Baldur’s Gate 3 comes to Xbox and our holiday gift ideas
Podcast Details
Hosts
Guests
Transcript
ANNOUNCER: Games in this podcast range from E-M.
[XBOX SOUND]
- What is going on, everybody? Welcome back to the official Xbox podcast, the only Xbox podcast coming to you from inside Xbox. I think that's how it goes, right?
- That's the line. [CHUCKLES]
- Who are you two? I don't even know who you are.
- I don't know. What's going on, everybody? I'm Malik Prince. And welcome back to the podcast. Our final show of the year, in fact. And we're going to kick it off with a great show.
But before we get started, if this is your first time watching, you know what to do. Hit the follow, subscribe button. Basically, whatever button lets you know when we post a new show.
But I'm going to waste no time because as you can see, I have a majestic person with a majestic mustache--
- [LAUGHS]
--that I'm super jealous of. Of course, we have Jeff and Tina, who are our regular everyday.
- Decidedly less majestic.
- Everyday, yeah.
- Any other way.
- The standard issue.
- You all are special, but not as special as our guest, Joe Skrebels, who is Xbox Wire's editor-in-chief.
- Hello. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for letting me come on.
- And also, the best accent on the show.
- Oh, I think that's-- I think people in England would disagree with that.
- Really?
- [CHUCKLES]
- I think they would find me very irritating.
- Oh, no, no, no. I think we love--
TINA AMINI: Fortunately, you're amongst good company.
- Yes, 100%.
TINA AMINI: So it's OK. We like you.
- So editor-in-chief of Xbox Wire. We're going to get it into a little bit. But high level, what does that mean?
- It means that I run a little team of people who like to bring you all the news that we possibly can about Xbox, about our platforms, about our promotions, and about the games that are coming, most importantly. And yeah, a big part of my job, I've been here for about a year now.
It has been in deepening that stuff, and telling new stories, and trying to get behind the scenes at studios. So I've visited Rare, I went to Finland for Alan Wake 2, and we've had team members dive into the oral history of Hi-Fi Rush. And we're trying to put together these big, meaty, new features for Wire and tell new stories. So if you would like to click on it, we would very much enjoy that.
- Of course. And I think to your point, we've seen a lot of great stuff come out of the Xbox Wire, and I know you have a lot planned. So we're going to get more into a lot of news because there has been a lot of news. We also have an interview with Adam Smith, who was the lead writer of Baldur's Gate 3, that picked up a very important award this past year.
[CHUCKLES]
- Quite a few, but also the most important.
- It's shocking everyone, by the way.
- [CHUCKLES]
- No one saw it coming.
- I guess, you can play it on Xbox right now. So we'll get into that in just a little bit. But let's talk about-- since this is a video game shoe, let's talk about what we're playing. Who would like to go first? I feel like I'm a teacher in the classroom.
- [CHUCKLES]
- It's like, there's so many--
- Look at me. Pick me.
- [CHUCKLES]
- And the teacher always picked their favorite kid.
- Yeah.
- All right, we'll start with Tina. Tina.
- So I'm the favorite, obviously.
- Yeah, we know.
- He just said it. You heard it here first. So it's actually Baldur's Gate 3.
- OK, there you go.
- Obviously. Because it's gotten a bunch of awards/ people have been talking about it for forever. I've been excited to play. It's finally out on Xbox, which is awesome because I've been playing since then, essentially. So my weekend was very occupied by a lot of exploration and a lot of character customization.
Because basically, my first hour or two, an incredible amount of time spent on just thinking about, do I want a pre-baked origin story? Do I want to start something new on my own? I started something new on my own, and then how do you want to spec things.
And it's not just a standardized class situation where you pick one and then you go through the leveling up system through there. You can actually micromanage some of those systems and add on subclasses and then pick your particular spells that you want, and maybe swap them out later if you didn't like them and practice. And that was such an incredible moment of choice where I was sitting there like, oh no, what if I'm making the wrong choice?
But fortunately, there's tons of guides out there now because the game's been out for a minute. So I was able to do some research too.
- And you can re spec for 100 gold, if you ever need to.
- Yes, exactly. You have options. You've got choices.
- So what did you pick? What did you start with?
- I'm a sorcerer. And then I have some subclasses that I'm even forgetting now. But I always end up going towards things that lean towards persuasion. Because in games like big RPG games where you have a lot of dialogue, I really prefer to talk my way out of situations. There's always combat, but why not also have an opportunity to see how the dialogue goes.
There's tons of people on the development team working through these different dialogue choices, and I like to see how stories might branch out or what consequences there might be. So I definitely spec in that direction. And then intelligence, of course, because I'm a sorcerer.
- You're very smart.
- Yes, I'm very smart. I need to be the smartest.
- You were like, of course. That's my--
- I wouldn't think otherwise.
- I'm the teacher's favorite.
- Yes, exactly.
- I'm Malik's favorite. Exactly. But then, from there, it's fascinating because this game is huge, and I can tell right off the bat because I'm just getting into the Emerald Grove, part of the introductory to the game. Obviously, your goal is to eventually get to Baldur's Gate. And I'm sure you see the game open up so much more.
But wow! I feel like I am scratching the surface. And the map, the game's world is being discovered in front of me. I'm like, oh, I can go left, right, or forward. And then again, left and right. So there's just a lot of options, and it is beautifully overwhelming.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Any tips for people starting Emerald-- like you had mentioned, Malik, we'll be talking to Adam Smith, the writer about how to spec and how to think about it. But just anything you picked up in your first few hours that you would recommend like, here's what I'm picking up right now?
- Well, there's so many things you can get sidelined and distracted by. And actually, I'd rather you two tell me because you guys are both further in the game, because we cheated and talked a little bit about the game before we came on to the podcast. And we can't help ourselves.
- We were let out of our isolation chambers before the show started.
- Exactly. The Baldur's Gate 3 isolation chamber. But yeah, I'm going down the path of like, ooh, this is interesting, or this seems nearby. But I feel like I'm probably locking myself out of things or missing things. So I'm going mostly Golden Path.
- OK.
- But I suspect, maybe I might be missing some stuff if I continue to do that.
- It's hard to tell in terms of-- because I've only done a bit of one playthrough, so it's really not clear to me what I'm missing. The key thing for me-- I was actually talking about this with someone else this morning. Resting in that game like time passing is a genuine thing you have to think about.
So for instance, I've definitely heard about people who are like, so I found this burning house and I was like, oh, I better rest up before I go in. And obviously, they rest for the night and the house burnt down. It's not like a normal quest where it just burns forever for no reason.
- Waiting for you, yeah.
- So I think that's worth-- any situation where you come across something and someone is dying or something is going to happen imminently--
- Yeah, think about it like a living world.
- --don't let it happen. So I think that would be a big one. I promise, I won't do this throughout. But we have a very good Xbox Wire article from the developers--
MALIK PRINCE: This is your time to shine.
TINA AMINI: Yeah
JOE SKREBELS: Exactly. From the developers of-- or a developer at Larian, who gave a bunch of ideas for starting builds as well. So if you don't want to go through the two hours of hand-wringing that I did, you can have some jumping off points for different classes.
- Who did you pick? What class did you pick?
- I am a half orc paladin with an oath of vengeance.
- Ooh.
- And I basically--
- Sounds dangerous.
- I never-- I never roleplay in roleplaying games. I'm always just like, I'm the good guy. And in this one, I was like, right, I'm going to do that. And I've decided, I'm playing him as orc Batman. I'm just like, he strives for justice, but he sometimes does it the wrong way or In a dark way. I'm like, that's what I'm going for.
- The Dark Knight, yeah.
- Yeah. exactly.
- Orcs, yeah.
- Yeah.
- I always--
- No, go on.
- I was going to say, I always try to be the good guy too. And you actually are the-- most of the time, I find in these role playing games, you do benefit from being the good guy. There's a lot of things that-- people are more drawn to you, you have more options not to deal. Because in this one, you don't, I've noticed.
- Video games, you always are the-- listen, you play your life as the good person, right? Right?
- Yeah.
- You go through life, I think most of us are genuinely good people. You play video games to be the bad guy, to be the bad person, and just--
- You're always the hero as the protagonist. You're saving the world. Your motivations are all pure, yeah.
- Yeah, it's just me. I don't know.
- Well, this is the chance to try it out. But there was an opportunity where you can get into a cave, for example, and the options are intimidate or attack essentially, you get a lot of these options throughout the game. And I'm like, well, there's no good option to be the good guy here and reason with the person and the situation.
And so, I have to find an alternate way to go in. So it's actually-- I'm not getting penalized per se, but I'm not getting my way by being the good guy either. So it is something to think about, to be more like Malik.
- The thing that's interesting with paladins, you have to swear an oath. So I'm also a paladin. And I have-- I forget something like justice or something like that. And if you ever go against what that credo is, after you've made that decision, something like a scary dude teleports in and is like, I'll see you tonight, buddy. It's like your sleep paralysis demon or something that shows up and is like, OK, I might have just broken this oath and--
- I've clearly been role playing so well.
- [LAUGHS]
- Yeah, OK. Because a couple of times where I've lost my patience, they got largely-- I go for like-- I forget what it is. But it's just like, I have my moral compass, and so, there's certain things.
And there was one thing where I was like, I just don't feel like getting involved. Let me tell you, letting injustice go by was a violation of my oath. And I reloaded very quickly. And so that's my advice, is going into a situation where you're not-- I don't like to save scum too much. Like, oh, I got the wrong role, I'm going to reload. Things like that.
Because I'm learning the game and learning the mechanics. I've never played a CRPG before like this. I literally don't know what the rules of engagement are. So I'll save going in. And if things go a little bit bad but I work my way out of it, great, we're going to keep going.
If I did not even know that I was just going to kill this innocent person that was standing next to a bunch of mushrooms, this happened last night, because I got too close to one, and it unleashed an inferno that killed everybody, I'll reload in that situation and think about it differently.
- I realized I play games so differently than many people. But I guess, that's the beauty of it, right?
- Oh, exactly. Especially RPGs.
- 100%. I live with the consequences of my actions. I will never go back and redo a scenario because I'm like, you know what? This is what you deserve, Malik. You didn't take this into account or you didn't see this coming to you. To your point, Jeff.
TINA AMINI: Yeah, that is fair.
- That's what you get.
- If it's an accidental button press though.
- OK.
[OVERLAPPING SPEECH]
- Because I accidentally stole something and I was like, I'm just jamming A around the place. And I apparently stole something and got yelled at. And then they came and like, you got to go to jail. And I could try to bribe them. I didn't realize how much money I didn't have.
I tried to bribe them and they were like, what is this? This is paltry. And went to jail and were like, OK, now you have to figure out how to break out of jail. And I was like, you know what? I just want to push forward in the story a little bit. So I'm just going to reload and be OK with that decision.
- What I think is amazing about the game is that we can play through and just have wildly different experiences. I'm constantly thinking like I'm taking the hard way out, which is like fighting my way entirely too much. Occasionally, I have found like, wait, if I say the right thing, this village full of goblins will just let me walk around.
MALIK PRINCE: Yeah.
- If I happen to use my silver tongue.
- That's my persuasion.
- Yeah, you're a podcaster. You're really roleplaying and you don't even realize it. But even using the tricks, using the things around. So shoving people--
MALIK PRINCE: Yeah.
- --versus trying to-- there was one very difficult boss I was fighting in some Goblin cave, and at some point I was just like, I was banging my head against the wall. I kept missing them. I just shoved them off of a bridge and I was like, oh cool, done.
- That was actually the bridge you're talking about?
- Yes, OK. You do. And so I would say, you shove. It's a free move that you can use pretty frequently. But yeah, I actually started out on PC because I couldn't-- over Thanksgiving, I knew it was coming to Xbox. I was very impatient and I bought it. But then, I was able to transfer the game over pretty seamlessly.
You just need to make sure, in your settings, both on your PC and on your Xbox version or any version you're transferring, you have to turn on-- there's a checkbox. To turn on cross save or universal save. Something like that. Then every time I save, I can see it it's uploaded.
It literally tells you it's uploading to the cloud. And I'm one of these people--
- A sense of relief.
- Yes. I save, and then I save again, and I wait--
- Yes, yeah--
- --then I turn it off.
- --just in case.
- You know, one of those normal people who behaves very rationally in those situations.
- On the combat note though, in terms of, you can play so many different ways, I tend to be a DPS person. I'm like, all my specs is on my spells that are specifically to just deal damage. But I like investing in the grease.
You can either get a grease bomb. Or some of your companions can also have that spell, right? From the get go and combine that with my fire spells. And it's just fun to see those combinations.
But yeah, a shove or putting people to sleep, and then strategizing around, disengaging from an enemy so you don't get hit from them as you're trying to evade and get into a safe spot. There's just so much strategy embedded in it. I find myself playing in a different way than I normally would. But I like it. It adds to the level of depth, essentially.
- It's also tough enough that it really forces you to think about those things. I'm trying not to give specifics, but I was in a very tough fight. I could not beat it. I tried it three times and kept reloading and was like, eventually, I'm just going to have to run away and come back. And the best way I could work out to do it was to take all my spellcasters and effectively put them about 30 feet above the person I wanted to kill and just stood there and chucked stuff at it until--
- Light you.
- And it was just-- it felt so cheesy but was also like, well, they put this here for a reason.
- Yeah.
- I can climb to it for some reason.
- Plus, it's war. You might die.
- Exactly.
- This is serious state.
- I died.
- Oh, so many good stuff. And I obviously haven't jumped in yet. So I think hearing your experiences and how you all decide to tackle things has got me excited and I know, everyone out there who maybe hasn't played it. It's only been out for a few days on Xbox, at least.
I can jump in now. And hopefully, you have a great time. And again, we have an interview with Adam Smith, the lead writer of the game, a little bit later on in the show.
So obviously, Baldur's Gate is a huge game. Baldur's Gate 3. Joe, anything else you've been playing?
- Yeah, this tiny game called Fortnite.
- Oh. I mean, yeah, yeah.
- So this week or over the last week and a bit, they've been adding entire new games to Fornite out of nowhere. So LEGO Fortnite, Rocket Racing, which is from the Rocket League. Developer's Psyonix.
And then, the one I was waiting for was Fortnite Festival, which is a Harmonix game that now lives inside Fortnite, which is wild. So this is effectively somewhere between Rock Band and their last game, Fuser, if anyone played Fuser--
- Oh, yeah, I remember that.
- --which was a game about effectively learning how to DJ. But you could just stick stems of songs together to make new songs. It was incredible. And this has both elements.
So every day you log in. There's a selection of songs that you can play in rock band style. You can play guitar bass or lead melody, bass drums, and vocals, which eventually, they are going to patch in support for your old plastic peripherals, if you haven't thrown those away yet, which is amazing.
- That's great support.
- And the clever thing about it, to me it's like, it's quite a limited pool of featured songs that switches over quite often. So you're never going to-- it feels like it's not designed for giant party sessions like the old days. It's like, I've turned on Fortnite, I want to play a few songs with some friends, and then we'll jump into Battle Royale or we'll go into Fortnite or whatever. So quite a smart way of turning that into a very different experience.
And then, it has a whole section called the jam stage, which is effectively them using the tech from Fuser inside Fortnite. So you can earn or buy songs. Jump in there and it just drops you in with 30 people. Five different little stages that you can run onto and then you can load up stems from songs and just stick them all together and create new songs. It's wild. It's an amazing little tool.
- I think the things that Epic is doing over there with Fortnite is just impressive. Like just breathing new life. And using it really, as the anchor to your point, for all these awesome experiences from other development teams within Epic, I will say, Harmonix-- Dance Central brings me back. They need to have Dance Central game. Because I used to tear up a rug almost literally in my apartment, doing all these amazing dance moves. But Harmonix is so talented musical developers.
And then, of course, as you mentioned, Rocket Racing from the folks over at Psyonix, I think, a really great way to utilize the talent that they already have on the team making such an amazing experience in Fortnite. So wow! Hats off to you all at Epic. I mean, come on.
- They know what they're doing.
- Yeah.
- It's not even a game anymore. It's an experience. It's an ecosystem.
- Yeah it's thousand things.
- Yeah, exactly.
- 100% Jeff, what have you been playing?
- So before heading out, we were actually sitting next to each other at the Game Awards and just trying to guess what everything was before it. That was a good time. But before playing that game, the night before was when one or season five something, something for Halo came out. The second part of it.
And that is what launched Firefight, King of the Hill. And I had the best time playing with our old co-host, Mr. Major Nelson. And we ended up playing for hours on Firefight, King of the Hill. And what's really fun is if you can make it through a round of this, then you get a skull. It could be good things. it could be bad things happen to that. And we had just gotten finished getting wiped negatively, in case it doesn't come out on regular level.
And for some reason, Larry was like, let's play on. Let's play on HEROIC. And so we're like, yeah, that's going to work out well. Well, somehow, we ended up getting a skull that gave everyone unlimited ammo for any weapon that they had. And so we pick up the power weapons and then we are just-- just imagine a Halo bazooka that never runs out of shells.
- I like it.
- It was awesome. So we ended up having-- we'll probably never get that exact run of pattern to happen, but ended up having the best time. And so it's PVE. It's exactly what I was hoping for, which is a day-- it's an environment for us to chat and have a good time, and also be partnering up together and not-- it's just not sweaty, which I think is fun.
I'm sure if you put it on the highest level, it would be. But at a HEROIC or down, man, it's just a relaxing fun time. And I highly recommend it.
- Oh shout out to 343 who did a-- we had Brian Girard obviously on the show a while ago, who also did a great appearance on the SFS.
- Kind of funny. This week. Yeah, he was awesome.
- Parasitic. Great job interviewing. So the team, again, just doing a great job at just adding new things to Halo. And I will say, we read the comments every week. Jeff and I, we hosted last week, and we were trying to figure out what PVE meant. And I think we both got it wrong. But somebody in the comments has corrected us. It's player versus environment.
- Oh, so it's like what humans do all over for the last 100 years.
- 100%. Essentially. And then for me, I obviously haven't played as much over the past week. But I got to jump into-- actually, a game that you all showed in the partner preview, The Finals.
- Oh, nice.
- It had a surprise release at the Game Awards. And so I got a chance to jump into that, played a little bit of it. And again, it's just-- if you love first person shooters competitive games like that, this is a great game to jump into. So many people have been playing about, playing it, talking about it. It's been really cool to see.
And what I love about this game is the higher time to kill. Because I am not a guy that can jump into a game with a low time to kill. And so this gives you a little chance to maneuver. We have jump pads. And you can destruct the levels like Battlefield. I think it has some ex Battlefield devs on it. So it's been exciting and it's free to play and available now on Xbox. So be sure to give it a shot, if that's your kind of thing.
- So I was hearing that you can pick a light and nimble character or a big bruiser that can literally like pound through walls. What do you find you're possessed with?
- So it has three-- yeah, it has three different body types, all have their pluses and minuses. And so I went in the middle, balancing speed with power. And then, I think like we've seen in so many great games, you can customize your character, purchase different kind of emotes and accessories for your character to make them look cool.
I am a no skin kind of person. I never-- in any video game, I never put a skin on my character because--
- You don't want to stand out and be shot.
- No, I don't. Exactly. And then also, if you're really good at the game, you get to be unassuming, right? You're like, nobody knows if you're really good.
- You're hustling everyone.
- It's his first game. He's not that good.
- [LAUGHS]
- Take that. Take that. But it's been really cool to see how people even already have found their groove in the game. And so, it's awesome.
- That's the thing. So I haven't had a chance to play it yet, but the thing that really interests me is it-- so many of those games have a set path to victory, and it's about getting really good at that thing. Whereas, this, with the destructibility and with a load of different tricky ways to play, it feels like there's a lot of onus put on work out, how you do better at this and do it in your own way. Have you had a lot of experience with people doing super unexpected things in there?
- It's been a lot of the destructibility. I've unintentionally done cool stuff because I'm like, how do I do that? So I picked up this explosive-- like the classic video game explosive barrel, and I chucked it and it destroyed the whole like floor of one of the buildings and took out a person who we were trying to capture the point, and an enemy was rushing us. And so I took out an entire floor and they had to find their way back up. And so unintentionally, I'm finding that there are some really cool ways to tackle different competitive parts of the game, which is really cool.
So I highly recommend if you're into first person shooters. This is another one to jump into. Give it a shot in just a field that's really thriving right now, I feel like. Competitive shooters. So yeah. So that's what we've been playing. You let us know below in the comment section what you've been playing.
As we go into the holiday season, there's so much time. I'm sure a lot of you are going to be jumping into your backlogs. But if there are any games that sparked your interest from the Game Awards, which we'll talk about in just a little bit, let us know, and we'd love to read them.
- Or any of your Baldur's Gate 3 tips.
- There you go. I'm going to need them, because it's going to be tough for me to jump into, but I'm excited to do it. So Joe, we talked a little bit about you and Wire. Anything that we can look forward to coming up with Xbox Wire?
- I mean, just-- this is the problem, I stepped on this at the start, forgetting that we had a whole section built.
[LAUGHS]
- Yeah, I did too.
- There's plenty to talk about.
- Yeah, yeah. But I think, basically what I'd like to say is, what we're aiming to do is make it surprising and make it a place where it's not just about-- obviously, we'll always have the news about the things that are coming out now and stuff that you'd expect to be there, but we're really aiming to drop those moments where there's a story on there that you were never expecting. By the time this podcast comes out-- am I giving away the fact that it's not live?
- [CHUCKLES]
- You're fine. We say it all the time.
- Yeah, we should have, I believe, a new story about an element of the making of Starfield, which I think is super unexpected, and a really different take on the making of a game. I won't spoil what it is. But yeah, we're just aiming for that rollout of stuff where it's not just about what's happening now, it's about how things were made and the bizarre stories of games development as well. So I would highly recommend that you check back and yeah, we'll have good stuff for you.
- Well, it's cool because we have these connections to all these studios and we get to talk about this stuff internally. You and I both. Because Joe and I were former and current co-workers. We just have this incredible passion and interest in gaming. And when you get to hear about the inside stories and get that deeper appreciation and education on it, it feels a richer experience.
And when you're playing through things, you have this deeper level of understanding. And that's what you and the team are really trying to do, is build that connection between our audience and our developers too.
- Yeah, that's the thing. I think my passion in game or games journalism has always been in hearing something weird and wanting to tell people about it. And I think that's what we're trying to build here, is like, is just being excited about stuff. And so yeah, hopefully, that comes across and we'll continue to do more and more good stuff.
- Good job, Joe.
- Thank you.
- And great job, Joe. Everyone.
- Good job, Joe, in the chat, in the comments.
- Yeah. [CHUCKLES]
- So let's talk about some news, actually. So we had the Game Awards that aired. I want to-- we're going to talk about--
- 10 years ago, it feels.
- It feels like it. So we'll get into a few of the announcements, as well as some of our highlights from the show. But I wanted to start with some of our games that won in the show. So we had Hi-Fi Rush, which took home the award for best audio design. Forza Motorsport won for best sports/racing game and innovation and accessibility. I got to work with that team a lot on the lead up to 410.
And we did an interview with Chris Esaki from Turn 10, who kind of just really showcased and broadcast the passion that the team had for doing something new with their blind driving assist. So it's great that they were recognized at the show. And, of course, Baldur's Gate, as we talked about, won game of the year. So you can play that on Xbox now.
Sea of Stars on Game Pass, best indie game. And so many more games that you can play on Xbox, that one. So congrats to the winners. Congrats to the devs who have worked really hard on these games. I think this has been an incredible year, and we owe it all to the people who are making the game. So really, just shout out to all of you who have done that.
- I think people wonder like, what do these awards mean? And it doesn't materially necessarily change the game that you're playing. But we ran into Rare afterwards. Neha Chintala, who really worked quite a bit. She works for Turn 10 and worked quite a bit on the blind drive assist. Her life was just made. It just felt so vindicated.
When you look at that innovation and accessibility category, you had Diablo, you had Street Fighter, you also had Hi-Fi Rush, and I want to say, Mortal Kombat, and they all did very interesting things. And I think all these different teams working independently, but towards a greater level of accessibility. It's something that all players can benefit from. But it meant so much to see that.
And I'd have to imagine, that's really motivating to continue to push things forward. We also were hanging out with John Johannes afterwards from Tango Gameworks, and he seemed super psyched to see how much love, I think, was in the room for Hi-Fi Rush, just in general. It had what? Five nominations?
- And got some of the big pops throughout. Even coming through on the stream, it was amazing.
- And at the biggest temporal disadvantage, because it came out in January. It's like, literally--
- Oh, the recency bias, yeah.
- Yeah, you would think. But I will say the judges did a great job of looking past that and remembering how meaningful and how impactful that game was all these many months ago.
- Yeah, and they just got a nomination for game of the year from IGN too, our alma mater, yeah.
- Love it.
- So it's great to see that appreciation. And yet, to see people celebrate on the podcast. We had Dan Greenawalt talking about that as well. This was-- God, how long? A month ago, I think. But there's so much passion and so much due diligence that's put into that thing. And back when we were at IGN, Turn 10 has been consistently praised. We've given out awards to Turn 10 previously as well for all of the work and accessibility. So it is really cool to see that people are pushing those boundaries too and discovering new ways to connect with different players too and different needs.
- Definitely important pioneers in the space for sure. And so, again, congrats to all the winners at the Game Awards. Now let's talk about some of our favorite moments. I want to start off with Senua's Saga, Hellblade II, which had an amazing showing. Of course, this debuted at the Game Awards a few years ago. And this time, we got to see a little bit of gameplay at the show.
And I think nobody left without their jaw being on the floor. It was visually stunning. And obviously, we have that game coming out in 2024. 2024? 2024?
- They're both acceptable. They're both. Although one sounds weirder than the other.
- They have a weird thing about a shift in society from saying--
- 2000?
- 2020.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Well, we'll talk about that another time. But the game looked amazing. And we had Melina who plays Senua at the show. And I think her story has just been tremendous from-- what was she-- what was her role in the-- I think she was a-- I forgot what her role was originally, but it wasn't related to being a main character in the video game. But she's taken that and run with it, and has become one of the greatest characters in video games.
- And has become Senua.
- Yes.
- 100%.
- I don't know if you saw at the very beginning of that trailer because you were like, oh, it's-- they showed some game. But the whole thing, it starts off. It's like in-game footage captured on Xbox Series X. So that's what the game's going to look like, which is mind boggling.
- It's wild. I feel like we're hitting that point of a generation where you always spend a few years where you're like, oh, I see where-- like technically, where this is getting there. And now we're hitting that point where it's like, this is the best game I've ever seen. This is the best looking game I've ever seen. And it just keeps going and going. So yeah, that trailer was absurd. I couldn't believe it.
- It was very intense.
- Very.
- I mean, the first game was very intense.
- Yes. And coupled with the performance from Heilung as well.
- Oh, yeah.
- We were hanging out with them after the fact, or we observed them. We were not hanging out. We observed them in their element.
- They don't feel like people who hang out.
- They were jamming out. It was incredible. Everyone was just in incredible spirits. But it was cool to see. I was reading a lot of the audience commentary and feedback on both the trailer and the performance, and a lot of people are saying that this is their first introduction to Hellblade, which I think is incredible because you can just see. To your point, Joe, the leaps and bounds that we're making as an industry. And then, to see that appreciation as well.
And people looking at-- people who might know Heilung or people who might know Hellblade being introduced to the other and having that new entertainment reference point. It's really cool to see those things come together. And that's one of the cool things about the Game Awards, is those performances coming and really breathing life into a lot of those moments too.
- What a great showing, honestly, by the team over there at Ninja Theory. A few other moments from the show. I thought one that was really great was the new EA original game, Tales of Kenzara. It was introduced by actor, Abubakar Salim, who talked about-- he had a really emotional moment talking about his dad and how he's making a game that is-- it showcases the love that you have for somebody. And I think it was really cool.
EA original is one of those programs, this umbrella program for really interesting stories. We've seen games like It Takes Two and A Way Out by Josef--
- Josef Fares, yeah.
- Josef Fares. Yeah, exactly. Who is obviously famous at the Game Awards for many reasons.
- What? no.
- Yeah. But this side scrolling game, I think with a deeper meaning is, again, what we've been talking about. This really swell of creativity and meaningful games being made by small development teams. That was just really great to see him get his moment. And I think that was what the essence of the Game Awards is, those kinds of moments. And so that was really cool.
- And such a personal moment for him because he-- we were talking before the cameras were rolling that he was actually Bayek in Assassin's Creed Origins. And if you haven't watched Raised by Wolves, he's one of the main characters, one of the Android characters in that series as well. And it's just really incredible that, for him, I imagine, that he gets this opportunity to do something so personal as well, and so much of your own personality being put into a game that gets supported in this way.
- Yeah, it means so much, I'm sure. And so excited to play that game when it releases. And then let's talk about some other personal favorite moments from the show. I wanted to talk about Sam Lake's performance.
- Yes! You stole mine. [CHUCKLES]
- Oh, was that yours?
- Oh, yeah.
- I just thought it was so amazing. This icon in the industry getting up there. I don't know if any of you-- would any of you do that? Because I don't think I'd have the courage to go in front of the entire industry and dance. And not only did he dance, he look like he was a professional.
- He did a great job, yeah.
[OVERLAPPING SPEECH]
- He did the number one thing you're supposed to do. So I maybe could do it, because I actually grew up with a dance background.
- Really?
- Yeah, but it was one of those things where your parents are like, do everything. Piano, and math, and also all these dance classes. Anyway. So he did the number one thing you're supposed to do as a performer, which is smile. And he had-- And it just-- it brought so much enjoyment for me to watch him enjoying himself.
And we were hanging out with them, after the fact. And they were in such a celebratory mood. All of Remedy. But then the place where we were at all celebrating. The DJ had put on the Old Gods of Asgard soundtrack again, and so they were redoing the dance as well. And it was just-- it was really fun. Clearly, it's not just this performative thing. They just really enjoyed putting all of this choreography together.
- How weird was it to see Alan Wake in person?
- Yes, very.
- That's him! That's him. It's like him.
- It's just like him.
- Not only him but the man who does his voice as well.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- You're getting a live dubbing session for Alan Wake. It was amazing.
- And Mr. Door was there.
- Yeah, yeah.
- I don't know why. It just--
- [CHUCKLES]
- I was starstruck at this.
- We had seen a being of pure cosmic evil.
[OVERLAPPING SPEECH]
- It's so scary, yeah.
- Security was tighter than normal. But still.
- Yeah, well.
- Let him in. [CHUCKLES]
- Yeah. Oh yeah, one incredible moment.
- So cool. So cool. Icon, congrats to that whole team over there at Remedy for Alan Wake 2. And I will say, actually, I don't want to say another one of my-- I want to make sure that I don't want to steal another person--
- That's OK. We're riffing. [CHUCKLES]
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will say, Dontnod, which is a palindrome by the way, I suppose. Saying backwards, forwards. I meant to say it on the show, but I didn't. I didn't remember the word. But Dontnod, who are the creators of one of my favorite game series of all time, Life is Strange, unveiled their new game Lost Records, Bloom and Rage. And it is a story driven game, as we just played Jusant. I said it right this time.
- You did. Great job.
- Nice.
- But I'm excited. Because it's the story of four teenagers who discovered a secret. I guess, we'll find out in the game what that is. And 27 years later, they've come back together to talk about it and uncover what that secret is. And so what I love about Dontnod is that not only are they great at storytelling, but they are not afraid to push the boundaries of what's in their game. I think Life is Strange 2, for example, dealt with some really strong mature topics.
And so what you can expect is even though it's more of a colorful palette in the game, I think you can definitely probably expect a more mature storyline.
- Darker themes, yeah.
- Darker themes.
- Seems like a dark mystery. I mean, the conceit of the story is also they were teenagers when they met. And I think it's 27 years or just over two decades afterwards where they get reunited and they're grappling with whatever's going on whatever that.
- Feels a big reference to It. And if it's as evil as It, oh I'm ready.
- Oh, I will take an evil game.
- They've also said-- they've specifically said that Lost Records is a series they're planning. So it's not just going to be a one-off thing. Most people will be like, well, maybe do the first one first and then we'll find out. But after Life is Strange-- I loved those games, so I'm just like, yeah, make loads of them.
- They're good storytellers.
- Yeah.
- Absolutely.
- By the way, if you haven't played Jusant, you must do so.
- Yes, yes.
- It's one of my games.
- Go on Game Pass. Go do it. No excuses.
- No excuses.
- Play it. All right, so I feel like there are a few other games that we're missing. One being Marvel's Blade was announced--
- Yeah.
- --which is exciting. Being created by Arkane Lyon, the makers of both Deathloop and Dishonored, which is exciting. So we know their track record at making games. So excited to see more about Marvel's Blade in the future. And then, we had Hideo Kojima unveiling his brand new game that we've gotten teases of a few years ago, and now we kind of get the title, OD. And the trailer was horrifying, of course.
Anytime you're confusing someone's face, regardless, is horrifying that you don't really know. But I think it was just terrifying. And of course, we got a little surprise halfway through when the icon, the Academy Award winning filmmaker Jordan Peele of Inside, Get Out--
- Us.
- Inside, Get Out, Us--
- Nope.
- --and Nope came out. And he talked about how he's partnering. And honestly, that was really cool to see. Because I think Jeff Keighley said it best. It's like two GOATs of the genre of horror coming together to make an exciting game. And so we're excited to see that game.
- It's a very cool pairing.
- That's right.
- It's amazing. But Kojima's also very particular to say that there's a bunch of other creators he's working with as well. So it'll be cool to see all the influences that come in to make an unexpectedly creepy game.
- I love that for that entrance with Jordan Peele.
- Yeah.
- They started playing, I put five on it.
- Yeah.
- But from my perspective, it didn't sound like anyone really reacted because I'm sure-- everyone was like, obviously, it's not going to be Jordan Peele that comes out the door. And then as soon as he did, you're like, wow!
- It wasn't until later I realized they were playing that slowed down version that they had used for one of the films.
- For Us, yeah.
- Yeah.
- That was perfect. By the way.
- Such great presentation there. Yeah, any other moments that stood out to you from the show?
- For me, I loved seeing Sega come out with all of those remakes of some of my fav-- I was a Dreamcast guy. So seeing Jet Set Radio. I noticed Jet Grind Radio, but I'm old. And Crazy Taxi, and Golden Axe, and Shinobi. And I think there was one more. But it was just like, all of this stuff coming back? I'm like, yes. No details on when or how or what. I'm not worried about that. The fact that the answer is it's coming, that's enough for me. That's going to sustain me for many a moon.
- The clips of them, you're looking at them going, OK, I can see how that Crazy Taxi looks. And when it showed Golden Axe, I was like, wow! This looks very different.
- I think the last Golden Axe we played was in-- well, there might have been one on the 360. But the last one I remember playing was on Sega Genesis.
- Yeah. Sega's going for a very different style. I'm like--
- Yes.
- --that's cool. I'm waiting for that.
- Yeah, so many great announcements and trailers. And of course, the award winners. Another great show by Jeff Keighley. Yeah, just hats off. Hats off to everyone in the industry.
- I had this one. Oh.
[OVERLAPPING SPEECH]
- Yeah, you go.
- You go. You go. We're like, not done yet.
- I just want to throw it out there. There was a game announced called The Rise of the Golden Idol.
- Oh, yes.
- This is a sequel to a game that came out a couple of years ago and had DLC this year called Case of the Golden Idol, which never came out on an Xbox platform, unfortunately. But genuinely, just one of my favorite little surprises for years. Like really intricate, interesting, and weird alternate history detective game set in a century ages ago. I'm not sure which one. Super, super smart and just an incredible little experience. And this sequel is set in an alternate reality version of the '70s.
- Yeah, I'm seeing that now.
- Blood and Disco, it's called.
- Yeah. It's really, really strange. And I just cannot wait. And it's coming to Xbox, which is amazing. And also the developers are Latvian. And as a man with Latvian heritage, there's not many times you can say that. So that's great. But yeah, just a really, really cool little announcement, and something I would never have expected to be part of that show. So yeah, I was very happy about that.
- Another unexpected one, because that's mine that I have to shout out. And I've never played Pony Island 1, but I saw-- I had a freak out moment next to Jeff where I was like, oh my God, the developer of Inscription. Because I love Inscription. I would also categorize it as a horror game. It's very puzzle driven. You're going through these creepy environments.
For Inscription, it was like this deck building game, essentially. Pony Island 1. And I can immediately tell because there's so much of that artistic similarities. This is a game by Daniel Mullins, an indie developer. And Pony Island 1 is essentially like you're interacting with an arcade cabinet that's been possessed by Lucifer himself.
So it's this point and click adventure game. There's some puzzle elements. It's quite simple, but also complex, which is what Inscription was as well. Because, yes, on the surface, it's this deck building experience. But then there's things you can interact with, and then items you get and information that you get that unlocks these other things, and unlocks the story, and unlocks like assets, and other video that you can interact with and experience. And so I'm just in for whatever Daniel Mullens wants to create. So I'm like, Pony Island, never played. But Pony Island 2, will absolutely be played by me.
- You should play Pony Island 1.
- I need to now to prepare, yeah.
- It came out around that time-- do you remember From Fractions?
- I was just about to say.
- Yeah, it's like the same thing where, because he hadn't-- Daniel Mullins hadn't built up the profile as a guy who does this trick. And so when it came out, all I heard, same with Frog Fractions, was people being like, I know what it sounds like. Just buy it, and turn it on, and play it for an hour, and then come back. And it was one of those games where I was like, what is this?
- You have to experience it to understand it.
- Yeah, it was really, really odd.
- Yes, in the best of ways.
- The thing I love about him, he keeps repeating this trick, but making it work every time. At this point, you should be like, well, I know you're going to do this.
- Right.
- But even the trailer for Pony Island 2, I'm looking at it, I'm like, he showed us so much stuff, which makes me think, there's going to be four times as much weird stuff in this game.
- Oh yeah, there's always hidden elements that he plays around with. And so I expect the same thing, yeah.
- I can't wait.
- Me toe, me too.
- Oh, so many good games. I feel like there's a game for everyone at the show.
- Absolutely.
- That's so exciting.
- Let's shift gears a little bit because now, we have Xbox here in reviews. The year is over, and so I'm excited to go through and see what everyone's year in review looks like. And of course, if you are playing on-- you've played on Xbox, of course. Why would you be? You're watching this podcast, so you probably played on Xbox. You can go to xbox.com/year-in-review--
- You're very lost.
- Exactly. To find out their stats. So I'll start with mine. Can you all guess what my most played game is? You can't guess, Joe because I think you read this--
- The thing is, I did guess.
- Oh, you did?
- Yes.
- To be fair--
- Give him the credit.
- --yeah, he got it correctly. He got it correct. What do you think my number one game?
- I already know.
- Oh, I don't know. I was-- because I feel like we were playing a lot of-- you were playing a lot of shooters last time you were actually living here.
- That's right.
- So I would say maybe Halo or Battlefield or fill in the shooter blanks.
- Apex Legends.
- OK, OK.
- It is Apex Legends. Although, Halo Infinite was number two.
- There you go.
- Oh, very good.
- Close enough.
- 212 hours in Apex Legends.
- Nice.
- I don't know if that's a-- Joe, you said, that was a lot.
- I mean, my most played game, I'm on 76 hours.
- OK. Yeah, and I have 2000 hours overall in that game. Obviously, I love that game.
- You're slowing down, actually.
- [CHUCKLES]
- I have stopped playing Apex as much, but now I have a Steam Deck, which--
- Did you see the Apex-- the Apex update where they're putting Final Fantasy VII in it?
- I did. That was a really unexpected--
- Yes.
- Yes, it's like, OK.
- That was at the Game Awards too, yeah.
- I believe-- oh, I forgot which character had the sword. Oh, I have to go back and watch. But that was out of the blue. I was not expecting that. Other stats. I have 307 total hours. So again, 2/3 of those are playing Apex. 24 games total, 35 achievements.
How many achievement points did I get? Oh, 580 gamerscore. So you can see from that that I stick to the games. But it's been really great. Because what this podcast has allowed me to do, especially with Tina and Jeff getting recommendations, is trying new games so that I don't come on here every single week.
- Yeah, we got to diversify. We've got to play all of them.
- Exactly. All of the games. But what about you all? What are your year end reviews looking like?
- Yeah, I'm Starfield. Starfield. 76 hours of Starfield.
- Just Starfield. Period. [CHUCKLES]
- I feel like that might become a trend. What was your gamer score?
- Oh my gamer score for the year is 580, is what I added.
- I think I've got nearly 14,000.
- Oh, my God. I'm looking at your screen right now. Wow.
- Yeah, I played 60 games.
- Are you a completionist, Joe?
- I am not.
- No?
- Like, I've just played loads of games, I think.
- I feel like he's just challenging us now.
- Yeah.
- All right. So Starfield, your game. Is that technically your game of the year, would you say? Tough question.
- Oh, it's pretty close. Alan Wake 2 is right up there for me. But my second top game this year was Cyberpunk, because when Phantom Liberty came out, I was like, right, I'm starting this again and just doing the whole thing. And yeah, I absolutely loved it.
- And Tina did a great interview last week with Monica from the other team.
- She was great.
- She was great. And I as someone who loves train systems, I'm excited that's coming.
- Awesome!
- I've been waiting for that since it came out. But what about you, Tina? What is your year in review?
- I didn't get a chance to do mine, but I assume it's a combination of a lot of Cyberpunk as well. I didn't go through and replay the whole game, which I probably should have because I played back in our AGN days. So that's on a PC somewhere. My save is lost, so I got to just do the-- play through on-- for Phantom Liberty, where they just give you a character and you can spec from there. But I assume there's a lot of Cyberpunk in there. to I'll have to put it in the comments.
MALIK PRINCE: Oh, there we go. Exactly. I'm excited to see what you-- see if you're right. And you predicted correctly. Jeff?
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Number one, Starfield. 77 hours. I think we had played within a few minutes of each other, which was great. So most played. Two was Marvel's Midnight Suns. I played for about 70 hours. I loved that game.
MALIK PRINCE: That's incredible.
- Definitely, that was the first game I think I played at the beginning of the year. And then it's kind of funny. Number three at only 64 hours was Persona 5 Royal, because I started in November or December, whenever it first came out last year. I played through Christmas and then started-- kept going. So that only reflects half of the playthrough.
- Yeah.
- So that's probably the most game I've played in the last 365 days. But for the calendar year, Starfield, number one.
- There's some really cool little details on here as well.
- Oh, yeah.
- The fact that it breaks it down by genre. I'm assuming, shooter.
- 82%.
- 82% shooter.
- Absolutely.
- Yeah, my top is 48%, action and adventure. Little list of games and how you stack up with other people. It's a really nice--
- Rarest achievement that you got in those games as well.
- That's right, yes.
- Just like a really nice, little, fully fledged breakdown of everything. It's a nice look back. It really is.
- You can see what games you are interested in and played a lot of. And so I'm excited to see what those look like next year when we have a lot of exciting games coming out. But we'll talk about that in due time.
All right, let's move on to patches, DLC update. We have a big one. Of course, hot on the heels of their game award win. Forza Motorsport, a game that I got a chance to work on and we featured many times on the show. They're releasing their 3.0 update, which comes with game fixes. Of course, the team are always working on stability and things like that.
The addition of the Hockenheim track, 33 new driver suits, and of course, new spotlight cars and events. Though I will continue playing my car, driving my pedestrian car in the game because that's what I do. What can I say?
- A man of the people, Malik.
- What can I say? I'm a man of the people.
- His pedestrian car is a Lamborghini Murcielago, just so you know.
- Well, I wasn't going to say it, Jeff. I was trying to be humble, OK, you know?
- But I was going to say, do you play as the bad guy in Forza as well?
- Yes! Knocking people off the track. Get out of my way. But no, it's exciting. So be sure to update your game, if you want to check out what's new in Forza Motorsport. But let's talk about-- let's go into the interview. Because again, we've talked a little bit about-- quite a bit, I should say, about Baldur's Gate 3 early in the show.
But we sat down with Adam Smith, the lead writer for Larian studios to talk about Baldur's Gate 3's epic game of the year win, and the game releasing on Xbox. So check it out. Hope you enjoy it.
[AUDIO LOGO]
- So I absolutely love that we are ending the year on a high note. We've been talking about the Game Awards. And nobody had a better TGA's than the folks at Larian, the creators of the game of the year 2023, Baldur's Gate 3.
Well, that's not entirely true, as Baldur's Gate 3 became available to Xbox players during the show, making us the real winners, I'd like to think. This is an incredibly complex and flexible game. And if you, like me, are maybe not super well versed in the CRPG genre, I'm here to tell you, don't be intimidated. At the same time, it's also nice to have a few tips.
And so I'm really pleased to welcome Larian's lead writer, Adam Smith to the show. How are you doing, Adam?
- I'm doing great. Thank you very much. Yeah, I'm three days out from getting back from LA, back to Europe. So yeah, tired and happy.
- Tell us how you're feeling. That's great. I mean, the game of the year. RPG of the year. Best performance for the voice behind a story. Six total awards. How does it feel to have such widespread recognition for a genre of game that maybe has always had its fans, but really doesn't get the spotlight like this?
- It feels surreal. It feels great. First of all, it does feel fantastic. I mean, we had-- we took a big swing. Our feeling was there was an audience out there for a traditional style CRPG. A big audience. But we didn't know how big it was because it had been a long time since someone had done this turn based, four player RPG that was hardcore but accessible. We hoped as well with the budget that we had.
So we put everything we had into it, our hearts, souls, cash. And we hoped the audience was as big as we thought it was. And what we had was a very good sample size, which was the people we work with, the people we speak to. And we're like, they all want this game. So we figured that a lot of people did. And it turned out they did, which was fantastic.
But it was nerve wracking. I mean, it's strange to say now because we're coming out of the Game Awards, the Golden Joysticks. We've done very well. We've touched a lot of people, hit a lot of people. We've made a lot of people happy. It's great.
But we were nervous on launch day. Some of us. I was sitting on launch day going, I think we're OK. We were very confident in the game, very proud of the game. But we didn't feel-- we didn't think it was a sure thing, that it had reached as many people as it has. So it's been great.
- Yes. And I think a lot of people are discovering exactly why the recognition has come, the adulation has come. And I'm definitely one of those people. So I will say it was a great surprise announcement for Xbox fans to be able to experience Baldur's Gate 3 now. What's been the reaction from Xbox players? What have you been hearing?
- It's been great. I mean, we knew, again, the Xbox audience was there. We knew they wanted this game. Our intention was always to have it in their hands as soon as we could. What we didn't want to do-- so I'll just-- quick segue, I'm pretty old, so I was around in the days.
I had a Spectrum. And then you would get these arcade ports and it'd be, is it going to come to my machine? Is it only going to be on Commodore? Is it going to come Spectrum and Commodore? And then the ports were like completely different games.
You'd sometimes buy it and you'd go, well, this is not the arcade version. They've cut out levels. They've cut out all kinds of stuff. Sometimes you wouldn't have music. You know, all this. So our intention was-- and we stayed true to it. It was when we get this to Xbox players, it has to be the best version of the game.
It had to be-- we didn't want to have a PC version different to an Xbox version. So our engineers worked super hard to make that true. And then, we also gave the most up to date version of the game. So the game has improved since release because we've been working hard on it, and we will continue to work hard on it. But that was it.
We knew that audience was there. We know Xbox players are RPG fans. We didn't see anything else that quite fit what we are. There's a lot of different things about Baldur's Gate 3. The cooperative element, the term based combat, the D&D world, and just the Larianess of it. Whatever that might be. The weirdness and the sometimes strange darkness of it. And all of those things.
Plus the production values. I mean, we threw everything at that. So we knew that Xbox players want good games. And we knew this was a good game. We knew they didn't have anything else quite like it this holiday season. So yeah. And the reception has been great.
So I watched many, many live streams because I enjoy seeing people play the game. And it's really fun seeing people discovering it for the first time. I've also seen people who have been waiting for it. I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos and trying to hold back from it when they're like, oh, wow, OK, so I knew this was possible. What else can I do? And that's really fun to see.
A lot of places we can go from there. Let's start with the fact that, yes, Xbox players are getting the absolute, most up to date version of the game. It timed out really nicely with update 5.five. What kinds of things have you and Larian learned since the game launched on PC this summer that have gone into this latest version of the game?
- So the big one was they wanted more, which you'd always expect. And the biggest place where they wanted more was the ending. So we added a whole epilogue. Now, if you played on PC and finished the game, then you got a fairly short ending sequence that still wraps up the story.
But people, they played that and then they said, well I didn't get a proper send off to my party. I didn't get to say goodbye to everybody. I didn't see the consequences of everything I did. We tracked all of that. So we knew that we could implement it. So we said, they want it, let's go do it.
So for my team on the writing side, we did nearly 4,000 new recorded performance, captured lines of dialogue so that you can actually say goodbye to everybody. We bring everyone back together at the end of the game. The ones who survive. Not everyone survives. they can, but not always.
And we did a lot of extra stuff. We added new music. The soundtrack, got expanded. The difficult thing was that we had-- once you end something that's as complicated as Baldur's Gate 3, you say, OK, here's all the different permutations of our endings. And then when we said, OK, we're going to revisit them, we were like, wow, OK, so we need to-- all the things that we promise, we now need to follow up on.
So that's why it became 3,000. Well, I think it's 3,600 3,700 lines of dialogue. It's to cover the density of possibilities there and new cinematics. All the rest of it.
The other thing is that we've been doing a lot of balance. Now, balance is sometimes a dirty word at Larian because there's some things we want to balance. But also, people do all kinds of weird stuff in our game. Some of it goes against the spirit of balance, and we applaud them and say, please continue to do that.
So we don't want to level out the fun that people are having. We want it to be a game where people experiment and discover things. But there were some things that worked better for balance. My personal favorite thing, partly because it didn't involve any writing, so I could sit back and watch it happen, was the honor mode. It's essentially a permadeath mode. So here you--
And my favorite thing about this is there's-- I won't spoil game stuff. But there's a specific optional dungeon in the final act of the game. And I've seen so many people go into there and they say, oh, the boss does this big talk like, oh, you're going to regret ever stepping foot here and all this. And they're like, and it's not that hard. And then you go, yeah. And you saved 75 times to get through that place. No, you can't.
And so many people go in and just say, nope, and they just get straight back out again because they're like, that's this time I'm really scared. I'm going to lose everybody.
Not worth the risk, yeah.
- I know. Exactly, yeah. And that's exactly what it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be high risk, high reward. So I'm having people see that. And I've literally seen streams of people where they run. They just go, I'm out of here. They just flee. And that's really powerful. It gives you a different story as well if you don't finish that one. So that's really cool.
- Good to know. I think I'm still 50 to 75 hours away from that dungeon at this point here. So Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, no stranger to Xbox. The enhanced editions are available for Xbox consoles, alongside Divinity, Original Sin 1 and 2. What has the team learned over time in adapting a genre that is commonly associated with PC gaming mouse and keyboard for controller wielding console players?
- Well, the first time I saw someone play on Xbox controller, I thought it was wizardry. I really-- I'm so impressed. The amount of complexity that they managed to handle. So the radial menus came in pretty early, and they were playing around with those for a long time. And what we do inside the studio is we playtest constantly. We play our own game more than we do anything else in the world. It's the best way to know if it's good or not.
Are you having fun playing it? So the whole way through development. And the first time we got the consoles plugged in and we saw the first UI, those radial menus were part of it, but they weren't quite right. So they tweaked and they tested.
And then, every time I see the inventory screens, and the skill menus, and all the rest of it, I'm just like, compacting that onto a controller is incredible. It's surprised me because we got a lot of old school RPG players here who've been around since the old days like me. And a lot of them got converted. They play on controller now. Even when we were on PC, they would play on controller.
And it started out as, we need to test this. So it was work. It was like, let's make sure this is good. Let's give feedback. And they never went back to mouse and keyboard, which I thought was heresy at first. I was like, what the heck. But it is the way to play now for a lot of people.
And I think because you bring the camera in, which really wasn't the case in previous-- some of the Baldur's Gate games but in the Divinity games as well. But once you get the camera in behind, it feels very natural to have a thumbstick to control.
So we look at that and we say, well, what happens next? And we see so many possibilities for how we can improve that more. But yeah, it's really magic to me. Because I didn't think we'd be able to do it as well as we had-- as well as we have.
- Yeah, I've played quite a few hours on PC. And then when the Xbox version came over, I was able to port my save at game over and pick it up and play on a 65 inch TV. And by the way, there's plenty of tutorials on how to do that. You just got to make sure you turn on cross-save progression, I think it is, as an option in there. Both on your Xbox and on your PC save, or wherever you're porting it over from.
Because if you're like, hey, how come it's not here? You got to do that. So pro tip. What I found is-- actually, I really enjoyed directly controlling my player character using the stick. And there's certain areas where there's traps or whatever, and I felt a little bit more confident doing that. As anything, I think it's going to come down to personal preference and what works for you. But I agree.
There's a level of immersion to having the direct control of the character, which I think is what appeals to a lot of people. Because when you look at the old RPGs, they were very RTS-like in the way they controlled. It's a lot of clicking and dragging. And you see people. It instantly translates to them in a way they understand.
So that's a good gateway to them getting used to the more complex systems because they get that straight away. Whereas if you say to them, OK, you need to drag around this party and then click over here, they're immediately detached. So then you throw a lot of other stuff at them and it feels a little overwhelming sometimes. So I think it really helps that.
Speaking of complex systems, let's talk about people who might not be really well acquainted with the rolling 20-sided dice. So what do they need to know about this Dungeons & Dragons world and demystify it a little bit on what that means and how it may differ from more mainstream RPGs that they may have played in the past?
- Well, from the perspective of the characters and the way that we wrote the world and we introduce people to the world, we go really weird really quickly. You wake up on an alien ship, infected with a parasite. And that's a very weird way to start. But it's also pretty familiar. It's the kind of thing that we know from sci-fi, as well as fantasy. And it gives you a very clear problem, which is one of the most important things you need in an RPG. What is my problem? What do I need to do here?
The thing that we always said was if we write these characters in a way that they believe in their reality, then other people will as well. So you don't need to know Dungeons & Dragons terms because these are just normal terms to them. So the introduction to the world is very much, this is a place that exists and all the fantastical things in it are actually normal to these people.
So when you speak to them, they'll talk about them as if they're normal. And then you encounter them and they feel pretty normal, which is why we went really weird at the beginning because what we needed was what is weird to these people. And that was the mind-flayers and the nautiloid. What is the thing that intrudes on your fantastical world and says, you don't know everything? So that was how we approached it from the writing side.
From the system side, really hard. Tabletop, fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons is very, very complicated. One of the most complicated things about it is the classes. Learning a new class is like learning a new role play system sometimes. So we spend a lot of time on the onboarding. The tutorial was redone over and over again.
I think what we have now is really good. My one piece of advice is always, don't try-- don't worry if you don't understand everything immediately because we're actually quite early on, and we try to introduce things slowly. It doesn't feel like that always. We don't throw you in the deep end.
Narrative wise, we do. Systems wise, we do try and ease you into it. But if you don't pick up on everything, it's not going to punish you too badly. You can get through the entire game. There's also the difficulty modes, right? So if you're struggling with combat, just put the difficulty down. If you love the combat, put it up again. But we try to make sure that you can get through the game on the easy difficulties just with fighters.
You can melee your way through the game. You don't need to learn about spell slots. You don't need to worry about that stuff. If you really start to enjoy the combat, go more complex and start dealing with that stuff. But D&D has the advantage that you're very squishy early on. So it's very perilous early on. But you don't have that many skills to juggle, so it's not too complicated.
By the time you hit level 4, level 5, you start to broaden what you can do. So don't worry too much by how much we throw at you early on. I think people can trust us that we have them in good hands. I know a lot of people who've never played this kind of game before and they got hooked by the visuals, by the characters.
And then, 20 hours later, I go visit them and they're on tactician mode, and they can do more than I can. So it works, yeah.
- Yeah, I'm living proof. Because this is something where I spent-- oh my God, it must have been 45 minutes, designing my character, and not really knowing exactly what I was doing. And now, I am level 5. I am a dozen hours in and I'm like, OK now I understand why this works so well and this isn't working so well. And you can respect your characters. Now I'm feeling like, OK, I'm ready to take that next step and move from surviving to thriving--
- That's it.
- --which is what I'm hoping to do. So you had mentioned-- I think part of the other really interesting element of this game is, yeah, at the beginning. I'm hacking my way through. But I'm starting to find-- wait a second. There's some-- I wouldn't call them shortcuts, but there are more creative solutions to things.
One of the things that I'd seen-- I've read every article. That's like, 10 things you need to know about Baldur's Gate 3 before you get started, or 15 things I wish I knew, that are non-spoilery. And one of them that they all bring up is, you can shove people. You can shove enemies.
And the amount of times, I've like, I'm not hurting this person. Oh, wait, I can do-- they're standing on a cliff, and bye bye. And that's been really, really opening up my mind that there's-- yeah, there's different ways to look at this thing if I can just get next to them.
So I was just curious. You've seen, I'm sure a ton. You've mentioned you're watching a lot of streams. So what are some of your favorite things you've seen in terms of out of the box thinking, whether it's in terms of progression or encounters or anything like that?
- So very early on, one of our playtesters realized that there's a boss in the Goblin camp early on, and there's a bridge that you can lure them on to shoot at the bridge and they die. And they were like, oh my. I can't believe I discovered this exploit. Well, that's not an exploit. We put that very, very deliberately.
And they were like, yeah, but it's so easy. We're like, yeah, but now you don't get any of the loot. And they were like, oh my God! And so the risk reward was very intentional there. And seeing people realize that is really good fun as well because they're like, oh yeah, OK. And so there was a lot of that.
But then, there was a video that someone made just a couple of days ago where they showed the Goblin camp and they showed all the different approaches that they'd seen and just condensed it into a two minute video. And it was so good to see. And just a little bit about the design of that. When we look at our inspirations, we're often looking to studios like Arkane and Immersive Sims, and the way that they approach the way a level design works and the way that you have all these different avenues to go in.
And I remember talking to one of the designers over at IO Interactive in the Hitman series and they said, a level is a block of Swiss cheese. It has all these holes in it, and you make sure the player navigates them and keeps popping out in different places. And we took a lot of that philosophy to it, which I think has always been part of the way these kind of RPGs work.
But with the tech we have now, just the verticality that we can add to it, the visual side of it, where you can actually see this stuff rather than having to click on a wall and get a pop up saying, oh, there's a hole in the wall. Now, you can actually see the hole in the wall. And you can stack the crates. And you've got the real physics. All that kind of stuff.
So once you put all those things together, then you get all kinds of things. One of my personal favorites was the owlbear belly drop, which somebody did. They went to Moonrise towers, which is an area in act two. Very, very dangerous area, that we made sure was very, very hard to tackle if you didn't do it very carefully. So either diplomatically through stealth.
But if you go in all guns blazing, you're in a lot of trouble. And somebody got a druid while shaped into an owlbear, jumped from the top of it. And the game systems go, oh, here's your momentum, here's your weight. And it just obliterated every single enemy in the area just from this massive belly flop. And that's a good example of one where we were like, we really should balance this out. And then we're like, but it's so much fun. So let's leave it.
And stuff like that, people just discover. I was talking to someone yesterday who only realized on their second playthrough that they turned into a cat, then they can get into a lot of small places that they couldn't get into before. So yeah, you wild shape into a cat with some holes you can get into. So very, very useful. And then, you can exploit other systems.
So get into the place, pick up stuff there. And then you can magic pocket that to your other companions so you can just start up a whole smuggling network from being a cat, which is great.
- It's funny. Some of the most empowering feelings are not necessarily winning a battle,0 but maybe winning a battle you didn't think you could win because you did something very smart or clever and thinking you've outsmarted the game. And now, I'm realizing, oh no, no, you all thought of that, which is maybe the most impressive part.
- We get outsmarted all the time. Yeah, as soon as we put the game out in the wild, we were like, how long is it going to take for people to do stuff that we did not dream of? And almost immediately. And as a writer, you try to cover as many cases as possible. We always want to have the line of dialogue that reacts to the weird thing you do. But it's impossible because you're all more intelligent than us.
And there's a lot more of you. We're outnumbered. So as much as we try, eventually, somebody will find the way to go, ah, Larian didn't think of that. And that's great, because they feel good about themselves for doing that. What we can do is we rely on all our systemics to say, you may have outthought us, but we'll make sure you still have fun.
So no matter how far you push the boundaries, the systems will pick it up. And if the narrative is in tatters because you murdered everyone in the game, then you'll still have fun because the systems will pick it up, and they'll make sure that there's stuff happening for you and the worlds reacting to you. Not always realistically, but in a way that's enjoyable.
Because realism is not the goal. The goal is for it to be believable. So sometimes you get the strangest things happen. Someone will notice a crime and they'll be like, OK, I saw this person commit a crime. They ran off to get help. They come back and you're gone, and they just go back to their patrol route. And that's fine because you feel good because you outsmarted them. It doesn't need to be-- Realism is not what you need in an RPG like this. You'd never get anywhere.
- All right. So we are coming-- we're winding down here with our time together. What does the team do next? I know we're at update five. I'm assuming-- well, hopefully, a nice break for the holidays would be ideal. But I'm assuming y'all aren't done with this yet?
- No. So I was saying, just before we started recording actually, that the last week felt like closure for me on Baldur's Gate 3, which was the best possible way to have closure, game of the year. New platform. It was incredible.
But I'm at the point where I'm looking at new things, personally, and I can't say what they are. But very excited about those. But we're not going to stop on Baldur's Gate 3. And I probably won't.
There'll be a point where they say, hey, we're going to add this or we're going to add that and they'll need writing support. So I'll always keep an eye on it. But for Baldur's Gate, I can't tell you exactly what's next for it, but we're not going to stop supporting it with free patches, free updates.
We have all kinds of ideas. Just like the epilogue. We always thought we might do an epilogue. We didn't realize how big it would be and how much love we'd want to put into it. So I'm sure there's something like that that we don't know about yet as more people play the game.
And again, the audience just grew again. So as they play, we'll find out what they want more of and we'll look at it. Now, we can't promise anything because we don't know yet. But we're not going to stop.
- You're just going to keep an eye on your inbox for a requests for another casual 3,000 or 4,000 words.
- Yeah.
- So where should folks go to stay up to date with Larian and Baldur's Gate 3, and what you are going to be working on?
- We actually have one of the nicest communities around. So we actually have a really cool subreddit, which sometimes surprises me still. It's so friendly. It's so creative. Full of just beautiful fan art, fan fiction, and playthroughs like, all the weird stuff there.
But we're on social media. All the usual places. Larian Studios. You can find me @noneconomical. If anyone gets the pun there, then, well, joke. Congratulations. And yeah, we will-- It's always through our Larian Baldur's Gate accounts that we make our announcements. The Baldur's Gate account, in particular, it's a lot of fun. We retweet a lot of fun stuff there.
So if you have weird things that you've discovered in the game, send them to us because we will probably retweet them. So make sure they're not too embarrassing. [CHUCKLES]
- Very good. Adam Smith, thanks so much for taking time out from everything. And I just want to say congratulations.
- Thank you.
- Again, all I can say is-- I know I said it earlier in the show, is like, believe the hype. Now that I've gotten to try it, I'm like, I totally understand why this is the game everyone's been talking about this year. So Adan, congratulations to you and the rest of the team. And now we're going to send it back to Malik, and Joe, and Tina, and me. So let's just do that.
[AUDIO LOGO]
- All right, thank you so much to Adam Smith for joining us and talking about Baldur's Gate 3, which if we haven't said enough, is now available on Xbox. Now, Jeff has had his hands on a very special little gadget here. It's the Meta Quest 3. Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming. And Jeff is in his own little world.
- [CHUCKLES]
- I feel like-- Jeff, are you there?
- Oh, oh, sorry.
- I didn't see you there. [CHUCKLES]
- There we go I'm sure my hair is perfectly cromulent.
- [LAUGHS]
- So in part of our effort, as always, to bring gaming to more people wherever they're at on the devices that they already own, we just announced this week that Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming to Meta Quest 2, 3 and pro. And so what that means is there's an app that shows up in the Meta Quest store. You download it, and it works just like if you were to go to xbox.com/play.
Or there's other-- you can download even on your Steam Deck or various other ways that you can access cloud gaming. What's really cool about this, I tried this last night, is that, I generally am gaming on myself. I have a 65 inch TV. It's a good TV. It's great. It's perfectly good size.
Well then, I put this on and I loaded it up, and it actually superimposed at least a 100 inch screen. It was basically like-- No matter where I looked, it followed. But it was well over my full field of vision. It seemed to measure the perfect amount.
And then it made like an entire room around me that was like an Xbox themed room. And then I went and I started playing Cocoon, and it was really fun. So you'd be like, well, you have a TV on the wall, why would you use that? Well, it would be great in a room if I didn't have a TV and if I was just traveling with just this because everything went through here.
So the controller paired through Bluetooth to the headset. And then it was just coming in through Wi-Fi, and it was basically as if there was an Xbox built into there. Obviously, there's not an Xbox built into here. But by using the power of the cloud, it was effectively just as good.
Latency was perfectly playable. It was really impressive. If you're going somewhere and you don't have a TV with you, you effectively have a TV in the hyperspace.
- [CHUCKLES]
- I know.
- And it was really very impressive. So am I saying, hey, you should go out and you should buy a Meta Quest 3 just to do that? Probably not. Your call. But there are millions of people out there with a Meta Quest 2 or Meta Quest 3, which by the way, is very fun.
And when you were talking about all the game stuff, the music stuff inside Fortnite, I've been playing so much Beat Saber in here.
- Oh.
- I highly recommend the weekend pack. It is so much fun.
- Panic! At The Disco.
- Yes. But then, it's just another feature that you get to do within the Meta Quest 3. And I loved it. I really enjoyed it. So try it out. Because if you have one of these, it's free. Just look in the store, you'll find it.
- There you go. Xbox Cloud Gaming, coming to the Meta Quest 3. All right. So let's talk about what is on the table in front of us. The holiday season is upon us. And maybe you're looking for a gift for your friend, your parents, your family in general. We have a few awesome products here from our designed for Xbox team.
And so I figured we might as well go down the line and tell everyone's family what they should get for us. Tina, what should your family get for you?
- Well, I snuck-- so we all got to pick. And I snuck a look at this new turtle beach controller. It's the Stealth Ultra high performance wireless controller built for Xbox and PC specifically. High performance. What does that mean? Well, it's all about minimizing lag, of course. So they advertise as very lag free experience.
You can actually connect it directly to supported smart TVs and Android through Bluetooth, so it has that functionality as well. And then there's a bunch of stuff that is highly technical that I can only barely appreciate from my layman's point of view, but all good sounding stuff.
So it's got anti drift thumbsticks. It feels very smooth to me as I'm playing through it. And it features something called magnetic hall effect sensors. I looked this up and it was highly scientific.
- [LAUGHS]
- So basically, what it means is there are magnetic fields. They come at a right angle. And because of this, it really minimizes the lag and the drift.
- That's an intelligence a warlock or mage--
- Yes, would do, obviously. Because I have spec'd in all of my intelligence, so I can barely understand it. And it also has something called micro switches. So that's similar. Make sure that everything is fast and responsive. And apparently, would last five times longer than your standard controller. That means just the durability of the buttons and everything that you're clicking and mashing when you get very frustrated at a video game, which sometimes happens.
- How do you think they test that? They just have a little machine?
- I feel like they're just people--
[OVERLAPPING SPEECH]
- --yeah, just like one little goose guy. Yeah, exactly.
- [LAUGHS] Goose guy.
- [LAUGHS] Yeah, just operated by water. So that's just on the surface. But if you notice, there's a little screen as well, a 1.5 inch screen. They call it the connected command display. So there's a lot of things that this thing can do.
You can customize the thumbstick performance. You can change where your buttons are mapping to. You can actually change the lighting as well. I think I can turn this guy on, just so you can see that--
- [GASPING]
- --it's got--
[OVERLAPPING SPEECH]
- You can burn the lid off this one.
- I know. Well, I wanted to build to that point. So in here, I can see, it says profile one right now. And nobody's used this thing just yet. But you can do-- I think it's up to 10 profiles. So if you have a big household and people have different color preferences, you can change the whole RGB, just a look at this thing with these accent colors.
But also, just how things are programmed. And including-- there's an eco mode, so you can preserve the battery life, if that's your thing on your profile. Up to 30 hours, apparently, for the battery life there. And then you can also get social media notifications.
So if you're like Joe and miss all your WhatsApp notifications, and you really need a second screen for that, that'll come through here as well. So just tons of customizable features that you can play around with. I think I've only even scratched the surface of what you can do with the connected command display.
- If you're going to scratch the surface on that, you'll just have to give it to me.
- Yeah, literally don't scratch the surface. But you can change your button mapping, as I mentioned. The access response modes, the vibration intensity. There's just a lot of-- if you are very particular about your gaming experience, I would say, this has it covered.
Oh, and then another thing too is it comes with this case with a-- thank you so much. With a little magnetic connector for the charging unit. But not only does it just magnetically connect here, you can actually just charge it through the case as well. It can sit right in the case and charge it directly from there, which is pretty cool, yeah.
- I love that.
- Yeah, nice little package.
- I'll jump in.
- Yeah, Joe what are you looking at?
- What's you got?
- I want to show off. I want to--
- Oh--
- Yeah.
- --so cool.
- This is the 8BitDo M30 wired controller. So it doesn't look wired right now, but it is wired for that lag free input.
- [CHUCKLES]
- Clearly very based on some classic roller designs. Sega, in particular. And designed for fighting games. Or if you want to go back and play the old Golden Axe as part of the Sega vintage collection on it.
- Way to bring it back.
- [LAUGHS]
- Perfect for that as well. What I love about it is A, it kind of makes you look like an owl.
- [LAUGHS]
- See, it's just got a really smart reproduction of all the buttons you would expect from an Xbox controller. It's not skimping on any of that stuff. But it's just repositioned them in a way that feels very natural. I'm not much of a fighting game player, but I genuinely think this would make me better at it. [CHUCKLES] So that would be good.
Yeah, just a really neat little thing. It's 30-- I was going to say 35 quid. It's 35 quid.
- [LAUGHS]
- I've got to remember--
- What is that in amount here?
- Yeah, I've got to remember what country I'm in. It's $34.99 USD. And yeah, it -- a really nice addition, I would say, for someone who's looking for a way to play their games a little differently or who want some of that classic experience.
- For Street Fighter 6, that's going to be great.
- Yeah, really cool.
- All right, so I want to talk about a very important accessory. Tina, if you don't mind, passing me this new UPspec Gaming xScreen for our Xbox Series S. Now you might have seen the UPspec released this for our white Series S. But of course, we released recently our 1 terabyte black series S. And so now, you can get one of these to match that, if you have one of them. They're $249.99. And again, like I said, the white is available now.
The black is coming soon. Be sure to stick around and I should say, tune into their Twitter for updates on this one. It's going to be available.
- What does it do? Tell them what it does.
- So this actually transforms your Series S into a little bit of a gaming laptop. I traveled up from San Diego and my one regret, and I was really upset, was that it doesn't actually-- I couldn't bring my console. And so now we have this, which is just connects straight to the console. It has a 11.6 inch, 1080p screen, 60 hertz IPS screen.
And the cool thing is it works really well with the console. It actually powers the console off when you close the screen like a laptop. Integrated speakers and controls and crosshair overlay.
- So basically, you hold it-- you put it in there and then flip the screen up.
- And look at this. Boom!
- And then, it basically connects in there. And it's just goes wherever you want to go. And it travels really well. And you don't need an extra cable--
- 100%.
- --which is the best part about it.
- It plugs right into the back. This is one of our dummy Series S consoles. It's just a little bit of a prop.
- Oh! That's why it's not working.
- [LAUGHING]
- I was like, is it going to work? I don't know if it's going to work, but I was--
- They're not real holes.
- What a fake gamer.
- It's a fake console.
- [LAUGHS]
- I promise it's a lot easier to put together on an actual Series S.
- Well, I'll just go back to my seat now.
- You know, and if you push hard enough, then the console just crumbles.
- I was like, what is wrong with it?
- It was an A for effort. You got the visual, yeah, yeah.
- Exactly. I was going to let Jeff know. I was like, that is not a real Series S. But on your real Series S, your 1 terabyte, you can put this on your white one, if you want a little black and white mix.
- Panda dunks.
- Exactly! So be sure to check this out. And I'm hoping that I can take this with me because this is going to be--
- Fits right in your pocket, right? [CHUCKLES]
- I have a Series S for you to take back home too.
- Oh, sweet, yeah. But does it work?
[CHUCKLING]
- It's really light. That's the best part.
- Oh, I love it. So yeah, like we said, be sure to go to news.xbox.com to check out all these accessories. Again, the design for Xbox team working with some of our great hardware partners on a lot of different options for a lot of different people. So if you're looking for a gift, be sure to check that out.
All right. So we're getting closer to the end of the show. But I know what everybody has been waiting for. Of course, our discussion has been great. But people want to know how they can win things. So Jeff, Free Code Friday.
- Free Code Friday.
- What's that all about?
- Yeah, so something we like to do every week is give stuff away. And this is our final Free Code Friday of the week-- of the year. So we're going to give out something really good, and that is Baldur's Gate 3. You may have heard of it as we--
- At least in the last hour.
- Yeah, yeah. If you hadn't before you tuned in here, you've heard about it now. And what we do is we ask a question here on Thursday, Friday at noon Pacific or 8:00 PM, GMT for our metric friends. You tune into twitter.com/xboxwire.
We'll ask a question. And you have about two hours to answer that question. And we randomly draw a winner. Actually, we randomly draw five winners. And those five winners, like I said, will get Baldur's Gate 3. The question, to give you a head start, what are you going to be playing over the holidays?
It's actually a question I've got for all of you. I'll be playing Cocoon. I'll be playing a lot of indie games that I didn't have a chance to play throughout the year. I'm going to be traveling quite a bit. I've loaded them on my ASUS ROG Ally or Roger Ally, as I've heard it referred to by Lucy James.
So yeah, Thirsty Suitors, Dave the Diver. A bunch of games I haven't played this year.
- Rollerdrome?
- Rollerdrome, I should download it because it's on PC Game Pass. So I've got plenty of room. I put a 1 terabyte in there. So that's what I'll be playing over the holidays. What about you, Tina?
- You've guessed it. Baldur's Gate 3. There's just so much to play. And I feel like with that extended amount of time, that's the perfect opportunity to dive in, and just feel through the systems, and push through, and hopefully finish it before the new year so I can push on through the rest of the backlog as 2024 piles on new games too.
- I always like starting a game with a proper world to immerse myself in and just play that across that whole period. And I'm feeling like Avatar, Frontiers of Pandora might be cool.
- Yeah, I've heard a lot of people praising that one.
- I've heard far cry with big blue people. I'm into that. That sounds great. So yeah, I think that'll be my one.
- Ooh, good pick. I'm going to play a game that came out while I was moving that. Everyone's been talking about it. Again, I haven't got a chance to jump into it. Alan Wake 2.
- Yes!
- Obviously, again, nominated for game of the year.
- It's the most festive game. [CHUCKLES]
- I actually want to see if it's as scary as everyone's been talking about. Because I feel like I can't be scared by a video game. So I'm up for that challenge. So this holiday season, I'm going to be playing with the lights on in daylight, just in case I get scared. But I'm excited to jump in.
And again, Remedy has been doing amazing stuff. And so excited that I get to play that, finally.
- I'm excited for you. I want to wipe my memory just to experience it all over again.
- New Game Plus just came out with a whole new ending.
- That is true. And that was announced at the Game Awards as well. That's very exciting. Whole new ending.
- Super exciting.
- So you'll have to tell us what your game that you're going to be playing over the holidays is. And that is your Free Code Friday question. Again, go to twitter.com/xboxwire. And that will be Friday at noon Pacific, or 3:00 PM, Eastern. 8:00 PM. Your Saturday night. Spend your Saturday night with us. GMT.
Answer that question. About two hours, and we will randomly pick five winners for Baldur's Gate 3.
- Awesome. Awesome. Well, there you have it. That's our final show of the year. Thank you so much for inviting us into your space and joining us to talk all things video games.
Of course, Jeff and Tina, thank you for being an amazing co-host as always. And Joe, thank you for stopping by--
- MVP!
- --and being our guest.
- Yeah, yeah. I flew 11 hours just for this.
- Just for this? Nothing else?
- Delighted.
- Awesome. Again, thank you so much for joining us. Please be safe over the holidays. And we will see you next year. Have a great one.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[XBOX SOUND]