ ] about stream sniping and and you get these people that spend like so we were doing trying to do a tournament and wow and we had these clowns making tauren sitting on totems for like hours dude yeah and blizzard didn't do a [ __ ] thing like imagine that happening in final fantasy i really couldn't that guy would be gone in a second do they have the gm's well i i don't give a [ __ ] about community they don't give a [ __ ] that's the thing they have the people they could easily solve this problem everything toy magic and cronkaholic they they used to follow me around in legion it was everybody it was all they did they actually they had a youtube channel i'm pretty sure of them just stream sniping people with the uh the rogue shoulders and they would just they would sit and stealth they would build up their stacks and they'd one shot everybody and you'd watch these guys one shot like some of the best wow players like the best pvpers completely uninteractive gameplay and the devs never did anything about it they were like yeah you know what like this is this is working as intended and it's just so crazy the message that that sends i think it's just because they're in their bunker like i i don't even i don't think this is i don't think it's intent and in a lot of cases i think any of the shit's intent i think it's okay so you can get the best person in the world but you throw them in a situation or a system right where they're just set up to fail you know it's like just [ __ ] stacked against them and i'm i'm fairly sure that that's what's going on i think there's instances where the left hand isn't talking to the right hand i think you just you have that right systems problems internal company culture problems you know what's their feedback process like even what's their project management software like when they go to work from home i mean [ __ ] hell i've used a little bit of jira myself i wouldn't wish the damn thing in anyone but you then just think like how well actually set up are they what are do you have little clicks forming within the development team do you have people that are siloed off is that why you get just some of these bizarre issues do you have particular teams that feel a bit understaffed like i obviously do not know any of that [ __ ] but whenever you see what should be competent people at a big company and it the whole thing's going to [ __ ] and stuff is less than the sum of its parts like is it intense do they actually intend to go into work and make a not particularly good game full of friction and pain points no but i i think it's probably that they they try but they have a whole bunch of issues and obviously there are cultural issues you know maybe regarding feedback or something like that that you know could lead to the appearance of not caring or you know maybe acting as if they didn't care stuff like that so i i just wonder what it's like internally at blizzard i i feel like if you pull back the curtain or if we pull back the curtain we'd probably understand a lot more about why like what should be a fairly easy win in my head or at least something where you could make an expansion that would do well be pretty risk-free and result in positive sentiment it feels like that shouldn't be as hard as it seems to be it seems like especially whenever you've got everything set up for you to knock it down right i mean like especially with a lot of this stuff i mean and it's even like the lore i wanted to talk about this because belly or you've made a lot of war videos man well what do you think about the new cinematic and like where do you think they get where do you think this is gonna go uh okay right wow there's there's so many ways to go with this one so i mean as as they as they've been saying he's got the five sigils bros what are we going to do the sigils i can you believe it boys he's got the sigils you know the sigils that you guys care about and are so you know deep and meaningful uh it's like not that none of that shit's been being established so they have these really weird things and this is this has really happened since bfa since they kind of and you know it's weird i don't think it's literally this but i do feel like i'm part of the problem on why the story telling because it's that sort of thing where the lore is cool but it's how it's told and matters right to players emotionally it just feels like they make [ __ ] so that i can do reaction videos so i'd be like okay so right you're all confused but this is why that happened this is when that was foreshadowed yeah yeah it was um that's that's the really weird thing i i think the storytelling is very strange i wonder what flip-flops they've had internally in things um but like regarding sylvanas you know if they do give her a redemption arc that is based on her getting a complete soul again that is a really weird way to do it because sure zoval giving her soul back means that she can you know be a complete person and reflect and all this shitty things she's done and she will suffer because of that but i feel like that's a bit of a cop-out getting us a complete sylvanas i think it would be way more interesting if zoval was like oh yeah you betrayed me here's your soul i was going to give it back to you but [ __ ] you it's destroyed now sylvanas has realized that the reason why she's been um you know a little bit moody for the last 20 years or whatever or whatever however many years is because um you know now she realizes what's happened to her soul and maybe her new arc is that she actually has to work for what she's going to get and earn it so there's like little storytelling things there i mean storytelling right like books you know why is it that we're waiting for world of warcraft sylvanas the novel that will come out in february 2022 to get the full picture right like no you tell the story in game like ff14 the only time i ever enjoyed it doesn't matter that the only time i ever enjoyed the the world of warcraft lore was watching novel's channel i watched a lot of novels channel and that made me love the lore a lot and then the only other time i read chronicle i imagine me reading a book i read chronicle i read the first one of chronicle and it was really [ __ ] good never never did i really feel the story the same way that i could with like um you know final fantasy for example and you look at a lot of the characters and the depth that they actually have i mean like i'm not going to say anything like too crazy because i know you guys are behind me in the story but when i look at like you look at like garage and rhuban after being on stream for like one minute is just cooler than garage i think garrosh is an exception i think garrosh is [ __ ] awesome i i think that the one cinematic that garrosh i think the one cinematic that garrosh got at the end was absolutely [ __ ] perfect they finally let him out and he said [ __ ] you [ __ ] the jailer [ __ ] everybody i'm gonna blow myself up and that was it like garrosh went out like a pimp and i was so happy that they did that but i would look like a 10 year old a 10 year old machinima you know compare it to because like that's true you know for those who are further along in ff their in-game cinematics are leagues above blizzard so it's that sort of thing i'm i'm seeing this really cool moment with garrosh and you're the bit where they do three quick cuts into his face you know boom boom yeah there goes my mic and you know the way that he's animating is just you know his his mouth is flapping up and down and i'm i'm like oh my disbelief it is really hard to suspend it right now but i like garrosh and this is how we should go but it's like it it shouldn't feel like a weird budget thing yeah it looked right it looked like he was talking like uh like miss kiff talks i was like what is going on and then on top of that the other thing is too i don't know if you guys noticed at the very end they you reused the old varian model i was like what the heck is this they literally reused the same character model jesus uh yeah so those weird these weird things in the storytelling it's crazy man like i'm just it's yeah i think that the endgame cinematics are definitely like they leave a lot to be desired to say the absolute least they definitely do like i would love to see like whenever they played that cinematic of like sylvanas versus uh sarfang that was so [ __ ] cool man like that was so awesome because nobody knew what was gonna happen people were like kind of expecting something like that but like really nobody thought this was gonna happen in the way it did it was just amazing man and like that's the kind of stuff that i i think that they need to do more of like i in my opinion i think all of the data mining it's just like everything about like like it's just so many things about the game that are just like they're just dog [ __ ] man like you have to have like all these add-ons to raid there's like all the patches are like triple quadruple data mine the second that they come out like what is this man what's the excitement that that cinematic is great but it's also i think a crutch because they can use exceptional quality of execution in the language of cinema to get a whole bunch of wins and that is cool right and we all like the the whole arc with surfing was great yeah the thing is though ff doesn't need to do that to get moments that hit very well for its audience right of smile suits a hero a lot of people will react to that um so what wow needs to do is actually really simple it's really simple and in a way it could even be cheaper what they need to do is they need to change their quest system they need to make it be framed as dialogue which is how it is done in ff14 where instead of just wall of tax click done you're actually s you know you are going through a conversation with a character dude increases did you see the video that i did about this uh oh so sorry i said i said that that wow wow told quests is a twit longer and finally tells him like tweet yeah yeah yeah that's exactly what it is like that's i completely agree with you like i read a lot questions like [ __ ] that well i'm not gonna read that but if it's like just two lines it's like yeah now he says this is what's gonna happen we have to go over here it's like okay yeah i got it like if you're the there's a more there's a subtlety to that though because you can install the add-on immersion for world of warcraft and it will immediately improve your quest like log experience uh so immersion was uh so yeah man okay i need to like get a build of wow tails working and like send it to you guys yeah and i thought i thought it was awesome but anyway anyway the uh that was piggybacking off immersion and we worked with the developer of immersion seriously [ __ ] get immersion it will make your like wow questing so much better thing is though it can't do everything because it's it's just an add-on they need to fundamentally reframe that as dialogue because when you're doing that [ __ ] with an ff character like with an npc you are clicking through dialogue and your character is actually having a conversation and that is the big thing that is why over time you develop this relationship with a character that doesn't exist and that's why there are people that you know get the crying moments as time goes on they need to do that then then if you want to do you know oh dear the the chuckler's got his sigils what are we going to do about this those sigils needed to be established earlier on we needed to have far more communicated stakes in game not inside a bunch of cinematics that were like dropped from doing the you know the boring tour gasped bolvar thingy no these sigils should have been framed as being important like the pillars of creation from the very start they should have then been made not just mcguffins but mcguffins that are essential to the characters of the covenants and whenever the archon gets you know ran through with uh shalamorn in case whatever they call it should have died because that would show us that oh [ __ ] this being that ian told us was like a titanic level of power got killed i guess we're [ __ ] and with that those sigils would have been better established and we would have felt a looming sense of dread doubly so if sylvanas was then an active character during the leveling process so that we were actually fighting against her thwarting her plants you know how like some of the [ __ ] was pretty good when you're in the warlords of draenor questing with the iron horde and there's those little bits where you kind of feel like oh right they're going to rinse their draenei and [ __ ] us all but they didn't do that they didn't it's like they it's like a few people told them that arthas felt like a saturday morning cartoon and then he popped up too much and then they got terrified of showing their villains in game no i have to know sylvanas in game and i think there's some people who have it was matt was telling me that there's a few times where ff14 runs the risk of like you spending a bit too much time with the villain and it feeling like a little bit outside morning cartoon or some [ __ ] but the thing that matters is that it works players actually get screen time and their character gets a relationship oh and also final point in this goddamn tirade stop this othering generic language of uh maw walker no one calls anyone mo walker piss off that that is so alienating to the player right you know if you're going to just have you know a little variable you know just reference you know what a player title call me huntmaster sure because you know at least i did that thing in legion and even that thing where you know uh jaina right we saved jane from tour guest there's a bit of dialogue in 9-1 where jane is like she gets confused and they write it so it's like another maw walker saved her and it's like yeah i guess she got confused all the time torture and stuff but to the player that just makes you feel so othered so disposable so just another mo walker so there's a whole bunch of stuff here that is basically it's like the geeky nerdy [ __ ] of narrative design which uh i mean some of that's close to like what we're doing with our our first game which uh you know it's i guess why it's maybe a focus for me but it's like there are so many easy wins and ways where they could actually get away with not doing expensive cinematics so make the story better no i mean you're right though but i mean you bring you bring up so many of these different moments uh that i think are really good examples of just showing how much bad storytelling there actually is right now and wow too like you you bring up mcguffins you bring up you bring up like having uh like a bruiser archetype that's strictly there to show the level of power uh that that you're actually up against like all of these cheap tricks seem to be the entire crux of what's going on in the game storytelling it's just not good storytelling i actually think that jupiter ascending has better story than world of warcraft currently i cared more again about mr scalligan then i care about sylvanas and that's just not the experience i've had with final fantasy at all glad that movie has a fan uh dude i actually if if somebody gave me a billion dollars to do one thing i would remake jupiter sending there there's some there's something there you know but uh hey look we've already seen even a billion dollars isn't enough to necessarily make a good game or it could not be yeah i mean sometimes you can't necessarily buy the quality but i do want to talk a little bit about especially about buying quality uh how do you guys feel about new world and ashes of creation i mean we talked a lot about final fantasy i mean belly or have you had any time to play uh any ashes of creation in a new world where are you out i'm i'm the noob i have no [ __ ] idea i've been really busy with other [ __ ] so uh you know what for this segment convince me why why do i care what should uh what am i looking out for so i've seen the kickstarter trailer of ashes but that's mostly it and my vibe from that was cool this seems like they're really going for the the shared virtual world thing and they're doubling down of that which seem neat to me so with ashes ash's the alpha looks great uh it it it looks great obviously it's a technical alpha so there's not really a whole lot i can do to convince you with that like come back to me in a year and i'll convince you with ashes with new world maybe three years maybe with new world there was a blue tree and there were all the other trees but there was one blue tree and i could cut down any tree in the whole forest except this blue tree and my skill level was 30 and i had worked hours to get level 30. and i went to click on this blue tree and it said i had to get 200. and so what did i do i spent the next 20 hours cutting down every single [ __ ] tree in the entire new world preview until i got to level 200 and i came back to that blue tree grove and i cut that [ __ ] down and it felt right up good i definitely did and i looked for any time there was a blue tree i was like stand back guys don't worry i'll take care of this situation and then after that guess what happened there was a red tree no [ __ ] wade oh yeah yeah and it was great in a very good way i like new world for the same reasons that i like old school runescape oh [ __ ] dude don't tell me this it's killing it tell me this i have other things to do you can play it on second monitor dude you you just you play it while you're relaxing it's it's you can do auto running back and forth to like town like it's super super passive it's totally okay i'm actually nervous i'm a little bit nervous with um with the next i guess it would be the next alpha or whatever it's going to be for new world or beta whatever it's going to be me too because the the thing is is this is going to be the beta or the alpha whatever the next testing period it's going to show us though did they double down on all of the things that were really good in the game or did they try to go wider did they try to fix some of the things that weren't its strengths like what was their actual philosophy because the game to me it wasn't necessarily trees for me but it was going around and it was skilling and it was learning all these different things about crafting it was learning all these different things that i could just make my numbers higher bigger number better person and that was what i loved about the game and i hope that they focused in on that uh the combat wasn't necessarily the thing that uh got my jimmies jostled we'll see what they actually ended up doing but it seemed like a game that knew what it was and it didn't try to be world of warcraft and that was what i liked about new world order that's that's called me actually okay so old school runescape for me back in the day right it was cutting down my trees setting up this whole thing with one of my friends right where we were the [ __ ] kingpins of selling arrows we had a whole network of my so it was all that actual virtual world [ __ ] and i remember the player housing came out the construction skill was there i'm like oh [ __ ] i have to cut down a lot of trees i have to learn how to build i was like man this chair's got a [ __ ] red cushion [ __ ] big [ __ ] big and then yeah so that was really good and then another game that uh you know i i never was able to fully get into because of you know the social side of it but eve online eva's so [ __ ] cool yeah there's like big dynamic economies and [ __ ] so there's a bit of me right a bit of a wet dream game is just some of those eve online vibes and you have some of those old-school runescape vibes and you maybe put it in a grounded feeling fantasy setting are you telling me new world could be going close to that i think so yeah absolutely because obviously obviously new world right you said your history buff i mean it seems like very clearly like new world is 1500's america okay and they've added some other factions to try to uh separate themselves from that but i feel like obviously the art style the armor everything like that is somewhere around there yeah i mean look at the helmets of the cinematic i mean absolutely and it it looks so cool and i i love the aesthetic of the game i am so excited for it and what i'm excited for is not just to only play new world but it's to play that sometimes and then play other stuff too people are saying 17 sure whatever but like all i'm saying is it's like old school whenever you had you know hatchets and uh tomahawks going up against uh a musket it's it's that that time and i think that's so cool like i'm so excited to to play the game man i honestly think it's gonna be really fun for all of those like really casual fun reasons like crafting and stuff like we've already agreed rich is going to be the crafter and i'm going to be the gatherer i'm going to gather everything and then rich is going to make everything that i gather i'm just going to be waiting in town for daddy to get home that's right that valheim cooperation you know like you're playing valheim and you all sort of slip into your like your natural social roles in the community asman asman didn't let me play valheim asthma made me watch him i i watched like 150 of it i remember i was like doing paperwork for otk or some [ __ ] and then as i was like look at this [ __ ] house dude i didn't get to play at all by the time i actually look how fast i can kill this guy dude watch if i shoot this guy well he's dead so fast right we'll do that dude asmin gave me a personal stream of him looking for a sea serpent he literally like for 20 hours not when i was watching we never found one yeah if you remember we you you stretched oh yeah yeah and you couldn't find one and you started spawning random [ __ ] into the world you started cheating that's right yeah i remember that i was i went on that other server and i started doing that did you play valheim believer yep yep no i played it for like uh 30 40 hours uh with the wow killed whenever you know cleared nathria nobody gave a [ __ ] about chat ones for a bit oh so it's so elegant that's what i loved about it was such an elegant design and it was it wasn't super prescriptive in player roles right so you just kind of you're like oh [ __ ] me and the boys just landed here hey [ __ ] out and you naturally find your little like i loved building and gathering and crafting other people loved combat and we actually you know you feel like you've got that little community developing it's it's what i loved about the promise of eve you know like eve i remember doing mining with people and i was like cool you know what maybe i'm less into the mining i'll there's a thing right you get is it just a chain mining gang gang something gang dropping i forget what they call it in the game but you know you've got a bunch of people mining and somebody comes into the holid ship picks up all the ore marries it back and it's like just that that bit where you know the players are clicking together in that novel way and the game is like just really supporting emergent mechanics well i love that [ __ ] it's like the the best design basically i love that it's so fun that's what it's all about man and like having that emerging gameplay like honestly i would love for whenever valheim actually goes live for them to actually have way more multiplayer support in my opinion you know why another good reason new world is [ __ ] awesome as a game is because it has proximity voice chat oh that's big that's so big like i remember so whenever i was in town i was like i turned it on i'm like yo can anybody hear me and there was nobody else that had it except for there was one other guy and he said yo is this thing working and i was like yeah and i started talking to him i find out later that guy worked on the game and that was a genuine question he did not know it was going to work it was just funniest [ __ ] either yeah i i like uh i was walking up to people saying stuff and then they they like weren't responding and then they all started typing me they were like how the [ __ ] did you turn that on yeah i like the second or third day people were using it much more um it was that was a good test that was a really good test yeah it was like it was kind of bad because like after people learned you had proximity voice chat you just had a bunch of naked characters that are in the prone position crawling in the prone position in circles like a human centipede screaming in the mic in every town what do you get for playing on the stream or server okay my favorite thing was that and then you would hear some guy with the healing staff just going yeah yeah it was it was a great time like i honestly love the game i cannot wait to play it like some of the images are just amazing like it's actually gonna be i think i don't know like what the longevity of new world is gonna be and i think that's one of the reasons why like that's why people care about if an mmo is dying or not and if an mmo is growing or not because people want to invest their time into something that they don't think is gonna just uh they don't wanna build a castle on sand they wanna play a game that has value lasting value that they can play in five years or ten years and them grinding a bunch of [ __ ] is still gonna matter then and i think that new world i don't know if it's going to have that or not i have no idea i mean it depends on how they want to do it i mean they have like the whole cash shop [ __ ] and we'll see i actually i genuinely think it was i actually think it was overblown my my truthful take on it right now um they have been pretty good about testing and they've also been very honest about transactions even on like their port like if you look at lost ark like that game that game is super pay to win right and they're not like oh no that's not paid like it's fine right it's part of the game it's not hidden um so i do think with new world people overreacted to initial testing that happened but i'm also a whale so i do look at things differently sometimes and i will admit that i do think that it was potentially overblown and i think that we'll we'll find out whether or not it was i think their statement uh said a lot but hey look i could be wrong i'm just sitting there the thing is like they showed a lot of this stuff and like i i think that like i'll play the game on release i'm excited to play the game i'm going to do it and then if they add in enough stuff that makes you not want to play the game after a certain point of time i'm just gonna stop playing like it's it's literally just that simple like i i don't want to play a game and and get into that kind of stuff because i just find it like really like boring and not fun if it has a bunch of like micro transactions and things that diminish the experience but you know what are those things really going to be we'll have to see i i was kind of uh i was a little bit i felt better that they showed the armor that was available and the armor that was available was not just you know a complete monumental difference better than just the armor that was available in game and then that was definitely reassuring absolutely so krisha brought up a great point in chat too oh uh yeah he was like he was like they removed the corruption boring farming stuff that was supposed to be super endgame but it was uh in for testing and like that that is some of the things that i think we saw like such a good point they were testing like that they were testing what we weren't necessarily seeing the final product and that's why i brought up the idea that this next test we're gonna see much more of what the game actually is um we haven't fully seen that yet we haven't seen where their focus is really are going to lie and i still have a lot of belief in the game and you you remember this has been better than anyone before that test happened i was like like new world is going to suck uh i was spelling world with an omega lol for an o like i had no faith in the game at all no interest in the game i thought it was just something that mcconnell talked about and that was it i did not care and after playing the test i'm very much on that hype train more so than ashes of creation i believe that the game is going to be really good they impressed me a lot in the test yeah i i what impressed me a lot with new world more so than the test was how receptive they were to feedback yeah because that's the one thing that i think for example wow really lacks is they don't have that ability to change things based off of feedback and while being able to like not make those changes i think really is what the problem is like the new world devs like we talked to them before we did an interview with them they have been some of the most receptive and honestly like even they went and they defended themselves and they talked about the cash shop thing and many companies would just have a radio silence policy on that yep and i i the thing is like i am very excited for this game because the reason why i'm excited for it is that i know that it can potentially change and i'll be honest the first time that i saw new world the first time ever like the engine the graphics and everything i was so [ __ ] hyped like i saw that i was like this is what a new mmo is supposed to look like this it inspired my confidence a lot if i was a company and i was in charge of pr after asthma and gold just [ __ ] on my game for for micro transactions i would say nothing i would say hopefully it blows over hope if look if i this is hypothetical i would be like hopefully that guy goes up and plays another game and shits on that he does it all the time let's just avoid it and they basically they basically went they were like you're wrong [ __ ] and then they gave a full explanation of what they were planning to do and that inspired a lot of confidence for me and the team and also asman and i when we first played the game we weren't like positive andy's at all we were talking a lot of [ __ ] and it was [ __ ] that i think the game deserved even though we liked it and you know what they did they still jumped on stream with us and they explained why things were like that they admitted faults and they they gave an idea of what their vision is going to be that is a good sign from dev team and that's the last thing you'll see from from blizz that's like it's [Music] why can we not just bring ian on a stream and have him just talk about the game why does it have to be this massive corporate uh theater production why why why can't you just talk about the game and have a conversation with us like we're players and not this weird like that blizzard acts like they're the [ __ ] government well they do they didn't talk to preach they did talk to preach i i i think they once a year maybe they just don't like us i don't know i think that's a little suspicion yeah i've got a little bit of a suspicion that's probably the case that you told me not to come back to the office i don't know man like i'd love to see that happen honestly like the 9.1 is an improvement over shadow ends i'm as i said i think that the tour gas stuff is good but they've just got so far to go and like i am so exhausted about restarting the beta process for every expansion so yeah shadow ends at the end of shadow lens it's going to happen if they can actually take what they learned in shadow ends and take the systems that they developed and make them better in the next expansion i'm going to have a lot more i'm going to have a lot more confidence for the game because i'm not going to quit wow like there's no way i'm going to quit wow but that doesn't mean that i'm not going to be frustrated whenever i play it or it doesn't also mean i might play it a little bit less whenever there's other games that i can play instead that's gonna be it like yeah when the only not the only but like when the main good thing is cool new raid it's like okay now i'm going to get you know i'm going to do some dungeons new mega dungeon comes out you know i'm going to do that maybe not ideal if the postmaster uh boss has got a bug that was reported by even someone in our team deck or like i don't know way way in ptr so a bit salty about that but it's like yeah if i'm just going to get curve and then it turns out there's no like there's no cool new rep to go and do or like new act like truly new feeling thing instead of just install tomcat and handy notes and run around in circles like yeah i'm going to play another game outside a raid like i'm going to acknowledge they are some of the best encounter designers on the planet and their aids are [ __ ] excellent but true that's one game that's like one small little game where's the yeah so i'm actually i i've googled right it's five days is the the beta for new world yep it's gonna be in five days it's gonna be on the 20th i need to get in this hip hip dude hit me up yeah and like we can yeah we probably could probably help you get in but like also play on our server and join our guild yeah it's going to be lit it is it is going to be lit it really is uh now the the thing is that we you started to allude to that i think is just so different about wow and used to exist in a while in final fantasy guys i don't know why you're saying lit like that like no cap on a stack like skrilla skrilla is going for real for real for real for real uh by the way we are going to be inviting aiden ross on next week uh for uh for all craft i i think it's about time uh i i we're gonna talk to ayden ross about i think we could get him to play final fantasy but nonetheless i digress i think the thing with final fantasy is final fantasy is it's very apparent that they expect you to play the new content and then either go hang out in your estate in your fc estate and like just look at cat girls or whatever the heck you're going to do there or they expect you to go play another game they even have crossovers with the other games you know what else does playing games you know what else does that is a path of exile i think even chris wilson said before he's like you know yeah after you finish all the content you finish your character yeah i mean it's you know if there's people that want to keep making new characters and do that and play the game to its fullest extent that's great they love that but there's a lot of people that are seasonal players i'm a seasonal player every league pretty much every league and if not every league every other league i come back and i play path of exile and i love it and sometimes i have to quit my stream over it because i want to play it so much imagine doing that imagine doing that guys the renowned bar lasts up to 80. that's so much to do i know that's a lot of content man and i'm gonna have to level up a rogue so i can farm out all my transmog daggers yeah thank god for that there are three it's a new character to do world quests on yeah sure according to ian that's what people play the game for some people play the game to get farm anima power on two characters imagine that path of exiles in the chat be good yeah yo what up boys by the way so uh let's talk about the mirror of calndra drop on the first day of me streaming the new league let's talk about loot boxes okay because i i i've been opening up a lot of those i'm just trying to get the portals i'll probably give them to you right wait really yeah probably i mean sure why not it's it won't be as fun i i need to spend the money to get the joy out of it i'm like actually like please path of exile do not give me any loot boxes for free i i won't enjoy it as much i really just won't enjoy it as much but i think that the thing with path of exile is you can come back you can enjoy it and then you can go live your life and you have the sense of self-accomplishment so you never built up build up the resentment like which is the opposite of wow right now i feel like i build up resentment over the game because i feel like i can't have to go to work yeah it feels stretched out and the bits where you feel the stretch are so you feel sad like yeah pretty simple this sucks man it really does belly or did you ever play ple no no a tiny bit ages ago um it's like i respect and people that i know uh are super into it so like i've seen plenty of it from a distance and like the gdc talk but no i'm just like man time's a time's a real bastard like it sucks right like poe it's a it's a lot you gotta know a lot about poe but the thing is it's deceptive like it's deceptive in both ways because if you follow a build guide you'll be able to you know you'll be able to do what you need to do it'll be all right it's a fun game but it depends on if you're into a rpgs like i'm super excited for it like i honestly like i've been playing video games all day every day and like usually all i do is i'll like watch youtube videos of things that i don't even care about and like it's just been so nice to have games to play that are fun man like it really has been and i also love how many good games there are these days yeah it's [ __ ] you can't play them all i know i i can't imagine it yeah and i do want to say guys we're going to get some questions here uh rich you want to go ahead and look for some questions for us and uh yeah if you guys are interested uh you can ask some in in the old chat but also if you want to tag us on twitter i'll just look for for the tags and i will ask whatever questions i see what game are you looking forward to uh believer more than anything well i mean now that you've told me about new world yeah yeah yeah the trees huh i'm actually um yeah i'm i'm big thinking about that uh you know what shadow brings an end walker i've i'm like i've barely played yeah uh like i barely played ff14 i'm not barely i mean like a few days but time's been a bit there's a whole bunch of things going on here but uh it's just nice having that much game to be driven to just [ __ ] plow through like you know like to actually play like it's like it's back in the day um for other things i mean it's hard i've i've slipped back into playing shogun two total war it's one of my favorite games of all time so uh 2004. oh no it's like 2012. 2010 20. okay okay oh dude show gun too so good yeah so i've been like in my little happy corner uh kind of silent away from everything um [Music] yeah i mean it's it's mostly that like i'm mostly thinking about ff and and now new world you know joel it is right sorry when you're so busy like working in the games industry it's real [ __ ] hard to get enough time to play games it must be weird right yeah because like now you're actually like making your own games and like you've got to think about making your own games rather than just playing games yeah [ __ ] it it is really [ __ ] uh and even on that like the the amount of games that like i've got to play more of suzerain i've got to play more of um oh hello mr brain the big the big rpg i cannot believe i [ __ ] this one up it's like oh my god which the one the the big one it's the top down one it's made by the uh dead balls like uh witcher no no elven ring uh no no it's um oh it's like an indie i've actually lost my marbles uh no it's like between my like games i really want to play for like that reason because it you know similar genre to us and uh man yeah it's really hard to find time to play games i know i know well people will know more about why that is in first stage one month and then what do you think what do you think we're going to get a look at your new game yeah uh okay so i i can say that the initial plan um how to do this we're not self okay currently we are not self-publishing so you can maybe put one and two together there all right so that means that we don't you know yeah people to work with right so initially the plan was to do stuff in and around gamescom uh so august for like you know trailer that the whole thing um that's been pushed back a few months not because of our development schedule funny enough but because um better [ __ ] some real let's say good time and place to uh you know to do proper announcements and stuff okay um so that i know people will see a lot more a lot more next year and i saw that like so that's like that's game one but like the whole the whole space is is wild and like it'll be nice so i can finally talk candidly about everything because for an example we lost an entire year to just f in a way just funding the studio like a whole [ __ ] year because you know we ended up getting together it was like how much was it like 60 80 grand um there was like a part of a local funding part to like do a bunch of prototypes you know six prototypes take those into two vertical slices take one of those into a more complete thing and it's like we kind of needed to do that to keep the company going for a year while we secured things for the first game we're going to release but then you lose a year right so there's always like weird trials and tribulations about like we're finally we're basically finally on the clear which might mean there'll be time to play video games soon which would be really [ __ ] nice i miss them yeah there's a [ __ ] red tree that i need to go and chop down somewhere i feel like the funny thing is it there weren't that many games that i felt like i wanted to play for a while and now they're all just coming out at the same time like now it's just every single thing is flowing out at the same time i'm gonna start taking some of these questions though um so one of the questions is do you feel like and this is for uh youtube basically the storytelling in final fantasy does that enhance the the content as you play like does it enhance dungeons for you does it enhance raids for you or yeah i have to pee really quick too while you guys talk about this one like dude massively like it's an rpg yeah so yeah you know humongously like that's what gives you the contacts all you know all the stuff that you're doing and the same happens in wow when you know they actually set up their stories right and you know we're not we're not just like oh it's i don't know like i'm not really a big marvel guy but it's you know as if they were just like at the end of the infinity war movie like oh by the way there's these things called infinity stones and he's got them all now he's all [ __ ] oh man like they just snapped to that and they didn't bother to like it would stop well that's that's literally what they did that's literally what they did with the justice league and like the mother boxes what the [ __ ] yeah it's garbage and like i've watched pretty much every single marvel video or every marvel movie and i i will say it right at the risk of sounding like a huge normie i think that the marvel cinematic universe is [ __ ] incredible i think infinity war is one of the best movies ever made and i love it i think it's so good yeah i'm a huge fan like and honestly the reason is because exactly what you're saying they built it up over so many years right people were expecting thanos for like four or five years like in my opinion i don't even think galactus is gonna be as good ah there's like no way yeah like you you can't just say hey there's this weird kinky looking dude with his nips out called the jailer and then we spend no time with him and then suddenly oh no he has the sigils bros what are we going to do you know we don't know what these sigils mean we don't know i mean okay we know where he's going he's going to separate the first ones but like that's lord nerd [ __ ] that's not like the core story that they told and yeah so lore is great because lore is the backdrop to the virtual world we're all having fun but story stories the bit you feel in your bones it's like yeah lord of the rings imagine if the whole of lord of the rings was uh written in the same way as the appendixes were it's like look i love the appendixes they're really interesting because i want to know what's going on in the world yeah but you don't tell the story with the freaking appendixes so it's yeah i mean a great example of this is the fact that like how many years was it like 21 or something years past between whenever gandalf left the ring with frodo and then whenever he came back that much time later after he went to minnesota to like research the ring and everything and if you're just watching the movie you don't even know that happened it doesn't even matter to you it's the same as whenever he got reborn as gandalf the white nobody has any idea any of that stuff happened and if you find out more about it it makes it feel better but at the base level it still feels good and i think that's the problem with wow is that a lot of the wow lore at the base level doesn't feel good but if you know everything about it it feels a little bit better and that's disappointing about it and this whole zooming out thing like i think it was ian's interview with me when he said you know zooming out on the cosmology chart yeah and you know at the time it was like okay cool where could this lure go there's a lot of ways they could take it and they could actually take it in a very very interesting whatever direction but the more you zoom out the further away the defias brotherhood and the scarlets and you know uther's little temple and ironforge and all those things that you know we actually have the emotional connection to the further away those things are from us and the smaller they appear and that lessens our connection you know it's like a lot of people would say that shadowlands narratively jumped the shark in that we've gone to the afterlife i mean if you actually you actually think about that from the perspective of like world building in a world i mean a cat has been let out of the bag right and it's just that weird thing of like how do you go back to that warcraft that people like know and like um that that thing was rooted in in our hearts and i think that's the that's the challenge they face and if they keep on going through this this cosmos thing in a way that feels alienating to the core of the setting they're gonna have a big issue like they could do a cosmic expansion in a way where you know it's the light invading azeroth and they've set that up with urel and a bunch of people are going to be very weak at the knees if you know mummy's coming through the portal with a big hammer and she's going to kill you yeah right so that that could be great they could do cosmos in its light and cosmic forces and all that stuff but it also can be azeroth with azerothian characters and places we know and characters we that would be great but if they were to explore the same thing by doing another something lens and just kind of pulling a thing out of the i mean it's not out of the bag from them because they've you know had all their nerdy meetings to work yeah like it's like imagine if zoval actually just arrived in azeroth and you know they revamped northrend and uh you know that was the shadowlands expansion like i wonder i just wonder how people would have reacted to that it's just mine here's my dream man is that we find out at the end of shadowlands that we actually were dead n'zoth killed all of us oh yeah yeah and then we come back and the world is just completely [ __ ] different that would be so cool you've got mass effect 3 indoctrination theory levels of copium going on i really hope it's that that would be cool i know i know i don't know i'd like that i'd like that you know this could tickle your pickle right let's just say you know zovale gets the sepulcher of the first ones right he gets all his oh no strange knowledge then he's got to come get azeroth so he zoops down through icecrown and then maybe our patch 9.2 is you know saturn ice cream satin north round yeah do a whole big thing there that i think is the right way to take the shadowlands expansion it's gonna bring it back to bring it back to azeroth yeah oh totally the amount of people i have talked to like seriously it is like i'm doing these lore videos i i read the comments i try to get you know a temperature gauge of the community people don't like this cosmic stuff as much as the wow devs do i think and it's like you know me and pyromancer and whatever we can just you know nerd out over the lore or something that doesn't translate into the ideal setting yeah so yeah the the problem is too is every time they have a really good narrative beat that they could use they destroy like they don't use it well like the build up at the end of the expansion even for bfa where it's like okay we can have this really great old god moment now and then they just they don't create like a really in-depth zone we don't really get to experience all the stuff that they've been building i do they made an entire expansion about just what that one patch would have been it would have been so thematically cool and this next expansion could have been into the void it's like oh wow you killed the old gods now kill their makers and something like that would have this really clean narrative progression and instead they go hey let's just all put it in one shitty patch let's make everybody hate it and then let's kill everybody it's like all right so bad man like it and it's even a thing of player investment like i was invested in that story i've been tracking all this old god [ __ ] ranges i'm like oh [ __ ] the void pedal that's in the emerald nightmare and we did that in the emerald nightmare raider no [ __ ] that was even kind of connected to the end of order to try oh my god yeah and then we just we just kind of gave him a zap it's like that where's this [ __ ] guy oh my god he's like really demand did he really take over oldham oh my god now i'm not gonna be able to do my camel dailies [ __ ] it's like oh wow this is so dangerous i can't i can't do my camel dailies what a joke it felt such a budget patch yeah like what is this dude like i was so upset about that i was expecting like the black empire to be like a whole i expected to be like argus honestly uh and even though you know what it is it feels like they're trying to race forward into this new era of the lore yeah they're really just trying to zoom and it's like we maybe in the older times you know we probably could have got two maybe three expansions out of the material bfa covered because you could do a fact that's a really good point like right have you read the mission table like flavor text from bfa no i have the add-on okay sweet so here's the good news i guess you haven't experienced the battle of azeroth yet because the actual battle that happens in the places that we know in azeroth is in the text of the mission table so it's like that could have been when uh do you remember right it's [ __ ] it's cataclysm yeah it's it's [ __ ] cata and you're leveling in you tune you're in the barns and you're just all those little bits where like the you know the war like garrosh and all that stuff's happening and you're just pumped to kill some horde you're pumped to kill some alliance because you because we're not you know weird goku characters at that stage we're just like oh [ __ ] the war effort we gotta go here and it felt like this good motivated story that really worked in the game it's like that could have been a whole expansion in itself all this [ __ ] of ashara like i don't think most people are just like oh yeah shower she's that like mean elf she is so like you know basically her power level is like super off the charts she's like a super super big powerful character she almost certainly could have been a whole expansion in the south black empire i mean obviously that could have been an expansion right but it's like they just blasted through that material i feel like the last the last tier should have been crucible like the point the reveal right where like the battle for azeroth isn't against the factions it's you know the factions uh the battle for azeroth against the old gods you know the funny thing too they fall back on the same narrative thing over and over again where it's like okay the really cool reveal is going to be at the end of the expansion but at the beginning we're just going to have another horde versus alliance fight it's going to be that's what it and they make the beginning of the story always the most redundant thing that we've experienced as world of warcraft players people check out of the story and then by the time they get to the end they're rushing and they rush through all the good parts of the story and we never get a good story and it just feels like we're getting the same thing over and over again that's a big thing that's a really big thing because yeah it's like if so we think about what zaval's doing right now yeah uh we experienced covenant world building and localized problem solving and like that is all cool and good if you want to get out of those zones and i i really like like the bits of culture ass that did that um but very little time went into telling the main actual story of shadowlands well you know the baby is not dealing with gorm in and getting collecting grace and anime cones it's still vanish it's so val it's you know the the sigils and all that stuff and they know the level up experience it's like we just found out about that [ __ ] whenever he stole one like what do you mean like why didn't we spend we spent all day killing baby gorm why did we spend all day building a better jail to put the sigil in if they knew that he was gonna be coming for it which they knew that [ __ ] was gonna happen like it's just crazy like very weird dude it doesn't make any sense and i think that's one of the problems like with the war is that like this [ __ ] just doesn't make sense and at a certain point you start like wondering like the willing suspension of disbelief kind of gets like it's like oh yeah that makes sense it's fine it's fine it's fine and then at certain points like okay what the [ __ ] is going on i will say every now and then they do have they do have like a few moments where i was like okay this was a well done story arden was uh arden wheeled had some good moments and then also uh what's his face with rastakhan and bonsambi oh i love him that was actually a good character right and a new character one of the biggest problems i think with wow is uh they're scared to actually kill most of their characters because they don't make new ones but one zombie was an interesting character and i was actually excited i didn't make it this far in the expansion because i wasn't enjoying it but i was excited to learn about uh muzala excited to learn about him i ended up not not doing it eventually i'll go back and you know maybe i'll watch a a video from from basically uh so bon swami is like the uh uh the uh the my cashier associate of death and mozallah is like the middle manager of death and then the jailer is death he's like he's like the ceo he's like the main manager at the walmart of death that's effectively what it was so basically right now uh the jailer's getting like 100 million dollar bonus right uh yeah pretty much i mean you saw that armor that [ __ ] ain't cheap do you think that uh i don't know maybe bonsambi might get laid off or something uh no no uh muzala got laid off he was getting paid too much money and uh jayla wanted to save some money and since he was more of a senior member and he had accrued a lot of uh you know just over the time raises and things like that he looked at the uh the quarterly earnings report and he decided that uh bon swami might as well take his place and so uh mazala got the boot okay that makes a lot of sense things are going good time to lay some folks off it is one of this absolute business the business you want to do one more question rich i think it's a good one it says are you guys worried about the remaster of diablo 2 with blizzard's recent track record no nope not at all it's not even gonna do it just fine it's not even okay it's technically made by blizzard but it's not really made by blizzard yeah it's made by vicarious visions who um i mean they did the tony hawk pro skater one and two remastered they have basically been pumping out great polisher for a long long time uh they've been merged into blizzards they're now helping uh they're helping a bit on uh d4 which i think is good news um so yeah like their their recent track record is absolutely banging it's going to be great cool uh yeah that was quick so don't worry this question literally is just golden saucer question mark oh yeah i need to log on and do that um i yeah i won ten thousand uh ten thousand of the points uh today in golden saucer because i won the the miniature uh scratch-off ticket thing wait pretty awesome you won cackpot i won the mini cake pop yo that's big congrats man thank you thank you wow good day what do you think of a place like golden saucer because i i think there are obvious parallels between uh yeah i [ __ ] love both of them i think they're awesome i i love content like that it makes the game fun i feel like golden saucer the fact that it's always up and like how it's designed has some advantages over darkmoon fair and darkmoon faire if it was more like golden saucer would be a really good place to hang out i guess yeah yeah absolutely i think they're both good in their own way and i think darkmoon fare is really cool i've always loved it i remember whenever they brought it out and i think it was 5.3 or 5.4 somewhere around there or no sorry 4.3 i think it was 4.3 4.2 and uh it was great i loved it it was so much fun i remember like seeing everybody doing the canon like flying one after another with each other dude that was so cool to see i loved it so much yeah just nobody hangs out there right like i i feel like that's the thing like so i logged in yesterday i was like okay i'm gonna take a day off from final fantasy i'm gonna take one day off from final fantasy so i logged onto final fantasy and i go over i go over to the old golden saucer and i see like three people there that i know and i like i gremlo was there i was like yo what's up gremlin and you know did a couple events i played some games i played some triple triad and i had a lot of fun and i would never have done that in the dark moon fair and i don't think that the darkmoon fair is bad right but i i feel like there are things about how golden saucers set up that create that shared space where people will just go there to hang out i agree with that i think final fantasy in general does a great job with that having those shared spaces and also i think that it appeals to the people that want to make those shared spaces too it appears to the moon guardians appeals excuse me yeah anyway i need to get more time in that game yeah this has been an incredible episode it's been uh well we you know we made up for lost time by having this be like a three hour episode hopefully so thanks a lot for sticking with us for this long i really appreciate it it's been guys i think how long have we been trying to get you on the show four years about four years yeah what is one of these i mean the dm's just didn't really line up i mean it is lazy yeah yeah who am i it's completely okay and uh listen man thanks a lot for coming on and and doing this with us man i thank you so much and guys yeah i mean i know y'all probably know bellew and everything but if you don't make sure to follow him on on twitter on youtube do you stream on twitch you just pretty much do uh you do all your stuff on youtube now don't you yeah i know what we're streaming youtube um how is it i don't know like technically i violated my twitch partner agreement because i like from back in the day right when we were uh when we were both youtubers yeah in warlords of draenor i was i was twitch streaming i got partnered but if you stream somewhere else you violate your partnership so uh yeah did i just burn that bridge i don't know be cool yo delete the vod man delete the vote i won't tell them it's okay [ __ ] but yeah valuer has not only got his wow channel he's also got he's got two other channels he's got his clips channel and that kind of goes with like kind of just like the uh the moment it's basically like my asthma tv channel talking about different stuff like little points from his podcast where he goes he does it with the uh yeah yeah doing the industry stuff which uh you know what fun to do but man it's been a dry year for news so uh yeah spice will happen soon hopefully but honestly we'll see what happens and [ __ ] and stuff anyway man thank you so much for coming on i really really do know you're welcome that was good and uh anyway guys uh make sure fall belly were everywhere and what we're gonna be doing here is we're going to be transitioning over to the after show and before we do that my uh my dad happened to come on over a little bit ago and he brought over something that this is something it's a long long lost relic and um all the way from back in the day my dad took me out fishing and he actually brought first time fishing to the coast and he brought out and apparently he wrote an article and he sent it in to a fishing magazine and they published the article with my picture of the fish that i caught like my dad used to take me down and i caught was i caught three yeah it was three reds so you kept the only had the only keepers i i caught more than you right yeah well like [ __ ] they had to throw all mine back mine were might were like two inches under and yours were two inches over how about that and you lost that one big big bag yeah yeah yeah took off you know uh-huh but uh but you didn't even know you were getting a [ __ ] bite yeah i had no idea i never done fishing before like yeah you're holding a pole like this and i'm still putting i don't even have my bait on you know yeah and you're holding and i just throw yours out there and then i go over to mess with mine and turn around i turn around you're going i guess i said are you getting a bite yeah he was eight years old you know so we lifted up the pole and things why is he holy [ __ ] get that thing up to the boat and swam by the boat whammo right in the boat yeah i want to make sure you got that first big one honestly like yeah i did i did i got i got a number of them and uh i i kind of like you know why i lost interest like i i i i realized you could fish with a grenade yeah i know you know you know all about that and so like that's the thing that's why i was like man like what are we doing using this fishing pole thing like i wanna let's get a grenade throw throw one in or get some fish but yeah back in the day my dad used to take me out to fishing that that's a young asthma goal right there look at that eight years old eight years old yeah he brought that over from his house but anyway uh just a little little quick personal anecdote little thing that happened there and uh guys thank you all so much for watching today we had an incredible amazing stream i had a lot of fun i hope you guys had a lot of fun on saturday what's gonna happen is i'm gonna come back and you know that boss that beat the [ __ ] out of me for an hour well we're gonna turn that around we're going to beat them and that's what's going to happen 100 so again shout out to belligere thank you very much for coming on the show i really appreciate it yeah man pleasure do it again it was fun i'm glad that you had fun man i'm glad you had fun absolutely and uh we're going to be moving over to rich's stream we're going to talk about a bunch of other stuff kind of do the after show taking some questions from you guys some call-ins etc and uh that's the plan so again guys i will see you over there but until then thanks a lot for watching and until next time peace [Music] you

Channel: Rich W Campbell

Views: 236,406

Keywords: WoW, World of Warcraft, Twitch, Stream, Highlight, Comedy, Funny, Meme, Asmon, Asmond, Asmongold, Rich, Rich Campbell, RichWCampbell, Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment, Shadowlands, Warcraft, Allcraft, Experience, Good, Bad, Mounts, Mizkif, Esfandtv, Jschlatt, nmplol, Podcast, 9.1, patch, burning crusade, TBC, Classic, guide, release, Elden Ring, Gaming, Trailer, Return, new, episode, Final Fantasy 14, FF, Final Fantaasy, XIV, MMO, MMORPG, Ashes of Creation, Interview, AoC, Ashes, Intrepid, Runescape, OSRS, Bellular, BellularGaming

Id: WrWAlxxgy7Q

Length: 158min 47sec (9527 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021