719: The Falconeer and more

Larry Hryb: Hi, it's Larry Hryb, Xbox Live's Major Nelson. Welcome to the Xbox podcast. Here we are, and joining me in... Let me hit this magic button, and through the power of the internet...

Jeffrey: You can do it. Hey.

Larry Hryb: Hello, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: There it is.

Larry Hryb: There it is.

Jeffrey: Hi. Look at this set.

Larry Hryb: You're here. We're together again. Things are cooking. Every week we do something different. I've got a little something for you this week to kind of keep plussing the show up, and we're going to make it better and better.

Jeffrey: All right. Let's see it. I have no idea what's coming.

Larry Hryb: Well, it's contextual to something we're going to do later.

Jeffrey: Oh, so it's not like when someone says, "I hear you're funny. Be funny."

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: And it's just like, "Ah."

Larry Hryb: It doesn't work like that.

Jeffrey: Yeah, yeah.

Larry Hryb: It doesn't work like that. "Hey, I hear you work in video games, come help me with this." Oh, okay.

Jeffrey: Oh, yeah. It happens a lot. Or, "Can you get me this thing?" Yes.

Larry Hryb: Anyway, good to see you. I haven't seen you in a week.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I guess that's true.

Larry Hryb: Have I? No, we've been on calls together.

Jeffrey: No, yeah.

Larry Hryb: Although, I notice something. As of late, you've been turning your camera off on all these Teams calls we've had.

Jeffrey: I don't normally leave the camera on. Sometimes, I do.

Larry Hryb: That's a mistake.

Jeffrey: On a morning meeting, no, not doing it. I'm usually making my coffee, but maybe afternoon.

Larry Hryb: I thought you were going to say you're in bed or something, you're still like, "[inaudible]."

Jeffrey: No, although at the very beginning of this, my wife was adopting a WFB sort of thing.

Larry Hryb: Work from bed.

Jeffrey: Work from bed. And very quickly realized that's just horribly unproductive. That was week one only of all of this.

Larry Hryb: Week one, day one. Okay, we're done with this.

Jeffrey: Yeah. Now she's got the whole alternate office set up, and I get yelled at for talking too loud on these when we're doing this.

Larry Hryb: Awesome, awesome.

Jeffrey: Yes.

Larry Hryb: Let's see what else we got here. Sorry, I'm just looking at my text messages. We got a lot of news to talk about this week, as usual.

Jeffrey: As usual.

Larry Hryb: We're cooking along. We're talking about what we're playing. I see what you've got playing behind you. Let me bring that up. Talk about what you're playing there.

Jeffrey: Yeah, slightly cut off there. Manifold Garden. This was a game where I saw a trailer. It came out about two months ago in mid-August and I saw a trailer and was like, "Oh, this looks cool." And then I didn't get to it, but I started playing this week. I would say if you're a fan of The Witness, if you were a fan of Portal, any sort of puzzle platformer. There's been a couple of other ones that have been pretty notable I think throughout the generation. There was the one that took place on a space station that I remember you played. The name escapes me right now. This is a-

Larry Hryb: Get to the Moon?

Jeffrey: No, it was older than that even.

Larry Hryb: Oh, right. I do remember that one. I can't remember [crosstalk].

Jeffrey: Yeah, it'll come back to me.

Larry Hryb: Okay.

Jeffrey: This is a first-person game, like a puzzler, where when you hit the right trigger, whatever wall you're looking at becomes the floor. Everything, gravity switches, it rotates 90 degrees. And there's just mechanics that you cannot jump, and there's mechanics you can go through. The reality in it, you can kind of see it behind me, is it has this very Escher-esque...

Larry Hryb: Oh, it does.

Jeffrey: ...aesthetic to it. And so it's like, "I'm walking up these steps... but wait, am I walking down the steps?" It's very well done. It reminded me aesthetically of, there was a game called Echochrome back in the day.

Larry Hryb: Right.

Jeffrey: It was like a PS3 game. That used perspective in interesting ways, like where if it was hidden, it wasn't there. This uses gravity and perspective in a different way in order to get to different places. You're manipulating the entire world. Really cool, really cool. Worth checking out. That's an ID@Xbox game, local on your Xbox One.

Larry Hryb: Awesome, awesome, awesome. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It took me a while to get my head around pulling the right trigger in the walls and what's the ground.

Jeffrey: Yeah.

Larry Hryb: It is a little crazy.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I'm definitely getting those Witness vibes. What do you got behind you there?

Larry Hryb: Well, I don't know if you can see this. Let me go wide screen. You can see I'm playing EA. I'm playing Squadrons.

Jeffrey: Yes.

Larry Hryb: Squadrons. Are you playing that? Have you had a chance to play it yet?

Jeffrey: Yes, yes. I am. Yeah.

Larry Hryb: Okay.

Jeffrey: I finally got my first fleet battle.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: I did one of those with E actually.

Larry Hryb: Yeah? Oh yeah.

Jeffrey: And Justicar and Esco and a few other folks that are long time listeners of the show [crosstalk]

Larry Hryb: I saw this guy's playing that, I got to jump in and play with him. But I've been playing that for now.

Jeffrey: Yeah, what do you think?

Larry Hryb: [inaudible] It's the dream we've had for 10, 20, 30 years of being in a TIE fighter, being in the X-wing. So it's all of that and it's just a lot of fun to go in and fly around. I'm going through the story mode, so I'm playing a little bit of that.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I was definitely a little bit intimidated about jumping into fleet battles. I'm not good enough to play multiplayer.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: But then I found that the non-competitive version of that, there's Ranked and Unranked, is PvE. And so you have a major overall arching goal, which is in many cases, take down a Star Destroyer. But there's a lot of little things you do between it. There's an ebb and flow to the battle. It's actually really cool. They seem to last about 20 minutes each. And I got a first win and it's really fun. I would say it's a step up from the difficulty that I've experienced in the campaign. Definitely getting taken out even by AI-controlled TIE fighters and stuff like that but super fun.

Larry Hryb: Check it out. What else am I playing? Sea of Thieves, Battletoads, of course, Apex. I have Crash Bandicoot, I haven't had a chance to check that out yet. I need to.

Jeffrey: I've been hearing good things about Crash 4, for sure.

Larry Hryb: I need to go ahead and check that out. As always, it's been a busy week. Not much time to play games, but I'm doing the best I can.

Jeffrey: I took your advice on The Touryst over the weekend.

Larry Hryb: And?

Jeffrey: So it's actually really cool. It's got a very simple, very blocky look to it.

Larry Hryb: But it's cute, isn't it?

Jeffrey: It's cute and it has very technically advanced shaders and tech going on, with the depth of field and everything.

Larry Hryb: Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey: It looks really good while at the same time having that very simple aesthetic. There's a difference between having, you can be basic and still look really good.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: And I think that The Touryst really nails that. The puzzles are fun to figure out and I've been really enjoying it.

Larry Hryb: You know who's playing it this weekend? I was texting with Laura, Laura played it. So she loved the puzzle games.

Jeffrey: I think I saw her playing that too, yeah.

Larry Hryb: So she loves her puzzle games.

Jeffrey: I see.

Larry Hryb: So check The Touryst, Game Pass and Touryst.

Jeffrey: Yeah. Game Pass. Another Game Pass title, I beat Wasteland 3 this week.

Larry Hryb: Yeah, you did. You talked about that, that's why...

Jeffrey: It's so good. I put quite a few hours into it.

Larry Hryb: GOT?

Jeffrey: Definitely in the top three, does it unseat Ori and the Will of the Wisps for me? That's tough one.

Larry Hryb: Right.

Jeffrey: And then I would say, we still haven't played Assassin's Creed.

Larry Hryb: Yeah. The year's not done.

Jeffrey: And we haven't played Cyberpunk yet. Plenty more to put in there. But when all is said and done, very confident that Wasteland 3 will be in my top five. And more importantly, because there's so many choices you can make, so many ways you can play the game, very likely I'll be going back and playing again.

Larry Hryb: Right, right. Totally get that. We got The Falconeer interview coming up later on. Do you want to do some news now? Or how do you want to handle that?

Jeffrey: Yeah, actually, I'm really hyped up about The Falconeer, I heard something to the effect of one person made that game?

Larry Hryb: Yes.

Jeffrey: So I don't know. Do we want to talk about that?

Larry Hryb: Well, you know what? Let's look at the trailer and then we'll go right into the interview, how's that sound?

Jeffrey: Let's do it.

Speaker 3: Let the skies bellow with thunder upon thee.

Speaker 4: We have the chance of light. But some men only see what is to gain in water, in stone, in fire. And unfortunately in this world, they are the ones who decide, behind those walls, out of sight. But what for the leagues of lost souls under the shadowy deep? What went before? What future? What be the right path?
I flow. I carry the splinters. I carry the souls, all except my own.

Larry Hryb: And that was look at The Falconeer, really excited to talk to the creator, Sir Tomas Sala. Tomas, great to see you. Thank you for joining us.

Tomas Sala: Thank you, man. Happy to be here.

Larry Hryb: I got to tell you, this is a fascinating game and we saw the trailer obviously right before we started here. Tell us a little bit about what the gameplay's about because this is very interesting.

Tomas Sala: Well, at the most obvious level, it's an open-world air combat game. But instead of flying around in spaceships or F-16s or anything existing, you're flying atop a giant bird of prey with a gun or multiple guns.

Larry Hryb: [crosstalk] We're using a bird here as one of the original, it's an original bird of prey, way before airplanes. What brought to leaning into using birds as the method of combat here?

Tomas Sala: The very first prototype I think years ago, I used an old dragon model I had. And I went, "What! Interesting." But it's been done before, so the contrarian in me going, "I've seen this before." And then I made this bird and had a little fly around.

Larry Hryb: Right.

Tomas Sala: And it had a magical thing to it. It's something you see in real life, you want to be a bird. We don't have dragons, so it has a sort of a different feel to fantasy creatures. It was that mostly. It's just something that happened, the entire imagery of the bird going up into the sunset basically, it just appealed to me.

Larry Hryb: Now we're looking at some of the gameplay right here, we saw some of the combat and it looks like we've got a little task here, we have to pick something up. Now I can kind of see, it looks like we've got a character on the back of the bird. So are you flying a massive bird, are you the bird? How does that figure in?

Tomas Sala: The character on the back is a normal human being. It's a really, truly gigantic bird.

Larry Hryb: Right.

Tomas Sala: So it's double decker sized.

Larry Hryb: It's pretty epic. And I noticed as you're flying around here, it feels natural. Certainly when you're dealing with any type of aircraft, you've got propulsion and what not. But this is using the wings, so tell us about some of the physics. Because it looks pretty good here.

Tomas Sala: Yeah, well, the people that play it really like it, because it has a very smooth feel to it. I expressly didn't want to make it a "powered creature".

Larry Hryb: Sure.

Tomas Sala: Which it sometimes did. So I spent a lot of time looking at birds, how they fly. And it's a combination of the camera and the bird, I must admit. I just took a lot of time, how would that be? So at some point, I made a demo just flying around, doing all the dog-fighting stuff. It's very inspired by the Red Baron, those old dynamics games, and Crimson Skies, of course. It's a huge, huge inspiration, that flying by the seat of your pants style air combat. And at some point, I thought, "Well, birds can do more." If you see footage of birds, they can tumble and spin and get at each other. So I added a roll to it, like a barrel roll or an aileron roll, depending on who you talk to, and instantly, it became something different. It became a creature you could throw around in the air with your [inaudible] push. I'd give it a dash forwards, a strafe, just all in that roll mechanic.
So it's all from the idea that a bird does certain things. Even when you're flying at something, it will try to avoid it a little bit. You've still got the reins, but it doesn't want to crash into the wall, basically.

Larry Hryb: Sure. It's just not doing whatever you tell it to do, it's got a little bit of self-awareness, right?

Tomas Sala: Yeah, it's got a bit of agency in it.

Larry Hryb: Now I was looking at what you've been doing in the games industry, and if I've looked at everything you've done, nothing would lead a path to a game where you're flying as a falcon. Because you worked on Skyrim mods and you have quite a fascinating history, tell us a little bit about that.

Tomas Sala: I think for many gamers it's not really... you see the celebrity game developers and you see the people at Microsoft, but there's all kinds of people earning a living, doing work for hire, doing all kinds of jobs in and around gaming, so I did a lot of that. From [inaudible] games in education, to doing for advertising, up to doing bespoke exclusives for platforms, for VR. So I've been a jack of all trades for a long time.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Tomas Sala: And at some point, I got into Skyrim modding, because I love Skyrim and I wanted to know the system. I'm always interesting in how things work, of getting into the mechanics, what's behind the curtain, so to speak. So I got into Skyrim modding, which went really well. If people've done Skyrim, they've probably heard of the Moonpath to Elsweyr mods, which was the first jungle mod and stuff. And that blew up unexpectedly, I went, "Wow, this is a lot more fun than anybody else." Here's a lot of people and they're enjoying what I'm making and seeing it while I'm making it, while I'm stumbling and learning. So that was a huge trigger for me. I think I spent the next seven, eight years trying to find a way to do that and take care of my family. Looking at all these indie guys doing amazing things, doing artistic things, it was just a matter of time for the stars to align for it to make possible.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Tomas Sala: For it to be there.

Larry Hryb: It's a fantastic journey and you said something I tell people all the time, they're like, "How do I get into the industry?" And you explained it perfectly, which is you do all the different things. You just talked about marketing or what have you, you just try all of the things because it all adds up to understanding the industry, right?

Tomas Sala: I think so. Well, it depends on the type of, I'm an extremely chaotic, hyper type person, so for me it was that. You figure out what's your skill set, and at some point, I did realize, "Okay, I am a 3-D artist by trade, but I've got my coding skills, my animation skills." I am self-sufficient, there was that and it was the bit where working in the games industry being professionalized for the last decade a lot with Scrum, Agile, systemized working. For someone like me who's just going, "I want to do this." And goes off and does it in the evenings, come back, "I've done it!"
I'm not a fantastic team player or really good at doing all the management work. So that led to me at some point saying, "Maybe I shouldn't be there." In the end, I had a burn out. I think it's a common tale. And then you start off what brought me to gaming, what got me up.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Tomas Sala: For me it was the games I remember, it's flying around in games, zooming about, those simplified 3-D games and exploring those landscapes. And then finding the stuff and seeing Star Destroyers come in or any TIE-fighter type gameplay, so that was I just want to get back to that feeling, instead of where I was at that time. And that is The Falconeer, basically. It's one guy wanting to get on a giant bird and fly away. It's literally that imagery is part of that journey. So to me, it's a hugely personal game as well. It's a personal journey and it's very symbolic for me. It's not necessarily that to anyone playing it, but I hope some of that human expression translates and resonates with people.

Larry Hryb: So I want to talk a little bit about The Falconeer again, because it's coming up. It's going to be released with the Xbox Series X and S, we'll talk about that in a minute. But are you the only person working on the game? Tell us a little bit about your team, because that's [crosstalk]

Tomas Sala: I did a DevCon talk on this and it's very dangerous to say, "Well, I just do it." Nobody is an island to do it on.

Larry Hryb: Sure.

Tomas Sala: I started this, I don't know, four, five years ago and thoroughly doing it full-time last three years, just me. I do the 3-D arts, so for me it always starts with the landscapes. I do the animation, then I do the programming of the bird, the gameplay. And I do all the writing and stuff. So I'm basically making the core game, it's just me. And then you have a fantastic publisher who helps you out with a writer or an editor to help. I'm not a native English speaker so I need some back up to make sure I'm writing coherent narratives and dialogues, that's a first.
I've got a fantastic musician doing all the music and scoring, Benedict Nichols, who's doing a lot of upcoming indie games. And he's really gone to town with the music. It's going to be unlike anything you've heard in a game. And then there's the staff of our productions, our QA and stuff. So not a lot of people around me helping me make the game, there's Stefan, he's helping me with some of the hermetic stuff, developing for Xbox can be. He's got a lot of experience in that. So there's definitely help. But the core game, everything you see in the game and feel and experience, that's just me. Yeah.

Larry Hryb: That's impressive. Tell us a little bit about your developing for Xbox Series X and S, what's that been like working on the platform? Because you talked earlier about working on mods, which is very different than actually writing to the metal on a console and doing everything, the entire stack. Tell us about that.

Tomas Sala: It's hugely different. But I think what I have in me is to be a minimalist and that I enjoy finding the core of things, so in the game there's no use of textures. It's got this weird graphical style where I like it if things are clean, not necessarily simple, because the volume metrics and stuff is quite complex. But I like to start of with a very minimalist approach, which works fantastic when you're going to console.

Larry Hryb: Sure.

Tomas Sala: I need my core to be super optimized and then you go to town. You really start to explore what to think and do. You start to push it. So for me, it was a very natural fit. I'm very comfortable. If you're by yourself, you want to focus on a bit of hardware, instead of trying to do everything. So it's been fantastic. There's very few things you can now not do. In the past, when you were working for consoles, it's always been smoke and mirrors.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Tomas Sala: A famous case where a building is collapsing but it's actually quickly being replaced by pre-rendered animation, I think that we're still using that [crosstalk]

Larry Hryb: Like going down a hallway and going around the corner as things are loading, right? We've all seen that.

Tomas Sala: Yeah, [inaudible] stuff. And so everybody, I think, who works in games nowadays is super neat freaks. You want to be clean. But with this new generation, you can actually let things roll and that leads to new things. So you can have simulation happen off-screen. You can have things happening outside of the game area, which leads to new things, instead of them having to appear just at the edge of your border.

Larry Hryb: Right.

Tomas Sala: I enjoyed that a lot. Can I do this? I put it in the blog. I just spent a day, how many ships can I put in the harbor. And normally you'd say, "Well, we'd put the minimum amount of ships in the harbor." I'll put a bunch of ships in the harbor and that just works. It looks so much better and so much more fun to see all that in motion and animated stuff. For me, it's a quantitative thing. The amount of things you can do just increase. And on top of that, this game, because I started off with a very clean look, I wanted it to run as smooth as possible, it's running. I started off with 60 FPS and it'll run 60 FPS on a regular Xbox One, it will run it on an S, it will run it on the One X, and it will run 60 at 4K on a Series X.

Larry Hryb: Wow.

Tomas Sala: With a minor downgrade, it's going to run 4K 120. And that'll be before anybody nails me to the cross for it. It'll be 4K and some of the 3-D art will be up-sampled from 1800p, but that will run at 120.

Larry Hryb: Right.

Tomas Sala: And the only reason I'm doing that is because there's minute drops in there, which I don't like. So I prefer it to be as steady as possible so there's no single bit of lag or micro-stutter in the game.

Larry Hryb: Wow, that's impressive. So for essentially all Xbox owners, The Falconeer will have something to show. Whether it's [crosstalk] That's amazing.

Tomas Sala: Yeah. I am a fanatic on that. 30 FPS, it's not cinematic to me. The smoothness of 60 FPS is such a base experience, I wanted that for everybody that plays the game to have that.

Larry Hryb: Tell us a little bit about, we're looking again at gameplay here, is there a campaign, is there a multiplayer? Tell us a little bit about the components of what you can expect in the actual gameplay?

Tomas Sala: Yeah, so it's an open world. It's quite an expansive open world. So you can just get up and fly around, do side missions. So in that sense, it's a little inspired by Skyrim. I think a lot of people will see the influences once they start playing that. But it's a game divided up into a number of chapters. So the core theme of the game is about wanting to escape but having to deal with the things you've left behind unresolved, things try to grab you back, hence it's a deep, dark water world and so on, trying to get away from the water. So in those chapters, those themes are explored in-depth, through the eyes of individual factions. So each chapter, you're either a civilian, or you're part of an Imperium, or you're part the Mancer Order, which is a more exotic faction. And you'll have the option to do a very classic, linear Crimson Skies-type campaign over X missions, where you have a campaign map and you progress with your faction's targets.
But you can also just take off and do side missions, great, you're a bird, get mutagens, abilities, new weapons, discover new locations. There's a lot of lore in the world, so the entire world's fairly coherent. There's temples, there's shrines you can explore to learn what's all the mythical history of the world.

Larry Hryb: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tomas Sala: So that's all in the open world. There's timed trials you can do. It's genre-bending a lot of things together, which I liked. It makes exploring the world part of its core, basically.

Larry Hryb: And [inaudible] I'm showing you some of the art here, the Day One Edition, which has a lot of different things in it. But I want to be clear, this is an amazing game that's going to be optimized for Xbox Series X and S, 4K HDR. You've got Smart Delivery in there. You're checking all the boxes, Tomas. You're doing everything there, aren't you?

Tomas Sala: I've had not much sleep in the last eight months.

Larry Hryb: Yeah, I can tell, if you're doing this by yourself, this is an extraordinary amount of work. Before I let you go, do you have any final things you want to let people know that they should know about The Falconeer before they put in their pre-order and take a look at it?

Tomas Sala: I think if you're into those classic dog fighting games from the late '90s, that flying by the seat of your pants style gameplay, this is definitely a title that's bringing that back. It's a genre that's been missing.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Tomas Sala: And it's making its comeback. You can see it in some of the multiplayer games for a while now. But this is a single player adventure that's going to take you to a new place to explore a new world, in a sense. Quite a crazy world as well, as there's flying eels and razor beetles zooming about.

Larry Hryb: Yeah, it sure looks it. Now I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about Flight Simulator, we recently re-launched Flight Simulator. Were you a flight sim fan back in the day?

Tomas Sala: Oh, definitely, definitely, definitely. I had a chance to play the new flight sim, X019, and it is an astounding experience.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Tomas Sala: I think the fact that all these flying games are coming back out, I think we're all in need of some escape. But Flight Sim 2020, it's fantastic. Just zooming about, the canyons, the fact that it's the entire world. It's hugely impressive.

Larry Hryb: Yeah, it's extraordinary. Well, I know that folks are excited to get their hands on The Falconeer and take flight! This is where it is, it's going to be available November 10th if you're getting an Xbox Series. Just I think it's important to point out, if you have an Xbox One X, you can get the game and then when you upgrade down the line, The Falconeer will just become even better. Right, Tomas?

Tomas Sala: Oh, definitely. Yeah, yeah. You can see the entire evolution of the entire hardware line of the good X and the Series S, which I thought is a fantastic bit of kit.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Tomas Sala: It's super impressive.

Larry Hryb: Yeah. People forget that it's so tiny but it's very, very powerful, isn't it?

Tomas Sala: It packs an incredible amount of oomph. It's doing, I think, 1800p, 60.

Larry Hryb: Yep.

Tomas Sala: And we'll also have a 120 mode for people to try it out. So the Series S is nothing to sneeze at, it's fantastic and so small and cute.

Larry Hryb: I think I have one. Here it is. See, you can see it right there. It's upside down, there you go.

Tomas Sala: Man, look at that.

Larry Hryb: So it's quite impressive.

Tomas Sala: Yeah, and I love the way it looks to be honest, it's fantastic.

Larry Hryb: It's a great little [inaudible]. Anyway, I want to congratulate you on your upcoming launch of The Falconeer, it's an extraordinary achievement to ship a game. But to do it essentially as a single person is even more extraordinary, so I urge people to go out and place their pre-order for the Day One Edition. Regardless of what Xbox you have, you are in for quite a treat with The Falconeer. So, Tomas, thanks again for your time today and congratulations and good luck on the coming weeks.

Tomas Sala: Thank you, thanks for having me.

Jeffrey: Thanks so much, Tomas Sala. The Falconeer is launching alongside the Xbox Series X and I think this one might be a bit of sleeper, I think this is going to be one of those ones. We know on day one, so many people are going to be wanting to play Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, but I've got my eye on The Falconeer and I'm looking forward to playing it.

Larry Hryb: Speaking of Yakuza, boy, you had an interview that we snuck earlier in the week. Of course, we included an interview last week, but there was a second element of the interview, which is where you interviewed the voice characters. Well done on that.

Jeffrey: Oh, thank you. Yeah. So out of the mainline Yakuza games, only the first one back in 2005 had English voice dub and since then, it's been in Japanese. That's part of the game.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: I really enjoy that. But whether it's in effort to broaden the appeal of the Yakuza series, because Yakuza: Like a Dragon, I don't know if it's a rebooting of the series, but it's so different than the previous games that they are doing a very high quality English voice dub with notable people in it. So we talked to Kaiji Tang.

Larry Hryb: By the way, who's a hardcore fan of the series as well, right?

Jeffrey: Yeah, yeah. He's an interesting guy, he's got a lot of followers. He does a lot of voice acting.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: And so we spoke to him and they shared a clip of his voice as Ichiban Kasuga, and look, I went into this, when I heard that there was going to be an English voice dub, I was like, "Okay. I guess some people will want that, people that don't like reading subtitles." And that's a perfectly reasonable way to look at things but I really like the Japanese voice acting in these games. But after talking to him, after watching some of the clips, I may either have to flip back and forth or do two playthroughs of this.

Larry Hryb: Two.

Jeffrey: Because it actually sounds really good.

Larry Hryb: I need you to do two playthroughs.

Jeffrey: Look, you know me, you don't have to ask me twice to do that, so very much. And again, Yakuza: Like a Dragon hitting November 10th, very excited about that one. An RPG, it's going to be one of the stranger RPGs.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: Maybe ever. And so, you know me, I'm all about it.

Larry Hryb: All right. You got some news there in front of you?

Jeffrey: Sure. So I don't know if you saw but Aaron Greenberg, my good friend Greenie, put out a blog post this week on Xbox Wire.

Larry Hryb: Yep.

Jeffrey: I don't want to saying tying a bow on the year, because we still have a lot to go, but really talking about how much Xbox Game Studios has put out this year.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: And there was a number of records, and so say I'm right, there have been 15 Xbox Studios games that have come out-

Larry Hryb: And there's only 12 months in the year, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: [crosstalk] There's only 12 months and we're only in 10, including Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition, which comes out next week. We'll be talking about that next week. 15 games and just going down the list here: Battletoads, Bleeding Edge, Gears Tactics, which is also going to be coming out on Xbox Series X, very much looking forward to that. We'll talk about that in a second. Grounded, a number of the Halo games through Master Chief Collection have come out on PC this year, including ODST, which I've queued up and I need to play, Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Larry Hryb: Yes.

Jeffrey: Minecraft Dungeons, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Tell Me Why, Wasteland 3, it's been a really good year and we still have more to go. So just very excited to see that. There's a number of other records that Aaron highlighted, like 1.66 billion hours have been played.

Larry Hryb: Oof.

Jeffrey: The most ever.

Larry Hryb: Billion.

Jeffrey: To this date for Xbox Game Studios titles. Calling out the great ratings for titles like Microsoft Flight Sim., or Ori and the Will of the Wisps and just how many people are playing Sea of Thieves. [crosstalk]

Larry Hryb: There's a good headline. That's a good headline.

Jeffrey: Hey, that's new!

Larry Hryb: This is the new [crosstalk] I was telling you about.

Jeffrey: There it is. That's the new. I like it. You saved it for the right point.

Larry Hryb: See?

Jeffrey: We waited for it. And revenge is best served cold here, Larry, so well done. And then of course, talking about how many bugs were killed in Grounded.

Larry Hryb: Right.

Jeffrey: And the answer is not enough, not enough bugs were killed.

Larry Hryb: Oh, stop it.

Jeffrey: So many spiders, there's so many spiders. So that was that. A little bit more on Gears Tactics, so if you didn't play on PC for any number of reasons earlier this year, and you're looking forward to playing on Xbox One or Xbox Series X, it is coming out November 10th. And there's some new modes, there's more that's been added to it. So I beat the game on PC earlier this year, really like it, also in my top five this year. But there's a new mode that's got me very excited which is called Jacked. The Jacked game mode includes Jack, the floating robot that's helped you out [crosstalk].

Larry Hryb: Yeah, opens doors and what have you.

Jeffrey: And there's a word they use for breaking doors...

Larry Hryb: Right.

Jeffrey: ...which escapes me right now. There's 400 Achievement Gamerscore with that. But there's some cool things to do and I think that Jack will change the game in fun ways. And there's also some new enemies called the Deviants, supreme equipment, there's reasons to go back if you've already beaten the game and I plan on doing that. So take a look if you want to see the Achievement list, we have that over on Xbox Wire. Over the weekend, did you watch Minecraft Live?

Larry Hryb: I did. I watched some of it. There's caves and cliffs thing, there's all sorts of stuff going on, right?

Jeffrey: Yeah. I recommend it, if you're a Minecraft fan, head on over to Minecraft.net, that's got all the details. But the high level stuff, new update which will add some biomes in terms of caves and cliffs. It's called the Caves & Cliffs update, but there's going to be a lot of other things in there, crystals, telescopes. There's something called the Scope Sensor block and a new hostile mob called The Warden. And so there was a vote, there's always a vote, seems like every year.

Larry Hryb: There's always a vote.

Jeffrey: There's a new thing that's going to be added. I was really pushing for the Moobloom, which is like when you see the Mooshroom, which is the cow that has mushrooms on it. Well, this one had flowers interact with bees. That's what we were voting for in this house. However, democracy, we respect it and the winning vote went for the Glowing Squid, which does look really cool.

Larry Hryb: All right.

Jeffrey: I can see why people voted for it. It's fine, it's fine.

Larry Hryb: A well-earned win.

Jeffrey: Yes. So there's just a ton of news. It was a live broadcast, it was so many people watching.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: Hundreds of thousands of people watching it live on YouTube and Twitch and other platforms. Saw some creators that we know on there, which is really cool. Go ahead and check it out, there's just a gigantic post on this. So Minecraft Live was really cool and the team, they were able to pivot like so many of us have had to do and put out an entertaining show here in this year 2020.

Larry Hryb: Yeah, 2020, it's the year that keeps on going. Feels like it's 50 months and 12, doesn't it?

Jeffrey: Yep. How is it October already? Also, how is it only October?

Larry Hryb: Right.

Jeffrey: It's perfectly reasonable to feel both these things. Just a real quick...

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: It's FIFA week. FIFA 21, I'm downloading it behind me as we speak.

Larry Hryb: Are you?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I am.

Larry Hryb: Okay.

Jeffrey: So the Champions and [crosstalk] Ultimate Editions are now available. Well, I will, I'm downloading it. I got to download it first before I can play it. And I did get the version that will be updated for Xbox Series X. I'm a big fan of sports games, especially at the beginning of a generation. Those always seem to be the ones that blow people away. I remember back, I worked at a retail store back in 1999. It was pretty much one of my first jobs and I was working at a gaming store. Leading up to the Dreamcast launch, we had a demo Dreamcast.

Larry Hryb: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeffrey: And I remember we had NFL 2K up there and I remember one day when the mall opened and on a Thursday morning, someone came in and like, "There's a football game out today? Wait, how did I not...?" I was like, "No, it's a video game." He was like, "It looks so real." And now it's come so much farther and honestly, I was looking at the NBA 2K trailer that came out this week that represents what it will look like on Series X. And it really looks super real. So that will one of those games when-

Larry Hryb: Do you remember what they used to say? That they used to say it looked like a Pixar movie.

Jeffrey: Yes.

Larry Hryb: That was always the high bar, was a Pixar movie.

Jeffrey: It's true. [crosstalk]

Larry Hryb: You go back and look at those and they're way far ahead of them now.

Jeffrey: Now, yes. The first Pixar movies have come a long way, too.

Larry Hryb: Sure.

Jeffrey: But now, it looks like reality. Definitely it looked for that NBA 2K trailer, because it's just mind blowing how good it looks. I'm really looking forward to playing FIFA and NBA. I'm all ready to go, I already have NBA downloaded here to be playing that.

Larry Hryb: Busy week, busy week, Jeffrey, busy week.

Jeffrey: One last game I wanted to just talk about was Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2. Look, your kid's a little too young, maybe for [inaudible], could be watching Nick Jr. I don't know your policies on TV, I'm not going to judge you.

Larry Hryb: Oh, you will.

Jeffrey: My kid watches TV, my kid watches TV. And she's gotten very into-

Larry Hryb: Well, she's older.

Jeffrey: She's a little older. So the Avatar: The Last Airbender and then Korra, those series, which I was dimly aware of. I think I played the Korra game early on in this generation, but I never really watched the show. And those are on Netflix now.

Larry Hryb: Right.

Jeffrey: And there's a whole new generation of kids that are getting very into Avatar. And so when I saw this was coming out, I was pleased to see Avatar, both Aang the Avatar and Korra from the Legend of Korra are in the game alongside people I grew up watching like Ren and Stimpy and Spongebob and Rugrats and stuff like that. So if any of those things, I haven't played the game yet, I can't speak to it, but it is out now. It might be a fun one to play. I like a good kart racer.

Larry Hryb: Who doesn't?

Jeffrey: Yeah, it's all about the characters.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: That is [crosstalk] it's $39.99. It's not a crazily priced game. And then next week, like I mentioned, we'll be played Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition. Of course, that will be available as part of Xbox Game Pass for PC. And we have a good post that went up, it was about a week ago now, but I'm looking at the screens, the game looks good. I spent the most time with Age II back in the day.

Larry Hryb: Right.

Jeffrey: But Age III is, especially the sea battles, they look really good.

Larry Hryb: Epic, one would say.

Jeffrey: Indeed. I wish I was better at those games. I'm so bad at a RTS.

Larry Hryb: Yeah, I'm terrible at RTSs as well. I just get frustrated, they're just not my cup of tea.

Jeffrey: I play against the computer, I put the difficulty down. I love building up the base.

Larry Hryb: Are a story mode guy with RTSs, are you?

Jeffrey: Completely. Because it wouldn't even be fun in multiplayer for the people playing against me, they would roll me so quickly, it would just be a waste of their time.

Larry Hryb: Yeah, well, okay.

Jeffrey: That's it. That's what I got. Apex, by the way. We should play, because the cross-play beta went live and I got in my first couple matches and it was cool.

Larry Hryb: Did you play cross-play?

Jeffrey: All the modes are just, that I saw at least, your typical Trios, Duos, Ranked. And we got just a couple matches in and you could see it. It was like, the champion squad in this case was people that... It had a controller and then if you're on Xbox, you see the O in the Xbox logo.

Larry Hryb: The Xbox logo, yeah.

Jeffrey: The controller, I'm assuming that means that they play on another console but not PC.

Larry Hryb: Right.

Jeffrey: So in this case that would be PS4.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: But I know they did say a Switch version was coming out. I don't know if they'll be part of that mix.

Larry Hryb: You and I were talking about this. We don't know what on the PlayStation side, do they just see controllers, they don't see an Xbox. I imagine not.

Jeffrey: Let us know if you know that. I have a feeling they see the PlayStation logo, the P with the S and that we're the controller [crosstalk]

Larry Hryb: With the controller. Yeah.

Jeffrey: But either way, interesting to know and hopefully we'll get some matches in. I sent my friend request over to Sid at the PlayStation Blog.

Larry Hryb: I did too.

Jeffrey: He saw it and that part worked really well.

Larry Hryb: Did he see mine? Did you ask him?

Jeffrey: He did. And he said he accepted that as well.

Larry Hryb: Okay, good.

Jeffrey: I did actually [inaudible] it to him last night. He didn't have a chance to jump on but hopefully this week.

Larry Hryb: You have to do all of this in-game, in Apex, you'll see it. It's pretty straightforward.

Jeffrey: Yeah, you just do a search and it worked as advertised.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: So great job to the folks at EA and of course-

Larry Hryb: Respawn.

Jeffrey: With the devs as well, Respawn, thank you.

Larry Hryb: You're welcome. So here we go. Anyway, we got so much going on, the next few weeks on this show are so terribly busy.

Jeffrey: What have we got coming up?

Larry Hryb: I'm working on it. I've got an astronaut coming up as a guest.

Jeffrey: Like an actual astronaut?

Larry Hryb: An actual, actual astronaut. Working on getting Tim Schafer on, because Tim hasn't been on in a while and I love having Tim on.

Jeffrey: That would be amazing, yeah.

Larry Hryb: Got a bunch of other folks coming on. We're going to be talking to Bose. They make headsets.

Jeffrey: Oh, the makers of [crosstalk] headsets.

Larry Hryb: They have a new gaming headset coming out, we're going to talk about that I think next week or the week-

Jeffrey: Really?

Larry Hryb: Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey: Yeah, they're that baseline headset. That was the first really awesome Bluetooth, noise canceling and all that.

Larry Hryb: Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey: I'm a huge fan of that and I use that when I'm outside.

Larry Hryb: I may get somebody out from LG as well, because we're replacing this TV back here with an LG so I've got to work on [crosstalk]

Jeffrey: Oh, are you getting an OLED?

Larry Hryb: Well, Jeffrey, of course, of course. Are you going to give me a chef's kiss?

Jeffrey: I love that you guys got that. Every time I'm at Costco and I walk by that, I'm like, "One day, one day I'm getting that."

Larry Hryb: One day. So yeah, we got a busy show. And of course, lots of games. Like I said, we got a few people coming to talk about games. We got Falconeer that we had on today earlier in the show, but coming up, we've got even more games to talk about. Because we're coming up for the launch of Xbox Series X and S, so it's going to be busy, busy, busy, busy.

Jeffrey: Yeah. We're, as you listen to this, less than five weeks away, which is...

Larry Hryb: Five weeks.

Jeffrey: We've been planning this forever and it's almost here.

Larry Hryb: Yeah. It's going to be, I don't want to over before you know it, but it's going to be launched before you know it.

Jeffrey: We'll be here.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: And then we're in it. We'll have so much to play. We have so much to play just this year, I'm so excited.

Larry Hryb: It's going to be a fun year. For the rest of the year, I think I speak for everybody, can 2020 be over already?

Jeffrey: Oh, my God. We're in the final act here, we're in the fourth quarter, I feel, literally the fourth quarter.

Larry Hryb: Anything can happen, right?

Jeffrey: I know. Do we get to start using all our time-outs? Or are we going to extend it like the last two minutes of a basketball game?

Larry Hryb: Who knows?

Jeffrey: Who's to say?

Larry Hryb: Who's to say? All right, we're going to wrap things up here. Like we say, we want to do a quick show for you. That's how you can find Jeff and I below, you can see the little, that's the complaint desk @jeffrubenstein, and other thing, tune in for other piffy commentary.

Jeffrey: Yes, yes. Yeah. If you want to hear about soccer or ramen noodles, man, I'm your guy.

Larry Hryb: I'm disappointed in you. You're posting on, as far as footwear, has decreased significantly as of late.

Jeffrey: It's because I haven't been buying any shoes.

Larry Hryb: Okay.

Jeffrey: I've realized so much of it is, if I'm not going to be seen, I'm not going to put my feet on it. But I'm wearing a pair of slippers right now and this is where I'm at. Slippers, I'm in the house all day long.

Larry Hryb: Peter Cushing, right?

Jeffrey: What?

Larry Hryb: There's a famous story from the original Star Wars.

Jeffrey: Yeah, he was Darth Vader, right?

Larry Hryb: No, he was Grand Moff Tarkin, Grand Moff Tarkin.

Jeffrey: Oh, nevermind. Okay.

Larry Hryb: Apparently the shoes are really uncomfortable so whenever they were doing his scenes, he would always wear slippers. So he's in this black, really foreboding thing on the Death Star wearing slippers.

Jeffrey: That's pretty good. [crosstalk] I did not know that. That's me on the Death Star.

Larry Hryb: At least you have shoes on, I don't even on shoes on right now.

Jeffrey: Okay. And that is why you've seen a distinct sneaker drop. Because normally we'd be out there, we'd be doing a panel at Pax, or who knows.

Larry Hryb: I have walls of shoes over there, like these Xbox shoes that I have hanging.

Jeffrey: Yeah.

Larry Hryb: And I don't wear them. I barely wear a pair of shoes a day.

Jeffrey: I'm going to put them on at launch day. I don't know what I'm doing but even if I'm just sitting right here, I'm going to put my Jordan 1s on and then I'll get yelled at for wearing shoes in the house.

Larry Hryb: All right, well, we'll talk to you guys next week. Jeff, you going to be around next week when we jump back into the studio, your studio and my studio here?

Jeffrey: This is the highlight of my week, Larry.

Larry Hryb: Oh, you are too kind, you are too kind. Well, it's the same as mine. If you have any questions... Oh, Jeff, everyone does it at the top of the video, we're going to do it at the bottom of the video. Go ahead and give them the...

Jeffrey: Hey, I mentioned this last week, please like on YouTube, please subscribe. Please, we look at the comments, the comments are super useful to us.

Larry Hryb: Yeah, and I reply to them.

Jeffrey: If you're listening via audio on podcast, also ratings and reviews that help make the show better. As you can see, we got these beautiful backgrounds now, which doesn't help you if you're listening on audio. But this was the feedback, it needed to look better. And man, nice job.

Larry Hryb: Every week, I'm trying to spruce things up along here, so thank you.

Jeffrey: Very much appreciated.

Larry Hryb: On behalf of Jeff and I, thank you for coming on the journey with us.

Jeffrey: We appreciate it. It took a while to get here, but I like where the show ended up. I do hope next year, we'll be able to go back at least in the same studio.

Larry Hryb: Right.

Jeffrey: We have that studio that we used to do the occasional live show over on campus. Maybe that becomes the every week place?

Larry Hryb: The main question is, I assume we keep doing video even though assuming eventually when things get back to normal, whatever that normal looks like.

Jeffrey: If you like the video, let us know in the comments.

Larry Hryb: Yeah.

Jeffrey: But I love doing that, especially since we had a great producer who could as we're talking about games, put B roll in there.

Larry Hryb: And we never even told him, he just found them and they just popped up.

Jeffrey: [crosstalk] He's an amazing guy. Yeah. Maybe in 2021, we can just write off 2020 as a mulligan.

Larry Hryb: On a lot of [crosstalk]. All right, gang, we'll see you guys next week. Thanks for tuning in, leave that feedback like Jeff said. We've got a lot going on next week. So Free Play, do we have Free Play Days this weekend. Did you cover Free Play Days if you're around next weekend?

Jeffrey: No, we're recording this on Wednesday.

Larry Hryb: So we don't know.

Jeffrey: I don't have the info. Last week, I know it was [inaudible] but I don't have the information today.

Larry Hryb: Well, keep an eye on it on my blog at majornelson.com or @majornelson on Twitter and I will certainly post those up there. Until next week, gang. Bye bye, everybody.