Hello everyone, Kirk here, as promised, with a special bonus episode for you all, a Thanksgiving

treat. A little while back on the show, I mentioned that I had been playing and loving a role-playing

game called Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. A bunch of people had written in over the course of the year

to tell me that I should play this game, that I would love it, saying that it was just the kind of grounded, narratively complex, and frictional game that I'm always saying I like. I finally listened to them, I installed it, and I quickly fell in love with it. I found myself falling under this game's weird spell. So thanks to everyone who recommended that I play this game. As I was playing,

I was talking with my friends Tom Bissell and Matthew Sagey Burns, two writers I've known for a long

time, each of whom had also been playing the game. Tom, many of you will know. He's an author,

a literature critic. He's a video game writer. He's written out on everything from Uncharted 4 to

the Vanishing of Ethan Carter to Gears of War.

Lately, he's been working in TV more, and he wrote the final three episodes of the tremendous second season of Star Wars and Orr.

We actually had him on Triple Click just recently to talk about that show.

Matthew, meanwhile, will also be familiar to longtime listeners. He's been, I guess,

on the show many times going back to the split screen days. He worked in various development roles

at big studios in the 2000s and 2010s. He worked on series like Halo and Call of Duty before joining

Zachtronics, where he wrote and continues to write music and did narrative design and writing for a number of

those terrific games, those machine-building puzzle games that they make at Zactronics. He also wrote and

directed the visual novel Eliza, which is great and kind of predated chat GPT, but it's all about

AI-driven therapy. And it's really more relevant than ever today. It'd be a great one to play, I think, really thought-provoking, and just a really nice game. Matthew's recent novel process is also really cool. It was my one more thing recently, and I really enjoyed that book. So I was playing this game. I was talking with these two guys, and I realized that I really wanted to talk about this game on triple click in a substantive way. Like, have an actual conversation about it, not just rant about how it's really cool for a while during a one more thing. It's just such an unusual and interesting game. It demands conversation. There's so much to talk about. And sometimes this just happens on triple click. You know, one of us gets into a game and the other two hosts just don't have time for it or they're not interested or whatever. And that's fine. I mean, that happens. It's not like we're going to start making episodes like this all the time. This is just kind of one of those stars-aligning kind of situations where Tom and I were chatting and we kind of just came up with the idea of, hey, why don't we just record something ourselves with Matthew talking about this game? And then Tom said, oh, you know what? You should have my friend Liam on as well. He and I played through the game together. He's really funny. He'll be a great guest. And I'm like, huh, Liam? Okay, who's Liam? And he says, oh, Liam McIntyre, the actor. And I'm like, oh, okay, so Leon McIntyre is a well-known actor. He played the lead in Spartacus Vengeance. He's been on TV. He's in a lot of video games and animation. He does a lot of voice work. You'll hear why he gets hired for a lot of voice work the minute he starts talking,

and he'll actually be playing Logan himself in Insomniac's upcoming Wolverine game. So I said,

sure, that sounds great. I'd love to know what Wolverine thinks of this game. So the four of us

hopped on a Zoom call and had the conversation you're about to hear. Now, what is this game?

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 came out earlier this year.

It was developed by the Czech Studio Warhorse Games.

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