No, Destiny was never originally supposed to be this way. Destiny was originally planned to be a four-game franchise, where a new, standalone SKU would release every other year, with a major DLC expansion for the in-between years. Based on the original contract with Activition, we’d be on Destiny 4 right now, and the…

but this will easily surpass GTA IV levels of ludonarrative dissonance.

That, and the two guys were also in a band with the guitarist from Phoenix back in the 90s. 

LOL.

Each year, we get a fairly massive expansion with an entirely new planet/region to explore. That’s kind of the lion’s share of the yearly cost. The rest goes toward the “repetetive” seasons, but at $10/season, it’s that calculus of dollars paid:hours played. And $10/3 months of stuff to do is honestly a pretty solid…

The original contract was a new game every two years, totally new SKU. We would get D1, comet expansion (like The Taken King or Forsaken) after a year, then D2 the next year. Comet expansion, then D3. Comet expansion, then D4. And then one final comet expansion, and that’s as far as the original contract took them.

I think Joel’s “Atkins diet” line was a tongue-in-cheek joke. He was watching Mr. Adler feed his mother a biscuit by hand, watching the food basically falling out of her mouth. And it was kind of grossing him out. 

I intentionally did not replay TLOU before this. Because I had forgotten enough of the minor plot points along the way. So I want the show to be fresh and to be able to stand on its own, just like the game should stand on its own. Sidebar, this is something GOT always failed at. Too many times a character would up and…

They explain in the post-episode behind-the-scenes why they removed spores, and it makes sense. Spores would be, literally, everywhere. They work as a mechanic in the game to add variety to encounters. But they’ve totally sold the network of the fungi in the second episode, and it works.

I’d recommend not playing the game until the season is over. The game is the game, and the show is the show. And the game can/might spoil things for you that will reveal in the show. I played the game twice eons ago, but I’ve forgotten it enough. So while I remember major plot points, there are enough minor steps…

I’m one who simultaneously loved the game and also love the show so far.

You mean dead in a hallway with a bullet to his head?

I feel like if you paid attention, the secret wasn’t a secret at all. We saw the child arriving in Boston staring at the poster. We saw the clear infection times. We heard Ellie countdown. We heard Ellie indicate her name as “Veronica, same as the day before, and the day before, and the day before ...” So she’s been…

I listened to the podcast, and they made sense of that. And Mazin even said that flashbacks are a very hard thing to do, and very easy to execute poorly. But their intention, in that scene, was not so much a flashback for the story sense, but what we saw was literally Joel having a flashback. The flashback wasn’t for…

I have an old friend from college who was standing on a stage/platform. It was maybe 2.5-3 feet off the ground, not that high. She hopped off onto the flat, level floor below, much like you’d do to a million things of that height on a million different ways.

Way, way, way back, a Rainbow Six game had a campaign mode where you could use your headset to issue voice commands to your team. I mean, this was like, 2005 or 2006. And at the time I thought it was a really innovative way to play the game. You could actually give commands to your AI bots instead of scrolling through…

Hol’ up. We waited eight hours for this announcement for it to be ... NFTs????

I think another Taskmaster alum, Romesh Ranganathan, could be a good host as well. He has that sort of self-deprecating humor where he’s not looking to take the center of attention.

Destiny’s open world instances are capped at 9 players, and the game reserves open slots for each solo player on a planet. So upping it to four-person fireteams would effectively mean you could only have two fireteams in any instance; or Bungie would have to redesign the architecture to allow larger open world…

I don’t think the game did well, primarily because of zombie fatigue. People just had no interest in giving it a shot, and I don’t blame them. At first glance, it looked like it was trying hard to be one part GTA, and another part TLOU, but not really doing either of those successfully.