Well damn, that all sounds very promising! I'm gonna have to look into this game a bit further, as this sounds like it has a lot of my favorite elements of the ARPGs from AAA studios that I love, but without the problems I often have with those games. Thanks for sharing this!
If you haven't already, I'd definitely recommend putting this up as a proper review somewhere, too. That's way too in-depth to just get lost in a random Lemmy thread over time!
As much as I want to be critical of it based on the cringelord description, the actual gameplay footage doesn't look awful at all. Of course, it's impossible to really judge an ARPG without seeing how the loot system feels as you play it. But at least visually, it looks pretty well fleshed out. Honestly, I hope they find success with this project.
More and more developers seem to assume everyone else can afford what they consider to be cheap, and feel entitled to gobble up all the resources on other people’s systems as if they aren’t needed for anything else.
It's adding insult to injury when most of these games are now also launching at $70-80 these days, too.
If you're paying $20/TB, you're probably getting ripped off with some counterfeit garbage from a no-name Chinese Amazon seller that's not even close to the advertised capacity. I wouldn't put anything on one of those drives that I have any intention of keeping for longer than a week at that price.
Wait, they finally got around to explaining what the veil was?
Well... sort of. There's still a lot of unanswered questions about it, but basically it's another cosmic entity that's somehow linked to the Traveler. We end up finding it on Neptune at the end of the Lightfall campaign, and it basically looks like a giant fungal growth. Aesthetically, there's some similarities to the Egregore that took over the Glykon and Leviathan, but I'm not too sure that they're really the same thing.
They released this cutscene which goes into a bit of the Witness's origins, and it briefly talks about the Veil.
Yeah, I'm remaining cautiously optimistic about The Final Shape. I'm still going to end up buying it, because despite a lot of the game's flaws and the poor release of Lightfall, the storytelling is still fantastic 99/100 times, and I really want to see how the story ends.
But post-Final Shape is going to be a really hard sell, even for players who are sucked into the game like myself. They've made some decent progress at fixing some of Lightfall's downfalls so far, so it's evident that Bungie does genuinely care about the game still. But they've definitely damaged our trust, and are still gonna need to work really hard to earn that back.
A lot of things, but most of them stem from the expansion being very clearly rushed to release. The narrative was also incomplete, and Bungie had to add a bunch of supplemental lore to the seasonal missions instead of putting them in the main campaign where it belongs.
Traditionally, Bungie keeps the seasonal storyline separated from the campaign story, because they're technically separate purchases the player has to make, so it makes sense to keep those stories apart from each other, so that a player who only buys the expansions but not the season passes won't be missing out on any narrative threads that they haven't already invested time and money into.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the case with Lightfall. The campaign didn't finish telling the story, and spent about half of the campaign time sending the player on a search for a MacGuffin that the game never properly explains, and the other half was spent awkwardly learning how to use the new Strand subclass. Except all the campaign missions where you get to experiment with Strand gave you a super-boosted version of the subclass which isn't available in normal play, so players were disappointed with how Strand performed in the endgame when it felt so overpowered during the campaign. A lot of the unanswered questions from the Lightfall campaign got explained in seasonal cutscenes, instead.
Now, granted, the seasonal and campaign stories are part of the same over-arching plot, so it's expected for there to be some overlap. But it's not supposed to go to the point where you literally can't understand the point of what you did during the campaign until 3 months after the campaign was released, and only if you also bought the season pass. They introduced "The Veil" in the Lightfall campaign, and it was never made clear to the player what it actually was or what it meant as far as the story goes, until some Season of the Deep cutscenes came out.
There's also the issue of Strand being completely reworked from whatever "poison" subclass it was originally going to be, and there's a lot of evidence from the Witch Queen campaign that suggests that the subclass was originally going to be poison (some unredacted text in the game originally referred to poisonous status effects for Strand that are not in the final version). Strand was originally going to be included in Witch Queen, but was cut and pushed back to Lightfall, and in its place in Witch Queen was a really half-baked mechanic called "Deepsight", which reveals hidden platforms for the player to use to progress through the stages (in places where it's clear that the player was originally expected to use the Strand grapple mechanic to progress).
To Bungie's credit, they've made some improvements to Lightfall since release, and it is in a much better state than it was when it launched. But the narrative issues are still there.
I think the title is a joke about how Bethesda games are notoriously always full of bugs. Like, to the point that it's just expected for any new Bethesda game to be a bug-riddled mess at launch.
Hell, there are still bugs in Skyrim that never got patched, even after they re-released it onto modern platforms. Not even obscure bugs, but things normal players will encounter in their playthroughs.
Bungie 100% can remove the gun from people's inventories, but they won't. They're usually pretty hands-off on stuff like this, because your inventory is accessible cross-platform, but your purchased expansions are not. So they'll leave the gun in your inventory because they know that the possibility exists that some people may change their minds on their original purchase and re-buy the expansion for a different platform.
This is some pretty trash reporting, which is odd considering that Eurogamer usually isn't this bad. But their source for this is a Twitter thread from Luckyy10P? The dude is widely known as the biggest clown in the Destiny community, and every piece of "news" he covers is greatly exaggerated drama that only like three players ever complained about, but he presents as some massive community-wide issue.
Nobody's buying and then cancelling their $100 preorders just to keep one of the most mid guns that Bungie has ever released. Tessellation is not that good of a gun. Maybe it will be good when the catalyst is released in The Final Shape (though you won't be able to even get the catalyst without owning the expansion), but right now pretty much every trusted Destiny community member is confirming that the gun serves little to no real purpose in the current sandbox.
If Eurogamer wants to cover nonsense from Luckyy, they should be inquiring about his child support payments.