I don’t know if I’d ever, even remotely, categorize Destiny as grimdark.

I mean, the past few “season” storylines haven’t been quite so dark...

Peace has been brokered between some factions of the other “enemy” species.

Not relevant to the topic at all, but man, I adore the hell out of that concept art, and really miss when Destiny felt like that.

Definitely. They actually made a couple of announcements yesterday — I believe the other was about an accessibility initiative, though aimed more at their workforce than consumers. It’s nice that there are some companies out there that don’t make me feel conflicted about spending money on their products.

From what I can tell Bungie actually seems to have a decent reputation among current and former workers, employees a fair number of women and POC, and is trying to get things right even despite the occasional fuck up. Good for them. 

Eh, feels like a lot of games writing these days is just browsing forums/reddit/Twitter to see what people are already talking about.

I don’t think it is niche though. There was a lot of talk during the beta and lead-up to release about trying to name characters after Bezos; these articles and the devs spending time on the name filter are consequences of that.

More than one person can write about something that’s recently gotten public notice

For sure! I’m also thinking of, and I know this is a completely separate issue, all the white dudes complaining about CRT or “replacement theory” or how in our current political climate white men are somehow being discriminated against. The tucker carlsons, the ben shapiros, etc. Though the latter are also pretty…

Exactly. And I know that 2D/3D animation for TV is completely different than a video game so it isn’t an apples to apples comparison. However, I just want to draw attention to my opinion that I just don’t think it’s even possible to achieve this comic book / 2D animation aesthetic in a 3D video game. It looks really…

It’s hard to articulate what I mean without showing examples. Here is an example from Invincible.

Totally fair, I don’t disagree. 

I said this after playing the demo: It’s hard to argue with “free” (Game Pass), but some of the animations are outright bad while some are okay. Everything about the flow of the game feels jarring and janky. By choice the game looks like it’s animated on 3s or 4s, which is kinda cool in theory, but it just doesn’t…

Don’t mean to discount your experience here, but for me admiration is as strong a reason to play as enjoyment. There are so many games where I get the opposite feeling. I think feeling removed from something while still being able to admire it is a good indicator that there’s a spark. 

Personally I think one of my best endgame content situations in a game was Borderlands 2 (3 looks the same but waiting on my co-op person to get a new console). None of it felt forced or time gated, you grinded better versions of gear for specific raid bosses. And playing through the other sections again was still as…

Thanks for your review. Aside from being beautifully written, it made me think. So, some thoughts, in no particular order.

I completely agree with you actually. I played the hell out of Destiny (mostly 1). They made the after-campaign mostly enjoyable.

I only chased the god rolls really in one Destiny 2 season, and naturally that was the final one affected by sunsetting before they went back on that idea. Ow.

I’ve actually been pretty interested in the campaign for this game since I’d heard it actually tells a decent story.

I get why stuff gets vaulted or removed for the most part. In the case of Destiny they want to keep the number of player matchmaking queues to a sustainable number. Doing seasonal activities means they can focus players on that activity. Though it still makes it very hard to put down the game when you’ve played it 3…