 This is Game Chat with Buona Episode 128, The Hunt for Monster Performance. Rawr, man. Rawr. Game Chat with Buona. Welcome to the show. Now, here's your host, Buona McCall, with all the gaming news of this week. By the way, that's me. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Episode 128 of Game Chat with Buona. We got a great show lined up for you today is Wednesday, August 1st. What's left of it? I'm recording a little bit late, but, you know, I got some stuff done today. And I'm happy to announce that I have secured a short-term campaign with Quip. Quip is a toothbrush. Yes, we're going to be partnering with a toothbrush. Very nice toothbrush. And I'm going to be having a deal with them that's related to my live stream. So if you want to get the links on that, you go over to my live stream at Twitch.tv. You can either type Escalation Point Quip in the chat or you can click on the giant picture of a toothbrush on the channel. It's not going to be promoted that much on the stream. I just wanted to announce that we're going to be doing that. In case you do go over to the live stream, you can check it out. That's going to be running for about a month. And hopefully we'll have some more deals in the pipeline. And my goal is to get more episodes of the podcast out so we can have some deals with this show as well. Game Chat Buona covers the best of the news for the week. And hopefully this week's news will get you smiling boys. Alright, let's get to it. And for our first story, we're going to be talking about Monster Hunter World. And we're going to be talking about Monster Hunter World on the PC. And this game hit the PS4, the consoles pretty much on, I think it was like earlier this year. February, January, February and March. I remember I stopped playing it around the March timeframe. It was earlier this year. And you know, I was a little salty because I'm a PC, I'm primarily a PC gamer. And I was like, man, where's the PC version? Because they pre-announced this. And I was like, where is it? And it's like, we'll have information on that later this year. And we finally got a release date. It's going to be August 9th, which is right around the corner. And some prominent content providers out there already have access. And they've already been showing content. I believe their NDA allows them to show up to three hours of content. And it's been interesting. So let's talk about the story that I want to cover first. And this has to do with the performance. Because when it comes to PC, you know, that's the main thing people look at first. You know, the content of the game, the length, the quality and all that stuff. You know, it matters. But the first thing people want to know is can my PC run this? Because consoles have the luxury of not having that issue. You know, if you get the game for the console, generally it will run. Like, okay, what are the system requirements? What kind of CPU do I need? Did I need a new video card, et cetera, et cetera? So it wasn't very, very good news. It wasn't very good news when people started reporting that. Even on a decently high-end system that they couldn't maintain 60 frames per second at 1080p on the highest settings. And these are the best, according to this article, the best graphics cards out there couldn't handle it. And this article also points out over on Rock Paper Shotgun that the game is actually crashing as well. I didn't know that. It was crashing quite a bit. So, you know, one of the differentiators, and again, this is a game that's running on consoles today. People are happily playing it. I played it for a while, I had fun, but I hit a wall. We'll talk about that in a bit. And the PC version, I guess the incentive is that, okay, you're going to have multiple input options, whether you want to play with keyboard or mouse, your own controller. You don't have to use whatever the console makes you use, et cetera. Hire graphical fidelity. We're talking 4K. People want to go up to 1440p. They probably want to run on cap frame rate. And they want to kill monsters in that environment. So if you got that incentive, you know, performance is a very important thing. You don't want to have to have the best system on the planet to enjoy the benefits of PC gaming. But there's some performance problems already with this early build. So this article points out, and this is kind of where my brain went, is that hopefully these will be fixed with a day one patch or day one graphics driver update, et cetera, et cetera. I'll tell you, just based on my experience, that's probably not going to help. Probably not going to happen. But anyway, Capcom, the reason why I'm talking about this story, they responded to these claims. They said, this is a quote from marketing William Yagi Bacon. Yes, that's his name, weighted on the subject saying, To eliminate interstitial loading during active gameplay, Monster Hunter World loads the entire level into memory. In addition to managing assets loading into memory, it keeps track of monster interactions, health status, environment object changes, manages LOD and object culling, calculates collision detection and physics simulation, and tons of other background telemetry stuff that you don't see yet require CPU cycle. This is in addition to supporting any GPU rendering tasks. While in the multi-threaded framework engine has been around for ages, it does a good job of distributing CPU cycles and load balancing tasks across all available cores and threads. The engine itself is optimized for x86 CPU instruction set. As highly scalable and loosely speaking is platform agnostic, regardless of PC or console platform, so as long as it confirms the x86 instruction set. Now, PopQuiz, do you remember any of that? No, I didn't think so. Basically saying that there's a bunch of CPU stuff going on and that they're probably going to try to improve and optimize it, but we're going to be stuck with what we got. That's kind of my takeaway from that. According to the article, Capcom recommends that you play with one of the Intel 8th generation Coffee Lake CPUs, the quad-core Intel Core i3-8350 to be precise, as they are much better at multitasking. They also mentioned the Ryzen 5 1500X. Rather than this year's Ryzen 5 2600X, they recommend the 1500X. Traditionally, AMD CPUs have a much better multitasking than Intel's processors due to having even more cores in their name, so AMDPs will find themselves better off in this respect compared to their Intel chums. This guy on the article says he'll do his best to back in with some testing to see how they compare. Again, this is opinion. This is not fact yet. So apparently, according to the quote, multi-threading may help that all the CPU stuff that they have to do, all the checks and balances, multi-threading may help, but I have my skeptical glasses on, and I'm going to say it probably is not going to help that much. Now, that's the article. That's the factual part. Let's get to my opinion about Monster Hunter. We've got another story about Monster Hunter as well. I hit a wall with Monster Hunter. I got tired of the fetch quest. I got tired of the footprint quest. I really got tired of the tutorial, and I really wanted to just hunt monsters. I was pushed by people, and this may have been my mistake, I was pushed by people who have gotten past the hump to say, I should really, really push past the story and get the story done, because that's when the game really opens up, and that's when I can really farm monsters in Monster Hunter World. I never got to that point. I got so sick of it. I was spending hours one Saturday night on my live stream. We basically had a night dedicated, it was Saturday night, dedicated to me and the community playing Monster Hunter and trying to make some progress. I was very, very jaded, and I was just mad, and I just didn't want to do it anymore. I got tired of running around the maps multiple times, looking for footprints. I was like, I didn't buy this game for this. I really didn't. And people told me, well, Bonny, maybe you'll like Monster Hunter Jelly Bean on the 3DS, and I'm like, I don't know what Monster Hunter Jelly Bean is. That's not the name. I'm just making up something. You know, and I just got tired of it. And ever since then, I've been playing Dauntless on PC, which is the exact opposite. Everything is hunting monsters, everything. So I was like, yes, this is what I wanted. So maybe a future Monster Hunter will be like that, or maybe there is one out there like that, that you guys will probably comment and let me know is the case. But I hit a wall and I just stopped playing it. So I don't plan on buying Monster Hunter World for PC and reading this article, given that the weakest component in my current system, given that I have an Intel Core i7 3770K, is that my CPU is going to be a huge bottleneck, a ginormous bottleneck. So I imagine I'm probably going to have to kick it down to 800 by 600 on low settings to even get 60 frames per second. Because the CPU is the bottleneck. I have a 1080 video card. So the GPU is only going to be able to do so much. If the CPU is the bottleneck, I am out of gas. The same is true for Final Fantasy XV. I'm even having trouble right now with No Man's Sky, even though I'm loving it. I'm CPU bound. My CPU pegs really, really, really quickly. So my system is quickly starting to age and I'm starting to feel like, I mean, I've had it for five years. So I mean, 2012 is when I bought the system. So it's six years now. Yeah. Yeah, it was 2012 when I got my current system, my current CPU. So it's going on six years. It's pretty old. So I'm not going to blame the game. My system is just old. But check the story out, guys. This is really close to launch. It's less than, what, seven days? No, eight days. It's August 9th. Eight days away and performance problems are being reported everywhere. Are they going to have time to address this? Are people just going to have to deal with it? Check it out, guys. Rock, paper, shotgun. They got the details over there. And for our next story, we're going to continue to talk about Monster Hunter World. And this one has to do with the in-game squads. Now, you may have just heard me talking about some of my complaints with Monster Hunter World, namely in the form of the questing that I had to do in the storyline. I didn't really enjoy it. Probably the next thing on my complaint list was the partying and the grouping on the PS4. It was clumsy. That's the best way I can think of. There was a lot of hurdles. And the thing that I consistently said was that it seems like this game is doing everything in its power to prevent me from playing with people I want to play with. That's what it felt like. It was just hurdle after hurdle. But it looks like they're trying to do some cooler things on the PC release. This article comes by wayofdestructoid.com is that they're going to be integrating Steam groups on PC. Now, the level of integration is not yet known, but what they're showing in this article is that you will represent your primary Steam group, which you can designate as an icon in-game. So when you log into a game, you're going to have a little icon next to your name, which is going to denote your primary Steam group. So if you're part of the All Things Buona Steam group, you can rock the smiley face of life and just put net out there. But anyway, you can actually go in the game according to this article ondestructoid.com and change which group you want to rep. That is really, really cool. So I got to imagine what other things they're going to be integrating with this. Are you going to be able to easily invite people from your Steam group to your game? Are they going to be able to join in you easily from your Steam group? I like the idea of that. I like the idea of going beyond this friends list of Steam because I don't like having to add a ton of people to my friends list, but I have an open Steam group that people can join and one of the things we used to do and one of the things, yes, I'm showing my age, is that I will join the group chat, the Steam group chat, and people will right click on my name and join my server. So I don't have to tell them the server, they just join the chat room, right click on my name and the server and then join the server. So if I were to play Monster Hunter on PC, which I'm not planning to, but if anybody else in my Steam group wanted to join on each other, if they have more and more of this tight integration with Steam groups on PC, that would be a win-win. That would probably alleviate a lot of my concerns with what they're doing with squads on the PS4. So check this story out guys, OverDestructory.com looks like they're doing some interesting stuff with Monster Hunter World and Steam integration. Now I gotta wonder, what about other platforms? Does Monster Hunter World only work on Steam? I haven't verified that, but it looks like if they have this kind of deep integration with the game of Steam, it probably will only work. I don't think they're gonna have a God version, a GOG version, or Origin Access version. I don't know what they're gonna have. Let's check it out guys. Over there in Destructoid, Monster Hunter World has some in-game squad stuff that's related to Steam groups. And for our next story, we're gonna talk about Valve, and they're a new card game that you may have heard of called Artifact. Artifact is a collectible card game. It's not a trading card game. So I don't think trading's gonna be allowed in it. Oh, actually it is. It's gonna be a TCG according to their press release, which is what I'm gonna talk about. It is going to be released on Windows, Mac, and Linux November 28th, 2018. That's the contents of this press release. And on mobile, Android iOS is gonna be in 2019. The price is going to be $20. I'm actually glad to hear, pardon me, it's glad to hear that it will have a price. Because a lot of these trading card games and collectible card games, they may be free to play, but then you end up having to buy all these card packs in order to compete if that's what you want to do in these types of games. Let me go ahead and read the press release. This is over on Reddit that I got a link to. Artifact, the digital card game from legendary designer Richard Garfield and Valve. Dota 2 and Steam. Richard Garfield is from Monster... I'm not Monster Hunter. Magic the Gathering. I've been talking about Monster Hunter too much. Magic the Gathering will be playable by attendees of this year's Packs West in Seattle, Washington, August 31st through September 3rd in the game's first public showing. Players will battle each other in a continuous single elimination gauntlet for the right to challenge a champion on the main stage. Everyone who plays will earn Artifact merchandise, including signed prints of artwork and two keys for free copies of the game when it is released. Targeted for release on Steam on November 28th, 2018, Artifact is designed to give trading card game enthusiasts the deepest gameplay and highest fidelity experience ever in a fantasy card game, offering more than 280 cards in the shipping set. Players will be able to buy and sell cards on the Steam Community Marketplace. So there you go. It's gonna have a price and you'll be able to trade, buy and sell cards on the Steam Community Marketplace for the dollars. For the Steam dollars, that is. Not the real dollars. Your money will be trapped on Steam, but there's always a black market. There always is. So, pretty cool. If you haven't seen this game, it's fairly unique. It looks incredibly difficult. You have three lanes of cards. Not traditional lanes like you see in other games out there, but they actually look like mobile lanes and the entire interface shifts when you move from lane to lane. And it's almost, you know, it's true to the Dota game where you go in, you destroy towers, and you have to ultimately kill your opponents. Basically, you have heroes, and you have creeps and all kinds of stuff. It's a well-thought-out game, and I'm hoping it succeeds. It could easily fall flat on its face. I'm not gonna lie. It's very complicated, very involved, and I don't know if the Dota crowd plays these types of games. I've seen some. Some of the streamers that I watch, they'll play games. They'll play card games like this. They'll play Hearthstone. They'll play Magic the Gathering. They'll play some of the other games that are out there. Shadow Realm? Shadow something. They'll play these other games out there. But Artifact, we got a release date in November. That's gonna be a busy time of the year, man. There's gonna be a lot of Call of Duty's and Battlefields, and the end of the year is really busy when it comes to new releases, and Artifact is gonna be right there with them. Check it out. The press release is on Reddit November 28th, and Mobile is gonna be 2019. That confirms the mobile release. I wasn't sure they were gonna do mobile, but now I am. Check it out, guys, over on Reddit. They got the details over there. And for our final story, we're gonna talk about Fortnite and just the landscape of just esports and video games today. You've probably heard of Ninja. Ninja is, as I heard on an outlet today, the most popular online gamer in the world. That carries a lot of weight. The most popular online gamer in the world. To the tune of 100,000 to 200,000 viewers every night that he streams. Millions, I think he's going on 15, I don't know how many, in the teens of millions of subscribers on YouTube. Untold amount of followers on Twitch. 100,000 to 200,000 subscribers on Twitch, which all of those people are paying him money. It's featured on CNN, talking about how much, or it was the CNBC or CNN, they were asking them, you know, how's it feel to be making millions of dollars as a gamer? Right now, video games is being seen as a legitimate profession. And some of that things can be attributed to him because he is projecting that into the limelight. The story I want to talk about now has to do with just the current generation of upcoming gamers. And this is an article on IGN that reads, parents are getting their kids Fortnite tutors. Now, before you laugh, before you laugh, you really have to analyze and think about this because even when I was growing up, you know, as a child, we looked up to athletes. You know, as an African-American youth, I looked up to basketball players and football players as being like career role models because a lot of them started with the same type of, you know, humble beginnings that I started with and they rose to the occasion and basically made it in this world because, you know, we looked at them as heroes, especially when you're like 8 to 12 years old, you're really young, you know, you're easily influenced by these people. You know, when I was growing up, I didn't really have a lot of access to, you know, successful businessmen that looked the same as me. I didn't see a lot of that or did the same things that I did. I did play a lot of video games, but I also played a lot of sports and I think that was my role model. So, if my parents were to come up to me and say, you know, we want to help nurture this, we want to get you some training, you know, some stuff like that in basketball, you know, I would have jumped all over it. I actually begged for a Michael Jordan tape which taught you basics. It was a Michael Jordan tutorial which was like teaching you how to shoot, how to dribble and stuff, how to do drills, and I begged my parents to buy it for me and they did. And, you know, at the time, I didn't really have serious basketball aspirations. Like I said, I was malleable. I was really, really considering, you know, this as a career because I, like I said, I didn't have access to see a lot of people who were successful in business or, you know, corporate world or in self-entrepreneurship was like unheard of. To me, a self-entrepreneur was a drug dealer when I was growing up. It's like, oh, he owns his own business, he's a drug dealer. You know, that's what I saw around me. That was in my neighborhood. So, just fast-forwarding to today, kids are seeing Ninja make half a million, million dollars easily playing video games. And this just so happens to be their hobby. They play video games. Okay, there's a lot of parents out there that want to nurture their kids' talents. They want to see their children succeed. You know, they may, you know, a lot of parents are strict about getting good grades, you know, with your good math and sciences, arts and sciences, I'm sorry, arts, writing, you know, language, good with your hands, vocational stuff, building, fixing things, whether it be parents are out to nurture their kids' talents and or hobbies. It doesn't surprise me that parents are going to be paying for their kids to get Fortnite tutors because today it is a legitimate and seemingly accessible career move. From a parental perspective, now I'm a live streamer, I'm pretty sure some of you, like Buona, don't tell me you think that too, that it's easy to do this. Of course not. Just like it's not easy to become a successful actor, become successful, anything in the entertainment industry is incredibly difficult. Athletes, same thing. I mean, you could be a high school star, you could be a college star, and then you just, everything just stops after that. You don't take that next step into the big time. The same is true here. It doesn't surprise me that parents are doing this. It doesn't surprise me, you know, because these parents are probably the same age as me. You know, they're probably around the same age as me. We grew up playing video games. We recognize that video games these days is in a lot better place than when they were when we were playing video games. You know, the best thing we had was Starcade, which was a TV game show where we watched people play video games and we used to scream at the TV because they didn't win that Commodore 64 because they didn't know how to play that stupid game that we knew how to play. These days, these kids got e-sports. They got tournaments. They got millions of dollars online by playing video games. Now, a lot of people want to, they want to dismiss this video games as being a legitimate sport. I personally don't care. People are doing things that are making money doing it. You know, like some people don't believe that live streaming and creating content is a job. People are creating content. They're creating live streams. They're making money doing it. So whether you want to call it a job or not is irrelevant. The money is being made and it can support your lifestyle. It can support your family if you have a family. So, you know, the semantics are kind of laughable at this point. But the game, I mean, Epic has contributed. They basically have committed to millions of dollars to give to e-sports players these days. So what parent out there, I mean, even when I was growing up, a lot of parents would dump money into their kids so they could possibly be a football star, be a basketball star, be a track star, you know, be a tennis star, be, you know, a chess star. I don't know. They might be playing chess. They might be doing debate club. I don't know. They might want to get into Harvard. They will invest in their children, especially if the kids want it. You got to think about that. I mean, some people look at these parents as being like mean and overbearing and stuff. A lot of these parents are just trying to nurture what the kids want. And there's a legitimate claim. Like I said, when I was growing up, it wasn't really there. Now there's a legitimate claim that, hey, you can make a living playing video games if you're really good at it. And not more, not just make a living, but you could be a millionaire by these examples. Of course, they're not going to be easy to get. But the opportunities are there and they're rising. Twitch is growing. YouTube is growing. Mixer is growing. This is only getting bigger. Last week, the Overwatch finals was on national television. You can't say that happened when we were kids, you know, 20, 30 years ago. Some of you weren't even born. I'm dating myself here. You can't say that, though. Like I said, we had StarCade. That was it. So check the story out, guys. I mean, the article itself doesn't have a whole lot in it, but I just looked at the title and it got me thinking about this whole, you know, esports craze, which some may say is getting worse. Some may say is declining because, you know, StarCraft II isn't as big as it used to be. CSGO is kind of on the decline. Call of Duty kind of fills it out a little bit. And I think some of the Tom Clancy, Rainbow Six stuff is starting to pick up a little bit. Fortnite is picking up. PUBG is picking up. And the Battle Royale craze. But when these guys die out, something else is going to pick up the slack because advertisers, not only technology advertisers, a lot of other advertisers are beginning to recognize that there are people with money in their pockets watching these kids play games. I mean, if you watch Ninja Stream for an hour, you will see hundreds, sometimes even thousands of dollars go the way into this guy's pocket watching him do this. And advertisers go, okay, they got that money. I'm going to stick my product in their face. Maybe they'll buy that. It's not a stupid idea. It's actually smart business. So while we can laugh at this, you see this article headline. You can laugh at it. Sit back, analyze it, and think about it. It makes a lot of sense. Now, if I had a child, would I give them a Fortnite tutor? You know, if they didn't ask for it, I probably wouldn't. That's just me. That's something that if I were doing it, they would have to ask or beg, and I'd have to see the potential. Because I know I could see potential. I could see people playing Fortnite. I know if they got the stuff or not. But it definitely is something that you would consider, especially if your child wants it. Now, by the time you guys listen to this half-kiss, there may be a different game out there. There may be a different type of e-sports thing. Blizzard is doing a great job of legitimizing e-sports. They are taking e-sports to the professional level that we have never seen before. They are taking it to levels toward NBA and NFL and the baseball, hockey, NHL. All these people are taking this stuff to the professional level with agents and contracts and benefits and salaries. They are taking it to that level and they are taking it to a format to where it's acceptable by people who play and watch other sports like basketball, football, hockey, and baseball. So that's paving the way for other people and other outlets and other video games out there to do the same thing. So by the time you guys have kids, or if you have kids now, by the time they grow up, a lot of the work will have been done and you may be heavily, heavily considering giving you kids some tutoring and some video games. Giving them some lessons, some video games. Something to think about. Check it out, guys. Overonign.com, they got the details. Parents are getting their kids Fortnite tutors. Is it crazy or not? Let me know in the chat. Wait, we're not chatting. Let me know in the comments. Tommy. And that concludes episode 128 of Game Chat 1. I want to thank you all for listening today. Please, please, if you can, follow me on Twitter. Twitter.com. I post my musings about what's going on in the life of Casa de Buona also. I post it when I go live on my Twitch stream at twitch.tv. We stream every day except Wednesdays and Sundays at 4 p.m. now. Brand new schedule, 4 p.m. Been playing a lot of No Man's Sky. We promise, I promise, that I was going to be playing some more single player games like Zelda, Breath of the Wild, and also some Horizon Zero Dawn. But No Man's Sky got that addiction factor going on. YouTube.com. That's where I post videos. I've been posting regularly this show and the occasional video on Wednesdays once a week. And I want to announce now that we're definitely going to be pumping more promotion into our Patreon. We have a Patreon at Patreon.com. It's been there with $1 to $5, $1, $5, $10, and $20 pledges. We've recently increased the pledges to account for, I think, $50 and $100 if people want to give more. I used to use a site called Gamewisp in conjunction with my Twitch stream to kind of do the same. We're going to be using Patreon solely now. We're going to be sunsetting Gamewisp and going over to Patreon. So you're going to be hearing a lot more about Patreon. I'm going to be updating my bumpers on my videos. This one won't have it. But I'll be updating my bumpers with thanks to all the patrons and trying to get their names on there. And we're going to be having regular posts, regular newsletters on the Patreon page for the patrons. Also, we have special discord stuff for those guys as well. We're not going to be doing some of the special incentives that some of the other channels do. We're going to keep it simple because I don't want to promise things that I cannot deliver. But I do want to give you things that I, that, you know, fit within a realm of cast that they've twitched at television slash moana.tv slash uq.com slash twitter.com slash moana. All that. Instagram.com slash moana. All right, guys, you have a great, great week. I'll see you all same time, same station next Wednesday for another fun-filled episode of Game Chat. We want to have a good one. Take care, guys.