One of the weirder things about algorithmic media is that I will receive apology videos from people I've never even heard of simply because it's media that has been engaged with beyond a certain threshold. It's a genre; they seem real sad. I thought Bungie's new video was going to be another entry in this Al-Qaeda Hostage genre, but at least I know what this one is about. Bungie's corporate leadership sold them up the river, made impossible promises, and then actual human beings had to try to spin that candy floss into real products, all while getting chopped up like a boosted Audi. A lot of people mourned Destiny, as they were essentially told to by the company itself. But now it's back! Kinda. Maybe?

There aren't many moves on the board. I think Marathon looks incredible, but it's a brutal game for a different player than I am, one whose aspirational raid content is essentially beyond my capacity. The path they've chosen is to create a more traditional co-op PvE experience and a dedicated deathmatch experience, which both sound like something I could get into but they already have my money.

Resuscitating Destiny 2 by exhuming vaulted content seems like a relatively lo-fi way to spruce up the place, keep the stove warm, which is why doing it before they had a funeral for the game might have been a good idea. World of Warcraft Forever could provide a model here, especially as Blizzard seems to have figured out a way to go Home Again. There is an incredible amount of content to reconfigure and interpret, whatever the problems that created the vault situation to begin with were. We've had a lot of opportunities to leverage the Ship of Theseus metaphor recently, probably because we live in a perpetual ruin, where parts are more common than wholes. For Bungie, I think it doesn't matter - this is the ship they have. They need to be good to it. Dance with the one who brung ya. They should have been better to it before; this is the next best time to start.

(CW)TB out.