‘Here’s a clean start, a new campaign that will make a good starting place for new guardians... and we promise it won’t be vaulted until there’s another campaign that works just as well as a clean start’ would absolutely go miles to solve this issue.

Counter-point: from a business perspective, a brand new title would be a much better stepping stone, and a way to attract new players - the current playerbase are just as likely to pay for ‘Destiny 3' as they are ‘Destiny 2: Whatever Expansion’ (at the same cost, if not higher), but new players, as the article shows,…

See, here - just on a personal level - is why I’m glad they didn’t take that approach: I never go back and play Destiny 1.

I think there’s kind of a tendency to blame everything that’s a problem in Destiny 2 on the vaulting, but in this particular case, I’m not sure that’s the entirety of the issue: part of it, I think, is just that Bungie has a bit of an overwhelming fondness for complexity, both in its narrative design and in everything…

Honestly, even if they just released the campaigns, as a stand-alone, low-priced single-player experience (maybe with couch co-op) - and also made that stand-alone title free to anyone who, you know, had actually paid for the games originally - I feel like they could get around a large chunk of this issue. ‘You want…

I’m in a similar position with a friend who’s got, you know, two toddlers in the house; as such, he tends to be able to play in short, really aggressive bursts... for a week or so, about once every four or five months.

Exactly! I mean, part of the whole structure of the ‘seasonal’ narratives is that they’re supposed to be slightly more self-contained* compared to the expansions; it seems like a little bit of tweaking could make any of them ‘a New Light’s first big adventure!’ (Especially if you gave every New Light their first…

Yeah, I quite enjoy Destiny 2, and don’t mind paying for it at all! (Which doesn’t mean I’m unsympathetic to how overwhelmingly obtuse it must seem to new players/players who took time off; I’ve been playing Destiny since the beta for the first game, but if I hadn’t been, I’m not sure at all I’d want to start it now.)

I think part of the problem is that Bungie can’t really seem to grasp how to create content that engages both established players who have been around since Destiny 1, and newly arrived players who don’t have any idea what’s going on.

I feel like there should be a way to make a ‘clean break’ with the older narratives; as a player who’se been there since Destiny 1, it definitely seems to me that newer players are ‘missing’ that vaulted content, but that’s based on my perspective that they’re missing out on something I got to play.

Yeah, I really doubt I would have gotten through Act I without the ‘broken’ Ouroboros continually improving itself, given that I’m not actually all that great at this sort of thing. (Which is why Kaycee’s Mod doesn’t really appeal to me; I get why it might in theory, and I don’t mean to take away from those who do…

And this is why I always play on ‘the easiest difficulty that doesn’t bore me’, rather than ‘the hardest difficulty I can manage’; I don’t actually find frustration fun!

Since you’re not there yet in Inscryption I’ll keep this spoiler-free, but I actually found the card game (variation) in Act III almost more fun than the version in Act I; it’s just... kind of broken for narrative reasons, which I think is part of why nobody’s calling for an actual ‘endless’ version of that one. (Or…

For what it’s worth: I pay my four bucks a month for the NYT (yeah, I get the annual subscription when it goes on sale) and don’t regret it one bit. I would ABSOLUTELY have paid the same - or more - for the AVClub back in the pre-Spanfeller days.

Yeah, I think Steam definitely has the advantage in that its relative ‘ease of use’, in terms of posting reviews, has the benefit of making sure you’re getting reviews not just from people with really strong feelings (one way or another). Which means games like Days Gone - which people may ‘like really well’, more…

I’d quite agree with you on Spider-Man - I enjoyed its narrative more than probably either HZD or Days Gone: I just enjoyed its gameplay more, as well, so I wouldn’t mark its narrative out as the highlight of the experience. It was a more well-balanced meal.

Yeah, in RPGs, if you’ve got tank/healer/DPS, usually the best you can find for that fourth player is... buff/debuff, I guess? Which is rarely all that exciting.

Don’t ask me to point at the source (it’s been years) but I remember reading somewhere where one of the developers who had shifted from four player squads to three basically said ‘we shifted to three because that’s how many people were playing together anyway’.

Yeah, it’s one of those... I get people being unhappy about it from a completionist standpoint (or even just a preservationist standpoint), but in terms of ‘man, I really wanted to play that again’, it’s really hard to imagine the Mass Effect superfan legitimately bummed they don’t get to play through Pinnacle Station…

Just dropping in to agree with the other posters thus far: I found it to be a significantly better game than its reputation suggested when I played it a couple years ago. Honestly, I’d say it compares positively to Horizon Zero Dawn - I think I liked them both about equally, really, and HZD gets talked about as one of …