Exactly; there’s a way to balance action gameplay and horror, and that series pretty much nails it. (Even the third game, despite its problems, did some fascinating things with ‘co-op horror’.) I think, as much as the conversation around the Alien franchise devolves into ‘the first film is better as a horror film, the…

Absolutely; the Dead Space series is pretty much a perfect example of ‘its basically already an Aliens game, we just didn’t want to pay for the rights to the franchise’.

Except third person, though (which is, admittedly, a bit of a letdown to me; I just enjoy first-person more, on a basic gameplay level). So the closer comparison might be the surprisingly successful ‘World War Z’ adaptation.

‘They’ve only been pretty good at best, though’, is kind of what surprises me: ‘shooting hordes of Xenos in dimly lit corridors’ shouldn’t be any harder to make fun than ‘shooting hordes of zombies in interchangable apartment buildings’, but Left 4 Dead is a significantly better game, and a significantly more fun game…

That sounds... more or less exactly what I’d want an Aliens* adaptation to be like! If it weren’t for the spectre of Colonial Marines, I’d be seriously excited right now.

Yeah, that’s true enough; they really ought to call these things ‘the state of Destiny for about a year or so, probably, before we announce we’re going to change everything up again after people spend six months complaining about the changes we made this time’. (I still want to know what the overall plan for Vaulting…

I think you’re absolutely right, in that they ‘learned their lesson’ when it came to perks that simply increase damage output, and I really hope we won’t see something like that again. I still think it puts an incredible amount of pressure on the weapon designers, though, and I’m worried about the same kind of ‘power…

You don’t get much new armor per season, no (though why armor was ever sunsetted anyway I’ve never understood), but they’ve definitely upped the amount of new guns you get each season, at least in part because players pitched a fit when Beyond Light hit with not ‘enough’ gear.

True enough; I’m just worried that, because Bungie can’t see into the future, we’ll hit another group of perks that contain an ‘overpowered’ pairing like outlaw + kill clip, and then they’ll have to do something drastic to deal with it (whereas, with sunsetting in place, they could have just said ‘don’t worry about…

Also worth noting you can get the Dreaming City stuff as legendary rewards across the Dreaming City, too - not just in the dungeon. (The dungeon drops can roll with exclusive perks, though.) Unfortunately, Tigerspite’s not one of the four they brought back.

I’m more or less the same way with sunsetting: their execution was way off-base - they really just should have done it year-by-year, and started by sunsetting all the Red War stuff, plus maybe the prior pinnacles (since those were what were really causing problems at the time), and left it at that. Plus, sunsetting…

True, but that just means we’re now back to ‘a whole bunch of gear is going to be sunsetted all at once, with little to no warning’, which I don’t necessarily think is inherently better than ‘gear just slowly phases out over time’. Sunsetting, for better or worse, was a permanent solution - we knew when gear would…

Possibly, but that still won’t sort the underlying issue: that over time, a larger arsenal means it’s much harder to balance the game, and much harder to come up with ‘new’ gear that will interest players who can just stick with a tried-and-true loadout. Sunsetting was a ‘fix’ for that, though whether the ‘fix’ was…

I think the champion mods thing is a good example - hell, even though I’m... pretty tired of Bungie using bounties/challenges/mods as a way to dictate what my loadout should be, I wouldn’t object to adding ‘get kills with this season’s weapons’ to the challenge roster, either, just as a way to encourage the playerbase…

I’d be down for that. (Honestly, I always kind of hoped - once they get the ‘vault rotation’ thing sorted - that they’d do that on a regular basis anyway: bring back one prior activity each season, then rotate another one out, so we’d pretty much always have 4-5 ‘unique’ past activities going at once, in addition to…

I mean, I agree, but I also think they feel ‘safer’ making the exotics more unique - and thus more fun to play - because they knew they wouldn’t be sunsetted regardless. Which, to my mind, was always the problem with the pinnacle/ritual weapons: it wasn’t that Mountaintop was just too awesome, it was that a gun as awes…

There’s a part of me that kind of wonders if they didn’t do that more or less on purpose: stick with sunsetting just long enough to get rid of the ‘worst’ offenders in terms of balancing and player-favoritism, then walk it back when they’d culled the pool down to a much more manageable amount of gear. (And if that’s…

I was a little concerned with how ambiguous that bit was, though. Essentially, it boiled down to ‘nobody liked sunsetting, so we’re not doing it any longer, but we don’t have a plan for what to do instead, which means in a just a few seasons we’ll be back to the same problem of nobody using the new weapons and never…

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind paying for it, even - I feel like I get my ten dollars of ‘value’ out of the current seasonal model, so I wouldn’t mind dishing out another ten bucks, especially since I wouldn’t be paying* the forty bucks - or whatever - for Witch Queen this year. But I basically view Destiny as a…

Yeah, it was definitely a bit ambiguous, as I recall (though I only read it once). Plus, they were also talking about an extra chapter ‘beyond’ Lightfall, and so that got a little confusing as well. (Again, in general, I thought they did a really good job explaining stuff here - even if I don’t necessarily agree with…