GeezawsYaps

 Last week was a particularly eventful one in the ongoing saga of Bungie’s Marathon, starting with last week’s balance patch 1.0.6.3. The usual suspects were addressed; performance issues, bugs, item economy, et al. The most significant of which was the long awaited address to the controversial “grenade spam” issue that was most prevalent in the game’s endgame experience; Cryo Archive. The change came in the form of stack limitations, where offensive grenades in one’s loadout now take up two slots each and can no longer stack, except for claymores which were reduced from stacking in threes to stacking in pairs. Moreover, armory barter limits were gutted by 70%; now allowing only 3 of each grenade to be purchased per daily refresh. The change is welcome, to be sure, but many wondered where or not it’d be effective enough, after all, players normally only needed 5-10 well placed grenades to eliminate an unsuspecting team that, in turn, would replenish the grenades they’d just used. L...

Dear Marathon Community, I find myself in a unique position; while I am eternally grateful that anyone (much less a seemingly sizable group of people) is willing to engage my opinion pieces, it’s strange that I actually find myself in the position to be able to do this. I don’t say that to stroke my own ego, I say it because I think it’s important that I establish the context within which I made the decision to start covering video game updates (specifically Bungie’s and even more specifically Marathon’s ). About 70k tweets in about two and a half years amounts to not much more than my penchant for not shutting the fuck up. Some of that talk became too detailed to reduce to twitter threads, so I started a blog to just yap. I talk about a lot of things, music, movies, culture, and of course, video games. Due to a current hyper fixation on Bungie’s Marathon, a majority of that yap has been dedicated to the game. Recently, it came to my attention that members of the community felt that th...

Good morning, it is Tuesday. As of this writing, Marathon is currently down to address matchmaking issues from last week’s update. That’s its own can of worms, but there’s a more consistent issue looming over the game: cheaters. (This is aside from the other blog post I’ve been meaning to write about player psychology with Jamie (Sc0nesandc0ffee on Twitter), which is still coming.) We’re in Week 7 of Marathon. It’s been a largely wonderful experience, but as the season’s gone on, cracks have started to show. If left alone, they’ll fester into irreparable fractures and further erode trust from a community that keeps giving Bungie the benefit of the doubt. I’ve been called “toxically positive” a lot. I do enjoy the game and say so, but I’ve never avoided being critical when it matters. This is one of those times. I don’t get paid by Bungie, and I’m not muzzling myself for anyone. I like making edits, memes, and jokes, and being generally positive about something I enjoy. That’s not a cri...

  Woof. I tried to start this one a few different times over the last few months, increasingly as time went on. Even over the last 24 hours I’ve tried to land on an approach that really tackles the heart of my concern. This is an overwrought, complex issue that must be detailed with great care. The issue is not DLSS 5, the technology is symptomatic of a much greater issue: Nvidia.  (Please keep in mind, this is ultimately an informed opinion piece, you’re technically free to disagree, but I’ve done my homework). It should be widely known by now that I am no fan of corporate juggernauts, they do more harm than good with no exceptions, for however much good they contribute to any single sector, they are masking their sometimes outright comically nefarious activities. As the ne w “Biggest Company In The History of Everything Ever, no seriously, they’re bigger than Microsoft and Apple and Google and Amazon”, Nvidia is also similarly responsible for its share of negative side effe...