Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined, not by Matthew Castle, but by Phil Savage. How’s it going, Phil? Hi, I’m good. We were just discussing off air that I’m in a wharf plot, and I’ve had to close all of the windows because there are people frolicking in a meadow outside. Yeah, you do live next to a meadow, which is a very bath place to be situated. I feel bad about that, Phil. I’ll try and keep it under 90 minutes with that in mind, so you don’t boil to death. But yeah, thank you for joining me. So Phil is a returning guest, UK Editor-in-Chief of PC Gamer. That’s right. That is right, isn’t it? Sorry, you went quiet there. I was like… No, that’s good. Yeah, I kind of thought, just in case you’ve been promoted, and I’d missed the tweet somehow, but no, I think we’re good. So on this week’s episode, we’re going to talk about the Destiny games, hopefully in a way that makes it sound fun, or at least interesting to normies. That’s what I’ve written in my notes here. So, Phil, I wanted to ask, how’s it going? How is that? We are recording this a little while after the NotE3 Bonanza. How have you found the continuous years of covering that in the pandemic times? For one thing, I do miss the hustle and bustle, and especially the restaurants of LA, and not being able to get out there and actually see people in person. So, yeah, that’s definitely a big difference in how we cover the event or the lack of an event, I guess, this year. And it was a weird one, I feel, this year, like looking around at what was announced. There’s a bunch of stuff, not many things, I would say, like feel like obvious things to get excited about or things that I’m looking forward to, but I have concerns or I’m just like, well, I don’t know if this is actually going to be to my tastes. Like, for instance, Midnight Suns feels like a thing I should be getting excited about. This is the Firaxis Marvel game. But really, just because it’s the next game from the guys from XCOM who made XCOM 2, which I loved. I don’t actually care about Marvel stuff, though. And I don’t really like card based combat systems, which this is using. So it’s like, well, I’m prepared to give it a chance, but I really don’t know how it’s going to go. And I feel like I’m the same with a lot of what was announced this year. Yeah, I think Jeremy says something similar about Marvel’s Midnight Suns. It’s a game that I have read two previews of now and still don’t entirely understand what it is. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, when it gets here, I will play it by default, much like you. But yeah, you’re not a card game guy. You play Monster Train. That’s a good card game. I thought you’d probably enjoy that. I haven’t actually played that. So I did play Slay the Spire a few times, and I kind of fell off just because Evan in our office and a few others were really into it. And I’d listen to them talk about strategies and realize, oh, I’m like so many tens of hours away from being on that level. And the process of getting there and the amount of failing that I’ll need to do to figure it out kind of feels exhausting. Yeah, I found that way about Slay the Spire too. Which is objectively very good, but it is a game that’s like, it kind of asks, how do you feel about being kicked in the balls like 10 times an hour? And we’ll just keep doing that. And it’s a tough sell. Monster Train has basically two ways of completing it, which is like a babby way of completing it. And then you kind of take on this optional currency, which kind of unlocks the much harder sort of end game mode of it. And that two layer approach to it means that you can sort of feel clever even if you’re not clever. So, you know, hey, it might be a good one to play on the old Steam deck at some point, Phil. Sounds good. Was there anything else about it in like the Naughty 3 mix that you’re kind of excited about or at least kind of cautiously excited about? I mean, so the thing that Wes and Morgan, who did play a few sort of demos at one of the events that was happening in LA, the thing that they were raving about was Darktide from Fat Shark. And obviously I was a big Vermintide fan. And so, again, it’s one of those things where like the actual setting doesn’t really… I mean, I don’t mind Warhammer and Warhammer 40k. They seem interesting, but I don’t have that history with them or that sort of breadth of knowledge about them. So really, when I was playing Vermintide, it was less about like the lore and the setting and how accurate it was to this sort of fiction as much as it feels really good to smash some rats in the face. And if Fat Shark is that and it’s sci-fi, then fine, cool. Yeah, yeah, like you and I mostly played Vermintide and Vermintide 2 together. So unless you may have played some more alongside, I’m not sure. But I think we felt similarly that the second one slightly overcomplicated things with like crafting mechanics and stuff. Yeah, both games have really incomprehensible crafting systems. That was definitely a problem throughout. And I think the place we fell off was the Winds of Magic expansion, which added like this new sort of infinitely replayable campaign system, but also reset all of the progress you’d made on weapons and things. It had its own progression system to attach to it. And that became quite hard to sort of want to persist with when you were losing all the things you’d built up before. Whereas I think like you and I and everyone we played with was kind of united by the idea of what if a kind of really good variant on Left 4 Dead with good melee combat and excellent bants between different characters. Absolutely. Yeah, I feel like that’s maybe where Dark Tide is really going to thrive. It’s just like four kind of like weirdos in the 40k universe, just sort of like, you know, a Bosch in different alien lads and such. So yeah, yeah, I share your enthusiasm for that. And I will have to rejoin the old Egg Clan server when it rolls around to make sure I get some multiplayer in with you guys. Yes, a name I still don’t regret to this day. That will be relevant in this conversation, actually, so that’s good. It will be, actually, yeah. So Phil, last time you came on was the Yakuza episode. You were one of our first guests. I was very grateful to have you on. Is there anything we should retroactively change about the Yakuza ranking now that Lost Judgment came out? Have you got around to playing this one yet? So yeah, this is where I have to make an admission and say that I have not actually played Lost Judgment yet. Right. For a couple of reasons, really. One is just that Yakuza 7 is such a big game anyway that by the time Lost Judgment came around, I was still wrapping up some of the final challenges and the hard mode stuff in that. And the other, I think possibly slightly sad, reason is that this is the first time I’ve been… based on when I got into the Yakuza series, this is kind of the first time there’s not been one to look forward to after this. Like the studio hasn’t announced what they’re making yet or what Yakuza 8 will be or when it will come out. Whereas previously there had always been a backlog of games that had been released in Japan and you knew they were going to come across to Europe eventually, it was just a case of when. So it’s like, oh, actually, I can just save this one because I’m not looking down the barrel of a nine game series anymore. I’m caught up pretty much. So yeah, I’m just sort of holding that on to savor for when the time is right. Yeah, the hard work that 2017 and 2016 Phil did is now paying off in 2022. Yeah, that’s completely fair. Yeah, that kind of makes sense. So yes, I’ll circle back a year or so and find out how you feel about that. How are you feeling about the old creative lead Exodus that happened there as they went off to go and make something else, Netis, I think, a negotiation company. Were you kind of like, had any thoughts on that? I think I’m like, I’m very interested to see what they’re doing. Like, there’s always an opportunity with a split like this, especially when, you know, someone who is very much part of the DNA of the series, but wasn’t necessarily like involved with the nitty gritty of what that series became towards the end. Like, you know, it’s a big team. A lot of people had a hand in what Yakuza 7 was, and a lot of them have stayed and are working on the next thing. So that’s what gives me a confidence that, yeah, OK, like the people who work in that studio definitely know what that series is and should be and they will continue to sort of work with that in mind. And so now we’ve got Nogoshi who’s gone off and he’s going to seed those ideas into new things as well. So the best case scenario of that is that you just sort of get those philosophies and sort of design ideas that you loved, filter them way out into even more projects and more studios as people leave and start new projects and stuff. That’s the kind of optimistic view that I choose to take with no evidence of the contrary right now. Yeah, that’s a good way to be. It’s like I suddenly get double the content as a result of this. Where the people come from to make it all, I have no idea, but I’m prepared to believe that that is the case. It’s almost like a city management approach to thinking about game developers. I quite like that. I did want to ask about having a Steam Deck, Phil. You have one. I’m a little bit jealous. I’m waiting till July to September for mine. What’s life been like with that and what have you been playing on it? Mostly what I’ve been playing is visual novels, beloved visual novels like the Zero Escape series. So I went through that trilogy and I’ve just started with the same studio, sort of next game, the AI, the Somnium Files. Trying to remember the names of these things is always a struggle. But yeah, it’s been a really good, I think just on its own, just like that out of the box experience there when you load up what is essentially kind of a comically large Steam OS thing and just browse through your library. That’s been great just as a way to catch up on all the games that I have on Steam that I don’t actually want to play when I’m sat at a desktop. I find visual novels like it’s just better to have a hand-held device and you know, you’re on the sofa or wherever, catching up with it like that rather than sat at a desk clicking a mouse forever. Get enough of that in the day job. So yeah, that’s been good. And then what’s kind of fascinating to me about it outside of the game stuff is like how much it feels like owning a PC as well. There’s a lot of things, it’s clear, that you can do just with like having a Linux operating system on a hand-held device that I haven’t even scratched the surface of and it is quite intimidating to approach. And then there’s been a couple of times already where I’ve just tested something and it’s not quite worked. And I thought, I guess that just doesn’t work on this. And then you find a forum thread and they’re like, no, if you go and download this obscure thing or load up this experimental version of Steam’s Proton operating system, then it will be fine. And you’re like, OK, yeah, this is like PC gaming 10 years ago. Yeah. Yeah, very familiar. Yeah, that’s quite cool. Some pretty wild stuff that people are doing with it in terms of emulation and many other things. Yeah, or just like I saw a guide to how to get the Epic Games Store and things like that working through it. So I was like, OK, well, I’ll try this because maybe I can play Guardians of the Galaxy or something, which I got in the Epic Store like through the Steam Deck. And I tried it and it absolutely didn’t work. And I don’t know why it didn’t work. And again, that’s an interesting problem that maybe I’ll get around to solving at some point. Yeah, I must admit that was the first thing I looked up the other day when I was thinking about Steam Deck, was like, can I access the, you know, all of the free games basically that Epic has given away on a device that is not intended to play them in theory. But yeah, I don’t know. The one I really want to try on there is XCOM 2. I don’t suppose you’ve given that a try, have you? No, I haven’t. So I’ve downloaded like, what is it, Desperados 3 and Shadow Tactics and some of those sorts of games, because apparently Shadow Tactics is marked as verified on Steam Deck for whatever that’s worth. Yeah, and Desperados was a game I sort of started with, quite enjoyed but never got very far. So I was like, I’ll give that another go. But I’ve not actually tried them yet to see how it quite works. It’s kind of interesting seeing that and seeing the sort of CRPG style things like Disco Elysium and Divinity Original Sin 2 and thinking, OK, this is perhaps more of a desktop experience than I would expect for a handheld, but I’ll give it a go. Maybe that is a good format for it. But sometimes all the fonts are very small and it’s just quite hard to use. Yeah, I did wonder if that was going to happen quite a lot with some of these games. Yeah, I did play Euro Truck Simulator 2. I felt like a hat to give that a go. And that works for a game with a lot of buttons. It works surprisingly well. Yeah, that’s the thing. I suppose the advantage the Nintendo Switch has is they’re all kind of native versions. Everything’s been made with that in mind and it’s just a bit more of a Wild West with the Steam library. It absolutely is. And you get some benefits from it. The existence of the Steam controller back in the day means that there are a lot of custom profiles that people have made for controller figurations for a lot of these games. So I think that’s what Euro Truck and things like that are using. Somebody went to the effort of making it work on a control pad and the benefits now are finally paying off. But again, it’s purely based on some guy’s preference, I guess. So you’re taking your life in your own hands every time. I also like that you are kind of spiritually turning your Steam Deck into a PS Vita by playing visual novels on it. That feels like a baller move. I’m happy with that. You must be pretty chuffed that all the personas are coming to PC now, Phil. Does it have no relevance to you as a man who has played them all on console? Well, so I’ve only played Persona 5 on console. I’ve never actually played Persona 3. So I’m kind of debating whether it is worth going back and doing that. Although I guess, yeah, that was probably also going to be a very good Steam Deck game. Yeah. Actually, it probably will be a good excuse to check out Persona 5 Royale as well because when I originally played it, it was just the original release version. Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ve sort of been debating. When do you go back and play what is hundreds of hours of mostly the same game just to get to some extra bits? Yeah, for like 5% new content. Yeah. At what point is it worth it? Yeah, that’s fair. Not tempted to boot him up on the old OG Xbox One, Phil? Still got that in the living room? Yes, I do. It’s not plugged in anymore and hasn’t been for a while. I did always like it as, because I was around when you bought it and it was the Forza Horizon 2 machine, is that right? Originally it was the Forza Horizon 1 machine and then it got upgraded to the Forza Horizon 2 machine and then they moved the series over to PC as well and so it didn’t get launched ever. Except for a couple of reviews I did of like really dodgy Xbox ports of beloved PC games like Kerbal Space Programme and Cities Skylines that I did for OXM back in the day. Yeah, I do seem to remember you were like their reporter on the ground of like ill-advised PC ports. How much will I have to fight a controller to make this work? It doesn’t matter, as long as I can do enough of these that I cover the cost of the console, thereby ensuring it wasn’t a giant waste of time. That is, yeah, every games freelancer has ever lived has basically functioned under that economy. And yeah, until they just couldn’t take it anymore. That’s good. Yeah, so it’s great of you, Phil, because I was, we were talking a bit in our podcast Discord recently about the PC Gamer UK podcast. I think people fondly remember us recording it. What are your kind of like memories of making that? I did mess it after it was over. That’s part of the reason I ended up doing this. Do you have any kind of reflections on the very odd content we put out for a few years there? I think, what do I remember about it? It was very chaotic, is the thing, with that podcast. I think part of it is that, I think, because of the way we brought it back, I sort of operated under the assumption that nobody was actually listening to it. Certainly nobody from the company. And so I don’t think, I think my problem with podcasts, as my problem in meetings is in the company, is I don’t really have a filter for what I’m saying. It’s just like, I’m having a chat with Samuel now, so I can say whatever, forgetting that it’s going to be broadcast to a lot of people. And that’s probably why some people enjoyed it, because it’s nice to have that energy sometimes. Yeah, I listened back to like the last episode we did a few months ago, and like, I sound like the most miserable motherfucker. Like, I’m absolutely ragging on the Top 100 process. Oh, now the Top 100 ones were always interesting recordings, because there was… I should explain the way the PC Gamer’s annual Top 100 works, is that a lot of it is just based on behind the scenes arguments that happen. And so, in the worst cases, you end up with a list that nobody quite agrees with. There’s been a few years where that’s been the case. I think we’ve got the process slightly better these days, but there’s been a couple ones where we definitely went into that podcast studio to air some grievances out. Yeah, for sure. And like, I definitely think it’s sort of steadily… The Top 100 list steadily got better the whole time I was there, and then by the time I left, I was pretty happy with the process. But early on, there’d be a lot of heated arguments about a thing that would result in two terrible compromises on either side that would completely break the list and no one would be happy about. And then those recordings, I sound so tired and grumpy and it’s kind of labelled as a commentary of The Top 100, but then there were games on the UK side we clearly just didn’t want in there, and we just kind of skipped over them or didn’t treat them with respect. I feel bad about that in retrospect because people argued for the things they like and they were asked to participate in the process. So I feel like I was the problem there rather than them, you know what I mean? It’s not other members of the team’s fault that they argued for a game that they love and the process is set up to reward that with a placing in the Top 100 list of the games the brand likes. Yeah, yeah. The other thing that strikes me is that when I listen back, the audio recording quality is so bad. When I made this podcast, the first thing I bought was a Blue Yeti. I don’t know why we only ever had one microphone that seemed to be… It was a Blue Yeti, but it had to go between four people. That was just pure carnage. At one point there were more microphones, but they disappeared? Yeah. It was a strange, strange thing. And that’s it. To pull the curtain back, it was just happening in what was called the studio, but was basically just one of the meeting rooms and had not been soundproofed at all, really. Because the company at large wasn’t really expecting podcasting to be a thing that happened. So the fact that we were doing it in a space that clearly wasn’t set up for it… I remember back in the day when podcasting was a proper thing of future, there was like a studio with properly soundproofed walls and everything. And this was just a meeting room where sometimes you could hear random drilling because they were changing some of the rooms nearby. And sometimes you could sort of make out a meeting that was just happening next door because that’s what those rooms were designed for. Yeah, you could follow on like hear conversations. And I was thinking, I hope there’s nothing confidential being said in this meeting now because it’s been broadcast to probably about 3000 people. But, you know, still, it probably shouldn’t be on the record. Yeah, I mean, it was broadcast to enough people that somebody once came up to me on a train and showed me their phone, which was playing an episode of the podcast. That’s very nice. Which was sort of scary and then nice and then awkward because I was just like, I need to leave now, please. Yeah, people really did dig it. I think it meant when I started this, there was quite a nice receptive audience for it. And yeah, it was going to sound for it to be over. I would have asked you to do this, Phil, but I imagine you got plenty to do in your day job. So, you know, I can only have, I’ll have like a sort of like free sample. That’s a Phil Savage, you know. Yeah, have you thought about bringing the podcast back at all, Phil? Is that something you’ve sort of discussed internally? We have because we have quite a big team now and there’s some like just really good voices on the team. Like whenever we’re, I mean, speaking of the top 100, we’re sort of in the process of doing the top 100 at the moment. And whenever we’re doing those sort of meetings, on the one hand, we probably could never record them because it’s a very loose way of discussing which 100 games we need to celebrate this year. But on the other hand, it does every time it makes me think, oh, yeah, we need to get some of these people into a podcast. So we’re sort of looking into it at the moment. Like the big question is, like, how do we get the American team involved and like do it as a proper PC Gamer thing, rather than having like a bunch of separate feeds? And so, yeah, what’s the space? Hopefully, that’s cool. That was always one of the weird things about the podcast as well as the site where it was hosted. Yeah, like the kind of the deliberately shit WordPress where we kind of plugged it in. Like the whole thing was so bootleg for like a publicly listed company worth like, you know, now worth well over a billion. It was quite embarrassing. But yeah, but like, but very fun. And I did get a couple of emails from people around the company that were like, Oh, so you’re doing a podcast now. So how did you get that set up? And it’s like, I shouldn’t tell you because it’s quite embarrassing. You don’t want to know. We force this into being because it shouldn’t exist, basically. So, yeah. Okay, great stuff. Well, yeah, good little check in there, Phil. I’ll take a quick pause here. And then we can come back and chat about the subject of this episode, Destiny, which you’re an expert in. So, we’ll be back in a minute. Welcome back to the podcast. So this section’s all about Destiny, so I imagine half of you are gonna tune out right now, delete this episode off your podcast, catch your choice and move on with your lives. If so, I wish you well with the rest of your day. For everyone else who wants to hear some great FPS chatter from a genuine authority on the subject of Destiny, this is gonna be a great section. So we’ve got a little bit of an overview of Destiny here, and Phil’s kind of journey with it, and a little bit about what kind of elements of it you’ll like if you’re an existing single-player shooter fan. It’ll just be a good chat, I think. And then we’ve got like a top five things to do in Destiny 2 list from Phil, and then a top five guns in Destiny 2 list from Phil. So it’s gonna be really fun. So I suppose, Phil, where does your Destiny journey begin? Because I think you came to it sometime after me, but it was before Destiny 1 had wrapped up, right? So I came to it quite early. Actually, before that, I should say, I really feel like I’ve picked the hardest possible back page podcast challenge in coming on to talk about Destiny 2, a live service game. I was going back and looking through the episodes where you’ve picked out and focused on a specific game, and it’s Hitman 3 or Super Mario 3D World or whatever, classics or single player games and immersive sims that we both absolutely love. So here I am to talk about the kind of awkward scratch pad of Bungie ideas that are somehow coalesce into a fascinating experience. But that’s exactly why I thought we’d make a good episode, because when I did try to talk about Destiny before, the thing I tried to do was pull out a specific element that I know people would like, so I talked about what’s the big hedonism bot guy in the raid they cut out? What was that raid called, Phil? That was Leviathan, and Callus is the guy who is back now. Oh yeah, Tim, when Tim came on, he intimated that Callus was coming back, so I’m pleased to hear that’s the case. I talked about that, for example, and a lot of our listeners did have their imagination captured by the idea of this preposterous figure who’s like, God, you shoot out of his hand, essentially. That’s always the thing with Destiny, there’s loads of good stuff in there, but reaching the good stuff requires patience or more people, but there is good stuff to talk about. Do you think that’s kind of a fair way of framing it? Yeah, I think it is, and I think a lot of times when people talk about Destiny, especially long-term players, it can almost feel grudging, like, here is a relationship that I have subjected myself to for reasons that they can often struggle to articulate, and I’m going to make an effort not to go down the self-deprecating route there, because, you know, I do think there are reasons why people, you know, why this series has lasted for, I think, 2014 at launch, so, yeah, eight years, essentially, and why people still get a lot of joy from it now. So, yeah, to double back to your actual question, which was when I jumped on, it was actually close to launch. I think a few days after the launch, me and PC Gamer’s former online editor, Tom Senior, sort of goaded ourselves into a reckless purchase of a PlayStation 4 in a way that we would sometimes goad ourselves into buying. Do you remember that week where we all bought Final Fantasy XIV? We never played it. We never played it together. I don’t think I played it on that console at all. Yeah, I think I was completely wrong there, Phil. I forgot you were right there at the beginning with Destiny. Because, yeah, it was September 2014, I think. And then I think, yeah, I was part of that too. I didn’t get into Destiny as much, but I think we all triple dead or quadrupled dead. Somehow everyone on the team, minus Tony Ellis and John Strike, ended up with a fierce war. So, yeah, please continue. Yeah, so I had it fairly on, and there is actually almost a meme at this point among the community of people having to prove their destiny bona fides by saying, oh, I’m a day one beta player. And it’s like, you must respect my opinion. So not quite that early, but yeah, soon after launch, we picked it up. And honestly, like those first few months, you know, I was very slowly working through the campaign, but I did bounce off it a couple of times. I think part of it, and this is a thing they still do, although not to the same extent, was the way, almost because like, oh, it’s kind of MMO-like now, so you can’t just do the campaign. You’ve got to do a couple of levels, and then you’ve got to raise your player level by however much before you can access the next one. And I found that structure quite, it hurt the pace in quite a bit. And we can talk about that later when we talk about sort of the newer campaign stuff and how it handles that. I think it is a lot better now, although it doesn’t necessarily tell you that it’s better about it. But yeah, so initially, yeah, I’ve checked in with it every now and again and was sort of very slowly making my way through. And I think it’s when the first DLC came out, which was The Dark Below, which actually wasn’t very well received. But that’s when I was sort of like, okay, more people are playing this. It’s clearly sticking around. Like, even though a lot of people are pointing out as problems, there’s clearly a lot of love for it, both among the community at large and the people I was playing games with at the time anyway. So I made a point to catch up there. And then it wasn’t until the sort of final DLC of year one, House of Wolves, that I was sort of caught up and ready to hit a lot of the end game activities. And that’s when, like, to really dig into the moment that made Destiny stick with me. House of Wolves had, like, this end game activity called Prison of Elders. And it’s sort of an arena fight against a bunch of bosses. I think each week there was a different one on rotation. And as they do, it was coming up to the end of year one as well. So they did this thing where, you know, you got some extra rewards if you did a bunch of challenges. And one of them was to sort of defeat the final, hardest boss of Prison of Elders. And me and someone else who was playing the game quite a bit, we started trying to get other friends through it who weren’t quite at level, but they wanted the rewards, they wanted to see it. So, you know, we’d already fought quite hard to do that ourselves. And then I think on the night before the next expansion release and the deadline was over, we managed to get somebody who was quite a bit lower level for it through. And it was just like, oh yeah, that’s amazing. Like, we actually managed to do this. And it was a really great sort of moment between the three of us because, you know, this person we were, I don’t want to say carrying, but we were helping through was like really excited. And yeah, that was the point where I’m like, oh yeah, this is a really good experience that I haven’t replicated in many other games. Yeah, OK, that’s cool. Yeah. So from there, like, how did your relationship develop? Because The Taken King was the first major expansion, right? And that was where I got properly into it. And at that point, it felt like it had, like, real shape to it. Is that how you kind of saw it at the time too? Yeah, I think with The Taken King, like, Bungie really landed on the things that they figured out really worked about Destiny. And so the new destination added, which was this sort of cool hive ship, which is the more insectoid race. And so, like, it was just sort of interesting architecture that was covered in, like, gribbly corruption and chitin and all sorts of weird alien designs. They have that, and it was sort of full of things to find. And so there was this sense of, oh, if you found this shit, or let me take you over here, you will find a thing. You’re like, oh, what’s this? The sort of… This is where it kind of became clear that Destiny was always going to be the game that guides writers for websites were going to get a lot of mileage from. Yeah. And I think those do lead to cool community moments, because everyone’s like, oh, we thought this was what we were getting. Actually, there’s this whole other thing. If you do this, it will lead down a rabbit hole, that will lead to a cool gun, and it sort of just whispers or posts, subreddits dedicated to finding out secrets and things like that. So there was that really cool element to it. There was also the raid, and I think we’ll be talking about raids quite a bit later on, but King’s Fall was just much bigger and more audacious than the first raid, Vault of Glass, from year one. And that really led to a sense of excitement. So yeah, just a lot of things coalescing in that release. And then once it was released, nothing happened for a year. And that’s sort of the story of early Destiny, I think. In year one, they thought they had this DLC plan that they were going to go down, but the DLCs weren’t particularly well-liked, because the campaigns were just a couple of missions, really, and there wasn’t much extra to them, but it was this thing that people were being asked to pay for regardless. So then they were like, oh, OK, we’ll just do a big expansion, and we’ll just fill it full of things, and maybe we’ll do some events to keep things ticking over. And that just resulted in a real dry spell for a long time. And there was plenty to do in The Taken King, but there wasn’t a year’s worth of stuff, which can be a problem in a live service game. There’s always that, I guess, tension between the community always wants more, and they will always complete the thing you’ve just released in the fastest possible time. But you’re developers, you have to go home and have lives and weekends, and it’s just this never-ending demand and figuring out how you can fill it. Yeah, and that seems to be something that they have perpetually wrestled with, like, from Destiny 1 to Destiny 2. I suppose, like, in the very early days, they were trying to work this out before the exact shape of modern live-service games had been figured out with battle passes and stuff, and what are now seasonal activities in Destiny. So, yeah, it’s tricky. But then, like, did you find that, like, Destiny 2 repeated some of the same mistakes, Phil? I remember there being a bit of a cool period towards Destiny 2 at the start. So, Destiny 2’s launch was pretty interesting in that when it, like, the first few weeks, everyone was like, oh, yeah, well, I don’t want to say everyone. Certainly everyone I was talking to was like, oh, God, this is amazing. They’ve, like, surpassed themselves. The campaign was pretty good. Probably one of the best sort of story campaigns or selection of missions they’ve done to that point in terms of, like, the variety of things you’re doing and the settings and stuff like that. And then the problem they had is they’d made a bunch of changes that in theory were a good idea, but I don’t necessarily think suited the kind of audience that game had. So one of the things they did was they took away random perk rolls from guns. So the way it works now and the way it used to work in Destiny 1 is that if you get a legendary weapon from wherever, it will have two perks picked from a pool of possibilities, and they’re just randomly generated when you get the gun, and you can look at them and go, oh cool, it’s Outlaw and Killing Wind, or there are a selection of perks you definitely want on various guns, and then there’s some that aren’t quite as good, or are very niche. Pretty quickly, the thing people are always asking is, what’s the god role? What is the gun that will perform the best, either in PvE or PvP stuff? What is the one that I actually want? There are entire websites dedicated to cataloging what the best potential role of every gun is. That’s a big part of the loot chase. Yes, you can earn a gun, but then you can earn the better version of that gun. And in year one, that just didn’t exist. Each gun had its own unique set of perks. Well, not necessarily unique, but its own defined set of perks. And once you learned it, you didn’t ever need to earn it again. And if you’re sort of somebody who plays the game, maybe an hour a week or you check in every couple of weeks, that’s great because you don’t have to put in the effort to get the same experience, the same amount of rewards as somebody who plays multiple hours a week. But then if you’re the type of person who plays multiple hours a week, you’re then like, how come they also have the same rewards as I do? Right. That I remember being a proper firestorm as well, of which type of player deserves to be rewarded the most. Obviously, more hardcore players are probably feeling like they’re being neglected as a result there. So how do they rectify that afterwards? Because Forsaken is a very well-received expansion, right? Add some pretty rad endgame stuff, if I recall, fun things to do after you’ve done the campaign. How do they write the ship on that? I mean, much the same way as they did in Destiny 1 with taking… The parallel is pretty surprising. Destiny launched, it had a lot of problems. People were kind of like, yeah, this is kind of good, but it’s not there yet. And then The Taken King came out and everyone’s like, oh no, they know what this is now. And then Destiny 2 launched, it had a lot of problems. I mean, not just the purple thing. People didn’t like the double primary system. They missed having special weapons, like shotguns and sniper rifles, which in year one were part of your heavy weapon slot. I think it’s a way to sort of reduce the sort of power creep as people were getting more and more powerful at the end of Destiny 1. They were like, okay, we’re going to reset everyone down. Supers charge slower, abilities charge slower. You’ve got less ammo to do like your big DPS weapons. And then, I don’t know, they released Forsaken and they just let go of a lot of that. They did what I think just before Forsaken release, they did what was called the Go Fast update, and that was just about rebalancing everything so that you got your abilities quicker, and you got the fun tools would proc more often. The other thing they got a lot of heat for in Destiny 1 was sort of a tonal thing, which I guess in Destiny 2 Year 1, there was a real sort of flanderization effect where everybody liked Cade in Destiny 1. So what if in Destiny 2, everybody was like jokey and tongue-in-cheek? And I think that fell flat for a lot of people, especially for a series where, like, you know, the most beloved expansion is The Taken King, which was very dark and gothic in tone. And so for everything to be very sort of light-hearted, Saturday morning cartoon fell flat to, you know, a lot of the player base. And so Forsaken, they’re like, hey, okay, let’s kill off the comedy character that you all love. And now everyone has to react to that and be sad, which it worked out, honestly. And also they didn’t have to pay Nathan Filipe any more money. That did also seem like part of the… I think that was also part of it. Yeah, he was definitely like, he definitely felt like he came and rescued the tone of Destiny 1 in The Taken King. That was how I felt in my head. But I say that as someone who never truly understood the lore. But yeah, it was a lot of very serious people voiced by people from like genre shows in the noughties and explaining stuff. And yeah, they were like, oh yeah, so we’ll just stick Nathan Fillion in this and have some fun times. But that’s the thing, it works in that context, doesn’t it? Because you have lots of people trying to tell this serious story about a Hive God who wants to do some stuff. And then you’ve got comedy jokes man just sort of telling everybody to lighten up. Whereas if everybody is comedy jokes man, then nobody is comedy jokes man, which was the Destiny 2 year one problem. So from there, is Shadowkeep the expansion after Forsaken? How does that mix things up? So with Shadowkeep, Shadowkeep was the one released after Bungie split from Activision. And like that did have a big effect because so I guess one of the things I’ve not mentioned with Destiny 2 yet is how they did sort of post expansion releases and stuff like that. And again, Destiny 2 Year 1, much like Destiny 1 Year 1, they had two DLCs, Curse of Osiris and Warmind. And much like in Destiny 1 Year 1, they weren’t particularly well received. Curse of Osiris especially was not well rated expansion especially because a lot of people already had many frustrations with the direction it had taken. That did not assuage any fears. I think Warmind was a bit more positively received. It added a thing called Escalation Protocol, which was a public event that just happened when you went down onto the Mars destination. It was a public event in a public space that was actually quite difficult and required a lot more than you would usually take after what is usually a fairly brainless activity elsewhere in public spaces. So that was all cool, but Forsaken then introduced proper seasons and they were just released on a seasonal model. I can’t remember what they cost. About 8 quid, something like that? Yeah, probably. I just spend the Destiny tax each year by getting the deluxe edition, so I don’t have to think about it, because some of the monetization decisions they make for buying individual piecemeal content is absurd. I feel like the government should reimburse you for that. To do your work is necessary. So yeah, a lot of what went right with Forsaken was also that the follow-up seasons were really good. Like the first one they did, Black Armoury, or Season of the Forge, I think it was called, but that introduced the Black Armoury, which was this event that you loaded into and based around forges. It was, as many activities in Destiny are, it’s a type of horde mode that involved throwing an orb at something. Yeah. But that came in, it had some incredible guns, like guns that are still beloved to this day, or would be if they hadn’t been Sunset with Beyond Light. So they had that, they had Season of the Drifter, which was less successful because the community remains, I’ll say, divided on Gambit. Right, yeah. And then Season of Opulence, which introduced the Menagerie, and it was all based around, you know, Kalos and the Leviathan and stuff like that. And so it was just a series of weird game shows at the behest of, you know, this Caligula-like figure. You’ve just zoomed in as well on the period that I was playing Destiny 2 the most, and like, yeah, fucking that Forge, man, did so much of that shit. You did a lot of that Forge. We did, yeah, it was funny because, was this around the pandemic time, so some of these seasons went on longer than intended, or maybe one of them did? That was, actually, so I think, actually, the period you were probably playing the most was season of Arrival, which was after Shadowkeep, but because they delayed Beyond Light, that season lasted about five months, so it was the longest one to that point, at least, but that provided a good period for everyone to sort of, because they’d also announced that certain things would be going away at that point as well, and they’d be removing a few activities from the game and a few destinations, so I think a lot of people jumped on to sort of check out what was about to be leaving. Yeah, I will say, actually, like the great joy I had with playing Destiny 2 that year was getting to see this kind of, like, backed up array of cool stuff to unpick in this game, so things like the kind of mysteries you talk about, where these were once community-solved things where no one knew how to solve them, and then you and Tom Hatfield would, like, take me through them, essentially, and then, like, kind of explain them, explain the background of how people found them, and there was so much of that stuff in there, I find it incredibly impressive. So I think, like you say, like, The Taken King is sort of where that starts a little bit, the kind of secret unraveling, and now it’s, like, in the DNA of the game, you know? Yeah, yeah, and, yeah, so that, I mean, that period I was much like in Prison of Elders and Destiny 1, taking, you know, this friend of a friend through a difficult thing to get them some decent rewards. Like, I think me and Tom were running people through, like, The Whisper, a secret mission that got you a cool exotic cyber rifle at the end of it, like, pretty much every week, just a rotating cast of friends who were like, oh, have you ever got this gun? No? Okay, well, let’s go and do a weird jumping puzzle. Oh, man, yeah, the jumping puzzle that was, like, oddly nightmarish, depending on which of the classes you picked, but, yeah, good times. Yeah, so the thing about Forsaken and especially, like, Season of Opulence and the Menagerie and that is they… Bungie was helped a lot by other Activision studios at that time, so a lot of Season of Opulence was actually made by Vicarious Visions, and, you know, because of Activision’s resources, like, they could sustain the amount of stuff that Forsaken had in it. Like, Forsaken had an entire different destination called the Dreaming City that people didn’t even know about when the game released, if I recall correctly. Like, you did the campaign and then it was just like, post-campaign, it was like, oh, by the way, something’s going on with The Awoken and you just unlock this whole new destination that is still probably one of the weirdest destinations they’ve made in terms of its look and style. And yeah, when Shadowkeep released, it became pretty clear that that wasn’t sustainable anymore. Like, Bungie is on its own now, or at least was, you know, they’ve been acquired by Sony since, but at the time it was like, Bungie were doing it for themselves and that meant they had to make everything themselves and that meant Shadowkeep was, I think, in terms of the campaign, a bit of a dud. Like, it was a few missions that were padded with some pretty egregious collection quests for a pretty ugly set of armour. It had, like, had some cool moments, especially with regards to, like, the story and, like, some aspects of the lore and reveals of things that had been hinted at before, but generally it was like, okay, this is it. And then the seasons that followed up were, the way they were doing it was, I think they were basically removing things after each season happened. So the season happened and then that season’s activity was just gone at the end of that season and you were on to the next thing. And so this was the year the community was, like, really complaining about fear of missing out being, like, the driving force of destiny going forward. And that was a real concern because, I mean, previously in year two, you could have taken breaks, you can go and play something else for an entire season and that season would still be there. Whereas now it felt like, okay, they really want us to keep up with it and be, like, part of the monthly active users metric and sort of justify things that way. And it became a real grind. Like, that was probably, for all the complaints of Destiny 1 year one, Destiny 2 year one, year three in Shadowkeep stuff was probably, like, some of the most worrying times for the game. Right. And then Beyond Light happened. And it’s sort of this pattern of ups and downs. Beyond Light, pretty good expansion, introduced Stasis, completely blew up the subreddit for months because of the PvP balance of Stasis, which is a power that freezes players. So people just constantly getting frozen, absolutely furious with it in terms of the competitive stuff. But again, really good seasons. And then that’s what led to arrivals in the five month season and the announcement that a bunch of things were going away. Yeah. So quite controversial because, you know, the original Red War campaign is gone now, right? So what other kind of like Destiny 2 sort of like old content is essentially no more? So, yeah, the Black Armoury stuff is all gone. Those forges and things. Two campaigns. Well, two main campaigns, the Red War one and Forsaken left when The Witch Queen released earlier this year. A couple of raids. So all the Leviathan raids, I think there was one main one and then two smaller ones. Well, one of them wasn’t very good, but Spyro Stars was certainly interesting, if not something one would want to subject themselves to more than once, really. Which one was that, Phil? That was the one where you had to stand on a bunch of plates with a ball to fling yourself up into a 3D representation of space to figure out which ship you would throw an orb at to destroy it with a laser targeting system. Oh my god, I just remember there being some very nervous moments of, will we actually ever get this done? The problem with that one, it wasn’t so much like, it was cool in terms of, oh, okay, you’ve got to destroy ships, you’ve got to do all this, but there were so many tight, like, this is the moment where we all have to throw an orb to each other and if we don’t do it in five seconds, we are all dead. Yeah, it’s a shame because being flung into space was awesome. But that was the cool bit, yeah. Yeah, that was like a proper, like, galaxy brain preposterous, subtle sci-fi moment. It was just really, really fun, but like, well, I suppose it wasn’t galaxy brain, it was just blowing up a spaceship, but still, you know, it was quite out there visually. But yeah, okay, I do remember that one and have no wish to repeat it. Yeah, but we also lost Scourge of the Past, which was a very good raid that I really enjoyed. That was the one with the sparrow section, where a giant flaming orb chased you down, like these warrens underneath the city. So good. Oh, that was a great raid, actually, because the city itself was a really cool environment. That was neat. And then, yeah, you just go underneath it, and then there’d be basically like a kind of speeder chase sequence. Yeah, that was great. What a shame to lose that. It’s weird, because they like remove things like this, and then they brought back the final arena of that area, which is basically where a bunch of the fallen now live, and they’re sort of hiding out in the city, and a sort of faction of fallen allies are now there, and that’s there. It’s called the Eliksni quarter. Although that has also been removed, because that was part of last year’s seasonal stuff. So yeah, part of the problem right now is just sort of keeping track of what’s there and what’s not anymore. There are ways that this has been good for the game, just in terms of this is clearly what they need to do in order to keep the pace of releasing new stuff and keeping the game not just like a decent file size for whatever that’s worth, but like ensuring that what does remain still works. And they don’t constantly have to test every new thing, every new gun, every new sort of interaction with, you know, six plus raids, multiple campaigns, all sorts of things. But yeah, it definitely hurts the game in other ways, like in ways we’ll talk about in terms of what it does for new players who are thinking, oh, is this a game I should check out? Yeah, yeah, I suppose then like, because we got up to Beyond Light there, we’ll save The Witch Queen, Phil, because I know that will come up a bit later. So I suppose then the question there is, to someone who typically enjoys single-player first-person shooters but maybe rankles the idea of live-service games, do you think Destiny has something to offer them? And if it does, how much hard work is it to find it? I would say it’s slightly easier these days if you’re interested in checking it out almost on a whim. The tricky thing is it’s advertised as a free-to-play game. I don’t think that’s entirely accurate in what we’d think of as a free-to-play game. You’re not going to be able to do much without owning the latest expansion. That’s where all the good stuff really is. Or at least without owning one of the expansions. You don’t have a campaign. You basically have access to strike missions and a handful of other things, which could be fun, but aren’t necessarily what you would load up the game and play it over time with. Again, we’ll talk about that in a bit, but I would say the new campaign is a really good first-person shooter experience. It does stand next to a bunch of single-player FPSs, but the best way to experience Destiny, really, is to rope in a couple of friends who are going to learn it with you, or if you don’t have friends who are already in there, if you have a couple of friends who are like, I’m kind of interested in checking it out, going through and learning things together and having those people to call on when you want to do more difficult things, like dungeons or night falls, you can get a long way with having three people in Destiny, basically. A lot of the game is built around that structure. And some of that is match made, like especially low level strikes and seasonal activities or whatever, like the game will fill in to other people with you, but it’s not quite the same. And in terms of sort of getting prepared and really learning what the game offers in terms of its RPG systems and the depth of build crafting and stuff like that, having some people with you is, I would say, a recommendation. I think it’s hard to get that same experience if you’re doing it solo. Yeah, I would agree with that as someone who was sort of shepherded through so much of the older content. Yeah, it was very valuable to have that and just people willing to explain things that the game confronts you with. You just do not understand different currencies and strange characters and parts of different worlds you didn’t know existed because you never went around a corner and found this guy there. Yeah, or just, what is this quest that I’ve had in my inventory for months? What does it actually do? Do I have to do it or is this pointless? Yeah, so you did a quest audit for me, you and Tom Hatfield at one point. I read out every single, in fact, I screen grabbed, I think, every single quest or something like that. And then you told me which ones to get rid of. And how many people have you done that service for at this point? To that extent, only you. What I’ve started to do is when we’re playing with people who are fairly new or are just getting back into it, I’ll just get them to stream their quest log over Discord. This is a service I provide. And we’ll just go through and we’ll just say, OK, well, that’s what this is, that’s what this is. And I will say the game has got a lot better. Perhaps I didn’t give it enough credit for this until I started doing it with people. It’s got a lot better at organizing quests in a way that they make a little bit more sense. So campaigns, for instance, Shadowkeep, Beyond Light and The Witch Queen are the three campaigns currently in. They are each their own quest that is made up of now multiple 20 to 30 steps based on the number of quests and things you’re doing. You can right click on a quest and you can just go into a detailed page view where step by step you can see what you’ve done and what you’ve got to do next. It’s the same for each of the seasons. One of the things that used to be difficult was each week of the seasons because they now roll out little chunks of story each week just to keep you checking back in or for you to catch up with once the season’s finished. They all used to be individual quests. It was an absolute mess to figure out. Now they’re all just one quest line and if you’re ever like, I want to see where I’ve got up to with Season of the Risen, you just have one place to look and it will spell it all out for you. That does make things a lot more user friendly. For a while my quest log was like a public toilet. It was rough in there. It was so bad. I looked over it today at that thing that I wrote up just to see what you were dealing with and it’s like, yeah, how anybody is meant to keep track of this. And some of it is down to the fact that the quest log used to exist just in the player inventory. They weren’t quests. They were just like little fragments of things you found in your inventory that hinted at things you could do to turn that into a gun or something. And then they introduced the quest page and quests became like the metaphysical concept of going on a quest. But also sometimes it’s still an extant object that you own in this space. So sometimes your quests are quests that you’ve been given and sometimes your quests are an oven that can be interacted with to bake cookies for a dragon. Yeah, and then those cookies are just stuck in your inventory for ages unless you’re just after the thing’s over. Just hope it auto-deletes them, yeah. Yeah, there was a lot of that for sure. I think the reason I sort of like, I kind of wanted to do this episode is I think that for anyone who’s interested in good FPS design, like if you play something like the Titanfall 2 campaign or any of the more modern examples like Doom Eternal with good single-player quest design, it’s like it’s not all the game is, but there’s a lot of that in Destiny 2 if you’re prepared to go and find it. And I suppose, like you say, there is the wrinkle of you kind of need two people to get the most out of it. But I think that’s fair, right? It’s just that that stuff is in there. You will find great FPS design in there if you persist, you know? Yeah, absolutely. With the most recent campaign, it’s good to see them putting that more up front and center, perhaps where it should be, as like the tent pole portion of an expansion release. It’s great. But even before that, things like… The thing that everybody used to call out were a couple of secret exotic mission quests like The Whisper because it’s a wild jumping puzzle across this expansive underground alien complex or Zero Hour, which is or was, I should say, again, not in the game anymore. But this kind of really cool tour of Destiny 1’s version of the tower, which was destroyed at the start of Destiny 2, but then they repurposed that space for this mission and you sort of work through the ruins of it and then into the underground bit of the tower. They were both timed missions, really cool sense of pace and panic, a couple of fun surprises doing them. Just really sort of top-notch FPS campaign design. We’ll get to this in a little bit, but the dungeons too, they need to be shared with people, but those as well very much see that design in there. So Phil, I was curious, why do you think that other live service games have died while Destiny has persisted? It’s kind of like the last of its kind, it was the first of its kind in some ways, but why do you think it has persisted while those other ones have gone away? So I think some of it is just it was the first of its kind, and so it managed to kind of get a kind of cache and respect. It built up a community because it was doing something that a lot of live service games weren’t doing. But also it was, I mean, if you think of live service games now, often you think of like Hero Shooters or Battle Royales in terms of the other live service games that I’m aware of are things like Apex and Fortnite and that kind of thing. Whereas I think Destiny, because it takes a lot of cues from MMOs in terms of how it structures a release schedule around expansions that include big new areas and then the seasons add new things and so there’s this constant update path to it. So that is all the stuff that I think have sort of kept people checking back in with it and also ensured it had a dedicated core audience as well that are keeping up with it because we see that those designs can be really sticky and really compulsive for people. So that helps. I think also the fact that this is Bungie’s main concern now, in a way that, I mean, if you look at things that compare to Destiny, it’s stuff like, I mean, I guess the Division is one of the closer ones in terms of being, you know, this shooter campaign that tried to have seasonal stuff and DLC like that. And the Division was never going to be like the main priority of Ubisoft, whereas certainly since the Activision split, like Destiny is just Bungie’s thing. And they’ve talked about, you know, even beyond like, that there’s two expansions to come and they’ve talked about, well, beyond that, we want to keep Destiny 2 running. And not even like, we want to keep Destiny running and make Destiny 3. They’ve talked about Destiny 2 specifically sticking around after their current plan with what they’re calling the Light and Dark Saga now. See, I find that kind of like, kind of amazing because there are definitely moments along the road in that, you know, you kind of explained the history in brief earlier, like where they could have just sort of dropped everything and ran and made something else and they probably could have gotten away with it after they split with Activision, but they kind of persisted with it through quite tricky times. So, yeah, there might be something in that. This is the one thing we’re doing, so we want to just do that as well as we can. I think there are moments the community would have like, by and large, celebrated a Destiny 3 being made because I think a lot of the received wisdom about Destiny 2 and the state it was in, certainly around Shadowkeep and stuff, was just that, oh, this is aging technology that they’re battling and, you know, it’s better to just scrap it and start again with Destiny 3. And, you know, I heard interviews with Bungie around that time and they were just like, well, you know, we’re working on this. There is more this can give. And they’ve like, redid a whole bunch of things with Beyond Light’s release. Like, Beyond Light was really sort of a fresh start for the game. It was very much it moving into, you know, the second era of Destiny 2. They announced the three expansions at once, which has now become four because they’ve added another one onto the end of their little saga. And it really felt like from that point they had a plan for where they wanted to take the game. And that’s had a real shift in how the community has responded to it. Like even when things happen that subreddits don’t agree with or the influencers that are important to the community don’t agree with, there’s no longer this suggestion that, oh, you should just scrap Destiny 2 and start again. Like, I think everybody’s accepted. No, this is the game that is going to last. Yeah, that’s a big battle to fight. And I know over the years that kind of community has been frustrating to you, Phil. How annoying is the Destiny community and the way it behaves? What a leading question. Sorry, let me start again. How annoying are these parts? I did write how annoying is that in this document. That’s maybe not very friendly. I suppose, tell me about the whole community element of Destiny and what it’s like dealing with that as a player who follows the game professionally to some degree. I find myself getting exacerbated a lot. And part of it is because not to be like, don’t you know who I am? I’ve talked to a few game developers over the year. I know a little bit about the problems. I guess I sympathise with the problems of making a game like this more than say somebody who is frustrated about the thing that they’re currently being killed by Incrucible, who rants on the subreddit and gets thousands of upvotes. And their frustration is real. But the thing that I often find is that the solutions or fixes they want feel very short-term and immediate. It’s like, I’m having this problem. They should do this to fix it, rather than I’m having this problem. And it is part of a systemic problem that needs to be addressed in a few different ways and that is probably being worked on. And some of it is just… I find a lot of the discussion is very led by the YouTube community and the Twitch streamers and stuff like that. And a big example of that is when the PvP switched to… What’s it called? The matchmaking, skill-based matchmaking. That did not go down well at all. And part of it was just like there was this constant complaining from the YouTubers and the streamers who rely on basically owning newbies to look good in compilations. And a lot of that discourse came through into the subreddits and into community complaints until it essentially got overturned. And now a lot of people are complaining that, oh, this connection-based matchmaking, I’m just constantly being matched up against people who are better than me. I have no way to learn. And it’s like, yes, that’s the problem that you’re facing. Every PvP matchmaking system has its problems, but the solutions aren’t necessarily always readily apparent. Yeah. I mean, you and I know that from having our ass kicked in Apex to the point where we basically retired from the game, and had skill-based matchmaking. I mean, that’s the other difficult thing, because Apex does have skill-based matchmaking. It just felt like it was constantly overestimating our level of skill, probably because we were queuing up as a stack of three people, which always makes the matchmaking a little harder on you, I think, because they expect you to be talking about in-game strategy and tactics and not necessarily what you’ve been watching on TV. Yeah, plus it seemed to stop doing the thing where it would reset at a new season, so we’d have like three wins in like about two days. We used to get away with it by taking a week or two off, and we’d sort of get the soft reset where we could get a win or two and feel good before getting back to the grind. Yeah, so yeah, I somewhat sympathise with the YouTubers and their kill compilations of noobs. But yeah, Phil, you kind of have followed the story to some extent. I remember going through different missions and raids with you and you flying off somewhere to go and collect a lore egg to understand the story. Did shoot some lore eggs. Yeah. Do you think you can break down the Destiny story concisely? Like, what is the kind of top line? I guess the top line, most concise version, is that the metaphysical concepts of complexity and simplicity are having a fight and you are a space wizard. I see. Okay. Well, I think that’s all we need to know about that. So that’s good. Yeah, I did want to kind of make reference to the great Destiny 2 gun or craft beer quiz, Phil, that we ran on PC Gamer. This came up on the weekend, actually, because a friend of mine found one of them, which was albino frog warrior or something, which is a beer that he suggested to me for it because he’s like a beer head. That was fun. I feel like there’s probably a newer version of that to be done now. But yeah, do you have fond memories of that? I feel like we almost get Bungie to retweet it, but it didn’t work on mobile devices. I think the quiz embed didn’t work on mobile devices, so they wouldn’t put it in the This Week at Bungie blog post that they do this week. And it’s like, oh, that’s heartbreaking. That was a very good quiz. That was also a very difficult quiz. I think we really upped the difficulty there by including a both option by finding a bunch of craft beers that were just the same name as Destiny Guns. It’s like, yeah, this is proof that this quiz needs to happen and also that even Destiny fans won’t be able to do well at it. Yeah, that was it. It was Destiny to Exotic or Craft Beer. So he cheated a bit by throwing in like vehicles and really obscure stuff. But yeah, such a good idea. I feel like that’s the culmination of all the work I ever did on PC Gamer in some ways. So yeah, that was it. And to an extent, Andy Kelly’s obsession with the name Hepridian thought crime. Which is an actual real thing in Destiny, isn’t it? That is, it was a Destiny 1 ship, if I remember correctly. Yes. I do remember Andy bringing that up a lot. Yeah, good times. So I suppose before we get to the 2.5s, Phil, what do you see as the future of Destiny being beyond lightfall? It’s lightfall and the final shape, right? You say that there’s endless life in Destiny 2, and I think I agree with you. Destiny 2 is kind of a platform, isn’t it, in some ways now? So do you see a destiny beyond this, or do you think this is the way it should be now? So yeah, I think there is. I think, again, it seems clear that they’re continuing with Destiny 2, and so whatever comes after that will be a part of the game as it is currently. I’m kind of interested in where it will go. So, you know, I was being slightly glib with the top-line summary of the story. But one thing Bungie’s got really good at since, I think, the second season of Beyond Light onwards is kind of crafting a story that is centered less around kind of the big weird lore concepts and is more about applying those concepts to actual characters that you can, you know, grow to care about. So a lot of what they’ve done recently is kind of you have these forces of light, which is the complexity one, and dark, which is trying to whittle everything down to the universe’s final shape. And everyone is essentially being forced to pick a side, and that means we’re making allies out of factions that were previously enemies and stuff. So previously it was the Fallen and this guy called Mythrax who actually appeared right at the start of Destiny 2 in a random post-campaign mission where there was this one Fallen captain you could choose to kill or spare, which I think most players missed was even a choice and just instantly Nova bombed him the moment they saw him and before the dialogue had even played about, oh, we could let him go. But canonically, Guardians do let him go. And now he’s the leader of a faction that’s aligned with the city and the Guardians and Callus’ daughter is one of our allies now as well. And as of, yeah, season of The Chosen, where we sort of battle her forces for a right to be pals, essentially, which culminates in a strike that has some very audacious game show style flair for the final boss reveal in a way that suggests, this is definitely the daughter of Callus. Like she’s learned some showmanship. Yeah. So you’ve got all these characters kind of interacting in ways dealing with like the higher level stuff. But it’s also when your main story is based around, yeah, the two sort of primal concepts, it’s hard to see what the threat is after that. I mean, I assume this is a constant problem that like comic book writers and stuff are dealing with. It’s like once you’ve introduced and dealt with the biggest possible threat in the universe, how can you create a bigger possible threat? Multi-versus, Phil. That’s what multi-versus is. So maybe it’s multi-versus. I think there’s been some like speculation that maybe like will start to go beyond the solar system. There’s definitely been a lot of references about weird planets and Vex Homeworlds and stuff and things that we could see. So maybe there’ll be some of that, but maybe they will just double down on the fact that increasingly Destiny is moving towards this kind of ongoing, almost soap opera drama set in a universe with space magic and sad wizard Goths. Do you have to have all of the sort of season passes to see that content, Phil? Is it contingent on you having that investment in it? Yeah, to get the weekly stories, they’re sort of attached to each season. So right now we’re running through season of The Haunted, which is the one that Kalos returns for. And it’s about, it’s essentially season of therapy where Zavala and Crow, who’s a fairly recent addition to the cast, are dealing with and kind of fixing the haunted manifestations of their past regrets. Okay, I hate when that happens. That’s cool. Is it too much to ask how Kalos returns? Is that kind of a spoiler or is it best left for the game itself? It’s one of those tricky things where you can’t see Kalos in his original form. But did you play Presage last year? It was that haunted kind of Kabul ship full of scorn. No, I missed that, unfortunately. Oh, did you miss that one? That was great. It was like Kalos had disappeared with Leviathan and there was just this, you get this thing that’s just like, hey, there’s an abandoned Kabul spaceship that’s broadcasting a distress signal. Go and investigate. Oh, I think I did do this, actually. Is this where you briefly go into space when you’re floating around? Yeah, that’s right. There’s a little jumping puzzle around the outside of space for a bit. And then you’ve got to shoot a lot of spores to get through glowing doors. And also there are sort of creepy noises as you go through. And then it’s all the scorn and stuff appear and rush at you. And basically a lot where a lot of the factions are starting to ally with us because having lots of life seems better than having only one type of life in terms of where you want the universe to ultimately end up. Kalos is very much team, I will be the last thing in existence. Wonderful. He’s got more Kalos than ever. Okay, that’s great, I’m glad to hear it. All of this is teeing up to me playing a bunch more of it. I have had it reinstalled for a while, so I should get on that. So I can livestream a quest log to you. That would be good. Okay, cool. So yeah, I appreciate you talking me through the Destiny overview there, Phil. That was a great journey through the game’s history. We’ve got two top five lists here. So the first top five list is things to do in Destiny 2. So how did you go about assembling this? Well, so step one is only list things that are in the game right now currently. So if it was part of this, quote unquote, content vault, where they remove it because it’s not relevant or it’s not part of the sort of up-to-date current storylines, yeah, I decided not to put that in because it seems like a bad way to introduce people to the game by telling them, here’s all the fun stuff you could have won. Yeah, completely fair. And you’ve definitely picked some stuff here that I like. I’ve also, like, the worst version of this list I think would be if I just said, oh, here’s a top five list of things to do and three of them are raids. So I’ve kind of picked what I think is the best raid to experience under the category of this is the pinnacle of this type of thing and we can discuss other examples of that type of thing when we go through. Basically, I cheated so I could fit a lot of things that I want to talk about into a list of five things. That’s completely fair. So here we go with your number five here, Phil. My number five, because I had to have a controversial choice first, was Gambit, the video game mode Gambit. Not the most beloved mode by the subreddit, certainly. Possibly the community at large, I don’t know. I enjoy Gambit. It’s a good idea. It’s had its ups and downs, but to explain what’s happening here, basically, it’s kind of a race between two teams. You both load into different versions of the same map, and you’re just racing to kill the most things, pick up the glowing motes they drop, and bank them in a big tank. In doing that, you’ll mess up the other team. If you bank a certain number of motes, you’ll send a big enemy to their side that they have to deal with before they can bank motes. At certain points, when you bank enough, you get to invade them and try and kill them so they drop their motes. It’s advertised as PVPVE, which is… We need a better name for this type of thing. I do really like the concept of Destiny’s full PvP mode, like the Crucible, as it’s called. It can be a lot. Sometimes you don’t want to deal with directly competing against other players and their good aim when you’re in your late 30s. This is just, can I kill things faster than another team? Sometimes the answer is yes. I think a lot of where the complaints about it come from is that people will go into Gambit with vastly different expectations of how to play it, or they just want to invade the other team, which can be a great help, but can also be frustrating if you need somebody to do a different job in that moment. This is where matchmaking can… You can’t expect everybody that you matchmake with to have the same priorities as you, and you can potentially match against a team of people who are just chatting, and they have a huge advantage if they’re on comms, even if they’re not really taking it seriously, just being able to organise how you go about the objective is a huge advantage in a mode like that. Yeah, for sure. I always really enjoyed it. It seemed like genuine innovation as a multiplayer mode. They thought really carefully about how to do it. It’s like there’s two sets of people doing the same task. Then at some point, there is this almost perverse joy to going through that portal and then killing multiple people on their side and then coming back a returning hero or feeling a bit bad when you whiffed it. There’s such a visceral thrill to going through that portal. I don’t think you can call Gambit bad on that basis alone. I think, like you say, it’s had some ups and downs. How is it these days? Because I remember it seems slightly broken when Beyond Light came out. Is it in a good place now? This is probably unfair to say, but when Beyond Light came out, it felt like the balance changes they’d made to Gambit were done with the attitude of, well, if the community doesn’t like it, let’s just ensure it’s over quickly. So they cut down a lot of the complexity of it, and it just became this sort of panicked dash that didn’t give enough time for there to be the kind of upsets and turnarounds, like the thing where the other team, they summoned the final boss that they’ve got to defeat to actually win the mode first, but because of invasions and because of these other things, it used to be like you could have some really dramatic upsets in that phase, whereas post-Beyond Light, it just felt constantly like, if you summoned first, the damage problem, because of the way the seasonal mods and power worked at the time, damage wasn’t a problem. If you got it up first, you’d kill it first. That was it. And they’ve added a bit more complexity to that phase now, to the final boss phase, that does mean invades are a bit more impactful, and you can have turnarounds, and yeah, it’s helped. Like, I’m not playing it as much as I was back in the Forsaken days. And some of that isn’t actually about the way the mode destructed itself, as much as for the 30th anniversary release, Bungie released Gjallarhorn, which was a Destiny 1 rocket launcher, and they put it into Destiny 2, and that gun solves every problem that Gambit puts in front of you. Right, okay. If you want to kill trash mobs, Gjallarhorn is really good at that. It splits into wolf backgrounds that cover a big area and will kill lots of things. If somebody invades you or you’re invading them, Gambit solves it, Gjallarhorn solves it, sorry, because it’s a tracking rocket launcher that will home in on enemies. And if you need to do a lot of boss damage, Gjallarhorn is a pretty good choice. So all three potential problems that Gambit presents, Gjallarhorn can just solve. It’s a bit too versatile for a mode that previously kind of made its bread and butter on making you think about, OK, well, I want to be an invader, so I’ve got to have a very different loadout to say somebody else who is going to be rushing to get all the motes. Yeah, that makes sense for them. But yeah, I could see why that would be an issue. Do they still add content to it? Because that was the other problem, because it felt like they forgot about it on that level in terms of just the simple act of adding maps to it. I say simple, not simple, but you know, it felt like it got less care than some of the other parts of the game. Yeah, they’ve still not added anything new to it, really. I think they’ve talked a bit about looking at it, and they’ve at least restored a thing that it used to originally do, where there are like different patterns and types of enemies that can load into maps that now change on a seasonal basis. Apparently, when they changed Gambit, I think around Beyond Light or maybe even with Gambit Prime, it’s something broken, so it was sort of stuck on default settings, but they can mix up enemy patterns for what that’s worth. So for number four, I have picked specifically the Lake of Shadows version of the Grandmaster Nightfall. So what is the Grandmaster Nightfall for people who don’t know? Grandmaster Nightfalls are basically the hardest thing you can do in the game. Nightfalls are based on strikes, which are sort of three-player PvE activities. They’re sort of like extended missions, designed for three people, where you just go and kill a big boss or something. They are of wildly variable quality, and some of them have been in the game now for five years, and a lot of people are kind of sick of them. It’s a thing that, until recently, hadn’t seen much in the way of a shake-up. Witch Queen helped with that. It released two strikes itself, but also it took a bunch of the seasonal activity from one of the Beyond Light seasons and sort of turned it into strikes and put it in the game. So the playlist is a bit more varied now if you go into it. Nightfalls, though, are on a weekly rotation, and they have selectable difficulty, I think, at the lowest phase, which might be Hero. It’s essentially… It’s not much more difficult than the Strike version. But on Grandmaster, you are locked to, I think, 25 light levels below its difficulty. Right. So everything hurts. There are things that can effectively one-shot you if you don’t build to resist them. It’s meant to be… They changed the name of Nightfall to Nightfall the Ordeal. And so Grandmaster is meant to be the most ordeal that it can be. Which probably sounds quite off-putting, but the reason I put it there as a kind of aspirational thing, it gets to the heart of what I’m really enjoying at the moment when it comes to Destiny, which is the bit before we do anything where we’re just sat around thinking, okay, this is what we’re about to deal with. Before you go in, it gives you the set of modifiers, the ways that they tweak the difficulty for the harder challenges like Legend, Master and Grandmaster content. And the Grandmaster one is just huge. It’s an entire bar full of different modifiers that will all screw you over in some way. But you’re looking through and you’re looking at the types of shields that you’ll need to take down, the types of champions that require special mods to deal with and stuff like that. And it’s like a little puzzle for three people to solve. Of like, how do we make sure we are equipped with everything we need to get through this? Yeah, see, my memory of this is that you and Tom would tell me exactly what to put on my guns. I would go in and still be largely inadequate, but kind of bailed out by the two of you. So what is particularly special about Lake of Shadows out of those strikes? So the good thing about Lake of Shadows is it is one of the shorter ones. It’s also one of the easier ones. I felt a bit, I don’t know, it felt a bit much putting Grandmaster Nightforce as one of the top things to do in Destiny when it’s like, certainly if you’re getting started with the game, that’s deep, deep into the future kind of stuff. It’s a thing that you need to have a sort of expertise in a lot of its systems. You need to understand mods, you need to understand which weapons work for different situations and why. So for me, it’s sort of like, this is the expression of, you know, the hundreds slash thousands of hours I’ve put into this series over however many years. It’s like, OK, I can finally use this acquired knowledge for a thing that actually challenges me to think about exotic choices, weapon choices, mod choices, and with the new aspects of Fragment system, which is how you sort of construct your subclass, how to fit all that together into something that kind of makes the task easier. Lake of Shadows, then, is sort of the best entry point into that. The problem is it only runs certain seasons because each season they cycle between, I think, eight different nightfalls. I don’t think it’s up this season. There are some other easy ones. I think Insight Terminus is generally accepted to be pretty doable. But yeah, if you’re dabbling in the game and you see the Lake of Shadows is up on the nightfall schedule, that’s the time to test yourself a bit further. If you’ve been doing match-made versions or if you’ve been doing the low-level ones, then try Legend, try Master. It’s a good entry point into the next level of difficulty of the game. Yeah, I do think that something that I liked about doing Nightfalls of You and Tom is that it does give you that next layer of challenge. I think Destiny can risk becoming like breathing after a while where you don’t really think about the things you’re doing in front of you because you’re farming or you’re just, you know, inertly shooting enemies because you just happen to be in a place and so your brain switches off from it. And that makes you think about every movement in a way that, you know, turns it into a truly skill-based game, but in the combat sense rather than the coordinating yourselves in the kind of raid sense, you know. So, yeah, for sure, that’s a good one. Yeah, I mean, I guess the thing I’m not really taught about, yeah, is sort of, I guess what it is about Destiny that kind of scratches the itch in terms of wanting to put so many hours into it. And like, this seems like a good place to drop it. Like, yes, there is that kind of the sort of mindless churn phase where you’re just on a planet or you’re just doing like one of the seasonal activities or something for some decent guns. And, you know, you’ve got a podcast on, you don’t need to think about it. You’re just kind of enjoying a very tactile shooting system with a generous amount of bullet magnetism and aim assist that makes you feel good. But I guess the reward for all those hours are like for both the low level kind of farming or the low level seasonal stuff, doing bounties, doing little checklists like that, is that you start to build up a kind of library of both experience and tools, specifically weapons, but also armor and just general mods and things like that. It feels really good to be able to apply that to something that is like the complete opposite in terms of challenge and how much sort of focus and attention you need to put on it. Yeah, for sure. That is quite an extraordinary skill ceiling to it, really, when you think about it. Okay, that’s great, Phil. So what’s your number three? Number three is something you, Samuel, should be familiar with. It is Prophecy, one of a few dungeons that Destiny has. This is a fairly sort of new addition, I guess, in terms of the entire length of the series. Like, dungeons are for three people, whereas raids are for a full team of six. They’re kind of a little raid light. A bunch of encounters and bosses and jumping puzzles sort of strung together in, like, usually a unique sort of thematic location. Yeah, for sure. So you put Prophecy here. Are you pandering to me here, Phil, or do you truly believe this is the best one out of them? Is it five they’ve got in there now? Yes. Sorry, I’m just thinking yes, yes, yes. Yes, it’s five. A bit of both, I think. It’s hard. I think the fourth one, Grasp of Avarice, which is the one that came with the 30th anniversary pack, that is a very good dungeon to take people through the first time because it is Bungie absolutely doubling down on their kind of very dickish trap-based level design. They have real love of putting some loose rocks in the wrong place or just in a general, like the Whisper. I remember one bit of the Whisper jumping puzzle that just has a little bit of floor that’s crumbled away that makes it really awkward to get over and will definitely fuck people up the first time. Grasp of Avarice is them just celebrating that mentality. The opening section of it is just like, here are three doors, guess which one won’t kill you. I imagine that dims slightly on a replay. Eventually it becomes, as with all the dungeons, it just becomes a bunch of encounters that you’ve grown used to. You start to enjoy executing with a bit more skill, with a bit more grace and stuff. That’s why there are always challenges with dungeons and raids for doing them flawless or doing them solo. You start to build up this mastery that then pushes you towards different challenges. With Prophecy, for instance, we for some reason got it in our head that we should speedrun it in under 30 minutes. And we did it, right? We did do it, yeah. I love Prophecy because I think it does capture the kind of specific visual feel element of the raids in terms of you go to a place that doesn’t feel like any of the other locations in the game. This almost like prog rock looking sort of like purple desert with weird buildings around. And then this very strange kind of like racetrack that goes through these weird shapes and while you’re being sniped and you’ve got to try not to fall off the sides. And then this bizarre final room where you’re chasing this dude down the end of a corridor. Like the things it shows you are just so dreamy and they put so much effort into the soundscape and stuff. And like that applies to all of these. But that one really just sticks in the mind. I feel like I was noticing slightly different things about each time we did it. Or the ridiculous room, Phil, where you’re fighting on a different part of the ceiling or the side each time. Yeah, just kind of magic. What’s the…? Yeah, sorry, go on. So that is ultimately… I mean, yes, a bit of it was like… Maybe Samuel knows, obviously. We’ll pick that one. But part of it is also just like, of all the dungeons, that one is the most sort of out there in terms of design. In that conceptually, it’s designed as a conversation between the player and, I guess, a group of consciousnesses that are the representations of each of the planets in the solar system. And so I’ve got to a point where I can say all these things with a straight face, but the benefit of Bungie’s kind of everything in the kitchen sink approach to lore is that it does open them up for kind of weird and abstract and sort of suggestive design like this. Like that can fit into a thing that just has space, Mars from the future as well. Yeah, I must admit I missed the subtext of prophecy of what you described there. But certainly just that some of the kind of music cues that would kick in, we’d hear like kind of slightly weird kind of like opera singing in the background or just weird kind of vocals. And just so much effort was put into creating that sense of place. And like, I just like the idea that you could get a little taste of what the raids are like without having all those people and all that coordination and like setting a day aside. So yeah, that’s rad. What’s the most recent one like? Is that good? Yeah, I mean, the most recent one is called Duality. And it is very much based around Kalos. And again, it’s very thematic more than it is like a sort of extant space. And so essentially you’re sort of touring through representations of his past. Anyway, it’s cool. And actually, like Prophecy, it is surprisingly difficult in places as well. Like, it’s kind of weird, Grass of Varivorous kind of lulled me into a false sense of security a bit, because that’s a relatively easy one for Bungie’s dungeon design. But yeah, going into duality, it’s like, oh, yeah, no, there was a time when these were probably hard. Like Prophecy really kicked our ass at the beginning as well. Yeah, for sure. And then it just somehow got easier and easier. I don’t know. I don’t really know why. But like, I didn’t mind too much. But yeah, it was like, okay, this is the swords bit, so get your swords out. And like, we will take this one weapon into the final boss, and that’s fine. But yeah, no, that’s cool. A dungeon and Cala. So yeah, that’s bait, sir. That’s that work of me. Excited to talk about this one, your number two, Phil. What have you got here? So number two is, yeah, the Witch Queen’s legendary campaign. So yeah, we mentioned we’d be talking about the Witch Queen campaign. And that is because it’s like a surprising step up in quality from anything that Bungie has done before for Destiny. They sort of mentioned this and they hide it up before the Witch Queen was released. They were going around making comparisons to the new Doom games and other recent very good FPS campaigns. And part of me was like, yeah, okay, we’ll see. Because very little of what was done before, especially recently with Shadowkeep and Beyond Light, it was like for actual missions, you can make some very good things, but it always felt like there was only like three or four actual missions and a lot of it was padded out between stuff. And then, yeah, The Witch Queen came out and genuinely it is probably one of the best shooter campaigns I’ve played for certainly the last couple of years. Like in terms of, I mean, story, very good, like leans into some of the more, the weirder elements of Destiny’s background lore in a way that it always felt like Bungie was sometimes afraid of doing. It felt like, okay, for a single blanket campaign, we’ve just got to make this, we’ve got to make this the basic stuff for the normies to kind of deal with before we hide away like the weird sci-fi writing project in a law book that only the hardcore will bother collecting. Whereas here they’re just straight up like, yeah, no, this is an ancient race that made a deal with some worms and now must kill constantly, otherwise they will be eaten from within. And here is a character who represents why that might be a bum deal for them. Think about their feelings. That’s rad. So I think like a really good question to ask here is like, if you are a new player to Destiny and you pick up Witch Queen, maybe like a bundle, with some of the other expansions, will you recognize this as a great shooter campaign, even if you don’t have that deep background with Destiny itself? It is hard for me to answer that just because like… I’m in deep. So some of it is just like, man, this really surprised me, somebody who is used to not expecting much from Destiny campaigns. But also like I’ve put, you know, I’ve talked it up a lot. I’ve had, to the point where PC Gamer’s online editor, Fraser Brown, has checked it out. And Fraser is a person who is not shy of calling me out on my shit when it comes to Destiny. If I said this was a good campaign and when he played it, he thought it was bad. He would have let me know and he would have relished doing so as an excuse to call me out on talking about Destiny. But no, he also thought it was really good. Like the design of the levels, the encounter design, the surprises that just happened moment to moment. I also specifically called out the legendary campaign here because when I called out Grandmaster Nightfall earlier, it was like this is an aspirational thing. This is what you’re aiming for when you’re starting your Destiny journey. It’s like you are learning things for the point where you get to hear. I think for the legendary campaign, the way they’ve balanced it and the way that they don’t rely on champions, which require specific mods and specific knowledge of how certain things work to defeat efficiently. The legendary campaign is just a good, difficult campaign. Even if you’ve not got the best guns and even if you’re still learning what your powers do, it’s a great opening challenge. If what you like is not necessarily difficult Destiny encounters, but difficult shooter encounters, like if you like to challenge yourself with Doom Eternal’s campaign or whatever, that’s a good comparison in terms of difficulty. It will kick your ass, but as you learn how to get around it, you will gain a deeper appreciation of the systems that Destiny offers to overcome that kind of a challenge. That’s quite an interesting selling point. In terms of how it functions as a Destiny campaign versus other Destiny campaigns, is it more set PC, less set PC? Does it bend the rules of how Destiny traditionally does set pieces? Sometimes Destiny campaigns can just feel like a collection of enemies in an environment as opposed to feeling like they necessarily have a bespoke structure to them in a way that a Doom Eternal might. I don’t know, maybe I’m being a bit unfair there, but do you know what I mean? Like, Phil, this, you know, there’s some… Yeah, go ahead. It’s weird in that, in a sense, they’ve kind of templated things a bit more in terms of how they deliver the structure. Like, the way they have made the campaign now, and I assume will do in future just based on, like, A, the amount of programming it needed to, like, change a bunch of things in how campaigns operated, but B, like, how positive the reception to the Witch Queen campaign was. Like, I think this is the sort of template now. Campaign missions work more like dungeons now, in that you sort of go through the environmental stuff, you get the story, you kind of, yeah, have a few skirmishes with enemies, and then you’ll get to an area and you’ll see, like, one of the rally flag locations, and rally flags work by, they just refill all your ammo, they refill all your super, they just make sure you have maximum everything, and when they appear, you know, okay, this is an encounter that’s coming up. And campaign missions didn’t used to have those. That used to be, like, a raid thing, it was a dungeon thing. Now they’re in the campaign missions, like, they sort of flag to you, here comes the difficult part of this. They sort of, they exposed, like, how you pace a shooter level, essentially. But then you do it and you get a bunch of chests at the end, you get, like, mid-remission rewards, and then you’re off to the next thing. And so they’ve made it, they’ve sort of given you a peek behind the curtains. They’ve revealed, you know, they’ve shown a bit of artifice there, but also it means that they’ve done it in a way that now feels consistent with what you’re building towards, which is raids and dungeons and that kind of thing. It doesn’t feel like, here’s a campaign, after you’ve finished it, you will do a bunch of things that have no relation to how a campaign works. So in that sense, there is sort of a template, sorry. No, as I say, like, it just sounds like… I think, like you say, the rally flags always give, they always punctuate the different activities in the game. They do make them feel a bit eventy. So I like the idea of just outright telling the players something big is coming up. And then kind of owning that moment a little bit means that the burden is on them to make something exciting that comes after it. So that seems like a good thing, you know? Yeah, and there is Artifice there, you can see it. It feels a little less organic. But the benefit of that is like it’s very clearly telling you what to prepare for. And it means that they, I think they knew like, okay, if we’re doing rally flags, if we’re doing that, we have to then make like, even if it’s just a combat encounter, even if there’s not like a grand surprise, there’s like a few big surprising moments. Like there were moments I was like, holy shit. But even if it’s just a mid mission thing, they’ve come up with a good way to make it feel like a good weighty fight against some tough enemies in like, in ways that will challenge you. Oh, okay, rad. Right, okay, well, I have that installed. I’m going to play that right after this podcast because I do need to get back into that. So you and Tom can take me through all the cool shit I’ve been missing for the last two years. I will also say the soundtrack for The Witch Queen is on point. Destiny soundtracks, there’s usually a few good things, a few songs that will stick with you in each soundtrack, and usually it’s big moments, often in raids. There’s one in Beyond Light that plays during the jumping puzzle, which is out in space called Deep Stone Lullaby that everybody was raving about. I think Tim did a post on PC Gamer about that moment specifically. But The Witch Queen, vibes are impeccable. That’s fantastic. That’s also like a peak Tim Clark content there. A PC Gamer article about one track and of Destiny Raid. Okay, yeah, that’s one of the raids I haven’t seen, so interesting. Okay, so last up then here, Phil, you’ve got your number one. Hit me with your number one. So I think it had to be a raid, and so I’ve picked The Last Wish. Right, yeah. So this is the one where you could cheat through it by battering a guy in the head with a sword, is that right? Or no, battering a foot with a sword, is that right? You could batter a foot with a sword, yeah. So one of the downsides to The Last Wish is that players very quickly work it out. The final boss, which, I mean, it’s been out for a while, I think I can spoil the reveal, but it’s against a large dragon that grants wishes. And you can dispatch it by, instead of doing the mechanics, just sort of hiding in a room, hoping that the boss turns up at the right step of her cycle, and then throwing every sword you have at her foot until you DPS enough to get to the next stage. I am sort of robbing it of some of its majesty there, though, Phil. A little bit, I feel. Because it is extraordinary in terms of visual design, and I don’t think any step in it is necessarily bad either, whereas some of the raids do creep over to that bit. So do you want to explain what the kind of structure of it is? Yeah, so it’s essentially a bunch of… It follows on a lot of story steps from The Taken King, which is when Oryx, who was one of the Hive Gods, corrupted a bunch of enemies and turned them to his own faction. And then it turns out also did it to this secret Awoken City, which was the hidden destination in Forsaken that I mentioned earlier. And attached to that was the raid, which takes place across this city, and you’re basically just cleaning up a lot of messes left over from that and trying to break in to the vault to, it said pretty explicitly at the start, to kill the last Ahamkara, which is one of these dragons. And so you know you’re building up to that moment, but the way they sort of execute it, and especially like the final third, when you’re sort of breaking into the vault and then you get the reveal of the boss, which is a great moment in itself. You sort of stand on a bunch of platforms around a room and they just drop in. And then even people who know sort of what they’re getting, even people who have explained like what the boss will be, they see it as they drop down and think, oh shit, because you sort of realize, oh, that’s what we’re fighting. Okay, that’s going to be a lot to deal with. And then you have to essentially carry her heart back through half of the raid again in a section that can be quite grueling, if I remember the first time we all did it. Yeah. So it is like, so you step on the place and then you drop down into this, it’s like a dark kind of circular hall, is that right? And then it’s just there in the shadows and it’s just gigantic. Coiled around this pillar, yeah. Yeah, that is quite the reveal, yeah. Amazing. I think the thing that really bamboozled me about this one is there’s a lot of symbol shooting in specific bits that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around that element of it. But like, yeah. I think this might be the first one where Bungie really relied on giving you a bunch of pictures that all looked kind of similar and made you have to impart the information of which one you were looking at to a completely different team who couldn’t see it. And that is a tried and true raid design trick that they’ve come back to again and again, including in the most recent raid, Vow of Disciple, where there are even more symbols. And they’ve tried to get around that by giving them all official names. Like when you go into the raid, you can sort of look at this gallery of all the symbols you’re about to deal with. And if you walk up to them, it will say in the top corner what their official name is. And obviously nobody remembered the first day or even bothered to learn them. So you just end up with the most like ridiculous call outs. I think we were just shouting out, oh, I’m looking at Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon because I decided one of the symbols looked a bit like the cover to that album and refused to not say its full name every time. Yeah, that’s fair. I think like the example of this I always remember is like there was a dog or a wolf or something like that in maybe it was in Leviathan. Yes. And like there would just be like someone would say the most obscure term for like a dog possible. And then the worst one there for Leviathan. And this was this is the thing that Tom Hatfield is still annoyed that I won’t let him live down. So I’m sure he’ll be most pleased that I’m bringing up in a podcast now is that I think we were calling one of the call outs Cup for the entire time. And at one point he decided to call it Chalice and everybody’s minds broke because it had been hours. And we were trying to we were still trying to like process what we were doing. And then suddenly this different call out just completely broke us. And then it became all the whole thing went wrong. Yeah, he did nothing wrong. Like he was technically probably more correct. I think he’s correct. I think it is called Chalice officially. But it was the moment. It was like just not now, Tom. Kind of like yeah, that was that was extraordinary. Yeah. So the raids are kind of like just sort of like magic in themselves. Like they they do require true commitment. They are like a thing to build up to. You do need five other people, so they’re demanding in that respect. There’s no matchmaking, right? So it’s always like and even if it did, it wouldn’t help probably. I picked last wish knowing it probably wasn’t your favorite of the raids that we experienced and also not really knowing if you even had a good time when we were doing raids a lot of the time. Oh, no, I love them. I love them and I really miss them. And like I, I worried that I wasn’t good enough and I was kind of annoying the other people a little bit. And but no, I had a great time doing the raids. I mean, a bit in my head, I do kind of box them off a bit as like pandemic era activities. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like I think, yeah. There was a real, there was a real like, there were kind of moments where I’d get a sense of how, how everyone’s mental state was going at that time based on like, how long you had been muted specifically. Oh, dear. Yeah. I was probably just going through a rough time. No, I genuinely enjoyed them. And you know what? Like, I consider it like, it sounds dumb, but a great privilege to have seen them, because there are so many people who will play Destiny who will never see those raids and will get to experience them the way that I experienced them. And so the fact that I got to go through them with people who knew what they were doing and were very patient and explaining things to me and other people who couldn’t listen to commands properly. No, it’s just it was pure magic. Like it’s that’s kind of why I always use the magic of Destiny is like the peak of FPS design is in there somewhere. You just have to stick with it long enough to you find it and be lucky enough to know people are playing it basically. Yeah, I mean, it’s difficult to be sort of taught around like what is Destiny Raids do a bit. I think just because we’re sort of sharing memories and commiserating about old times, like the time we were really good at Crown of Sorrows and everybody else kept messing up that boss, but we had it on point for hours. That was infuriating. Bad waste of a Sunday that for a corporate year. Yeah, I just looked up on Steam, 7.2% of the player base have the achievement for completing Last Wish, which is… It doesn’t surprise me. For one thing, raids need six people and it can be difficult to get six people together. And it really is much better to experience it with people that you know than like randoms, as you’ve met on an LFG Discord or whatever. Although I will call out the Destiny 2 subreddit. I think it’s Raid Sherpas. Let me check. I’ve used them a lot. And a lot of the people I’ve met through there are just like really good at explaining the encounters and really patient with everybody. And like if you don’t have people to play the game with and you are interested in it, I sort of feel bad for calling out the community earlier in terms of obnoxious posts that get me annoyed on a subreddit. Because there are a lot of people who are just like really eager to help you learn and enjoy the game. So yeah, the subreddit is just r slash Destiny Sherpa. I used it a couple of times to get through our first clears of Deep Stone Crypt and the most recent one, Vow of the Disciple, we found some of that. And both of them were really positive experiences. So if you are interested and you want to know where to look, that’s one place. I’m sure there’s some discords as well that are dedicated to helping people out. There are some really useful community tools. Yeah, that is the strange thing about them. They are kind of like a weird mix of FPS and puzzle, right? And each one is kind of like a challenge. You have to kind of figure out exactly what you do. Usually there’s some kind of cycle built into how they work. Like it’s repeating a thing over and over and optimizing, you know? There are a few design tropes that Bungie likes to rely on. One of them is like weaving players between different stages of an encounter. So you’ve got to do multiple jobs like in a different order or calling out certain things. Or two teams that have to coordinate with themselves before coordinating with each other at the same time in a way that just makes comms really messy. I suspect they design these encounters to be like, what does a really elegant version of this fight look like? And how can we stack on a couple of extra mechanics to just make it chaotic? The worst one for that is the final boss of Garden of Salvation, which I think is a constant panic attack for two hours, essentially, as you figure out and slowly get towards doing it. But it can never feel comfortable because you’ve got multiple teams essentially playing gambit to the side of you while every platform you’re standing on disappears and you have to try and rebuild it while everybody is shouting at you because things are going wrong for them as well. And how you respond to that pressure and the fact that everything is going wrong all the time is kind of a good benchmark for how much you’ll enjoy raids, I think. Yeah, for sure. It was like a kind of reappropriation of… It reminded me a bit of magazine stress, but just in a different format, where I was asked to do something a bit different. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, good times doing those. The more recent ones, top notch too, Phil, am I missing out on some good ones there? Yeah, so I really like Valor the Disciple. Part of it is that, yes, it does have a lot of ridiculous callouts, but also, so this was a slightly different one for us because me and a couple of friends found three other people and we tried to do it on day one during contest mode, which is like a harder difficulty that they implement to try and stop like, essentially to stop streamers from getting a head up on everyone by over-leveling for the encounters, just to make the sort of raid race on day one a bit more fair, a level of playing field a bit. So we attempted it and we did solve a couple of the encounters ourselves, like we figured out what we were doing, and that was quite gratifying because sometimes, especially if you’re coming to them late, like hearing the explanation of what you’ve got to do to complete a particular raid encounter, sometimes you do end up thinking, how did anybody figure this out? And yeah, being a part of that process was kind of cool, but also because it was contest mode, like I think we failed on the second encounter just because it was a very heavy DPS check and a lot of the group that we were with just didn’t have like the weapons at the time to deal with it. A lot more forgiving now. We’ve since done it and it’s not easy, but it’s really interesting. Visually, it’s such a cool space as well. It’s like inside one of the pyramid ships that appeared in Arrival. And yeah, just like this wild art gallery, essentially, from this strange collector that you have to eventually battle and defeat. That sounds like some classic Destiny bullshit. Oh yeah. That’s good. Yeah, I do want to see that. It is really funny that you kind of measured how the raids were going and how long I’d been silent on the comments. I actually didn’t realize you were doing that. Only because I often fell into the role of explaining the raid to everybody. So I kind of felt like I had to be raid dad and make sure everyone was having a good time. I’ve recently started going through them again with a bunch of people from the PC Gamer office, because there were a few people who were playing, but were playing on their own or had played in the past and had fallen off. So we got a team together. So I did Last Wish a couple of weeks ago with them. And it was very much the similar thing of like, okay, who’s not spoken for a while? Well, it’s Fraser, of course. But we’re getting through it. He’s not complaining. We’re getting through it. It’ll be fine. That’s good. This is the ultimate test of you as a manager, I think, on PC Gamer. That was a good tactic by me to take my usual management juices and apply them to the video games I play. That’s great. So last up then, Phil, we’re going to do the top five guns in Destiny 2. So you’ve got an honorable mention here when we get to the top five. I suppose, what’s your criteria for a good gun in Destiny? This was difficult, Sam. This one hurt. Because I feel like if you asked me on any particular day, I could have come up with a completely different list. Don’t tell me you picked your number one just to pander to me. No, no, no. I think that is pretty much a lock, regardless, because I love it. It’s one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in a first-person shooter, so that is fair. But yeah, go ahead. So the criteria, again, I wanted to focus on a mix of exotics and legendaries. I didn’t want it all to be exotics, because I think you’d be surprised how much of your fondness for guns in Destiny isn’t about the wild perks that exotics have. It’s about the workhorses that you take with you to every encounter. I also wanted to make sure there were a couple of guns from this year’s stuff, like post-Witch Queen, because again, I could have probably filled the list with guns that I earned back in Season of Arrivals, but a lot of them are quite hard to earn now, or quite hard to grind a good role for, because they’re just part of the general… I think they’re not even part of the general world loop. I think you can only get them when Xur sells them. So it’s like, we’ll focus on things that you can actively get and I’m enjoying at the moment. Okay, cool. So what’s your first honorable mention here? So, saying all that, I did want to give an honorable mention to the gun that broke the video game, essentially, that made them with Beyond Light come up with the entire plan of sunsetting guns so that you couldn’t infuse them up to current power levels so they would essentially have to be retired once they hit a certain point. So this is the gun Recluse, which was one of a few of what were called pinnacle weapons that you would earn from Shadowkeep onwards. No, from Forsaken onwards. A bunch of these, they used to be one for Strikes, one for Crucible and one for Gambit. And so many of them ended up essentially breaking the game. Recluse, SMG with a perk that meant that if you got a kill from any weapon, that gun would then do more damage for like 15 seconds or so. So that’s just, it’s like Rampage, which is one of the perks that many weapons can get, but just much, much stronger. There were a bunch of these, like Mountaintop was a grenade launcher that would fire exactly in a straight line. It had no arc to it, so it was just very easy to use and became a terror in PvP, but was also just one of the strongest guns for anything you could do in the game. It did a lot of blast damage, and so both Recluse and Mountaintop were PvP pinnacle weapons that were desirable in basically anything you do. They would get you through raids, they would get you through anything, and that made a lot of people quite mad because they were forced to play PvP and do well at PvP in some instances to get the strongest gun for every activity in the game. Wow, okay, yeah, that’s… Yeah, I could see there being some issues there. Pinnacles, yeah, were ultimately retired because… Yeah, they just… Each one had a unique perk, essentially, and that just meant they were often the best version of that archetype in that slot and were legendaries, so didn’t even take up your exotic pick. Okay, it was unsustainable. Yeah, that’s like sheer madness, really, when you lay out like that. Yeah, that’s not even an exotic. Okay, yeah, playing with fire, really. Okay, but that’s good. But you’re kind of like you’re yearning for a time that was there with that engine. I did… The one thing that I wanted to happen when they announced Sunsetting and said that, okay, going forward, because of what we did with these guns, any future guns you earn will only be relevant for years. I kind of wanted them to bring pinnacle weapons back. It’s like, okay, well, if you’re going to take them away from… If you’re going to take the toys away from us eventually, at least let us have some really absurd stuff. And also I kind of had to call it out because I have like over 21,000 kills on my recluse. It was basically equipped constantly for a year of my time with the game because it was just that good. So, yeah, it was a moment in time that had to end, but what a moment in time it was. Yeah, I think it’s beautiful because it last fell. Exactly. That’s good. So what’s your number five here? So my number five is a bow called Under Your Skin, which is one of the newer ones. It’s from last season, season of The Risen, which it’s worth picking out because I think it’s a good example of what you can do with the new crafting system that is in Destiny. So this is the first crafted weapon that I put a bunch of time into because I saw its perks. I knew exactly what I wanted. So bows work based on the draw time. A lot of bows have varying degrees of draw time and that is just how quickly you can fully charge an arrow before firing it off. There are a couple of perks for under your skin specifically that mean if you get a kill with it, it just supercharges your draw time and you can just fire off subsequent arrows super quickly. So there’s perks like archers tempo and successful warm up just pair really well together to really bring it down and it becomes absurdly fast firing if you land a precision headshot. And when I saw that it came with that, I was like, okay, that’s, I absolutely want that. It’s probably not even the best version of the bow in terms of pure damage because it’s got things like explosive head that I think the community loves, stuff like that. But it’s like, no, this is a specific role I definitely want. I can’t be bothered to like grind endlessly for it. So yeah, I’ve crafted one up and I’ve got, you know, the kills are getting up to the thousands now because it is just a lot of fun. The reward for getting like a precision kill just being this constant like tempo of fast firing shots. Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s like I never felt like I could fully click with bows in Destiny because they just never got, I mean, like they were nicely, they look nice and everything, but they never quite had the heft of using some of the other guns and like that counted against them in my head. Like even when they were good, they felt a little bit weak. But it sounds like this is this like kind of gets around that just by its very nature. Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah. So what’s your number four, Phil? So for number four, I have picked out, technically I’ve picked out two exotics that I was debating. I think the official one that I’m picking for number four is Exotic Grenade Launcher with a horde. So this is probably one of the more unique weapons in the game in terms of rather than shooting a grenade, it shoots like a ball of gribbly corruption. If you hit an enemy with it, it will just do damage over time to it. But also you can hit it on the floor, just fire it at the floor, and it will leave a pool of the stuff there that will just last for a bit. And it’s really good for area denial. It’s in a lot of use in PvP. Bungie recently introduced Rift back as a game mode, which is from Destiny 1, which is all about taking… It’s essentially a capture the flag type thing. You go and grab a ball from the center, and you’ve got to dunk it in your opponent’s rift back by their flag. And boy, does Witherhoard get a lot of use there, because it’s just great for blocking a doorway or other bits of area denial. Anything that has that kind of utility and kind of unique use case and also does a decent chunk of damage is going to be well loved. Yeah, this gun was like permanently in my inventory because it would just solve so many problems for me. It’s a great no-skill gun. You’re like, OK, I’m bad at this, but I’ll just plonk this on the ground, walk off, and three dudes will very slowly die from attritional damage. And that’s fine as a contribution. And also the fact that you could take it into the PvP and you just run into these witherhorn zones constantly. It’s messy, but also quite fun, and fun, definitely fun when it happens to other people. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. As an AOE kind of weapon, it was, oh, it’s terrific. Is this still in the kind of, like, rotation? Do you still use this and enjoy this, Phil? Oh, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, it is. So if anything, I don’t know why I want to say it’s better now. It has some really good use cases now in the… Because they’ve reworked a couple of the light-based elemental classes, and they’ve reworked them to focus on a bunch of keywords. One of the keywords for void elements is devour. And what devour does is if you get a kill, it basically just instantly restores your health up to maximum. And if you get lots of kills, it will just keep restoring it on a timer, as long as devour is up. Every time you kill something, your health goes back. Witherhood is great for that, because you just leave a pool down into where a bunch of enemies are about to run over, and it will do the job for you. And you’ll just be running away, and your health will just keep refreshing itself over and over again, because things are running into your Witherhood pool. It’s really good for the new dungeon, where there are a lot of cabal dogs and they are constantly biting at your ankles. I do like the idea of newer Destiny mechanics, augmenting previous existing guns. That’s quite cool as an idea. Yeah, as their best, Bungie is really good at designing these things to sort of support each other. The problem is, there are instances where they haven’t done that, and you especially see that with Solar right now, which is the one they reworked this season, where it introduced or it defined certain behaviors as keywords. So instead of burning, you have scorch is the keyword, and it’s just a burn over time effect. And if you apply enough scadacs of scorch to something, you get incinerate is the keyword, and that’s just an explosion. The problem is there are still guns and like exotics that do burn as just a generic effect called burn that doesn’t apply to the scorch keyword. And there’s still things that cause solar explosions when you kill things with them, but they’re not incinerate explosions. So currently they’re in this weird system where there’s like two different concepts that do the same thing, one of which is supported as an official keyword, and so it ties into all this work they’ve done to codify a bunch of systems. But also the uncodified versions still exist in some cases. So probably some work to be done there. Yeah, this is why they have to vault content, essentially, because there’s already loads of work to maintain what they have. Again, I also wanted to give a quick honourable mention while talking about Wither Horde to its sort of heavy, exotic partner, Anarchy, which is another amazing fire and forget sort of weapon that did electric damage over time and that you earned from the Scourge of the Past raid. I think we repeated the end of that raid over and over again so different people we played with could get their own. That was the one we farmed and I’m glad we did because not long after that, Bungie introduced a seasonal mod called Breaching Clear. I can’t remember which season it was available for, but it essentially meant every tick of Anarchy did escalating damage. It was so absurdly strong. They don’t really do these kinds of archetype-based damage mods anymore. I think it’s because things like Breaching Clear kind of solved the game for a little bit. So this was one way you fire it in two places and basically create like an electric trap. That’s kind of what you did with it, right? Or multiple places and then you just created a network of traps. The way you could do it was create this sort of network of trip wires that pulse electricity. But the way it was usually used was you’d just fire it twice at a boss. And so the trip wire would exist on the boss and just do all the damage to that one target. Oh, yeah, so good. Such a lovely looking gun as well. Just a preposterous, spiky, but functional looking thing. Just great. What’s your number three, Phil? My number three is Fatebringer. So this is a gun with quite a bit of history in Destiny. It was one of the most aspirational guns from year one when Vault of Glass was released. That’s because, as I said a while back, in Destiny 1, kinetic primary guns were all kinetic. They didn’t do elemental damage, except for a few Vault of Glass primary weapons, including Fatebringer, which did arc damage and so was just the best possible thing you could have. The best hand cannon you could have for like Nightfalls and that kind of stuff where it’s difficult enough that you need to care about what shields enemies have. So recently, they brought Vault of Glass back last year into Destiny 2 and they’re going to keep doing that. So Vault of Glass came back last year and it looks like next season they’ll bring back another Destiny 1 raid as well. Most likely King’s Fall, the Taken King raid, but potentially the one from Rise of Iron, which I think was called Wrath of the Machine. That’s one I’ve never done. So I kind of hope it’s that one, although I would be excited to see King’s Fall again. That’s cool. But yeah, so Fatebringer is back in Destiny 2 and you can get a special version that has the Firefly perk, which is… So this is a Destiny 1 trait. When you kill something, it just makes it explode with big solar damage, not incinerate, just a solar explosion. But it came back in Destiny 2 as Dragonfly, which wasn’t as good. So for the Vault of Glass weapons, they bought back Firefly again specifically. And it’s basically the hand cannon I’m using for everything right now. It is the V-Gun to do Vault of Glass for, especially if you can do the master version and get this time-lost version of it, which takes special mods. But even if you can’t, a good Fatebringer role will serve you well. I’ve been using a lot for about 6,000 kills now, looking at my list. That is a tasty looking gun as well. What a lovely little thing. Oh yeah. That is beautiful. Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, so Destiny has a very long list of exotic and special hand cannons. It’s very much a hand cannon game. I very much considered like Thorn, which used to be a Terror in Destiny 1, Crucible, it’s still a really good gun for Crucible in Destiny 2. A bunch of other hand cannons like Hawkmoon and The Last Word. But yeah, I think a Fatebringer, it’s a good legendary pick. It will just, again, a quality workhorse weapon. I do also like the idea that there’s a lot of stuff in Destiny that’s now so old, they can bring it back round, and there’s a nostalgia factor for an old gun, essentially. Oh, absolutely, yeah. It’s really got that kind of… I think it’s because they do a very good job of coming up with good special concepts for a lot of these guns or just good designs. And hand cannons especially, the community loves a 140 RPM hand cannon. There’s probably more of them than there are any other archetype of guns in the game. Yeah, yeah, that’s cool. So what’s your number two? Number two, so this is from the new dungeon. It’s called Storm Chaser. So this is absolutely just the best heavy pick that you can have this season. Linear Fusion Rifle’s really had a moment a couple of seasons ago in the season before Witch Queen’s launch, which was an extra long season. It was like six months season of the last because Witch Queen was delayed. That had yet another one of these damage mods that basically meant Linear Fusions were doing absurd amount of damages, absurd amount of sort of escalating damage based on the number of hits she took. But in addition to that, they were also buffed a bit. And so they’ve just been strong heavy weapons, even though that mod no longer exists. Storm Chaser comes out, and I guess because it needs to stand out from the pack, it does a burst of three shots. And currently that just means its damage output is exceptional. There’s, you know, it’s not a gun that I’ve got, you know, the longest history with. I only earned a good version a couple of weeks ago, but you know, already it’s taken me through most of the raids I’ve been doing with the PCG team. It has been with Storm Chaser at my side, because it’s like this will be a nice burst of damage to help us get through things a little bit easier. Remind me what a linear fusion rifle does in Destiny, Phil. A linear fusion rifle just fires a big laser in a straight line. Oh, yeah, that’s nice. So it’s slightly different from the regular strip fusion rifles, which are special weapons that do sort of this burst fire, usually in a vertical pattern. Still very good, like a lot of good fusions. But linears, like the best one by far is called, in terms of design more than damage necessarily, is called sleeper simulant, which is an exotic that does this like very hefty red laser that then refracts back when it hits into multiple shots that do reflected damage. That is preposterous. But this is a beautiful looking thing, this. Yeah, so this is the current king, and a good reason to sort of grind out the new dungeon a few times to get a decent roll of this baby. I don’t know how they keep on just making these designs look so tasty after all this time, like so… Yeah, they match to keep that. All of the duality guns like that, they’ve got this sort of nice kind of red flecked obsidian look to them. Yeah, really good stuff. Yeah, very nice. So you’re number one, Phil, familiar to me. I’m number one. I’m sure there’s like a lot of potential options here people might have been expecting, especially because I’m going with newer weapons or useful weapons now. Things like Arbalest, which is basically the default pick for a lot of high level content. But nope, I’m going with a personal favorite, which is Izanagi’s Burden, a special sniper rifle that you can essentially overcharge with a four bullet round to do just massive damage. Yeah, just the nicest thing I’ve ever fired in a first person shooter, I think. And makes a preposterous noise when you charge it up, right? That’s the thing, the ritual of it is what just makes it the best gun in the game. Like this thing of, you pull it out, you hold the reload key and you just get the satisfying reload animation as you stuff this sort of overcharged round in. And then yeah, there’s a sort of cacophonous funk of firing it. Yeah, it’s like a blade kind of sound it makes. Like, I don’t know, just the sound of metal basically. And then like, yeah, and then just the noise. And also just an absolutely gorgeous looking thing as well. Like all of the weapons that came from the Forge were like this, right? Like just these really ornate looking kind of, they just look like these boss guns that were kind of like the peak of what the game had to offer, you know? Yeah, just a really nice thing. Yeah, so this was what you were grinding out Forges for a long time before. Worth it. I can’t imagine you regretted that decision once you got hold of it. I’m actually really hoping. So yeah, a lot of the Season of the Forge weapons were kind of a victim of the sunsetting. So I’ve got a couple of them. Like I’ve still got my Hammerhead Machine Gun, which I loved dearly. Oh yeah, that was great. It’s still in the vault. I don’t really break it out much because again, sunset weapons cannot be infused. So you can’t really take them into anything except the most basic stuff these days. But this season, they have bought back a bunch of the Menagerie Weapons from the season of the Opulence. So I really hope that at some point they’ll be bringing some of these ones back, Hammerhead and stuff like that. Yeah. But in lieu of them, you can still get, I think it’s a Nagi’s burden because the forges are no longer around. I think you just buy it from a kiosk now with some random materials. Yeah, that almost feels like it should, I think it’s like a lot of materials to get it right. Like it’s not like an inconsequential purchase. I think it is unless you have, unless you buy the, what was it? The Forsaken something or other pack. There’s a little pack that basically gives you a heads up on all the Forsaken exotics that aren’t available through normal means anymore. I think that’s one of them. Gotcha. I think I’ve just been protective because I’ve put so many hours into getting it myself. This is the thing. You sort of build up a relationship with the effort you go through. And now these people come in and they can just, just earn it from a kiosk. It was the ultimate. Just a transaction. Yeah, it was the ultimate FOMO for me because I just saw, I could hear you and Tom using it every time. And then like sometimes I would hear the clinkers you both like did the charge shot once and then like the two shots in a row. And I was like, what am I going to do? Not have this? Like, yeah. Yeah, if you just see two people fire an Izanagi’s Bird and you just see like this pretty beefy champion instantly destroyed, you’re like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that’s good. Well, a great pick for number one, Phil. Well, that’s awesome. So yeah, I hope they bring it back too. But thank you so much for joining me and talking about this stuff, Phil. Oh, it’s been a pleasure. As you can clearly see, I am happy to talk about Destiny for a long time. Yeah, it’s great. Like I thought, okay, well, I’ll try and fit this inside 90 minutes. Didn’t happen. That’s absolutely fine. Oh yeah, God. No, we worked loads in, but I really appreciate your time. So thank you. I’m sure we’ll have you back on again. We are like, incidentally, going to do another Hitman episode. So if you do want to come on that one, like. Oh, awesome. Yeah, did you, do you manage to fit Hitman, much Hitman 3 in around your live service games these days or? So I played like a decent chunk when it came out and I need to go back and sort of catch up with a bunch of things. I don’t think, I just don’t think I’ve got the, the sort of time or necessarily the mentality for the like speed run races we used to do back in the day. The leaderboard races that we got really into in Hitman 2. I think that’s, I think those days are behind me. Yeah. No, I really, I really love that game. That was just a bit of like Black Friday PTSD, I think. It manifested some weird ways, doesn’t it? It really does. Like either foolish purchases or like foolish life choices basically. But yeah. Okay, great stuff. Where can people find you on social media, Phil? I mean, technically they can find me on Twitter at Octada, that’s O-C-T-A-E-D-E-R. Although I will warn everybody, I don’t actually tweet that much. It tends to just be a rant about a Destiny thing every three months and maybe a Yakuza retweet. I still think that’s well worth consuming when it does happen, personally. And your work can be found at PC Gamer occasionally, I’m guessing, Phil, as the big boss man. Yeah, yep. PC Gamer, both in the magazine and on the website sometimes. Awesome. Yeah, and the podcast can be followed at Back Page Pod. We have a Patreon, patreon.com/backpagepod if you’d like to support the podcast. I will offer Phil 40 pounds after this call that he can go and spend on some Destiny 2 silver if he wants to, that’s up to him. But you know, if it’s underground, Phil, you don’t have to declare it as additional earnings. That’s how we do things on this podcast, transparent accounting. I’m Samuel W. Roberts and thank you very much for listening. Matthew will be back next week as we return to the Games Court format that has no nutritional value, as he says. So look forward to that. Thank you very much for listening. I’ll be back next week. Goodbye.