 Hello everyone and welcome back to enter the ether or the podcast all about the very ambitious upcoming third person mobile ethereal clash of souls. We have a lot to talk about this week. Fortunately, I have the best in the business when it comes to talking about this stuff. It's my friend and cohost jelly knees. How you doing jelly? I'm good man. I'm happy to be here and ambitious is like an understatement with all the things that we've learned recently. Yes, just a holy crap season with a touch of humility, which I like. They did say that they're willing to back off on some of these things if they don't quite work out, which I think is important for them. They need to they need to back off on some of this. They're going a little too wild. I think the main thing that I feel like they can't back out of at this point is the classes, right? Everything else that we've talked about and what we will talk about today, I'd be like, OK, if it doesn't work, it was a cool attempt, but it's OK, right? The classes are the one thing that I'm like, please, this has to work. This has to be the thing. The classes in the in the map, I think that's I think that's the main draw for ethereal is the vertically tiered map. Their their lanes are stacked one atop each other. I don't know if I can really indicate that with my hands. OK, so as jelly figured out and theorized, they did have phase two for their website, which at first. Not that impressive. Like when it first came out, jelly and I were talking about like, what is this? Like, it was kind of our fault because we'd hyped it up so much in our heads. And they never said that it was going to be like big blowout thing. But when it came out, a lot of us were a bit let down. However, as they've added more to this phase to like, this is an ongoing phase. It's gotten to be a far more impressive. And they've released a lot of new information about the game. So we're going to dig into it this week. Jelly, before we do that, before we do that, the podcast is now officially a podcast instead of a vodcast. Oh, yes. And we're on currently Spotify and Stitcher are all the episodes. And then we are applied for Apple, Google, everything else under the sun that we're just waiting to hear back before we get on to those podcast areas as well. So if you want to listen to it, if you're in the car or something like that, you're going to be able to do so from now on out. You don't have to look at our dumb faces. You can follow your laundry and listen to the latest ethereal news. So in we'll have links to what we have currently available. So Stitcher and Spotify in the description this week. So if you then you can get that going forward, follow it, do all the listens, downloads, clicks, I don't know what podcast terms are. So those things. And yeah, so let's now now this week we can actually do the official thing. Indeed. All right. So the phase two at first, what it was, it was just kind of additions to they have their in their discord, they have the development fun facts. And it was stuff that was just kind of adding onto the development fun facts. But as we've gone along, there's been a lot more information come out in this phase two of the website. So if you go to the undyinggames.com website and then you click on the arrow at the top right hand corner, it'll take you to phase two. And there's these blog posts that are very reminiscent of what you would find in like a Kickstarter campaign. If you go through and look at like the various things that they're they're saying that they're going to bring. And so let's let's start with the first one, which was November 13th, two thousand twenty, which addresses addresses, special abilities, something we've already talked about, which is the right click abilities for each hero. We'll have a how would you call it, Jelly? Pros and cons, I guess, is probably the easiest way to put it is a benefit and downside. I mean, like you said, we talked about it a little bit. The big thing that they did on the website for this post is they gave some like hypotheticals of what abilities like this could be for the both the pro side and the cons. And they gave I'm just recounting now to make sure I'm not an idiot. But they gave one I maybe I am an idiot one, two, three, four, five. They gave five examples of pros and five examples of cons. So in my mind, these are actual abilities of some kind that we might be able to tie two myths that are that will be in the pre alpha or come out in the future. Yeah. And some of the benefits include movement speed, more damage, additional gold decrease, cool down on abilities and more. What? Don't touch that dial. Yeah. And then the cons, whereas it cons will decrease your movement speed, blind yourself in place, allow increased damage from other sources or apply extra resources to cast your abilities. So to me, it seems like those all tie to each other one to one. Yeah, that really does seem that way. One thing that I thought of immediately when I read this post when it said blind yourself in place was Richter, as you guys all know from Paragon, I was a huge Richter fan, love playing Richter. And that was one of the drawbacks of using his ultimate ability is you would just root yourself in place while it was going off and people could just tee off on you. That's a pretty big drawback. So whatever they make, whatever the the benefit, the upside to using that ability is better be pretty strong. I completely agree. And it's so for that one in particular, I feel like we're I'm getting Noxus vibes that that's going to be Noxus's right click. I don't know someone. What makes you say that? It's the blind yourself in place because she's blind. Not not necessarily that, but yes, at the same time, because it's when you're when you're blinded, you can't see, you can still move. Whereas she's already blind and she uses the light around her to be able to see and move. So if she doesn't, if she loses access to that for some reason, then she wouldn't know how to move kind of deal. I don't know. Could be a complete long shot on that one, but. That's you jelly all over with the tin foil hat conspiracies. They need to make a tin foil Noxus where she's got a tin foil hat covering her eyes. That's what they need. Perfect. The one I think is really interesting is the do more damage and then allow increased damage from other sources. Yeah, it reminds me of what was that card in Paragon where it would increase your damage, but it also increased damage taken and would do it in like an AoE around you. Yeah, I don't remember the name of the card specifically, but I know I remember its existence. And that's what it sounds like. That's strong. And I wonder if that's more of a consistent effect, like it's a toggleable passive that I turn it on, I do more damage and take more damage and then can just turn it off whenever. Or if that's a actual ability that only lasts a certain amount of time would be my curiosity, because if it's a toggle, the best player for whoever that is is going to be the person that can toggle it on and off in perfect sync with their abilities to get the most effectiveness out of it while taking the least damage during the process. Yeah, if you got stunned while that was toggled on. I screwed you be screwed. I just imagine if it's visual, too, that you can see it's toggled on, you just like a nabash stun, just throw it at him, be like, you're dead. Sorry, like. Bye-bye. Just the stun itself would hurt. And additional gold is an interesting. Advantage or disadvantage. We've seen that in Paragon with Revenant. Yeah, that if you kill and I'm curious if this applies to all income sources or just myths or just minions or what, but just additional gold when you use the ability or all the time, like it's just. Yeah, I don't know. It's this plot implies a whole lot of interesting mechanics that they might be able to do or even other it opens the door like we were saying before when we were talking about the right mouse button abilities is that once we have an idea of where they're going with the pros and cons, it'll open up a lot more of what we can expect from those abilities. And this spectrum kind of covers it all. That like there's no ground that they're not willing to go to for one of these right clicks pros and pros and or cons. Right. I didn't even think of additional gold from like minions or something. I just my mind immediately went to Revenant when I saw that and that's what I thought of. But yeah, you're right. It could be just gold from all sources that you get an extra gold per minion you kill or something or when you kill with this ability on minions, you get 10 gold, whatever it may be and a little bit of gold goes a long way. So it's it's going to be very interesting to see how that ties into everything else. Yeah. You ready to move on to the next post? Absolutely. Next post was about skins and it was kind of just talking about a lot of the stuff that we already knew about skins that even their tier one skins will be transformative to a degree. However, they did include a picture which had quite a few skins that we have not yet seen. And a lot of them are really cool. Jelly, what do you think? I think these are incredible. The one I have the most concern about is the Dante skin, but I feel like that's because all we can see is his hood. That's the like I want to see the rest of it like what's what's missing that I can't see in the rest of the art. Yeah. It just looks like his base skin doesn't it? Yeah, a little bit. But the other six incredible. I mean, you called it with Egyptian Leah. And that that skin looks amazing. But even Talos has got like hardcore monster hunter vibes going with the extra horns everywhere in the fur and everything. Yeah. Yeah. Cyberpunk Malaya we already knew was a thing, but it just looks amazing. I like I'll never get over how good that skin looks. Marina skin changes up a lot of her outfit and the coloring of it and it looks really good. Like I just think it ties together really well. Talos just looks like a demonic creature from hell that I love. Like it's just I'm ready. I'm running at me in a lane. I'm stoked. You mean Iran like his curled horns and stuff. Yeah. Sorry. Not Talos again. And then Noxus, I got my dream. I got the dark skinned Noxus. Yeah. It just looks so clean. I just love it. So I called it on Egyptian Leah and you called it on a dark Noxus, which is pretty cool. I think the one that I'm impressed most by is Marina. Not because of any normal mangoes reasons. I just think it looks really good. I like the red hair on her. I like it's kind of a succubus sort of feel to it. I really like that. I really like the that skin for Marina. What's your favorite skin about out of all of these here? I have to go with Egyptian Leah. Yeah. Yeah, I just I look at that. I'm just like that. I'll buy that second one second in. I'll be like, yep, that's the skin I want. Like I don't know what it is about a base skin, right? It does. It absolutely does. And it gives me spite vibes a little bit just because that's because the Egyptian theme. But I just love the way it looks her there. Her whole style there. It just looks incredible. It's something else to talk about with this. So as you see in the picture that I have a bit right now, you see that there's these strange runes at the bottom. We have deciphered a lot of those runes between jelly and I. And you've been working with somebody in the discord. Who is it? Who was that jelly? I can't. That was Young Boomer. I think he changed his name to Torquey recently. So I don't know what he's going by right now, but that's who was working with me on it. Yeah. So we've been deciphering these runes. We figured out quite a bit. So like we can tell you right now that those runes right now say cosmetic. And that's kind of what what the starting point was. I haven't contributed much to this. All I contributed was I figured out that this was cosmetic. And the jelly and Young Boomer went from there and like the cyber and everything. We went hard. I mean, the only letters we're missing right now are B as in Boyd, D is in David, F is in Frank, J is in Jelly, K is in King. I almost said Castle. V is in Victor, W as in Winnebago, X is in X-ray, and Z, Zebra for all you or Zed. Sorry. I should say Zed for all the non Americans in the world. Those are the only letters we're missing. We have everything else figured out based on this image and then a couple other images. And Young Boomer and I went back to the extra life play through and around the towers. There is the same like lettering around it and we went through and grabbed screenshots of those and deciphered the wording around that, which let me pull it up really quickly. The towers around the towers, it says nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. And we believe that that loops twice. Nice. That is amazing that you guys went that far in depth and figured all that out. It took a while to find like a good shot of the towers that we could actually decipher what the letters were going around. Yeah, I was going to try and help you guys with that, but I couldn't find a good shot of the towers. I was like, I figured the cosmetic thing out. I'm done. You guys take it from there. If I know jelly knees, he'll figure it out. It's fine. Exactly. Exactly. So let's move on to the next post, which is the minions. And we talked a little bit about this last week, but like I said, they the fun fact little teasers tell us a little bit of info. These blog posts on the phase two of their website tell us a lot more. So jelly, why don't you tell the folks about the minions? So I was completely wrong. I'll admit it. Uh, these, the minions will actually have classes because I didn't think that was the case at all. Um, the minions will have each, there'll be eight minions, right? I'm not crazy. One for each class and the plan is that when it all comes to fruition, the minions will all have a special ability based on their class of some kind. They didn't go into any detail about what that ability would be. Um, but the standard minion wave will be a night minion, a cleric minion, a reaper, an archmage and two marksman minions. So three melee, three ranged and that'll be your wave of minions. Every three waves, I believe is what they said will have a Berserker minion that comes through kind of like your siege minion. And then when you destroy the inhibitor or Phoenix, depending on what they're going to call it, you will spawn sky slayer minions into your lane, which sounds incredible and terrifying at the same time. What was your thought on the minions? The way, the way it was stated, the sky slayer minions, it won't actually be sky slayer minions. It'll be the regular minions, but they'll have a sky slayer buff. So they'll hover off the ground a little bit, which will give them increased movement speed and damage, I think. Uh, yeah, it does the increased damage. Yeah. So it's not actually a sky slayer minion. It's just the regular minions that are already there. They just happen to be hovering in the air, which will make them a lot stronger. So really cool stuff. And this, um, I must say that this is where we were talking about before. They did say that if this doesn't work, if this is way too hard to balance, they're willing to just drop it. And I'm really happy to hear that. I would hate them to try and force this to the degree that it's just broken. And I can see this getting out of hand real frickin fast. Absolutely. Like it would just be who could take the tower the fastest to get those sky slayer minions and then just jam those up a lane. I can see that happening so fast. Absolutely. And I think this, at least on my end shows a different side to a theory that we didn't see towards the end of Paragon's life. That if something wasn't working, they're not going to just keep shoving it down our throats. They're willing to make changes and make the game better because of it. Like it's a cool thing, but if it doesn't work, it's not the basis that the game is going to be built on and what they want the game to be built on. But I agree with you. The balancing of now just minions by themselves, each having their own ability, each getting a sky slayer buff, the, like the different classes is going to be a nightmare, I'd imagine. I don't envy anybody that's balancing those minions because that would be insane. And just creating all those extra animations and every an extra models and everything has got to be very taxing on the team. I can just imagine that we'll get into game initially and Berserker minion spawn and they come up in just one shot somebody. It's like, nope, nope. Too strong. Way back. I do like that. So a Berserker minion, I guess, would spawn towards the front of the wave as opposed to the back of the wave, which is what you normally see from a siege type minion. That would make sense because it's not ranged, I wouldn't imagine. Right. But I know we could have ranged Berserkers, I guess it depends. Part of this is it all depends on their abilities. Yeah. You would assume based on the fact that they're called the same as the class that the ability would tie somehow into the same thing as the class ability. But who knows, it could be anything. I was really curious if they do, if they make the cleric minion have some kind of heal for the wave. That could be a really interesting thing that your minions have a healer that you can destroy the healer and now it's going to be easier to push that wave in in comparison to trying to keep them up and pick them off last. You could set a slow push by simply killing the cleric minion and that's it and then leave that lane. Yeah. That's very interesting. I never thought of that. Or I mean you could also set a slow push by killing the front minions, leaving the cleric up so that he can heal the or he or she, whatever the hell it is. Just build a giant wave and crash down town. Yeah. Absolutely. I feel like the wave with this wave management is going to be a huge thing that if you know how to manage your waves well, then you could dominate games with just that. And wave management is a very important part of Mopas that I think is missing from a lot of the Paragon remakes right now. And I really want to see it come back. And with this, I think it really can. But I'm also happy that they're willing to just drop this if it doesn't work because it can pick and very well not work. Absolutely. I like to see that flexibility. And then the image on this one that hopefully Mangus has been so kind to put above us has that same writing underneath that says protect in their own language, whatever you want to call it. I kind of want to call it just a therian in a therian. It says protect, which I mean for the minions is I think a good word to put there. And it gave us puzzle pieces. Yeah, which is nice. It was really that image that kind of solidified like figuring out almost the entire alphabet. Once we had enough letters, we could piece words together being like, OK, only two letters are missing here. The word must be nothing. Like here we go. And it was so much fun, but it was also so ridiculous at the same time. When they were releasing all this, I mean, I was in the discord like every 10 minutes, found a new word. Like here we go. And I like in the discord, they were like, oh, you guys think you figured it out. I'm like, yeah, that's what they're saying like in the discord, but like in reality, they're like, holy shit, these guys figured it out this fast. They're like, OK, jelly, someone needs to put a leash on jelly. This is not. Nope. You can't do this. They finally acknowledged it. They're like, oh, OK. You guys got it. OK. And so the next thing for the blog post that is just as big as the minions, in my opinion, is the item system, which this is really the first time, other than hearing how many items and that there'll be actives and passives. This is really the first time we've gotten actual information about ethereals item system. And so this is the one for me that I was most excited to read because I was like, OK, this is this is the basis of your game more than anything else. How is this going to work? And they I mean, they've done an incredible job and I'll let I'll let you explain it, man. Goose. OK, so if you look at this image, you see a one, two, three, four. Those are obviously active slots because they have potions tied to them. However, you also see seven other slots. So those are seven slots for equipment and you have four slots just for active. So you don't have to take up an equipment slot with your potions or your wards and all that sort of thing. And then the one thing that they mentioned in here is boots. And if you guys have ever watched my channel for any length of time, you know that I hate boots in MOBAs because if you're going to give if everybody's going to take boots and just make that movement speed, you know, just standard across the board. If everybody's already going to take those boots, the boots anyway, they've solved this problem by having the boots be a seventh slot that is free to use and only four boots, it seems. And so, yeah, so not so it is kind of standard all across the board, like the movement speed, but you still like a lot of the argument against that is that a lot of times you pick different boots according to your class that are better for you. So you still get to do that, but everybody still gets the movement speed so they can balance the map around movement speed from boots while still having extra stuff from the boots. Amazing. This is an absolutely great solution to the problem. I messaged Owen. I was like, hey, man, this is a really creative and great solution to the boot problem. And that's not it. Jelly, there's even more. There's even more of this item system. There's different types of items. You want to speak more to that? Yeah. So the system itself is going to be a tiered item system that the tier ones will be your cheapest, weakest items, and then your tier threes will be your biggest and best. And your tier ones will build into tier twos and then build those will build into tier threes. So kind of your standard build layout in the MOBA genre. But the crazy thing, they said they're going to have gauntlets, gauntlets, charms, guns, marks, masks, rings, and sides as a few of the item trees featured in the game. So everything in that tree will be whatever that tree is about. If it's a mask, all tiers will have mask items, which is an interesting progression because you see in other MOBAs, for instance League, just being the one I play the most, you're building the attack speed sword, but you put two bow items into it. And so it's this weird, like if you think about it, you're like, how do two bows equal a sword? I just, I'm not figuring this out here. Whereas this combats that problem entirely and just is like, nope, they're all swords. Like just across the board, your attack speed sword is just a sword all the way through that just has other stats, passives, actives, and a look to it, which incredible. I think this is a great design. I echo your point about the boots. I think that's a whole new level of innovation for the genre that you still get the stat changes, you still get the passives that probably apply, but you also get the movement speed without having to make it standard to just every character across the board. And it's something they can tweak accordingly. And I just think all around such a great choice for this game and in general. There's also going to be jungler and support specific items that anyone can build. You don't have to be in that role to build them, but that's kind of the intended role for these items. So the marks and masks are created in order to be items for junglers and supports in their role. And I think that that's a great thing. I imagine that the jungler items will be something like an execute or a smite for the jungle minions, potentially buffs of some kind or a way to get buffs from these minions. Support items I would imagine are the boards or some kind of vision access and extra gold for supports since they're not going to be getting the items or the main gold from minions from their carry lane. But honestly, they could be anything. They've said that they're not going to restrict them to the jungler role or the support role. So it could be anything, honestly. I'm stoked as a jungle main myself. I love this idea. I think it's great. And I just can't wait to see it. And as a support main, I concur. This is one of the really good things we've seen come come out of a lot of the Paragon remakes is they've really come up with creative ways to help supports and junglers. And apparently Undyne Games has learned from this and they're applying that to their own system, which I'm really happy to see supports just get shit on as far as economy. Like you can never build your full build as a support because you just aren't gaining as much gold as the other classes. And then junglers, the smite, they always have to waste something, waste an item slot on a smite to help them clear the jungle. So really great ideas all around. I really like their ideas for the item system. Absolutely. And I can't wait to see the whole, they mentioned in the discord that the unique passives and actives for these items. So I should say you can't build multiple of the same item or you can build multiple of the same item. You can't stack their passives if they're unique. So that's pretty standard across the MOBA genre. But they also said that the unique passives and actives are going to be so strong, useful, whatever you want to put here that you won't need to stack multiple, even if you wanted to. Like it's going to be that interesting and unique and dynamic that I can't wait for that because that's it should feel meaningful to make my item purchase more than just a stat change. Yeah. If I'm purchasing an item for the passive, I want that passive to be I'm like, oh, that passive definitely did something there rather than just like I did 32 extra damage. Yay. And it creates interesting builds that are personalized to how you want to play too. Absolutely. Really good stuff all around. All right. I think that covers everything. Do you have anything more to say on the Phase 2 or or on the language that they speak or anything like that? This one, the item image says equipment and was kind of the definite final puzzle piece to solidifying all the things that we thought we knew prior to this. But incredible. These updates were really nice to see more in-depth versions of everything they do. So they will update the fun facts on the Discord Friday. It seems like Friday mornings and then they update the blog post with the more in-depth version on Friday afternoon. So they kind of give you half a day of like, what does this mean? What could this possibly do? And then answer your questions later. Maybe not fully answer them, but they give a lot more information at least. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. I think that's going to do it for this week. Jelly, you got anything to plug? Are you going to do a video on any of this stuff? I was kind of thinking about doing one myself. I will probably do an individual video on all of these things. I was debating that today, actually. So I'll have those out over the next couple of days kind of going as in-depth as possible about each of these things. And of course, putting on my tin foil hat for some theorizing as the jelly knees does. But that's about it. Podcast actual podcast locations Spotify, Stitcher at the moment. More to come. Yeah. Please take a look and subscribe or whatever you do with podcasts. We barely know how the YouTube part works, let alone trying to be like, podcast download, listen whatever. And then yeah, I might do a video about this stuff. I'm still not sure. I've been pretty busy. But I do want, if you guys have any interest in Kings Hunt, I did a excuse me. I did a complete breakdown of Kings Hunt recently. If you guys want to check that video out. But yeah, I think that about wraps it up. Unless you got anything else, jelly. Nothing comes to mind. All right. I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. There was a lot of information that we covered. A lot of very interesting things coming out of ethereal. The hype train is still rolling along and we hope that all of you join us as we finally enter the ether for now. This is jelly and the man who's setting off you guys. Have a good one. The best outro yet. Right. Mangoo's