#ths writeups

they actually establish a couple supporting characters, more security guards and scientists, which is nice. in the original game it was basically just dr rosenberg, so more named characters is a good change imo. feels like you're actually rallying people together to fight your way out of black mesa.

a weird thing this mod does is take away player control sometimes. i can understand it for specific sequences, like when the elevator crashes at the beginning or when you first teleport into xen, but it also does it for some mundane things too, like inserting a keycard into a switch. why? half-life's whole thing is letting the player be in control the whole time.

the first few chapters are well paced, but it starts feeling like its padding a bit when you go off to find dr rosenberg. you have to do this whole song and dance moving a train back and forth and turning it around properly on turntables to bust him out. they could have cut out some of the tedium there a little.

my problems really start when it comes to the xen chapter. the original blue shift xen chapter lasts for roughly 30-40 minutes for a first time player, though someone like me was able to speed through it in under 15. with the black mesa mod, they have stretched out the runtime of this chapter to 3 hours.

it starts off pretty strong, you're making your way through xen, taking in the sights and finding all the stuff the previous science teams have left behind. about 90 minutes in i was wondering when i'm gonna get to the focal point relay thing, the whole reason calhoun goes to xen in the first place.

but instead you keep detouring through black mesa outposts and alien factory things and it just gets so long in the tooth. it'd be one thing if you get to one of these places and you're there for 5-10 minutes at most, but you typically spend over 20, sometimes even 30 minutes at these places.

there's one bit where you inexplicably decide to jump on the back of one of the giant flying manta rays and it flies around for like 15 minutes like an autoscroller section until it gets shot down by alien railguns, and then you spend 30 minutes making your way over to and destroying the railguns. and the whole time i'm just like... when are we getting to the focal point thing.

so finally you get to the focal point relay and turn it on but it gets jammed by a signal so you spend another 40 minutes blazing through ANOTHER alien factory so you can blow it up and you make your way back to the focal point thing and the portal's open but alien controllers keep telekinetically grabbing you and yanking you away from it... and it's just so exhausting. i got burned out.

not to mention the weirdness with how they handle vortigaunts. so in black mesa they do this whole thing in xen to show that the vorts are slaves and don't actually want to fight you, but calhoun never encounters any of that stuff. for the first 2/3rds of xen in this mod, vortigaunts are constantly trying to kill you non-stop. then all of a sudden they don't attack you anymore. why? because i, the player know they're not really bad? why would calhoun know that? it doesn't really make sense to me.

this game really sucked me into it. i've said it before but you can tell the developer has had brainworms about this world and setting for at least a decade, if not longer. it blends exploration, world-building, and doom-style action very well. i spent 30 hours going through the whole game again, since i had only played the first part previously.

hedon was a lot longer than i expected. this is going to sound a little weird, but i had to step away from the game a couple times, not because it was bad or dipped in quality, far from it. game has a pretty consistent quality the whole way through. but it was almost like too much of a good thing? like eating an oversized easter rabbit chocolate. you're sitting there munching your way through it, enjoying the experience, but at some point you just have to put it down and return to it later, lest i get sick of it and never come back. i didn't want to just blitz through it and get it over with either, like i said i was enjoying my time.

if i had one true criticism, it'd be the inventory system. it's hexen-style, so all your items are just in a list in the order you acquired them. there are at least a dozen usable items alongside the myriad of quest-specific items which all sit in the same inventory, which makes cycling through them in the middle of combat very cumbersome. you can assign hotkeys to all of them, but good luck remembering which keys are which items. the only two i remembered the keys for were the healing potions and the time stop crystal. hedon really could have benefited from overhauling the inventory system, whether it's making it a wheel or having two inventories, or something. i understand that'd be a pain in the ass to do in gzdoom, but it would have been a worthwhile investment. oh and the whole squad system is a little jank. no specific controls for your squad, just press use on them to make them stay or follow. they are supposed to teleport to you if they fall too far behind, but sometimes they just don't, usually because they got stuck on level geometry.

rest of the game is just a great time. guns shoot good, plot is enthralling, good characterization for a game with no voice acting or visual character emoting, environments are fun and interesting to explore, world sucks you into it.

itadori is a weird protagonist because while he's very strong, he almost never wins. any time he fights a villain with something at stake, even if he wins the fight or he's on the verge of winning the fight, he loses the battle in a manner of speaking. the villains are always two steps ahead of everybody, mostly by interfering in ways specifically to tie the hands of gojo, who might as well be a demi-god.

itadori befriends a guy and tries to recruit him to be a jujutsu sorcerer, and mahito kills him in front of itadori, so they fight and when the tides are about to turn, mahito runs away. when itadori teams up with todo to fight hanami, they're handling it pretty well together, but gojo blasts hanami so itadori can't claim the w. itadori wins a fight against two cursed brothers, but this ultimately leads to him losing to the third brother, choso. even when he's about to claim victory over mahito for himself, suguru takes it away from him. he loses battles, and he loses friends.

was honestly a little shocking and refreshing to see just how willing the show is to kill off established characters. i've gotten too used to media being unwilling to kill off characters people like to avoid losing favorability and marketability. junpei and nanami get a shocking amount of screentime before they're snuffed out. while i doubt the show will kill off megumi, nobara, or maki at this current point, they get wiped out pretty fucking hard on-screen.

by the end of the shibuya incident, the state of the world is irreparably changed. gojo's sealed and itadori's stay of execution is reversed. tokyo becomes a literal void of curses, and the public becomes aware about the existence of curses. it was very wild to see just how fast shit hit the fan, i'm not used to seeing plots like this move so quickly. maybe it happens in other series, but i haven't seen them lol.

two of my favorite characters are maki and nobara, and while they scored some early w's, they were crushed into the dirt during the shibuya incident, which i found a bit disappointing. you could say "that just shows how outclassed they were" which maybe you could argue with maki but nobara's fight with that shitty swordguy should not have been in the guy's favor at all. it felt pretty contrived how she loses that fight and has to get rescued by nanami, especially when she holds her own against mahito's double later. it just felt like weak "girls aren't as strong as guys" writing.

Complete lack of narrative cohesion

It's no secret that "sunsetting" was one of the worst possible decisions Bungie could have made for Destiny 2. Removing whole swaths of the game that people paid real cash money is obviously awful, but the knock-on effects of this have been somewhat dire, primarily the fact that you can no longer experience a fairly important chunk of Destiny 2's story within the game itself.

New players starting Destiny 2 for the first time right now have no real entry point to the story. They get the New Light tutorial quests, which are terrible at introducing the world compared to how it was done in Destiny 1. If they bought the DLC, the earliest campaign they can play is Shadowkeep, one of the weakest stories in the game's history and one that makes no sense to new players. Not to mention that the seasonal story model, where you buy a battle pass every three months to access the new story content, locks out the story after the season is over. If you missed the big story moment from a past season, it's fucking gone forever! Fuck you!

There's not even an in-game cutscene viewer or a bare-bones written summary of the events that have transpired. There's an in-game timeline, sure, but it only gives you a sentence or two about the general events of a given DLC's story. It's basically nothing. Do you seriously expect people trying to understand the basic story of the game to go watch hours of Youtube videos to catch up? That's complete horseshit.

Confusing and aggravating pricing model

Some Destiny Youtubers have been stirring the pot recently about microtransactions, and this is not really about that. I'm talking about straight up purchasing the game. A recent change Bungie has made is a Legacy Collection, which bundles all the previous available campaigns together in a single pack. This is good! Why are they still available to purchase separately from the bundle? Like seriously, look at this store page:

This is a whole bunch of redundancy, and it only serves muddy the waters. "This is so people who have some of the DLC don't have to rebuy the ones they already own when they buy the bundle" that's stupid. There's two solutions to this: either A) have the bundle recognize which DLCs you own and offer a discount based on that (this is possible to do on Steam already), or B) just lower the price of the whole bundle to the price of the latest included expansion (which is Witch Queen, so $30) so people won't feel that bad about rebuying something they own. The latter is what FFXIV does. Buying the latest expansion gets you all the ones that came before it bundled in for $40. Easy. Makes sense.

Then we have the Forsaken Pack and 30th Pack. The Forsaken Pack should just be included in the free to play portion of the game. The fact that they culled Forsaken from the game but still charge money for that content is insulting, though the 30th Pack is arguably worse. $25 for a single dungeon and a single exotic weapon. For the record, dungeon keys, which give you access to two dungeons, is $20. A complete slap in the nuts ripoff.

Speaking of dungeon keys, the fact that dungeon keys have to be bought separately from its corresponding expansion is moronic. Regardless of the reasons Bungie does what it does with dungeon keys (or excuses people come up with for it), it ends up feeling like squeezing people for every dollar they have.

I know at the end of the day, Bungie is a business, and they need money to pay their staff and survive as a studio, but they really need to give some thought into how people actually purchase their game, the process they go through, what they see and encounter along the way, because for a lot of people it's really, really off-putting.

Lack of meaningful player interaction

So Destiny's whole thing is that it's an MMO, right? At the very least, it takes a lot of elements from more traditional MMO games. Something it does not do very well is get people to actually mingle with each other in a meaningful way.

When I play FFXIV, I can strike up a conversation with people hanging out in the main cities if I so desire. There will be people willing to engage in some small talk at the very least. You might tell someone you think their character looks cool, you emote at each other, maybe even add each other to your friends list. You basically cannot do this in Destiny. Text chat might as well not exist with how little I see people use it, and almost nobody opts in to voice chat during activities. People occasionally emote at each other in the Tower or in the field, and that's about it. I've made friends with random people playing FFXIV. I have not made friends with anyone playing Destiny.

Destiny also lacks a proper Group Finder feature common in most other MMO games. They've toyed around with adding matchmaking to raids, but that feature has been in Beta™ for roughly 7 years, so it's safe to say it's never going to properly get off the ground anytime soon. People trying to find pick-up groups for harder content have to use external sites (or know a guy who knows a guy, which is how I've gotten through most of D2's raids).

They have taken a small step in the right direction with player commendations, where you can rate whether people on your fireteam were fun to play with, were a stout ally, or fashionably dressed. This is good! But they really need to make it easier to communicate and form groups outside of matchmaking from within the game to truly take a big step forward.

just about the most interaction i ever managed to get in the tower

To summarize, you can't experience a large portion of Destiny 2's story within the game, trying to buy the game itself is convoluted and the pricing structure is all over the place (and kind of high in my opinion), and for an always-online MMO-style game, it's challenging to find groups or even make friends with other players. Destiny 2 feels like a game that is in desperate need of some true backend maintenance and development, but that kind of work doesn't translate into profit, so it is heavily minimized.