Starfield: We Saw the BIG Updates, Greg Went to Bethesda! - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Let's go! From Nintendo and Illumination... The Super Mario Brothers can take care of the kingdom. ...comes a super-powered adventure... ...on April 1st. Pack our things. The Galaxy gets even bigger. He knows that's my bike, right? Lussie! The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, with EPG. Only at Peter's April 1st. Get tickets now. You can't control. Terms apply. Toyota. Let's go places. Refreshing wild cherry cola meets smooth cream. The treat you deserve. Pepsi, wild cherry and cream. Treat yourself. The Super Mario Brothers on. He's a very nice... ...brains. You eat those tots? Hell yeah, man. I like that. I like that. I had tots in a minute, but I'm about to have some right now. Hi, I'm... Yes. It's out in the world, but as you said last week, we got to fly. To Bethesda, Maryland. Talk to... Bethesda. About all this Starfield news. Ladies, gentlemen, NBs, if you're watching or listening and don't know what's going on, let me give you top level, okay? Of course, Bethesda has announced that Starfield is coming to PlayStation 5 on April 7th. Finally, make the jump. Meaning that Kevin, can you please get all this ugly green thank you off the screen? Let's switch to PlayStation. Oh man, the same Patti's day and y'all getting rid of the green. Kevin, go back and forth at your leisure. Don't worry about me. On top of that, Terran Armada and Free Lanes, two big old DLC packs will release on April 7th on all platforms. Free Lanes is free for all players. All existing premium owners on Xbox and Steam will receive the Terran Armada DLC at no additional cost. If you're a normal normie, which of course now costs $50, they've lowered the price of Starfield to $50, you can then go buy the Terran Armada DLC for $10, they said, right? And of course, they brag about all their community creations, which we will talk about at length. Terran Armada is the big DLC. It introduces new quest lines across the settled systems with new characters, locations, enemies, systems and rewards. Players get the chance to shape the future of humanity in space as they combat the incursions of the Terran Armada's robotic forces in this brand new story DLC. Meanwhile, Free Lanes is a free update that adds significant new features and systems designed to deepen the core Starfield experience for both new and returning players, most significantly opening up interplanetary travel within systems. With this update, players can use cruise mode to travel from planet to planet within a star system where they'll experience frequent encounters and activities and spend some quality time with their ship and the crew. There's a bunch of new features that are there, new locations, X-Tec, enemy modifiers, moon jumper, outpost improvements, new crew, starboard improvement. We will talk about all that in length. But then the final big topic bullet point is at the track tracker's alliance. One of the creations Bethesda made and had on the creation store for a while is getting an update today. It's five new bounties to go after. One of them, one of them about the fucking guy faking being the Mantis. That's the first one I'm chasing. I'm the Mantis. All right. I took the Mantis. I'm not letting this guy get in there. Of course, that is already out today. You could go play it right now. And if you already bought trackers alliance, it's included at no additional cost. If you're jumping in, you can get the complete trackers alliance bounty system for 700 creation credits. That's a lot, baby. That's a lot to shove in there. But before we jump in, I think everybody knows, at least if you're kind of funny fan that I'm a Starfield sicko. When you asked me, yo, you going to Bethesda next week? I'm like, damn, I am. You're coming. What is your history with Starfield for people who don't know? I reviewed Starfield on hit video game website, GameSpot.com back in 2023. And I have to be honest, I mean, y'all can pull up the review that is published on that site. Kind of disappointed in that launch version of that game. And I think that, you know, there's a lot that goes into it because a Bethesda RPG, many, many years of hyping this up. And sort of, I don't want to say that expectations got in the way because there's so much more beyond expectations that it did not meet. And, you know, you come to this, you expect a certain level of like something new, but it felt like we just put the, we put a space veneer over what we've done in the past. And some of it, some of which was felt under baked. There's a, there are things that I really, really enjoyed about Starfield. I think a lot of side quests were great. The Crimson Fleet quest line was probably one of my favorite side quests in Bethesda history alongside like the Dark Brotherhood from the Elder Scrolls series. And I really liked the combat I said to you is like, you know, one of my favorite things about Starfield is actually the gunplay. So hearing that the Terra, Terra and Armada DLC is so combat focused. I'm like, hell yeah, that's actually playing into one of the things I really liked about Starfield. But there's a lot of things that chipped away at my enthusiasm. I think a lot of the character interactions, especially with your crewmates, felt very shallow. And the story, the main story itself also felt shallow. And like, I'm not expecting, you know, a Bethesda RPG to be thought provoking in the same way that I expect something like a, I don't know, like a, I don't know, Octopath Traveler Zero. Because that's all I'm always thinking about Octopath Traveler Zero. You know what I'm saying? See, we could agree. We could agree on something. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't get it twisted. I agree with you on the, I agree on your characterization of Starfield so far. If you're new around here, weren't he like the character of Greg being the Starfield sicko? When you, when you do that starts going, and I think people fill in the gaps that I think it's a 10 out of 10. I do not. The whole reason I like this game is because I had a very specific glitch that really set me off on a path. Yeah, I remember it. Yeah, I remember it. And, but yeah, so going on to what you like, the things that you liked about it, we're really interesting because I think that those are the, those are the parts in which I think everyone's going to have a different perception or they're going to have a different experience with it, or they're going to feel differently about it, like, especially because you did a lot of the New Game Plus stuff. Yes. And that is, I will give Starfield this is that that is a very unique approach to New Game Plus. What's, I started poking through it, like I get the kind of mechanisms behind how that, how that all that stuff works. And it could have been fascinating, but for me, I was like, Oh, it's nice to see the variations in which, you know, some of the very wild variations that you can get as you jump through the unity, unity multiple times. Yeah. And I was like, Oh, that's really fascinating, but it doesn't fundamentally change how I feel about what this game is saying. Totally fair. I'm not going to be standing in this place in space. And I say in my review back in the day that like, you know, I'm not going into this expecting it to be the next Mass Effect or to be as thought provoking as like the Carl Sagan books that I read as a kid or anything like that. But I did want it to at least have its own identity. And so I think it struggled to establish like, this is our version of space. These are the factors that go into aside from like criminal factions and intergalactic governments and all that like that stuff, of course, is there. I just didn't get a sense of like a real sense of place and personality from the game. Granted, you know, some of the some of the core Bethesda things that make these RPGs so fun to like poke and prod at are definitely there. You know, finding a derelict ship in the ship in the middle of like a planet's orbit and then digging through there finding quest logs and getting new getting new items and that stuff could is interesting in parts. And again, like some of the side quests were the more interesting parts of it. So very mixed feelings about Starfield upon launch. Now, another thing too is like Bethesda games evolve over time. Sure do. You know, and I think we're in a we're in an era where that's kind of the expectation now is that you're going to get to continual updates, DLC and like foundational changes. Because if you think back to even Fallout four, we were still in an era where traditional expansion packs were kind of the norm. We were phasing out of that, but that was kind of the how those games came out. And when you look back at Skyrim also, it's like traditional like the games out a year or two later, we're going to get expansion pack another year or two later, we're going to get another expansion pack and you know, mods are going to come out. And that's how you that's the life cycle of those games. Yeah, that's a support. But Starfield has entered had entered in a new era in which developers a lot more hands on with how they handle like the intermittent updates. I think Starfield has benefited greatly from that. And you know, it's visiting Bethesda and talking to them and kind of like recounting the path that Starfield had from launch to today. I'm like, oh yeah, they really stuck with this. And they really thought hard about foundationally what are the things that they should change to both satisfy the audience and just make it a better experience from the ground level. So, yeah, that's kind of how I feel about Starfield from launch and, you know, seeing some of the new stuff. Did you come back for Shattered Space? Have you come back for the creations? I didn't. So I mean, I've heard accounts of Shattered Space and from people I trust, you know, I always encourage people to experience things for themselves before they form an opinion. But I think after hearing friends talk about Shattered Space, it was like, oh, okay, like I did. It doesn't seem like this is the kind of thing that I want to come back for. Sure. Maybe if you have multiple pieces of DLC and then I can kind of have a much more chunkier bite of the game again, then I'll come back. And that's what I feel like Terran Armada is going to be for me. Yeah. It's like this is enough, like combined with the fact that I have not played Shattered Space. Sure. And with the Terran Armada stuff, which I'm actually like really excited for, I think putting those things, two things together is going to, like, I will sit down for a week and play Starfield, reload my old save, and play through a lot of new content that I just, you know, did not experience. Let alone all the creation stuff. Yeah. So yeah, the creation stuff is crazy, man. Like, oh man, like that's a that's a whole other topic too. We had like what we visited them like dedicated a whole presentation and segment to creations. And I think we can touch on this later, but I'm when creations came out of the gate, which is like their kind of paid mod system or system of like how to house mods like a next. Nexus mods. Exactly. Ability and nexus. You just click on it. Kevin's brought up the website you could go to log in and do. You can do it from your console or your PC as well. Obviously go in there and get stuff. It's both free and there are paid stuff. Yeah. And like I just kind of initially when we, when it came out, it was like, oh, we're charging for mods now. And like as a old school PC gamer from like the early 2000s till now, it's like, no mods were always like a community ran thing. Why are you taking mods away from us? Or like it felt like it felt like mods were being like colonized by. Yeah. Oh, there's money in these hills. We can get it. Yeah. And like, you know, but as the games are historically ripe for mods and but what I've seen so far is that if they are going to move to this paid system, you know, these creators of the creations are Assessably getting money for their work. Yeah. And perhaps like that is the not silver lining, but that is it took time to get there and perhaps that is a better way of housing these things and maybe putting a little bit of quality control on it. Yeah. And making that stuff easier because not everyone's going to like spend a day a whole day trying to learn how to install mods. You know, you have different installers. You have different packs that don't are that are incompatible with each other. There's all like a lot of nonsense that I I liked digging through because I was a sicko back in the day, but also bringing myself to consoles like really cool. Yeah. You know, I am obviously well known for being a console plebe and I've been better about it. And I'm playing a PC. I'm going to play Starfield again in PC today. But the crew what spoke to me about the creations was the ease of access for it. And then back to your point of like, yeah, like being able to work with these people and get these creators money and do stuff like you're talking about it, which I thought was so interesting powerful. We went to Bethesda and a lot of times like you go on a trip like this, you go to a studio and there is wasted time. We're like, I really, really didn't like it. Not only could most things be a zoom call. That's a throw. But like we're here a whole day. We're really not when they sent us the schedule and it was like nine to eight with the dinner included. I was like, there's no way you're going to make this all worthwhile. But to your point, they had King gaff, Josh King. King gaff is this creator who's been creating stuff since quake. And he was there and gave an entire presentation with one of the members of his team. And it was this really, I thought heartwarming conversation about, Hey, we did all this and we've been, you know, modding this and we were making stuff for fallout before. Like we were all about these fallout ones before I'm trying to find it was the Sim city or Sim settlements and fallout for. And it was a community project that took years and they went on and on and on. And by the end of it, they finished like, what do we want to do next? Could we do something next? He shrunk that he was like, you were the most reliable people I'm working with you. But as it turned to them was like, Hey, do you want to make stuff for us with us alongside of this? And now they are an 11 person small business making mods for Starfield and fallout and Elder Scrolls. And it's like, Holy shit, that's awesome. And to the point like I do tune in to the mods and keep my eyes there. And I, you know, I did shattered space. Yes. But when the quality of life, 60 frames has dropped in the car dropped, I've popped back in for all that. I pop in for all these different things. And when wash tower dropped last year, I did pop in and download it and started. fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades fades I had a round table. I sat down with the Gath creations in Bethesda. It was like, so like, is there still an audience for this? Like, you know, the same thing. So many people make fun of me for being the one Starfield fan. It's like, no, there is a lot of people. There's still a lot of people playing it and then making this content. And I think everything we saw goes back to what Todd said in the games cast, right? Of like, yo, if you like fall or I mean, you like Starfield, you're going to like what we're working on. And if you didn't like Starfield, you're probably not. This isn't 2.0 as he said. So my question for you, then is, was this enough from what you saw in these presentations for you to be excited for April 7th to come back to Starfield? I would say that Starfield had kind of been out of mind for a while, like past the past the conversations of review. And I think what's going to 2024 was like, well, I'm ready to move on. And I'm, there's, I wasn't, I didn't think of Starfield as a memorable experience, but I think it's, it's, it's one of those things where when you hear like the, like the progression of a game and how much it has evolved, you want to dip back just out of like sheer curiosity, because no, I remember what my experience was like. And I want to compare that to what it's going to be like with the freelance update, like how fundamentally is this game changed? And you know, it's maybe similar to coming back to an MMO, where there's a new expansion. I'm like, not to bring up Final Fantasy 14 everywhere I go. My goat. But it's, you know, sometimes you come back to a game, you relearn it, and then you dig into new stuff and like, wait a second, this is a, this is, I'm actually interested in sticking with this. And you know, combined with the creation stuff, when you, when you mentioned like, yeah, there's a lot of people playing this, I think there's also maybe for us, we're, we're so locked in on the yearly cadence of games that we kind of have to move on. Oh, of course, this job requires you to go away from things. And I almost lost sight of the fact that to this day, there are people who still play Skyrim daily. And I think King Gath was talking about that too, about how like, yeah, there's, there are people who buy these games, put hundreds of hours in these games, and that's what video games are to them. They're not looking at the release calendar. They're not, you know, buying annual call duties. And they're not buying like sick, sicko RPGs like, like, like I am. Yeah. And like, they buy this game, they play the Bethesda game, they stick with it, they, they poke at it for many, many years, depending on which game you go to. And like, I think that presentation really put into perspective, just how deep these games can go. And I think that's a credit to mods and creations. And the fact that Bethesda has, and Todd Howard had said this many, many times too, is that they stick with games post launch. Like they don't just release a game like, oh, it was below expectations. Well, I guess we're going to move on. It's like, no, a lot of people buy these games, whether they get critical reception or not. And that's an audience to serve. And, you know, through creations, I think like, you sell someone a game, they buy it once, maybe they'll buy the DLC. There's no subscription to this. So it's like, okay, well, you know, you start hit a certain ceiling or starts to taper off in terms of sales, and you have some of the creations where it's like, the creators get royalties and Bethesda also gets a little off the top as well. And I think this amount of support is kind of all in this ecosystem of keeping a game alive. While making it sustainable, as they go into like full development for Elder Scrolls 6, they still have this game that can, you know, support the studio and make, make money without having to like, dedicate full resources to it. So I don't know where I was going with that, but it, it's just, I think, visiting there really put into perspective like, oh, that's how all this shit works. And like we've, we've been covering games for a long time. And I think every time we actually talk to a studio, visit them and see what their workflows are like, I feel like we learn something new because everyone kind of does it differently. Game development is, you know, there are certain phases in which everyone goes through to launch a game. But once you get to the nitty-gritty of like, oh, right, that's how this works. This is how it is sustainable. This is how they make their money and then continue with new projects and, you know, the leapfrogging of like, okay, we're still supporting this game, but we're doing the next one. And then we're thinking about when we're in pre-production for this one. So, it's fascinating. It's always been something, you know, over the 19 years I've been doing this professionally, right? The idea of how invaluable those visits and interviews are, just conversations. Because I think it's so easy for us as gamers and pundits and whatever to sit there and be like, oh my God, why would you make this decision? Oh my God, it's just money-grubbing. And sometimes it is. Last time it is, you know what I mean? But there's, you get there and you meet these people and they are like, cool. We were getting the tour and it was the, all right, here's like the engineers and here's the, and it's like small pods. It wasn't thousands of people, right? Like, damn, like, this is really the people who are trying to make multiple games at one time and do this and do the best they can. And for them to go into these presentations and show how excited they are for the content and how they are actually trying to answer people's desires for what this game is. You know, I think, you know, Freelanes is an interesting place to jump into, right? This is the free update they're talking about that they're going. And I think the biggest thing, and I read through it, but it maybe didn't make sense to you, when Starfield came out, right, one of the big discussions was it's just fast travel simulator. Yeah. I get into the thing. I warp around. I'm in a ship, but I'm not in a ship. Alana, of course, friend of the show had a great video where she like for nine hours flew towards the thing while she's clipped right through and never did anything. Right. Like Freelanes is answering that Freelanes is, all right, cool. Once you hop to a system, and there's multiple planets around you, you can fly organically to those things and you can put it on cruise, but now you're going to be pulled out by incursions and there's going to be more POIs that are happening. There's going to be more encounters that are going on. It's going to shake it up that if you want that experience, go for it, let alone you're going to be getting X tech off of it. A new resource used to upgrade ships, weapons and modules, which for me taps into a part of Starfield and I've, you know, never left and I, but of course our jobs keep us away. I'm always proud of myself when I put hours, I feel on the board that are above what a normal, my normal route. I love ghost of Yote and after whatever it was for review, put it down and haven't come back. And so like my hours are stalled at 40, whatever it is, you know what I mean? And like I booted up Starfield this week to get started getting ready. And I looked at it. It's like time played on my save six days and 15 hours. I like how they still use days. I feel like you accomplish something when you roll a day, right? And so like this X tech that they're talking about, right? It's also in boss, a chest legendary and off legendary enemies, right? And you can take it to the work bench to make skins upgrade modules. You're going to go in and then like you can start taking your weapons as they talked about in the big developer conversation that went up today from legendary to rank four, to the new quality tiers, to then you're rolling all the, and I'm like, damn, like I just like my shotgun. I've never sat at this table and been like, I need to roll explosive rounds and I need to roll all these crazy things for it. But it's like they're serving that audience that is still there and playing this game like you're talking about every day being insane about it. Yeah. Cause we saw, we saw a hands off demo. So it was a live playthrough of a lot of this new content. And I was thinking to myself that it feels like we, maybe they were very precious about how the game played upon launch. They want to, want to create a deliberate experience for you. Sorty, sort of semi believable space exploration maybe, but I think like something like this is like, Oh yeah, we're an RPG and you can create some bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. They had a, they had a Grendel, which is an SMG that exploded upon impact on mechanical enemies that also had a 25% chance of real, when you reload, it'll have like five times the amount of rounds into that clip, like out of nowhere. What the fuck is this? And it reminds me like, yeah, RPGs can be really stupid, but that's also kind of what makes them really fun, figuring out how to break the game. And now that we're like kind of past the point of like having the being precious about how the game is supposed to be played is like, yeah, fuck it. We're an RPG. If you could figure it out, by all means. And here's like the X-Tex stuff. Also, you have to find it yourself. They had like 500 of them things in their inventory. So they're just like showing us how it all works. But that is a, and when I mentioned that combat and gunplay was one of my favorite parts, I'm like, Oh, cool. This is something that might be worth digging into when I do return to it. And yeah, that's that, because that's the sick RPG stuff I'm into. I'm like, I want to create like stupid builds and see how that works when I play through the rest of the game. You know, to piggyback off that where you're talking about like, let's be less concerned with what is this game and let people have fun with it. Right. I remember at review arguing with Gary, maybe not arguing, but him being like, I am so turned off by being over encumbered that I won't even play it. I won't, and he's like, I won't do it until they patch that out. And I'm like, that is classic Bethesda. They will never patch it out. And then that first big quality of life, they're like, we're taking it out. You don't have to be that way. You can be close to your ship. You can be far away. But then when they did it of like, you know, make it harder on yourself, but you get extra XP and stuff like that. I was like, damn, that's a really nice payoff back and forth that I loved about it. And it's the same thing here. Right. And I did a Greg way, like I said today, that's 20 minutes of me talking about what I'm going to do with my character and the new update. So you can go get detailed thoughts there. We don't want to spoil the game, but so much of this kind of is, but I'm going to throw it on terminology that if you don't, you haven't beaten the game, it won't make much sense to maybe, but you talked about going through the unity. One of the things they talked about of like going through the unity is supposed to be a sacrifice. You're supposed to feel like, Oh, do I leave behind hundreds of hours that I've done here to go do this thing? Or do I stay here and live in this world? And so I really appreciate them dropping in this quantum entanglement device. This is another new one, right? Where you can park it in your, you know, park it in your room at the lodge. You have a limited amount of storage in it and you can put stuff in it so that if you go through the unity, when you come out on the other side, that stuff will be there. And I was like, damn, that's a nice way. And they were like, we want you to feel that sacrifice, but clearly it stopped enough people from going through and experiencing the gameplay loop they wanted. Cause even if you don't now, you can take quantum essence that you're fighting and upgrade the starboard abilities you have rather than have to what you would have done, do the 10 unities all the way through, go to every temple, which can be a little bit grind. Yeah. That's, yeah, that's a, yeah, it's things like that, quality of life stuff that part of me, I talked to Todd about this too, is I do like friction in my RPGs though. I like it when the game pushes back on you, not just challenging you or, and definitely not like creating up obtuse systems for the sake of being obtuse and pissing you off and shit like that, but actually challenging you and thinking about choice and consequence, not just like your dialogue decisions and, oh no, how is this faction going to feel about me after I make this particular decision in a quest line? But what do you bring with you? How do you handle over encumbrance? When you go exploring for loot, are you going to have enough space for like all these little things like that, that, that challenged me to think about what it is that I'm doing, how I'm engaging with the game. And so I'm not sure how I, how I feel about that overall, but I think that, you know, you work hard for a lot of these, these items too, especially with the, with the X-Tec stuff, you're going to be investing, essentially you're going to be investing more time and effort into building these very specific pieces of gear. And I think I feel like the, the sacrifice is a little bit higher now if you work towards those things, like, oh fuck, well, you know, I put all this effort and, you know, the rolling for attachments that you want is like, you know, there, there's an element of RNG to it. And like, once you have that perfect weapon, it's like, well, I'm not going to go through the, are you kidding me? I have this really cool gun. And so at least you're able to, to do that. Like, I think hearing about it is like Starfield has, Bethesda has been able to find a good middle ground between staying true to what the systems are, but also alleviating the things that are just annoying, you know, it's, it's, it's, cause it's hard to determine like what's just annoying and what is actual good friction in a RPG. And I think what's interesting about it and can obviously work for or against it, but it's giving the player the choice. Like when I go into my settings, right, I have difficulty of combat cranked up and I'll X, Y and Z turned down. And even right now, the Greg way today is a conversation of like, I want to go through the unity for this. Do I do it before this? Like, you know what I mean? Do I wait and go through or should I go through and use the thing? Cause I do like the guns I have, but the guns I have, I'm not that guy, aren't special. I already feel like a God in the game. So I might as well go through and have that sacrifice and have to build it back up, but kicking it around and figuring out what you want to do with it. I think it's an impressive way to tackle this. And finally being like, what do you want to do? Do you want it over in conference? It's there if you want that benefit or that, that limitation, right? Cause I feel like I'm with you so many times the limitations of it are what then makes me go, okay, I want to play the game a certain way. Yeah. Which during their presentation was something I thought, interesting in Starfield, I have never built an outpost. Like I just, the game does not make an enticing. I don't understand why I would do inventory. Imagine it was a pain in the ass. I'm not going to ever do that, right? But what it means is that my starborn ship, guardian five or six or whatever the fuck it is, right? Sure. Yeah. It's so packed to the gills with crap. Like I look like a hoarder. I've got chests everywhere, shit all over the place. You know, the vault is way too stocked. And so watching this presentation and then being like, all right, well, first off, you know, there's these new things for outposts that are like shared between all your outposts. So you can have one box that's united across the entire galaxy. I was like, that's interesting. And then it was the, you can throw down pre-fab outposts now that are already decorated. I'm like, that's also very interesting. If somebody doesn't want to fucking do that. I was like, shit, watching the presentation, I was like, this is going to change how I play of like, I have been this starborn stuck on this ship. I don't have a home. I'd rather build the home, take all that crap, shove it in there. This becomes my car and then do it. Let alone this fucking mansion in an asteroid. That was like, oh fuck. Yeah. That seems awesome as hell. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, as I say, like, it's all these small updates that have that kind of feed into the same idea of making it easier for you to engage with the things that the game is actually doing well. And the outpost stuff is really interesting because I had, I tinkered a lot with the outpost stuff because upon review, I'm like, I should probably see what this is about at least. And it's, you know, the Fallout 4 settlement stuff, the fall of 76 building stuff. But I felt like those games were like tighter in scope and like 76 is built around that idea anyway. So like, that's just how you engage with the game whereas Starfield's a lot more optional. And so I didn't, I came away from not really compelled and it just took the reward and the amount of work it took to get there just kind of didn't, the ad equation didn't really work for me. But when he saw like, Hey, you can start your starter kit, you got a really nice apartment, what you do from there, you can kind of go crazy with whatever you want to build and however you want to arrange this stuff. So it's like, Hey, we're going to give you a sort of boost to start with. So then you might be interested now to engage with the system, because you don't have to worry about building a foundation like a house. So, so that's a really cool idea. And the fact that all of your inventory for outposts are all in one like you don't have to go fucking finding your materials and shit that you left in other start systems. I think that's a really smart move. And I'm surprised it took a while. I'm surprised that like that kind of thing isn't there to begin with. I think people also, you know, when you talk about Pocopia and I was going to say, I'm complaining about it. It's so funny because I was thinking about that when they were like, yeah, and now your storage boxes, like all your stuff is going to be in whatever box. It's a lot easier and universal storage is like, Oh, I just, I was playing a game that struggled with this a little bit. The game that I absolutely love. I'm like, Oh man, I feel like this should just be there from the jump. And then tying it back around to other pieces of content, the moon jumper, which is that new vehicle they have. It's like a Mako from Mass Effect, but better as I describe it. It's that also feeds into the idea of like, Oh, if you are on a planning, you want to get on a vehicle, this thing could just like hover everywhere. You can get on top of buildings. You can get on top of mounds. We don't give a shit no more, man. Like just to have fun, tear it up. And I know they've added vehicles beforehand, but this is like the most, this one has even more jump. This is the easiest. Like, I just want to get on top of the building. Boom, boom, boom, jump, jump. I'm on top of there. So it's just like, it feels a little bit more arcadey is maybe not the right word, but it's just, it's like they, I say in my preview, like it feels like they just took the ankle weights off and this, like, fuck it, man, you can do all you could do all this shit. And yeah, whatever. The people who have played it the intentional way upon launch have already played it. So have fun. And I think that it can only bring in more people who weren't interested before. But I don't think that that is what this update, as far as you said, like this isn't a 2.0. This isn't going to convince people otherwise who have already made up their mind about Starfield, but it is creating a new way for existing players to engage with it. And maybe poke at systems that they wouldn't have engaged with otherwise. And that's already happening, right? At least from what I'm seeing. I'm like, yeah, I'm going to be all about that. Even ship builder, they've changed a bunch of stuff, which I know Andy loved. But again, I was never that you can get schematics off of ship battles. And then you have a shipped optimization terminal, right? Where you can go through and make it do it for you. Like, yeah, I want shield strength. I want regen. I want this in a way of like, the missions where I had to attach stuff to my ship. I'm like, I can't, why do I even make this fucking work? I hate this. Like when I was playing this game for a view, my ships looked fucking nasty. Because it was just like, you're just like, I just want to have this shield generator. I want to have this gun. I want to have it somewhere. I don't really give a, I don't give a damn where it's in. It just needs to be attached to the ship. So you have like these really weird gummy ships from like Kingdom hearts, but that look that look photo realistic, but also just look like these weird amalgamations. Like who the fuck was the architect of the ship? Cause it looks nuts. So that stuff is also more elegant. And yeah, I think that's to its benefit. Well, we have more to talk about. And of course my Tim Lam interview, but before then, I want to remind you, we couldn't do this without your support. Pick up the kind of funny membership, patreon.com slash kind of funny YouTube.com slash kind of funny games, Apple Spotify, get all of our shows ad free, get your daily dose of me, Greg Miller, which of course is 20 minutes all about my plans for my starfield character and get good karma for supporting an 11 person, 11 year old small business. But right now you're not using your benefits. So here's a word from our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by five hour energy, indulge your sweet tooth with a fruity rainbow, extra strength, five hour energy shot. It's basically a candy store in a bottle. 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And we're back. I saw a whole bunch of people shouting out how many hours they have in Starfield trying to make me feel bad. I'm sorry. I have a job, everybody. I'm sorry. I have to play other games. God damn it. We have a super shot on Miss Prime said, I think if this game was like five to 10 explorable planets and it had a sci-fi aesthetic like mass effect instead of NASA punk, multiple humanoid races, elder scrolls in space, people would have loved it. And I think at that point, yeah, you've made a completely different game. You know what I mean? And that's like always a fun slash hard thing about armchair quarterbacking everything. Like clearly Starfield does work for certain people. But yeah, it could have been a lot more. And again, so something you said at the top, it was those expectations. Because I remember leading into it, laughing in his face when Mike was like, for Xbox, this needs to be a game of the generation. And it's like, there's no shot. There's no shot. I don't even know if it can make a game of the generation because Bethesda is still so beholden to what Bethesda has been before that you need those ideas. And again, remember timeline wise, this dropped like what three weeks a month after Baldur's Gate. And that was always the back breaker of I remember walking in the constellation the first time and I was like, shot everybody in the face and like, Oh, don't do that, please stop. All right. Well, like this ain't this is going to give you the same vibe as Baldur's Gate where I can just kill people and everything. The story moves so funny, man. Yeah. And like, and a couple of months after that, we had Phantom Liberty and I know it's funny because like, I feel like we're, we're like, we swap sides when it comes to both Phantom Liberty and Starfield and those things came out in succession. I reviewed them back to back and is one of two 10 out of 10s I've ever given in my writing career in games. And then so I think after Phantom Liberty kind of like put into perspective, what do I want out of this style of RPG where the first person kind of a shooter sci-fi where you make decisions and you have consequences and all that other stuff. So yeah, it just I was like, Oh, I guess like, I don't know, Starfield wasn't, this is, I just, maybe I wasn't in the mood for it, but I don't think I just think my gaming tastes have also moved on and in combination with the things that I was like, I don't think this game is coming. What I find when I, when I get it, go on my Starfield binges is that inevitably I hit that thing of like, why am I doing this again? Like I'm, especially vanilla as it was, right? Of like, I'm going in, into this, I, from the outside, I'm like, Oh, I already know the layout of this building. And they talk about like, they're switching up POIs or putting in more, you won't get as many as the same way, but it was a problem before, like, Oh, it's this one again. Some run around, shoot people in the head, using my, I'm like, I'm just, I enjoy this and it's, it feels good, but it's not good for me. It's junk food. Exactly. Talk to me, Mr. Heim. While we were there, of course, I interviewed Tim Lam. You all see that in just a little bit. You interviewed Todd Howard. How did that go? What did he say? Todd is, he's fun to talk to because that's someone who's obviously been making these kinds of games for a very, very long time. So whenever I talk to somebody who can share that experience and provide perspective, it's, it's always fascinating. It feels like, you know, our entire visit at Bethesda, it felt like going to college lectures. Yeah. Yeah. I do like, I was locked in because I miss, I miss school. I, that sounds, that sounds crazy, but like, I just felt like I was learning something and I'm getting insight that I wouldn't been able to if I, if I hadn't been there. So my conversation with Todd was really interesting because I knew that I'm not going to get necessarily any headline breaking information about Elder Scrolls six. And so I think, but what I wanted to get out of him is like, all the things around that, like, I'm not going to say, Oh, what's the story of Elder Scrolls? Yeah. What's the location going to be? Like, he's not going to tell me, but I can ask him about what is it about creation engine three that's going to be different and why is that beneficial to Elder Scrolls six? Sure. You know, we had oblivion and unreal. A lot of people are moving to unreal, but they're sticking with their guns there. So like, why is that? What it is? What is it about it that we're going to see reflected in the game? And also things like, how do you perceive choice and consequence in RPGs? Well, how do you think of friction? Yeah. And I, because I, when I previewed The Outer Worlds two, I posed that question to Leonard Boyarsky. And I love asking them that because everyone has a different answer. Yeah. All these people who have worked on, on renowned RPGs of years past and to this day have all different perspectives on what an RPG means to them. And so I really think it's fascinating. And I posed a question to him too. I'm like, he talked a lot about, he sees a lot of that quote unquote friction. He didn't like that word. Because I think that I think that also we're working out that what the definition of that actually means, because it does, it can carry a negative connotation. Of course. But to me, that's more like, when the game pushes back on you and say, Hey, you can't do that. Makes you try. Figure out how to circumvent this problem here. To me, that's how I see friction. But he was like, a lot of that to him relies in character creation. How do you spec into things? And how do you like, we're going to give you these options. But what do you do with it? Like, I think he, he emphasized that. So I'm like, Oh, okay, maybe there's going to be some interesting things with character creation in Elder Scrolls. Steve, of course, he's not saying that out loud. But I think you got to be strategic about how you talk about these things, right? It's like, yeah, I'm not going to get a release date out of you. But I want to, I want to see what the team's mindset is as you are now in full development of this game. And so a lot of my interview is about that. And it's, it's fascinating because you get an idea of how Bethesda works, how they're thinking about this game. And you could apply that. You can kind of apply that to Elder Scrolls six. You know, it's not saying that that's exactly how the game is going to be. But, and we're not going to see this game for a very long time. But at least these are the things that they are thinking about. So that was really interesting. And talking about, you know, business side of things, like, you know, two and a half years, PS five port, like, what took so long? Yeah, I don't want to say what took so long. But, you know, you can, you can. Yeah, it's like, why now? And coinciding with the, with this big update and how they deal with community feedback. And that's something also I like asking people who run live service games, Starfield is not a live service game, but a game that is so tied to its community. You have a million people asking for asking you a million different things. Sure. You have a lot of competing interest and you have a limited scope into in terms of what you can do with all of this information. Like, how do you implement that feedback? What are what direction do you go with it? What things do you actually consider? And a lot of that was, you know, we're not plucking specific things people are asking for. But we're trying to get an idea of like, what's the core problem here? And what can we make that kind of addresses all of this in some sort of way? And I was like, yeah, okay, that's that's one way of problem solving. But yeah, damn, this we talked a lot about a lot. Well, it's up on IGN.com, right? I mean, go watch it. You could watch the interview on IGN's YouTube page. You can, if you prefer reading, there's also a text version of it all on there. But yeah, it's, it's always fun to talk to people who work on these games at such a high level because you do get a lot of insight, even if they're not going to be saying anything that's going to run a headline or so. But yeah, it's a technical side of things is really interesting when you're talking about creation engine three, he was talking a lot about, you know, it's not just how a game looks. He said that a lot of people attribute an engine to its sort of visual style. And that's a big part of it too. You know, every engine has its sort of artistic style. I think like with Ari engine, you could tell that someone looks like a Capcom character. Yeah. As you probably talked about on games daily. Not much longer. If DLSS five gets its way. Listen, man, like I could spot an Ari engine character from a mile away, but I like that about Capcom games. It's identifiable and that art style works. But there's so much more that goes into an engine than just what is on that what you see in front of you. You see, he emphasized like the reason why we have proprietary engine, we stick with creation is much of like, you know, sometimes it has a bad, it has a reputation of being janky. Yeah. And that's kind of in a way just core to Bethesda's experience. Yeah. Not to give them a pass on that because that's some of that shit really fucking sucks when your game doesn't work or like you got physics breaking things. Like that stuff can be really annoying. And a lot of the crashes with older games upon launch, that was really annoying too. But he talked about having your own tech also allows you to determine how things in the back end work. And he was talking a lot about how the engine manages data when you load in and out of spaces, how does it compile it, how does it manage all those things. And when you are building such a big world, you want to be in control of the tools that you're making. You know, if you're into like the techy nerdy stuff about that, I think he provide a lot of insight there. It's not going to be the sexiest thing if you're itching for more information on Elder Scrolls. But you get an idea of what they're currently doing with the game. It's like they're doing a lot of back end stuff. They're like designing armor sets. They're play testing certain versions of the game. And like, as I think as he said, when he was on here, he was like, yeah, we have playable builds of the game. And he said the same thing where it's like, they're at a point where a lot of the test builds that they're putting out are like, they're working and they're poking and prodding a lot of different things. And every day they're, they're putting out a new build of the game for them to play test that is like, oh, wow, this is like coming along really well. So it sounds like, you know, they're not running into many problems with that, but of course, like that's what we'll see. That's what Todd Howard put on the certain helmet. You walk on this one beach. We'll see what happens. Yeah. But that, that's again, with the caveat that like, these are the things that Todd Howard is willing to say about you. And he's the studio head. So, you know, he's going to be protective about the things that, that are shared. But at least you have an idea of where they're at and where they're going. Hell yeah, Michael. Yeah. Of course. I don't give a rat's ass about Elder Scrolls. That's why I sat down with Tim Lamb, the lead creative producer for Starfield. Sorry, Tim, I can never remember your actual thing for a 20 minute interview where of course I ask, what's going on with switch two version of Starfield? Come on. If we're this far gone, and then is this the last stop for Starfield? Of course I'd been predicting for a while as a Starfield fan that you'd get to PS five version, put that out of game of the year, whatever you want to call it, complete the mission, be done. There's no more sorry to spoil your interview, but there's still more Starfield, whether you like it or not, still watch the interview. I like it a lot. I'll be streaming Starfield this afternoon after the kind of funny podcast. Check it out on YouTube.com slash kind of funny games. If you're listening or watching later, and of course, no, this is Michael Hyme from IGN.com. Go watch his interview with Todd Howard. I'm going to listen on the way home. Oh, nice. What else should you be promoting? What else do you want to say? Podcast Unlocked, the hottest Xbox podcast in the game because Xcast. Tim killed it. Yeah. As he often does. Yeah. So, yeah. So, podcast Unlocked every week with the boy of Ryan McAfrey and the home girl Miranda Sanchez. Everyone, I would put that every Thursday. And of course, all the coverage from the Bethesda trip. And I got a lot of stuff cooking. Yeah. Can't talk about quite yet, but that's always the business, baby. That is the business. Everybody, like I said, you're about to get the interview with Tim Lamb. That will close out this episode of the gamescast. But in case you don't need it all the same, thanks for watching. We're here every weekday. There's going to be a kind of funny podcast in a second. Me streaming Starfield later. And remember, pick up that membership, youtube.com slash kind of funny games, Apple, Spotify and Patreon.com slash kind of funny. For now, it's time for an interview, but until next time, spend my pleasure to serve you. Peace. Hello, Tim. How are you? I'm doing all right. How you doing, Greg? I'm all right. But I hope you're ready to answer the hard hitting questions from your Starfield sicko. How do you feel about that? Are you ready? I can't wait. I cannot wait. Here's where I want to start. And this is a loaded question. What do you think of the general internet doesn't get about Starfield? Because there's somebody who loves Starfield so much. I'm so excited to be here, see all the presentations that you've now seen. Of course, we've talked about in the gamescast before this. I still, when I bring up Starfield, there's always some chucklehead in the chat that wants to laugh at me about it, make fun of all the hours I put into it. What are they missing? They're missing the energy. Yeah. No, I mean, look, the internet's going to do what the internet does. It's just going to do what it do. It's a big tapestry for you to tell your own stories. Yeah. Player or director, you can do whatever you want. Yeah. With your reason. With very broad guidelines. But it's about that, like getting into that world, experiencing that. Do you want to build ships? Do you want to go kill bad guys? Do you want craft? Do you want to, what do you want to do? Oh, I want to set up an outpost and I'm going to build my ships there, and I'm going to set up supply lines. I'm going to live in this world where it's not necessarily full-on, full-tilt action all of the time. You know what? I just want to go out and I want to have my house by the beach, and I'm going to sit here. It has the ability for that downtime, that cozy game. And I think it's probably, are you not serving like intensity more frequently? So it's like, but as a player directed thing, I think, you know, some players like it for, love it for what it is in that way. That's me. You know, I think we launched the game we wanted to launch. Yeah. And I think, but we've made so many updates since then. Some big things coming. Yeah. And I think when you look at all of that together, you know, I don't think we're, we're not trying to change the narrative, but we're just trying to make a better version of Starfield. We're like, I probably said it before, but it's like, I'm a little envious of players that are just seeing it for the first time. Yeah. To see it through that lens with what it's become. Yeah. Just it's a better version of Starfield. And that's one of the things I wanted to talk about, right? When Todd was on a game's cast, he was, he could say even less than we could now, because of course now we're talking about it with three of you did all the stuff, but he mentioned the fact that, you know, what's coming to Starfield is not Starfield 2.0. And he said, what I found super refreshing, of course, as a fan was that if you liked Starfield before, this is more Starfield. This is what you want. My question for you is something that, you know, Todd's talked about, he gave us a couple of different times with us. Is the idea that, you know, 76 Starfield, not necessarily what tried and true Bethesda fans would have wanted or expected, you know, one people over you've lost people in a lot. Was there ever a moment after the launch of Starfield where you sat there were like, let's seriously consider 2.0, whatever that would look like, blowing something up, doing the cyberpunk or no man's sky or whatever you want to call it up at all? There was never a moment where I thought that. I mean, because I like, I look at like what happened, like what it would take, what the lift would be. Yeah. There's a lot of, it was like one of our biggest launches. It was one of our cleanest launches. It was like, there's so many good things about it. Yeah. That it's like, we have a dedicated player base. I think we're still in the top 10 on games, past hours played. Like there's people who love it. Oh, yeah. But it's like, you know, so by the way, thank you. Thank you. I mean, I'll joke aside. No, thank you. I mean, I think there's, there's things that resonate and you want to continue to, you want to listen and you want to push those things that resonate sort of both ways. Like, hey, you know, I think it would be great if Starfield did this. I was like, can we do that? Can we do that? Yeah. You know, and it's like, oh, yeah, we totally do that. Oh, I did it yesterday. Oh, let's, you know, no, like, I mean, there's a, the whole, the whole gamut of those things. Some things, you know, as it comes to something like free lanes and cruising to the, to the space between the planets, like much bigger than some of the smaller things we did, probably things I haven't even mentioned yet. Like there was a request for like, I always want to see a camera play when I land on a planet. Yeah. I haven't showed that, but there's now a switch in the gameplay options where you can switch that on. So every time you land, but like, it's like, to me, like, why would you want that? It's like, that doesn't matter. We can do it. Go. Yeah. So it's like, you know, you want to say yes, where you have the bandwidth to say yes, as much as you possibly can. Well, I think that's one of the refreshing things I always talked about with the game is how what I love about Starfield isn't going to be what somebody else loved about Starfield isn't going to be the experience they had. You know, Andy over on my team always talks about getting so lost in shipbuilding, which I just never did because I just don't have that mindset. Right. I found the Mantis ship and I'm like, I am the Mantis and that's what I'll do until I got my, uh, Starborn ship. And then I was like, this is who I am. And that is all part of my narrative for my character, which is what the game is to me. But again, if we're something like Andy, like you blew my mind in there of like, I think my biggest complaint with Starfield ever is just not having enough storage capacity on my ship. But then when you were talking about outposts and now the fact that all right, cool, there's now basically a fully outfitted outpost you just put down and you have it and you have it. And then you showed the storage boxes being linked and then you're showing the database of how easy those I'm like, is it time for my ship? Like literally, I'm like, does Becky Lynch, my character finally need to lay down roots? Does she need to have a home base somewhere, which disaster disaster will look pretty promising. You know, but do I make that and then use the ship just to be a ship, which I have not done. I've always felt like such a nomad in this game roaming the galaxy with Andres, my wife, my side, you know what I mean? Like that. Believe it or not, I do know what you mean. I know you know what I mean, because I know you were putting Andres over in your presentation too, which I really appreciated. But that's like so both I think inspiring, interesting, entertaining when you talk about all the different directions somebody can go with your game. But that I think for so many people, that was what was off putting them in Starfield is that it was such a blank piece of paper and it was shipbuilding, it was base building, it was this and it was that. Like when you looked at player feedback and what you wanted to make and what you wanted to improve going forward with it, was it numbers based of what you saw people do with all those game past hours or what you saw them talking about on reddits or was it like you knew these are the pillars we need to strengthen what we want to get into? I mean, I think we have like multiple vectors for sort of like the intake of that information, whether it's Reddit or Discord or whatever. So it's like you hear that and like internally, like if you can imagine like anything that you heard, almost anything that you heard on the internet, there was probably someone in the studio was like, hey, by the way, you know, I want to do this thing. Or I think this is the place where there's something I want to do. And like, I always think of us as our harshest critics. You know, that makes us great at what we do. We're like, we want to improve this, we want to refine this, we want to do this with it. It's interesting to hear you talk about the shipbuilder because I feel like I was the same way. Yeah. And that similar story, similar arc. Oh, I got the razor leaf, great. No, I got the mantis ship. Yeah. Razor crest. No, I think that's Mandalorian. It's the mantis ship. It was my battle field. So, you know, I had that, but then it was like, well, I want something else. Yeah. Whatever it is that I want, I want to do this thing. But like, you know, that's the thing that's great about our games is you have that like, if, and this is where it comes back, I think to your question where it's like about the sort of the balance and the tricky part is always tell me where to go, tell me what to do. Yeah. But like, how much of that is like, oh, I'm going to the dot over there. And when I get to the dot, it's brain dead. I go to the flashing thing, I do the flashing thing, give them the guffin, kill the person and then I don't know the flashing. Right. Click, click, click, click. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and it's like, there's always a balance there. Like you want it, you want it to be interesting and a lot of ways you want to, you want to slow it down or spread it out or have interesting pivots going throughout that. Yeah. And I think players and different players have different internal clocks for that. Like, nope, that was the right amount for me. Yeah. This is the speed I want to go. And like, that doesn't resonate with everyone, but it was very much in the, in the spirit of the game we wanted to make. Hell yeah. You talk about different players and different things, of course, one of the big things here jumping to PlayStation five brand new audience. And like you said, they're lucky if they get to jump in now, have all these bells, whistles, all the learnings and updates and passages there question that was asked in our Q and A, but I wanted to bring to the table especially for the audience is, is this you being done? Do you feel like you're closing here? It is it's PlayStation five, it's free lanes. It's everything that's come before it. It's the Terran Armada. We are putting it out and that's the game of the year edition. It's over thing. I don't think we're done. Okay. We're not going to talk about very no, I told him, but I'm not trying to get you. But we're not. Look, there's a, we talked about the tapestry. There's still lots of things that the team would be interesting in in pursuing and lower. So it's like, Oh, what do we want to do? What's interesting about Starfield? What haven't we explored? What excites us? Sure. So there's, I think there's still things we want to move towards. Okay. But no, not done. I am excited for the PlayStation launch. I'm excited for players to get that first of the new, the new, the new, the best new version of it. Yeah. Like I can't wait to see what the feedback is now. Yeah, I'm excited for that. I'm excited for the influx of players. I'm excited for it. Yeah, hopefully give you guys all what's new ideas, but then also, you know, such the presentation we got today was so creations based. And you know, to really see what so many people are doing, so many of those experiences I've had out there downloading something from the creation space and having it, you know, be a better Starborn suit. I mean, to be able to run up there to run these quests to have that stuff. Like, have you been, I don't know, surprised is the right word, but I guess, yeah, I was going to surprise with the feedback and support you've gotten for Starfield creations. Cause I mean, like, I know Bethesda is so linked to the creation suite, but the way I, see I'm spoiled or maybe ignorant where being a console pleaded for so long, this is my first real go with Bethesda creations. I had heard about them, but by the time they came to Fallout 4 on PlayStation, I was like, okay, I've moved on to other games. I'm not doing it. So to be wrapped up in it and always have something new, always have new pictures. It's a magical new world. No, like, I think there's from all manner, great to small, like there's something in there. Yeah. You know, like, oh, there's a funny helmet. I love funny helmets. Do you know what I mean? Like totally, there's a big new thing with a faction and it does this and like there's new ship parts and there's new weapons and like there's in the way that like, there's a lot to explore in the game. There's a lot like we can, there's no end to the desire for something new. Yeah. And I think, you know, I love the creators in that like they're breathing life. They have a passion. They're picking up part of the passion that we have internally for it, and they're carrying them. They're still saying like, look, there's something exciting here or, hey, here's a little thing I made, Mike, you might think it's fun. Go have a ball. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like that whole gamut of those things, like I'm not, I'm not surprised, like excited. Yeah. But like every time, you know, like good on them. Yeah. You know, like if you made something and it was like your passion and we had this platform that allowed you to springboard into that and like, come on, you know, it's awesome. Do you ever see them beat you to the punch? What you wanted to do? What you were trying to do? There are, there are times where it's like, I've seen creations and I was like, right. Well, because it is one of those things where it's like, you don't want to be like, oh, they're just doing that thing. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? So it's like, but you want to, everything has to have its space to breathe and you want to give it as much space as possible. You know, there are places, you know, for every one of them that would be, that might fall into that bucket. There's probably dozens that are like, these things support each other or they synergize in a way where it's like, oh, we did this thing. They did that thing. And like now they're, they're systemically like intertwined in a way that's positive versus like, well, we didn't do that because this person did it or vice versa. Okay. I know that you just announced the PlayStation five version. So now I will kick off the next, uh, as long as it takes, what about a switch to version? All right. I got Todd Howard showing up during this partner direct coming out with all these Bethesda games coming to the switch to no Starfield, but then you go, okay, they got to be put, they do PlayStation. How we feel about switch to, uh, we always want to have as many players as we can. Um, but we're not really talking about, uh, plans for the switch to keep it. Keep it in the bazaar. Think about it. All right. Cause that's, people would like that, you know, all the go, ready to go. Of course, with my ROG Ally Xbox, I have it all the time as well. It was an Xbox play anywhere. Of course, that's where my saves are tied up. I digress. I'm so excited. You guys are doing this again. Like we joked about it a little bit earlier, but thank you for getting to support this game because I love it so much. Thank you. No, no. And I say it in that way because, uh, I think sometimes when I think about Starfield, it's like I'm seeing through the matrix, right? And it's like, I understand a lot. I've, I've played a lot of Starfield. I mean, uh, so talk to me about that though, because you mentioned in there, of course, another, I think, benefit of some of the updates you're bringing here, right? All right, cool. We have all these powers, but if you really wanted to maximize, you had to go unity, unity, unity. Now you guys are bringing me where I can go and use my Stardust to go in there, get them that way, up level. Well, for you in Starfield, and I know you're creating it, but you're also playing it, how do you view your character? Do you have the one character and is that the narrative? And is the narrative you just run in the unity or have you made connections and you're like, I care about Barrett. So I don't want to leave him behind and so it's over. I, I think I always thought it was an opportunity to explore something different every time. So like, there was a point where I, I really like the hunter, something about his voice, like that guy's a badass. Yeah. Right. And then like, I was really like, I was like, you know, like probably like the first couple of times through, I was like, Oh, the emissary, he's the good guy. I want to be the good guy. But then at some point, like, I'm just gonna, what's different? I want to try something different. Yeah. And you can, you know, so you do that. And it was like, it was always the, the freshness like, Oh, I have a weapon skill. I want to level up where, where am I going to go? I'm going to go, I'm going to go to the lock because there's like 100 creatures in there to shoot. Yeah. So you start going, there's this sort of like metagame of like, what is the best way of all of the knowledge that I have, like down to like microscopic levels. Like, Oh, I'm going to do here because I know that'll be fast. Yeah. Or I'm going to do that because that's the thing I'm trying to achieve. And like, you end up getting this like, you know, like seeing through the matrix of like, how am I going to, how am I going to get this done? Or how am I going to do this? See, I love that that, that this game allows that. Because you and I are so similar, but so different where it's like, it's a motion that pulls me through the unity, right? Like it was that I couldn't save Andrea Jess. So I'm going to go back and save her. And then I told her that I was starboarded. She had a bad reaction to it. I'm like, this will not stand. I'm going to go. And I'm like, I was doing this super villain thing on these play throughs of going and going. And I, I finally get her and we're falling in love and we would have actually been married in this play through. But at some point the starboard show up and they put it together. They go, wait, are you reliving your old life? Why? And I'm like, it's crazy. The game just realized that. And now I'm having this conversation with everybody. I don't want to spoil too much even about like base level, but there are, there's the first time you experience, I'll say, and it sounds like, you know, yeah, some of the special things that happen there where you're like, this is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. This is just really, but then it's that thing where it's like, now that I'm happy and now that I'm content, I still have that like itch at the back of like, but what if I wanted to get this really the life I want Becky to lead the shit or she's so bitten by this adventure and unknown that she wants to keep rolling. It's like what, like you were like, oh, I'm going to have this house and like very great aspirational item. And it's like, everybody wants it. Everybody wants it. But like, you don't have to stop with one. Like, look, one of the other things that I didn't mention is like photo mode where, and this is a carryover from 76 where it's like the photos you've taken photo mode become load screens. So to me, they're like postcards to myself in a way when they show up on a little smile. So we added, we did add a few more poses for vehicles for the rev eight. So you can do like wacky poses with your rev eight in photo mode. And it's like, I chuckle, you know, because it's like that postcard from, you know, yeah, how many different things. Yeah, when you were so young. Yeah. That's right. I used to hang out with Andresia and did that. Now it's like, I'm, you know, I'm isolationist. I'm a loner. I keep thinking about that too. Like, what if I did it? What if it was just a vascular? What if I brought there? That was one of those times where I think Todd came down and he looked at him and was like, why do you take that? I was like, because it's awesome. I mean, I was like, you've never done that? And it's like, I mean, even melee where it was like, I think as my, my starborn powers rose, I was like, what, how do I want to play? And I was like, I'm not solely melee. Yeah. But you mentioned, you mentioned invisible slow-mo katanas. I will, I will definitely go in, phase time, drop into a middle of a group of spacers. And then like, you know, pistol, pistol, pistol, step, step, step, and just like wipe them out and just feel like, I'm a starborn powerhouse. And there's something about that that it's like, that it, you know, it, and how it scales. And like, you know, if I, if I really want to challenge, I will push the difficulty sliders up. So it's like, and then sometimes depending on what I'm trying to do, I'll push them down. And that's really stuff, especially like, XP, but dead colony. I mean, I'll admit it, but I have done the like, I don't feel like running back to my ship and I'll go in and just like, give me, give me, give me, give me, give me. But it was one of those things where it was like, do I, do I want to experience the story? And I'm just, I'm just trying to see that. I just want to see it right now. I want to see every version of that. And so like, I go fast that way, or it's like, I really want to push it the other way, because like, I think, I think I'm a badass. Yeah, well, let's see. Let's find out. So you push it up there. And it's usually what I find is like, when you switch between those two things, like you forget that you've done it. Yeah. And you, you run in and you drop down into that group of spacers and you're like, you're like, pistol, pistol, pistol, stab, stab, dead. And you're like, ooh, I should have been paying more attention to my health. But I got sort of used to, to playing this other way. I think as it comes back to your question about the, I've started multiple characters. Yeah. You know, sort of trying to find like, I was like Tim's optimal strategy. Yeah. And I think there's like different versions of that. But my main character was always, he, he was always the hunter. He was always like, it's about power and the, and the meta of figuring out how to get more power as fast as possible. And I don't know, you know, like, is it okay to beat a villain? I don't know. It feels good. It feels good in that case. Like you go to that, you become it. Tim, love it. You made a hell of a game. Thank you so much for Starfield. Thank you for playing. Of course, everybody, April 7th comes to PlayStation, but so does all the other bells and whistles. Of course, the trackers alliance is already out right now. As you see this, you can go play the extra missions there. And I'm sure I've already talked about that on the gamescast with Michael Hyam. And we're going to go back to that right now.