LOVE that Ken still fucks with Colin publicly. I know Collins said he's still friends with Druckman but Sony PR doesn't let them connect and we really need that to change!

At the 1 hr mark Colin finally makes his pitch for Ken Levine to join Last Stand Media. The sole reason Colin began the company all those years ago.

You can tell Colin gets hyped up for interviews like this. It’s honestly some of the best content in the industry. Two experts in their respective field makes for a great listen/watch. Thanks for all the hard work, LSM crew!

Ken is the only person in the industry that I want to listen to 24/7. Man I wish he would talk more. Great interview.

Did anyone else have to check if the video wasn't on 2x speed? Colin started FAST!

Would love to see an episode with Colin, Ken, Jonathan Blow and Jaffe all in the same room round table talking about games and design and the industry. Make it a yearly event and review the previous year and what they expect to see in the future.

One of my favorite and most replayable games in years is Resident Evil 2 remake. It's considered a short game, but the pure act of playing it is just joyful.

Seeing Colin doing interview like this. Honestly kinda makes me sad that he's not in the industry anymore...... And Judas looks dope. I can't wait to play It.

I just want to thank Colin for reassuring Ken that we would not be bored. While it's a sign of Ken's humbleness, we tune in for the in-depth discussion and it would have been such a shame if Ken pivoted to a more surface-level discussion. Great interview as always Colin!

Huge shoutout to Colin for having these conversations. I love hearing the thoughts and ideas of these prolific creators.

So excited to get into this one. The last interview with Ken was awesome but now Judas is actually something he can talk about.

Ken is a treasure. Thanks for getting him on Colin!

Ken is such a legend and the industry should be very grateful to have him.

Many thanks to Ken for coming on the show again. Great show! Fascinating conversation!

Been waiting for this one

Oh boy, we eating good bois. ‘n gals!

Man I got a lot of respect for Ken. Not sure where it was born from but he really intrigues me as a wannabe dev. The Ai talk was very interesting as someone who dabbles with it in a creative capacity coming from a music producer, graphic design and 3D background. I think the last mention in the interview about Ai kinda of summed things up in the regard of that we all draw from various references in life to then create. Ai kinda of does the same but without the 'skin' or character of a human creator but indeed does that matter as Colin touched upon in the interview. I recently generated some Ai music and have been listening to it since it was created and some of it has become very beloved to me. It's an interesting situation when we challenge all we've ever known and what is considered right or wrong. Great interview. I'm off to watch the first one now.

Since its an fps there should be an FoV slider, Ken. Dont forget about this for consoles, please.

Fantastic interview.

Colin is at his best when he's doing these interviews. He's easily the best and asks good questions

What a great interview. Ken Levine is a legend!!

Ken is such a cool guy, I really enjoyed listening to this conversation.

You interview people so well, keep it up sir. The way you interact is so genuine

I can't quite appreciate how much these 2 legends influenced my appreciation for videogames.

Always a pleasure listening to Ken. Fantastic interview!

Listening to this honestly makes me a bit pissed off in retrospect for the hit piece Jason Schreier wrote about Ken, Ghost Story and Judas a year and a half to two years ago. If you are a passionate individual… who in gods name wouldn’t want to work for this man? I totally get the time it takes to make a game like this and the fact that you might not have the financial freedom to spend a decade not releasing a game. But I think the two interviews Colin has now done with Ken paint a pretty good picture of the type of guy he is. He expects near perfection from you, but he’s also going to give you that in return. I think Judas is going to be astonishingly special.

What an interview! I hope to see more of them even if they have to wait until after the Judas release. Ken is so interesting. He also meshes so well with Colin. He is willing to listen and to push back. Great discussion!

This is such a fantastic conversation.

Ken Levine is one of my favorite writers in the industry, love him. Still has that humble, casual air about him after all these years in his field. Get this man on the show as much as you can Collin.

How nice of Colin to bring back his dad on the podcast.

Colin out here giving us the big boy interviews. Way to go, Colin!

Great interview. Amazingly talented individuals here who have a deep desire and passion for what they do. Great interview Colin and thanks for being here Ken!

Definitely interested in playing Judas when it comes out. I like Ken's concepts for games.

Such a great interview as always.

Can’t wait for the game! Great interview again

Always love conversations with Ken, one of my favorite Creatives of all time. Also just to add, what a super positive conversation! 😊

Ken looks like modern Steve Carell

Great conversation. Can't wait for Judas.

Can not wait for Judas! I hope theres a physical release 🤞

Way too much hype for just an hour. I need 4 with you two.

another great episode. I can listen to Ken forever.

Game recognises Game. Brilliant interview again, wish more people in the industry would take Colin up on these interview offers.

1st-person is my personal favorite view,like Metroid Prime, System Shock, Grounded (optional), Ultima Underworld, Empyrion Galactic Survival, Elder Scrolls Arena.. So immersive.

really nice to hear that Ken is a fan of Lucy and Ralph. good people with good people. Thank you both for such an engaging conversation!

Excellent interview, Colin.

Love these interviews! Fantastic job as always Colin.

This is the Last Stand content I come for.

Great interview- even better than the first

Great interview. Ken should definitely talk more.

What a nice convo

wonder what the cut is for. when colin mentions Shinji Mikami

I'm very excited for Judas, release the game man! lol

Easily one of my most anticipated games

Awesome awesome interview

Listened on Patreon but wanted to drop by and like/comment for the algorithm

Awesome interview as always 👌

The only video game journalists worth listening to 👍 great stuff boys

Super excited for this one! Keep up the stellar work.

Next year is going to be sood good. Judas, GTA 6, Death Stranding 2. A new Nintendo system. Jeez.

Loved Ken's take on AI. I feel like it's a more nuanced/mixed perspective that underscores the advantages and disadvantages of it. I do graphic design and 3D modeling work; AI is amazing for automating certain dull/repetitive tasks to free up my time for more creative stuff, but it often lacks specificity and control. It's a blunt hammer rather than a fine tool. You can manipulate an AI-generated image with an editing program like Photoshop, but it has a lot of trouble making certain adjustments without you yourself knowing how to manage them. I think we should be very concerned about it for sure, but there are still things it very much cannot do.

Loved hearing Ken plays Rocksmith!! That is sick. Great interview!

This was fantastic!

Great AI conversation! Our need of chasing expression of different format will always win out in any form of media. I cant watch a prerecorded game, but I am willing to do that when a streamer I like, is playing it.

Thank you Ken, thank you Colin, thank you LSM🙌

Another great convo from 2 of my favorites 🎃

Cool , always a threat to hear Ken talk about game development

I tend to enjoy more longer videogames, because they tend to stick more to me, like an irl experience, a whole meal, rather than a cool flash, or a tasty brioche. Ex: " The Last of Us "- The rainy grown in forest in the town, the free exploring, the music, the dialogs, the various hints to other people's lives in various forms, I was bored too after a bit doe and the only big thing missing, in my op, that would have fixed the boredom, were the well made Side quests, and there were none at all of side quests. All this makes the game more like a rl experience, and more cozy, and I love it. I still can enjoy short games, just not as much as the long ones if the quality is the same between them, like Ken said too. Biohock 1\2 (+Minerva's den), and Infinite (+Burial at sea), were shorter but the quality of the stories were, in my op, better than The last of us, so bc of that, and ALL the rest of the details, I prefer them. The Biohocks made me love them as much as I love the Harry potter movies (#istandfortransrights), this fantasy worlds made me wanna live in them. Thank you Ken Levine for making them! 🧡 I can't wait to play Judas, and fall in love with it too 🌞 :)

Chiming in on AI : I'm a writer (French Canadian, so forgive me if I make mistakes), and I did a bunch of tests with both ChatGPT and Google Gemini. When it comes to fiction writing, I truly believe that AI will never be able to replace writers. The only thing it will do is maybe speed up the process and act as a tool for already great writers. Because those AI will never... EVER... Be able to write a compelling 500 pages book with great character arcs, consistent world building, twists and turns, etc. There's just no way. The only thing I've seen it good as is either improve an already existing text or come up with decent sentence structures and things like that. But you always got to feed the machine with good material. It will never come up with strong ideas that make sense in the grand scheme of a story; it can rearrange your text to present your ideas in a slightly more compelling way however. It can also write a decent paragraph, but it's usually filled with fluff that needs to be filtered out; which usually requires a writer of talent. And if you don't input your own personal details, the AI will regurgitate the most boring and predictable text ever. It's like non stop "Candles casting long dancing shadows on the walls". And that's it. Someone with no imagination and no talent will never be able to write an amazing book with AI. But a good writer will be able to speed up its writing process and maybe improve his material, thanks to a few good ideas by the AI, along the way.

Take a shot everytime they say “generational shift.” 😂

Been waiting for this 🙌🏿😁!!!

Ken Levine mentioned Tim Cain, you guys should try and see if he would be join for a chat.

when Colin gets into his interview bag, Moriarty really always shows hes a cut above all. love this content Rise UP!

Thank you Mr Colin and Mr Levine for this wonderful conversation,how can I talk with Mr levine? Can you help me?

I'm really glad you brought up game length. There's too many long games and because of that, even the ones I really like, I'm only going to play once. I've replayed TLoU 3 times, it's a fairly digestable 16 hours. Kingdom Hearts 2 I've beat maybe 20 times. God of War 1 I replayed over two sessions. I want to replay games but it's not doable when they're 35+ hours and golden pathing isn't much of an option.

1:11:10 All-time PAUSE moment right there! Geez Louise Ken! Pause!!!

Seeing how into Bioshock and ANOTHER BIOSHOCK from Ken the LSM community seems to be week after week has been so mindblowing to me, the trilogy is fine but god damn

Absolutely amazing content.

The revisionist history on Ken Levine (specifically on Twitter, specifically from “journalists” who have been in the industry less than 5 years) is so lame and frustrating. This dude is an auteur and we should love and appreciate our auteurs in the games industry like Ken, Kojima, Druckmann, Sam Lake, David Cage, Miyazaki, and others. It’s special when they release a new game and it’s exciting. Why do people have to shit on that? If you don’t love exciting and different video games why are you in this industry covering them? Excited for Judas.

Love when I forget to watch a Sacred+ episode

I also have a dualsense in a box on my shelf, I was told drift would happen sooner than later- same for the switch. Yet never happened to me. So now years later I have a boxed pro controller+ dualsense never unboxed on my book shelf :S ofc, its always good to have for the future, I guess?

He mentioned the mustache man, never saw that coming…

Undermine was so good!

Ken briefly mentioned him but you should definitely try getting Tim Cain on.

I love that they’re kinda buddies. I would looooove for Ken to come back on Jaffe’s channel too, but this time live (or at least for a full show). I totally understand why he won’t though lol; much much more difficult to regulate what you say and avoid unintentionally revealing too much when you’re talking to someone like Jaffe. But even if they just talk game design and the narrative LEGOS with nothing specifically about Judas, that would be dope too. [but let’s be real… Jaffe would prob rather ask Ken about industry politics, politics politics, how much it sucks to work with pompous young developers, and whether or not Ken wants would pound out a lifelike robot woman if he could. Now that I mention it, sounds like a sick interview actually.]

Nice try Steve Carell

So im assuming your old CLS channel from March 2017 is no longer active? Im glad i found your new channel ❤

tnx 4 sharin

Honestly, I don't mess with short games, I don't like them. And the fact that a lot of people don't finish long games, doesn't mean they're too long. It means a lot of people just don't finish what they start, a lot of people have short attention spans, and some games either don't keep the same quality throughout the entire game, or the game play itself just isn't refined enough to last an incredibly long time. Maybe a story can be too long, but I don't think a game that has a lot of optional content, could ever be too long. I spent 70+ hours in AC Valhalla, but like most AC games, I got bored and quit, but not because it was too long, I quit because the game loop broke down over time. In contrast, I spent over 300 hours in my first play through of Baldur's Gate 3, and I still didn't want it to end.

A very good interview, I may jump from the question ask at 59:20 and his responses, that it prejudices his relationship with the work and that He want to meet the artists in theirs arts. Engaging about abstract and ideal stuff doesn't reveal that much about someone else, but looking how they react, how they make judgement on factual events in the real world will tell infinitely more about them. Basically "meeting an artist in a game" doesn't mean anything if it doesn't mean anything in the real world. The art of an artist is not a hiding place or a deflection for their trash mentality. But good news you can know that an artist is trash and yet still love the work they contributed to, and generally they thought on art and all. It is not incompatible though it requires maybe a view of creators or authors or artists, call them whatever you want, that is not godlike or transcendent of any kind, just people doing work, a very special type of word and a work socially praised, but just work. Look at me, I love Bioshock and Infinite, and System Shock 2, in fact I played them recently again for who knows how many times, and I still think (albeit some stuff here and there) highly of them, and I may (the future will tell) think the same of Judas (and maybe more if Ghost Story deliver on the promises told here) but make no mistake I also know that politically and morally Levine is trash. I can hold this two views of him very well. And after playing those game many times, if there is any thing that resemble Levine's soul in those games, it is nothing more than a wish of what Levine hope his soul is. But what trash am I speaking about ? I am speaking about is genocidal denial, is ability to deflect his look on the massacre that is happening right now, and more broadly his ability to refuge take refuge in literature (The True Believer from Eric Hoffer he recommended a while ago, "that it explain everything that is happening right now" yeah for the lazzy certainly it has explanatory power for sure) that allows him to make zero effort of understanding the social conflicts on the present time overall in the world, because in the end he just seems to care only about his ass doing art, sorry ART (with big A, big R, big T), because ART is where HUMANITY is (no it isn't). His tweeter say all I need to know about him (he doesn't give a shit about palestinians, take the youth for idiots, have a paternalistic view on them, doesn't seem to care about the layoff in this industry, an opportunistic behavior to take some of Arkane Austin experienced devs and say that they made incredible games yet when Redfall launched didn't say any word of support....) his interviews say all I need to know about his creative thinking (that he has a lot of point that I also value, the combination of narration and gameplay, his ability to let his work take meaning by the player...), but unfortunately his art have nothing of him in it. To come back to Hoffer I notice this interview shows how much his book had an impact on Levine "they rejected me but I didn't get mad", I didn't get frustrated, I didn't become a true believer, what a great mark of mental strength of Levine... So it is a great episode from both of you, and when it comes to videogames I still think Levine approach and thinking are admirable, but humanly, morally the sewers of New York are cleaner, this is the level is at. Next time in the next episode with him, ask him and let him share is non-orthodoxe thinking about the Isreal-Palestine conflict, since you are able to make him quite comfortable and since we are not on twitter, plus he has touch the spider so he is not an afraid writer anymore, and let us use of that sacred free speech that both of you care about, I will be more delightful than anybody here to hear him on that matter.

you love to see it

It seems like Ken is one of the only people that can make it though Colin's thick head! I love Colin to death but he is so stubborn on certain things and you can tell Ken at least gets him to accept some other ideas like Ai lol.

The A.I. iteration thing has already been solved.

Why isn’t the previous interview linked?

When people complain about game length, it’s usually because they’re charging full price and usually it’s not just short, but there’s very little (mechanically and/or agency) to the gameplay. Like it’s simple and also stops you every 10-20mins which makes it worse. It’s also kinda funny as a topic. It’s really only a concern “now” because the average gamer is 30-40 and has less free time than before. And the kids/teens/zoomers playing Fortnite daily/weekly are used to ongoing games more than we were. And why the sentiment of “short games bad” was more common 10-20 years ago. That said, 10-20h games are perfectly fine, and I’m not sure people are complaining about that bracket. Most games since the 3D era, and even some 16-bit games were around that length. It’s usually just said for the $60, AAA blockbusters that are 4-5 hours long (where at least half is walking and/or cutscenes), and you barely get to play it. Or play before they rip control from you again. Because then it might as well be a movie instead. It would be cheaper for both the customer and the studio. I love FF7 Remake, but there’s way too many times where the game would stop you and not just let you get into the combat. You’d get like 1-2 encounters and then half to walk around or do puzzles. I forget if that held for the whole game or just the early hours but it was irritating nontheless. Because the combat was great.

Baldurs gate 3 has like a 25% completion rate. It’s still a great game and the length was necessary. The length argument is bullshit from Colin Both final fantasy and BG3 can be significantly shorter if main pathed too. Are you arguing for less choice?

As a self taught musician I'd be most eager to let you fine gentlemen hear my music lol

God I hope this is just a complete game. Just one finished game

Would you kindly, post time stamps

Take two is probably more interested in the new tech than the new IP. Modular narratives could be huge for retaining players.

Don't count your horse before they carriage