As many fans of Dune are doing right now, I am watching the new HBO show Dune Prophecy, which is trying to ride the coattails of Villeneuve’s Dune movie success.

I haven’t been a fan of Brian Herbert’s and Kevin J Anderson’s books. I have always felt that they reduced the power of the original Dune Cycle, by completely missing the mark on Dune 7, the final Dune book, which was supposed to reveal many tantalizing details about Marty and Daniel, who were believed to be ascended Tleilaxu Face Dancers. Instead, they reduced them to Omnius, the Evermind hivemind that enslaved humanity before the Jihad, and Erasmus, a deviant robot that loved to experiment on humans.

Also, many plotlines that they came up with feel forced and unnatural, in all of their books, especially since they always circle around the same characters, an Atreides, a Harkonnen, a Corrino, an Idaho, etc. It’s so boring.

Therefore, I stopped reading after the House trilogy, I never read the Mentats, Navigators, and Sisterhood of Dune, because I felt it betrayed the heritage of Frank Herbert. The origins that they came up with are pedantically boring. Their characters are all cut from the same cloth, filled with clichés and prejudice.

The Villeneuve films paid a great homage to my favorite books. While there are some issues, the glorious magnificence of the movies completely revitalized this series. HBO quickly moved in to try and secure this property and come up with some interesting show, à la Game of Thrones.

Dune Prophecy is a bit of a mixed bag. It combines a CW show with some space opera fantasy. The set pieces are nice, the lore interesting, but then we see an Atreides, who is badly cast IMHO, Valya Harkonnen, who is the Mother Superior of the nascent Bene Gesserit Order, a weak Corrino on the throne, and some mysteries.

I could do without the CW plots, but hey, I can’t complain too much. It’s more Dune. At this time, 10000 years before Paul Atreides, the sisterhood hasn’t perfected the agony of the spice, so there are no reverend mothers, sisters who can access the genetic memory, called the Other Memory, locked in within their DNA and speak to their ancestors.

Lila is a boring AF choice, wtf. The rest of the chapterhouse isn’t bad, but they go too far, as is normal with Brian Herbert fashion. I don’t mind that sisters are mentats or Suk doctors, but that the basic precepts are not followed is somewhat mindboggling. For one thing, Valya Harkonnen. Since she knows her lineage and isn’t a reverend mother, actually none living are, why is she the head of the chapterhouse? Family feuds will fester, in this case, the old Atreides vs Harkonnen. I think we’ve had enough of that.

Desmond Hart is either part machine, part god, or a ghola, a kind of tleilaxu clone. He has the power to make people burn from within, and he seems to have interstellar reach, as he is able to burn Mother Kasha on Rossak from Salusa Secundus.

Salusa Secundus has always been the prison planet of the Corrinos. It sucks how it is now the Imperial planet. Secundus implies that there is a first planet too, it’s precursor of some sort.

BH has been busy trying to integrate the Honored Matres from post God Emperor of Dune into the past, which is a really bad idea. Honored Matres are a splinter of the Bene Gesserit, and they grew into power during the Diaspora, which occurred after the God Emperor’s death. They reappeared chased by unknown entities, which many believed to be awakened Face Dancers, who split from the Tleilaxu after absorbing too many memories, reminiscent of the way Reverend Mothers acquire their Other Memory through the spice agony.

They are called Sorceresses of Rossak, or something like that. Thankfully, this is completely absent from Dune Prophecy, and only present in Sisterhood of Dune. It’s really bad.

This is typical BH slop, as the Honored Matres are absorbed into the Sisterhood after they came back from the Diaspora. BH is like, I want to do that, but before my dad every thought of it, let me put it in my sloppy books. That’s what’s happening.

Hart’s abilities remind me of what the Honored Matres could do, their abilities are less of the mind and more of the body, pervading the Prana Bindu balance. However, he seems to be holding his temple each time he activates it, so it could be robotic of nature. I’m sure that in the BH BS, he’d be happy to do so.

We saw some inkling of thinking machines, when Pruit Richese has a toy that’s obviously too advanced for the current technology level. I’m very surprised that they used RIchese instead of Ix. I suppose that Ix is too mysterious, still. Richese is/was a major house of the Landsraad.

I’ll keep watching, and we only have 4 more eps to go.

Anakin is an angry teen in love with Padme. Obi Wan already regrets training him. Someone should have dealt with him. Balance to the Force… Meaning leaving two Sith and two Jedi alive. Sure, the Force is balanced.

The meat of the plot revolves around mysterious assassins hired by an even more mysterious bounty hunter to kill Padme, who’s the senator for Naboo now, and Darth Sidious is the Supreme Chancellor. Sidious is able to manipulate the idiot Jar Jar to give him more executive powers, signaling the end of the republic.

Obi Wan leaves his padawan slurping after Padme while he goes to investigate the bounty hunter, who’s using weapons from Kamino, a system that has been erased from the Jedi archives, by another Jedi. But who?

At Kamino, he discovers that some Jedi ordered and paid for a clone army, based on a bounty hunter named Jango Fett. It’s still a mystery who ordered this army, who chose Fett. Obi Wan is told to capture Fett, and this leads to a great fight on a landing platform on Kamino. Fett leaves and Obi Wan is in hot pursuit. There are more great fights near Geonosis.

It’s here that the true villain is revealed. County Dooku, Yoda’s Padawan, and Qui Gon’s master, is the leader of the separatists. They are trying to push the republic into a war, which will allow Sidious to take control of the senate.

Obi Wan relays his findings and is captured. Instead of staying on Tattooine, Anakin and Padme try to “save” Obi Wan, which ends in disaster. Jedi Master Mace Windu comes with about a hundred Jedi to try to save them. Most of these Jedi die. There are about one or two dozen survivors. It’s crazy that they opted to start their fight in the arena instead of more advantageous positions.

The good part of this is that we see many Jedi fight. This is something that I had wanted to see for so long and finally saw it in this movie, when I originally watched it.

The tactics. Well. Not that much. Yoda arrives with the clones and saves them. Jango was killed by Windu, Boba is still alive. They pursue Count Dooku, but neither Anakin, who is headstrong, arrogant, and an idiot, nor Obi Wan, could stop him. This is where we see Jedi Master Yoda arrive and fight Dooku. He fights him with a lightsaber, and he’s a swirling mass of green, jumping all over the place, showcasing his almost 800 years of experience with the Force. Dooku is able to escape with the Death Star plans by putting both Anakin and Obi Wan in danger.

The Clone Wars have begun, and so has the end of the republic. I didn’t remember that Mace Windu and Yoda were talking about how their ability with the Force had diminished significantly. Was this due to their proximity to a Sith Lord or just a general malaise?

Once the war starts, there are so many interesting machines that the separatists in the front. I can tell that a lot of time was spent making these, as well as the vehicles used by the clones.

Star Wars Episode 1 The Phantom Menace was also rereleased in theaters. This movie has some good parts, especially the lightsaber fights between Obi Wan, Qui Gon and Darth Maul. They are fast, with lots of acrobatics from Ray Park, playing Darth Maul. In order to prepare for this, I watched some supercuts of the most recent Star Wars shows, Ahsoka and Obi Wan. I watched them before, and I did notice how bad the fights were in Ahsoka, almost like Rosario Dawson is moving in slow motion at times, but she’s not, she’s just old.

I gotta say I was surprised at how bad they were, even between Sabine Wren and Shin Hati, mostly from Nathasha Liu Bordizzo. It’s all pretty bad. The inquisitors add a bit of fun, especially Marrok, but overall, you don’t really watch those shows for the fights. It’s probably due to a couple of factors, these being that the actors are old and can’t move fast, and also that they didn’t put much budget in training and stunt people. It’s pretty ridiculous imho.

I skipped all of the Jar Jar BS. I hate that guy. The highlights were definitely from the last 30-40 mins or so. The scene, when Maul appears and Qui Gon and Obi Wan start their fight is spectacular.

I think you can skip most of this movie, except for the last act. It’s kind of funny that Natalie Portman wasn’t wearing all of the beautiful costumes, but her body double was.

Don’t get me wrong, the Fireteam Finder system included now in the game, in its beta form, is absolutely needed. Unless the game can do its own MM, FF is a must. That being said, the system still has plenty of issues. The whole application process that can take up to 3 minutes to get a response is crazy.

While I used FF from time to time, I mostly used the Bungie companion app to join LFG groups. Let me tell you, that’s completely broken right now. I tried looking for a 1st encounter Prophecy farm, and the same post was up all day. It never went away. On the app, there was 1-3 posts for this, at the most.

In the game, it was a bit better, but the experience has been slowed down to a crawl. While I could join many groups and wait for the first one to reply to get on, it’s impossible now. It’s slower, so much slower. Something that used to take about 2-3 mins not takes 10-15.

It’s crazy. While I was eventually able to farm all encounters with groups, I definitely am not a fan at how broken the system is, especially on the app. Applications are stupid. Many lobbies are still online while they are running the LFG. It’s stupid. I have to join a post, wait to be approve, check if the leader is already currently running the activity with a fireteam, then look for something else. I can’t apply to more than one post. The posts fill up almost immediately after I see them, but still appear in the listings. Even in game, I had the same post appear for hours upon hours, without getting any response from the leader. It seemed like a bug. Once the fireteam has been summoned, the post should be deleted. Some people keep it open to rotate in different players, but that’s a stupid idea, clogging up the whole system.

I guess the whole system is still in beta. I hope that things are fixed quickly, and the process is back how it used to be.

The weapons, whisper and outbreak perfected. will be craftable. New versions of the ships will be available. The missions have been retuned with the new sandbox in mind, secrets have been moved around, so you won’t be able to rely on older guides. If you’ve already unlocked the catalyst previously you won’t need to run the legendary version. That’s like Dead Man’s Tale. I only realized this after running it a couple of times.

That’s pretty cool. I was pretty sad when they removed them. They also announced three new maps for PvP. They will be released on May 7th. They include Eventide Labs, on Europa (Beyond Light), Cirrus Plaza on Neomuna (Lightfall) and Dissonance on the Witness’ pyramid. The maps are designed around 3v3, so they won’t be these giant maps like Dysjunction and Cathedral of Dusk. They all look pretty interesting.

There’s also going to be a raid boss rush mode called Pantheon. It will release on April 30th. Next week, there will be another stream dedicated to The Final Shape at 12:30 PST. If you watch it for 15 min, there’s another emblem to grab.

I’m out of Iron Jail, but it took 54 matches. I only won 21 of those over 2 days. It took 10 engrams to decrypt to get the GL, which didn’t drop as an after game reward. The reward track at Salad-man has none, because it’s an effing 7 month season, and I’m on my 3 or 4 reset already.

I know of players who had turned in 60-90 engrams and still no GL. I guess I’ll count myself lucky. IB is filled with 450s and summoners, so I went the same way. I felt like using a zen moment/onslaught summoner was actually a lot of fun. I stopped using ARs a lot in crucible, and was in the Igneuous/conditional bandwagon, but swapping was needed because getting teamshot by 6 ARs is pain.

I always solo queue, and getting enough engrams to focus took me a while. Eventually, after having turned in 40-50 engrams, I finally got the roll I needed. I might play a bit more to get more rolls of the new multimach, but I’m not sure. I rarely use SMGs in PvP, and I’m not a fan of the way that multimach/immortal sounds. It’s a hollow, annoying sound to my ears.

There was a lot of talk about deconstruct, and how it can refund ammo out of thin air on 2 to 3 hits. I haven’t played around with the roll I have, but it can do interesting things. I’m not a fan of slidways. I like slideshot and since I do have a roll of ignition code, I guess I’m ok.

Chain reaction is getting a nerf in The Final Shape, with its direct impact and wave detonation. This means that Hatchling might have a spot, especially on strand builds. Hatchling builds on Hunter and Warlock are pretty crazy. Though I haven’t tested them yet. In the third column, we’ve got envious assassin, that can refill from reserves up to 3 shots, so that’s cool. The only other perk that I found interesting is slice, though on a waveframe, it won’t be that useful since it’s used for clearing adds.

It’s the only strand GL, on top of being a waveframe. The only other waveframe in that slot is New Pacific Epitaph from Ghosts of the Deep. There is a stasis GL from Duality, but it’s not waveframe and I have never gotten the chill clip roll.

It’s crazy to see that this movie will come out this August. I’m definitely looking forward to it. Hopefully, it’s really good.

This led to me rewatching Predators and The Predator. The autism thread is a bit bad, but overall, this part of the Predator franchise led to Aliens. I didn’t rewatch Predator 1, Alien, and Alien 3. I started with Aliens and researching Prometheus. Aliens was iconic, I remember that my mom really enjoyed it. It still holds up, with many really good scenes.

Prometheus was interesting. It’s creepy in parts, but I hate Noomi Rapace’s character Shaw. She’s so happy and optimistic. The OST is also annoyingly positive. That doesn’t work well with the rest. I didn’t like Holloway either. I’m so mad. We found our gods, but they’re all dead. Let me be an asshole and drink a lot on camera. Weyland is an idiot, thinking that the Engineers could grant him immortality. The rest of the cast, Vickers (Charlize Theron) and Janek (Idris Elba) were really well cast and I enjoyed their performances.

David is puzzling. I get that he doesn’t want to be under the control of humans and that he wants to be able to create, which he equates to godhood. He pursues his agenda in Alien Covenant with Shaw on another Engineer-seeded planet and kills them all off for revenge. That’s the part that I thought was a bit much. He was given too much agency for a synthetic. There’s some crazy body horror in the last few scenes in Prometheus.

Alien Covenant has actually got some really good scenes. Of the ones I rewatched, Covenant was the most surprising. There’s a sequence that starts at about 46 min in that lasts until 53 mins which is insane. It starts with two of the crew getting infected by the Engineer pathogen, maybe it had been mutated, but it was resting in pods that expels particles that amalgamate. This starts slowly, but eventually, within minutes (>30 min) they start getting sick. They make their way back to the lander. The first crewmate makes it to the medbay. The pilot, Faris, starts panicking, messaging her husband aboard the spaceship, intermittently due to the ion storms.

Faris knows something is wrong, but Karine won’t listen. They try to help the soldier, but Ferres locks them up. Karine pleads to be let out, hugs the soldier and gets punctured on the hand by the alien organism, which finally makes its way out of the soldier’s back. It’s pale, white, and very hostile. Faris gets a gun, looks on as the alien charges Karine, who’s on the ground because she slipped on the blood. She takes a knife, manages to kick it away, but it charges again and brutally attacks and murders her. Faris comes in, misfires, falls to the ground, and then tries to get back out. The alien charges. Her ankle gets caught in the door, breaking it. She hobbles away. The alien tries to get out of the locked medbay and breaks the glass easily. It comes after Faris, who gets to another gun and starts wildly shooting. She clips some warheads, and the lander explodes. The pastor gets restrained by the crying girl. They see Faris in flames, trying to get out and dying.

Behind them, the other soldier gets held down. Eventually, the alien bursts out and starts slaughtering them. It escapes, but they quickly come back to attack them, killing many. They only manage to survive when a hooded figure arrives and detonates a bright flare, making the aliens flee.

I probably rewatched this scene 3 times. It’s crazy. Overall, I hated the crying lady (Daniels – Katherine Waterston) and Tennessee (Danny McBride), but it was not as bad as I remembered because the rest of the movie is pretty good.

That’s not even the best part. Next comes the whole David/Walter how I designed and tried to improve the aliens part. This is once again a bit much. I don’t believe that David could have done so, just by hybridizing and working with primitive tools, since he lost all of it in the crash of their Juggernaut. He only had Shaw to work with/experiment with, since he killed off the whole population of the planet. From the white version to the black version of the Xenomorph, there are a lot of physical differences. The white version looks a lot like the Engineer’s Deacon, whereas the darker version has a whole hive-like organization, with a queen, workers, defenders, etc.

From then on, it goes downhill to Aliens Vs Predator. Both movies are terrible. Alien Resurrection, bad. I loved how James DeFranco just made a cameo in Alien Covenant and then was nowhere to be seen.

Many predator movies fail because we don’t get to see enough of the predators. That’s the main reason why people want to see these movies. Maybe it’s because of the makeup/effects don’t hold up well to scrutiny. There was a tiny snippet in AvP Requiem on a Predator planet, which was interesting, but it only lasted a few seconds.

I’m glad that Prey (2022) was good and well received. We’ll hopefully continue seeing good Alien/Predator movies.

Last year, there was an adaptation that was aired in China from the first book. I haven’t watched it, because I read some reviews and there were some issues, mostly in the writing and performances.

I was looking forward to this version from Netflix. At $20M per episode, it’s one of the more expensive Netflix adaptations. The show definitely looks good. The acting is also good. Some of my favorites are Benedict Wong, Rosalind Chao, and the Game of Thrones alumni, Liam Cunningham and John Bradley.

I have to say that the beginning episodes are really good, the latter few episodes were a bit of a letdown. There is too much emphasis on the boring relationships between characters I don’t really care about, like Will Downing.

There are some likeable characters, which made me push through this, and naturally I enjoyed the whole of the series, especially concerning the San Ti/Trisolarans. The brutal portrayal of the Chinese revolution was very interesting. It led to the show being banned in China.

There were characters that I straight up disliked, like Will Downing and Auggie Salazar. I also didn’t think that the whole Sophon technology, and unfolding protons, hasn’t been properly explained.

I think the most interesting parts of The Remembrance of Earth’s Past is in the following novels, including how the universe is a Dark Forest. Also the aftermath of the San Ti/human conflict.

This adaptation was was produced by David Benioff and DB Weiss, best known for Game of Thrones. Like many, I feel like that instead of confronting and exposing the complexity of the source material, they just created a flashy, stripped down version to market as the next Game of Thrones.

The world is rocketed by a series of alarming suicides in the scientific community, Clarence Shi, a private intelligence officer of some kind, veteran of MI5 and Scotland Yard, pushes his investigation into the cast of the show, Jin Sheng and her four Oxford friends. Auggie started seeing a countdown in her vision, a countdown that would never go away. This countdown has been seen by other scientists who have taken their lives.

In the midst of all this, a new kind of VR game is sent to many people. They are sent into a tailor-made VR to try to solve problems. The game is addictive and many scientists are stuck playing it, including some of the main cast.

Mysterious forces are working at some shadowy plot. Eventually, Auggie is told by enemy agents that if she stops working on her discoveries in nano materials, the countdown will stop. Which it does.

It’s eventually revealed that the shadowy forces are aliens, the San Ti, who launched a fleet to conquer and eradicate Earth. It will take them 400 years to arrive, but since their time will be spent in transit, if nothing is done, human technology will be so far more advanced than theirs. To stop this, the San Ti deployed Sophons, four quantum supercomputers, entangled two by two, which allow instant communication between the aliens’ agents, the ETO, and the fleet. This also runs the VR game. They also inserted blocks into particle accelerators and other scientific experimentations, making their results meaningless, effectively blocking it.

There are some really incredible action scenes in the show, including when Salazar’s nano material is used to attack the ETO’s floating HQ. Netflix’s adaptation is merely an introduction to Liu’s work, trying to distill a masterpiece into eight hours of television. The groundwork that they lay will eventually become part of a bigger, deeply complicated story. However, this will only take off if there are more seasons of the 3 Body Problem, which I think is highly unlikely.

First up: we’ve seen the feedback on releasing an additional weapon each week after the first six drop on April 9, and we’re condensing the schedule to release everything by April 30th, rather than May 21st.

Destiny’s team tw

It was pointlessly annoying to have it spread out so much. Already, 3 of the 6 that were supposed to release at launch were average. This also means that the superblack shader will be available sooner since all Brave weapons must be acquired in order to unlock it.

Initially, as announced in their dev blog post, the weapons available are

And that’s all of them! Half of these will be available starting April 9, including The Recluse, Hung Jury SR4, Succession, Edge Transit, Elsie’s Rifle and Falling Guillotine. The remainder will unlock one at a time each week through the week of May 21. The BRAVE Arsenal weapons will continue to drop from Onslaught after The Final Shape, but the limited-edition variants won’t be available after June 3, so go get them while you can! 

Dev insight blog

I wouldn’t be surprised if the most sought after weapons release in the final weeks. Of those available, three haven’t been sunset and are still available in the live game. It kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It’s cool to limit the loot pools, but weekly releases are such a lazy way to keep people playing until the release of TFS.

Recluse, mountain top, midnight coup, blast furnace and hammerhead are among the more iconic weapons making a return with modified and reworked perks.

These weapons won’t be craftable, but you’ll be able to enhance their perks, I think like the current adept raid weapons, meaning that all you’ll be looking for is the 2 main perks from columns 3 and 4. The rest of the guns can be customized, which is cool.

Luna’s Howl makes a comeback, but as a 140. The perk has been reworked. I’m not sure how it’ll compare in pvp. Chris Proctor compared it to Hawkmoon. It looks pretty strong.

Two weapons, succession from Deep Stone Crypt, and forbearance from Vow, will also be available without owning the expansions the raids came from. This is unusual because they are still obtainable, and I think the craftable versions will still still be stronger.

Falling Guillotine will be available with, wait for it, eager edge, bait and switch, chain reaction, relentless strikes, immediately outclassing the adept slammer because FG’s perks can be enhanced. Though I remember that Slammer can also be enhanced.

They showcased the new social space, which is just filled with chests that you can open with currencies from Onslaught. There are also new vendors, Shaxx and Arcite. The weapons can drop with a special ornament, that is tied to this specific weapon. It looks pretty good. Curated rolls with ornaments can be obtained via quests. Once a weapon is unlocked, you can attune your drops to it, combatting rng. The limited versions with ornaments are, well, limited to the time between April 9th and the release of TFS, June 4th. Recluse’s master of arms has been reworked more than a few times. From what I’ve seen, it’s capped at 15%. If recluse can roll with onslaught, that’ll be fun.

There is one new armor set per class. It’s the one featured in the key art. There’s going to be a new shader called superblack, which will be a completely black shader, something I’ve been wanting since refurbished black armory never dropped for me.

I’m kind of annoyed that out of the 12 weapons, I already have 3. Of those, 2 are fully crafted and enhanced. Yet I can see why it’s been done. It helps new players since this is free. I’m not the target audience. There’s also going to be a package available, as the gift from the thunder lords, to level up to 1800. I don’t see why they have reissued Hung Jury for the 6th or 7th time. There’s a blog post dropping today with all of the weapons and the available perks.

Joe Ziegler’s appointment as game director for Marathon is concerning, mostly because he replaced Chris Barrett after the game was announced on May 23rd. According to the article, it has also shifted the direction of the game from fully customizable characters to more of a selectable cast of heroes, à la Valorant, where Ziegler was game director before joining Bungie in 2022.

Within the company, there is a growing expectation that senior company leadership will leave in droves in the summer of 2026 when the final payouts from Sony’s acquisition of the company take effect. With this in mind, there is a strong push to get Marathon out the door before then, and let whoever takes the reins after that (be it Sony or Bungie) worry about how it’s sustained.

Rebekah Valentine for IGN

This move has alienated many current fans and/or future customers of Marathon. This could be tied to macro transactions tied to character and gun skins, which can go up to $300 in Valorant. Marathon is supposed to be free to play.

The extraction shooter genre is quite niche, and for it to be successful, it would need to be exceptional. Even then, it probably wouldn’t be enough to bridge the gap between this and Bungie’s next release. Unless they decide to abandon the extraction shooter and move to a hero shooter genre, either battle royale, or team based combat.

It’s fruitless to hypothesise where this is going, but it’s plain to see that a Sony takeover is imminent and that Bungie will struggle after TFS is released, with no clear roadmap on what will be done in Destiny 2, as for expansions. We could possibly be heading into a 2-3 year gap between TFS and the next expansion, if there is one.

The Summoner is a 600 rpm solar auto rifle which was first released in Destiny 2 Season of the Hunt S12. This was before the subclass verbs interaction. I still have a MKC roll in my vault, because there aren’t that many solar ARs. There’s Abyss Defiant, a 360 rpm from Crota’s End, and a couple of world drops. There’s also a 450 rpm Prosecutor, which can now drop from Prophecy. 450 rpms continue being very good in this sandbox. Unlike Ammit and Firefright, it’s not craftable, but it’s easily obtainable from the first encounter of Prophecy. I have’t gotten it, but it’s everywhere right now. I’ll grind a zen moment roll (target lock) in the couple of weeks, but I have enhanced crafted Firefright, which is usually my kinetic go to.

The summoner can roll with onslaught, which is probably my favorite new perk they reissued. I have a sub onslaught on Ros Arago IV, a 600 rpm void AR. Zen moment and onslaught feel really good, but the summoner can roll with heal clip and incandescent, which is awesome. Heal clip got a buff in the last patch, and it’ll proc Curex2, which is a 120 hp heal in PVP. The closest I got to this is heal clip/golden tricorn.

I haven’t tried the zen moment/onslaught roll in PVP yet, but it’s fun. I usually run condi/igni, but I was finishing up a trials reset on warlock and was using DMT and matador.

Solo Queue trials on Cauldron was wild. My last game, the opposing team popped their well to early on the capture point. I got my well, popped it as well, and me and my two titan friends went on to punch the other team to death. It was awesome. There’s a lot of crazy shit going on in trials, I kind of enjoyed the energy.

Bungie has been working on Destiny for almost a decade. During this time, while the game had its faults, up until 2022, it was quite successful. The seasonal model had its ups and downs, but overall, sentiment was good. Sure, the sandbox could be improved, and actually recently was, but Witch Queen was still a great expansion, with some of the best storytelling so far.

Then came Lightfall. Lightfall, the cringiest filler expansion. Lightfall, the expansion which was just a Strand tutorial. Lightfall, where the first cutscene and the final cutscene could be edited together, and you felt like it was just 1 cutscene, which it probably was.

Lightfall came into being as a filler expansion, because of a variety of reasons. It could have been because The Final Shape wasn’t ready. They wanted to generate more money. They needed more time.

Lightfall sold well, but was poorly received. Since then, it’s been a getting worse and worse. Right now, we’re in the longest season of D2 because TFS wasn’t ready and they needed to push the release back even further. The expansion had already been pushed back. In fact, the releases will have been pushed back so much since Beyond Light, that they’ll have added a whole year once another releases in a coming fall.

And while we’re talking about releases, Bungie has heavily implied that there won’t be any new expansions. Or it’s by their lack of foresight. In the past, we’ve had expansions announced years in advance. We’re, technically speaking, a year away from another expansion. We haven’t heard anything about it. All we hear is about the episodic content coming after TFS. No word on expansion. That doesn’t sound good.

In the last six month season we had, Bungie released the 30th expansion pack, which came with a dungeon, updated loot and sandbox, as well as new activities. We’ve had nothing, expect the announcement of the horde mode Onslaught announced today, 3 weeks before launch, which makes me think that this was a last minute addition in order to keep some kind of a momentum going into D2 final expansion.

There’s no point in not talking about expansions. If there would be any expansions, they would only build up hype. That tells me many things. First, they’ve got no real idea where they want the story to go. It’s a bit like the MCU. Plots are being rewritten over and over, because they don’t know where it’s going and how to monetize it the way they want. It speaks volume about leadership at Bungie. Leadership that’s bloated so much and blamed for so little. Leadership, who isn’t to blame, while devs get fired. I’m sure that leadership is well paid, and 10 devs could be paid with the salary of one of these leaders.

The feeling I get is that there is no way to stop a Sony takeover, and that could be good because they’re probably going to get rid of a lot of the leadership to make the company better. Even if TFS is a success, most of the player base won’t stick around. Bungie has made the new player experience quite bad, and just getting the right expansions is complicated and unexplained, turning off many new players. It should be simple and streamlined. Buy this and you can play everything, instead of partitioning content off. Recently, i got all of the past Bungie content for $40, except the new upcoming expansion TFS. This should be like this always on all platforms.

There have been some emails and intel made public this week. They seem to indicate that Sony is unhappy with Bungie. Sony has invested billions, and they need to recoup their losses. So far, it’s not been going good, with revenue 45% below expectations. About 100 people were fired last year. This seems to say that there will be more. A lot of the executives are making plans to jump ship by 2026 once the Sony purchase is fully vested, though I’m unsure if Bungie will remain independent that long. Well, they aren’t independent at all, because they’re a Sony studio.

The fact that nothing has been said about expansions makes me believe that there won’t be one in 2025. There might be one in 2026, if there is any. It’s not long enough for Destiny 3 to be made.

Bungie is already shifting things around, to prepare for more intervention from Sony. As per the emails, Bungie seems to try to delay Sony, but that’s not going to happen much longer. They won’t have months to delay. Once most of the player base leaves, I assume around the fall or late summer, it’s going to go down.

It was just announced that Joe Ziegler, who joined Bungie in 2022 from Valorant, has been the Marathon game director for 9 months (something about the TL of this makes no sense. If he has been the game director for 9 months, then C. Barrett would have only had a couple of weeks as lead. There’s more going on here). He replaces Christopher Barrett, and from what was said, the direction of the game is shifting away from customizable players to a roster of heroes. I’m not surprised. This game needs to be shipped ASAP. Bungie has been burning money on undelivered projects, like Matter etc. In its current state, I don’t think they can support more than one game, which is another reason why I think that there won’t be any new expansions any time soon.

They added another heavy GL waveframe, the hullabaloo, which can roll voltshot and chain reaction. The format is very similar to last year, except for the way to obtain the hoverboard, which is needlessly complicated.

There are 3 ways. The first is to obtain 1200 medals. The second is to get into the top 10% of the competitive NF playlist, which is fairly easy at reset. The third is to open three winning focus packages.

I did 2 GG NF and completed my objectives and got the exotic hoverboard. If you only have the white one, then it won’t persist after GG. Naturally, there is a Ghjallahorn themed skimmer, and armor sets, for sale in EV.

I heard from plenty of people in my TL that they had issues getting the exotic skimmer from GG. It’s a combination of the score keeps going up, I’ve seen close to 800K this week, to the pledging your class mechanic. Basically, the class on which you compete in a GG focus event, is the class you’ve pledged on. For the first 7 days or so, Hunters won. Bungie “readjusted” the scalar to compensate for the current population, which is mostly hunters apparently. It’s also due to the fact that people switched to the winning class.

I don’t like the Title SMG, but it can roll destabilizing rounds and repulsor brace. I haven’t kept any rolls of it, even this one. It just feels bad. I kept one roll of Taraxippos with moving target and cascade point because Lego says he loves it. It’s a strand scout. IDK.

EV is filled with new armor sets, I got the hunter set with bright dust, but that’s pretty much it. The class MM, which kind of made the Supremacy mode kind of fun, was quickly disabled due to, my guess, player population and the MM having trouble finding so many players to put together in lobbies.

Speaking of player population, it’s quite low after this weekend of trials. I heard that people are loading into the playlists with incomplete lobbies. Content creators are eating well thanks to the Diamond medallions available for watching 2 hours of Twitch, where drops are enabled.

Villeneuve has an immense talent for creating striking images, but I personally find him most compelling in the moments when, somewhere amidst the monumental tastefulness of his visual sensibility, a small bit of Quebecois asserts itself. These deadly sex-harlequins at the Fucked Up S&M Triangle Stadium–only a French Canadian could have imagined them, and their presence is a reminder that the Dune movies are only a few degrees removed from a massive Cirque du Soleil production.

Dune Part 2 Annotated via Max Read’s substack

The plot is very interesting, because it’s pretty farfetched. Only Duncan Idaho remains, the eternal man. The rest of the cast is new, seeded out from God Emperor of Dune. I never agreed with Brian Herbert’s rendition of these two characters, making them into Omnius and Erasmus, two AIs from his Butlerian Jihad novels, that happened thousands of years before. While those started well, they quickly became ludicrous and boring. The fact was that Frank Herbert specifically mentions that Daniel and Marty are the Ones with many faces, Face Dancers who became independent and then continued absorbing personas to become something more. Biological AIs of a kind.

One of the plots involved some advanced Tleilaxu intelligences posing as Marty and Daniel, who were trying to capture Duncan Idaho, the no-ship and the escapees from the Old Imperium. This is an assumption, but there are some passages that clearly indicate that they are Tleilaxu in origin.

During their escape, Idaho starts seeing projections in his mind. It’s supposed to be some kind of Holtzman effect linked to tachyons. Two intelligences, tending a garden, were trying to capture the no-ship. They had deployed some kind of tachyon net, but Idaho’s quick actions helped them avoid capture.

The woman, Marty, accuses Daniel of letting them get away on purpose.

“He surprised me. I knew he saw us but I didn’t suspect that he saw the net.” “And I had such a nice planet picked out for them. One of the best. A real test of their abilities.”

Daniel and Marty are discussing the escapees in the no-ship. Duncan Idaho was able to escape, deleting all records and information from their navigation computers to ensure that no one would ever be able to follow them and that they would never be able to make their way back.

“They had a Tleilaxu master, too. I saw him when they went under the net. I would have so liked to study another master.” “Don’t see why. Always whistling at us, making it necessary to stomp them down. I don’t like treating Masters that way, and you know it! If it weren’t for them…” “They’re not gods, Daniel.”

Tleilaxu Masters are completely in control of all of the different parts of the Tleilaxu civilization. They mutated their women into birthing tanks to manipulate genetic material, Axolotl tanks. That’s why Tleilaxu women are never seen. During God Emperor of Dune, or slightly before, the Tleilaxu mastered the art of cloning, and awakening the clones to their previous memory. This has allowed the Masters to live thousands of years, changing bodies every couple of hundred. The God Emperor naturally was aware of this, and used it himself because he went through a long series of gholas of Duncan Idaho. Tleilaxu Masters control Face Dancers using a whistling language. So obviously the Masters that came across Daniel and Marty recognized them as Face Dancers and tried to control them.

“Neither are we. I still think you let them escape. You’re so anxious to prune your roses.” “What would you have said to the Master anyway?” “I was going to joke when he asked who we were. They always ask that. I was going to say: ” What did you expect? God Himself with a flowing beard? That would’ve been funny. They have such a hard time accepting that Face Dancers can be independent of them.”

At some point in the Scattering, Tleilaxu Face Dancers, with sympatico, the ability to absorb personas and emotions of their victims, became akin to Reverend Mothers with multitudes in them. I suppose they became a sort of hive intelligence after breaking free, allowing them to use the knowledge to develop technology that none of the other factions possess.

Daniel chuckled. “That would’ve been funny. They have such a hard time accepting that Face Dancers can be independent of them.” “I don’t see why. It’s a natural consequence. They gave us the power to absorb the memories and experiences of other people. Gather enough of those and . . .” “It’s personas we take, Marty.”  

Chapterhouse: Dune, page 369

The Ones of Many Faces, also called the Enemies of Many Faces, were malevolent forces which created the incredibly powerful Weapon, as well as the Futars. They directed a war against the Honored Matres, causing them to flee back into the Old Imperium. Since the War of the Sisterhoods caused violent upheaval and chaos to those who lived in the Old Empire, it was not known by them, or remembered by the Matres, who or what it was the Matres were fleeing from. During his time imprisoned on Chapterhouse, Duncan Idaho saw two beings who named themselves Daniel and Marty, who he knew had found a new way to apply Holtzman’s ancient theories. He strongly suspected these to be the Ones of Many Faces.

Dune wiki

Overall, it’s a great movie, especially when you combine parts 1 and 2. Part 2 is definitely stronger in my opinion. We get to see the more exciting parts of the novel. There are some incredibly strong performances in this movie. Austin Butler, Javier Bardem, Rebecca Ferguson, Stellan Skarsgard, who manages to be in every good movie/TV show, Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa, Léa Seydoux. The visuals are inspiring. The vehicles, the planets. In this movie, Gieidi Prime and Dune are the mainly featured. Gieidi Prime has something they call a black sun. This washes out the scenes into black and white, which was a great touch. Maybe it’s due to the IR radiation from their sun, but it’s really a nice touch. It introduces Feyd Rautha, the na-Baron, who the Bene Gesserit want to take over the Imperium by taking the hand of Princess Irulan, also a Bene Gesserit sister.

The visuals are just incredible. From Arrakis to Gieidi Prime, to the scenes where we first see Paul riding the worm. Large, oceans of people when Paul shouts long live the fighters. The technology used, from lasers to vehicles, slotting into the society.

The sound design the whole movie is amazing. It projects a kind of gravitas to all of the ships and vehicles. When the voice is used, it’s iconic and immediate. The music was good, but I did miss the Brian Eno Prophecy theme, which was amazing in the 1984 David Lynch version.

I feel like the Harkonnens aren’t brutal enough. Their grotesquerie wasn’t really shown as much as I wanted. You got the clear idea how evil they were from the 1984 movie. All of the Atreides suffered under them. From Gurney to Duncan, even the traitorous Yuweh.

Villeneuve made a conscious decision to compress the timeline. In the book, Paul spend two years with the Fremen, Alia was born immediately when Jessica took the Water of Life. She was a creepy abomination, which could have made a really interesting part of this movie. Instead, Villeneuve had Ferguson talk with the unborn child, talk in her voice, which was a good touch. I appreciated it.

He also decided not to include the Bene Tleilax or the Spacing Guild at all, which shortened the story, maybe, into something that was easier to film. But we’re missing the stage three Guild Navigators, who fold space. We’re missing the mentats, which lead into Dune Messiah and the facedancers as well as the Masters.

Maybe Villeneuve chose to use these parts in Dune Messiah. Edric and Scytale are key parts of the plot against Paul in that book, there’s no way of not using them. Dune Messiah isn’t really a good Hollywood story. It ends badly for everyone involved, especially the main characters and pushes the Dune Saga into the future with Leto II’s Golden Path.

Maybe Chani is already pregnant in this movie. This could explain some key choices, like the blue headband she wears. It could also simply mean that she has a partner.

Princess Irulan makes an appearance. Florence Pugh does well. She narrates the beginning of the movie, just like Virginia Madsen does in the 1984 version. The chapters in the Dune books always have some introductions, small snippets right before they start. Many of them are from Irulan’s diaries.

Lady Margo Fenring plays a key role in securing the Harkonnen bloodline. She is the wife of Count Fenring, one of Emperor Shaddam IV closest friends.

Count Hasimir Fenring (10133 AG – 10225 AG) was a renowned assassin and Mentat political tactician who was one of the deadliest fighters in the Corrino Imperium. Fenring was also genetic eunuch and a failed Kwisatz Haderach. A distaff cousin of House Corrino, all accounts agreed that Fenring was the closest friend Emperor Shaddam IV possessed. The Imperial chores carried out by Count Fenring included that of Imperial Agent on Arrakis during the Harkonnen regime there and later Siridar-Absentia of Caladan. He joined Shaddam IV in retirement on Salusa Secundus.

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Hasimir_Fenring

I assume that Count Fenring will make an appearance in Dune Messiah. He is a very interesting character. Léa Seydoux plays Lady Margo very well. Sadly her and Irulan only have a couple of scenes.

The same goes for Piter de Vries, the twisted Harkonnen mentat, as well as Thufir Hawat, who both only appeared in Part 1. Maybe Villeneuve thought that the Tleilaxu would take away from the main story. That could be why they and the Spacing Guild weren’t in this movie. It’s sad though, because he could have sown the seeds for Dune Messiah by using the Spacing Guild. The Stage 3 Guild Navigators are very interesting. I feel like the movie would have benefited from showing what happens with spice mutation.

I found both Zendaya’s and Timothée Chalamet’s performances good. That’s about it. Chalamet’s was stronger than Zendaya. Overall, Zendaya made for a forgettable performance, sadly. I’m not sure why this is. It could be her American accent, the fact that they didn’t really have that many scenes together, except when she teachers Paul the ways of the desert. I actually enjoyed some of her compatriots more than her, like that woman who keeps mocking Paul and ends up dead at the hands of the Harkonnens. I loved Sean Young in Dune 1984. It’s also odd that they decided to swap Liet Kynes gender and not make her Chani’s mother? It’s never mentioned in this movie, so Paul and Chani don’t get to mourn their fathers’ losses together.

Chalamet is OK. I don’t think his performance is very strong. It’s fine. When he does his speech in front of the Naibs of the sietches, he just sounded like a little boy shouting. I wasn’t a fan. In other scenes, he’s good. I don’t think that shouting makes for strong acting. When he stomps his feet, like an impetuous child in front for the Emperor of the Known Universe, that’s pretty stupid. This scene could have been easily improved. Paul should have just used the voice. It would have been compelling, a showcase of strength. He just used it on Reverend Mother Gaius Mohiam.

Dave Bautista was happy to tell everyone that Denis Villeneuve believes that he is a great actor. I’m sorry, but Bautista plays the same role in every movie I’ve seen with him. He shouts a lot. It’s not good acting. The fact that he wasn’t killed like in the books was sad too. It would have been grotesque to show his head to the Baron and na-Baron as punishment for his failure.

One other argument I’ve noticed is the sense of scale. While there might be 1-2 million Fremen on Arrakis, this could in no way be enough to lead a jihad across the Known Universe, home to trillions of people. It all depends on the amount of great houses that stand against Paul.

Ixian technology should definitely appear in Dune Messiah. Or at least start to. The machines of Ix will pave the way for space navigation without using Guild Navigators.

While this movie has its faults, just like Part 1, combining both makes for an amazing watch. I rewatched Part 1 earlier this week. My wife finished watching it right before we went to see Part 2. It’s a must see movie.

This is what we’re in for with Dune Messiah. I feel like Villeneuve will combine parts of Children of Dune with Dune Messiah. Children of Dune is one of my favorite books.

After ruling his new Atreides Empire for twelve years, during which the galaxy was at war in a jihad which the Fedaykin spread across the universe, Paul was blinded by a stone burner in a final conspiracy against the Atreides throne, but managed to see through his prescient abilites. This presceience-sight ended after the birth of his twin children Leto II and Ghanima, coinciding with Chani’s death, and he walked into the desert according to Fremen Law, his sister Alia becoming Regent of the empire. In the ensuing times he became known as the Preacher, an identity he held for nine years before he was murdered while preaching his ‘heresy’, shortly after accepting the Golden Path planned by his son Leto II, who inherited the Imperium as God Emperor not long after his death and the suicide of his possessed sister Alia.

https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Paul_Atreides

There is an introduction done by Princess Irulan, which was like an hommage to the 1984 movie. Irulan narrates the introduction. The action picks up almost immediately after the end of the last movie. They make their way to Sietch Tabr. Over time, they become part of the Fremem. Jessica becomes their Reverend Mother. Alia was never born, at least in this movie. However, she talks to her mother and brother from the womb. The divide between Jessica and Paul grows. Paul becomes Muad’hib. Under his command, the Fremem disrupt spice production on Arrakis.

Rabban can’t control the situation. The Baron grows furious because they are not producing enough spice. The spice is life. The spice extends life. It expands consciousness. It allows the Guild Navigators to fold space. He who can destroy a thing, controls it. Eventually, the Baron sends his heir, Feyd Rautha, the na-baron, to Arrakis, but not before he gets examined by Lady Margo Fenring, a Bene Gesserit sister. He gets tested, and she leaves inseminated to preserve the bloodline. Feyd pushes the situation even more, making Paul finally go south. He knows that if he goes south, he will have to take the Water of Life, a poisonous substance that comes from drowning wormlings. Reverend Mothers use it to awaken their buried memories of their ancestors.

Once he uses the Water of Life, contrary to the book, he isn’t in a coma for months. Instead, Chani wakes him up using her tears and the water of life. Once awakened, they formulate a plan to bring the Emperor to Arrakis. Spice production is at a standstill. Paul sends a challenge to the Emperor, who comes with all of his legions.

The battle happens as it does in the previous movie and the books. They use the family atomics to breach the shield wall at Arrakeen. Worms break through and ravage the emperor’s legions. There is a duel between Feyd and Paul. Paul wins and takes Princess Irulan as his wife. He becomes the new Emperor. The Sardaukar get killed. The Emperor is a prisoner. The Jihad starts to bring the other houses of the Landsraad into the fold.

There are some differences between the books and the new movie. Alia hasn’t been born yet. This movie has no mentats or no real mention of the Spacing Guild, which is kind of sad. The 1984 movie had them both. We left Thufir Hawat in the 1st movie, and it doesn’t look like he was captured by the Harkonnens. But this could explain the Baron’s lack of tactics in his decisions.

I want to know how they found Sietch Tabr and the other sietches. The Fremem bribe the Spacing Guild to ensure that there are no satellites over Dune. Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet don’t really have much chemistry. Their story isn’t elaborated enough. The movie feels like it has been sanitized to make it palpable for the mass audiences. The grotesquerie of the Harkonnens is never really shown. However, the scenes on Gieidi Prime look amazing. The black sun makes all of the scenes black and white. Christopher Walken didn’t do much to be honest. It was most forgettable, and they should have chosen someone else. Or Walken should have actually performed. He looked like he was MIA most of the time.

This is a fabulous movie that everyone should go see. Denis Villeneuve is already working on the script of Dune Messiah. The visuals are incredible. There are many scenes that made me appreciate the cinematography, the set design, and more. I have to say that the movie was missing some impactful music like the Prophecy theme by Brian Eno.

The way that the Fremem are portrayed is also really good. The rich culture is vibrant, the first hour is spent among them, almost exclusively.

I was reminded of Sigourney Weaver and Alien when I started watching this yesterday. I have trouble finishing bad shows, so I wasn’t sure how it would go. It went great and I finished all 4 episodes last night.

If you haven’t seen any promos, Noomi Rapace plays an astronaut who experienced some strange phenomenons on the ISS, linked to some quantum entanglement experiment run by JPL. I won’t call it by its stupid movie name. This happens while she is alone on the station, trying to repair an escape pod, just before she was able to get safely back to Earth. She has trouble slipping back into her life. She isn’t exactly the same person that went up a year ago. Her marriage, which was over, has new life because she doesn’t remember that she was having an affair with her supervisor. She has strange gaps in her memory or misremembers certain aspects, making her feel alien. Her daughter has become quite odd.

The experiment, which she brought back with her, has some kind of pull on people. It feels like it’s some alien consciousness, but I can’t be sure. It’s definitely trying to manipulate her in different ways. Then there are the different conspiracies around her. People are acting strange, she’s being prescribed anti-psychotics, etc.

I’m not sure where it’ll go, but shows on Apple TV are usually really good, and I have enjoyed watching it. I recommend it.

When I watched the two premiere episodes Anjin and Servant of Two Masters, I was mesmerized. This show evoked so many emotions and developed the character of each of the important ones so well. While initially, I thought that John Blackthorne didn’t really fit the role, he quickly proved me wrong. The brutality, the beauty, the mystery of Japan in the 1600s. It was quite a sight to behold.

I kept thinking of how I felt when I watched Westworld. This show evokes the same kind of feelings. It’s probably one of the best shows that’s been made. It already sits up there with some of the greats, like the aforementioned Westworld. I wonder if they will adapt the rest of the Asian Saga by James Clavell.

The novels are 1000 pagers, as thick as a bible, that I utterly enjoyed as a teen. The story follows John Blackthorne, an English pilot on a fleet of ships, trying to get to Japan, which is under Portuguese control. He arrives as a prisoner in a land ruled by five regents vying to become shogun. This includes Lord Toranaga, favorite of the deceased Taiko.

Japan is a land on the verge of civil war, as the regents try to best each other to become the next Taiko. Some of the regents are Catholics, while others like Ishido and Toranaga are still loyal to their own beliefs.

Toranaga is being held hostage at Castle Osaka. He is in diplomatic bind. He sees the barbarian as a way to split his enemies, who were united against him beforehand. Blackthorne arrived with muskets, cannons, and riches that were all taken by Toranaga and his vassals. Toranaga interviews Blackthorne twice. Once with a Jesuit father serving as a translator and Lady Mariko ensuring accurate translations. The second time privately, with the heir. Blackthorne reveals how the Portuguese consider Japan theirs, which visibly offends and surprises Toranaga, because the priests have been singing other songs.

It’s a fabulous show. The other eight episodes will be released weekly.

His appeal was rejected. According to what Cruz said and the response from Bungie Security, it seems like they detected some cheat engine running. This lead to his permaban. Cruz reported that he was running something called ArtMoney to help with the economy of some rts game that is decades old. It’s called Total War Shogun. It sounds like the cheat engine had to do something with the in game currency. The program itself ArtMoney can scan the memory for any relevant strings and rewrite them.

According to D2 Clarity on TW and others, this could be used to cheat in D2. It’s not made for it. There are other, much more sophisticated cheats, that are available for Destiny 2.

There have been other high profile bans, most recently bakengansta and the false ban of Dre from D2 Gunsmith. This left such a sour taste in Dre’s mouth that he discontinued working on D2 Gunsmith, which was a valuable resource at that time. D2 Foundry has since taken over.

There’s probably more to this story. There’s no telling what Cruz was running on his computer. However, it doesn’t make much sense for him to be running this kind of cheat engine. All we have is what Cruz has divulged on TW. Until Bungie decides to respond, we won’t know for sure.

It’s sad for sure, because he’s put 10 years into his account. This means he won’t be able to take part in the World’s First race for TFS.

The reality is probably a bunch of different factors. From being acquired by Sony, to not having fully realized where the end of the light and dark saga is heading, to mass layoffs, 2023 was an eventful year for Bungie. Lightfall was bad. There’s no way around this. It was barely a Strand tutorial. The campaign felt like an afterthought, made by devs so out of touch with the actual aesthetic of Destiny, that it looked like Night City from Cyberpunk. Neomuna is empty, the difficulty is scaled up. I actually haven’t returned to that location since I finished all the post-campaign missions, and crafted all of the weapons.

It’s a failure on so many levels. Unlikable characters, nonsensical storylines, MacGuffins galore. So they have a lot to make up for in TFS. To make matters even worse (or better), Joe Blackburn, game director, is leaving. He was pretty well liked in the community. The game now lacks a face. DMG left earlier and Dirtyeffinhippy was fired. Times are tough.

Currently, Bungie has 1450 employees or so. According to statements, around 700 are working on Marathon. The rest are split between the different projects that Bungie is working on. With the live service bubble exploding quite spectacularly with Suicide Squad, any new live service will face an uphill battle. Sony bought Bungie to serve as experts in the live service game industry. So far, expect canceling some projects in TLOF. there hasn’t been much of an impact.

Bungie could have been verging on bankruptcy according to some reports, and the buyout saved them. These haven’t been confirmed, though they do tell a story. Bungie isn’t a publicly traded company, so their financials are opaque. The Sony collabs in Eververse are the most expensive items in there. There might be a reason for this. It was a 33% increase over the usual armor ornaments. Generally, I would get any that I liked. Since the layoffs, I haven’t been supporting Bungie this way. I speak with my wallet. I hope others are doing the same.

I am very dubious that Bungie can support two live service games of the same magnitude. This is because Marathon is coming out in 2025, unless they’ve already delayed it to 2026. Bungie has only spoken of Episodes after TFS. There has been no mention of expansions. To me it’s obvious that there won’t be any expansions in 2025. Just more disjointed episodes. Take S23 as an example. Most of my friends have stopped playing and have moved onto to other games. Many content creators are diversifying and moving into different games, no longer focusing on D2. There won’t be many people left playing the game in 2026, let’s get real. There needs to be some kind of announcement or strategy this year. Even so, I’d bet that many people will stop playing after TFS. It’s the end of the light and dark saga. Bungie has made no plans public about how things will evolve post TFS. All we’ve got is a bunch of disjointed storylines that have never been completed. They’re just left as cliffhangers, to add to the rest of them.

If Marathon releases on schedule, of which I’m also dubious, since Bungie has delayed their last three yearly releases, making them on an 18 month cycle, instead of a 12 month cycle, the next D2 expansion will release in 2026. There’s not enough time to make a D3. This would take years. Three to five years. Unless they’ve been working on this since the launch of Witch Queen, and that’s why they needed more time.

Lightfall was a filler expansion, done badly. The fact that the beginning cutscene and the final cutscene can be spliced together, without missing a beat, is quite telling. Most likely, Root of Nightmares started out as a dungeon and was made into a raid, by adding the planet encounter Macrocosm.

2023 was as disaster for Bungie. The player count has been steadily declining. People are moving towards other games. Seasons were never meant to be six or seven months long. The tech behind the game is showing signs of aging. Netcode, lag, all of the networking is telling. There’s a reason why so many of the enemy races teleport around. It’s to make up for bad netcode. After Beyond Light, Bungie announced all of the expansions leading up to The Final Shape. Now, they haven’t announced next year’s expansion, which is supposed to release, what, Fall 2025?

This season they added a couple more. The most notable is Ros Arago IV, a 600 rpm void AR that can roll onslaught and repulsor brace. I got onslaught and subsistence. Once this thing ramps up, it’s crazy. With onslaught x3, it goes up to or over 1000 rpm. It’s a lot of fun. With Gyrfalcon, go invis, pop out, and make everything volatile while getting an overshield.

The Heliocentric Qsc is so good. It can roll plenty of fun perks, including heal clip and incandescent. It tears up PVP as well. I got a couple of good rolls, but not the exact one that I want.

Crux Termination IV is an aggressive frame rocket launcher that can get some spicy rolls, like envious assassin and bipod.

This season, they made some of the loot farmable, at least the drops from last season. They’re on rotation in the LLS or MLS. Sadly, since this is a 7 month long season, it will be a long time before we will be able to farm the AR. I’ve also gotten permeability and onslaught. My RNG hasn’t been good.

After finishing up my seasonal weapons, including the Undying weapons, I stopped running the coil. This week, I started farming it again for mats. It’s the best, or one of the best, and least boring, alloy, prism and core farm. While technically, you could run thousands of LLS, I just can’t stand doing that. I’ve been burned out farming for exotics, so I won’t be doing that at all.

I get 2 alloys, 2 shards, 10 prisms, and 10-15 cores from dismantling all of the gear I get from each run. The runs take 30-40 mins, which is the only negative. I only join coil runs that will get plat. It’s easy to tell after a couple of minutes if it’ll be successful.

If you’re running low on spoils, doing the Vow entrance solo, and the first two chests of Vog on each character will net you 45 spoils per week. For that, you’ll need to LFG, but there are many groups running it at peak times, at least in my timezone.

I wish that they’d use the Coil as a template to add more complexity to the encounters. If they were more random, like each encounter would be randomized for each run, that would be really cool. It would be pretty easy to add more encounters. It would be even better if the difficulty could go even higher, but I’m not holding my breath. It could work, since I can see fireteams not clearing it at all. There’s a lot of potential there. It would be pretty sad if they would just let it die just like the rest of the seasonal activities.

The minigame involves getting rid of guns, even if they’re good rolls, on guns and armor that you don’t really need or use. For me, it’s mostly guns. I’m sitting at 135 slots of legendary armor, which needs to be pruned. I’m at the point where I’ve deleted all the exotic and ritual weapons that I no longer use. I used to craft every single weapon. No longer. I only craft and level then weapons that I want to use. This season was quite expensive in mats, considering that I no longer run GMs. Only raids, dungeons etc. When GMs became easy af, I lost interest.

It’s no longer a question of needing checkpoint items, like a solar pulse, etc. It’s more which weapons are being used. Which weapons can be deleted because even though they were good at the time, they’ve been outclassed by better guns.

I went from around 2500 cores down to 1400. I’m currently building them back up. I’m sitting at 1700. I used to have a full stack of 50 prisms sitting on each of my characters. I went down to none this season, because enhancing guns is expensive. It’s 4 prisms, 2 alloys etc to craft a double enhanced weapon. I burned through a lot of cores leveling up weapons. Just adding a masterwork to a crafted weapon costs 17 cores.

I like how this season, the mat farm is pretty straightforward. All I need is allows, prisms and cores. These are easily obtained from running the Coil. I tend to only stay in teams that can run plat runs. If I see ppl just messing around, not getting jars for points, I tend to leave. It’s typical though. At this point in time, MM is a bit ass. It puts me in Coil runs that are about to fail, etc.

I did a pass yesterday through my vault. I deleted at least 10-15 guns. It’s becoming harder, as the guns are better. But it’s always a work in progress. I deleted all my timelost fatebringers. I never used the gun, what’s the point in keeping any rolls? I might have used it a couple of years ago, but no longer. I deleted my Extraordinary Rendition. Too many good kinetic SMGs in that slot. Unending Tempest, Immortal, Showrunner, etc. For some reason, I had two rolls of Prolonged Engagement, the 900 rpm vanguard stasis SMG. There are also duplicate craftable guns, like Rapacious Appetite and Blood Feud, both stasis SMGs. I never liked the Plunder weapons. I only kept the sidearm and the scout, because they rolled with voltshot, and at the time, that was rare.

This season was the first time that I seriously used handcannons in PvE. They’ve become my favorite go to, and I crafted some rolls to synergise with all subclasses. It led me to do a lot of testing with the key words of the subclasses, like voltshot, incandescent, volatile, etc.

One thing to note is that if the season has certain perks, like this season where your strand guns gain unravelling rounds after picking up an orb of power (unravelling rounds, horde shuttle), those guns outperform any others. Since this season it’s strand, I was using Rufus a lot, when it wasn’t Quicksilver Storm, which simply has the best synergy with Strand subclasses. Recently, I switched over to Mykels, since it’s really fun to run with Indebted Kindness, the arc rocket sidearm, which is really good at high single target damage and ammo economy.

This whole change started when I saw that everyone was using Sunshot due to some of the artifact perks, and I started using it too. It became my go to primary in the energy slot. It’s also exotic, so heavy ammo drops are optimized. I ran into the issue that when I wanted to use an exotic heavy, like Dragon’s Breath, I had nothing that could compare. I was able to craft Zaouli’s Bane (KF HC), and it performed really well. The combination of explosive rounds and incandescent makes for good add clear and the creating of firesprites as well as orbs. Now, with the March 5th update, they will have fixed the resto timer issues, so we’ll be able to stack up to 15 sec, and picking up firesprites won’t reset the timer.

I used to think that voltshot was top tier, but it only overcharges the next shot after a a kill and after a reload, meaning that you lose time to reload to proc it. I crafted Oversoul Edict, the 540 pulse from CE, with enhanced voltshot/demo, it didn’t blow me away. I have tested both Posterity, the 180 from DSC and Nation of Beasts, the 140 from LW. They can both roll with double damage perks. Posterity gets rampage, and Nation gets dragonfly. I tested them for a couple of hours each, starting from the base gun only, since I went down from 2500 cores to 1400 this season, due to crafting.

I crafted a lot of double enhanced guns, but I recently changed how I felt and dealt with this. I no longer craft every gun and have it sit in my vault. I just craft the useful ones, level them up and enhance them. For example, most of the raid weapons of the recent years, as well as the reprised ones, like DSC, LW, RON, CE, all have really good rolls. If you haven’t gotten any, I suggest using your Deepsight harmonizers and targeting specific guns. Currently, I only have Abyss Defiant and Fang of Ir Yut left to craft for CE. I was running full CE raids, but since I generally use LFG only these days, because no one else is playing, I run Crota CPs to get my red frames.

I feel like Posterity is better in higher end content and Nation is better in mid tier content, due to the perks. If you’re running Arc, Centrifuse is still a top tier pick IMHO, due to its synergy.

For void classes, especially Omni or Gyrfalcon Hunter, I ran Collective Obligation. Depending on the encounter, I stopped because pulse rifles are underperforming. The number of guns that can roll repulsor brace, which generates an overshield after defeating a void debuffed target, and destabilizing rounds, final blows makes nearby targets volatile, are fare and few. Currently, the only craftable ones are the Age Old Bond and Word of Crota. It can roll on Positive Outlook, the 450 rpm AR from vanguard, Vouchsafe, a 200 rpm scout from the Dreaming City.

Sadly, AOB is a 360 rpm AR, long range and slow firing. The range is pretty good though, and I can see this performing well in higher tier content. I’m still getting a feel for it. WoC is great since it’s a HC, and it usually rolls with unstoppable or something like that on the seasonal artifact.

I think, excluding the release of a new dungeon, the most interesting part of this season is the reprised weapons of Last Wish. It’s also the weekly farmable raid. So almost everyone I know has been running a Kalli farm. There are many ways of doing it. The most efficient way that I found is to stick her with Anarchy and trap her in place. It takes about 45 seconds.

Kalli is the first encounter of LW, and it can drop everything in the loot pool, including all red borders, as well as all of the armor. There are 8 weapons to be crafted, each requires 5 patterns each. So far, after about 10h of farming, which is intense, I’m missing 5 patterns only, for Nation of Beasts, the hand cannon, and Transfiguration, the 150 rpm scout.

The most important weapon is definitely Apex Predator, the rocket launcher. It can roll reconstruction and bait and switch. Or explosive light. It has become the best rocket for DPS phases. It can be crafted with enhanced perks.

Techeun Force is an adaptive frame 660 arc fusion rifle, which is pretty cool. It rolls with many PvP perks. Chattering Bone is a 450 pm pulse. It’s also PvP focused, with rangefinder, headseeker, and a couple of other good perks. Age old bond can roll repulsion brace and destabilizing rounds. It’s a 360 rpm void auto. It also can roll target lock.

Supremacy is cool because with rewind rounds and triple tap, you can hit crits 64 times, or some ludicrous number like that.

The farm is a bit mind numbing, especially after 200+ runs of the same encounter. It’s rewarding in many ways, on top of the possible patterns. You get defiant and sonar umbrals. I’ve already capped out at 99. The sonar emblems can be decrypted for weapons, which can drop patterns.

Unlike the most recent seasons, S21, Season of the Deep launched in a rocky state. Maintenance was extended for hours. At first I thought it was just server congestion. I tried login for hours, then I went back to Zelda TotK. Eventually around 5 I got to play for a bit.

Needless to say the launch was rocky. The story was fine. The seasonal battleground is kind of average. It’s definitely not the best that they’ve done. The underwater sequences are short and you just have to walk slowly towards you go. It’s nothing like Season of the Lost. You just kill a bunch of ads that spawn over and over again.

Deep Dive is the 3 man activity. It’s similar, but you can secretly find Toland, and if all three players do so, they unlock a hard mode to open up a tier 3 chest. Both activities require their respective keys in order to maximize drops.

They debuted a lot of new systems, including exotic engram armor focusing, which is currently not delivering its promises on high stat armor, so I’d skip this and not waste any materials. Currently, the Vex Strike Force event on Neomuna isn’t dropping new seasonal exotics, of which there are 3.

The warlock helmet, the Cenotaph Mask, buffs trace rifles. It’s probably going to be a good pairing with Divinity. It reloads and marks targets, which when defeated by allies, generates special ammo for the user, and heavy ammo for allies.

The Titan chest piece allows you to power up your grenades with light and when thrown, they’ll pop a barricade at their location.

The hunter arms buff glaives. They increase reload speed and melee damage when surrounded. Glaive melee final blows overflow the mag, Glaive projectile final blows cause detonations if the glaive matches your subclass.

The Centrifuse is the seasonal exotic. It’s a 450 rpm auto rifle, which can get overcharged. You overcharge the shots by moving quickly. Final blows with high charge cause explosions, and with full overcharge blind targets. It’s good, but I feel that voltshot is better.

Another big change was that all of the Last Wish weapons have become craftable. Everyone has been running Kalli farms to finish off their patterns. It’s because it was also farmable this first week, which was pretty great.

The power cap didn’t go up, so no need to run pinnacles. A dungeon was released last Friday, which is awesome. However, it’s not part of the season pass. You’ll need to buy dungeon keys separately.

I chose to skip watching Ant-Man 3 in theaters because the reviews looked so bad. I was happy I didn’t go see that turd. I have since watched it, and it’s pretty bad. Holy crap. So here I am, waiting to see if Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 would be any good. To my surprise, it got some really good ratings. Many people have been saying it’s pretty good. Ok, so we ended up seeing it tonight. Holy shit. What a waste of time. It’s terrible. Well, it’s barely average. I think why people are enjoying it so much is because it’s just so much better than the last few movies, Wakanda, Ant-man, Thor 4, as well as the most recent TV shows.

I feel I should have skipped the rest of the MCU. What happened? James Gunn tries to make us care about some CGI animals with some cybernetics. WTF. IDGAF.

I’m not sure why the writing is so bad in the most recent movies. Did all the script doctors quit? Is it because they’re on strike? Is it because they just don’t know how to write good movies anymore? It’s plain and simple, the time for superhero movie is over. What’s left is at best something you will eventually stream.

Why is the CGI action so unwatchable? I think it’s due to the camera angles, and that you can barely see what’s going on. The fights look stupid. Angry Joe thought that the hallway fight was good. MF, the atrium fight in the Matrix was good. This was ultra garbo. The Matrix Reloaded Chateau fight was spectacular. This is shit.

With the s3 of the Mandalorian finished, the next thing on the Star Wars horizon is the first season of Ashoka in August. At some point, I stopped watching Clone Wars and Rebels. In Rebels, I found that the portrayal of Ezra Bridger was annoying. The kid was too shouty and arrogant. I rewatched all of Rebels because many of the characters will be seen in live action in Ahoska.

I had completely forgotten that Bo Katan made an appearance in Rebels. Katee Sackhoff was also doing her voice work. It was pretty satisfying to see the characters in animated format, knowing that they would appear in live action in August in Ahsoka.

Speaking of Ahsoka, what an amazing trailer! Thrawn is back, meaning that Ezra will be there too, since they left for the Next Beyond/Unknown Regions together. I can’t believe it’s been this long. This series has been 5 years in the making.

The trailer is crazy. We see the Dark Jedi Baylan Skoll and his apprentice Shin. It looks like she’s a former padawan, because of her braid. The music is so good. There is a sequence in which Baylan attacks a Republic ship of some kind. The scene is eerily similar to when Darth Vader attacked the Corellian Corvette on which Princess Leia was with the Death Star blueprints.

We also see Hera, Sabine Wren, there’s even a scene in live action that appeared in animation first at the epilogue of Rebels. It’s eerie. Sabine is using a green lightsaber, probably Ezra’s. at the end of Rebels, Sabine and Ahsoka leave to look for Ezra.

Ahsoka was already crazy good in Mandalorian. It’s going to be great. Well, at least, expectations are high. They were also high for the third season of the Mandalorian. Sadly, it wasn’t that good. Instead of focusing on Din Djarin and Grogu, we got roped into Bo Katan’s story. I’m not sure how I’m feeling about this. Actually I know. It’s pretty disappointing, especially when Picard s3 was so much better than this.

The Mandalorian season was also so short, at 8 episodes. There were a couple of good episodes, and it was great seeing Mandalorians fighting together as a unit. It’s like seeing Jedi fighting together. It’s great. There are so many inconsistencies and logical problems in the series, mostly due to bad script writing. It’s sad, because I really liked the previous seasons.

While I like seeing Jedi in animated format, I actually enjoyed the Bad Batch. It was pretty good, minus the clone who dressed up as Rambo. I could have done without that. The reason why I waited to watch it was because it was about clones, not Jedi. It seemed uninteresting. They wrapped up the Kamino clone storyline pretty effectively.

I wasn’t too impressed with the seasonal storyline so far in Lightfall. The activity is fine, but once you get all of your patterns, triumphs, and engrams, I don’t really see a reason to run this variation of battlegrounds.

I’ve kept a couple of things to do during the lull, but to be honest, since RoN launched, I’ve just been raiding, doing dungeons, and getting back into the proper endgame. I think I lost my drive when I left my previous clan. While it was full of people, it was difficult to schedule raids, which was one of the reasons I left. Two clans funneled better players into an elite clan, in which players just played in cliques. The feeder clans just had people coming in and leaving so quickly that I couldn’t even complete a clan night triumph for Vow or Kingsfall.

Now that the master requirements for RoN have been completed, I don’t know if I will run master RoN again. I’m not impressed with Briar’s Contempt, it performed quite poorly compared to Cataclysmic, I don’t really see a reason to acquire an adept, with the RNG aspect of it. I will just craft it and that will be it. Since I grinded out the Iron Banner shader, I didn’t play the week it came out again. It came back way too quickly and according to my sources, it was pretty painful.

I haven’t run DSC since the weapons got updated last season. The drop rates for red borders were nightmarish, so I wasn’t enthused to waste my time. However, I should have been running DSC at least once a week. It’s the farmable raid this week, and I wanted to finally make some progress on my patterns. Commemoration, Succession, Heritage, are all top tier weapons. I’ve done a fair amount of progress in just one session.

The whole guardian rank system is a complete waste of time. I’ve seen some memes and LFG horror stories on how this is impacting gameplay.

Shut up, PEA—SANT 6s, the 8s and 9s are talking!

It’s not a good system, and since it resets, at least partially, every season, it’s a complete waste.

After the success of the Witch Queen campaign of last year, the hype about Lighfall has been real. The players have been revealed, and the marketing spiel of Bungie was that this would be the expansion in which we would get answers to everything. What is the Witness? What does it want with the Traveller? How would the Witness put the universe into its Final Shape wielding the Darkness? Right now, these just sound like buzz words.

The initial reviews and thoughts about Lighfall’s campaign were pretty bad. IGN gave it 5/10. The campaign’s narrative is lackluster, bringing up a McGuffin that makes no sense and we never find out what it actually was. Throughout the 8 missions, we have Osiris shouting at us the whole time to push toward Strand, the new Darkness subclass. We never really get to use it fully. We engage in some encounters, and we are completely hampered by it. Even worse, encounters can’t progress unless you use it. There are times you get to use it for only a couple of minutes.

The new raid came out Friday, March 10. How does it compare to the rest of the raids that have been released? It’s called the Root of Nightmares, and even its release has been polarizing.

However, it’s not all bad. The quality of life upgrades have been significant, even though we didn’t get more vault space. Overall, the post-campaign content has been good. As usual, the seasonal content that released at the same time has also been really good. I’m going to break this review down in a couple of sections.

The Witch Queen’s campaign was stellar. We got to see the reason why she came to the light. The Throne World is a beautiful location, filled with secrets. It’s sparsely populated, which is kind of a bummer. Expectations were very high after this. Everyone I know was looking forward to Lightfall’s campaign and Strand.

Campaign 5/10

We did not get a stellar campaign. Narratively, the story was subpar, below average. It didn’t make much sense. Calus is pushing his ship, the Typhoon Imperator, towards Neomuna, a lost city on Neptune. We board a ship and sabotage it. We are confronted with a Tormentor, one of the best enemies in Destiny 2. The first fight I had with one was pretty scary. It kept pursuing me, relentlessly. I didn’t have enough time to land precision shots to break its crit spots. I got it down eventually. Instead of running it completely solo, I did a mix of both on legendary. The rewards for running the full campaign on legendary difficulty were 1770 LL gear, a choice of the new exotics, with good rolls, 65 stat rolls. While the stat distribution isn’t spiky, no matter what ghost mod you put on, it’s a lot better than the 49 rolls we got in Witch Queen and Beyond Light.

During the whole campaign, you get to try out Strand for a couple of minutes and fights, thanks to some communion nexuses. In fact, the whole campaign is about acquiring Strand, but you never get to use it fully. It’s only post-campaign, after Bungie unlocked all of the fragments before the raid release that you get the full effect of Strand. It’s quite potent. That’s not how it feels in the campaign. For context, I ran the campaign first on Hunter. I completed it on Warlock and Titan the following weekend.

Things get dicey in the campaign on Neomuna. Most of the fights take place in enclosed spaces, making it difficult to get alway from Tormentors. You are pushed by an annoying Osiris to hunt down the Veil. This has appeared in the lore before. It’s never properly explained. Initially we thought that the Veil were a new race. The name has been mentioned before. The people of Neomuna aren’t on Neptune. They’ve uploaded themselves into a computer, effectively transcending their humanity. They’re post humans, protected by Cloud Striders, of which there can be only two, like the Sith. Cloud Striders have cybernetically enhanced themselves, vastly shortening their lifespans, to about a decade. Rohan is the grizzly oldie, who hasn’t got long to live. Nimbus is the annoying youngling, making inappropriate jokes and puns. They protect the Cloudark, the distributed mainframe in which the Neomuni reside. The Cloudark is powered by the Veil?

The Witness wants to plop the Radial Mast, another McGuffin, on top of the Veil so that it dampens the light and the traveler’s influence. It’s not really explains why or how, but we find out during the final mission that the Witness’ goal was to pierce the Traveler. The Raid takes place in that area. During the missions, you come across some suppressing machinery. This is a kind of annoying mechanic, during which most of your abilities are suppressed. It’s a bit like fighting a Tormentor and getting suppressed.

Downfall is a beautiful mission. This is when you assault the inside of Calus’ ship. Once again, there’s some kind of McGuffin that they want to use called a Radial Mast. Apparently it can be used on the Veil to do something to the Traveler. The fight in the pit is really intense. I enjoyed it. Caital even makes an appearance. The ending sparrow escape was great. For some reason, in all of my fireteams, I’m the only one that makes it out alive.

No Time Left is the obligatory tank mission. It’s fun, but the boss room gets very hectic solo. All the ads are looking at you. When two Goliath tanks enter the fray, it’s even worse.

Headlong is a whole mission centered around using Strand. Since it’s not fully unlocked, it’s freaking annoying, especially the part where you do the time trial in the Vex network. I died so many times in the washing machine arena. Eventually, I got it down. The next few times I ran it, I found a cool cheese spot, behind one of the Vex gates. It’s easy to complete it then.

They made the Headlong time trial replayable. I saw Skaryton and Hyrna both get 50 second clears. That’s crazy. But it does make you master the mechanic. I know from Hyrna that he spent hours in Headlong perfecting his runs. He got it first.

In the last mission called Desperate Measures, you race to a final confrontation with Calus. There’s a cool part where you defend some AA guns. Two Tormentors appear. As well as tanks. Caital makes another appearance. Her cabal come fight as well. For the final part of this mission, you head down a bunker built by the Ishtar Collective to house the Veil. It looks like a purple swirly hole.

The boss fight isn’t so bad, but I never used Strand. It was a hindrance more than anything else. You have to be mobile to evade Calus’ Darkness gun. The boss fight’s design was average. It’s just a two phase thing. During the second phase, he runs at you like a gladiator. It’s kind of anticlimactic and disappointing.

Campaign Analysis

I’m not sure what exactly happened. It feels like parts of the Witch Queen, like Strand, were spun off into Lightfall as a filler expansion between WQ and The Final Shape. Maybe Bungie needed more time. Maybe they wanted more money. The what was supposed to be Lightfall was migrated into TFS. That could explain why the story was so disappointing and went nowhere. You can splice together the opening cut scene and the final cut scene and you’d not miss a beat. That’s the definition of filler.

Some people even think that the raid, Root of Nightmares, was a 3-encounter dungeon that was padded out with its best encounter, Macrocosm, maybe from a future raid, because it’s the only one that doesn’t follow the mechanics that were established in the early encounters.

Now that Bungie has messed up, narratively speaking, they’re going to have to work hard in the seasons leading up to The Final Shape in order to make up for this fumble. They’ve done it before, but it’ll be a hard battle.

Strand 9/10

Initially, when used in the campaign for a couple of minutes, Strand was pretty lackluster. I was actually getting annoyed at having to use it at all, because it felt like a hindrance in order to complete the campaign. Now that I’ve got builds for all classes, I can firmly say that Strand is really good. It came out of nowhere, because everyone was expecting a poison subclass. The movement is great. You feel fast and zippy. The only problem is the grapple cooldowns. It seems kind of pointless if you can’t zip around with Strand. The other abilities are pretty good. The warlock is centered around making threadings. The Hunter can move quickly, and the Titan can suspend everyone. There were a few bugs, but they have been resolved so far.

I started using Cyrtarachne’s Facade, which grants Woven Mail after a grapple, but I quickly started using the shackle grenade and Radiant Dance Machines, to suspend everyone on Hunter. On Warlock and Titan, I’m using the Strand exotics so far.

Neomuna 7/10

The city of Neomuna on Neptune was supposed to be cyberpunky Metropolis, built vertically, easily explored with Strand. What we got is a desolate space, which feels abandoned. That being said, there are plenty of enemies to be found all over the map. There’s the Terminal Overload activity to farm rolls of the uncraftable Neomunian weapons, Synchronic Roulette, the 600 rpm Strand SMG, Circular Logic, the 450 rpm Strand LMG, and Basso Ostinato, a void shotgun.

There’s the Vex Incursion Zone, which can spawn the Supernuminary Blitz, a public event during which you can get an exotic, which are now on the same kind of knockout list as legendary lost sectors. Some areas are beautiful. The lost sectors are fun. The activities feel rewarding, the golden patrols are a good addition to farm for Neomunian weapons, but the drop rates are abysmal.

Difficulty Scaling 6/10

With Lightfall came an overhaul of the general difficulty of the game. In most sections, you’ll be 5 under, which was started in last season’s battleground. The patrol zone of Neomuna is fairly ridiculously high level. The funniest part is when Threshers spawn and can 1 shot kill you. In Legend difficulty, you’re capped at 1815, and you’ll always be 15 levels under the activity. In Master (1840), it’s -20 and it’s the equivalent of contest mode. Grandmasters are usually -25 (1850), and your LL is capped at 1825. This is all fine and dandy, but this makes for some very frustrating missions. First of all, Legend Lost Sectors are 1830, with a power delta of 15. They’re ridiculously hard. The new legend version of the Vexcalibur quest feels like a GM when you run it with 3 people.

While I’m all for making the game more challenging, challenge isn’t always what I’m looking for when I’m grinding some public events, exotic missions, etc. I was fine with the difficulty of the legend version of the Revision Zero mission, but putting in an 1830 mission at the beginning of the season is a non starter. After 2 weeks, I’m 1815 on my highest character. On top of that, it’s like a raid or a campaign mission: you’ve got revive tokens. If you die more than a couple of times, you wipe. I’m not a fan of this mechanic. I’m fine with this being in raids. I don’t think it has a place in the campaign or exotic missions. Seriously, day 1 contest raids are easier than legendary lost sectors.

They definitely need to work on it, tune it so they it feels better. Right now, I’m not doing LLS or any Master level content. I’m under light and face an aggressive power delta.

Root of Nightmares Raid 7/10

The raid launched last Friday in contest mode. It’s been the most cleared raid ever, during contest, with 45000 teams beating it during that time. While I’m no day 1 raider, I no longer have good enough teams for that, I’ve tried some and it’s not my cup of tea. The World’s First race was won by Clan Hard in the Paint, headed up by Roen. The team is filled with speed runners, which made this a real race. Most of the top teams were speed runners. Salt, Datto, ATP, Redeem, they all placed a lot lower. The biggest issue was figuring out the Macrocosm encounter.

I ran the raid 3 times on reset the week it released, back to back. I enjoyed it. They were easy clears. The second jumping puzzle with the Darkness Refuge mechanic took me a while to get used to the timing, as the killing pulse will constantly spawn. It’s definitely not as complicated as Vow of the Disciple, but it’s not a bad raid. The design is beautiful. It takes place in a pyramid ship that’s been partially transformed by the Traveler’s powers. So you have the dark pyramid-like architecture juxtaposed with the vibrant, colorful roots of the Traveler.

The mechanics are quite easy to learn. Which means that this will be an easy raid to run with LFG, which is how many people get clears since there’s no in-game matchmaking for raids. I’ve run it 6 times with LFG groups. It’s fine.

The primary mechanic of this raid involves “growing a seed” by connecting multiple nodes by creating a chain. You start the chain by shooting the first seed of light field. You’ll need to shoot the next seed, which is indicated by s faint thread of light. Once you do this, you’ll need reacquire the buff from a previous link in the chain.

In Cataclysm, you run around, ferrying a buff to different locations. This encounter can be completed with two runners quite quickly. The rest of the team is on add clear. Once two psions are killed in their bubbles, tormentors will spawn. Once killed, it will add time to the wipe mechanic, listed as a debuff called Sweeping Terror.

In Scission, your team is divided into 2. Two runners ferry the buff accords a chasm. Launchers are provided to make it easier to traverse. They are obviously RNG based and can send you tumbling to your deaths.

I wasn’t a runner, but I enjoyed this encounter. If the runners can do well skating or shatter dive skating, it’s actually fun to watch and see. Before you know it, this encounter is done. It reminds me of the gauntlet in Vow. The launchers are terrible to use on Warlocks. I died so many times. The trick is to use a sword with eager edge, use Icarus dash, and make sure you get enough height. The jumping puzzle introduces the refuge mechanic, on which you create a refuge to protect yourself from a pulse. This will be used in the final encounter.

Macrocosm is the best encounter. You get to be in the room in which the Witness moved planets around. That’s really amazing. This encounter revolves around getting buffs and moving around planets in a certain amount of time. You get a bit of leeway but if you make too many mistakes, you will wipe. The damage phases are short, and we used rockets to get that burst DPS with a tether.

Nezarec is a beefed up tormentor. He is a bit like Rhulk, but less deadly because he can easily be manipulated, with melees, and other ways, to not kill you inside a well. The fight combines runners, who connect nodes, dark and light, on each side of the arena. There is a player who needs to capture the gaze of Nezarec, and read what color the refuge will be. If the runners are fast enough, refuges aren’t needed. Once the nodes have been connected, it’s time for a DPS phase. We use the same strat as in Macrocosm, rockets, tether, etc.

New Orbital is out, and it’s already looking like a better year. A

One more chance to say I’m sorry.

On December 20th, Bungie launched the next exotic weapon quest launched for all season pass holders. This is the first weapon that was completely designed by Mercules. Since it’s launch, it’s actually been the cause of many bugs and DC. So much so, that they had to switch off the API again.

The mission is like an introduction to the DSC mechanics of the scanner, operator and suppressor roles. I really enjoyed it. The fact that they reused a lot of DSC assets didn’t bother me at all. This even had an even better jumping puzzle, during which you could see Earth and the Traveller sitting on top of the last city.

It seemed to me that this wasn’t to scale; the Traveller is too big in this representation, compared to how it looks in the sky above the Last City. However, even this didn’t bother me that much. It was a great perspective.

The mission has you getting to the Seraph Station using similar pods that were used in the DSC mechanic of the Atraks encounter. They ferry you to orbit, it’s majestic There’s a microwave floor, like in Zero Hour, the aforementioned DSC jumping puzzle through space, which I really enjoyed.

Weirdly, it feels a bit like a dungeon, but it has no checkpoints, which royally sucks if you’re playing on legend. For some reason, the difficulty scaling with a fireteam on legend is just stupid. This becomes very apparent in the room where three Brigs spawn in.

The last 4 warmind nodes are in the mission and they reward red patterns for Ikelos weapons you need patterns for, which is cool. The yellow drones can be shot now, and they reward a special little insight that I won’t spoil. Just make sure that you get the security upgrade from the helm instead of the other two options. This will allow you to completely finish this mission.

The weapon is craftable. Now that it’s been more than a week, we know that each of the 4 catalysts can be obtained by running Seraph’s Shield on legend difficulty. The first one grants feeding frenzy. It was shortly after this that Bungie shut down the API. I’m still amazed that the whole studio shuts down until January 13th. That’s mental. They should have devs working elsewhere on the planet, like Asia, so it’s not an issue to support the game over Western holidays. Since I’m in Asia, it’s really annoying that the API is down. I can’t really switch my loadouts or switch guns. It’s annoying.

The actual weapon is pretty good. It’s a 450 rpm pulse, which have always been a bit meh, but they got buffed enough to be relevant. I heard the 2 burst setting can compete with DMT at some ranges. It also has a 4 burst. The telemetry data takes too much time to gather. I feel like it’s tuned for pvp, not pve. Once you’ve got enough data, you can convert it to a sniper for up to 4 shots. It’s pretty interesting.

The API is down for a week, which means no DIM or 3rd party apps to change loadouts. No LFG. It’s terrible.

A couple of days after Season of the Seraph S19 launched, Bungie released a new dungeon called Spire of the Watcher. How did it hold up to the hype? Just like many others, I wish Bungie would actually try to hype up their seasonal releases a bit more. It’s usually radio silence until the season has launched, which is pretty stupid in my book.

The dungeon was released to mixed reviews, and this was mostly due to some reused content. It’s not the best dungeon, but it’s a fun activity that has some great loot. It’s also new. In my opinion, Duality was a lot better. Duality felt crazy. I didn’t mind the reused bosses because they fit the seasonal narrative really well. While Gahlran was a Crown of Sorrow boss, and the Cabal bosses to open up the vault were a bit inconsequential, Destiny 2 dungeons have always had pretty memorable bosses. I’d say that the Fallen Captain in Grasp of Avarice was also a bit forgetful.

Now that I think more on the matter, a lot of the bosses have been reused assets in a lot of the dungeons. I think why it’s more evident and obvious now is that Bungie is reusing a lot of their vaulted content. People are still salty about losing what they paid for, myself included. This means that if we pay $10 per dungeon, I expect it to be completely new content.

Prophecy and Duality are my favorite dungeons. There’s something about Prophecy that’s just so beautiful. Duality was difficult initially, and had many bugs. However, the quality of the the dungeon excused that.

In Spire of the watcher, there’s only one mechanic. You get the Arctrician buff from the shielded minotaur, and shoot nodes in sequence to create a circuit. First off, after some light platforming, you make your way to the top of the Spire, which counts as an encounter. At the top, you’ll find the first reused boss, Akelous. The reuse as the Consecrated Mind from Garden of Salvation was pretty bad in my opinion. The mechanics to get to the DPS phase is fine, but they should have used something else. That raid hasn’t even been sunset.

Then you make your way down to the final boss. The descent is fine. It has some fan blades from Zero Hour. I felt some Trvr vibes at one point. The final boss is a giant Wyvern, basically one of those jive turkeys. It’s sad that they didn’t do much to differentiate the final boss from a normal Wyvern. If they did, it was too subtle.

You complete a couple of circuits. First, to let the boss into the reactor room. Then to activate more cores. Once they blow, you have a short DPS window. I use Witherhoard with the Weakened Breach mod, a adept Hothead with Clown Cartridge, and an incandescent primary. If I’m on Arc, I’d switch to the Ikelos SMG with Voltshot.

I haven’t gotten the exotic so far, it’s a bow, Hierarchy of Needs. The more triumphs you complete in the dungeon, which has its own seal, WANTED, the more chances you have of getting the exotic. That’s actually not a bad system. The catalyst drops from the Master version. By day 1, I already had people in my new clan who had solo flawlessly completed it. The emblem is pretty nice.

The armor is nice too. There’s a space cowboy motif, and all of the classes have a hat of some kind. However, the drop chances are ridiculously low, probably lower than the exotic, which is stupid.

There are four new weapons, including a stasis sidearm that can roll desperado, which is a first, but the perk was nerfed pretty hard, so it’s not as OP as before. There’s a legendary scout rifle called Long Arm. It’s hip fire isn’t as good as Dead Man’s Tale, but it feels pretty good. There’s a dual launcher breech loaded grenade launcher, which is also a first. I haven’t gotten it, but it’s incrementally better than others. Sadly, it’s void, so no perk like chain reaction, voltshot, or incandescent. Only Repulsor Brace, which isn’t bad, but not as good as the others.

Now there’s another really bad thing. They’ve reissued two more Seventh Seraph weapons, the 180 rpm handcannon and the 450 AR. They can roll some DSC perks, but it was a terrible idea. Unlike the Epicurean and Fixed Odds, well mostly the Epicurean, they’re pretty bad to be honest and they’re thankfully not craftable. I’ve only gotten 1 red border from Duality and have stopped running it so I don’t think I’ll progress it that much. The only thing that made the Seventh Seraph weapons good was that they could generate warmind cells, back when they were good.

Not only are those weapons kind of meh, they also dilute the loot pool with bad weapons, meaning that you’ll be getting a drop of them and you’d want to get one of the new weapons, which is what everyone wants. It didn’t help that they shut down DIM the weekend of the launch, making it impossible for me to really switch builds, so I ran it for the first time on Arc hunter.

I didn’t really talk about the story of the dungeon. It’s pretty simple to be honest, and it kind of ties in with the story, though the reused bosses were a bit of a faux pas.