#we've all been into destiny since d1

[pigeon-ponders]

my siblings helped me do starcrossed on legend so i could get the wishkeeper catalysts and riven plushie!!

i'm so happy we're all playing together now 😭

[thefirstknife]

I am LAUGHING at the people upset about Bungie's pride flare and saying they'll quit D2 over it. D2, the game with so many completely normalized queer characters of many flavors you're practically tripping over them, that had an on-screen gay kiss and has a they/them nonbinary as a major expansion characters and destination vendor? What game have they been playing all this time??

It's so cringe. You can see in the comments that everyone who's shitting on Bungie has been poisoned by the recent conservative anti-trans and anti-LGBT+ propaganda that strives to take away primarily trans rights but also LGBT+ rights in general. Don't look at the comments though, for your own sake. They're particularly nasty this time around, because of the propaganda they're all slurping from their fave right-wing youtubers. I'm glad Bungie isn't backing away from this and that they continue to support us, especially at this time.

And yeah, it's really ridiculous how little attention they pay. Destiny is basically led by LGBT+ characters. From the very start. Even when they were not really allowed to have open rep, they still did it. Maya and Chioma have been canonically wives since vanilla D1. We've come from some minor lines in lore tabs that weren't even in the game to having an on screen kiss between two gay men and a major non-binary character! And not just that, but so much more. And none of it hidden away on a website.

Also people tend to either not know or purposefully ignore it, especially when they try the usual "corporations just want your money and don't care about gay people" cinicism but: Bungie has been supportive of the LGBT+ community for way longer than people think. They've been participating in and sponsoring Seattle Pride Parade from at least 2018. Their first LGBT+ pin was released in 2019. As I've noted, there have been LGBT+ characters since vanilla which released in 2014 which means that Bungie has been writing LGBT+ Destiny stuff since the early '10s.

Absolutely incredible that these gamers haven't noticed any of that. They're so good at poking around every single detail about Bungie, but somehow they didn't notice just how much Bungie has always been supportive of the LGBT+ community. My dudes, if you're bothered by this, I'm sorry to say but you've been playing a gay ass game and giving money to gay ass developers for nearly 10 years now.

[prophecydungeon]

thoughts on the final shape now that i have Percolated (tl;dr net positive)

gonna get the cranky negatives out of the way first: it's been, you know, seven years of D2, and i'm still not happy with how often they pull the You Are The™ Guardian™ thing. like, the whole point is that we're a whole swarm of weird space zombies with science magic powers. yes this is about the cutscene after excision. at just about every point in time that the narrative has been all You Are The Only Guy! it would have been totally possible to either pull in an NPC to be The Guy or to be like, this fireteam, this cohort, whatever. i like the way in which cayde went away - it was obvious from the start that he wasn't gonna stick around, duh - but that could have easily been turned into something like... idk, ghosts across sol are fading and he steps in to do the thing to everyone all at once. now there's this weird narrative hole where 12 guardians all had their ghosts cork it and... 12 caydes all did the thing?

but overall the excision cutscenes were cheesy but sweet, and i cried during the ghost one because how can you not, and excision as a whole was fun and weird and chaotic. really cool way to wrap up a raid and i'd love to see destiny do this kind of thing again.

crow as a character has a weird shape in my brain because i feel like i've just gotten bits and pieces of his involvement with the vanguard, especially since i played through lightfall and like 2 weeks of defiance and then went "well this is shit" and put the game down for 10 months. in spite of that, i liked the way he was involved with this storyline - he's already doing the job, ikora and zavala already trust and depend on him to do the job, and he really just needed a nudge. the fact that the nudge came from the no.1 source of his guilt was fittingly done and i liked it a lot.

and cayde! admittedly i am kind of a cayde hater. i liked him when i played through vanilla D1, TDB, and HoW, and then in TTK he became Funnee Quip Machine and my interest in him dropped to approximately zero. vanilla D2 did not fix this. WM/CoO did not fix this. forsaken only sort of fixed this, in the sense that he was not in the game anymore. when the first TFS trailer dropped, a solid 80% of my lack of interest in the DLC was the fact that CaYdE iS bAcK and i was just. like. i was already done with him! the game and community had finally shut up about him and now we're dragging the dead horse back to center stage. AND i'm burnt out on this game and haven't enjoyed the stories or lore for a long time.

HOWEVER, by the end of the first mission i was fully sold on cayde's presence in the DLC. it really felt like he got to be a character again; he had his funny and charming moments, yeah, but he also got to be a whole person outside of Funnee Quip Machine and that immediately made me enjoy and respect this DLC. he got to be frustrated and freaked out and concerned and reckless, he got to be a mentor in a genuine way and a silly way, and he was enjoyable to be around.

other positives: the gameplay was fantastic and i had a great time on legendary with Fireteam One Braincell as usual, and the structure of the story missions felt exceptionally great this time around. they leaned a lot into the raid/dungeon playbook of "introduce mechanic -> complicate mechanic -> chaotify mechanic" in a way that i really enjoyed and that the three of us had a lot of fun with; probably the best legendary campaign we've gotten of the three in terms of gameplay. i also liked that there wasn't a lot of fetch-questing in between the story missions and that most of that was saved for the After.

i also like that, you know, as per usual, we really didn't get all the answers and nothing wrapped up completely. i'm only partway through micah-10's stuff but i'm enjoying her a lot as a character and also really enjoying the lore we've been getting. there's a lot to do post-story and the amount is honestly kind of overwhelming (and the UI is kind of a mess...) but i'm very interested in it all!

i'm curious to see how the episodes pan out, especially as someone who's disliked the seasonal storylines for uhhhhh a few years now. my primary beef with the seasons has basically been that like... each story has felt like a constant loop of "OH GOD THE WORLD IS ENDING OH FUCK YOU HAVE TO SAVE THE UNIVERSE okieeeee we're good this week :) OH GOD THE WORLD IS ENDING" and the stakes just don't feel like stakes anymore. i loved the first handful of seasons we got, back when bungie was still trying to figure it out; the black armory and gambit prime and the menagerie all felt like reasonable and realistic Happenings™ that deserved the vanguard's attention between massive events such as "holy fuck uldren killed cayde" and "the fuck you mean 'moon's haunted'". shadowkeep's slow progression of stakes felt really great, and then beyond light's seasons were kind of all over the place with stakes. other seasons have had decent stakes but i've disliked the writing for other reasons (eg. i'm also a drifteris hater, i HATED rasputin's "sacrifice", the less said about defiance the better, etc.), so... i guess we'll see. tentatively feeling positive! but we'll see how the season episode starts next week.

this DLC didn't completely rewrite my entire brain the way forsaken did, but it was still very good. i think i would have been a lot more into the post-story stuff in the witch queen if i hadn't been at the very edge of being totally burnt out on D2 (after, you know, playing nonstop since forsaken) but over the past few days i've found myself really excited to jump back in and keep exploring, so i'm gonna hang onto that feeling.

[thefirstknife]

All the talk about the complexity of software dev and gaming today make me think it was a mistake to let gaming get so complex. Games were fun, even decades ago. Maybe we should just go back to that. Sure games won't be anywhere near as pretty or complex or expansive but I don't like the whole "it's just so complex now so we HAVE to make it less friendly to the end-user because there's no alternative with software this complex" thing.

Well true, games were fun decades ago as well, but it doesn't mean they weren't complex. In comparison to today? Of course they were less complex. But so was the technology to run them. We may look at old games and think they were easy to make and run, but they were not. In their time, they were complex.

It's human nature to strive for improvement. We've been doing this since the dawn of time. Things get more complex because we want to make them more complex. I don't see how and why we should just decide to stop developing better technology.

So let's talk complexity. Obviously, there's a reasonable limit. If some form of complexity is taking a toll on human life (in this case, making devs crunch), then we should take a step back. Bungie has been transparent about this and they've delayed two expansions to allow their workers to work in normal conditions, especially during pandemic times. They've cut ties with Activision for this and they decided to make the game at their own pace and Destiny has been better for it.

There's obviously losses here when a company like Activision isn't holding Bungie on a leash, but that's the opposite of the issue of complexity. Activision was the one to force Bungie to make expansive overly-complex and bloated game. They demanded campaigns with a million locations and missions and different mechanics and cutscenes and expensive voice actors. If anything, Bungie is currently shrinking the complexity of the game by removing these huge unused areas which they may return at some point after reworking them to better fit their vision of the game. There's a reason why we're probably getting D1 version of Mars back instead of D2: D2 Mars was unnecessarily huge and a waste of space. It was nice and pretty and had cool stuff, but you know. Complex.

So I don't really think vaulting is the result of Bungie trying to make the game more complex now. If anything, it's a result of Bungie having been forced to make it complex 4 years ago. Now they're forced to reduce the complexity in order to keep it working without as many resources as they've had under Activision.