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This Physin't What We Asked For, Sony.

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Anyone who knows me knows that for the past 15 to 20 odd years of my cognitive life, I’ve been a stalwart and at times stubborn Playstation supporter, a self-procclaimed “Pony”, if you will. The very day I was born there was a Playstation in my house, which I’m sure is true for many people reading this due to the seemingly irreplicable success of the almighty Playstation 2. I think the first time I remember ever being given a console was a launch edition PS3, the fat one, the one that had backwards compatibility built into it. I still have that very same console, it’s sitting in a display case. At the time I didn’t know how divisive the PS3 actually was, I was 6 years old and the “you should want to get a second job to afford this bad boy” of it all was very much my father’s problem. To me, it was just a box under a tree that contained a console I’d spend a decade putting through its paces. As problematic as its price tag and software-limiting architecture was, I loved that thing. I st...
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#Sekitember: Shell Trace, Sentinel, "Avarice"

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ANALYZING… FILE TYPE: Dead Drop Message PERIOD: Present Day TOPIC: Shell Trace, Sentinel, "Avarice" SUMMARY: A corrupted message recovered from a Dead Drop Location at AI Uplink. ===================================================================  I've been in this fucking swamp for days... I think. I 've managed to stave off the degradation by plugging myself into Relays, and I've been b oarded up indoors so long I've lost track of the solar cycles. More often than not I keep track of time by how loud the voices are; they're worse at night. So, so much worse. I can't recall the number of times I've heard them. It's usually the same ones, always shrieking, always blood curdling. Ever so often it sounds like children, but those are always weirdly cut short. You get used to it, you learn to tune it out or chalk it up to the ambiance. Sometimes I think it's the Skracs, those things freak me out; though I think I'm more comfortable with the...
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The Cord: Final Push For Season 2

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Good morning, we are in the final leg of Season 2 for Marathon, which is confirmed to end on September 22nd, 2026. In the final five weeks of the season, Bungie is offering a new experimental event called “Ordnance Heist” until September 1st, a PvPvE experiment that promises to put vault keys and high-end loot at the forefront of the extraction shooter. Within this update resides a new prestige store skin for Destroyer, along with the introduction of the game’s first “power weapon,” the Firestorm; a single-mag modified Repeater HPR rifle that shoots incendiary explosive rounds and notably cannot be reloaded. To acquire the elusive weapon, players first need to collect UESC Manifests and Key Templates from UESC enemies on Perimeter. Those Key Templates can then be taken into Dire Marsh, where completing their objective and successfully extracting turns them into Firestorm Locker Keys. You'll need three keys to open a Firestorm Locker, which can appear on Perimeter, Dire Marsh, and O...
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The Cord: Vault Breaker Launches Today.

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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...
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One Thing I Love About Marathon.

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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 ...
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"Inevitable" Does Not Mean "Moral".

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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...
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The Cord: Marathon Season 2.5

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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...
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