Leah's Gaming Digest, 27th November

Look, this one is a bit thin on the ground.

Destiny 2, on the rocks.

Destiny has been in a weird place for a while now. I barely enjoy giving my opinion on the game at this point - I’ve followed Destiny since Bungie teased it in Halo: Reach. I saw the posters in the game, I lost my mind. When the beta came around I was immediately hooked - something that rarely happens to me. Destiny captured my attention, my imagination, the setting, the theme, the vibe, everything grabbed me in a way I can’t really explain. And those of you who followed Destiny from the beginning will remember the wild rollercoaster ride the community has been on. The game released to much ado about the lack of content, the story was short and the post-story content was lacking. Further seasons (Crota, anyone?) did little to bolster the communities confidence, content was still light on the ground yet the fanbase was rabid, desperate for more. Truly a testament to the world Bungie managed to create, and the feeling of the gameplay, that the game managed to live past its first year.

And live it did! Destiny succeeded where many other games had, and would, as a live service FPS. The sequel released in 2017, but with many system changes and what was effectively a reset to the world, there was a mixed reception. And slowly for me, Destiny lost its spark. A seasonal model developed of story content releasing every few months followed by a FOMO-esque grind - you needed to log in weekly and commit to completing repetitive seasonal gamemodes and collect-a-thons to ‘finish’ a season and keep up with the story. And the story would be hit-or-miss, some of the story and lore that was developed was fascinating and captured that original indefinable spark that Destiny had for me. But many of the seasonal storylines fell flat and just served to muddy what was a very compelling world, always leaving more questions than answers.

And this doesn’t even cover the PVP scene, what was a vibrant, dedicated community left inexplicably to die on the roadside with the strangling of PVP development. Likely due to the co-development of Bungies as yet unreleased PVP extraction shooter, Marathon, and the shared resources being weighted more towards the new game, but that’s my speculation, not based on any evidence.

Lightfall was the most recent big expansion to hit Destiny 2 and it didn’t seem to impress. Player numbers have declined slowly, bringing Destiny to it’s lowest playercount point… ever. Hundreds of staff were culled last month, and the next expansion has just been announced as delayed from a release next February to June.

As a long time fan, watching the decline of the series is pretty saddening. Will I still buy and play the next expac in desperate hope it rekindles my love of the franchise? I’ll probably play through the story, try the raid, then set it back down again. Will I be happy about it? If the last few expacs are anything to go by, likely not.

The Game Awards!

There’s still time to vote in the Game Awards! Many gamers consider the Game Awards to be the pinnacle of the gaming year, with award winners chosen partly from public vote and partly from panel vote, and this year there are 41 categories to vote in. It’s been a huuuuuuuuuuge year for games, so get your votes in if you care enough. If you just want to watch the spectacle, it’ll be live on Twitch on December 7th on Twitch, and the show usually always includes a bunch of upcoming game trailers and releases, since it’s the biggest show this side of the year. I believe we’re anticipating the first GTA 6 trailer at the Game Awards too.

I’ll do a full rundown of all the award winners once the show is over!

Lethal Company outsold Call of Duty on Steam?!

It’s a little horror scavenger game and it looks absolutely hilarious. I’ll probably pick it up to play with friends, it’s a 4 player co-op affair but there are various steam mods to increase player count up to 16, with various levels of jank included. If you’ve been looking for something multiplayer to satisfy a chaos itch, you’ll probably love this one, if you can stomach a little janky jump scaring.

Alright, I’ll be honest this week has felt a litttttttle slow in terms of industry news so I’ll leave it there! Thanks so much for reading and let me know if there was anything wild going on that I missed this week in the comments below.