• Mk.44 Stand Asides (Exotic Titan Leg Armour) – 13 Strange Coins
• Lucky Raspberry (Exotic Hunter Chest Armour) – 13 Strange Coins
• Claws of Ahamkara (Exotic Warlock gauntlets) – 13SC
• Patience and Time (Exotic Sniper Rifle) – 23 Strange Coins
• Legacy helmet engram – 29 Strange Coins
• Three of Coins – 7 Strange Coins
• Glass Needle – 3 Strange Coins

The Titans’ Mk.44 Stand Asides start off the parade of the meh, furnishing an extended duration for your shoulder charge but not much else. Hunters get a better buff, with Lucky Raspberry increasing the chain on lightning grenades, but it’s hardly the sort of thing that you’ll want to lock up your Exotic slot with when there are so many other options around. 

Warlocks come off best in the armour stakes this week, with the Claws of Ahamkara. They give a second melee charge for every gauge filled, and increase melee attack speed at the same time. That’s decent in itself, but if you combine them with a Sunsinger build using Flame Shield – and maybe even Monte Carlo, with its high chance of melee recharge on kills – and you’ll be be seriously protected flame-puncher. The only question for yellow Warlocks is whether you’d prefer that over Heart of the Praxic Fire. 

As for guns though, Patience and Time is a natty sniper rifle indeed, given that it makes you invisible and maintains active radar while aiming. Basically, if you snipe in the Crucible, you are now Satan. 

As ever, Xur will be in the Tower until 10am UK / 2am PT on Sunday, when he’ll be gone forever. Or at least until next week. Yeah, more likely until next week. 

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• Immolation Fists (Exotic Titan Gauntlets) – 13 Strange Coins
• Radiant Dance Machines (Exotic Hunter Leg Armour) – 13 Strange Coins
• The Stag (Exotic Warlock Helmet) – 13 Strange Coins
• Suros Regime (Exotic Auto Rifle) – 23 Strange Coins
• Legacy Special Weapon Engram – 31 Strange Coins
• Three of Coins – 7 Strange Coins
• Glass Needle – 3 Strange Coins

Titans and Hunters get the best specialised picks this week. The Immolation Fists might only have one unique perk, but it’s a bit of a beast, granting the Titan’s Explosive Pyre ability (ie. the power to chain-explode enemies with your Sunbreaker hammer) for free. Similarly, the Radiant Dance Machines’ big perk – faster movement speed while scoped – may not sound too impressive on paper, but in PvP it’ll be a hell of a bonus. Warlocks slightly lose out this week, The Stag being less impressive in its functionality than in its looks. Faster Super charges when your team are dead is nice, but very situational, though that chance to spawn with an over-shield is thoroughly pleasant.

Suros Regime for all though? Although it’s been nerfed since its Crucible world-killer days, it’s still a hell of a mighty auto-rifle, balancing high stability, hefty power, and tweakable range, and coming with the bonuses of increased damage for half of each clip and occasional health regeneration. You can also tune it up for slower fire and even more damage. And it looks and sounds very, very cool indeed. Still a winner, basically.

As ever, Xur will be in the Tower until 10am UK / 2am PT on Sunday, when he’ll vanish for the week. So make sure you stock up while you can.

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• Crest of Alpha Lupi [Exotic Titan chest armour] – 13 Strange Coins
• Young Ahamkara’s Spine [Exotic Hunter gauntlets] – 13 Strange Coins
• Obsidian Mind [Exotic Warlock helmet] – 13 Strange Coins
• Exotic Engram [Gauntlet] – 19 Strange Coins
• Legacy Engram [Chest armour] – 31 Strange Coins
• Three of Coins – 7 Strange Coins

Warlocks, this is your week. The Obsidian Mind is a monster of an Exotic, charging your Voidwalker’s Nova Bomb metre every time you, er, fire your Nova Bomb, and giving your increased Super energy from every Vanguard kill. Combine it with Red Death (which recharges your Super energy with every kill) or a gun with the Army of One perk (which recharges your grenade and melee energy on clean kills; certain rolls of the Lyudmila-D are a good bet for this), and you are going to be legitimately goddamn terrifying. If you use Voidwalker, you need to buy it. It’s as simple as that.

As for the others? The Crest of Alpha Lupi is a strong choice for co-op play, given that it increases the speed of revives both delivered and received. If you have a tight, regular Fireteam – and particularly if you play the more hardcore, small-squad, revive-based Crucible modes – it’s a damn good choice, though one that’s rather specific in its focus.

And the Hunter option? Young Ahamkara’s Spine is a good one, but it’s arguably Crucible focused. Greatly increasing the duration of your Tripmine grenade, the year two version now also gives you a second charge for each full metre. Build yourself a high enough Discipline rating, and you could have another grenade pretty much ready to go by the time the old one went out. In fact, double that. Two Tripmines down at any given time, constantly. If you play a lot of Control, this is going to make you MVP overnight. It’s just crazy-powerful for spatial control. But again, it’s an Exotic that’s narrow in its effectiveness.

So, that’s the line-up this week then. Anything take your fancy? As ever, Xur will only be around for a couple of days, from now until 10am UK / 2am Pacific on Sunday 15 November. After that, he’s gone for another week…

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Oh, the in-game microphone, we had such high hopes for you. You promised to connect us, to let us chat, mingle and strategise with other like-minded gamers anywhere in the world. You never said anything about playing beleaguered babysitter to a bunch of late-teething teenagers. We all know the sort – they’re the absolute bane of the multiplayer matchup, attracted to a live mic like flies on faeces.

Only by playing with known friends – in private chats – can we hope to avoid these mad-eyed mic fiends. It’s such a universally recognised issue that in some quarters the rise of the headset has had the inverse of the intended effect, making players instinctively less willing to engage with others they meet online. Sort of like springing a surprise talent show on a group of dogged introverts. “Thanks for the opportunity” they seem to say, “now leave us alone forever”.

It’s a basic issue of online etiquette and one that I haven’t the foggiest concept how to actually fix. Instead, what I’m going to talk about is more of a ‘silver linings’-type affair – an unlikely positive to all of this unremitting muting. You see, to my mind at least, where audible chat can sometimes be a turn-off, the absence of microphones can bring about some refreshingly civil behaviours.

So, what am I trying to say here – that without verbal communications, players can become… nicer? So far, so obvious, right? Next you’ll be telling me that Mario likes moustaches. But what happens when we attempt to communicate despite that silence? That’s where things get interesting, and humanity actually starts to display its best colours rather than its shabbiest.

Just like meeting a non-English speaker abroad, instances like these can quickly turn into a jaunty game of charades. Sure, we might end up performing the entire Funky Chicken on a Parisian street corner, but I’ll be damned if we don’t enjoy the experience just a little bit. In essence then, silence forces us to get creative, to establish a rough and ready coda with our equally flabbergasted teammates – by pointing here, jumping there or doing just about anything in between.

When sharing without words, even a simple statement becomes something of a puzzle, the silent game world – heck, even a lobby, sometimes – turning that much more ‘game-like’ than any mic’d up alternative. It’s a game that requires not only teamwork to succeed, but a refreshing degree of patience and understanding too. We’re not just communicating, but creating a shared means of communicating, and that’s nothing if not a wholesome experience.

Perhaps the most notable, most recent example of a game to completely disallow mic chat is 2011’s Journey (opens in new tab). Its developers adopted this approach in order to maintain the game’s stunning sense of atmosphere, and also to encourage players to interact in more subtle, less confrontational ways. I’d say that they succeeded – so much so that I’ll defy anyone to come up with an instance of Journey’s co-op play that left them with a sour taste in their mouth. Oh sure, some allies may have left at crucial moments, or run around in circles, but even the most wickedly malevolent of players would have had a hard time causing consternation here.

‘But Journey is a beautiful, chilled-out experience’, I hear you cry. ‘What about other, more visceral adventures – gut-punching action titles that burst our blood vessels, and cause irate 12-year-olds to question our mother’s chastity’? Well, if I might be so bold as to break with website tradition here, and talk about a little game named Destiny (opens in new tab), the same also holds true here. Just this week I had the bizarre fortune to be shot at while out collecting resources. As it turned, out my apparent assailant – a high-level player just whiling away the hours – had spotted me scavenging for scrap and decided to take me on a whistle-stop tour of the level’s best loot.

Through a mix of helpful demonstrations and clever cues, my guide directed me to a whole heap of useful items. After which, he or she simply waved and disappeared, just like in the ending to Field of Dreams, except without me blubbering away like a baby. Pretty nice though, right? Now let’s imagine that scenario played out with live microphones. It could have worked out alright, but the fact remains that – due to our unfortunate learned wariness – most unsolicited, online interactions are at least initially greeted as invasive and potentially unwanted.

But by making contact purely through the gameplay mechanics that we were both sharing and enjoying – the fabric which bound our Destiny experience, to get a bit Yoda for a moment – my Spinmetal Samaritan’s introduction felt entirely natural and implicitly trustworthy. This random act of kindness would’ve been that much more difficult to achieve had verbal or even text-based communication been involved.

And that’s just one of the many benefits of co-operating sans-language. For instance, the more video games adopt an always-online approach, the greater the threat becomes of players casually chatting over carefully prepared narratives. With silent play, that just isn’t an issue. Likewise, co-oping with gamers with whom we don’t share a language suddenly becomes that much more feasible, drastically increasing the pool of potential comrades online.

There’s no doubting that voice chat can be one hell of a tool in the right hands, providing as it does an enormous benefit to teams actually willing to work together. And if you’re prepared to put up with the random loudmouths, then I say more power to you. If not though, then perhaps it’s time you learned to simply enjoy the silence. Because with a little more effort, far more harmonious experiences are possible. And that, surely, is the goal of human communication in general. Give it a go. Your eardrums, sanity and faith in humanity will thank you.

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The game’s plot, as penned by former lead of Bungie’s writing team, Joe Staten, was far more linear and focused on saving the Warmind AI, Rasputin. In this version, players would have to rescue an Exo (the robotic humanoid race players can choose at character creation) that was being controlled by Rasputin (though players wouldn’t find out his true identity until later DLC). The journey would take Guardians to several locations scrapped from the final game, including Oryx’s Dreadnaught – though it’s not clear how far into development the area was at the time.

According to Kotaku’s anonymous sources, not only were locations overhauled, but plot threads and characters were also reused, recycled, and re-stitched together to form what we would experience in September 2014. Osiris was originally a mentor figure with a female Exo assistant. The Crow was an Awoken male ally with a roguish attitude.

Now, Osiris himself has no in-game presence, and his assistant has become The Stranger. The Crow was recycled to become the stuffy prick we all came to hate, Prince Uldren Sov. As for the story itself, it’s hard to sum up its construction better than one person who worked on the game: “The story was written without writers.”

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“The sound of anything transmatting is something I came up with a couple years ago,” says audio director C Paul Johnson. “It’s a combination of vegetables sizzling in a skillet and tinfoil. If you take tinfoil and pull it out and crunch it, you get all this cool metallic high end. Then taking that, making a mix of it and running it through, like, doppler plugins so you fake pitch and distance changes on it.”

Plus, you’d think electricity warping would just be, y’know, electricity. Apparently not. A processed version of crushed up Styrofoam is the way forward when it comes to your Warlock’s Stormcaller abilities. It also transpires that the sounds of the Vex come from some heavily modified versions of big cat roars. Yup, off you go and see if you can hear it all.

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Let’s face it: Destiny’s voice actors don’t have much they can chew into. In the year since its release, Destiny’s expansions – including the megaton additions in The Taken King – have done a lot to flesh out the story, but you won’t find too many long monologues or gripping dramatic scenes throughout the cinematic plot. You may not even realize how many instantly recognizable actors are part of Destiny’s cast, which is full of talent that in hindsight seems startlingly underutilized.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of every voice actor in Destiny – just the ones you’ll definitely recognize, even if you didn’t identify their voice right away. Peter Dinklage’s performance as your Ghost may be dead and gone, but these roles will continue to be a part of your daily Destiny routine. Knowing who reads the lines for the many supporting characters in Bungie’s massively multiplayer universe could make you see those bit players in a whole new light.

Nathan Fillion – Cayde-6, Hunter Vanguard

In Destiny, he’s: The head honcho for the Hunter class, this Exo is the guy to talk to whenever you need Hunter armor or a pep-talk on fighting the good fight. He’s also crucial to the overarching story content in The Taken King.

But you probably know him better from: You’ve got at least starter-level nerd cred if you instantly recognize Nathan Fillion as Malcolm Reynolds, the rugged, dashing captain of the ragtag crew in Firefly and its film follow-up Serenity. He’s also gained mainstream recognition as the lead on Castle, where he plays a crime-solving author, as well as roles in cult classics like Slither and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Judging by Fillion’s numerous appearances in the Halo series, it’s safe to say the folks at Bungie have a thing for Captain Hammer – and really, who could blame them?

Gina Torres – Ikora Rey, Warlock Vanguard

In Destiny, she’s: Warlocks know to visit this soft-spoken sage for any class-specific quests and gear whenever they stop by the Tower.

But you probably know her better from: Like Fillion, Torres is an alumni from the cast of Firefly/Serenity, where she played the ship’s second-in-command (and distinguished crackshot) Zoe Washburne. Fans of TV drama might also recognize her from Alias and 24; more recently, Torres has played key roles as Jessica Pearson on Suits or Bella Crawford on Hannibal.

Lance Reddick – Commander Zavala, Titan Vanguard

In Destiny, he’s: Rounding out the Vanguard trinity at the Tower’s command center, Zavala tutors Titans and doles out some early story quests.

But you probably know him better from: Reddick’s distinct, baritone voice exudes authority, which surely helped him nail iconic roles as Phillip Broyles on Fringe and the pivotal Lt. Cedric Daniels on HBO’s The Wire. He’s also had some brief stints on Law & Order, Lost, and Oz. Nowadays, you can catch Reddick on Bosch and the upcoming Quantum Break TV show that ties in with the game.

Lauren Cohan – Exo Stranger

In Destiny, she’s: One of the most mysterious (and still unexplained) parts of Destiny’s main story, the Exo Stranger keeps tabs on your Guardian and eventually rewards them with a legendary pulse rifle.

But you probably know her better from: Fans of AMC’s The Walking Dead will surely recognize Cohan as Maggie Greene, one of the most crucial survivors in the whole series. Cohan’s also made appearances on Chuck, The Vampire Diaries, and Supernatural.

Lennie James – Lord Shaxx, Crucible Handler

In Destiny, he’s: The overseer of all things PvP in Destiny, Shaxx is the one narrating your team’s every triumph (and failure) during each match in the Crucible.

But you probably know him better from: James is another recognizable face from The Walking Dead, where he plays one of Rick Grimes’ earliest allies, Morgan Jones. James is also the lead of the new ER drama Critical, Robert Hawkins on Jericho, and the bumbling criminal Sol in Guy Ritchie’s cult classic Snatch.

Bill Nighy – The Speaker

In Destiny, he’s: Because that giant white orb known as The Traveller has a hard time chatting with Guardians, The Speaker is there to act as its surrogate quest-giver/speech-maker.

But you probably know him better from: Nighy’s been in countless films and shows dating all the way back to the ’80s, but his most mainstream roles include the washed-up rocker Billy Mack in Love Actually and the tentacle-faced Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean series. You may also recognize him from his parts in Hot Fuzz, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the primary villain Viktor in the Underworld franchise.

James Remar – Executor Hideo, New Monarchy Merchant

In Destiny, he’s: A mild-mannered vendor representing the New Monarchy faction (with no known relation to Metal Gear Solid godfather Hideo Kojima).

But you probably know him better from: Remar’s another veteran actor, with dozens of on-camera and voiceover roles under his belt. You most likely recognize him as father figure and imaginary confidant Harry Morgan on Dexter; he’s also had some great turns on animated shows such as Ben 10 and The Legend of Korra. And I’ll never forget his breakout role as the smarmy tough guy Ajax in The Warriors.

Peter Stormare – Arach Jalaal, Dead Orbit Merchant

In Destiny, he’s: Another peripheral vendor hanging around the Tower, representing the black-and-white-centric Dead Orbit faction.

But you probably know him better from: This Swedish actor’s unmistakable mug has shown up all over the place, but most will know him from his roles in films by the Coen brothers, where he played the short-tempered crook Gaear in Fargo and a ferret-owning nihilist/porn star in The Big Lebowski. He’s also a crucial character on Prison Break, and his lent his pipes to several other video games including Until Dawn and both of the Mercenaries games.

April Stewart – Petra Venj, The Queen’s Emissary

In Destiny, she’s: As one of the most trusted servants of Mara Sov, queen of the Awoken, Petra Venj is the vendor for the Queen’s Wrath faction.

But you probably know her better from:Just as Matt Stone and Trey Parker provide the voices for most of the characters on the profane cartoon megahit South Park, Stewart does the voices for the lion’s share of the female cast, including iconic Colorado citizens Wendy Testaberger, Sharon Marsh, and Liane Cartman. That’s right: Cartman’s mom is one of the Reef’s most trusted intermediaries.

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