It’s Saturday (unless you’re reading in this in the future, of course) which means that it’s time for yet another weekend Talking Point. As always, we’ve rounded up various members of the Nintendo Life team and forc- *ahem*… kindly asked them to share their weekend plans, so make sure to give them a read before getting involved with our poll and comment sections below. Enjoy!

Austin Voigt, contributing writer

This weekend, I’m actually headed out to London for a gaming meetup with friends, so I’ll be once again admiring my Switch’s portable capabilities in airports, planes and trains. I’ve got a friend with me, so it’ll likely be some good old fashioned Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Smash Ultimate and Splatoon 2. Maybe even a little two-player Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu!. I’m sure we’ll either annoy the heck out of the other passengers on our flight across the pond or start some cool aeroplane-wide Mario Kart tournament with everyone else – who knows!

Jon Cousins, Japan correspondent

Intentionally avoiding the horrors of a certain classic remake (because I’m a massive wuss and can’t be playing that kind of malarkey at the moment), I’m delving into a wonderfully wacky world I’ve had my eye on for quite some time: Pikuniku. Trying to stay away from footage and reviews as much as possible (apart from our handsome talisman Alex’s video) it’s as if George Orwell made a Mr Men game and I absolutely adore it.

It actually inspired me to revisit a Switch launch game – Snipperclips. Of course, the co-op and competitive multiplayer are hilariously brilliant, but I again appreciate the single player with its charm, moments of methodical thinking and fun puzzle solving.

Dom Reseigh-Lincoln, reviewer

This weekend I’ll be returning to a platforming gem almost no one seems to remember from the sixth gen, Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy. It’s been given an HD makeover and it’s headed to Switch so of course I’m going to see if it’s got what it takes to live again in a new era of consoles. I’ll also likely doing be doing my usual thing of flitting between Warframe and Paladins because, presumably, I’m only truly happy when I’m shooting things to death in a game!

Ryan Craddock, staff writer

This weekend looks like it might be a pretty busy, time-consuming one for me, so my gaming time might be sadly limited. Having said that, I’m sure my recent rediscovered love for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe will make an appearance at some point – I’ve never really played Mario Kart online before, as I don’t tend to like playing anything online really, but I’ve been enjoying the added tension that actual, real-life humans can provide. I need to get out more, I know.

Elsewhere, I still haven’t found the time to play GRIS, despite the fact that it’s been sitting on my console for over a month now. Hopefully I can get a little bit of time to start that soon as I’ve only heard wonderful things.

Liam Doolan, news reporter

Earlier this week I bought Mutant Mudds Collection, Xeodrifter and Soccer Slammers in the Atooi sale on the Switch eShop. So this weekend my plan is to play them all. Mutant Mudds is a game I’ve been meaning to revisit for a long time to try out the additional modes Super Challenge and Mudd Blocks. When I’m not playing either of these, I’ll be spending time in the Metroid-inspired game Xeodrifter, while trying to come to terms with the fact the development of Metroid Prime 4 has been reset.

Gonçalo Lopes, contributing writer

Moe weekend! It will be all about Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes for me; I welcome all this Suda51 insanity with a passion and despite knowing full well no one will remember the game by the year’s end, I am certain this is one of the 2019 Switch GOTY candidates. Elsewhere a bit of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and as much as I can possibly fit into Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition. Hmm, I got a bit of the sniffles… hopefully not the G Virus.

My game of the week goes to Pikuniku! What a delightful, minimalist journey where a flying kick solves most issues. If only real life were this simple…

Gavin Lane, contributing writer

This weekend I shall be mostly playing Downwell, OlliOlli: Switch Stance and When Ski Lifts Go Wrong, all for your reading pleasure over the coming week(s). It would be nice to make a dent in the backlog, too – Dark Souls Remastered isn’t going to play itself! – but I’ll also be knee-deep in IKEA furniture, so most of my time will be spent spinning teeny Allen keys and shooing cats out of empty packaging.

Don’t feel too sorry for me, though. Without wanting to spoil anything, that Downwell is still per-ritty good.

As always, thanks for reading! Make sure to leave a vote in the poll above and a comment below with your gaming choices over the next few days…

The launch of the original iPad on January 27, 2010 saw pundits guaranteeing its failure, some Apple fans disappointed, and Steve Jobs turning out to be right. Again.

Steve Jobs unveils the original iPad

In the last few months before the much, much anticipated iPad was launched on January 27, 2010, competitors had been talking up their own tablets. Then suddenly it was rumored that Apple’s one was going to be called the iSlate and competitors such as Microsoft were calling everything they could ‘slate PCs.’

Three days before the iPad was announced, Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer even unveiled three such slate PCs. He did so in his typical hesitant, clunky style and launched a video that was over practically before he’d introduced it.

Given that and the way he belabored that all the slate PCs he showed were prototypes, it all felt a little desperate. Apple was coming, it seemed to say, and rivals were afraid.

Microsoft, for one, should really have been feeling chagrin. As far back as 1996, its founder Bill Gates wrote in his book The Road Ahead that “in the future lots of people will be taking handwritten notes on computer tablets rather than paper.”

True, by then we’d already seen the Apple Newton so Gates’s book wasn’t as visionary as it seemed to think. However, Microsoft had done more than talk about tablets, it had released Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing in 1992. Then by the early 2000s, companies were making Pocket PCs.

Microsoft had tablets long before Apple. Many, many companies had tablets. It was just that nobody was buying them.

So this is where we were in early 2010. The entire computing industry was waiting for an Apple tablet, the world’s press was going to cover its launch. And then, as now, Apple didn’t say a word about what was coming.

The earliest official indication of something, anything, happening came on January 18, 2010, when Apple issued a press invitation to the launch. It was less cryptic than usual as it blatantly said: “Come see our latest creation.”

Apple’s invitation to what would be the launch of the iPad

At 10am Pacific on Wednesday, 27 January, 2010, Steve Jobs stepped out onto the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. He didn’t pause the way he had with the iPhone three years before. He didn’t say that this was a day he’d been waiting for.

Yet he could have done because as we found out much later, the story of the iPad began much earlier. It began earlier even than the iPhone.

Origin story

You know that the Newton was Apple’s first tablet computer, albeit one that needed you to use a stylus instead of your fingers. It’s debatable whether there is really a line from the Newton MessagePad to the iPad but if this were a case of evolution, we’ve found the missing link.

That 2012 video is a demonstration of a pen-based Mac that was made around 1992 but never shipped as a commercial product in the US. It was called the Apple Penlite and the version shown here is a stylus-based tablet version of the Macintosh PowerBook Duo.

Reportedly, though, there was also a version that ran with what we would now call multi-touch gestures.

Apple dropped that and it dropped the Newton but in 2004 Steve Jobs revealed that Apple had continued looking at a PDA. “We got enormous pressure to bring back the Newton or do a PDA and we looked at it,” he said at the D2 All Things Digital Conference. “And we said, wait a minute, 90 percent of the people who use these things just want to get information out of them, they don’t necessarily want to put information into them on a regular basis. Cellphones are going to do that.”

At the time, he said this as if that were the end of it, that cellphones were a market that Apple could never compete in. Yet by this moment in 2004, Apple had produced a technology that would end up becoming the iPhone. It’s just that it wasn’t looking at a phone then, it was looking to do a tablet.

CAD drawings from 2004 of the iPad (Source: The Verge)

That image and others were later to be used as exhibits in an Apple vs Samsung court case where we also saw photographs of later prototype iPads.

It’s odd just how unclear and uncertain the origins of the iPad are given that it and the iPhone are so important to Apple and that none of this was so very long ago. Yet while the CAD drawings show a date of 2004, Walter Isaacson claims in his Steve Jobs biography that the idea for the iPad didn’t come until 2005.

Even then he recounts two different versions. One is that Jony Ive and his team had been working on improving the trackpads of the MacBook Pro when they developed multi-touch. Ive showed Jobs a version of their attempt to move multi-touch onto a screen. Isaacson reports that Jobs then said that “this is the future.”

Alternatively, Isaacson also recounts a version that sounds more colorful and apocryphal but which he backs up with quotes from Jobs and Bill Gates. Reportedly Gates and Jobs were at a dinner party for the birthday of a Microsoft engineer who, says Jobs, “badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software.”

Apparently this wasn’t a new topic for this unnamed Microsoft engineer —”this dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it” —but each time the conversation was about using a stylus. “But he was doing the device all wrong,” continued Jobs. “As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead… I was so sick of it that I came home and said ‘F*** this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.'”

What is clear that this work to make a tablet was changed into making a phone. We know this from how Jobs, Ive and others have said so, but also from the fact that it happened. The iPhone came out in 2007 and it wasn’t until 2010 that the tablet appeared.

It’s not as if the road from idea to tablet was easy but once the iPhone was done, and also was such an overwhelming success, the iPad was at least more assured.

Except that Apple was new to tablets and so many other companies had tried and failed. The iPad’s success was of course going to be down to its technology but also very much to how Apple positioned it.

And as much as unveiling the hardware on January 27, 2010, Jobs was really selling us on the idea of an iPad.

Showman

Steve Jobs got a standing ovation when he stepped out onto that Yerba Buena Center for the Arts stage and he got it before he even said “Good morning.” He got the welcome because this was his public return to Apple after having taken six months leave while recovering from a liver transplant.

The extent of applause did seem to surprise him and he did still look ill, but he was soon into a very astutely prepared presentation.

Steve Jobs on stage for the first time after his liver transplant operation

Twice he teased about being there to show us all something new and then instead said he wanted to tell us other things first. He gave a typical update on the state of Apple and of course the numbers were impressive, or at least they were at the time.

While they’ve now all been dwarfed by the company’s later success, in January 2010 Jobs was able to report that the company had sold its 250 millionth iPod. He was able to say that there were 284 Apple Stores and that they’d seen 50 million visitors in the last quarter. He could tell us that there were now over 140,000 applications in the App Store and that they’d been downloaded over 3 billion times.

It was all the regular stuff but in this presentation it was specifically laying the ground work for how Apple was the company to deliver a tablet. How it was the firm that would of course get this right.

After the numbers about the stores, Jobs showed an image of himself and Steve Wozniak from the earliest days of Apple and then paused. “We started Apple in 1976,” he said. “Thirty-four years later, we just ended our holiday quarter, our first fiscal quarter of 2010, with $15.6 billion dollars of revenue. That means Apple is an over-50 billion dollar company. Now, I like to forget that because that’s not how we think about Apple but it is pretty amazing.”

Steve Jobs recalls forming Apple with Steve Wozniak

It was also the cue for him to expand on the revenue number, to talk to us about how Apple gets this from three product lines. Those were the iPod, iPhone and the Mac.

“Now what’s really interesting about this is that iPods are mobile devices,” he said. “iPhones are mobile devices. And most of the Macs that we ship now are laptops. They’re mobile devices. Apple is a mobile devices company, that’s what we do.”

Remember that competitors had been making tablets for at least a decade. Here was Steve Jobs saying that Apple was bigger and better than them all. “It turns out that by revenue, Apple is the largest mobile devices company in the world now.”

He belabored the point, driving home that Apple was larger than Sony —or at least that company’s mobile devices business —and the same with Samsung and Nokia.

With us all now fully briefed on Apple’s stature in the mobile devices market, he finally went into the iPad part of the presentation. Or appeared too.

Jobs quotes the Wall Street Journal on the hyped-up rumors of an Apple tablet

“But before we get to that,” he said to laughter, “I want to go back to 1991 when Apple announced and shipped its first PowerBooks.”

Now he was underlining Apple’s hardware expertise and how it led the industry. He spoke of how the PowerBook made the laptop into what we now recognize as one. “It was the first laptop that had a TFT screen the first modern LCD screens. It was the first laptop that pushed the keyboard up, creating palm rests and had an integrated pointing tool, in this case a trackball.”

Amazingly, we’re only just over six minutes into this presentation but Jobs has primed us to think that Apple is the best mobile devices company in the world and also the best at making laptops.

And finally, it was here.

“A question has arisen lately,” said Jobs. “Is there room for a third category of device in the middle? Something that’s between a laptop and a smartphone. The bar is pretty high. In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks. They’re going to have to be far better at doing some really important things. Better than the laptop. Better than the smartphone.”

He sketched out some tasks like browsing the web, doing email, reading.

“If there’s going to be a third category of device, it’s going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone. Otherwise it has no reason for being. Now, some people have thought that that’s a netbook. The problem is that netbooks aren’t better at anything.”

He dismissed netbooks for their lack of speed, lack of quality and poor software. He said they’re “just cheap laptops and we don’t think that they’re a third category of device.”

And then he said “But we think we’ve got something that is and we’d like to show it to you today for the first time. And we call it the iPad.”

The first time we saw the word iPad

It’s as well that Jobs had done all this work positioning the iPad because just about the instant that slide appeared, so did the first criticisms of the device. The very first criticism, though, was valid. It was about the name iPad.

Among many references online to Maxi-Pad tampon and among Twitter references to #iTampon, there were criticisms that clearly no women work in Apple’s naming department. Fast Company‘s Alissa Walker or perhaps her headline writer said it best, though, in a piece called “Apple’s iPad Name Not the First Choice for Women. Period.”

Slated

If you got an original iPad when it actually went on sale in April that year, your first reaction was surprised at how small it was. Then after a few minutes of using it, you tended to forget that and even come to think the opposite. Seeing a full website page at a time did feel like, as Jobs said, “holding the internet in your hands.”

Look at the bezels on the original iPad

The majority of critics did not wait to get one, did not wait for it to go on sale, before they were pronouncing the iPad a certain flop.

Business Insider called it “a big yawn” and a disappointment, saying that Jobs “didn’t deliver.”

InfoWorld didn’t even wait for the announcement, let alone the product, before it went a bit crazy with the idea of a “coming Apple tablet-pocaplypse.” Written for IT professionals in corporations, it advised “an outright ban [on the iPad] is in order.” It even told them to make any excuse they liked but ban the iPad and “seek to contain the situation by offering up an alternative tablet solution running the IT-supported and IT-approved Windows 7 operating system.”

John C Dvorak was always more of a clickbait and shock-jock style of pundit but he at least waited until the announcement, even if he didn’t see an iPad himself. Still, he reckoned it was a serious misstep. “I’m of the opinion and hope that this device is only released as a market test and placeholder for something more spectacular in the future,” he wrote.

Spectacular future

If Dvorak’s notion of a market test was bizarre for a business writer, you could say that he was right that something more spectacular would be coming in the future.

Despite the critics, despite being late to the whole idea of tablets, Apple made the iPad and we bought it in our millions. It’s had some ups and downs since that 2010 launch but it’s also got progressively more spectacular.

You’ve seen how shockingly huge the bezels on the original model now seem to us. Here’s another way to see the difference between then and now.

Main image: 2018 11-inch iPad Pro home screen. Inset, to scale: original iPad home screen

The main image is a home screen from the current 11-inch iPad Pro. The two devices have slightly different dimensions. The original iPad was 9.56 inches by 7.47 inches and the 2018 model is 9.74 inches by 7.02 inches.

However, look at the inset image. That’s the home screen of an original iPad and it’s rendered here to scale. This is how far just the quality of the iPad screen has come since January 27, 2010, when Jony Ive said that the iPad was “magical”.

Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos.

RESIDENT EVIL 2 / BIOHAZARD RE:2 is Now Available on Steam!

A deadly virus engulfs the residents of Raccoon City in September of 1998, plunging the city into chaos as flesh eating zombies roam the streets for survivors.

An unparalleled adrenaline rush, gripping storyline, and unimaginable horrors await you.

Witness the return of Resident Evil 2.

RESIDENT EVIL 2 / BIOHAZARD RE:2 is Now Available on Steam!

A deadly virus engulfs the residents of Raccoon City in September of 1998, plunging the city into chaos as flesh eating zombies roam the streets for survivors.

An unparalleled adrenaline rush, gripping storyline, and unimaginable horrors await you.

Witness the return of Resident Evil 2.

Mortal Kombat 11 has been revealed! On a rainy Thursday, in an industrial building on the edge of the Koreatown neighborhood in Los Angeles, Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon lifted the veil of secrecy from the latest chapter in the long-running fighting game series.

The story of Mortal Kombat 11 (we’ll call it MK 11 from here on out) picks up right where the last game left off. Shinnok is defeated, and Raiden has been corrupted into Dark Raiden. More importantly, there are new systems and a character customization adapted from the gear system in Injustice 2. And, naturally, there are hundreds of bone-crunching, blood splattering moves, all visualized with animations that might be the best in the series.

I got hands on time with MK 11 and came away with some detailed impressions about how the game is taking Mortal Kombat into the future.

A Roster of Old Favorites and New Fighters.

The character select screen in MK 11 has twenty-five slots. Seven characters were visible in our demo: Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Sonya Blade, Baraka (who was in MK 9 but sat out MK X), Skarlet (finally a default selectable!), Dark Raiden, and the new guy, Geras.

We’ll get to Geras in a minute, when we talk about story. Ed Boon suggested that we’ll see young and old versions of characters, but neither he nor other developers would elaborate. Nor would the devs I spoke to say that the 25-character roster was the upper limit on the lineup.

A Fatal Blow Might Save You

The most significant new mechanic is the Fatal Blow system, which offers a special move when any fighter’s health drops below thirty percent. These moves behave in a pretty different way from the X-ray moves introduced in 2011’s Mortal Kombat. (But the close-up X-ray visual effects remain, with many of them incorporated into the flow of gameplay.)

Launch a Fatal Blow and gameplay goes into a set of slow-mo closeups that shove spears through chests and blades through faces. It’s not quite a fatality, but if you’re losing a round the Fatal Blow offers a chance to knock a big chunk of health off your opponent. The attack doesn’t land automatically, but in my play session it was fairly easy to pull it off. There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to use it every time — we’ll see how NetherRealms refines the mechanic as the game gets towards release — but if you’re getting beat down the Fatal Blow will probably be a good back-pocket move to rely on. I couldn’t tell in play sessions if there’s any downside to using it.

Get Kustomized!

As expected, there’s a significant character customization system in MK 11. The system is certainly inspired by the one from Injustice 2, but there are a lot of differences. The most crucial thing to know is that you can create, name, and save at least three variants of any character.

Each fighter has a host of different customizable options. “Kosmetics” encompass Intros, Victories, Taunts, Brutalities, and Fatalities. (Each of the characters I could tinker with today had two Fatality options, most of which were not viewable.)

Then there’s the actual gear. Unlockable gear options are also primarily cosmetic, and, broadly speaking, they cover masks, weapons, and special attacks. But each piece of gear has a set of Augmentation slots — typically three. Those Augmentations also have to be unlocked and/or collected, and that’s where your bonuses come in. You might be able to add punches or slashes to a specific move, get a damage buff as your health is whittled down, or increase the duration of some effects. That’s just a sample; there are dozens of options.

Other customization options include skins, with options of 20 per character; abilities, which let you swap special moves in and out of an active set; and AI attributes, which give you a set of points that can be allocated to six different broad tactical categories which define how that character will behave under AI control.

Gore Never Looked So Pretty

You’ve probably already watched the first gameplay footage, so you’ve seen it: this is a brutal, gory, gnarly game. Baraka puts his teeth to work biting legs, heads, and, in one fatality, brains. Faces are torn off in successive layers. Bodies are broken into pieces by every conceivable weapon, from hammers and stone to blades and even blades made out of blood. (Hello, Skarlet!)

And it all looks incredible. MK 11 is more fluid than ever, with impressive lighting effects that really come into play when Scorpion is seen as a fighting, burning skeleton, or Raiden electrifies an opponent with red lightning. The liquid modeling has also been improved, which results in a pretty significant visual upgrade, given how much blood flows in the game.

So What’s the Story?

Let’s circle back to the new character, Geras. He’s the enforcer for Kronica, who we saw in the game’s first teaser, putting hands on a giant hour glass at the end of the trailer. Ed Boon said today that Kronica has been pulling the strings from behind the scenes going all the way back to the original Mortal Kombat. (Or at least the original as revised in 2011.) Kronica didn’t think Shinnok would be defeated by Raiden, and now wants to set the timeline right. That’s how we’ll see different versions of some characters — she’s going to do something with time, we just don’t know what. Kronica will also be the game’s big boss, and so will probably be playable in some form.

As Kronica’s henchman, Geras also uses time-based attacks. Most of his attacks relate to time, and sand, but he can mold that sand into bludgeons and hammers — his moves are some of the most crushing and brutal in a game that already pushes the limits of violence.

A Few Other Details and Observations

An Xbox One beta has been announced for March 28, which will function more or less like NetherRealm’s previous betas. (Short version: you’ll have to pre-order.) Players can get a taste of a limited roster with the major game mechanics all intact, but we don’t know any more beta details yet.

There are three meters now: health, which powers the Fatal Blow as it decreases, and defense and offense, which fill over time, and power special moves.

Ronda Rousey voices Sonya Blade, a character she says has been an inspiration since she first played Mortal Kombat as a pre-teen. Since Rousey is the biggest new talent announced for the game, does that mean Sonya will be particularly important to the story?

What about Babalities and/or Friendships? While Babalities made a comeback in MK X, we don’t know if they’re an option in MK 11. And there’s no indication that Friendship is an option… but NetherRealm hasn’t yet said they’re out, either.

Mortal Kombat 11 arrives on Xbox One April 22 and is available for pre-order today on the Microsoft Store. Prepare for battle today by playing Mortal Kombat X with Xbox Game Pass. 

No, it’s not some horrible nightmare, Nintendo has in fact announced the development of Metroid Prime 4 will be restarted, with the original developer Retro Studios now collaborating with producer Kensuke Tanabe.

Prior to this shock announcement from Nintendo, there were rumours circulating late last year about the re-release of the Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Nintendo Switch as an appetiser. So, what’s the current status of this rumoured project? According to a series of tweets by Game Informer’s Senior Editor Imran Khan, “it’s been long done” and the initial announcement for the trilogy collection on Switch was supposed to happen last month, but not necessarily at The Game Awards. Why exactly this game wasn’t revealed by Nintendo around this time is unknown.

Over on ResetEra, Khan said Metroid Prime 4’s development reset is likely to alter Nintendo’s schedule and mentioned how there was more “Metroid stuff” in the pipeline to anticipate.

Now that Nintendo has revealed the news about Metroid Prime 4, do you think it should focus on releasing the Metroid Prime Trilogy as soon as possible, assuming it is more than a rumour? Tell us below.

CHAOS;CHILD is Now Available on Steam!

From the creators of the critically acclaimed STEINS;GATE comes a sensational new visual novel: CHAOS;CHILD. Set in Shibuya in 2015, a group of high school students who survived an earthquake six years ago find themselves at the center of a new series of bizarre murders in the city.

This week at Bungie, we’re getting ready to turn up the power.  

Mayhem Returns

With all of these new Super changes, we figured you’d be eager to jump in and try them out. What’s the best mode for showcasing Supers? Mayhem! We’re turning up the recharge rates to 11, so pick your space magic of choice and start melting faces. 

Mayhem!

Begins: January 29, 2019

Ends: February 05, 2019 

As you battle it out amidst the chaos, please remember that the Crucible is not liable for injuries sustained therein.

Crimson Days

Crimson Days is coming soon. It was originally scheduled to start on February 5. That date is being shifted slightly. Grab your partner and get ready for action and rewards.

Crimson Days

Begins: February 12, 2019

Ends: February 19, 2019 

If you missed out on Crimsons Days last year, or didn’t get everything you wanted, you’re in luck. This is your chance to get the rewards exclusive to this event. The event is very similar to last year, but we have added a few new rewards and ways of obtaining them. We’ll give you the full details closer to the special day.

Cleaning House

Starting with Season of the Drifter, we’re making a slight change to the way bounties grant powerful rewards. To ensure an even playing field each time we kick off a new season, bounties acquired during previous seasons will have a maximum possible power reward. This change is intended to prevent players from feeling the need to hoard bounties and raid keys that grant powerful rewards until the Power cap is raised in an attempt to get a leg up in the push toward the new Power cap.

Example:

NOTE: Completed bounties have no mechanism to “dismantle,” so keeping completed bounties could negatively affect players for the first week of a new season. By holding on to the old bounties, this locks players out of an “uncapped” bounty that could become available with the start of a new season.

We strongly recommend either completing or discarding any powerful rewards bounties before the new season begins. Completing these bounties after the season changes could result in missing out on the new season’s version of the bounty with the higher Power cap.

We are also looking to address stockpiles of Raid Keys as well. We are currently finalizing details, and will give additional information when available.

Final Preview

We’ve talked about a lot of changes coming next Tuesday in 2.1.4, but we have a few more you may not know about yet. Here is a final preview before the official patch notes ship with the update on 1/29/19.  

Redrix’s Broadsword Quest:

Enhancement Cores

Grenade Launchers

New Year’s Resolutions

The DPS team is always working diligently behind the scenes. They are making sure you have the info you need to have the best Destiny 2 experience.

This is their report.

Destiny 2 Update 2.1.4 Resolved Issues Preview – Part 2

Resuming the conversation from last week, the following known issues are expected to be resolved with the launch of Destiny 2 Update 2.1.4 on January 29.

• “Like a Diamond” Triumph: The “Like a Diamond” Triumph is not unlocking for fireteams who complete the “Scourge of the Past” raid in a single session with no deaths.
• “Always on Time” Sparrow: The “Always on Time” Exotic Sparrow from the “Scourge of the Past” raid cannot be reclaimed from Collections.
• Modulus Reports to Postmaster: Modulus Reports earned when a player’s Pursuits inventory is full are not sent to the Postmaster.
• “No Feelings” Kill Tracker: The “Scourge of the Past” raid Scout Rifle “No Feelings” does not correctly track kills when Masterworked to tier 6 or higher.
• “Rasmussen” and “Satou” Ghost Projections: There is a discrepancy between the assets used in the “Rasmussen” and “Satou” Ghost projections available in the Etched Engram.
• “Veterans of the Hunt” Emblem: The “Veterans of the Hunt” emblem uses art from the “Universal Hero” emblem, causing the “Universal Hero” emblem to not display properly.

For the full Destiny 2 Update 2.1.4 patch notes when they are available, players should monitor our Updates page.

Destiny 2 Update 2.1.4 Deployment Timeline

Next Tuesday, January 29, Destiny 2 Update 2.1.4 will become available to players. This update marks the arrival of the Exotic quest, “The Draw,” as well as the expected resolution to issues described in our Resolved Issues Previews—Part 1 and 2.

All Destiny 2 players will need to download and install this update when it is available. Please see below for the Update 2.1.4 deployment timeline for Tuesday, January 29.

• 8 AM PST (1600 UTC): Destiny 2 maintenance is scheduled to begin. Some Destiny Companion features may be unavailable on the web, mobile, and third-party apps.
• 8:45 AM PST (1645 UTC): Downtime in Destiny 2 will take place at this time. All players will be removed from the game. Players will not be able to log into the game.
• 9 AM PST (1700 UTC): Update 2.1.4 will begin rolling out across all platforms and regions. Downtime in Destiny 2 is expected to end, but maintenance will be ongoing.
• 10 AM PST (1800 UTC): Destiny 2 maintenance is expected to conclude.
• 11 AM PST (1900 UTC): Destiny Companion features will be re-enabled on the web, mobile, and third-party apps. Players who encounter issues should report them to the #Help forum.

Dutch Angle

What will they do next? It’s a question we often ask ourselves. Movie of the Week is one of the ways we like to highlight the awesome things the community creates. It can be anything from a huge accomplishment to a funny short. Every week, we pick a few of our favorites and show off their creations here.

Movie of the Week:  How to Titan

Honorable Mention: Live like Legends

As always, both creators of these videos and any helpers they had will receive a special emblem for their efforts. If you are one of the winners, make sure you put everyone’s player name who helped in the description.

<3 Cozmo