August 22, 2025 • 45 mins
This week we talk about Playstation 5 prices going up, Escape From Tarkov announcing their 1.0 date, The Division is getting a new Survivors game, Battlefield 6 post-beta changes 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
00:00:35 News
00:42:45 Closing
00:44:13 Wrap Up
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
This is the Bonfire Gaming Podcast episode 351.
I'm your host Morgan AKA Von Diesel, and this week we'll be
talking about PlayStation Five. Prices are going up, Escape from
Tarkov announces their one pointO launch, The Division Two
Survivors is announced, and muchmore.
Be sure to subscribe to the showon your favorite podcast app,
(00:25):
leave a review on Spotify or iTunes, and subscribe to the Von
Diesel YouTube channel to get all of my videos, including this
podcast. Let's get right into the gaming
news. We're going to kick it off with
PlayStation 5 announcing the prices are going up $50.00 for
each of their main SKUs in the USA.
(00:47):
This follows months of this being assumed it would happen.
Xbox raised the prices of their consoles a couple months ago.
PlayStation raised the prices ofthe PS-5 and other regions a
while back, but are only just now actually doing it in the
USA. This is weird, right?
(01:08):
By this point in the generation we're five years in, we would be
assuming discounts at this point, right?
At least for the original launchdevices, right The the mid Gen.
refreshes like the PS-5 pro, maybe not, but even even the
switch one got price raises recently.
Not the switch to those are absolutely coming, but they will
(01:30):
probably wait until after Christmas I I suspect.
And and I think this is what happened with PlayStation as
well. I think that Nintendo and Sony
got so much inventory into the United States before these
tariffs hit and all the chaos ofthe tariffs happened that I
suspect they were able to just stay this off for quite a while.
(01:54):
On the inverse Xbox, it seems like it's been kind of a known
secret for a while that they just probably aren't making very
many Xbox the Xbox consoles at this point, Series S or X I I'm
under the impression they're kind of hard to find out in the
world. I'm I'm sure you can order them
from anywhere because of how that inventory works, but I'm
(02:15):
under the impression that the stock is fairly low on those,
which is why I assume they raised their prices so early in
this whole debacle because they just didn't have the stock on
hand in the United States to push off having to raise prices.
Because, you know, once the devices you're selling are ones
that you had to pay tariffs on, you know, no company is going to
(02:37):
eat that, especially five years in to this generation.
So I suspect, you know, with Nintendo and especially with
Sony here, the reason this is happening right now is because
they're, you know, stocks that they had are probably getting
low and now they they, you know,they don't want to eat that.
We also knew not too long ago heard rumors or saw some
(02:58):
speculation that the Xbox they actually are making money on
them. That's probably post price raise
for the ones they do actually sell even though it's not nearly
as many as the other platforms. But that it was very likely that
even though at one point there was a a short time where the
PlayStation 5 was profitable as hardware, it would have been
very minimal. But still profitable is better
(03:21):
than not and and it's rare with hardware.
It's likely it hasn't been profitable in a long time.
It definitely wasn't recently and they are raising these
prices and it may not even be profitable with these price
jumps. 50 bucks, you know, if that makes it profitable, it's
not by much. So, you know, that margin is
(03:42):
still extremely thin, if there is one at all.
This was kind of, you know, funny just because there was so
much determination amongst some of the PlayStation kind of
fanboys that this was not going to happen.
They've, you know, sold double the number of Playstations as
Xboxes. They aren't worried about, you
know, raising the prices or profit margins, all that stuff.
(04:06):
And then this inevitably happens, right?
And that shouldn't be surprisingto anyone that it's I, I really
don't think sometimes people fully comprehend or, or
consider, you know, the possibility that that Sony may
not be doing great money wise right now.
I know that there were recently some financial reports that were
showing that they took in a lot of income, which they almost
(04:28):
always do. We, we've seen that back to the,
the leaked documents during the Activision Blizzard King
acquisition by Xbox, when Microsoft accidentally leaked a
bunch of documents they weren't supposed to.
It showed even back then that PlayStation, you know, takes in
a ton of money. The problem is, is that due to
their extremely expensive and long development cycle, first
(04:52):
party games, they they they don't, you know, they spend a
lot of money too. They they spend a ton of money.
One of my favorite stats from that.
If you've listened for a while, you'll probably be rolling your
eyes hearing me say this again. But what was so crazy is that on
actual like, like, like like money made at least on that old
(05:12):
chart PlayStation had, I think it was as much if not more than
Xbox and Nintendo put together on actual money they took in.
But even then on actual profit margin, Xbox actually made more
profit than PlayStation did, despite making way less money.
And Nintendo made more profit than Xbox and PlayStation
(05:35):
together. And while I'm sure the things
have changed and, and those margins aren't all the same as
they were and, and everything, that story probably still holds.
And especially recently with PlayStation, they've had the
issue of they had a game like Concorde come out, be out for a
week and then get shut down. And they shut the studio down
after paying a relatively substantial amount of money for
(05:58):
that studio and that IP. Not too long before.
They've had presumably, you know, some reported and some
assumed, you know, almost every one of their first party studios
working on a live service game of some capacity for some amount
of time and then those being cancelled.
So you know, like Naughty Dog with The Last of Us and I
(06:20):
believe Sony Santa Monica with aGod of War life service type
game that ended up not happening.
You know, like like that cost a lot of money because it not only
cost money, but it gets 0 return.
It's purely wasted right now. We're in a situation with
Destiny, with Destiny, Destiny'sdeveloper Bungie where they have
(06:42):
Marathon in the works, which unless they pull off some
miracle already seems like it's in the dumps.
And I to this day still don't believe that Marathons ever
actually going to release. I I think it that I maybe they
Kick It Out and see if it can make anything back or gets the
Concorde treatment as well. While, you know, Bungie doesn't
(07:03):
exactly have its best reputationin its history and Destiny 2
still seems to be plodding along, but isn't the big hit
that it was at one point. And it's not the big money
maker. The big live service game that
PlayStation has been desperatelytrying to get from all of their
studios with the only real successful one ironically coming
from a third party studio with Hell Divers 2, which is about to
(07:25):
launch on Xbox. Whole different conversation
there. We won't get into it today, but
actually we will later, but in adifferent angle.
So these price jumps like shouldn't be surprising.
What's crazy is I see a possibility that PlayStation has
a new console two to three yearsfrom now.
(07:46):
Xbox has a new console one to two years from now, and it
wouldn't even surprise me if theprices of the current Gen. goes
up before then. And then you get into the
conversation of like, good Lord,what are these new consoles
going to cost? What is a PlayStation 6 going to
cost? What is a Xbox?
Whatever terrible name they giveit going to cost like, like, Oh
(08:10):
my gosh. You know, the rumors recently
have been that the PlayStation 6may actually be a fairly budget
device that's not that much morepowerful than the PlayStation
Pro, with a lot of focus on PSSRslash FSR.
You know, leaning on that a lot where the Xbox that's coming out
presumably in the next year or two could be a actually very
(08:31):
powerful device that's also going to be very expensive.
That could be closer to 1000 than 500, which starts to put us
in some weird territory. But after these price jumps for
PlayStation five, that PlayStation 5 Pro is 750 now.
And if I remember correctly, that two terabyte limited
(08:51):
edition, whatever series X aftertheir price jumps a while back,
I think was it was 750 as well. Kind of a unique situation
because of the extra memory and how much it costs for Xbox and
blah, blah, blah. But still, you know, you're,
you're, you're literally at the medium point between 500 and
1000. And you know, you don't, you
want to assume that the next consoles won't be more than 750,
(09:15):
but you know, who knows? So you know, these price jumps,
I mean, I'm not going to celebrate this.
I feel bad for people who wantedthe PlayStation 5 who are still,
you know, on the PS4 and they'vebeen waiting for price drops and
they are not getting them. And they at this point at least
looks like they will never get them.
I, I wouldn't be surprised if these prices hold until the day
(09:36):
the new consoles come out and then we'll have to see what
happens then. Maybe they discount them after
the PlayStation 6 comes out. I I have no idea, I think almost
What's more likely is they just stop making them and sell out
the rest of the inventory at theprice and move on to the next
Gen. But we'll have to wait and see.
(09:58):
Escape from Tarkov's developer Battle State Games has announced
the one Point O final version launch of the game on November
15th of 2025. This is going to be interesting.
I have been playing Tarkov for four or five years at this
point. I believe I've got thousands of
hours in that game. Admittedly in the life I've been
(10:21):
playing it for four or five years.
The the 75% of those hours I didin the first year or two.
I, I, I, it was very front loaded my time with that game.
I, I still dabble here and there, but for various reasons
I, I don't really play it much anymore, both because of the
game and not. This is likely, I think going to
(10:42):
be one of the biggest like crap shows ever for a early access
game going full release, partially because it's been 8
years and that's been an early access.
And you would think like, oh wow, they really took their
time. That game must be polished and
ready to roll. And that would tell me that you
(11:03):
don't know anything about Escapefrom Tarkov, because what is
actually happening is that there's issues in the game that
have been issues for almost a decade now, almost since since
launch, that they, they have heavily prioritized, especially
in the last two or three years, putting out new stuff and not
(11:24):
fixing old stuff. And, and I understand that, you
know, or, or I assume that with game development and all this
stuff, if you spend, if you onlyadd new stuff, when everything
old is fixed, you'll never add new stuff.
I understand that. And, and the issue there, but
it's, I mean, it's pretty bad here.
For instance, they their their most recent update, the the last
(11:46):
one they've put out before this one point O launch had a bug
where you could have a grenade launcher in this, you know,
somewhat realistic, very grounded game that you know when
you die, you lose everything youhave.
You know, you can be one shot killed from across the map with
the right shot in the right place.
You know this game that's fairlygrounded.
(12:08):
There was a glitch where if you took a grenade launcher and with
one round you could you had unlimited ammo and you didn't
have to reload. So it worked like a semi auto
gun. So as fast as you could click
was as fast as you could fire off grenades all over the map
and they did damage, They killedthings.
I I don't think it was in the PvP, so the person in person
(12:31):
servers, but it was in the Pve servers where it's essentially a
single player mode. Not great.
And then I mean, a big topic with this game forever has been
the cheating situation. And you know, to their credit,
you will never eliminate cheaters from any game.
There will always be some cheaters.
(12:51):
If a game has an audience, if a game has notoriety, it it's
going to have cheaters and and that's fine.
I don't even fault them for that.
What I do fault them for, and this kind of starts to get into
some of the shady stuff about them, is that there is some
thought around the idea that they don't hardware ban
cheaters. So in in the theory of they say
(13:13):
they do, but it's it's been kindof disputed to a point.
Long story short, there's a there, there's at least somewhat
of a conspiracy that they essentially count on banned
people to buy more versions of the game and it makes them more
money because and, and there, and that may sound silly at
first, but when you find out that a large number of the
(13:33):
people who are cheating are doing basically it's called RMT,
but it's, it's where there's some items in the game that are
so hard to find that cheaters can find them very easily and
then sell them on the market. Or cheaters will boost up an
account to full whatever and then sell that account to
someone else because there's people who, you know, don't want
(13:54):
to do it. Or cheaters will take someone's
account, boost it up and then give it back.
And it's, you know, essentially A shepherding service in some
capacity. Like that's a thing and and it's
a fair it's a really common thing.
I've even seen ads for this on Facebook before, which is insane
to me. I've seen them on YouTube as
well. And this game is just, it's so
(14:18):
wild because things that they'vebeen working on and testing for
years don't work right. The game looks old at this
point. Like I mean it looks 8 years
old. The like I, I saw people trying
to be like, oh, Tarkov looks better than Battlefield 6, but
there may be I I find that I don't agree.
Basically it, it looks old, especially the the player
(14:40):
models. Good Lord.
Like it legit looks like like APS three-game.
Like some of the player models and things like that just look
really, really, really bad. And, and, and with all of that
said, the game does some things uniquely that no other games do.
I, I think the gunplay in Tarkovis unique and no other game does
(15:00):
it the same or as well. And, and, and you know, some of
the movement stuff and all that,you know, there, there is a
reason people keep playing this game, but that there's also this
weird situation where they're going one point O, this is
supposed to be the high point ofthe game.
And I would argue that there's areally good chance that even
when it launches one point O, itwon't reach the peaks it made,
(15:23):
you know, player base wise, three or four years ago.
I, I, I think the game was the most popular it ever was, you
know, two or three years ago and, and I, and I think it's
been a downward trend ever sincethen, you know, because of other
games, because of things and choices made.
And this one, you know, this what, what's so wild is a few
months ago or a couple months ago, they, they did a big update
(15:46):
to the game and they, they do these things called wipes.
So when they do a wipe, your whole character gets wiped to
zero. You started over completely.
You have to do all the tasks andall the progression, all that
again. And this time the the white.
Before their 10 launch, they decided to make it a hardcore
wipe, which made the game essentially impossibly hard for
(16:07):
regular people trying to play it.
You don't stream it, lay it 24/7and they didn't even do it that
creatively. Like it's not like they added a
bunch of new rewards and challenges.
They just made everything twice as hard.
Like literally they just times twoed the number of enemies you
had to kill for some tasks, the number of items you had to
collect for different tasks and things like that.
(16:27):
They just they they just times twoed everything and then made
it so you can't buy a bunch of stuff that is essential and made
everything way more expensive that you could buy.
And and it just, you know, the the vibe isn't great around the
game and it was likely the worstdecision they could have
possibly made in the lead up to the final version of the game.
I just, you know, supposedly they're adding this whole single
(16:50):
player campaign. You're going to actually be able
to escape from Tarkov, a task that you can't actually do in
the eight years of, you know, testing of this game.
But the supposedly there's goingto be like cinematics and story
missions and all this stuff in here.
Like Please remember why I said before they've been testing
things in this game, some of them for eight years that still
don't work. And we're supposed to believe
(17:11):
that they're going to release this game and it's just
magically day one-on-one point Ogoing to be ready and it's all
going to work, right And it's all going to be fine.
Like it's not going to be it's going to be a complete mess.
The only cool thing about it is that I believe this means the
game will be going to Steam and to other launchers.
So if you no longer want to use their launcher, which I don't, I
(17:33):
hate having their software on mycomputer, I believe you're going
to be able to buy it through Steam.
But you know, for people like mewho have spent more money than I
want to admit on even though supposedly you were getting
Steam codes, but I don't know ifthat's still true or not.
If you have to buy it again, youknow, you're talking about
hundreds of dollars that you're going to have to rebuy this game
(17:55):
for. So we'll see.
I you know, you probably tell from what I've been saying, I'm
I'm not confident this is going to go well.
It's been years at this point since I've like really wanted to
grind this game, but it's it's always caught my interest again.
I've always jumped back in at least for a week or two when
they have big updates or whatever.
(18:16):
I'm I'm always going to be curious and and I hope I'm
wrong. It's just, you know, there.
There's also a lot of bad vibes around the studio.
He makes it. They're based in Russia.
And while that's not inherently bad, I'm not suggesting that
there is some reason to believe that.
Like, their owner may have, you know, at least at one point been
involved with some of the private, private military
(18:37):
companies like Wagner to do consulting on their game back in
the day. Now that likely will have been
before the Ukraine war began when Russia invaded Ukraine.
And, and, you know, we, I don't think there's any reason to
believe that there's still ongoing involvement there.
But you know, there's, there's, there's always that chance.
And I, I just as someone who follows that conflict and pretty
(19:01):
closely, it just kind of makes me uneasy to in any way, shape
or form tacitly support a, a company who may be supporting
the other side of that situationvery directly.
But that kind of turns into a different conversation.
I'm wishing the best for him, especially for the players.
People have been waiting a long time for this 1.0.
(19:21):
It would be cool if it wasn't a complete craft show.
I I would like to be proven wrong at games com Ubisoft
massive studio has announced A various number of things.
Some ongoing content for the Division 2.
They talked a bit about resurgence, the mobile game that
(19:43):
I believe is a prequel to two. It takes place between 1:00 and
2:00. Could be wrong you can correct
me if you want, but the big thing they announced was the
division two survivors. So when they did some teases
recently, I I think I made a whole topic in the the podcast.
They were teasing snow and in the DC and Washington DC.
(20:07):
So not the small New York map, not the small Brooklyn map, not
back in the Division One, but inDivision 2 Washington DC cover
than snow. And my initial guess and I'm
sure many other people's was, ohwow, they're bringing back
survival. And, you know, we were, I think
either on stream or or somethingwe were speculating about what
that could mean, how they could,you know, they they can't do
(20:27):
survival the same as Division One because the way the map was
in Division One, it it really lent itself to that mode where
Division Three, you know, Division One had just one DZ
this one location that everyone would go to for the survival
battle Royale kind of extractionmode game where Division 2 has
3D ZS. So maybe they're going to split
(20:50):
the map in the threes and you know, depend you'll just
randomly matchmaking to one of them or something.
I don't know. But it does sound like they're
bringing back some kind of survival experience now from the
conversation around it that theyhad, they didn't give me any
details. I interpreted much of what they
said as this is going to be likeSurvivor Plus.
So I assume they're going to adapt the base idea of Survivor
(21:13):
from Division One, the DLC to Division Two and do some kind of
round or or round based mode where you go in, you upgrade
your character, weapons, gear, all of that, you collect
something and then you try to get out probably through one of
the D ZS. So what they said though was
(21:36):
that this isn't just a remake ofthe original Survivor in
Division Two, that they're adding more to and all that, but
that's as far as they went. What's a little concerning I
think is that they talked about this being in early stages.
They showed off only concept artand and like the logo for it at
this point. And the director of the game,
because this is getting talked about like it's a separate game,
(21:59):
basically said that he'll be able to talk more about it next
year at games.com. So a year from now, they'll be
able to start detailing the game.
If I was someone who was excitedfor this and wanted to come out,
I would be a little concerned about that.
If you want me to be straight up, if you want my personal
opinion, that would not be very exciting for me.
(22:20):
You know, we, you know, in the last few years had the division
Heartland, which was supposed tobe this kind of spin off, you
know, just to throw out and probably break an NDA here.
That was supposed to be survivalby Red Storm was be supposed to
from the what I'm under the impression of was supposed to
make survival 2 point O for Division 2.
(22:41):
They pitched the project that project turning it into a
standalone game, which eventually became Heartland and
was eventually cancelled. I have a lot to say about it.
I don't know when or how I can talk about that stuff.
We'll get to it one day. But this, I'm afraid, will just
be that again. Now this is internal.
I believe this is that massive. And so you know, that does help.
(23:02):
It's not like a satellite studioor support studio doing this.
Massive itself seems to have quite a bit of pull at Ubisoft,
so maybe it's a little safer because of that.
I think calling it The Division Two survivors is a terrible
idea. I think it should just be The
Division survivors. I think attaching 2 to it causes
them all kinds of issues. Namely, it's a bit concerning
(23:25):
that this game is almost certainly two or three years
away at least. And that implies that they're
calling Division Two survivors, that they're not expecting
Division Three in that time. Because you can't release
Division Three in, you know, three years and then release
Division Two survivors after that or around the same time,
right? So I find that interesting.
(23:48):
I just, man, you know, they're going to continue supporting
Division Two. I've personally become pretty
tired of that content. I I need to try, maybe I should
try to get more into it and stopbeing so you know, whatever
about it, but I just, I wish they would let it die.
I just, I wish they would just wrap it up.
I think that's my bigger issue is I I totally understand them
(24:11):
putting out more content, givingpeople reason to buy more game
paddle and battle passes and allthat crap.
But like just the fact that theykeep pushing the story along.
And in my opinion at least, the story just keeps getting more
silly and and dumb and hard to move on with, you know, with the
next game, maybe one day Division Three, but that's what
they're doing. They're they're continuing that
(24:32):
and for what it's worth it. They're ambitious.
They keep trying to do big things with the story and with,
you know, the content that comesout, even though I'm, I'm under
the impression they're doing it with a pretty small team.
So we'll see. But I, I really thought maybe we
would get at least a mention of Division 3 here, but they
didn't, they showed off a like atimeline of, of what's coming
(24:56):
up. They do have a big event they're
teasing for March of 2026, whichwill be the 10 year anniversary
of the Division 1 coming out. I think that's where they will
probably talk about Division Three for the first time.
I think it's literally just going to be them being like,
Yep, we're working on it. It'll be out one day and that's
going to be it. I don't expect it to be more
(25:17):
than that, but I could be wrong.Yeah, we'll see.
I love my division. I just want something new.
Pete Parsons over at Bungie. The CEO is stepping down.
They posted A blog this week. I believe it was here on Friday
talking about handing over powerto some other people who are
(25:40):
already there. This is fairly notable from what
I'm aware of. I'll be honest, I don't like
Destiny. I find it, I just don't enjoy
it. I like the Division despite the
fact that it's a looter game, not because of it.
And Destiny does not tickle my fancy at all.
So I'm mostly, you know, most ofwhat I know about Destiny is
(26:00):
there is, you know, second hand.I'm under the impression Pete
Parsons isn't liked very much. If I remember correctly, he was
the one who he buys like tons oflike exotic cars and lives this
really kind of wild lifestyle orat least expensive lifestyle.
While, you know, his studio is kind of been in shambles and
they've laid people off and gotten smaller and Sony has
(26:23):
taken more control over them, even though they were supposed
to be independent when they got acquired by Sony instead of
PlayStation and all this stuff. For the most part, I saw this
being celebrated. I saw this mostly people being
like, oh, thank goodness. I'm not really under the
impression there was anyone in the line of session there that
is necessarily going to be much better who wasn't already in
(26:45):
some kind of power position and maybe not using it very well.
But you know that this seems like it's one of those things
where people aren't super worried about who comes next.
They just seem kind of happy he's gone.
We'll, we'll see, man. I mean, Bungie is, is a weird
studio. You know, back when they left
Microsoft, I can't remember if they went independent for a bit.
(27:07):
I think they did. There was all this talk of like,
oh man, how does Microsoft lose the, the, the Halo studio,
right? And then Microsoft made another
studio just to work on Halo games, which is, you know, had
its ups and downs. But then Bungie, you know, they,
they did Destiny and that was a big hit.
And then at some point in there,they got acquired by Activision.
(27:28):
And I believe that's when Destiny 2 came out.
And then they left Activision and they're independent for a
little bit. And now they're with, they're
with PlayStation. Actually, there was Sony, not
PlayStation. They were acquired specifically
by Sony. And there were all these
agreements that, you know, that Destiny would remain, you know,
multi platform. Their next game, which became
(27:49):
Marathon would be multi platformas well.
That this was a Sony thing and not necessarily they weren't
necessarily a PlayStation studio.
Well, Marathon hasn't been received very well, has had a
bunch of its own issues. Destiny 2 has had its ups and
downs. I believe one of the recent DLCS
was really good and, and liked, but I suspect that even when
things are going well for them in the big picture, it's
(28:12):
probably still not that great asthe popularity and the player
base of that game probably just wanes a bit.
And you know, as far as we know,there's no Destiny 3 in the
works. Marathon seems like it's at risk
of not even coming out and it's just, it's a weird, weird times
over there. The, the, the common belief at
(28:34):
this point is that if Marathon especially doesn't do well,
which it looks like it might not, that it's pretty likely
that Sony will put Bungie underneath PlayStation.
And it could either be turned into like a codev studio.
It could just get absorbed by another studio.
It could just get shut down and the people moved around and laid
off. We, we don't know, but it it
(28:56):
kind of seems like the eventual move of Sony being their owners
to PlayStation being their owners is almost certain at some
point in the relatively near future and we'll have to see if
that's a good or bad thing. I I'm sure it wasn't completely
their decision, and I don't think that a Destiny Three would
(29:16):
fix everything that they need tofix, but I suspected Destiny 3
being in the works at least would have people looking at
Bungie in a more optimistic way.As for optimism, Battlefield 6
devs have given a debriefing talking about changes coming
from everything they saw during the two weekends of open beta.
(29:38):
The big thing they talked about,which has been a fun topic to
pay attention to, is some movement changes.
Basically, they're making it so when you slide, you don't slide
this far when you move side to side, it's just more limited.
When you jump, especially when you jump repeatedly, your
accuracy on your gun gets way, way worse.
There were some pretty shared videos from the bait of, you
(30:00):
know, these Call of Duty playersliterally bounding around the
map and flying around corners and killing people and playing
Battlefield in a way that DICE definitely doesn't want people
to play and in a way that you could argue they're exploiting,
you know, issues in the game. And they seem pretty dedicated
and them not allowing that to happen as well as people
(30:21):
climbing into parts of the map they aren't supposed to be in,
like on rooftops and maps where you're not supposed to be on
rooftops, as well as some other things.
So all the movement stuff I thought was really great.
They talked about weapon balancing kind of generically,
but they did specify that the shotgun, and I assume there will
be multiple shotguns in the final game, will require more
pellets to hit a player to kill them, where it seems like maybe
(30:45):
that number was too low. You can kind of just wing people
with the shotgun and the betas and they would just die.
Seems like here you're going to have to like legitimately hit
them with like a full body shot to be able to take them down,
which is how it should be. Whether it's realistic or not, I
personally don't care. It's for balancing purposes.
Bigger maps was a big topic and they kind of assured everyone,
(31:08):
yet we have bigger maps come in.We just want to focus on the
smaller stuff for these betas. We'll see if it's true or not.
And then a big topic was Rush and the various ways they want
to make Rush better, but also some pushback by them of, you
know, people want Rush to be a bigger mode.
Right now it's only 12 on 12, which is tiny.
That's a small mode for a Battlefield game.
(31:30):
They've done as big as 64 V 6432V 32 for Rush and it's has its
own issues, right? I would like Rush to have more
players. I think like 16 V 16 or 20 V 20
would be ideal, but they kind ofseemed like they were sticking
to their guns with that. It's going to stay 12V12.
We'll have to wait and find out.I'm not super worried about it.
(31:51):
I'm just going to play Conquest or Breakthrough 20% or 2090% of
the time. So I'm not super worried about
it. And they did push out a 20
Battlefield 2042 event where youcan unlock I think it's like 30
cosmetics for battlefield 6 if you play through this this big
battle pass they have for 2042. Look, Battlefield 2042 isn't the
(32:17):
best Battlefield game ever made.I still think it's a pretty good
game. It does provide a lot of that
unique Battlefield gameplay evenif it's not the best version of
it. I've still put almost 4400 hours
into that game over the years. If you are going to play
Battlefield 6, I think you can get 2042 for like under $5.
(32:38):
If you at least just want to getsome of these cosmetics and have
something similar to play until October 10th, I would suggest
checking it out. I like it, I think it's a good
game. It's just a little too arcade
but I got over 8 years ago hitting some of the smaller
stories here. We have possible upgrades being
rumored to Xbox's streaming service, one of the big parts of
(33:00):
this being a potential for a a cheaper streaming only game
passed here, which would be interesting.
Rod Ferguson is going to cloud Chamber Games to help them ship
Bioshock 4. So that game has been once again
I believe internally delayed. About 1/3 of the studio has been
laid off and they're bringing inRod Ferguson to finish the game.
(33:25):
This is a bit ironic because if you remember the saga of
BioShock Infinite, Rod Ferguson was brought in late in its
development to get it shipped aswell.
So he's like the Bioshock Whisperer, I guess.
I actually like Infinite. A lot of people don't.
And I'm at least curious about aBioshock 4.
It's not really my main franchise.
(33:47):
I, I just, you know, I, I like the games in general, but I'm
not obsessed with them. But I am curious about a
Bioshock four and you know, hopefully he can, he can land
the ship because their whole situation doesn't look great.
Hollow Knight Silk Song has finally gotten a release date.
It's going to be September 4th of 2025 here in just a few
(34:08):
weeks. This is a I'm not familiar with
Hollow Knight. I've never played it.
But I will say that the obsession with when Silk Song is
coming out and the way people have just frothed over this and
freaked out at every game show, every showcase, you know,
wondering if this game would be shown or announced or whatever
kind of came to a head this year.
(34:29):
Obviously, now we have a releasedate.
I've made the joke that it wouldit would be kind of funny if it
was like a four out of 10 game. I doubt it will be.
The previews I've seen of it. People seem pretty high on it.
Maybe I should check out the first one.
But I did find it to be, you know, I hope it's good because
people being this crazy about itfor years, you know, it would it
(34:50):
would feel kind of pointless if it if it if it's not good, we'll
have to wait and see. The Expanse Osiris were born by
Alcat games showed off some environments in a trailer.
They look amazing. More than ever.
I hope this is a big inspirationor maybe like a preview to what
we may see from like a Mass Effect 5 type game.
(35:13):
It just looks great. The the aesthetic is good, the
combat looks good. Everything they showed looks
awesome. It looks like a really cool
grounded, you know, sci-fi spacegame that will, you know, kind
of scratch that itch for people like me waiting for some more of
that stuff as well as Outer Worlds 2 coming out here in the
next couple months. What's so wild is that you have
(35:36):
like Mass Effect 5 coming to oneday the Expanse of Cyrus were
born coming, I believe in 2026. And then you have Exodus.
It's this like these three gamesthat are kind of in the same
genre or or at least we assume it is.
We just started hearing like like the expanse game.
We it's fairly new. We, we only knew it existed
(35:57):
fairly recently, I believe in June.
And we know, I believe, I think so that we know so much more
about it than this, this Exodus game being made by a bunch of
former mass effectives and stufflike that under Hasbro with
their studio. I think it's archetype games.
And we just, we've seen nothing.They, they just, they, they,
(36:19):
they put out like a book and like an art book or something.
They they have this referral program thing that seems kind of
janky in my opinion. They keep doing these like dev
blogs or they they were doing them for a while or they just
never said anything. They just kind of I sure hope
the game can do this thing but not actually talking about the
game. They've shown like snippets of
(36:40):
what looked like super pre alphagameplay in a while ago and then
fairly recently in a blog they showed like this composite
concept art thing that looked like it might have actually been
using some assets from a game. I, I have no idea, but it
looked, it looked really bad. It looked really, really, really
terrible. And so Exodus is like such a
(37:01):
mystery to me. I have no idea if it even
exists, if it's ever going to come out.
Who knows. It seems like we're going to be
waiting a while before we find out.
Hell, Divers 2 showed off some aHalo ODST war bond.
War Bond is like their version of a battle pass and they
they're putting in a bunch of Halo weapons and armor and and
(37:23):
such and capes I believe into Helldivers 2 to celebrate the
addition of Xbox to the the platforms that game is going to
be on. I am such a weird spot with that
because I only recently found out that it's not going to have
cross progression. So if you want to play
Helldivers 2 on your Xbox and you already have you know 40-50
(37:44):
hours on PC like I do, you have to start from scratch which I
find to be pretty lame. That is it is 2025 that should
not still be a thing but here weare.
I hope they figure out a way to to do some kind of cross
progression because I'm probablyjust not.
I'm probably going to not buy that game like I have a
(38:05):
pre-order in, but I'm likely going to cancel it if I can't
carry over my character. I I I like Helldivers too.
It's a super cool game. I have 0 desire to start from
scratch again. Blackmith Wukong launched on
Xbox this week, very conveniently exactly 1 year
(38:26):
after its release on PlayStation.
I I will still argue till I'm blue in the face that this game
very obviously had a one year exclusivity deal, mostly because
of the timing of this, even though they claim it's just a
date that is really important tothem and that's when they do
things. Whatever, I guess, as well as
(38:47):
the fact that Xbox like official, like official Xbox
communication multiple times insinuated there was a deal.
You know, they didn't just come out and say it, but they did
say, hey, we can't affect the deals that the games make with
other publishers and platforms, but we'll be excited to have Wu
Kong on our platform when we can.
Like was essentially the messagemultiple times.
(39:09):
This is frustrating to me because there's this whole in
general a negative outlook on Xbox, at least from a lot of
journalists and content creators, influencers and, you
know, parts of the gaming community.
And you know, this, this developer playing into that and
doing the whole, oh, the Series X is a challenge.
We might we might not be able toput our game on there.
(39:30):
And then it comes out and it hasa 60 FPS mode on Series S.
It's just hilarious. It's in battlefield 6.
Did to you know this like super graphically and like work
intense game, you know, looks just fine on the series S, you
know, within expectation. I don't know.
(39:51):
I I just I would never encourageanyone to buy this game or to
have anything to do with this developer.
I, I think that they're, you know, after the one of the, I
think the head of the studio. Like very clearly just lied
about the series SB and why the game wasn't there when they had
clearly taken some kind of deal from PlayStation.
It just makes it makes them a nogo for me at least, so I'll
(40:12):
leave that to you And then that games com they announced a
sequel somehow. It was just a cinematic.
They probably haven't even started making it yet.
You know, it's probably two or three years away, but you know,
the game sold a lot of copies, mostly not in the West and that
doesn't really matter. They sold a bunch of copies.
Good for them. But it was a game that I found
(40:35):
was talked about more because for performative reasons than
the actual game. And I think it's the lack of
performance and the game awards and things like that kind of
proved that to be true. And then finally we did have
games com this week opening Night Live Jeff Keeley show was
(40:56):
predictably unremarkable. Funny enough, at least to me,
the best part of it was the fallout TV show.
The season 2 trailer was shown and it looks insanely good.
It's super exciting that I'm just so pumped for that.
It looked great. Other than that it was just just
a bunch of slop man like I therewas some cool announcements They
(41:19):
showed Resident Evil requiem theResident Evil 9.
I believe it is I I think that game looks awful and you know
I'm seeing other takes on it that are different, which is
totally fine. I'm not the end all be all.
I don't like the more recent Resident Evil as I hate the
first person mode, even though this one technically has third
person, but you can tell they don't want you to play it that
way. I just I don't I miss the
(41:41):
Resident Evil 2 days man and youknow what I have got Resident
Evil 2 remake. It's amazing.
So if I if I want to play it, I guess it's right there.
I just I wish they would get away from doing this just like I
don't know, it just doesn't lookexciting and honestly,
technically I thought it looked kind of bad.
I thought the animations on the characters in this trailer look
(42:02):
terrible. Some of the environmental work
looked pretty good. The lighting was really pretty.
They obviously, you know, are using the RE engine well for
that, but the actual like kind of like man, that that engine
just cannot do hair. I don't know if it's worse or is
what Decima with death strandingtoo.
I don't know which engine does hair worse, but it looks like
everyone's hair has a different gravity than everything else in
(42:25):
the game. It just, I don't get it.
It's that's beyond me. But yeah, I I found games come
to be pretty underwhelming in general.
There were some cool panels, some cool info came out, but
more than anything that the Fallout TV show, the season 2
trailer is easily my highlight of that whole show, for better
or worse. Getting into some content
(42:47):
updates and closing thoughts here.
I'm finishing up the Mass Effect3 Vods streaming modded
playthrough I'm doing. I have one more stream left.
It's I'm at the Cerberus headquarters or whatever.
I'm going to do that and then doyou know the taking back Earth
and then we're going to move on to Andromeda.
(43:08):
Actually, I'm having to play through in a while.
I've only ever played Andromeda on Xbox Series X and it is not
like FPS boosted or anything there.
So it looks and plays like crap.So I plan on trying to play it.
I'm going to do some light like quality of life modding.
There's not that many mods for that game.
(43:29):
So but there I did see that there is AI think I don't know
if it's a newer mod or something, but kind of like a a
community patch mod there and some other things I'm going to
throw in there. So it's a little more tolerable
to play. So we will we'll we'll be taking
care of that. You know, I'll keep doing the
podcast. I don't foresee a Mass Effect
(43:50):
episode coming up unless unless there's some big the hype cast,
unless there's some big news that happens.
We'll probably save that for October before and seven day.
And yeah, I'll keep streaming, keep, you know, shit posting on
social media and all that stuff.And if you're still hanging with
me, well then I really appreciate that.
Thank you and that is where we will wrap it up.
(44:16):
Thank you so much for listening to this episode and thank you to
everyone who supports as YouTubemembers and or Twitch
subscribers. If you have Amazon Prime, please
throw me that Prime sub. I would very much appreciate it.
If you're 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, hit me up on social media at Von Diesel or at the
(44:39):
Bonfire. Join my Discord via the Link
Tree link in the episode description or comment on
Spotify or YouTube. That is all I have for this
episode of the Bonfire Gaming Podcast, so until next time.
(45:12):
None.
This is the Bonfire Gaming Podcast episode 351.
I'm your host Morgan AKA Von Diesel, and this week we'll be
talking about PlayStation Five. Prices are going up, Escape from
Tarkov announces their one pointO launch, The Division Two
Survivors is announced, and muchmore.
Be sure to subscribe to the showon your favorite podcast app,
(00:25):
leave a review on Spotify or iTunes, and subscribe to the Von
Diesel YouTube channel to get all of my videos, including this
podcast. Let's get right into the gaming
news. We're going to kick it off with
PlayStation 5 announcing the prices are going up $50.00 for
each of their main SKUs in the USA.
(00:47):
This follows months of this being assumed it would happen.
Xbox raised the prices of their consoles a couple months ago.
PlayStation raised the prices ofthe PS-5 and other regions a
while back, but are only just now actually doing it in the
USA. This is weird, right?
(01:08):
By this point in the generation we're five years in, we would be
assuming discounts at this point, right?
At least for the original launchdevices, right The the mid Gen.
refreshes like the PS-5 pro, maybe not, but even even the
switch one got price raises recently.
Not the switch to those are absolutely coming, but they will
(01:30):
probably wait until after Christmas I I suspect.
And and I think this is what happened with PlayStation as
well. I think that Nintendo and Sony
got so much inventory into the United States before these
tariffs hit and all the chaos ofthe tariffs happened that I
suspect they were able to just stay this off for quite a while.
(01:54):
On the inverse Xbox, it seems like it's been kind of a known
secret for a while that they just probably aren't making very
many Xbox the Xbox consoles at this point, Series S or X I I'm
under the impression they're kind of hard to find out in the
world. I'm I'm sure you can order them
from anywhere because of how that inventory works, but I'm
(02:15):
under the impression that the stock is fairly low on those,
which is why I assume they raised their prices so early in
this whole debacle because they just didn't have the stock on
hand in the United States to push off having to raise prices.
Because, you know, once the devices you're selling are ones
that you had to pay tariffs on, you know, no company is going to
(02:37):
eat that, especially five years in to this generation.
So I suspect, you know, with Nintendo and especially with
Sony here, the reason this is happening right now is because
they're, you know, stocks that they had are probably getting
low and now they they, you know,they don't want to eat that.
We also knew not too long ago heard rumors or saw some
(02:58):
speculation that the Xbox they actually are making money on
them. That's probably post price raise
for the ones they do actually sell even though it's not nearly
as many as the other platforms. But that it was very likely that
even though at one point there was a a short time where the
PlayStation 5 was profitable as hardware, it would have been
very minimal. But still profitable is better
(03:21):
than not and and it's rare with hardware.
It's likely it hasn't been profitable in a long time.
It definitely wasn't recently and they are raising these
prices and it may not even be profitable with these price
jumps. 50 bucks, you know, if that makes it profitable, it's
not by much. So, you know, that margin is
(03:42):
still extremely thin, if there is one at all.
This was kind of, you know, funny just because there was so
much determination amongst some of the PlayStation kind of
fanboys that this was not going to happen.
They've, you know, sold double the number of Playstations as
Xboxes. They aren't worried about, you
know, raising the prices or profit margins, all that stuff.
(04:06):
And then this inevitably happens, right?
And that shouldn't be surprisingto anyone that it's I, I really
don't think sometimes people fully comprehend or, or
consider, you know, the possibility that that Sony may
not be doing great money wise right now.
I know that there were recently some financial reports that were
showing that they took in a lot of income, which they almost
(04:28):
always do. We, we've seen that back to the,
the leaked documents during the Activision Blizzard King
acquisition by Xbox, when Microsoft accidentally leaked a
bunch of documents they weren't supposed to.
It showed even back then that PlayStation, you know, takes in
a ton of money. The problem is, is that due to
their extremely expensive and long development cycle, first
(04:52):
party games, they they they don't, you know, they spend a
lot of money too. They they spend a ton of money.
One of my favorite stats from that.
If you've listened for a while, you'll probably be rolling your
eyes hearing me say this again. But what was so crazy is that on
actual like, like, like like money made at least on that old
(05:12):
chart PlayStation had, I think it was as much if not more than
Xbox and Nintendo put together on actual money they took in.
But even then on actual profit margin, Xbox actually made more
profit than PlayStation did, despite making way less money.
And Nintendo made more profit than Xbox and PlayStation
(05:35):
together. And while I'm sure the things
have changed and, and those margins aren't all the same as
they were and, and everything, that story probably still holds.
And especially recently with PlayStation, they've had the
issue of they had a game like Concorde come out, be out for a
week and then get shut down. And they shut the studio down
after paying a relatively substantial amount of money for
(05:58):
that studio and that IP. Not too long before.
They've had presumably, you know, some reported and some
assumed, you know, almost every one of their first party studios
working on a live service game of some capacity for some amount
of time and then those being cancelled.
So you know, like Naughty Dog with The Last of Us and I
(06:20):
believe Sony Santa Monica with aGod of War life service type
game that ended up not happening.
You know, like like that cost a lot of money because it not only
cost money, but it gets 0 return.
It's purely wasted right now. We're in a situation with
Destiny, with Destiny, Destiny'sdeveloper Bungie where they have
(06:42):
Marathon in the works, which unless they pull off some
miracle already seems like it's in the dumps.
And I to this day still don't believe that Marathons ever
actually going to release. I I think it that I maybe they
Kick It Out and see if it can make anything back or gets the
Concorde treatment as well. While, you know, Bungie doesn't
(07:03):
exactly have its best reputationin its history and Destiny 2
still seems to be plodding along, but isn't the big hit
that it was at one point. And it's not the big money
maker. The big live service game that
PlayStation has been desperatelytrying to get from all of their
studios with the only real successful one ironically coming
from a third party studio with Hell Divers 2, which is about to
(07:25):
launch on Xbox. Whole different conversation
there. We won't get into it today, but
actually we will later, but in adifferent angle.
So these price jumps like shouldn't be surprising.
What's crazy is I see a possibility that PlayStation has
a new console two to three yearsfrom now.
(07:46):
Xbox has a new console one to two years from now, and it
wouldn't even surprise me if theprices of the current Gen. goes
up before then. And then you get into the
conversation of like, good Lord,what are these new consoles
going to cost? What is a PlayStation 6 going to
cost? What is a Xbox?
Whatever terrible name they giveit going to cost like, like, Oh
(08:10):
my gosh. You know, the rumors recently
have been that the PlayStation 6may actually be a fairly budget
device that's not that much morepowerful than the PlayStation
Pro, with a lot of focus on PSSRslash FSR.
You know, leaning on that a lot where the Xbox that's coming out
presumably in the next year or two could be a actually very
(08:31):
powerful device that's also going to be very expensive.
That could be closer to 1000 than 500, which starts to put us
in some weird territory. But after these price jumps for
PlayStation five, that PlayStation 5 Pro is 750 now.
And if I remember correctly, that two terabyte limited
(08:51):
edition, whatever series X aftertheir price jumps a while back,
I think was it was 750 as well. Kind of a unique situation
because of the extra memory and how much it costs for Xbox and
blah, blah, blah. But still, you know, you're,
you're, you're literally at the medium point between 500 and
1000. And you know, you don't, you
want to assume that the next consoles won't be more than 750,
(09:15):
but you know, who knows? So you know, these price jumps,
I mean, I'm not going to celebrate this.
I feel bad for people who wantedthe PlayStation 5 who are still,
you know, on the PS4 and they'vebeen waiting for price drops and
they are not getting them. And they at this point at least
looks like they will never get them.
I, I wouldn't be surprised if these prices hold until the day
(09:36):
the new consoles come out and then we'll have to see what
happens then. Maybe they discount them after
the PlayStation 6 comes out. I I have no idea, I think almost
What's more likely is they just stop making them and sell out
the rest of the inventory at theprice and move on to the next
Gen. But we'll have to wait and see.
(09:58):
Escape from Tarkov's developer Battle State Games has announced
the one Point O final version launch of the game on November
15th of 2025. This is going to be interesting.
I have been playing Tarkov for four or five years at this
point. I believe I've got thousands of
hours in that game. Admittedly in the life I've been
(10:21):
playing it for four or five years.
The the 75% of those hours I didin the first year or two.
I, I, I, it was very front loaded my time with that game.
I, I still dabble here and there, but for various reasons
I, I don't really play it much anymore, both because of the
game and not. This is likely, I think going to
(10:42):
be one of the biggest like crap shows ever for a early access
game going full release, partially because it's been 8
years and that's been an early access.
And you would think like, oh wow, they really took their
time. That game must be polished and
ready to roll. And that would tell me that you
(11:03):
don't know anything about Escapefrom Tarkov, because what is
actually happening is that there's issues in the game that
have been issues for almost a decade now, almost since since
launch, that they, they have heavily prioritized, especially
in the last two or three years, putting out new stuff and not
(11:24):
fixing old stuff. And, and I understand that, you
know, or, or I assume that with game development and all this
stuff, if you spend, if you onlyadd new stuff, when everything
old is fixed, you'll never add new stuff.
I understand that. And, and the issue there, but
it's, I mean, it's pretty bad here.
For instance, they their their most recent update, the the last
(11:46):
one they've put out before this one point O launch had a bug
where you could have a grenade launcher in this, you know,
somewhat realistic, very grounded game that you know when
you die, you lose everything youhave.
You know, you can be one shot killed from across the map with
the right shot in the right place.
You know this game that's fairlygrounded.
(12:08):
There was a glitch where if you took a grenade launcher and with
one round you could you had unlimited ammo and you didn't
have to reload. So it worked like a semi auto
gun. So as fast as you could click
was as fast as you could fire off grenades all over the map
and they did damage, They killedthings.
I I don't think it was in the PvP, so the person in person
(12:31):
servers, but it was in the Pve servers where it's essentially a
single player mode. Not great.
And then I mean, a big topic with this game forever has been
the cheating situation. And you know, to their credit,
you will never eliminate cheaters from any game.
There will always be some cheaters.
(12:51):
If a game has an audience, if a game has notoriety, it it's
going to have cheaters and and that's fine.
I don't even fault them for that.
What I do fault them for, and this kind of starts to get into
some of the shady stuff about them, is that there is some
thought around the idea that they don't hardware ban
cheaters. So in in the theory of they say
(13:13):
they do, but it's it's been kindof disputed to a point.
Long story short, there's a there, there's at least somewhat
of a conspiracy that they essentially count on banned
people to buy more versions of the game and it makes them more
money because and, and there, and that may sound silly at
first, but when you find out that a large number of the
(13:33):
people who are cheating are doing basically it's called RMT,
but it's, it's where there's some items in the game that are
so hard to find that cheaters can find them very easily and
then sell them on the market. Or cheaters will boost up an
account to full whatever and then sell that account to
someone else because there's people who, you know, don't want
(13:54):
to do it. Or cheaters will take someone's
account, boost it up and then give it back.
And it's, you know, essentially A shepherding service in some
capacity. Like that's a thing and and it's
a fair it's a really common thing.
I've even seen ads for this on Facebook before, which is insane
to me. I've seen them on YouTube as
well. And this game is just, it's so
(14:18):
wild because things that they'vebeen working on and testing for
years don't work right. The game looks old at this
point. Like I mean it looks 8 years
old. The like I, I saw people trying
to be like, oh, Tarkov looks better than Battlefield 6, but
there may be I I find that I don't agree.
Basically it, it looks old, especially the the player
(14:40):
models. Good Lord.
Like it legit looks like like APS three-game.
Like some of the player models and things like that just look
really, really, really bad. And, and, and with all of that
said, the game does some things uniquely that no other games do.
I, I think the gunplay in Tarkovis unique and no other game does
(15:00):
it the same or as well. And, and, and you know, some of
the movement stuff and all that,you know, there, there is a
reason people keep playing this game, but that there's also this
weird situation where they're going one point O, this is
supposed to be the high point ofthe game.
And I would argue that there's areally good chance that even
when it launches one point O, itwon't reach the peaks it made,
(15:23):
you know, player base wise, three or four years ago.
I, I, I think the game was the most popular it ever was, you
know, two or three years ago and, and I, and I think it's
been a downward trend ever sincethen, you know, because of other
games, because of things and choices made.
And this one, you know, this what, what's so wild is a few
months ago or a couple months ago, they, they did a big update
(15:46):
to the game and they, they do these things called wipes.
So when they do a wipe, your whole character gets wiped to
zero. You started over completely.
You have to do all the tasks andall the progression, all that
again. And this time the the white.
Before their 10 launch, they decided to make it a hardcore
wipe, which made the game essentially impossibly hard for
(16:07):
regular people trying to play it.
You don't stream it, lay it 24/7and they didn't even do it that
creatively. Like it's not like they added a
bunch of new rewards and challenges.
They just made everything twice as hard.
Like literally they just times twoed the number of enemies you
had to kill for some tasks, the number of items you had to
collect for different tasks and things like that.
(16:27):
They just they they just times twoed everything and then made
it so you can't buy a bunch of stuff that is essential and made
everything way more expensive that you could buy.
And and it just, you know, the the vibe isn't great around the
game and it was likely the worstdecision they could have
possibly made in the lead up to the final version of the game.
I just, you know, supposedly they're adding this whole single
(16:50):
player campaign. You're going to actually be able
to escape from Tarkov, a task that you can't actually do in
the eight years of, you know, testing of this game.
But the supposedly there's goingto be like cinematics and story
missions and all this stuff in here.
Like Please remember why I said before they've been testing
things in this game, some of them for eight years that still
don't work. And we're supposed to believe
(17:11):
that they're going to release this game and it's just
magically day one-on-one point Ogoing to be ready and it's all
going to work, right And it's all going to be fine.
Like it's not going to be it's going to be a complete mess.
The only cool thing about it is that I believe this means the
game will be going to Steam and to other launchers.
So if you no longer want to use their launcher, which I don't, I
(17:33):
hate having their software on mycomputer, I believe you're going
to be able to buy it through Steam.
But you know, for people like mewho have spent more money than I
want to admit on even though supposedly you were getting
Steam codes, but I don't know ifthat's still true or not.
If you have to buy it again, youknow, you're talking about
hundreds of dollars that you're going to have to rebuy this game
(17:55):
for. So we'll see.
I you know, you probably tell from what I've been saying, I'm
I'm not confident this is going to go well.
It's been years at this point since I've like really wanted to
grind this game, but it's it's always caught my interest again.
I've always jumped back in at least for a week or two when
they have big updates or whatever.
(18:16):
I'm I'm always going to be curious and and I hope I'm
wrong. It's just, you know, there.
There's also a lot of bad vibes around the studio.
He makes it. They're based in Russia.
And while that's not inherently bad, I'm not suggesting that
there is some reason to believe that.
Like, their owner may have, you know, at least at one point been
involved with some of the private, private military
(18:37):
companies like Wagner to do consulting on their game back in
the day. Now that likely will have been
before the Ukraine war began when Russia invaded Ukraine.
And, and, you know, we, I don't think there's any reason to
believe that there's still ongoing involvement there.
But you know, there's, there's, there's always that chance.
And I, I just as someone who follows that conflict and pretty
(19:01):
closely, it just kind of makes me uneasy to in any way, shape
or form tacitly support a, a company who may be supporting
the other side of that situationvery directly.
But that kind of turns into a different conversation.
I'm wishing the best for him, especially for the players.
People have been waiting a long time for this 1.0.
(19:21):
It would be cool if it wasn't a complete craft show.
I I would like to be proven wrong at games com Ubisoft
massive studio has announced A various number of things.
Some ongoing content for the Division 2.
They talked a bit about resurgence, the mobile game that
(19:43):
I believe is a prequel to two. It takes place between 1:00 and
2:00. Could be wrong you can correct
me if you want, but the big thing they announced was the
division two survivors. So when they did some teases
recently, I I think I made a whole topic in the the podcast.
They were teasing snow and in the DC and Washington DC.
(20:07):
So not the small New York map, not the small Brooklyn map, not
back in the Division One, but inDivision 2 Washington DC cover
than snow. And my initial guess and I'm
sure many other people's was, ohwow, they're bringing back
survival. And, you know, we were, I think
either on stream or or somethingwe were speculating about what
that could mean, how they could,you know, they they can't do
(20:27):
survival the same as Division One because the way the map was
in Division One, it it really lent itself to that mode where
Division Three, you know, Division One had just one DZ
this one location that everyone would go to for the survival
battle Royale kind of extractionmode game where Division 2 has
3D ZS. So maybe they're going to split
(20:50):
the map in the threes and you know, depend you'll just
randomly matchmaking to one of them or something.
I don't know. But it does sound like they're
bringing back some kind of survival experience now from the
conversation around it that theyhad, they didn't give me any
details. I interpreted much of what they
said as this is going to be likeSurvivor Plus.
So I assume they're going to adapt the base idea of Survivor
(21:13):
from Division One, the DLC to Division Two and do some kind of
round or or round based mode where you go in, you upgrade
your character, weapons, gear, all of that, you collect
something and then you try to get out probably through one of
the D ZS. So what they said though was
(21:36):
that this isn't just a remake ofthe original Survivor in
Division Two, that they're adding more to and all that, but
that's as far as they went. What's a little concerning I
think is that they talked about this being in early stages.
They showed off only concept artand and like the logo for it at
this point. And the director of the game,
because this is getting talked about like it's a separate game,
(21:59):
basically said that he'll be able to talk more about it next
year at games.com. So a year from now, they'll be
able to start detailing the game.
If I was someone who was excitedfor this and wanted to come out,
I would be a little concerned about that.
If you want me to be straight up, if you want my personal
opinion, that would not be very exciting for me.
(22:20):
You know, we, you know, in the last few years had the division
Heartland, which was supposed tobe this kind of spin off, you
know, just to throw out and probably break an NDA here.
That was supposed to be survivalby Red Storm was be supposed to
from the what I'm under the impression of was supposed to
make survival 2 point O for Division 2.
(22:41):
They pitched the project that project turning it into a
standalone game, which eventually became Heartland and
was eventually cancelled. I have a lot to say about it.
I don't know when or how I can talk about that stuff.
We'll get to it one day. But this, I'm afraid, will just
be that again. Now this is internal.
I believe this is that massive. And so you know, that does help.
(23:02):
It's not like a satellite studioor support studio doing this.
Massive itself seems to have quite a bit of pull at Ubisoft,
so maybe it's a little safer because of that.
I think calling it The Division Two survivors is a terrible
idea. I think it should just be The
Division survivors. I think attaching 2 to it causes
them all kinds of issues. Namely, it's a bit concerning
(23:25):
that this game is almost certainly two or three years
away at least. And that implies that they're
calling Division Two survivors, that they're not expecting
Division Three in that time. Because you can't release
Division Three in, you know, three years and then release
Division Two survivors after that or around the same time,
right? So I find that interesting.
(23:48):
I just, man, you know, they're going to continue supporting
Division Two. I've personally become pretty
tired of that content. I I need to try, maybe I should
try to get more into it and stopbeing so you know, whatever
about it, but I just, I wish they would let it die.
I just, I wish they would just wrap it up.
I think that's my bigger issue is I I totally understand them
(24:11):
putting out more content, givingpeople reason to buy more game
paddle and battle passes and allthat crap.
But like just the fact that theykeep pushing the story along.
And in my opinion at least, the story just keeps getting more
silly and and dumb and hard to move on with, you know, with the
next game, maybe one day Division Three, but that's what
they're doing. They're they're continuing that
(24:32):
and for what it's worth it. They're ambitious.
They keep trying to do big things with the story and with,
you know, the content that comesout, even though I'm, I'm under
the impression they're doing it with a pretty small team.
So we'll see. But I, I really thought maybe we
would get at least a mention of Division 3 here, but they
didn't, they showed off a like atimeline of, of what's coming
(24:56):
up. They do have a big event they're
teasing for March of 2026, whichwill be the 10 year anniversary
of the Division 1 coming out. I think that's where they will
probably talk about Division Three for the first time.
I think it's literally just going to be them being like,
Yep, we're working on it. It'll be out one day and that's
going to be it. I don't expect it to be more
(25:17):
than that, but I could be wrong.Yeah, we'll see.
I love my division. I just want something new.
Pete Parsons over at Bungie. The CEO is stepping down.
They posted A blog this week. I believe it was here on Friday
talking about handing over powerto some other people who are
(25:40):
already there. This is fairly notable from what
I'm aware of. I'll be honest, I don't like
Destiny. I find it, I just don't enjoy
it. I like the Division despite the
fact that it's a looter game, not because of it.
And Destiny does not tickle my fancy at all.
So I'm mostly, you know, most ofwhat I know about Destiny is
(26:00):
there is, you know, second hand.I'm under the impression Pete
Parsons isn't liked very much. If I remember correctly, he was
the one who he buys like tons oflike exotic cars and lives this
really kind of wild lifestyle orat least expensive lifestyle.
While, you know, his studio is kind of been in shambles and
they've laid people off and gotten smaller and Sony has
(26:23):
taken more control over them, even though they were supposed
to be independent when they got acquired by Sony instead of
PlayStation and all this stuff. For the most part, I saw this
being celebrated. I saw this mostly people being
like, oh, thank goodness. I'm not really under the
impression there was anyone in the line of session there that
is necessarily going to be much better who wasn't already in
(26:45):
some kind of power position and maybe not using it very well.
But you know that this seems like it's one of those things
where people aren't super worried about who comes next.
They just seem kind of happy he's gone.
We'll, we'll see, man. I mean, Bungie is, is a weird
studio. You know, back when they left
Microsoft, I can't remember if they went independent for a bit.
(27:07):
I think they did. There was all this talk of like,
oh man, how does Microsoft lose the, the, the Halo studio,
right? And then Microsoft made another
studio just to work on Halo games, which is, you know, had
its ups and downs. But then Bungie, you know, they,
they did Destiny and that was a big hit.
And then at some point in there,they got acquired by Activision.
(27:28):
And I believe that's when Destiny 2 came out.
And then they left Activision and they're independent for a
little bit. And now they're with, they're
with PlayStation. Actually, there was Sony, not
PlayStation. They were acquired specifically
by Sony. And there were all these
agreements that, you know, that Destiny would remain, you know,
multi platform. Their next game, which became
(27:49):
Marathon would be multi platformas well.
That this was a Sony thing and not necessarily they weren't
necessarily a PlayStation studio.
Well, Marathon hasn't been received very well, has had a
bunch of its own issues. Destiny 2 has had its ups and
downs. I believe one of the recent DLCS
was really good and, and liked, but I suspect that even when
things are going well for them in the big picture, it's
(28:12):
probably still not that great asthe popularity and the player
base of that game probably just wanes a bit.
And you know, as far as we know,there's no Destiny 3 in the
works. Marathon seems like it's at risk
of not even coming out and it's just, it's a weird, weird times
over there. The, the, the common belief at
(28:34):
this point is that if Marathon especially doesn't do well,
which it looks like it might not, that it's pretty likely
that Sony will put Bungie underneath PlayStation.
And it could either be turned into like a codev studio.
It could just get absorbed by another studio.
It could just get shut down and the people moved around and laid
off. We, we don't know, but it it
(28:56):
kind of seems like the eventual move of Sony being their owners
to PlayStation being their owners is almost certain at some
point in the relatively near future and we'll have to see if
that's a good or bad thing. I I'm sure it wasn't completely
their decision, and I don't think that a Destiny Three would
(29:16):
fix everything that they need tofix, but I suspected Destiny 3
being in the works at least would have people looking at
Bungie in a more optimistic way.As for optimism, Battlefield 6
devs have given a debriefing talking about changes coming
from everything they saw during the two weekends of open beta.
(29:38):
The big thing they talked about,which has been a fun topic to
pay attention to, is some movement changes.
Basically, they're making it so when you slide, you don't slide
this far when you move side to side, it's just more limited.
When you jump, especially when you jump repeatedly, your
accuracy on your gun gets way, way worse.
There were some pretty shared videos from the bait of, you
(30:00):
know, these Call of Duty playersliterally bounding around the
map and flying around corners and killing people and playing
Battlefield in a way that DICE definitely doesn't want people
to play and in a way that you could argue they're exploiting,
you know, issues in the game. And they seem pretty dedicated
and them not allowing that to happen as well as people
(30:21):
climbing into parts of the map they aren't supposed to be in,
like on rooftops and maps where you're not supposed to be on
rooftops, as well as some other things.
So all the movement stuff I thought was really great.
They talked about weapon balancing kind of generically,
but they did specify that the shotgun, and I assume there will
be multiple shotguns in the final game, will require more
pellets to hit a player to kill them, where it seems like maybe
(30:45):
that number was too low. You can kind of just wing people
with the shotgun and the betas and they would just die.
Seems like here you're going to have to like legitimately hit
them with like a full body shot to be able to take them down,
which is how it should be. Whether it's realistic or not, I
personally don't care. It's for balancing purposes.
Bigger maps was a big topic and they kind of assured everyone,
(31:08):
yet we have bigger maps come in.We just want to focus on the
smaller stuff for these betas. We'll see if it's true or not.
And then a big topic was Rush and the various ways they want
to make Rush better, but also some pushback by them of, you
know, people want Rush to be a bigger mode.
Right now it's only 12 on 12, which is tiny.
That's a small mode for a Battlefield game.
(31:30):
They've done as big as 64 V 6432V 32 for Rush and it's has its
own issues, right? I would like Rush to have more
players. I think like 16 V 16 or 20 V 20
would be ideal, but they kind ofseemed like they were sticking
to their guns with that. It's going to stay 12V12.
We'll have to wait and find out.I'm not super worried about it.
(31:51):
I'm just going to play Conquest or Breakthrough 20% or 2090% of
the time. So I'm not super worried about
it. And they did push out a 20
Battlefield 2042 event where youcan unlock I think it's like 30
cosmetics for battlefield 6 if you play through this this big
battle pass they have for 2042. Look, Battlefield 2042 isn't the
(32:17):
best Battlefield game ever made.I still think it's a pretty good
game. It does provide a lot of that
unique Battlefield gameplay evenif it's not the best version of
it. I've still put almost 4400 hours
into that game over the years. If you are going to play
Battlefield 6, I think you can get 2042 for like under $5.
(32:38):
If you at least just want to getsome of these cosmetics and have
something similar to play until October 10th, I would suggest
checking it out. I like it, I think it's a good
game. It's just a little too arcade
but I got over 8 years ago hitting some of the smaller
stories here. We have possible upgrades being
rumored to Xbox's streaming service, one of the big parts of
(33:00):
this being a potential for a a cheaper streaming only game
passed here, which would be interesting.
Rod Ferguson is going to cloud Chamber Games to help them ship
Bioshock 4. So that game has been once again
I believe internally delayed. About 1/3 of the studio has been
laid off and they're bringing inRod Ferguson to finish the game.
(33:25):
This is a bit ironic because if you remember the saga of
BioShock Infinite, Rod Ferguson was brought in late in its
development to get it shipped aswell.
So he's like the Bioshock Whisperer, I guess.
I actually like Infinite. A lot of people don't.
And I'm at least curious about aBioshock 4.
It's not really my main franchise.
(33:47):
I, I just, you know, I, I like the games in general, but I'm
not obsessed with them. But I am curious about a
Bioshock four and you know, hopefully he can, he can land
the ship because their whole situation doesn't look great.
Hollow Knight Silk Song has finally gotten a release date.
It's going to be September 4th of 2025 here in just a few
(34:08):
weeks. This is a I'm not familiar with
Hollow Knight. I've never played it.
But I will say that the obsession with when Silk Song is
coming out and the way people have just frothed over this and
freaked out at every game show, every showcase, you know,
wondering if this game would be shown or announced or whatever
kind of came to a head this year.
(34:29):
Obviously, now we have a releasedate.
I've made the joke that it wouldit would be kind of funny if it
was like a four out of 10 game. I doubt it will be.
The previews I've seen of it. People seem pretty high on it.
Maybe I should check out the first one.
But I did find it to be, you know, I hope it's good because
people being this crazy about itfor years, you know, it would it
(34:50):
would feel kind of pointless if it if it if it's not good, we'll
have to wait and see. The Expanse Osiris were born by
Alcat games showed off some environments in a trailer.
They look amazing. More than ever.
I hope this is a big inspirationor maybe like a preview to what
we may see from like a Mass Effect 5 type game.
(35:13):
It just looks great. The the aesthetic is good, the
combat looks good. Everything they showed looks
awesome. It looks like a really cool
grounded, you know, sci-fi spacegame that will, you know, kind
of scratch that itch for people like me waiting for some more of
that stuff as well as Outer Worlds 2 coming out here in the
next couple months. What's so wild is that you have
(35:36):
like Mass Effect 5 coming to oneday the Expanse of Cyrus were
born coming, I believe in 2026. And then you have Exodus.
It's this like these three gamesthat are kind of in the same
genre or or at least we assume it is.
We just started hearing like like the expanse game.
We it's fairly new. We, we only knew it existed
(35:57):
fairly recently, I believe in June.
And we know, I believe, I think so that we know so much more
about it than this, this Exodus game being made by a bunch of
former mass effectives and stufflike that under Hasbro with
their studio. I think it's archetype games.
And we just, we've seen nothing.They, they just, they, they,
(36:19):
they put out like a book and like an art book or something.
They they have this referral program thing that seems kind of
janky in my opinion. They keep doing these like dev
blogs or they they were doing them for a while or they just
never said anything. They just kind of I sure hope
the game can do this thing but not actually talking about the
game. They've shown like snippets of
(36:40):
what looked like super pre alphagameplay in a while ago and then
fairly recently in a blog they showed like this composite
concept art thing that looked like it might have actually been
using some assets from a game. I, I have no idea, but it
looked, it looked really bad. It looked really, really, really
terrible. And so Exodus is like such a
(37:01):
mystery to me. I have no idea if it even
exists, if it's ever going to come out.
Who knows. It seems like we're going to be
waiting a while before we find out.
Hell, Divers 2 showed off some aHalo ODST war bond.
War Bond is like their version of a battle pass and they
they're putting in a bunch of Halo weapons and armor and and
(37:23):
such and capes I believe into Helldivers 2 to celebrate the
addition of Xbox to the the platforms that game is going to
be on. I am such a weird spot with that
because I only recently found out that it's not going to have
cross progression. So if you want to play
Helldivers 2 on your Xbox and you already have you know 40-50
(37:44):
hours on PC like I do, you have to start from scratch which I
find to be pretty lame. That is it is 2025 that should
not still be a thing but here weare.
I hope they figure out a way to to do some kind of cross
progression because I'm probablyjust not.
I'm probably going to not buy that game like I have a
(38:05):
pre-order in, but I'm likely going to cancel it if I can't
carry over my character. I I I like Helldivers too.
It's a super cool game. I have 0 desire to start from
scratch again. Blackmith Wukong launched on
Xbox this week, very conveniently exactly 1 year
(38:26):
after its release on PlayStation.
I I will still argue till I'm blue in the face that this game
very obviously had a one year exclusivity deal, mostly because
of the timing of this, even though they claim it's just a
date that is really important tothem and that's when they do
things. Whatever, I guess, as well as
(38:47):
the fact that Xbox like official, like official Xbox
communication multiple times insinuated there was a deal.
You know, they didn't just come out and say it, but they did
say, hey, we can't affect the deals that the games make with
other publishers and platforms, but we'll be excited to have Wu
Kong on our platform when we can.
Like was essentially the messagemultiple times.
(39:09):
This is frustrating to me because there's this whole in
general a negative outlook on Xbox, at least from a lot of
journalists and content creators, influencers and, you
know, parts of the gaming community.
And you know, this, this developer playing into that and
doing the whole, oh, the Series X is a challenge.
We might we might not be able toput our game on there.
(39:30):
And then it comes out and it hasa 60 FPS mode on Series S.
It's just hilarious. It's in battlefield 6.
Did to you know this like super graphically and like work
intense game, you know, looks just fine on the series S, you
know, within expectation. I don't know.
(39:51):
I I just I would never encourageanyone to buy this game or to
have anything to do with this developer.
I, I think that they're, you know, after the one of the, I
think the head of the studio. Like very clearly just lied
about the series SB and why the game wasn't there when they had
clearly taken some kind of deal from PlayStation.
It just makes it makes them a nogo for me at least, so I'll
(40:12):
leave that to you And then that games com they announced a
sequel somehow. It was just a cinematic.
They probably haven't even started making it yet.
You know, it's probably two or three years away, but you know,
the game sold a lot of copies, mostly not in the West and that
doesn't really matter. They sold a bunch of copies.
Good for them. But it was a game that I found
(40:35):
was talked about more because for performative reasons than
the actual game. And I think it's the lack of
performance and the game awards and things like that kind of
proved that to be true. And then finally we did have
games com this week opening Night Live Jeff Keeley show was
(40:56):
predictably unremarkable. Funny enough, at least to me,
the best part of it was the fallout TV show.
The season 2 trailer was shown and it looks insanely good.
It's super exciting that I'm just so pumped for that.
It looked great. Other than that it was just just
a bunch of slop man like I therewas some cool announcements They
(41:19):
showed Resident Evil requiem theResident Evil 9.
I believe it is I I think that game looks awful and you know
I'm seeing other takes on it that are different, which is
totally fine. I'm not the end all be all.
I don't like the more recent Resident Evil as I hate the
first person mode, even though this one technically has third
person, but you can tell they don't want you to play it that
way. I just I don't I miss the
(41:41):
Resident Evil 2 days man and youknow what I have got Resident
Evil 2 remake. It's amazing.
So if I if I want to play it, I guess it's right there.
I just I wish they would get away from doing this just like I
don't know, it just doesn't lookexciting and honestly,
technically I thought it looked kind of bad.
I thought the animations on the characters in this trailer look
(42:02):
terrible. Some of the environmental work
looked pretty good. The lighting was really pretty.
They obviously, you know, are using the RE engine well for
that, but the actual like kind of like man, that that engine
just cannot do hair. I don't know if it's worse or is
what Decima with death strandingtoo.
I don't know which engine does hair worse, but it looks like
everyone's hair has a different gravity than everything else in
(42:25):
the game. It just, I don't get it.
It's that's beyond me. But yeah, I I found games come
to be pretty underwhelming in general.
There were some cool panels, some cool info came out, but
more than anything that the Fallout TV show, the season 2
trailer is easily my highlight of that whole show, for better
or worse. Getting into some content
(42:47):
updates and closing thoughts here.
I'm finishing up the Mass Effect3 Vods streaming modded
playthrough I'm doing. I have one more stream left.
It's I'm at the Cerberus headquarters or whatever.
I'm going to do that and then doyou know the taking back Earth
and then we're going to move on to Andromeda.
(43:08):
Actually, I'm having to play through in a while.
I've only ever played Andromeda on Xbox Series X and it is not
like FPS boosted or anything there.
So it looks and plays like crap.So I plan on trying to play it.
I'm going to do some light like quality of life modding.
There's not that many mods for that game.
(43:29):
So but there I did see that there is AI think I don't know
if it's a newer mod or something, but kind of like a a
community patch mod there and some other things I'm going to
throw in there. So it's a little more tolerable
to play. So we will we'll we'll be taking
care of that. You know, I'll keep doing the
podcast. I don't foresee a Mass Effect
(43:50):
episode coming up unless unless there's some big the hype cast,
unless there's some big news that happens.
We'll probably save that for October before and seven day.
And yeah, I'll keep streaming, keep, you know, shit posting on
social media and all that stuff.And if you're still hanging with
me, well then I really appreciate that.
Thank you and that is where we will wrap it up.
(44:16):
Thank you so much for listening to this episode and thank you to
everyone who supports as YouTubemembers and or Twitch
subscribers. If you have Amazon Prime, please
throw me that Prime sub. I would very much appreciate it.
If you're 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, hit me up on social media at Von Diesel or at the
(44:39):
Bonfire. Join my Discord via the Link
Tree link in the episode description or comment on
Spotify or YouTube. That is all I have for this
episode of the Bonfire Gaming Podcast, so until next time.
(45:12):
None.
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