(End) The Winter Collective in Crota's End: The New Raid in Destiny: The Dark Below

The Dark Below expansion for Destiny went live at midnight PST, and my "brother clan" The Winter Collective hopes to be the first group through the new raid, Crota's End, on their PS4s. All times below are in MST. Clan members in this party were:

McKrankyStank
expldngpngn
KillaBlaze (twitch: killablaze92)
LordJebe
Coinstock
Whitewitchdoctor

At about 5:45 AM the group decided to call it quits for the night, having not succeeded in getting everyone across the bridge. The clan will try again later in the day, perhaps with some substitutions in the lineup. They probably won't be the first to finish the new raid, but there's always hard mode. Hopefully I'll get a chance to play it soon as well (though I did take care of some of the new story missions while I was watching). Thank you to The Winter Collective for letting me lurk in your voice chat! 

3:37 AM
The totems won't open if you're not in the center. You can only cross the bridge if you have a sword.

3:23 AM
Bathroom/smoke break! Group pact to not look up anyone else's strategy. But can I take a look? I think I'll save some of the surprise for myself as well.

3:16 AM
A sword appeared, the bridge was fully formed, and somebody needs to hold the sword in order to cross the bridge without dying, and people need to stay on the totems as well, but they're still trying to figure out the logistics of this.

3:08 AM
And they made it! Across a bridge, and into the moon's core. Ascendant materials abound.

"What's Superman's planet? It looks like that."

"It looks like Lord of the Rings."

"We might not even be on the moon anymore. Did we get teleported?"

"My guess is we should not stand on those glowing circles on the ground."

After someone stands on one, the ground shakes and enemies start appearing.

"I think they're like confluxes, we need to guard them."

There are three circles called Annihilator Totems that activate a bridge.

3:02 AM
Hunters are saying Blade Dancer is wonderful so far in the lamp tunnels.

2:40 AM
After another run, only Whitewitchdoctor is alive, and has discovered that they have circled back through the beginning. All the lamps they passed are broken now, so he's moving slowly with the stacked debuff, but there are no more enemies while this is happening.

"Oh my god, we found the first cheese!" someone said.

A few minutes in, someone makes the first "You've woken the Hive!" crack.

Suddenly, there are Hive everywhere, but Whitewitchdoctor has revived a few teammates, and they found the next lit lamp to try.

2:35 AM
The consensus seems to be that the longer you wait at a lamp, the more Thrall come, so the party has decided to move immediately to the next one rather than fighting.

2:23 AM
The party died within seconds, but they soon figured out how to set up the bridge.

After falling down the Hellmouth, you land in a circle of light in a dark cavern. If you move out of the light, you get the Weight of Darkness debuff, which multiplies the longer you stay in the dark, adding new restrictions. Known effects of the debuff so far are:

• no double jump
• no running

You have to move together as quickly as possible from pillar of light to pillar of light while fighting Thrall, and eventually Knights.

Blizzard's Commitment to Better Female Representation

One of the biggest developers in the business, Blizzard, stated its intent to better represent women in its games. Their effort to create more realistic characters starts with Overwatch, a competitive FPS planned for release in 2015. Though images from the website still show them in revealing clothing, employee Chris Metzen said that they have been "trying not to oversexualize the female characters."

This comes after a speech from Blizzard CEO Michael Morhaime, where he condemned the recent attacks on women in gaming known as Gamergate. "Let's take a stand to reject hate and harassment," he said at BlizzCon.

Blizzard Entertainment publishes the games World of Warcraft and the StarCraft franchise and has a revenue of $4.85 billion.

Building the perfect Destiny playlist

Need a little background music for your video game binge? Here's a playlist of songs about post-apocalyptic wastelands, gun-fighting, light, witches, bounties, and fire. There's also the theme from Pacific Rim, guaranteed to pump you up, and the Mjolnir Mix of the Halo theme as an homage to Bungie's earlier games. The run-time is a little over two hours. If you play longer than that in one sitting (I know I usually do), then use the playlist to start a radio station, or sprinkle your favorites from the list into one of your own playlists.

Good hunting! Now go grind out that strike playlist. 

Hear Me Out: Destiny Needs Minivans

Pimp My Ride: Destiny Edition

It's a brisk but sunny day, and me and my friends are cruising around the outskirts of the city looking for trouble. We roll up on a group of vandals, slide open the side door, and send out a spray of bullets. Once they're all dead, we pick up our loot and hop back in the car, reclaiming the wastelands that once belonged to our ancestors.

IGN's article about looking into the Halo series for hints about Destiny's future brought up vehicles. Single-rider vehicles, group vehicles, vehicles with machine guns, vehicles with laser beams... Halo had a multitude of vehicles available to roam around with, while in Destiny you can only own and ride the sparrow at will. But wouldn't it be cool if there were group vehicles available to patrol with your friends?

As impractical as it might be to design, I would love to refurbish an old Prius I found wasting away in Old Russia. I guess we'll just have to save that for the Destiny fanfiction.

Gamer Community's Ownership of a Medium Causes Sexism in Video Game Culture

The most recent batch of sexism toward women in video game culture has become popular enough to be discussed by Forbes and The New Yorker, as well as five articles on Time in two days. But why do some gamers hate women enough to send violent and detailed rape and death threats, harass their families, and drive the women from their homes? I asked Doctor Rosa Mikeal Martey, an associate professor at Colorado State University in the Department of Journalism and Media Communication who researches identity and gender in online social interactions.

Martey explains that "gamer" is a label reclaimed by a community that was once stereotyped as having a low social status and no relationships with women. Like all communities, they also defend their boundaries, so if a woman threatens the gamer community by trying to enter or change it, the community retaliates. In the case of gamers, the threat is handled like a boss fight in a raid, where people team up and strategize how to take her down. 

"The fact that there's a human being who might actually have personal consequences as a result just wasn't part of the thinking in any way, because she became the object, literally the object of their attack," Martey describes. "It was a name and a set of linkages that they were trying to sever in their mind, not a person." 

Martey suggests that the open dialogue between developers and players has created a more solid sense of ownership over the medium than fans of other media have, likely because developers listen to player feedback and make adjustments, especially for online games. In the case of BioWare, enough people voiced their dislike for the ending of Mass Effect 3 that the developer released downloadable content with a new ending. 

But as more people play games, the label of gamer means nothing more than one who plays video games. Now the industry has to cope with and respond to criticism from varying perspectives, as any new form of media has while it adjusted to becoming mainstream. Early adopters of the medium likely struggle to hole onto the old boundaries of their community once they find they are no longer the sole demographic of their medium. Perhaps this is why some gamers are reacting so violently to feminist cultural critique. 

Kotaku Promises Critical Video Game Coverage Post-Release

Video game journalism is about to read a lot less like corporate advertising. Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo announced today that the gaming news site will shift their focus to reporting on games and gamers long after a video game has been released. This is in contrast to the current and long-held standard in video game journalism of previewing and reviewing games before they come out, then ignoring them once they are released.

Totilo says this change will help their articles seem less like press releases as they begin to write more people-centric stories that cover games once they are actually being played. His reasoning is that addressing the community of players surrounding a game is more important and more interesting than simply covering games before they are released. This is an effort to get out of "a cycle of coverage dictated by public relations firms."

Authenticity is a big theme at Kotaku, where Totilo wrote similarly about the downsides of previewing games in February of 2013, saying that they are "reporters and critics ... trying to find the truth," and that the truth is rarely found in the small preview of a game. An article in 2012 also criticized the cozy relationship between journalists and the developers of the games they write about.

As Kotaku prepares to make video game journalism more journalistic and interactive, they have set up an email address for people to send their story tips and ideas, and made it clear that contribution opportunities are available.

You can find the full article on Kotaku here.

Destiny: Cryptarch changes coming this week

Bungie will patch the Cryptarch in Destiny on Tuesday so that engrams will only decode at their level or higher. For example, blue/rare engrams will only decode to blue or purple/legendary, and purple engrams will never decode to blue. Rare engrams will also have a higher chance of decoding to legendary. However, Bungie warns in their dev notes that any legendary engrams you find now but wait to decode until after the update will automatically decode into rare, so get them decoded now and look for your legendaries later. 

Daily and weekly challenges will also include more chances for rare and legendary rewards, and ascendant materials now have legendary status. 

Destiny: The Treasure Cave is no more

By Jenna Brown

This article was originally posted on 2014-09-25 13:05 MDT. It was updated on 2022-05-28 for clarity and to provide additional details.

Bungie has rendered the famed “treasure cave” at Skywatch on Earth effectively useless with Hot Fix 5, an update file released to consoles this morning. The patch notes indicate that the spawn time of every cave on Earth was increased to 40 seconds. For comparison, treasure cave monsters previously spawned every six seconds, the shortest on Earth. Three of the other four caves respawned every 10 seconds. The cave with the longest respawn cycle was in the Barrens at 20 seconds.

According to their Dev Notes, farming for loot does not align with Bungie’s tenuous "dream for how Destiny is played." One of the most compelling aspects of video games is when users find new ways to play a game and make it their own. Gaming becomes infinitely more fascinating when a game evolves into something other than its hardware and mechanics, providing a backdrop for a community to grow and greater entertainment value outside the campaigns and arenas.

For as much as Bungie claims that Destiny is a social experience, they certainly make it difficult to socialize. There's no proximity chat to help gamers group up and fight together while casually patrolling the open areas, and the "social" Tower area provides no method to communicate either, besides gestures and dancing. Loot farming was a great way to find a group of people to interact with while picking off the runners and hoping for Legendary drops.

Other popular farming method “waking the Hive” was nerfed with the Sept. 22 Update 1.0.1.4, but clarified with the rest of today’s Hot Fix notes: the engram drop rate is now temporarily reduced after a hard wipe, meaning you will have to wait longer between rounds of waking the Hive if you want any of your kills to drop loot.

Perhaps I'm being too emotional, but this update has certainly made Destiny less appealing to me. In my irrational fervor, I almost feel like organizing a protest, like a sit-in at the cave, or picking a day where no one plays Destiny as a kind of walk-out.

What do you think about the updates? Still in love with Destiny? Were you ever in love with Destiny to begin with? Let me know! 

Destiny: Farming Russia for fun and profit!

If you're playing Destiny, you may be nearing or have already reached the level cap of 20. But where are you going to get some nice loot for the raids that opened last week? Russia. That's right, low-level, introductory Old Russia. Before you begin your farming adventure, you'll need to take care of a few things first.

Make sure your rank with the Cryptarch is at 2 or higher. This will cause more Engrams to drop, the lower level ones automatically decrypted. Next, find someplace like the Moon to kill a bunch of Hive Ultras so that you will get a Black Wax Idol. Idols make dead Hive drop more Glimmer for 10 minutes. Now you're ready to patrol the Cosmodrome!

You're going to Skywatch, near the Hive Seeder. When you arrive in Old Russia, head toward the left, across the Mothyards, where all those rusted airplanes areThrallstunnels in the building on top of the hill will open out at Skywatch, and just on the other side of the short cliffs is the seeder. You will probably see a few people already farming.

If you stand any closer to the cave than these people are, then only Acolytes will come out, but you want Thralls as well for maximum profit. If other people are standing too close, you can try to stand in front of them and do the pointing gesture to get them to back up. If that doesn't work, try melee-ing them in the face a bit.

I can see my engrams from here!

Now comes the fun part! Consume one of your Black Wax Idols. From your vantage point, kill the Hive that come out of that cave and watch your Glimmer count skyrocket. If any Hive make it out of the cave without dying, you have to hunt them down and kill them, or no more will respawn from there.

Eventually, everyone will run out of ammo, resorting to shooting rockets into the cave, at which point, everyone will run into the cave together. Nothing will spawn while someone is in or near the cave.

No shortage of ammo, Glimmer, or Engrams! 

As you can see, there are lots of treasures to be found in the cave. Two people found Legendary Engrams in the ten minutes I farmed this cave. You can farm this cave all day if you want to, and maybe you'll experience the roughly once-per-day surge of ten times as many Hive at one time. You might have to clear out your inventory periodically when you get too much stuff (that's where having Engrams decrypt automatically becomes helpful).

Some additional notes: The public event of "Defend the Warsat" occurs every thirty minutes in this area. You'll know if it's about to happen if the sky turns a weird blue color. I suggest running into the cave at this point, or the Warsat may drop right on top of you and kill every one in the area. It's happened before.

If you're near a group of people that doesn't seem to get how to farm the ideal way, and you can't get them to do it right, you can always return to orbit and try landing in a Russia on another server. Good luck!

Mobile game review: Kami

KAMI - State of Play

How can something be so challenging and relaxing at the same time? Kami is a puzzle game whose difficulty is offset by simple visuals and hypnotic sounds. The object of the game is to unfold paper to make the screen a single color in as few moves as possible, which - like many puzzle games - is harder than it sounds. Each new level challenges you to think in a different way.

With each touch, a new color of paper unfolds outward from that point in an intricate manner, accompanied by the soft noise of rustling paper. Changing the color of the board is therapeutic and addictive enough to repeat each level to get the perfect score.

The first few levels of the game are free, and unlocking a set of new challenges costs 99 cents. Kami is from independent developer State of Play and is available on Android, iOS, and Steam.

I give Kami a grade of A.

Warning from Bungie about poor early reviews for "Destiny"

If you see a bad review for "Destiny" in the next couple of days, Bungie says it might be because the reviewer didn't play it enough. 

Developer Bungie is not allowing reviewers to play the first-person shooter until it has been released to the public so that the reviewers experience the world fully populated with other players. For their most recent and final weekly update before the launch on September 9,  Bungie expressed that reviews for the game would be incomplete if they were written before playing for a few days. The developer has said that you can play through missions on your own without running into too many people, but their vision for the game's full experience involves working with others and teaming up for missions and raids. 

Half a game: Review of The Sims 4

By Jenna Brown

This review was originally published on 2014-09-06. It was updated on 2022-05-27 for clarity and to provide additional information, as well as to revise the grade from C+ after further consideration of the base game’s content.

I'm not sure whether I'm flirting with a teenager or a senior, but at least I look good doing it.

The Sims 4 features a more complex balance of emotions and needs, but is missing too many other elements that were established in The Sims 3 for me to feel comfortable encouraging anyone to buy it. For example, people who are teenagers or older are all the same height, and there are only a handful of lots to visit in each world map. Above all, it is missing the Create a Style function!

Complete customization of characters and the environment was one of the most creative aspects of TS3 and, while I enjoy the fun updates to clothing and hairstyles, I miss designing the textile, pattern, and color of every outfit or object. Apparently, the engine in which TS4 was built was not capable of supporting Create a Style. How much consideration was given when deciding to eliminate this compelling and popular feature?

Additionally, there are fewer than 25 home lots in a world, all of which have completely flat and unchangeable terrain. TS4 does not have an open world, so each lot requires a loading screen to get to ‒ no more walking, driving, or cycling between places. In fact, there are no cars or bikes at all. Your Sim just walks off the lot, and you enter a loading screen. Also missing is the option to choose your Sim’s quality of performance or area of focus while working: instead, your Sim's career status and promotion rate are determined by completing assigned tasks outside of work hours. This is beginning to get a little too close to reality…

Unfortunately, the game is lacking too many features considered standard from TS3 for The Sims 4 to be a true sequel. Rather, you might play it and its predecessor alternately for different experiences, if you play The Sims 4 yet at all. It's as though it's half of a game, albeit an interestingly novel half wrought with mixed feelings and more of the usual wild reactions.

I give The Sims 4 a grade of B-.

The Sims 4 was released Sept. 2. For a laundry list of everything missing from TS4, check out this mega-post by Sims4News, a fan-owned and operated website devoted to discussion of the game. 

Microsoft's Xbox One Reveal

This article was originally posted on CharmingOrangutan. 

It's big, it's black, and it's sexy! Ladies and gentlemen, Xbox One, the new console from Microsoft, has been revealed.

Photo credit: Microsoft

It's powerful, and it does a lot of things. You can read all about the tech specs on IGN, cnet, Gizmodo, Forbes, NBC, you name it. You can read the Microsoft release (though as of 1:30 MST, the server is waffling between slow and broke).

Photo credit: Turn 10 Studios

But just look at it. That beautiful box may not read "sleek" to everyone, but its prismatic and sharply angled design brings to mind high-horsepower muscle cars, a fitting comparison considering that Forza 5 was the first game announced for the console.

 It's not all about the console by itself either: the new Kinect, which will be included, has a 1080p camera that can supposedly measure a heartbeat and works in tandem with the controller. Speaking of the controller, it will have better sensitivity and is designed to be more ergonomic.

 Xbox One is definitely not just for gaming: it will be seamlessly integrated with television and apps. The demo on-stage during the reveal shows that you will be able to control everything from the guide to fantasy sports teams with your voice. The console is "always ready," meaning you simply say "Xbox on" and it turns itself and the TV on. I'm no technophobe, but I am wary of how many aspects of my life and living room that the Xbox may take over.

 Now, I've never been one to feel the need to buy a console as soon as it comes out, but I am already pretty giddy about this. It is one fine and impressive piece of machinery so far. I can't wait to see how Xbox One does at E3 in just a few weeks.

 What are your impressions of Xbox One so far? Love it, hate it, still unsure? Let me know in the comments!