Hi friends, this is Samuel, co-host of The Back Page. Matthew was away this week, so I recorded this episode with Jeremy Peel, sometime guest. Just be aware that we had some audio syncing issues in the second half of this episode, that because we recorded it so late in the week, it was too late to actually solve it before this episode went live. Nonetheless, I hope you still enjoy the episode. Thanks for listening. Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. My name is Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined not by Matthew Castle, but by Jeremy Peel. Hi, Jeremy. Hello. I’m very happy to have Jeremy join us. Matthew Castle is temporarily in disposed. He sends his love. I think he was taken into shock after destroying me in the 90s PC gaming draft poll. He wasn’t mentally ready for that, so he’s needed a little rest. But I’m delighted to be joined by a returning guest, Jeremy Peel. How’s it going, Jeremy? Are you well? I’m good, thanks. Yeah, Hay Fever season has started. So it’s the time of year where I post the gif of Matt Damon in The Martian desperately trying to seal up his space suit to avoid contact with the atmosphere. But apart from that, I’m good. That’s good. Is that like something you got as a scheduled post for the next 10 years? Just have that kind of ready? Yeah, it’s mid-June. Do what you do in about 2016. You know, once a year I un-retweet it and then retweet it again. And I think it has about 11 likes now. That’s pretty solid. Well, yeah, if you want to go through Jeremy alike for that, then by all means, JeremyDeepPeel on Twitter. You know, just support that great meme content. Very valuable. Yeah, I’m so pleased you could join me, Jeremy. It’s my first ever guest co-host. So I really appreciate that. I was curious, because you are a big PC gaming sort of like guy, and that’s like your background, we last had you on to talk about Immersive Sims, which definitely came out. I wanted to get you on before then, but I failed to finish the Witcher series. So I’ve been very slow with doing that. I appreciate that really, because I’m also trying to play as much Witcher as I can in anticipation of our episode for that. And I was secretly hoping that you were kind of pushing it back as well. Just kind of having committed to that and realizing how much Witcher there is. My Lord. But it’ll be great once we get there. Yeah, you had some great tweets on Witcher lighting, so going real deep, I see, which is exciting. But yeah, I kind of wanted to do that episode when I wanted to play all three of them properly. And I thought we could maybe try and time it when the next gen revamp arrives. So that might be a good way to do it. But yeah, so I suppose Jeremy, you started a new job. So I guess I’ll ask about that. So you started TechRadar Gaming, right? And you were a freelancer before. So what led you down that path? Yeah, I didn’t really expect to go for a staff job. I really like freelancing and the freedom of it. But somebody I really respect, a great friend, is Julian Benson, is the editor-in-chief at TRG. We’re trying to get people to call it TRG, which sort of reflects that it’s hopefully going to have its own voice. And that’s what I’m there to try and help do, is define that. And yeah, it just seemed like the best opportunity for me to pass on some stuff. I’ve been doing this for 10 years now. And it feels like I would like to, you know, improve the industry a bit and pass on some features, writing knowledge to some people. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m a features editor, I should say. That’s my new job. Yeah, I’m pleased that some Black Friday SSD sales money is going on. Some rad features about old PC games now. I assume that’s what you’re doing. Yeah, I felt a little guilty this last week, even with, you know, a lot of my teammates have been doing the brutal late E3 or not E3 shifts. Whereas in features, my role in that is sort of to sit back and analyze and stroke my chin. And then the next morning, write some kind of musing take. That’s not amusing. My writing isn’t amusing at all. Musing. Yeah, so that’s what I’ve been doing is sort of stepping back, thinking about what the implications of things might be, which is not really something you get to do if you work in Econ, to be honest. Valuable role too, but yeah, very, very different. So yeah, that’s great. Congratulations. That’s cool to hear about. I was curious, as someone with a big piece of gaming background, did you listen to the draft episode last week or have you seen our draft picks? Did you have any kind of take on who the winner was? Because Matthew beat me about 50% more votes than I did, and I was a little bit devastated because I felt like I had some better deep cuts than him. He did have a very good list, but did you have any reflections on our picks? Did you see that sort of pan out? I’m about halfway through currently, so I’ll withhold judgment on who I think my winner was, but I enjoyed hearing a lot about Baldur’s Gate, and I particularly enjoyed hearing you moan like a wounded animal when Matthew picked TIE Fighter. There’s just something very funny about the idea of a man spending hours researching a thing, and then, you know, with the assumption that it was going to help him, and then in the event all it did was help your opponent, but you still felt compelled to use that research and to sell that game, and maybe that was your downfall. I don’t know. We’ll see. Yeah, like one voter said that they voted for me because I did such a great job of explaining Matthew’s picks. I kind of respect the process there. It’s like, look, you didn’t pick the best games, but you did do the best explaining of the best games, so here’s my vote. I enjoyed that. Was there anything that you would have picked instead, Jeremy, any kind of 90s PC classics that you felt like needed to be in there? I suppose you’re still listening to the episode, right? Yeah, I mean, Baldur’s Gate would have been my first pick as well. It’s a very formative one for me and I think you did a good job of selling how, not just how important it is, but also that it’s still a lot of fun. I don’t, you know, sometimes worry about selling how important a game was because I don’t think that really excites people to play a thing. You know, this is very influential. Okay, I will play what it influenced. But I think Baldur’s Gate actually has a really sort of unique, sort of the best fellowship of the ring game to my mind. It really captures sort of the danger of the wilderness and, you know, showing up at a friendly seeming inn and have somebody jump you outside and try to kill you. Yeah, I love it. I can’t get enough of that game. Well, damn, I should have had you come on and explain it for me. Maybe I would have got more votes. I assume you’re a big Planescape Torment guy too, Jeremy, but I mean, you know, this whole lineage of games is something you’re very into, right? Yeah, like all the Infinity Engine stuff is big for me. That was what I was buying for a fiver at Asda in 2001. So, you know, it’s a deep part of my makeup. Yeah, for sure. So for this episode, I’ve brought Jeremy on to talk about our most anticipated games of the future, essentially. So we’re coming off the back of Not E3 or Key 3 or whatever sort of like SEO-unfriendly term you want to describe it. So we’re excited to get into that. I’ve got a little bit more I want to dig into with Jeremy here before we get to our two top 10 lists. So people can look forward to that. But Jeremy, I was curious what your last days of freelance were like. Did you treat it like your sort of last days alive? Did you try and tick off some things that you had sort of like done before before moving into a full time gig? Yeah, exactly that. I was very conscious of it and quite self-indulgent about it. So I booked myself, courtesy of Katherine RPS, on to E-FanFest in Iceland, which only games journalists know is the best trip in the business, just in terms of location and the stories you get to write up and the amount of time you just get to be with your peers and have a lovely time, that was really nice, having not seen anyone for the majority of the time I was freelance during the pandemic, that felt like a really nice way to sort of cap it off. I asked Edge if for my last thing I could write a time extend on Bioshock Infinite, just pick something really naughty and work out how I felt about it. So you can look forward to that in an upcoming Edge at some point. Is there anything you can hint at as to what present day Jeremy’s takes on Bioshock Infinite are? I sort of felt like my feelings on the game itself haven’t changed very much, but I think it’s a little sad that because of the sort of weight we placed on it at the time to sell games as art, perhaps a collective sort of need to impress our parents, that there’s still an ongoing sort of games cultural backlash where people sneer at Bioshock Infinite now, because obviously that was absurd to say that Infinite, you know, created games as art, whereas in fact at the time, and the whole time since, there were all sorts of fantastic artistic segments going on in games outside AAA and maybe we just weren’t paying attention in the right way at the time. So I kind of want to like remove some of that baggage from Infinite one way or the other and just kind of look at what it is, which is a flawed but still very impressive shooter, which weirdly reminded me of Doom 2016. Going back to it somehow, our precursor, you know, with all the sort of the skyhooks, the spinning round sort of arena maps, it’s a little quake arena-y, a little Doom 2016. So there’s something there, yeah, worth revisiting for sure. Yeah, for sure. That’s exciting. So that’s the next issue of Edge that’s out, that one? I’m not sure whether it’s the next one or not. That’s not very helpful, but you know, I’m up for encouraging people to buy every issue of Edge until it appears. I’m not above that. You know, I want Edge to sell. This is what happens when you’re freelance, you have no sense of when your work will actually appear in print. That’s like very, very kind of familiar. So yeah, that’s cool. Do you tackle when Burial at Sea is in there as well, Jeremy, or just the game itself? I didn’t, but I had played Burial at Sea Part 2 quite recently, which is on the choir, a very solid stealth game. You know, you’ve got some really interesting stuff going on in there, like in terms of sound mechanics and broken glass and stuff like that. You play as Elizabeth in that one, so you kind of strike a different sort of figure and tackle scenarios in a different way to, you know, how buck-a-do-it would. So yeah, I think that one’s definitely going worth going back to as well, even though it’s sort of very timey-wimey, it’s got a… it’s almost a kind of return to Irrational’s roots in some respects. Yeah, for sure. Like, I always think of sort of like Ken Levine and the writers on those games, like the forces kind of pulling at them. On one hand it’s like, you know, sort of philosophy books they read when they’re in college, and on the other hand it’s like Marvel and DC comic books where a load of random bullshit happens. And like, I think those two forces definitely feel like they’re at work in Bariatricy Part 2. Yeah. So, yeah. I think the emblematic enemy type in Infinite for me is the George Washington bot. You know, that’s the perfect sort of meeting of high and low brow, and it kind of shows to me that there’s self-awareness at the studio there. It’s like, these two things are quite funny when you stick them together. Yeah. Oh, great. I can’t wait to read that. That’ll be fantastic. So, yeah. Like, eFanFest, that’s good. Go hang out, have some beers, sit in a hot tub, watch an FPS get announced. That’s kind of what happens at eFanFest, right? Yeah. An FPS gets announced pretty much every time, and it’s usually the same FPS, and it has yet to come out. But, you know, I love digging into that stuff. I’ve been to that event so many times now that I can draw on years of sort of sediment of old announcements and all that kind of thing in a way that I can’t, you know, similar events. So that’s really fun to do. That’s awesome. I suppose then to switch focus to the not E3 of this, Jeremy, how have you found this past week of live streams and hype? Do you follow it that closely these days? Yeah, I mean, obviously, I have a work reason to do so, but I haven’t actually directly watched even half of the streams that have happened, partly because I go straight into work brain and I wanted to sort of preserve my energies for, you know, the takes, the writing. Also, because I don’t know, there’s something about it now, it’s hard to know even what the essential ones are. You know, there’s obviously Xbox and Sony and I guess Jeff Keighley’s thing is a big one as well. But then you go beyond that and you’ve got the Epic Games one, the Guerrilla one, the Wholesome Direct and at a certain point, I think they encouraged me to pick and choose and to go, you know what, I don’t actually need to watch four hours back to back, three nights in a week. I can just look through the roundups and watch the trailers that pertain to me. Yeah, for sure. This was actually like the first year where I was super selective with what I watched. So I watched a piece of gaming show on Xbox and dipped into some of the others. So I watched the Wholesome Games Direct actually, which I find is quite divisive among people. Not sure where you stand on the Wholesome Games, Jeremy. I find it like fairly innocuous and those games wouldn’t live anywhere else. And I thought they actually had some, I had over five games from there added to my Steam wishlist this year, which I thought was pretty good, but is that one you pay attention to? I did watch it last year, and I don’t know what this says about me, but by the end of it, I did kind of need to see some blood. I was wholesome out by the end, but and I do think that probably as a term that will be retired within a couple of years. But I do think it’s a useful way to group together a lot of, you know, worthy games. I also heard that it was a more sort of varied and better paced show this year. So I may well go back to that. I mean, it’s only right given that, you know, Summer Game Fest is unofficially the blood and gore show. It’s just not in the title that there should be a direct counterpoint. That does feel fair. Yeah. I sort of, I do think it’s funny that like, I definitely, you know, games with guns, we’re so kind of used to that now we don’t even think about it. But games with frogs, you might have games journalists, I saw kicking off about that at the weekend. I was like, people are just absolutely sick of frogs and games. Hey, games with bears. Games with bears is the new, the new shit. That’s where it’s headed. So you did follow it for kind of like work purposes. How have you shaped your viewing habits around this livestream era, Jeremy, like, how kind of like, did you sort of like interact with it and lap up the good stuff? Yeah, I relied on, I think a lot about doing a good job now of kind of passing this stuff and making sense of it. One thing I did, which was really sort of enjoying my new abilities as a commissioning editor, was that I asked Rich Stanton to write up the Sony show for me. So rather than watch it, I commissioned the piece of writing I most liked to read about that show and then read that. I mean, that’s amazing, isn’t it, to be able to do that. Yeah, I paid a man to watch this, so I didn’t have to. Oh, that’s good. How was it for you? Yeah, a bit strange. I had one of the games I was working on in one of the shows, so that was a bit strange. So that was good. Apart from that, I was pretty tuned into it. I was editing the podcast during Jeff Keighley, so I had it sound off and I was just looking at all of the space games where people getting smacked in the head and attacked by aliens and robots and such on a second monitor. That was good. Yeah, I thought the Xbox conference was pretty strong. I actually quite like the idea of E3 being divided up by subject matter. That’s why I quite like the wholesome games one, even if you’re right that maybe the term will die out in a few years. Wholesome doubt is a great phrase, by the way. I like the idea that there is Warhammer E3 and then there is wholesome E3. I’d be well up for a retro FPS E3 and whatever else you want to throw in there, really, strategy games. I think that’s the Devolver show, retro FPS E3. I really like the Xbox show as well. I did cover that one from start to finish and did my best impression of Rich Stanton for the write-up. There’s a lot of stuff in there that interests me. I was curious if there was anything about the old style of doing things at E3 that you missed, Jeremy, because I’ve seen a lot of games journalists saying that they’re a bit burned out of the livestream format. We have all been at home indoors for two and a half years now, so maybe people are ready for a change. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is there anything about E3 that you missed in terms of the dynamics this time of year? Starting last year, I started to think, and maybe I’ve stolen this thought because I think Kezzer has talked about this, but the idea that E3 had a lot of value as a single punch, you know, a single combined punch, a very short space of time. I used to seem to see a lot more mainstream coverage of E3. I used to hear about it on the radio, you know, places where I’d never normally hear about games. I think it loses its potency the more spread out it is and actually need all the major players to kind of throw the momentum in one direction to really make that kind of impact. So I think that’s a shame. We don’t reach those audiences so much. Oh, and this year, I’m sorry, this year I was thinking really that there’s less journalism that happens around these shows now, because it used to be, you know, when Starfield was announced, there’s not so much of the ability for people to be there and question Todd Howard, you know, he’s quite an open man, he used to tell us things. When Fallout 76 was announced, we didn’t really have a very clear idea of what that game was and that the full picture emerged in the coming days. And it was a combined effort by various outlets, you know, questioning Bethesda, how does this actually work? What’s it going to feel like? Within another week, we had, you know, a better picture for potential players of what they’d be buying into. I don’t think we’re getting that in quite the same way this time, so that’s a shame. It does sort of seem like there are fewer interviews to go around for some of this stuff. Like there was a really good IGN interview on Starfield actually that I thought blew it wide open. Yeah, that’s true. That really worked. But like, generally speaking, I think like being on the ground at E3, so many people from so many countries get so much FaceTime with devs that maybe that is like one part of it. And there’s also like a cascading real world element to E3 that’s quite hard to explain the idea of like the, the kind of like sleeper hit that spreads among people or like the hot thing you hear about like this. It’s not that relevant to the people on the outside, but it does kind of shape how things are instead everyone’s looking at the same thing. So it’s, it’s like, just culturally not the same when it’s all happening on the internet basically. Yeah, and I think it might be hard as a viewer or a reader to kind of see the benefit to you of, you know, a bunch of games journalists wanting around LA, but there is that, you know, that temperature reading aspect to it and which then ends up informing what we write about and what kind of interviews we chase and that stuff is important. And, yeah, the access when nobody’s there around the developers is just a lot harder to get. So for that reason, I hope that there’s some kind of physical event in the future, although I don’t miss back to back half an hour appointments and running between them and apologizing to upwards of 10 people in a day for being late. I don’t think that’s a good system. Yeah, that was maybe kind of chaotic. But hey, you know, it was more exciting than switching to another live stream tab or whatever or refreshing your browser. Yeah, undoubtedly. So yeah. No, I kind of miss. I miss it too. So I totally get that. One thing I kind of saw people argue about Jeremy was whether there were enough actual good games to go around for the volume of streams happening this year. Do you have any kind of like thoughts on that discussion? I don’t know if I buy into that. I do recognise that there’s a lot of stuff being delayed, especially in the AAA end because of the disruption of the pandemic and everything that’s come with that. But I generally think when there are fewer AAA games around, all that happens is we see through the clouds a little bit and we see more of the great stuff that’s on the layer below. You know, there’s never really a time where there’s nothing happening, not anymore. There’s only games upon games upon games and hopefully, you know, if the schedule looks a little too clear in the next year, then we will spot things that we wouldn’t have otherwise. There will be hits on Steam that wouldn’t have happened otherwise because they were too preoccupied with Starfield. So, you know, I think there are good aspects to that. Yeah, I think it does mean that a lot of the kind of games that were being announced were like from some different kinds of publishers. I mean, I keep forgetting there was almost no Ubisoft. In fact, I don’t think there was any Ubisoft in this like last few days at all. That’s, they’re completely not a part of the picture. Activision, I think, just makes Call of Duty now. So that’s what they had there. But yeah, it does mean that some slightly different publishers and developers are maybe getting more spotlight than they otherwise would. So yeah, I think that the hunger for AAA games is just not currently aligned with where things are at. Like maybe next year we’ll be caught up on COVID stuff, but it’s really hard to say. So yeah. So Jeremy, just before we get to our kind of like top 10 lists, I was curious if you picked up any weird gaming habits lately, because I know I’ve kind of like known you to have your sort of driver phase and call of duty campaigns phase and all that sort of stuff. But aside from The Witcher, what’s kind of like been going down for you in the past year or so in terms of funky game habits? Yeah. I was thinking about this and reflecting on my most recent driver phase and how intense that was. I think there was a little pandemic syndrome going on for me there. Not in the fact that I dedicated time to driver, which I thoroughly recommend as a pastime, but just the intensity of the way I explored it. I got into playing the original game on my Vita, but I became annoyed that the frame rate limiter on the PS1 version was too limiting. So I decided to hunt down the PC version, which is actually incredibly difficult to do. I had to buy a disk drive for my laptop. I had to download a file. I don’t know what this file does, but it used to exist in previous versions of Windows. They got rid of it because it became a security concern. It was like a potential doorway for intruders. I reinstalled this file because without it, driver one wouldn’t run. I took that risk with the laptop I used for work. Looking back on that, I think, well, would I have done that if I was able to go outside? I’m not sure I would have. So I think probably my habits are a little more balanced at this stage. But it’s funny to look back on the way I was behaving in regards to my favorite games at that time. Yeah, I think my version of that is this entire podcast. I totally feel you. That makes sense. I was curious actually on that subject, Jeremy, you do listen to the podcast. Is there any observations from that journey for you? How have you found it as a listener who has been a guest before? Yeah, I don’t really listen to any of the gaming podcasts. I listen to this one all the time. I think the fact that you do talk about contemporary stuff, but you often have your heads in 10, 15 years ago. I think I find that to be an escape in a way that listening to other people exactly like me talk about exactly the games I talk about all through the day wouldn’t be. So there’s hopefully something about that. I really like the podcast has got to the point where you get returning guests, and it feels like there’s a cast of characters surrounding it. There’s something special about it. That’s nice. Yeah, it’s a bit like that. I take pride in building a little supporting cast of people, and then people ask those guests to come back on, and then they do, and yeah, it’s just quite nice really. I’m still surprised people bother listening to it, but hey, that’s on them, not me. Yeah. That said, I’m not as classy as Jen Simpkins, and I will be accepting my appearance fee. I still have some of that freelance energy remaining, and my new wage hasn’t kicked in yet, so. Yeah, you won’t be paid an exposure any longer those days are behind you. Yeah, that’s okay, Jeremy. I’ll make sure Matthew pay powers you 40 quid after this. Very high-tech operation we’re running here. So yeah, that’s absolutely fine. Okay, great. Well, let’s take a quick break then, Jeremy. We’ll come back and discuss our Top 10 Most Anticipated Games. Are you good, buddy? You enjoy it? I’m good. Yeah. How are you finding? Am I doing okay? Yeah, for sure. I think I’m so not used to just having one co-host who’s not Matthew Castle, so it’s like I’m recalibrating slightly. I’m trying not to think of myself as trying to prop up one half of the dynamic because it’s just not helping to worry us all. Too much pressure. Matthew, you’ll be listening. About an hour ago, I felt like I needed a Renny and I think I resisted having one because I thought, no, I’ll just be Matthew’s shadow. It feels like I’m just trying to embody him and that’s not the right way to go about this. You know, we have to keep this in the podcast, right? It’s too good not to keep. It has to stay in. Welcome back to the podcast. So in this section, myself and Jeremy have both constructed two top 10 lists that will count down of upcoming games that we’re most excited about. These games, some of them are from the Not E3 and some of them are just kind of more generally games that are upcoming that we’re excited about. I want to have something kind of forward-looking on the podcast, just kind of like break up the very kind of like retro focus of the 90s episode. So Jeremy, I was curious, how did you assemble your top 10 here? Like how many of them appeared in Not E3 and how many of them are just stuff that you’ve had your eye on generally? I’d say there’s probably an even split. Yeah, it hasn’t really defined what I’ve come to. It did remind me about some games, which was good to see. But yeah, I wouldn’t say that it’s a post-E3 or post-Not E3 list exclusively by any show. How about you? Yeah, well, I just put on 10 space-based survival horror games and then put them in order, and I think that will create some good content. Hey, it is good enough for Geoff. Yeah, I did actually, I considered one of the, putting one of those in there, but I didn’t in the end. So yeah, it’s a bit of a mix. Like I’ve kind of, some of them are from the PlayStation State of Play thing. Some of them are from, two of them are Warhammer games actually. So that will make sense when I think we discuss them. One of them is an MIA Nintendo game, as we’ll get into. So yeah, there’s a good healthy mix in here. So let’s start with you then, Jeremy. What’s your number 10? Yeah, sorry, just before that, I’d completely forgotten about the games announced in Warhammer Schools. And I think I know which two games you will have picked. So I’m grateful that you remembered about it. So my number 10 is Thirsty Suitors. Ah, yeah, okay. So I’m kind of vaguely aware of the premise of this game. It has a very nice art style. So will you talk me through it? Yeah, so it’s one of those games that’s sort of best to describe its kind of story premise to get across what it’s about. It’s about a woman from a South Asian family in America, I think in Washington State. So she’s kind of returning home as an adult and there’s a sort of Scott Pilgrim-esque set up to it where she’s sort of confronting her exes from earlier in her life and also dealing with a very imposing grandma and repairing a relationship with her mother. So it’s very sort of interpersonal drama, but the way it’s expressed is this incredible kind of, I don’t know, mix of The Matrix and Scott Pilgrim and those kind of influences. The encounters with the exes are sort of JRPG-style turn-based battles and they’re really sort of outsized, to use an American term, you know, cars are thrown. I saw one Ultimate which involved the protagonist, I think her name is Jala, her mum showing up with a gigantic slipper, you know, a sort of 30-foot mum and slapping down her opponent. So it’s a sort of action comedy game in that respect. But it also has these really interesting sort of connecting elements too. The traversal around this town is skateboard based. So it looks like a really sort of slick skateboarding sort of free-roman game in that respect. And there’s also a cooking element, that’s when you’re interacting with your mum and cooking all these delicious South Asian meals. And I recommend that people kind of seek out the trailers on this because it really, it has to be seen to be appreciated. The direction and the animation, the team involved, a few of the key members worked on Into the Matrix and Path of Nier. You know, games that were… Yeah, that was kind of their early career experience. And you know, the Wachowskis were unusually involved on those games. So they have this kind of incredible and unique experience of cinematic video game direction. And yeah, that definitely comes across there. I’m just really looking forward to a game that seems funny as well. I think that’s going to be great fun. Yeah, I mean, you know, there’s… I don’t think I kind of realised the scope of this game till you’re laying it out. I was aware of the Scott Pilgrim-like premise. It did make me ponder if a game like this was based on my life, and it was just people had to fight my two exes. There were just two. Like, what a short game that would be. That’s so short that people could steam refund it after they’d finished the game. Yeah, they’d play it and think, oh, this was a demo for Steam Next Fest, and, like, no, that was the whole game. Like… That sounds really good. I also, you know, surprise, surprise, the idea of, like, people having made, like, slightly average licensed games from the noughties and invoking that as a kind of influence is really exciting to me. So that’s great. Yeah, that was my hook as well, unsurprisingly. That was what got me into it. Yep, that is the weird part that we find ourselves in on this podcast. That’s cool. Is that coming to sort of all formats, or, like, it feels like a game that would be great on Switch but I imagine wouldn’t run on Switch. That’s the profile of game it is in my head. I should have checked this. I know it’s coming out on PC and presumably other stuff, but nice. I think it’s just down as PC for the time being, actually. I think. But yeah, that looks great. That art style is beautiful. Okay, fantastic. My number 10, much more obvious, is just Resident Evil 4 Remake. Now, Jeremy, I was curious. How did you feel about the fact that people were having this discussion about leaks around the last few weeks? Because this game was so extensively leaked that when it arrived, it was like it almost registered no response from me and it kind of took me like a couple of weeks and seeing a bit more of it this last week to really kind of tune in to how exciting it might be to see someone reinterpret Resident Evil 4. Do you think there’s any kind of fairness in that discussion of how leaks spread and how it affects these things? Yeah, I think a number of my peers feel this way, but I think if a leak is only, you know, getting a couple of weeks jump on a thing and is just, you know, removing any theatre from that reveal, then it’s not of huge value to anyone, certainly not the developers. But, yeah, I think sometimes people can conflate, you know, what a leak really means. You know, if a leak tells you about terrible working conditions at a studio and, you know, reporting on that may help see them improved in the future, you know, that’s a very different thing to finding out that a new Resi game is going to be revealed in a couple of weeks’ time, you know. I don’t think that’s really a great public service, necessarily. Yeah, I saw it and then just sort of nodded and went, oh yeah, there it is. And, like, the idea of someone remaking one of the best games ever made should be, you know, it should evoke a different response, not that response. So that’s kind of how I felt about it. But, you know, the more I looked at it, the kind of, like, the leaks were suggesting that this draws upon some kind of content from the game. I don’t know about that, but all of the kind of, like, ganadoes, kind of, villages they’ve been showing and the environments just look super, like, amplified visually, just so incredibly detailed and beautiful. So, yeah, I’m really curious. And it has a release date. It’s out in spring, like, it’s coming. So that I really like, too. Like, this, you know, the kind of, like, more amorphous reveals where, like, they’re still years away. Kind of, like, less and less interesting to me now. I like knowing that a game is just, you know, is less than a year away from being in my hands, essentially. So, yeah, I was pleased to see it there. Not entirely sure what shape this will take, but it certainly made a good first impression in terms of, like, colour palette. And Capcom games always look really good. Do we have much of a Resi 4 guy, Jeremy? No, total, total. Big blind spot for me. But am I right in thinking that this is the team behind the Resi 2 remake, the really good one rather than the third one? Yeah, did you play that, the Resi 2 remake? Nope, not an inch of it. I have no experience whatsoever. But yeah, I also really like the, you know, having things announced and out in the near future. One thing I like about the Xbox conference was the idea that everything they would be showing would be out within 12 months. That’s how I like things to be done now. Yeah, it feels like we’re more and more in that space than ever, with the exception of Hideo Kojima making something with cloud gaming. That was like the one sort of like nonsense thing that Xbox allowed themselves, which is fine. What’s your number nine, Jeremy? So I got System Shock, which isn’t called System Shock Remake. Ah, OK, we’ll come back to that then. Yeah, I feel bad now because that’s a classic Jeremy game. But this next one actually is one I wanted you to talk about. So number nine on my list is Flintlock, The Siege of Dawn. That is its subtitle, isn’t it? The Siege of Dawn, I believe it is. That’s correct, yeah. So this publisher, Kepler Interactive, really, really interesting, published Sifu this year and is working on this game Scorn. Had quite a lot of stuff at E3. There was this trailer that appeared in the Xbox conference that’s coming out day one on Game Pass. It’s a game made by A44, I believe is the name of the developer. And they are from New Zealand, this developer? They’re from New Zealand, yeah. And yeah, they’re part of, Kepler’s a really interesting outfit in that they’re a group of studios that are banded together to sort of pool their funds and make each other’s stuff happen rather than an overarching publisher, which is a really cool setup, I think. So they’re sort of part of Kepler as well as being published by it. Yeah, like a developer-made publisher. It’s quite an interesting idea. I would say to the listeners as well, seeing the developers they’ve got under there as well, it’s a really, really interesting bunch of folks. So yeah, it’s cool. And this game kind of came to my attention, Jeremy, because you wrote the cover feature for Edge from a few months ago. This open world, kind of dark, soulsy looking game, but with where you are kind of hunting these gods down, and you have a little kind of like foxy dog like companion thing. Kind of like, couldn’t get a massive read of what it was, but it does look really nice. It does look quite dark soulsy in kind of how it seems to play. But I’m kind of like most into the sort of character design and world design they were showing off here. Like it doesn’t exactly look like it’s drawing from the same influences as some of the other sort of like third person action adventure games that you see around these days. Is that the kind of like vibe you got from kind of learning about it for the edge feature? Yeah, very much so. It’s funny, I’m looking directly at that cover now, which happens to be on my desk here. And seeing the reveal was quite special for me because this was my first edge cover feature and kind of had lots of discussion with A44 about what this game was going to be. Didn’t have a lot of footage or kind of imagery to show me at the time. So I was really just working this out through conversation. And then to see it kind of, you know, to see the trailer and go, yeah, I recognize it. That is it. That’s exactly what they described to me. It was quite a good moment. And yeah, it has a really, it was definitely the world that drew me into it as well, writing about it. It’s Guns N Gods game, I think they call it. It’s not steampunk exactly, but a world that’s very much about that kind of early flintlock weaponry and that sort of groundedness and grittiness. But mixing that with mythology. And there’s something about bringing those two things into close proximity. That kind of changes the mythological aspect, I think. It’s really cool. This sort of cat companion is a little god in himself. But by kind of being brought into this grounded world, he’s sort of humanized as far as a cat can be anyway. And he’s a sort of haughty individual. That’s the impression I get anyway. And you’re fighting against the gods of this world who have been worshipped from afar for thousands of years and then have suddenly showed up and turned out to be not all they were cracked up to be. I really like the idea of there being this sort of global existential crisis that’s going on as people find out that the, you know, the beings that they’ve been worshipping and asking for help with the, you know, hard times in their lives turn out to be these horrible tyrants and they have to kind of take up arms against them. And yeah, the idea of it being kind of dark souls-y, it’s funny, you know, Alden Ring came out and there was this whole kind of hoo-ha of western, mostly western AAA developers going, you know, doesn’t do any of the kind of smart things in UI and presentation and introducing players gently that we have as part of our best practice and players don’t seem to mind and that’s kind of shocking. And it feels to me like Flintlock is the game that folds souls into that. You know, it brings that kind of souls-y combat into a, you know, it’s made in New Zealand, but that kind of Western-style open world, something a little more accessible, a little more story-driven, explicitly story-driven at least. So I’m certainly interested in it for that reason. Yeah, and as the name would suggest, it mixes guns in a lot. One of the things you’re doing in this game is basically assembling a group of experts in firearms, explosives, to age your armoury essentially. And so you have a mixture of guns, magic, and using melee weapons. So essentially it’s a familiarly souls-like mixture of gameplay elements, but wrapped up in this world that looks a little bit different. It weirdly reminds me of something like Hellblade, where it exists exactly what they’re going for. It exists to the side of what other people are doing. It’s not exactly following the path of Dark Souls. It’s not exactly an Assassin’s Creed style open world. It’s very much trying to forge its own path while introducing those other influences. So yeah, I’m really hopeful. This will be day one on Game Pass when it releases next year. So I look forward to playing it. What’s next up on your list, Jeremy? What’s your number eight? I have Saints Row. Not on my list. So go ahead. Why are you excited about this one? Well, I’m not especially a Saints Row that or haven’t been. But I think you’ve talked about this a little on the podcast before, but the sort of the missing open world city driving games, the games that we don’t really have anymore because publishers gave up trying to compete with GTA. But when GTA is five, ten years apart, it’d be nice to have more of them. And I think the GTA style open worlds are sort of thought of mistakenly by publishers as where the open world started, almost regressive to go back to. But I specifically love getting in a car in a dense open world city and that kind of navigational challenge of weaving around other vehicles and mixing it with combat and all this kind of stuff. I love that and I’ve missed it. And Saints Row from the footage that I’ve seen looks like it’s going to do that stuff pretty well. You know, it has some kind of weird driving combat specific mechanics of rolling around on the roof to shoot at your opponents. And it also has, you know, sort of police chase mechanics. And I’m really a sucker for those. That’s sort of my driver gene kicking in there. But I love the sort of weird stealth that can occur in, you know, in chase sequences and games of that kind. I also like the vibe. It definitely seems to evoke Watch Dogs 2, you know, something that isn’t trying to be a gritty crime drama. It’s really matching the natural tone of a daft open world game, but also having, you know, rather than these really sort of larger than life characters that Saints Row had before, sort of just a group of friends, I guess. It seems very unlikely that these group of friends will be challenging the local gangs of the city, but, you know, as a space to exist in, it looks really sort of easygoing and a lot of fun to me. Yeah, like, it’s funny because I think when they first announced this, it got quite a cool response. People were quite down on the characters and stuff and maybe the tone will switch from the previous ones. But I was thinking that if, like, all this game is, is like a really good version of this type of game, this game type that remains very popular, but is entirely dominated by one series, it looks as nice as this and it has these quite good vibes, this beautiful looking city. And, you know, that’s enough for me. But then you kind of citing these additional sort of, like, game systems, mechanics, that’s exciting. What’s the kind of, like, deal with the police chasing then? How does that work? How have they kind of made that sound exciting? Yeah, they haven’t really specifically revealed it. It’s just kind of showed up as part of some of the footage that’s come out, I think only recently. But, you know, they have a sort of mini map and whenever there’s a police car near, there’s, you know, there’s a kind of radius around them. And there’s that kind of aspect of that grey area of being known or not being known to you pursuers is something that has kind of dropped out of these kind of games in recent years. And I think, you know, if you watch classic car chase films, they’re all about that. They’re not all about the pure screaming down a highway at 100 miles an hour. There are moments of cat and mouse and that’s what I really like. Okay, great. Yeah, I can’t wait to play that one. That’s how very soon. Is that September, that’s how I think? I think in August. Yeah, real close. That’s exciting. Okay, great stuff. Yeah, I can’t wait to play that. It’s been a long time coming in New Saints Row. So my number 8, I have cheated and picked an old ass game, but I did want to talk about this a little bit, is Persona 3 Portable, which is coming to PC and PS5 and Xbox. It’s going to be on Game Pass. So this was like one of those announcements that did make me light up a little bit, even though I have all three of these games in my flat right now. So I don’t know why exactly, but just kind of like the idea that they’re more widely available for people, probably would play Persona 3 portable on my TV if it looks as nice as it did in the trailers they showed, rather than playing the old PSP version on my PS Vita. But the idea that these kind of like Japanese RPGs crossed with like life sims that have like experienced like a real breakthrough moment in the last five to ten years as Western fans have like amalgamated and it’s become one of the biggest RPG series full stop. And it’s just such a breath of fresh air compared to other games in the genre. It’s great that these are just now going to be just basically everywhere, everyone will be able to play them all the time. They have become mainstream games essentially, which is quite strange. Jeremy, where are you at with kind of Persona? Is that a series you’re kind of interested in? Did this announcement please you as well? Yeah, it did actually. It felt like a real, in that Xbox show, just having the, you know, pop music blaring and the colour, I was grinning like this. Because I’ve only played Persona 4, that’s the extent of my experience in Catherine, which I guess is a sort of Persona offshoot. And Persona 3 exists to me as an icon in the Vita store, costing upwards of £35, which I hovered nervously over and never quite buy, and I’m now too late to do that. So I’m glad that it’s going to exist in a new form, because I think otherwise I would never have ended up playing it. Persona 5 is coming first to different consoles and PC, but I assume Persona 3 will be next year, but it would be great to have those all in one place. Yeah, really good. No idea what that team is working on next. I know there is a separate fantasy RPG being made by the director of Persona 5 at Atlus, so I’m curious to see that at some point. I share Jeremy’s enthusiasm for seeing something so colourful, bright and fun at the Xbox conference. So what’s your number 7, Jeremy? My number 7 is Metal Hellsinger. I’m aware of this game, but it didn’t make my list, so go ahead. I actually played this today. It’s the only game on my list that I’ve had an opportunity to play so far. But yes, it was shown… I can’t remember which show it was shown in. At some point in the last week, a demo went live on Steam at around the same time. And it’s one of those FPS rhythm shooters, which is a sort of developing genre or sort of spin-off genre. There are other games that have existed, you know, this kind. BPM, I know, is one of them. You know, I don’t think any of them has really kind of like met an incredible response. This feels like the most promising so far. And to me, it feels like it’s evolved from, you know, Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal. Not that they’re rhythm games, but they have a kind of dance to them. You know, they’re very sort of heavily rules-based first-person shooters. There are, you know, certain moves that it makes sense to do at certain times. And this feels like a sort of organic progression from that kind of thing to have an FPS, which is about shooting on the beat, reloading on the beat, dashing on the beat, and doing your finishes on the beat. All of that stuff. And, you know, obviously since the first Doom, the FPS has been intrinsically linked to heavy metal. And this game has, I think, a completely new soundtrack with a bunch of quite famous and beloved metal singers. So the level I played today featured the singer from Arch Enemy, which is a band I saw when I was a teenager in Manchester. And, yeah, it’s great stuff. What you do is you kind of hit as many enemies on the beat as you can, and as you do so, the music builds and builds. Sixteen times multiplayer even is when the singing kicks in, and that feels like a really earned, fantastic moment, a great reflection of you doing well. And it’s quite generous as well. It doesn’t really sort of, even if you mess up and, you know, your multiplier drops, it gives you, you know, a nice, decent dose of the vocal before dropping you back to guitar and bass and drums again. And it’s got a really sort of… It feels like a game where an awful lot of work has been done to make it feel natural and to support your kind of rhythm. Like, it’s not just your crosshair and the music that’s pumping out the beat. Like, even the… There’s a sort of hellish environment and even the torches sort of blast out pyrotechnics at regular intervals, and the enemies you’re shooting, the, you know, the torso’s pulse along with the beat. So everything’s working to kind of help you keep in rhythm and it feels really kind of beautifully balanced in that way. Yeah, I think it’s really promising. Is this a game that’s like coming out soon or if there’s a demo, I assume it must be fairly far along? It looks very far along. It looks incredibly polished. So, yeah, I’m not sure exactly when that’s due, but it feels close. That’s fine. Our listeners have Google. That’s good research for you, isn’t it? That’s good. No, that sounds great. I’m guessing that the lead singer of Alien Ant Farm hasn’t made the cut, Jeremy, for shame. Sadly not, but Serge Tankin from System of a Dam, similar sort of era vocalist, he signed up, so that’s something. That’s definitely a less embarrassing pick. Okay, great. Yeah, I can’t wait to play that, actually. Do you say it’s just that demo just on PC now, anyone can go grab it? Yeah, there’s like a good sort of hour of that to play through on Steam. Yeah, I definitely recommend somebody spending a lunch break doing that. Awesome. Okay, great stuff. Well, my number seven is Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader. Yeah, that’s one I thought. Yeah, I thought this would have been on your list, but then I thought maybe Jeremy would have forgotten that there was a Warhammer E3, so I’ll put this on here. Yeah, full disclosure, I have worked on a Warhammer game in the last year, so that’s maybe worth saying, but I’m excited about other Warhammer games because it’s always a great backdrop for video game experiences. This is the first Warhammer CRPG developed by Alcat Games, the developers of the Pathfinder series. Is that what they’re called, Jeremy? That is right, isn’t it? Pathfinder games. I think so, yes. And so in this, you basically play these, as the names suggest, kind of like these Scions of the Emperor, these like permitted kind of like, basically guys who sell stuff, these traders, and you kind of form a party with characters from different factions in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, which I really love. They were shown off with this quite gorgeous looking sort of like cartoon art style for the cutscenes and then like just really nicely realized like Warhammer 40k sort of environments and characters in the combat they showed off. And I think like it’s one of those game types, you know, like I always love a good, you know, Warhammer Cross with a whole bunch of different sort of games. I’m excited about Space Marine 2, of course, and another game on my list that I’ll discuss in a little bit. But like, I think the idea of adapting a kind of a CRPG around this universe makes sense. The different sort of like sides of 40k you can bring out within that CRPG format, how you can use the writing and where you take players just has a lot of narrative potential. I assume you’re excited about this one too, Jeremy. Yeah, I mean, that Warhammer Schools event was full of stuff that you could have sworn must have happened before in Warhammer games, but bizarrely hasn’t. Given how many Warhammer games there have been over the decades, there’s never been a classic CRPG style one. And yeah, I think that kind of format is ideal for exploring the weirdnesses of the 40K universe, which are the most alluring aspects for me at least, but they are the things that tend to get dropped. In the case of a Dawn of War or a Space Marine, they don’t really kind of get the spotlight. The CRPG is built to kind of indulge certain aspects, different kinds of industrial worlds, cults, all this kind of stuff, I think. And Owlcat have a good reputation, a solid one, I’d say. They’re not considered sort of top tier classic RPG developers like an Obsidian, but they’re on their way up, I think. So there’s good prospects for this thing. Yeah, for sure. Those companions who can join you in the game, they range from Space Marines to Sisters of Battle and even Eldari Rangers. So I really love the idea of the potential conflicts there of having those different members in your party, how good that can be. To what you were saying, Jeremy, you are exploring the fringes of Imperial space. You have a ship and a crew, essentially, in this game. So I think it really is a specific and cool 40k fantasy that they’re selling with this one. So yeah, I can’t wait to see this one. I’m really surprised to see it and excited for sure. So what’s your number 6, Jeremy? My number 6 is Minecraft Legends. Wow, okay. I didn’t see this coming, but it kind of makes sense now, I think. I didn’t think you would, yeah. So this is kind of Mojang’s latest experiment in making other games in the Minecraft world that aren’t Minecraft. They did a Diablo-style game, Dungeons, not so long ago, which isn’t quite so much my thing, but was decent. And this is much stranger. It’s a sort of RTS directed from the ground, as far as I can tell. He’s sort of defending the Minecraft world from a pigmen invasion. And I have a real, real weakness for this kind of hybrid, real-time strategy game that sort of peaked in the 90s and 90s because they never really sold. You know, stuff like Sacrifice and Brutal Legend, you know, the sort of more tower defense end of things as well, Orcs Must Die, I’m a real sucker for, and Iron Brigade that double-fined it as well. That kind of stuff that really embraces the messiness of the RTS by having you in a third-person perspective not able to keep track of everything really speaks to me. You know, when I was younger, like you Samuel, I played quite a lot of classic RTS stuff on the PC, you know, Command and Conquerors and Age of Empires, but I have never been good at them. Like, my brain just can’t split in enough different ways to keep track of stuff, so a game that really sort of embraces that failure to keep on top of things really suits me. Unless we forget, Baldur’s Gate was a hybrid RTS game as well. This is something that kind of gets forgotten because it became the defining shape of RPGs to come, but you know, mixing a turn-based D&D system with a weird sort of isometric real-time combat thing was a daft idea at the time, and it was one of these sort of experiments that it just happened to do really well. But yeah, I don’t know about Minecraft Legends commercial prospects given that kind of lineage that it seems to belong to, but I’m really fond of this kind of silly thing. I mean, this, by virtue of being a Minecraft game, will probably be the most played RTS like the next 10 years, which is quite an interesting prospect. But yeah, I mean, it is, we have achieved like peak Jeremy Peel, I would say you have mentioned Orcs Must Die, and you have invoked Baldur’s Gate to describe a Minecraft game. I think we’re like, yeah, we’re definitely in your home territory here. Self-parody. Oh, I also forgot to mention that the Mojang are working with Blackbird Interactive on this. They were, I think the founders came from Relic, so they’ve got real sort of RTS cred there. They also made Hard Space Ship Breaker, which is my favorite of their games. Not on RTS, but really great sort of ship deconstruction, spaceship deconstruction game. But yeah, the idea of mixing those two studios and having real sort of RTS knowledge behind it as well is really cool. Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, I didn’t realize that’s what their Heritage Watch was actually. So that’s great. Wow, cool. Very exciting. And yeah, like all of Xbox’s games will just be on game paths. So you can play it without going anywhere or doing anything. My number six is my only MIA game on this list, which is Bayonetta 3. Now, I think this will re-emerge at some point soon. Nintendo tends to just… There’s a lot of stories going around that Nintendo has finished this game a year ago or two years ago, and it’s just been sat on it ever since, which is… No other games company is doing that in the world, as far as I can tell. But I do quite like it as a baller move, the idea that, oh, yeah, we finished a JRPG 18 months ago. We’ve just been waiting for a bit of a quiet moment to push it out. I quite like that. What I believe Bayonetta 3 has almost done, because while there have been platinum games in the last few years, nothing kind of like massive, massive scale. I’d like to think that a lot of the talent is being soaked up by this. The idea of playing a new Bayonetta this year is still very exciting to me. Is this a series that kind of passed you by, Jeremy? Or did you kind of give these a try? No, this one definitely passed me by. I really like the idea of kind of sitting on a game for a year. It makes me think of your PC gaming 90s episode and you talking about the kind of quantum leaps that would happen within a year or two years in that sphere. Games would get rebuilt in development to try and catch up with Quake or Half-Life or whatever it would be. I think today you really can just probably sit on a game for a year, put it out and have it not necessarily feel behind in terms of graphical fidelity and control schemes and all that kind of thing. There isn’t that kind of speed of change anymore. So maybe that’s why not wait for the right window. Weirdly, I think that happened with Rayman Legends where they pretty much completely finished that game and then it was pushed way back, which I think that was a Wii U, early Wii U game, wasn’t it? So that’s a weird sort of parallel there. Yeah, it seems so implausible to me as someone who is like never ever ahead on magazine planning. There was never an issue that when the next one started, I already had a flat plan done for it. It was like the last one’s gone, time to start the flat plan. That was me every single time. So the idea of like we’ve been sat on a fire emblem for a year is just preposterous to me. But yeah, good stuff. So what’s your number five, Jeremy? My number five is Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Not on my list, but I was hoping you would bring it up. Have you kind of dissected what this game is? Because I’m still struggling to get my head around it. Yeah, I’m still fuzzy on the details. It’s definitely a game where I’m on board because of who’s making it, rather than knowing exactly what it’s going to be. And I’m sure you can speak to the fiction aspect of it, that sort of 90s comic influence is better than I can. But I did interview Jake Sullivan, so from Foraxis, the XCOM series, that’s who’s leading this game. For Edge, fairly recently, kind of an overview of his career. And the things he was saying about this game are really interesting, that it was in some ways a reaction against XCOM. We’re kind of used to games developers building on the things that have come before, but I think in some ways it’s more exciting when somebody goes, as in this case, I’m sick of percentage chance, there’s not going to be any of that in my new thing. So yeah, there’s not really that kind of trademark XCOM, you know, nervy shot taking, that’s not going to be a thing in Midnight Suns. And it feels it seems even more intimate in scale than XCOM as well, almost sort of arena based, turn based tactics as far as I can tell. And for me, the sort of smaller scale, the closer that genre gets, the more excited I am by it. I’d rather be having, you know, an almost kind of John Wick scale fight than to play a country in Civilization or whatever, you know. It’s kind of funny actually thinking about the Firaxis is going to have, you know, the largest scale strategy game and one of the smallest ones at the same time. Yeah, it might just be a perfect fit for the format though, where like, I guess they’re probably expecting a lot of Marvel fans to just pick this up based on the license. They want them to understand what it is. So maybe the scale there might help. Yeah. I assume it’s still using cards, right, to kind of like work. Have they kind of explained how that works? Yeah, I should have done a little more of the fundamental explaining there. But yeah, you play as various Marvel heroes and they have access to, you know, unique cards and you’re sort of playing from a deck while you’re battling, I believe. I’m not entirely clear on how exactly that interacts with the battles. And again, I’m not entirely clear on how the management layer above those battles works. So there is still a lot of mystery around this. It’s just the sort of pedigree involved and the, you know, the general thrust, the direction it’s going seems really, really promising. Yeah, yeah, I for sure want to play this. I like you, I share your enthusiasm for Raxus doing something new and different. So, yeah, absolutely want to give this a try. Yeah, like, as I understand it, Midnight Sun is a fairly obscure kind of like set of sort of characters. Here there’s a lot of like weird dark magic-y stuff going on with it and quite a disparate set of Marvel heroes, like one character from The Runaways in there and then you got your Iron Man and your Wolverine and they just revealed Spider-Man, who seemed to be voiced by the same Spider-Man actor from Marvel’s Spider-Man, which if so, that was a good call to try and link those together a little bit. Yeah, I’m quite excited for the potential of this because you think about just in terms of characters, the idea of a wide roster is exciting in these Marvel games. The Avengers game got there a little bit, but very hard to do in a game of that scale where you basically have to build a different third person action game each time you add a character, which is a big ask. Here you can still see them doing a War of the Chosen sized expansion that adds a new Marvel villain and a bunch of Marvel locations and then three or four heroes or something. The potential for it to become that very complete package in the way that XCOM 2 did is quite high. Yeah, that’s a pertinent call about that War of the Chosen, which is an XCOM 2 expansion, right? I feel like that really is the moment when Firaxis were reborn as storytellers. This is a studio rooted in Civ and it’s not really systemic games. They’re not really traditionally a narrative studio, but as XCOM has gone along, it’s gone further in that direction and War of the Chosen had a set of villain characters who had distinct personalities and would taunt you during battles and stuff. That makes sense as groundwork to do a Marvel game, whereas a couple of games ago, it would be very hard to envision what Firaxis would do with something like that. Exciting to see them take that next step. My number five is Terra Nil. This was the first game that was shown in the Wholesome Games Showcase. It’s a city builder from the developer Free Lives published by Devolver Digital. Bimpitch is a reverse city builder, actually. You are basically taking this radiated, worn out, damaged environment. Rather than building it up, you’re essentially restoring nature to it and cleaning it up. It was all wrapped up in this very nice visual style. There is a demo for this as part of Steam Next Fest. I’ve just downloaded that now in the background. Not played it yet. The idea of the chill city builder is more and more appealing to me these days. I say that having just played one in VR called Little Cities, which I really liked. Jeremy, I’ve been doing the old Paradox sale thing where I’ve been hoovering up Cities Skylines expansions too. That game has got good vibes. This is another step along the road there. Did this cross paths with you during the last week, Jeremy? No, I haven’t heard of this one at all, so that’s really cool. I do think that the city builder has always had a mood piece aspect to it. They were always relaxing to sit in. In a way, it was a shame that they were tied to incredibly complex plumbing disasters or what have you. In some ways, a tonal mismatch. I think it’s great that the genre has worked that one out. It does feel like there’s a new tie to environmentalism in the genre as well. City skylines, at least one of those expansions, is an entirely green focused thing. I think that comes more to the fore in our societal consciousness than developers of urban building games have gone hang on. Rather than just building a load of pollution pumping stations, why don’t we try and make this a slightly utopian thing and give players the pleasure of rebuilding cities in a way that’s more sustainable, which is cool. I like that too, even if I will confess that I did, for a long time, leave the green cities expansion because it never quite sounded as sexy as like airports or like art deco buildings or whatever, but that’s just because I’m a terrible person. So yeah, that was my number five. What’s your number four, Jeremy? Number four, A Plague Tale Requiem. Ah, it’s not on my list, but that’s only because I’ve not finished the first one. I did start playing it recently and yeah, this is kind of like quietly one of the most anticipated games of the year, I think. Yeah, I think considering that for a long time, you know, it’s kind of been a given that Sony makes a certain type of first party game that you can only get on PlayStation. I think that Asobo, who’s the studio that makes A Plague Tale, are quietly kind of threatening them, that status. And, you know, it takes a long time to build up to the level of the Naughty Dog or something like that. But like that last Plague Tale game was a really big swing and it really paid off, I think. Not just for Asobo, which is a French developer, also made Microsoft Flight Simulator, oddly. But before that, they were like a support studio and they made sort of Disney platformers and that kind of thing. Yeah, they, you know, a big step up for them and also for their publisher, Focus Interactive, who, you know, in the past have, you know, I love Blood Bowl and some of the other stuff they put out, but they’ve often been a little sort of buggy, a little ropey. It seemed like they really put the budget and heft behind a Plague Tale and the result was this incredibly polished and beautiful action adventure thing which plays somewhere between an Uncharted and A Last of Us, let’s say. A lot of kind of set piece stealth and almost a kind of survival horror vibe of kind of ammo conservation and people’s faces being eaten by rats. Yeah, it’s set in a kind of 14th century France and is not especially historically accurate. It sort of mixes plague and English invasion and inquisition with sort of supernatural betrayal of disease. You get these kind of incredible swarms of rats that move sort of like a liquid. And as you move through that game, you’re kind of pushing them back, usually with fire and torches and kind of working your way through these increasingly eerie and very unnatural environments. And this sequel is, yeah, this sequel is further south as far as I can tell. It looks sort of Mediterranean, like there’s a sort of blue seas and sandy rock, and it brings to mind Karnaka from Dishonored 2, more than anything else for me. There’s that sort of vibe that you’re in a wonderful holiday destination, but also there are things rotting in the sun, that there’s something terribly wrong, which is an irresistible setting to me. And there’s also a really fantastic dynamic at the centre. You play, I think she’s called Amicia, and who’s a teenage girl, insofar as they have the concept of a teenager in the 1400s. And you’re looking after your little brother, Hugo. And at the beginning of Plague Tale, Hugo is kind of, he’s grown up ill essentially. All of his parents’ attention have been devoted to looking after this little boy, and his sister’s been neglected as a result of that. And events conspire that the two of them are on their own, and the big sister’s in charge of looking after Hugo, but there are also these kind of bubbling resentments. She’s been jealous of him because her mother’s been been completely occupied with him his whole life. So there’s a really sort of complex and grounded character story at the centre of it, which is handy because the last game got pretty wild with the stacks of rats. It keeps it kind of centred. Yeah, I should get this first one played, shouldn’t I, Jeremy? It’s like a Hall of Fame game pass game basically. Yeah, I reviewed it at the time, so I had a reason to push on through, but it’s definitely worth finishing it. It does get daft towards the end, but as I say, I feel like it kind of, in the most important respects, it kind of rewards your investment. And there are also… It’s a game that backloads some of its mechanics without spoiling anything. You know, the rats aren’t something that you just push away by the end of that game, and I expect some of that stuff to return in the sequel too, so that should be cool. Okay, good. Rat Mechs, that’s my guess, but we’ll see how it goes. Okay. So, yeah, okay. My number four is System Shock, so we were going to discuss this before, so I appeared at the PC Gaming show. Lovely Warren Spector turned up to introduce it. I don’t think he’s working on the game, but it was a nice kind of like handoff, I suppose, for night dives, long awaited sort of like redo of the original System Shock. Now, Jeremy, I’m much more familiar with System Shock 2 than the first one. I suppose, what is it about this that you’re excited about? What is it about the original game you kind of see this remake drawing out? I played some System Shock 1, but I think the appeal of this remake is that it’s one of those, you know, sometimes you get kind of Twitter threads where people say, oh, what’s the game that you would remake because it has great potential, or, you know, you think it’s not really sort of playable today? And this is definitely one of those. It’s not a game that is looking to just get prettier. It’s a game that came out in the early 90s. You know, it was, and it… Yeah, I think it’s like a Doom. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, Doom defined what control schemes and expectations were for first person games from then on. System Shock was developed before that, so everything about the way it controls is completely alien to us at this point. It’s a really strange game to get to grips with. And, yeah, it’s a real form of kind of archaeology to play that now. So much so that having this remake almost feels like getting a free new immersive sim, you know? It feels like, well, this is one that I probably wouldn’t have have gone back to and tried again. But here it is and it’s getting, you know, I think all the dialogue’s been re-recorded with, you know, original cast members like Terry Brotus, who plays Shodan. And he was also a great writer, by the way. I think she wrote on Dishonored. Yeah, so it feels just like an enormous bonus for fans of a genre which doesn’t have that many games to its name. You know, it feels like a fantastic extra. And visually, what they’ve done with it is really fantastic and quite hard to describe. There’s a sort of almost pixel art touch to it. The closer you get to objects in its world, the more sort of blocky they look. It somehow looks better than when you’re further away. Do you know what I mean? There’s a very unusual sort of aesthetic approach that they’ve taken. And it’s got these really vivid sort of turquoises and tangerines and whatnot. And yeah, it looks fantastic. And I think it will just be a joy for anybody who loves, you know, a Ken Levine game. Not that this is a Ken Levine game, but System Shock 2 was. All that kind of storytelling that became popularized by Bioshock that really started with System Shock of piecing together what happened in a place in a strange order. Finding the bodies, listening to the last will and testaments of all these space station folk. It’s going to be great. Yeah, I think the way you put it there, it’s a free immersive sim. That is kind of how I see it too. Like you, this is… System Shock 2 I think is fine to go back to. That will feel familiar to people who are playing FPS games in the late 90s. That’s perfectly fine. But the original, yeah, like you say, just maybe slightly too far back to be high on my list to revisit. So the idea this comes along and just kind of like very playable, a real kind of like nice facelift, that’s very exciting. It has been through quite a long development. I think at one point they felt like they overscoped it and then trimmed it back again to be a bit more faithful to the original. But whatever the end result is, I just thought the gameplay looked really, really good. So yeah, yeah, exciting stuff, Jeremy. What’s your number three? My number three is Project Golden Necker. This is CD Projekt Red’s next Witcher thing, which is a Gwent solo game. And it’s supposed to come out later this year, and we don’t know what it is. But yeah, I’ve got really, really heavily into The Witcher, you know, partly in preparation for our episode, partly because that was my latest obsession and that’s kind of run over the last six months or so. And I had a really great time with Thronebreaker, which is the, you know, the existing standalone campaign Gwent RPG. But this is supposed to be something different. They’ve already said that it won’t resemble Thronebreaker, which just kind of spurs the imagination. You know, it’s not going to be a Witcher 4, it’s not going to be this sort of grand 3D adventure because that wouldn’t fit something built around a card game. So whether it’s going to be, you know, I’d like to see them try their hand at some kind of interactive fiction, some kind of, yeah, something sort of dialogue based maybe, but not an RPG. I quite like the idea that, although it obviously lends itself to the genre, Witcher games don’t have to be RPGs, you know, I’d like to see more sort of genre experimentation. And I feel like this is going to be that, simply by dint of not being, specifically not being what they’ve done before. Yeah, like, I didn’t know this was out this year. I knew there was another web game in the works, but I couldn’t really fathom exactly what it was. Like you say, if Thronebreaker exists, what is this in a world with Thronebreaker? And so, yeah, like the idea that they’ll have another swing, it is quite interesting. And I think it’s only set for PC and mobile as well as well, Jeremy, which suggests that maybe it’s not going as wide as some of the other ones. So, yeah, I don’t know. Like, yeah, curious one. Yeah, I also really like what Gwent is now. You know, if the last time I touched, Gwent was in The Witcher 3. It is kind of a changed game. It’s not the three lanes anymore. It’s two lanes on each side, and there’s an awful lot of interaction between those lanes, cars moving back and forth according to various rules, a little more half stony, as you might expect. But it’s a very sort of reactive and tactical game now, but also one that I would never try and play in multiplayer because the skill ceiling of CCGs just immediately puts me off every time. So being able to play that alone and thrash an AI opponent is definitely my speed. Well, my number three, Jeremy, I think it’s going to be higher on your list, and that’s Pentament. Is it higher on your list? It’s not. It’s not. Wow, it didn’t even make your list. Yeah, I don’t know why not in retrospect. Yeah, there’s got a lot going for it, but we’ll talk about that. Oh, we’ll talk about that now. Yeah, so this is a game developed by Obsidian, led by the very well regarded Josh Sawyer. It is like a branching story game set over 25 years, I believe, in the 16th century Germany. And you play as this artist, and essentially are tasked with solving, well, kind of, it seems like, at least like participating in trying to understand why a series, basically a bunch of people have been killed sequentially over the course of this period of time. And then you kind of shake the investigation as you go. I couldn’t exactly get the shape of it from reading the comms they put out with this. I could only, like, kind of get to grips with the basic idea of the setting and a murder mystery in this setting, and the idea that, like, it’s basically an entirely story-driven Obsidian game. It’s quite a quote-unquote small game. It’s $20. It’ll be on Game Pass. Exactly the sort of game that can only exist when Obsidian’s been bought by Microsoft. But, like, it seems like a neat little passion project, Jeremy. Yeah, definitely. It’s funny. It probably seems like a weird leap for, you know, a lot of Obsidian RPG players. But if you followed Josh Sawyer on social media for any length of time, it makes complete sense. You know, this is a guy who I distinctly remember when Game of Thrones was happening. He would sort of deconstruct the poor strategic representation of the battles and whatnot after the fact, you know. He’s a real dedicated amateur historian. And, you know, this kind of game makes perfect sense for him. And yeah, I think watching that Xbox show reconfigured my understanding of who Obsidian are in some ways. You know, for a long time they were, you know, a contractor. They had to pitch all of their games to various publishers. And the games that got made were RPGs, which makes sense because those were the ones that publishers could see they had a great track record with. And right now, you know, the games that we’re seeing from Obsidian are Weird Medieval Investigation Game and also Grounded, which is just, you know, just now finishing up sort of a miniaturized garden survival game. And yeah, I think it made me realize that Obsidian maybe weren’t a studio that wanted to make only RPGs. They were a studio that were only allowed to make RPGs. Of course they had other ideas. And now they’re under Microsoft’s wing. They can finally do that stuff. Yeah, just kind of not worried about trying to hit a wide player base. Or like you say, kind of pander to anything that Obsidian has been before. Just like so singular in its presentation compared to other games. So yeah, and as I said to you on Twitter, Jeremy, this is 100% be, oh, actually maybe you just saw my tweet, but games journalists will bang on about this game. That’s totally what this game is. Yeah, so that’s, and it’s got this mad wood carving aesthetic to it as well, isn’t it? She’s got a strange thing. I’m just now deciding that this should be an official licensed CAD file game. I don’t know if it’s too late for Obsidian to go back. Yeah, I think you’re right about that. So what’s your number two? My number two is Redfall. Yeah, you definitely seem very one round by the presentation of this at the Xbox conference. Why was that? Yeah, I guess the so this is the new Arkane one from Arkane Austin. So Prey and the original Dishonored. And the kind of focus for presenting it this time around was to make clear to people that this would make sense as a solo game as well as a co-op one, which is obviously what it’s, you know, first and foremost built to be. You know, this is something that’s never really happened before, a co-op shooter from an immersive sim approach. You know, like, I always liked the idea of co-op shooters, but I’m not really into the sort of, you know, Diablo influenced looter shooters so much. That doesn’t really speak to me in the same way. This is necessarily going to be something very different, even though it might not appear as such on the surface. And it’s a really kind of strange experiment to have that kind of dishonored paced game where you’re kind of observing the environment and planning and, you know, reading notes or what have you and sort of taking your time to get to grips with the world and having that in four person co-op. Just the struggling to get my head around this is exciting in itself. You know, it’s something that is made by my favorite people in games and I don’t understand what it is. And that’s delicious. Yeah, so I did like the presentation for this. I particularly like, you don’t see this enough in games, like staking vampires as a mechanic. Like that was the best bit of the game Slayer Shock, which I see you play, Jeremy, in some form. But like the idea of just that kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, stake him in the heart with a piece of wood, watch them kind of burn up thing. That’s like definitely appealing. And it looks like something they’ve done quite well here. You’re quite taken with some of the characterization in this as well. Yeah, I really liked the description of one of the protagonists, Layla, which is I think the telekinetic threat in student debt. The best possible Twitter buyer, essentially. Yeah, like I think one of the big draws of actually venturing into multiplayer in this is having the back and forth between these four weirdos. I think that will be a lot of fun. I’m sort of curious to see what the structure will be of it exactly. But, you know, like, yeah, of course, I’m never not excited about playing a new arcane game. Yeah, there’s the weirdness of it being open world, which no arcane game has explicitly been before. And, you know, how much of the incredibly dense and curated design can they spread across an island? I don’t know. That’s going to be a weird one to see. But I’m already kind of imagining, you know, how I’m going to play it. I’m going to, you know, mainline the main missions with friends, specifically Matt Perslow of IGN, who’s the person I play this kind of game with, and then, you know, mopping up the side missions and whatnot in solo and having a different sort of more reflected vibe while doing that. That really sounds like a good time to me. Yeah, it’s the sort of game that Matthew will play with me once again, and then I’ll just play it with Jay Bayless, my other buddy. So yeah, it’s all good. OK, great. Yeah, yeah, I can’t wait to see more of that. I was comforted by the fact that it looked like an arcane game in terms of the fact that they haven’t really done this setting in a game before, but the buildings and the overall art style just kind of looked arcane-y in a way that was familiar to me, in a way that, like, when I look at Deathloop and Dishonored side by side, I just kind of feel like I know they were made by the same people, you know? There’s just some kind of, I don’t know, some kind of artistic something that was through-lined DNA. For sure. I think fundamentally arcane build buildings as they would be made in real life, you know? They don’t build them for sensible, you know, first-person level design necessarily. It’s kind of like, okay, we’ve made a bank, and now let’s see what we can do with it. It makes me think of the first level of Deus Ex, you know, Liberty Island, Harvey Smith, who is the, you know, one of the lead devs on Redfall, just based that heavily on the actual layout of the island. And as a consequence, there’s just a lot of running around and trying to make your way up this huge tourist attraction. It’s not necessarily, you know, the kind of most sensible first thought for making a snappy FPS, but it does lead to kind of more thoughtful interactions with the world, I guess. Yeah, the scale of that first level is preposterous in retrospect. That’s why, like, it’s basically a room in Invisible War, by comparison. Yeah, okay. Great stuff. Yeah, so speaking of Left 4 Dead type games, actually, my number two is Warhammer 40,000 Darktide, Jeremy. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever played much of Vermintide or Vermintide 2. I thought they were both great, but Vermintide 1 I slightly prefer because it was, like, less heavy on the kind of, like, loot and sort of, like, sort of forging new weapons side of things, which I’m not as into, but I really love the idea of, like, basically, like, banter-heavy, character-driven, Left 4 Dead sort of, like, rifts with a lot of, like, melee combat at their core. But here, this has been a lot awaited. This is a developer, Fat Shark. They have been working this for a while, going from Warhammer fantasy to Warhammer 40k, creating these kind of, like, four very different types of characters and having them fight a kind of, like, variety of 40k monstrosities, adding, like, proper sort of range combat for the first time. Just generally looking a lot, kind of, sharper than them. But the second Vermintide looked a lot nicer than the first, but this looks like, you know, as good as any other AAA game, really. And out of all the things that people were actually playing at the Summer Games Fest stuff, this seemed to be the thing that captured people’s imaginations the most. And, you know, again, it’s a game that’s coming out this year that I can play this year on, you know, and that is appealing to me. And I thought they took such a good swing at making Warhammer Fantasy seem really accessible and fun. And they’re going to do the same thing here with 40k characters, and it just seems like such a good fit. Are you excited about this one, Jeremy? Yeah, I played at, you know, some Vermintide and Vermintide 2, and I think, you know, they’re certainly among the most successful, Left 4 Dead are likes, which are obviously really difficult to make because there have been so many attempts at them, and so few of them have been worth spending your time with. I was kind of similarly slightly put off with Vermintide 2’s kind of focus on longer term progression stuff. I remember playing it with a friend, and we were kind of passing a tone back and forth through the whole level for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom. But, yeah, just in terms of really sort of putting you down on the ground of that world, it was astonishing. I remember a specific moment in Vermintide 2 in one level where a marching band of Skaven would crash through some gates and just being genuinely alarmed by that, the sudden change of pace, the fact that they weren’t aware of the party immediately, and we were maybe trying to sneak around them or have this incredibly tough fight, and Darktide seems to really be leaning into that kind of thing, the idea that there’d be these weird, different kind of scenarios you’d come up against in the course of a level, and that different characters on your team would be best suited to deal with that kind of threat. So, yeah, I’m definitely excited for that. Yeah, they’re like one character is a Psyker, and then there’s like a broad array that are drawn from different elements of 40k, and they’ve kind of, they’ve worked quite meticulously to make sure that a game like this sort of fits in that universe. So, yeah, yeah, I really can’t wait. It’s great to see them kind of continuing down this path. Yeah, Vermintide, I have so many good times actually playing Vermintide, and like the, one of the things I loved is the first game had like a pub as your sort of central hub, and then they actually added a level just before Vermintide 2 came out, where that pub got destroyed, and they set up the premise of Vermintide 2, which I really loved as an idea. That was cool. So yeah, good for them. This has been a long time coming, but glad to finally play it. Number one is Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s tricky, isn’t it, with an early access RPG. I think you don’t necessarily want to see too much of it. He says having interviewed the developers about every single early access update they’ve done so far, but I’m kind of trying to keep my distance a little bit and not play too much of it, because I think the finished thing will just be the omni RPG. It will be everything. I’m playing Return to Divinity Original Sin 2 recently, which is just such a fantastic game for just having an insane amount of interaction between stuff in the world. It’s just anything you can think of to try in a fight. It will probably be supported in some roundabout fashion. You know, kind of having two party members drop into a tough fight by accident on one part of the map and circuitously taking the other ones back around and entering a cave from a different point in the map and then ambushing that same enemy from a different angle. You know, it doesn’t make sense temporarily, but fantastic stuff. And, you know, Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to build on all that kind of ludicrous turn-based battling. And also it just sort of does all the things that you’d assume that were kind of necessary sacrifices for the games that Larian makes. Like it has, you know, close-up perspective cutscenes and sort of great performances. The studio’s really bulked up in number to make this thing happen. So yeah, I’m kind of struggling to get my head around what the full thing will look like. We still haven’t seen the city of Baldur’s Gate. And that’s kind of a mind-blowing concept in a Larian game where you go to a village and every building is accessible and full of meaningful objects. And you can go down to the basement and find somebody’s secrets. What does that look like on the scale of a city? I have no idea. But that’s a really intriguing concept. And of course, bring us full circle back to the original Baldur’s Gate, which I just really love for their sort of very dark, but also very oddly real atmosphere. You know, games about iron shortages mixed in with ascendant evil gods. I’ve also got really into the idea of The Forgotten Realms again recently, which is quite a sort of vanilla setting. But the magic of it is that it’s a shared canvas. It’s this thing that literally thousands of different people have been scribbling away in for decades. You know, novel authors, game developers, dungeon masters. And it’s all valid. Like every adventure you’ve had in that world, that’s attached perhaps to a specific town or a wood or what have you in that world, when you’re in another Forgotten Realms game and you hear those places referenced, you go, oh yeah, I was there. I did that thing. This thing happened. Or I listen to… I’ve got into the C-Team podcast, which is a… what do you call it? Dungeons and Dragons live session thing. I’m invested in that world as well. It all coexists. All the different weird tones and strange corners of that world have built up over decades. Baldur’s Gate 3 is another way into that with my favorite or one of my favorite developers. Great. I love Omni RPGs. Are they rolling out in quite big chunks, Jeremy? They do like acts at a time. Is that how they’re doing it? Or is it much more piecemeal? Lately, it seemed like specific classes and stuff like that. They’ve been a little more piecemeal. I assume that there’s going to be an enormous chunk to come towards the end. I can’t remember what their given window is for now at this stage for release. They have pushed it back a couple of times, but I don’t mind at all. It’s a game that they’ve re-scoped during development to make it bigger. Rather than cut it back, they’ve just grown and grown using all that divinity money and haven’t compromised on it as far as I can tell. So my number one on the other end of the RPG scale, I picked Final Fantasy 16 here. Now, I know this is probably the anti-Jeremy Peel game in a lot of ways. I retain a never-ending enthusiasm for Final Fantasy, a sort of evergreen optimism, I suppose. And this one, I quite like that Square Enix has got to the point now where the numbered entries, which used to come out every year or every two years, now come out like six or seven years apart. This one will be almost seven years after the last one. And obviously, there’s plenty of Final Fantasy in between. But this one, I like what they’ve done with this one, which is they did announce that the PS5 was being released because it’s a PS5 exclusive. And they showed off what it actually looked like from the start. And this time, they’ve been quite about it for so, so long. And they’ve come out with quite a big sequence of gameplay and story. You do play as a main character called Clive in this. I’ve got to still mentally figure out how I feel about that. But I’m intrigued. But the thing that got people excited, including me, was that they tweeted out who the developers were, who the lead developers were. And they were like the main combat designer worked on Dragon’s Dog, Mourning Devil May Cry 5, and you can really see that DNA in the game. Now, I’m guessing, Jeremy, this is not your sort of thing, but kind of curious to hear what you make of it anyway. Do you have much of a Final Fantasy relationship? No, no, not really. And I really like how Final Fantasy heads like yourself really sort of keep track of who the directors are of these games and their movements about within Square Enix and the significance of that and kind of getting a sense of what that’s going to mean for upcoming games in a way that’s completely… I would not be able to get a sense of what the next Final Fantasy is going to be like based on specific Japanese guys who are involved in it. Yeah, it’s partly because this is Naoki Yoshida’s creative business units. That was a joke that he made on Twitter. That’s a very evocative name for the studio. So he’s the guy who saved Final Fantasy XIV, basically. There’s an amazing no-clip documentary about that. I really recommend people watch it. Even if you had no interest in the game, the minutia of how he took people’s time and accounted for it in a spreadsheet to try and figure out how to save this MMO is such a great story. And after you watch that, you’ll be convinced that he can do anything. And then as you see Final Fantasy 14 go from strength to strength and become a lot of people’s favorite game in the series, the idea of him being the producer behind a full single-player entry for the first time is really exciting. So I think that, combined with the real-time action chops behind this, that’s kind of why I’m pumped about it, Jeremy. It does visually look basically like all the other Final Fantasy games, as the same kind of mix of stuff, but that’s kind of where I’m at with it, you know. Yeah, from the outside, it seems as if Final Fantasy 14 succeeding and having this sort of long-tail story has eased the pressure on the mainline entries a little bit. There’s kind of… People aren’t so desperate and maybe not quite so damning of these games when they come out. Yeah, I think that combined with the fact that they are remaking 7 as well means that you have these basically three streams of Final Fantasy. So I think that’s besides all the other stuff they make. But in terms of the stuff, the core stuff that people are interested in, that’s very true. So yeah, that is the game. It’s out next summer. Very curious to see more of it. But I thought it made a good showing. Feels like a real game that I’ll be able to play. And sometimes these Final Fantasy showings don’t give you that. They give you a CG and then like take five years to come out. So yeah, the guy who gets shit done with Excel spreadsheets has seemingly done it again. So I’m excited to see that. We reached the end of the episode. Jeremy, thank you so much for joining me and giving up two hours of your free time. You definitely earned your 40 quid. I don’t want people to think that I’ve been too mercenary about this. This is my favorite podcast. It’s an honor to be here. And no one can really stand in Matthew’s shoes. But yes, I will accept my 40 quid. Yep, it’ll be pay-talling its way to you very shortly. So where can people find you and your work? Yeah, so if you come to TechRadar Gaming, TRG, if you Google that, you’ll find work that either has my name in it or as I’ve touched in some way or commissioned or what have you. And if you go on Twitter, I’m jeremy__peel on there. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter, Back PagePod on Twitter if you want to follow the podcast. patreon.com/backpagepod if you’d like to support us on Patreon and unlock monthly bonus episodes. Matthew will still be on those this month. How we’ve kind of done it is that there’s probably going to be two regular episodes without Matthew, but he’ll still be on the XL and XXL episodes this month. So yes, I promise you he has a good reason for not being here, and he sends his best, as I say.