Gamer's Outpost Press (archived)

by Paul Tassi via Forbes

There has been a lot of debate about the potential of upcoming “half-consoles” that Sony and Microsoft are rumored to be making. Sony’s PS4.5, or PS4K, or NEO, seems to be more tangible, as at this point leaks have spilled nearly every detail about the system, which may be coming this fall. And though Microsoft has cautiously backed away from talking about an “Xbox 1.5,” rumor has it they are indeed testing more powerful versions of the Xbox One behind the scenes.

Some view these consoles as inevitable, that technology is evolving in ways that require incremental upgrades rather than these big leaps every 6-7 years. The idea is that the original sin was releasing underpowered Xbox Ones and PS4s to begin with, and now these new consoles may be what they were supposed to be originally. The “death” of the console generation could be a good thing, as it may allow the industry to evolve along a smoother curve with smaller upgrades in time, and so long as there’s backward/forward compatibility, it shouldn’t disrupt players who own even older versions of the new consoles.

That’s all great in theory.

What I can tell you in practice is that no matter the logic here, if Sony releases a PS4.5 as an entirely new, more powerful console this fall, you are going to make a large percentage of ~40 million PS4 owners pretty damn angry. The same goes for the Xbox crowd if Microsoft does something similar.

by Brad Bourque  via Digital Trends

Getting my PlayStation account hacked was terrible, but Sony made it a whole lot worse.

Instead of helping me, Sony decided that I had to pay for the games that my hacker purchased, or face a permanent ban on my account.

It all started Saturday afternoon. I was scrolling through my inbox and noticed some odd emails from PlayStation, all of them at 3:01 AM. There were three $25 payments to my PlayStation wallet, and a purchase for NBA 2K16 and some credits. After checking to make sure my roommate hadn’t drunkenly purchased the game, thinking he’d pay me back later, I noticed even more concerning emails.

The first asked me to confirm a change to my PlayStation account’s email. The email wasn’t opened, nor had any odd devices accessed my email account, but another message less than a minute later confirmed the email change. Yep. While I was sleeping, someone locked me out of my own account.

But PlayStation requires you to confirm an email change by clicking a link in an email sent to the old account first, right? Wrong.

As it turns out, hackers have an easy way around this problem. Payment info, or at least a portion of it, is visible in the web interface for a PlayStation account. Once an attacker has your password, they can chat with Sony tech support, explain that they don’t have access to that email anymore, and use the visible info in the account to verify their identity, changing the email on the account to prevent recovery by its rightful owner — in this case, me.

In the meantime, they added a device to my account, a PS Vita. Unlike a PS3 or PS4, a PS Vita can’t be removed from the account by Web, it can only be deactivated from the device itself.

Fortunately, social hacking your way through tech support tends to be a double-edged sword, and I knew I would be able to wrestle my account back by providing the right info. Both consoles that regularly access the account are in my home, so that’s a form of proof, and because Sony doesn’t let users change their user names, no email changes could alter my gamertag.

Following the paper trail

This all happened on a Sunday, so Sony’s phone support wasn’t open, and I was forced to use the text chat. This actually ended up working to my benefit, as we’ll see shortly, but it also raises some problems of its own.

I wasn’t at home when I noticed the hacker’s activities, but I needed to stop the intruder from making any more purchases. I called PayPal support, and an agent there was quick to de-authorize my PlayStation account from making any more pre-approved purchases. Then, I filed a dispute on all three $25 charges.

Once I got home, I sat down at a computer and fired up Sony’s chat support. At first, the agent was helpful. The intrusion and email changing were a separate issue from the disputed purchases, so we would deal with them one at a time.

The agent rolled back the account’s email to the previous address (mine), and forced a password reset when I confirmed the change. Then I was a little bewildered as the agent asked: “Now what do you want to do about the purchases?”

“I don’t want NBA 2K16, and I don’t want to add $75 to my PlayStation account,” I said. It sounded simple enough, or so I thought.

The agent passed the buck. They explained that in order to issue a refund, I needed to cancel the dispute with PayPal. Essentially, PayPal had taken the money back from Sony, and I needed to have PayPal release it so Sony could hand it back to me.

So I contacted PayPal. This turned out to be a process in and of itself. Because the dispute was security related, I had to call PayPal support, verify my identity, and then say in no uncertain terms that I was closing the case permanently, and get a guarantee that PayPal wouldn’t reopen it.

I informed the Sony tech support agent once the dispute was canceled. I didn’t get a human response. Instead, I got a copied and pasted statement explaining that Sony doesn’t offer refunds, and the funds would only be returned to my wallet. I asked what would happen if I issued a chargeback at the debit card level, and the agent explained matter-of-factly that my account would be banned until I paid the $75 in fraudulent charges.

After six years as a paying PlayStation customer, my account was now being held hostage, not by a hacker, but by Sony. I had to cover the cost of the metaphorical broken window, or my account was going to be locked. Basically, I had to apologize and pay for a thief.

Why hasn’t Sony learned?

You would think Sony would know how to handle hacking, especially after its multiple massive breaches (this one and this one) in the last five years, but it hasn’t learned. The PlayStation network has been around since 2006, but there’s no two-factor authentication, and visible payment info on the web front-end. This leaves a wide enough security hole for an elephant to walk through. The customer service agent suggested that I only use prepaid cards, but that’s more of a workaround than a real solution.

Sony has a history of poor responses to hacking. Back in 2011 when PlayStation Network went down for almost a month, the gaming brand offered affected players one month of PlayStation Plus, which meant you got a few games that were disabled after the month ended if you didn’t become a paying subscriber.

You could argue that the way it treated me is to avoid refunding purchases that people made accidentally (or drunkenly), but even if a few people take advantage of the system for an ill-gotten refund, at least they’ll stick with PlayStation.

As for me, I now have to decide whether I buy FIFA 16 on PS4 or PC. Right now, I’m not a big fan of Sony’s attitude or policies. It’s bad enough to be hacked, but it’s even worse to have to pay for the digital damage.

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by Chris Kohler via Wired

Is this year’s E3 going to be the Battle of the Slightly Upgraded Consoles?

Xbox chief Phil Spencer set off a flurry of speculation last month at an Xbox media event when he said that Microsoft would “come out with new hardware capability during a generation allowing the same games to run backward and forward compatible,” allowing Xbox to “focus more and more on hardware innovation without invalidating the games that run on that platform.”

Then, coming out of last week’s Game Developers Conference, Kotaku reported that Sony is in development on something of a “PlayStation 4.5,” which would be an upgraded PS4 that supports 4K resolution and boasts increased processing power that could allow Sony to create better-looking games on PlayStation VR.

It’s firmly within the realm of probability that we could see a PlayStation 4.5, or an Xbox One and a Half, at or before this year’s E3 Expo in June. This would be a pretty big shakeup to the console paradigm (which I’ve long argued has a fast-approaching expiration date on it). If it happens, it could all be because (if I may quote Spinal Tap) consoles’ appeal is becoming more selective.

“Part of the reason for this move is, I think, a general lack of confidence that there is the same number of people in the world who want to buy dedicated games hardware as there have been in the past,” said Ben Cousins, a veteran game developer who has written and spoken extensively on gaming’s future, in an email. “While I think there will always be an audience of a certain size for consoles, it might not be as big as it was in the past, because the ‘I buy a console when it’s $99 and only play Madden on it’ audience may have moved over to mobile gaming.”

In other words, Cousins says, releasing slightly upgraded consoles might be a tactic to sell more consoles to fewer people. It’s all about increasing ARPU—average revenue per user, the amount of money you get from a single customer. Console makers do this with software by selling DLC, a subscription, or a collector’s edition, he says, and releasing console upgrades could have the same effect on the hardware side.

“If they can communicate to consumers a strong reason for the upgrade… then they could generate a lot more income without having to grow the overall market for consoles,” he says.

Sounds like a slam dunk, right? Well, there’s a reason that neither Sony nor Microsoft has ever tried something like this before. Typically, consoles have a 4-6 year shelf life, during which the actual processing power of the hardware is never upgraded. The box might get shrunken, more optional features might get tacked on, but ultimately the games themselves don’t change.

For players, consoles are supposed to be an idiot-proof alternative to building a PC. Buy an Xbox 360, and any game that says Xbox 360 on it Just Works in your box, whichever box you have. For game developers, it means not having to make a lose-lose choice: If you create your game using the increased hardware power of the new box, you can’t sell it to anyone with the old machine. But if you make a game for the whole audience, you leave all that horsepower on the table and compromise the design of your game.

It’s worth noting that Nintendo, which does occasionally upgrade its portable game machines mid-cycle, just did this with the New Nintendo 3DS. This handheld can ostensibly run better-looking games, but in practice, only a tiny number of games utilize its additional power.

Phil Spencer, in his address at the Xbox event, connected this iterative-console concept back to, as Microsoft always does, Windows. He noted that these “backward and forward compatible” games could be developed on the “Universal Windows Platform,” the environment that lets developers create software that, once programmed, will run on both Windows 10 and Windows Mobile—and soon on the Xbox, Microsoft confirmed at Game Developers Conference last week.

Sony, which as far as we know has no such dream of unifying the PlayStation platform with PCs and phones, may simply see an opportunity to leapfrog the competition technologically, introducing a 4K-capable game system a little bit early in anticipation of the price of 4K sets coming down rapidly in 2016 and beyond. And since the PlayStation VR setup is a bit cumbersome at the moment, requiring an extra box that hooks up to your PS4 with its own AC adapter, perhaps a PS4.5 could integrate that hardware a bit more, just as the Xbox 360 Slim was made “ready for Kinect.”

Microsoft’s and Sony’s incremental upgrades may, therefore, end up being very different in their ends and means. Will either of them actually get gamers to buy in?

“It’s a really hard call to make,” Cousins says. “If we look at previous attempts to upgrade consoles (Sega 32X) you might think ‘no’… If you look at Nvidia’s business model from the 2000s of getting people to buy a new GPU every 18 months, you might think ‘yes.’”

If you’re a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One owner, it’s a call you might have to make for yourself, perhaps sooner than you think.

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by Dave Thier via Forbes

The big rumor out of last week, aside from everything out of the Game Developer’s Conference, is the Kotaku report that Sony might be working on something like a PS4.5 — a mid-generation hardware update that would increase the PS4′s graphical horsepower, assumedly to allow the console to handle 4K gaming. It’s a puzzle, from a hardware perspective: I don’t know quite how Sony would pull something like this off, or what it would look like, but those aren’t the only problems here.

It echoes something we heard from Phil Spencer recently, who suggested that the Xbox One would also be seeing incremental updates. The implication is extreme: essentially, these plans are an attempt to totally upend the concept of a console generation and further break down the barrier between machines like the PS4 and the rest of the panoply of personal computing options available to us.

There is something about it that makes sense, and lord knows that both the PS4 and Xbox One will start to look a little dated if they can’t manage 4K. But consoles begin to lose a lot of what makes them special if the hardware stops being static. On the consumer side, the magic is gone: a console plays any game designed for it, it plays it well, and it does so with no tweaking. A sliding hardware scale could work much like PCs do now, but you lose that uniformity that defines consoles now. On the developer side, you’ve all of a sudden got way more concerns than you had before, and you lose the optimization that static hardware can offer. Notice how much better games look late in a console generation than they did at the beginning? You get a lot of mileage out of a good team of developers learning a specific machine from the inside out.

The obvious concern is that you could split the market: that’s the last thing these companies want, but they’re going to have to be very careful to avoid it. Would a developer be allowed to press a console for all its worth, and make something that wouldn’t run on an older version? Could a company like Naughty Dog still make the graphical showcase it’s known for if it has to work on two different systems?

The counter-example that’s always giving is the iPhone, and there’s a lot of truth to that comparison. The iPhone manages consistency with constant iteration, and that seems to be what Sony and Microsoft MSFT -2.21% have in mind. But it’s also important to remember that older iPhones don’t run new games, and people don’t expect to have a smartphone as long as they expect to have a console. It introduces a whole range of questions that don’t have to be asked today.

This might be a necessary move: the death of consoles might have been vastly overstated, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t several existential threats to the way we game in the living room today. The PS4 and Xbox One may well need to adapt in order to remain relevant, especially if Sony wants to keep working on total living room domination. But it might be a rough transition.

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by Barbara Ortutay, Dan Goodman, and Derrik Lang via The Associated Press

NEW YORK — Nico Deyo, a 33-year-old e-commerce specialist from Milwaukee, used to enjoy mixing it up with players from around the world in the popular online fantasy game “World of Warcraft.” Then a stalker began harassing her on the game’s forums, impersonating her in the game and, later, sending her barrages of Twitter messages, some threatening her with graphic rape and murder.

While the stalker didn’t drive her from the game, the experience helped sour her on multiplayer gaming. “There’s a lot of things about the community that are very hostile,” she says of Warcraft. Deyo largely gave up the game almost two years ago and now mostly spends her time on playing other games by herself.

Deyo is far from alone. In the male-dominated world of multiplayer online games like “Grand Theft Auto,” ”Halo,” and “Call of Duty,” many women say they’ve had to take drastic steps to escape harassment, stalking and violent threats from male players. Some quit particular games. Others change their screen names or make sure they play only with friends.

Online harassment of women, often involving threats of horrific violence, has become a big issue — and video games are a frequent flashpoint. Two years ago, the online “Gamergate” movement, ostensibly a protest over the ethics of game journalists, also fueled Twitter attacks on female critics replete with gutter-level abuse and assault threats. Some targets left their homes or canceled speaking engagements, fearing for their safety.

On Saturday, the South by Southwest Interactive festival plans a daylong summit on online harassment ; one panel will address problems in “gaming and geek culture .” That summit, however, almost never happened; last October, the festival canceled two gaming-issue panels after receiving “numerous threats of on-site violence .” Organizers reversed themselves a few days later after BuzzFeed and Vox Media threatened to boycott the festival entirely.

Online gaming companies, however, have been slower to act. Major console makers Microsoft and Sony and game developers like Blizzard Entertainment have “terms of service” that explicitly ban stalking and other harassing behavior. The companies have the right to ban reported bad actors from their public forums. Players say that rarely happens — and when it does, as in Deyo’s case, their harassers often follow them onto Twitter and other social channels.

Becky Heineman, the 52-year-old founder of the Olde Skuul game studio in Seattle, was an aficionado of shoot-em-ups like “Halo” and “Call of Duty.” But constant catcalls from other players and questions about her bra size or “whether I do it on top or bottom, or other derogatory things,” she says, wore her down.

Reporting her harassers never seemed to make a difference, she says. She limited her play to friends for a while, but now mostly focuses on simple single-player games like “Cookie Clicker” on her phone and computer.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, women are avid video gamers; one recent survey showed that about half of all women play video games, about the same as men. But men are far more likely to identify themselves as “gamers,” and experts say that “hard-core” shooting and action games remain mostly male.

It’s only recently that “women players have been recognized as valid gamers that are interesting for companies,” said Yasmin Kafai, a University of Pennsylvania professor who focuses on gender and gaming.

Microsoft says recent changes to its Xbox Live service make it more likely that players with bad reputations will end up playing each other. It adds that its enforcement team monitors complaints at all times and that all reports are investigated. Sony, Blizzard and the Entertainment Software Association, a trade group, did not respond to requests for comment.

Those moves don’t impress some women in the industry.

“While they have very good statements about harassment and, you know, responsibility to the community and all that kind of stuff, the enforcement side of it is pretty lax,” says Kate Edwards, executive director of the International Game Developers Association. “Players basically have to adopt their own strategies to deal with it.”

Games and online game networks, for instance, let players “mute” messages from opponents and turn off voice chat, where trash talk can easily shade over into harassment. Xbox Live also labels players who get lots of complaints with a red marker so that other players can avoid them.

But constantly muting or reporting other players interrupts what’s supposed to be a fun pastime. And it doesn’t change harassing behavior.

“If I just block somebody, is that stopping them from doing the abuse?” says Kishonna Gray, an Eastern Kentucky University professor who wrote a book about racist and sexist interactions within Xbox. “They can go to the next person and do the same thing.”

That’s especially true when harassment shades into the real world. Mercer Smith-Looper, a 27-year-old Boston woman, found it annoying when male players patronized her and told her how to play. Then she started receiving unwanted gifts — a necklace, a sword — in the mail. One gamer unexpectedly showed up at her workplace after calling her repeatedly.

Fed up, she changed her gamer name and now sticks to playing privately with friends or alone. “I’m kind of in hiding,” she says.

What would effective anti-harassment measures look like? Experts like Edwards and Gray point to Riot Games, the maker of “League of Legends,” for its efforts to change player culture. Riot built a system based on artificial intelligence and player feedback to determine appropriate behavior during gameplay, and uses it to punish or reward players who draw complaints, according to the company’s onlinesupportdocuments .

When players show “signs of toxicity,” Riot can block them from competitive play, limit their chats or ban them entirely. The company shows players what behavior other players didn’t like when it punishes them. Jeffrey Lin, Riot’s lead game designer for social systems, has said that because of these efforts, only 2 percent of its global games experienced racist, homophobic, sexist language or excessive harassment.

Riot Games declined to comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

IGDA’s Edwards acknowledges that dealing with harassment is a difficult challenge. “You’re dealing with minors versus adults,” she says. “You’re dealing with free speech issues. It’s a struggle for companies to figure out exactly how to approach it.”

And while Riot-style moderation might limit harassment, it’s unlikely to solve the problem on its own. “This is a social and cultural problem, not a technological one,” says Dmitri Williams, CEO of game analytics firm Ninja Metrics.

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by Dave Thier via Forbes

In many ways, The Division feels like the game Ubisoft has been practicing to make for years. Everything that we’ve seen in other games is here: the open world side mission structure, crafting, a story mission that weaves its way through exploration and progression — etc. It’s the sort of thing that lends itself well to the MMO format that the developer is now testing out, but not everything necessarily translates. After a few days with The Division I’ve plunged my way into a New York shattered by a smallpox epidemic, I’ve mowed down hordes of countless enemies and a bunch of other people I’m pretty sure were bad, and I’ve begun upgrading my weapons and creating what feels like a customized agent. I’ve also got some skinny jeans. There are plusses and minuses to the whole thing.

The Good: The Division feels grounded. The 1:1 recreation of Manhattan is one of the best I’v ever seen in a video game, and that’s only enhanced by the way your character moves through it. Your agent slams into cover with a sense of weight, climbs up onto ledges with the feeling that he or she is actually doing a pull up, and dashes from the back of a car to a traffic barrier with urgency and grace. It’s a pretty game, and it offers up its nightmare versions of familiar landscapes little by little, unfolding more and more of the story as it goes. On top of that, the squad mechanics and environments are fantastic. This is a deeply tactical game, and it only gets more so the more skills you and your group members acquire. Every area I’ve been in has multiple avenues of attack, multiple ways of approaching the same group of enemies, and excellent opportunities for cooperation when it comes to taking down high-level enemies. There’s a real sense of satisfaction that comes with a successful flanking maneuver or a well-placed turret, and that speaks to how well some of these encounters are designed.

It all comes to a head in The Dark Zone, Ubisoft’s blended PvE, PvP environment that stands head and shoulders above the rest of the game. There’s a real sense of danger in there from NPCs, other agents, and even your own teammates. And the fact that you have to call in a helicopter to extract any loot found in there lends a superb sense of structure to a jaunt to the Dark Zone. It’s a striking transition when you cross over that wall: all of a sudden you sit forward, your fingers arch, and you activate in a way that the rest of the game doesn’t quite ask you to do. My only complain is that I can’t spend all my time in there.

The Bad: So far, things are a bit of a grind. In some ways, it’s a similar situation as with the earlier parts of Bungie’s Destiny, but without those ultra-satisfying shooter mechanics to keep you on an endless dopamine loop. I found myself grinding out some fairly repetitive side missions just a few hours in: that may have been fine for an MMO ten years ago, but neither myself nor the market at large has as much patience for grinding as we once did. The gameplay works, but the shooting lacks that tactility that makes navigation such a joy. Even low level enemies have a way of absorbing a whole mess of bullets before going down, and you never quite get the feeling that your shots are making much of an impact. Armored enemies are even worse. More than one engagement I’ve found myself in has resulted in finding a safe spot and just slowly picking off small moments of health before retreating, healing, and waiting. That’s not a good place to be in.

The story is fine, but not remarkable enough to fall into either a good or a bad category: it’s there, with one faction of interesting enemies, a few passable characters, and more deep New York accents than you can shake a stick at. There’s a real troubling moral ambiguity about what you’re doing: trying to fix the world by shooting anyone and everyone, and that wears on you after a little bit. All in all, I just don’t always feel that drive to move forward that I get even from other Ubisoft games. There’s a plod here, which slows you down.

The Bleak: Things have been better for New York. while the worlds in which we gamers clomp around killing computer controlled enemies are never exactly friendly, there’s something particularly depressing about this one. Part of it is the weather: so far, New York is caught in a perpetual winter, with the streets covered in snow and rarely more than that a slightly brighter version of overcast to mark the daytime. Things are cold, people are desperate, and it’s starting to wear on me. That feeling is exacerbated by the relatively constrained environments. We’re in Manhattan, and only a small part of it at that. Unlike other RPGs, there are no verdant forests or parched desserts to be discovered. Instead, we’re trapped in a relatively sameish environment, shooting the same enemies with upgraded versions of the same guns. That’s my main worry about the game so far: that Ubisoft is going to be able to give me that sense of wonder and excitement that needs to come with MMO expansion content. Part of that will be well solved by just melting the snow and moving on to winter. Or maybe we’ll just be able to go to Grand Central and hop on Metro North.

And that’s where we are now: a solid beginning, but one that worries me about its ability to keep me interested in the face of higher-energy games. Those are my initial impressions, and I’ve put enough time into the game to get a sense of what it is. Still, I’ll keep playing, and the changing nature of an MMO means that there’s bound to be plenty more to see, so check back.

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by Paul Tassi via Forbes

The internet is starting to buzz again about yet another NX “leak,” this time from market researcher GfK, who reportedly has slipped in some Nintendo NX info into one of its recent surveys. And what’s been revealed is making fans both upset and confused. Among the details:

– Gameplay flows between the NX console and NX handheld device

– Gameplay graphics are 900p/60fps

– The box includes the console, a controller and a sensor bar

The problem with using a survey like this as gospel is that GfK might not have any idea what they’re actually talking about. While Nintendo may have given them specific information about the NX, it seems unlikely it would find its way into a survey like this. GfK could just be extrapolating test question info based on rumor or the precedent set by the Wii U in order to craft a survey for a client who might not even be Nintendo.

In the first line above, the survey says that gameplay flows between the NX console and an NX handheld, seeming to reference rumors about the console being both a console and handheld. Yet in the box itself is only the console and a controller, which would imply that it’s just a set-up like we have now with the Wii U and its touchscreen gamepad where gameplay also “flows” between them.

But what really makes no sense is stating outright that the consoles graphics are 900p/60fps, which is actually a step backward from many of the Wii U’s current titles. There have been Wii U games at 900p/60fps, but also 1080p/30fps and 1080p/60fps, depending on the title. It is entirely illogical that the NX would lock graphics at one resolution and framerate, and if they did, it (hopefully) would not be 900p/60fps on a console meant to be an upgrade from the Wii U.

So while the survey itself is supposedly legitimate, it’s unlikely all this information is. I talked to an ex-GfK employee who has done tons of these kinds of surveys, and he says there’s no way to know whether or not the information is based on fact or theory. A survey like this is usually a fact-finding mission for consumer preferences. For new products, they will invent a price, for instance, six prices, and see which one tests better. So any piece of this information could be a test about what consumers would want or not want to see in the NX.

But could some of the information be valid? Again, we have no idea because nearly a month into 2016 Nintendo is still refusing to talk about the NX, a system that all analysts predict is supposed to come out by the end of the year.

The problem is that Nintendo’s silence will continue to be filled by rumor and speculation for as long as they’re not saying anything. Last year it was their supply chain partners who couldn’t shut up about possible NX info. Then it was people crawling over Nintendo’s patents. Now it’s their own market research firm. This isn’t going to stop until Nintendo themselves comes forward with some solid, concrete information about the NX.

Nintendo already has their Direct format down cold as a way of effectively distributing information, so it’s high time that they at least put an NX Direct on the calendar. Some have suggested they’re going to wait until E3 2016 in June to give out any info, but that’s waiting way too long, unless the system isn’t actually going to come out until Holiday 2017 (which it very well might, with the way things are going).

Nintendo just needs to say something, anything concrete about the NX at this point, or these misleading rumors are going to continue to dominate the conversation about the future of their brand.

I’ve reached out to Nintendo for comment about this alleged leak.

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by Paul Tassie via Forbes

At this point, Destiny fans have resigned themselves to an extended stretch of time without substantive content for the game. Last year at this time, Destiny’s first DLC, The Dark Below had already been out a month. Today, we don’t even have a hint of new paid content, only possible future “events” like the recent Festival of the Lost and the Sparrow Racing League.

These events have been mostly focused on adding new cosmetics to the game (Festival = Masks, SRL = Sparrows) and as such, fans have been brainstorming about what other new types of cosmetics might pop up in future events like the ones we’ve seen so far. I recently opined that Destiny needs its own Hearthfire-type expansion, focused on building a place for your Guardian to call their own (and to display all their sweet loot somewhere other than an ugly vault grid). Other fans have different ideas.

There’s one rallying cry I’m now hearing across forums, subreddits and social media alike, something that has been requested by fans from practically day one: Everyone wants the ability to re-customize the appearance of their character.

When you first designed your Guardian in Destiny, you had one chance to get it right. After that, you were locked in, and the only way to change your appearance was to stash your gear, delete your character, and re-level a new, prettier one. It sounds ridiculous, but I know many, many people who have done exactly this.

Now seems about as good a time as any for that to change.

Some fans just want a “barbershop” where they can at least change hairstyles. Others want the ability to change their character from head to toe, including face, race and gender. Given that your character has no name and rarely speaks, I don’t really think this is a huge deal from a lore perspective. After playing each story mission about thirty times over the past year, I don’t think your character has much more than a dozen lines in the entire game.

But from a technical perspective? That’s a different issue entirely, and one that could be somewhat difficult to overcome. It seems likely that there’s no character customization in the game post-creation because the hero is coded into the game and future cutscenes right after it’s made. We see this in other games, most famously in Mass Effect, which never let you go back and significantly alter your hero, but in others like Saints Row, you can change literally everything about your character at any time, even their race and gender.

Fans are hoping for a less restrictive system that the one they currently enjoy. After all, these Guardians are supposed to be carried with us for years, according to the grand master plan of Destiny. But not being able to second guess our creative choices from 2014…ever, is going to grow tiresome. It already is, for many people, hence how popular this request has become.

There’s another side to this, however. Given that this is cosmetic, and has no effect on gameplay, naturally that means it’s prime for Bungie’s newfound obsession with microtransactions. Why offer something for free when people will very clearly pay for it?

There are a few ways this could work:

1) Bungie charges a one-time fee of ~500 Silver to change the appearance of your character, allowing you to mess around with the existing creation options.

2) Bungie lets the re-customization be free, but introduces new customization options, new hairstyles, Awoken tattoos, Exo head…things that cost Silver to unlock. The same price range as emotes, perhaps.

3) Bungie charges for both re-customization and these new options, having their cake and eating it too.

4) This was going to be an option where Bungie the benevolent adds a bunch of free new customization options and lets the redesign be free as well, but that’s too preposterous to consider at this point. With that said, I think I like option two the best.

This is a fairly significant money-making opportunity for Bungie, though I am wary of their recent microtransaction practices. I’ve seen some fans joke that instead of buying new accessories or a redesign, you’d get a “Barber Pack” that includes one random hair cut or a “Plastic Surgery Pack” that gives you one new random face to use. Spend that Silver until you get them all! It sounds absurd, but that’s exactly what’s happened with the Sparrows of the SRL.

I don’t think re-customization is a huge deal because unlike Mass Effect, you really are not staring at your character’s face that often (95% of the game you’re wearing a helmet or are playing in first person), and there isn’t even a consistent way to view your face up close the way you do in the initial creation mode. With that said, this is still something the game should offer as a service, seeing as how we’re stuck with these characters for potentially the next decade. I hope, at least, that in future content, your character will be more involved in cutscenes and get more of a personality, and when (if) that does happen, their appearance will become more important.

And the fact is that this is another revenue stream opportunity for Bungie. Even if it “should” be free, you’d be crazy to think that fans wouldn’t pay to redesign their character, or for new options like beards or tattoos. Bungie knows this, and at this point, they aren’t exactly leaving money on the table when it comes to expanding the microtransactions in the game.

The point is that all of this fits in with their new philosophy of selling cosmetics to raise revenue during the game’s “downtime.” Personally, I’d only even remotely think about spending Silver on a character redesign if there were some significant and cool new options for my Guardian. Otherwise, I have no desire to pay to re-do my hero using the same limited toolset we were given over a year ago. What about you?

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