• $250k – Dawning 2020 Titan universal ornament concept art 
• (You’ve already smashed this milestone)
• $500k – Dawning 2020 Warlock universal ornament concept art
• $750k – Dawning 2020 Hunter universal ornament concept art
• $1 million – Dawning 2020 Legendary Reward preview
• Every $100k after reaching $1 million – Guest lore reading

Destiny 2 Update 3.0.1 has quite a bit more under the hood. The team has been working on some bug fixes for issues found around launch, but we also have a few promises to keep. Let’s dig in.

• The Prophecy Dungeon will be returning to Destiny 2 on December 8, 2020.
• This endgame activity is free to all players.
• Powerful rewards may be earned from each checkpoint once per week.
• Players may complete the dungeon once per week to obtain a pinnacle-powered reward.
• Previously featured weapon and armor rewards are available once more.

• Beginning next week, players may acquire bounties from Destiny 2 vendors using the Destiny Companion App.
• Bounties may only be acquired when players are Offline, In Orbit, or in The Tower.
• This will be introduced through a Companion App update, which is planned for December 8, 2020.
• Stay tuned to @BungieHelp for more on this Companion App update.

• Fixed an issue with the New Light subclass quest where Ikora’s waypoint was suppressed.
• Fixed an issue where veteran players with two characters of the same class were blocked from acquiring their subclasses.
• Fixed an issue where a step on the New Light pursuit was not granting experience.
• Fixed an issue where players who skip the Shotgun chest in the first mission did not receive Special ammo when the Shotgun was granted.

• Fixed an issue where the waypoint on the Exotic Archive Vendor continues to flash for players who own all Exotics.

• Badges and Armor in Collections correctly select player’s class.
• Fixed an issue where the UI would forget which page the player was on after previewing an item in Collections.
• Fixed a bug where some new armor mods had incorrect sources listed in Collections.

• Updated the mercy rule for Control and Clash to prevent it from triggering too early in the match.
• Fixed an issue where the “Survivor” medal could be awarded to players who were defeated during the round.
• Fixed an issue where the “Untouchable” medal could not be earned.

• Icefall Mantle
• Fixed a bug where the Icefall Mantle’s description did not mention the slow field it generates when activated.
• Mask of Bakris
• Improved the readability of the visual effects when another player wearing Mask of Bakris shifts directly toward you.
• Updated the description string of Mask of Bakris’s perk to correctly describe its damage bonus, which applies only to combatants and affects all Arc weapon damage and all damage against slowed or encased enemies.
• Additionally, fixed an issue where this damage bonus was applying to players who are slowed or encased in Crucible and Gambit.
• Necrotic Grip
• Fixed an issue where being killed by the effects of Necrotic Grip would show as being “Killed by the Architects.”

• December 3, 10 AM PST (1800 UTC): Destiny 2 background maintenance for Update 3.0.1 begins.
• December 3, 2PM PST (2200 UTC): Destiny 2 background maintenance for Update 3.0.1. completes.
• December 8, 7 AM PST (1500 UTC): Destiny 1 and 2 maintenance for Update 3.0.1 begins.
• December 8, 8 AM PST (1600 UTC): Players are removed from activities in Destiny 1 and 2 and won’t be able to log back in until 9 AM PST when Update 3.0.1 is available.
• December 8, 9 AM PST (1700 UTC): Destiny 2 Update 3.0.1 is rolled out across all platforms and regions. Players can log back into Destiny 1 and Destiny 2 at this time. Ongoing maintenance is expected to conclude at 10 AM PST.
• December 8 10 AM PST (1800 UTC): Destiny 1 and Destiny 2 maintenance is expected to conclude.

• Xbox Series X|S 3.0.1’s patch download size: ~70.0 GB
• PlayStation 5 3.0.1’s patch download size: ~67.0 GB
• Xbox One 3.0.1’s patch download size: ~2.35 GB
• PlayStation 4 3.0.1’s patch download size: ~2.09 GB
• Steam 3.0.1’s patch download size: ~1.5 GB

• Below is a list of some issues expected to be resolved with Update 3.0.1:
• The lift tubes in the Warden of Nothing strike fully drain Super energy.
• The “Wanted: The Fanatic” Triumph is not being awarded after defeating the Fanatic in the Forsaken campaign.
• “The Hit List” Triumph is not being awarded after defeating all the Barons in the Forsaken campaign.
• The holograms from looped emotes, such as the Luxurious Toast and Feline Fancy emotes, disappear and leave players in a static position after the first loop ends.
• The Adored Sniper Rifle cannot be reacquired from the Collections.

• Players who are colorblind may have difficulties seeing trails in Wrathborn Hunts.
• In the Last Wish raid, players will get the “Place Relic” prompt for Riven’s Heart even if they aren’t holding it.
• The Binary System ornament for Symmetry disables enemy highlighting in seeker mode.
• Some players are being forced to reacquire the Cryptolith Lure every time they launch the game.
• Major enemies that drop Moon weapon parts aren’t spawning.
• The Scourge of the Past armor can’t take Season of Arrivals mods.
• The Strength of Memory Challenge can’t be completed.
• Some icicles on the Rimed Ghost shell are black and don’t look like icicles.
• The Lost Lament quest sometimes progresses inconsistently/not at all and sometimes needs to be abandoned and reacquired to continue.
• Kills with the Jade Rabbit Exotic Scout Rifle no longer auto-refill its magazine.
• The Halcyon Visage Exotic Sparrow takes shaders poorly.
• The Selfie Emote functions poorly on ultrawide monitor setups.
• The Wisdom of the Witch Triumph no longer counts progress.
• Some players cannot progress past the first mission of A Guardian Rises.
• The Drifter sometimes misgenders players in idle dialogue and Gambit dialogue.
• Eris still has a Weekly Challenge for some players. This Weekly Challenge intentionally does not provide a Powerful reward.
• Flawless Execution on the Way of the Wraith Hunter subclass has a delayed trigger.
• Resetting Valor rank on step 4 of 5 on the Light Reforged Crucible quest prevents future Valor earned from being recorded for the quest.
• Multiple ships have their rocket effects floating behind the ship model.
• Shiver Strike Titan melee does not function with the Heavy Handed mod.
• Collections go back to the main menu instead of to the previous section.
• HDR isn’t working as intended.
• We’re investigating player reports that their veteran dialogue has been replaced with new character dialogue.

‘Tis always the season to celebrate the artists of our community. Whether it be an awesome cosplay build, a slick digital piece, or a handcrafted replica of a raid boss using plastic construction toys, we’re excited to celebrate it!

Romero Games’ Empire of Sin is an excellent premise for a turn-based strategy/management mash-up that sticks you in 1920s Chicago during the heyday of Al Capone and a host of other real-life gangster legends and charges you with building up your very own criminal enterprise. It’s an era that absolutely oozes atmosphere and one that we couldn’t wait to spend time in – however, it’s also currently bogged down by game-breaking bugs, poor performance and gameplay systems that should mesh well together but just haven’t been executed properly. It is, in short, a bit of a mess.

Starting out in the dog-eat-dog world of Empire of Sin, you’ll be invited to choose your protagonist from a generous roster of budding mobsters, each with their own backstory, perks and traits, before hitting the streets in your own personal bid for power. There’s a fantastic selection of characters to choose from here that includes the likes of good old Scarface himself as well as Dean O’Banion, Daniel McKee Jackson and a bunch of well-realised fictional choices all of whom have been impressively designed and voice-acted. For our playthrough, we jumped into the shoes of Frankie Donovan, an Irish ex-rebel and expert marksman who does a fantastic line in swearing at every single opportunity he’s given.

Once you’ve decided who to run with, the game gets down to showing you the ropes, giving you a whistle-stop tour of its many, many menus, introducing you to its management systems, RPG-lite elements and XCOM-style turn-based combat. First impressions here – although the tutorial does go on a bit – are good; there’s lots happening but none of it is too hard to grasp, and you’ll spend early hours wandering the streets in either a top-down or zoomed out overworld map view, smashing up local neighbourhood rackets and businesses owned by rival gangs in order to take them over for yourself. The brothels, casinos, speakeasies, hotels, breweries and safehouses that you can then turn these properties into each come with positive and negative aspects that affect the speed and volume of dollars you accrue.

And you’ll need plenty of dollars here as you shell out for various levels of security for each of your establishments, more refined ambience in your bars and brothels, stronger word-of-mouth to bring the punters in or to add new games to casinos and make sure the cops are well looked after so they turn a blind eye to your nefarious escapades. You’ll also need to hire goons to join you as you run around the streets of Chicago smashing up joints and muscling in on new territory. In order to hire said thugs, you’ll refer to the game’s black book, a rogue’s gallery of criminals, all of whom – in one of the game’s most interesting ideas – have relationships and history with one another. Move your cursor over each face in this wretched hive of scum and villainy and indicators appear on top of other mugs indicating personal links, whether it be lovers, friends or deadly foes. This system does a great job of making the game world seem alive and interconnected.

Once you’ve hired a few thugs, you’ll get down to the turn-based combat element of proceedings – an aspect of the game that’s initially exciting, atmospheric stuff full of swearing, spraying of Tommy Gun fire and suitably vicious melee attack animations all set to a consistently excellent Jazz soundtrack. However, this is also where the wheels start to come off this particular 1920s Cadillac Sedan.

The turn-based combat here is tediously average at best – when it decides to actually work properly at all. Enemy AI is pretty poor in general, running around in and out of cover, exposing itself to attacks, failing to take its chances and making completely nonsensical decisions with regards to where it positions itself. Even if you happen to accidentally run into a battle solo – something that happened to us consistently as our squadmates randomly broke themselves off from us before engagements – it’s absolutely possible, and more often than not quite easy, to take down an entire room full of rivals on your own. Not a good sign for the underlying strategic mechanics or the AI at work here, let’s face it.

Character models are also heavily overused; you’ll most often find yourself in a room full of clones, with the locations themselves not doing much to add variety as they too are repeated ad-nauseam. There are a nice selection of skills for each of your teammates to unlock as they level up, including automatic overwatch, extra turns upon successful kills, brutal frenzied melees that can be chained together and so on, but Empire of Sin dishes all of this stuff out too readily – at least on normal difficulty – and before long, turn-based engagements that should be thrilling, challenging and tense little stand-offs with rival factions become an absolute cakewalk. Indeed, we very quickly switched from being the negotiating type who’d accept a peaceful deal with local gangsters rather than start trouble into a fingers-in-your-face, don’t-talk-us-or-we’ll-stab-you sort of criminal crew, rocking around town drenched in blood.

Things really do unravel quite quickly here in terms of challenge, and it’s not just with regards to the massively repetitive combat. All of the various aspects of management – there are tons of them and they’re all presented in terribly busy menu screens that are painfully difficult and time-consuming to parse – begin to expose themselves as completely unnecessary. Why bother to take your time to tinker with minute aspects of your empire when all you really need to do is ransack, kill and bully, take everything and pump all of the money into your properties ASAP so nobody dares come near them? You can, in fact, go one better and just cut off the head off whatever snake happens to be attempting to bite you at any given time; head straight for the boss of whatever family you’re dealing with and sack them off, take what they own and lock a district down. It’s pretty easy to do, even with a low-level crew.

All of these problems are pretty damning, but we’d still be willing to overlook many of them, still willing to sit down and have fun, just because the era itself and the characters which exist in it are so compelling. But then the bugs creep in. The constant performance problems enter the fray with stuttering, pausing, crashing, glitching and just straight-up not responding. This Switch version of Empire of Sin looks pretty decent, all-told; graphically it’s been downgraded, there’s plenty of blur and pixelation and low-resolution textures, but nothing we wouldn’t expect in order to get a game of this scope and scale running on Nintendo’s console. However, we eventually reached a point where even our superhuman reserves of patience were tested to their absolute limit.

We endured several crashes to the console’s home screen that meant we had to reload back to an earlier point in our campaign – a big annoyance in a game of this type – as well as numerous full-on freezes that required a restart. We also pushed on through broken animations that saw our gangsters skate around combat engagements rather than move their legs and waited for egregiously long periods of time for members of our team to perform an action once we’d chosen it.

Things really can get pretty choppy here with fights slowing to a crawl as the game struggles to keep up with itself. However, Empire of Sin then started to refuse to respond properly at all, allowing us to move units around a fight well enough but not to make an attack or any other action. We started to skip turns and put our goons into overwatch in order to try to snap them out of it but, in the end, we had to give up on the entire affair as it wasn’t letting us finish fights unless we just stood around and let ourselves die – not ideal in a game with permadeath.

A day-one patch for Empire of Sin has been released already – unfortunately, the most pressing of the issues we detailed above happened after we applied it, and we’ve been assured by Romero Games that multiple other fixes and patches are incoming. However, at this point in time, it’s pretty much impossible to recommend you jump into this one. There’s so much promise here; it’s such a good idea, such a neat meshing together of genres, and we love that black book nemesis-style mechanic, the hugely atmospheric sit-downs with rival bosses and the excellent soundtrack, but it really is all pretty broken and botched as things stand at the moment.

Beyond the bugs too, the management mechanics are too easy to game. There are lots of aspects to running your own empire but most of them are just far too easy to ignore. The turn-based combat needs a lot of work to make it feel genuinely engaging. Overall, this one is a fantastic idea that we dearly want to love, but as things stand, it would be criminal of us to recommend you jump in.

Conclusion

Empire of Sin is undoubtedly an excellent idea, a clever meshing together of management sim and turn-based tactical action that’s set in a hugely compelling era of Chicago’s criminal history. There are some cool mechanics here, too; the well-executed overworld map of the town, the gangster black book with its complex relationships and those tense sit-downs with rival ganglords. However, all of this promise is held back by copious technical problems, game-breaking bugs and management and combat systems that feel half-baked and scrappy. There are more patches and updates planned and we desperately would like to see this one sort itself out but, as things stand, it’s virtually impossible to recommend – and it remains to be seen if future updates can bash it into shape.