03 Nov 2023
Another go ‘round the merry-go-round…
Look, not to be glib, but I’m tired. The last three years alone have been exhausting for anyone with a functioning frontal lobe, not to speak of any time before that. And now, it comes out that Bungie is once again in trouble. First off: it really fucking sucks that once again, the workers are the ones punished for ‘underperformance’ and apparently the fault never lies at the feet of the managers that the problems developed under their watch. This year in particular has been notible for the amount of layoffs in a lot of sectors, particularly in technology, and goddamn it always hurts to see good people lose their jobs for something that ultimately isn’t their fault. Any long term fan of Destiny and Bungie will tell you that this is not the first time the company’s had a serious problem. Aside from the various crisises and dramas with particular nitpicks regarding the game’s mechanics, there was the reported sexism and abuse issues in 2021, and then in 2018 how Bungie was basically a month from complete collapse if Destiny 2: Forsaken didn’t succeed. So, given that Destiny 2: Lightfall missed it’s targets by a massive 45%, I would like to ask the question - how did this happen?
Let’s try and take a … ‘objective’ look at where Destiny is right now, and what contributes to it being here. For the last several years the game’s run on the model of a major update on a semi-yearly cadence (delays aside), with four smaller content seasons, each taking three months of the year. For the last several major content updates we’ve gotten:
- A story campaign, about 8-10 missions long and would generally take 3-4 hours to complete.
- 1-2 strikes (a roughly half-hour narrative-driven mission designed for repeat play)
- A raid (a 1-4 hour narrative driven combat challenge designed for six players, and is supposed to represent the most complex and challenging content in Destiny)
- A bunch of armour and weapons, exotic or otherwise
- Some sort of ability update, whether it’s the entire new subclasses of Stasis and Strand of Beyond Light and Lightfall, or the Subclass 3.0 updates from Witch Queen.
A seasonal content update usually consists of (most of which requires the paid season pass):
- A three-or-six player activity
- A (harder) three-player activity, often non-matchmade
- A story that plays out over six or so weeks, usually in the form of a few cutscenes / audio recordings, a laundry list of tasks, and a mission each week.
- An exotic quest of some sort, depending on the season.
- An exotic weapon from the season pass, that free-to-players can earn midway through the free tiers.
- A three week event which usually involves some sort of remix on an existing activity with fun modifiers and some sort of armour and weapon loot reward. (free to play)
Also, there’s some sort of a ‘returning’ raid from Destiny 1 in the third season of the year, and the second and fourth seasons get a Dungeon, which is sort of like a smaller three-player raid. The dungeons require the purchase of a Dungeon key from the online store, or if you’ve purchased the big-mega-huge-ultimate version of the expansion it comes with the year of seasonal passes and the dungeon keys. The reprised raids in season 3 are free-to-play for all.
It’s also worth noting that with each major content update, due to what Bungie claims is keeping the game’s package size small and also not having to constantly retest older content to make sure they don’t break it, Destiny removes the previous year’s seasonal content from the game, making the armour and weapons from those seasons mostly unavailable to players at all. The content removed is access to the seasonal activities, narrative content, and rewards.
So looking at it all laid out like that you might think “Wow, Chris, that’s a lot of stuff! And you paid $150 AUD for it, that’s nuts!” and my answer to that is … “sort of.” If you’re not familiar with Destiny, aside from the chunks of story content that add up to maybe 20 hours of content a year if you’re being generous, you have to understand one thing about the game: You spend a lot of time running the same content over and over again. Strikes, Crucible, Gambit, seasonal activities, tne seasonal event, you’ll spend hours upon hours running the activities over and over again to earn rewards. And that’s the problem - why are you doing this, and are you having fun?
So, and keeping in mind I have 3000 hours in the game, the game is fun to play. Shooting the guns is fun and feels good due to a combination of animations and sound and tweaking feedback. The abilties that you get access to are unique and can significantly change how you approach any given encounter. At the higher tiers, combat is challenging and there are encounters in the game that are absolutely brilliant to play through. The raids are, for the most part, amazing experiences and are where Destiny shines the most. The PVP can be brilliant, showing your mastery of the games mechanics against someone else’s (or your mastery of the game’s bullshit).
What’s not so great about Destiny? The way guns work in Destiny is that they have a series of perks on them. Any given random drop of a gun randomly selects from a pool of perks for that weapon that can significantly affect how that particular instance of that weapon behaves. The first two perks on a gun will affect things like it’s accuracy, range, reload speed and recoil, and the third and fourth perks will be more esoteric modifiers, almost always requiring you to meet some sort of requirement like killing an enemy, or killing with a precision (head) shot, or killing multiple enemies, or dealing melee damage, or using an ability, and the effect it applies ranges from improving damage or reload speed to creating miniture explosions, to healing you, to giving you ability energy. There’s a massive amount of perks in the game, and not every gun has every perk as they each have a curated-by-bungie pool of perks to make this hand cannon different from that hand cannon, for example. In any case, given the massive pool of random options that can occur on any specific weapon, you could be hunting for a 1 in 1000 or higher chance to see a specific combination of perks on a gun, which is what drives players to repeatedly play activities. Repeat that for particular stat splits on armour, or completing triumphs (specific tasks that the game has you complete for prestige reasons), or obtaining “red borders”, weapons with a red border that give you progression for a blueprint to allow you to craft that gun, allowing you to select the perks - for an (in-game currency, not real money) fee, of course.
So you’re playing activities over and over again to get guns that work well to play activities over and over again. It’s a weird gameplay loop, but it works. vsauce sting noise But does it? If you’re actively playing Destiny 2 it’s hard to not notice that, well, there’s less people playing. Matchmaking times are longer, you see the same people more often than normal, you’re playing with international players more, using the Looking for Group (where you can find other people to coordinate to typically complete raids and difficult activities) has less ‘traffic’. Why is that? There’s a few reasons.
- This is an absolute banger year for video games. Baldur’s Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, Spider-man 2, just to name a few - you’re absolutely spoiled for top-quality games to play, and this is after previous years that also had excellent titles.
- Lightfall’s story was… lackluster. The plot was a little nonsensical, players did not mesh well with the new characters in general and had issues with tone and delivery, the conclusion was incomplete and felt unsatisfying - to the point where they added more plot in later seasonal updates that provided some answers as to what the hell was going on.
- Very little of the content added to the game is the repeatable content - we got two new PvP maps this year, the second one only after complaints reached a breaking point regarding the issue - one new strike, and a raid. The seasonal activities are 15 minutes long at most, and there’s only two, meaning you’re doing slight variations on the same fifteen minutes over and over again. The game’s content is feeling stale at this point, and there’s less of it since the Beyond Light update removed a stack of strikes, and gambit and crucible maps from the game.
- All the content and narrative from the previous year, apart from the major expansion content, is gone. Any narrative context is almost completely removed from the game and you have to basically go to YouTube in order to find out what even happened.
- It’s super difficult for a new player to start playing the game. You enter this game, nine years into a dense narrative, a lot of which isn’t even available to experience in the game, and you’re thrown into the deep end with mechanics and terminology that other players have learnt over nine years and the game makes an attempt to teach you, with varying success depending on your willingness to engage with the often oblique ways this game presents it’s content. It’s often stated that new players have to be sherpa’d into the game. And that’s all on top of the confusion of “which version of Destiny 2 do I buy”, because you need to buy each expansion separately, and if you want Stasis you need Beyond Light and if you want that you need to buy this and that and it’s all a bit much.
I’m sure I missed some reasons, but basically it comes down to: the overwhelming sentiment is that players are bored, the game feels like a chore to play, and the narrative payoff is whelming at best. (side note: I have less issues with the narrative than most - I *like Nimbus, and I miss Sagira, and I didn’t mind the ‘more cheesy’ Red War story, and I love the little bits of narrative all over the place; the recent lore book from the Festival from the Lost is a great example - but even I recognise issues with the Lightfall narrative.) After nine years it’s really not surprising that half-measures aren’t going to cut it to keep this game alive, and this is *on top of having new corporate owners (Sony) that surely look at the budget sheets and ask questions.
So, given that Bungie are (yet again) at the precipice of do-or-die for Destiny 2; what do I think they should do?
- All development on unannounced projects is mothballed. Marathon goes to skeleton development staffing at best. They now have 8% less staff than they used to, they can’t afford to waste time here. All available resources on The Final Shape.
- Bungie announces The Final Shape has a six month delay. Replacing that slot they extend the final season and basically do what they did for the 30th anniversary expansion with key differences: it’s free, and it’s more akin to the Age of Triumphs final update from Destiny 1 where they make it rain loot, bring back vaulted strikes and maps and remix encounters. No new content, but heavily lean on existing content. Heck, next year they’ll have the 10th anniversary for Destiny, play off that somehow.
- Reduce RNG - give players ways to affect RNG even further in their favour. Note that players’s behaviour seems to indicate that a certain amount of RNG is an enjoyable way to play; much in the same way that people enjoy gambling, but clearly a line has been crossed here and they need to pull back - it’s worth noting that they have been pulling back RNG since Shadowkeep, but I think they’re still too far over in Gatcha territory for what this game costs.
- Unvault content, particularly narrative content. I think The Final Shape just needs more stuff. More strikes, more maps, more everything. Gambit maps will go a long way but I think they need to take a hard look at that mode’s balancing again. I don’t think we’ll magically end up with another darkness subclass - it’ll take more than nine months to develop that, but I can pipedream. Maybe they’ll announce it for a later seasonal update.
- Package all previous expansions into a single cheap bundle, including the dungeons. Emphasis on the cheap, like 20 bucks. 40 if you include Lightfall maybe. Make it easy for a player to work out what to buy to play the game fully. Heck, maybe make Shadowkeep and Beyond Light’s narrative free to play.
- (pipedream) SRL. Screw it, people keep asking for it.
The problem with this wishlist is that they don’t have a lot of time to do it in. They might have legal and/or accounting issues with preorders and not delivering inside windows - but that’s for lawyers to work out. They just cut a small pile of staff, that’s not-insigificant chunk of people less to do work with, particularly when some of the people laid off are some of the most experienced staff they had. They’re fighting an uphill battle and I’m not even confident that management are going to learn the right lessons from this - there’s every chance that they turn around and go “well it was working better when the game was more frustrating to play, so let’s double down on that”. Hopefully they still have smart people who can identify the issues and make the game a more engaging place for more people to play.
I really love Destiny and it’s world, and I think it’s a real shame if it was to fizzle away at the ten year mark and become nothing more than a quiet footnote in gaming history as a “hey, remember Destiny?”.
25 Nov 2022
Hear me out, I’m not crazy.
So, I’ve recently started to exercise again, after becoming super slack during the covid years and putting back on a tonne of weight. My primary form of exercise right now is walking in the pool, as this takes a lot of strain off my poor knees - another reason I stopped regularly exercising.
I’m actually fairly inured to being bored walking back and forth across 25-25 meters of a pool, but it would be nice to be able to listen to something while I’m doing so. This is where the Tozo T6’s come in.
These are rated for IPX8 water resistant for up to 1m under water, so while they’re not for swimming (Bluetooth signals typically don’t mix well with water), they should be fine for walking in the pool, giving that if your head is underwater while walking in the pool you’re either doing something very wrong, or you’re somehow super dense.
I managed to get these from Amazon (I know, I know, but it’s like the only place to get them) for fairly cheap for just under 40 Australian dollarydoos on sale, which is why I pulled the trigger.
This model is around two years old, but there’s nothing newer I could find that also supported this level of water resistance.
I took them out of the box, which is compact and mostly cardboard, aside from a plastic wrapper, and a few plastic tags covering the charge contacts and the touch surface on the earphones themselves. There’s six sizes of silicon tips provided, the mediums are installed on the buds, and there’s two sizes in either direction, and a short USB mini cable in the box. There’s also a few slips of instruction paper.
There’s no app for these dinguses, it’s just pull out both buds initially and they enter pairing mode and you use the standard Bluetooth pairing screen to connect to them. They pair to each other fairly quickly, within a second or two of pulling them out of the case, and they even work fine if you take one out, put it in your ear, and take the other out, which I’ve had problems with with other “true wireless” earphones.
I’ve had a lot of issues with Bluetooth headphones in my area. For whatever reason - overhead powerlines, proximity to mobile towers, straight up bad juju - walking around my area I’ve found that at least three sets of headphones I’ve used from cheap to a $200 pair will just constantly get interference and dropouts just walking around with my phone in my pocket. These, however, worked flawlessly - walking in the exact same areas I never experienced a dropout once. They started to cut out when I put my phone down and walked around 15-20 meters away from my phone, which is about what you’d expect for Bluetooth.
Fitting them in your ears is fairly straightforward too - following the instructions in the booklet gave me a good fit and I haven’t felt like they were going to fall out at any point. I’m not the kind of person who would be running and jumping around, but walking around at least it felt fine for me, but as always with ears, your mileage may vary. I changed the eartips to the large size, and taking the installed ones off was a bit of a fight so they’re held on very securely.
The case is fine. The buds don’t fall out if you open it upside down and shake it, they’re held in securely with magnets. The lid hinge isn’t a satisfying fidget toy, but it does also close with a magnet so it does hold shut pretty well. It’s not that large so it is pretty pocketable and it’s nice and rounded so it doesn’t feel awkward. It has a usb-mini port on the bottom to charge with four white leds on the front to tell you the charge level. The port has a rubber gasket as the case itself is also supposed to be waterproof. It also supports Qi charging so you never have to use that if you want to, which is nice.
The buds themselves are supposed to have around 5 hours of battery life, and the case can recharge them for up to 24-ish hours. The manual reports the buds charge from flat in a bit over one and a half hours, so they’re probably not the best things to be taking on an airplane for continuous use, but they’re perfectly fine for exercise sessions. The case itself should charge from flat in around the same time too.
As for sound - they’re fine. I’m no audiological analyser, so I’m never going to be able to tell you “oh the low end is heavy and there’s no top end” or any of that shit. It was acceptable to me walking around the streets here. I’ve heard better, but I’ve also heard a lot worse too. The noise isolation is fine, I didn’t get bothered by outside noise leaking in although there’s no noise cancelling or anything - it’s just the silicon eartips doing all the work. Pausing the music allows you to hear people talking nearby so it’s obviously not great but I find it acceptable in my case.
They have microphones for making voice calls and… they exist. It’s fine, it’s a Bluetooth, microphone what do you expect?
As for pausing - the controls. Each earbud has a single touch sensitive surface and it’s the usual tap to pause, double tap the left earbud to go back, right to go forward, etc. It’s fairly intuitive and it does support holding to change volume and triple tap to invoke the voice assistant of choice. However, since these are jammed in your ears you’ve got to a) work out where in your ears to tap and b) tap on a thing jammed in your ears. I find this to be kind of awkward and often miss the first tap on a double tap to skip a song and end up pausing the music instead. And when you do tap, you’re uncomfortably jamming the thing in your ear, so I found myself pulling out my phone to make the adjustments more often than not.
All in all I think these are pretty good “true wireless” earbuds for the price.
20 May 2022
Why do you always have to jump?
Final Episode. Here we go.
You know, taken as a stand-alone episode absent of any of the baggage of the prior eight episodes, this episode isn’t that bad. It’s got some decent Spartan-on-Covenant action, Cortana and Kai carrying the whole damn thing on their backs, and John finally acts like the Master Chief… in a way.
We get a pretty decent battle on a planet clearly designed to look like Halo 3’s desert levels on the Ark, and there’s also a pretty good 4-Spartan firefight battle with a somewhat shakily CG’d action sequence that’s still mostly entertaining. And then we get Cortana Chief… Master Cortana? Johntana? Corn? Anyway, Cortana takes over Master Chief’s body like Halsey always intended, and she’s a force to be reckoned with. Neat, if somewhat canon-abusing.
It’s a weird stopping point, too - the whole B plot with Kwan and Soren basically completely ignored at this point (and you can leave it there too, IMO) - we don’t find Halo, and Makee is… ‘dead’ (yeah no, she’s 100% uploaded to the Domain, the Forerunner’s galactic network).
Halsey’s in hiding after escaping the consequences of her attempted coup, using a clone of herself to fake the UNSC out and then just walking around somewhere where there’s totally security cameras? As in the last episode, the UNSC’s security makes no sense - they’re supposed to be everywhere, watching everything and yet they miss stuff on cameras all the time. Has there ever been the real Halsey on the show? Was it the flash clone the entire time? Was her going rogue just the clone breaking down? Who knows?
Much like the whole thing with them searching the star system for the Covenant planet; “oh yeah we know that this solar system we can’t see in due to lensing artefacts from gravitational fields” and yet “yep we’ve searched it and found nothing”. Which one is it? Can you not see into the area, or have you searched it?
Sigh.
I can’t ignore the trainwreck that was this series as a whole, and I can’t strictly recommend anyone watch it. If I were to give any advice to Season 2’s scriptwriters, more of this episode please, and less of the rest. Heck, retcon a bunch of stuff, I don’t care - I can pretend that Halo Season 1 didn’t happen; I already pretend that Halo 5 doesn’t exist.
13 May 2022
Kai can stay though, she’s great.
Episodes 4-6: Meh. Decent Covenant battle though. Jack-yap stole the show, and then lost it immediately.
Episode 7: I knew this was coming, and it’s as bad as I thought it would be. At least we got an explosion.
Episode 8:
- What the fuck.
- That’s pretty on-brand for Halsey, but she’s normally more subtle about it.
- Cortana has significantly redeemed herself over the last few episodes, in no small part due to Jen Taylor carrying the whole shebang on her back.
- What the fuck.
ps: Reach City, Planet Reach? What the hell happened to New Alexandria?
07 Apr 2022
Exposing the Master Cheeks.
So hey, episodes 2 and 3 are out.
Episode 2: Plot dump ahoy, nothing particularly egregious to speak of here.
Episode 3: Spoilers Ahead.
Okay, so there’s a few severe changes to the Halo canon that I really don’t like. It mostly comprises of two things:
- They wiped John’s memories as a child when they conscripted him, and,
- The entire way AIs work.
So, let’s start with John. In the show, they wiped his memories before the age of six - before they conscripted him into the Spartan program. It’s not outright stated why they did this, but it’s pretty clear that they - the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), and Halsey - are afraid that if the Spartans knew who they used to be they wouldn’t want to be Spartans anymore. In proper canon, the Spartans are effectively brainwashed into being soldiers by dint of being trained from the age of 6, but they do remember everything. In the novel The Fall of Reach, the topic of erasing memories is briefly discussed but immediately dismissed by Halsey, stating about targeted amnesia “A memory loss that may leak into other parts of the brain. No, this will be dangerous enough for them even with intact minds.”
Part of the plot of the show has John recovering memories about his prior life through interacting with the artefact. As of episode 3, it just so turns out that John knew about another piece of the artefact back since before he was kidnapped and conscripted. I’m sure it’ll end up mattering more and more through the series and frankly I’ve got a pretty good idea of where it leads; the librarians geas - the idea that the Forerunners implanted a sort of genetic DNA in the human race to fight the Flood. That’s one of the weaker ideas of 343’s Halo and while I’m not surprised to see it show up here - it does tie into why I find the changes this show makes all the more frustrating - I, well, find the idea that your hero’s actions are pre-determined to be kind of weak.
Moving slightly tangentially - Cortana. In actual canon, Smart AIs - that is, AIs born of scanning actual human brains - are fairly common, at least among UNSC and ONI systems. There’s also dumb AIs - AIs that are completely synthetic and rather limited in scope, used for maintaining systems, running city networks etc etc. Smart AIs like Cortana are able of thinking in the way that we would define it for ourselves - coming up with new ideas, not just following programming. They’re used for when tasks are too complicated for a Dumb AI; Cortana’s specialty is in information processing and computer network manuipulation. More importantly their appearance, name, and behaviour are all entirely determined by themselves on first boot - they’re self-deterministic. For an example, we’re all pretty familiar with Cortana, the girl in the skintight blue leotard, but in the books there’s also AI like Black Box… who presents themselves as a black box.
In the Silver timeline, there’s no such thing as a Smart AI as far as I’m aware. It takes until episode 3 for anyone even to mention the existance of AI outside of “The Cortana Program”, where they’re usually all over the plot of any Halo story, often taking centre stage in the narrative. The fact that Halsey clones herself is fine for the narrative the problem with it is that ONI, this supposedly shady organisation that’s totally fine with kidnapping six year olds somehow draws the line at cloning humans. Also, it leads a deeply creepy moment with her assistant and the clone that I have no idea why it’s there apart from making us know that yes, this guy is an absolute creepshow.
In any case, after an unsettling surgery scene, Cortana comes online and I have to admit that Jen Taylor threw me for a loop here. It’s the voice of Cortana, but it’s really not her character in the slightest. There’s a few lines here and there delivered in such a way that I’m like “There she is!” but on a whole, this isn’t Cortana. Cortana canonically isn’t an AI that “follows directives”, or has problems when the plan changes, and here, at least in episode 3 that’s exactly what she does. She literally says “This isn’t what I was made for.” and that’s not what a Smart AI is supposed to be in Halo canon - Smart AIs mostly determine for themselves what they’re made for.
Bringing it back together this is the major issue that I have so far with Halo: The TV Series. They’ve taking characters from the canonical story and stripped them of their free will. In canon, while brainwashed to a degree John knows exactly what they’ve done to him. He’s made the decision to be a soldier protecting humanity and Halsey and the Spartan program is simply the best way that he has access to of doing that. Cortana has less say in the matter, when it comes down to it she’s just a chunk of silicon, but she took a look at what’s going on and decided that she was going to protect John the best she could.
This might come off as very whiny fanboy of me, in fact I’m 100% sure it does, but they took agency away from these characters and I think they’re all the more weaker for it. They’re going for a narrative of these characters regaining their own agency, when it really should be a narrative of characters in a system that already have limited agency and how they decide to use it to protect Humanity from being wiped out by the Covenant.
Plus, it always boils down to War Crimes are Bad and frankly that’s not what I find is interesting about Halo.