It’s not necessarily that they’ve ‘removed’ anything, as it is the entire focus of the game has changed: no, you don’t ‘have’ to engage with the base building (or the exo building or the gardening or the freighter owning or what have you), but so many of the gameplay elements are bent toward those activities that they…

See, I’m coming at it from a slightly different perspective, I think: I actually enjoyed the initial release, divorced from the hype train it was attached to. Maybe it was ‘empty and broken’, but as a chill, almost meditative experience, I still really enjoyed it. In fact, I’d say that first, vanilla version of No…

Honestly, my issues with Elite: Dangerous were less ‘the gameplay loop’ and more ‘the core gameplay itself’. I like my flight sims to be... pretty significantly arcade-y, and Elite Dangerous was very much not that. (Not that there’s anything wrong with being a technically-focused flight sim - I get that some people…

I bounced off of it hard initially - I kept playing ‘because it’s Final Fantasy’, even though I really wasn’t having any fun, which means I wound up feeling more negatively about it than I probably would have otherwise - so I’m... a little hesitant to give it another go. That said, it’s been, what, a decade? Maybe my…

It really is a fascinating thing to examine: ‘where the game started’ vs ‘what the developers overpromised’ vs ‘what the developers felt the need to add to address anger over those undelivered overpromises’. I’d love to see the alternate-universe version of No Man’s Sky where... Sean Murray kept his mouth shut, the…

See, I didn’t have a whole lot of use for those at all; I played through once or twice, enough to see the ‘seams’, basically, and then was just kind of... done. (Granted, it doesn’t help that the usual From Software layer of ‘we’re not gonna explain anything; good luck figuring out how these systems work!’ was…

Yeah, that’s gonna be my concern, too: there’s a Mos Eisley on every planet, and they’re all exactly the same, same layout, same resources, same vendors. That’s the problem with procedural generation in a nutshell, though: for it to work at all, the content has to be homogeneous to a certain extent - you ask for…

That, I think, is an excellent notion! I’ve tried several times to ‘restart’ with the new updates (both because I want a fresh start, and also because I’m trying to play on a different console), and it just gets... really overwhelming, really fast - I think you start the base-building stuff before you’re even off your…

I mean, I’m not saying I want to be Thanos... but I wouldn’t mind a game set in the ‘post-snap’ universe, either. (And yeah: I also found the stuff in Endgame about ‘what the world became after the snap’ significantly more interesting than ‘what the return of all the people meant’ stuff.)

It’s a weirdly hard itch to scratch! The ‘Rebel Galaxy’ games are good at that ‘old school Privateer’ feel, but that’s more combat/trading-focused; in theory, I enjoy Subnautica, but in practice I get frustrated with survival/crafting games pretty quickly, and besides, that’s only one planet. ‘Genesis Alpha One’…

In theory, this is very very cool. In practice... I’m the weirdo who liked the earlier iterations of the game, which were more focused and just sort of aimlessly bopping about the the galaxy. I’ve tried to get back into it a couple times since then, and each time, there’s more and more focus on the various crafting or…

I sympathize; I think Destiny has kind of a weird ‘gap’ where at first it feels kind of overwhelming, then it seems like there’s actually not a lot of content to engage with, and then you kind of find your sweet spot (assuming you stick with it through those first two stages). I totally understand why someone wouldn’t…

I’d entirely forgotten the Gemini exists; now I miss it, too! Alongside First Curse, Fabian Strategy, and Dragon’s Breath, it was one of my most-used exotics in D1, but it’s been so long I’d blanked right over it. Funny how none of my favorites really seem to be at all popular with the Destiny community at large,…

Yeah, this is definitely just one of those... this sort of thing just happens, sometimes. It’s clearly not being used ‘as intended’, but it’s not ‘breaking’ the game, either; it’s just a combination of perks/abilities that nobody tried during the testing phase. No, I wouldn’t expect Bungie to keep it in the game…

I like the Ascendant Realm in theory - I think it’s creepy, and cool-looking - but as a gameplay destination, it definitely has its limitations, thanks to that murkiness. Bungie’s insistence that it should also be a platforming-heavy area is definitely kind of baffling as well. ‘Everybody loves first-person…

If your interest lies in the narrative: it depends on how deep you want to go, really. The ‘current’ narrative - where the Darkness showed up and sealed off half the solar system (otherwise known as the narrative justification for that vaulting) just started in Beyond Light, the current expansion, so picking up there p…

Okay, I hadn’t seen all the cosmetic stuff, thank you.

True, I did notice that! Shame it doesn’t go all the way back through Destiny 1 and its various expansions, though.

Yeah, exactly: about the only thing I’ll ding Splicer for, narrative-wise, is that it didn’t keep developing Crow the way the rest of the seasons this year have done, and I really, really liked Crow being sort of the ‘throughline’ of the seasonal stuff this year. Other than that, it was really, really strong stuff.…

Yeah, that’s the one part of all the new announcement stuff I really... I don’t know. Either I don’t understand it, or I’m not happy about it, one of the two. It’s not an entirely new season, so it’s theoretically less content than that... but it cost twenty-five dollars, which is more than double a regular season’s…