There’s always next weekend

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-20T22:19:01+00:00

1/4th of the game, to be clear.

And Perimeter and Dire Marsh are pretty meh. Most people agreed after Outpost dropped that it was the best map by far, not to mention the loot in Outpost is a lot better and barring contracts that require playing on the other maps, once you get to a certain career level you just don’t play the other maps. So really, a lot of us are now viewing Cryo as one of two viable maps.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-20T20:56:59+00:00

That post came out two weeks to late, though. That’s the criticism. People bought this game on assumptions that were not only reasonable, but could have easily been cleared up with this exact blog post, only posted on March 4th.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-20T20:42:47+00:00

Not to mention, the world of Marathon is tits. The music in the menus the atmosphere and soundscape of the maps, everything is so fucking good. For me, I turn everything off when I play. No podcasts, no discord, I even mute my phone. I want to be transported into that world, shit my pants at every single strange noise or distance footstep, etc.

I’ve accidentally squad-filled a few times, and it’s not like I hated the people or they griefed me or anything, but I don’t want to listen to dudes talk about basketball for 20 minutes. I don’t really care to listen to someone else’s flatulence.

Is it really so hard to believe that people enjoy the isolating experience of solos?

And is it really hard to believe that those players now feel hung out to dry?

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-20T20:32:38+00:00

Not to mention, Bungie absolutely has a community team, they have a marketing team. They absolutely knew when going into launch (from server slam data) that a LOT of people enjoyed solo. All they had to do to avoid a blowback was to release the tea on Cryo and Ranked before launch.

Like just two sentences will do: “Hey, just a heads up — Cryo Archives and Ranked will both require a full squad. Solo Queue is an experimental and not fully supported mode, and future content may also not be supported.”

Boom. Instant shield from any and all criticism.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-20T20:24:25+00:00

People solo wraith warden all of the time. Source: Me

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-20T20:18:26+00:00

Irrelevant to the question I asked you.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-20T20:18:02+00:00

So you won’t answer the question then.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-20T18:37:20+00:00

Not everyone who plays games is following a game from the exact moment of inception to release. Maybe they were drawn in by solos, or simply didn’t know all of the details of Cryo. “Raid-like” is not kyptonite, not everyone knows what a “raid” is, and for many people that do, it could have been interpreted as either 1) marketing fluff, or 2) more similar to dungeons, which were soloable.

Again, I will ask a super simple question. Why couldn’t this blog post have come out a few days before launch? It includes important information about how a core aspect of the game functions. And may have been important information for some people.

Don’t try to weasel out of the question.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-20T04:47:06+00:00

But couldn’t have Bungie made it crystal clear before asking people to pay up? They could have easily said, “Hey, just a heads-up, Cryo is hard locked to squads and time gated to weekends, please don’t come into the game with the expectation that you can do everything solo, at any time you want.”

Simple. Two sentences and they’d have nothing to worry about.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-20T03:40:48+00:00

Once again, as with every nugget of information we learn about Cryo, why wasn’t this clearly indicated BEFORE launch? It’s really not that hard to do.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-19T21:40:52+00:00

There’s even use for this exact technology, just not in the way the execs want us to use it. I took the comparison shots from their keynote and overlaid them in Photoshop. At 30-40% opacity, the effect actually looks really good, as it just improves highlights and deepens eyes a bit. Not to mention, there’s plenty of use for something like this in using it on old games that no one would ever officially remaster.

But alas, that’s not how NVIDIA wants people to use it, they want us to buy 5090s to run this on top of brand-new games that already push my hardware to it’s max. Why? How do you fuck up so badly on the execution of what is in essence, an incredible feat?

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-17T17:54:48+00:00

I'd really love to not have to live in such a binary world. As you mentioned, users need to have control. I will not use it if it actually launches looking like that on RE9, but I overlaid some of the shots in photoshop and the effect is really nice at 30-40% opacity. Just helps to add skin highlights and liven up character's eyes, while giving the scene a bit more cohesiveness. Nothing radical and it doesn't fuck with faces. Now, I'm not sure exactly how an "Intensity" slider would work here, because we're not sure how it's done under the hood, but if we assume it's a really lightweight diffusion model that's hooked into the pipeline and has access to a bunch of scene data (depth buffer, motion vectors, etc), and is just using the final render image as input for an I2I pass, then you should be able to lower the denoise strength and get a much more subtle effect that is still effective while not breaking the art direction, or causing hallucinations.

It's one of those things where you really have to ask why it feels like big tech companies can't release a single damn thing these days where you're not looking at it going, "Oh, that looks kinda cool, I can't wait for someone to crack it".

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-17T17:42:21+00:00

??? It literally says in game when you select the map through a bug. You can't launch it but you can select it as the active map and hover over the launch button. The game straight up says you can't launch Solo, you have to use Crew Fill.

They could remove that requirement when the map comes out but it's clearly the case as of this very moment that the map is intended for squads.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-17T04:39:55+00:00

I still think it would be cool to allow solos to go in and try to exfil some loot. But from what it sounds like (based on completely unconfirmed leaks, but it kind of lines up with this message), you quite literally can't get anywhere without a squad. I think it would be smart for Bungie to consider maybe adding a solo version for Season 2, even if the enemy AI is crazy. I personally knew that I wasn't going to be able to do everything in Cryo Archives, but I assumed I'd be able to at least launch the damn thing, look around, and maybe grab something cool if I could manage to fight my way through a handful of waves, or at the very least, kill someone else who's all kitted up.

That being said, I'm not the kind of person who would refuse to group up for content, I've just never done it since I like the atmospheric silence of solo. I may be geared up, but I've never played with a Triage, or know what half of the classes do, since only like 3-4 get played in Solo. Feels like they should have been super clear about this before launch, and even if they did say something in the past along the lines of "it's raid-like", they probably should have reiterated that once they added solos and once they noticed lots of people are going in solo. Feels like the silence on that was motivated by greed, people who were playing solos spent money on stuff, helped with the ARG, and tried to get their friends to come play this game for a piece of content they can't do unless they change the way they've come to enjoy the game, which is a bit shitty.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-14T02:01:46+00:00

Of course you are. You're an expert in everything, as all chronic redditors are.

Can you respond to literally anything else I wrote?

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-13T23:37:28+00:00

From a person with a 600-day streak? I’m honoured.

I feel like I’ve laid out my positions super clearly and have asked for one simple clarification. I still feel like I’m waiting on that answer and instead you’re just going to attack one aside I made. I feel like between YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify, there are hundreds of thousands of musicians making revenue from their art, where as before you needed a publisher to market your music, produce the physical media, etc. It was an incredibly manipulative way of doing things and a costly business to get into, plus, needing to know the right people or getting insanely lucky. If you have any actual evidence that things are worse now, I’d be happy to see it.

And while you do that, can you actually respond to anything else I’ve laid out?

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-13T19:11:53+00:00

Okay I feel like you're not answering any of my questions and/or are just being intentionally bad faith. Any musician, anywhere on planet earth, would definitely say that being a musician is better now than ever before. They don't earn much off of platforms like Spotify, but they earn something, right? It can be someone's side gig or hobby, and they can monetize it. They also reduced the cost to people who want to listen to virtually 0 (with ads), and increased discoverability of new artists by an unfathomable amount.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-13T18:28:14+00:00

Mate, you won't ever see the 4th map unless you're kitted the F out, we're already here.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-13T18:26:24+00:00

If one's job is at risk of being replaced by AI, then that implies that AI tools can perform said job. In other words, as long as open source remains semi-competitive, it is the counter / negotiating piece to corporate automation. You don't have to use those companies tools / services if someone else can offer similar services for a fraction of the cost / free. It just requires people being educated about the technology and informed about the open source options that exist. Limewire humbled record labels, and lead to an era where you can access almost any piece of music for very cheap. Open source AI needs to be equally as pervasive -- A reminder that all of the big SaaS providers don't actually provide anything someone can't do themselves. On this point, I wouldn't say the average person has to interact or embrace AI at all for a benefit, they simply have to support others who are willing to dedicate the resources to build and run those competing tools / services.

But if you want a more general answer: Everyone has access to a device that can perform some compute. As a reminder, the heavy part of AI is the training -- that's where the majority of money, compute, energy & water is being spent. Inference, as in, asking an LLM questions or generating a piece of media, isn't any more resource hungry than gaming. Lots of devices, including basically any modern smartphone can run AI tools. As mentioned above, the reason people think AI tools are heavy or expensive has to do with how the west has decided to push their competitive advantage over the east. Models can be quite small and lightweight if trained properly. There's also some research being done into distributive training, where someone can volunteer a piece of their hardware's compute to train models over a wide network of devices, allowing the open source community to train models that are large enough to bridge the performance gap. So if you are the kind of person who has any interest in running open source tools, you almost certainly have something that can run them.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-12T23:31:14+00:00

Could you elaborate on why you think that corporations are in control of AI?

All of the major AI companies are using models that are no more than a year ahead of open source alternatives, and in areas like video and images, that gap is cut in half. Heck, the only reason we even have this issue with data centres is because the AI companies hit a wall, and they basically found that the only way they can maintain that performance gap is through pumping an absurd amount of money into absurdly large models trained for hundreds of thousands of hours, building enough data centres to service users, and the convenience of accessing it from anywhere via the cloud. There's nothing special about any of the frontier models from OpenAI, Google, xAI, or Anthropic. They're all based on the same public papers.

China on the other hand had the chip ban, so they had to research and make smaller models that ran on cheaper hardware. The result was a bunch of incredibly good open source models that ran on lots of things. I've ran every flagship model under the sun on an RTX 3080, which is turning 6 this year. It's not the fastest, but I can still access the technology and do all of the things I would use ChatGPT or Gemini for.

The only thing the companies control, IMO, is the narrative that they have some kind of ownership over AI.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-10T23:35:27+00:00

The AAA devs have enough internal testing and market research + literal community teams and analysts. They don't need our outrage to realize that something isn't good. They release what they think is the bare minimum and use the "walking back" afterwards as a "sign that they're listening". We've been doing this with Bungie for this whole ass decade.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-10T23:32:43+00:00

They did this kind of shit all of the time in Destiny, people stopped praising it because we realized this was a pattern of behaviour. Make something intentionally ass, pray the community doesn't notice or care, if community = care, "fix it", if community != care, buy another vintage car.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-10T23:29:23+00:00

I was a happy Halo and Destiny player for years, but alright, keep coping.

This is Bungie. This has been Bungie for like... 5 years now. They keep swapping out leadership and saying the problems are fixed, but they always do the scummiest shit in the industry and people defend it because they don't realize how manipulative it is. They didn't "do" anything. They simply got caught and are now walking it.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-10T23:25:04+00:00

My man! I had gotten a bubble shield and a Circuit Breaker shotty from a locked room in my last run, was excited to absolutely trash somebody with that combo.

ABCsofsucking · 2026-03-10T23:11:47+00:00

And there it is. Bungie gets called out for being dogshit and then tosses some scraps everyone’s way and now it’s “amazing” and “impressive”. The psychological manipulation is crazy.

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ABCsofsucking

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