 everyone and welcome back to enter the ether of the weekly podcast all about the upcoming third person mobile ethereal clash of souls i'm your host the man goose joining me as always it might be jellies it might be an imposter kind of sauce how you doing jelly i'm great man goose happy to be here man even if i am kind of us how you doing i am doing great uh this week um we're gonna talk talk of course about the iran spotlight that recently came out then uh we have a little bit of a sad news one of the members of the ethereal team is leaving to start their own project and uh then we're going to talk about something that people have complained about more than i think anything else in the spotlights which are the animations so we're gonna that's going to be our topic for discussion for tonight so let's start off with the iran thing uh jelly knees what do you have to say about the iran spotlight i think iran fell into a very similar boat for me as talos did kind of a like a myth that i was like yeah like he's really cool looking right it'll be fun to play him when i do play him but he's not somebody that i'm overly excited for and then seeing his spotlight i'm going like no like i'm going to play this person a considerable amount like this this is going to be absolutely so much fun to play just with his abilities and the interactions and all the weird little details in there i'm so i'm super stoked about it and i really enjoyed the spotlight overall yeah his kit looks super interesting just i think the thing that captures iran the most is just running at somebody picking them up and then choke slamming their ass like there's some wwe shit right there and i absolutely love it it really fits it okay the pronunciation of shit is it was going to get to me though is it iran i think you're supposed to erin aronson that's his name from now on erin aronson but yeah his kit really cool um i as far as his animations go i didn't see i didn't have a problem with any of iran's animations this time around and uh really like the particle effects too for his whenever he gets a soul stack yeah that's any and that really stuck out to me was the the effect of like seeing the soul burn off of the minion was i think a really cool effect and seeing that as well when he uses his right mouse button ability you see a blue version of that same effect triggering the fear right as a visual cue so the thing i love about that in particular is that as an enemy i can see iran across the lane from me and see that blue visual cue and know that for the next couple seconds he can hear me if he gets close so i love seeing that there's there's visual feedback of like okay he actively used that ability now i know for however long it's going to last i need to avoid him or be prepared to get feared in some way are there kit similarities between iran and any buddy in games that you play i know you play legal legends and i don't i think the only real kit similarity with for iran is the uh the soul siphon kind of for health i feel like that's a trope in almost every moba that there's at least one character that has some very similar ability to that severog in paragon uh scion in league there's there's a whole bunch that i feel like all kind of have that similar feeling but otherwise i guess his ultimate as well kind of the getting larger and dealing damage in an aoe around him yeah that's i would say that's a generic isn't the right word but that's the only word i can think of um but the rest of his kit i think is really interesting and if he reminds me of anybody it would be diablo from heroes of the storm because diablo is a you know fiery demon everybody knows who diablo is from uh from the game diablo but yeah it he has a soul sacking mechanic kind of like that where it increases his health however he loses his stacks if he dies but he and he also has like a grab and suplex but his it's only like they have to be in range and he just tosses him over like behind him it's always in the same direction you don't get to pick where you throw them and they don't go nearly as far it's just a kind of a melee move and he also has one of his ultimates is called apocalypse but and that's that so you mentioned the grab and throw ability for iran that ability is going to make or break his viability i really i truly believe it that by itself he could do a lot of damage with his other abilities or just be a tank on the side and he'd be just okay but that ability sets him apart that because he can grab somebody and toss them off the edge somewhere and they enter an in combat state that means when they hit the ground if you're throwing them to another lane when they hit the ground they're going to take damage potentially enough to kill them and or you can throw them off the other side and they'll just die right like that's insane you never go against it's one of those things you never go against in iran near the edge of a lane because you're almost likely going to die 100 of the time if he can land it because i imagine it's going to be a lot like um rineheart's charge and overwatch where like when you charge forward you're like you have increased speed but it's a little hard to turn and you know if you if you're good with it you can slam into somebody you know people are going people to have moving abilities they will be able to dodge out of the way of this yeah and so we have like a good chunk of people watching the spotlight with us in my discord man goose and kai and burb from the ug team showed up and we're answering a bunch of questions that we were having about the spotlight and how ron's abilities are going to work and they said that his turn in the spotlight is more mobile than it will be on release okay so in the spotlight he does almost like a 180 turn granted over distance but almost a 180 and they said that it's going to be harder to pull that off in the actual so i imagine it really will be a lot like rineheart's charge then because and that's you can land it but it's it's it's a little difficult and they they answered i mean a bunch of things that we had that you can use his uh torment ability and then his charge and it'll fear people and then if you manage to grab somebody even through that fear you then are able to continue with that because we were talking about that being like his primary combo of fearing the enemy team but grabbing one person and just yeeting them somewhere else it yeah it's that might that might make it easier to land that ability too because if you know kind of where they're going to run to if you fear them so if you run into to them fearing them um they're not going to be able to dodge because they're feared and then you can just grab and pick them up that's uh what i want to know this this would be so cool if it's possible since he's a berserker and berserkers ability is they can damage terrain they can break terrain can you charge bust through like a rock or a fucking tree or something and then grab somebody on the other side because i'm i'm said from the very beginning that's going to be a kool-aid gank when you bust through something and in surprise somebody but if that would be a true kool-aid gank like you boom right oh grab them oh it'd be so satisfying to land too because you're essentially going in blind because if the bust through the wall oh i really hope that's an interaction now i really do if you could do that that should just be their game trailer like this is what you could do in our game if people would be like i'm playing that and then we need a kool-aid man's skin for aran 100 percent for like trademark reasons unless we go the whole smite route with that um but they definitely need like a like red liquid aran skin like red liquid something very clearly a ripoff but is not quite infringing on the trademark i think it might be easier to make a kool-aid man's skin for grog dark but oh man and then we need to go back to berserker too right oh yeah because that's too close we gotta like have like just something just similar enough oh god if we could get um claire's voice line where she said blood and viscera my favorite to have that be the kool-aid gank voice line for her boom blood and viscera my favorite oh my god yes i'm so down for this it's great ug we're taking a 10 cut of all sales on the kool-aid man aran skin sorry what the malaya body pillows we want to cut of that we want this kool-aid aran skin we can and we're gonna do our custom lego gig so across the board we're just gonna be set mangoes oh yeah oh yeah oh my goodness oh i think that that's all i had to say about erin erinson what would you have do everything else the uh thing we also saw the marksman minion in the spotlight yes which was cool to see and the obelisk which i'm not going to get into um but the skin for aran i think we're looked really good i didn't think we got a good enough to look at it personally say that again i didn't think we got a good enough look at it personally i wish i i don't know what happened between the first spotlight and the rest of them but the first spotlight we got the same like intro spin around the model we got that of daunte's skin as well and we haven't had that for any of the others since malaya's right just during the back animation callous was just during the back animation um and aran's was just during the back animation i wish i was full scale render spin around the model like we did with daunte i wonder if that was just a happy accident with daunte like they forgot to put his skin on for the back animation so they just slap that on the end maybe but they had always intended to always have the back animations with their skin because that's a common thing that games do is that they highlight the skin during that back animation portion of the spotlight but yes i really wish that they would go back to doing that with each and every myth that gets released so we could get a better look i really would have loved to see um malaya's uh cyberpunk skin because like that one we've seen like some we haven't seen enough of that skin that's not that's that's that's all i'm saying i really love that skin i would love to see see it on her model like in the 3d view like we saw with daunte yeah absolutely and something they mentioned i think it was on my video for tallos is that his axe during the back animation is not the correct axe that it's all really to be his skin his actual his crimson skin whatever it's called i can't think of the name suddenly um but the the crimson tallo skin actually has a different axe but the one that was in the spotlight wasn't the correct one so that will be different uh it when the game actually releases all right all right yeah other than that i think this was a good spotlight and yeah all right so let's move on now um as we mentioned before there's one of the members tweeted out that they were going to be leaving the team and starting their own game and that is tricolor star the um their sound engineer so jelly what do you know about this so i was honestly just perusing twitter the other day and i follow try on twitter and i've seen that he's been working on creating his own game and producing all of the things they're in has been looking for people for that and i just saw a message from him saying that he's going to be stepping down from ethereal in the coming months kind of slowly leaning off the project and that broke my heart to uh to an extent right it was kind of like he's done so much good work for it it was kind of like no no i need you to just stay please like i just want more good work not that i think they're going to do bad work in the future by any stretch but it's the we know what we're going to get from try we don't know what we're going to get from other people and so it's right it's that kind of fear of the unknown i guess that sticks out to me yeah um from from what we've been told though try has already done like work like we all know tries freaking work ethic he's a mad man he works his ass off apparently he's done myths that we don't even know about like he's already engineered the sound for a lot of these myths so it's not like they're losing out on a lot and it's not like this is something that's going to delay them any it it's just kind of sad to see try go because he's such a character he's such a fun dude and it's just really nice to interact with him so um i wish him the best on his game i wish i knew more about the game uh didi knows something didi i was talking to her during her stream the other night she knows something but she wouldn't tell me which yeah absolutely no there's no hard feelings from what i talked with the ug team and and from what i've seen from try it doesn't seem like there's any hard feelings in the separation in any way shape or form it's just try kind of going off to do what he's always wanted to do so godspeed to him wish him nothing but the best it's just kind of sad to see him leaving the project that we care about you know yeah oh well um yeah i will definitely be tracking and checking out try his game that'll be uh that'll be cool that'd be a fun thing to to do so uh i think that's about it for that so let's move into the biggest problem that people have you see it and after every or even after or during every single one of these myth spotlights and that is the animations people don't like a lot of the animations and um a common thing you see is that they're not triple a quality they're they're good enough for now but they need to be improved um i could definitely see that with some of the animations i don't think that all of them are up to par i think i think some of them are really good i thought malaya's basic attacks were really good i thought iran's basic attacks were really good i thought tellus his ultimate was great where he flips through the air but um yeah that's there's a lot to be said here jelly what what what what do you have to say i think so like you kind of hit the nail on the head that it's not triple a quality but it's good enough for now but it definitely needs to be better heading towards a full release right coming out with the pre alpha and whatever stages they have thereafter beta early access whatever they decide to do there there needs to be improvements along the way of that toward that end and they used to have a mo cap studio to do a lot of this stuff and it was broken into and they lost a lot of their stuff two years ago now if i remember correctly yeah it was 2019 the columbia riots in march of 2019 i believe so almost a little just barely over two years ago yeah um but so it's i hope they go back to doing more motion capture in the future because if they're hand animating all of this now that's hard and that takes so long to make look smooth and any of those details to get feeling really good a hand animation is going to be insane so i really hope they go back to the mo cap route once they secure more funding via the kickstarter whatever they're going to do and are able to afford that equipment and do all of that and i think if they do go that route that those animations will improve very quickly over the course of early access to full release yeah i believe that they were really they were really counting on that mo cap like they hadn't really looked into hand animators the way they had looked into other other parts of the game they because they were really relying on having that mo cap studio to do all their animations and um they even tried after after their their studio in columbia got broken into and smashed up uh they tried to go uh some college i forget which one it was but when they actually saw the mo cap studio it was like it was like four feet high or something it was like tiny i'm like maybe they could do nickolai they'd get a little kid to do nickolai's animations but yeah you can't do full character animations with something like that so that yeah they ended up having to go with hand animation so if the hand and the quality of the animations i think i think it's good i think they're doing a great job i really don't want to shed on anybody that's been doing the hand animations for them but they definitely started way behind like they weren't the animations that should have started a long as time ago if there will do hand animations and it's showing now that they got some catching up to do but they have time they have time to catch up that's kind of what we're saying you're pretty alpha doesn't need to be perfect animations um i think one thing like daunte's daunte's right click what is that called the overload overload is that what it's called yeah that was something like we pointed out even during the extra life event is like he fires drops his guns and then starts shaking his hands i think if you had a mocap studio and somebody was actually acting that out you would see that they're like the guns overheat they throw the guns as they shake their hands it would be like a really wouldn't be a three-step process yeah yeah absolutely but he like stops guns down ouch yeah yeah and and i think you also have a really good point that it's by by no means are we trying to like tear down the people that have worked on this thus far because honestly the fact that we have the amount of animations and the amount of quality that we do heading into a pre alpha state is impressive like usually in pre alphas you're seeing textures non-existent on the map or right not not even really having a character model that you're kind of using a very generic uh soft body or just generic body on the map running around doing the thing or not having v effects on abilities or anything like that so right they're definitely ahead of the curve in some ways and behind it and others but i think that by the time that they lead to a full release a lot of that will be smoothed out yeah um i covered this in a video a long time ago they do need before they release to get those animations up to triple a they can lean on being an indie studio because that's not going to produce results like they they need to have triple a quality animations in the end state or they're going to fail because that's a big thing that people look for that's a big thing that's a big part of the game and um it just like like i often say it adds to that visceral experience i think the animation for iran picking people up and tossing them is pretty freaking awesome uh however like the animation for marina that was actually clutched in iran's arms i think that needs some work like when he when he spikes her into the ground she still stayed it up and she just kind of stunned like she should actually get rammed into the ground you know i and i think that they're they could probably mix some of the animation from talus's ultimate knocking people down with iran just when he spikes people um and it may be that that's in the works already and we just don't know so there's there's a ton of things that they could do there but the kind of example that i think we have to show people is if we compare alt animations to predecessors animations uh yeah in a lot of ways alt has the slightly clunkier animations and they don't feel as smooth but predecessor does in in a lot of ways there are some that are still not as great but in a lot of ways the predecessor tests they've had really smooth animations i think that's part of why it helps feel most like paragon out of the two because that that kind of polish is on it and polish is a big thing when you're trying to appeal to a new audience right the people that are here right now going to go into pre-alpha and things like that a lot of them are willing to overlook unpolished animations or especially for a project this ambitious right because there's so many things that they have to do um but going into a full release if you're going to advertise your game to people and expect them to come in and want to play it uh for a as a finished product that has to be really fleshed out yeah and uh i don't know if you guys watch it or not jelly and i uh joined windu recently in a conversation about fault and one of the things that came up where we were talking about the uh their item art and we were talking about how ethereal's item art is fucking light years ahead of fault's item art that's the kind of thing that they invested heavily into because they didn't think you know that's just something that that they could pre-plan and have and have that going but the animate like i was talking about the animation work if they would have had looked for the talent for hand animating like they would have looked like they look for the talent for building their item art then it would have been a different story by now but they were so dependent on that mocap i guess they probably shouldn't have put all their eggs in one basket i guess which they should have known that there was going to be riots in columbia how dare they you didn't plan for riots in columbia the world to shut down to a national pandemic you didn't plan for these things i plan for that on a daily basis are you kidding me me and my doomsday bunker under my house are ready to go just in case now people are thinking i really have a doomsday bunker in the bottom of my house and i'm not gonna say well you are the tinfoil titan i would assume that you have a doomsday bunker um but the the kind of i think this naturally segues into something we have to talk about for sure which is we're at the end of quarter one yeah and other than the spotlights we really don't have anything no um and they don't have a game that's for damn sure um and you can feel it in the community you can feel that while there are people that are hyped up and the spotlights are creating a lot of this hype there's also that like the the dark side of it all that you can feel kind of just sitting there yeah when you interact in the discord and with the number of people that come in and like when this game was supposed to be out two years ago what's going on like you're just you're you're just now putting out spotlights what's going on and it's i personally am of the mindset that they need to make some kind of announcement yeah um we've seen messages from owen directly to people in the discord kind of saying that like we're working on it we don't but we can't give you a solid date right now that needs to be something that they announced to everybody not just to whoever sees it and whoever's asking and they need to take ownership of it too they can't blame it on don't blame it on the fucking pandemic and don't blame it on this don't blame it on that and we were talking about the columbia riots they there's no way they could have seen that but that was just another thing that they kind of leaned into to justify why the game didn't come out in 2019 or 2020 and we were sure that it was going to come out we started this show expecting that it would be the end of 2020 is when we got a pre alpha and now it's the end of march 2021 and we still have no idea no no official date of when there's gonna be a pre alpha they need to just not give any dates whatsoever and completely take ownership of this and admit and apologize and say you know what we're sorry this is taken longer than we expected this is completely our fault we never should have said that it was going to be the end of quarter one 2021 um we'll release the game when we can for the in the meantime enjoy these spotlights or something like that and and while that will sting for a lot of people that is a open communication that you're setting it up with your community that you're willing you're willing to take the ownership for what like for lack of better way to put it you're willing to take the ownership for what you did right and be like yeah we messed up right we want to be better we plan to be better this is how we plan to be better but for now we messed up we're sorry we've never seen a roadmap from them you see a roadmap from a lot of the companies as far as what they like check marks of what they need to do i'd like to see that from undying games i've always assumed we'd get the roadmap with a kickstarter but because we don't have a kickstarter that that's always that's really difficult as well yeah um for me personally the thing that bothered me then and and bothers me again now being that we're at the end of quarter one with nothing is they casually shifted the end of 2020 into quarter one there was no announcement there was no anything it was just now that when you when people asked it was instead of the end of 2021 it was the end of quarter one 20 or the end of 2020 to the end of quarter one 2021 it was very casual like it was almost a secret that they were just like very carefully just being like oh yep we are moving it over here that feels really bad and feels sketchy to a lot of people yeah the the casual shifting instead of at least owning it and saying like we were we we missed our date this is the new one it feels beta buffy uh-huh 100 and i hate to say that because i really i really don't believe that this project will end up like meta buff and the things that they pulled but it does have a lot of those similar feelings to to what meta buff was doing within the last three four months that we actually heard from them yeah the big difference is that when made above missed their alpha date they just completely went black and i can't say this enough and i think it applies in a various amount of things under promise over deliver always yeah never never give us the exact date that you think if you think you're gonna finish it on the april 24th do not say april 25th because if you are even one day behind or two days behind you're wrong give i would rather you tell me june and have it show up in april than anything else totally agreed and we're here we're sitting here as the two people that probably make the most content for the game right that we're we're frustrated by this but cautiously optimistic at the same time right like we believe in ethereal otherwise we wouldn't be recording right now it just it stings a little bit to constantly have this alpha pushed back further and further and further and further yeah absolutely oh i mean like a lot of people say it's better that they delay it's it's better to have a good game that's been delayed than a rushed terrible game so if cyberpunk hopefully it'll all be worth it what's that if cyberpunk taught us anything yeah i think that's about all i had to say on the on the whole thing uh jelly you got anything else i think that's it for me too okay right on um anything to plug uh streams i'll be streaming all week on twitch and youtube so catch me there uh we're doing it'll be yesterday when this comes out but tomorrow we're playing dream daddy on stream which i i'm not sure if i'm excited or horrified i've been playing marvellous mondays every monday in the hopes that i can win and make you play dream daddy and all it lily lily won you form like a coalition of people that were like praise any of the four or five of us win dream daddy the thing you guys don't know what dream daddy is game grumps designed this game it's a dad dating simulator here's the catch you're not looking for moms you're looking for other hot dads so you make yourself a hot dad then you go look for other hot dads and uh it's gonna be great watching jelly play this single dads in your area yeah that includes me yeah so come catch the stream streaming all week various things so happy to have anybody there and talk about ethereal talk about whatever yesterday we were like talking about a wrong spotlight for like an hour and a half talking about like where is he gonna be viable support not support what i like all the things it was great you know me i'm all about support support erin herrington what about you manger uh uh theory and gg check out jellies website for all the your latest ethereal news how's the how's the builder coming along builders pretty good actually we are looking to have an internal test for the builder within the next couple weeks so that's really big for us and we'll get internal testing done we're gonna have some of the ug team tested out probably to see what they can break so that we can have and then we'll put it up for everybody to use after that for a kind of a public test right oh super stoked about that yeah i will when it happens i'll be everywhere being like but yeah that's god that's gonna wrap it up for this week uh bit of a roller coaster this time and obi seems a little sad and down there at the end but we're still very much looking forward to ethereal we very much believe in undying's philosophy and that this game is going to be awesome so i hope you all join us as we enter the ether man go