May 2, 2025 • 48 mins
This week we talk about Grand Theft Auto VI being delayed to 2026, EA laying off another 300+ employees, Xbox raising prices on their hardware, games media outlets are in shambles and much more. Click this link for my socials, all of my other content and ways to support: https://linktr.ee/baundiesel
00:00:00 | Intro
00:00:30 | Opening
00:03:15 | News
00:46:18 | Updates
00:47:10 | Wrap Up
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:07):
Welcome to the Bonfire Gaming Podcast for episode 334.
I am your host Morgan, AKA Von Diesel.
And this week we'll be talking about Grand Theft Auto 6 is
being delayed to 2026, another round of EA layoffs, Xbox
joining the tariff price jumps and much more.
(00:30):
So this week was a good reminder, or at least the last
week or so, a good reminder thatgood games can come out and, you
know, you can have fun with gaming and, you know, related
activities while the industry isstill a hot mess.
(00:52):
It's it's not one or the other, right?
It's not that there's all these layoffs and there there's this
and that and you know, and that means that there's no good
games. There's definitely good games
coming out as proof of the last,you know, couple months, if not
last couple years. Really with the backdrop of
(01:12):
especially in the studio developer side of things, a ton
of instability and things like that.
We'll, we'll talk about that here in a bit with the EA
layoffs, but we're also going totalk about a little bit with the
journalism side of the industry being in trouble.
Giant Bomb effectively is shutting down or at least has
(01:33):
lost its major people because ofa big shift their venture
capital owners want to make. And then Polygon got sold off
and most of the staff fired. I have some relatively
controversial opinions about some of that that may not be
super popular, but I think it's a fair statement to give.
(01:56):
But regardless, at the end of the day, for everyone who gets
laid off anyone, because who knows, it could be me one day, I
hope they land on their feet. Even if I have, you know, some
some varying opinions about things.
It's just weird times, you know,to to have an industry where
games like Exposition 33 or Bulger's Gate 3 or even Avowed
(02:19):
and some other games I've had fun with recently can exist
while also those devs can never be positive that they'll have a
job tomorrow. And it's even if they made some
of those games, even if they made great games, the the the
boulders gay people over at Larian, they're probably fairly
safe. They, you know, spin the the CEO
(02:41):
over there has he's said a little too much for them to like
ever have layoffs because it would come off as a bit
hypocritical. But what they're doing over
there seems to be smart. And I hope the rest of the
industry can learn, especially from people like sandfall games
who made Claire obscure. And I, I hope that maybe the
(03:03):
industry side of things will start to match the the product
side of things, which I think has been pretty impressive.
So there's the opening thoughts for this week.
OK, let's get into the gaming news.
Let's kick it off with probably the biggest story of the year,
at least so far. Grand Theft Auto 6 has been
(03:24):
delayed to May of 2026. They put out a statement,
Rockstar themselves did and you know, kind of given you the
normal corporate gobbledygook ofof why they are doing something.
What's interesting about it is Jason Schreyer also put out a
statement about it saying that no devs that he had talked to
(03:44):
anytime recently thought that this 2025 date was ever going to
happen. So it sounds like it was pretty
much, you know, known that they were never going to make it this
year. I don't know what 2 KS fiscal
year is. I assume it goes from like May
to April or something like that.So or April to March or whatever
(04:04):
it is. So it's coming next year.
What's interesting is that for games like Fable and stuff that
delayed till next year, presumably for their own
reasons, are probably now kind of looking at the calendar being
like, like, maybe we need to release like January 1st then
and try to, you know, I, I, I'm sure there's plenty of analytics
(04:27):
and, and studies done and all ofthat.
Like they know, like if Grand Theft Auto 6 comes at the end of
May, then most games probably know they, they need probably a
month of space, right? So we're probably going to see a
ton of games come out in March and April and maybe even the
beginning of May. But I, it will be very
interesting to see that release calendar and see how much people
(04:48):
stay away from Grand Theft Auto 6 because everyone knew everyone
was going to like, that's just, it's been a known quantity.
But we're also in a situation where games, there's games
coming out every month that are big and good, right?
So you can only avoid other big and good games so much.
And at some point you can't let other companies and other games
(05:10):
dictate your own strategy. So, you know, last week on Xbox,
we had the situation of Xbox hadtheir Oblivion remake or
remaster. Forgive me come out and then
just a couple days before ClaireObscure Expedition 33, not a
Microsoft game or or Bethesda game, even though even the
(05:31):
oblivion was a third party remaster, but still.
But Claire obscure had a marketing deal with Xbox.
It was on all platforms, but youmostly saw it talked about input
on Xbox and and it's done fine. So I, I, I think at the end of
the day, you know, a game just being good, it's probably the
(05:52):
most important part. And that sounds so simple and
it's not always been true. We know that like Titanfall 2, I
think, you know, the single player won the greatest ever and
honestly, a really good multiplayer game that got lost
in the sauce of Battlefield and some other titles that came out
right around it. And to this day, people still,
you know, kind of crap on EA forletting it kind of, you know,
(06:14):
starve on the vine like that. So, so I don't know the the
whole discussion about timing and marketing and all of this
with gaming is, is so pointless because it, it seems like such a
imperfect science. It, it, it seems like, you know,
sometimes games don't advertise until like a week before they
(06:35):
come out and they do really well.
Or sometimes they have 6 month campaigns and they don't do very
well still. And suddenly you have a
situation like Dragon Age of theVale Guard last year that
obviously had the huge marketingcampaign with Game Informer.
And then like a month into a Game Informer shut down and
deleted all of the content they made for the game as well as
everything else. So I, I just, you know, like
(06:58):
I've even had frustration, unfortunately, I've even like
lost connections with other people over, you know,
conversations about this where I, you know, maybe a bit too
aggressively stated things like we don't know what we're talking
about because the people who getpaid millions of dollars to do
this stuff don't even really know.
They're just going off analyticsand, and, and what they've done
before and things like that. I just, I, I think it's all very
(07:23):
interesting and more than anything it's like kind of just
nice to have a date for Grand Theft Auto.
So it's like, OK, in a year I'llplay Grand Theft Auto.
Until then, what am I going to be playing?
I'm going to be playing the nextBattlefield.
I'm going to be playing probablyFable Outer Worlds 2 and I'm
sure a handful, handful about next, next Call of Duty, you
know, and a handful of other things I am not remembering at
(07:44):
the moment. And that's that's kind of
comforting. But I really do think it's going
to be so interesting to see thisnext like month and see how many
games get announced for the second-half of 2025 or like the
first quarter of 2026. Because I bet it's going to be a
ton. Because I think a bunch of
companies, even big AAA companies have been kind of
(08:06):
sitting on their hands waiting to find this out.
And we may see some of it trickle out here in the next
couple weeks. But you have to remember that
the, you know, formerly the, thetime frame formerly known as E 3
is coming up really soon in, in about a month.
And I bet we're seeing a bunch of trailers getting recut right
(08:27):
now, a bunch of stuff being changed where companies are
like, oh, OK, Yep, we're coming out in November.
Because the big thing is it opens up the holiday season for
a bunch of games and companies. Nintendo is probably praising
the Lord right now because now they can really push that, you
know, the Christmas season with their new console and new games
that will be coming out for it and things like that.
(08:51):
You know, we'll, we'll, we'll see about PlayStation and Xbox
with their pricing and stuff like that.
We'll get into that here in a minute.
But yeah, interesting story. I it's in Grand Theft Auto for
me is interesting. I really, really, really enjoyed
Vice City and three and San Andreas and four and man, I
(09:11):
might have played five hours or so of five and just couldn't do
it. I didn't like, I hated the
characters and I know you're supposed to at least like
they're supposed to be flawed characters, right?
But I, I still didn't like them.Even understanding that I
really, really, really, really hate when games basically force
(09:33):
you to switch between protagonist.
It was one of my my few complaints about Assassin's
Creed Shadows is I really hated that you couldn't just play the
game as one of them. I ended up by the end of the
game appreciating both characters and playing as them.
But I never felt that with GrandTheft Auto 5.
I just, I really, really, reallydidn't like it, which was weird
(09:56):
because I love Rockstar games. I, I, I loved all of all of the
Grand Theft Auto before, even the old top down pixel ones.
And even like like Red Dead Redemption 2 is probably still
my favorite game ever, even though that's definitely been
challenged here in the last few years.
So it's, it's interesting times,but you know, we have a day for
Grand Theft Auto and, and honestly, it's, that's been
(10:18):
coming for so long is that it's,it's like such a strange feeling
to be like, Oh yeah, we know when that game is coming now.
Weird. What's not so weird because it's
so familiar is that EA has laid off 3 to 400 employees through
various reporting this week. We found out and their own
announcement that Respawn lost around 100 developers and
(10:40):
cancelled 2 early stage projects.
The initial reporting of this was like they cancelled
Titanfall three. It doesn't appear that that's
what they did. It looks like that one of those
early projects was a Titanfall extraction shooter, which is
just, you know, we'll we'll talkabout Arc Raiders and Marathon
and Tarkov here in a little bit.But man, it should be very
(11:04):
telling that they cancelled thatproject.
I think that was probably a goodidea.
I think any effort they put intothat should have just been put
in the Titanfall 3. But there's a reason I'm not an
executive, I guess. Code Masters also appears to be
getting a reduced in some capacity.
Their social media channels are gone.
We found out that they are no longer going to be working on
(11:26):
dirt or WRC games, which I believe is World Racing Circuit
or or something along those lines.
I think it's like the off road racing.
And you know, if you follow me, if you check out this podcast, I
assume you are likely a Mass Effect fan.
So if you've been paying attention to BioWare and stuff,
as far as I can tell, BioWare came out unscathed from this.
(11:49):
It was other parts of the company.
Not that that makes it any better for those people.
But if you're like me and you'reinterested in BioWare and hoping
that they can stick around long enough to make another Mass
Effect game, I think they're safe.
I hope I follow a lot of people who are still currently working
there, as well as people who used to be there.
And it doesn't look like, as faras I can tell, any of them got
(12:10):
laid off either. So people add, you know, working
on like Battlefield, on the IronMan game, even on Skate, as far
as I can tell, all of those teams were unaffected.
So if you can try to get a silver lining of a story like
this, I, I guess that's it. One of the interesting reactions
to these layoffs was the, the, the conversation around their,
(12:34):
their CEO and the conversation around it was Andrew Wilson.
He made $25 million in 2024. And the the big conversation
whenever this happens is people being like, oh, he makes
25,000,000 and then they still laid off 1000 people in the last
year or whatever. Like these conversations make
(12:56):
sense. And I'm not here to dispute them
and to tell people they shouldn't complain about that.
Fair game, right? Obviously.
But I do think just for the simple, you know, just for
wanting gamers to understand theindustry better from all the
(13:17):
people I've talked to who are inthe industry as developers, as
high level, you know, studio folks, things like that.
It's they could have paid AndrewWilson $100 a year and those
layoffs probably still would have happened.
You know, EA could have made twice as much money last year
and these layoffs probably stillwould have happened because
(13:39):
these decisions, as I'm told, are very, very rarely ever made
in, in such broad sweeping ways.You know, it's, it's not, you
know, because they gave Andrew Wilson a $5,000,000 raise.
Well, now they have to fire $5 million of people.
It's, you know, the corporations, at least the ones
I've interacted with and, and, and knowledgeable on, don't
(14:03):
operate that way. They operate, you know, where
like every team is their own little business and, and things
like that. And it doesn't sugarcoat this.
It doesn't justify layoffs, it doesn't justify these hyper rich
companies doing what they do. And it doesn't justify someone
making $25 million a year. But it also doesn't really
(14:28):
explain it. And like $25 million a year is
insane. No human being needs to make
that much money. But when you consider that last
year EA made like 7 point something billion dollars, $25
million is absolutely nothing toa company making $7 billion a
(14:48):
year. Just like the salaries of the
people they laid off, at least in the short term, it's pocket
change. Not really that big of a deal
to, to the company as a whole. But when you break it down to
studio and department and thingslike that and you start to
realize that these studios get their individual budgets.
You know, there isn't just a potof $7 billion sitting there that
(15:13):
everyone gets to take from as they need it.
You know, they, they run each ofthese studios like little
businesses, even to the point where right now we know that EA
is split up into sports and theneverything else.
And I'm willing to bet that the sports studios get a lot more
leeway than the other ones do. And so, you know, you just can't
look at these these choices and like vague of these, if that's
(15:38):
even a word or generalities, youknow, where it's like that
there, there's just more to it that there's and and to
reiterate, doesn't excuse it. It doesn't make it any better to
say that for these people who lost their jobs and their
livelihoods and maybe moved across the country or to another
country to get these jobs and then they lose them.
(15:58):
One of the awful stories from Respawn was that the day before,
so the layoffs happened on Thursday, I believe on May 1st,
the last day of April, they announced the new Apex character
and and a new fighter that's going to be added.
And the next day the the the lead writer for that character
got laid off, right? That sucks.
(16:22):
There's no excusing that. You, you can't justify that,
right? Someone who just was productive,
who just created content that you're going to release is new,
that you're going to take battlepass payments for so people can
play as them and unlock their skins and all that crap.
It's inexcusable, right? But I think sometimes people get
(16:44):
a little too focused on things that maybe aren't actually at
fault because it's just easy or it it it just makes sense or
there's a face to yell at. Andrew Wilson is easy to yell at
because he looks like a, he looks like a, Oh my gosh, a
Hunger Games villain. Like he looks like he would be
the president that would take over after Snow and would be
(17:07):
even worse. Like he just he looks like a
robot designed to be an antagonist in the story, right?
Like, so I get it. And he's Australian and you know
what they say? I have no idea what they say,
but it it actually I think beingAustralian makes them seem less
evil because they have such likesweet accents I guess, or at
(17:27):
least to me they do. So anyways, sucks to see all
those layoffs. Selfishly happy it didn't affect
the people I interact with directly, but Respawn is also
one of my favorite studios and if people want to Titanfall
three, that lessens those chances big time.
If you're excited about that next Jedi game coming out the
the final game in that trilogy, it's probably not looking great
(17:50):
for that either. It certainly won't.
You know it's going to affect that game in some capacity.
And if you're still playing Apex, you know, I'm sure it's
not going to help there either. So that's the wishes to all of
those people. In another story of just
excitement and joy, Xbox is raising prices on all their
consoles and accessories. So they made this official
(18:12):
announcement. Some of the examples of the
price jumps, and this is uniquely to like PlayStation.
This is in the US and and all other territories.
As far as I can tell that in theUS the the Series X with a disk
drive is going from 499 to 599. The digital edition I believe
(18:32):
was 450 and now it's going to 550.
The Series S the minimum. The 512 gigabyte model is going
from 299 to 349. I don't think that's right.
I'm pretty sure it's 380. Actually.
I think I'm a typo there. And then the Series X special
edition two terabyte, which was 599, which honestly wasn't a
(18:53):
terrible deal because if you consider a $500 series XA decent
deal because the extra gig is what you're going to pay for
anyways or the extra TB is what you you pay 100 bucks for that
anyways. So you just get and you get this
like kind of cool looking console.
It's going from 599, which was OK, to $730, making it almost as
(19:15):
much I think as the PS5 Pro, which is wild because even
though I think the PS5 Pro is a bit has been talked about a
little dishonestly, it still is more powerful.
We know that from the things that we've seen with the patches
they've released for it and stuff like it is a more powerful
piece of hardware, albeit with aunique methods right.
(19:41):
But you know, this base series Xbeing almost the same price is
is pretty nuts and I think that the PS5 pro has two terabytes as
well. So now then I think controllers
went up to like 65 bucks or something, which actually isn't
that bad. I think they're currently 60, So
it's not too awful. The reaction to this has been
interesting. My own reaction is is
(20:01):
frustration. I I understand the Xbox is kind
of giving away from being like hyper focused on selling
consoles. That's obvious, right?
They still need to sell consolesthough, right?
Like, like it's not like they, they just can't sell them.
One of the things that is interesting is I've seen a lot
of chatter over the last, you know, couple of years that
apparently at least series XS are kind of hard to come by.
(20:23):
So you know, that's kind of a whole different issue.
But for, you know, a couple of years now I've been preaching
like, man, there, there's no way.
Like at this point, you why not just discount and undercut
PlayStation and sell the series S for like 250 and sell the
series X like the base model or digital or whatever for like, I
(20:44):
don't 2 I don't know, like 300 bucks 350 maybe.
And, and we're going the opposite direction.
So I mean, it's weird, you know,four or five years after a
console comes out, this is when you, you know, with the last
Gen., it's when you saw like the, you know, the PS5, the PS4
slim or the what was it the XboxOne S, right?
(21:07):
Or it was still an Xbox One, butit was somewhere and had like, I
think a more efficient processor.
And then they had the 1X right, as like kind of a beefy model.
And instead those are cheaper, right?
And instead now we're getting, you know, $100 jump in price on
the five year old console that hadn't had a price drop yet.
(21:27):
So you can blame lots of things.I'm sure tariffs are part of
this. It's, you know, at least for
Americans, but they raise the prices everywhere.
So it's obviously other stuff. The tariffs could still apply
there because, you know, it's likely the manufacturing of
these things are getting more expensive because of tariff
issues or just trade problems orjust general economy issues.
(21:49):
But there's also for sure a, a, a hint of selfishness, right,
of, of greed, you know, as everyone's going to want to say.
And like, like, that's a weird thing because it doesn't seem
like Xbox is really pushing to get people to buy these consoles
that hard at this point. They're out there and they
(22:10):
advertise them. And, and, and I love my Series
X. It's been a really good piece of
hardware. It's, you know, most of my
computer at this point is newer than five years and I paid a lot
more than 500 bucks for it. So it's been a great deal.
I play on all the time. I play a ton of games on there,
but you know this isn't a good look, especially because
PlayStation while they did a fewweeks ago raise their prices as
(22:33):
well, they haven't done it in the States and they absolutely
will now especially they're going to.
I saw someone post oh useless PSY Pro is a better deal after
all. It's like well, I mean it's
still 150 bucks more than a series X while, you know
arguably not being $150.00 better.
(22:54):
That's obviously very subjective, you know, but I, I,
I would find it extremely hard to believe that we won't in the
next month or so get a press release from PlayStation of them
being like, oh, sorry fellas andladies, we actually need to
raise our prices too. And the PS5 goes to 600 as well.
(23:18):
And man, I don't even know what the PS5 pro would be if they
raised it be like 900 bucks probably if it raises a similar
amount, I mean like 1000 bucks for APS 5 pro and then you know
something I mentioned before I move on from this to people.
Is that like so the answer to people in the back of your minds
(23:39):
be like, Oh well, maybe now I finally will go PC.
Well, unfortunately if you want to get it used to be with PC
that you know, getting used parts or old GPUs and things
like that wasn't that big of a deal and you still can do it.
But that's not how I roll for the most part.
I want new stuff because I want the warranties.
(24:01):
I want all that, right? And I'm at a point where if
someone wanted to build their own computer, I would have a
hard time recommending anything below 15 or 1600 bucks just
knowing all the basic prices of stuff right now.
And that's if you build your own, if you buy off the shelf
from HP or Dell or whoever, you're looking at probably $2000
(24:24):
for a decent computer, not even like a top of the line when
you're looking closer, probably four or five grand for that.
So it's, it's getting to this conversation.
And I put out a video about it on my YouTube about this
affordability issue that, you know, our, our fun little hobby
that used to be affordable is, is not looking like that
anymore, at least not if you want to be on the cutting edge.
(24:47):
So I think that sucks and and I also think it sucks.
The reaction to this has been interesting.
Like obviously, you know, people, some people were kind of
weird about the price of the switch to because it jumped in
price a lot. The switch is 300 bucks and the
switch to is 450 and it's a little more powerful, but not
it's not, you know, 50% more powerful or at least you know,
(25:09):
however you would decide to measure it.
And then the PS5, you know, theydid raise their prices in non
American regions. And I can, I mean, they will
raise their prices here. They're definitely going to let
Xbox take the brunt of the bad PR.
And then they'll slip out a press release here in a few
weeks and and have some kind of price jump themselves for, you
(25:30):
know, like I said before, for legitimate and maybe somewhat
greedy reasons. So it sucks that I think what
scares me the most is thinking about what the next consoles are
going to cost and what the next GPU is going to cost and all of
this stuff. We have a situation where you
know, the next Xbox or the PlayStation Six, they could be
(25:53):
750 plus dollars like from the jump.
And that's hoping that they're going to keep subsidizing them
the way they have. I'm sure PlayStation will.
They're still so focused on hardware sales.
But as Xbox deemphasizes hardware sales and you know,
they still put out something andthey still want people to buy
it, but maybe they aren't willing to take a hit.
(26:14):
Maybe they aren't willing to break even and sell it at cost,
right? Maybe they want to make some
money off of it, you know, You know, they know they aren't
going to sell 100 million of them.
So if they're going to sell 25 million of them, maybe they want
to, you know, tack on 100 bucks onto them and recoup some more
of that money. We'll have to wait and see.
I am very curious, speaking earlier about the game industry
(26:41):
and the game's journalism industry, Giant Bomb and Polygon
are both in trouble. So Giant Bomb is being like
temporarily held back. Jeff Grubb and Dan Reichert have
both officially left. Mike Minotti, who's another one
of their personalities there who's like a contributor is no
longer contributing a Giant Bomb.
(27:03):
And it's assumed that the vast majority of the front facing
staff there is gone. It's supposedly they're the
venture capitalist company that owns them is going to try to
it's fandom is going to try to turn them into like a guides
website. So I'm I'm sure people who just
need jobs will stay, stay and and make some of that content
for them. But as I already said that the
(27:25):
more notable people there and Jeff Grubb and Dan Reichert are
both gone already and we'll see what they end up doing.
And then Polygon got sold off toa new venture capitalist company
just like they do, and most of the staff got laid off.
So maybe they'll reappear in in some AI objectively evil way or,
(27:46):
you know, but we'll have to waitand see.
This whole thing is is is weird to me.
Giant Bomb is the only one. I used to watch them a lot.
I haven't so much in the last couple years.
I started watching them because I watched Jeff Grubb a lot when
he was at Gamesbeat still and was doing his Jeff Grubb podcast
with him and Mike Menotti. And then I kind of migrated to
(28:08):
Giant Bomb when Jeff Gersman left there and they brought in
Jeff Grubb and some of these other personalities.
And I got into it for a little bit and then I kind of wasn't
anymore. And what was interesting about
them is that you had someone like Jeff Grubb who was like a
journalist at Gamespeed, right? Had pretty good connections.
If you're an EA fan, he's a goodperson to follow.
He seems to have some pretty high level contacts there.
(28:31):
His info from for that publisheris often pretty good, but as he
and the others transitioned to Giant Bomb, that they went from
like journalists to like contentcreators right to entertainers
more so. And, and that definitely, at
least in my opinion, affected a lot of their takes and some of
their reporting and stuff. My, my big thing with them is I
(28:54):
saw a lot of their reaction fromthe gaming community in general,
but especially their own fans oflike, how could this happen?
And one thing to keep in mind isif you go look at giant bombs
live streams and their videos, they they get like 3 or 4000
views and they've had a few willjump up a bit higher, like the
Nintendo switch to reveal and stuff was it was a little bit
(29:16):
higher for them, but like, not much like, like the numbers they
were getting. From what I've seen over the
last, you know, almost 10 years of me being a like hobbyist
content creator, their numbers likely wouldn't even sustain one
person being like a one person show and doing everything they
(29:36):
did and getting all their numbers would likely maybe not
even be a full time job for one person money wise.
And so then you think about it, you, they have this huge team
of, you know, front facing people, back end people,
producers and editors and all this stuff.
And like, this is likely not a channel that could even sustain
one person, let alone this wholebig team with, you know, a lot
(29:59):
of equipment and a lot of content and all this stuff.
And so, like when I saw people be like, I can't believe this.
I'm like, how like they, they, they, they weren't getting, they
had an emotion, they weren't getting views.
They were getting a couple 1000 views of video or, or live
stream. Like that's not very many.
You need 10s of thousands every single time.
For example, I have a, a video from I think two years ago,
(30:22):
maybe 3 now. It's my, my highest, you know,
viewed video. It's 15,000 views.
It's not really that many, but it's more than most of their
videos. And in three years that's made
me $19.00 and like 20-3 cents orsomething.
My rates are lower than theirs probably.
And, and they have sponsors and ads and all that.
(30:43):
I'm sure that stuff adds up, right?
But you know, if a video only gets 5 or 10,000 views, you're
talking about like 5 or 10 bucks.
And if you, you know, they're doing live streams and that
they're probably not, they're not putting that much time into
them. But even like when you see like
a small content creator make a video that's like 2 hours long
about the entire lore of some franchise and it gets like, you
(31:04):
know, 5000 views, like they, they, they spent, you know,
maybe dozens, if not hundreds ofhours on that video and they're
going to make like 10 bucks on it.
And, and for someone like me, that's fine.
It's all good. I'm not making this stuff to
make money. If you want to become a member
on my channel or, or, or, or subscribe to me on Twitch or,
(31:26):
you know, buy a coffee mug or something from me off of
YouTube, Like that's cool. I'll take the couple bucks.
I'll use it to improve somethinghere.
But I'm not going to quit my job, right?
I have a full time job. I work full time.
I take care of a little girl. I, you know, spend time with my
wife. I'm a married guy.
Like I have a family and and so do a lot of these people that
(31:46):
that work there. And I think what it's kind of
come down to when I've, when I've looked at all of this, like
I saw one of the people be like,well, I like covering games and
that's what I'm going to do. And it's like, that's cool, man,
but there's a really good chancethat you may need to have a real
job, like like you, your hobby and your personality may not
sustain you in a house and multiple children and insurance
(32:11):
and this and that. And I, I think that like, I
don't know if it was COVID or, or just kind of streamer
delusions or whatever ANYWAYS, but there's so many people.
I think COVID was a big part of it because there was a big spike
in people who were able to, you know, kind of make a living
doing it. You know, it's, it's not that
sustainable and it's because there's not a lot of room.
(32:31):
I've talked a lot about game journalism and, and that it's a
small club and you're not wantedlike, like, if you really think
about it, there's like a 50 games journalist and then
there's a bunch of other people who write articles, but there's
like 50 games journalists. And there's like Jason Schreyer
is like the one legit journalist, I think, and I don't
even like him that much, but I think he's the most like legit
(32:53):
journalist in, in gaming, right?And then you have all these
other people doing and, and everyone thinks they can do it.
And then they start off and now what's going to happen is
someone's going to start a Patreon or they already have, I
think, and they're going to try to do their own little show And,
and, and a lot of excitement will drum up and they'll get a
bunch of Patreon Subs for a couple months and then that's
(33:14):
going to drop off because the economy is rough.
People don't have any money. Maybe, you know, the the, the
kind of most uncomfortable part about all of this is that not
everyone is interesting enough or talented enough to do this
stuff as a job. A lot of the people who do it as
a job, I don't think really are great journalists and aren't
really that interesting and don't really have, you know,
(33:36):
very unique takes. Like you have entire podcasts
and shows and content creators who like their entire thing is
reporting what other people havereported.
Like that's not sustainable in the long run because you're not
doing anything original personality and stuff like that
can only take you so far. And so I think when we start
(33:58):
seeing these people falling off of these big, more traditional,
you know, outlets and trying to do their own thing and a lot of
them don't succeed, it's becausemaybe they kind of overestimated
how interesting they are or, or how much of A poll they really
have when they're no longer at Giant Bomb or IGN or, you know,
whatever company. So I think it's going to be
(34:19):
interesting to see the fallout from this again, like I said
before, I hope everyone lands ontheir feet, whether I like him
or not, And it's going to be interesting to see, you know,
where everyone ends up. And, and, and I hope that it's
all I hope that they all end up in a good place.
Last few stories here arc Raiders test 2 is out and I've
(34:41):
played it quite a bit. It is super fun.
They have come so far with it. It's no longer in D aid it it
looks great. It's one of the prettiest games
I've seen in quite a while. It looks really good and I play
on series X. I'm pretty sure it's doing like
ray tracing and stuff It's Unreal Engine 5.
I believe that the textures seemreally high quality like it's
weird how good it looks and it'sdefinitely 60 FPS like it's
(35:04):
running well. So I'm sure it looks even better
on PC on the nice solid PC, but I've been very pleasantly
surprised of how this game looks.
The you know, the loop is prettysimple.
And I think that's a a big benefit to it.
You, you, you, you have a stash full of weapons and stuff and
you have these quests that you're trying to complete by
(35:25):
collecting certain things or going certain places during
these raids. And during the raid, you're
fighting these robots, which arelike hard to fight.
And you could be fighting other people and you can get dominated
very quickly by them. And what you're trying to do is
you're trying to find stuff or do things to complete these
quests to get more experience and upgrade your character and
your base and everything more. And, you know, once you collect
(35:47):
all those things from this world, from the various maps,
then you extract and, and you have to sometimes fight for that
extraction with other teams. And then if you kill them, you
take their stuff. And it's, it's that Tarkov idea,
right? But in a more, it's a third
person game. It's got this kind of retro
futuristic, I I don't know how to describe it, like 80s vibe
(36:08):
almost and and, and just the aesthetic of it.
The sound design in this game, from the sounds of the enemies
to the gun sounds, even the voice, the VoIP, the voice over
IP that it like accurately. If someone's in the next room,
you'll hear them like muffled because of the walls and you'll
hear like it's interesting. So say you're in the hallway and
(36:32):
from me, from you facing it, it goes off to your left and then
there's a doorway on the right or no.
Here's a better example. You're standing in a hallway,
big long hallway and down the hallway on the right, there's a
door in a room. And if there's someone in that
room, Voiping, I think, and someone at Ubisoft told me that
(36:55):
this tech was being worked on and and I could see it being
done in Unreal Engine five. I think they're using like ray
tracing for sound because I noticed that if you heard sounds
in that room, you would hear it from like your left because the
sound is coming out of the room and hitting the hallway wall and
then coming to you and within less of it is coming the other
(37:18):
way. So even though The thing is
happening on the right. So you have to start thinking
almost like in real life where, you know, like, like it happens
to me sometimes where we'll have, you know, there'll be a
noise outside our house and we'll have a window open, like
on my left side, even though Thething is happening to my right.
But those windows are closed. And it's kind of that, you know,
(37:39):
as a normal person, you learn toanticipate those things and
figure them out. But in a video game, you often
don't have to do that because invideo games, sound is often just
directional. If you hear it that way, then it
was that way. So yeah, Arc Raiders has some
really cool stuff going on. This game feels so close to
done. I suspect it comes out sometime
this year, very likely this summer.
(38:00):
That wouldn't surprise me at all.
And I'm excited for it. I'm trying not to play it too
much now because I don't want tobe annoyed when I have to play
it again, assuming none of myself will carry over.
So so that was cool. I got into marathon yesterday.
I got I got a code and I fired up played a couple rounds.
Man, I don't like that game. It like it looks neat, like it
(38:23):
has a cool like kind of Apex legends kind of aesthetic, but
like even more futuristic and and whatever.
But the actual gameplay. So I played Tarkov almost 3000
hours. I've played, you know, even like
kind of older extraction games if you call them, you know,
extraction games really are the evolution of battle royales,
right? So even back to like The
(38:45):
Division, survival mode and stuff.
Like I've played a ton of these games, PvP mostly.
And my issue with Marathon is itjust doesn't feel good to play.
I know Bungie always gets like all of its flowers for its
gunplay and stuff. I think the gunplay in this game
does feels OK. It's kind of inconsistent, at
least in my opinion. The movement feels terrible.
(39:08):
The Walking speed, like the non sprinting speed is like it's
just it's not slow, but it stillfeels clunky.
And then the sprinting is like OK.
But what, what's really killing me about it, I think more than
anything is that I, I don't knowwhy and, and Bungie's the worst
(39:28):
about it, that some of these companies, especially Bungie
thinks that people on a controller want to use a mouse.
And I, I'm telling you, if I am on a console and I am using a
controller, I don't want a cursor that I have to, you know,
swing around and you can have that like Assassin's Creed does
that, right? Like you can have a cursor, but
as soon as you hit your D pad, it's, it converts to that.
(39:51):
And then you can use your D pad to go around.
At least right now in Marathon, you can't do that.
And it's it's annoying and it's clunky and they'll like game
menus. But it's straight up bad.
It it feels terrible in game because it still does that.
So a big thing about extraction games is that you go, you know,
into a building and you need to loot that building.
(40:12):
So there's a bunch of boxes withstuff in it.
So you run up to a box. And one of the things that
drives me nuts is that you don'tjust hit X or at least on on
Xbox, the the left pad button, you have to hold it down for
like an extended amount of time and and then it opens and then a
(40:33):
cursor pops up right in the middle of the screen.
And you would think that there'dbe a button to like take all or
something. And maybe there is if I missed
it, you can yell at me in the comments, but as far as I can
tell, there isn't. And, and but then you also can't
just hit like the pickup button.You have to move the cursor over
to the item and then hit pickup and then do that on all the
(40:53):
items that are in there. And in an extraction game,
especially a game like Tarkov, but even some of these other
ones that are coming out, you like that that is wasted
valuable time. And it doesn't like, it's not
intuitive. It doesn't feel good because if
you could just use your D pad and hit it and it would just
default to taking you to selectable areas like any
console game should, it would feel, at least in my opinion, a
(41:14):
lot better if at least it would start the cursor on the box that
you're opening and then you could quickly kind of pick
things up. So that's stuff that could be
improved, but there's just man, yeah, I, I didn't like that
game. I didn't enjoy that experience
very much. I have, I've played way more of
Arc Raiders and obviously of Tarkov and I, I can give
(41:35):
Marathon more of a go for sure. And, and I plan to, but may I
game? I, I just Arc Raiders gave me
that feeling of like, oh, peoplewho like Tarkov will like this.
This is Arc Raiders is much morecasual than Tarkov, which I
think is a big selling point. I, I don't think that it's going
to be the same reaction for marathon.
And I've seen some of the big content creators from Tarkov,
(41:57):
like Castilli talking about marathon and being like, like
it's neat, but it's, it's neat in the way that like, I'll try
it out and never play it again. And then they're going to charge
for it. And then I think that's rough.
We'll just, we'll see. I'm I'm not as excited about
marathon. Far Cry 4 released 10 years ago,
(42:20):
has gotten a patch to give it 60frames per second on PlayStation
5. And that's cool.
I don't know why they're doing that.
I'm I'm curious to what the dealis.
It was interesting because this that's how this was being
reported and I saw some people being like, what about Xbox?
Didn't they do it for that too? Funny enough, Far Cry 4 was one
of the games that FPS boost usedwhich if you remember when the
(42:46):
Xbox Series X came out, Xbox hadthis tech that would take games
from the Xbox One and would and even 360 I believe and boost
them the 60FPS without any patches or work by the studio.
I don't know how they did it. I don't know what how the tech
works. I assume it's some kind of
(43:08):
machine learning or you know theDLSS or FSR or whatever.
I assume it was like an early iteration of some of that tech.
But there were there were like hundreds of games they they did
that with that you were able to play AT60FPS on the Series X&S
without any intrusion by the studio.
I believe Dragon Age Inquisitionwas one of them.
That game looks like hot garbageon the Series X, but it still it
(43:31):
does run AT60FPS. It just doesn't look very good
doing it. But they did this with a bunch
of games and it's really cool. I think Red Dead Redemption, the
old one because they had FPS boost, but then they also have
like a resolution boost thing that would make games look a
little sharper, higher fidelity textures, things like that.
It's one of those things it's really cool.
And they had already done that with Far Cry 4, so I'm assuming
(43:53):
they did not work on a patch forthat because they didn't need
one. And then finally my updated
thoughts on Claire Obscure and some news about Expedition 33.
I'm on the last boss and what's so interesting is that if you
read some of the reviews about this game people complain about
doing too much side content and being over leveled and the
second-half of the game just being like a breeze.
(44:15):
Well I did the opposite and I golden pathed it real hard and
it turns out that I am on the final boss and the final fight.
Literally, I'm going to beat this boss and then make and then
do the finale of the game. The game will be over, but I
can't beat them. I've tried like 10 times and I
looked more into it and I saw the level that most people are
(44:36):
beating this boss at in the 50s,even like in into the 60s.
I'm level like 38. So currently I'm going back
through and I'm, I'm trying to level my characters back up and,
and get, you know, probably to at least like level 50 so I can
actually win because I've gottenthrough there's like there's,
there's so many phases to the final boss and I've gotten
(44:57):
through a couple of them and I just run out of juice.
I just can't do it. So I will report back when I've
actually finished that game. They did sell over 1,000,000
copies. I bet they're getting close to
higher numbers than that as we speak.
And one of their developers has already come out and said that
there's a the, the chances are pretty likely that they're going
(45:17):
to do some kind of DLC. I can see where the ending is
going. I'm curious to how it actually
ends. DLC and sequels for this game
are going to be very interesting.
What I will say is that Claire Obscure has three acts.
And the first act, it was very kind of, you know, it was great.
(45:38):
It was so good and it ended so well.
And then the second act, you start to realize that there's
something funny going on. And then the final act is just
just blows your mind. It's so cool, man.
I love it. So I'm excited.
I will probably do a spoiler cast for Claire Obscure once I'm
done with it and and likely onceI start a second playthrough.
(45:59):
It has a new game plus system that adds new weapons and things
like that. So yeah, it's it's a cool game.
I can't wait to talk more about it.
Because the average person, evenpeople who are playing it, most
of them aren't far enough to realize what they're getting
into. And I'm, I'm excited to see the
conversation around it. OK, moving over to some content
(46:21):
updates. All I really have is that Doom
the Dark Ages is coming out later this month.
I'm going to check it out. It's almost certainly going to
be a game I talked about here onthe podcast.
I would be surprised if I get really into it and like do a
full review, But we'll see what happens.
I'm I'm not going to rule anything out.
My plan for content really is going to be doing any videos as
I see fit, either on gaming newsor if I can make up a reason to
(46:45):
talk about Mass Effect I will. I do want to keep streaming.
I would love to finish my Mass Effect Legendary Edition modded
playthrough. Hopefully this month would be
the goal, as well as playing some other games on stream when
I'm able or just hanging out. Early in June, we'll be doing
some of the Showcase Co stream, so I'm excited for that and
(47:06):
that's kind of what we have coming up and that is where we
are going to wrap up this episode.
Thank you so much for watching it or listening to it.
Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app, leave a
review on Spotify or iTunes, andsubscribe to the Bond Diesel
YouTube channel to get all of myvideos, including this podcast.
(47:28):
Thank you to everyone who supports as YouTube members or
Twitch subscribers. If you are interested in
supporting this podcast and all of my other content, please
check out the links in the show description.
If you have any questions or feedback, comment on Spotify or
YouTube, let me know in my Discord, or hit me up on social
media at the Bond, at Bond Diesel, or at the Bonfire.
(47:53):
That is all I have for this episode of the Bonfire Gaming
Podcast, so until next time.
Welcome to the Bonfire Gaming Podcast for episode 334.
I am your host Morgan, AKA Von Diesel.
And this week we'll be talking about Grand Theft Auto 6 is
being delayed to 2026, another round of EA layoffs, Xbox
joining the tariff price jumps and much more.
(00:30):
So this week was a good reminder, or at least the last
week or so, a good reminder thatgood games can come out and, you
know, you can have fun with gaming and, you know, related
activities while the industry isstill a hot mess.
(00:52):
It's it's not one or the other, right?
It's not that there's all these layoffs and there there's this
and that and you know, and that means that there's no good
games. There's definitely good games
coming out as proof of the last,you know, couple months, if not
last couple years. Really with the backdrop of
(01:12):
especially in the studio developer side of things, a ton
of instability and things like that.
We'll, we'll talk about that here in a bit with the EA
layoffs, but we're also going totalk about a little bit with the
journalism side of the industry being in trouble.
Giant Bomb effectively is shutting down or at least has
(01:33):
lost its major people because ofa big shift their venture
capital owners want to make. And then Polygon got sold off
and most of the staff fired. I have some relatively
controversial opinions about some of that that may not be
super popular, but I think it's a fair statement to give.
(01:56):
But regardless, at the end of the day, for everyone who gets
laid off anyone, because who knows, it could be me one day, I
hope they land on their feet. Even if I have, you know, some
some varying opinions about things.
It's just weird times, you know,to to have an industry where
games like Exposition 33 or Bulger's Gate 3 or even Avowed
(02:19):
and some other games I've had fun with recently can exist
while also those devs can never be positive that they'll have a
job tomorrow. And it's even if they made some
of those games, even if they made great games, the the the
boulders gay people over at Larian, they're probably fairly
safe. They, you know, spin the the CEO
(02:41):
over there has he's said a little too much for them to like
ever have layoffs because it would come off as a bit
hypocritical. But what they're doing over
there seems to be smart. And I hope the rest of the
industry can learn, especially from people like sandfall games
who made Claire obscure. And I, I hope that maybe the
(03:03):
industry side of things will start to match the the product
side of things, which I think has been pretty impressive.
So there's the opening thoughts for this week.
OK, let's get into the gaming news.
Let's kick it off with probably the biggest story of the year,
at least so far. Grand Theft Auto 6 has been
(03:24):
delayed to May of 2026. They put out a statement,
Rockstar themselves did and you know, kind of given you the
normal corporate gobbledygook ofof why they are doing something.
What's interesting about it is Jason Schreyer also put out a
statement about it saying that no devs that he had talked to
(03:44):
anytime recently thought that this 2025 date was ever going to
happen. So it sounds like it was pretty
much, you know, known that they were never going to make it this
year. I don't know what 2 KS fiscal
year is. I assume it goes from like May
to April or something like that.So or April to March or whatever
(04:04):
it is. So it's coming next year.
What's interesting is that for games like Fable and stuff that
delayed till next year, presumably for their own
reasons, are probably now kind of looking at the calendar being
like, like, maybe we need to release like January 1st then
and try to, you know, I, I, I'm sure there's plenty of analytics
(04:27):
and, and studies done and all ofthat.
Like they know, like if Grand Theft Auto 6 comes at the end of
May, then most games probably know they, they need probably a
month of space, right? So we're probably going to see a
ton of games come out in March and April and maybe even the
beginning of May. But I, it will be very
interesting to see that release calendar and see how much people
(04:48):
stay away from Grand Theft Auto 6 because everyone knew everyone
was going to like, that's just, it's been a known quantity.
But we're also in a situation where games, there's games
coming out every month that are big and good, right?
So you can only avoid other big and good games so much.
And at some point you can't let other companies and other games
(05:10):
dictate your own strategy. So, you know, last week on Xbox,
we had the situation of Xbox hadtheir Oblivion remake or
remaster. Forgive me come out and then
just a couple days before ClaireObscure Expedition 33, not a
Microsoft game or or Bethesda game, even though even the
(05:31):
oblivion was a third party remaster, but still.
But Claire obscure had a marketing deal with Xbox.
It was on all platforms, but youmostly saw it talked about input
on Xbox and and it's done fine. So I, I, I think at the end of
the day, you know, a game just being good, it's probably the
(05:52):
most important part. And that sounds so simple and
it's not always been true. We know that like Titanfall 2, I
think, you know, the single player won the greatest ever and
honestly, a really good multiplayer game that got lost
in the sauce of Battlefield and some other titles that came out
right around it. And to this day, people still,
you know, kind of crap on EA forletting it kind of, you know,
(06:14):
starve on the vine like that. So, so I don't know the the
whole discussion about timing and marketing and all of this
with gaming is, is so pointless because it, it seems like such a
imperfect science. It, it, it seems like, you know,
sometimes games don't advertise until like a week before they
(06:35):
come out and they do really well.
Or sometimes they have 6 month campaigns and they don't do very
well still. And suddenly you have a
situation like Dragon Age of theVale Guard last year that
obviously had the huge marketingcampaign with Game Informer.
And then like a month into a Game Informer shut down and
deleted all of the content they made for the game as well as
everything else. So I, I just, you know, like
(06:58):
I've even had frustration, unfortunately, I've even like
lost connections with other people over, you know,
conversations about this where I, you know, maybe a bit too
aggressively stated things like we don't know what we're talking
about because the people who getpaid millions of dollars to do
this stuff don't even really know.
They're just going off analyticsand, and, and what they've done
before and things like that. I just, I, I think it's all very
(07:23):
interesting and more than anything it's like kind of just
nice to have a date for Grand Theft Auto.
So it's like, OK, in a year I'llplay Grand Theft Auto.
Until then, what am I going to be playing?
I'm going to be playing the nextBattlefield.
I'm going to be playing probablyFable Outer Worlds 2 and I'm
sure a handful, handful about next, next Call of Duty, you
know, and a handful of other things I am not remembering at
(07:44):
the moment. And that's that's kind of
comforting. But I really do think it's going
to be so interesting to see thisnext like month and see how many
games get announced for the second-half of 2025 or like the
first quarter of 2026. Because I bet it's going to be a
ton. Because I think a bunch of
companies, even big AAA companies have been kind of
(08:06):
sitting on their hands waiting to find this out.
And we may see some of it trickle out here in the next
couple weeks. But you have to remember that
the, you know, formerly the, thetime frame formerly known as E 3
is coming up really soon in, in about a month.
And I bet we're seeing a bunch of trailers getting recut right
(08:27):
now, a bunch of stuff being changed where companies are
like, oh, OK, Yep, we're coming out in November.
Because the big thing is it opens up the holiday season for
a bunch of games and companies. Nintendo is probably praising
the Lord right now because now they can really push that, you
know, the Christmas season with their new console and new games
that will be coming out for it and things like that.
(08:51):
You know, we'll, we'll, we'll see about PlayStation and Xbox
with their pricing and stuff like that.
We'll get into that here in a minute.
But yeah, interesting story. I it's in Grand Theft Auto for
me is interesting. I really, really, really enjoyed
Vice City and three and San Andreas and four and man, I
(09:11):
might have played five hours or so of five and just couldn't do
it. I didn't like, I hated the
characters and I know you're supposed to at least like
they're supposed to be flawed characters, right?
But I, I still didn't like them.Even understanding that I
really, really, really, really hate when games basically force
(09:33):
you to switch between protagonist.
It was one of my my few complaints about Assassin's
Creed Shadows is I really hated that you couldn't just play the
game as one of them. I ended up by the end of the
game appreciating both characters and playing as them.
But I never felt that with GrandTheft Auto 5.
I just, I really, really, reallydidn't like it, which was weird
(09:56):
because I love Rockstar games. I, I, I loved all of all of the
Grand Theft Auto before, even the old top down pixel ones.
And even like like Red Dead Redemption 2 is probably still
my favorite game ever, even though that's definitely been
challenged here in the last few years.
So it's, it's interesting times,but you know, we have a day for
Grand Theft Auto and, and honestly, it's, that's been
(10:18):
coming for so long is that it's,it's like such a strange feeling
to be like, Oh yeah, we know when that game is coming now.
Weird. What's not so weird because it's
so familiar is that EA has laid off 3 to 400 employees through
various reporting this week. We found out and their own
announcement that Respawn lost around 100 developers and
(10:40):
cancelled 2 early stage projects.
The initial reporting of this was like they cancelled
Titanfall three. It doesn't appear that that's
what they did. It looks like that one of those
early projects was a Titanfall extraction shooter, which is
just, you know, we'll we'll talkabout Arc Raiders and Marathon
and Tarkov here in a little bit.But man, it should be very
(11:04):
telling that they cancelled thatproject.
I think that was probably a goodidea.
I think any effort they put intothat should have just been put
in the Titanfall 3. But there's a reason I'm not an
executive, I guess. Code Masters also appears to be
getting a reduced in some capacity.
Their social media channels are gone.
We found out that they are no longer going to be working on
(11:26):
dirt or WRC games, which I believe is World Racing Circuit
or or something along those lines.
I think it's like the off road racing.
And you know, if you follow me, if you check out this podcast, I
assume you are likely a Mass Effect fan.
So if you've been paying attention to BioWare and stuff,
as far as I can tell, BioWare came out unscathed from this.
(11:49):
It was other parts of the company.
Not that that makes it any better for those people.
But if you're like me and you'reinterested in BioWare and hoping
that they can stick around long enough to make another Mass
Effect game, I think they're safe.
I hope I follow a lot of people who are still currently working
there, as well as people who used to be there.
And it doesn't look like, as faras I can tell, any of them got
(12:10):
laid off either. So people add, you know, working
on like Battlefield, on the IronMan game, even on Skate, as far
as I can tell, all of those teams were unaffected.
So if you can try to get a silver lining of a story like
this, I, I guess that's it. One of the interesting reactions
to these layoffs was the, the, the conversation around their,
(12:34):
their CEO and the conversation around it was Andrew Wilson.
He made $25 million in 2024. And the the big conversation
whenever this happens is people being like, oh, he makes
25,000,000 and then they still laid off 1000 people in the last
year or whatever. Like these conversations make
(12:56):
sense. And I'm not here to dispute them
and to tell people they shouldn't complain about that.
Fair game, right? Obviously.
But I do think just for the simple, you know, just for
wanting gamers to understand theindustry better from all the
(13:17):
people I've talked to who are inthe industry as developers, as
high level, you know, studio folks, things like that.
It's they could have paid AndrewWilson $100 a year and those
layoffs probably still would have happened.
You know, EA could have made twice as much money last year
and these layoffs probably stillwould have happened because
(13:39):
these decisions, as I'm told, are very, very rarely ever made
in, in such broad sweeping ways.You know, it's, it's not, you
know, because they gave Andrew Wilson a $5,000,000 raise.
Well, now they have to fire $5 million of people.
It's, you know, the corporations, at least the ones
I've interacted with and, and, and knowledgeable on, don't
(14:03):
operate that way. They operate, you know, where
like every team is their own little business and, and things
like that. And it doesn't sugarcoat this.
It doesn't justify layoffs, it doesn't justify these hyper rich
companies doing what they do. And it doesn't justify someone
making $25 million a year. But it also doesn't really
(14:28):
explain it. And like $25 million a year is
insane. No human being needs to make
that much money. But when you consider that last
year EA made like 7 point something billion dollars, $25
million is absolutely nothing toa company making $7 billion a
(14:48):
year. Just like the salaries of the
people they laid off, at least in the short term, it's pocket
change. Not really that big of a deal
to, to the company as a whole. But when you break it down to
studio and department and thingslike that and you start to
realize that these studios get their individual budgets.
You know, there isn't just a potof $7 billion sitting there that
(15:13):
everyone gets to take from as they need it.
You know, they, they run each ofthese studios like little
businesses, even to the point where right now we know that EA
is split up into sports and theneverything else.
And I'm willing to bet that the sports studios get a lot more
leeway than the other ones do. And so, you know, you just can't
look at these these choices and like vague of these, if that's
(15:38):
even a word or generalities, youknow, where it's like that
there, there's just more to it that there's and and to
reiterate, doesn't excuse it. It doesn't make it any better to
say that for these people who lost their jobs and their
livelihoods and maybe moved across the country or to another
country to get these jobs and then they lose them.
(15:58):
One of the awful stories from Respawn was that the day before,
so the layoffs happened on Thursday, I believe on May 1st,
the last day of April, they announced the new Apex character
and and a new fighter that's going to be added.
And the next day the the the lead writer for that character
got laid off, right? That sucks.
(16:22):
There's no excusing that. You, you can't justify that,
right? Someone who just was productive,
who just created content that you're going to release is new,
that you're going to take battlepass payments for so people can
play as them and unlock their skins and all that crap.
It's inexcusable, right? But I think sometimes people get
(16:44):
a little too focused on things that maybe aren't actually at
fault because it's just easy or it it it just makes sense or
there's a face to yell at. Andrew Wilson is easy to yell at
because he looks like a, he looks like a, Oh my gosh, a
Hunger Games villain. Like he looks like he would be
the president that would take over after Snow and would be
(17:07):
even worse. Like he just he looks like a
robot designed to be an antagonist in the story, right?
Like, so I get it. And he's Australian and you know
what they say? I have no idea what they say,
but it it actually I think beingAustralian makes them seem less
evil because they have such likesweet accents I guess, or at
(17:27):
least to me they do. So anyways, sucks to see all
those layoffs. Selfishly happy it didn't affect
the people I interact with directly, but Respawn is also
one of my favorite studios and if people want to Titanfall
three, that lessens those chances big time.
If you're excited about that next Jedi game coming out the
the final game in that trilogy, it's probably not looking great
(17:50):
for that either. It certainly won't.
You know it's going to affect that game in some capacity.
And if you're still playing Apex, you know, I'm sure it's
not going to help there either. So that's the wishes to all of
those people. In another story of just
excitement and joy, Xbox is raising prices on all their
consoles and accessories. So they made this official
(18:12):
announcement. Some of the examples of the
price jumps, and this is uniquely to like PlayStation.
This is in the US and and all other territories.
As far as I can tell that in theUS the the Series X with a disk
drive is going from 499 to 599. The digital edition I believe
(18:32):
was 450 and now it's going to 550.
The Series S the minimum. The 512 gigabyte model is going
from 299 to 349. I don't think that's right.
I'm pretty sure it's 380. Actually.
I think I'm a typo there. And then the Series X special
edition two terabyte, which was 599, which honestly wasn't a
(18:53):
terrible deal because if you consider a $500 series XA decent
deal because the extra gig is what you're going to pay for
anyways or the extra TB is what you you pay 100 bucks for that
anyways. So you just get and you get this
like kind of cool looking console.
It's going from 599, which was OK, to $730, making it almost as
(19:15):
much I think as the PS5 Pro, which is wild because even
though I think the PS5 Pro is a bit has been talked about a
little dishonestly, it still is more powerful.
We know that from the things that we've seen with the patches
they've released for it and stuff like it is a more powerful
piece of hardware, albeit with aunique methods right.
(19:41):
But you know, this base series Xbeing almost the same price is
is pretty nuts and I think that the PS5 pro has two terabytes as
well. So now then I think controllers
went up to like 65 bucks or something, which actually isn't
that bad. I think they're currently 60, So
it's not too awful. The reaction to this has been
interesting. My own reaction is is
(20:01):
frustration. I I understand the Xbox is kind
of giving away from being like hyper focused on selling
consoles. That's obvious, right?
They still need to sell consolesthough, right?
Like, like it's not like they, they just can't sell them.
One of the things that is interesting is I've seen a lot
of chatter over the last, you know, couple of years that
apparently at least series XS are kind of hard to come by.
(20:23):
So you know, that's kind of a whole different issue.
But for, you know, a couple of years now I've been preaching
like, man, there, there's no way.
Like at this point, you why not just discount and undercut
PlayStation and sell the series S for like 250 and sell the
series X like the base model or digital or whatever for like, I
(20:44):
don't 2 I don't know, like 300 bucks 350 maybe.
And, and we're going the opposite direction.
So I mean, it's weird, you know,four or five years after a
console comes out, this is when you, you know, with the last
Gen., it's when you saw like the, you know, the PS5, the PS4
slim or the what was it the XboxOne S, right?
(21:07):
Or it was still an Xbox One, butit was somewhere and had like, I
think a more efficient processor.
And then they had the 1X right, as like kind of a beefy model.
And instead those are cheaper, right?
And instead now we're getting, you know, $100 jump in price on
the five year old console that hadn't had a price drop yet.
(21:27):
So you can blame lots of things.I'm sure tariffs are part of
this. It's, you know, at least for
Americans, but they raise the prices everywhere.
So it's obviously other stuff. The tariffs could still apply
there because, you know, it's likely the manufacturing of
these things are getting more expensive because of tariff
issues or just trade problems orjust general economy issues.
(21:49):
But there's also for sure a, a, a hint of selfishness, right,
of, of greed, you know, as everyone's going to want to say.
And like, like, that's a weird thing because it doesn't seem
like Xbox is really pushing to get people to buy these consoles
that hard at this point. They're out there and they
(22:10):
advertise them. And, and, and I love my Series
X. It's been a really good piece of
hardware. It's, you know, most of my
computer at this point is newer than five years and I paid a lot
more than 500 bucks for it. So it's been a great deal.
I play on all the time. I play a ton of games on there,
but you know this isn't a good look, especially because
PlayStation while they did a fewweeks ago raise their prices as
(22:33):
well, they haven't done it in the States and they absolutely
will now especially they're going to.
I saw someone post oh useless PSY Pro is a better deal after
all. It's like well, I mean it's
still 150 bucks more than a series X while, you know
arguably not being $150.00 better.
(22:54):
That's obviously very subjective, you know, but I, I,
I would find it extremely hard to believe that we won't in the
next month or so get a press release from PlayStation of them
being like, oh, sorry fellas andladies, we actually need to
raise our prices too. And the PS5 goes to 600 as well.
(23:18):
And man, I don't even know what the PS5 pro would be if they
raised it be like 900 bucks probably if it raises a similar
amount, I mean like 1000 bucks for APS 5 pro and then you know
something I mentioned before I move on from this to people.
Is that like so the answer to people in the back of your minds
(23:39):
be like, Oh well, maybe now I finally will go PC.
Well, unfortunately if you want to get it used to be with PC
that you know, getting used parts or old GPUs and things
like that wasn't that big of a deal and you still can do it.
But that's not how I roll for the most part.
I want new stuff because I want the warranties.
(24:01):
I want all that, right? And I'm at a point where if
someone wanted to build their own computer, I would have a
hard time recommending anything below 15 or 1600 bucks just
knowing all the basic prices of stuff right now.
And that's if you build your own, if you buy off the shelf
from HP or Dell or whoever, you're looking at probably $2000
(24:24):
for a decent computer, not even like a top of the line when
you're looking closer, probably four or five grand for that.
So it's, it's getting to this conversation.
And I put out a video about it on my YouTube about this
affordability issue that, you know, our, our fun little hobby
that used to be affordable is, is not looking like that
anymore, at least not if you want to be on the cutting edge.
(24:47):
So I think that sucks and and I also think it sucks.
The reaction to this has been interesting.
Like obviously, you know, people, some people were kind of
weird about the price of the switch to because it jumped in
price a lot. The switch is 300 bucks and the
switch to is 450 and it's a little more powerful, but not
it's not, you know, 50% more powerful or at least you know,
(25:09):
however you would decide to measure it.
And then the PS5, you know, theydid raise their prices in non
American regions. And I can, I mean, they will
raise their prices here. They're definitely going to let
Xbox take the brunt of the bad PR.
And then they'll slip out a press release here in a few
weeks and and have some kind of price jump themselves for, you
(25:30):
know, like I said before, for legitimate and maybe somewhat
greedy reasons. So it sucks that I think what
scares me the most is thinking about what the next consoles are
going to cost and what the next GPU is going to cost and all of
this stuff. We have a situation where you
know, the next Xbox or the PlayStation Six, they could be
(25:53):
750 plus dollars like from the jump.
And that's hoping that they're going to keep subsidizing them
the way they have. I'm sure PlayStation will.
They're still so focused on hardware sales.
But as Xbox deemphasizes hardware sales and you know,
they still put out something andthey still want people to buy
it, but maybe they aren't willing to take a hit.
(26:14):
Maybe they aren't willing to break even and sell it at cost,
right? Maybe they want to make some
money off of it, you know, You know, they know they aren't
going to sell 100 million of them.
So if they're going to sell 25 million of them, maybe they want
to, you know, tack on 100 bucks onto them and recoup some more
of that money. We'll have to wait and see.
I am very curious, speaking earlier about the game industry
(26:41):
and the game's journalism industry, Giant Bomb and Polygon
are both in trouble. So Giant Bomb is being like
temporarily held back. Jeff Grubb and Dan Reichert have
both officially left. Mike Minotti, who's another one
of their personalities there who's like a contributor is no
longer contributing a Giant Bomb.
(27:03):
And it's assumed that the vast majority of the front facing
staff there is gone. It's supposedly they're the
venture capitalist company that owns them is going to try to
it's fandom is going to try to turn them into like a guides
website. So I'm I'm sure people who just
need jobs will stay, stay and and make some of that content
for them. But as I already said that the
(27:25):
more notable people there and Jeff Grubb and Dan Reichert are
both gone already and we'll see what they end up doing.
And then Polygon got sold off toa new venture capitalist company
just like they do, and most of the staff got laid off.
So maybe they'll reappear in in some AI objectively evil way or,
(27:46):
you know, but we'll have to waitand see.
This whole thing is is is weird to me.
Giant Bomb is the only one. I used to watch them a lot.
I haven't so much in the last couple years.
I started watching them because I watched Jeff Grubb a lot when
he was at Gamesbeat still and was doing his Jeff Grubb podcast
with him and Mike Menotti. And then I kind of migrated to
(28:08):
Giant Bomb when Jeff Gersman left there and they brought in
Jeff Grubb and some of these other personalities.
And I got into it for a little bit and then I kind of wasn't
anymore. And what was interesting about
them is that you had someone like Jeff Grubb who was like a
journalist at Gamespeed, right? Had pretty good connections.
If you're an EA fan, he's a goodperson to follow.
He seems to have some pretty high level contacts there.
(28:31):
His info from for that publisheris often pretty good, but as he
and the others transitioned to Giant Bomb, that they went from
like journalists to like contentcreators right to entertainers
more so. And, and that definitely, at
least in my opinion, affected a lot of their takes and some of
their reporting and stuff. My, my big thing with them is I
(28:54):
saw a lot of their reaction fromthe gaming community in general,
but especially their own fans oflike, how could this happen?
And one thing to keep in mind isif you go look at giant bombs
live streams and their videos, they they get like 3 or 4000
views and they've had a few willjump up a bit higher, like the
Nintendo switch to reveal and stuff was it was a little bit
(29:16):
higher for them, but like, not much like, like the numbers they
were getting. From what I've seen over the
last, you know, almost 10 years of me being a like hobbyist
content creator, their numbers likely wouldn't even sustain one
person being like a one person show and doing everything they
(29:36):
did and getting all their numbers would likely maybe not
even be a full time job for one person money wise.
And so then you think about it, you, they have this huge team
of, you know, front facing people, back end people,
producers and editors and all this stuff.
And like, this is likely not a channel that could even sustain
one person, let alone this wholebig team with, you know, a lot
(29:59):
of equipment and a lot of content and all this stuff.
And so, like when I saw people be like, I can't believe this.
I'm like, how like they, they, they, they weren't getting, they
had an emotion, they weren't getting views.
They were getting a couple 1000 views of video or, or live
stream. Like that's not very many.
You need 10s of thousands every single time.
For example, I have a, a video from I think two years ago,
(30:22):
maybe 3 now. It's my, my highest, you know,
viewed video. It's 15,000 views.
It's not really that many, but it's more than most of their
videos. And in three years that's made
me $19.00 and like 20-3 cents orsomething.
My rates are lower than theirs probably.
And, and they have sponsors and ads and all that.
(30:43):
I'm sure that stuff adds up, right?
But you know, if a video only gets 5 or 10,000 views, you're
talking about like 5 or 10 bucks.
And if you, you know, they're doing live streams and that
they're probably not, they're not putting that much time into
them. But even like when you see like
a small content creator make a video that's like 2 hours long
about the entire lore of some franchise and it gets like, you
(31:04):
know, 5000 views, like they, they, they spent, you know,
maybe dozens, if not hundreds ofhours on that video and they're
going to make like 10 bucks on it.
And, and for someone like me, that's fine.
It's all good. I'm not making this stuff to
make money. If you want to become a member
on my channel or, or, or, or subscribe to me on Twitch or,
(31:26):
you know, buy a coffee mug or something from me off of
YouTube, Like that's cool. I'll take the couple bucks.
I'll use it to improve somethinghere.
But I'm not going to quit my job, right?
I have a full time job. I work full time.
I take care of a little girl. I, you know, spend time with my
wife. I'm a married guy.
Like I have a family and and so do a lot of these people that
(31:46):
that work there. And I think what it's kind of
come down to when I've, when I've looked at all of this, like
I saw one of the people be like,well, I like covering games and
that's what I'm going to do. And it's like, that's cool, man,
but there's a really good chancethat you may need to have a real
job, like like you, your hobby and your personality may not
sustain you in a house and multiple children and insurance
(32:11):
and this and that. And I, I think that like, I
don't know if it was COVID or, or just kind of streamer
delusions or whatever ANYWAYS, but there's so many people.
I think COVID was a big part of it because there was a big spike
in people who were able to, you know, kind of make a living
doing it. You know, it's, it's not that
sustainable and it's because there's not a lot of room.
(32:31):
I've talked a lot about game journalism and, and that it's a
small club and you're not wantedlike, like, if you really think
about it, there's like a 50 games journalist and then
there's a bunch of other people who write articles, but there's
like 50 games journalists. And there's like Jason Schreyer
is like the one legit journalist, I think, and I don't
even like him that much, but I think he's the most like legit
(32:53):
journalist in, in gaming, right?And then you have all these
other people doing and, and everyone thinks they can do it.
And then they start off and now what's going to happen is
someone's going to start a Patreon or they already have, I
think, and they're going to try to do their own little show And,
and, and a lot of excitement will drum up and they'll get a
bunch of Patreon Subs for a couple months and then that's
(33:14):
going to drop off because the economy is rough.
People don't have any money. Maybe, you know, the the, the
kind of most uncomfortable part about all of this is that not
everyone is interesting enough or talented enough to do this
stuff as a job. A lot of the people who do it as
a job, I don't think really are great journalists and aren't
really that interesting and don't really have, you know,
(33:36):
very unique takes. Like you have entire podcasts
and shows and content creators who like their entire thing is
reporting what other people havereported.
Like that's not sustainable in the long run because you're not
doing anything original personality and stuff like that
can only take you so far. And so I think when we start
(33:58):
seeing these people falling off of these big, more traditional,
you know, outlets and trying to do their own thing and a lot of
them don't succeed, it's becausemaybe they kind of overestimated
how interesting they are or, or how much of A poll they really
have when they're no longer at Giant Bomb or IGN or, you know,
whatever company. So I think it's going to be
(34:19):
interesting to see the fallout from this again, like I said
before, I hope everyone lands ontheir feet, whether I like him
or not, And it's going to be interesting to see, you know,
where everyone ends up. And, and, and I hope that it's
all I hope that they all end up in a good place.
Last few stories here arc Raiders test 2 is out and I've
(34:41):
played it quite a bit. It is super fun.
They have come so far with it. It's no longer in D aid it it
looks great. It's one of the prettiest games
I've seen in quite a while. It looks really good and I play
on series X. I'm pretty sure it's doing like
ray tracing and stuff It's Unreal Engine 5.
I believe that the textures seemreally high quality like it's
weird how good it looks and it'sdefinitely 60 FPS like it's
(35:04):
running well. So I'm sure it looks even better
on PC on the nice solid PC, but I've been very pleasantly
surprised of how this game looks.
The you know, the loop is prettysimple.
And I think that's a a big benefit to it.
You, you, you, you have a stash full of weapons and stuff and
you have these quests that you're trying to complete by
(35:25):
collecting certain things or going certain places during
these raids. And during the raid, you're
fighting these robots, which arelike hard to fight.
And you could be fighting other people and you can get dominated
very quickly by them. And what you're trying to do is
you're trying to find stuff or do things to complete these
quests to get more experience and upgrade your character and
your base and everything more. And, you know, once you collect
(35:47):
all those things from this world, from the various maps,
then you extract and, and you have to sometimes fight for that
extraction with other teams. And then if you kill them, you
take their stuff. And it's, it's that Tarkov idea,
right? But in a more, it's a third
person game. It's got this kind of retro
futuristic, I I don't know how to describe it, like 80s vibe
(36:08):
almost and and, and just the aesthetic of it.
The sound design in this game, from the sounds of the enemies
to the gun sounds, even the voice, the VoIP, the voice over
IP that it like accurately. If someone's in the next room,
you'll hear them like muffled because of the walls and you'll
hear like it's interesting. So say you're in the hallway and
(36:32):
from me, from you facing it, it goes off to your left and then
there's a doorway on the right or no.
Here's a better example. You're standing in a hallway,
big long hallway and down the hallway on the right, there's a
door in a room. And if there's someone in that
room, Voiping, I think, and someone at Ubisoft told me that
(36:55):
this tech was being worked on and and I could see it being
done in Unreal Engine five. I think they're using like ray
tracing for sound because I noticed that if you heard sounds
in that room, you would hear it from like your left because the
sound is coming out of the room and hitting the hallway wall and
then coming to you and within less of it is coming the other
(37:18):
way. So even though The thing is
happening on the right. So you have to start thinking
almost like in real life where, you know, like, like it happens
to me sometimes where we'll have, you know, there'll be a
noise outside our house and we'll have a window open, like
on my left side, even though Thething is happening to my right.
But those windows are closed. And it's kind of that, you know,
(37:39):
as a normal person, you learn toanticipate those things and
figure them out. But in a video game, you often
don't have to do that because invideo games, sound is often just
directional. If you hear it that way, then it
was that way. So yeah, Arc Raiders has some
really cool stuff going on. This game feels so close to
done. I suspect it comes out sometime
this year, very likely this summer.
(38:00):
That wouldn't surprise me at all.
And I'm excited for it. I'm trying not to play it too
much now because I don't want tobe annoyed when I have to play
it again, assuming none of myself will carry over.
So so that was cool. I got into marathon yesterday.
I got I got a code and I fired up played a couple rounds.
Man, I don't like that game. It like it looks neat, like it
(38:23):
has a cool like kind of Apex legends kind of aesthetic, but
like even more futuristic and and whatever.
But the actual gameplay. So I played Tarkov almost 3000
hours. I've played, you know, even like
kind of older extraction games if you call them, you know,
extraction games really are the evolution of battle royales,
right? So even back to like The
(38:45):
Division, survival mode and stuff.
Like I've played a ton of these games, PvP mostly.
And my issue with Marathon is itjust doesn't feel good to play.
I know Bungie always gets like all of its flowers for its
gunplay and stuff. I think the gunplay in this game
does feels OK. It's kind of inconsistent, at
least in my opinion. The movement feels terrible.
(39:08):
The Walking speed, like the non sprinting speed is like it's
just it's not slow, but it stillfeels clunky.
And then the sprinting is like OK.
But what, what's really killing me about it, I think more than
anything is that I, I don't knowwhy and, and Bungie's the worst
(39:28):
about it, that some of these companies, especially Bungie
thinks that people on a controller want to use a mouse.
And I, I'm telling you, if I am on a console and I am using a
controller, I don't want a cursor that I have to, you know,
swing around and you can have that like Assassin's Creed does
that, right? Like you can have a cursor, but
as soon as you hit your D pad, it's, it converts to that.
(39:51):
And then you can use your D pad to go around.
At least right now in Marathon, you can't do that.
And it's it's annoying and it's clunky and they'll like game
menus. But it's straight up bad.
It it feels terrible in game because it still does that.
So a big thing about extraction games is that you go, you know,
into a building and you need to loot that building.
(40:12):
So there's a bunch of boxes withstuff in it.
So you run up to a box. And one of the things that
drives me nuts is that you don'tjust hit X or at least on on
Xbox, the the left pad button, you have to hold it down for
like an extended amount of time and and then it opens and then a
(40:33):
cursor pops up right in the middle of the screen.
And you would think that there'dbe a button to like take all or
something. And maybe there is if I missed
it, you can yell at me in the comments, but as far as I can
tell, there isn't. And, and but then you also can't
just hit like the pickup button.You have to move the cursor over
to the item and then hit pickup and then do that on all the
(40:53):
items that are in there. And in an extraction game,
especially a game like Tarkov, but even some of these other
ones that are coming out, you like that that is wasted
valuable time. And it doesn't like, it's not
intuitive. It doesn't feel good because if
you could just use your D pad and hit it and it would just
default to taking you to selectable areas like any
console game should, it would feel, at least in my opinion, a
(41:14):
lot better if at least it would start the cursor on the box that
you're opening and then you could quickly kind of pick
things up. So that's stuff that could be
improved, but there's just man, yeah, I, I didn't like that
game. I didn't enjoy that experience
very much. I have, I've played way more of
Arc Raiders and obviously of Tarkov and I, I can give
(41:35):
Marathon more of a go for sure. And, and I plan to, but may I
game? I, I just Arc Raiders gave me
that feeling of like, oh, peoplewho like Tarkov will like this.
This is Arc Raiders is much morecasual than Tarkov, which I
think is a big selling point. I, I don't think that it's going
to be the same reaction for marathon.
And I've seen some of the big content creators from Tarkov,
(41:57):
like Castilli talking about marathon and being like, like
it's neat, but it's, it's neat in the way that like, I'll try
it out and never play it again. And then they're going to charge
for it. And then I think that's rough.
We'll just, we'll see. I'm I'm not as excited about
marathon. Far Cry 4 released 10 years ago,
(42:20):
has gotten a patch to give it 60frames per second on PlayStation
5. And that's cool.
I don't know why they're doing that.
I'm I'm curious to what the dealis.
It was interesting because this that's how this was being
reported and I saw some people being like, what about Xbox?
Didn't they do it for that too? Funny enough, Far Cry 4 was one
of the games that FPS boost usedwhich if you remember when the
(42:46):
Xbox Series X came out, Xbox hadthis tech that would take games
from the Xbox One and would and even 360 I believe and boost
them the 60FPS without any patches or work by the studio.
I don't know how they did it. I don't know what how the tech
works. I assume it's some kind of
(43:08):
machine learning or you know theDLSS or FSR or whatever.
I assume it was like an early iteration of some of that tech.
But there were there were like hundreds of games they they did
that with that you were able to play AT60FPS on the Series X&S
without any intrusion by the studio.
I believe Dragon Age Inquisitionwas one of them.
That game looks like hot garbageon the Series X, but it still it
(43:31):
does run AT60FPS. It just doesn't look very good
doing it. But they did this with a bunch
of games and it's really cool. I think Red Dead Redemption, the
old one because they had FPS boost, but then they also have
like a resolution boost thing that would make games look a
little sharper, higher fidelity textures, things like that.
It's one of those things it's really cool.
And they had already done that with Far Cry 4, so I'm assuming
(43:53):
they did not work on a patch forthat because they didn't need
one. And then finally my updated
thoughts on Claire Obscure and some news about Expedition 33.
I'm on the last boss and what's so interesting is that if you
read some of the reviews about this game people complain about
doing too much side content and being over leveled and the
second-half of the game just being like a breeze.
(44:15):
Well I did the opposite and I golden pathed it real hard and
it turns out that I am on the final boss and the final fight.
Literally, I'm going to beat this boss and then make and then
do the finale of the game. The game will be over, but I
can't beat them. I've tried like 10 times and I
looked more into it and I saw the level that most people are
(44:36):
beating this boss at in the 50s,even like in into the 60s.
I'm level like 38. So currently I'm going back
through and I'm, I'm trying to level my characters back up and,
and get, you know, probably to at least like level 50 so I can
actually win because I've gottenthrough there's like there's,
there's so many phases to the final boss and I've gotten
(44:57):
through a couple of them and I just run out of juice.
I just can't do it. So I will report back when I've
actually finished that game. They did sell over 1,000,000
copies. I bet they're getting close to
higher numbers than that as we speak.
And one of their developers has already come out and said that
there's a the, the chances are pretty likely that they're going
(45:17):
to do some kind of DLC. I can see where the ending is
going. I'm curious to how it actually
ends. DLC and sequels for this game
are going to be very interesting.
What I will say is that Claire Obscure has three acts.
And the first act, it was very kind of, you know, it was great.
(45:38):
It was so good and it ended so well.
And then the second act, you start to realize that there's
something funny going on. And then the final act is just
just blows your mind. It's so cool, man.
I love it. So I'm excited.
I will probably do a spoiler cast for Claire Obscure once I'm
done with it and and likely onceI start a second playthrough.
(45:59):
It has a new game plus system that adds new weapons and things
like that. So yeah, it's it's a cool game.
I can't wait to talk more about it.
Because the average person, evenpeople who are playing it, most
of them aren't far enough to realize what they're getting
into. And I'm, I'm excited to see the
conversation around it. OK, moving over to some content
(46:21):
updates. All I really have is that Doom
the Dark Ages is coming out later this month.
I'm going to check it out. It's almost certainly going to
be a game I talked about here onthe podcast.
I would be surprised if I get really into it and like do a
full review, But we'll see what happens.
I'm I'm not going to rule anything out.
My plan for content really is going to be doing any videos as
I see fit, either on gaming newsor if I can make up a reason to
(46:45):
talk about Mass Effect I will. I do want to keep streaming.
I would love to finish my Mass Effect Legendary Edition modded
playthrough. Hopefully this month would be
the goal, as well as playing some other games on stream when
I'm able or just hanging out. Early in June, we'll be doing
some of the Showcase Co stream, so I'm excited for that and
(47:06):
that's kind of what we have coming up and that is where we
are going to wrap up this episode.
Thank you so much for watching it or listening to it.
Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app, leave a
review on Spotify or iTunes, andsubscribe to the Bond Diesel
YouTube channel to get all of myvideos, including this podcast.
(47:28):
Thank you to everyone who supports as YouTube members or
Twitch subscribers. If you are interested in
supporting this podcast and all of my other content, please
check out the links in the show description.
If you have any questions or feedback, comment on Spotify or
YouTube, let me know in my Discord, or hit me up on social
media at the Bond, at Bond Diesel, or at the Bonfire.
(47:53):
That is all I have for this episode of the Bonfire Gaming
Podcast, so until next time.
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