Gaming
Destiny 2’s Single-Use Shaders Are Just Plain Wrong
From what I can gather, Destiny 2 is a fun game. Many gamers who hated the first Destiny seem to enjoy the sequel a great deal more, and thanks to the PC beta test, I can say from firsthand experience they’re right. While PC gamers need to wait a bit to play the game, PS4 and Xbox One (and PS4 Pro) owners are playing Destiny 2 as I write this article and sadly discovering several issues with the game, namely its microtransactions, or to be more specific, the one-time use shaders.
Depending on your video game experience, you may or may not recognize “shader” as the term commonly used to describe cosmetic items that overwrite the colors of wearable equipment. Shaders are standard in many modern games, especially role-playing games that emphasize character customization, including Dragon Age: Inquisition and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Blood and Wine. Shaders are a godsend in MMOs where all end-level armor looks homogeneous. Why should every player settle for the same old drab silver and brown suit when players can color it as bright and shiny gold armor with purple highlights? Shaders were everywhere in the original Destiny, and players could swap shaders at any time. However, according to a Reddit post, Bungie (or more likely Activision) decided to change how shaders work in Destiny 2 by making them disappear after being used. Oh, and they can also be found en masse in loot boxes that can only be purchased with real world money, because why not?
Perhaps the executive behind this decision didn’t get the memo, but Destiny 2 is a loot-based game, which means players are stuck in a never-ending cycle of “find armor and weapons, equip them, and replace them five minutes later with even better armor and weapons.” While luck plays a huge factor, eventually every player will replace every piece of equipment with something better, which raises the question: what’s the point in wasting a one-use shader on a piece of equipment that will inevitably be replaced? Gamers color their armor with shaders to give it a specific color scheme, but this scheme is replaced when players equip a new piece of armor. Since the shader is one-use, the new armor piece can’t be colored unless the player has a duplicate shader, which is highly unlikely given the random nature of the loot drops. In other words, there is no point in wasting limited-use shaders on equipment that will be replaced. Sure, gamers can always stockpile shaders and use them to color end-level equipment, but this equipment will eventually become obsolete in a future patch or expansion. To put it simply, the loot-based nature of Destiny 2 conflicts with the nature of Destiny 2‘s shaders.
You are now probably wondering how Activision/Bungie should handle shaders in Destiny 2. Since shaders can now be applied individually to every piece of equipment, including weapons and ships, perhaps the companies should take a page out of Wildstar. In that game, shaders have unlimited uses and can be applied to almost any piece of armor or clothing. Moreover, players can mix and match shaders to create any color scheme imaginable. Personally, I consider Wildstar the bar by which other MMOs should be measured regarding how shaders are implemented. Maybe it’s too much to ask the developers at Bungie to copy Wildstar‘s shader system, but the company should at least get rid of the one-use limitation.
Bungie could and should patch in an update to Destiny 2 to fix the shader system. The fan outcry is near universal; nobody likes that shaders are one-use items. I cannot think of a legitimate reason why shaders shouldn’t be permanent items, and apparently neither can anyone else. Please, Bungie, you have a good game on your hands; don’t ruin it for the fans. Please.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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