Honestly, part of the benefit and the downside of the seasonal structure is that I don’t think it would be all that overwhelming to come back, just because so much of the seasonal stuff is a) relatively self contained and b) not really playing out at the moment. Take the Rasputin bunker stuff you mentioned: that...…

If it helps, I’ve say they’ve gotten better at letting ‘playing just a little Destiny’ still feel productive; it’s not quite as ‘sink 100 hours in a month or else why even bother?’ as it has been in the past.

I’m definitely trying to remind myself, in the rush of ‘new season, new content, woohoo!’, that this season is going to last six months. So maybe take it slow.

Splicer was my least-played season as well (or at least, since they started tracking playtime with the Season Passes), by a significant amount... but I don’t necessarily think that’s because I didn’t like it. To me, it almost did too good of a job in its stated goals: it’s narrative was more self-contained, they cut…

See, I’ve gotta disagree about the narrative this season - not that it’s inherently uninteresting, but I feel like they’re mishandling it a bit. Granted, we’re only a week in, but that first mission just kind of... drops a pair of relatively major plot points in front of the player - Mara’s actual, physical return…

I was about to say something similar; it’s great that not everything has to come out in the ‘late Holiday’ window (though we all know that at least half of these releases are... things that got delayed out of the late Holiday window), but we really don’t have to stack them all right on top of each other in a different …

Cheers; so glad you enjoyed it! I may have to boot it up again myself, once I get tired of running through Hades again and again and again and again...

Just as an FYI: I just noticed that the expansions are on... pretty significant sale (ten bucks each) on Xbox, presumably to go along with the Witch Queen announcement - so I can only assume the same is true on the Playstation Store.

For sure; the notions of ‘rogue-like’ and ‘shooter’ aren’t actually inherently opposed at all. (I’m going with the relatively wide usage of ‘rogue-like’, which basically just means ‘some combination of procedural generation, permadeath, and repetition are baked into the core premise’.) Just off the top of my head,…

Yeah, just by the title you can tell they’re aiming for an Empire Strikes Back-style downer vibe with ‘Lightfall’. (Presumably with a side of ‘ha, ha, that’s what you get for using the Darkness, suckers!’ over the course of the campaign, before it somehow works out okay so Bungie doesn’t have to completely remove…

Interesting; I didn’t realize it had a specific connotation in the mythos. (I’m very much in the camp of ‘I pay attention to the narrative stuff in the actual game, but don’t really do deep dives on the lore’.)

The seasonal content has been really, really cool, but I think they’ve done a pretty good job in making it relatively self-contained, too, where someone’s probably not going to be too out to sea booting up Witch Queen if all they’ve played is the actual expansions. (I’d compare it to missing a few episodes of a…

The answer to that is honestly going to come down to ‘money’. If both expansions were free (which, to be fair, they are if you’re on GamePass), I’d say ‘yeah, it’s absolutely worth playing through the main campaigns of each expansion - that’s a time investment of maybe five, six hours, and that should catch you up on…

Good news is, Shadowkeep is a very Hive-heavy expansion, so if that’s the part of the universe you’re interested in, that’s at least one of the two expansions that should cater directly to your interests. (Beyond Light is less Hive-heavy, but it is darkness-focused, and is arguably the more important in the ‘overall…

All the Witch Queen stuff aside, I’m curious about the ‘Final Shape’, the eventual expansion that’s supposed to end the current ‘arc’ of Destiny: I wonder how ‘meta’ that title is, in that it might indicate Destiny itself moving into a ‘final shape’, something more MMO-like, as they transition away from annual…

Sure! Yeah, I understand why they do it from a game structure, keep-matchmaking-tidy, only-so-much-file-size-to-go-‘round perspective, but coming at it from a purely narrative perspective, it’s definitely a pain in the ass.

Not sure quite what you mean; the seasonal content itself sticks around for basically the length of an expansion now, rather than how they used to do it, where it was ‘gone’ as soon as the season was over. (So all the seasonal content that’s come out post-Beyond Light will remain playable until Witch Queen, the next…

It really would work as a game mechanic, wouldn’t it? Hell, as much as I dislike Alien: Resurrection, I always thought the scene where the xenomorphs were aware of their acid blood, and willing to kill each other to exploit it, was pretty cool. (I always feel like that film was just a terrible mismatch of writer and…

Absolutely. I won’t knock the movie for it, because Cameron’s always been good at that ‘so long as you move confidently - and fast enough - people won’t notice the holes’ approach, but it’s definitely one of those ‘the xenomorphs’ blood does exactly as much damage as the plot dictates it should’ type things.

If narrative is your main concern, I’d say ‘play the expansions, ignore the seasons’. (Or, rather, ‘play the expansions, do a quick wiki read on the seasons’. ‘Shadowkeep’ and ‘Beyond Light’ are the two expansions, for what it’s worth.) The expansions are the only ones that have any real ‘campaign’ content; there’s…