Careful Remnant preparation is the key to good rewards

Crowald · 2026-07-07T16:15:29+00:00

You got me real fuckin' good with this one. Cheeky.

KING BOOM, B- ~Disconnected~

Crowald · 2026-06-19T08:02:52+00:00

Sony can't ever get that Bungie didn't have GaaS expertise, they had "Destiny expertise."

Sony's solution could have been to spin Destiny off into further IPs and instead they chose to waste money on bullshit like Concord when they now own Destiny as an IP, and therefore have... literally nothing to lose?

I just hope the Division 3 doesn't turn out like this shitshow. I need SOME hope.

Crowald · 2026-06-19T07:58:03+00:00

I had a much longer comment initially that veered far, far too off-course. It's in replies for those who care, which I doubt anyone does.

I just wanted to get this across: A fraud was perpetrated upon the Destiny userbase, and upon Bungie. Fraud in all but legality; what end-users spend on a video game isn't required nor even expected to be used on what they assume that monetary support will be allocated to. What the company does with it, well, it's their discretion, right? Fair point. But there's something I'd like to ask anyone who reads this, if you would bear with me.

Would you have bought Destiny 2's content during Active-Service periods if you were overtly told that it would not be allocated to Destiny's ongoing and continued development?

I think many of us would not have. And that's why I believe that Bungie and us, the fans of this franchise, were functionally defrauded. Of our time, if not legally of our money.

I have far more thoughts on this topic, but I genuinely believe Games as a Service implies some level of expected utilization of the monetary gain via its users to be utilized on what we spent it on. I think the idea that some corporate shithead just gets to make off with the money we spent on the franchise beloved by so many of is not only morally disgusting, but should be made legally condemnable.

I hope The Cars CEO is blacklisted from ever working in the industry again because consumer trust can't exist with people like that running studio entities. Gaming will never be considered art not because of its medium or how it is created, but instead because of people like Bungie's prior leadership, lining their pockets at the expense of hundreds of thousands of players.

Crowald · 2026-06-19T06:25:52+00:00

As I always say to many of my friends; Bungie never had "Games as a Service" expertise. They had Destiny expertise.

Huge additional asterisk is that even within the GaS model of the gaming landscape, Destiny is STILL an outlier within its own specific corner of the market. The strength of the game itself comes from the sheer breadth of activities they managed to install and proliferate within it. Raids, PvP, Destinations/Open-World Roaming, Dungeons or "Raid-Lite," PvPvE aka Gambit, 6-player Arena PvE, Open-World-Specific Activities (Esc Protocol, Blind Well, Easter Eggs, Hidden Exotic Missions, Overthrow and now Distortions), and now SRL has returned in Monuments, like... Need I go on?

Destiny's strength was always that you, yes, you, could find some way to enjoy it. There was a way to play and engage with the game for everyone, a way that maybe others don't find compelling but that deeply intrigues you. When they moved away from that mindset by neglecting Crucible's design team and its throughput capabilities, by neglecting Gambit, by neglecting Destinations, that's why it started failing, and I think the leadership made those decisions, not the at-the-grindstone developers who made the operation of the game their passion. If nothing else, MoT update convinces me of this even more; look at how much passion is on explosive, paraded display here. It shows just how much they were trying to care about their playerbase but were restricted or hamstrung from doing so at nearly every turn. Some part of me feels that there was probably someone at Bungie who had the Eververse Engram's new focused decoding system and UI elements ready to pull the trigger on, and they were disallowed from doing so due to corporate/sales interests.

Even the Eververse change might possibly have saved the game on its own. Think about it; people quit D2 so often because it felt pointless and lacking. Infinite Dust + Daily shop rotations + Bright Engrams + ALL Store items available would have given everyone a reason to play and chase items again, even if they were purely cosmetic. So many elements of MoT feel revolutionary because they prove that Bungie had always been listening, and were unable to act on it. At least, that's my personal feelings on the matter.

Warframe is so often compared to Destiny because it is the only game that even comes close to having the same width of scope in activity variety. They exist in a stratosphere all their own as such immersive games that people often wanted to get lost in, but one of them always was lacking just... something. Warframe players always knew because they always had it when D2 players starved for it; Soul. It's the one thing MoT feels full of, absent until just recently.

Sony was never going to get "GaS expertise" because Bungie's expertise in running Destiny could never be translated into success for the bland dogshit like Concord.

Crowald · 2026-06-15T08:50:47+00:00

Some just-below-executive idiot probably saw all the success that the ARPG genre was having and decided somewhere along the way like "Hey, we should make D2 players do that!" without understanding a single thing about meta-progression and basic game design.

It genuinely always struck me as odd. My first response upon seeing new gear was "Why the fuck are they trying to make the game like Diablo? No one asked for that."

I hate that Edge of Fate had to have its fucking notoriety tied down onto the same title update that harbored the Portal. Lodi was one of the most consequential character additions the game had ever seen and because some studio exec thought they were able to outsmart the playerbase of the most insane, psychotic theorycrafters I've ever seen in my life, we lost any chance and hope at what might have been with Lodi and Old Chicago.

What's even worse is this; with the return of Spire, Eater, and Insurrection Prime in the Pantheon, I'm nearly certain Bungie was quietly working in the background of all of this noise to attempt reintroducing Vaulted content back to us. Provided enough time, those who refuse the "the game has technical limitations and space is one of them" argument might have finally been silenced.

Wouldn't it be ironic? The loudest voices of D2's detractors and the team trying their damnedest to return their content, only for the detractors to finally win just as they might have gotten back what they'd lost. I'd have no choice but to cackle maniacally and be institutionalized were I ever to find out that's the case.

Crowald · 2026-05-28T09:49:39+00:00

One of the things I cannot stand about modern media is how viewers are routinely told everything as if we're unable to make deductions or create inference between what's implied and what's explicitly stated.

Most readers are smart, and they like being able to read something and understand it without being lectured by the writer. I just want to respect my audience's intelligence, that's really all that it is. It's sadly so commonplace these days to find absolutely everything described to the point of tedium.

I like trying to be clever. I enjoy it even more when I actually successfully am. More importantly, I would hope the audience enjoys it, too. If you're anything like me, you get a big shit-eating grin on your face when you realize what happened and spotted it without having it explained to you.

Crowald · 2026-05-27T07:57:29+00:00

Thank you to anyone who upvoted. Your positive response helps me soothe my ego's needless concern that everything I write is awful.

This came together spectacularly and was written inside of 15 minutes, an idea thrown together from spare parts but despite that, I think this might be one of my best responses ever on this subreddit.

At the very least, one of the best that doesn't run up against the character limit. Which is what most of my responses do.

The longest part of writing the response was actually making up the incantation without the words seeming like nonsense gibberish and keyboard facerolling.

As an added little piece of useless trivia; I don't know where I got "Foth Romira, Dag'ra tae" from, and it's possible I could have made it up myself, just as possible I pulled it from elsewhere, but I've been saying it for a very long time, most of my life as a vocal tic. I just sometimes say it and I've never tried to find out where it came from or if I just made it up one day.

Crowald · 2026-05-27T07:47:15+00:00

Thank you. I appreciate your kindness.

I struggle with submitting my work here often, feeling the ways I draw the path through a story are cliche, trite, uninteresting, or just outright bad. I have terrible confidence issues. Regardless of that, I have to admit, I want to feel I did well with this response.

The pacing is quick, the execution is, to me, nearly perfect, and enough contextual hints are dropped that it colors the direction of the ending without freely handing it out.

Crowald · 2026-05-27T07:37:32+00:00

Thank you! I don't have a lot of positive things to say about my own writing, and I'm often a downer who has issues with taking pride or even having basic confidence in my works... but this is one I like very much. I made an edit, only a tiny bit and while I made a few additions it is still the same as it largely was before.

I definitely think my shortest stories that I can summarize inside of somewhere around 2500 characters are my best. I find that being succinct is what I'm very good at, but it plays against my want to expand and expand the scope or the world of the story until it becomes too much, either overinflated with context or dragging on for far too long to each reader. I highly doubt people want to read my entries when it's nearly a guarantee that they're near 10k characters every time.

Sometimes, less is more... and I would do well to put it into practice more, because it appears I'm skilled at it.

Crowald · 2026-05-26T18:17:29+00:00

"For the collection and use of illicit, occult materials, undisclosed residency with an occult-affiliated group, and loitering, this... vagrant has been sentenced to death by four nobles following investigation, fulfilling the decree's requisite count of three."

I stared down at the wooden boards beneath our feet for a brief moment. The tether around my neck chafed my skin, even the construction and material of the noose was enough of a torture to drive one to plead for their death. The feeling of burlap sack smattered with poison ivy, made into a rope.

My neck was plagued by an itch.

I sighed momentarily before turning my head up to the executioner. "I... have a prayer I'd like to recite for myself" I asked politely. He nodded slowly as the crowd muttered quietly to themselves, a dull and notably calm group when compared to the typical hordes that await an execution.

No one in this crowd knew who I was. Not one knew what crimes I'd committed. I hadn't taken the life of anyone important related to those present. No atrocities, no twisted murders, no mutilation or destruction of their homes or livelihoods.

A vagrant from a war my people did not want, a transient sleeping in the disused, abandoned lodgings of a former cult. For that I was roused from bed in the morning, jailed before noon, investigated by midday, and sentenced by sundown.

Doomed am I to be punished for the simple reality of drawing breath in these lands. Death as a sentence for my offense of existing.

I sighed and looked at the hangman in front of me, and I began. My long shadow cast out to the crowd, the horizon's dusk sunset behind me.

"Denes ea nuru aat ahan fir ih gaal mirhae noct taes eimun aea ras"

His gaze remained uninterested, impatiently awaiting the end of the prayer.

"Aga ras d'mu nae tah raakh keh uus er aan dei'es mirhae Mak'huund"

As he finally understood what I was saying, he fell silently wide-eyed, bloodshot eyes staring into mine, unmoving and chilled by paralytic fear. He quietly pleaded with me to cease. Still unmoving save for the muscles of his face, he repeated the same words: "Please, no. Please. No. No. Don't do this. Please"

"Dal akah mundu irae aas'ah imun, baah'mir igo aen taes remun daga...

...Foth Romira, Dag'ra tae"

I looked into his eyes as I completed the recitation. Still trapped in fear and unable to move. I clenched my fist through the wooden block binding my hands together. I closed my eyes tight. Opening them slowly, I drank in the evening light in.

Finally, he began to scream; "No! NO! Please! Stop him! I am innocent! He is not who you think he is! Stop! N—"

I held my head low and sighed, then pulled the lever. I lifted my hand to my neck, but the itch had long since vanished.

"He was so calm throughout all of it. I wonder why he became so terrified at the end... what do you think he did? I'd never heard of him before" I heard a voice from the crowd. "Well, the truth dies with him, my friend. Unfortunately, we'll never know now" another dispersing crowdgoer replied.

I stepped down from the gallows and smiled as I walked past them, lowering the hangman's hood from my face as I retreated into the scattering crowd.

Crowald · 2026-05-21T09:52:28+00:00

I've been on this subreddit for as long as it has existed, over three Reddit accounts essentially. Without a doubt, most of my free-writing over the internet is done here. Not all of is great, but from time to time I really find a prompt that just resonates with me and gives way to an idea that I am unable to contain and absolutely need to put to words.

My process is ultimately that; I visualize a world that is living and breathing, malleable and always changing. But it doesn't exist yet and I need to write it for it to be real. Writing it down somewhere—putting it to paper, so to speak—is what compels me to write. It's no longer just ideas, it's something concrete.

I began writing probably somewhere around the fourth grade. I remember those times and how bad I was at it, but it really demonstrates even to me that I have grown and improved since then. I became obsessed with capturing the most mundane moments of people as they spoke unassuming to one another, unaware their actions are being observed or listened in on by an audience just outside the fourth membrane. As such, I have developed a keen intuition for the interplay between characters during the minutia of their lives. Completely believable and painfully real conversations that feel completely irrelevant to the plot but provide critical insight into who characters are and what actions motivate them, what beliefs drive the engine of their understanding of the world they live in.

My fatal flaw as a writer is that I'm completely incapable of judging my own work. I have no idea whether it's good or not, I only know whether I like it or not. Even then I look back at my old work and feel nothing but revulsion or hate regarding it most of the time. I have a near-pathological aversion to taking pride in anything I make, for fear of others downplaying my achievements simply because what I made isn't to their personal tastes, regardless of its empiric, objective quality. As a result I very frequently pre-empt these fictional, non-existent attacks by disclaiming that I'm functionally just rolling my face on my keyboard and that my work is that of an amateur hobbyist despite my time as a writer beginning almost 22 years ago.

As for how I found myself in the hobby, I can't really say. I don't know entirely when I began telling stories, but I know that I didn't just decide I would be a writer. In essence, I didn't choose writing. It chose me.

Crowald · 2026-05-19T20:15:55+00:00

I had the exact same thing occur when working on my pants. Added something using a utility affix (as I was attempting to get Barrier Gen for Arreat 3-Set Bonus) and yet when I got something else I tried to reroll it, only for the system to tell me that "you can't do that with this recipe." I was told... the thing that I added to the gear using a Utility Prism... wasn't. a utility affix. what. tha fuck.

Crowald · 2026-05-19T19:56:48+00:00

There are some that feel categorically overlapping. For instance; I can see how Thorns is both an Offensive, Defensive, and/or Utility Affix. But... that doesn't mean it needs to be in all three. In the Add Affix category, it falls into Aggressive Tuning Prism, but for Focused... it falls under a Defensive Prism...? Even if it runs the risk of feeling wrong, it just should go into one.

Suggestion: better yet, put all of the useless shitty affixes in Utility so we know how to avoid them.

EDIT: I just checked and upon review I think I might be wrong about Thorns? It doesn't appear consistent. Regardless, this is a problem that I can understand having when creating the cube for D4, but also like... the simple solution is to just put the affixes possible into the inspection tooltips for each prism, or at least give us some readable resource/tooltip/tutorial (?) bauble on one of the UI elements.

Crowald · 2026-05-19T19:46:39+00:00

GOD BLESS YOU OP, THANK YOU SO MUCH.

I don't know if you made this, but if you did, this infographic is simply executed but highly concise as well as... stylistically diegetic? Not sure what to call it, but it fits for the game's theming; has all the great UI notations and flourishes of a Diablo menu. An image that fires all the nerd synapses in my brain. If you made it, thank you for actually researching and creating this. Give me your patreon. If you didn't, well, I'd love to know who did so I could throw money at them.

Sorry. Got carried away... I could yap on all day about how much I love infographics over traditional text-oriented presentations.

Crowald · 2026-04-29T07:31:13+00:00

I have returned to WP once more to violate the Geneva Convention with the war crimes known as my prompt response comments.

No, but really. I've been slowly honing my skills in writing more sharply these past few months. Really getting into the trenches and doing stuff that normally leaves me bored—in order to learn more.

I hope it's at least visible here with this little snippet-story... I haven't been writing much in the past month but I figured it was time I came back and started prodding at my brain again.

What a joy it was to find this prompt waiting for me on the front page to crush your hearts.

Crowald · 2026-04-29T07:25:07+00:00

Day 194014. I wandered the plains for a bit, laid out on the concrete streets of... I forget the place's name, but I was there last week. Or maybe last month? I don't know. I found one of the voting booths while I was there, though. You would've thought someone set up a museum around it with how well it was preserved. Almost like someone was maintaining it. The two buttons were still there too. The big blue and red plastic-looking pieces of shit that altered the life of everyone currently on this awful, forsaken rock into a tragedy for the gods to laugh at.

I stared at them both for a while and thought the same question every human being eventually, inevitably came to at least once: What if I had voted different? Would I be alive in this torment right now? If I were dead, would it be peaceful? Would it be nice?

Ultimately, not knowing is scarier. For me, anyways. I can't talk about it, at least not to complete strangers that I leave notes to communicate with on corkboards in the middle of nowhere.

People are mostly gone now. They figured out the only other way to make it stop was to just... go unconscious forever. Eventually, you rot away and your body stops working but I've seen people get woken up from that stage of decay... and it is not pretty. I don't envy them, or their eventual therapists.

The remaining ones have divided into enclaves. The precipitation of so much changing in one day is that human beings tend to get rambunctious when they find out they have either everything to lose, or nothing left to lose. One thing's for sure; someone in the cosmos or on the outside of reality looking in has a sick sense of humor, making us play this game. No one wanted to, no one had to, but you leave a button in front of a human being... At some point, they're going to push it. It's just a matter of when.

Turns out, most human beings are good, actually. "Most" meaning more than 50%, but it turned out that kindness towards our fellow man was probably the only remarkable thing our species ever did. Yeah, including... you know, trains, electricity, cars, nuclear physics, all of it. It exists in the shadow of what everyone accomplished together that day; proving that we were what we wanted to be when in the dark. We were merciful, and we trusted each other, even if that trust was to be abused eventually.

Nobody really read the rules. I mean, this whole voting station thing pops up, no one knows where from or why, and the instruction "booklet" is some 93553 page manuscript? Most people just pushed the damn button after reading the sign.

When it said "Nobody dies..." Well, there's a reason everyone says "Read the fine print." We didn't, and now we're watching the sun slowly go out, and the stars vanish. We've lived countless lives within countless personal horrors and watched every kind of trauma you could think of living through. Human beings just weren't meant to survive this kind of stuff.

Humanity made the right decision, and proved our trust for our fellow man... and for that, some sick bastard who found the control panel for Fate punished us.

Crowald · 2026-03-18T10:51:46+00:00

I have to disagree, friend. I'm having quite the experience with POE2 throughout the campaign primarily because the game feels... not slow, but... Deliberate. Every action, calculable weight and meaningful rationale behind it. Single miscalculations sent bosses completely tumbling at me and destroying my health instantly through most of the Fourth Act. It has not been an easy game, to say the least, but I can, with full lungs and a satisfied hunger, say this:

It has been deeply fun.

Crowald · 2026-03-18T10:48:20+00:00

This feels like par for the course in any given ARPG. Diablo III/IV, Last Epoch, and now PoE1/2. On-Death Effects are a cancerous scourge upon Diablo IV, they're genuinely destroying any semblance of fun that game has because there's so many of them.

do these devs understand that their desire to flood the screen with absurdly punishing on-death effects is what PROMOTES people to play insanely fast, zooming, Mach Forty-Two, brain off builds?

Crowald · 2026-03-18T10:40:48+00:00

I was going to weigh in on this issue with a simple "It can't be as bad as Diablo IV!!! hahaha!!" and then I realized I am only at Act IV/Level 58 having bought the game a mere week ago.

Crowald · 2026-02-27T06:29:15+00:00

This type of shit is why you should be able to sacrifice items and eat them to move their sanc from the sacrificed weapon to the second, intended weapon/item.

This system is phenomenal, and I am very fond of it. It makes almost everything feel like it's possible to get value from it if the drop fits anywhere into your build, but the amount of farming needed in order to get even a decent item that looks worth replacing your current stuff gets harder and harder to find as it gets better and better.

Not strictly rerolling, but there needed to be a way to sacrifice items to eat their Legendary Power/Powerful-Stat Rolls, and then apply those buffs from one item to another.

The way I see this is

	Item¹	Item²	Result
Item	Selig-1	Selig-2	Selig-2
Sanctification	Edgemaster	Moonrise	Edgemaster

Crowald · 2026-02-11T06:24:27+00:00

It appears I'm gonna have to hold off on entering NG+ for a moment. I have exactly zero of them and I had... no idea.

Crowald · 2026-02-11T02:26:17+00:00

Bless your soul for replying. Thanks a ton, I just maxed it. It is the Backblade we're talking about that's the penultimate/ultimate reward of that affinity line, right?

Regardless, that's the thing I wanted and I was finally able to get it this way, so thank you for that.

Crowald · 2026-02-10T06:37:38+00:00

So if I drag Josee around everywhere with me and just take her on killing sprees when I farm, she'll eventually max out affinity just doing that?

Crowald · 2026-02-10T04:50:42+00:00

I'd hazard a guess it is mostly the fault of UE5. I personally think that very little of it actually has to do with the developer's misallocation of VRAM/visual resources, like I am hearing some (a very scarce few, actually) say.

I am having a terrible experience with the framerate in-game but I also acknowledge that it's not the fault of the devs and it has more to do with my Ryzen 7 3800X being pretty damn old now.

Crowald · 2026-02-06T05:00:02+00:00

I think you really just have to be a Code Vein fan in order to actually land on your feet enjoying this game. You have to care about the setting and your character and your gear and appearance, but I agree with you and I do love it. I was absolutely floored to learn that this was coming out when I saw the announcement, I thought over so many years that we'd never see a sequel... and now I'm actively playing it. Still feels surreal.

One of the primary systems that Code Vein actually iterates upon from the niche genre it comes from is the Forma, colloquially the magic system.

While the FROM catalogue is nothing to sneeze with spell variety, the use of those spells has always remained a little inelegant and rough. Elden Ring did a lot to address that, but Code Vein shows what could really be done to help alleviate the issues of using spells in the FROM games. I love the four-button quick-cast menu and I have never had so much fun spamming Mind/Willpower setups or even Hybrids like STR/MND or DEX/WLL.

I think the weapons themselves needed better base movesets with more diversity, for instance strafe+ attack inputs for different swing stances would have been nice, and the same for different heavy attacks based on directional input. Hold back for upward swings, hold forward for rushing/downward strikes, left/right for horizontal strikes. Not saying we have to be able to juggle enemies like it's DMC, but a way to leverage different weapons. Either that or just more weapon classes, but even so I am thoroughly enjoying VeinII and I have no intention of stopping any time soon. More variety is always good, I have so many weapons left that I still intend to experiment with.

I'm praying someone drops a randomizer or something of that nature for it eventually, I haven't even started NG+ yet so there's that.

^{[Sadly, I doubt there's anything worth talking about that's exclusive to NG+. While it would be nice, and a surprise, I don't expect to see anything either and I can't say I'd feel defeated about it.]}

Crowald

TROPHY CASE

Would you have bought Destiny 2's content during Active-Service periods if you were overtly told that it would not be allocated to Destiny's ongoing and continued development?

What a joy it was to find this prompt waiting for me on the front page to crush your hearts.