As someone more or less in the same boat as the original poster, I feel like the Deck* has a couple of advantages that just hooking up a PC to a television doesn’t offer (beyond portability): the first, simply, is cost, in that if this review - and others I’ve read - are to be believed, then this thing is capable of…

Ah, my mistake; I only ever unlocked stasis on the Hunter, because, like I said, I... didn’t really care for it on the other two.

Reportedly, one of the ‘areas of disagreement’ between Bungie and Activision that led to their split was that Activision wanted a theoretical Destiny 3 to be more welcoming to new players, whereas Bungie wanted to develop content aimed squarely at the playerbase they already had in Destiny 2, a playerbase which was…

Agreed; Europa always felt like a handful of good ideas, design-wise, that were never quite developed to a full enough potential.

Honestly, the music is almost too good - the stuff that plays whilst you’re just sitting in orbit is a little too high-key (pun also intended) for me. I’m messing around in my menus and whatnot and meanwhile the music’s just giving off this impression of relentless dread... which doesn’t exactly make comparing guns or…

I’m definitely happy to ‘trade’ the Throne World for the Tangled Shore, not just in terms of environment - though I do think the Throne World’s an improvement there, for sure - but, from what I’ve seen, in terms of mechanics, as well: the Throne World feels fully formed, whereas most of Forsaken’s big ideas and…

I think with Shadowkeep they were releasing little bits of narrative each week, yeah (though they were more in the vein of ‘lore and world-building’ than ‘direct storyline’ bits). With Beyond Light, they did something similar with the new subclasses - you had to unlock them a bit at a time, with each new ‘fragment’…

You’re not wrong at all, though I’d say it’s less ‘three locations that look visually distinct’ and more ‘two distinct settings, and one location is entirely setting A, one location is entirely setting B, and the third location is split between the two’. (Super looking forward to a future expansion with an entire…

I feel like Beyond Light, even in comparison to other Destiny expansions, went WAY too far with the ‘kill x number of enemies y way in z location’ stuff, especially in the ‘post-campaign’ content. (It didn’t help that, to me, at least, I didn’t particularly enjoy the new subclasses, so I never found ‘y way’ very fun.)

I definitely don’t find the swamps as interesting as the ‘palace’ stuff, but I do find the swamps interesting for - as you say - the mandatory ‘video game swamp level’. Again, in comparison to Europa, which did just feel (to me) like ‘mandatory generic ice level’ and that’s it, the swamps here have a much more…

Alternately, we should also remember it in two months when we get the ‘Destiny Is Just So Boring Right Now I Can’t Even’ take.

You’re absolutely right, but Hive destinations have pretty much always borrowed heavily from that aesthetic; this one at least doesn’t look exactly like ‘might as well be Mordor’.

I really liked the Ascendant Realm as a mechanic - the overlay of the different ‘dimension’ providing a different play area - but yeah, in sheer terms of ‘navigating from point A to point B’, neither it nor the Dreaming City at large gets top marks where layout is concerned. (It doesn’t help that the Dreaming City…

My take on that was the the article’s title was referencing the campaign itself, whereas the ‘is it better than Taken King or Forsaken’ was referencing more the expansion in its entirety and the general state of the game at large (which encompasses significantly more than just the handful of missions comprising the…

Dreaming City was definitely my ‘Destiny art design’ high water mark prior to this, and in a lot of ways, I think the two destinations succeed for interestingly divergent reasons (to me, anyway): the Dreaming City was so striking because it was so new, so unlike anything we’d ever seen in Destiny before, whereas the…

The art design here really does just defy superlatives. Granted, part of that is coming off of Beyond Light - which didn’t really do much with it’s ‘yep, basically Hoth’ setting - but whoever it was at Bungie that went ‘you know, if the Dreadnaught was Hive Notre Dame, what does Hive Versailles look like?’ deserves…

Presumably because that’s how Microsoft announces them. The last two weeks had their own announcement at the beginning of the month, which had its own article at the time. (Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s silly of Microsoft to go with a ‘fortnightly’ announce schedule, of all things, but it’s hardly Kotaku’s fault…

I’m honestly kind of curious if part of the reason this stretch is a little weak is because gaming in general is pretty busy right now: we’re right in the middle of that ‘February is a weirdly big month for gaming, just because that’s where the stuff delayed out of the prior Holiday comes out’ bit.

Absolutely - or just engaging with ‘optional’ content on your first time through. God of War was a great example of that for me: the ‘main quest’ stuff was about where I wanted it to be on Normal, difficulty wise - complex enough to be engaging, but I wasn’t having to re-start each fight multiple times - but some of…

Absolutely. I also think it’s worth noting that the rise of ‘subscription’ services - like GamePass - kind of obviate that need to ‘stretch’ the value of a game as well. It’s one thing to buy a game for sixty bucks, and know that’s all I’m going to be playing for the next four months, like when I was a kid: there,…