The RPGs of 2025 (with Cameron Kunzelman)

Kirk, Maddy, and Jason bring on special guest Cameron Kunzelman to talk about this year's suite of roleplaying games, from Avowed to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to The Outer Worlds 2. They also talk about Assassin's Creed's pivot to RPGs, what an RPG even is, and much more. Plus: Steam Machines!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Kirk Hamilton?

  A role playing game is only a role playing game if at some point, preferably early on, you get to decide if someone lives or dies. That's just how it is. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the role playing games to you. This week, we're joined by special guest Cameron Kunzelman to talk about the RPGs of 2025 and what we can learn from the many choices that they offered us. Let's get into it.

• 0:31Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Kirk Hamilton.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:33Jason Schreier?

  And I'm Jason Dreyer. Hello.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Hello. It's so nice to see you both.

• 0:38Jason Schreier?

  Great to see you guys. It snowed today in New York for the first time this season. Pretty wild.

• 0:44Kirk Hamilton?

  How much snow?

• 0:45Jason Schreier?

  Just a tiny bit of flurrying, but still it was like, when I say tiny bit, I mean, it didn't stick, but enough to like fill the air with, with the snowflakes.

• 0:52Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, for early November, I feel like that's, that's pretty early for, for you to get snow.

• 0:56Jason Schreier?

  Definitely.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  It's supposedly coming here too, but I, I don't know if it's here yet. Jason and I are close enough proximity that sometimes the weather report actually contains both of us. And that's why it's so important that we go over what the weather is.

• 1:11Jason Schreier?

  Exactly. So we do it for you. So, so you know whether to put on a jacket.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Right, right. Jason can tell me at a time before the winds push the storm over. And when I'm going to take the trash out later tonight, do I need to put on a more significant coat or not?

• 1:25Kirk Hamilton?

  If you like this scintillating weather content and you want, you want even more of it, then you could support our show by becoming a member of Maximum Fun at maximumfun.org/join. That's where you sign up to become a member and that's how you support Triple Click. That's the only way that we make money on this show and we really appreciate everyone that is a member. So, maximumfun.org/join, become a member, get access to bonus episodes. There's all kinds of bonus episodes. We recently recorded a very interesting one about Indie Game, the movie. And we have a very exciting one coming up for November that I'm not actually going to spoil. I'm just going to tease that it's something that we've been talking about doing for a long time and is actually going to happen in November. So it's very exciting. We'll probably announce it next week.

• 2:07Jason Schreier?

  I'm going to go full sicko.

• 2:10Kirk Hamilton?

  It's gonna be pretty good. One more way that you can support us also is to buy merch. We have got a bunch of new merch this year in the triple click store on the Maximum Fun. It's really on the Maximum Fun store, the triple click section. There's a link for that in the show notes as well. Get some merch. Get a, get some.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Get a hoodie.

• 2:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Get a mug or a shirt.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  It's gonna snow.

• 2:28Kirk Hamilton?

  You know.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  You need a hoodie now.

• 2:30Kirk Hamilton?

  Get a set of pins for the lowercase g gamer in your life. There's some really cool designs in there. So before we get started, there is some news we're gonna talk about that Jason, I think you had been briefed on before it was announced today. So yeah, what is that news?

• 2:44Jason Schreier?

  Valve is announcing a new Steam controller with trackpads and haptics and magnetic thumbsticks. And Valve is announcing a new Steam VR headset that runs SteamOS and a Snapdragon processor. And Valve is announcing a new Steam Machine that is a console that plays PC games on SteamOS. And there's this little, this adorable little box that sits into your, under your TV and you plug it in or your monitor. And you use one of those fancy new Steam controllers to play PC games on it.

• 3:19Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, man.

• 3:20Jason Schreier?

  Get a whole lot of new Valve hardware coming.

• 3:22Kirk Hamilton?

  It's funny because I've been, the YouTube algorithm has been feeding me videos about this for the last week and a half because there have been some.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Like rumors?

• 3:29Kirk Hamilton?

  I guess leaks, but like, like there's an icon that sort of showed the controller. So then, of course, it would show me some hour and a half long podcast where three guys are just talking about.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Analyzing about the icon? Great.

• 3:41Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, to me, the most exciting thing is this Steam Machine because like, I remember, man, I don't know if you guys remember this, in 2012.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I remember.

• 3:49Jason Schreier?

  You weren't in Kotaku, yeah, but Kirk and I were, and I was at the, the Spike Game Awards at the time. And I interviewed Gabe Newell on the red carpet and he told me for like, one of the first times they'd ever said that they were working on a living room console. And I broke that news on Kotaku. And that turned into the Steam Machines, which were these like ill-fated devices that had Valve's branding, but were made by third-party companies.

• 4:10Kirk Hamilton?

  If I can tell a story, I went to Las Vegas during CES for an afternoon. I believe this is one of the only times I did this at Kotaku. I flew in in the morning, went to. To a hotel room above a casino and watched the Steam Machines presentation and then had some very unsatisfying interviews with various valve engineers just about like, what is this? Cause it was just a bunch of PCs and then flew home and filed a story about it.

• 4:34Jason Schreier?

  Well, cause it wasn't made by them. That was the important part. It was like third parties and had valves branding. It was very expensive, very confusing and sold terribly by 2018. It was all discontinued. But it led them to say, hey, we want to make hardware still, but we're going to take it in-house. And that led to the Steam Deck, which we all love, the portable gaming PC. Which has done really well for them. They won't say how much it sold, but they told me multiple millions. And that's the success of the Steam Deck and its popularity led them to then make this investment and be like, hey, we're going to do a proper Steam Machine. We're making it. It's got like, it's very specific, got these predetermined specs. One big caveat here, all three of these devices are going to launch in early 2026 and they do not have prices yet.

• 5:15Jason Schreier?

  So this could go all sorts of awry if the prices are revealed to be really terribly overpriced because of tariffs or whatever other reasons. But the Steam Machine is really cool. It comes in two models, five 12 gigabytes and two terabytes. You can buy it in a bundle with the Steam controller, or you can just buy it on its own. If you want to plug in your own Xbox controller or whatever. And it has this AMD Zen 4 with six cores as a CPU and the GPU is this AMD RDNA 3 with 28 compute units, which is basically the equivalent of like an AMD 7000 GPU, which I believe is like a mid-tier gaming PC level. So if they can sell this thing at like console prices, 500 bucks, 400, 500, 600 bucks,

• 6:00Jason Schreier?

  that could be really appealing for a lot of people to be able to play your Steam games, run pretty well on a TV on this machine. So I'm pretty excited about this. I think it's pretty cool.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really takes me back.

• 6:10Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that's cool. I'm more excited probably about the controller just because I will use that. And that was actually something that they also unveiled at that CES was the first Steam controller, which I know has a lot of really diehard fans.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Weird like touchpads?

• 6:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, there were two touchpads and one thumbstick, which I'm guessing, Jason, I haven't seen a picture, but there are probably two thumbsticks on this new one. And I'm assuming it's sort of. It works like a Steam Deck.

• 6:37Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, two thumb six. It looks, yes.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  I remember playing it, not for Kotaku, just at a PAX East. I just played it like a regular person. It was real weird.

• 6:47Jason Schreier?

  It looks like you take a Steam Deck and you got rid of the screen in the middle and you just smash the two sides together. That's what this looks like.

• 6:53Kirk Hamilton?

  So yeah, since I started playing on the Steam Deck, I basically wanted this whole time. And Valve has added a really nice layer to Steam where you can customize your controls, which is really nice. It's actually, it works with my DualSense Edge, the sort of advanced Sony controller, and lets me even program the underbuttons of that controller.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Cool. Yeah.

• 7:12Kirk Hamilton?

  As a kind of extra layer. It doesn't always play nice with games, like it'll read as an Xbox controller. There are some things about it that aren't perfect, but it's the same as on Steam Deck, how you can just pop into that layer and just customize the shit out of the controls. And man, having done that a lot on Steam Deck, especially with PC games where you can set a radial to one of those trackpads to be like a bunch of key commands. For example, the M key to get to your map, or whatever, the JK to get to your journal. Like, when I'm playing Cyberpunk and I can just do that, or even F5 for quick save. Just having a radial for like seven or eight key commands is so nice. And the idea of having that as just a controller when I play games on PC, like I will absolutely buy one of those things. Hopefully they're not super expensive, but I'm at least really

• 7:57Kirk Hamilton?

  excited about that.

• 7:58Jason Schreier?

  So yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think is really appealing about the Steam Machine, and the reason I'm excited for that above all else, is that it runs SteamOS, which for people who haven't used it on the Steam Deck, is incredible. It's very snappy, it works really well, it's so compatible with your Steam games, but it's also compatible with other stuff if you want to run emulators on it. You can like get that working in the same interface. And the idea of that going to a PC, or like a living room PC that just plays on your TV is really cool. You can do that with your deck too, but like this will be much more powerful, much more suited for living room gaming or bedroom gaming or whatever. And we're about to enter a world where Xbox, the next Xbox, is going to be a living room PC as well. But as we've seen with the ROG Ally Xbox, which is their own

• 8:39Jason Schreier?

  version of this handheld PC thing. Running games on Windows is much more of a pain and has all sorts of problems. Problems. I've been texting with people who just talk about how like getting a basic game just running is just like a pain in the ass for them, let alone getting games through Steam. That is such a chore that having SteamOS on this thing and then also them beating Xbox to market, it's going to be really interesting to see. The Steam Deck is my number one most-used game console husband for, since it came out for three years now. So I'm a big fan of what Valve has been doing with it. Steam, obviously, like, has the biggest library of games anywhere and the most variety of games anywhere. And yeah, I think this is pretty cool. And hopefully, it's not $1,000, because that would kill it.

• 9:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, we'll see. I'm looking forward to reading about the

• 9:27Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, we'll talk about this more down the road, I'm sure.

• 9:29Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it'll be fun. I'm sure we will. And we'll probably check all of that stuff out. All right, so let's get into the topic for this week. This week, we're going to talk about role-playing games and the role- playing games of the year. And to do so, we thought it might be fun to have on a guest. Cameron Kunzelman makes some of my favorite podcasts, including Just King Things about the works of Stephen King and also Mages and Murder Dads, which is, I think, sensibly about the Baldur's Gate series, but it's about a lot of different RPGs, too. He's a part of the Range Touch Network. They make a whole bunch of different shows that I'm sure a lot of our listeners know. And if you don't know, they're worth checking out. And he has a new book out about Assassin's Creed, which is why he reached out and said, hey, maybe, you know, you want to have me on your

• 10:09Kirk Hamilton?

  show to talk about Assassin's Creed and adjacent things. So we invited him on the show. And yeah, we're going to sit down with Cameron and talk about the role-playing games of 2025. So let's get into that.

• 10:26Kirk Hamilton?

  All right, Cameron Kunzelman, welcome to Triple Click. Wow, I'm here. You're here. It's so exciting. Yay. Yeah. It's Cameron. I almost want to just totally sidetrack you and just start talking to you about Bob Dylan, because I just put out an episode of Strong Songs about Bob Dylan. Yeah. I just want to kind of troll you. And that's a rivalry, famous rivalry. Yeah, how did you, how'd you manage to cover one of the worst musicians to ever live? It seems like I think now that you've gotten that hot take out there, we could almost just move on. And we could let listeners Feel just kind of tantalized by the mystery of Cameron's incendiary takes about Bob Dylan. But no, we are here to talk about role playing games. We are here to talk about video games and we're here to talk about 2025 and RPGs.

• 11:08Kirk Hamilton?

  So a couple of years ago, we recorded an episode called, What Even Is An RPG Anyways? I think that was the name of the episode. I'm not sure we answered the question, a little bit of a Godwin's Law situation there where like, I guess then the answer would be no. So it wasn't a Godwin's Law situation. I don't know.

• 11:24Jason Schreier?

  What is an RPG? No.

• 11:28Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, that was the closest, that's maybe closer to an answer than anything we came up with. But we, we talked a lot about, you know, RPGs at the time. It's a very funny conversation, partly because Baldur's Gate 3 had not come out yet. And of course, I have listened to you and Danny on Mages and Murder Dads play all the way through Baldur's Gate 3, a really great series that I learned a lot about that game, even though I had played it. So you seem like a very good person to ask this question to. Cameron, what even is an RPG anyway?

• 11:57Speaker 03

  Well, you know, one of the easy answers is no. Which I've heard is apparently a valid one.

• 12:03Kirk Hamilton?

  I guess we give you an easy out there.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Simply no. You know, I don't know. Sometimes you got to put your, your genre analysis hat on. I wrote, I wrote a book on science fiction a few years ago called, The World Is Born From Zero. People can check that out. $21 in paperback. Wherever books are sold and.

• 12:22Jason Schreier?

  Always be selling.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  That's right. You get it. You know the deal.

• 12:26Kirk Hamilton?

  It's true.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  And the, but what's interesting about that, you know, is somewhere in that book, I had to say, what is a science fiction game? And I very neatly, you know, maneuvered my way around that because there's kind of two different ways of thinking about genres, period. And that, that means genres of games, which are often about the actions you take in those games, or genres of, of different media modes, which is often about aesthetics, right? So like, science fiction's got lasers and spaceships, fantasy's got swords and magic or whatever. And the, the decision you have to make is like. Do you want it to be descriptive of qualities and content? And so basically, it's just a big bucket that you put things that are like one another in? Or you do want it, do you want it to be prescriptive?

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Which is to say that science fiction, or an RPG, or whatever, has a very limited set of possibilities that we have determined what they are beforehand. And so, I don't know, like a role-playing game seems to be a game where you take on some sort of role and then embody it with choices that you make through a character. You know, is that, is that sufficient or useful? No.

• 13:36Kirk Hamilton?

  That's pretty good, yeah. I think that choices are an important part of it.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:39Kirk Hamilton?

  And, um, yeah, I really do like that distinction between game aesthetics and other media. Because a first-person shooter is a genre that could only exist in games, right? And it tells you what the game is in a way that, um, I don't know, the word jazz does not really actually tell you that much about what kind of music you're going to be listening to. It could be so many different instruments and so many different styles and sounds, right? Even though that's technically a genre. A first-person shooter, you kind of know what you're getting. Um, so that is a, a important distinction for listeners to think about. But yeah, I think that's, that's more or less what we came, came up with, right? It was something about choice, something about inhabiting a role, whether it's a character that you've made yourself, or, um, someone who has been sort of imposed upon you. Maddie and Jason, am I forgetting anything?

• 14:23Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, when people talk about RPG elements, oh, this game is RPG elements, we're adding RPG elements to our game. Oftentimes, they're talking about things like levels and quests and other very specific criteria. So I think the, the genre has been kind of codified as this collection of separate features. And it doesn't have to have all of them. But if it has a few of them, then it qualifies as an RPG.

• 14:46Kirk Hamilton?

  You know, I remember people would talk about Modern Warfare in 2007 as having RPG elements in the multiplayer, just because there were bars that she would fill. Like, that alone was sort of understood to be an RPG aspect, which I'm not sure.

• 15:00Jason Schreier?

  Well, also, you got to carry around RPGs and shoot them at people.

• 15:03Kirk Hamilton?

  That's what it was.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Maybe you misunderstood Kirk. And you thought maybe this, this was like, you know, slightly... No, I, I remember that really clearly between, um... Modern Warfare 1 and Modern Warfare 2, when those came out because of the perks and the way that you had character builds. And I remember there being that kind of weird, "The RPGs are coming from my World War II shooter" kind of internet forum conversation. So, yeah, that was definitely in the mix back then.

• 15:30Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, and I think that now, at least when we talk about role-playing games, we're definitely talking more about narrative than about those kinds of systems, just because, you know, that was Modern Warfare in 2007. The great innovation of that game went on to infect every multiplayer game ever, and now most games have a bunch of bars that you have to fill and you're constantly making progress. None of those, I don't think, would be called a role-playing game, really, meaningfully, today. But then, all the games that we're going to talk about on this episode do feel more like, you know, narrative role-playing games. You're in some way inhabiting a character and making choices.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, something that Outer Worlds 2 really had me thinking about was the idea of coming into a game and having to invent a character and then having the option to be allowed to invent a character. We can debate as to whether it's effective at that or not, and I don't think that has to be true of every RPG. We've got a lot from this year and from history where you are invited to step into a pre-existing character who has a designed personality, and you maybe make a few dialogue choices here and there, but you're along for the ride on this other person's personality, and either you like it or you don't. But in Outer Worlds 2, I felt like I actually could design a personality

• 16:46Speaker 01

  for my character, for better or worse, and continue to role-play it, whoa, throughout the game. And I don't know if that's good or bad, but it was definitely something that I was extremely aware of while playing. And in my mind, that is, like, the dial on RPG is turned up more when I'm doing that, when I have more control over how much personality I get to have.

• 17:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I'm curious, Cameron, if you've played much Outer Worlds 2. I know you did a whole series at Too Much Future about Fallout New Vegas, which those games are very kind of in conversation with one another. And I'm curious if you played that game and what you thought of it.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, you know, I played maybe the first five hours or so of Outer Worlds 2 and I ended up feeling kind of the same way that I felt about Outer Worlds 1, which is, uh, this is a great schematic for getting me to engage with a world that is wrapped up in a lot of things I don't particularly care for. Uh, I think there's something about the science fiction tone that is in those games that really pulled me out of the stuff that you're talking about, Matty, right? The, the ability to imagine myself as a character in that world, which is, you know, um, the inverse of that, which made, a game that made me feel like, and where the aesthetics were really aligned with me, was, um, Starfield. Uh, but I just didn't enjoy playing that game very much, right? You know, I had kind

• 18:09Speaker 03

  of the opposite, but I felt more like I was involved in the actual conflicts of, of the world of Starfield than I was the Outer Worlds 2, which felt like, um, a series of predefined politics that I could ping off of with a little guy that I made, as opposed to like, a little guy that I made that can run around in the world and kind of do whatever he wanted. And so I do think that, at least in some of these RPGs, there is at least the illusion of freedom that matters a lot, you know, the, the self-expression, this ability to engage in it. And this goes all the way back to the beginning of role-playing games. You know, you can read John Peterson's work, uh, who's written a lot about the early days of D and D and the early days of role-playing, and you can see these exact questions showing up at the very dawn of role-playing games in the, in the 70s, yeah.

• 18:51Jason Schreier?

  I wonder about the, uh, the kind of, the difference there that you're identifying, looking at New Vegas compared to Outer Worlds 2, being that in a game like New Vegas, and maybe a more quote-unquote "open," uh, RPG, you have to actively discover the factions and learn about them, uh, and you can go the entire game without stumbling upon, uh, one or two of them. You'll probably run into at least one of them, but like, you could go the whole game ostensibly without running into Caesar's Legion, um, and just kind of play through all the way to New Vegas and, and finish the game there. Um, whereas in Outer Worlds 2, it's kind of, it's shoving a lot of that stuff in your face from the

• 19:33Jason Schreier?

  get-go, so you have less of an opportunity to, you have less agency in picking what you want to learn about and learning about it in an active way, and so maybe it feels a little bit more prescribed than a game that just throws you into the desert and lets you find things yourself.

• 19:49Kirk Hamilton?

  That's an interesting idea that the role playing in these games is partly the wandering around and discovering things, that that is actually part of the experience. You know, it's not just, are you making choices at any given moment? But also, are you finding the game rather than having the game come to you? Because those are, that is a really significant difference between a game like New Vegas, where you feel like, oh, I heard about these guys and then I discovered them, you know, five hours later, and now I'm learning even more about them and I'm in their camp, you know, talking about Caesar's Legion. Where, yeah, that is definitely an issue with Outer Worlds in general, or with, it was kind of an issue with Avowed too. Like, the feeling that the, it's all laid out for you at the very beginning, and now

• 20:33Kirk Hamilton?

  you're just going to sort of make a series of choices through this defined framework.

• 20:38Jason Schreier?

  Well, just to be clear, at least for me, it's not that one way is an issue, or one way is better than the other. I actually, I found the Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed way to have its own kind of advantages as a player. I don't think, I don't think there's anything wrong with seeing the lore upfront, Star Wars style, or it's throwing, throwing a bunch of text at you, throwing a bunch of data at you. Like, I don't think there's anything wrong with that necessarily. It just, you feel like you have less agency when you're being given things and told things as opposed to actively finding them yourself. It's just a very different style of game. And I mean, also, it wouldn't really work for a game like this as opposed to a game like New Vegas where you're on a giant open world map and you can walk in any direction and you're not really limited. Outer Worlds and Avowed are much more constrained.

• 21:22Jason Schreier?

  You have smaller, smaller kind of zones or smaller open worlds, and so you do have to know a little bit more. It is a little bit harder to kind of breadcrumb you and get you discovering a bunch of different things on your own.

• 21:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that makes sense. And it's sort of, I mean, yeah, right, it's just more or less agency. And it's easy to say, oh, more agency should be better, because, I don't know, video games or something, but you're right that it, it all depends on the goals of the game. Cameron, did you play much Avowed?

• 21:48Speaker 03

  I think I played about the same amount of time. I mean, there is something, I think Jason's really kind of hit the nail on the head, because I do think there's an onboarding method, or a philosophy of onboarding that maybe is existing within these recent Obsidian games that I'm really empathetic to, which is to say that they make complicated and interesting games, but I think the realm of dropping someone into a random world and asking them to just figure it out, I think that's hard to do these days, if you're making games for a really wide demographic. There are lots of games that do that, that are very successful and really good. Caves of Cud, one of the best games made of all time, most hostile thing you could ever pick up. I mean, not literally, but it's pretty close. And so, for both of those games, I

• 22:33Speaker 03

  really felt like having the full stakes of our world, I don't know, engagement being presented to me, like, over and over and over again, it seems like for the first few hours of those games, you're constantly being given context and stakes, and I think that probably is really efficient for getting people interested in an RPG from zero, but I'm already on board. You know, like, I'm already on board to play an RPG, so I'm looking a little bit more for novelty, or interest, or whatever. And this is something that goes all the way back through Pillars of Eternity 2. Those games, I have similar friction with them because they do a really similar move. So, this is in the studio DNA in some ways, I think.

• 23:14Kirk Hamilton?

  Hmm. You know, to circle back to something you were saying, Matty, earlier, that one of the big things about Outer Worlds 2 is that the character creation, the mechanics for it, like, the way that they've set up the character creation is so cool. This is something we just talked about. It's the best part. Yeah, it's really well done. The flaws, the perks, the way that you kind of gradually realize, "Oh, I'm playing, like, a really lunk-headed, lucky, you know, person who, with bad knees," you know, and the game kind of gives you these opportunities to start role-playing. That's something that that game does that almost none of the other RPGs of the year really do in the same way. And it's also something that's different from Avowed, because in Avowed, one of the notable things about that game is that, you know, you can't choose

• 23:56Kirk Hamilton?

  your background, for example. You have to be this, like, you know, race of fungus people because that- Ties in with the narrative and then as a result, they're able to God likes people who are ordained. Thank you.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  How could we forget?

• 24:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Not quite fungus. Thank you, God likes. I was trying to remember the name on the fly and it was eluding me. Yeah. So and as a result, then they can like tie you into the narrative in this certain way. And, you know, and then make the story make sense in a way that it just wouldn't if you were playing a human or whatever. And so it works, but it's just a really different approach to character creation. I'm wondering what you think of that, maybe Maddie, since you were talking about it earlier. Just thinking about Avowed versus Outer Worlds 2, since we've played both this year.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember being really struck by the almost chosen one narrative of Avowed. And I mean, we haven't gotten into chosen one stories yet, but they're such a staple, not just in video games, but I think of RPGs. And part of that is because I think that if you spend a lot of time designing your character, as you will be doing over the course of the entire game, not just at the beginning, you feel special. And so having the game tell you that, I tend to chafe at that, actually. And so I think I, that's part of why I was endeared to Outer Worlds 2, even though I agree with Cameron, that some of the storytelling

• 25:16Speaker 01

  was just laid on really thick at the beginning in terms of just characters like almost walking up to you to tell you the plot of the game. That I, um, I could take or leave, but the fact that I could affect my character so much, just really strongly appealed to me. And in Avowed, I didn't super feel that way. I, I kind of felt like I was just, the dialogue choices didn't feel notably different to me. And because there wasn't some additional system, like the flaws system in Outer Worlds 2, that I find really charming. I just kind of felt like I was there and like the other characters in Avowed were people. And like I was a video game protagonist.

• 25:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Jason, you're a lover of Avowed. How do you think of the two, the two games in terms of how they handle the player character? Like in, in how you felt as your character moving through that world?

• 26:09Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't have a problem with the game telling me, like, when you play Mass Effect, you're Commander Shepard, no matter how you choose to play her. When you play Baldur's Gate 3, you're always a guy or a girl with a tadpole stuck in your head and the plot goes around that. I mean, similarly, Avowed just handles the godlike setup in that way. And part of the game's core mystery is to figure out who the deity is that is, the deity is that is kind of in your head and giving you instructions and blessings and whatnot. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that part of it. Avowed is one of my favorite games of the year for other reasons, mostly because of the exploration, because it's one of those games that just is so good at teasing you into climbing up things

• 26:51Jason Schreier?

  and parkouring around things and finding all sorts of fun little treasures and knicks and crannies or little story moments in little pieces of the game. Which also can be an interesting and special part of RPGs is that exploration element that I think video games are better at doing than any, really the only art form that can do that, that can give you a play space to explore. And I guess it's not just RPGs that have that kind of level of exploration, but they're, they're easier to pull off in RPGs.

• 27:22Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that's true. You know, speaking of having a set character, so another game that came out this year that has RPG elements and then I think, I don't know, fits into this conversation, interestingly, interestingly, is Assassin's Creed: Shadows. This is not something that I was expecting in this game, that you would actually be making narrative, like branching narrative choices. The first one comes kind of early on. I think we talked about this way back when that game came out, but you're choosing whether to kill a guy or let a guy live and you're inhabiting Naue in that moment. And it's really, you know, really far in the direction of, okay, I'm just playing as this girl and she is making a decision right now. And I found it to be interesting because it's, it's not like my character where I've

• 28:05Kirk Hamilton?

  decided who this character is. They're evil, you know, they're, they're good, they like This person, they don't like this person. I've spent however many hours just watching an actor emote and play this character. And then suddenly the game is just asking me, okay, so now do you think that she would spare this guy? Or would she kill him? And my Naoe killed him. I think, I believe that maybe all of us did in that moment in that first big choice. And that sort of leads you to unlock one character and maybe not unlock another one. It's this kind of odd direction that that series has gone. So Cameron, you've written a book about Assassin's Creed and toward the end of the book, you get into this, this latest transformation that that series has undergone. Cause they've been making these games forever, but this most recent trilogy finally started introducing,

• 28:48Kirk Hamilton?

  quote unquote, RPG elements or really like the Witcher three style dialogue choices and some branches in the narrative. This is with Odyssey. And I'm interested, I don't know, could you just talk a little bit about that? And how that fits in with like the, you know, history is your playground thing that Assassin's Creed is going for?

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I, something that's really interesting about Assassin's Creed is that,

• 29:11Speaker 03

  kind of more than, hmm, more than any, yeah, sure. More than any other franchise.

• 29:15Kirk Hamilton?

  He's superlative, that's fine.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, more than any other franchise. I don't know if this is a superlative or not, but it is willing to be a weather vane for whatever the heck is going on in the world, right? So like whichever way the wind is blowing is where Assassin's Creed is going. Uh, and so that meant, you know, uh, multiplayer modes, when multiplayer modes in a random AAA game were important. That meant, um, you know, engaging in tower defense. If people remember playing, what was Revelations that has tower defense in it?

• 29:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Um, there's lots of different, if you, you know, you play across the franchise and you play attentively. Ubisoft is, have always been pretty tactical with saying, what's up right now in the games world? How can we have Assassin's Creed, um, interact with that? And so something that's really interesting to me about the dialogue choices that were added with Odyssey, and which is accelerating into the stuff in shadows that you're talking about. Is that I read all of that very cynically, or experienced that very cynically. To write this book, everything is permitted. I did a lot of digging around in Ubisoft and reading a lot of investor reports and looking at investor calls and checking out the way that they talk about themselves, all these different things.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Ubisoft and many other companies right now are very invested in how much time you spend working on that thing, as much as what the quality of that time spent is. You know, these games have moved into login bonuses and things like that, all that kind of stuff of how often you're engaging with it. So in Odyssey, which is a game that really ballooned after the origins before that, origins you can complete. If you just want to play the mainline story in about 30 hours, you can really power through it if you want to. Odyssey's not that case. I tried to do it as quickly as possible, and I think it took me 65 hours.

• 30:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it took me like 80 hours or something. That game, and I played the whole thing because I really liked it, but damn, it went on a very long time.

• 31:05Jason Schreier?

  That was 2018. That was the peak of service games, and they described Odyssey as a service game, which is one of the reasons.

• 31:10Kirk Hamilton?

  It kind of felt like.

• 31:11Jason Schreier?

  To your point, to your point about the daily bonuses, they wanted it to, very deliberate.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  And so I think that's a part of it. I think these RPG mechanics, the acceleration of just going from dialogue, which is, could you engage with this more often or more frequently or in different ways in order to get a slightly different story, which is kind of the whole deal. Multiple main characters who interact with the world similarly, but not identically, and then they can choose to interact in different scenarios, right? So to make people fight with them or not fight with them, whatever, in the dialogue choices. I think that is just as much of a games as a service thought on the part of Ubisoft in the sense that it means that you are coming back to the same product. You're engaging with that product over and over again, and that accelerated into Valhalla, and then that accelerated into Shadows,

• 31:56Speaker 03

  with obviously Mirage kind of being the little side story along the way that doesn't really follow that. Although in terms of unlocks in that game or whatever, it looks a whole lot like an RPG. I don't know if y'all played that, but.

• 32:07Kirk Hamilton?

  No, I never did. It, yeah, it seemed a little like a side story, the way you describe it, but, but no, I didn't, I didn't make time for it, even though I heard some good things and some kind of mixed things about it.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  You should check it out, I think. I think if you like Assassin's Creed and you want to play like a solid 18-hour game that feels a lot like an RPG, it is like right in the sweet spot. And it's the last one that I played before the book came out, so I didn't have an option to play Shadows, and I haven't yet. I spent about. 2,500 hours, give or take, playing Assassin's Creed for the book. And so I literally got to the point of buying Shadows. And I was hovering over, you know, clicking the button. I just couldn't physically bring myself to do it. I was like, I can't, I can't sign up for more of this. So I'm waiting, I'm hoping that my, the burnout goes away. But I do think that thinking about these RPG mechanics, I think it is worth in the macro scale,

• 32:58Speaker 03

  thinking about how are they aligned with other things that game companies are tracking and they're invested in, in terms of bringing players into the fold and keeping them there. You know, what you were talking about earlier with bars going up and experience being accrued in Call of Duty, there's a reason those RPG mechanics are in. And it's rewarding, you know, in a very kind of Skinner boxian way. It's rewarding to get that small trickle of you did a good job. And I do think that, that narrative, if we think about it robustly, I think narrative in games can function the same way. It's about novelty, it's about engagement, it's about feeling fulfilled. You know, Matt, you were talking about kind of chosen one narratives before.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  That's all part of the same, I think, cosmology of ways of getting people invested in a product. And so macro level, I think all this is part of the same system.

• 33:49Jason Schreier?

  Can I push back against that a little bit?

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, please.

• 33:52Jason Schreier?

  Cause, cause I remember when Odyssey came out, I remember talking to people who worked on it and I heard a couple of things that I thought were, it was really interesting. One was that this Odyssey came out in 2018, The Witcher 3 came out in 2015. Witcher 3 came out when Odyssey was essentially kicking off development and everybody played it and fell in love with it and was like, we want to make a game like this.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:11Jason Schreier?

  And I think that was a big inspiration for a lot of what came in Odyssey, including the dialogue trees. I also think, I might be misremembering this, but from what I remember, there was conversation about how like, hey, we're making a game in ancient Greece, Plato and Socrates, their like entire treatises, their, their work was told through dialogue exchanges. And so we should have some interesting kind of dialogue exchanges and play around with dialogue in that way.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  And that was a thing in Odyssey, right? Where you talked to Socrates and you were like, have to do.

• 34:41Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So while I think, I think you're. Spot on about things like the daily bonuses being part of being part of that cynical kind of grab that player engagement and grab it by the horns or even the amount of content in the game. To the point where there were different teams and different Ubisoft studios, each working from different continents and like it's it's a big massive beast of a game. Odyssey is also my favorite Assassin's Creed, so I have a soft spot for it for a lot of reasons. But I think a lot of the stuff that sometimes we as players think is cynical is really just developers just thinking it's cool.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I would never say that the fingerprint of the artist is not on the thing, but I think this is where you and I diverge a lot of the time. Right. In terms of our way of thinking about games, but I think this is can be easily a question of both and rather than either or right. Like in order to make a game within a framework of something like Ubisoft, this is massive company and with Assassin's Creed as a franchise. You have to make stuff that's legible within the framework there that is presumably a thing that someone wants to work on, but that can also be completely aligned with larger economic values or larger systemic values that produce a thing that we can maybe be cynical about, right? Or that maybe we can question. So I take your point. I bet that people and I feel very confident that people played

• 35:57Speaker 03

  games that they wanted to emulate. I think we should also take seriously that there are game mechanics and there are modes of design that are affirming to the people making them and that are affirming to us who play them that also can feed into other systems that we might more on surface be cynical or questioning or negative about, right? Like

• 36:16Jason Schreier?

  Sure. And part of that conversation is always, well, The Witcher 3 sold a bazillion copies, so that's why we can justify doing this.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like Baldur's Gate 3 sold a bajillion copies and like we can, I think, I think it would be fair to say that all of us like it in a pretty uncynical way and that we can see the artistry of it. But it also is one of those games where you see its success and I get nervous and I'm like, what cynical conclusions? I mean, we've talked about that on this this podcast before too.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, a listener, I think, wrote in and was like, what would be the most cynical conclusions that somebody could draw from Baldur's Gate 3? And I feel like you're actually answering it, Cameron. unwittingly here because the cynical answer is, well, okay, maybe narrative choices are what gets a player to log in over and over again. And yeah, that's true in a vacuum, but also what makes those narrative choices feel like they do matter as opposed to just being there for the sake of being there. And to tie it back to Shadows, I've really been thinking ever since you said this, Kirk, you characterized it as what decision would Naoway make? And you feeling like you needed to make a choice on behalf of Naoway there, which is interesting to me

• 37:31Speaker 01

  because I usually think of it as, well, what would I do? And then I feel like I'm refracted into the character. And I think that the fact that Shadows has this quote unquote canon mode, where the game tells you the correct choices, like you, it takes away some of the choices from you that would otherwise be there. And it allows you to see what is supposed to happen, quote unquote. And like, that is a key piece of the Assassin's Creed lore that also, Cameron, I'm really curious for your thoughts on how that's changed over time as somebody who just played them all. But that I think is a really fun tension with Assassin's Creed where introducing RPG elements to it

• 38:12Speaker 01

  is fascinating because this is also a game about genetic predestiny and things that already happened in the past, like Socrates lived and died. We all know what happened. Like, it's, it's very funny for that game to have choice be what it's hinging on.

• 38:28Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I have a sort of transitional thought on that, actually. This is something that I think is very distinct about Assassin's Creed. Last week, we were actually talking about the Sance of Blake Manor. And I mentioned how I love that that game is set during a specific point in history and how playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has been this kind of eye opening experience for me because it's set so specifically at this point in history. And it is not like fantastical. It's like they're real people. You're just at a real point in time in history. And how that felt really cool. And then I was editing the episode and I thought, why didn't I mention Assassin's Creed when I said that? Like, there's this long running, very popular series where the whole idea is that it's set during historical periods.

• 39:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Then actually something in your book, Cameron, clarified that for me, which is that Assassin's Creed is not actually About history, exactly. Like, it's not a historical game, and this is something that the creators of the game, I think, have even said, "Well, no, it's a sci-fi game. It just is set in history." And then that's, you know, reflected in the whole narrative premise of Assassin's Creed, which is that in the game, you're in like the future and you're getting into some crazy VR machine and then going back into the past. And then they've used that as a way to, you know, write up all these different things that you can do in the past, including now dialogue choices and branching narratives and, you know, getting like changing their own lore to make more and more things possible. And it's, it really helped me realize like, oh, so maybe Assassin's Creed isn't really historical

• 39:55Kirk Hamilton?

  role-playing in the same way that something like Kingdom Come Deliverance is, or even something like Blake Manor is, where it's just telling you a story that took place in history and making you a historical character.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I, that's something, I'm glad that that came through in the book. Because some of this really, I guess I approached the Assassin's Creed games being like, they're historical fiction, you know, and historical fiction has some parameters on it, but overall they're historical fiction. And then I read a million interviews with all of it, going all the way back to the first game and even preview material from the first game, where they are constantly banging the drum about it being a science fiction game. And that, that for them was, you know, kind of a lever or a wedge, to be able to say, "Listen, it's taking place in history, dear gamers, but that doesn't mean we have to be responsible to everything." You know, something that they say repeatedly many people have, I guess

• 40:46Speaker 03

  most recently, Maxim Durand, Durand, not sure how you say it, but is the 15-second rule. Everything in Assassin's Creed stands up for 15 seconds, you know, in terms of its historical content. After that, you're on your own. And, but so, you know, that's what's really interesting, is there's always this escape valve for it. And I think what's interesting about the addition of dialogue choices, the addition of all these other mechanics that we've been talking about, these RPG elements, whatever, all of them have been born out of a science fictional narrative maneuver, which is to say, "Well, we just made a better version of The Animus, and so we were able to look at the genetic data for this given

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Moment and inside of that given moment, here are the alternate possibilities and they've expanded that. You know, since really since origins of of what that might look like and how it shakes out. And they've moved really far away from the mechanics and ideas around synchronization and have moved into this. And what what's really great to me about that is that it's leaning into. The science fiction premise that's going on with Assassin's Creed to say, what? What does that open for us? What does that give us the ability to play with? Um, and they've done it in other genres too, you know, they've made the 2D games, they made the mobile games. They made the Facebook game that was just, um, you know, dealing with Templar. Um, Wikipedia, you know, they've they've done lots of different. Interventions, I guess, into different ways of of doing Assassin's Creed stuff.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  Um, but I, you know, I really like the idea of leaning into the tools they've already given themselves in order to. Add more ways of interacting with the thing.

• 42:23Kirk Hamilton?

  Do you think that if they made Assassin's Creed now that they would still do the whole Animus thing? Is that an artifact of its time or is that is that something that you think would just is essential to the series? That they would still think, oh, that's a cool way to do a historical story?

• 42:36Speaker 03

  I, you know, it's hard for me to say, I mean, I I talked to lots of people for the book, some people on the record, some people off the record. Um, I think that there are real tensions around the Animus, obviously, still in that company. You know, the the stuff about Black Flag remake supposedly and not having the Animus supposedly involved and. I, you know, out of the last 10 games, maybe half of them have not really featured the Animus, maybe maybe three or four of them. But no, I think they would want to run from it as much as humanly possible. It is way too complicated. Many people still don't like it. I wrote about that extensively in the book about just the conversations that have happened around the Animus. I think that that stuff is the most important and interesting.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Just thing going on in the game, right? Like I I find it really compelling. It does not seem like the player base necessarily enjoys it and obviously the the critical base is really hotly split on it, so. Uh, you know, maybe in the year of 2025, if you're being, we're talking about cynicism earlier. Maybe you do say. In order to be as controversial as possible within a very. Uh, apolitical framework, maybe we put in something like this in order to make people argue and yell about it. You know, one can could say that. I don't think they're that cynical. I think, yeah, if they did a redo, they just get to be historical fiction games and you don't need the additional device. Reading about the development of that, and I cover some of the stuff in the

• 43:59Speaker 03

  book, if people are interested, it's really fascinating to learn about those conversations and why they happened and how they happened on the back of the Prince of Persia game that it initially was supposed to be, the first Assassin's Creed. And the way they tell their own story in the Assassin's Creed 15th Anniversary Weird Hagiography Volume, people might be interested in that as well.

• 44:19Jason Schreier?

  It's worth noting, of course, that the original creators of Assassin's Creed, Patrice Deslitz and Corey May and Jade Raymond are all gone from Ubisoft, long gone from Ubisoft. So, a lot of people who came up with this idea of the Animus and kind of saw that as the the framework in which Assassin's Creed was built around are just no longer a part of the franchise. So, the franchise has just become kind of its own. It's kind of like, what's a good example of this? I don't know, The Twilight Zone, or like some other like Doctor Who, or some sort of like running series where like whoever comes into it and takes over, puts their own spin on whatever it is, and it's just not even really a franchise anymore. It's just kind of like a series of like games that are loosely connected with

• 45:03Jason Schreier?

  some like basic, like very, very skinny lore.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, the the flip side of that too, though, being that Darby McDevitt, who is, if there's anyone on the earth Man. who is more into the Animus and all the weird stuff in Assassin's Creed than I am, it's Darby McDevitt. Darby is great. He's a great guy. I really like him. He's got a lot going on and clearly, you know, every time if you look at the projects that he's been the most intensely attached to, those are all the places where you're diving the deepest on it. So, it is really interesting, Jason, I think that's a really good point, that all the people that made up these initial kind of goalposts or parameters, they're all gone. But there is this kind of next generation, and now a third generation that have come in who are seemingly way bigger freaks about it than anyone else ever has before. And I really like that. That's like really affirming to me.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of grown on me for what it's worth.

• 45:54Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, Darby, Darby notably not was not on Shadows, but is working on the next one, Project Hex, so we'll see. We'll see what that looks like.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  And worked on Valhalla, right? He was, I think, the narrative lead on that.

• 46:04Jason Schreier?

  Which Valhalla, of course, had that big twist at the end involving the Animus. So, that's like, which has not been, not been addressed again, which is hilarious.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  I started out as a person who was very anti-animas and I feel like either because of the games forcing it on me or reading people like you, Cameron, I've grown to love it. And I think that isn't an uncommon modality of interacting with these games to just be like, I don't really get why this is here. Can't this just be a game where I'm in Italy and I'm killing guys? And you can tell which one's the first one that I played. And then over time, I think it was probably around Origins, which is famously my favorite one, where I started to kind of grow attached to the modern character who's in that game as well. And then I grew to really like the meta layer of it that, again, often isn't in any other RPG at all, and certainly not any others that we've talked about today,

• 46:59Speaker 01

  where it's like, you're playing a game as someone who's playing a game. And so you're going to really think about the fact that you're playing a game the entire time. And you're never not doing that when you're playing a game anyway. So we're just gonna make it so freaking literal that you can't not think about it and then have you question that. And that is actually a very fun mindset to be in as a critic and a player. And so it's it's come to it's it's come to be be something I enjoy now. You, you, Cameron, among the other animus diehards have converted me.

• 47:34Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's true. For me, I think it was Steven Totillo, who has always loved the animus stuff and is of course a total Assassin's Creed sicko. And he just, you know, he like, I think Rogue is his favorite game. You talk about Rogue in the book, Cameron, which is definitely the deepest in the Kenway lore. And it's this whole, it's like an Avengers Endgame of this whole middle, kind of unloved middle series of Assassin's Creed of the Assassin's Creed three timeline. So anyways, he got me into the animus. And then over time, I appreciate it for what it is, even as, especially lately, you know, Kingdom Come Deliverance two is one game, but another is actually Indiana Jones from last year, playing that game, playing that game and being in these historical places, you know, going into the

• 48:16Kirk Hamilton?

  Sistine Chapel, like exploring Rome or wherever, you know, in that game, I was just a guy in history. In Kingdom Come, I'm just a guy in history. It's fine. They don't, there doesn't need to be this whole extra layer to explain how I happen to be there doing things. It's just kind of cool to feel like my character is actually there. And in that role playing aspect of the game, I do appreciate that, the feeling of Actually being there, this sounds kind of stupid. Because obviously, Indiana Jones was not really there, you know, Henry from Kingdom Con. Yes, he was. What are you talking about? Was not actually there, right? Sorry, I forgot Indiana Jones is a real guy. But you know, like, it does feel slightly different. Just the narrative context affects

• 49:00Kirk Hamilton?

  me slightly differently when I feel as though my character is in a world in which he exists, rather than my character in the game being, you know, one further step removed from me, which has always been a weird thing about about the Animus in Assassin's Creed. But then again, that feeling like feeling refreshed playing those two games I just mentioned, that only is true because I've spent so many years playing Assassin's Creed. And really, for a long time, that was the primary mode through which I experienced history in video games, was the Animus, because Assassin's Creed was doing something that nobody else was doing outside of like, the historical Call of Duty games or whatever. But but those are, those are pretty different. So one other thing that happened in 2025, in terms of 2025 and RPGs, is Claire Obscure

• 49:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Expedition 33. And I have to mention this game only because it seems to be a frontrunner for game of the year. It's gonna win so many awards. And between that game and the Final Fantasy Tactics: Ivalice Chronicles, there are these two poles of like JRPG design. Jason, I want to throw to you on this, because I'm curious if you have some thoughts on it. But so many people have held up Claire Obscure as this like revolution, this revolutionary idea of kind of like Western aesthetics, JRPG, turn-based combat. How do you even think of that game as a role-playing game at this point?

• 50:15Jason Schreier?

  I feel like you just like are giving me bait, telling me that that game is a revolution. I mean, you cross like Paper Mario with Final Fantasy X.

• 50:23Kirk Hamilton?

  You don't take it however you want.

• 50:24Jason Schreier?

  And you get Claire Obscure.

• 50:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Just answer the question.

• 50:27Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a polished, well-made game that's like designed to appeal to people. It's very pretty. It's very well-written and well-acted. It has fantastic music. It's a very lovely game, very melancholy game. It like isn't afraid to kill a character or two. And it takes a lot of ideas from games that worked really well in the past and iterates on them in some cool ways. I bounced off of it for various reasons. That we talked about a few months ago when it came out, but, uh, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I would definitely call it more of an iteration than an innovation. That's for sure. As far as its position in the grand RPG canon, I don't think it will be remembered as some game that just like brought all these ideas to the table. I think it'll be remembered as a game

• 51:10Jason Schreier?

  that executed really well and was beloved because of that. There's also the whole meta narrative surrounding it where everybody is like, feels like they're, they're rooting for the ex Ubisoft like indie team to beat all the odds when they, when they support this game and give it all this acclaim and love and stuff. They feel like they're, they're rewarding true gamers instead of the Corpos, which I think plays a large role in the kind of the, the overall reactions that we've seen to it. But that's a whole nother bag of can of worms. And like you threw this at the very end of this conversation. So.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Well, I have a thought on it too, for what it's worth. As the person who did complete Claire Obscure and is almost done with Final Fantasy Tactics, I was playing it right before we got on this call.

• 51:55Jason Schreier?

  Oh, wow. You're almost done.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  We'll see. I'll, I'll see if I'll talk about it next week. Maybe I'll be done by then. But I think something interesting about it in the context of this conversation we've just had is that those are both games where you are so along for the ride that the story is happening without you. Like you are not, you're not having Ramza make decisions or having Gustav make decisions in that way. You're watching a cutscene play out and then you're playing a tactical battle. And that's part of why in my mind, I tend to call that a quote unquote story game. That's not an official genre term. It's simply how I choose to describe this type of game,

• 52:37Speaker 01

  which is also a genre I really enjoy, but I don't know that I often feel like I'm playing a role, as it were, if I'm playing a Claire Obscure or an F F T. I mean, I'm, I'm certainly interacting with the characters and playing as them whenever that battle music kicks in. But that's pretty much it, right? I mean, the rest of the time we're watching what happens to them. And we don't get to have a say if there's a character death, for example, in those games that isn't part of one of those battle music moments where I'm specifically moving my guys around. And that is, that is like another entire subsection of RPGs that is just actually

• 53:18Speaker 01

  super different because you kinda don't have a choice about what happens to the characters there. And whether you have a phoenix down or not is not going to matter if it's a cutscene, famously.

• 53:30Kirk Hamilton?

  Cameron, did you play episode or Expedition 33? Do you have any thoughts on that game?

• 53:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And even played it for longer than I played many of the other games we've talked about so far. I mean, I finished it and I got to the end and I thought, yeah. Kirk, did you finish it?

• 53:46Kirk Hamilton?

  No, not yet. It's

• 53:47Speaker 03

  It's just us.

• 53:48Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm going back to it. I want to finish it before the end of the year.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  You'll be all right. You'll be fine. I mean, one of the things really notable about that game is that I, yeah, 10 years ago, there would be a huge amount of discourse about the last, I don't know, 10 minutes or so of that game. And in the world we live in now, just seemingly no one cares to talk about that very much, which is interesting. I mean, the stuff that you're talking about, Matty and Jason, that you were alluding to earlier, is a lot of what you're identifying there is the very, I don't know, traditional differentiator between the WRPG and the JRPG, you know, that you're identifying some long-running strife in between those two different strains of RPG design. I guess the thing that about Clear Obscure that was really notable, and it sounds like, Jason, this was a big thing

• 54:34Speaker 03

  for you as well, is that it feels, I don't even know if I would use the word iterative, it feels very profoundly derivative. You know, I've seen every plot beat in that game more than once, and most of them in Final Fantasy X, just by itself. Good game. Yeah, good game. Yeah, no complaints, you know, really enjoy that. But I think what's notable to me is that Clear Obscure's Position right now, you know, I think part of the stuff, Jason, that you're alluding to in terms of what is fulfilling a kind of function. One of those is discursive about, you know, the scrappy gamer upstarts who get to do this kind of stuff and, you know, against the corpos, as you said. I think the other one is that we do have a, in games

• 55:19Speaker 03

  culture, this has been talked about repeatedly, we have a really short memory. There are objects that are really important to games culture. I would not say that there is a deep memory of the specificity of things. So I had a conversation, for example, with someone, a friend of mine who really enjoyed Claire Obscure, and we were talking about it, and I said, "Listen, you know, I've seen a lot of this before," and I just started laying out the plot beats that are in that game that are shared with other games. Look, this is common in all media, this is not unique to Claire Obscure, but literally, this person I was talking to had said, "Oh, you know what? I'm familiar with Final Fantasy XIX. I just didn't know all that stuff was in there. You know, I know the icon of these games." And so there's something going on, I think, that we'll see going forward a lot.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  I think this is going to be more present than not in the next several years of very specific tactical retreads of things that feel very familiar, but in objects that, for our generation of player, feel very held on to or dear, but might just exist as YouTube videos for people who are younger than us. Which is not saying that their mode of access is wrong or anything like that, but I do think that there's an accessibility thing going on with Claire Obscure of, "I can play it right now on whatever thing I want to do, and I might not be familiar with that game from literally 20 years ago." And why would you be? So I have some empathy for that position. But yeah, I think that derivativeness,

• 56:46Speaker 03

  that feeling of that iterative cycle, I think we're going to feel this going forward a lot more of really reusing some of the ideas of the big hits of yesteryear.

• 56:57Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, what you're describing is also the end result of video games that, like Assassin's Creed Odyssey, are so bloated that they're impossible for most people to finish. I imagine that one of the reasons we haven't seen a ton of discord around the ending of Claire Obscur is because like, how many people actually finished that game? To your point about Final Fantasy X, how many people know that Tidus has a laughing scene, but have never actually played that game to completion? I mean, gaming culture, or discourse online, or whatever you want to call it, is often driven by people who have not finished the games in question, which I think is a large part of the phenomenon you're talking about.

• 57:32Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I gotta finish it. I want to finish it before the end of the year, only because I have seen enough people say, "Well, the ending of that game is pretty wild," and I just want to know what they're talking about, because I'm not spoiled on it. Anyways, this has been a very fun conversation. We're going to wrap it up. Cameron, before we go, why don't you tell listeners really quick, one more time about your book, just in case they want to check it out?

• 57:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's called Everything is Permitted. It is on every storefront you could attempt to find it on. It's, I think, $26. Those are the most important parts. No, that's the back of the book stuff. It's about Assassin's Creed as a franchise. It's a book that came out from an academic press, but if you're familiar with the things I've written or the podcasts I've done, it's, I think, pretty conversational. I think it's pretty readable. It is an attempt to understand what the heck is going on with a 15-plus-year-running franchise, and how does it manage itself aesthetically, conceptually, science-fictionally, all these different pieces? How does it feel like it's all of a piece with one another?

• 58:36Speaker 03

  And how does it present different parts of it to players in order to interact with them? I think it's a pretty leisurely walkthrough. What's up with these? Why are they culturally important? How do they work with people? How do they get you to engage with them and their ideas? And what maybe will they give you to take with you further on in your life? So, big cultural kind of history work. I think people will like it. Generally positive reviews all around. That's the pitch.

• 59:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. Well, hopefully, some listeners will check it out, and we'll put some links to some of your other podcasts and other work down in the show notes as well. Cameron Kunzelman, thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 59:10Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 59:11Kirk Hamilton?

  All right, let's take a break, and we will be back for one more thing.

• 59:18Speaker 04

  Wonderful is a podcast where we talk about things we like. That's hard to sell in a promo like this, so we've enlisted the help of piano rock superstar Billy Joel to tell you about some of the topics we've covered. Take it away, real Billy Joel.

• 59:29Speaker 05

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• 59:56Speaker 04

  Listen to Wonderful every Wednesday on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks, real Billy Joel.

• 1:00:02Speaker 06

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• 1:00:04Speaker 07

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  With more continuity than comic books? And more reality than reality television?

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• 1:00:46Kirk Hamilton?

  And we're back for one more thing. Maddie, how about you go first? What's your one more thing?

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Okay, so I realized something today. It just so happens that today, the day that we're recording this, bear with me here, it is the anniversary of Dina's and my first date, November 11th, 11/11, really easy to remember.

• 1:01:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, hey.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Which was seven years ago. And you two might not remember that something else also happened seven years ago, which is why these two things are kind of linked in my mind. And so I looked up these dates today. So the very first time that I was announced as a host on, it was split screen. Back then was also seven years ago and it was very close in time. So that was actually December 13th, 2018, that I was first, first became part of the trifecta.

• 1:01:35Kirk Hamilton?

  It was official. Maddy Myers is joining the cast of Kotaku's split screen.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  It's kind of tough to say like when our anniversary is because I guessed it on split screen a couple of times ahead of time. And I was like, what would we say is our anniversary of the three of us podcasting every single week together? I think it would be hard to know, but December 13th is maybe, maybe a good day. I'm not saying you guys get me anything, but like it's coming up. It's been seven years. And also it's like weird that those two events are linked. That's just pure coincidence.

• 1:02:07Jason Schreier?

  Can I make a counterpoint here, Maddie?

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Jason Schreier?

  I feel like typically anniversaries are not the first date, but like the wedding, right?

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Right, right. Okay. I see.

• 1:02:15Jason Schreier?

  So I would say that our equivalent of a wedding is when we launched triple click.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  I would agree.

• 1:02:20Jason Schreier?

  Because that's when we really like all committed to each other permanently.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Because we all quit Kotaku and we were like, let's get into business.

• 1:02:28Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Let's sign a piece of paper, wedding style. Yeah. So I would say it's kind of like how Dina and I have our date anniversary, which we celebrate in a more low key way than our wedding. So like our, our triple click date anniversary, when we went on our first date, perhaps, was back in the split screen days. Anyway, I just thought that was kind of fun. But we've been doing this for seven years together, almost. And a lot has happened in that time. So yeah, I was really thinking about that today, the past seven years of my life. And yeah.

• 1:02:59Jason Schreier?

  So do you give us credit for like keeping your relationship healthy?

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Yep. It's all this. It's actually all just this podcast. I, I don't really share that much information about myself on this show outside of the games I play. But like, if somebody wanted to kind of track the few times I mentioned Dina early on, like as I recall, I was like, oh, this girl I'm seeing like very, very early in the show, you could, you could do that, I suppose. But what's more important is these two things coincidentally happened seven years ago. And I just think that's cool. So happy, happy almost anniversary, you two, date anniversary.

• 1:03:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. Happy almost anniversary to you too. And yeah, maybe all of our listeners out there can think about what interesting and lovely anniversaries are happening for them as well. It's good to think about anniversaries.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, right on.

• 1:03:49Kirk Hamilton?

  What is your one more thing?

• 1:03:50Jason Schreier?

  I have been champing at the bit to talk about this one.

• 1:03:54Kirk Hamilton?

  You sure it's not chomping?

• 1:03:55Jason Schreier?

  Champing, chomping. There's no way to know. I've been chomping at the bit.

• 1:03:59Kirk Hamilton?

  It's one of those unknowable questions.

• 1:04:01Jason Schreier?

  I want to talk about nepotism. Nepotism is a really interesting thing, right? Nepotism is a funny thing. It gets a bad rap, right? Like, we think of nepotism as like, oh, my god, your boss's nephew is coming in and on the fast track to success. They're the CEO suddenly. Yeah, or, I mean, Ubisoft's Yves Guillaume, the CEO of Ubisoft, his son is suddenly the CEO of the new Ubisoft company that they started, right? Perfect tie-in. But nepotism, I also think can have, like, can be advantageous even to the outside, people outside of that nepotism world. Because if you are the child of someone who is really, really good at something, then you can learn from them every single day.

• 1:04:44Jason Schreier?

  You can train with them. You are essentially getting, you are becoming an apprentice from the time you are born to this, like, master at a craft, which is why I think nepotism in the creative world is a little bit different than nepotism in the business world, where there's a little bit less of the craft part of things. I bring all this up because I recently read the book King's Sorrow by Joe Hill, and Joe Hill is the son of the author Stephen King, also the author Tabitha King, who I believe is a force in her own right, but I'm not as familiar with her work as Stephen's, of course, as most people are. King's Sorrow is the best book I've read this year. It is tremendous. It is a torrid force. It is this, like, 900-page doorstop of a book

• 1:05:28Jason Schreier?

  that tells the story of this group of friends, this group of six friends who, in the 80s, summoned a dragon to help take care of a problem for them, and that dragon, it turns out, in addition to taking care of that problem, also demands a sacrifice every single year. So every single year, they have to get together and decide, this is the person or people we are going to have King's Sorrow, the dragon, kill. And the book follows three or four decades of their lives. And rotates between the different characters and tells different vignettes in their lives as they deal with this dragon and the forces in that they have unleashed into the world by summoning it.

• 1:06:12Jason Schreier?

  And it feels like a Stephen King book in so many ways, and it feels like a book who that was written by someone who just learned from Stephen King and had Stephen King read early drafts and had Stephen King teach him for years and years and years. Now, Joe Hill, I should be clear, he is an established writer already. He wrote a comic book series called Lock and Key that turned into a pretty big show. He wrote a bunch of other books, The Fireman, I believe, is one of his books. Heart Shaped Box, I think, is another one of his books.

• 1:06:40Kirk Hamilton?

  And he famously helped King rework the ending to 112263, right? That's one of the Joe Hill fun facts.

• 1:06:46Jason Schreier?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:06:47Kirk Hamilton?

  That I'm aware of.

• 1:06:47Jason Schreier?

  Good to know.

• 1:06:48Kirk Hamilton?

  The ending apparently was not really working. I think of that as an unusually strong ending. I at least like the ending to that book. And yeah, apparently Joe Hill kind of gave him some notes on it and they reworked it together.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  I like that family business. That's the phrase we're looking for here. He's part of the family business.

• 1:07:02Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. Well, it's so interesting because I think that like it's worth noting that Joe Hill probably would not be where he is right now. He probably opened, the door was left wide open for him because of who his parents were. That is undoubtable and he acknowledges that. But he also goes by a different name in part because he wants to be like his own identity. And I think the fact that he was able to learn from Stephen King is like irrefutable and has made him into this masterful writer and storyteller. And reading this book, I mean, finishing this book, I was like, I want to read this again. This is so good. This is like such a, such a ride, such a trip, as good as anything Stephen King has done, like as good as anything. Like the best book I read this year, I think. And so I guess, I guess maybe people are a little bit too hard on nepotism.

• 1:07:46Jason Schreier?

  Sometimes nepotism can create more writers like Stephen King, which is something that we want in the world. So maybe nepotism, maybe when we talk about nepo babies, maybe we should give some credit to those who like use their nepotism as an opportunity to get so good at their craft and really like find their own incredible creative path in the world, as opposed to the ones who are like. Oh, well, I got this internship at the job and you can't say anything bad to me because my, my dad's the boss. That kind of nepotism, maybe we don't, we don't need to give credit to. But man, Stephen King's kids and if he's like Stephen King has had this, now has this lineage. His other son, of course, is a, is a famous writer too, Owen King. And I think that's pretty cool.

• 1:08:31Jason Schreier?

  So yeah, here's to nepotism.

• 1:08:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Do you think that this book will do well because it has the word king in the title?

• 1:08:38Jason Schreier?

  It's so funny and it has a whole bunch of references to Stephen King stuff, all the, it's like broken up into different books. And each one is a title that's like a reference to some sort of like literature from the King family. There's like, there's one incredible gunslinger reference that I won't spoil, but it's pretty fun. There's, I think there was a reference to Cujo in there. I mean, it's like in Stephen King fashion. It's, it feels like, like he has all these kind of like mannerisms that Stephen King has in his writing where like, he'll be like, that was the last time this person did this ever again. And like, he'll do the foreshadowing thing. Like it's very clearly written by the son of Stephen King, but he also has his own ideas and his own flourishes and his own writing style that I really appreciated reading this book. So yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty cool.

• 1:09:23Jason Schreier?

  It's almost, it's like a, you're playing one of those games that's like a rogue-like where like the child inherits some of the traits of the father and then take over the child's life. Or like, I was thinking like zombie you or something like that. Maybe that's not quite the, quite the right one. Rogue legacy, yeah. But yeah, anyway, pretty fantastic.

• 1:09:42Kirk Hamilton?

  That's funny. Yeah. I mean, I'm wondering if, if literally there's like a Pavlovian thing. People see the word king in big text on a cover of a book. I saw, I saw this at the bookstore the other day. Actually, right before you told me you were reading it and sent a picture to my friend, just sort of laughing.

• 1:09:56Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Kirk Hamilton?

  Because it's like Joe Hill, king. And that's what you see first. And it grabbed my eye immediately. And then you told me you were reading it. I think I have this on, on hold at Libby and waiting on it. So looking forward to reading it.

• 1:10:08Jason Schreier?

  That is funny. I think it's, I think it's doing well because it's an astounding good book. You guys should both love it. Cannot recommend it enough. King sorrow, Joe Hill. Everyone should go read it. You'll probably hear me talk about it again during our bonus episode where we talk about our favorite things of the year. Cause yeah, blew me away. My favorite book of the year by far.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:10:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. Yeah, I will definitely read it. And yeah, kind of appropriate to talk about that on an episode where we just had Cameron.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:10:33Kirk Hamilton?

  I think they've talked about Tab, one of Tabitha's books on Just King Things. I wonder if they'll ever talk about it, Joe Hill.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm curious about that.

• 1:10:39Kirk Hamilton?

  He comes up a lot on the show, but it'd be cool for them to cover this book, just because it'd be fun to listen to Michael and Cameron talk about it. All right, well, I will go last. My One More Thing is a 1989 film that should have won Best Picture and didn't called Do the Right Thing, which I watched for the first time last week.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  The first time. Wow.

• 1:10:58Kirk Hamilton?

  I had never seen it. This is a massive blind spot in my, in my film, filmography, my film history. And, and I'd wanted to see it forever. And then, as I've mentioned on the show before, my friend Sam and I have a regular hang where we roll a dice and whatever year, a 100-sided die, and whatever year we roll, we then go through the Academy Awards from that year, and we pick one of the Best Picture nominees. We rolled 1989. And as a result, it was just an easy pick. We both were like, neither of us had seen Do the Right Thing. Both of us really wanted to see it. So we just sat down and we watched that movie. Holy shit. That is an amazing movie. I was totally unprepared for how amazing it is. I knew it was good. I've even heard Wesley Morris talk about it multiple times.

• 1:11:42Kirk Hamilton?

  I think it's one of his favorite movies. He's always talking about it on various podcasts. And I knew what it was about. I knew that it was just kind of the story of, you know, this one kind of block in Bed-Stuy, that it's one day, it's sort of a day from start to finish, like the hottest day of the year, as racial tensions kind of simmer and then erupt. And it's also the story of a neighborhood. And I haven't mentioned, but this is, this movie is written and directed by Spike Lee. And this is why they've seen as one of Spike Lee's most important films. And yes, also starring Spike Lee as Mookie. And then starring a whole raft of other actors, many of whom you would recognize. Frankie Faison's in it. Giancarlo Esposito, a very young Giancarlo Esposito is in it as bugging out.

• 1:12:22Jason Schreier?

  Unrecognizable, I would say, if you've only seen him in like Breaking Bad or something.

• 1:12:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Especially because he's all, you know, he's like very ornamented. He has his hair is a certain way, and he's got glasses, and he has all this just stuff, all these sort of accessories. And he's a very, you know, I mean, Kind of everyone in this movie is just yelling at one another the entire time. It's like a very yelled movie. Anyhow, John Turturro is in it. He's Pino. Who else? Oh, Rosie Perez is in it.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:12:47Kirk Hamilton?

  In a kind of small but crucial role. She's really great. And then so many other actors. I mean, just watching it, you'll recognize half the people in it. And I just, man, I mean, I've seen some Spike Lee movies, not every Spike Lee movie. This one is just amazing. I really think anyone out there listening to this, if you haven't seen Do the Right Thing, you should. I think it's like should be required viewing in like history or American history or civics class or something, just to kind of see this artistic interpretation of America and of race relations in New York and in America. And then also to understand it in the context of the 1989 Academy Awards, because famously, Driving Miss Daisy was up against it for Best Picture, and Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Very Green Book winning situation.

• 1:13:31Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, and yeah, I think that was referenced quite a bit when Green Book won Best Picture, because it's a similar kind of story. It's a story of racial reconciliation, where the black character and the white character come to understand one another, and it's this very optimistic view of race in America. The fact that Driving Miss Daisy won, and that Do the Right Thing was snubbed and did not win, can almost be read, you know, in some way like the judges were saying, we want to believe this version of race relations in America, when, if you watch Do the Right Thing now, especially the culminating event of that film, which is horrifying and which I was not actually prepared for or aware of, we live in that America. Like, it is unquestionable. We do not live in the Driving Miss Daisy America. We live in the Do the Right Thing America.

• 1:14:14Kirk Hamilton?

  That movie had so much more to say. And I just, like, I was totally blown away by it. Also, stylistically, it is, no shot in that movie isn't interesting. It's like, beautiful looking at all times. It's so creative. It feels like it was shot on a soundstage, even though I know it wasn't, but there's a sort of a Broadway, like, a stage-like quality to a lot of the performances. And half the time, you almost expect the characters to kind of come out onto a stage. Like, you expect to see an audience with them. Mother, Sister, and the Mayor, they're two scenes, these two elderly characters who are talking to one another. She really doesn't like him. He's kind of trying to charm her. He's kind of the, like, local alcoholic, you know, he's kind of just around. A really great character, played by Ossie Davis.

• 1:14:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Their scenes, the music just feels like it would be a Broadway production. There's this, like, string orchestra, you know, playing under them.

• 1:15:06Speaker 08

  Don't stare at me. The evil eye doesn't work on me.

• 1:15:09Speaker 09

  Mother, sister. You've been talking about me for 18 years. What have I ever done to you?

• 1:15:15Speaker 08

  You are drunk fool.

• 1:15:16Speaker 09

  Besides that, the mayor don't bother nobody. And nobody don't bother the mayor but you. The mayor just tend to his own business. I love everybody. I even love you.

• 1:15:28Speaker 08

  Hold your tongue. You don't have that much love.

• 1:15:32Speaker 09

  One day, you gonna be nice to me. We may both be dead and buried, but you gonna be nice. At least civil.

• 1:15:43Kirk Hamilton?

  A lot of the time Branford Marcellus is in there playing saxophone. But this, I don't know, it feels like a stage production. And then, having seen In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda's kind of first big musical, I was looking around for this to see if there's more critical discussion of these two things. Because they are so similar. I mean, there's like a paraguas seller in Do the Right Thing that turns up. And then the paragua guy in, you know, In the Heights is like this recurring character in that musical. I have to think that Lin and everyone else who wrote In the Heights were like very influenced by Do the Right Thing. It's like also the hottest day of the year. It's a neighborhood, it just happens to be Washington Heights instead of Brooklyn. And like, it just has so many little echoes. And I found that really interesting as well.

• 1:16:25Kirk Hamilton?

  So it was like an essential piece of the American canon that I hadn't seen. I'm so glad I saw it. It's like a work of genius. I really just can't recommend it enough. I want to watch it again immediately. So this is my big recommendation. Anyone out there, if you've thought about seeing Do the Right Thing and you've never watched it, just watch it. Sit down with some friends, put the movie on, you'll be very glad you did. It is a masterpiece, an amazing movie.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  It's great. I'm glad you finally watched it.

• 1:16:51Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, me too. Man, what a movie. All right, and that's another episode of Triple Click. Hey.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Did it again.

• 1:16:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Look at us. Congratulations. We're recording a podcast. Happy, happy day anniversary. Like we've been doing it for seven years. I guess, for five years. No, you're right, it does kind of confuse things. Happy holidays.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Forget what I said, it's fine. We're, it's whatever day it is, who cares? We're did it again.

• 1:17:11Kirk Hamilton?

  We've been doing it for years. We've been doing it for years. And we'll do it for many more years to come. All right, I will see the two of you next week. See you next week.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:17:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddy Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join. Email us at [email protected] and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:18:23Jason Schreier?

  Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artist-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.