Entirely possible, but it would have sailed right past me; I’ve never been a big handheld guy, for whatever reason.

To be fair, even in ‘Aliens’ (which definitely feels like the major influence here, rather than ‘Alien’), the acidic nature of the blood varies pretty wildly from scene to scene.

I feel like that’s something they’ve gotten better about in the last few years: making the game ‘rewarding’ even if you’re not chasing high-end endgame stuff. Like, there’s a way to play Destiny where you put in at least a hundred hours each season, sure - and the game has a reward structure in place for that type of p…

As someone who’s more-or-less consistently played Destiny and Destiny 2 since the first game launched - the game’s not in that much of a different state than last autumn, which was when ‘Beyond Light’ (the expansion with the blizzards) came out. Just personally, I’d say they’ve gotten much better this year in their nar…

I’m very much in the ‘never say never’ camp with the concept of an Aliens-based shooter - the fact that it’s never been done particularly well* doesn’t inherently preclude the notion that it might be, I don’t think - but yeah, it does feel like low-hanging fruit, a little bit: ‘space marines, mindless enemies, bingo…

Now - in a press-the-bruise, bad-idea kind of a way - I really, really want to see someone attempt some sort of videogame adaptation of Prometheus/Covenant. Find a way to make that entertaining, games industry!

I still feel like ‘Aliens’, in videogames, just can’t get past the ‘John Carter’ problem: so, so, so many games - from Doom to Destiny, and everything in between - have borrowed so liberally from ‘Aliens’, that when you actually try and do a relatively straightforward ‘Aliens’ game... it just feels like you’re aping…

And I honestly think that’s what BioWare kind of wanted you to do, but it just never felt like a necessity on ‘normal’ difficulty to me - especially if you were doing a powers-heavy build, or were willing to take advantage of companions that were. I think on my first playthrough I usually swapped out the damage…

I mean, most everything’s subjective, ultimately - there are just some things (like Mass Effect 1's inventory system, for example) where defenders are so rare on the ground that we can pretty definitively say the inventory system in the later games is ‘better’: that’s still a subjective statement, but it’s a widely…

We can probably argue back and forth over whether that was part of BioWare’s ‘vision’ or not, but it doesn’t really matter: my larger point is that unlimited ammo as a general rule runs the risk of making weapon variety superfluous. Whether or not that’s a flaw in Mass Effect 1 is a matter of perspective - if you…

That’s definitely where I hope this is going - that they’re doing this to presage a general usage bump in primary sandbox design - but I could also see it going in the other direction, too, where ‘you might as well have unlimited ammo for your primaries, because it’s not as though you’re gonna do any real damage with…

I don’t necessarily think the argument is ‘every game should have infinite ammo’, though; it’s more ‘games where ammo conservation isn’t really part of the gameplay design might as well have infinite ammo’. In The Last of Us, giving you ‘infinite ammo’ would absolutely break the game, because encounters are designed…

I’m not overly worried about it, either; my concern is less ‘over-buffing’ primaries, though, and more in the other direction. Part of that is just I already think special ammo weapons are a bit too overpowered (either in damage or in ammo drops, take your pick); I’d say at least 50% of my damage is done with special…

You’re absolutely right, of course; I’m really bad about getting the nomenclature that did change between Destiny 1 and 2 mixed up with the nomenclature that didn’t. (I still refer to ‘Light Level’, too.) I should have said ‘primary’, rather than ‘kinetic’.

Honestly, I’m not unhappy with this call - ‘kinetic’ ammo (which is what’s becoming infinite here) was so common on the ground that you only ever ran out in really, really specific circumstances, ie if you were trying to clear a large room with a kinetic weapon from a perch, where you couldn’t go and pick the dropped a…

Yeah, as much as I enjoyed the ‘cooling’ mechanic in ME1, it definitely had the side effect of making any gun besides your chosen favorite (usually the assault rifle, in my case) completely superfluous. Playing with any other weapon was basically something you, the player, decided to do for variety’s sake, rather than…

I think, even outside of a ‘survival’ style game, there’s an argument for using limited ammo pools as a method to force players to use multiple weapons - in something like Halo, for example, and that’s even the argument I’d use for Mass Effect 2 swapping over to finite ammo - but yeah, it’s definitely the sort of…

Which, to be fair, is more or less what Destiny’s done here: an infinite amount of the ‘least damaging’ ammo, but still finite amounts for the next two tiers up.

It’s a rare situation where I’m not gonna be for ‘giving more control to the player’, so yeah: the more control you could give over to the player as far as the bot’s abilities/approaches, the better. I’m not sure how you’d make a UI that wasn’t entirely overwhelming for that - since the more complex the bots,…

Granted, I’m not AT ALL a programmer, but the hope would be you could just add a certain level of randomization to certain behaviors: rather than having, say, ALL bots prioritize picking up a battle rifle over picking up a pistol, you could randomize their weapon prioritization, one would think with relatively minor…