clagnaught

I buy enough games and have a back catalogue, I don’t necessarily see the appeal of a Game Pass or PlayStation Now. I have over 250 games on Steam and probably a couple dozen or so more spread out on other platforms, maybe 25-30 Switch games, and probably another 200+ games on PlayStation (granted a good chunk is through PS+).

I still have a lot of reservations about Game Pass and the likely subscription arms race that’s going to happen at some point, but I just don’t need access to more games (most of which I’m probably not going to play)

This is cool. I’m not sure if I will listen to this since I’m at the point in my life where I get video game podcast fatigue very quickly. I’m also trying to listen to more news oriented podcasts to mix things up.

But good for them. The little bit of their GOTY stuff they did on Twitch was good from the stuff I watched, so this sounds promising.

A big thing is the seasons, which last about 3 or 4 months. It's definitely worth doing them, since that's when a decent amount of the new stuff is added.

More importantly, the story progresses through those seasons as well. (This may have always been the case, but I only started playing through the seasons when I got back into Destiny during lockdown) To give a high level example:

• Season of the Arrivals: This was the leadup to Beyond Light. There was a lot of talk about the Darkness arriving, which manifested in content being vaulted and the main campaign that takes place on Europa.
• Season of the Hunt: This was focused on the Hive doing what Hive do. This launched alongside Beyond Light and it was a nice counterpoint to the Beyond Light campaign. While Beyond Light was focused on the Fallen and Stasis on Europa (and like a mission on the Cosmodrone), the Season of the Hunt was about a Hive infestation which largely took place on the Dreaming City and the Tangled Shore.
• Season of the Chosen: This is focused on the Cabal and dealt with a possible war between them and the Vanguard. Part of the context for that conflict is because the Cabal had a pretty significant blow dealt to them from the Hive in the previous season.

With the current loop of Destiny, there are several milestones between doing your weekly bounties, to larger campaigns, to triumphs that require a lot more grinding. The grinding part is where I generally fall off.

If you are looking to come back to Destiny, here's what I would recommend focusing on:

• New campaigns you haven't seen (i.e. Beyond Light and Shadowkeep). Beyond Light I really enjoyed. Shadowkeep...eh. There's some good stuff, but not as strong as Forsaken and Beyond Light in my opinion.
• Seasonal content: This gives you new stuff to do while giving you new story which builds out the world and leads to major events. Even with older seasons, some of those events are still around. (Not sure if the full blown story are still there to be honest, but you can do the actual "hunts" that were introduced in the Season of the Hunt)
• Exotic quests: If there are quest lines for exotic weapons you haven't done, those are generally worth doing (particularly Presage)

Late game stuff like raids I would probably hold off a little on. Garden of Salvation (the Shadowkeep raid) is good, and Deep Stone Crypt (the Beyond Light raid) is probably my favorite thing to do in Destiny, but those are almost like capstones. Not in the sense that those raids are so hard they are the last thing you should ever do.

What I mean is, if you are looking for just stuff to do in Destiny, those top three items are what I would start with and will generally feed into each other. Raids on the other hand are a 2 to 3 hour commitment (depending on which raid, if you have an experienced crew, etc.) In terms of getting back into the live service aspect of Destiny, working on those three items will give you more stuff to do long term than preparing for a raid, if that makes sense. (At the same time, I've cleared the Deep Stone Crypt 36 times over approximately 72 hours, so you can definitely spend a lot of times doing raids if you have the crew, haha)

A lot of stuff is political and trying to be unpolitical is still being political. Excluding and avoiding something like the plague can say just as much as including something.

That’s not to say that all games need to cover all themes or you can’t have a game that’s as dumb as shit. That said, plenty of arguments I hear from people wanting games to be apolitical are sometimes over very basic stuff, whether it being general themes that go with the territory (i.e. any number of political messages surrounding war that could have parallels in your modern military shooter) or representation in a story.

I have never done this myself, so don't have any suggestions along those lines, although I believe with their current setup they are using Parsec to stream video (and maybe audio?) to everyone. There may be something different for people's webcams, but I'm pretty sure Parsec is used to stream the capture to people, with something like OBS used for switching feeds locally.

Red Candle Games, the creators behind Detention and Devotion, have created an online store to sell their games DRM free. While Detention never left Steam, the Nintendo eShop, or iOS, things have not gone smoothly for Devotion to say the least.

Hopefully the game is here to stay and Red Candle Games can have financial freedom going forward. Detention and Devotion are both great horror games, with Devotion being my 2019 GOTY. So yeah, I think this is fantastic news and more people should play their games!

It would be cool if the devil Luchadeer shirt (forget the exact name of it) and the This Is The Run shirt came back.

As a tall person, I personally would greatly appreciate if you could get Tall shirts in here, since I basically have to get a shirt through a pre-order or hope the shirt fits ok / never shrinks.

I am a strong supporter of Team Daisy.

Not quite this, but the first game that came to mind is Tales of Graces. On one level, the game goes through some lengths to have the first several hours be a prologue where the cast are still children and then the game jumps forward like 8 years into the future. There’s also a late game reveal that sort of caught me by surprise. But also, there are some archetypes that you’ve seen plenty of times before or subplots that were pretty well known from other games.

The characters, while not the greatest cast ever, made things fun and they keep things interesting when the story gets typical. But parts of the story made me think, “Yes, I’ve seen this before”.

The closest thing I have is playing Destiny with people. A friend of mine was in a clan first (not sure how they found them) and I joined sometime later. As a result, I've been doing raids or exotic quests with people. When the latest raid came out in November, I started to have a regular crew of people, where we try to do something once a week.