Minecraft’s Spin-off Hytale Makes Waves, Meta Layoffs, and Metacritic’s Best Game Ever

[music] Good morning, MATT.
OH, GOOD MORNING, WILL.
GOOD MORNING TO ALL OF YOU.
WELCOME TO GAMES FOR BREAKFAST, THE ONLY INTERNET TALK SHOW. WE TALK ABOUT THIS WEEK'S gaming and tech news, but that also we will officially rock you down to Electric Avenue and then maybe we'll take you higher, I don't know, uh to a place where uh the light can see. I mixed my Creed with my 1982 song from Eddie Grant. I'm sorry. Did I just have a stroke? [snorts]
I smell toast, buddy. Like,
these are the things these are the things that you that you missed by not watching the pre-show.
I feel like I'm kind of glad
which might be which might be good.
Yeah. Don't listen. I don't think anyone in any world will say that the pre-show is our best material, but it is definitely material. So if you right like you all get the refined filtered opening to the show and not the

first three attempts where we reference more cowbell and like other things and like it just doesn't work right. But this intro where we explain that this is the good intro and not the bad intro is much better because it's a meta commentary, right? And we're very high.
Not to be not to be confused with our story about meta coming up.
Thank you.
Um
I I wouldn't want any confusion about that because we have meta commentary later, but this is meta commentary.
Those are two different things. Please try and keep up. And uh if you were if you cannot keep up, a duty sergeant will be assigned to you to help you keep up. Um that is the new [laughter] militaristic games for breakfast that we have going on right now.
I just want to I just hold on. I'm just continually confused. Why was this comment held by Automod?
Show is internet uncles. I mean, we're

not your internet dads, but we are probably their internet uncles.
I guess
we're definitely the fun uncles.
I don't know.
I can't wait for my brother to have kids so I can make I can mess them up. I don't want to mess up my kids. I'm just going to mess up my brother's kids. It'll be great. [clears throat]
Games for breakfast. More like games for morning rations. Am I right?
Okay. [laughter] Now, all right. You know what? No. No, we're I'm I'm pulling us out of this nose dive. We've gone too deep into the commentary on current events.
I want to I want to preface before we get into our main story on Hightail. Um Will and I we it's a slow it's a slow early gaming gaming news month
largely because it's a very busy other news
other news month,
right? which we won't be talking about, but we did want to clarify that um

if you have stories that you'd like us to talk about and you're in the Discord, don't ever uh be afraid to post them in the industry news for breakfast chat or if you're over on the skies of blue and you see a story somewhere that you want us to talk about on breakfast, add us. Like literally just in the in the replies, just add us and be like, "Hey, I saw this story. I was thinking of you. What do you think about this?" And we'll we'll add it to the show. And if we add a show that you suggest, we will shout you out and thank you for suggesting that story because
right now
sometimes there's days like there's there's episodes like this that uh I think we have like some really good like esoteric discussions about things around the gaming space, but like the news itself is light. Does that make sense?
I'll give we we'll give you all an example that we we mentioned earlier in the pre-show. We were we were looking through to make sure sometimes we have time in the mornings on Monday to make a to do a quick check to make sure I didn't miss anything over the weekend,

which happens sometimes. But the big story that everyone's reporting in the gaming space this morning is that at a Rockstar office, a boiler blew up. No one's hurt. Everything's fine.
There's no foul play.
If if you're not familiar with the way these work, you literally made a pressure vessel in a building. And sometimes pressure vessels go boom. It's not common, but it happens. Yeah. And normally no one's hurt because there's precautions in place for when they go boom. But like that's the gaming news this MORNING IS THAT OH MY GOD, THERE WAS A HARDWARE FAILURE in the building maintenance section of a Rockstar office. [screaming] ALL RIGHT. Like that's the that's the news, right? So um if you know of any good stories, please uh don't be afraid to hit us up.
Agreed.
Matt,
yes. What do you know of the game they call Hightail?
I know that it's like what if Minecraft

but also with like hair on the character.
Okay, that's a good start. I have hair on my Minecraft character, but like that's okay.
Do you though?
They put two layers on uh a while a while back. Minecraft skins became two [laughter] layers.
Fancy. No, I actually don't. The most I know about Hightail to be perfectly honest is sort of the timeline of stories that we've talked about on this um on this show over the last I don't know six months to a year I think roughly maybe a little longer.
So so let's let's back up then and do like the quick the the quick and dirty retrospective right and Chad if I missed any major moments please let me know. A long long time ago, um there was a uh sort of a move to create servers, which are not really a single server. They're a collection of servers. They're like a server hub in Minecraft where people can like hang out. They're like server networks. One of the biggest ones is Hypixel. Hypixel um has a game called

Sky Block. It resembles the the idea of a sky block only loosely. It is actually an MMO. It is an MMO built entirely in Minecraft. I played on the channel years ago. Um, it has since become increasingly pay to win over time, which is not great. And I don't believe that that will have any bearing on high tail, but it does bear mentioning when I bring up a used to play.
When something when something evolves,
right,
it is important to sort of look at some of the places that it came from. uh and just to sort of see and again it's interesting because pieces of art or or or things that are built by a large number of people andor corporations those things even if it's in that sort of project's DNA can change but it all has to do with the groups that are
correct involved. So, uh, Hypixel made a ton of money. Um, ton of money both from the, um, the way that this usually works is,

uh, inside of Minecraft's ULA. There are ways to make money outside of Minecraft's ULA. This is not one of them. Um, you they have ranks that you pay for, um, faster cues to get into servers and for special non gameplaywinning winning perks, um, cosmetics and the things like that. made a bunch of money and they decided, hey, we've had a really good run with this Hypixel Minecraft MMO thing. We know a lot about making a game that feels like an evolution of Minecraft. Let's make a game. Take all the money from that server network and let's make a game and we'll call it Hightail and it will be like the best parts of the MMO that we're making and we'll be able to cut out some of the chaff from Minecraft which is leftover. For instance, there's like um one of the things, one of the concepts is that they wanted you to need more than 64 items of a particular type

and that's a restriction in Minecraft, right? Or has been there's like ways to work around it now. Sure.
Um so they had like this deeply convoluted system where you'd craft stacks of stuff into enchanted craft stacks of stuff. like essentially the items would compress and compress and compress and that was sort of an artifact of being in Minecraft, right? And they it feels like they've done away with that now. So, um so they they commit to this project. uh they start working on it and at some point in time, I do not recall when, I do apologize, uh they came to a deal with Riot that Riot would publish Hightail and that Riot would be in charge of all of the publishing stuff and that Riot would fund development and that, you know, okay, and then it kind of went dark and a lot of people thought it was going to be vaporware, like a dream that just sort of evaporated, you know, like Elder Scrolls or GTA 6.

I don't think those are
I'm joking.
First of all, I know
I'm messing. But yes,
um so uh the the upshot was that Riot was going to um was going to publish it and then that deal fell apart last year
and Riot said, "We're gonna cancel the game." And the head of Hypixel, Simon, said, "What if you didn't? What if I put it all on the line and bought the game back from you because you're going to cancel it, so I'll give you money to not cancel it and you'll sell it back to me." Um, and they said, "Okay." And
shout out to actually Riot for doing that. I'm I'm in a in a world where a lot of places are just gobbling up games andor IP and then when they die they're like, "No, it's now in our vault." Haha.
Uh that's just really good.

Look at you, Disney. Um looking at you, WB. Um rip Batgirl. Uh, so we heard a a reasonable amount about it and then it's sort of I'm not going to say this is like full Willy Wonkaesque like and then the lights turned on and people got golden tickets and there's a magical experience waiting for you, but it's kind of like that, right? They sort of spun this out and now Hitale is out in early access and by all reports it's pretty good. Now, we should be very clear. I haven't had a chance to play it yet. It's probably I'm either playing it on stream this week as a backup game or next week as a full game. And if I play it this week as a backup game, it'll probably get a whole slot next week. Um, and Matt hasn't played it either. I have seen some gameplay footage. What we're largely going to be talking about is the reaction to it, not the game itself, because we get radical concept. We haven't played the game. Mhm.

So, we can't talk about a game
wild.
Yeah. The uh I was just trying to look up how much is it is the early access running at this point.
Uh the there are three tiers of early access. The cheapest of which I believe is $20. Um me double check that. Uh the Hightail store where you can go. It's store.highttail.com.
$69.99 if you want curse. If you want the the top tier founders edition, yeah, it's $70. The mid tier is 35 and the bottom tier is 20. However, I should also note, and this is like really important
because I think this is very worth clarifying whenever we do this, all of the differences between those are cosmetic.
Yeah, this is supporter. This is this is a supporter level thing.
This is not like earlier access or premium access. No, all of these tiers come with game access and uh you get to lock in your username right now and

those are the big things and everything else is like, "Hey, are you like sure that you're going to play Hightail every day for the next 10 years? Great. Spend 70 bucks and get some cool cosmetics."
Yeah. I do like there's also a message on there, you know, this is early accessive development. Expect bugs and changes as we work towards a full release. So, there's no like
and they've been quite upfront about that, right? [clears throat] which I think is to their benefit because um I think that one of the reasons that Hightail is doing so well is that it has this story behind it, right? That it has this like we came from scrappy roots. We were running a Minecraft server. We decided to make a game. It didn't work out. We pulled together all of this money and bought it back from big company. Riot's not viewed unfavorably in the industry. Definitely not as unfavorable as like Ubisoft or EA or Blizzard, whatever, right? But it is still a big company,

right? So, we bought game back from big company and now we need your help is a very scrappy story in an era where people are increasingly disenfranchised with the idea of big publishers and big companies, right?
Yeah.
Um, also here's another interesting one. Not on Steam.
Yep. which is kind of an interesting I mean it it makes sense, right? Uh in a lot of ways for them to not go through Steam because Minecraft doesn't go through Steam, but it is another element of this that it is off the grid. It's very indie. It's very scrappy. It's not on Steam. They bought it back. Like that narrative sells
the narrative the narrative of it being very indie is is sort of interesting. And but again, you go back to specifically the DNA of a project as it as it sort of comes out, right? Like Minecraft was its own thing that you downloaded Minecraft and that's the that's how you got it. So Hightail, it

seems just only natural that they would go that route. And because they are so closely tied to this incredibly popular mod on Minecraft, their audience already knows how to do it. This isn't like a awareness campaign they have to run, right? Like they're they're And I believe um that the the because it was released last week. Yes.
Uh the end of last week. Yes.
Yeah.
So um I believe the reception has proven this strategy to be a good one.
Yeah. Um it officially released the 13th Uh,
just to [laughter] artful just to confirm this is live in 2026. I'm not watching a Twitch rerun or something.
Yes, correct. It is. [laughter] Um, uh, is Off Steam going to be the gaming version of Off Broadway? No. No. And,

uh, to to be completely fair, yes, Simon has said that it may end up on Steam at some point, but it isn't now. And that's [clears throat]
[sighs]
There is a sort of there is a weird category of games that started off steam and made their way on, right, that have a really diehard following. Looking at you, um, Escape from Tarov and Path of Exile
or are the two that first come to mind, right, where they're like, "Yeah, we have this thing." or like Final Fantasy 14 or like there are other big games that have gone this route where they're like, "Yeah, you can buy our game on Steam or you cannot buy our game on Steam because as ridiculous as this is for a large portion of the population to understand, there are people that really hate Steam.
They don't they don't like participating in that space." And that's very fair and valid and there's no shade on that opinion, right? Like if you don't want to participate in Steam, this is another game you can get that comes from an

indie developer that isn't on Steam. Great. Right.
Um so I think that the narrative is really selling games. And let's talk about that reception real quick. Um the the two big metrics for the reception
because again we don't have like Steam numbers, right?
Correct. Yeah. Yeah.
Um is a post from Hightail uh that comes to us by way of IGN. Um Simon said uh that they have officially covered with the early access funds and this is a fantastic metric just to keep in mind
that with the money they've already made from early access they have secured the next two years of development costs which means so much more. I think when we talk about this game and when people um look to buying it, right, it's an indie game, right? It's an indie game

that could go away at any time. You don't have Steam protection on your refunds. Like, wait, how am I going to Well, they've said that they've got two years of funding. So, you're going to get two years of development already,
which I think is an excellent metric to like look at, right? Um and uh the other big metric is that it was the number one game game not category but game uh on Twitch on the 13th which is
not unexpected but is nice confirmation that
because one of the reasons that Minecraft did so well and does so well is it streams super Well, right. Minecraft streams super well because it's bright, it's colorful, everything is big and chunky. You can watch it on a phone and see what's going on.
It's also fast until it's slow and slow until it's fast. Like there's good there's good areas of of uh tension and release based on what kind of streamer you're watching. Yeah.

Um,
so the It's funny like I've uh played a little Minecraft, not a lot of Minecraft, and uh I always felt like because I'm redacted years old that like I was just outside like the the peak Minecraft time. Even though you might even say that now is peak Minecraft time, but like when Minecraft was becoming Minecraft, right? like when it was and when it was the soup dour and that was all anyone was talking about at all. And part of me is like, oh well this is interesting. This spins off that dynamic and that game and this is an early thing. Is it worth like get giving it a shot? Maybe will maybe actually do you want to do that on Thursday?
We could do that for our Thursday stream. It's $20. It'll be fine. Um I
Yeah, I I think
I I think that might be a fun exercise.
Yeah, I think the So

I also think that Hightail is when we when we it is inevitably compared to Minecraft, right? For like a whole bunch of
really quite valid reasons, right? Number one, the studio that made it is a bunch of Minecraft nerds, right? These are a bunch of people who were so nerdy they took apart Minecraft for parts and put it back together into an MMO. Like even though I'm not a huge fan of the way some of the mechanics from a gameplay side work in
Hypixel.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It is a technical triumph. There was like a whole lobby system and there are multiple different games with like sat tracking and advancement and um you know rotations and seasons and the the sky block world has like Minecraft seasons and like mayoral elections and like a storyline and events and it is a big

deal and a technical triumph, right? So these are Minecraft mega nerds making a new game. Of course, it's going to feel like Minecraft cuz they know Minecraft, right? Right.
Um, so I think that that's uh one of the big comparisons. I I think the other one is a narrative one. It feels a lot like
you're talking about of it of its design and its inception.
Yeah. It feels like the same kind of scrappy come from nothing Smash social media hit that Minecraft was even though it's not. Right. Like to be very clear, bare bones alpha Minecraft sucks and this does not suck.
Yeah.
Um this is also standing on the shoulders of giants, but it does feel like they're not beholden to a lot of the decisions that Minecraft made early on.
Look at you creepers.
All right. Uh Galaxian. I actually, this is something I I worry about, too. It feels like it might be the type of game to download uh just to retry an hour later, delete it. Like I I that I think

is why I'm very curious to try it out on Thursday because does anyone ever sort of feel this way cuz again time is a limited thing and we can't play all the games that we really want to play, right? Like there are moments in gaming history. Uh I think Minecraft is my big one. Um and maybe the like at the at the peak of Fortnite for instance too like these cultural moments where everyone is playing a thing.
Yeah. Um, and I I definitely missed the Minecraft bus. So, there is like I I'll be curious after playing it on Thursday. Is this me just being like I can reclaim some FOMO here or is this um something that like I can actually get into and want to engage with in a larger way? And I will say this, regardless of what the answer to that is, for me personally, due to the story of this game, due to the story of how it was uh conceived and created and bought and sold and bought,

I would not be upset even if we just did if if I dropped 1999 to to to try it out and support just this journey and see if it's something we could turn it into content and it will be fun and nice. So, like I um yeah, I'm I'm really really curious about it.
Actually, let's let's I'm kind of curious. I've seen some people talking about it in chat chat. Um
if you can do a thumbs up emote, there should be thumbs up availables in both um in both.
Yeah, there's a version of thumbs up.
Yeah, there's a version of thumbs up. Can we get thumbs ups in chat if you have already played or plan to play Hightail? Like what's the what's the market saturation look like in our community?
In our Yeah.
Right. Because
I'd be curious about that.
I we we've established that our community doesn't necessarily conform to broader gaming trends a couple of times. Um yeah. Yeah. There's there's there's a

thumbs up. Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool. This is the first time I'm hearing it. Okay. All right. Yo, and this is this is a fantastic God. This is such an interesting idea, right? While everyone's while everyone's getting their keyboards and getting into chat and putting them.
That's me and Silkong. I brought it knowing I wasn't going to finish it. I got my money's worth regardless. Yeah.
Right.
If you if you appreciate the the the art that someone makes, you don't have to technically eng You don't have to technically engage with it in any way that you don't want to,
right? Like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have definitely there are games that I have purchased after watching a let's play and being like I don't need to play it but like I do want to support the developers of this excellent game
but I am also in a doubly privileged position in that I get and I need to acknowledge that when we talk about that right one my games are tax writeoffs
and two I have the disposable income to spend on games and to encourage artists to do things like that and that's part

of my existence in the digital space so not everyone one could do that and I'm aware of that, right? But I do want to own those two. Uh,
uh, Jiggly just says, "A lot of fun, but there's some gamebreaking bugs. Those who use AMD or integrated graphics cards." So, we'll be on the lookout for that. That'll be a uh,
yeah,
interesting. And again, that's that's the that's the earliest access gamble, right? Like,
oh no. Is that me or is that Matt? Oh no. Chat, can you hear me? Can Can you see me? Has Matt Has Matt been Thanos snapped? Or is it me? I think I think it's Matt. Okay, cool. It's just Matt. All right. Okay, great. Awesome. I can never tell. Um, we we'll keep talking about this while I try and figure out where Matt has gone. Uh, Matt has gone gone. Great. I am now expecting a Discord message. That Discord message says, "Well, you vanished. I'm still here.

[snorts]
Um, okay. No. Clean feed. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. This is very peculiar. Hold on.
Hear me now, right? Yeah. Well, because I have you muted in the call because you're supposed to be in clean feed.
I know. So, if I mute this is fun. This is fun for everyone, isn't it?
Yeah.
Nope. Can't hear you in clean feed.
I don't hear you in clean feed. That's the weird.
I'm bouncing in clean feed and you're not.
I'm going to remake the clean feed call. We'll keep talking here and then we'll do that.
Yeah. Um All right. Uh Okay.
Sorry everybody. This This error brought

to you by a boiler in the basement.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. This is the boiler, right? Yeah. Okay. So, I do want to address a thing that I saw on um that somebody brought up in chat. Hold on a sec. Uh I'm going to read it out. Lot unfinished product says, "This feels a lot like it's legally distinct Minecraft. Could they get PAWorlded?" I don't think so. And here's why. They are far from the first game to do like Minecraft doesn't have a monopoly on voxalbased adventure games.
Though they'd love to think that
they would love to think that actually I don't know that they
No, actually no. I take it back. I take it back. That was a that was a snap.
Yeah. Right. Mojang is not right. Also, I I think I might have been more worried if Mojang had not very recently opened up all of their um stuff to open um uh to modding. Right.

Right.
Hold on. I'm I'm I'm changing.
You pop it into clean feed and then we'll see if it works.
Yeah.
I will let you in. Talk for me.
Hello.
There we go. I think we are back.
We are indeed. Hooray.
Okay.
Pray we do not get back further.
Yeah. Um, so I feel like it's it's not really in the cards that they're going to get obliterated, right? I think that I think that Mojang knows that they would lose, right? Pretty clear.
Or or even if they wouldn't lose, I mean, then there's the the little court of public opinion to think about, too, right? Like I think um
Yep. I think that this won't go that way because it's not and technically I mean we're going to see with with the the patents and the lawsuits and all that sort of stuff about PAW World and and Pokemon.
You guys got a really good point that PAL World also has the Nintendo Sony

beef going on, right? And I think that's a very accurate thing. Uh
even though God, it's so funny how companies work. I I want to and we'll get back to what Mila just said about the Minecraft Java deviscation. the S the Sony Nintendo thing and that sort of I guess not even beef or just congruence of events. But also on the flip side of those companies, the Sony produced Legend of Zelda movie is now going to after its first year live exclusively on Netflix. Like my point is all of these companies have so many different facets that like oh this company's getting in trouble because power world and the thing but they're also doing this with these two companies. The movie part of the companies are really going together. Well, it's an odd these companies have become so big that like a lot of the beefs don't don't transcend departments.

Yeah. Um uh and and I want to address um something about this. Um WLE says, "I can't allow I can't see Microsoft allowing for an MCDK or something like that." No, they completely deobuscated the codebase. So they have removed all obfuscation from the codebase with the express intent of allowing modding of Java Minecraft to be easier. Now, I think part of the reason that Microsoft is down with that is that they know that they can't win the Java war because what will happen if Microsoft ever stops supporting Java and demands that everyone move to bedrock is that the modding community will just start updating the Java version.
Yeah.
Right. And that ship has sailed. They can't undo it.
I don't think this is an altruistic thing. I think this is a factual thing. I think if they could do that and get away with it and make that work, it would have already been done and they can't.
Yeah. So, I think that that's um that that's a big part of it. And I think that that sort of um condoning,

encouraging step up towards modding is a sign that they're okay with something like Hightail um existing, especially because there have been other games in the same millu as Hightail. Who remembers? Oh god. I I have like I'm having flashbacks, chat. Oh god. What was the game that everyone had like it was like a duo dev team that like people bought and then vanished for like years and then came back with an update and then made it to Steam and made like one update and then vanished again. Cube World. Thank you, Grass. We've already had Cube World. Now, I'm not suggesting that this is uh I like Cube World. Yes. Cube World. Right. So, like I'm not
I also like how it's sometimes it's or it's a question or it's just a statement.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I don't think that um there's other elements in the genre. Right. Minecraft for all of its ubiquity

is not does not have exclusive rights to the idea of a voxalbased uh survival game. Right. They don't. They would really like to maybe, but they don't. Right. And I I think that's fine. Right. Um,
also speaking of Voxil was just smaller. Thinking about getting back into Valheim. I loved Valheim. Valheim was fun.
Yeah. I also think that the sandbox is big enough for everyone to play in. Pun very much intended. Right. Like I think that Hightail will serve a function that I'm very interested to see when we dive into it. um which is that Minecraft is not a game about combat. It is a game about building things that includes some combat and many mod packs try and steer in a different direction in that direction.
I'm very interested to see how Hightail with its MMO roots focuses on combat as a concept and includes some building. Um I'm very interested in that. Also,

I think it I think that might be a reason why I'm excited for it because that is something that I think that that that split sounds more exciting to me than the splitting it the other way for for my own personal use case, you know. So,
yeah. Um, it's also about losing the stuff you build. Yeah, creepers remain the biggest piece of technical debt in Minecraft that should never have existed. Highly recommend if you're tired of creepers too, a reminder that the uh game rule for mob griefing off exists. You can just turn it off. You can make it so they don't blow your stuff up. You just don't have to deal with that.
Um yeah, I know it's not what technical debt is, Chad. I can't think of the right word. It's like um design hangup.
It's a uh design holdover. It's a thing that they're stuck with now. And and Robo, excellent point. I never saw Minecraft as it own game more of a base for people to make what they want of it.

And I actually used this point when Will and I did um well on a on a couple different things. Um uh when we did a panel um no, I'm sorry, podcast. When we did the podcast about about the Minecraft movie, we were discussing Minecraft like our individual use cases andor uh history with Minecraft. And the thing that Minecraft and games like it because of how exactly you just described it structured there, Robo, is it can be so many different things to so many different people.
Yeah.
And and that even continues into this story, right? The Hypixel team wanted it to be this other thing, and they've taken it to the largest extreme I think you possibly can at this point. Uh, and now they've made a g a standalone game essentially from the ground up around that concept. Um, I and I I really do respect Minecraft for that. I think it it gave everyone again we've already used the term sandbox, but something to play in and try and make sure that like

whatever they wanted Minecraft to be, Minecraft could basically be that. And that's why its ubiquity is there. That's why that, you know, and I'll even I'll even go out of limb and say that's why a successful spin-off like Hightail can exist. Even if Hightail peters out over the next two years, they have enough funding to work on the game for two years so they actually have a shot. That is a success story in my opinion.
Yeah, I agree.
So, um I don't know. I I think Minecraft is such a I am a fan of any piece of art that you can engage with at your own pace in your own way. It feels like Minecraft is a really is is is the one of the pinnacles of that in the gaming space.
I agree.
Um
I also think and and um you know there's the inevitable question of like is Hightail going to be the Minecraft killer?
No.
No.
Minecraft is the fungus of the gaming world. By which I mean it is immortal in a way that we do not understand and you

cannot kill it in any way that matters. It will be here when until computers stop running Java which will be when we stop having computers. I need people to understand that the game is immortal, right? Like it people Oh god, I know people who are still playing mod packs that came out in seven or in 1.12 that are based in 1.12. I know people are playing m mod packs that are based in 1.08. Right? These are versions of Minecraft that are older than some people who may be watching this show. The game is immortal, right? Nothing's gonna kill it. And I I think that um the question is, is Hightail going to carve out its own niche to stand alone? And I think the answer is yes. I think that it will succeed with people like Matt who maybe don't like the balance, right? So Matt loves Valheim and doesn't dig Minecraft, right? which suggests to me that he wants more guided or he wants

more adventure and less build. And it feels like Hightail is in that space. We've seen the rise of Enshrouded recently as well. Similar concept. Um uh Rust is kind of a similar concept although god this is not Rust, right? Not Rust. Um
I will um I will also even though is this out there? Oh, it's not yet. Okay. Uh people were asking in chat um where the episode that Will and I did. Will can you post this in the places because I don't have the right thing open.
Yeah.
I was going to send it to the we have uh there's a YouTube page for the podcast called the only podcast about movies but we I that we just sort of started that and started populating it over on YouTube. uh and will our episode falls in the in the in the weird span of right before we started doing that actively and now we are uploading one episode a day of our backlog for a 10-year podcast. So it will take forever to get that to YouTube.
That's fine.

So that's on uh just our web page. But yeah, if you want to hear me and Will talk about Minecraft, the Minecraft movie specifically for like an hour and a half,
yeah,
that is that is there for your listening pleasure.
So yeah, that's um that's largely our thoughts on Hightail. I think it is. I'm fascinated. I I genuinely think this feels differently to me than a lot of other games. Right. Okay. So, like this isn't Brighter Shores, which is a game that has come up more times than I thought it would in a while. Matt, do you know what Brighter Shores is?
No, but the the the fact that it's something that is forgotten that is called Brighter Shores is interesting to me.
Right. Okay. So, Brighter Shores is the um next project by one of the original developers of Runescape.
Oh, wow.
Except it appears to have learned very few of the lessons from Runescape. It is still tilebased. It is still tick based.

It is like it's it's just more like do thing A until you need to do thing B because that's what the game tells you to do. Um, and it feels very bare bones and it feels like it's not really profiting from the lessons learned by Fruitscape.
This feels like it has learned all of the lessons from Minecraft, right? It ditches the crafting grid for a lot of things. It has better in inventory crafting. It treats materials more interestingly. Like there's a bunch of different like little lessons that it feels like it took right at the start from Minecraft and said, "Cool. I see why Minecraft did this. We're not going to do it. We're going to do something different." And I feel like that's one of the reasons that it'll stick around is that it is very willing to kill all of its zeros. Right.
Yeah. I I have high hopes for We'll check it out Thursday if if uh obviously the Twitch folks, Brad, if you're around

there, you know where to go. YouTube will be doing that over on Twitch if you're interested. Twitch.tv extra credits Thursday 4 pm right after Design Club. So,
yep. Right after design club,
which will that design club will be on YouTube,
correct? The high
play. We're actually looking [clears throat] at a new game from one of Jeff's buddies uh and offering feedback. So, if you have if you are in a hankering to watch me and Jeff pick apart a game and maybe offer your own thoughts on it as a viewer, that'll be on Design Club this Thursday, 2:00 p.m. Eastern, 11:00 a.m. Pacific here on YouTube and Twitch. So, please join us for that.
There we go. Uh, also, this just reminded me almost watchable was the only lesson learned from Rescape was if you try to copy WoW, people will just go play WoW. Um I the on that note uh we need to plan our our our dive back into that for midnight. We need to plan whatever that content thing
um and
I think it's March.
Uh early access is March. Full release is April, I think.
Um
whenever you think we it'll it'll be better for us.

Yeah. Uh that Oh, man. That's, you know, Matt, we're going to finish one project and then I'm going to I'll put on my planning hat and content.
You got it, Mcruber.
Yeah, we've got several pieces of stuff uh that are coming down the pipe.
Uh so, is that it?
I think that's it for chat. Actually, genuine. Um is there anything I'm missing about Hightail? Is there is there any reason that you love the game that you are like, "Oh my god, I'm gonna get a Hightail tattoo on my forehead to show my love of Hightail and I you will just completely miss the reason that Hightail deserves to be on my forehead." Like, is there anything that I'm missing that is a reason that you love the game?
Speak now or forever hold your voxels.
No tattoos on this forehead. Yeah. My first child will be named Hightail.
Wow.
You know, fair valid.

Also fair and valid.
I hate time zones. I have I have an unending personal crusade against time zones.
They're coarse and rough and they get everywhere.
Yeah.
Um
Okay, hold on. I I want [clears throat] I need I need to ask follow-up questions here real quick. Why does it like for Hightail? Why does it strike you as an MMO? Because it has a full single player mode. You can play the whole adventure game single player. Is it
I think it's it's it's the DNA of of Hypixel,
right? Like it's what I'm expecting from it.
Yeah. Even if um even if it doesn't if it isn't a technically an MMO, it will have the DNA of an MMO built into it. There there is a Minecraft mod that does
use XP per thing you do in Minecraft.

So like if you mine, your mining level goes up. If you craft, your crafting level goes up. Um, that is a that is a plugin for for Minecraft. I don't think they've got anything like that in Hightail, but um, [laughter]
little bit different, but I appreciate the poll. You could play Left 4 Dead single player as well, but why would you? I think but this game you could like Hightail specifically there is an element of it that is designed for a single player experience where I think Left 4 Dead is designed for multiplayer and then they throw a bunch of dummy bots in there if you can't get your friends together.
Um the uh and and to this um the single player just runs a server on your computer. That is a trick um to accomplish something that they wanted to do. Oh, I didn't mention this. I should probably mention this.
See, there was a thing we forgot.
I forgot one of
on your forehead,
right? Yeah. One of Hightail's big initial pitches um is that they are doing full day one

mod compatibility. Uh and one of the really big things about that is that they are doing um uh they're they're building it. So, if you've ever modded Minecraft, you know that there are two kinds of mods, client side mods and server side mods. And that can be a bit of a pain to get the two groups of mods to play nice together. As someone who stood up several servers, it can be a bit of a pain at points. Um, one of the reasons that they decided to do the local host server thing for single player is that all mods are server side.
So if you join your friend's hightail server, you don't need to do any mod things because they're on the server, not on your client, which I think is very good and interesting. And so in order to accommodate single player, that's one of the ways to do it. And you can't have client side only mods for every player because then you don't have a single authoritative source for all

players, and that's bad.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh so I think
Oh, yeah. Civ 6 is a good solution for that, too, just finding it and downloading it, too. But I like I like both.
Yeah. Yeah. I uh I'm very I'm very excited about that bit, too. um that they're they're paying that bit forward and saying, "Hey, we started off as a mod. [snorts]
You should mod our mod."
So, you put a hat on the hat
and then it's not funnier, but you get a towering pile of hats and then you light it on fire and then you sell it for the price of a small car
and that's how it works.
A hatchback. But yeah,
bop. Well,
speaking of things I'm not excited about.
Oh, well, I was going to do ads first, but you could be ads. No, you could be not excited about ads.
Sure. I could be not excited about ads. Do you want to be first on there or do you want to be second on there?
Um, I could be first.

Okay. By the way, everyone watching, if this is your first time, hello. I'm Matt. That's Will. We basically do ads in front of in the middle of the show when Twitch gets ads so you don't have to. We can time out where Twitch gets ads. We can't time out where YouTube gets ads. Apologies for that. So, we're going to sell you things that you can't buy in our fake ad section. Starting with whatever Will is going to try to not sell you right now.
Hi there everybody. Will from Extra Credits here. Sell you the concept of uh stable internet. Have you ever been doing a show and like midthought and all of a sudden you have like a panic because your co-host uh doesn't feel so good Mr. Stark and just into the ether, right? Uh constant internet, right? Not fast internet, but consistent internet that doesn't like randomly just crap out in the middle of a show. Um is a concept that I would like to sell uh to you as a thing that we need. Um, so I would highly recommend 10 out of 10 that you not have the experience of

that was good. That was good. Um, hey everyone, Matt from Extra Credits from Matt for extra credits here. Uh, yes, I said that twice. Just go with it. I would like to sell you on the concept of really appreciating wonderful service technicians. I actually did have a huge internet outage at my home uh on last Friday to the point where my actual fiber box just died. It was 9 years old. I actually then had a phenomenal experience talking with someone, getting a tech to come out, and then having that tech be super knowledgeable, know exactly what needed to happen, not making me do the whole rigma roll of like do all the 9,000 things I already tried before. I talked with this person, he delivered and fixed the problem easy, and then I filled out the survey and gave him 10 out of 10 stars. That's how that should be. I'd like to sell that as a as a I was not expecting

that to be the experience I had. Um, but I it was one of the few times uh that that that was a wonderful a wonderful a wonderful boon. Those are those are the things.
Yeah,
those are the things we're selling.
Yep.
I I I now an internet scientist. Alex, an internet scientist visited me. Do you want another one, Will? Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, I do.
Here we go.
Hi there, everyone. Will from Mad from Extra Credits here. Uh here to sell you the concept of uh filling more time. Are you trying to fill a specific amount of time in your day? Consider just pause. Just take a second, stare at a wall, let your eyes unfocus, and just take a breath. I took a train trip yesterday to go into the city to hang out with my brother, and I just did nothing for like 20 minutes. It was great. You should do that. You should just take time to just

don't just don't and fill the time that way.
I really I really do like that message. I think that's good.
I actually had the most fun. Like not the most fun, but it was like a truly relaxing experience to just like get on the train and get in like and just put in some earbuds, put on some music, and just chill for like 20 minutes and not have to worry about anything. If you, by the way, if you have uh if you are also a neurospicy ADHD haver, highly recommend being in transit for calming some amount of that. It works for me at least. Um, if you're in motion to a thing, you're doing a thing. Even if you're not doing anything, it's great. Works real well. All right. Um, let's move on to uh things we're not huge fans of. Uh,
so,
oh, I got
Well, we can do that one first. It's a

three Pete.
Yeah, it's a three.
This isn't the exact story we were talking about. We're teasing the other thing. Um, so uh we've talked about this a little bit before, but New World um is essentially uh you know, they're retiring it. Uh and now the official timeline has been released from the what remains of Amazon Game Studios. Yeah. Uh, basically the game will be playable until January 31st, 2027, so a little bit over a year from now. Uh, you can no longer buy the game. You'll be able to buy the in-game currency if you already own the game. Uh, I think up to 6 months till that last January 31st, 2027 date. And there'll be no new anything the entire time. And the reason why we wanted to sort of talk about um because we've talked about New World before, actually a lot I feel like on this on this show um and this may be the last unless something whackadoo happens. Um we often talk about end of life cycle for games. So I actually don't want to

specifically talk about New World outside of this announcement.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to talk about too. And I wanna I want to talk I actually would love uh Brad and Janet's opinions on end of life cycle for essentially always online games that you've known are always going to be online from the get-go from the drop when you bought it from when you subscribed or whatever. Like I want to know like do you think and you can check the show notes if you're watching this on the on the VOD but I've I've given you the the the cliff notes of the information that they are giving here. Does this feel to you like a fair tact andor plan when a game has been decided to uh cease running and being like does this seem adequate to you if you had purchased and were playing this game?
Right. So if if New World was and and to

to to help with this, imagine if your game of choice, right, did this,
right? If your game of choice, your Final Fantasy 14, your Runescape, your WoW, your pick your Minecraft server with your friends, right? Your whatever. um did this said you can't no one else can join and in a year this is going away but you have a year to finish unfinished business right
how do we feel about that
yeah oh this is a good one right if Warframe reached end of life now you also don't need to worry about that because there will be two apps that run on every computer at the heat death of the universe Minecraft and Warframe um they'll just be there. They'll just be there.
If if if uh Digital Ex uh if DE wants all my money, all they got to do is make the Switch 2 version. I will jump back

in that game so quick.
I got bad news for you, buddy. It's something I don't believe.
Is it really?
Uh as along with the mobile versions because they made it run on phones because I'm pretty I'm pretty sure it's cuz the devs were bored one day. They were like, "Hey, can I cram this onto a phone?" And then they did and they were like, "Oh, no. We can cram this onto a phone."
Yeah. So, let's see here. Let's go down some of the uh lists here. Gives me a chance to burn out then come back for the party at the end of the world was a good one from Travesty. Uh, a year is quite a long runway and they could have just for sure ended it in 30 days. You're right, uh, dads that it's funny that's that's sort of what I was more expecting. Um, and this is all true from like as long as it is a very explicit it was always online game and I believe New World was it's an MMO. That's kind of how it has to function. Um, I would prefer they turned off the shop or removed cost of the items in the shop because as of the FAQ, there will be no refunds. That is true.
Um, but they're also making that plane

here as well. I mean, would I like it if they just didn't do it? Yeah, I think it would be a better move. But,
you know, this feels very company company focused.
Yeah. Um
um
yeah, I I think uh
and this is this is interesting too from uh uh MKA uh I think that no one else can join is a little sad. I think a lot of people are going to try to get a taste of the game and vibes in the last couple weeks party of what happened uh kind of like what happened to Anthem. I you know it would be nice what I would love to see is make it free like let people download it for free for a month and just run the servers into the ground at the end of its life cycle.
I I think that part of it is that they don't want there to be any reasonable chance of a reason to save it.
Yeah, I think that's very true. That's the reason. Right now, that being said, I've been holding out on you, Matt.

I have never played but own New World.
Oh, interesting.
So, if we ever want to do Dead MMO Tour New World from a completely new player perspective, that can happen cuz I own it and I can download it, but I've never played it.
That's so funny.
Um,
yeah.
Yeah. Maybe there's something in there. Maybe there's an episode or a stream or something in there because that is
Yeah. So, so, so let's let's talk about this.
Oh my god. It would be so funny to to like I think six months into the year will probably be the deadest it's ever going to be, right? Yep.
And then it will slowly trickle up. But I'd be interested in the new player experience at that time frame, like in June or July. And the new player experience on January 31st.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. like your tune is one day old.
Yeah. Um, okay. Uh, I do I do want to address this because it's come up a couple of times. No,
not unless they plan to do it from the

start. There are a bunch of legal reasons that they probably can't release the server code unless they plan to do that from the start. There are server plugins that they don't have the rights to release. All kinds of stuff like that. So that that is um there are two conversations, right? Should MMOs be prepared to do that is a different conversation than can this MMO do that? And the can this MMO do that is probably not. That's my bet. Right. Will they do it? No, absolutely not. Right? Because then they'd be introducing a competitor that they funded to the space. Now, I think Amazon Games is probably just fully bailing, right? which means they should because they're not losing anything and they would regenerate some amount of goodwill towards the brand that they've burned over the years.
Yeah.
But they're not going to and they may not be able to because they don't own all of the like
um the rights to the server code, right?

They may have purchased things that they can't re-release. Um and that gets more complicated. And then the other question is should MMOs plan to release their server code at end of life? And again, that's a different discussion that we're not going to have today.
Sure. Uh Janet asks, "Why have a shop for a game that's going to disappear soon?" Well, there's two reasons. One, they want to make as much money as they can on their way out the door. But two, the game to be played, this is actually, I think, more I was going to say damning, but I don't think it's damning because I think it's obvious. uh um what's the word I'm looking for when uh you can really see the game's intent because New World has an has a shop that you can spend for items and whatever, right? Uh real world money. It is designed for that experience,
right? And therefore, if you look, the nice thing to do would just sort of like maybe give everyone a free limit of like fake New World bucks and let them spend it every day until the servers go down and they don't spend anything to sort of

like mitigate that design mechanic that you've sort of had. But that to me says from the get-go the one of the main ways that this game balanced itself was based around the user buying more stuff with real money.
Yes. And I will be very interested to see how this game plays even from a new player experience when the shop doesn't exist. How slow is that progression? How how how different is the experience, you know? Um but
yeah. Uh so anyway,
so that's that's New World.
Yeah. Che
what's the next what's the next? Yeah. Yeah. Cheers. Cheers to cheers to what what is dead may never die. What is dead may never die.
Oh yeah. What is dead may NEVER DIE. WHAT
IS MAY NEVER DIE. Uh this is the 5070. Um so there were Okay, this is a weird story. The

lots of people were like, "Oh my god, they've pulled the 5070 from stores and it's never coming back and the 5070 Ti has been cannibalized." And that's not the story. The story is that the the graphics card manufacturers are running into such significant supply issues that they can't get 5070s into production at two stores. That might be in for the indefinite future. That might be just for now. We don't know. But the 5070 is experiencing significant supply chain issues. Uh so that's fun. Thanks. AI bubble pop already pop.
Someone needs to make what? What can pop? What can pop an AI bubble? Chat,
right answers only. If there's an actual bubble in front of you made of AI, what is the one object that could pierce and cause its uh uh uh globular uh shape to

cease to be?
Draw me a hand. I like Well, we got lots of stuff coming in here. What? [laughter] Okay, here we go. I This is so hard to click. Augmented reality gun. Good. Uh, my soul. Yep. Molotov. Uh-huh. John Connor. Wait, hold on. How about a stiff breeze? EMP would probably do the job. Regulation needle. I dig that. A shotgun. Listen, it worked in Stranger Things.
I love pretty big. Oops. Ignore all previous instructions and pop.
Yeah. Oh, that's good. Or perhaps just a human artist with a pen. Um, [laughter] Goldie, basic accounting. Yep. I like basic accounting. That's pretty good. Yeah. Um, for anyone who's not in the loop, this is monetarily

unsustainable at every level. Um there is no world in which this becomes monet like this bubble becomes monetarily feasible. Um that's not even said with that like that is a separate issue from my dislike and disdain for the use of uh generative AI in artistic work um and for its um permeation throughout culture. uh separately as an aside the math ain't math then
yeah like
and what they're hoping it's it's funny this all ties together and this ties together with the story we were going to talk about but it's it's sort of like an undercurrent story uh will you found that story about um Basil's interview a while ago about like essentially like wanting you to rent your computers as opposed to owning your computers remember we were talking about the tinfoil hatness of that a couple weeks ago
like that feels like an undercurrent plan still. Yeah.
Um but even if that moves forward,

I don't think this is going to flow the way like monetarily and numbers wise the way that anyone thinks.
Yep. Agree. Uh so that is that is all of this to say the 5070 is not dead. Probably it may come back, it may not. We'll see. But also a reminder, the supply chain is in flux. If you see stuff not available, that doesn't mean it's never going to be available. It means the supply chain's in flux. And unfortunately for us, we have a lot of experience with that. So,
also, if you are looking to buy any hardware, even though the prices have already started going up, uh, a lot of like pre-made manufacturers for computers and stuff have around 6 to9 months of inventory like in warehouses right now. That's roughly what it is. So, if there's something you've been eyeing and you mean to get it, it might not be the worst idea to pull that trigger because after the 6 to9 months of that inventory sort of leaving,
I think it's going to get a real it's going to be real difficult uh for the end of 2026 and into 2027 with hardware

stuff.
Uh so, wait, cheers to cheers to uh what is Dead May Never Die Die
that we can't get. It was funny twice, it's funny three times.
That's right.
What is that may never die? [laughter]
Meta. Oh, Meta, if I never had to speak your name again. Uh, Meta laid off a ton of studios uh basically in a massive pivot to AI. That's they're sort of shifting their metaversal projects over to uh the bubble which uh basic accounting will hopefully one day pop. Uh CNBC reports this. It's in our show notes. essentially uh they this we the tales all the time, right? You have a successful app that rates the looks of people on your college campus and then somehow you become a billionaire. Um
that's a very relatable experience.
Pull yourselves up from your bootstraps, right?
Um no, so the

Meta shifted its from Facebook to Meta because Zuck was all in on the metaverse. Yep,
we know the story. He posted a dumb picture that looked like uh an Xbox avatar from the OG system or no, the 360 with no legs. It was a picture of a terrible Eiffel Tower and that like caused the that was the first domino to fall in the metaveral nightmare that they have since lost billions of dollars on. Uh what sucks about this is in the I think as part of this grand ambition as we all know they bought Oculus for I think
$2 billion.
It was a bunch a lot of money stupid amounts of money.
Um and now uh they are coming to the realization that
I don't like to take credit for things often uh because often I can't. But I think the I have said from the get-go about VR and AR. First of all, I love them both dearly. I wish VR wasn't a

niche. I was playing Resident Evil 4 in VR this weekend and god, it's probably the best experience I've ever had in a headset. Um, but uh the user base is incredibly small and um it will not grow. And I think Meta is finally realizing this after burning piles of cash. It will not grow until it is something that is attractive to wear and they are seeing that with their partnership with Ray-B band and their sort of metaowered sunglasses with the cameras and the one little screen thing that you can kind of see above your eye. Um, I have not tried them. I think the tech looks really interesting, but I also don't want fa I don't want to use anything that is Facebook. That's why I've stopped using Oculus headsets. You know, I don't own a MetaQuest, blah blah blah blah blah. Um, but they're they're learning this and the sad the sad realization is here is after buying Oculus, after buying multiple VR game studios, um, they have decided to lay off and close down a bunch of them.
Yep.
Um, and they're going to pivot all of

their those resources pointing more towards AI.
Sure. Um they're they're shifting like corporate titles around for the people who are in charge of the metaverse are now in charge of um uh oh god what's this what's the name I have to find the name of this job. Uh oh god it was so silly. I'm so sorry I don't have this pulled up. Anyway it's in the article you could find. It's like head of AI strategy formulation or something. I'm like you just moved from like one like metversal nonsense thing to another. Did you just say that their job title is prompt engineer?
Yeah. Yeah. Uh and but they they go on to sort of say things um like the the effort is part of reinvest the savings and support of the growth of wearables. The meta spokesperson said without commenting on the specific layoffs. Um the Meta Rayland glasses I think now are like $800, but what they what they are is they look like sunglasses. Like you could wear them on your face and not

look like a a silly person in public. there. And a we saw this with the Vision Pro, right? Apple's AR headset, VR AR headset.
Yeah.
Like they tried to make it cool with like the rendering of your face and eyes on the outside of the box or the screen. And like look, I appreciate the swing, but like I never saw one of those in the I only saw one or two of them in the wild and every time I was like
like
it's not aspirational.
Yeah. Uh, I want to address a question from chat real quick that Travesty in Motion had that I think is really good to address whenever we talk about these. Why do studios get bought to be closed instead of being allowed to buy themselves back and continue? It's a loss.
Yeah.
If they close it, the studio is a loss and they can write off that loss against their profits in other fields for their taxes. This is partly a tax thing. Um, and I I also want to believe and maybe this is ascribing too much um narrative

uh to it that like there there is some amount of like if you can't if I can't have it, no one can. Lights it on fire and leaves
um kind of vibe to it. Um, but a big part of it is if a company just writes something off as a loss, it they don't they get to they get to say that they lost it on their taxes and accounts against net for the year. Um, and that's a big reason we often see those like high value write offs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, also I agree with this. Feels like the world they want is the ending of No Other Choice. Great movie. If you can see it, do it is a great movie. That is the most recent podcast that she and I did. Uh, if you can go see No Other Choice. Uh
yeah,
is good and sad and good. Um yeah, so uh listen, I guess what is dead may never die.
Cheers to that.
I'm glad Hightail came out this week. Otherwise, this would be a really

depressing episode.
Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Uh let's talk about uh some some sleuththing. So we should say upfront when we talk about this that this is conjecture.
Yep.
That has been tested by multiple people but neither of us and it is an interesting idea that sort of illustrates an ongoing problem. um a user um on uh Reddit named Demandere uh to Morande, sorry, I can't pronounce things. Uh noticed when they were playing on their friend's computer that when they were logged in to a installation of Monster Hunter Wilds, game ran like crap. and when their friend logged in, it ran fine. And that the difference between those two accounts was not story

progression or unlocks. It was the amount of DLC they owned, which has led to the fascinating uh piece of conjecture that has stood up to some amount of scrutiny that the reason Wild sucks on PC for some people is that it is checking in the background to see if you own the DLC on a relatively frequent, and by frequent I mean potentially constant basis. And that's what's hogging all of the resources and making it run like crap. Now, is this true? Some people are saying that the their testing produces the same results. Some people are saying they can't replicate the results. It's definitely not true for all hardware. Some hardware apparently endures the checks more frequently that uh more uh efficiently than others. Um but this is a theory that people have shown statistics is potentially true.

And God, if I can't think of a better piece of like ju just tech to point at and be like this this is the problem with gaming. This is like direct like
I think it's I again this is not malicious even if it's true. I don't think that they designed it to do this. I think this is a knock-on effect of something sloppy that they did
to because the way and I you've played more Wilds than I have will.
Yep. Um, the way that the game kind of functions is it the DLC is incredibly peacemeal. Yes. Right.
It's it's like single outfits. It's like
Yeah.
So, if it has to keep checking that or whatever, like it's probably like a uh it could even be like a a piracy sort of essentially quadruple check. Do you own this? Do you own this? Do you own this? And even if you do, you don't. flags it as yes or no
because it it here's the and
I don't
Yeah,
I was going to say I don't think that they designed it to make the game slower if you don't own the DLC. I think that's

a terrible way to sell DLC because if the game runs slow, you're not going to want to buy stuff for that game.
Correct. Um
yeah, I'm I'm with Smaz on this. We're not going to assign to evil. We can't assign to incompetence. Yes.
Yeah. But it is kind of emblematic that like the DLC code is already in the game because it has to be in your game because other people can have outfits that they bought with DLC money.
I mean, we knew this has been true forever though for everything,
right? Okay, cool. So, like it's not it's not like it's downloading extra things or doing extra things. It's literally just checking to see if you're allowed to put that thing on, which is weird. Um, and yes, it's not in all circumstances. I'm hammering this a little flat because it's not that big a story, but it is kind of an interesting thing to point out that we are still almost a year after Wilds came out, more than a year after Wilds came out. When the heck did Wilds come out, we're still working on this, right? I just I can't believe

I I really like I Monster Hunter Wilds falls into a category of game of a game that when I think about it, my god, that's a fun game, but I never want to start it. I never want to play it. I don't know what to call that.
Yep. Uh it is just shy of a year. Released February 28th, 2025.
Chat, what what would that be called? And is that a feeling that you actually have had before? like a a a a game that you actively when you it comes up in your head, in your mind, you're like, "Yeah, that's awesome." But then when you sit down to play, you never boot it up.
I think mine's returnal, weirdly.
Like every time I watch you play it, I'm like, "Yeah, that seems cool." And then I'm like, "Never want to just play it." Right.
Phantom game. A game you think about but can't start because ghosts in your brain. I don't know about that. Destiny 2 is a good one. Same.
Uh, Nev, I'm gonna need you to
Oh, sorry, Ne, get that back.

Yeah, I was gonna I I was gonna say I'm gonna need you to be a little less loud with Executive Gaming Dysfunction,
right? Yeah.
Quieter. Put the megaphone down.
Tears of the Kingdom.
Yeah.
Cyberpunk.
Yeah.
Doom. Dark Ages.
Yeah. What is that? What is that feeling? What is that? I want to come up with a nifty name for it.
Yeah. It's that feeling of um I I sometimes refer this as you want to want to.
I call it watching all of Supernatural. [laughter]
Yeah. Right. Like the I I I feel like the the term that the way that I always describe it is I want to want to,
right?
Yeah.
I want to want to play more Monster Hunter Wilds, but I don't want to. So, my desire to desire doesn't exist.
What if we call it the cheap trick? Because it's basically I want you to

want me.
Yeah.
I'm begging you to beg me.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's a cheap trick. Yeah, that's it.
Um Oh, hey. Hey, Copper Chef. Copper Chef, buddy. Buddy, I'm going to need you to turn down the volume. I'm going to need you to turn down the volume in this bus. It's a little deafening with I have lots of emotional story games, but I end up going back to Tet Pokemon because I want to relax more than feel.
I'm gonna need It's okay.
Can I make You know what's interesting? That's I think why this sounds crazy. I think that's why I play Night Rain so much. Like it's not that it's relaxing. It's that it it is a game that does not demand my narrative functioning attention. Like I can I can go into a flow state of skill and whether or not that skill is good, that's another question.
There's an entire game that sells exactly that premise. Warframe.
Yeah. Right. Like
it's like 20 hours of story and a thousand hours of flow state. Enjoy.

Uh at generic cheap. That game cost $69.99. It's not cheap. That is fair.
Yeah.
I was just trying to think of a song that played it. Anywh who
Yeah. Uh so
interesting interesting little piece of uh
I RC I don't know if we have something about that. We probably do in the back
so many EC videos like
500 I believe the one I'm working on right now. Let me tell you what number we're up to. Let me go to my local drive and tell you what. And this is like regular canonical extra credits episodes not like specials or or April Fools or or games you might not have tried or any of that stuff. I am working on the episode that you're working on right now specifically will as well is episode 566 and we have scripts for I think up to 568. So it's a little hard for us to keep track.
Yeah. Um okay. Uh let's talk about

actually chat it is time. Light the incense, prepare the candles, and get ready to praise the omnisiah because Games Workshop is the latest in a line of companies that said, "Nah, nah, you can't do that." Um, which makes sense, right? Because this is Games Workshop and it's like straight up in their game story. Um, but Workshop, Games Workshop has come out recently and said, "No, you're not allowed to use AI in any content or any designs for the company at all." No, it's just not allowed. Which squares cuz it's your machine doesn't have a soul and only things with souls are allowed to do things. So,
checks out. Um,
yeah. Yeah. The abomin Yes. Correct. New guys got it. The abominable intelligence shall not be suffered to live. Correct. Um, which yeah, you know, checks out. Um,
Travis, does this pop the AI bubble? [laughter]

Maybe. Does a heavy bolter pop the AI bubble?
I still like basic accounting. I
I think that's Yeah, it's [clears throat]
it is so whip smart. H
And I think here's the other thing that I I really like about their announcement. Um, is that not only did they just say, "No, you can't use it." Um they also uh had a um they they had the following statement. We do have a few senior managers that are experts on and and the the implied is experts on AI. None of none are that excited about it yet. We have agreed on internal policy to guide us all which is very cautious. We do not allow AI generated content or AI to be used in our design process or its unauthorized use outside of GW including in any of our competitions. We also have to monitor and protect ourselves from a data compliance security and governance perspective. The IO machine learning engine seems to be automatically included on our phones or laptops whether we like it or not.
Right? And then here's the interesting one. We are allowing [clears throat]

those few senior managers to continue to be inquisitive about the technology. We have also agreed that we'll be maintaining a strong commitment to protect our intellectual property and respect our human creators. The period reported we continue to invest in our Warhammer studio, hiring more creatives in multiple disciplines from concepting to art to writing and sculpting. talented and passionate individuals that make Warhammer the rich, evocative IP that our hobbyists and we all love.
And this this story is a comes to us from IGN as well. And I think that the important thing here is that they are I think this is probably one of the this is the line of the honest take that I like which is yeah we're looking at it we're not using it but we are aware that it exists and if it reaches a point where we are happy with it then we will explore that right and I think I just come down on this side of the line rather than like the laren side of the line which is we're looking at it and using it a little bit right I'm I'm not a fan of that it's definitely not the end of the world and I definitely respect people who are still like I'm going to buy the next Larry game and play it for 10,000 hours. Cool, great, awesome.
But I like this side of that fence

better, which is we are aware the other side of the fence exists and we've decided to stay over here.
It's a difference between and there's look I think the the AI discussion gets wonky. Go see our last episode for that um of this show. But the um because it is such a broad topic of what AI is and its uses across every element of our life. Like it's so broad it's almost not even a thing you can discuss outside of how the world is now. Um I like this tact for it because it is not a I hate this, this is awful, even if it is awful. It's I hate this and this is awful. Right? Like there's there's a different like one is sort of like no, I won't look at this stuff or engage with it at all and one is like I'm going to watch this because I don't like it and I want to make sure that it doesn't creep into what I do.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Yeah. And and and to be fair, I think

this is probably I don't see how Workshop could have taken another stance given how protective they are of their own IP.
Yeah. They wouldn't even Dark brings up and said no to 3D printers. They're going to say no to AI, too,
right? Yeah. Although that's probably not the best example given the amount of 3D printed GW minis that are available on Etsy. Um
but you can't use them in tournaments and stuff. That's the thing.
Oh, for sure.
Yeah. Um
just like Magic and other proxies,
of course.
Uh but yeah, so that's that's the news on that front. Um Matt, are you ready to talk about what is possibly my favorite weirdest story of the week?
Sure.
Okay. So, you know the website Metacritic?
I've heard of it.
You know what the top rated game on Metacritic is by users anyway?
Of course, the user the user dig. Uh, no, I have not checked it recently.
It's Expedition 33 for now because some people are doing a thing and I love

the internet so much. Okay, so if you're not familiar with the show Corey in the House, I cannot blame you. It was like a mid show on Disney that came out.
It was a spin-off of uh That's So Raven, wasn't it?
I believe that is correct. Um and it had a DS game and the DS game is by all actual accounts terrible. However, it is in some ways in an effort to demonstrate the problems with Metacritic. I think
every [laughter] greatest anime ever made.
Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right.
Oh, I like that Ed. Uh uh avatar there, Jar. Good.
Yeah. Um the uh the there are a group of users who are attempting to boost Corey in the house to be the highest user rated game on Metacritic above Expedition 33.

And that's what an ambitiously stupid project. And by the way, thank you to whoever came up with this idea for giving us levity and just something stupid to laugh at cuz like god, do we really need these? Right? But someone decided that Cory in the house and by the way again I cannot stress this enough. The game is terrible. It is not in any way.
I watched some footage of it this morning and I was like
a good video game. It's terrible. But they've decided that it should be the top Metacritic rated game of all time. So that's the reason. Um, and it does. Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna say a thing. Um, look, we have our Metacritics and our Rotten Tomatoes in these like aggregate sites of reviews because we can't be bothered to go and read a nuanced uh review of a specific thing. We need everyone's opinions boiled down to a a num a numerical score and then,

oh well, this game is a 9.3 and so, okay, great. I'll buy it. Like, and I'm not saying that's all of us here. Again, you everyone who's watching this show, I feel like is in the very very very very very small minority of like people who care enough about games in the industry to watch two chuckleheads talk about it for an hour and a half every Monday morning.
And make no mistake, we are the chucklest of chuckleheads
of chuckleheads. Um I take a little bit of umbrage with um aggregate review sites. I see value in them in some ways, but I like that this story highlights really how useless they can be other than like I think the humor here is wonderful. Like that's great as sort of what we're saying, but it reminds us that these sites should not be the end all beall of opinion if they are so easily manipulated.
Right. So, so by the way, I'm going to give you the complete list, right? Because Cory in the House isn't just second, it's tied for second. Yeah.

Um, so Clare Obscure has a 9.5. The Witcher 3, Original Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill 2, Metal Gear Solid 3 are all tied for second best ever by user score with Cory in the House. That is followed by The Last of Us Balders's Gate 3 Stellar Blade, The Last of Us uh Remaster, The Witcher 3 Base Edition, and Ghost of Tsushima, Ghost of Sushima, Chrono Trigger, Warcraft 3, Ocarine of Time, and more games than uh almost fit on the page for third, right? Like,
it's wild to me how like broad the spectrum of games is. And like these aren't comparable. How do you compare Warcraft 3 to Silent Hill 2? You don't. They're not comparable except in that they're both video games.

Yes. Well,
I I take your point, Matt, that like it's a numeric it's a funny number that describes art.
Yeah. Uh look, I like reading or watching reviews of things.
Yeah. um or listening to uh I don't love outside of like a kickoff bit of a conversation like what these numbers sort of mean. So uh long live Corey in the house. I hope Cory takes I hope I hope Cory climbs that ladder more and rips the crown off of Expedition 33. Not because I don't think Expedition 33 deserves it. It's because I think that uh we should uh more people should be aware and think about how kind of useless this kind of aggregate review is.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's funny as hell.
And it's funny as hell. Matt, it's time. What are your thoughts

on Tomb Raider?
Oh dear. Oh my. Uh well everyone the I believe this is is this an Amazon show? Yeah. Right.
Sounds right.
Does Amazon have this? I think uh Phoebe Waller Bridge is writing the Tomb Raider show which I'm actually very excited about because she's an excellent writer. The writer of Flea Bag uh and a bunch of other things uh who I just I whenever she writes something I will go see it. Um yeah, Sansa Stark doing doing the we got the first look at the new Larara Croft uh design, I guess. And um or as new guy quotes it, it's Jane. It's Jane Tomb Raider.
Yeah.
Um so, so there's two parts of this conversation I kind of wanted to have. this reveal happened. And overall, I I think we live we live in a society that essentially will make anything like this, which is literally a picture of an actress dressed to play a video game

character in a show. Uh, and it will become a weird like THIS IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD OR THIS IS THE WORST THING IN the world when
did you want to did you want me to show them the best response?
Well, yeah, because So, wait a second. So, like essentially this got released. I think it looks interesting. I think it's the it's a I feel like and we'll get into this a little bit like it's the perfect idea of what 2026 people remember wanting Larara Croft to be.
Yeah.
Does that make sense? And I think that that window shifts a lot in a lot of different ways. But there was a thing that really got to me about this specifically, and it was this one response to what I consider a pretty okay, neat thing that I will not judge until I watch the show. GameStop GameStop said in the weirdest little meme lord cringe way, "This is not Larara Croft."

I mean,
I wasn't aware that junk retailers for bad collectibles and NFTts were allowed to have opinions on art.
Yeah. Uh, this kind of got me like when when GameStop says this is not Larara Croft. I got to thinking we were actually going to maybe do a story on this and maybe we'll do a little bit more investigative uh invest in investigative investigating and actually do something about this in the future. Um uh if GameStop is saying this is not Larara Croft. It got me thinking what is GameStop. What what is GameStop? I know what GameStop used to be. Heck, I even kind of get what GameStop was when it was a meme stock. What is GameStop now? And and does that thing somehow make them the arbiter of who Larara Croft is?

It's a miserable pile of secrets, Matt.
I guess,
right? Like that's it. Yeah. It's a miserable pawn shop. Yeah.
Yeah.
Like it doesn't This is the most how do you do fellow kids except it's how do you do fellow people with money what might save up business? Like
I just think GameStop has become this mishmash of weirdly some of the worst elements of the internet that somehow can also manifest in a brickandmortar store if there's any of those left. And I it makes honestly it makes me sad because look, I understand the world treks forward and that brick and mortar at this point is not the future and uh we're all going to just be ordering things from our couches and slowly become the world of Wall-E. But I think

that there was a time when going to a GameStop or an EB Yeah, GameStop is Twitter for physical spaces, Artemis. It's Yeah, it it seems like it and stuff like this makes it feel like that's what they're going for.
Yeah.
Um because because it's exactly that because this is not like this is not Larara Coft is not terribly inflammatory, but it's also a no one asked you for your opinion, GameStop. This has nothing to do with you corporation with a social media account. like we don't we're not dying to see what GameStop thinks of current movements in media,
right?
My my my point is I I just I am sad because these on these these brickandmortar stores like uh Electronics Boutique, EB, uh Babages, these all these longgone dead things. GameStop's the only one left. And GameStop even used to be a place that like I was happy existed. And now the one major retailer that does is video

game focused, although it's also like ThinkGeek or whatever now. Um, it having it suck so bad is just sad to me.
Yep. Also, I I do like Jar I think is right on the money. Silence brand.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. 100%.
So, let's let's turn this around upside down. Let's let's go to the third image, Will, if you wouldn't mind. Here are all of the live action layer crops. And I think they do speak very clearly to the time period in which they were released. But I think when you have I I need to do more digging on this, but tell me if this if this vibe checks out for all of you, when a longunning franchise has multiple TV shows or movies and it has to keep reinventing itself, it feels like, and maybe this is getting better, but it feels like whatever the current iteration is of a character or a

world of a video game is the thing people wished it was five years ago when it also wasn't that and a other third thing.
Yeah.
So like like when Tomb Raider came out, obviously the gameplay was huge and whatever, but also Lar as the character became like a weird like video game like sex symbol kind of thing. And then the game sort of moved on and then we got Angelina Jolie's Tomb Raider, the two of them. I actually like those movies. They're not they're not changing the world, but they're fine. Uh it's not exactly Tomb Raider, but like you would look at like the cultural cache of what was going on in cinema then, and you can even tell in the costumes, right? Like when did Tomb Raider, the first Tomb Raider film came out? I want to just double check this before I start running my mouth. Uh and then it's going to be Tomb Raider. I believe the first Tomb Raider came out um uh 2001.

And then the first X-Men movie
roughly that
was 2000. Perfect. Okay.
So this is this kind of this kind of is going into what I'm talking about.
Looking at the color schemes of these characters this character over the course and and Lararaoft in the original game had uh brown shorts and a green top and that was sort of it. But in the 2000s when we were scared to put characters in their actual costumes, Allah the X-Men uh movies making them all like black leather and the Matrix had already like changed what we thought was able to be cool.
Yeah,
it makes sense that Lararaoft looks like this in in in that iteration.
Yeah.
And then we got to a space uh with sort of like the the in 2018 when the um I'm trying to remember this actor's name. I'm blanking. uh uh Alicia uh Vander um when they did that movie, this was playing off of a

little bit later cuz I think they were on the third uh iteration of like the darker, more gritty Tomb Raiders because that's what people thought that games wanted. So now the movie is going to sort of move into that direction as opposed to almost like a high fantasy kind of thing,
right? And now it feels like with the announcements that we saw at the Game Awards of the remakes, so the re remix remakes of Tomb Raider 1, 2, and 3 and the new Tomb Raider coming out later,
it's almost like they want to portray like a this sounds so weird, but like a retro future thing. Like they're trying to and I and I think they're succeeding in what they're trying to do. I'm just curious if it'll work. Like this is this is the most video game Larara Coft that we've seen.
Yeah, I agree. I also think the glasses are a huge part of that. I think
Yeah, the glasses are
kind of iconic after after
whoever whoever like sourced those for this outfit. A+ uh your work is commended. It really It really helps. Um also I like Braston's take that no Laura

Craft will match with Aging Millennials and Gen Xers's head cannon from Ted Pixels. Correct. Correct. And that's that's kind of the point of like us dunking a bit on GameStop is that like shut up.
Like this is someone else's vision of the thing, right? And like no one is actually Laura Croft. Laura Croft is a fictional character. I also think Can I Can I just get Can I just dump like a little bit of Sriracha in this? Just a little a little bit of spice. No one would do this if it was Joel or James Bond or Kattos.
Actually, they are doing it for Kratos.
They are?
Yeah. So, there's a Netflix is it Netflix is doing the God of War series? I don't remember. Someone was dunking on the actor for some reason, but they haven't I'm sorry. No, you know what? It's not the same. They're dunking on the actor, not the costume, because we haven't seen what the costume looks like yet. And look, there was people dunking on um on Sophie Turner uh because of the

history of characters that she's played in the past. Um I think the casting is fine. I think we're going to see how it goes. I uh someone in the chat said this looks almost like um it's funny. The first two, the Angela Jolie and the Allesia Vander characters look like they're trying to look self assured. And this pose, at the very least, I'm only going off of three pictures, looks more like the carefree, not traumatized like Larara Croft, which I'm more interested in those stories anyway.
I agree.
Um, yeah, but no, I you're right. If this was if this was a dude, uh,
there would be far fewer men on the internet who are willing to air their garbage opinions about how she looks and how she doesn't live up to their ridiculous internalized fantasies that they cooked up from 10 pixels 20 years ago. Yeah,
we should have Jack Black as Lar. I think
you know what? 100%. As long as costume remains the same. Costume has the

important
then we raid.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. 100%. Because
God, Jack Black can nail. Oh god. Yes. Absolutely. He would nail that part. He would 100% commit to it. Right. Also or or I would also accept John Cena. You wouldn't see them.
Oh, you just see the floating outfit.
Just 10 polygons.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. 100%.
Anyway, I'm And the only reason that again I go back to even being remotely excited about this as a show is that Phoebe Wallerbridge is attached to it. Uh she is such an excellent writer that I'm looking forward to seeing her doing this in a larger thing. Like it's funny, the last time I think I really saw her was the latest Indiana Jones movie, which was not good. Though there are elements of it I liked. Um, I don't think it not being good was her fault.
Yeah.
Cool. Cool. Cool. Well, that
anyhoo,
that is our our show for uh today. If again, if you have uh topics you like us to cover in the

future, if you have things uh if you're watching this on Nebula later and you can't leave a comment down below, um hit us up on Blue Sky. Leave us links to cool stuff. Uh you can look at my pre-release piles from this weekend. I definitely had a thing where I opened two mythic rares and went on a tear with it. like you can you can follow us on Blue Sky and get more info about what we're doing uh between shows and like other musings and such. Um
and if you if you pitch us sort of um stories or gaming news, gaming and techbased news in the month of January, I imagine that's probably going to have a better chance of us talking about it while this is still in the slow times for this specific section of the news cycle.
Yeah. If you're watching this later and you're like, "What are they talking about?" It's January 19th. Yeah, it's
January 19th, 2026. and we woke up this morning and looked at the news and then came to do this show. All right. Anyway, um uh coming up this week again on Thursday, Jeff and I will be taking a look at a game that a buddy of his made uh and we'll be doing some

live testing and feedback and we'll be soliciting feedback from all of you. So, if you want to watch me and Jeff uh tag team to pick apart a game uh and talk about what we like, what we don't like, and you want to participate in that, please join us on Thursday for Design Club, 2:00 p.m. Eastern, 11:00 a.m. Pacific. Um and then following that, if you're a fan of Hightail, Matt and I, uh have agreed on the spur of the moment, uh based on your uh enthusiasm that we'll be playing Hightail over on Twitch, 400 p. p.m. Eastern, 1:00 p.m. Pacific on Thursday. So, please do join us here on Twitch for that. Um
indeed.
And I think that that is all that uh we have
all that remains except for our our our wonderful and consistent for years ending of this show that we do to foster a sense of community and togetherness because everyone knows exactly what is coming at the end of this episode so we can all engage with it together as a family as your as your internet dad uncles. I don't know what that means. What was that? [laughter]
Family.

Yeah.
Yeah. Uh so with that uh I would like ask you all to please take a deep breath and join me in saying oh out in the street, out in the street, out in the daytime, out in the night, we're going to rock down to Electric Avenue and then we'll take you higher. CAN YOU TAKE ME HIGHER? [music]