 All right guys, welcome back to VG News. We have a bunch of stories for you today and I don't wanna waste too much of your time. I just wanna thank you for being here. If you're really enjoying this show and you wanna keep going and keep supporting the channel, I'd appreciate it if you would subscribe on our road to 150,000 subscribers. All right, let's just dive right in because first we need to talk about Endless Ocean Luminous. This game is releasing on May 2nd and we have a slew of news for you today. Now look, Nintendo did drop a brand new trailer for the game late last night and the trailer is just like three to four minutes of just pure gameplay. So we're gonna be using a lot of that trailer throughout here but we'll link to it down below as well so you can get your hands on it. But here's what really we wanna focus on is the new information that appeared on the official website in Japan. That's the big news here and all of this was compiled because I don't read Japanese very well and relying on Google Transit can be a little messy. So we actually are using a compilation of this information that's provided by FamilyBoard's user and moderator MondoMega and I wanna thank him for having such a comprehensive thing out there publicly. That way we can go over all of this new information. So you guys can get a great idea of what to expect when Endless Ocean Luminous releases. Now remember, Endless Ocean Luminous is the third game in the Endless Ocean franchise, the first two games originally being Wii games and you could argue Wii U if you wanted to have backwards compatibility but whatever it came out during the Wii era. So there's a lot of people that really enjoyed the game back then that are just happy to have it come back and it's another one of those surprise releases published by Nintendo because again, Nintendo's been kind of bringing back a lot of these surprise franchises just like Famicon Detective Club, right? No one thought that franchise would come back either. So really nice to see this. Let's go ahead and dive into this information. So here's some general information here. It says you have a diver rank which will increase as you survey creatures, salvage treasures and fulfill achievements. Points are accumulated that can be spent on customization options for your diver, the selection growing as you raise your rank. There are sets of colors, types of helmets, bodysuits, flippers, vests and tanks along with different gestures to purchase. Creatures can swim alongside you as many as a whole school of fish. As your diver rank increases, the quantity and size of the creatures you can bring with you increases. As explained during the reveal, the veiled sea changes topography each time you dive. Various look types and locations and details can appear are shown on the site. Shallow waters, caves, coral reefs, sunken ships, hydrothermal vents, drifting ice on the surface, submarine volcanic activity, et cetera. Like closely observing creatures, information will be documented and sent to the research headquarters, ecological info, scientific name and description, how many of each you observed, largest and smallest size as you observed, et cetera. You can view your encyclopedia anytime but you can also view this information in real time while observing the creature. They said over 500 creatures since the reveal but based on the screenshot of the encyclopedia there are 578 total creatures. Salvage treasures are found on the sea floor and come in various forms with different rarities. You can take photos of creatures as well as take selfies with them which can be saved directly to your Switch media album. Now, they went on as well to kind of expand upon the online features. So we want to get into that because that's one of the big new things for endless ocean luminous is this playing with 30-something people online that's crazy, so let's get into this. You can dive alone or dive together with other players. You can be joined with up to 10 random people or invite up to 30 friends. In multiplayer, everyone starts from a different location but your map is shared and details will be filled out as you explore together. When you come in proximity with another player you'll be able to see their location on the map, share specific creature locations with them and fast travel to them for the rest of the session. You can tag creatures with emotes and mark treasure locations for other people to see. Special research missions will be given while playing with others. You'll be tasked to find specific locations and observe the creatures found there. Once you've uncovered 80% of a randomized ocean you'll receive the ocean ID which will allow you to share the seed with others. So that's pretty fascinating how they're managing that remember. And this ocean's really about the exploration and discovery and really calming nature of gameplay. It's definitely a slower paced game but one that people that play it tend to just have a really damn good time. It's not for everyone. But I'm excited that this game is coming back. We'll see if we're gonna end up picking it up ourselves here at Nintendo Prime. But yeah, we're gonna kind of leave the story at that. No real controversies here. Just really nice to have this game come back with some new details. Now we're gonna dive into a rumor floating out there for Xbox. And this has to do with a franchise that's been there for a long time and really helped develop that dude bro mentality that a lot of people said that the Xbox players have especially during that Xbox 360 era because we're talking about Gears of War. And the funny thing in talking about Gears of War is that dude bro mentality is really because all Xbox players just play these heavy duty dude bro games like Halo and Gears of War. And it's funny because I don't know if that's entirely true. Microsoft was just sitting there making exclusive marketing deals for games like Call of Duty. Oh, well, look, can we at least give Microsoft some credit? They didn't have Fable back then. At least there was a little variety and Rare was kind of doing things. I mean, Viva Pinata was a thing and I understand where the reputation came from because their most popular games were obviously the Gears of War and Halo. And it felt like there was one of those games coming out almost every year. But we do have some rumors here on Gears of War 6 which is a really big deal because again, we haven't seen this franchise in quite some time and you know what? I actually wondered if the franchise had been canned for a while because all we hear about are all the franchises from the studios that they previously purchased. So diving into this a little bit, we're talking about something that was initially brought up by Jeff Grubb. If you guys don't know who he is, he works at Giant Bomb and has been an independent journalist for some time working at various outlets. He has his own YouTube channel as well where he has a couple podcasts that he runs. But the biggest thing to hear from Jeff Grubb is that he was guessting on kind of funny games, Xcast which is their Xbox podcast and he gave them an exclusive scoop. Here, check it out. Jeff Grubb, what do you think we'll see this holiday season? Is it, is this Xbox discless all white series X the thing? Is that real? What are we really expecting new hardware was? Well, real quick, I will say I've heard some stuff might be happening with Gear 6 this summer. So I think that the tease sounds about right to me Paris. That seems like what we can expect. So yeah, that's the first time I've said that anywhere. So you guys get a little scoop there. Oh, a little scoop from Jeff Grubb. Give us a little scoop, just a tiny one. No, that's all fine and dandy, but he wasn't the only industry person saying something known inside or Nate the hate that we have actually covered previously on this channel. Went ahead and added the following comments over on the reset era forums. I'd be very surprised if 2024 came and went without a mention or look at Gear 6. The game will be that this is what the next gen is about moment. So essentially the claim here is obviously that this is going to be a very impressive game and prove why we're on this, you know, current generation hardware. And let's say in next gen, we kept, you know, the reason next gen keeps getting sad is because we just haven't had a lot of games that showed we needed a new generation of hardware. And this might be one of those games that does that for Microsoft. So it's going to be pretty interesting. Of course, these are just Nate the hates thoughts. I don't know if he's adding real information here, but I wanted to note that just because he is a notable person in the industry. And if he does know something about Gear 6, it's something I don't know. So that's pretty exciting. And regardless of the actual rumors, with Hellblade 2 dropping here very soon next month on May 21st, and then this game, you know, supposedly being revealed later, it's possible that we're finally going to see Microsoft show what they've got cooking to truly make this current generation of Xbox Series S and X feel like a worthwhile upgrade over the Xbox One. And that's always exciting. I always want to remind you guys as well that all of these games from Microsoft, they are a PC first company, are going to be on PC as well. So PC gamers should be very delighted by this news too. Now, have you ever heard of a company called Roku? I'm sure you have because they became really popular releasing those little USB sticks that you could plug into non-smart TVs to make them smart. This is a decade back when smart TVs weren't in every home and it just made a lot of sense to just convert your current TVs with a $100 or less little USB stick that you could just literally just plug in and get all of the smart TV functionality that was starting to become popularized. I mean, look, it was a lot cheaper than spending a thousand plus dollars on a brand new TV. Now, as technology has progressed and these old non-smart TVs have sort of been phased out, Roku had to find a new way to adjust to the market and what they have done is gone ahead and injected themselves into the cheap TV market, partnering with companies such as TCL. So you can end up buying a lot of your cheap TVs and have literally this be the backbone of the smart features and you even just get a Roku remote included right in the box. So Roku has become very popular among people who have bought basically TVs on a budget. And now look, there's a lot of other smart TV applications whether we're talking about Android TV or Apple TV or getting even into one of my personal favorites and actually rated as one of the best LG's WebOS. I actually really like that one. But here's the thing, for all these smart TV applications what does this really have to do with video games? Well, one thing about these smart TV applications is all of them can be 100% bypassed with anything you plug into your TV through HDMI. So whether it's a video game console, let's say you have an independent 4K Blu-ray player or anything like that. Any sort of device can just bypass it because you can just turn your TV on and have it load right into that HDMI product or just turn the product on and usually through smart TV features it'll just automatically switch over to it. Nothing wrong with that. And I think we've understood this is how TVs have worked for a long time and what's the big deal? So why are we talking about Roku? Well, they have put out a patent and this patent is something that is probably gonna make a lot of people upset if it ever gets implemented. And this patent is about advertising. For those who don't know, a lot of these applications, whether it's Android, Apple TV, Roku, et cetera, at least put ads into their programs. And the reason they do that is they need a way to monetize because once you buy the TV, it's just like a licensing agreement for companies like Roku. And so they don't make any money once you buy the TV. They need a way to monetize the users. So they put ads in. And frankly, it's just like YouTube and everywhere else. I'm kind of just used to seeing ads on a lot of things. So it doesn't bother me and I don't really find them to be too intrusive. However, what they wanna do now is extremely intrusive. So they have patented the ability to interrupt your HDMI signal. Now, why would they interrupt the signal? Well, if you're playing a video game and let's say you're sitting on the home screen too long and ad might pop up, oh, don't like that. What if you are paused in a video game sitting there too long and Apple pop up? In fact, how this works through the patent is quite fascinating. It doesn't examine reportedly. From what I can see, any sort of audio, it's only examining the video. And if their application determines that you have been on a video screen for a set period of time, without there being hardly any changes on the screen, they will then take over and put an ad up until you then do some sort of action that makes something move on the screen. So this would be whether you're pausing your Blu-rays or pausing your video games. In fact, it's possible that you could be sitting in the overworld of a game, let's say such as Tears of the Kingdom, and you're just listening to the overworld music, but because there's barely anything changing video-wise and movement-wise on screen, all of a sudden, hey, they take over and drop an ad. That is extremely intrusive, and if this technology ever gets implemented, I would venture to say that it could or should end Roku's popularity. In fact, look, I got a Roku remote right here. See, they also work with this on TV company. My kids have a Roku TV in their bedroom. That's what that remote's for. The point I'm making here is that this is just very anti-consumer, and personally to me would make me just stop using Roku in my house. But here's the problem. People are very stubborn. We learn how to use something and we don't like change. I actually know someone, one of my buddies who spent $4,000 on a really nice 85-inch OLED display, which is just awesome. Honestly, it kicks the crap out of everything in my house. And you know what? They couldn't get used to LG's WebOS, so they bought a 4K Roku stick to plug it in and use it with that TV, which just made me wanna hurl. So, look, I don't even think the Roku stuff is that bad. I've used it myself. I know well how Roku works, and it's fine. It's just, this is so intrusive and so bad. I want it to have a bigger negative impact than I think it probably will. But you know what? All these companies care about is money, and if there's a way to make money, they're just going to do it. So you know what? I'm really upset about this. I don't know if you guys are gonna get that angry about it, because you probably don't use Roku. Again, I don't have Roku on any TV in my house, except the one in my kid's room. But man, even then, dude, I might have to swap out that TV for another cheap brand that uses like Android TV or something, even though I don't really like Android TV. And for some reason, Android TV on cheap TVs is really rough running compared to Roku. I don't really understand. I know they're using cheap chips and everything, but whatever. All we can do is hope that this technology never really makes it into a real world product. But where money is to be made, you can pretty much expect it to happen. Now, we ought to dive into this interesting story. They actually just popped up this morning, Dragon Quest. There's a major change coming with Dragon Quest 12 and supposedly it's due to a couple of things. One of them being that Dragon Quest 12 has had internal delays, so it's taking longer to make Dragon Quest 12 than it should. Other stuff is because the entire company seems to be restructuring. So check out this Dragon Quest 11 footage because by the way, Dragon Quest 11 rocks. And let's get into some of this information because the last mainline entry that you're seeing on the screen right now, Dragon Quest 11, has sold over six and a half million copies as of 2021. So this data's a bit out of date. Maybe it's sold seven million by now. But that's actually not a small feat for AAA games, especially for Dragon Quest. So today's news is actually a little bit shocking because Yumiyaki, the executive producer of Dragon Quest 11, is moving off the Dragon Quest 12 project supposedly due to delays, but there's more here involving. Bloomberg is reporting that the company has undergone a massive restructuring internally at the behest of new company president, Takahashi Kiru. Supposedly, he has vowed to take most of the game production internal with less reliance on outside resources and to turn around their AAA and mobile game sales. It's not as if Miyaki, who is a director of the board as well, is being removed from the company. He's reportedly being moved to a position where he heads up their mobile game division. Thus, one could argue they feel the Dragon Quest 12 project, even with delays, is not in as dire of straits as their mobile gaming division. Still, Miyaki has worked on a ton of Dragon Quest games and Dragon Quest Builder games as well since joining the company in 1992. Bloomberg claims they have sources saying that his role with Dragon Quest 12 will be filled by near-producer Yosuke Seto. Most recently, this guy was also the lead producer on the Tomb Raider 1, 2, and 3 remastered games that came out or will be coming out this year. So I find that to be quite fascinating. The Dragon Quest series is one that I've never really gotten deeply into. It's actually one of my biggest regrets that I never deep dove into this. And while this guy's the executive producer in the more important creative role as the director, he's been involved with the franchise for a very long time. And so it's kind of a little sad to hear that he's moving on to other stuff, especially mobile gaming, where a lot of us are probably not going to participate in Square Enix's offerings there. But you know what, this just happens. The company's restructuring, they're trying to become more profitable. They're also trying to drag all of their development internally according to the Bloomberg article and be less reliant on external teams. So take this for what it is. Look, Dragon Quest is a great franchise. I hope that it's in good hands. And I mean, at least the guy that's supposedly taking over has helped make some pretty damn good games with Square Enix, so there is that. Now, our last story is actually about the Pokemon Company. And positive news, wait, we have something positive to say about the Pokemon Company. What is going on? Well, they did something extremely unexpected. They released a shiny hunting guide for Scarlet and Violet. And look, them just releasing a guide isn't really that big of a deal on the surface. Until you realize that this guide is maybe the greatest shiny hunting guide ever made. Not only does it describe what shinies are and all of that, it goes into all the various ways in which you can spawn and capture shinies, including specific recipes and sandwiches you can make that were previously unknown, especially the specific way the recipes are made with the least amount of ingredients. Now, this has actually caught a ton of Pokemon trainers off guard because the Pokemon Company has traditionally been very hands-off in helping people actually play the game. And even at times has been a little bit discouraging of people who literally play Pokemon solely to shiny hunt. This shows a great reversal of mentality where they dropped a guide, albeit a little bit over a year after the game came out, for something that they absolutely didn't need to do. Shiny hunting has always been this thing that the community has shared tips and guides, YouTube videos, all that stuff. And now you have literally the most comprehensive guide ever made for this, provided to you directly by the Pokemon Company. This does open the doors wide open to them doing this much sooner with brand new games. Like I can understand if they don't have the guide ready like day one, because it could have spoilers in it, right? So I can understand if they don't have that ready, like day one of the next big Pokemon games release. But I would be shocked within like a month or two after a game comes out if they don't drop another comprehensive guide, just like this. I find this to be a very positive story surrounding the Pokemon Company with all the negativity that company gets. I wanted to make sure to highlight something they actually did that the community just widely agrees was an extremely awesome thing. Also, beyond all of that, I just wanna mention that with this being such a positive change, I hope this means they're taking fan feedback a bit more seriously and they consider things like better quality control on their future Pokemon games. I understand the defense that, hey, once a development cycle is set for a game, they can't do game delays and stuff because they have the Pokemon trading card game that they have to worry about. They have the animated series that they worry about different merchandising and other stuff. And I understand all of that, but I would say that most of us that play the games would rather a high quality polished. That's the big thing, polished product release rather than something that came out in the sort of state that Scarlet and Violet did. So I hope that they take that to heart. Maybe the next Pokemon Legends game, ZEA that's coming out will be polished, really, really polished. We'll see. I just really want them to not be afraid to delay games. The Pokemon coming to be like, hey, even if our trading card game is gonna release before the game does, who cares? And the animated series is usually so far behind the games, even like a six month delay shouldn't be that big a deal for the animated series. But I'm just throwing out there that one positive change doesn't guarantee another, but at least it's a step in the right direction. And for that, I need to give them some credit. But again, the Pokemon company, as we all know, could be doing much, much more. All right, guys, that's gonna do it for today's episode of VG News. I hope you guys are really enjoying this. This is our first full week of the show. We successfully hit every single day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and now Friday. You guys let me know how I did. How do you enjoy this first week of VG News? Hopefully it evolved a little bit and you're just enjoying what we got going on around here. I don't know why I put a pair of scissors here. They're just there and they're my daughters. So I think she slipped it in on the set and it took me all week to notice that it was sitting there. So I know, really minor thing. Have yourselves a great weekend. We'll catch you in the next video.