GeezawsYaps

Good morning, it’s Tuesday. Marathon’s midseason update goes live this afternoon, and with it comes an extensive list of changes and additions aimed at addressing player pain points while introducing new ways to engage with the game in an attempt to draw a larger audience. We’ll briefly get through the need-to-knows and then move onto a bit of a different conversation. The marquee feature of this update is Marathon's first fully PvE experience: Vault Breaker, seemingly a Rogue-lite-horde-shooter. In this new mode, players are tasked with infiltrating Cryo Archive against UESC forces in an attempt to loot vaults and, if they're up for it, take a crack at the game's endgame encounter, the Compiler, all without having to contend with the looming threat of enemy Runners. With the introduction of a PvE mode, the natural question becomes how Bungie intends to preserve the integrity of the loot economy. To address that, Vault Breaker features its own separate Armory. Alongside the...

It’s Sunday night and I have to get up for work in about six hours. I can’t seem to find the desire to lay down. I’m sure if I did I would probably fall asleep with relative ease; it was a long day of running around cleaning up errands I’ve been putting off for a bit too long. Procrastination, ultimately. It’s been a sobering summer thus far, in the worst of ways. I've had a lot of time to reflect on myself, my career, the aspirations I have when I look forward, family, friendships (or the diminishing prevalence of), finances, free time, regrets from years past; the things you think about when you’re trying to sleep but always seem to flood you with anxiety right as you drift off. Those thoughts aren't unique to this summer. I've had them before. What's changed is the conclusions I'm starting to draw from them. When I look at the state of my life and the increasingly insurmountable hurdles that crop up preventing me from advancing my life in ways that I thought I’d ...

This is the second blog post I’ve written today. The first was an economic breakdown of GTA VI’s pricing, but by the time I finished it, news broke of major layoffs at Bungie. In light of that, it felt inappropriate to publish a detached economic analysis of the games industry without acknowledging what that economy produces on the ground. This morning, Hermen Hulst published an internal memo detailing a wide scale layoff across Bungie, which includes most of the D2 team and even parts of the Marathon Development team, this affected full time employees as well as contractors. For a studio that just yesterday was operating with 850 employees, it would seem now that they’ve been left with around 400, give or take. This is a collapse in real human terms. The consequences of years of mismanagement, combined with increasing pressure across the industry to deliver immediate returns on long-term investments, are now materializing in full force. A $3.6 billion acquisition is not something that...

Well, well, well… What do we have here? In a surprise Tuesday update from the Marathon Dev Team, we’ve just gotten a roadmap for the rest of Season 2: Nightfall. We now know that Season 2 will end on September 22nd, meaning that Season 2 will last for 15 total weeks, 3 weeks longer than Season 1 did. One has to wonder whether this decision was always intended or whether it was deliberately delayed to give Nightfall more room to breathe following its rocky launch. However, it seems that we’ve had more options added to the menu that may point towards why Season 2 was actually extended. Midseason starts on July 21st, and with it, an unprecedented slew of content, chief among these additions will be “Vault Breaker” the long teased “PvE mode”. Before we dive into Vault Breakers and what that’ll have to offer for dedicated players and those who are more on the fence, we will briefly cover the second major upgrade: Cradle Evolution. Season 2 introduced The Cradle, a skill-tree-esque menu that...

It feels as though the wind behind Marathon’s sails have shifted a bit this weekend, and while many might immediately jump to point out the obvious resurgence of Destiny 2’s player count, that’s not exactly what I’m talking about, though I’d be remiss to not entertain the idea that these two things are intrinsically intertwined. Over the past weekend I’ve seen the tune change, a handful of once staunch and dedicated players have revised their original sentiments to suggest that the game was never good, that they’d been lying to themselves, caught up in the hype, or any number and combination of reasons that they simply do not enjoy the game anymore. While it’s one thing to fall out of love with anything, it’s another thing to attempt to retroactively change your prior opinion on it. While this isn’t particularly widespread, it is a bit of an “I’d only have two quarters, but it’s weird that it happened twice” type of situation. Far be it from me to specifically indict people on somethin...

  I find myself decreasingly motivated to write these days, and it's not for lack of drive. If anything, it's because I'm increasingly unwilling to digest the subject matter. The reaper has come to collect, and the gaming industry is being marched toward its grave. The one thing we can say is that none of this is surprising. A few years ago, prominent industry insiders were already warning about the inevitable consequences of the COVID-era hiring spree and the unchecked growth that followed. If you want to go back about two centuries, there were entire schools of economic thought built around the idea that industries eventually collapse under the weight of their own excesses. I'm not particularly interested in turning this into a philosophical debate about economic systems, especially given how quickly those conversations derail into violent radioactivity online. What matters is that we knew this was coming. We knew the correction would be agonizing. I don't think e...