Happy Monday, friends, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread! This is the place for us to talk about games and gaming. And while the past two weeks have given us quite the slew of gaming news, let me try to come up with a distinct prompt.

Yesterday, I started Future Connected, the expansion added to Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition (incidentally, my article on the game as a whole was finally published!). Released as an epilogue in the remaster of a game that came out eleven years earlier, whose sequel came out three years earlier with its own expansion a year later, it’s a game juggling a number of things. It has to find new tweaks in the gameplay without really upending the decade-old combat (Xenoblade 2‘s aforementioned and wildly larger expansion, Torna ~ The Golden Country, does much better on this front). Similarly, it needs to make locations that can use the assets of the base game and marshal them into something that feels distinct. Additionally, it needs to jettison some stuff and make an effort to be just a fraction of the behemoth of a game that is the first Xenoblade. And it needs to be an appropriate end to Xenoblade 1 that seeds in ideas for Xenoblade 3, which would only be announced a year and a half later.

Personally, I think it’s doing nicely on that front. It’s nice not having Skill Trees and having a clear delineation of what I need to unlock bonus to my skill tree. The Bionis’ Shoulder is a fun new sandbox that mixes up level design choices in the first two games. And the short plot is fun; I’m already seeing how it ties into XC3, but it also feels like a decent standalone filler story for Shulk and Melia. It’s what this bespoke remaster arguably “needed,” or at least gets a lot out of.

So, from that, here’s the prompt: Expansions in games, what you think about them, and which are your favorites. And while I usually try to make broad prompts, not this time! I don’t mean no rinky dink “oh, I love when Smash added this character!” nonsense. I mean an expansion, something big and meaty. Like Mass Effect 3: Citadel. That’s a big whopper of an expansion. Or The Conquerors and The Ballad of Gay Tony and Awakening and all the ginormous packs Destiny has. It needs to be big, and it needs to be thorough.

And, as always, what did you play this weekend?