Ink & Bytes
Ink & Bytes
Episode Thirteen: The Architect And Narrative Storytelling
Today I sit down with a good friend "the real Shin Malphur,". Our backgrounds as writers shine through as we dissect the complexity of creating engaging narratives within the Destiny universe.
We dive deep into our philosophy, emphasizing the importance of inclusive gameplay and the excitement of Destiny’s expansions like The Taken King and Rise of Iron. From the thrill of the original Chaperone quest to the grind for exotic gear, we recount our personal journeys through Destiny 1 and 2. Our conversation shifts focus to the latest expansion, The Final Shape, where we discuss its mechanics, narrative reveals, and how it stacks up against previous content like The Witch Queen and Lightfall. Spoiler alert for those who haven’t ventured into The Final Shape yet!
As we wrap up, we explore the broader narrative landscape of Destiny, speculating on the franchise’s future and the challenges of writing satisfying endings. We also reflect on character arcs, villain complexity, and the potential for new storylines and expansions. Whether you’re a long-time fan or new to the game, this episode is packed with engaging discussions, thoughtful analysis, and even a humorous Drifter impression to keep you entertained. Join us for a comprehensive and heartfelt exploration of what makes Destiny and its universe so captivating.
And if your a writer this episode is filled to the bring with storytelling background and insights! We are both writers and authors after all.
Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Ink and Bytes podcast. I know last episode was a bonus episode and I was really just talking about Destiny and saying thank you to the studio for making such an amazing experience and basically charting my dream job career course. And this episode is a little bit more special. It is about Destiny again, so that's awesome. I love talking about the game and I have a good friend with me here who is also a author and we're both narrative nerds and we like to talk about the story of the game and the twists and turns it's taken, and I'm sure we're going to have a very intense discussion across various points, but as normal normal, I will let them introduce themselves hi, I am the real shin malphur, not the fake one.
Speaker 2:Uh, the fake one, liquid shin, is very real and he is coming for you. Um, so if you see him outside the studio door, if you see him outside the window, uh, know that it already is too late. That's at least the name I go by in Destiny anyway, I figured, since it's kind of the Destiny-sode, that I'd give you that one. I like it. Plus, I'm gonna talk a bunch of big game about me playing raids. So if anybody wants to raid, report me, they can absolutely do that. And you can just use the real shitmail for spaces, not all one word, they're not prepared. Report me, they can absolutely do that. Um, and you can just use the real shit mouth or, uh, spaces, not all one word, they're not prepared.
Speaker 2:They're not prepared for your raid report like I mean, if they wanted to, I mean if they want to be oh oh, this guy's talking out of his ass then I could be like I mean, I've got the stats to back it up. I'm not gonna lie about anything here. There's no point.
Speaker 1:So yeah and uh, I also to the audience out there. This is the first podcast that I'm doing very late at night, slash in the morning because of my night job, so get ready for a little bit more delirium, but that's fine. It feeds in perfectly to what we're talking about, because about 21 delirium 87% Don Way. Exactly. But yeah, and you're a writer too, right? You can talk about that a little bit, if you want.
Speaker 2:I got my edits back on my most recent short story this week. My editor found my revision to be quite effective. We're going to be working on some more in-depth sort of stylistic sentence revisions, uh, at this point, but I'm very happy with where that's landed. Um, I'm also working on a novel that's it is also under revision, but I've I'm making some big changes and, frankly, I'm in a funny spot with where that's at right now. So, um, kind of just taking this opportunity to really get the process down with something that's smaller. Um, so, yeah, um awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we're. We both love narrative and stuff like that, so perfect two people to be talking about this. I'm just gonna get right into it because I need structure this late in the morning I love it when you talk to the in the invisible third party.
Speaker 2:That's not here you talk about you talk about us like I'm not sitting right here across from you hey, hey, I'm tired.
Speaker 1:Okay, bear with me.
Speaker 2:It's liquid, it's uh who are we who wait where?
Speaker 1:it's too late. He's already in the walls I hope it got. I hope it got that but I'm gonna just throw out. I know you said you have a bunch of notes, so I'm curious to see what you want to talk about what you have written down seven pages of notes, which is wild it made me feel. It made me feel super underprepared when you had seven pages you showed.
Speaker 2:You made the mistake of showing me the outline. So I was like, okay, I'll just do what I do. I'm a writer, I'll do what I do. So I mean I guess it's probably fair, uh, for me to talk about what my experience with the game is, because I mean, you might be wondering who's this schlub? Why? Why do I care what he has to say? Why don't, why do? Why do I want to listen?
Speaker 1:So exactly, that is the first question.
Speaker 2:Uh, something, something quite interesting that not a lot of people are are ready to hear is that I was a destiny hater. Uh, for D one, I was like this game stupid. Uh, this is a terrible concept. Why would you ever? You know any any chance that that I had to really sink my claws into the game and disparage it for any reason? I would take it. I was a warframe fanboy during that period, so I mean, they were kind of in direct competition. Warframe is the only destiny killer that's still around. So I, I figure you know it hasn't quite killed the franchise or anything bungee's doing a brilliant job of that themselves. But as for Warframe, I mean it's still sticking. But I got Destiny 2 for free, actually as a digital attendee of BlizzCon in 2018.
Speaker 2:And at that time I was going through some stuff. I mean I was falling out of love with Warframe and I was going through a bit of mean. I was I was falling out of love with warframe and I was going through a bit of a writer's renaissance and I was just kind of looking for something new to take my attention. I tend to play these mmo type games and just bounce from one to the other like I. I guess I guess, um, before destiny I was an overwatch player and I don't want to talk about From one to the other. I guess Before Destiny I was an Overwatch player and I don't want to talk about my Overwatch career Because that's Not worth talking about. But I was falling out of love with Warframe, I was falling out of love with Overwatch and I just needed something new To put thousands of hours into.
Speaker 2:And I came into the game at the launch of Forsaken and I didn't play D1, I didn't play Vanilla and I was lucky enough and it's funny that I have to say this I was lucky enough to play the Red War. I did not have to suffer the modern New Light experience. And Forsaken I mean it's one of those touchstone moments of the franchise, like Taken King and Witch Queen and Final Shape. These are all big-deal expansions and I did play from the beginning.
Speaker 2:I played all of the content in order, I didn't jump around. So I mean it took me a second to get to where we were in Forsaken, but by the time that I had completed the campaign I was like, okay, when do we get to the raids? I want to do the raids because that's Destiny's thing. I mean for those of you, I figure, if you're watching this you probably play Destiny, so there's no point. But the last time I checked, only something like 18% of the player base has ever cleared a raid. Watching this, you probably play destiny, so there's no point. But the last time I checked, uh, only something like 18 of the player base has ever cleared a raid.
Speaker 2:So if you've never cleared a raid uh, if you've never cleared a raid, dude the, the point of destiny is the raids.
Speaker 1:That is the point I didn't know that stat was so low.
Speaker 2:I thought it was higher than that, yeah, yeah, no, it used to be lower. It used to be lower. And then, uh, pantheon came out and people started doing pantheon and they were like, wow, this is you know, they might do uh, atrax and uh oryx. And they were like, oh, this is super easy. And they're like, well, so the regular raids are even easier than this. And then we started to see that clear number go up as well. Uh, after root of nightmares was released, that really that's a lot of people's first raid, I think. Now my first raid was last wish, because I'm hardcore like that. Um, but um, ron is so easy, I mean it is. If you haven't cleared Ron and you're curious about doing a raid, that is the one to start with. It looks intimidating. Third encounter can be a stickler, especially in LFG when your team's kind of a crapshoot. You don't have to bleep that. By the way, craps is a real game.
Speaker 2:Don't worry, I wasn't have to bleep that, by the way craps is a real game, um, so don't worry, I wasn't going to anyway the the point is that if you're, if you're curious about a raid and all you have to rely on is lfg, do root of nightmares, because that's the one that really started to bump those player numbers up in the first place.
Speaker 1:We went from eight percent of the player base to about 12 after ron came out, and then up to 18 or so, um, by the time that pantheon dropped, because there was just more exposure on these encounters, you know yeah, that makes me feel significantly better about the fact I don't rate as much as I used to, because I was like, yeah, I'm sure at least half the community is clear, right, but 18 is like no, it's, it's a tiny number.
Speaker 2:It's a tiny, tiny number. You'd be surprised I was floored.
Speaker 1:No, that's interesting, you can actually tell um.
Speaker 2:You can actually tell. Let's see here. Well, actually, I guess you used to be able to tell um. There was a way. Oh, how do I do it? Basically, if you go to your destiny achievements and you look at I think it's called wishing for the best, yeah, this one for clear the last wish raid. It's the only. It's the only um one, that it's the only raid that gives you an achievement. And if I look at it, it still says 7.1. So only 7.1 of the global player base, because the game isn't available on Battlenet anymore, it's only available on Steam. I guess that's the global PC player base, because it's only on Steam and then console. So I guess this number is probably attenuated a little bit for console. I'm a PC player, so all of my figures and stuff are tailored to the PC crowd. But 7.1% of players on PC have cleared Last Wish.
Speaker 1:That's nothing, that's none that makes me feel even better about the three times I actually did do it. That's, that's funny.
Speaker 2:Well, you and you haven't played with me, so I haven't forced you to play with a ribbon legit, yet Best encounter in the game. I love it so much.
Speaker 1:I um, maybe next time it's on rotation I've need to do more of uh um salvation's edge. But before we get down tomorrow, wish me luck.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, good luck I know that's gonna be a gruel yeah but, um, before we get too far into our raids already.
Speaker 1:But we will talk about raids because I want to talk about so so, so I've got.
Speaker 2:I've got more. Um, I have to rep my clan because I love my clan. Um, but my last, this is my last point on my notes for this topic. I joined sample text shout out to sample text, love sample text so that I could take the game more seriously. We've cleared literally hundreds of raids Wallace raids, low man raids. Our clan has cleared every day one raid that has come out since deep stone crypt and I've participated in four of those clears personally awesome, that's pretty sweet.
Speaker 1:I tried one day one, then I realized I'm not doing and I've participated in four of those clears personally. Awesome, that's pretty sweet. I tried one day one and then I realized I'm not doing it again. But then again I did also have Mobius Quiver with Primary Ammo Finder.
Speaker 2:You have to be a special kind of insane to do a day one. I've participated in four clears. We usually field between two or three teams, and so sometimes I was on the team that cleared, sometimes I wasn't, but I've participated in every one since Deep Stone, except for Crota because I was busy with school, and all of them have been endeavors. I mean, we were in Vow for 32 hours and my team didn't clear that, and we were in Salvation's Edge for 38. That's intense.
Speaker 2:I did have to bail on Salvation's Edge, which I feel bad about, but there was kind of some important family stuff that was going on literally the next day and I couldn't miss it. I had to go.
Speaker 1:And sleep is important, so I needed to.
Speaker 2:I needed to kind of make oh, I didn't sleep, don't, don't get me wrong, I didn't sleep, but I did need to make a judgment call and, unfortunately, if you weigh real life and video games, real life has to come first.
Speaker 1:So oh yeah, totally I was edged um salvation's edge. Is edge of salvation or salvation's edge? I keep Edge um Salvation's Edge. Is it Edge of Salvation or Salvation's Edge?
Speaker 2:I keep Wait, Never mind Um. It is Salvation's Edge.
Speaker 1:Salvation's Edge. Okay, I keep reversing that name. It's great. Nobody is edging here. No one's edging, everyone's edging in the raid. Though I was in that raid. I haven't been in a raid for longer than five hours, probably since Destiny 1, like wrath of the machine. Yeah, wrath of the machine. So the fact that I was in my first uh salvation clear for like eight hours was like, did you?
Speaker 2:did you participate day one or? Oh god no was this after you were in an eight hour raid after yeah, it was a sherpa run everyone.
Speaker 1:Honestly, I'm not surprised my team.
Speaker 2:Uh, when I got back I was gone for two days and then we started the um, we started the sherpa runs right after that um, we took routinely more than six hours to get even one person over the finish line. I mean, my team, we're, our philosophy is probably, you know, it gets in the way of that clear timer a little bit. You know, in our mind it's if we're sherping somebody, they need to do the mechanic. You know we're not going to put them on ad clear and just let them go. And salvation's edge at least, uh, everyone's always doing something three of those encounters.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everybody's doing something. No, four, there's five. Right, yeah, there's five. Yeah, so every encounter, but first you can have somebody doing something, because verity is random.
Speaker 1:So verity is oh god, but um, that your, your, um introduction into destiny is kind of similar to mine, but instead, instead of Destiny 2, destiny 1. You already know mine so I'm going to keep this short. But just so everyone else knows, I came into Destiny during the Taken King era. I also was a Warframe nerd. I played Warframe before Destiny because it was a poor man's destiny to me, because I was younger, I had to beg to get games and I came in and I did the same thing. I played destiny.
Speaker 1:One vanilla campaign couldn't really tell you how I felt about it. I mean, it existed, couldn't tell you the story that much I can tell you now. But at the time I was like I'm just shooting aliens. And then I played through the two expansions, um, then played through taken king, and taken king was such a big influence on me. I remember being really excited to get home off the bus to do the chaperone original exotic quest, which is significantly better than destiny 2 chaperone quest. It actually didn't have any pvp steps, it had strike steps, which is kind of funny imagine using the chaperone and pve yeah literally, you'd be laughed at.
Speaker 1:The fire team bro it wasn't that bad in d1, but now it is, and the the original quest didn't have any pvp steps. It was all like like it had special missions and I can't even I can't even conceptualize the chaperone as a pve weapon.
Speaker 2:That's just fundamentally incompatible in my head no, it was crazy.
Speaker 1:Destiny one was just a wild, wildly different ecosystem, but um played through that and then wrath or um, what was it? Rise of iron came out, and I always have a hot take. I always tell every destiny person about this. I personally think rise of iron was the best destiny one expansion. I will die on that hill. I played that raid like hundreds of times. And then Destiny 2 came along. I got peer pressure to buy it on PC. Everyone who peer pressured me to buy it ditched the game clearly, which is which is understandable, because Destiny is an acquired type of game and Destiny 2 vanilla, was very. And here we are thousands of hours later. I definitely have a lot less raid experience in D2 than you do, but we? What's your total play time? I'm curious. Here we are thousands of hours later. I definitely have a lot less rate experience in D2 than you do, but we what's your total play time?
Speaker 2:I'm curious what does steam say you have?
Speaker 1:Uh, almost two K, I think.
Speaker 2:I'm at 2,809 and a half and I know for sure that I had a couple hundred on battle net, so I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1:Oh battle net time didn't transfer, right yeah so I'm pretty sure, oh, battlenet time didn't transfer, right?
Speaker 2:yeah, no, it didn't so we probably have more than it shows.
Speaker 1:But I'm at least 3k, at least because I played the shit out of Curse of Osiris, because there was Curse of Osiris. I promise we'll get to the narrative, but Curse of Osiris introduced the first exotic ghost and you had to do an unhealthy. I did it I did it.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I got the secure shell legit. I also got the telesto catalyst legit, which involved doing all the prophecies. Yeah, it's painful, raw so doing the prophecies. Fun fact doing the prophecies in a post-forsaken sandbox, uh, where you had guns that had multiple perks per column and had three perks. Um yeah, those prophecy weapons didn't. They were static rolls with less perks than world drops. So no matter what you were getting something that was useless. Um and, and I did them all just so I could get Telesto Catalyst.
Speaker 1:That is some true commitment to the craft.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was bad. You get Sigura's.
Speaker 1:Shell as a side effect from that quest? I believe as well. Yeah, it's a good shell. I also should note beforehand that a lot of the conversation is probably going to be related to the recent expansion. The Final Shape, if anyone is listening, is a Destiny player and hasn't played it by now. Run away and play it Full spoilers.
Speaker 1:Full spoilers. The first question is literally just going to be talking about the end. So full spoilers. And if you're new to Destiny and don't know much about the lore, this might be a little confusing, but you're welcome to stick around. The game has a great story, uh, hidden under crappy business decisions. But um we're. We're gonna jump right into the first actual question related to narrative. Now that everyone knows we're kind of nerds for this game and its story. What is your overall takeaway and feelings of the final shape? First off, non-narrative. I guess I jinxed it.
Speaker 2:We're doing non-narrative I got you well. The gameplay felt good. Uh, that's. That's the thing destiny does best. Destiny is great at two things, even when the story is bad. Because the story has been bad, light fall existed. I'm so glad we're not talking about light fall. You would not be able to release that episode, that's where I got you.
Speaker 1:This episode's actually all about light fall I'm kidding, um, anyway, uh.
Speaker 2:So yeah, gameplay feels good. Destiny's got the juice. There's something about just the flow that feels good. Uh, not a lot of games can get that down. I mean even warframe. The thing with warframe is that it doesn't feel as skillful you're not. You're going around nuking everything as fast as you can. It's not about precision. There's no strategy. It's less mechanically intensive because your abilities kind of take away 90 percent of the worth that you would get from aiming, whereas destiny is kind of more about the gunplay. But uh, campaign felt good, uh, even if the legendary difficulty definitely felt like it had been scaled back from witch queen and lightfall. I didn't mind that they scaled back the patrol zone difficulty, but it just highlights how weird of a decision that is to make. The Neomuna patrol adds like master light level, which is super weird. If anything, I actually would have expected that to be here on the Pale Heart. It would be like this is the witnesses, this is his elites, this is the guys that were strong enough that you haven't killed them yet. Like, these guys are high level business and so I mean I kind of would have expected it to bring to bring the tooth here.
Speaker 2:I think that there were three fights that I had to sit up for, um, the first was the one in the cave where you had to run to both sides and collect the spikes that were always witness and big ship, and you have to then kill the tormentor in the middle and there's yeah, there's like splinter mines and stuff. That one I had to sit up for on all three classes. And then the um one with the big mind in the ice. That one on titan was so hard that titan I'll get to. I'll get to my feelings on titan. Um, yeah, I, I breezed through in a warlock, I sat up for hunter and then I was taken. It took me like two or three tries to get through on titan. Um, as for the last one, that last witness fight that's, that fight is so good. Like they're I, I generally raise an eyebrow at boss fights that don't involve fighting the boss, but I also didn't really ever expect that we were going to be able to shoot the witness and hurting him, hurt him in any meaningful way. So I think that was fine. Um, destroy us has become a little bit of a meme around my clan.
Speaker 2:I liked to see the integration of mechanics, but they. I don't think they went far enough. Um, this is my first hot take. I think that it was a good start, but I would have preferred more on this front than just clocks and ron nodes. Uh, like, the stuff that's in Dual Destiny is really good. Like you can play Dual Destiny with somebody who isn't super good at, or experienced at, raiding. They don't know a lot of mechanics and you can get that done under the time limit. It's fine. Or maybe something involving the Spherical Pyramid and Hexahedral Resonance that's in the raid. Just anything that involved those mechanics would have been nice. Um, it's unfortunate that the mechanics that we got were ron spikes and clocks, but it's a start. If anything. It makes me wonder if we're going to see an increased mechanical sort of emphasis in future content, which, honestly, is going to need every edge that it can get.
Speaker 2:I think Prismatic is great for everyone but Titan. This is the part where I talk about Titan. Everything on Titan stands alone, and the thing with Prismatic Titan is that it's fine but it's not great. You can get powerful abilities on Prismatic titan. It has all the right supers. It has all the right grenades. It's transcendence grenade isn't super great, I don't think, because it bounces. But that's just me. I'm sure that that's less of an issue for people who are experienced with playing with the grenades that bounce, but I don't, so same for me. That kind of that kind of adds a little bit of randomness to the, the ability that I don't like.
Speaker 2:Um, you, you can build the triple consecration fire slam build, which is great, especially if you run it with pyrogale, and that can be good. But it's not like on hunter. You have nighthawk golden gun and still hunt, which is 33 nerfed as of the recording of this video. But you could do when still hunt, uh, nighthawk first came out, you could do eight million damage to the witness with it, which is, for those of you who are playing along at home, insane, actually crazy. It is almost, it was almost a million damage, a trigger pull like it was crazy, and you could proc that three or four times during a damage phase. So I mean, that was nuts. And the thing is the trade-off that with that, if you're using it on Prismatic, which I don't think necessarily is the play, but if you're doing it on Prismatic, which you- can the trade-off is survivability.
Speaker 2:So you can have your mix-and-match abilities and your DPS, but you lose out on being able to keep yourself alive.
Speaker 2:But you also, on Hunter, have the liar's handshake punch a guy and get a dozen buffs build, which, if you haven't tried, is very silly. Um, if you run the one that gives you uh god, what does it do? It like gives you frost armor for punching somebody with who's got a darkness debuff or something, and then you run the one that gives you radiant, you can get frost armor and radiant and heal yourself with knockout. And if you kill them because it's because it's combination blow or not knockout combination blow is what it's called. If you use combination blow, now you're healing and you're amplified, so you're amplified radiant and you have frost armor at the same time, which is crazy, and not to mention that your punch does like 80,000 damage. So you're punching harder than a Titan, which is sad, and you have all of the builds that you want, whereas on Warlock, on Warlock you get Devour, heal Nade and Phoenix Dive and everything that was good about Strandlock without being Strandlock. The number one thing that holds Strandlock back is the fact that it's strand lock. So you get needle storm. You get the throw out threadlings when you use your class ability which you can use on phoenix dive, by the way and it's really fast, um, and you get the threadling grenade as well, which, if you use that combo with euphony, goes insane, uh. So, yeah, I mean prismatic for everybody, but tit Titan is great. The Raid ooh, this is no, it's not. The Raid goes crazy.
Speaker 2:I actually didn't think Bungie could cook that hard. I was pretty pessimistic about the game going into this expansion. I was feeling pretty rough. I was feeling pretty down. You know, our expectation was that we were going to get a Nothing Burger Raid and we breezed through the campaign. We were like, well, is that it? Where'd the last two years go? And then we got into the raid and I was like, hey, I think we found where those two years went.
Speaker 2:Um, so, and the thing that makes me think this is verity. We actually actually don't, or at least I certainly didn't think that the engine was even capable of giving us verity. I've never seen anything like it. That just completely defies everything about previous styles of mechanics, about what I thought was possible to do in a raid, and throws it away. Whoever on sony's crisis team is responsible for this, because I'm not 100 convinced.
Speaker 2:That bungee thought of that. Uh, I don't know if I want to kiss you or throw you down the stairs, so I mean, whoever you are out there, my hat's off to you. You made me feel strongly. I dreamed about verity for two or three days, uh, during the period where we were sherping and we would just get stuck for hours in verity. And I mean now I can kind of you know, they've got the calculator, I know how inside works. Like you know, I could do verity, no problem now, but like when that came out, oh, my god, I remember when we were in day one we got up to verity and the only teams that we were aware of who were ahead of us were the guys who had cleared salta greppo, all the players and dato.
Speaker 2:So like we were basically fifth globally and that's crazy but I don't think I don't think we would ever, because of because of what was going on with the streamers hiding their screens from each other, which I have a totally opposite take from you on this so I'm not gonna get into it.
Speaker 2:um, it's okay, I'm not gonna get into that, but uh, I think that we probably weren't going to clear that encounter, at least until somebody who had done it like actually posted a video of the footage. You know, given if we had played the full 48, I think we could have gotten a challenge clear, but I don't think that we would have gotten a day one clear, not at all. There's nothing in the game. Yeah, there's nothing in the game.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's nothing in the game that remotely resembles very day. Like they never experimented with anything close to that. Like the closest thing is like vault and last wish, but like the fact that is easy, like I'm not scared of volt anymore, like the uh, the dissecting mechanic and the shapes and all of that stuff also. It's really funny because I know that encounter as the LFG killer, because you're asking people to really communicate and deal with shapes when most LFGs I've ever been in someone's high.
Speaker 2:I'm usually high when I raid. I mean it's you know, if you can't do the raid while you're high, you're not really doing the raid it depends on the person, right, you know?
Speaker 1:yeah, no, I mean doing that encounter high is a totally different experience like Rock Lee taking his training weights off when I play sober like you need to be high to get through. It's insane. Did you have any other thoughts on the uh uh final shape?
Speaker 2:non-narrative I mean this as far as gameplay goes. I the the episodes system frustrates me, but um, that I think is a topic, so I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna spoil that oh yeah, we'll get to that yeah, but otherwise I mean the episode system feels like I was gaslit, so I mean we'll get to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really I don't have too much to add, I have exactly the same. That's what's gonna happen. You're gonna give a really good explanation. Be like yeah, I feel the same because we pretty much feel the same on 90 of this game, which is good. Um, I think I was a little less pessimist. I'm really easy to get hyped up, like it is a flaw, like I seen to my bent, like to my credit, the first trailer. They released the final shape. I was like, oh, that's cool. But the v-doc where they released prismatic and the dread and all the other stuff, I was like sold right. When I seen that trailer, I'm like they cooked.
Speaker 2:So, going into the final shape, I was very excited I remember everyone in my clan posting the picture where it's all the dread on the on the ridge line and I think everyone who posted it said they cooked, they did it like they actually did it, the mad men yeah no, it's the entire community sentiment I never.
Speaker 1:I've been through pretty much every up and down from taking king onwards and lightfall was quite literally, I think the worst I've ever felt in terms of community sentiment. So I'm glad that they cooked, but I did go into final shape really excited for it. Um, like I said, I feel pretty much the same about the campaign. The only boss I really had to set up for myself was the um, the second to last mission that the giant abomination um.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah, fight right before the witness. That one actually took me like an hour of swords was under the thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that one actually took me like an hour when the Five of Swords was under the thing. Yeah, that one was rough just because I got killed by bullshit multiple times. But I feel exactly the same.
Speaker 2:That's got a lot going on.
Speaker 1:I mean it does. I died actually running away, like at the very end of the mission and I was gripping my desk. I'm like you better have a checkpoint. That's so sad. Did it have a checkpoint? I mean, or have a checkpoint so sad? Did it have a checkpoint I mean? Don't leave me.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah it, did it have it had a checkpoint and I died from a classic bungee moment. If you had to do it again after doing the encounter successfully and then you just die to it like a straight projectile, that would be where I just I'd be like, okay, I'm gonna pick this up tomorrow oh yeah, like I'm, I'm, I'm not gonna do that again, and it wasn't even even my fault.
Speaker 1:I never stopped holding the shield block, the sword block. It literally was like it dropped it for no reason.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you probably ran out of energy. Yeah, I bet you weren't square on the crack.
Speaker 1:I wasn't square, I was circle, yeah.
Speaker 2:Wait, I was trying. You can't do this to me, you can't send me back. You can never escape.
Speaker 1:verity, it's, all verity, it's all verity, yeah, so I guess, um, we'll move on to the next one. This is kind of the meat of potatoes for us. Personally, I have a lot more to talk about on this, but what is your overall feelings of the final shape and, narratively speaking, I think the story is my second favorite behind witch queen.
Speaker 2:Um, witch queen had more oh shit moments, like there were p. There were times during witch queen and and in the vow of the disciple raid where I was just like thrown like. When the hive had the light I was like, oh duh, no wonder they're better. They're, they're better guardians than we are because their shape is mutable, like their bodies can change to better channel the light. They, they, are objectively better than we are.
Speaker 2:And that never clicked as an idea to me before. I mean, even when they revealed Hive Lightbearers as a concept in the marketing material for Witch Queen, that idea didn't sink in for a while. And then when the Traveler warped into the Throne world, I was like it's a no-brainer, the Traveler is selfish, it's out for its self-preservation. Note that this was before season of the seraph. Um, so the cut scene where it goes up, uh and and almost gets blown up by the warsats, that hadn't happened yet. So we hadn't actually seen the traveler take a stand before.
Speaker 2:And at the time I was like, well, this is duh, if I was the traveler and I could hide in a demiplane, no brainer, yeah, I'm gonna do that. So I mean, that was that. And then zeta finding out that the hiver manufactured, uh, that all of the zizigi story was a lie and that Rolk tricked everybody, learning who the witness was for the first time, was up there with like the second dream which I hold as my. That's the number one gameplay reveal that I've ever like. That's my favorite, that's the best.
Speaker 1:What's the second dream Remind me? I completely. I don't recall so the second dream was Warframe's.
Speaker 2:I don't so the second dream was warframes first story quest oh, yes, uh, a handful of years into the game's lifetime, and so by then I was already playing for years, and what warframes were was an open question. And there's this moment spoilers, warframe, uh, for a I don't know 12 year old quest. Now, but this you came upon this pod that was like in a beautiful reservoir of water, with these waterfalls that are coming down, and this big pod approaches you and it opens up and this guy, this, this fully suited person, humanoid, just falls out of the pod and two or three seconds later, your screen glitches and your Warframe collapses to the ground. And I remember jumping out of my seat and shouting it's me, like that's me, I recall that now yeah.
Speaker 2:My brother burst into my room and he's like, what are you yelling about? And I'm like it's me In the pod. It's me in the pod, it's me, that's me, that's the real me, that's the real shin malphur. And and so that that reveal is was so good. And what makes that reveal so good is it was so many years in the making that one. You know you'll be really hard for another game to top that.
Speaker 2:But the witness reveal was another good one, because we had so many questions about who was the winnower, who, who is control, who's in control of the darkness, who commands the pyramid. Ships like these were all disparate questions that we thought all led back to one answer. Um, now I will say the, the oh shit moments that we've gotten in final shape have been good. Those have been quite effective. Uh, my favorite uh of these being the confirmation that the winnower is a separate entity completely from the witness and that the witness says he's the first knife, but he might not even be that. Um, it's in the lore tab for a ship I don't remember. Uh, off the top of my head.
Speaker 2:Let me go to lightgg really quick um bungee, casually dropping the biggest lore in the game in a ship lore tab yeah, no, they did, and I think, I think that this was the collector's edition ship, so it's like not even everybody got this uh, new collectible, probably right? No, yes, but I don't remember what it's called, so it's pointless. I remember what it looks like though, anyway the the point is that that ship's lore tab is a conversation with the winnower, who we now know is separate and is still out there and still yapping, which is horrifying, by the way, which is horrifying. And also, if you compare the writing in the ship's lore tab to, uh, in spiral, one of the one of the entries in in spiral, I think it's number nine, and the um writing of the book of sorrow, where oryx communes with darkness and unveiling. That is the same style. So we know the winnower wrote unveiling, the winnower wrote entry nine, I think of in spiral, and the winnower talked to oryx, not the witness.
Speaker 2:That is a big deal. That's a huge deal. Not only. I think that means, you know, not only was Oryx, who was communing with the winner, were directly more of an equal to the witness, as in you know, in terms of things that the winner were was creating to go against the gardener, but also that means that you can no longer power scale the witness and oryx next to each other because the witness isn't his, his. You know he's not actually above him in the hierarchy. Um, I think that to the people who think that forsaken was better, um, you don't remember Forsaken. That was six years ago. There was primary ammo on the ground. You don't remember Forsaken.
Speaker 2:I feel that I'll say Forsaken was when Bungie looked at the camera, did the Kubrick stare and said we're serious, which is great, that's awesome. I didn't get the intention that any of the story before forsaken was anything more than schlock, which is fine. It's okay to be entertaining. It's okay to not really want to have that deep of a story again. I mean, I wasn't here for d1, so red war, curse of osiris, war, mind, that was all the context I had at the time. But I could definitely tell Forsaken was building up to something and I just don't think that the highs were as high as some of these have been, you know, and the lows are certainly lower.
Speaker 2:I watched, I mean, when we were first planning this I mean I know that we've rescheduled this podcast like three times and so when I had, when I had first planned for this, I watched a bunch of videos from like datto and all them who were going into forsaken and then coming out of forsaken, so that I could specifically know and have specific examples to cite. But I don't remember. Uh, the point is, go watch some of those videos if you're at all curious what forsaken was really like, because there's big differences oh, yeah, and I mean like to your point of the highs, weren't as high, I mean, if you compare them.
Speaker 1:I mean k dying is a big oh shit, because it's like the first time, if you don't read lore tabs that you know ghosts can be killed yeah because usually like that, you die and you always get res.
Speaker 1:Then no one ever thinks to shoot the ghost, and maybe before then, the only guy who did that was uh dredgen yor yeah, literally that guy that I killed and, relatively speaking, that's relatively deep if you want to learn about it unless you watch which who made an amazing like animated type lore video on that. It's amazing. But the other like big oh shit is for that expansion is oh my god, wish dragons actually rendered in the game instead of just being talked about forever and the the curse cycle. I'm probably missing some minor ones, but those are like really the last oh shits or like the biggest ones for me in that expansion. And then you go to like witch queen I mean um final shape.
Speaker 2:Didn't oldren get rezzed at the end?
Speaker 1:oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was weird, that was, it didn't happen directly at the time of launch, though it was like a season later read the lore, uh, and you kept up on the lore books. You would have been following the story of pulled pork. So here's what the vanguard doesn't want you to know. Glint isn't his name, it's pulled pork pulled pork is his name.
Speaker 2:That is his real name, that is the name that he was given. Uh, and I mean somebody's gonna get mad at me for dead naming pulled pork. I don't care, it's pulled pork I have a question for you.
Speaker 1:What's that? Do you think they changed it to glint because they didn't realize they were gonna? Make it a big, big deal, because I don't think they would seriously say pulled pork in game I think they just didn't want to say pulled pork in game yeah I think that when that was a lore tab, um, somebody was just having fun and you know, I think the lore has always been better than the story.
Speaker 2:Like just, I mean, year over year I think that the lore has always slapped the hardest. But somebody was having fun. There was something I think they're allowed to get away with more in the lore versus in the presentation of the game itself.
Speaker 1:That has to be a little bit more. You can't see the lock-in that I'm doing. Do you think they offload that to contractors? That's why they don't really. Yeah, like writing lore books.
Speaker 2:No, I don't think so. There's one guy I don't remember what his name is. Oh, somebody, somebody, somebody. There was a guy who was like the creative director of the game. Don't remember his name. If you find it in post, let me know. But whenever there was layoffs or restructuring in destiny in that team, like people moving on to marathon people who were getting let go for whatever reason he always was still there. I think the lore has always been directed by that guy. I don't think he's. He wrote them all, but kind of like how Joseph Staten was the guiding force for halo's story. I think that, whoever that was whether it was luke smith or, um, uh, joe joe blackburn, or if it was that other guy who I swear I can picture in my head on it from a Vidoc, but I can't think of his name Uh.
Speaker 2:I'm pretty sure it was one of them, and it's always been one of them in charge of that project, but I think that's always been bungee internal because the lore has been very consistent, gotcha.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the um final shape narrative was just over. I like the uh, oh shit moments you were talking about. I Final shape narrative was just over. I like the oh shit moments you were talking about. I didn't mean to sidetrack us there, but you were continuing down that path.
Speaker 2:I think that the worst thing about the story, at least in terms of its presentation, wasn't its fault. The server issues made the story very hard to understand and related glitches actually uh, prevented me from really fully getting the story. There was always a cut scene that I was missing in the middle, but I only got on my third playthrough. So when I was going through my titan I was like I've never seen this before. So something was still going wrong in the actual cut scenes themselves that were kind of screwy, that made it difficult to piece everything together.
Speaker 2:But, beyond that. I think that a good way to summarize my feelings on Final Shape as a whole is that everything great casts a shadow, like it. The story felt personal for everybody but us. Um, we are him, we have always been him, we will always be him, and yet we don't really have a dog in the fight. I mean not, yeah, like we're him. So it's our destiny to go deal with the witness and the ending after excision. You know that feels personal. That is good. That sticks the landing with the rest of the story just doesn't feel like it's about us and I think that's fine.
Speaker 2:But in a game, like in a in a book, you understand that you are experiencing the story of someone else explicitly. It is up to you to be attached or not to those characters. Ask me my opinions about fourth wing, but not here on podcast. That's another one you won't be able to release. Whereas in a game I think there's a little bit of an expectation that the player will be directly involved somehow I mean with the progression of the narrative, other than like shooting the guy, which is really what our participation in final shapes narrative boils down to go here, shoot a guy. I mean that's all of destiny.
Speaker 2:Um, crow was handled very well. I actually think that crow is modern bungie's biggest narrative achievement. My clan Clan will burn me alive for saying this, but I think it's true because we as a community echoed his arc and that was that when he was first brought back, we were on the whole and I'm speaking generally because again, I know a lot of people who still don't like Crow they're like Crow sucks, get him out of here. But I think generally the community at large was really against Oldren coming back. They're like crow sucks, get him out of here. Uh. But I think generally the community at large was really against crow. Uh, oldren coming back and seeing that echoed in the lore where other guardians would just slay out against him over and over for something that he didn't remember, and then, as he slowly started to coalesce around this new identity and learn to forgive himself and kind of step into that role that cade filled within the rest of the cast, I think that's amazing. I mean, I'm not too. I wasn't too hot on the still hunt mission as a gameplay piece. I don't think that was particularly fun, uh, but the story was good. I think that Crow has been handled fantastically. Yeah, he's good stuff.
Speaker 2:Ikora sort of meh. I mean, it seems strange to me that she was so at odds with Zavala but that's got more to do with Zavala than it does with her and I'll get to him in a second but I suppose it stands to reason that her issues were the ones that we kind of just fixed by fixing everything else, because she didn't really seem like she had a particularly outstanding thing that needed to happen. She remained pretty static. Zavala, however, I thought, was completely fumbled. Vala, however, I thought, was completely fumbled.
Speaker 2:I feel like I need to go back and re-watch everything that happened in Season of the Haunted, because I'm pretty sure that his internal conflict vis-a-vis Sophia and his son was already resolved. I thought that was dealt with. I thought he banished his nightmares and that was the indication that he has moved, you know, indication that he has moved on. And, yeah, he healed. We had season of the therapy and so I have a spin foil about this. Um, my spin foil is zavala's arc wasn't there until after the writing team got excised, post light fall and they went back and they were like okay, we need to do something personal, we need to do something emotional, we need a, we need a through line. So they used details about zavala that were probably in a character bible that weren't updated for what happened in the expansion cycle before that.
Speaker 2:So I'm thinking that there might have been an accidental retcon that happened with Zavala. Now I could be totally wrong, like I said. I mean this is the downside with Destiny's seasonal model is that once it's gone, it's gone, it's gone forever. All of that is poof dust in the wind. Like I cannot, without finding an external resource which I didn't take the time to go look for, I can't actually go back and verify that. So I mean, if somebody comes back and posts on your video, oh Zavala actually didn't get over anything and you're totally wrong. Maybe I'm wrong, in fact tell me if they do because that would remove.
Speaker 2:That would actually fix. My biggest complaint about this story is zavala's, just two steps back like I don't understand.
Speaker 1:I remember with a pretty clear picture season the haunted, because I I enjoyed that season and everything that happened with the zavala was exactly what you said and the like, literally the final cut scene of the season, the final cut scene of the season. He literally talked with the healed version of sophia, with kytle, with I forgot, uh with crow. They were all there together and they all like had their peace with their, their, their nightmares, before they vanished, after callous became a disciple, like literally.
Speaker 1:And and kytle hugged zavala, like zavala was like like she's built like a steakhouse godion, but she handles like a bistro exactly that was the start of their relationship but, like that season closed the narrative loop on his torment, I would say less his son. I feel like, if anything, they should have pulled if they wanted to do the story with him being tormented. They should have pulled on his son a little bit more, because Ophia was soft. He put that to rest, but not his son. His son could have been a better through line.
Speaker 2:And I will say that it is interesting to screw up the dynamic the way they did. Whenever you have characters that are fulfilling certain roles for extended periods of time, it can be refreshing to change it up and force characters to behave in different ways than they otherwise would, because it's you know, it's it's fresh and it it causes them to have to act in ways that wouldn't normally be parcel to their nature, like Cade, for example, having to be the rock, which was what Zavala did in forsaken they had a total role reversal, and I mean ikora unfortunately just sits there and continues. Ikora never existed. She is ikora.
Speaker 2:That's what yeah, she's in her character, in her character notes. Uh, there's two sentences better than better at crucible than shacks and ikora.
Speaker 1:That's just a one, a one word sentence her best moments have always been in seasons, never in main narratives, like she's just never there.
Speaker 2:Her, her best, uh, her best thing comes from a lore tab, uh, where she beats shacks at crucible.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, that's fantastic. I think I remember I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't know what gun it is, but it's one of them. It's a shotgun, I think.
Speaker 1:I hope we get more from Ikora. She definitely needs something.
Speaker 2:Ikora's always needed more, I think, and I mean with Osiris being reduced to curmudgeon status. You know we definitely need some more Ikora going on. I think otherwise, like where's Eris Morn? Where is our resident god like?
Speaker 1:what is she up to? Literally the most powerful character in the entire universe for well, not over, you know, the primordial forces or the witness, but like literally the most powerful hive that ever existed, for like six seconds yeah, and then there were no consequences to that at all and they started like doing a relationship with the drifter. They started building that up and it was getting really cute and which is good like that's good like that's.
Speaker 2:That's very well done. I love it when the two outcasts come together like that's. That's always fun. It's not a lot of romance tropes that I like, but that's one of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's not that many romances in general in Destiny other than Saint and Osiris.
Speaker 2:Kytle and Zavala isn't technically confirmed either.
Speaker 1:They're skating the lines. They don't know if they want to give the Rule 34 artist the ammo for that one.
Speaker 2:Well, it doesn't matter, they'll make their own. Uh, otherwise, I mean, my only other complaint regarding character was where did micah 10 come from? Like what? Huh ha ha. Yeah, like last time we heard from micah abram, I'm pretty sure they were dead, which is like of all of the things that you could say about Micah as a character. What did they? In which order did the? Did the guardianing and the exoing happen?
Speaker 1:because I'm pretty sure they were dead on Europa yeah, I finished up Bife's well, not all of it, most of Bife's video on Mega 10. I mean, I know we had the Cloak and Destiny one that talked about her a little bit and we had the six coyotes. Yeah, we've got the six coyotes, but she kind of lived or sorry, yeah, she lived in the back, I forgot she trans character. She lived in the back, I forgot she trans character. She lived in the background of the lore for a while and she's been kicking around.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but not that much, Like maybe five tabs or something and they added some crazy foreshadowing. Yeah, at least the vocally, so the community knows, because the people who aren't like us and be like, who the hell is?
Speaker 2:this Because apparently I was like who the hell is this?
Speaker 1:Exactly so vague the hell is this? Because apparently I was like who the hell?
Speaker 2:is this exactly so vague? Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. This is. This is the person from the europa lore books, and I didn't even think to look back earlier than that because I just didn't remember. Thankfully, everything else related.
Speaker 1:That character is so old like shinobu, like nobody talks about shinobu or shiro 4 or any of those guys anymore I have opinions about getting some love.
Speaker 2:Praedis is getting some love. Uh, I've heard I haven't played the newest episode stuff, but I heard that there was confirmation that asher, mir and praedith are still alive, which is awesome, because praedith is awesome praedith.
Speaker 1:I have to, I have to see the asher stuff because I haven't seen that yet. But but like and with the final shape, lore, just in general, when we're talking about characters just drawing, this is a bigger oh shit. Moment that I think people actually kind of realized because again it's buried in the books Is the fact that Cade, like his son that he's talked about for a long time, might actually be Micah 10 post-transition.
Speaker 2:Because that's what everyone's theorizing thatah 10 might be like kate's son. Wow, maybe I mean we. I can't speak to that, but I do ascribe to the theory that ace doesn't really exist. Yeah, uh, there is no ace as a person. There is ace that is a gestalt of something that kade thinks is a person, because, I mean, I think that it was suggested that he's been rebooted more than six times.
Speaker 2:There's just that's just the only six times he could remember, I believe so I don't remember 100, where that is either, but I wish I had more sources, but I don't. But I do think that was a thing.
Speaker 1:If you had to give the final shapes narrative a rating, what would you give it?
Speaker 2:I don't like ratings out of 10.
Speaker 1:Do you consider it the best expansion they ever made game of the year contender that it was or do you think it's like there's something else still above it that they've made? I think think it's like there's something else still above it that they've made?
Speaker 2:I think it's a loaded question um, it exists.
Speaker 1:It was good, they cooked, I think.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't call it game of the year.
Speaker 1:I mean it's also hard to say an expansion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's kind of funny to call an expansion game of the year, but I mean like it was close the ratings the important stuff was there defeating the witness involved more than shooting him with a gun, but we still got to shoot him with a gun, which is nice. The raid went insane. Prismatic is good, the dread exists, the guns are fine, the exotics are good, with the exception of the hunter one, and my favorite part of the story is that it had consequences. Bungie is afraid of consequences. They are so afraid of consequences, except for key moments like Cade's death.
Speaker 2:Stuff like Hive God Eris and Nezcafe Nezarek speaking to us after his death these are all dropped plot threads. They're just gone. Bungy just either wrote him off or never picked him up again. Aphelions like I really want to know what that is like. I'll get to that later, but, um, there's stuff that's lurking around the edges of the lore, that are open questions that bunchy has just never got in gone into. That all stem from big, major events and this story add consequences. This story spurred the episodes which I don't think are very good. We'll get to that. Um, but the the that is such a big thing is we did something that actually affected the state of the world. It didn't just go back to the status quo between seasons.
Speaker 1:Yeah, If we killed the witness and it was like all right, go farm your weekly engrams, I think everyone would have quit.
Speaker 2:I mean, I definitely still feel like the game wants me to go farm your weekly engrams. I think everyone would have quit. I mean, I definitely still feel like the game was go farm my weekly engrams but yeah, ask me about how many gms I haven't done yeah, no, I'm right there with you.
Speaker 1:I think, overall, the final shape is what we needed to like. Give the game the longevity that it needed to go into 2025. Because I think if this turned out to be another lifefall, sony would have decapitated Bungie and made them walk on Marathon, I was always going to stick for Final Shape, like I mean, I just sunk Class Fallacy.
Speaker 2:I was already in so deep. Yeah, you have to see how that ends. It doesn't matter if it was bad, I may as well see the end. But I'm still not sold that frontiers is gonna be super good. I mean the cool part. Um, I was gonna save this for later. Um, judging by the outline, but if you want me to get into it now, there is something cool that I think does give me hope and maybe the community needs to hear it sooner. What do you think?
Speaker 1:If you want to dive into it, you can. I'm definitely going to be mentioning Torabano at the end.
Speaker 2:The cool part If you've never worked on a really big narrative project like this that's had a lot of hands on it, that kind of passes down from person to person and team to team, then you might not be aware that so much gets thought of and used and reworked and left behind that if it had the original people in charge might have gone totally differently. Every time you get a new set of hands on a large-scale narrative project like this, it changes and that change is immutable. It is inevitable. It will always happen. You can't hedge against it, no matter how many notes you think you leave behind. You could write a whole Destiny Silmarillion and it wouldn't matter, because someone will come in with new ideas and say no, we're not doing that, we're doing this. And one of those things that I can point to, as I'm pretty sure that this is a newer idea, is the witness himself. That is a new idea.
Speaker 2:I do not think that the witness existed during early iteration on destiny as a story. I think that they oh, this is raindrop prelude. I love chopin, um. I think that they were in need of a big bad guy and they didn't have one. There was no clear uh contender, and then somebody with a cool idea came in and said hey, we're going to do this, and it ended up being what I thought was very cool.
Speaker 2:I like the witness a lot as a character, but the point is, everything from here on is pure vision. This is destiny, unfettered by the trappings of what came before. Once we're done with the episodes, I have a feeling that they're going to tie up all of those loose ends with a neat little bow and say, okay, we're not touching these anymore Because you know Bungie and consequences, right. So they're going to take those and put them in a box and they're going to slide it over there and they're not going to think about it anymore. And then everything from here on is you know, sky's the limit. So that'll be interesting to see at the very least, even if it falls flat. I'm just, I'm really curious about what they're going to give us.
Speaker 1:Unbound Destiny is Unshackled at this point it no longer has to be what it thought it was so and I, for the first time since we knew that we were in this saga called the light and dark saga. In like going, if we go rewind time and think about destiny one and arguably until forsaken, I don't, unless they said it specifically before. I don't think we ever really knew we were in a saga. It just felt like things were happening in a universe. Maybe you could argue in taken king, because then you got this weird thing talking from the darkness, but I personally never really felt like we were in a saga until they said light and dark saga, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2:I mean what? What defines a saga like I mean?
Speaker 1:yeah, I don't. It didn't feel like it was defined until we had the villain of it fully clarified in our vision. So like we're going into this era where everything's going to be new and they said they wanted to start a new saga, but like what is it going to be? For a little bit, we're going to kind of be testing the boundaries and finding out what it is. Because gonna name it right away when project frontiers gets a name also everyone's saying it's destiny three and it pisses me off.
Speaker 2:No, destiny three will be destiny three. Yeah, like I'm sure that's gonna happen eventually. Yeah, totally. You know games take years to develop, like years and years. And I know for sure bungie's not throwing their all behind this because they're still working on marathon so, and they said they want to keep supporting this game for a while yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I mean destiny 2 is going to kick around for, I'd say, three to five more years at least, before destiny 3 even gets teased, but I do think it's coming yeah, eventually it has to because people are going to want it, um, but I'm excited to see what frontiers is.
Speaker 1:Did you have?
Speaker 2:fantasy, I mean final fantasy. I've been playing a lot of that recently and I mean I'm I'm over 100 hours in and I'm not even out of the first expansion yet nice.
Speaker 1:I've been meaning to play it. I just can't handle the subscription right now. I uh, we will definitely be coming back to project frontiers, because that's the last bullet point, because I really want to talk about, like toro battle and the vex homeworld, so on and so forth. But, um, I'm again, I'm right there with you. I feel the same way about the narrative. I think it's what we needed to conclude, um, but this is another big question. Do you think the light? Talking about sagas, do you think the light and dark saga concluded in a satisfying way? Do you think it ended well?
Speaker 2:that's hard to say. Um for one, satisfying endings are complex things. Um, I'm gonna turn my show pan down really quick here, because this is a. This is important writing a satisfying ending is really hard. Um, there are famous writers, very famous writers, writers you've heard of, who are not good at writing satisfying endings, and the one that pops into my head is Stephen King. Stephen King is really good at the beginning, he's really good at the middle, he's really good at keeping you engaged, but I just don't think his endings are particularly strong, and I think that that's a function of a lot of things, but really, when it comes to what makes an ending satisfying Wow, somebody just got lit up on the next. Oh, wow, that's five, six, seven, eight shots.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Something is going on on the next street over. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Anyway, I don't feel wholly dissatisfied with this ending, but I don't feel a sense of truly genuine closure, and part of this is that it's a live service game If we get closure, the game ends, yeah, and part of this is that there are still some open questions, but nothing surrounding those questions feels tangibly different. It's, you know, we, we are more aware, but that doesn't manifest in any meaningful way. And, as I said, what makes an ending satisfying is different for everyone and there are a lot of ways to achieve it. And and I've listed out a couple of these versions, but I mean, this is like, literally paragraphs and I don't know if you want to hear it, but you can like.
Speaker 1:I'm into this conversation so.
Speaker 2:So let me spoil a bunch of stuff for you. So halo reach story spoilers for halo reach. Halo reach, I think, has the best ending in video games. Um, the whole story is about sacrifice, it is about bravery, it is about the human cost of valor. You get to watch your entire team be hunted and killed one by one as you operate on reach, with the exception of carter uh who crashes his pelican and so that you can get past a scarab and one of the best scenes in the entire game. But the point is that every inch, every victory that you get in that game requires sacrifice, and there is a growing sense of certainty that, as you keep losing party members, that you're going to be required to make that sacrifice as well. And you die on reach and there's no other way the game could have ended. I don't think it is the most satisfying ending in gaming. I think and the whole work builds to this moment. It is thematically and tonally consistent. Like halo, reach is haunting if you think about it like have you played it?
Speaker 1:um no, but I've watched clips and I, yeah, I've watched it is one of the few games that I've uh I.
Speaker 2:it's the only halo game I beat lazo, so legendary all schools on the only one that I beat uh lazo, and it's the only. It's one of the few games that I got 100% achievement completion on on Xbox, so I played a little bit of Reach, just a little bit.
Speaker 1:Just a little, just a few hours, just a little. I only ever played OST.
Speaker 2:ODST is good too. Odst I don't have this podcast thoughts about ODST, but ODST is also a very good story Other than that. I mean the number one ending, I think, is I call it. It couldn't have ended any other way, and that's because the way it ended is the ending. When you play D&D and you're acting as the dungeon master, you need to make decisions that feel like they make sense for those characters, because otherwise your hand is revealed in contriving a situation or the behavior of npcs. The conclusion to everything that happens in a D and D game is only satisfying because it is the. It is the thing that happened. It is the only thing that could have happened Like that is. It is a culmination of everything that came before. Now there are other ways that you can make an ending satisfying. You can have a major revelation or a or a big subversion. Uh, one of my favorite books, joe Abercrombie's last argument of Kings, spoilers. Last argument of that. You can make an ending satisfying. You can have a major revelation or a big subversion. One of my favorite books, joe Abercrombie's Last Argument of Kings, spoilers. Last Argument of Kings.
Speaker 2:We get to see that the Gandalf figure, lord Baez, is actually the villain. He uses a magical artifact that they go questing for throughout the whole second book to turn himself into a magic nuke that levels the whole district. It levels the entire palace district of the capital city, killing hundreds, to stop an army of sorcerers. He kills literally hundreds of civilians and then the uh, the king that he elevates into the position because they are a, uh like representative monarchy, so they elect their kings, uh, he puppeted his, his choice, into being kingly and when that king uh turned and spoke out to him, he beat the living crap out of him with his magic. And that type of revelation only works if you have a big question that you're hinting towards throughout the entire work. Now there's two other ways that I think you can really reach for a satisfying ending where you have a character focused story where that character is struggling and struggling and trying and failing to achieve something. A bonus points If it's a really sentimental something, that's really like emotionally important, uh, but they never quite get it and then they finally do something to earn it.
Speaker 2:That can be very satisfying as well. Uh, destiny doesn't really have that. And then, of course you know, bottom of the list I would say is pure spectacle, course you know, bottom of the list, I would say, is pure spectacle. You know where you just have cool stuff happening like that. That can work and that can be awesome in and of itself. But you know there's that's one of those where you're, you're getting something out of the fridge later and you kind of realize there wasn't a lot of substance to it. I don't think that the final shape really hits any of those other than you know. It's kind of the only way that it could have ended, ripping the witness out of the darkness. We were never going to kill the witness any other way and I'm really glad that they followed through on that promise of making it not just a um, not just another. Shoot him with a gun fight and I'm probably a little bit jaded, so I'm a little probably unfair to bungie in my analysis.
Speaker 2:Um, bungie girl although although, although um so did, you see the reveal trailer for uh for final shape, where the like he finalizes those guys and like apple falls.
Speaker 2:So the finalization of earth apparently really happened. That was a canon event that really happened. That's for like for like 10 seconds. The witness one and I think that would have been really really powerful if we would have seen it in game, but the fact that that was just in the trailer I think that's a big disservice to the story as a whole, because the witness did win for about 10 seconds until the traveler reversed it that's wild that I some things come to mind, like again the consequences thing, like are we ever going to hear like, sure it got fixed, but the entire world being finalized, or even 10 seconds would have consequences somewheres.
Speaker 1:And also imagine if, instead of loading into the Pale Heart, like you're walking through the Purple Tunnel, you instead, like I don't know, spawn in the tower and you're going to your ship, because I like to imagine Guardians walk to their ships instead of constantly transmitting, but like you're just going something to launch, maybe you're in the helm and then you, as the player in the moment, are actually finalized in game, kind of like in um like when you're in verity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like that would have been so impactful because then that would have been cool. It would have made the first like going through the portal a lot more impactful. Because you're listening to mara soft, like basically when does she break character ever like she was choking and borderline crying. That would have made all of that feel like better so let me tell you.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you about the ending to a game that I didn't like. Um, the base campaign for final fantasy 14, a rom reborn. Uh, this is the one or the 2.0 expansion for the game. It's the first thing that you play through. The ending to that spoilers Final Fantasy XIV. You fight this mech suit that eats gods and at least three times it casts a spell that's so powerful. You yourself cannot do anything to prevent yourself from dying. It is a guaranteed death, but luckily God shows up to save you. Literally, god shows up to save you, and that makes me angry. The ending of final shape did not make me angry. Uh, actually, it makes me a little bit angry because for some reason, the orbit music will not go back to normal. It's always that other song now it's always that song.
Speaker 2:I liked it. When it was other songs, I liked the shuffle like bring the shuffle back. Does nobody else care about this? I've not seen this brought up by anyone else in the community completely.
Speaker 1:Like I've gotten so used to it I don't even hear it, like I have music loud but I don't even notice it anymore. But now that you mentioned it too, I'm also angry about that, because the shuffle was nice. Sometimes you get really good music.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you get deep stone, deep stone lullabies in there like um. So another thing, speaking of endings that make us mad, have you seen the statin cut?
Speaker 1:um, that's the other ending they wanted to use for that. Yeah, yeah, where you basically do the animation from the beginning yeah yeah so you know what's really funny about that what
Speaker 2:so let me get this straight really quick before I talk a bunch of stuff about joseph staten on the internet. He still works at bungee, right, or is he not? Does he work at 343 now? Yeah, okay, so it's not actually statins cut, then it's somebody else's. Well, that kind of makes this moot, I guess.
Speaker 2:But something else that's kind of silly is um, the ending for this game and the ending for halo were also changed at the last second. Like both of these were shifted at the last moment, the original ending for Halo 2 would have set the entire franchise on a different trajectory. If you're not familiar, the original ending for Halo 2 was going to feature 343, guilty Spark and the Arbiter finding a Forerunner ruin on Earth. And Guilty Spark opens like stasis coffin thing and he's like, hey, you really need to see this. And arbiter comes over and a human skeleton is in there and then it would have cut to credits.
Speaker 2:So we would have gotten the explicit confirmation that in the original canon for halo, humans always were forerunners. There was no separation. Everything that came after, with the forerunners and the humans both being client species of the precursors, the stuff that uh came up in the greg bear novels, which are all fantastic, by the way. Um, that all was a creation of 343. That essentially retcons, um, what amounted to only being one line because they uh, microsoft wanted the cliffhanger. They wanted that, you know, really powerful hook that I'm finishing this fight. That was explicitly like. Microsoft was like no, you need to end it this way.
Speaker 1:Classic Microsoft. Do you think Not to cut you off? I didn't know if you have any more thoughts on that.
Speaker 2:No, let's.
Speaker 1:I've seen that and it makes me think, originally, that this kind of leads into another question. So I think we'll do a little bit of hopscotch. We'll probably go to the Cade question and then the Witness question. I, the fact that the original ending wasn't Cade giving us his light to save the ghost and it was us doing the transcendent thing, makes me feel like they wanted Cade to stay, because even the seasonal artifacts it's a hunter's notebook with, like Cade, memorabilia on it. So there's a part of me that hopes and wishes that originally they wanted Cade to stay.
Speaker 1:I think that would have made the ending a lot worse, to be honest. Because let me tell you, every time I play Excision and I just help my friend through it and he experienced the ending cutscene for the first time I cry like a wimp. I don't just cry, I sob and I'm completely fine until the music plays when you're holding your ghost, when it's like that, I don't, I don't original destiny music it's. It's definitely an old track, that's why I lose it. But I feel like if they went with that other ending it would have hurt how it felt and that kade might be alive. I think so. Do you think kade was originally planned to be alive and they scrapped that? Or do you think he was always going to die again, but we just didn't see it in that?
Speaker 2:it's hard to say. I mean, I'm not gonna speculate too much on the rev revisive iterations that they went through when they were bringing this to production. I mean, given that we can see that rendered cut scene and kade doesn't die, I have to imagine yeah, you know, but that actually was what I was afraid of.
Speaker 1:And I think everybody was we.
Speaker 2:We would get Cade back and then he would be great in the campaign, and then he'd just become a vendor and just stand there for years not doing anything. So should Cade have stayed? Not at all, I don't think so. When Cade died, bungie threw a gauntlet down. They said we can make better characters than this, we can do better than this, and I think that that was really where Destiny as a franchise had a tonal shift, going from this is a space opera to this is a personal story, and I think that bringing Cade back would cheapen that a little bit.
Speaker 2:What's the point of permanently killing a character if it is so easily reversed, especially in a property where resurrection from death is not only possible but commonplace? I think final deaths should always be impactful. We should never, ever, get a guardian back from a final death. Yeah, I think that Cade, in terms of bungees writing, was a bit of a crutch character, like he's the one that everybody liked. I mean, you could have cade there doing anything and people would automatically probably like it and bringing cade back was impactful for the resolution of crow's arc.
Speaker 2:I think he could have actualized in a version of the story that didn't have cade in it, where he is not explicitly forgiven for his actions as an Uldren, and it would have been fine.
Speaker 2:But this way we have full closure on the Crow-Uldren dichotomy.
Speaker 2:He is completely absolved now and he can move forward into his position as the Hunter Vanguard with no baggage. He is unfettered and that is important because if they wouldn't have done that, then crow would have been stuck in the past still and that wouldn't nearly be as compelling as a crow that has fully come through an arc and now completed it. Because finishing an arc is still part of an arc. You still have to, you know, actually do something and show that you have progressed, because otherwise, if you're on an arc that never ends, is it really an arc or have you just plateaued, or are you just freaking out and doing random things that seem like they have a through line but don't really, because it never ends. Endings give things meaning in our context, although I do have an interesting, um, an interesting thought, and I think that it's implied and again, my experience with the cut scenes was kind of funky, but I think it's implied that the only reason kade is back is because uh crow wished for it is that true?
Speaker 2:that's correct, he came back, yeah because I was wondering, like, if he's like a reflection of a dead guardian, where's the rest of them? Where's reed? Where's joxer? Where's andal brask? Where's the iron lords? Where's ariana three? Like there are so many really interesting characters that could have been here, that are these big, tall names that we've never seen and that could have been really cool to explore who some of these characters were, and I don't know that that could have been very interesting.
Speaker 1:But if it's the case where it's just the, the wish that brought him back, I guess that makes sense and it's also pretty, um, that that's pivotal for crow's character, because him wishing for kate back and I I like what you said before, where crow is like a representation of us as a community kind of or however you phrase that because everybody hated him forever and I know a lot of people still do, but now he's a pretty strong character. But, um, yeah, I'm once again millions time. I agree, there's a part of me that wishes cade stayed because, to your point, everybody loves cade. He's basically destiny dad other than shacks, so it'd be nice to have him around because his dialogue and hearing him talk again is so refreshing and while I didn't necessarily like the gameplay elements, like you did, of the um, still hot, exotic west, just the, the narrative and the dialogue and the banter is it's and the yeah, that was all really good yeah, like that was, like that was peak, cade moments it was, it was really there is.
Speaker 2:There is something that I didn't like about that. Now that I think about it, there is something about that that, uh, offended me a little bit.
Speaker 2:Um repulse I'm just kidding, no, no, the fact that it had x hours later breaks, that was so dumb oh yeah, that was just like cut your screen to black and it was like eight hours later and I'm like, bro, just make it another quest, or just why does it all? Why does it have to happen later? What? What is it adding by happening later? Just make it happen now, like what, what's the?
Speaker 1:what's the point I think they were trying to to key into, like this campfire type feeling. That didn't really work. It was weird, like why am I resting in this tent? Why am I reflecting on my actions? I did that enough with a core years ago. Yeah, right, but yeah, no, I agree. Okay, but yeah, no, I agree. Cade, definitely good that he's not back. It would have took away his painful death and his meaning. All right, let's go back to the other question that I skipped over. I know you briefly mentioned you like the Witness as a character. Do you have anything?
Speaker 1:more to say on that, because he really realistically had what two and a half years to grow.
Speaker 2:Conceptually. I've never seen anything like the witness outside of my own fiction. Um, at risk of violating some nda stuff, I did create a character that is fundamentally similar to the witness. It's different in in key ways that make things artistically inspired and not stolen. Um, this character is a gestalt of selves. They are all himself. It is not distinct, uh, individuals in the way that the witness is, but that's really cool.
Speaker 2:Aggregate beings is not something that I've seen very commonly executed before and you know, as an idea he is very distinct against the other villains that we have in destiny. His design is instantly recognizable. You see that big mr hourglass and the smoke column head. Like that's the witness that is. You know, you'd know him in silhouette. Like you know him right away. And from my work, uh, on a web comic that I can't talk about. Um, I know from what I've I've worked with the artist that distinct character designs really matter. Recognizability is huge. Like you don't want to ever get confused with another character, because if that character is more well known than yours, then people are just going to think that you're ripping off, whereas this way there is only one thing that can be, I think, the biggest flaw with the witnesses and as a character is just that they didn't think of him earlier, or at least I can't see any evidence that they did. I mean, I talked about this a little bit earlier. When you have these vestiges of past ideas and things that earlier, uh, people who were in charge of the narrative had laid down and you're kind of building on that as the plane is flying, so to speak, you know you're, you're cooking as you're cooking as you're cooking as you're cooking, and they did great, I think. But if he was a force that we knew about earlier, I think that that would have made everything that happened in final shape and maybe even light fall land so much more squarely.
Speaker 2:Getting a villain to work right is really really hard and a lot goes into building and presenting the perfect villain for your work. Um, I think that part of showing off a good villain and getting your reader because I mean books is what I know best, so I mean getting your reader to really key on the villain and how important they are and really sell them as a character is to show the villain early. And if you don't, if you can't show the villain early, at least show signs of them, show what they do to people. Show how things look when they leave. Think about how crazy it would have been. Um, actually, we do kind of have an example of this. Do you remember what happened to mars?
Speaker 1:in which plane do you remember? Oh yeah, when I was taken imagine if that mattered.
Speaker 2:Imagine if we had to walk through a golden age city stuck in flux and think about what the witness did to everyone who lived there. Imagine if we had to live through the stuff from the missing black armory papers, which, if you haven't read, is nuts uh, I don't remember it specifically, but bife. Bife has a video all about the it's. I think it's called like the witness hates us. Yeah, um that, yeah, I mean. Imagine if we actually got to see that. Like that would have been nuts like it's horrifying that would have sold me so much earlier.
Speaker 2:But the witness does hit three things that are really important when you're talking about strong villains. So so I brought this question up to my clan leader. I said, mr Clan Leader, sir, do you think the Witness is a good villain? He said emphatically no. He says to him that a villain is only good or well. What makes a good villain I won't say only, because that wasn't the word he used what makes a good villain to him is a motive that you yourself can get behind, and he thinks that the witness's motive is what killed the witness as a villain for him.
Speaker 2:But I think that there's more to that. I think that there are kind of three things that I'm really looking for, and that is that, you know, they need to be a complex character, which the Witness is. The fact that there are dissenters within the Witness at all, even though in Entelechy, which is the collector's edition lore book, we're told that other factions in Precursor society were dealt with Air quotes, air quotes, air quotes. We don't know what that means. We are led to think that they were exterminated, but we don't really know. And so that means that the consciousness is within the witness either there were dissenters that didn't speak up within the uh I forget what they called themselves within the faction that became the witness and uh pessimist or whatever is something like that, something like that.
Speaker 2:Uh, and and um, the nihilists, I think. I don't remember. Uh, I'm not going to use, I'm not going to use a title that I don't know, but, uh, either either there were dissenters within them that didn't speak up, or the consciousnesses within the witness are still individual enough that they were able to change their mind, which is a big deal when you have that. That rounds out that character a little bit. And the other thing is that he is a necessary opponent. I've talked to you about this before, uh, when we were talking about writing, and that was that the best villains are the ones that belong to your heroes, the ones that are the only one that they can, can defeat, like all uh one for all, or uh all for one and uh all might, and uh uh uh.
Speaker 2:Shigaraki and deku in my hero academia. I actually think that the that shigaraki and deku are the best example that I can think of right now of the necessary opponent, because they, they literally have parallel arcs. Like it's beautiful If you, if you zoom out at my hero academia, it's, it's a beautiful story. But, um, so he's? You know everything that we are not. He is a personified opposition to our deal, to our ideals, and the third thing is that he is a champion to an alternate way of thinking. He ideals. And the third thing is that he is a champion to an alternate way of thinking. He is the edge of the first knife, he is the tip of the sword. Logic, he is a singular entity. That is one thing. He is a monofilament edge, whereas we, in excision, if you, if you noticed, beat him as 12, we beat him as many, we came together and defeated him using the opposite concept, which is huge. Like that's I never thought about consistency.
Speaker 2:That's super tasty, that's a good point, and you never thought about it like that so I mean that's that is a lot of really good um.
Speaker 2:So I mean that is a lot of really good ingredients that I think go towards making the witness interesting versus. You know, yeah, I can sort of see when you have a character that's not sure of its own motivations, it kind of takes the teeth out of its actions a little bit because it's like, well, maybe it could just stop at any time, which I think might be the impetus behind my clan leader's argument, is it's like that kind of takes some of the threat away as well. I mean, he could wake up tomorrow and change his mind, but I don't think he will. There's a certain tyranny of majority in the witness's actions. That I think is kind of interesting.
Speaker 2:It's like he's a society in miniature, and the most important thing about him, of course, is the fact that we couldn't defeat him the way that we normally defeat things. Bullets weren't gonna, uh, bullets weren't gonna do anything to him, um, although, that being said, I do wish that there was more mechanically to the excision process than just shooting him with a laser like that. I mean all of that and it comes down to shooting him with a laser that you can't miss, like that's kind of. But I mean, you know, this is. This is where the elitist versus casual mentality comes out, where it's like well, if you wanted a fail condition, you got that in the raid. You, you had that. You had your opportunity to have it your way. And and really dividing the witnesses, downfall into the raid and excision to satisfy both camps, I think was a smart move I one million, so that everybody, everybody kind of gets what they want but,
Speaker 1:nobody really gets their way and they both felt like when they talked about it, like originally, where they said we can't kill the witness in the story, we have to kill him like you have to deal with him in the raid. I was really afraid that excision essentially would be the raid.
Speaker 2:So the fact that, as mr raids, I would have been fine with that I know you would have trust me.
Speaker 1:I totally get it. I mean, I cleared it once, so I would be fine with it too, because at least I got to see it, even though it took me three weeks to get to it yeah, what the uh, what, what was that statistic?
Speaker 1:82 percent of people oh yeah, in the player base might not might not get to experience it like yeah, that would have been a riot, but like the fact that both endings like felt impactful because in order to have excision you needed the raid. So the people who did the raid basically allowed excision to happen. You cut the witness off in the light and then everyone can experience his actual downfall because technically he loses twice. So you, you know it was good. I was afraid that it was going to be like you kill him in the raid and then everyone just gets a cut scene. So it was definitely the best way they could have ended that or handled that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because right now there is such a pull, there is such I'm I'm a lot more. You know, I used to argue about this especially heavily during ron. I'm a lot more chill about it now because I a lot of I can see the issues that casual players kind of emit around them. Like you, you seen how mad I was about the cooperative focus stuff. Like I get the aggravation now and I'm a lot more chill about the hardcore casual audience. So you know, my train of thought kind of fell apart there. I'm really tired, um, but you know, definitely the the best way they could have ended the witness and that.
Speaker 1:So we got the episodes conversation. My um, I need to get mad, yeah. So like I'll just quickly sum my side up because I know you're gonna have more coherent thoughts on this. You've already read it in my outline, but I'll just regurgitate it here. I feel like the episode model has allowed for bigger narrative ideas Because I feel like we never got in something as impactful as, like, the conductor and the Vex basically changing and these bigger story moments Other than Eris becoming a god for a few seconds. That was pretty insane, but it just feels bigger and it's giving it more time to brew. But the delivery method of that narrative is kind of shitty. Nobody likes it and it, like you said originally at the start, it feels like we were gaslit because they said they would change it. Thankfully they will be going forward and we'll see if they do it.
Speaker 2:But we'll see.
Speaker 1:I'm not optimistic, yeah but how do you feel about? The episodes and the lens and narrative.
Speaker 2:So. So this is the part where we get into a fight because bigger, no flat, no better, maybe. Uh, I'm behind. So, I mean, I haven't done the, I haven't done the. Uh, I haven't done the act two stuff, uh, yet I just haven't. Like I said, not super interested in the game right now, I do this. I did this when Helldivers came out. It's just because I'm playing something new. By the time that I get tired with Final Fantasy, I'll go back. I always go back.
Speaker 1:Can't escape.
Speaker 2:But why isn't it bigger? Because Bungie needs to reset the tension. If they don't, you know, nobody will believe them. Nothing will ever be bigger than the threat the witness posed. He was going to end the multiverse, he was going to end possibility, like literally everything that could ever be calcified into a single moment. Forever. Nothing, literally nothing tops that not frieza.
Speaker 2:Like nothing. Panoptes, who could have control a, deleted the entire universe if he got out of the infinite forest. No, not even panoptes was bigger than this. Not even riven, who could have literally cast wish and destroyed us the moment that we set foot in the dreaming city. Like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. So there's nowhere to go. They hit the ceiling. You can't break through it, otherwise you get the dragon ball z effect where, oh well, this guy's uh, 15 times stronger than the last guy and it's like oh well, my infinity plus one, oh, my infinity plus two. Oh well, this guy over here has got infinity plus five. Oh, we're going to need to go train Like that's? No, I don't believe you. And bigger than any other season? I don't think so either. Arrivals, seraph Witch and Wish All of them had higher stakes and a wider scope. Even worthy had us building up for the pyramids arrival. They gave us a countdown. You could go watch it if you want, there was literally a countdown in the serif bunkers.
Speaker 1:That was terrifying that was that was.
Speaker 2:And then arrivals when the pyramid ships actually showed up like crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, which, where eris became a capital, g god wish, bringing, riven back, bringing back the aham kara. That's massive. That's one of those things that a bungee throws in a box and forgets about. I'm gonna be mad, like I'm gonna be really mad about that, if they, if they forget we saved her eggs.
Speaker 1:We better be getting more dragons. Oh yeah, god yeah, and that's not a consequence. You can forget.
Speaker 2:Like seraph, I think it was a little bit tighter of a scope, but the stakes were still there. I mean, zivu irath was on her way and if we didn't get rasputin ready to counter her, well, I cast black terrorists. Your planet no longer exists, like you know that. Uh, that was a big deal. So I don't really think that echoes is bigger and I don't think it needs to be.
Speaker 2:As for this story, it really kind of strikes me as one that we don't even really need to get involved with if we don't want to. Like the Vex are weird. Okay, great, the Vex are always weird. Nothing the Vex do is normal. Point to the Vex and tell me that thing is normal because it's not. It's a time bot made of milk. That is a society in miniature like that. Nothing about that is okay, but like this is a vex civil war that doesn't actually threaten us, which is a really fascinating concept, but without a strong hook there's no impetus. If it wasn't for Failsafe saying hey, captain, you haven't come to Nessus in like four years and I really miss you, we probably wouldn't have ever gotten involved. We just would have been like yep, those are Vex.
Speaker 1:Do you think? A unified Vex out of the sub-mines and completely collected into one cohesive unit would be a problem.
Speaker 2:So that's the thing, the Vex, from what I can tell, only actually have three subtypes. There's the I forgot already. There's the soul divisive, the ones in the garden, the soul inherent, the ones that are the um, uh, the uh, the ones in the raid in garden of salvation. But there's a third one, uh, the one that's just regular vex. They have a name, they have a special name.
Speaker 1:Oh gosh, I know there's precursors or something well, those are.
Speaker 2:Those are the soul collective oh yeah, that's it yeah the soul collective, I guess, okay, there's.
Speaker 2:There's a couple more like the soul progeny, who are the ones in the black garden, those three minotaurs, the soul primeval, that are the old ones, the sole imminent or the descendant Virgo prohibition, okay, so yeah, I guess there's more Vex than I thought. But really I mean, when we're talking about the Vex, you know, all these other ones are special, like the Hezen productive and corrective only exist on Venus. You know, they're only in the Vault of Glass. The sole divisive are only in the Black Garden. The sole inherent're only in the vault of glass, the soul divisive are only in the black garden, the soul inherent are only in the raid and the soul collective are everybody else.
Speaker 2:So there was a unified vex. It's just we didn't think about it that way because of how the vex are organized, and that's kind of the interesting thing. Um, I won't parrot a lot of what Bife said, but really the thing that the Vex do is that they've only ever done one thing. They've only ever gone back in time now to now, to ensure some nebulous victory in the future. They are Roko's basilisk given form. If there is ever a Vex, there will always be Vex. The Vex are basically perfect. They have automated victory and that doesn't really give a lot of room for variation or nuance or strong characters, which I think is one of the biggest problems with the vex as a faction. They're so alien to us. Like I said, there is nothing normal about the vex. They literally enslaved a star. They have enslaved a star and they tortured an entire civilization in nested simulations just because, like I mean, I don't think they gained anything out of that, they just wanted to because they're vex. So like I mean, that's, that's crazy yeah, the vexer they're.
Speaker 2:They are the most interesting faction, because we just don't really know that much about them I mean, other than query a blade, transform, uh, who kind of gets a little bit of a pass because they were taken or it was taken, um, and so it could kind of act outside of the programming of the collective. We didn't really have any vex characters. The conductor is the only one, and so that's fresh. I mean automatically, that's fresh. It remains to be seen who that's going to be, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be my ass under ash, and if they die at the end of the episode, I'm going to be really disappointed because I mean, if the vex just go back to being the vex, then I'm really going to question what the whole point of the episode was. Yeah, um, as far as, do I like what I'm seeing? Do I like what I'm playing? Is it, is it better than the seasons that have come before? It's just too early to call it. I don't really like to pass judgment on works that I know are incomplete.
Speaker 2:Um, the season, the fact that the episode, that the episodic model, is literally the exact same thing as the seasonal model, where it's get on, do a mission, do a seasonal activity, come back, watch some characters talk, then listen to a radio transmission and then wait for a week. The fact that it's literally that same thing again, but with extra time gates, is crazy. That is actually bonkers. You can't point at that idea and say that it's any good at all. But I do think that there's a definite regression on the gameplay front. Every seasonal activity run that I've done anyway is the same week over week. Deep dive, if you remember deep dive, there was those like there's a couple of different things that you could get, like different encounters between different tiers, and you could get those like boons. Even Riven's lair and the coil felt better than this activity does. This activity is always the same. It is not different week over week, which is very strange.
Speaker 1:It is quite boring.
Speaker 2:I agree.
Speaker 2:I don't really know what's up with that. And the secret mission is cool but it doesn't feel rewarding for how long it takes. And also, if you run icarus dash or heat rises and you go into the man cannon, you die instantly and I don't know why that happens. I have no idea what's up with that. So don't run icarus dash or heat rises if you don't run Icarus Dash or Heat Rises if you don't want to die instantly Otherwise. I mean, I've kind of noticed a funny trend among the members of my clan where when a new season comes out, everybody's hyped. We all love it, but by the time that week three rolls around, we're all tired of it. That's how quickly we burn out on this, even when it's new.
Speaker 2:And I think that there is nothing more important than fixing up, or nothing more important to the future of episodes as a concept, than fixing up this content delivery method, because it's like saint's internal conflict is interesting. The role reversal of saint and osiris in terms of who is vulnerable and who is not is also very interesting and we don't really know where that's going to go yet. But like you need a lot of things to happen by 30% of the way through a book, you know you need to initiate the reader into the world. They need to be literate in the conflict, they need to be aware of the stakes and the villain and they need to get the emotional hook. And if you're writing a hero's journey, they're over the threshold.
Speaker 2:If you're writing with the save the cat structure, they need to have been given their catalyst. Or if it's a rising action structure, there needs to be some intensifying conflict. And I wrote these uh talking points kind of at the end of episode one. Like I said, I haven't done there at the end of act one and I haven't done the act two stuff yet. But I mean that just goes to show that it took more than a third of the way through the episode to get all of these things. So I mean they're behind as far as the three-act structure is concerned yeah, no, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the um. Now that you phrased it like that, I think I might have been going under.
Speaker 2:I don't know, drink the kool-aid.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I drank a little bit of kool-aid because, like it felt, because, like for maybe I'm a little bit weird, but the way it felt playing through it just felt different. Maybe it's because Ness is quote-unquote in giant quotation marks, because it doesn't actually change in the patrol space. There's change in the landscape and for some reason I just thought the story felt bigger. But the way that you phrased it there makes a lot of sense. No, I agree.
Speaker 2:And I don't mean to bleed like bleed your enthusiasm dry here. But I'll also say it's okay to like something that other people don't like. I think that in my circles at least, liking Destiny is kind of cringe which is funny considering how much destiny we play. But like, it's okay to like the game and it's okay to like the content even though it's flawed, and it's okay to enjoy yourself playing it. I like all of those things are fine.
Speaker 1:I like how mad people get when I say that I genuinely enjoy ron.
Speaker 2:It's the one raid that I enjoyed because I can play it do you have any idea how hyped I was when Nezarek showed up? I was like this guy's from the deepest lore. Like this is the guy it's him, it's the guy. I'll admit, he went down easy. Even on contest mode he went down easy.
Speaker 1:But like I mean, that's him, there he is, he's right there it's cool to see those deep lore characters get brought forth into the actual limelight, especially even though we don't really know that much about Micah 10. It was, unless you read or go back in time, it was nice to see them, even though they weren't rendered in game like you would think, they were just a hologram, which is also kind of silly where are?
Speaker 2:they like. What are they doing? Why do they need to show up as hologram? Why can't they just be in there? Yeah, like she's doing maybe they only rendered the top half like at 10. That's my spin foil I love that.
Speaker 1:That's great. They only have the resources for the top half. No, I'm yeah yeah, we'll see. I'm cute. Like to your point, we can't really say how episodes are going to feel until we have one under the belt, but currently, right now, the the sentiment is that it's very meh. It's not really. People still say seasons instead of episodes. I think next season, once we have so you just did it right there oh yeah, exactly damn it.
Speaker 1:Next episode, when we have, um, the time gates lifted and it's only they released the acts fully when they come out, I I mean we're gonna have the people. I'm gonna be one of them, because I I know how I play destiny. I'll probably end up doing the entire act in like a day, and then have nothing to complain about not having.
Speaker 1:Oh, I don't come, I'm trust me, I don't complain, like I like when I do the campaigns in a full a day or two days. I know I'm doing a bulk of the content quickly. I know that going into, I've seen people complaining on twitter that they maxed out the battle pass in like an hour, but they also were like speed rushing in. They were adding bungee literally.
Speaker 2:I literally maxed out my level the moment I logged in. Yeah, I just had banked bounties and then they they turned in all my bounties and I was like oh, there it is that I will parrot a little bit.
Speaker 1:I'll quote um bife on this. The end data to, to a certain extent, the argument between not having anything to do because you do it in 10 seconds, or what was the other half of that? Um, I don't remember either, but is it's um? It's a debate that's never really gonna end and there's no good way to really solve it. It's a lose-lose situation. You can either release everything all at once and have if someone like us and you do it in like 10 seconds, or you can time gate it and have people be mad that they can't do all of it.
Speaker 2:You can't really I personally, I would rather do it all and me too, be done yeah because then I can go play something else yeah, you're not waiting.
Speaker 1:I, after going through years of seasons and episodes now and I'm curious to see how it's going to feel when they release an act by act, I'm also kind of just tired of, because then it's like you're just being held on a fish line, right, like you just want to kind of experience it all at once and then go play final fantasy or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but we'll see. We'll see how episodes progress. Let's see how this one goes. I also feel like the this episode came out with the expansion, and this always happened with seasons as well. The first season always season's always bad, yeah because I mean like, how, like to your point.
Speaker 2:How can you top the story that we just experienced in the final shape like my clan leader was like I even liked undying better than this, and I was like, bro, that's not that's.
Speaker 1:That's straight up a lie. That's illegal. Three of a lie undying was bad that's. I'm pretty sure that's an illegal opinion undyne like oh my god, I don't even I. The only thing good about undying was the weapons and the enemy density. That's it.
Speaker 2:Uh, I liked it when Ikora opened a portal into the weasel dimension.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was. My highlight of the week was logging on to see the portal have one more piece of metal attached to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's. That's not really. That's not really a highlight of the season, though, but you know the fact that she turned it on and crashed the frickin servers. It's just. That's just really a highlight of the season, though, but you know the fact that she turned it on and crashed the freaking servers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just, that's just kind of silly icora shows up, in the main, the vanilla campaign to shoot one nova bomb disappears, comes back for undying, open up a weasel portal game. But, um, like, we have one more question here and that is we kind of been discussing it passively over the course of our conversation. But what do you think is next for Destiny? How would they even be able to tell another saga? What threads are left to pull? And I put in all caps, like I want to go to Torbottle, I want to see these things that were teased in the lore. And if it's codenamed Frontier, I'm assuming we're leaving Sol, but are we going to eventually be fighting the Winnower? I don leaving soul, but are we going to eventually be fighting the winnower? I don't think so, not at least for a while, because it's a prime, it's a no, it's a primordial force.
Speaker 2:He's fundamental. Yeah to the universe.
Speaker 1:Nothing we can do about the winnower yeah, exactly, and to the uh forgot his name, but the scholars um, light and dark has to exist in coalescence in order for things to kind of like exist like yeah, so like I don't think, I think the the winnower is gonna be annoying, but I think it knows we can't really fight it I want him to show up like rafael in balder's game. Oh, my god, I think that'd be funny because they have the same energy like they really do what would the widow whatow of War even look like?
Speaker 1:I wonder Like. Does it even have a form or is it just a voice?
Speaker 2:It's a face where a person should be.
Speaker 1:Literally.
Speaker 2:Just a silhouette, just a model with a Vantablack texture.
Speaker 1:That'd be. Yeah, he is super black. The super black texture or shader, yeah, but what do you think Like? What do you think Frontiers is going to be?
Speaker 2:Rhys and Torabottle are the easy answers, and that's because we have existing debts to pay back on our alliances. We told Kydle we would get Torabottle back, so we're going no matter what. I think that's definite. But the last place we saw Aramis was on a ship leaving at sublight speed towards Rhys. That was what became of Aramis after Season of the Seraph. So I think that it wouldn't be out of the question to help Mithrax restore Rhys and if we go at light speed, we'll beat Aramis there, reese and if we go at light speed, we'll beat Aramis there. And then Aramis could show up at the end of the of the story to a fully restored Reese. And I think that would be a really interesting character moment for her, because all that she's done, everything that's been like, every decision that she's made, has been in the name of restoring that memory. Like all of the reese reborn stuff on europa that was made and then never like expanded on, all of that was her attempt to rebuild the society that the fallen lost, and I think that that's a really powerful narrative and I think that that's definitely something powerful narrative and I think that that's definitely something that, if bungee's paying any attention, they're going to want to pull on, but I think there's more than that.
Speaker 2:I mean, of course, savathun is a low-hanging fruit. She's always up to something, that's what she does, that she's the god of being up to something. But there's also the precursor, exile, who is explicitly confirmed to be alive per intelliki. So they're out there. There is a living precursor out there somewhere and we don't know what's what they're doing or what's up with them. And then I would really like to kill zivu irath in a raid. So I know for sure that there's another rain on the horizon. I don't know what it's going to be, but I hope that it's zivu a wrath, because zivu a wrath does not deserve to be constrained to being a campaign boss like I was hoping.
Speaker 2:I was hoping we'd get a raid for sabathun. That wasn't the case. But zivu, a wrath for sure, needs a raid. She's the god of war, she's the god of getting in a fight like yeah honestly, sabathun is not completely out of the picture either.
Speaker 1:I mean she has, true, I guess, yeah she's also, like you said, the the gotta fuck around and find out and up to something.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, we just we just haven't found out yet. Yeah, um, other than that, I mean, give me pantheon too, please. I I would like pantheon to return for every moments of triumph with new stuff added. I loved pantheon. Such a good idea. That was literally so cool. Honestly, I did all of it. I loved it.
Speaker 1:I would play Pantheon if it was permanent, you know, because like I think it should have been permanent.
Speaker 2:It's also Pantheon five was the only thing in the game that scaled you to contest light, so it was the only way to actually test builds for contest mode. Interesting, yeah, that's the only thing, unless you keep zero light gear, which, if you didn't do when you had zero light gear, you can't do anymore because of light flooring. That was the only way to tank your light level far enough. Other than that, we're going to need some new names, and I think that reaching back into the Books of Sorrow and the deep lore to get some more inspiration is a good idea. We could see Taox from the Osmium Dynasty or the other Wormgots like Iyer and Yul they're still out there and then the return of the Ahamkara we talked about that.
Speaker 2:If that goes in the Bgee hates consequences bucket, I'm I quit, I will eat my hat. Um, come back. You know the nine, that's that's. That wasn't even on my list, but I mean. I mean the nine. Now that the darkness and they're in the witness isn't eating their planets anymore, that they need to think. They need those, that is, their brain cells. Um, like they can show up and start doing stuff again speaking of just fucking weird.
Speaker 1:I dropped the first f-bomb. I'm just, I'm cool like that, see I made it through the whole podcast I I just because this is the weirdest thing in destiny to me, it's just the nine that we had zero since destiny. One vanilla, just weird tentacle, something weirder for you, and I've got something weird, it's on my list.
Speaker 2:So so next on my list is nezarec, because I know, because coming back is what nezarec does. Right, there are four tombs of nezarec that we know of, which means that this is at least his fifth resurrection. So nezarec's thing is coming back, he'll be back, he's gonna be back, but an a's going to be back, but an Ophelion. Do you know what an Ophelion is? Um, no, I'm not surprised. They are mentioned in exactly three places. There's a location in the Dreaming City called Ophelion's Rest. Oh, that's a lot of secondary. And then there are yes, and then there are two lore books that talk about characters that get attacked by an Ophelion. The only thing that they are aware of is a bright blue light, and then nothing. They are vaporized completely.
Speaker 1:Something some amorphous thing destroys them. Liquid ship that is terrifying.
Speaker 2:I I maybe, I don't know. If I see any blue lights, I'll start writing. I'll become an environmental storytelling skeleton and I'll start like writing a half finished message let me get those lore books for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as you're doing that, though like the nine, to just like they, we had Zer do nothing besides give you stuff. And then we had the Drifter come in and then Star Horse and a game show and giant lady that talked to Drifter. I mean, we have some good lore about them, but I'm really curious. We don't know if they're good or bad, they've just been observing.
Speaker 2:So there's. There are four mentions, uh, five mentions of a Phileons, one of which is unconfirmed. Uh, the star reader scales lore tab mentions an Eliksni pilot ship malfunctioning, and then he sees the flash of blue particles, uh, but he doesn't die. And and then he sees the flash of blue particles, but he doesn't die. And then the Dreaming City, bambergia.
Speaker 2:Lore book talks about the RSS Amestris being destroyed and only Shuraido survived, marasenna, impotent. One talks about paladin pavel nolg's ship, uh, being destroyed by an aphelion before executing a light speed jump. Uh, aphelion's rest is a lost sector. God, I hope it doesn't hang out there. And then in the chronicon, scribe, shagak refers to the, the Aphelion, as a predator with the power to devastate worlds in the blink of an eye, and that apparently the Cabal keep an Aphelion on their Athenaeum world. Oh, that's good. So we have no idea what this thing is. This is one of those. They were cooking with something and then the rest of the team forgot, or it was an idea that they never, they never, um, uh, they never latched onto. But like this, this quote first it shimmered, then it crawled and then it screamed. Like that's. That's terrifying. That is actually Lovecraft stuff, like I want this. Where is this? Put this in the game, please.
Speaker 1:This is terrifying yeah, that makes me feel like I felt while reading the Black Armory pages.
Speaker 2:Man and then otherwise I mean the stuff that I've heard about d3. I kind of don't really credit. But I've heard that it's going to be any race, no classes, all abilities on the table, so you could be a hunter air quotes, that runs burning mall for, for example, like there are no classes anymore, and you could be a fallen or a cabal or a hive, yeah, and so it's like I think that's cool on paper but I don't think that that's enough to get me to play it. I've spent 3000 hours in this game and I'm already good at it. I have all of my best in slot gear, with the exception of some like raid, god roles and stuff when I hear how easy it would be, you know, to get me to play that.
Speaker 1:Just allow me to play a fallen, that's all you would need to do, like, give me, like, let me play a fallen that has some, like some unique passive, having passive abilities on races, would be cool. And if they did like an all race, all classes thing, like what if you had some special passives as a fallen, maybe you run faster, or something I think if I, if I had to guess, knowing destiny players, they would just pick the race with the best passives and then they would do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's fair, that's they would just optimize like that's. That's the end game is optimization. So you're not running a fallen build, get out of here yeah, you get out of the fire team, bro, actually trolling you know there's a lot of things left to pull those.
Speaker 1:Those sound really creepy though that is. I hope we get to see that and if we go to tour bottle then maybe maybe and I'm new. Um, let's think who else is that, that I'm telling you, man, that they, they, just they made that story warm again with the, the quest and final shape oh yeah, they expect because you do the strike again for one of the ghosts um, like a 10 quests, like when you're preparing for the the raid I don't think of.
Speaker 2:Or if I did that one, I was just speed running so fast that I don't remember.
Speaker 1:There's new dialogue at the end of the strike, because you know how, when you do it, normally the ghost is like who's Otsat, what's whatever? Like there's logs have been.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah, no, I definitely haven't done that yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, then can I tell you, or do you want to, because it's for Micah 10. You can, oh, oh you can hit me okay. Yeah, when you do the mega 10 version of that strike for her quest, there's new dialogue saying that new logs were um accessed by atsat, and I don't remember what the rest of quote was, but they made that entire thread very warm again, so I'm sure that's on the horizon also.
Speaker 2:The nine uh all uh. Atsat was one of the conspirators. He was one of the conspirators, he was one of the guys in the Midnight Coup, so I mean he's a big deal.
Speaker 1:Totally, I'm excited to see that. And, um, I forgot my brain's too tired for what I was going to say originally. Oh yeah, the Niners are suggested. I can't confirm or deny this, but the Niners are suggested to play a part in Episode 3, I believe it's either two or three. That's supposed to be Episode three is the one we know little to nothing about, other than that we're going back to the dreadnought, which is a yes, please.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we get to drive the dreadnought.
Speaker 1:They. They said something interesting that I don't know. I've pointed it out. I don't think too many people are thinking about it, but they said that in episode three there's going to be a new malevolent. I can't pronounce this word malevolent. Yeah, malevolent.
Speaker 2:Eldritch force that appears that has never been seen before. Hey, I I have one. I have a malevolent eldritch force for you, bungie. They're called aphelions.
Speaker 1:Please, they scare me so good I'll I'll make sure to to add bungie when I post this on twitter do it yeah at bungie on twitter at bungie help. I'll tag the help page bungie help, help us add these into the game now. That'd be cool, though we need more scary things. I think the scorn are like the only thing that would add it.
Speaker 2:That were scary originally no, I don't think screams man. I look at screams and I go I do screams and like I don't, my brain ceases to function when screams are around. I'm like that's peak, that's that's peak. Evolution right there, that is the end state of evolution is Screebs. It all comes down to Screebs.
Speaker 1:Screebs is Bungie representation of what Destiny players are in canon. That's what we look like to them.
Speaker 2:Give me the unstoppable overload barrier Screeb. That's what I want.
Speaker 1:That's traumatizing. It just chases you forever. That was all the questions I had. I'm curious are you going to be sticking around for Project Frontiers, because I know since Final Shape I'm sure a lot of veterans are going to be retiring. I haven't really checked. Do you think you're staying around, are you?
Speaker 2:going to be a more casual observer? Really checked, but do you think you're staying around or are you going to be a more casual observer? If there's a raid? I might. It depends on what my team does. I mean, really, I just right now I don't feel really super compelled to play the game but um you know, if it comes to be that there's a new raid on the horizon which I've heard that it's scourge is the. Is the reprised raid, um, scourge oh um yeah, scourge of the past.
Speaker 2:So I'll die on that hill. I have. I have heard that that's the reprised raid that's coming back. I think that there's some achievements in the API that are related to scourge, some achievements in the API that are related to Scourge. I'll definitely try it.
Speaker 1:I actually haven't even got to clear that rate. That's the one rate I never even did at all.
Speaker 2:I think that if my team were to do that, that would be one that we might not even need to train for it. I got the flawless of that way back. I got my always on time legit. You used to have to um, do a chest puzzle and hit buttons while a blazed glory was chasing you during the sparrow race, and then you had to get up the pipe and into a side passage where you were still vulnerable and get the sparrow from a chest and then get out before a blazed glory killed you. That was the original way to get always on time.
Speaker 1:Jeez.
Speaker 2:And I got mine legit, so I mean I'm ready.
Speaker 1:I am. I will die on the hill, I know my CAPs. I will die on the hill that I really want. Wrath of the machine.
Speaker 2:Everybody I know who played D. One wants wrath.
Speaker 1:I don't know what is in the engine, I don't know. Literally it's so good, I mean.
Speaker 2:Okay, I don't believe them.
Speaker 1:I don't know what's in the engine when they stick to its technical limitations. They made Verity yeah.
Speaker 2:If they made Verity, they can do it Like it's possible. That just means they don't know how to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they either don't. They don't know how to do it or they don't want to add anything related to SIVA textures back into the game.
Speaker 2:Which I mean they hate SIVA. I know for sure that one of them came out and said we're never going to do SIVA again.
Speaker 1:I don't know why they SIVA kind of hit, though man SIVA fucking hit.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:I'm sad about that, but anyway, yeah, I uh Destiny. It's been a 10 year ride. I'm probably going to stick around because I mean, destiny made me want to be a writer. But I'm curious to see what the rest of these episodes are going to play out.
Speaker 2:So I mean the only game in the science fantasy space like other than Warframe, which it's 1999 update looks really good, but I kind of warframe mishandled its story as well. This isn't a warframe podcast, but they also did things that made me really mad and I just stopped playing after that yeah so I mean it's possible that it could go either way. You know, warframe could come back, bungee could offend me so bad that I stopped playing. Like you never know, we just don't know. Yet we're not there we don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the future as for right now.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think it's pretty safe to assume that it's going to be, you know, status quo. You know, if you liked last year, you're probably going to like this year exactly yeah to what you said before.
Speaker 1:This is a bungee, untethered. We're going into something we haven't seen since basically destiny vanilla. So we'll ultimately time will tell. So is there anything else that you wanted to ask, anything you wanted to bring up before you run it out? Also, congratulations for being the longest episode I've ever had I want to put you on the spot.
Speaker 2:How am I gonna do that? Yeah, I want to put you on the spot yeah, it's gonna be a good question how do I do that?
Speaker 2:how do I do that? What do you think is the most impactful thing that destiny could do to elevate its experience to the next level? And I mean that in any regard. You could answer narratively, you could answer in terms of gameplay, but what do you think it'll take for bungie, for Destiny as a property, to really take the next step in its own evolution? What does that look like to you? That?
Speaker 1:is a fantastic question. That is a really good question. Honestly, my gut tells me go full RPG. I would love to see Destiny embrace the MMO title instead of like what I say in MMO Lite. I would love to see it have the classes, have traits, just like go full MMO, like go into it, lean into that shit. I think that would be something to change the game for me and elevate it. It would have to be like a complete and utter. We would have to redefine what Destiny is in our minds to have that. But in the perfect world, seeing a full mmo destiny like elder scrolls, online world of warcraft, oh yeah, 100, I would love it I think that would be.
Speaker 2:That would be very interesting as well. I mean, I think, more on the rpg side, where it's more character progression focused and you can really kind of make your guardian, your own versus existing, in these archetypal spaces that have been carved out for you. I think that would be something that's really interesting. So do you want to hear the saddest news that I've ever heard about related to Destiny? Sure, all of the multimedia projects are canceled. Oh, no, really, that yes. So so what happened was sony was so angry that they took all of their people back in terms of the ones that they had assigned for franchise adaptation into like animation and movies and all that. All those people are gone now. So that sucks.
Speaker 2:The multimedia push is dead, which sucks because, like I said, like this is this universe is one of the few mainstream products that I've ever seen that really embraces the science fantasy mantle in all of its like enormity, where you have science fiction that matters and you have fantastical elements that feel like they're cohesive and not out of place. You know, usually when you have something that straddles genres in this way, it kind of it doesn't fit it, it's discordant with its own internal consistency, whereas destiny is not. Destiny fits together really nice and I think that some it might be worth their time. If they're not going to expand into multimedia, if we'll, if we're never going to see the arcane equivalent you know for this universe, if we got a game that was smaller scale, that was, you know, single player, where you could really live up that power fantasy but also play somebody totally new, where you're not the guardian but you're actually playing a character.
Speaker 2:One of my favorite games, um, in recent memory was jedi fallen order, because july jedi fallen order not only felt great to play, um, it was everything that I liked about the jedi academy games and dark souls, I guess Sekiro really, but I hadn't played Sekiro then so I didn't know. But it's Jedi Academy meets Sekiro and it's really, really fun. But also the story is so personal and thematic and it touches on a lot of these ideas that we'd never seen in mainstream Star Wars media really before. And so I think that this universe could really do with a game like that, where we just dig into a character or a group of characters and experience fully a story that is contained and tight and different but, most importantly, emotionally resonant, because that, I think is what Destiny as a franchise is missing the most Is that it doesn't feel like emotionally powerful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally agree. I think of movies, even TV shows would have like a destiny equivalent to the bad batch Star Wars animated.
Speaker 2:I think that's crazy, dude, we're crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's like arcane is so good. I thought of playing league and then I, and then I very quickly thought better, arcane was so good. I thought of playing League and then I very quickly thought better.
Speaker 1:Arcane was so good it literally stopped me from giving up being a writer because I was about to.
Speaker 2:Arcane is great. You want to know something funny about Jedi, fallen Order and Arcane, by the way, that relate to Destiny. So Lakshmi, too, plays the oh yes in Arcane to destiny, uh. So lakshmi, too, plays the oh yes in arcane and savathun. It plays your mentor in uh jedi fallen order, that's, she plays uh the, the fallen jedi master that you learn from all of a sudden, I forget what her name is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's that's savathun crosses game. She appears in that be like, haha, I was actually this person. Well, that's, that's sabbathoon crosses game. She appears in that be like, haha, I was actually this person well, that's, that's where she was when she was uh possessing osiris oh, that's so true that's where the rest of her power was.
Speaker 2:She was, she was canonically in jedi fallen order.
Speaker 1:That's awesome well, thank you for having this. Uh, thanks for coming on with me, thanks for having this. Thanks for coming on with me, thanks for having this conversation with me, great time.
Speaker 2:Sorry if any of my takes or inaccuracies get you hate mail on the Internet. It's OK If anybody if anybody cares to find me to get hate mail, just so you know, if I don't at least share one mutual friend or a server with you, I block you immediately because I assume you're a spam bot. So good luck getting to me.
Speaker 1:Ha ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha ha ha. I love it. My hot takes all the way home. Yeah, you gotta stand by those hot takes I do. Uh, I let you know this ahead of time because I wanted to see if you can think of something unique. But this to everyone listening this person, this man over here, the, the real, the real shin, can do the best Drifter impression I've ever heard in my life, and Borderline could just be like a stunt double or something for Drifter if they ever needed it. So I want to end this episode with a Drifter voice line from you.
Speaker 2:Oh brother, you're really going to put me on the spot like that, come on man. Gotta warn a guy Just ain't right what you're doing. Don't tell me that you've not had problems when you're trying to perform on the spot. Friend, I know you have. You can't hide from old drifter.
Speaker 1:Perfect. That's amazing. That was good. That was good. Hit him with a Transmat Firing and we'll close it out with a Transmat Firing you.
