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Retail Housing/TBC arena/Jeff Kaplan interview/Future gameshow/videos/Mewgenics? | !podcast !guide !gamersupps
03-12-2026 · 6h 06m
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Thanks, Holland Boys.
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Well, good morning, all right, what are we listening to?
Not that.
Yo, good morning, bro, an eight morning.
It is for me, man.
This is morning to me.
I actually slept.
This might be the first stream I've done.
I
Know I slept it's been like four days since I've slept I swear to God, but I slept so well last night
Oh, hello puppy, you know
Actually slept well, did you snore? I don't know
Vicky couldn't sleep she said she literally just told me during my intro I
went out to go grab a drink now song because like babe I had the best sleep
ever and she's like that's crazy I tried to sleep but I couldn't so I got up at
like 5 a.m. and fucking watch the boys I'm like what you got up last night yeah
Now I'm tired as fuck. So now she's grief
We all saw my title
There's apparently like this Jeff Kaplan interview that's been pretty big and he talks about a lot of crazy stuff in here
Like he talks about Titan the failed Blizzard project that eventually rose up overwatch. He talks about
Building world of Warcraft a lot of wow cool. Apparently it's a great interview
I only saw the beginning and I was like what the fuck is this it was weird as hell to me
Because like the guy is wearing a suit and he's talking really slow like listen. There's three types of this is an intro
place every day. Oh, here we go. Come
We're actually working on a game
The Lex Fridman, maybe that's just his thing is a conversation with Jeff Kaplan a legendary game designer of World of Warcraft and
and Overwatch, which are two of the biggest, most influential games ever made.
He is genuinely one of the most amazing human beings ever met.
In the many conversations I was fortunate enough to have with him, including while playing video games,
he was always kind, thoughtful, hilarious, and still and forever a legit gamer, through and through.
Okay, of course, he's always quick to celebrate the incredible teams of creative minds
He has gotten chance to work with over the years and they are truly incredible
I don't want to put him at 1.5 because then it's gonna speed up Jeff when Jeff is talking. I'm not gonna fucking stance switch
midfucking YouTube it
I will skip forward this whole thing
It is Calendan. That's all that I genuinely can't just
What?
Fart, adventure, and action.
Is this his?
It's also a world called the lead blizzard video game lore.
Jeff left blizzard in 2021 and has been secretly working on a new video game.
Okay, so this is his game, this is an ad.
Okay.
I guess it kind of is.
That's why Jeff came on.
Before you ever left and on lead player in particular.
You were first a legendary video game player, in particular in EverQuest, before you ever
became a legendary video game designer on World of Warcraft and on Overwatch, which
I think is a wild journey to go through, from gamer to designer, but first let's go way
back.
When did you first fall in love with video games?
I was lucky I was born in that golden era of coin op.
So I was going to remember the first time seeing Pacman.
I was with my uncle Ronnie and he just kept feeding me quarters.
I think he wanted to play, but it's like arcade games.
Oh, and how old is Jeff the fuck?
I had arcades growing up.
I guess maybe his era was like super arcade games.
probably even deeper. I feel like arcade games kind of died off as I got like to you know my teenager years.
I was too scared.
I guess some baseball like after baseball season was over like we have that party to celebrate. He's 50. Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, he's got like an extra 20 years of arcade games. All right, moving on.
So we, you know, his little nephew, he was just giving quarters to play Pac-Man.
I remember being at my brother's graduation in Philadelphia, they had an Asteroids machine
in the lobby.
It was one of the first coin-op machines I played as well.
I'm going to skip through a lot of this.
My brother and I will-
Because it's five hours long, and I love Jeff, but I don't need to hear about his writing
career.
I don't need to hear about him playing Pac-Banner his cousin ever quest obsession. I'm interested in that
You switched to uh video games, how did that happen?
gradually suddenly
Gradually and suddenly so when I had that fateful moment where I just sort of gave up with writing
I had these days where I'd structured eight-hour chunks of just this was writing time, you know,
I'd sit solitary typing, all that was gone. And, you know, I could still support myself,
which was nice. And then I had this free time and I wasn't spending it with anybody. I was just alone.
me and the dog Jack. And I just poured it all into EverQuest.
You know, I, I, it was 1999, when that game came out.
And I had a friend, Victor, like kind of a lifelong friend.
One of the few friends I had who played computer games,
because there was a stigma to that.
There was.
You know, it wasn't, you didn't walk around telling people you played games.
they thought you waste your time. And my friend Vic had bought EverQuest. I'm like, that's that
game that that guy Brian Hook went to work on. Is it good? And he's like, yeah, you got to play it.
And the moment I logged in, I was just transported. It was the world of Norath. And
it wasn't just the world itself and how it looked. I thought the game was gorgeous.
It was the mechanics, you know, that I was this halfling rogue that, you know, had to go out and adventure in the world.
And when I killed stuff, I got experience and I needed better loot to kill more stuff, to get more experience.
And the sort of draw of progression in the game, it was amazing.
I and I just live my life of I can't wait till the next time I log in there was a lot of escapism going
It wasn't all healthy
When all was said and done when I finally had quit EverQuest three days later
You could type in the command slash played to see how much played time you had I had I think it was like
two hundred and seventy two played days in three years.
So you start to do the math. Wow.
That is crazy.
So you'd have to. Yeah, you he's logged in at least eight hours a day down here.
Logged in.
Crazy rookie numbers.
Hey guys.
On like, how much time in those three years I was living in that world, it was, it was kind of insane.
Well, that's over 6,000 hours.
Yeah.
Of gameplay.
Yeah.
Wow.
So here I'll go to Proplexity.
EverQuest is a long-running 3D fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game, MMORPG, set in the world of Norahath, as you were saying.
first released in March 1999. Dude, the way I'm being honest is something about how he talks makes
me so mad. Holy spit it out junior. My role playing game where thousands of players create
characters, group up and explore persistent shared world is widely regarded as one of the
foundational MMO art worlds. That's the other rating is usually around 30 people or more
more getting together.
I don't know anything about EverQuest, so I kind of find this interesting.
Otherwise.
And to do successful rating, you usually need to join what in EverQuest everyone referred
to as an Uber Guild.
So I had this great pride in my EverQuest journey that I, most of the time leveling up,
I was ungilded, where I was in like a role playing guild with Rogues only.
And it was when I got to level 50 and EverQuest was the-
I think there was a time really, really early in WoW where people would like calling like
dude that's Omega.
Crazy.
Like, well this guy's Omega good at the game.
Like Uber.
It's like calling something epic.
You know, it's cringes fuck nowadays but there was a time where it was cool.
That was the thing.
Turn into Giga.
He's sure.
The top level.
I got invited into this guild called Legacy of Steel,
which on our server was the top.
Every server had a top guild.
And I was on a server called the Nameless Server
and the top guild was Legacy of Steel.
And that the thrill of getting 30 people together
to go see if you could beat, you know, Nagathon,
who was the fire dragon or Vox,
who was the Frost Dragon, and needing perfect coordination
to pull it off, it was insane how fun,
like you would literally scream out,
you're alone in your room at home,
but you felt like you were there with these people
and you would audibly cheer out when you won
and you feel depressed when you lost.
And it was a game of high highs and low lows
and it did everything right.
It was amazing.
So that was a big leap for you to go from the proud lone warrior to a member of a guild,
Uber Guild.
And then there's that epic story of you rising to the top.
Oh my god!
Nice!
Yeah, so organizing people in an online game like EverQuest is like hurting cats.
I swear to God.
You know, everyone has their own will.
Some people are lute motivated.
Some people want the guild to do well.
Some people are just lonely and want people to hang out with.
And there was also a lot of depression in the EverQuest community.
It was something I suffered with.
But a lot of people, you know, anytime you're feeling sad or down, you're looking for escape.
And one of the great things video games brings us is escapism.
And escapism isn't always bad or negative.
But when you sort of abuse it to escape your real life problems, it's bad and negative.
So there's a mix of pain and darkness.
Let's move it on, move it on.
Getting higher than Blizzard, I'm curious on this one.
So speaking of which, you have to tell the epic origin story of how you got the job with
Blizzard.
As we said, you were this legendary gamer and now legendary troll on EverQuest, username
to go.
You gave a lot of edgy feedback to the devs, telling them in now famous, they're several
This is a famous one where you tell many of them to do a bunch of things including to pull their heads out of their asses
You're loved and respected
Hold on
Fix your goddamn buggy bullshit half-assed encounters the amount of time we dedicated to get our keys to see this guy die
And take a turn at the emperor is just sick to finally see blood die only to have the entire raid
Deteed from anywhere in the room was simply an insult blood die. What is blood?
Blood dies there was two earrings on the corpse yet no matter where you are in the room the emperor DT's so congrats
Rot on those it's cheap enough to make a mob DT in the first place
But to have his aggro radius extended the entire room is ridiculous
So let me get this straight and this is how you guys envision this in San Diego
You spin months farming keys to get up to the room months farming
Shissar bane weapons and the recipes where you kill blood while dealing with eight other snakes in the room and
Immediately after that you're supposed to engage the death touching from anywhere in the room
Emperor along with the eight snakes whoever came up with this sheer fisting of an encounter
Do me a favor so I don't waste my guild's time on this kind of jackass shit fest again
Send me an email at teego at legacy of steel net
When you decide to a implement an encounter that wasn't designed by a retarded ship
Chained to a cubicle get a quality assurance department actually beta test the fucking thing and deep
P-patch in life!
And please for God's sake do it in the order I laid it out for you. Don't worry
I won't charge you a consulting fee on that one and good luck you might as well pull your heads out of your asses while you're at it
rename the game to pay the quest
Since you've used up your allotted false advertising karma on the bazaar, and you're trying to be scared of the one
Oh fuck that is so funny
God is so fucking funny to give a lot of specific ways that the game could be
improved the fact that it comes from Jeff as well it's so good you actually
love the game and you gave them in the language of the time advice and how to
improve their game and it's funny because like you look back to those
messages firing to me it should be informative inspiring a lot of people
because you're really legit, full time talking shit.
And now we always have been like one of the kindest,
most loved human beings in the entire fog.
That is so funny. Anyway.
Later, smug-ass face behind the curtain.
When the first skill leader was, I guess he's a demon founder.
He was a guy named is online name was Dred.
That was his name. He left.
And our guild was kind of in this listless spin
for a while, and eventually somebody stepped up and took his position as guild leader and that person's name was Ariel.
He was this blonde, wood elf warrior.
Remember the hair color of this?
He always refused to wear a helmet because thought their character was so pretty, wanted to show their face.
I guess it's okay.
All right. So Ariel was a great guild leader for us and made me like a assistant guild leader,
raid leader, officer type in the guild. And over time, Ariel got busier and busier.
And, you know, would send me messages like, hey, I'm not going to be online, you know,
tomorrow or I'm not going to be online tonight. Can you run the raid? Can you run the raid?
And running the raids was very natural for me.
And it was my first experience with leadership in my life of, like, how do you motivate people?
Like, what does motivation look like? What does discipline look like?
How do you inspire people? When do you force people versus encourage them?
You know, so it was a learning experience for me on the fly.
the fly and I had the safety net of the real guild leader would log in eventually.
As you mentioned I'm just now reading about doing a bunch of research on
Justinian of the Roman Empire and he rose from being a peasant to being emperor so
I see a lot of parallels in your life journey from peasant to emperor but go
ahead I'm sure. At least ever quest guild leader that's that's as much as I can say.
Uber guild leader, best guild on the nameless server.
So as time went on, Ariel became busier and busier.
And then one day they contacted me
and we were having this like whisper back and forth
and they said, you're gonna have to take over the guild.
I'm just too busy.
And then it came out later.
Well, let me back up a second.
I started fooling around, like around this time Half Life One had come out and with both
Duke Nukem and Half Life One, one of the incredible things that those companies did back in the
day was when they shipped the game, they shipped the editor on the CD.
And if you were curious enough, you could like fire up that editor and fool around with
it.
I made a Duke Nukem level and you'd send it off to like those UK programming magazines and, you know, you get excited because your level was in, you know, some random magazine.
And then I started making like half life levels and
Ariel had stepped down as guild leader. I had become guild leader.
And then at one point, Ariel contacts me and says,
Hey, you know, you were talking about those half-life levels you made.
I want to see those. I'm like, oh, that's cool.
Like I didn't know you played half-life.
Like, yeah, maybe we can get a server up and I can plan.
And Ariel tells me, you know, mail them to this address in Irvine.
Oh, shit.
Because, again, to rewind in the time machine for a second, to send something like a half-life
level over the internet would have taken like 12 hours.
So you actually burned it onto a CD and stuck it in the mail.
So I put my half-life levels, I send them to Ariel, and he says, you know, my name's
Rob.
I'm a designer at Blizzard Entertainment.
I hear you're in Pasadena, because you mentioned it.
You know, I would write about, you know,
the Rose Parade and all these things on our website.
You know, I kind of, it was blogging
before blogging existed.
So he knew I lived in Pasadena.
He's like, Irvine's only an hour away.
Why don't you come down, see Blizzard,
and you can also meet, and he names like
four people in the guild. And I'm like, they all work at Blizzard, too. He's like, yeah, we're all
Blizzard. How do you not know that weird because being in that game playing every day all day,
it was an inventory level. That's crazy. It feels like everybody plays every game,
but you had to be selective. So like I never bought Starcraft or Diablo or Warcraft. I was much more
of the Half-Life Quake, Quake 3 guy around that time. And I never played a Blizzard game and I
just got invited to like go to Blizzard Entertainment. Was Blizzard already legendary?
You know, with the Warcraft and Starcraft, was there was a building this
like great legend of this game company that seemed like... I don't think Blizzard was that big at
the time. Was that World of Warcraft? Very much on its way to enshrining itself as being one of the
a legendary game. Like it was beloved by gamers, but there were still ignorant people
like me. It was definitely beloved, but I don't think again, maybe Starcraft. I mean,
Starcraft was the biggest game, wasn't it? Diablo two and Warcraft three. Yeah, I guess.
But I guess, okay, so you understand how niche gaming was though. Wasn't gaming super fucking
The World of Warcraft broke through that barrier, but it was beloved behind the barrier.
I really don't think a lot of people were playing these games.
Like PlayStation existed, that was it.
And the World of Warcraft, again, still Warcraft is such a nerdy term and no one cared about
it.
At least you couldn't say it out loud without being shoved into a locker.
But yeah, I don't know, interesting.
We had tons of land parties for Starcraft. I didn't do Starcraft, so I don't know how big it was there.
But I damn well know no one was talking about it at school.
Or World of Warcraft. What a Warcraft eventually kicked in, but I played World of Warcraft III.
You hadn't played, you know, War II or Diablo II or Starcraft, which was shocking to people.
So you weren't like freaking out, freaking out.
No, I was freaking out in a different sense.
I'm like, am I going to get mugged when I like who are.
Is this a scam because you didn't meet people off the internet?
Yeah. So.
I also drove down there.
Just another thing I mentioned he should have known they worked at Blizzard
and someone said people are none of us. I think people were a lot more.
I think your gaming life was so much more separated from your real life back then.
Because yeah, I'm thinking about people I talked to back when I was 10 on Ventrilo.
Yeah, I never got around to even learning their real name.
We just didn't talk about it.
Everything was so, there was no Facebook, there was no MySpace.
You were a different person online, all together.
All right.
I ended up, there was Rob Pardo, who at that time was a lead designer on Warcraft 3.
And he was Ariel, you know, so okay, it wasn't a woman after all.
It wasn't this blonde wood elf.
You know, I don't know what you expect at that point.
It was Rob Pardo.
To this day, a great friend of mine named Scott Mercer was the enchanter
in our EverQuest Guild, a guy named Dale Oman.
There was a guy named Roman Kenney who was like this totally psychotic wizard
who played in our guild, and I had lunch with these guys.
You know, we just went out to Irvine to like a restaurant
and, you know, forgive me for the misuse of the phrase,
but it was like my coming out moment.
And we talked about games having that stigma
and being embarrassed about who you are and what you like.
Like up until that point, I would never tell friends, family,
like I love games, I'm playing this game EverQuest.
It's so cool. We just killed a dragon.
And so you were hiding this part of your identity
and I'm out to lunch with these guys in Irvine.
And we're talking about dragons and swords and, you know, raid tactics and talking shit on all
the people in the guild. And I literally had this moment where I felt like myself for the first
time, I just felt like so comfortable. And that was an eye opening moment. And after that, after
that lunch happened, he invited me for a couple more lunches down, you know, just, I just thought
as like, oh, now I'm, you know, I made friends with these people online. Now we know each other
in real life, and they happen to work for this game company. And another one of the lunches,
is they invite this troll warrior to have lunch with us,
whose name in the game was Barfa, the troll warrior.
And Barfa, Barfa wasn't somebody
who played with us all the time,
but kind of like Ariel got into the guild,
kind of on the side.
You know, it was one of those like inside invites
of like, who's Barfa?
I don't know, but Barfa's in the guild now.
And there was, at the time it was a new dungeon
called The Hole, and we had never done it before.
And we jumped down in this hole,
and we're doing this whole dungeon,
and everything goes wrong,
as it's prone to do in EverQuest.
And The Hole Guild escapes, except for Barfa,
whose troll character is so big,
he can't jump out of the exit.
And I had this potion that was like a really expensive potion,
that was a teleport potion that, you know,
no one but someone in the Uber Guild
could afford at the time.
And I hand the potion to Barfa, and I said, here, use this.
You'll teleport you out.
And I'm a rogue.
I can just stealth and get out of the dungeon on my own.
So I saved Barfa, not really knowing who Barfa was.
And I did it with a very expensive potion.
Having lunch, Rob introduced me.
This is Alan Adham.
He plays Barfa.
I'm like, oh, Barfa, and you saved me in the hole that time.
Well, it turns out Alan was the founder of Blizzard.
And he was the head of everything at that time.
It was Alan, Mike, Mike Morhine, Frank Pierce.
And what I didn't realize with these lunches
were I just loved them because I felt like I was myself.
I felt true happiness being surrounded
by these, you know, people who were talking about video games.
Okay. I'm gonna, the way I sum this up is all these Blizzard employees sucked at the
game and then they had their best player in the guild being Jeff. They brought his ass
in to work for the game. That's how I'm seeing this. He's the carry. He really is. Whether
it be time investment or mechanical skill, I'm not sure the details, but it's definitely
more time investment. That's for sure with Ariel not doing shit. I guess he's working
on that. I felt comfortable around. Let's go, Jeff. And one day Rob logs into Everglades.
He wasn't playing much at the time. He said, I want you to tomorrow to check the Blizzard job site.
I'm like, okay, like I'll check the Blizzard job site. And they had announced World of Warcraft
and posted on the job site was the job for an associate quest designer and the funniest part of it was I
forget if it was a requirement or a plus in the job description but they're like we really want somebody with a creative writing degree.
He was so unemployed that they set this up for me like they were just looking and and it was that hindsight moment of like actually these guys were just
guys were just interviewing me for six months. They were actually friends and they were really
cool about it too. And I just had the fuck it moment like that job opened up. I applied
with all my heart, you know, like they had a bunch of quest writing on it. And then I
went through like a pretty hardcore six month recruiting process because they never hired
designers from out of the company. Traditionally, designers were promoted from within Blizzard,
either they would like transfer out of other disciplines, or they would come from quality
assurance, tech support. So, hiring somebody off the street was kind of a big deal for them.
And they really put me through a grilling. I met with, it was the first time I met Chris Metzen,
who is maybe the most inspirational, creative person on the planet. And you instantly, they
paired me, they did this interview pairing, or these two guys, it was Kevin Jordan, who
was one of the original designers on Wow. Really, he doesn't get enough credit for his contributions.
He was one of the earliest class designers, PVP designers. But he's a really, I never
heard that name either. Wow. These two guys, it was Kevin Jordan. Kevin Jordan. Look at
him up. Kevin Jordan. I feel like I've seen his face probably in interviews here and there.
Interesting. All right. So you did a thing with stay safe as fan tips. I see some as in gold.
I don't know. Moving on.
It was one of the staff of Jordan is named after him. Oh,
didn't realize that. Okay.
More, you know, original designers on Wow.
Really, he doesn't get enough credit for his contributions.
He was one of the earliest class designers, PVP designers.
I mean, that is some foundational world of Warcraft stuff.
Class designing probably had big sway on which classes are even in the game.
But he's a really quiet guy.
And they paired him with Chris.
And Chris just owns the room.
You know, Chris, you could just sit and listen to him.
He's so creative.
He's so passionate.
And the way he articulates things,
like you just instantly become a fan of Chris
when you're around Chris.
Chris, Kevin, and I go to lunch at this Italian place that
was across the street from Blizzard.
And I remember Chris made a stop to buy cigarettes.
you know, on the way to the interview.
And then every other word out of Chris's mouth
was like, fuck and shit.
And I had come from this whole like corporate culture
from my dad's recruiting business
where I'd never imagined somebody would curse
in an interview or stop to buy smokes.
And again, it was like, I'm around my people.
Like I never smoked, but just, you know,
being around people who didn't care about
what the corporate norms were was so inspiring.
And then my last interview was with Alan and Rob
and a great programmer named Bob Fish.
Like, I think he's one of the first five developers
at Blizzard and they took me to an Arco station
that had a jack in the box.
You know how like sometimes they'll combo?
It was like Arco jack in the box.
I can't remember the most pointless details, but...
My final interview at Blizzard was at the Arco Jack-in-the-Box.
And I remember thinking to myself,
these guys just brought me to a Jack-in-the-Box
that's in an Arco station.
I need to work here.
Like, these are my people.
This is where I belong.
Like, it was the greatest thing ever.
And so yeah, that's my crazy journey to Blizzard.
I'll start at the bottom and end up at the top in the jack-in-the-box.
Can you speak to, because you mentioned some of the low points in depression, through that
journey, how did you find your way out?
So can you just, a lot of people are sitting in those low points right now listening to
this.
What kind of wisdom can you draw about finding your health, finding your people?
Okay, there we are. I'm good. One of us early blizzard culture. Oh boy. Let's hear this.
All that work. So, uh, what were the, what was it like? What were the vibes of, um,
early blizzard like? They've at this point, Warcraft one and two, Warcraft threes in production,
Starcraft. These are legendary games. I spent, does he have any idea? He doesn't even work. Wow.
Wow isn't even I guess he's working on World of Warcraft, but Warcraft 3 isn't even out yet
If Warcraft 3 is not out yet, I'm not even much of a PC gamer yet. I'm like eight years old
Maybe I'm playing Age of Empires
Finally where I'm at in life during this time probably over a thousand hours in these games combined
Work after I played Warcraft 1 2 3 I played Stark Earthland 2 I played Wow, of course Diablo 1
One, two, three, four.
But your devil is shitting in your diapers.
I don't listen with Dr. Cain.
Stay a while and listen.
I mean, some of these characters, some of these experiences
just stay with me forever.
Anyway, so big thank you to those early Blizzard folks.
What was it like?
Well, what was the team like or the developers like?
What was the vibes like in those early days?
It was me.
It was the dream.
When I showed up at Blizzard on my first day, the office was on the University of California Irvine
campus at the time. They had this research and development park where if you're like a tech
company you can get office space there. And Blizzard took up, when I joined, it was three
fourths of the building with Blizzard. And there's like a building right next to it that had like
Cisco and you know it's like all kind of techie places and it was so funny because you drive up and
like everything was very serious and corporate and then outside of the Blizzard offices it's
everybody's wearing black t-shirt and shorts and throwing frisbees and playing hacky sack and
non scooters and skateboards and you're like okay that's where that's where Blizzard is.
So it was that environment.
I remember walking in the door and thinking like,
it feels like I'm walking into a dorm room
because it was just posters on the wall.
And there were actually like people would have futons
because they'd be sleeping
because we would work so much back then.
But the vibe was, it was very small.
Like Blizzard, the day I joined in May of 2002
was fewer than 200 people.
And that included there was a whole group up in San Mateo called Blizzard North.
So Blizzard South, the Irvine group was responsible for Starcraft and Warcraft.
And there were two development teams at Blizzard. It was called Team 1 and Team 2 at Blizzard South.
Team 1 was revered. These are the RTS guys. They made Starcraft, Warcraft 2,
and they were, at that time, they're working on Warcraft 3.
Team 2 was kind of the redheaded stepchild.
Like, apparently, before I joined,
they had tried to spin off a second team multiple times and failed,
and then they finally decided they were going to make World of Warcraft.
There was a game called Nomad.
I don't know what that game was exactly,
But that was what team two was working on at first.
That got scrapped and Alan stored steered the team towards World of Warcraft.
Wow. There's amazing designer named Eric Dodds.
He'd go on later in his career to be the game director of Hearthstone.
Him and Ben, Ben Broad basically were the core designers behind that.
But Eric and Kevin Jordan were these two key designers working on World of Warcraft for Team 2,
and then you have this tech group that was headed up by John Cash.
And John Cash, the first day that I showed up to work on Team 2, they said,
you have to go get your login from John Cash.
I'm like, John, the John Cash from Id.
And, you know, John Cash has a skin.
You could be John Cash in Quake III.
So, and then he saw me and he was a huge EverQuest player.
And you're like, he was like,
you're the guy who runs Legacy of Steel.
I'm like, you're John Cash.
And we had that moment where we kind of fanboyed out
on each other.
And it was just, the vibe was so cool there,
like there were very few producers.
So a game team, there are five core disciplines
that make a video game.
You've got engineers or programmers
who are writing the code.
You've got the art team
that's making all the visuals for the game.
And that spans everything from like 3D modeling,
characters, environments, to also animation, tech art, you know,
making it all work.
A lot of art.
You've got game design, which some companies don't have design,
the artists and the engineers do it.
What?
Val famously has very few designers because everybody there is a designer.
But in companies where design is a discipline, which very much is so at Blizzard,
game designers are sort of the creating the game experience people, you know,
setting up all the systems and content in a way that gets the player to navigate
through the game.
So it's part of the story, part of the quest design, part of it is like how you
move through the game world.
Yes. So game designers, there's a spectrum, like same with art, same with
with engineering of roles within game design.
Some are more heavy on the system side.
So like any game that you've played where loot drops,
you know, Diablo 4, World of Warcraft,
you know, Escape from Tarkov, whatever.
Every game.
If there's loot dropping,
a designer has planned out very carefully
what drops where and at what percentages.
That would be like a systems designer.
a content designer, somebody who's gonna make quests
or write storylines, where there might even be
a narrative designer, which is even more focused on a story.
But designers, you know, run the gambit
and then you've got these jack of all trade designers
that can do it all.
So that's the design group.
There's production, which is project management.
And production is different at every game company you go to.
So if you talk to someone from EA or Blizzard,
production might be very different.
They might be the boss.
They might actually be a designer,
or they might be more of a project manager.
And then one of my favorite disciplines on a game team
that's often overlooked is sound and audio,
which is comprised of the sound designers and composers.
And there are two things, I think there are two things that no one realizes how much they bring to a game until they're missing, and that's audio and lighting, because most of the time we're playing without these things, and it just feels a little off and wrong.
And when you have a great lighting artist, or you have a great composer or sound designer, like the experience, you're just tapping into these senses that you wouldn't otherwise.
But that's that's who comprises the game team as the the lighting, you know, all the all the different kinds of graphics, would that be under the art team.
Yeah, lighting, you're going to have lighting under the art team, but they're going to be best friends with a graphics programmer.
And, you know, like I mentioned with design, there's this wide spectrum on the engineering team.
You have some guys who are like architectural geniuses who are coming up with, you know, the server client model or the networking or whatever.
others are more like gameplay focus. On Overwatch, we had an audio programmer just
doing nothing but audio hooks for the audio team and on every game team you're
gonna have graphics programmers who will work with people like the lighting
artists or the environmental artists, character artists on shaders and basically
any way to make the game, they'll always ask what's your vision? What are you trying to get it to
look like? The one illustration of what should the world look like? And they'll be the ones
that I know how to write. Chat GPT. That will let you do that. So you partner a great graphics
programmer with a great lighting artist. And that's, that's actually the creative tension behind
games, and what makes game teams so unique is if we were to
line them up on some crazy spectrum, on one end, you're
going to have the artists who they're creative, dare I say,
emotional, you know, they are artists on that end. And on the
other end, you have the most logical, brilliant programmers
who their minds just work very differently from the most
creative art like artists could be sitting you have a meeting with them and they'll just sit
illustrating if there's any piece of paper they're drawing on it um and programmers you know they're
just so brilliant and organized and they're thinking everything's so logical and then in the middle
are people like the sound designers the game designers and the producers they're kind of a
a little bit in all those fields,
but it's the brilliance of taking people
who are so vastly different in their interests and talents,
but aiming them at that shared goal
or that shared vision of the game
that really makes something special.
And there, I mean, you showed me the size of the team
for World of Warcraft, but you've also,
are well known for working on quite small teams
to create these incredibly huge games.
Well, what is the power of a small team in this kind of context
where there's that creative tension?
Is it because a small team avoids maybe the compartmentalization,
like the modular where the artists now have their own wing building
where they never talk to the engineer, that kind of thing?
Absolutely.
I mean, you hit the nail on the head.
The bigger the team, the more you become a cog in the machine.
And on a small team, the way I like to describe it
is you get to have a loud voice.
If we're a small team, let's say we're going to make a game
and it's at sort of the incubation period of a game
and there's only 10 of us,
all 10 of us are in the room for every decision.
You know, I'm not a server networking guy,
but I'm in the room for that discussion.
I'm not an illustrator, but I'm going to sit in the room
when we decide what the art style looks like.
As soon as the team starts to grow,
we become compartmentalized.
And it's exactly like you said.
And there's a weird thing that happens.
It's just kind of a human nature thing.
The less you interact with somebody,
the more you sort of become alienated from them
and vilify their point of view.
You tend to look at what they do and say with skepticism
rather than trust and belief in them.
And I find on smaller teams
where we all know each other's names,
I know what everybody's working on every day,
they know what I'm working on,
everybody can talk to each other.
There's none of that
stereotyping of a discipline.
on big unhealthy teams, you start to say things like,
well, the artists just don't get it.
They don't understand what we're trying to make.
And when you back up and you think about the statement
that you just said, it's like such an asshole statement.
Like really all the artists don't get it.
Like that's, A, that's not true.
B, that's sort of demeaning to them.
Like they signed up for this.
This is their life's work too.
This game is gonna be as much theirs as it is mine.
So who am I to say a statement like that?
Interesting.
Okay, I'm skipping forward.
I kind of get to suggest to that.
Building World of Warcraft.
I'm curious on this.
This is gonna take a while, guys.
I'm only a third through this video.
Characters and roles in classes.
You pick a race, appearance, starting zone,
small racial bonuses in a class,
how you fight, what your role is in groups.
Can you continue filling some of the gaps?
What is World of Warcraft?
World of Warcraft, first of all, more than anything, is a world.
Like, it's a world that you can live in with real other people
and everybody's kind of living out their fantasy.
You shouldn't live in it.
Chris Metzen, who was the creative director on World of Warcraft
and really like Alan Adham, who's one of the founders of Blizzard,
calls Chris the heart and soul of Blizzard.
And it's almost like when you're making a Blizzard game,
you're making Chris's imagination at some point.
And Chris famously said,
the lead character of World of Warcraft is the world.
And I always believed that.
So you're trying to create this place
that's exciting and dangerous, but comfortable,
but uncomfortable and gorgeous.
And, you know, it should feel massive.
And it really is.
It's, you know, can take a half an hour to get from one end of the world to the other.
But it's this world you're living in.
The world is divided into two warring factions.
There's the Horde and the Alliance.
And that was a very important, very controversial decision.
really that was made by Alan Adham was the champion of the Horton Alliance
and there really is those are really strong division strong division like
yeah you big aside and then you hang around with only people you're kind yeah
and you get a tattooed in real life on you like the amount of people who walk up
to me and show me their horde tattoo like it's epic it's like it's become who
They are like if you were to say like hey Lex come play World of Warcraft with me we're alliance on
Tychondrius you'd be like dude lose my alliance like okay. I don't think we can be friends anymore
But the Horde alliance decision was really controversial because in EverQuest it was mixed race
Yep, I bet Jeff was against the decision to have factions
They had all the races kind of like wow did but they could all group with each other and
part of when I came from EverQuest where we felt like this was a horrible decision Alan was
making and we argued Alan, Rob, Bob Vitch and I would have lunch every single day and we would
just talk about wow and the core design of wow. Rob wasn't even on wow at that time he was finishing
Warcraft 3. And we would fight over the Horde Alliance split if it was a good idea or not.
And Alan had, he came from more of the Dark Age of Camelot community, which was another
massively multiplayer online game that was more PvP based. And he said the magic of that game was
they had three factions. And he liked the fact that you were instantly on a team. You weren't a
loner in the world. And whether you liked it or not, you had people on your side. And Rob and I
just argued and argued against it. And then sometime before beta, Alan retired. He went on to run a
hedge fund of all things, like got super into poker, got super into finance, left and retired.
like, I think it was nine months to a year before, wow, really, shit, which is kind of nuts.
And Rob takes over as lead designer in Alan Stead. And to Rob's credit, the first thing he
did was go, speaking to what we were speaking about earlier, he said, Alan's a smart guy.
The fact that he was fighting so hard for word alliance, we got to do it.
And Rob and I sort of changed our point of view and got on board with Horde Alliance and went all in.
And so, you know, the early days of WoW was it was a great team.
It was a mix of these veterans that we all looked up to.
You know, we had Mark Kern running the team.
Shane DeBerry was, you know, legendary Blizzard developer.
Bill Petrus was the art director.
And then we had Metzen who was sort of like,
Metzen was the cool big brother we all, you know,
aspired to be, I'm older than Metzen,
but I looked up to him like a big brother.
And then there were a lot of us who had never done it before.
Or they had also pulled a lot of people
from other teams and other game types.
Like for example, the guys building the dungeons,
they hired out of the Quake community.
And because they didn't have any hardcore MMO designer
on the staff at that time, it was, you know,
Kevin and Eric and Alan were sort of the only designers.
They started building Quake dungeons.
And that's like Quake levels as the dungeons.
one point WoW was even made in QE Radiant, which was a quake engine. And they later, you know,
retooled to where they were using a proprietary engine. So we were like this hodge podge,
like the bad news bears is how I would describe the WoW team of this mix of veterans. I do feel
like a lot of people like a lot of the classic dungeons could be much easier to navigate if
you were a quick character doing the fucking bee hopping through like wailing caverns I feel like
you could be hopped to the end you I don't know. I'm just some fucking idiot who played a lot of
EverQuest and I end up designing quests. Yeah like okay we're gonna design World of Warcraft now
And I've said this later with hindsight, I think a huge part of WoW's success with,
especially with the early WoW team, team two in its earliest formation was that we didn't know
what we were doing. You kind of like it's that Titan was the example for me. Titan was the attempt
that making an MMO after World of Warcraft and Blizzard, and we failed horribly and we
had the best of the best on that team. And it's because everybody was too much of an
expert on how to make a groundbreaking phenomenon MMO World of Warcraft was.
This is actually the main thing I wanted to listen to, because I don't know much about
Titan, but it was a failed project that cost, it was massive. And then all of a sudden it
was just gone. So a bunch of people like a very successful sure of itself company who had made
Starcraft Diablo Warcraft with a bunch of Yehuz basically who was like, yeah, we can compete
with Sony online. Yeah. At the time they were making EverQuest 2, like if we go back in the time
EverQuest 2 had been announced, and EverQuest fans, we were just drooling for EverQuest 2.
It wasn't a cool world of Warcraft. It was EQ2 was going to take the chalice and run with it,
and then of all things, they announced Star Wars Galaxies. And they had a brilliant designer on
that, a guy named Raph Koster, who had come from that Ultima Online. And he's just a really smart
game design. If you can ever watch one of his lectures, like he lectured a lot at GDC.
And, you know, we're like, oh my god, they're, they're making EverQuest 2 and Star Wars Galaxies,
and they have the Star Wars intellectual property. We're fucked. Like, how are we going to compete?
And everybody had seen the success of EQ EverQuest, and everybody was going to make an MMO.
And it was just a question of who was going to win.
Do you feel there's immense pressure of this small team of just this hodgepodge of this
unlikely team that kind of looks fast forward into Overwatch, the heroes in Overwatch,
but working extremely hard? You told me about crazy, crazy work hours,
and not because you were forced to but because you wanted to because your heart wasn't it because
you're like this is everything like you loved it. Yeah the the games industry has a terrible
reputation for insane amounts of overtime. It's just called crunch like do you crunch or not.
These days, crunch is not allowed, not permitted, heavily frowned upon.
If we were to work overtime, somebody write an article about it next week and say how horrible we are for working overtime.
Back then, we worked insane, and I mean insane hours.
The longest shift I ever worked straight was 30 hours. That's when we were gold mastering Warcraft 3.
This was in my, I think, um...
Wow.
War 3 shipped on July 3rd, 2002.
Here's a difference though. I feel like, uh, this is how I feel. This is not reality.
I bet back then they had a fucking computer, and this was damn near also their gaming computer.
I bet they had they would log in in the middle of their shift for an hour to like run a dungeon
in EverQuest because they had to and then get back to work, right? Like their lunch breaks
consisted of actually playing the game. So yes, he had a 30 hour shift, but like you get these
very comfortable, very comfortable gamer breaks, I would call it. Maybe still today,
I don't know. Now I sought to down what is it to take away from a 30-hour shift, but
it's not like you're sitting there crunching in a Google Doc for 30 hours straight. Maybe I'm
off base, but... So this would have been like late June, early July, probably late June.
And I had nothing to do with War 3. I should just say that like in the credits, I'm additional
additional help or additional testing or something like that.
When I showed up in May of 2002,
it was all hands on deck, world of Warcraft for E3.
We got through E3 and then all hands on deck,
the whole company get War3 out the door.
For shipping Warcraft 3.
For shipping Warcraft 3.
And because I had not been involved with the game at all
and I was a brand new wet behind the ears game designer,
they're like, you're just gonna help test
whatever we tell you to test.
So we're trying to gold master
and there's a crash that happens rarely
if you run one of the cinematics,
like you have to be watching the cinematic
after one of the levels
and then there was a crash that happened.
And so a programmer put in some logging to catch it
and then they needed somebody to just over and over again.
I need the crash to happen so I can fix the bug.
And I sat there for 30 hours
and just watched cinematic for 30 hours.
What cinematic?
And it was the funniest thing.
Like it was almost surreal watching everybody leave
at the, which was a trickle out.
Like everybody kind of trickles out like in different hours,
you know, the family guys go much earlier
than the single guys.
And then watching everybody show up again
the next morning and they're all like dressed different and they look all
refreshed and I'm just like in the same position you know like eyes are beat red
to the soundtrack of the cinematic yeah but we crunched World of Warcraft we
crunched the date slipped so you do this thing I remember Mark Kern standing in
the team up and saying we're gonna crunch early so we don't have to crunch
later in the project. And I really believe he wasn't manipulating us. Like, I really
genuinely believe that he believed in that. But with games, anything can happen. And they're
just, we slip uncontrollably all the time. And we slipped and it sort of created just
this death march, endless death march, that like to this day, members of the wow team
will remember like Newport Rib. If I say that, they'll have like twitches because like they
would cater the dinner. They'd bring it in at like six or seven at night. And everybody
was eating Newport Rib or Panda Express. It was like the worst diet ever. I actually like
Newport Rib, no shade on them, but you can only eat so much of it.
And the carpets are stained and like dudes are falling asleep on the couches.
And it was an unhealthy work environment.
It gets pinned on a lot of places.
It is executive driven and it is mandated from the top.
But the hours that I work, I never blamed on anyone but myself.
I just wanted to.
I remember coming in on Memorial Day with sound from the beach on my feet because I
really wanted to get some work done that day and working through Christmas.
Those were things I wanted to do.
I never felt like somebody held my feet to the coals.
Yeah, such a complicated thing because, yeah, okay, you could say that's unhealthy, but
I know a large number of people, especially in their 20s, but actually throughout their
career that have been a company that do crunch for a thing they believe in for a thing they love
and it's some of the most fulfilling years of their life months and years of their life and they
also uh it's not just fulfilling they grow from they learn from it and they you know and when they
especially when they talk back about it about that time they can see what the fuck is that keyboard
You're right. You're going through it.
The hell?
It's you can fill that thing with water and drink from it.
And then the crunch that you mentioned is supposed to be a month or two.
And then it turns out to be a half a year.
And then maybe it turns out to be something like a Titan type game
where you never actually ship it and it's heartbreaking in the pain.
That's all. But then you look back and you realize how incredible that journey was.
I think like my reflections on it many years later and having gone through
like pretty crazy levels of crunch to more controlled I think where crunch is
problematic and people are good to all right so they're gonna talk about
working big hours but how wow changed video games no I think I skipped that
single player versus multiplayer skip how Blizzard made let's go to this one
This looks interesting.
Let it run. It's five hours.
I got to the show again.
You continue to speak with so much humility,
but while it turned out to be one of the biggest games of all time,
both in terms of local claim and then
wrath of the Lich King, which by many is also a good place to ask about
the famous Blizzard Polish.
So Blizzard as a company has historically
And you were certainly a big part of that, delivered these games that were just got so many pieces right and well functioning and well coordinated and just feel finished in a way that a lot of other games don't get right.
So what does it take to take this gigantic game, this game played by millions of people, loved by millions of people and delivered in a way where it's like it all just works.
To have a level of polish is like a studio-wide culture.
It's an interesting speed-up plan.
That has to be filled in everybody.
Like no one can be satisfied with a bug.
Every game is gonna have bugs.
And Blizzard games have bugs.
It's a question of how quickly do you fix them
and with what urgency?
And as players ourselves, if we're playing
as much as anybody else,
we're gonna be motivated to fix the bugs.
There are some really tactical aspects to it too.
The quality assurance department at Blizzard
is the best in the industry.
Like the people who come and do QA at Blizzard,
they're passionate gamers.
Many of them wanna be developers themselves
and they're not just doing it for a job,
They do it because they fucking love the game.
And the relationship we tried to develop
between us on the development teams
and QA was extremely tight.
And whenever possible, we also tried to sit
as many QA members up with the development team as possible.
Depending on the logistics of, you know, in the early days,
we didn't always have the space for all of QA to sit with us.
We're very fortunate on the O.
How much does a QA tester at Blizzard get paid?
I'm curious.
$25 per hour, 19 to 35, depending on experience and location.
OK.
$68,000 annually.
How good is that?
I'm actually so, what's the word, out of touch, so I'm just asking.
Not bad.
It's California too, yeah.
It is very expensive there.
So in California, if y'all are saying not bad, not great, not terrible, okay, just curious.
Overwatch team to have a large amount of QA sitting with us, and then developing that
relationship, you know, in the early days, there were these fears of like, well, QA can't talk to
the developers and trying to shatter that, because some of our QA members knew the game so inside
out, you would just say to them, like, hey, dude, just message me any, here's my home number,
like, if there's a bug, if you think we're going to get raked over the coals on this,
you got to speak up. I don't care what the chain of command is, like we got to fix this thing. So QA was amazing.
I mean, so can you speak to QA quality assurance at the peak of the craft? What does it entail? Like you're basically experiencing the game and trying to figure out a particular slices of that experience that could be improved.
improved. Yeah, people simplified the so isn't QA kind of going out of business with all these
early access versions of every game nowadays? Isn't like early access just you're basically
just paying to be a QA tester? Or is that crazy? No.
I mean, maybe they still have it, but it's definitely
No, because players are dumb really kind of PTR beta realms early access. I mean yeah in terms of World of Warcraft
But even other games, but I guess they probably still have some QA testers
Because players aren't you know gonna be the best, but I feel like that gets a big chunk of it every fucking game has that shit
QA does a lot of organizing. Okay, so maybe QA actually takes that feedback
back from players. Okay, whatever the role. I just feel like the way Jeff is talking,
he's talking in a way before early access was even a thing or beta testing for players
was a thing. That's how I feel like he's talking about QA testers right now.
Oh, these guys just get to play games all day. QA looks for specific looks specifically
for bugs, players don't. Sure, they don't actually play the game. They're like, all right, like
Jeff was saying he watched a cutscene for 30 hours straight, trying to force a bug to happen
so he could submit the crash report to a dev that would fix it, right? That's QA. But if you have tens
of thousands of people just playing the game normally, one of the bugs will happen and hopefully
one of those players will submit it. So that trims a lot of it. Right? I feel like QA's
job is reproducing what the players are saying, and maybe either way, moving on.
And then like, let us know if there's a bug. They are so systematic in the way they test
stuff. They come up with these plans that are actually amazing of like, who's going
to test what. There's a lot of regression testing that goes on. Within QA there also
be compatibility testing. The Blizzard compatibility department was amazing. Like they had every
card, every machine, every configuration and they would roll through to make sure there
wasn't some quirk that was going to come up on some video card or some motherboard that
you weren't expecting.
But it was all very systematic.
It wasn't just Wild West, let's play the game.
And then as a developer interacting with QA,
you would find that there were certain specialists,
whether like, for example, on Overwatch,
there were a couple of players that,
like we all were shooter players
when we were making Overwatch,
But I'm not like eSports level shooter player.
I'm like, you know, Gen Xer, remember Doom?
How good I was type of shooter player.
But we had, you know, a couple of these QA specialists
who like, they could just snipe from 100 meters out
and hit the shot every time and tell us
if there was a frame of input delay, you know.
And then you sit that person with an engineer and say,
hey, I think there's some input lag here.
That's amazing.
And sure enough, they'd be right.
But you have to have that relationship
where the devs trust QA or just even on like a World of Warcraft,
they had a great relationship with QA
and that they built out a full raid team to do the raids.
And then you're not only like looking for bugs,
like, hey, the dragon was supposed to fly instead of just like sun through the world
and the game crashed, which would happen.
A lot of my friends ended up working for the QA team to test race.
You're asking them, what do you do?
What do you think you're, you know, like 10 million people are going to see this.
Your opinion, multiply it, you know, it matters.
What do you think, you know, are you having fun?
Yeah, this is cool.
This isn't cool.
So QA was important.
But the other thing that was important is the Blizzard engineering, which you have to
architect your game to be hot fixable.
And what a hot fix is games, there's a couple ways to fix them.
The way most of us know, because all the software we have gets a patch, you know, you have to
update it, you have to download a new version of it, Windows, you know, you get that annoying
message, like there's a new version of Windows and it takes, you know, a few minutes and
and you update it, obviously we patch our games
and that's where we fix a lot of bugs.
But if you really wanna run a game like Overwatch
or World of Warcraft successfully,
you need master level engineers who have architected
the client and server in such a way
that you can hot fix the game on a dime.
And what a hot fix is is a server patch
that no one's client has to go down for.
It's because you're dealing with a huge number of players
and you discover an issue
and you wanna respond to that issue really quickly.
I don't understand this.
There's a lot of issues like something's crashing,
like the worst case scenario
is anytime the server's crashing
or an overwatch, like a really catastrophic bug
would be something where you have to disable a hero,
like someone found an exploit
and you have to disable a hero from the lineup.
You wanna turn around that hotfix
If you can in half an hour get that hero back live, you might have somebody who only plays that hero.
And the only reason they're going to play Overwatch is because that hero is active, you don't want to wait for-
Now there's three rows of characters down there.
... more hot than this as fast as you can.
Who the fuck?
And then also to improve the game quickly, to just even settle stuff.
Yeah, players feel it. Like, they- that's where- there's this idea of, like,
the love and the craftsmanship of the developer that you can feel like any product,
you know, your iPhone or Android or like any computer or consumer product,
you can feel when there are people who loved it behind it and aren't just putting it out on a shelf.
games have that as well, where you can feel the like heart and soul of the developer in the thing.
And some of that's like the joy and delight of like that there's a cow level, right? That that's,
you know, you can feel the humanity of the development team through that. But another part
of that is like, do they clean up their fucking yard? You know, does this game work? And it's not
just the bugs and the crashes it's like when balance gets wacky and stupid and you know suddenly
everybody's a barbarian and whirlwinding and no one else will play anything else you're like
we should probably fix that you know. Ah those were the days I sadly was the barbarian whirlwind guy.
One handed. Yeah it brought so much joy. So a lot of people modern day think of you as Jeff from
the Overwatch team. My name is Jeff from the Overwatch team. I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team.
I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team. Classic, but you almost forgot. You were the game director of WoW
in an era when WoW was one of the biggest games in the world. Just, you know, looking back, what
wisdom can you draw from that time when you got to experience this era of gaming that changed
gaming forever, where it's millions of people playing this video game.
It was my first game I worked on and I joined it as this entry-level dude.
I still have my offer letter from Blizzard, which was for 35K a year.
That's what I was making.
In California, I guess back then, but even very shortly after while shipped, Alan left
his lead before the beta, or like right around the beta. And then Rob took over as the lead
designer. And then he left the team very shortly after a WoW shift to go start StarCraft 2.
And he put myself and Tom Chilton in charge. Tom is a designer who, he was a great partner
of mine and a great leader.
And he actually came from Ultima Online.
And so I always looked up to Tom
as he had a lot more experience than I did.
And this is like early 2005.
The world was on fire, the servers were barely running.
Wow, it was just had taken off like gangbusters.
and they basically put me and Tom in charge of WoW.
And at the time they promoted me my title,
I didn't even have a lead title.
My title was Senior Game Designer.
And Tom and I were running the design of WoW at that time.
So I thought it was totally normal.
And I thought what we were experiencing with WoW
was just normal for making a video game
because it was the first video game that I had worked on.
I thought it was the funnest joy ride
because we were working on wow,
we were still working insane hours.
And then I'd get home, eat dinner,
and then me and my wife would log in and play wow
for four hours, and then I'd go in the next day and I'd work.
And it was just this, my whole life was World of Warcraft.
And I loved it, like I loved everything from the creative meetings with Chris Metzen,
and just what an inspiration and muse he was, down to the simplest, dumbest design stuff that,
Like we as game designers, like you want to talk about why a button is in the lower left versus lower right and what does that mean?
That's like two hours of discussion and is there a better way like the 10,000 minutia problems
were thrilling to me and then also the big disasters like the big I had in the
early days of, wow, we didn't really have all the processes in
place for like how to deal with being a successful online game.
And I literally had GMs, like Game Masters, these are customer
support guys, calling my home phone at three in the morning.
Like I remember this one time there was some faction token in
Stranglethorne Vale, and they figured out a way to exploit it.
and the GM calls me panicked.
It's three in the morning.
He's like, I'm just spawning,
what did we call them?
Guardians of Blizzard,
they were these giant infernals
that we just made that instantly death touched anything.
We used to have them when we were in the beta,
like often the distance of places players
weren't supposed to get in case they cheated their way there.
And this GM is just spawning them
all over Stranglethorne Vale
because he's worried because the players are exploiting.
It's like through in the morning
and I'm talking in hushed tones
because my wife is sleeping right next to the bed.
I'm doing this because it was actually like
before the cell phone days when I actually had a landline.
But that's just how, and I loved it.
I loved the thrill of those big moments, the minutia.
And I felt like through the running Wow Live,
which was me and Tom together with an amazing
STV must be hurt.
Kind of learned how to be the loud team.
And you imagine putting wow on a box and shipping it
was like only chapter one and the 12th chapter book.
Essentially picture a GM just like,
dude, I'm not gonna deal with this book.
So I'm actually just fucking killing everyone
with these GM infernals.
Can you imagine just questing normally and STV
and it's actually just raining hell
and you don't know what's going on,
but then there's actually a GM on the other end
freaking the fuck out,
doesn't know how to deal with this bug.
So just killing it.
That's fucking great.
Billy, and that first, how to run the game,
how to patch it, what type of content,
how to deal with emergencies,
what should our customer support be like?
I mean, we would debate, should we have a launcher or not?
You know, in the early days, the only reason the launcher existed in Wow was to run anti-cheat on your machine.
And we had a moment where we figured out how to put that into the game and out of the launcher.
And it was the first time I ever really had an in-depth conversation with Mike Morheim.
He's like, you got to bring the launcher back, guys.
And we're like, why?
He's like, there's no better way for us to talk to our players.
And I remember trying to hide the launcher, and to this day, Mike was right, like that launcher turned out to be the best thing we ever had.
That's essentially what BattleNet has morphed into these days.
But all those decisions, when it came time to make Burning Crusade, you know, at that point, Tom and I were leads, we were full.
they had actually promoted us.
There were two big exoduses of groups that quit Blizzard.
They were disenfranchised.
If you can believe it,
like we just shipped World of Warcraft
and this whole group just walked out the door.
I was actually sitting, my desk faced Moorheim's office
and I watched them all go in and quit.
And they were the group that formed Carbine,
which made the game Wild Star,
ended up taking them 10 years to make.
And they were just really unhappy with World of Warcraft
and they were unhappy with...
What expansion was WoW on 10 years
before Wild Star released?
I wanna know what state WoW was in.
That's a crazy question.
Okay, so June 3rd, 2014.
What?
Vanilla?
Wild Star was released in 2014,
exactly 10 years prior to that.
Board of Warcraft had not really,
oh, he just said, I didn't, sorry, I'm dumb.
What were they unhappy about?
Maybe we'll talk about it, that's crazy.
I don't know what they were unhappy with.
They were unhappy enough to walk out the door.
right after we had shipped wow that's incredible but what is it about their heart and soul in the
game and they maybe it's awesome in a certain kind of way yeah and i don't want to it's not fair
of me to speak on their behalf i think they were promised some compensation that they didn't immediately
oh and someone has something else before we move on the event was this the stv event
oh my god is this when he was just dropping infernals and killing people here we go
GM owns everyone. Shut up. Oh, so here's the token they were abusing. I bet there was
a system where you could like get more rep tokens. Oh, and this is where you go to turn
him in so he's just blasting him.
Glue there's the infernal.
He just spawned it right there.
Right where you have to turn in to get the tokens.
OH MY GOD IT BLASTS FROM FOREVER!
Damn, fuckin' proof, man!
Right now, this guy right here, he is on the phone with Jeff right now, at 3 AM.
Is there- there's no time in the corner back then, I guess. We don't see the time in game.
Crazy. We got lore.
All right, moving on.
At least see, I don't know if the game, like, here's the weird part when you make a game.
When you come up with the idea and you start pitching it to people, that's the best the game is ever going to be.
be. And then you work on it, like, you know, games I worked on take five years, you know,
Overwatch was two and a half, three years. Every day you get close to ship, the imagination of
the ideal game gets farther and farther from the reality, and you're always shipping this, like,
greatly sacrificed thing that nowhere near matches the imagination of the inception of
the idea.
So you've become disenfranchised with the concept.
So in some sense you're shipping, you're constantly in a state of disappointment.
You're basically shipping a lesser thing that you've been dreaming about.
Yes.
and less and less and less saying no and no and cutting and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's
difficult, psychologically difficult, but nevertheless the result when you zoom out is one of the
greatest games of all time and millions of people played for thousands of hours. It's just...
Did you ever have an experience, a realization, how huge WoW was in terms of not like
statistics on server and so on, but the cultural impact they had? The first time was
as the first BlizzCon, which was in 2005.
So when WoW shipped, and this is so weird to tell people,
but on the team, not everyone,
but a lot of us were very demoralized after WoW shipped,
there were all sorts of issues with the servers
because the game did way more successful
than we expected it to do.
And the server load was just nuts.
Like we were just, we were doing our best
to hire database programmers, you know,
cause we just didn't know how to deal
with the sheer scope of the game.
But when you're an individual, like,
and at that time, like I mentioned,
There were multiple exoduses of people who quit Blizzard.
They went and formed a couple of notable studios.
One was Carbine, the other was Red Five.
And we lost like kind of our core people.
Like when Red Five started, that was our team leader.
That was Mark Kern and our art director, Bill Petrus.
They quit.
When Carbine started, it was, I think, all of our animators
and some of our best programmers.
And like it's really demoralizing
when you lose team members like that.
But then we were also underwater.
Like the servers aren't running.
We're not able to keep up with demand.
And we had to start putting patches out.
And now we're making patches like,
for a while we had one animator stuck around
and then eventually he left also, but you're doing like,
Okay, we got to now do a patch without an animator.
A lot of our art team was gone at that point.
Really, man.
And we had to keep the ship afloat
and the morale was just in the shitter.
Like everybody felt very down on team two,
the wow team was called team two,
and that we had somehow failed.
And during that time, there was this idea
to do BlizzCon and the way that started was EverQuest had done these like meetups because
they knew it was like a big guild social game and people would get together at like some
hotel ballroom and you'd sit with your guild at like a big room table.
And to give credit where credit's due, I remember sitting in the meeting for what was to become
BlizzCon was part of who said, Blizzard's bigger than that. We're not just one game. And I know
everybody's focused on World of Warcraft right now. We should do BlizzCon. And at the time,
we had a game called Starcraft Ghost was in development, and that was getting ready to show.
And there was Frozen Throne, which was expansion to Warcraft three. But like, we knew we're going
Hold on what time are we in right now because what released first frozen throne or classic while I'm under the mindset
We're in TBC right now. Am I crazy?
This is before TBC
Okay
Really frozen throne released after vanilla I actually didn't know that
Because vanilla released in 2004 didn't it
Of course, I didn't know you're saying like I'm I'm nine years old ten years old and I just I got the frozen throne at a
Game stop. There was no news. There was no streamers. No websites to look up. I don't know things
I just know I had frozen throne and I remember having vanilla and I don't remember ever having one before the other
I just assumed four craft three frozen throws and thrown came out before vanilla. I don't know I
I didn't know that moving on make Starcraft 2 and then there was a lot of motion happening with blizzard
There was before vanilla separate story, but there was like hey, we could really do a cool show
That's this blizzcon thing and at first
We kind of announced it and it just was crickets
You know when you're like excited about something you're like man everybody's gonna love like we're doing blizzcon
areas kind of like crickets with BlizzCon, who cares. And we're idiots, we're reading the forums
and the forums are just flaming us all the time. Like there's lag on this server and can't log
into that server and that's that was our perspective of what was happening. And then like I said give
Mike Morheim credit where credit's due. He kept us, he kept us committed to that launcher
and they put the BlizzCon tickets on the launcher, which they hadn't done before. It was on the website.
And so everybody who logged into World of Warcraft suddenly got this like, hey, we're doing BlizzCon in Anaheim.
Do you want to come? Sold out instant, like instantly sold out.
And when I showed up at that show, one of the most emotional things in my life, it was nothing but an outpouring of love.
And up until that point, your perception was because you're just reading online.
And literally reading the feedback that he would give ever question is such hatred because people who are passionate online
They express themselves in the harshest ways because it gets attention
You know, that's the lesson I should have learned from my early days
And it's such an unfortunate thing because then you met these people in person and
They loved world of Warcraft
Fuck I really want to find that one post for all the new people that just tuned in
He was talking earlier about how when he played EverQuest, he submitted a ticket about a bug in the game.
And it showed it on screen, his ticket, and it was so fucking funny.
I don't know where it's going to be in the interview, but whatever.
And all they wanted to do was talk about World of Warcraft and hear about what was coming next,
and be around other people who loved World of Warcraft.
Warcraft and isn't quite right. It's a fascinating to me about here it is here is I
Mean I'll just read the beginning fix your goddamn buggy bullshit half-assed encounters
Do me a favor so I'll waste my guilt's time on this
Jack-ass shit-faster again. Send me an email a
Implement an encounter that wasn't designed by a retarded chimp chain to a cubicle. I mean it goes on and on it's pretty
Yeah. Anyways, moving on.
I'm in nature and it's absolutely true. And I wish there was a thing that could be solved, but then again, maybe not. Maybe that's just the way it is. But in person, all of the people that are passionate about a particular topic and whatever that topic is, it could be games, it could be conferences, technical conferences, they are, they're all mostly full of love.
love and just the way they talk about stuff they nerd out even the
disagreements are drenched in this respect and appreciation and love for
the game for the topic and online you're right I don't know if it's because of
popularity or clicks or so on but it's just a way of speaking on the internet
is more mockery and cynical if you say I love this thing here's an apple I love
apples I love bananas I love I love X whatever you just get me fun yeah and
then so with the lesson you learn from that is well I'm just not going to speak
up when I love something I'm going to instead speak up when I maybe how much I hate another
thing that's similar to it or maybe join in when we're making fun of a particular quirky
thing about don't you hate it when you're right versus like not saying that calling up the elephant
in the room is we're all gathered here today is absolutely right but it's interesting it's
an aspect of the internet that I think is jarring to a lot of people depending on the game if you
go to discord or reddit or so on in communities that love a particular video game there's a
if you're not used to it and I don't often go so when I go it's like wow there's a lot of like
mockery and so on but you're super quick you understand it just I wish there's more love I
I feel bad because I played a role
in the earliest development of some of that online culture.
It really was social media before it was called social media.
You know, I ran, I actually,
I had this reputation for being edgier than I really was.
There were a couple notable posts that survived 30 years
that people like to look back on.
But they didn't look back on the ones where I'm just being chill.
And that's unfortunate.
I think a lot as a game designer about the design of social media, and unfortunately,
social media in general is designed in such a way where the maximum hyperbole works.
And that's how you get the most points is by being max hyperbolic.
And usually, unfortunately, it's more in the negative direction than the positive direction.
You know, if I say, that's a pretty nice mug.
I've seen nicer, but I like this one.
No one's interested in that.
I have to either love this thing or better this thing's a crime against humanity in some
way.
And it's very self-reinforcing and everybody sort of feeds into it.
Especially when you're young, I got to see this kind of interesting thing.
So I was at, I spent, is what we're talking about.
I know I don't need to hear about the online toxicity, but I understand why they're going
to.
Here we go.
Why Titan failed?
one. Here we go. So after shipping well, Wrath of the Lich King, again, many consider it
to be one of the great expansions for WoW. You step down as WoW's game director and
switched to developing Titan. This epic, huge game that promised to be the sort of the MMO
to end all MMOs and it's kind of a legendary vision for a game, right? It's gigantic with
a lot of, like you said, a brilliant team, a team that's now hardened and knows how to
do a great game, but it was canceled after seven years in development. So tell me what
was the vision of the game and what happened?
Sure. So as we were experiencing success with World of Warcraft, there was this concept in
the studio that WoW wasn't going to last forever. WoW would be maybe successful for five years and
eventually kind of age out. And the studio would be in real trouble if we didn't have another
massively multiplayer online game, sort of wading in the wings. So starting around, I want to say
2006, maybe 2005, the talk of starting a team really picked up momentum. And we were working on
burning crusade, Rob Pardo took the helm to start sort of Titan development. We didn't even really
have a team then. And I remember being like embroiled in burning crusade and going to Titan
meetings. And Rob pulled a group, you know, from kind of across the company. And we started talking
about what this next MMO could be and when it would get going. And eventually it started in
earnest like real development around 2007, the first team members joined. And it was a real
ambitious project including like building a new engine from scratch. I think maybe the first
team member was a guy named John LaFleur, who was just a stellar game programmer.
And the engine which ultimately failed for Titan ended up becoming the engine for Overwatch,
which is... So the times are weird. They started working on Titan before BC even released.
So, they release Classic WoW. It's a success. They're working on TBC. They're drowning.
No, this is after Wrath. Well, I mean, he says it's 2004, 2005. I mean, the point is,
they started making a team. I mean, did I not hear that right? He said 2007. Mike,
Am I like a skit so engine from scratch?
Bob Pardo took the helm to maybe successful for five years
and eventually kind of if we didn't waiting in the way, say 2006, maybe 2005.
OK, the talk of starting a team.
Really picked up.
So 2005 is what I heard.
And yeah, classic release in 2004.
The talk of, okay, that's my point though.
The talk of starting a team.
So they made a vanilla, right?
And now TBC is being worked on.
And now like, you know what?
Maybe we should start working on another MMO.
Like that, someone said that out loud and they went with it.
That's crazy.
That's insane.
That's a crazy thing, even to talk about it.
momentum. And we were working on burning crusade. Rob Pardo took the helm to start sort of Titan
development. We didn't even really have a team then. And I remember, I remember being like
embroiled in burning crusade and going to Titan meetings and Rob pulled a group.
I heard this MMO could be and when it would get going.
And eventually it started in earnest like real development around 2007.
Okay. The first team members joined.
And it was a real ambitious project, including like building a new engine from scratch.
I think maybe the first team member was a guy named John LaFleur.
Her all those who was just the stellar game programmer and the engine which ultimately failed for Titan ended up becoming
the engine for
Overwatch which is a great success story for him and the idea behind the game it was going to take place in
Future Earth and the players played as secret agents and
And by day, they all had day jobs, and by night, they went off and did cool secret agent stuff.
And the secret agent stuff was very first-person shooter, but over-the-top abilities, like you would see in Overwatch, because that's where they came from.
And the by day stuff, we're going to let you run businesses.
We took a lot of influence from games like Animal Crossing,
Harvest Moon, The Sims.
We had a brilliant game designer and game director named Matt Brown,
who was the creative director on The Sims.
He came over.
And so we had this vision that there was going to be all this like daytime
business, house stuff, you could you could build a house, you could live in a neighborhood, like second life, there was also a vision on the technical side game design and technical side that unlike World of Warcraft which that the modern day term for is is that it's sharded.
So meaning people play on different realms or servers in a while server.
I don't I haven't been on that team in a very long time.
But back in the day, you might have 5000 people on a while server before they'd have to spin up another while server.
The big idea behind Titan is that everybody would play on one server.
It was a one server, one world game.
And the world was massive. It was going to take place in future Earth.
And we were literally building like we have what we call Bay City, which was San Francisco.
We had, you know, Hollywood.
And then we had to build all of California between that. And we also wanted to build like Cairo and London.
And there's this realization of like, how do we connect all of these?
the game had driving in it, like full blown, like GTA style driving. It was such a gargantuan,
huge undertaking with it, with a brand new engine, a brand new team, a brand new IP, intellectual
property, you know, setting, which we really wrestled over, like the amount that the IP just,
you know, trying to figure out, like, are there aliens or not aliens? You know, like, all that sounds kind of dumb and fun. But when you're building a game, like you, especially world building, you have to have rules. That's what makes world building work is that, like, this exists in this world and this doesn't.
And, you know, why it's like, because someone said so and just the way it needs to be.
But that development started in 2007 kind of as ideation brainstorming early work really got going in late 2007 and then I had to ship wrath of the Lich King.
And it was, we had the like, we always said that like a champagne toast.
I still remember it because it was election day.
I think it was like election day and my birthday
and the day Obama got elected.
Then I left the wow team on that day.
It was like memorable in all those ways.
And then I joined the Titan team.
And that game, we went on,
like the fast forward part of that is we shut it down in 2013.
that was one of the most painful development processes that I've ever been a part of.
And probably deep into 2009, I knew that the game in its current form could never ship and would never exist.
And by 2010, like after numerous times trying to convince the powers that be that like this game is not going to happen, it's in trouble.
I remember going to Mike Morheim in 2010 and like you're going to the CEO of, you know, at that time, Blizzard was a big company and I'm like you got to shut us down.
us down. We're just going to burn money.
What was your intuition about why? So like, for my understanding, there was a few issues.
So one was such a gigantic world, which by the way, is a beautiful dream.
That's kind of universe simulator. Cause I love every game you mentioned there is,
is great. I empathize with the dream. I would love to play.
I don't know if I would have liked Titan,
but assuming they actually understand was unclear what like the quest flow is.
Like, what are you supposed to really do in this game?
What's the thing that connects all of the pieces together?
Like, the biggest turnoff to me was like future.
I don't really care too much for future like fantasy.
I guess future is kind of fantasy, but you know what I mean?
Not sci-fi.
So it was a multifaceted failure for for many reasons.
Ultimately, the failure of Titan lies with leadership, team leadership.
myself included. Like, there's just no getting around that. And then on top of that, like a lot
of games you can point to as being like an engineering failure, like the, you know, the servers
didn't work, or like an art failure, like no one responded to the look of the game or design failure,
like the, it's just not fun or it's tuned poorly. We failed on art, engineering and design. And I'm
cautious about calling out art because some of the best art ever made at Blizzard was made for Titan.
My criticism isn't of the art that was created. My criticism is that we never had any art cohesion.
So the art looked like it could have come from 10 different games.
And we should say it cost 83 million dollars across those years. So
So, large team doing a lot of stuff, but not conversion towards a game that can actually
ship.
Correct.
As like a game designer, I use semantics a lot, and I like to define my semantics so
people know where I'm coming from.
Talking about ideas versus vision for a second.
Ideas are easy.
Ideas, you know, I can have 10 and 10 seconds.
you know, let's make a 2D platformer about a mouse, you know, whatever.
Like you can cut, I want a secret agent by day is, you know, doing all this cool shooting stuff by night is running a flower shop, you know, ideas are just infinite, at least on creative teams, you know, you have no shortage of ideas.
What I call vision is the ability to not only take a great idea but shepherd it into existence,
and you're doing that through inspiration first and foremost.
If you need a team to make it,
you need a team to believe in the vision of the idea.
Then there also has to be a technological plan for the idea.
There has to be a design plan.
There has to be an art style for the plan.
There has to be a pragmatic production reality to the plan.
And Titan kind of was like, that was
the hubris of Blizzard in that era at its height.
We were over being hurt about World of Warcraft.
I don't know if people are going to like it.
And we were now in the era of like,
we made a world of Warcraft, we can do no wrong.
This next thing is gonna be the best ever.
And there was also a lot of what I call anticipatory hiring
or like there's opportunity hiring
and then there's also anticipatory hiring.
I have the exact opposite hiring philosophy.
I won't hire anybody on any team
until like we're feeling like we got to work over time or like we might not ship if we don't get you
know somebody else in here and Titan kind of had that hubris of like well we're going to build a
really big world we don't know the story of the world yet we don't really have it mapped out what
it should be like we don't have the art style really defined we don't know technically how we're
going to make the art or what the constraints of it are but we know we're going to build a really
big world. So let's just start hiring environmental artists. And like in one year, we would hire
like 70 environmental artists from all over the world, you know, we're getting visas and
like the top tier talent because at the height of World of Warcraft and nobody knew the team
that they were coming on. It was Blizzard's next MMO top secret and then, you know, their first day
at work like some you know poor guy from Belgium just shows up and he's his first day at work and
he's like oh are we making a world of starcraft is that and like no dude let me show you what
and he's like what is this game you know we were in that world and we hired way too many people
the right way to incubate a video game the story craft give the smallest group possible
And you try to get the idea to be fair
I don't know when it was but there were word on the straight of Titan
Like that word was going around and I was like the fuck you talking about that's stupid and people were actually thinking
That it was like maybe a Starcraft MMO
Genuinely because no one really knew if it was gonna be a new IP or whatever. I think they knew it was an MMO
But it's had no idea and there was talks I remember people on probably Vent or Skype were telling me about it on my shut up
But yeah, if I was a Belgian artist, I could be doing starcraft. I would think the same shit
Across with whatever technology you can get your hands on using other engines using art from whatever
You prove out that idea and once you know what you're doing then you expand the team
You know, the cliche of idle hands is the devil's work or whatever.
You have these like brilliant team, huge, and we don't have a road map for what we're
making or how we're going to make it.
And now you're having to deal with all these people, like they're coming into your office.
You know, you're trying to figure out what is the quest flow?
How do I design the quest system for Titan?
How can we prototype it?"
And we're like, oh, this prop artist over here is running out of stuff to do.
What prop should he make?
Should he work on Chinatown or the Hollywood set?
And you're just making up busy work.
The engine didn't work.
When we would run play tests on Titan, we would have to tell the team stop checking
in because it slows us down.
with this really great technical artist,
a guy named Dylan Jones.
And he was on Titan with us.
And I remember in like the last days,
we asked him, because he was a very active user,
Titan editor was called TitanEdit or TED,
which is to this day,
TED is the proprietary tool for Overwatch,
since Overwatch came from the Titan engine,
which was Tank.
And we said to Dylan, I want you to log your uptime
in the editor and Ted.
And in a 40-hour week, he was only able to work for 20 hours.
And you can imagine you're building a team of the best
and the best in the industry, and they can't work.
So not only are you just burning cash faster
than anybody on the planet, it's also like,
Imagine having fighter pilots, but we don't let them fly.
Yeah.
Like the creative frustration and the way
that that manifested itself and how demoralized the team got,
it was a disaster.
And so many elements of that were done completely differently
for Overwatch, which turned out to be this incredibly
masterful execution and a short timescale
the small team with a clear vision.
I read that sort of if you were to compare overwatch and Titan
so the defining characteristic for the Titan team that said yes to everything
in the overwatch team said no to everything, meaning focus,
like deep, deep focus on the execution of a very clear vision.
And maybe that's the process of designing games.
Like you said, as you talk about how they decided to make overwatch
overwatch in six weeks. Here we go.
All right. Well, I guess the next topic is how Overwatch happened. Let's get forward.
So when Titan was canceled, I mean, there must have been a gigantic
heartbreak for everybody. And there's this moment when the plan was
that I think it expanded and moved elsewhere, but you fought for for keeping
some part of the Titan team, the core of the team together. And Mike Mohan
gave you six weeks to come up with a pitch for a new game. And he talks about
this process. And you've mentioned that there are three possible ideas,
directions, you're thinking about a Starcraft MMO, maybe an MMO in a new IP
called Cross Worlds, and then the third idea was Overwatch.
Can you take me to those six weeks?
Yeah, the six weeks, it was supposed to be
the greatest time ever if you think about it
because you're a game developer at Blizzard
and you get to come up with a new idea.
So that sounds awesome.
Like to everybody at Blizzard, to all game developers,
it sounds great.
But we were probably the most demoralized
we'd ever been in our careers, at least I was.
I didn't know if I was going to be fired.
I didn't know if that was the end of my career at that point.
And so it was like a really serious kind of dire environment
that this was happening in.
And we were given two criteria that we
had to hit for these pitches.
The first one was that we had to ship within two years.
And that is a very ambitious time frame for any game.
That's crazy.
But for a Blizzard game, it's kind of insane.
Yeah.
And then the second, OK, the second is even more ambitious
and crazy, was whatever we made, whatever we pitched,
had to have the potential to have World of Warcraft-like revenue.
Yeah, right.
And to date, at that point, there was
one game that had World of Warcraft like revenue,
which was World of Warcraft.
So immediately I just threw out the revenue thing
cause it's all fucking monopoly money to me.
Like this game money is, it's insane.
And I just don't think about it.
That's someone else's problem.
But I did want to be as realistic as I could
about the schedule part of it.
So most of our team, the Titan team was 140,
Some people, most of that team got moved to go work on,
here's the storm, the D3 expansion,
World of Warcraft, Hearthstone.
So immediately, large number of the team was gone.
Then we had a bunch of like what we called temp loans.
People that someday were gonna come back to us,
but we loaned off for like six month tour of duty.
And then there was a very small team.
There was a group of engineers that was mothballing Titan.
So it exists somewhere at Blizzard at that point.
And they were also deconstructing the engine
because they knew it didn't work anymore.
And to make a new game,
it had to be where I reconsidered
to sort of what it is today.
Like packing it up.
And then there was a very small creative group
that was supposed to come up with these three pitches
and given six weeks.
And we just sort of arbitrarily decided like,
let's spend two weeks on each pitch.
The ground rules that I sort of led with
is you have to be all in for the two weeks on the pitch.
So if we're, you know, pitch one was a Starcraft MMO
and we have to live and breathe and want it
more than anything.
And I kind of warned everybody.
I said, at the end of this two weeks,
you're gonna think this is the only game idea
and you're not gonna be invested in the next.
But we're going to throw it out as soon as we finish it and do the next one.
And the Starcraft MMO actually really loved that pitch.
It was called Starcraft Frontiers.
So the way the concept was like less of your play.
So that random guy, that random artist from Belgium
maybe said it was onto something, you know, a Starcraft MMO.
Imagine that.
Playing like Space Marine, like it was less armies.
Starcraft, the RTS is always about the three races and the giant armies and kind of what made wow, wow and
separate from the Warcraft
RTS series
Was a single character instead of being like a footman in the army and World of Warcraft you were like a lone adventurer
You know make your mark on the world
So we had this idea. It was this old Chris Metzen drawing
the space prospector. I love that idea that like somewhere out in like where
all the giant Starcraft battles were happening you know thousands of Zerg
and Protoss and Terran there's like this like lone prospector on some planet
like going through like a mysterious dungeon you know looking for minerals
but finding monsters like it was that kind of spirit of that's awesome more on
ground level. I didn't even think about that because my intuition with the Starcraft MMO
would be the soldier as part of the army, right, the prospector. That's such a beautiful vision,
yeah. Looking for the resources and on the way finding the monsters. You want to be on the ground,
like what's it like on the ground floor? And I don't want to be a minion in a giant army. I want
want to be Indiana Jones in space, you know. So then there's
this Metz and picture, the prospector. And then two of
the most amazing artists, Arnold sang and Peter Lee, Arnold's
the great character artist. Peter Lee's the great
environment artist. They did this concept art for frontiers.
That was metz and space prospector, he's smoking a
cigar and he's got his foot on a hydrolyzed skull.
And then there's like a med vac in the background and they're on this
like big alien planet.
And like that picture, you just wanted to like, here's my money.
I'll preorder now, like sign me up for that game.
That picture ended up being McCree from Overwatch.
Redid it.
know, but but yeah, that's that was where McCree actually came from.
Well, is it?
Craft frontiers idea.
Cassidy, we we went around a world design.
We had class design, like how how the classes would work.
What progression?
Why did they change like and wasn't McCree named after someone
that was canceled for something?
Me, I'm actually going to look it up.
Why was McCree renamed to Cassidy?
I'm actually curious.
To distance the game from a real-life Blizzard employee, Jesse McCree, who was fired following sexual harassment allegations and lawsuits.
Oof, okay. Moving on.
You also have to think when you're trying to design an MMO, like what could expansions and live content be like.
And we put together a really good pitch.
We all knew there's no way you can make this game.
Like this, even though it was more focused than Titan, it's five years on Blizzard's
best day with nothing going wrong in perfect scenario.
He was the breast milk guy.
Am I like maybe maybe I'm y'all can let me know if it's true.
Did they have to rename McCree?
I mean, they can just say on Twitter, hey, we don't approve of this and he's fired.
And I just keep the name of Cree, because I don't have a Cassidy, am I crazy?
They had to, it's not that simple, it made it worse, right, I don't know, am I crazy?
It's probably better to create distance, I mean, but did it create distance?
I guess maybe if they kept it like that, that'd be like,
you're making a legend out of a breast milk drinker out.
Remove his legacy, I guess, what's stupid stuff.
What a shitty situation.
What a shitty situation with that game.
Probably with 150 to 200 people,
like these 40 people are not making that game in two years.
So as much as I, like again, that was an idea, not a vision,
because it lacked the path to reality, you know?
Because that's a legit, large-scale MMO
in a world that you haven't quite developed
in the way that an MMO needs.
It was really crafted for the
Art of Real-Time Strategy formulation of Starcraft.
And it's in space, it would take,
I mean, it would be incredible,
but it would be a five-year
and realistically even more.
Like an endless thing that you'd spin on that team,
you're making the Starcraft game,
how do you get from planet to planet?
is it a cut scene? No one's going to want a cut scene, but we should probably make it
a cut scene because that's easy. But we got to have space flight that you're adding like
three years just by saying we got to have space flight.
You are.
And then how do you make a space game without space flight? We've all played them. We know
we know those games.
So
When you're like that, and by the way, it's such an incredible story for two weeks, you're
just really falling a little with the game all together and trying to figure out if it's
actually possible. If you're developing that, are you just constantly trying to say, like,
what is the simplest possible thing we could do that's a complete world? Like, are you constantly
trying to simplify or are you allowing yourself to go big? So when you're brainstorming and you're
with the team and you're the creative leader, it's, guys, what's fucking amazing? What's big?
with what's what do players need there's there's a Blizzard design value called what is the fantasy
what is the fantasy you you want to be in space you want to be in the star craft universe and then
your job is the game director and if you have a great creative director art director tech director
the director should be scoping it back into reality the mistake I see on a lot of game teams
is scope becomes a production problem.
You give it to the project managers or the executives
or the producers to say, no, there's not enough time
or you guys should hire more.
Cause, right.
Like what, what do executives,
what do those types have at their disposal?
They can hit you with meetings and outlook
and tell you that you can hire more people.
It's not really how you get the game made.
That's why they get paid the big bucks.
The scoping, your best case scenario is when your tech director, art director
and game director are doing the scoping.
Because then, you know, like this part, we got to spend big bucks on.
There's no getting around it.
This part we can cheat.
If you have a giant.
What on earth is he writing about this just to make props, you know, crates and chairs?
Guys going to make the, you know, that's probably a awesome developer
who's going to put his heart and soul into it.
If you let him, he'll take, you know, six weeks to make a crate.
You have to have that moment where you're like, I kind of need 200 crates.
So just spend like a couple of hours on that one.
And that's a hard thing to say to somebody.
you're doing this kind of scope carving while also talking about what is the fantasy. So there's
a tension there that you're constantly dancing. So you're allowing yourself to think big but then
scoping it down and doing that what on a scale of days in this case? Yeah, we had two weeks.
And I don't think we were, I was working on weekends, but we weren't getting the group together.
So it's, you know, like 10 working days.
And then you like shut it off and go to idea number two.
Yeah. Idea number two was Crossworld.
That was a medicine vision for a universe.
And like I'm I'm glad medicines back at Blizzard.
And I hope they make this game someday.
The way Chris described it was there is a planet on the edge of the universe.
Okay, that's like the Moss Isley spaceport with all these you know freakish aliens and people from all walks of life
And it's kind of seedy and criminal and there's traders and smugglers and diplomats and
But this one planet is sort of the planet that they've agreed to like meet on and this is like the neutral place
And then the game was gonna take place on that planet. So this is awesome
Yeah. So that was more of like a world IP driven one that was really inspired by Chris.
And then it allows you to play with different characters, different. I like that. I like that
idea a lot because it's the meeting place of different worlds. And then you can allow your
imagination to drive what the worlds from which they came from are like. So you don't have to
design those worlds. No, you don't have to design them, but then they're yours. Like if the players
really are reacting to like the green people planet or whatever and some day you're like hey
what expansion should we make I don't know green people yeah like let's do it I'm like it so it
was actually that it was cross worlds we were working on cross worlds and like the starcraft
frontiers you know for for frontiers we were having the class meetings you know how class
progression work, like the game designer-y stuff. And on Crossworld, we were having a class meeting of
a big decision in RPG-type games. It's always, are you doing skill-based or class-based?
And it's usually some combination of those. But class-based, you're choosing, I'm going to be a
warrior, therefore I use sword and shield. And I do these things. We're more of a skill bases.
Everybody's kind of an avatar. And then the skills that you pick define. So I might take that I
know how to use swords. So you're kind of making those decisions. And with all things game design,
there's no right or wrong. It's all tradeoffs. So the tradeoff decision we were making is like,
Oh, I think we want to be class based with this cross world thing.
And we were in a design meeting and one of my favorite designers of all time is a guy named Jeff Goodman.
He was one of the original WoW encounter designer.
He designed like Onyxia and all the big raid bosses.
Like if someone has a favorite raid boss, Jeff probably designed it.
And he just kind of off the cuff set in this meeting.
He said, I wish instead of making like six classes,
I wish we could make 50 classes.
I wish instead of having like a hundred abilities on the classes,
the 50 classes all just have like one or two things that was really interesting about them.
Then the class meeting ended like we designed our six classes in that meeting.
And then the meeting ended and I was back at my desk and it just stuck with me what
Jeff had said about the way he wished he could design the classes.
And then I also had, we had this directory of all the amazing Titan art and I started
pulling up Arnold Sange's characters, Arnold's vision and his art is second to none.
I started taking some of the old Titan characters that we had designed.
We had a class called the jumper and the jumper could like teleport forward and rewind time
and come back and the jumper used dual wheel pistols at the time designed after my dual
GA teams from Modern Warfare 2 was my favorite loadout.
I was just cribbing Infinity Ward.
That's where Tracer's guns came from.
And we had all these like different guns,
like some that bloomed and some that, you know,
had this like really crazy recoil.
And we had other types of guns.
And I took every version of like the Titan jumper
and I just distilled it into what I thought
was the best version of the jumper,
which was, you know, the dual wheel pistols,
the blink, the recall and time bomb.
And then I took Arnold saying R and I went to Arnold
and I'm like, what if this wasn't like a class?
Who is this as a person, not a class?
Oh, what if she's British and her name's Tracer
and like that was the origin of Overwatch.
And some of the pragmatic part of that was
I knew that Jeff Goodman was going to be on this team.
And I knew that Arnold Sang was going to be on this team.
And it's a play to your strengths moment.
Like, what could we make in two years
with the talent we have?
And what is realistic?
Like, what could we realistically make?
And so then I just sat there and I sort of,
I went through a bunch of Titan classes with a guy named the Gunjack who became Reaper.
We had actually the Ranger got split out and became 76 and became Bastion of all things.
You're describing the game of Overwatch where exactly that vision from that meeting came
to life for you, as opposed to having a small number of classes with a large number of skills,
you have a large number of heroes with each their distinct look, distinct set of skills.
McCloud. Yeah. And the personality was a big part of it, like capturing, this isn't some generic
the jumper, it's this person, Lena Oxton, you know, and she has a life and we're gonna,
that, you know, make you interested in her. Yeah, there's like a deep back story. And
that's also what's interesting about over back. Look at bottom left. She has a life
and we're going to, you know, make you interested in gills. Fuck. With
eat
Mama Hong
Angelica
Huntress
Frost
Freak
Rashi Yetzi Reaper are all these closet rumble
Helio
Cyblade where you all see inside? Oh?
These are not in the game are they?
Mercy, what the fuck Angelica and Mercy over here, the clues.
Each.
The personality was a big part of it, like capturing, this isn't some generic, the jumper, it's this person.
Let's get forward a bit.
And it's also what's interesting about Overwatch is that backstory is not like revealed in a direct.
Holy fuck.
So the backstory is implied.
We're having these cross world, like people are writing design docs and doing concept art for
cross world and we'd have some brainstorm meetings every day. And I put together, it was a seven page
deck, overwatch deck, and it was called monetized shooter at the time. And it just said monetized
shooter. And then the first slide was League of Legends plus Team Fortress 2 logos. And then I had
like six heroes like Sloppily designed. And as everybody was working on Cross Worlds,
there were two, you know, co-leaders of that Team 4. There was, you know, Chris Metzin was there
and Ray Gresko, and I remember Ray coming over.
Ray is like a phenomenal game developer of all time.
He like wrote the Dark Forces engine,
was the production director on Diablo 3.
He and I killed Titan,
and then he's at my desk looking over my shoulder,
and he's like, well, what are you working on?
Is this the cross worlds pitch?
I'm like, no, this is like another idea
that I'm just working on on the side and I show them the seven slides and he
just looks at me and he says go show Metson this this is what we should make
instead and then I went and I showed Metson like hey this is it this is an
idea and Metson was like yes you know like this is what we should make and I
showed Arnold and it was Arnold's art. And then Ray tells me, he's like, because we would every
morning we get the team together, because we were in this like dire, you know, dire straits,
and we're midway through at that point. And Ray and a producer named Matt Holly said,
tomorrow morning at the meeting, you're going to pitch this monetized shooter idea. It was called
monetized shooter because originally when I pitched it, it was free to play, and you had to buy the
heroes, which is fucking terrible. But at the time, I actually
thought that was a good idea. And I'm walking down the hall
with Matt Holly to go like pitch this to this group, you know,
we're supposed to be working on cross worlds. And like, you got
to pitch this idea to them. And Matt Holly stops me in the
hall and says, You, Jeff, you cannot go into that meeting. I
refused to put up a deck in front of the team where the first slide says monetize shooter.
They'll hate that. And that's not the spirit of who we are as creative development. I'm like,
yeah, you're right. Well, no one was supposed to see his deck anyway. You guys were all looking
over my shoulder. And he's like, you need to put a name on it. I'm like, it's Overwatch. Like,
Right on the spot, I said the name was Overwatch.
And where that had come from was when we were working on Titan,
I was really angry about this.
We did this fake.
I did not do this.
Another leader on the team did this, this fake.
Like, we're going to put up whiteboards,
and everyone gets to vote for their favorite name for Titan.
But the person who did it already
had a name in mind for the game and just kept pushing towards that name and the thing that
got the most votes was Overwatch. Overwatch in Titan was like a police group, essentially,
but somebody had written Overwatch on that board and it got the most votes. So I basically
name the game Overwatch to like high five my team and kind of middle finger. Yeah. Like,
don't act like it's a democracy when it's not. Yeah. So it's a middle finger. Yeah. So Overwatch and
then that's petty and I love it. So what what in that slide deck is that in that slide deck
did you already have a kind of crawl walk run idea of the way this would be developed?
So my my deck was terrible people actually there's a thing called a Jeff deck, which is it's always gray with black writing and then the default like PowerPoint blue shapes because I just don't bother making it look good.
Besides dragging Arnold saying art, you know, desecrating it into my deck.
Um, we put together, we had this amazing game designer on the Overwatch team, a guy named Jeremy Craig,
um, who's now actually game directing.
All right, guys, the future game show is in 15 minutes and I really need to poop.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna let this video keep playing,
and I'm gonna be listening while I take a shit in the bathroom right there.
Okay, so let me just get to a part where I'm willing to let it autoplay for 15 minutes while I listen.
Rust, why Jeff left Blizzard?
This looks interesting.
Perfect.
I'll be listening to this.
So yeah, so now there's this wave and the live game and events,
but the pressure on creating Overwatch 2 was building.
Yeah, we had a coalition on the team that was really want to overwatch two builds instead of the live events and then the executive pressure became monumental.
And what would have been correct was to do more world events like keep it going.
But the major derail was Overwatch League.
And we really like the weirdest part about Overwatch League is I believe in it.
You know, I helped pitch it along with some other people.
We thought it was like the future of eSports and doing regional based teams,
ensuring minimum player salaries and player protection.
Like there was a lot of very good about Overwatch League.
And there'll be teams associated with the big cities.
Yeah.
The international real competition.
The dream. The ambition was really.
Yeah.
The teams part of the dream was more of like regional base.
Mouse.
Player protection.
Try to make e-sports more of a first class citizen.
Cause there were all these stories about like shady teams,
you know,
screwing their players over where it got away from us was.
was there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League, like too much so.
And then it got over marketed to the people buying the teams.
They went on this road show where they had a deck basically and like you could put anything
in a deck and sell anything.
And they were pretty much selling the Brooklyn Bridge that Overwatch League was going to be
more popular than the NFL.
And we got a bunch of billionaire investors in these teams.
And when 2018 started, like for example, the day I got back, they said we signed this huge
deal with Twitch for streaming of Overwatch League like a meteorite steal.
And that means that here's all these commitments we made for Overwatch League of like in-game
stuff that had access to this video, like a lot of it was integration with Twitch and
camera control and that kind of stuff.
The other part of it was a bunch of skins and, you know, uniforms for all the teams,
which was not just getting the art in the game, but there's huge technical challenges
to like how all that worked and was efficient and hit the right, you know, memory footprint
and all that kind of stuff.
And so all of your plans at that point kind of go out the window, like you're not going
to work on new world events, you're not really even focused on Overwatch 2, you're just kind
of treading water.
There was a lot of talk of like, oh God, you know, the deal, like, the deal didn't go well
and we've got to do make goods to make the deal better for them, and like, just give
them some money back, you know?
if you the deal isn't what people wanted like putting it on us the Overwatch team to like support
this beast and it was a it was a great idea that the wrong instincts and sort of I don't know how
to phrase this in a way that's not damning but there was too much focus on let's make lots
of money really fast and a lot of people got dragged into it and while Overwatch League was
great for Overwatch in terms of the players that it brought in, like the Overwatch League players,
they were awesome. I love them, the Overwatch League staff at Blizzard, some of the nicest,
most motivated, great creative people, like all these organizations got built and they were all
great but it was a house of cards waiting to fall. And it became more about the money versus
the quality of the experience of the different teams playing together and actually building
this ecosystem of e-sports. The financial reality kicked in where these teams now we didn't just have
have executives at Activision and Blizzard who care about the bottom line of the launch.
We have all these people who basically invested in the game, and then they started to express
their opinion.
Originally the business model was going to be that they were going to do in-person events,
and there's going to be big ticket sales and then merch, you know, and all of that.
And I think really quickly everybody learned like, yeah, we can't do in-game events when
you have a London team and a Shanghai team and like, how does this work?
So that fell apart super quickly.
The merch was good, but it wasn't going to be making NFL level money, whatever insanity
anybody thought that was going to be.
So everybody quickly defaulted back to,
hey, didn't Overwatch make like $500 million
just in the live game last year?
What can we sell and what can you give us?
That pressure comes onto the team.
And then the pressure to ship Overwatch 2
and all care and love that we had
for like the live game and the live server.
Let's just make events and new heroes and new maps.
We're losing all these resources.
And it got to the point, you know, my accident Blizzard,
I believed in Overwatch 2.
I think we could have made a great game.
I have a lot of hindsight of, like,
how I would have designed that game differently
with what I know now versus what ultimately we didn't ship.
And there's Overwatch 2 is out now,
but it's not the Overwatch 2 that we planned and announced.
So when you're referring to Overwatch 2
in this conversation, you're referring to the PVE version.
The PVE version.
Which by the way, I would have loved to play.
I wanted to help people that were,
Overwatch is great, but the PVP.
Six comma seven, comma six, comma seven, comma seven.
I think everybody would have loved to play it.
And there's a misconception online
that all I cared about was PVE
and I didn't care about PVP.
All of the Overwatch 2 PVP maps were something
that I said to the team over and over,
we have a PVP audience.
If we get anything right, it has to be the PVP.
We would be lucky to welcome these PvE players,
but that's not guaranteed.
So it was never a PvE-only focus.
It's just almost expanding it to also the end.
And what eventually broke me was it used to be like in 2016
and 2017, I felt very in control of the Overwatch team
and the direction of the game as a game director,
working with Ray Gresko as a production director.
It felt like we were running Overwatch.
And we were very, very successful and doing a good job.
And I think the fans were happy.
And then as we transitioned,
Overwatch League was the best intention.
My parents always say the road to hell
is paved with good intentions.
That was the Overwatch League
and it ended up being in Albatross.
And then Overwatch II was the same thing.
And what it boiled down for me,
like what sort of ultimately broke me
my Blizzard career was I got called in the CFO's office and he sits me down and he says
he gives me a date which at the time was 2020 and was going to slip to 2021 but at the time it
it was 2020. And he said, overwatch has to make in 2020. And then every year after that,
he needs a recurring revenue. And then he says to me, if it doesn't do how much y'all think
I think it was, 100 mil.
I mean, he was talking about how Overwatch made 500 million earlier,
wasn't he?
It had to have been hundreds of millions, minimum.
It's about how many hundreds, right?
I don't know, 200 million, 300 million, 500 million again, I don't know.
dollars. We're going to lay off a thousand people and that's going to be on you.
Wow. And that was just the biggest fuck you moment I had in my career. It felt surreal to be in that
condition. And as somebody who's worked on a lot of games, made a lot of games, you get in these
meetings where they're like, there's, Fortnite has 1400 people working on it. If you just hire
1400 people and make it free to play, we'll make that money, right? And that was, I had
believed I would never work any place but Blizzard, I loved it. It was a part of who I was.
And I felt I was a part of it. And I literally thought I would retire from the place. I never
thought the day would come. And that was it. I was like, it's, we're done here. Luckily
for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there. Blizzard is one of the greatest companies
in the history. Great take, great take.
Tree of Earth. They've created so many incredible video games. It's so difficult to create so
many hits and they were done not by chasing money. They're done by small, incredible teams.
the hodgepodge that you describe, taking big risks and falling in love with the thing they do
and then just chasing it and working extremely hard.
Just because you figured out a way how to make a lot of money doesn't mean it's not at the core
this incredible creative journey that's incredibly difficult to pull off.
And just because you've got a bunch of really smart, creative people who have somehow figured out
how to pull off multiple times in a row doesn't mean you can just treat it like a machine.
Every single time, it's this beautiful journey of a hodgepodge of weirdos working together
and weirdos have to run that thing.
If you don't ever have a chance to create something special, you have to have weirdos at the home.
And if you have a degree to which you don't have weirdos at the home, create one at the home
and you're a business person at the home, get out of the way.
You cannot have the music you're describing.
And I'm just taking all the people from the company
and just the entire industry.
I just, there's so much joy to be had
if we could create great games.
And I just hope we can see those great games.
I think there's a message to creative people out there
and people who make stuff.
We're generally, we're so focused on the love of the craft
that we get lost in it and we love doing it.
And we're not cutthroat.
And we don't have that kind of ambition.
We have a different kind of ambition.
space or left click to make it two times since early.
Especially as soon as you're lucky enough to have success that are very cutthroat and very ambitious.
And for whatever reason, we keep giving ourselves to them. And we need to stop giving ourselves.
World of Warcraft, when we made it, there was no CFO at Blizzard.
You don't need a CFO to make World of Warcraft.
You need artists, engineers, designers, producers, and an audio team.
You don't need to bring in just because you're making a lot of money.
It doesn't mean you need to now start adulting by bringing in a CFO.
You can figure it out.
And there are great finance guys.
Like, I've worked with finance guys who get it and get out of the way
and respect and they're gamers and they sort of understand.
but like, I wish developers would understand their own value more and stop handing the
golden goose to people who don't deserve it.
How painful was it to say goodbye?
It broke me.
I think after you've been at a place like Blizzard, which I love Blizzard to this day,
I have nothing but warm, fond memories.
I mean, there's those moments where you're like,
I wish that hadn't happened,
but on the whole, that place is mecca for game development.
And everything I have is due to Blizzard.
They provided for me and my family, made me the person I am.
So separating from Blizzard was one of the most painful things.
And I was very sad when I resigned,
and I didn't realize how broken I was until recently,
like the morning grieving I had gone through of like,
I think I'm a little fucked in the head
for not being there anymore.
How could I give that up?
How could I not be there anymore?
It was really, really painful leaving.
Can we just speak to, I don't know,
I don't think we can give enough love to Blizzard.
It's a legendary company.
For me personally, for everybody,
for millions of people created some of the greatest games
out of Warcraft, Starcraft, Universe, Diablo.
Wow, Overwatch.
What made it such a legendary game company?
Just looking back at the whole of it.
The start is Mike Allen and Frank.
It was run by three gamers.
They were all three of them programmers.
They made the games before they just ran the company.
All right, I think that's gonna have to be my stopping point.
I can get back to this after.
But we have the future game show.
Hoping this isn't going to be a
massive waste of time.
We will see.
It will, all right.
Well, then let's buckle up for
a massive waste of time.
It crashed.
Hello?
How long is it?
I think it's like an hour long.
We forgot to drink.
Oh, there we go.
Dude, was audio fucked up?
Is this just me?
Like right? It sounds awful. I'm gonna refresh.
Uh oh, we've got hosts.
Sigh.
I wonder if their jokes are gonna be good. We'll see.
Ah.
Okay, we're back.
Oh, it's Layzel!
Dreams or nightmares depending on your playthrough and I'm shy Matheson the voice of scar and weathering waves a cruel and twisted maniac
Silvando in Dragon Quest 11
Darling and the hero Gotham deserves when he's made of plastic bricks
I'm Batman my go Batman
I didn't know we could use the second camera for dramatic effect voice actors. That's fun. Okay
Anyway, we have a jam-packed show for you today full of exclusive trailers and developer
deep dives into the hottest upcoming games.
But before we begin, we'd like to thank you for joining us as we enter our sixth year
of helping you discover something new.
We've featured over a thousand games so far and were the first to showcase a war...
God, my bad.
Breakthrough Blueprints.
I mean, should I just not be touching the volume slider or am I breaking the barriers
here?
Oh, god damn. Dude, what the fuck?
Steam page and wish list your favorites from today's show. We'll all
chance to win some HyperX goodies later on so don't go anywhere
But why would you there's no reason? No because we haven't even shown you our first world premiere
Oh, this is gonna happen every time as long as we save the magic words now roll the trailer
Okay, it's a simple job for men with nerve the roses, that's why you're here
Dishonored, maybe?
No.
Everyone's got such interesting faces.
Everyone's got such interesting faces.
What are you doing?
Do you hear me?
Answer!
Joe?
Joe?
I'm here.
Move!
Jamsil, John, I'm here. Help!
And above all, remember, those places must remain closed.
You see, it's a simple job.
Right again, take it, get out, that's all.
What?
Maybe it's like a Dead by Daylight type game, one person defends, four people go in to loot
some house.
psychological horror game that preys on your paranoia.
It's coming soon to PC and PlayStation,
so get it on your wish list, pronto.
Okay, here's a pup-punk action adventure
where you play as a love-struck zombie,
desperately trying to revive his frozen girlfriend.
Oh.
To be honest, who hasn't done that?
Stupid Never Dies was unveiled late last year,
but we've got an exclusive gameplay trailer
for this body hacking RPG coming at you.
Isn't this that one trailer that played like some song
that everyone hated, it was awful.
At some other game show.
Bouda!
Die, man!
I remember.
I used to swallow the human body
and seized all of our collective intelligence.
Since you now have the same ability he does,
you can take it all back and resurrect the human species!
The game doesn't look that bad.
It looks kind of fun, look at that.
I'm just not really into the...
on us a bit.
Oh wait, I'm already dead.
The only way to revive her is to dive into the dungeon, 8KOM, and see this, the over technology.
As long as you're calling her back, there's a special kind of miasma that drifts within the dungeon.
Oh, there's the time limit to your activities.
When you return to the dungeon, it should reduce the time required to rejuvenate.
The speed of your growth will increase with each trick to the dungeon.
One thing is for certain. Once the power in the cold storage goes off, your girl is a goner.
You told me this would happen!
What does that say? I can't even read the name of it.
Clutching yourself into a dungeon.
Stupid Never Dies?
Stupid Never Dies is coming out later this year, but you can wishlist it now on PC and PlayStation.
And remember, every wishlist helps.
Okay, so up next, we've got the scoop on a brand new jungle-centric DLC for Dave the Diver,
the beloved restaurant management simulator where the catch of the day is entirely up
to you.
Can't that shit kill you?
Oh my god.
Consider your summer plans sorted because Dave the Diver in the Jungle is coming to
all platforms on June 18.
And while you've got your calendars out, why not leave some room for our next, wait for it, World of Premiers.
Again?
It's the remake of delightfully spooky adventure game that was a killer out for the humble CD-ROM.
Let's check it out.
Okay.
All my stuff, not the house.
I'll kill you for these toys.
Six guests came one night.
This screams the only noise.
This is a game. Nothing more.
One of us is going to win that prize money.
I say, any minute for himself.
You and me, there's more to this than we thought.
And what about the rumors?
They're just there.
No one came out that night. Not one was ever seen. The old man's staff was waiting there.
Crazy, sick, and me.
Okay. The guest? Or the seventh guest? I've never heard of that.
The seventh guest is on its way to PC and consoles, so get it on your wishlist ASAP.
What's next, Shine?
Well, Dev, do you remember those 3D pixel art clips that went viral on social media but
were made with AI?
Imagine if it was possible to make something like that without destroying the environment
and making PC parts even more unaffordable.
Well imagine no more because a solo developer has taken it upon themselves to build an immersive
sim in that style and it's already racked up a hundred thousand wish lists.
Wow, score one for humanity.
So here is the gameplay reveal for Project Shadowglass.
What'll it be?
Okay.
Oh
I feel like you just die. If you do that.
Alright. Well.
You can get your hands on Project Shadowglass when the demo launches on Steam later this
year. And yes, if you couldn't already tell, it's a love letter to classic games like
Thief and Deus Ex. What's next, Shy?
What's next, Dev?
Well, I mean, only the hottest game of the year.
It follows an orphan thrust into a spotlight.
You could even say it has all the building blocks of a Shakespearean tragedy.
But hang on, this is the developer diary for a Lego Batman, isn't it, Shy?
Well, yes, Dev.
Oh, okay.
Good evening Gotham. Join us in a celebration of absolute chaos.
Hi, my name is Matt Ellison. I'm executive producer at Titi Games, currently working on Lego Batman, Legacy of the Dark Knight,
which is an open-world action-adventure game where you get to experience playing with Bruce Wayne,
taking him through his journey to becoming the hero of Gotham City, so from origin through to legend.
This game is truly a celebration of all things Batman.
You'll be able to experience all the DC lore from comics and films and TV shows,
and all of this will be brought together in this game with a Lego twist of humour added throughout the whole game.
Let's get to the root of the problem.
We don't need that. Sorry.
So in this game you'll be able to play as Batman, Robin, Nightwing, Catwoman,
Catwoman, Batgirl, Jim Gordon and Talia Al Gould and all of these characters will have
unique progression and skills you unlock and different abilities and different gadgets
that you'll be able to use in the game.
So Jim Gordon has got a foam gun which you can use to gunjup different gears and things
to solve puzzles, but you can also use it to immobilise enemies in combat and that's
a really fun and effective way to deal with people there as well.
And Catwoman, she's got a whip and she's also got a cap that you can bring out and that
can be used in different ways to help you get through the game.
One of the other really cool things is the new combat system that we've got in the game.
With this, it's very action-packed and fluid and very dynamic,
and people really feel powerful and inclusive.
If I had a kid, this is the game I'm going to make him play.
And you can also use these different gadgets in the combat, for example Batman.
You play this when he's like five.
He's got buster rounds that can...
No, maybe I've got enough of a kid.
I don't have a kid.
I don't have a team.
And then you've actually got a Batclaw, which you can use to reel enemies in
and get them up close to fight them.
As you'd expect, Backman and his allies are finding a whole variety of villains throughout
the game.
So all of the famous DCC villains are here, so the Joker, the Penguin, Mr. Freeze, Poison
Ivy, Raza, Ghoul, Bane, and there are many more as well, so you'll be fighting a variety
of the enemies as you go through the game.
One of the cool things about LEGO games and what people expect from LEGO games is to be
able to collect lots of different things, and this game isn't going to disappoint that.
So, as you're going through the game, you'll be able to collect 100 different suits for
your playable characters, spanning a whole variety of different eras and different references.
So we've got things going from the very early debut look of Batman, from the golden age
suits which is from Detective Comic in 1939, and then going through to all the modern based
up as well.
Also today we've got an exclusive look at two new designs of outfits that we've got for
characters.
Batman and Robin and their original Lego Batman the video game looks that we had in our title
way back in 2008 in our first adventure to Lego Batman. We've got those two suits available
in this game as well and it's a great way for us to look at the legacy that we have with
Lego Batman and that character here at TT and celebrate that in this game as well.
Lego Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight is available to pre-order and wishlist now and will be
available for players on May 29th. We can't wait for you to experience it.
I just watched a 20 minute ad.
I hope you enjoyed that deep glide into the mean streets of Gotham City.
I know I did.
Lego Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight is coming to PC, PlayStation and Xbox on May 29th and
Nintendo Switch 2 later down the line.
Right.
And next we have...
So put it on your wish list now.
Okay, should I back in the zone? Back in the zone.
Next up, we have some exciting news about Void Interactive's tactical swatshooter, ready or not.
Oh yeah, I forgot about this game.
falls apart.
Right?
But we're not so different.
We all break.
Eventually, some just
make a little more noise doing it.
You call this chaos?
I think it really is more of a correction.
See you soon.
Okay, so I assume it's new maps.
Ready or not, spoiling point update is out now on all platforms.
Introducing new missions and fresh cosmetics for you and your friends to check out.
Be sure to jump in after the show.
And while you're organizing your next Discord session,
we've got another world premiere, especially for you.
Are you gonna get to do all of the...
This one's an ambitious remake of a classic 18 strategy game set in the
younger ages. Let's take a look.
Okay. England is at war. King Lionheart knighted his greatest warriors, but the
king's murder shattered the realm and each lord sought to seize the crown for
themselves. In the year of our lord 1986, Defender of the Crown launched.
Brains, tournaments, siege and conquest.
In the year of our lord 2026, Defender of the Crown returns.
Retro mode, featuring original visuals and gameplay.
Classic mode, with new graphics and refined systems.
Yeah, I have no idea what this is.
Thanks, Dev.
Before we move on, just a little note to say, we'll be uploading all of the individual trailers
from today's show onto the FDS YouTube channel, so you should go and subscribe right now.
Go on, you know how to do it.
You really do.
Okay.
Now, next up, we have the latest update on adorable adventures.
A relaxing journey where you'll follow your nose to reunite a family of baby boars.
Extremely cute stuff.
This little guy is Boris. Even though he's young, Boris has an incredible sense of smell
and can use his nose to learn about the plants and wildlife around him. The park is full
of exciting things just waiting to be discovered. But with so many different areas, it's easy
to get lost, especially after the fire.
Boris knows that his brothers and sisters are out there, and while finding them won't
be easy, he's determined to bring them back together, so they can be a family.
Once more.
The aptly named Adorable Adventures is sniffing its way onto PC, PlayStation and Xbox later
this year.
What have we got next, Dev?
Well, let's keep the good games rolling with a developer overview of our modding Mr.
Koo, a hand-drawn adventure game from solo developer Nacho Rodriguez.
Take it away, Nacho.
Hello, I am Nacho Rodriguez and you're watching a little bit of gameplay of unboxing Mr. Cool.
This is the sequel to the mini-pieces of Mr. Cool, which was launched on September 2023.
And this is a fully animated graphic adventure, a point and click game with a lot of hand
drone, frame by frame animation.
I am the director and animator of the game,
and I love to create surreal stories,
and I love to tell stories without words.
Only pictures, moving around,
cartoony, fluid, surreal, adventure, slapstick.
Nice tones.
And I love to put as much control as possible
in the hands of the player,
so I want every click to be responsive,
every little action to be fluid and responding to whatever the player commands and to let
the player play at his own pace.
So you will get to explore a story full of adventures, full of puzzles, and full of slapstick
hilarious, fantastic adventures where Mr. Koo may suffer something even more than getting
cut up into pieces. Maybe this time he will dissolve into molecules. The game is currently
under production, but you can already wishlist it on Steam. Thank you very much. See you.
That actually looks like the most interesting game I've seen so far. I'm guessing Mr. Koo
is coming soon to PC and consoles, so make sure it's on your wishlist to catch all the latest
updates. And without further ado, here's your first look at gameplay from Kalex,
an action adventure game set on a mysterious alien planet.
At first I thought I was going to be like Journey, you know, just walking around.
But then you got this combat, okay?
Pogs with the Enix dodging.
Didn't seem very polished though.
Like the animations look shitty as fuck.
Calyx is coming to PCN consoles in the summer, but you can play the demo now on Steam.
And with that, it's time for our Check This Out.
First developer deep dive.
Aww, so you do have a fraction of my power?
Once to watch is where we delve into an upcoming game that players have been raving about online.
The visceral medieval combat of blight survival made an immediate impact on social media,
So we asked the game's developers what players can expect from this promising horror game.
I remember that this is the medieval, like zombies almost, right?
Forgot about this game.
Yeah, people were pretty hyped about this.
Damn.
Damn, damn, okay.
These executions look sick.
1.5 million wish lists, yep.
I believe it.
Hi everyone, Holder here, creative director for Blight Survival.
On behalf of myself, Moth's, Ash, and the team, thank you.
Hitting 1.5 million wish lists is a massive milestone.
We're incredibly grateful for your support.
We're taking the time to make sure that it pays off when the moment comes to put light
in your hands.
When we teamed up with Behavior, we spent a lot of time digging into the original vision
for life.
It quickly became clear that if we wanted to truly do justice, we needed to take a step
back and rebuild our core systems from the ground up.
It looks like details.
Barsons.
We're designing blights to be a brutal, visceral game.
Combat is meant to be felt, from the first clash to the final deadly blow.
These finishes are just one part of our immersive combat system that we can't wait to show you
in the future.
We've started ramping up on small scale play tests, so for anyone who's interested in
shaping the future of blight, join us on Discord.
Pass.
Everyone here of the team of blight and we can't wait to see you say
Like how heavy it is
Okay
Thank you to the blight survival team for that inside scoop make sure you're in the official discord for information on future play tests now
Now, here's a good idea for a game dev.
Power wash simulator, but you're restoring natural spaces to their former glory.
Well, that sounds wholesome and moreish.
Yeah, but get this, your in-game contributions actually impact real-world recycling efforts,
too.
Wow.
Let's take a look at some new gameplay.
Okay, regroup.
Everyone, over here.
Can I weigh my weight?
Happy that.
Let's move.
All right, team.
All right, Tim, let's clean this zone.
You guys, we gotta do the shipwreck.
Let's move.
You can get it. Here we go! Come on.
Like this. Oh, look at that.
I've got recycling covered. Anyone got rope?
Yeah, I've got it.
Where's Brian? I think he's in the kitchen.
Almost done.
I've got something. How about here?
Wow! Look at that! So cool!
Alright, let's celebrate. Awesome guys, we did it.
Big celebration!
natural beauty with your buddies when clean-up earth launches on pc playstation and xbox later this year
You're so mean. Now let's move on to a slightly different cooperative experience
Here's supermassive games to tell us more about the studio space station thriller directive 8020
The organism that can manipulate its physical appearance
The subject is unidentifiable.
It can change shape.
It can turn into a bus.
Terminator?
Mitchell?
No.
I can do everything right.
I can do everything right.
I can do everything right.
I can do everything right.
It's different.
It's me.
I should go.
That's fine.
Okay.
Prime your soap pillows because Directive 8020 launches on May the 12th on PC, PlayStation
and Xbox.
I'm excited again. Here's the launch trailer for 1348 X photo you're able to play with three friends
But you can also play young knight in medieval Italy
The end justifying the news
Every deed as a price
In times such as this
Okay, this looks like shit.
It feels like there's zero weight to that sword.
Why is it his armor so you can hear blood splatter?
13, 18, someone said it's already out.
1348 X Photo is out today on PlayStation and PC and stars Albie Baldwin as well as a friend
of the show, Jennifer English, so don't miss it.
Now from Shadow Heart to Shadow Stone, this is the next game from Secret Draw, the team
that brought you Sunderfolk.
Let's find out when you can go hands-on with the Starpastor Tactics Roadlight.
Thunderfog was actually pretty cool.
That's a new class.
These aren't new.
Okay, I mean that game is cool.
Shadow Stone is coming soon to PC,
but you can sign up for the play test on the game steam page.
Now, Shai, I think it's time for some
friendly competition, don't you?
You're not gonna beat me up again, are you?
Oh, no.
I think some devs at Blizzard made Shadow Folk.
I'm not gonna have them muted for a second.
I'll give a shit about HyperX.
They made Shadow Folk or something,
and you kind of played it on your phone in a way.
Like your phone was your controller.
It was actually really cool.
sounds stupid but
so now they're making shadows stone
i guess they want to make it more mainstream and accessible
cool
it was cool for one week
center folk was actually pretty fun but the phone was annoying to play through
screen share yet sphere
that's fair like they had a vision
and it just didn't
but the game is cool
and bluetooth connectivity
as well as the game-specific macros, switch between devices seamlessly, and change the
color of your setup depending on your mood.
Head to the link and good luck.
And now for something completely different.
Bandai Namco has some memes to share about Little Nightmare's Altered Echoes, the VR
spin-off of the famously creepy franchise.
How do you play this in VR?
I guess maybe like...
You're like top-down, note what?
What?
I thought maybe it'd be like top down like you're looking down at a board, right?
I'm not sure what to do.
I'm dead.
Well, I play this.
No.
No, it's VR.
It looks cool.
It looks scary, but...
Little Nightmares is coming to PSVR 2, SteamVR, and MetaQuest on April 24th, and don't be
afraid to give it a wish list.
That's funny.
That's what my mom calls me.
What?
Little Nightmares?
Alright, we've got some brand new gameplay for Silver Pines now, a moody survival horror
game set in a small American town.
Peggy's 16.
I
Know it's the strangest thing I
Feel like I'm dreaming
I don't
I thought it was some wealth.
I'll find any moment. I promise.
Silver Pines. Team 17.
That guy looks like he could use a damn fine cup of Joe.
Oh, and maybe some cherry pie, too.
You too can take a trip to Silver Pines when it lands on PC and consoles later this year.
Alright, we've got something pretty special for you now.
There are no ghosts at the Grand as an upcoming spooky renovation game where you restore a crumbling English hotel with talking power tools.
The hotel might be haunted and there's a talking cat in there too. He's called Mr. Bones the Bastard.
But most importantly, it's also a musical with lovecraftian vibes.
And you know how we like our performances here at the Future Games show.
So without further ado, we'd like to welcome Marcia Richards and the Concierge
to perform an original track from There Are No Ghosts at the Grand.
Lights!
You would never know that you first went to the room
A first glance was really nothing wrong in this town
You were a little bit present
You're smelling on the earth, and feeling in the ground, it's a shining night
You're smelling on the earth, and a hundred and a nine, every tree calls the light
I'll be honest, when I first saw the trombone guy playing, I'm like, you know what, that's okay
But then I saw the whole band and I got sad
I think I've seen this before, why, because like just seeing the trombone player by himself
felt more mean-y rather than like this performance.
Also, yeah, the singing is not synced with her lips
and it's extremely off-putting.
I guess it's better than hearing it live.
I don't know.
Who cares?
Hence the problem.
I do not care about a li- I don't care.
I'm gonna go pee.
I know a point and I don't mind if I just slide all night,
I just think it down and I understand by your touch.
I'm with my feelings for you.
You see my mind to my side.
I know I can see your eyes, I don't understand you.
I know I want that, it's my time.
I just want to let you know.
I'm right here and I try to make you.
Like I sure as hell do not give a fuck about a song.
Like a video game song for a game that I have not played.
I gotta listen to a live performance of like Expedition 33 because like I played the game,
I'm attached to the game, I'm so attached to it, you know what?
I'll go deeper, I'm curious about the band, the whatever, I don't give a fuck about the
game even yet.
Why would I care about the band?
Oh, and you can lift some spirits of your own with the heart of a vacuum when there
I guess it is a musical game.
Off the disco, down the hatch.
Off the...
Off Julius.
Jampon.
Off your face.
Off your mother.
Gigi.
Okay.
Last flag is coming soon to PC, but in the meantime, you can hoist it onto your wishlist and keep an eye out for future plans.
Wasn't this game...
There was some, like, actor that was promoting it.
Who was it again?
Don't worry, imagine dragons. That's right. Hold them on.
I'm an actor, a celebrity. Imagine dragons. We're fucking promoting it.
Talking about how much you love it.
Is Aniki Road a post-apocalyptic combat racing game where you dodge traps and destroy them?
Is it their game? Oh, there you go.
It has punchcalls. Throw that.
Next, we're looking at Damon and Baby, a highly technical twin-stick shooter backed up by an emotional story.
It follows a gun-toting demon and their adorable companion in a world full of quirky creatures.
Quirky? Ooh.
Or how about Astro-Tex, an isometric strategic shooter where you chart the hazard-filled hallways of a gloomy spaceship
and protect its damaged systems from nanotech monsters?
Okay.
Finally, we have Demon Lord Just-A-Block, a grid-based roguelite where you play as a square of decapitated royalty
with deceptively simple controls and a flexible build system.
You'll make your way through a quadrilateral world to take down the usurping dragon queen
I'm more interested in the games that are only getting five seconds from today's show on our dedicated future game show steam page
In the meantime, though, we've got another game that you'll want to keep an eye on. Yes. It's another world
Here's the next project from the team that brought you moonlighter
Okay
Yeah, I love Cataclysm.
That was, uh, base building.
Yeah, I love Cataclysmus.
That was, uh...
Base building.
Ooh!
Hold on it says fucking tower defense now what I expected hold on I thought it was gonna
be like hack and slash that looks like a sick tower defense to like adjusting the rooms
and putting mobs in each room.
The new genre just dropped, ReVamp, is a tower defense vania.
The goddamn right it is!
That's how the devs are describing it, not you dev, the developers of course.
And me!
And it's coming soon to PC.
But who knows, I think this dev would make a really good dev, and safe to say I'd have some pretty, uh, wild ideas.
Ho ho ho!
We've got another one to watch Deep Dive coming up next, and this time we're focusing on Hello Sunshine.
A game where you survive in the shadow of a giant, friendly robot.
Here's the developers Red Thread Games to tell us more.
Alright, I'll see if you do it better than I did.
Shuihan's done.
We're working on Hello Sunshine, a survival mystery game.
A woman protagonist?
A nomad who's walking in the shadow of a giant robot.
And you're on a journey to get to a tower,
and the journey is all about figuring out who you are, where you're going,
and what is the mystery of this grander world you're in.
We put out a trailer which shows this epic robot bamboo, which people found really cool.
cool and the game actually starts with that and right after that battle is done we just let the
player take the control. It's just you, the sun, which is very dangerous in this world and the giant
robot. And the giant robot's shadow is your haven at the start of the game. You venture out to the
shadow to find resources to learn more about the world, to investigate mysteries. I see the game
meter in the top. You have the ability to move further into the world and then out of the shadow
Don't stay out of the shadow longer, but you're always following this robot and the relationship between the main character to the player character and the robot is key.
It's instrumental in this kind of fun journey.
The robot is always walking ahead.
So unlike a lot of survival games, which are about sort of having a hub and then you sort of enter off from that, your hub keeps moving and it keeps pushing you through this world.
And at the start, you don't have any way to interact with the robot.
You know, you're just sort of like trying to figure out like, what is this robot doing?
Where is it going?
It's going the same way we're going, which is great, but how long will that last, but as the game progresses, the relationship evolves.
All you know is that you have to sort of get to somewhere, you don't even know what that somewhere is at the start.
You didn't know you're in this world that is like the ruins of a corporate empire.
There are a lot of really good survival games out there, and all of them are very systems driven for the most part, right?
all of them are quite forbidding. They're quite tough. They require quite a lot from the player.
We wanted to make something that's a little bit more forgiving and that's also a little bit more
narrative. But of course the game is very systems driven. Heavy is the wrong word because we don't
want the systems to weigh you down on this journey. The systems are there in order to
support the narrative and the player journey. Some of the core systems like we've already
mentioned is some shadow of course, water. If you stay in the shadow for too long,
You're gonna start getting thirsty. You need to find something.
I mean, it really goes down to what all are you looting those runes?
Um, am I excited about anything?
I don't eat this just or am I just looting more water needs of hydrants, right?
I see she has a bow and arrow. So what are you using that on? How does that help you?
The real thing in a co-op is for two people to sit on the couch with two controllers and play split screen
There are so few games that allow for that. You know, I have a daughter and I love playing games
But there are sometimes there aren't that many games where you can sit together and play and have an experience where like Jonathan said
You can either go together somewhere or you can sort of split up once you feel more confident and go apart
Hello sunshine is coming to PC. It's available on steam to wishlist and you can also sign up for a playtest which are starting
Soon soon soon very soon. I'll be honest. I look 70 it it might be
I mean, I like the concept of following the robot
But hello, something actually coming soon to PC. So give it a wish list and keep an eye out for that upcoming play test
Now from sunshine to something a little chillier
Let's find out when you can get your hands on will follow the light and mesmerizing puzzle Odyssey set. That's the idea
Yeah, but what are you doing between?
Whatever
Come in this is will take you read me
What's wrong, Cass? Is Thomas all right? Over.
How much time do I have, Cass?
I know. I'm coming. I'm coming.
I know. I know. I know. Just hold on for me, alright?
Is she crying? I thought she was like, happy.
I thought I was a kid like at a playground having a good time. Am I crazy?
Follow the Light is coming to PC and consoles on April 28th, 2026.
Alright, our next trailer takes aim at Papenita Headshot, a steampunk shooter starring a furious
cowboy with a cursed metal arm.
Okay, I'm being honest.
Like the way the mobster is auto walking into you and then it's the same repeat scheme.
Like it actually looks like a college project, genuinely.
Oh, there we go.
We got some environmental stuff.
Keep your heads down boys, because...
He just turned Jammin' to a popsicle! Who does that?
Papa needs a headshot, is coming soon to PlayStation and PC, and it's also what my agent says when I call the office.
Okay, now we've got a trailer for Atmospar, an open world survival game set on a series of floating islands.
I think we've seen this before.
When we die, do you think we'll see the people on Earth again?
When I lost my son in the scorching, I thought I'd seen him else fire.
Another one.
Once again, that was a blast.
This is it. The last outburst of humanity. There is no other way.
Titans might still have the answer we're looking for. We have to find it before it's too late.
Okay.
You can wishlist it now and stay up-to-date ahead of launch, Deborah.
Prepare yourself Shry because we are checking out a cooperative horror game
that taps into one of humanity's darkest fears in continents.
I don't think I have anything sad to that, so here's, we gotta go.
Help me out.
Ugh, in the stomach.
I got you, bro.
Full of sketchy burritos.
It's gonna be nuts.
Damn!
The pressure builds your only hope.
Looks like we gotta find a key.
Your only relief.
Ooh, Luke.
Oh, I got a forward!
Lies in the haunted halls.
Look at the character's name.
Dookie monster.
Pants Edgar Allen poof
Barely made that jump
No drop
Pop him, guys.
Those go 360.
Have a proof, don't leave me.
Oh god, they're right behind us.
Get inside, get inside.
We gotta go April 14th.
Who's this voice actor, or the person?
I don't want to wash that hand.
Bearing any unfortunate accidents,
We Gotta Go is exploding onto PC in spring 2026.
Okay, shall I? We get it. All right. It's the game about trying not to poop your pants.
I'm sorry. I just couldn't hold it in.
All right, let's move past the rogue potty here for a second.
Blah, blah, blah. What happened to the passion? It's all been down hill since Al Pacino started
handing out awards. Hello.
Who actually is this? What's going on?
Um, hello?
Yes, hi. Thanks for having me. Make me bigger, please. Like we talked about with Barbara.
Barbara, backstage I asked you to make me a big boy. You nodded like you understood.
Don't tell me you lied to me. Oh yeah, this is good. Thanks, Barbara.
Oh god, make him smaller. Make him smaller.
Why does he have lips? What's wrong with my lips?
You know what? Fine. Whatever. Is this your show game, baby?
Well, welcome to the future games.
I don't get experience.
Okay, is this what you came here to tell us about?
Tell us about.
Yeah, sorry, sorry.
I'm just a little bit nervous.
I just keep thinking about that lip comment you made.
Look, I'm sorry about the lip comment.
I didn't mean to just go on and pitch your game.
Introducing the Dungeon Experience
with our new exclusive trailer.
Trailer, trailer, trailer.
Ha, ha, ha.
Trailer.
Dungeon Master Creations.
The Dungeon Experience is an immersive first person fantasy
guided tour.
Run by me, a low-level RPG monster,
sure an entrepreneur, and all around handsome crap.
Wow, look at that beautiful symmetry.
Those clippy clappy claws.
Take the time to explore our dungeon.
Exploration.
And meet our many dungeon inhabitants.
Hey, you really don't need to speak to me.
Consider me a table.
Just power the room.
Transition.
Hey, well, wait a minute, Mr. Crabb.
I've seen this trailer before like five years ago.
Yeah, this isn't exclusive at all. You need to show us something unique.
Alright, alright, fine. I'll show you something unique.
We've got this retro dungeon crawler section. It has a large and unique cast of characters.
We've got Walter, Wanda, Wayne, Weaver, Welch, Wendy, West, Will...
Oh, and I almost forgot, William.
Is this really happening? Who are the proofers?
Alright, this is all we have time for.
No, no, wait, wait, wait. Wayne, show your party trick.
Oh, yeah, it's pretty neat and if you think so too, then go ahead and wish list the Dungeon
Experience.
Show nothing.
That was enlightening.
The Dungeon Experience and our new friend the unnamed talking mud crab are coming to
a screen near you in 2026.
Don't miss it.
I wouldn't miss it for the world.
Now, let's move on.
With over a million wish lists to crew to date,
you've probably heard of Outbound, the sustainability
focus survival game, but we've got the scoop
on when you can finally get behind the wheel.
The demo is out.
It's good.
Cool.
Good for them.
time to get the rope
Oh
Interesting
you heard it here first outbound is inbound to PCN consoles on the 23rd of
April and if it isn't on your wish list already then go fix that now our next
game is about the discovery of a ninth planet in the solar system that could
be humanity's life diaries is on site as far to what essentially is you know I
just saw I'm logging on steam closer look at the latest game from don't nod a
Aphelion. No, we don't get to see.
as dense but stable enough to breathe with the right equipment an electromagnetic field
spans the entire planet forming a complex energy network most importantly our instruments
have detected a mysterious heat source a source that could allow liquid water to exist ice
snowfall flowing rivers this planet could have a complete water cycle but we're ready
Ooh, okay.
So, we gave it a name.
Not for what it is, but for what it will be.
Persephone.
The Greek Goddess of Fertility.
It can't be about Omen, right?
Interesting.
Lots of climbing.
Holy shit, no way.
A feeling is coming to PC, PlayStation and Xbox on April 28th, 2026 and pre-orders are available now.
Alright Debra, prepare yourself. I'm going for it. This next one is a world premiere.
Sorry shy, call it an attack of opportunity.
This is getting pretty ridiculous actually, but at least I get to grab my sorrows with an adorable Doug Venture.
Sure.
We'll see.
With.
Oh my god!
I could make this map.
That is the, it's great.
We love that, hurdles.
Fuck, jump and zoom through a vibrant landscape
in hurdles which is coming soon to PC.
Now, let's throw it over to Goodwin Games
to tell us more about the studio's atmospheric
biking adventure, Quite a Ride.
Oh, this looks pretty sick.
Hello, Future Games, Charles.
Alex here from Goodwin Games.
Where's the studio behind Quite a Ride?
A first person psychological horror game
where a bicycle is the only lifeline.
You have to write through a mysterious fog covered zone known as the blind spot.
This is a game about dread, tension and enigma, where exploration fits the mystery.
You trapped in a shifting world where you must write to keep your phone charged.
Research anomalies and decode cryptic messages to escape.
You're alone, it's dark, and you're never safe.
If you stop moving for too long, the fog and what hides inside it catches up to you.
Let's talk a bit about the blind spot.
setting of our game. We haven't shared too much yet, and frankly, we don't want to spoil the mystery.
But here's what I can tell you. The blind spot is a stretch of land swallowed whole by a thick
and natural fork. It's a place where logic doesn't quite work the way it should. Roads change, landmarks
disappear. People don't go in, and the ones who do don't come back out. If you want to survive,
you'll have to explore. You'll solve puzzles, uncover clues, and slowly piece together what this place is.
But you are not alone here. The blind spot is a haunted anomalous, strange and unexplained phenomena.
You'll have to document them using the scannograph, observe them, and piece together how they behave.
But the data is fragile. If you run out of charge, collected data is gone.
Some anomalies simply exist. Others must be awakened. Some adapt and some are alive and will hunt you.
Failing to learn this is fatal. The blind spot is massive and navigating on food is dangerous.
This is where your bike comes in. It allows for speedy escapes when you're being haunted.
It's the easiest way to generate power. You have to keep cycling to keep your device charged.
Your bike is also equipped with a strange tech, specifically an analog FM radio, fused
to the frame.
This is a tactile mechanic.
You have to manually operate the dials to keep the distance from the bike.
This game looks cool, but I don't need to see any more about it, I really don't.
We are working hard on polishing the experience, and will have much more to share about the
game later in 2026. In the meantime, you can watch the game on Steam right now. It really
supports the team and helps us get the game to you. Thank you so much for watching, keep
paddling, don't look back and enjoy the rest of the show.
All right.
Avoid anomalies and low battery notifications in quite a ride. It's coming soon but you
You can wish us to sit on steam now.
We've got some hot to go gameplay for Shelf Heroes up next.
It's a bite-sized shooter where you play as an action figure
and face off against way too colorful.
This is way too colorful.
...and enormous household arenas.
Oh, I guess for what it's going to be, all right.
Wasn't there a game very similar to this?
The old-year hero.
Interesting.
Shelf Heroes is coming soon to PC with a demo dropping later this year.
Wishlist so you don't miss it.
Okay, now let's take a look at a brand new gameplay trailer for Deep Dish Dungeon.
An ambitious survival game where teams of curious spelunkers explore handcrafted dungeon
I'm all my own I'm safe
I'm gonna die
I lowered the water over here
Oh! He woke up! He woke up!
Oh god! I'm fighting! Remember me!
I died!
Watch out! Watch out!
I'm gonna die, Erranty!
What? What is this?
I
Okay
That looks like fun, baby
Deep dish dungeon is coming to PC in full 2026 and we're following that up with a gameplay trailer for Rover's tale
Which imagines a world where dogs get to live on a wonder where they like past their depart who they decide to be the
The hardest parts of owning a pen the streamer for the trailers aren't gonna live forever
When a dog reaches the end of their natural life their consciousness can be transferred into one of our like to rovers
Where it will live on forever among the stars is a brave space explorer
as the newest member of our research team your loyal canine companion will be
entrusted with exploring new undiscovered worlds so you're a dog
huh keep me up to date with the latest tech enough rights supporting their
fellow explorers
And any, who knows what else they might discover.
So what are you waiting for?
Sign up to the Leica program today.
Has your dog got what it takes to change the world?
No.
Become man's best intergalactic friend in Rover's Tale, which is launching later this year.
Now, shy quick question, did you pick Bay or Bay?
Ah, nice try. I'm not at liberty to answer that, dev. Lest I summon the pitchforks of the internet.
However, the developers at Deck 9 Games are reopening that hella tricky question with Life is Strange Reunion,
a brand new entry in the series that will continue the tear-jerking saga of Max Culkin.
Isn't there a, uh...
Well, tissues that they're ready for March...
Are they doing a live action for Life is Strange?
Here's a first look at a scene which sees Max and Chloe reunited at last.
I have this power to help people, but Rewinding Time has bought me only three days before everything
burns.
The Maevon party is starting soon.
So what's next changing the black robes black shirts going by the old photo
We've got to get to the Abrax's house and look for smoke
This is it it could all start tonight
Think you can get me another eyes wide shut mask so we can split together you're on stay out of trouble
Between all the drinking and making out, someone must have taken their mask off.
Not their usual logo.
This rooster snake has been doused in nightmare fuel.
Password?
Rooster snake.
Uh, I think you mean...
Xilisat, which would have been correct.
Too bad.
Okay, I've got the password.
Just need to use it now.
Password?
Xilisat.
Okay.
Hell yeah, teenager parties, this is what we do here.
This is just what they're like.
She's on a treat.
She's in the trees.
Hunting for a secret room in a spooky house?
Chloe's gonna love this.
I've been to plenty of bonfires.
And a handful of pagan parties, thank you Portland.
But a secret society, pagan bonfire.
That's a new one for me.
Spermander. So fucking peaceful.
Here. Jesus!
Sorry.
I think you should check out the basement.
The door password is...
...fixillzha...
So...
Split up?
Meet at the bonfire when we know more?
I just want you to know...
Oh god.
I'm so excited to make these memories with you.
Besides your own story when Life is Strange Reunion comes to PC, PlayStation and Xbox
on March 26th.
Now our next game blew up on social media and for good reason.
It's a wonderfully silly concept where you man the gates of a medieval town to decide
who makes it inside, and who ends up in stocks.
Here's a brand new gameplay trailer for Gate Guard Simulator.
Watch out for the cheeky geese.
It's crazy, like, the impact of papers, please.
A SAGE!
Providing the heat isn't guarded by a thorn on the far of the fence.
It pulls a rust upon the cheese.
He's carrying smells apart.
He cries to nuns apart.
And lead it from the shade.
They did not see the grace.
They kicked him out of us.
With cops upon his underpass.
The bridge he swept down for help.
But stances, evenings, fashion, proficient with warning.
Help!
The gate will just stop there, take some pictures, the gates will keep us safe.
No matter what the gate is, I'm not by a moron.
Gateguard Simulator is all about using your deduction skills to protect the people.
Unless the gate is protected by a moron.
Wait.
The Gateguard Simulator is coming to PC later this year, but you can wish us it right now on Steam.
Yeah, okay, great.
From gate defense to wave defense,
here's a closer look at killing floor three's
chilling season three.
Don't people not like this game right now?
I love killing floor, but I heard bad things about this.
Interesting.
the new weapons and mods, fucking Wolverine.
All right.
That's right, Killing Floor 3's Operation Deep Freeze
is out now, so you can jump in and battle
for the future of humanity after the show.
We're approaching the end of the show now,
but there are still a few amazing games to share with you all.
Yes, in fact, here's another trailer to get excited about.
Capcom have sent over a closer look at gameplay
from Monster Hunter Stories 3, Twisted Reflection.
Hey future game shows, this is Joe Bustos from the Monster Hunter community team at Capcom
USA.
We're all so excited for the launch of Monster Hunter Stories 3, Twisted Reflection, coming
in just a few short hours.
We actually have a free demo available now on all platforms, but you can actually carry
over your progress to the full game.
Take to the skies in the back of your Rathblos to save the kingdom from peril after death.
I'm not sure you like most video games.
I played Monster Hunter.
What's the worst?
To kick things off, you'll customize your prints or princesses as you see fit.
Wait, what?
Make them as royal or rowdy as you like.
And don't worry, you can change your look at any time.
Why does this look like Zelda?
Start out by exploring the hustle and bustle of Azuria Castle in the royal family, your
ranger partners, and the various townsfolk.
This is in Monster Hunter?
If you leave the castle, you'll take flight on the back of your skyscale Raffles.
You meet even more monsters along the way that'll make your journey one to remember.
Alongside your new monster and ranger friends, you'll battle wild monsters.
This is a turn-based game?
Oh, this is a different game?
This is a turn-based combat system.
It's simple to use, but lets you and your teammate fight in satisfying and flashy ways.
The story series?
Okay.
I don't know what this is.
I've seen that in a game collecting materials lets you craft even stronger weapons
and armor. And there's Habitat Restoration, a new feature where you nurture endangered
species, repopulate locales, and hatch monsters with special traits. There's tons to do and
even crazy tough monsters to fight, so be sure to give it a try. Your story begins in
Monster Hunter Stories 3, just a reflection, available March 15th.
Yeah, I've never heard of Monster Hunter Stories before, that's new to me.
Gear up in Bond, view your favourite monsters in Monster Hunter Stories 3, Twisted Reflection.
It's launching tomorrow, March 13th on PC and consoles,
so just one more sleep till Monster Hunter Christmas.
On holiday we should all celebrate, Shine.
That's right.
Now, we are getting a brand new look at Ritual Tides,
Vert Paint's spine-curdling horror game set on a remote island.
Okay.
The bugger is crawling.
Not the most FPS I've ever seen, Jesus, it's horrible, actually.
that game could be really good didn't show much though nice trip to the country side
It'll be fun.
Reminds me of my childhood.
Oh, does it?
No.
Ritual tides is something I assume, though,
so make sure it's on your wish list.
OK, time for a look at the latest project
from the creator of Just Cause.
Samson is an intense, big city brawler
where you navigate the pressure of crushing debt
one punch at a time.
No.
As far back as I can remember, I worked for other people.
They called it opportunity.
I called it dead.
The city never stopped moving.
And neither did what I owed.
I never picked a smart job.
I picked the one that bought me another day.
Ha!
Inlustin!
Nobody voted they'd turn.
If you gave them space, they took your teeth.
Sometimes you didn't meet skill.
You just needed something solid.
Hear that?
Yeah.
That's the sound of face makes when it meets regret
Pain built up
adrenaline took over
Kratos I didn't fight to win. I fought to finish
Cars that way every hit matter
The more work I did
I allowed the city got
Misappayment and they reminded you
They were negotiators
they were punctuation when the day ran out so did your luck sleep didn't fix it
day it just reset the clock it was all connected time looks like they work hard
on our driving violence and speed people talk about momentum like it's a feeling
They have no idea.
I'm getting some serious GTA IV vibes from that one.
Which list it now because Samson is coming to PC on April 8th.
I can see only one world premiere left on the schedule, Deborah.
Do I get to do this?
Here is the world premiere of a gorgeous action game where you never get a treacherous criminal underworld
Yeah, but treacherous criminal underworlds are my thing
Blah blah blah blah blah blah
When all this began, no one imagined how it would end
What kind of haircut is that?
No one finds their way back after erasing their own footprints
and sometimes I like and protect something worth believing
Okay.
Okay.
The Ninth Dragon is a voxel brawler where you topple the kingpings of Kowloon City.
It's coming soon to PC and your wishlist very shortly, I'm sure.
Oh. Well, that's it. We're out of trailers.
I didn't even get to say it. The whole point of doing one of these shows,
and, ah, all right, well, it's been real.
Oh, shy, come back, come back, come on, come on, listen.
Come on, listen, I may have some good news.
There could be one more thing.
Really?
Swear to God.
Swear to me!
Okay, go on.
Do your thing.
Okay, here's our final world premiere.
It worked.
Okay, here's a brand new entry
into a cult survival horror series.
Enjoy.
All right.
What are we willing to do to save our children?
A lot of horror games. There are at least attempts at it. I wonder why.
I feel like horror games are not that profitable.
Like I like them, but...
Nice
That's it
Okay, here we go. All right
I bet you didn't see that one coming.
I do love a twist.
Remothered, Red Nun's legacy is the third entry in Stormmind Games psychological horror
franchise and it's coming to PC and consoles later this year.
Of course, you already know what to do.
That's right, wishlist it, chop chop, or the Red Nun will get you.
Joking, of course.
Or am I?
Yeah, that's really scary, Dev.
Well, but on a serious note, this does mean we've reached the end of the show.
I'd like to thank you, first and foremost, for being an amazing co-host.
Likewise, Shai, it's been an absolute pleasure.
Oh, stop it.
We'd also like to thank the viewers, you viewers, for tuning in.
Me?
And the team behind the scenes, and of course, our sponsors, HyperX.
Remember to enter that competition.
That's right, because you've got to be in it to win it.
You do.
Also, make sure to check out our dedicated Steam page to follow up on any games that caught your eye.
But don't go anywhere because FGS Live from GDC Festival of Gaming is coming up right after
this show like literally in a f-
Alright, that's it.
GG.
There was nothing really.
There's two games that I'm excited for.
Maybe three at most.
That's suck balls.
Yeah, well they usually do.
It's like, it's an hour and a half and it's literally only worth 15 minutes of your time.
you have to get through
an hour and fifteen minutes of shit
when it comes to like shitty jokes between the co-hosts
because they have to squeeze an ad so they can be profitable and
shitty games that paid to be there and took up way too much time
and shitty games that just shouldn't be there altogether i don't know why they
even fucking show them off
i'm a negative Nancy
but three of those games look sick
especially that uh...
that tower defense one. That looked cool. And then also Blight, cool, seeing more of that.
I forgot about that game. I wonder, makes me wonder when the hell that actually releases.
Re-Vamp, right? Of course, Mad Mushroom, Friend Slot, big fan. Check it out, wishlist it.
Alright. I was watching this interview, but before I get back into that, I actually had a box sent to me.
I
Opened it with a beaky
I didn't really know what the hell this was
Big box clearly it's a world of Warcraft
Mythic dropped it off at that house and we opened it and she's like you should open this on stream because we got to about
Right here. I
Don't know what this is
but
Look at that little art on the back
that's pretty good even notice that so I haven't I don't know what's in here I
have not even moved this paper but it starts with paper obviously greetings
adventure thank you for being a part of our world and journeying with us across
all of Azeroth it's players like you who continue to make wow a living and growing
community where everyone is welcome wow now to help ensure you're ready for the
battles ahead. We know that after a full day of adventure, even the most
resolute travelers need some downtime to recharge. We hope you enjoy this bounty
of cozy comforts to aid you in your preparations to rally together and stand
against Zalatath and her devouring host in midnight from the World of Warcraft
team should you wish to share these items of or or the tales of your
adventures with your followers on social media don't forget to use the
hashtags hashtag wow underline partner and tag at Warcraft blah blah blah all
right also please remember to make it clear to your followers that these
items were sent to you for free by Blizzard as required by the FTC
Make sure I check that box hashtag wow partner by the way. I
Had no idea this box is coming, but we'll take it. So what do we got?
Lot of fuzzy stuff at the top not sure what these are fanny packs. Oh, it's one big thing. Oh, oh, oh
That's a fucking blanket hold on it's actually very cozy
Me undo that little bow there
Let me second they really tight this on there.
Pretty tight.
Oh, it's too fucking, Jesus, get out of here.
Okay, damn, it's not even small.
Jeez!
That's a blanket!
pretty stretchy too look at this you can kind of see it stretches hold it out see
that stretchiness that's nice that's real nice
hey we're gonna drape that on here like a cloak
Yeah
All right
See what else we got
Just gonna pull it all up
What the hell world of Warcraft midnight. It's like an empty whoa
They'll see inside of that thing
Need like a phone light hold on let me get a phone light
Look at that.
That's pretty cool.
There's a light on the bottom.
Oh.
You're right.
What the fuck?
Okay.
Well, that's pretty sick.
And a little fire. Oh, that's where the lights coming from. There's like a little fireplace there.
Kind of cool. What? I don't know.
So it's a fake book. That's still pretty sick. Okay, that's actually cool.
All right.
What else we got?
We got a box here.
It's kind of heavy.
World of Warcraft.
What do you guess?
It's probably a candle. It might be. It's got some weight to it like a candle.
You're damn right, it's a candle.
What's the smell? Scented candle.
Hmm. It just says, look, this is all it says.
Azaroth, the very bottom fiddle focus.
It's not going to focus is it?
Here we go.
Scented candle made in the USA.
Yeah, I don't, it smells good but I wouldn't say it smells like midnight or
Azeroth like what I don't know what to do with it but it does smell good it's a
very nice smell this is it this is quite the box what is this
Yeah, the little circle thing there. Collector edition. Yeah, maybe it's something like
that.
I'm thinking it is. Is there anything else in here? No, it's all a bunch of mesh.
Clean that later.
World of Warcraft Midnight.
What the hell do you put in here?
Oh.
Okay. It opens up. Pretty cool.
Okay, I guess I just pulled a string, which brings out a book, which has probably a bunch
of art and stuff, yeah, just art direction behind the scene stuff, cool, and kind of
see a lot of that.
That's cool stuff.
All right.
A book for the bookshelf.
Do you think it fits in here?
It doesn't.
No.
I don't think you actually put anything in here, ever.
All right, but we got more in here.
We got some type of plastic crown, as well as this.
I don't know what to do with this.
Oh, you press it. Look at that. It lights up.
Wow. It's actually tripping out my camera. It's not flashing like this in real life.
It's consistently, oh, hold on, weird, and what does this do?
What, what even is this little fucking thing, a stand, oh it's a stand, you're so right, it is a stand.
Somehow, but I actually don't know how.
What?
Am I dumb?
How does it, it's a tiara?
How does this work?
How does this, I guess it's just like that.
It just doesn't feel that snug in here. It's pretty loose as a goose. Whatever. Turn that off. There we go. All right, Nido. And they also sent last thing in here.
Oh, here's a guide on how to work it has a USB plug. Yeah. Alright. And then there's paper.
Ooh redeem game key at Battle.net. Oh
I have to scratch this off, but I don't want to show y'all so get fucked. You will not redeem that
And then some type of blue pin
And a USB charger for the thing
How do I get this thing off we go
Cool. All right. Hey, look at this. Some type of, I can't even tell what it's supposed
to be. Which way is the right way? I think that's the right way. Promo slop? Yeah. Okay,
I can't figure it out.
Oh no, here's the right way.
Here's the right way.
There you go.
What do you do with these, by the way?
You like put them on your backpack, I guess?
I don't know what else to do with them.
Throw it away.
It's a magnet.
It's not a magnet and it has these spikes coming out.
I wish it was a magnet.
Truthfully, I am a magnet collector.
Peaky and I.
All right, well either way, GG's, cool.
Thanks for sending that to me.
Free stuff is always fun.
Okay.
Woo, redeem the code.
I think it's probably just game time, so pass.
In the what else do I have to do TBC arena Jeff Kaplan interview future game show watch that
Mugenics
Don't have enough time not happening
It's the full game of midnight no way
Wow well I could log in and do some housing on retail
I'm not gonna do housing
But I'm going to figure out how to go check out other people's houses.
Because apparently they're busing.
Word on the street.
For real, for real.
Some people have made Mona Lisa and stuff. Yeah
Well guys, I've never been to housing when I came up. I've never I don't even think I've done my intro quests
I'm like teaching me about it
So I'm gonna have to get walked through here
Portal and Stormwind all right. Well, let me go to Stormwind real quick
You're trying to do jump puzzles?
I'll do whatever.
I just want to check it out.
I've never done it.
Press H. That's bound to my focus.
I can't.
I've unbound H.
Bottom right.
Okay, bottom right.
Housing button.
Oh, look at that.
Housing dashboard.
Start tutorial.
Ah.
Well, if this proves I haven't done anything.
All right, my first home, welcome to the neighborhood.
Feel free to explore, have a look at plots,
follow up, speak to your steward, familiar, okay.
Can I fly here?
Oh, look at that.
I don't think she's made one yet.
I'd like to have a look around.
Let's go.
Okay, we'll go over here.
I'm just questing, I guess.
I'm just gonna say it.
I hate housing.
Okay, classic players will agree with you.
I think housing is fucking awesome, um, for retail.
What is women to do?
Fucking positive music play in game.
Okay, let's go over here then.
Hasn't even done a minute.
He loves it.
I like it because it adds to, like you can find furniture and you can put it in your
house.
I can already see that just adding more to the game without taking away from what retail
is.
That's the cash too.
I don't really give a shit when Blizzard makes more money as long as it doesn't take
away from the game. When it takes away from the game, sure, I'll be upset. Brother. Hmm.
It took so much already, doesn't matter.
Uh, well, again, if they added housing to Classic, and it was this big cash grab,
they're like, well, this takes a lot away from Classic.
Classic shouldn't have this.
Things like that.
You got it to retail.
It's gonna make people not be in the cities anymore.
Who the fuck's in the cities?
Who the hell's actually inspecting other people?
What do we, retail?
Did y'all even play this game, or are you just upset?
Okay, now what do I do?
Acquire a house. So I have to pick one?
Do I pick one?
I feel like I don't do this yet.
Does this matter?
Pick a plot?
You can move it? Okay.
As long as this isn't like any type of commitment bullshit
and I can just move.
How do I take area 51?
Can't?
Ugh.
Owned by Snowy Flake.
Who are these people?
Where do I...
go to these other houses these ones 37 38 17 42 9 25 I might be a 9 main excuse
it's also really close nine this isn't bad I can work with this what plot is
already reserved. Did you reserve this? No. Interesting. My house is in my guild neighborhood.
Why are you here? Checking his gear, 237, 246. You know why I do. How do I see his item
level 240s. Oh, this guy's
make fun of him. Get out ASAP.
I
Well
I bang
Skipped, complete, house level, level one, god damn, enter your house via the front door,
okay
oh loading screen cringe
all right do you need help getting started uh yeah actually i do
shut up bitch click this button to enter the house decor okay
decorate mode click into core and press r to place it in your house
or click a decor, put it, okay,
remove toggle grid, rotate mouse wheel down,
it wants you to remove it though, okay, remove R, got it, okay, big removal,
Click this button to exit the house
All right now we got this place let's decorate blah blah blah this guy's sober tarted
How does he take five seconds to get past this tutorial? I know how to do it already
And I'm gonna let everyone know and chat that this guy is an idiot
Take this button
Decor placed
Wow, look at that. That is too big, apparently. Ignore collision with V. Whoa. Okay. Solid,
quest completion. And that's it. Alright, let me leave and go to visit merchants selling
decor.
There are a number of vendors in the town center who sell decor for your home.
You should stop by and introduce yourself.
Okay, introducing myself?
Hello, number one.
Maybe I should just buy it all, actually.
This is cheap as fuck.
Wait, oh, this will be added immediately on purchase to your house.
Oh, so you only own a certain amount.
Like, if I buy this table, it's infinite, is it?
You have one table.
No, no, no, so it's not infinite.
You only have one.
I understand, okay, so I was right.
Interesting, yeah, owned two,
so I only have two crates.
Interesting, I mean, other stuff isn't like this, is it?
Like things you find out in the world?
Okay, in that case, I don't really wanna buy anything here.
I just bought everything why do why is it interesting all right whatever
Purple quest to die for easy completed
Once we talk to this person
Oh
Okay, you can do a lot of things with these squares. I
Feel like these three pieces are where it's at
This is where you actually make stuff like Legos
wood
Carpets, damn.
Damn, alright, cool stuff.
What else do I do?
Ask the last architect about other decors.
This motherfucker?
Okay.
Decor treasure hunt, alright.
Got a blue quest here taking our photos of your neighborhood photos, huh?
photo
I remember there being like a camera toy do you use that now? Oh
Take pictures
Okay, locations photographed.
What locations though?
Oh, maybe these with the blue arrow?
percent
Hmm damn stupid
I'm I'm worried those blue arrows don't pop up unless you have the camera out
I'm walking around two miles per hour now press M public carriage ah shit okay
What is a public carriage?
This?
Just carry people around? Okay, that's stupid.
Treasure found.
is more okay no this is not this is just the whole entire area I'm understanding now let's
go to that sick the image I'm fucking rest oh bro I'm a stupid healer bang got it
Make a secret room.
Uh, well, I was gonna, you all gotta tell me how to get to other people's houses.
I have no idea how to do it right now.
I'm just doing these pictures real quick.
New tutorial. I think that's what I'm doing. So, getting this cleared. There's a guy that
made an actual insane escape room basically, but if you start there, everything else you
find will disappoint you that's fine I'll start with the best I don't care
you're doing a daily am I well you know me big in the housing gotta get my
housing daily is completed
three coupons fuck yeah i mean the core treasure hunt
Is this a daily or is this tutorial?
Skip that quest?
And fuck it.
How do I go to other people's houses?
How do you do this stuff?
Genuinely don't know.
Make a guild neighborhood?
No, not doing that yet.
Just enter.
Where?
Just, is this everyone in the fucking game?
Right click, Saren. View houses. Visit house. Oh! Hold on. Hold on, Saren. I'm gonna go check
your house out. Let's see what you did. Ugh, horde. Yuck. Gross. What the fuck is this?
Did Sarin make a jump puzzle? Is this Sarin's?
Oh, I guess I shouldn't cheat.
Cheating's cringe.
No spells.
Oh, God.
Chance, right click this priest.
I mean, should I just leave this then?
Fuck.
Dude, I'm actually getting owned by this fucking purple thing.
How do you do that?
Oh my god!
It's actually a dwarf dip you're short
There we go
That was close, oh
All right, we're getting it
Easy
This is a little awkward here actually I think I want to go to about here I
Think I'm gonna jump over it if I jump forward
forward. Yep. How do you do that then? Fuck. All right,
May fuck never thought my years of getting under or would actually come into
play or on top of the or gates would help me in any such way can I I can get
in the chair. Damn. All right. How does one is it a jump up and tap W? That that would
be too short of a jump if I did that jump backwards oh smart gamers smart
gamers I didn't even think about that the fuck is that a pixel for ants what
What are we doing with this fucking chair?
Are you kidding me?
Bro, what?
Do I even have the right bit rate?
Y'all even see what I'm looking at here?
This is crazy, sitting it.
My outside is harder than my inside.
Interesting.
But you can always give up and cheat outside.
This took me like 10 hours,
so when you see the next guy,
I mean there's got to be a special spot you got to jump from.
I'm thinking pinpoint accuracy.
I think I make the jump from right here.
I actually think I just send it all the way.
Nope, maybe to the back up.
I'm going to cheat and get back to where I was.
I think you gotta click it midair or just be that accurate
Nice, big prog, to the bed, up the bed frame, okay this is a tough one, can I
I clipped to it. Nice I can.
This is a little awkward. This might be a jump.
This is a jump backwards angle for sure.
With pristine accuracy. Jumping backwards? How far am I going to go?
I feel like I jumped from here maybe.
Got it.
Huh!
Okay, I think I can just send it.
That is brutal.
That is fucked up.
How high does this go?
Jeez!
Okay, I think I get up here.
Ah, I didn't mean to!
Okay, I fell.
Fuck.
Trying to land here on that chair and get back to where I was, but it's hard.
Okay, fuck it. Let's just land on top of the goddamn bookshelf.
Oh!
Change flight mode? Yeah. I don't know if I can I?
Of course I can.
Okay, let's just go backwards here see if I can hit that
Hole
Massive it was just a backwards jump. I mean it had to be there was no other option
I
Think this is a go right angle onto that yep
That's crazy. That's crazy.
If I couldn't fly for him, I'd blow my head off.
That was close.
Okay, this is a bit awkward.
Fuck, I just tried to walk off.
Fuck, I just tried to walk off.
Fuck, I just tried to walk off.
Fuck, I was trying to walk off.
I've fallen so many times.
Oh god.
Yeah, I can't walk off because I just clipped this bullshit.
Oh my god.
there we go are you kidding me dude how do you even do how do you go about this
I'm cheating. Really? You're the first person to point that out. Just jump over the whole thing.
Oh, I don't know if I could recreate that consistently. I feel like I got kind of lucky there.
Maybe not. And then you got to jump to the right of this. Climb up the desk.
jump to this climb up the weapon rack where am I going from here the chair
motherfuckers love chairs huh nice gaming
Very nice, uh...
It looks like you jump down, and you have to climb back up.
Wait, am I fucked here?
What do I even...
Hold on, let me go back up to where I was.
So I think I actually have to land on this box, like you're on the bed here, and you
You gotta walk off to the box.
Oh yeah, okay.
Oh fuck.
Okay, you're on the chair. I think you gotta jump backwards.
Chair.
Okay, so we're chair climbing.
Interesting.
I'm almost done, even though I cheated most of it.
Dead.
God damn, how the fuck?
Oh, that chair's clickable. That's why
What
What how do you do this?
Jump on the stick part like up here. Oh get the high ground. Yeah, you're right. I didn't I wasn't sure if like there was collision on those sticks or not but after failing five times I learned.
I learned. Let's get on top of this throne if I can. Then you go on top of this box.
Noice. Top of that box. Get th- dude, that's crazy. These little small boxes are so troll.
Like that I could walk and not walk that and then this is his house let's see
where you put your house up in the sky it's just more puzzles man it's all it is his puzzles
No cheating, yeah, now I can't cheat, you're right.
Yep.
It says, how do you get- oh, wait a second.
Oh, you crafty bastard.
What the fuck?
Yeah, the fence isn't meant to climb.
It's actually meant to just gatekeep you and force you on the left side.
Uh...
Dude!
Fuck!
It's hard to know where I can actually stand.
Okay, a little backwards jump onto the scroll.
Are you kidding me?
Okay, that was it?
It's not my fault the game isn't clipping awkwardly.
Okay, how?
I tried to jump on the fence maybe.
Do it, Saren.
No, really, go ahead.
Go ahead.
I fucked up.
I'm watching.
Okay.
I'm watching oh
You failed in your own puzzle at the beginning weird you'd think you'd have this figured out, huh?
But fucker jumped onto this the wall on the left side by the way
Yeah, okay sure, bro. That's crazy
Unbelievable!
I should have known that, my bad.
Now, what the fuck? I can't even get a goddamn view.
Okay, we clearly jump onto that barrel there. BAM, pristine accuracy.
Okay.
I'm trying to clip onto this pillar, but it's not clipping.
FUCK!
I actually hate this music too.
Does not fit the vibe of what's going on.
I can just walk, okay.
inaccuracy
Go ahead, sir
Okay.
Fuck, he's gonna make it too.
Damn it.
Hmm.
We gotta go here.
Ooh, wait.
I thought I could hit that.
There's no way my head hits that, right?
There's no way my head hits that right
Nice okay onto the torch maybe
Torch nice walk on to the fence nice
No
Speedrun
Who's- oh it's Valkor.
Alright alright hang on.
Where the heck do I go from- do I go onto that stick?
I think it's to that stick.
Onto this!
We clipped.
Okay, we're up.
Shit.
Damn, it's kind of hard to clip onto that torch there.
I don't know where exactly I clip onto it.
Ooh, there we go.
Damn, I'm actually owning right now.
K
NICE
Okay, I think I need to get on top of this axe handle. I'm not even kidding
NOOOOO I HAD IT! Why did I hit the W gig and NO I HAD IT I SWEAR
I'm all the way at the bottom now
Depression
Fuck, I'm an idiot, I forgot about the wall method.
Did Valkor put his monk portal as a checkpoint?
Oh, that is crazy.
Uh-uh.
And that's why Saren's on his alt.
I was wondering why his gear was so bad.
217...
Oh yeah.
No, this guy's a cheater.
He's on a monk for a reason.
It's the best parkour class.
Fuck.
217 is PvP gear?
Oh.
Well, either way, whatever.
My narrative is better.
Fuck it, travel form.
Look at this.
I fucked it up.
Why does this give so many flashbacks of how we used to get under Stormwind or Goldshire?
Because that's kind of what it is. It's just clipping stuff.
Fuck, Saren's out of range. I wanted the wild charge to him.
Alright, I'm seeing if I can cheat here. I know I can.
There's an absolute wild charge cheating method.
Okay, that's too far.
Ooh!
Fuck.
Imagine.
I can just do that.
through this checkpointing fucking freak rat bastard
too far
alright fuck your house sarin
alright give me some different houses or actually let me go to the one that sarin wanted me
go to this priest. View houses. Visit house. The Pop-Tart Corn Dog Gaming Rectangle.
And before it's another puzzle, I think it is.
Okay.
I need to zoom in a little bit, Jesus.
Alright, easy peasy, easy peasy.
Like a glove.
Uh, okay, it's a little bit more difficult.
Alright, we're in.
Did she just fly to the door?
Yeah, I could.
Yo, this house is very long, so I recommend doing it on an alt so you can log out and save your prog.
Well, I don't have an alt.
I'm just gonna quit and not come back. That's probably what's gonna happen in reality here.
appreciate the disclaimer though very professional all right well
I
Huh
Where's my is that my end goal right there that little slit I think so so I
See it I see the vision
all right all right we're in what's the fuck
I just don't know if I can clip onto some of these things.
I guess if I fall it's not a big deal here.
Yeah, okay. Can't clip onto that.
So I think I need to go...
Like there.
To here.
But where is my end gate? Where's my goal?
What?
I don't even know where I'm trying to go here.
Oh my god, wait, this is clickable. What the fuck? Oh! I'm in.
Well, this is kind of nice because it's like multiple levels, right?
So if you fall you just you know, you don't fall the entire thing
Goodness
I think there's an opening up there maybe so I got to climb up
Where on earth do I climb up? Oh to this book and then to that book and then to that book oh
Oh, shiznit. Okay.
Walk to that book.
Land on this book. Okay, okay.
Clickable door!
What the hell?
This is crazy!
Shkirk!
I don't know if I was supposed to fall there, but...
What?
Okay, well, we got a lot of books I can climb up here.
But why is there this hallway over here, too?
Hide your UI.
Yeah, you're right.
I guess I do.
little region of little life bloom. I'm gonna climb up these books and just see where it
takes me. Can I jump on these moving? I feel like these are see-through. Ooh, but maybe
not that one okay well this is clickable oh
I'm stuck. No, I go down here. Surely. I mean, big-ass gateway. Damn. Ooh. Maybe I don't
to fall I fell okay that's just design stuff that's a block door Griffin so I
guess you do climb up this
Where is my goal?
It's gotta be like, over there, surely.
Fuck, I'm bad and stupid, fat and ugly.
Fucking chain, there we go.
I was hoping I could just clip that thing. I don't think you can.
Todd, that is so annoying.
Okay, baby chain to chain.
You must be able to run at this, yeah.
This is a bit awkward.
I'm going to have to hit that wall.
Nice.
Fuck I overshot it, damn it.
I had it adjusted too, but it was it cooked itself.
Shortcut.
All right, time to cheat.
Did not cheat there.
That was a mistake.
Now I might cheat.
Get owned.
Fuck.
How damn it!
Second time I overshot it.
Wait, I'm five seconds here.
cocks. Okay, I'm just going to do it normally. You might want to respect out of any passive
move speed. The jumps are designed for 0%, so it'll be easier. I don't- oh my god, you're
right I actually have bonus move speed somewhere in here I think some druid
bullshit feline swiftness yep there it is
let me put these points somewhere I can remember
Okay, the entire right row needs to get moved.
You're fucking right, man.
But now I'm going to be slow, oh, no.
All right, this is I keep getting
fucked by this. But maybe now with the move speed diff? That's it. Ah shh. Wait. I'm an
idiot. I had it too. I recently changed my movement key bindings. I used to be like a
add-ons movement. Like I used to be able to turn. Like if I pressed A, I would, I can't
I didn't even do it anymore because I changed it, but now it's like I strafe, like this,
by hitting A and D. I used to have to hold right click to do this, but it's not like
that anymore.
As of two days ago, and it's cucking me.
Keyboard Turner.
I mean, it's been like that since I played in Classic, but as soon as I expect Resto, I first saw a problem.
And I knew I needed to change it for like actually healing Raid and dodging mechanics at the same time.
I think I make this jump here.
No problem.
Try to cheat.
Okay, I'm just gonna not move.
I feel like I need to walk this way on the chain, though.
Can I just jump from here to there?
I think I can. Hold on.
Nice.
I'm in.
Next puzzle.
Hmm.
okay it's getting a little more complicated where is my heading is that
my goal that door right there
I mean, I could cheat this so hard with Wild Charge.
Okay, I think I see. I go down these chains.
Okay, up that chain.
Now I'm up top tippy top.
And then
at doors...
There's no way I go inside the wagon, right?
I feel like that's it, but it's blocked.
I don't know where to go now.
Fuck it, I'm inside.
Okay, come out this chain.
I mean, can I clip onto the wagon at all?
Nope.
It's fucking over.
God damn it.
Where do I go?
On top of it?
Maybe.
Fuck.
Yeah, I don't, I just don't know where I'm even going.
try again where's it starting in there's like chains I gotta start climbing up
we go
Oh my god.
I'm trying to like shorten and like take little shortcuts but it just, it never ever ever
works.
Oh my god, I'm gonna fucking freak out.
Ugh.
Hmm.
Is there something I'm actually where do I go?
I'm looking for like maybe a door that's clickable or am I missing something here?
The door to the right.
That's not a door though.
It doesn't open.
Oh, cocks.
Oh my god, it does.
I was in that opening before and I was hovering over, right?
I don't know.
Mm.
Mm.
Mm.
Mm.
Mm.
Mm.
Mm.
What?
Mm.
What do I do here?
It's something on the other side.
Okay, but I can't get over there.
So that means that my goal should be somewhere else, like maybe a lever or something that
I missed?
Wait.
I'm cheating.
Oh, this is where I came from.
So that's the last level.
Okay, got it.
Try inside the wagon.
Yeah.
Maybe you're right.
Now Cox, I have to do it all normally?
There's no lever, you are just too far away, clicking the bottom.
Bullshit.
I mean, am I wrong for being kind of confused?
Am I wrong for being kind of confused here?
Like...
Could be a land on top of this thing.
Chains inside.
Chains inside.
You think I go to the chain here?
Okay.
Now what?
the left. Other left. Oh wait, these chains. Oh, these are new chains. Right? Yeah, had
to have to be. There's no way I've been here before. Motherfucker! You guys are right.
correct this is me off I can't tell if that's like have I been there I think I
have this has to be like I win this is the I win page for sure nice okay we're
going down but I could also go up. Motherfuck, what the hell's my goal now? What? What? Oh,
I'm going to get lost.
Is my goal down?
How do you even do this as a Tarn?
Okay, no, no, no, no, we're back at, we're just looped around.
All right.
Fuck.
I guess part of the puzzle is figuring out the goal right? Okay. I'm in here. All right. This looks like some big prog
Okay, serious prog here
I'm back in the beginning
I think my goal is to go up. Up is what I want to do. I think.
Yeah, I gotta check for hidden doors. I feel like he's sneaking them in here
Can't crouch huh?
Proceeds to go down. Well, what if like the the entrance to the up is at the bottom bitch
Shh. Huh?
See, I see I need to get up there, but can I walk on this wall, maybe?
Is there any clipping going on?
I don't think so.
Okay, we got some stuff here, but this just puts me right back to this spot.
Fuck
Bottom floor again. I have this ramp that goes up, but this doesn't really help me at all
It's now I'm just behind the ramp. Where the fuck do I go man?
Wait, wait
Wait, hold on
something here might be clipable nice okay we're roofed out of our minds so now I need
into wall run, I think, all the way here.
Fuck! That has to be it.
All the way around.
Yeah, it's got to be an all the way around angle
That was it man. That was it. I was gonna get over the wall.
Yeah, that's it. I can do it.
The S key has never been more useful.
I'm going to kill myself.
CBA.
Karma.
Okay, let's do it all natural.
it's just frustrating it's frustrating as hell getting clipped like that
Okay, I'm in.
Hidden path ahead.
Okay.
Oh wait a second if you drop that puts you back at the beginning oh wait I'm back at
the beginning.
Okay.
I'm not doing that again, it's not happening.
Okay, hidden path ahead.
I mean why would he why is I guess the portal is kind of leaking through awkwardly a little
bit
That's crazy
Did I just bug the game out or was that it that was it you fucking rat you rat?
I didn't think I'd be able to walk through it
Wow.
Okay, this is a whole different world here.
This is kind of crazy.
Is this spin me if I stand on top of it?
I don't know how retail items work.
I don't think I can stand on top of it.
Well, let me.
All right.
I'm looking for like an exit, you know?
So I have an idea of where I'm trying to get to.
Probably need to drop down into this.
I mean, can I not just hop over this fence?
No, okay, so that fence is gate cap.
My goal is to drop down into this.
Yeah, I can't tell what I can and cannot stand on top of here.
Can I make that jump?
I didn't.
I hit the jump key.
I know I did.
Nice.
Okay.
Big.
Okay.
That wire.
Okay, that wire does not work, noted.
Are there any retail Andes?
Like, I feel like most classic and TBC, like, items and stuff that you can jump on.
I have an idea of what is and isn't, what's the word, when you can walk into things.
But with retail, anything, I don't know these items, I don't know these screws, I don't
know what I can and can't go through, collision, thank you, that's the word.
I don't know what I collide with.
Ah, fuck, I went too far.
That might be a jump backwards angle.
everything with a physical model you can jump on and no not really like that
fence for example has some crazy invisible wall this lever for example I
got you don't fuck with the lever I guess even retail players wouldn't know this
kind of shit it doesn't really come into play until you do a jump puzzle like
this right okay I'm I want to land on that I jump backwards okay I'm gonna go
backwards nice can I make it from here I feel like I can but I'm not gonna risk
Let's get, let's go to there, walk.
Okay, that's how that goes, I guess.
Okay.
That works.
I guess Jesus fuck is this all could
Wait.
What just happened?
No, I should have known.
What?
I'm still confused.
Did I miss a turn or did I I must have fucked some jump up and I didn't even realize
Okay, hold on, hold on, before I move on, am I sure I'm going to be able to do that?
sure I want to jump down here surely this is what I want to do right I just I
had to have missed something
okay so oh maybe I want to go in that box that's the goal
Make sure.
Man, I don't know. Maybe I don't.
I'm gonna go down. Fuck, I guess I'll find out. I feel like there might have been another path up there.
here. Shut the fuck up. He's saying wait, wait. Come here. Okay, what? This is the creator
of the map I think. What? He said there you go. Wait. Did I miss something? Okay I remember
doing this room what did you just do did I miss something dev assisted run I
guess oh he edited the map so he fucked me okay and then he unfix unfucked it
that wall wasn't supposed to be there okay all right
Alright, I guess I go here to here.
Uh...
I was fixing something earlier and forgot to fix it.
Okay.
Let's see.
I am barely hanging on this thing.
Okay, this is tough. These are some tight fits. I'm about to clip off and fall for sure.
I'm thinking I wall run to here, jump up onto this platform, but then I don't think I can
jump here to there.
So I'll be stuck if I do that.
I feel like that has to be it.
Maybe I can make this jump?
Oh, I think I can.
It's feeling better now that I'm here.
Alright, alright, now what?
secret doors I'm missing? Oh, right there. Alright, hold on. Can I just... depression?
I should have took more of my time there for sure.
don't remember how to do this. I just did this. How did I do it again?
Let's try right side. Maybe I had it right the first time.
That cannot be it.
I literally just did this and I don't remember how I did it.
Left side gaming.
That is what I did. Is it?
It is.
I don't know how to get past this part.
I thought maybe I could clip on that.
No, I can't.
Wild charge that's cheating.
I only do it when I know I can do something and I've done it already and I just want to
get back to where I was.
okay just walk no man no
maybe I just go under the fire pit like this
fuck!
dude, I actually did this like first try last time and I don't know how I did it, but
Oh my god.
Oh!
Okay, somehow I got it that there.
Wait, where do I go now?
Big proc.
Okay.
Yep.
Now I'm going to wild charge it, CBA again.
Now I'm feeling rushed.
of
I mean, I guess I'll just try and jump on it again.
Now it works.
Thank God.
So how in the fuck?
I mean, I could wild charge in there.
I know that, but how?
Is just accuracy.
I think you just got to walk off and you have to not let your head hit the ceiling or you
just fall straight down. Left ledge. Or yeah, maybe you land on this weird gold sticking
out. It's one or the other. I'm going to try the left ledge angle. Okay, this is awkward.
Okay, not the I was looking for here
Are you mean jump from there no way
No way
Okay, impression.
Oh, saved.
Huh.
Y'all, there's no way it's the left ledge.
huh what a hundred percent yes I eat your name is I eat please die I eat P I
don't even know what the fuck your back flip in check the wall below you I don't
thing I can stand on that there's just try it I mean fuck all right I can get
there really quick
I know I can't well you're right it's actually higher than me
Okay, I'm done.
Thought it was right there, but even then, I don't know if it'll work, it just doesn't
look like it will.
I don't know if I go- Okay, hold on.
Fuck.
Okay, so that angle might actually look pretty good.
And I'm annoyed, but that is correct, I think.
Okay, so what did I do last time?
How did it go wrong?
I like landed somewhere awkward.
And I was like floating.
How do I avoid that?
Huh, just go for it!
Oh!
That works!
Wait...
Where the fuck?
Can we go this way, I guess?
Is this just a maze all together oh
Okay, I got it first try
What the hell
We're going first person mode.
Wait, am I back at the beginning?
Okay.
I am.
I am.
Interesting.
So I know that's a dead end. I've checked that out.
And then I go here.
This looks diff.
All right.
somewhere diff for sure?
Uhhh...
What? Jesus Christ.
Uhhh, we got some... dude, dude.
How many stairs do you fucking need?
Three different directions to go here.
Okay, hold on.
Let's go this way first
Where the fuck am I now dude
What okay well we went that way so let's try going this way this one oh what's back there
Hey look it's connected.
Oh hell.
Okay we've got a hole down there.
Some random fucking stairs.
I don't know where I am anymore.
I have no idea if I've fallen. Whoa, whoa, whoa, that goes way down
What if I like that?
Dude, what the fuck
He's so lost I'm lost do any of you know where you are I mean really
There's an invisible wall here.
Of course, I'm sure y'all are, y'all already beat it.
Surely, of course.
I'm stupid as fuck.
But you?
You're a genius.
Is this fucking threak following him?
What kind of gear we got here, 224?
237-11?
Well, he's editing things.
Fixed.
Fixed what?
Oh
Fuck you
What
Is there any point to this entire area?
I can clip up onto that bullshit maybe what is this house a good question
epilepsy
fuck you there's actually no point
Hahahahaha!
Uhhh... It's crazy!
I'm- God damn it! I have to- I actually have to play first person or I start seeing, like, the floor above me and whatnot.
Oh God.
Okay, there's stairs. Maybe my goal is to go up?
Then this goes back down, which is awkward.
Then this goes back up, kind of, and then up another floor, maybe.
Jump across this.
I'm back in the Silver Moon Place.
Crazy stairs.
through the middle, maybe?
More stairs?
Okay, hello.
No way.
GGs.
Hey, actually, what a great map.
That's awesome.
Oh, it's a Skitso house.
I'm not, I'm good.
That's crazy.
All right, I will be on tomorrow.
Tomorrow, maybe some eugenics, maybe some retail.
We'll see.
GG's guys, see you tomorrow.
Peace, I'm tired.
Boop.