For what it’s worth, the advice I always give to new or returning players is this: don’t try to do ‘everything’. Treat Destiny like a theme park - rather than running around in a tizzy trying to do everything at once, or trying to force yourself to keep to a schedule of the most ‘efficient’ (and miserable) grind,…

I’m, admittedly, hot/cold on a lot of Back 4 Blood: the moment-to-moment gameplay, I think, is really good, a legitimate successor to Left 4 Dead, and the gunplay is fantastic, but the writing and general level design, well... ‘really make you realize what Valve brought to the table’ I think is the nicest way I can…

Cheers; hope you guys enjoy it!

My regular co-op partner and I tried (in private matches, rather than in matchmaking), and even on rookie difficulty, we were hitting huge difficulty spikes, especially around the finales. Part of it is - as the review points out - that the bots are absolutely terrible, which is an issue if you’re playing solo or in a…

I agree with the thrust of your overall point, but I also think there’s a better way to implement some of this stuff than ‘have players stop to paw through a bunch of scopes, including some nobody wants on anything other than a sniper rifle, every five minutes or so’. Give me the ability to earn skill points that…

Eh; I don’t really have any problem with the Eververse, but cosmetics have never really been my major concern with gaming in general, so I typically don’t begrudge a game the opportunity to earn more money from people who want to spend it. So long as it’s not impacting the gameplay, it just doesn’t bother me.

True, but I still think there could be ways around that; offering up a season for free as a mea culpa, or something. (The way that, frankly, this whole ‘30th Anniversary’ stopgap probably should have been free.) Plus, if Bungie wasn’t charging money for expansion content, they could actually release it piecemeal,…

Not that I recall, but I also didn’t play much ‘high difficulty’ content in Destiny 1, so it could have been limited to the harder stuff like Nightfalls and Raids and whatnot.

What’s also kind of hilarious is that, with the last expansion, they created activities that you had to solo if you wanted the unique exotics on offer... which meant they were also punishing players who only wanted to play co-operatively.

If there is, it’s light enough as to be more or less negligible: I spend about half my Destiny time playing solo and the other half in a duo, and I’ve never noticed any sort of scaling. (I also tend to assume that if it had scaling already, they wouldn’t have mentioned it as being a factor upcoming expansion.)

Cheers; I do remember you! Good to know the game, at least, was agreeable, even as Bungie tries their best to overcomplicate... pretty much everything.

One of the things they’ve talked about with the upcoming expansion is... actual difficulty scaling based on number of players in your fireteam*. Which is, you know, a) fantastic, and b) something this game really should have had from the start, seven years ago. 

Absolutely; there’s a direct correlation between how long you wait and how cheap it’ll be, usually up to at least 50% off (and sometimes even further). So if you’re always picking stuff up on sale, or if you’ve got GamePass, or especially if you do both... it gets real easy to just wait for that price to keep…

100% agreed. I also think that hardcore approach of ‘maximizing every possible aspect of a build through grinding and consulting YouTube’ hurts the game as a whole... because Bungie then has to make content that can still challenge players who take that approach. It’s essentially ‘the Reckoning’ problem - where Bungie…

I’m the exact same way in terms of ‘not needing to do everything’ (which was why I laughed when the article talked about the season pass ‘lacking value’ because it no longer had high stat armor). It’s why this particular blowup has kind of passed me by, because I don’t really ascribe a lot of value to the dungeons,…

I think it really depends on what you want out of the game. I come at it from the opposite angle, where yeah, it’s expensive, but the return for me is massive: Destiny is easily the most-played game in my library - it probably accounts for 50% of my total gaming, or close to it - and yet the expense comes nowhere near …

I think you’re probably right that they’re ‘taking advantage of their hardcore playerbase to get more money’, but frankly, that’s the financial model of a F2P game: it’s built around a small percentage of the playerbase subsidizing the game for everyone else.

Yeah, this is really my problem - the ‘Obamacare’ comparison the article makes is spot on. Especially with the 30th Anniversary pack in the mix, it’s hard to know what the actual ‘value’ of any of the bundles is... which is why I haven’t pre-ordered yet, despite the fact that I know I’m going to play Witch Queen Day…

That’s true, but even there, I feel like ‘clarity’ is... really not the messaging’s strong suit, and I do kind of wonder how broad the ‘we’ is in ‘we knew 6 months in advance’. Like, yeah, people who comment on Kotaku are probably aware which marquee titles are coming Day 1 to GamePass... but how much of the general,…

Far Cry 6 is an especially interesting benchmark for me, I think, just because Far Cry 5 is one of the last games I bought for full price, relatively close to launch. So the three years between the two is very much where I shifted away from ‘paying full price for most games’ to ‘waiting for a sale, and playing other…