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Destiny 2's The Final Shape Collector's Edition Is A 10-Year Nostalgia Trip That Might Turn Tragic

The collector's edition for The Final Shape, the next Destiny 2 expansion and the last in its current "Light and Darkness Saga" story arc, is more a celebration of the last 10 years of Destiny 2 than it is the upcoming new content. With the story reaching its conclusion, the collector's edition is a fond look back that's especially rewarding if you're steeped in Destiny 2's lore.

Recently, though, Bungie has started to release details about Into the Light, an upcoming content drop meant to fill
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Why Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's Ending Doesn't Really Matter

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. We recommend you finish Rebirth before reading further.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is a haunted game. It's nearly impossible to have any awareness of the popular culture surrounding video games and not already know the twist waiting for you in the Forgotten Capital: Aerith Gainsborough dies. And it's impossible to play any amount of Rebirth without wondering if that moment i
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Video Game Industry Layoffs Are Worse Than Ever. How Did We Get Here?

On February 27, Sony announced it would lay off 900 people across its worldwide games business, affecting several games studios. Among them were Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games, both of which had just released big, noteworthy titles--Marvel's Spider-Man 2 launched in October to audience and critical acclaim, while The Last of Us Part II Remastered dropped in January with an updated version that included new content. The Sony layoffs constituted some 8% of the people working in its games division
GameSpot •

In Dune: Awakening, You'll Fight To Survive Sandworms, Political Machinations, And Other Players

In the story Dune, Arrakis is the most dangerous planet in the universe. It’s a vast desert world where the scorching sun’s intense heat is a major hazard. Water is nearly impossible to find, and dehydration will claim an unprotected person in a matter of hours. More frightening, though, are the sandworms--enormous, carnivorous creatures that move beneath the ground and hunt by detecting vibrations. The sandworms hear you when you walk in the open deserts of Arrakis, and they always come.

To ca
GameSpot •

Helldivers 2 Should Become Even More Like Starship Troopers

Ask someone what Helldivers 2 is and what it's like, and there's one constant touchstone in every description: Starship Troopers. Spending a few seconds with the game makes it easy to see why the 1997 film is invoked so often, as your early experience of playing as a high-tech human soldier will likely include getting torn apart by a giant insect, just like in the movie.

It's not just the "space marines fighting giant bugs" gameplay that draws from Starship Troopers, though. Helldivers 2 also i
GameSpot •

Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree Trailer Breakdown - Miquella's Story Gets Dark

This first line also sets the stage for the DLC with a description of Miquella: “Pure and radiant, he wields love to shrive clean the hearts of men. There is nothing more terrifying." Lore and descriptions about Miquella describe him as being able to compel the love of other people, and that has always had a light implication of mind control. This first line underlines the idea that Miquella can control people: "shrive" refers to confessing sins, administering a sacrament, and freeing someone of
GameSpot •

Forget Tony Stark And Captain America, Bill And Ted Are The Best Time Travelers In Movie History

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is celebrating its 35th anniversary in 2024, having released in February 1989.

Whenever I watch time-travel movies, I find myself yelling at the screen a lot. You know how people shout at horror movie characters when they inexplicably head into the dark basement or wander alone into the woods to investigate a strange sound that's obviously coming from an eight-foot-tall monster? That's me, but I'm desperately trying to get Denzel Washington to understand his f
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Nightingale's Survival Aspects Are Familiar, But Its Strange Worlds Hold A Lot Of Promise

Our band of Victorian survivalists opened a portal to a swamp filled with vicious creatures, and then we went hunting. A magic spell created by one of our group pointed the way across the festering, waist-deep waters, which carried some unknown disease if you lingered in them for too long. Man-sized rats and frogs appeared at the fringes to slow our progress, but eventually, we found our prey: a fire-breathing beast called a Humbaba, big as a building, that lumbered across the landscape.

It too
GameSpot •

Enshrouded Is Like Multiplayer Skyrim--And Makes My Group Feel Like The Fellowship Of The Ring

One of the first things Enshrouded instructed me and my friends to do was delve into the evil blue fog that infests its lowland areas, seek out a huge, fungus-covered, axe-wielding boss, and murder him.

After that, we built grapple hooks to swing over a destroyed bridge, and within the next hour, we crafted wingsuits from goat skins. We trekked back out into the world, discovered a huge, ancient tower, and scaled it. From its height, we spotted a destroyed monastery in the distance, so we leape
GameSpot •

How Destiny 2 Is Ditching Seasons For Less "Predictable" Episodes

Destiny 2's Season of the Wish is the last time Bungie will use its seasonal content system, switching instead to a new episodic story format between its major expansions. Part of that change is a response to feedback from players that, after four years, the seasonal approach of weekly short story missions had become stale. Each season's story followed a model that Destiny fans started to expect and anticipate, and while Destiny 2's seasonal stories have largely been thoughtful and engaging, the
GameSpot •

How Destiny 2 Finally Got A Dungeon Where You Get Trapped In A Literal Dungeon

Warlord's Ruin, the Destiny 2 dungeon released with Season of the Wish, took players in some unexpected directions when it released on December 1. Where the last two dungeons had a more sci-fi feel, Warlord's Ruin carries a much more Dark Souls vibe. It takes place in a ruined castle; it's a dungeon in which you get trapped in a literal dungeon.

But while Warlord's Ruin and its dark fantasy elements were a surprising and fresh direction for Destiny 2 players, some of those ideas had been floati
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Mass Effect 2's Human Reaper Was Dumb And I'm Sad We Didn't Get More Of It

Mass Effect 2 is celebrating its 14-year anniversary today, January 26, 2024. Below, we look back at one of its strangest aspects, and how it set up a broader subplot that went almost entirely unexplored.

The Suicide Mission of Mass Effect 2 is one of the all-time great climaxes of a video game. After tens of hours building relationships with a crew of characters you've recruited from all over the galaxy, you take them into a final battle where you have to make use of their specific skills and
GameSpot •

Alan Wake 2: Everything New We Learned From The Final Draft

The Final Draft often provides more context for existing story beats rather than offering new ones, but one additional element gives hints at events that happened at an area we never visit: the Lake House. This is the FBC's laboratory and command center in Bright Falls, but you can't go there in the main game. Later, Estevez tells Saga that the Lake House has been overrun by the Taken. A new manuscript page in The Final Draft suggests that one of the FBC researchers at the Lake House, Dr. Jean M
GameSpot •

The Last Of Us 2's Roguelike Mode Is Fun, But Highlights How Its Elements Don't Quite Fit Together

Combat in The Last of Us Part 2 creates a pretty specific feeling. It's often slow and heavy, providing a weight to every interaction that demonstrates just how tough it is to kill someone and how quickly things can go wrong. At the same time, it relies heavily on improvisation as you vault over objects, smash people with bricks, and bury machetes in guts--or just silently open someone's jugular with your knife as you clamp a hand over their mouth.

Despite having a certain clunkiness, there's a
GameSpot •

FX's Alien Show Is Making The Monster Scarier By Dropping Prometheus's Plot

Sharks have been basically unchanged for millions of years. Essentially a torpedo with teeth, the shark is a creature incredibly honed to its particular ecological niche of eating stuff while swimming fast. Though, according to the theory of evolution, it was created through a confluence of random events--millions of generations of slight variations and mutations slowly selecting for the best combination of elements--it was fine-tuned through that process to create something incredibly powerful
GameSpot •

The AI George Carlin Special Sucks For Every Reason You Thought And More

To even judge "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead," an hour-long YouTube video of bad AI-generated images, narrated and purportedly "written" and "performed" by a generative artificial intelligence model as an imitation of a dead famous human man, as a "comedy special" would be to lend it legitimacy. "I'm Glad I'm Dead" is a weak, watered down, boring approximation of the artistic performances a human person honed over the course of a lifetime by combining his experiences of living with Carlin's s
GameSpot •

Destiny 2 Has To Do Something Better Than This Ahead Of The Final Shape

Warning: This article includes spoilers for this week's Season of the Wish story events in Destiny 2. You might want to finish it before reading further.

With what is ostensibly the conclusion of the story of the Season of the Wish, Destiny 2 is now proceeding to the conclusion of its 10-year story with The Final Shape. Though the next big expansion has been delayed all the way from February to June, the stage is set for players to pursue and confront the Witness, the series' biggest villain.
GameSpot •

In Spider-Man 2, Spider-Cop Is A Big Reason Why Peter Parker Must Step Aside

There's a joke in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 that, if you're at all tied into discussions about Insomniac's Spider-Man games, feels pointed. It comes up during side-plot moments with Wraith, a vigilante who wants Peter Parker's Spider-Man to help her put an end to a fire-obsessed killer cult. When Spider-Man asks Wraith if she has any tattoos, she quips, "Just the one of Spider-Cop's gravestone."

It's a joke that requires some familiarity with the first Marvel's Spider-Man. The 2018 game saw Peter c
GameSpot •

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Will Tell DC Stories "You Probably Never Thought" Would Be In A Game

With Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, developer Rocksteady Studios looks to bring elements of what made its open-world Batman games work to a cooperative, live-game framework. That raises a question, though: Live games require continuous content, but how can Rocksteady keep a game called "Kill the Justice League" going after players (at least presumably) kill the Justice League?

We recently attended a Warner Bros. Games preview event, where we played about five hours of Suicide Squad. Ro
GameSpot •

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Is Ambitious But Conflicted

With Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, developer Rocksteady Studios is hoping to do for the live-service genre what its Batman series did for melee action games. Batman: Arkham Asylum set a standard for beatdown combat that has influenced plenty of developers since its release in 2009, and Batman: Arkham City did the same for both large-scale fights and an open-world setting. Though Suicide Squad is pretty different--it's a co-op third-person shooter--Rocksteady looks to bring the same spe
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Iron Banter Column

A weekly column covering all aspects of Destiny 2, published at GameSpot.

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