#Destiny 2: Episode 2 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

unpopularly-opinionated · 3 months ago

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My thoughts on Destiny 2: Episode 2: Revenant: Act 1 so far. Spoilers below, but the TL;DR (it's just a really long yapfest below, guys) is that Bungie somehow keeps hitting new lows. Not only has the quantity of content dropped significantly between Echos and Revenant, but the quality of said-content has dropped pretty significantly as well. We're in for a rough 6 weeks.

So uh... I've always been under the notion that Bungie is a, shall we say, mediocre company these days. Destiny 2, while still unfortunately a one of a kind, has been mediocre for the past like 3-4 years. Sure, it's had its ups, but it's had a lot more downs, let's be honest. It's a one of a kind, so I keep coming back, and I'll likely keep coming back due to sunk cost. I won't pretend that anything I'm about to say will dissuade me from hyping it up in the future.

So far, after playing a couple of hours of this new episode, I'm alarmed to put it mildly over just how low the bar of quality has fallen.

To start, whether due to a bug or an intentional change, a quality of life feature was removed for seemingly no reason, that being the ability to press F1 + Tab to quickly open your Director without having to hold Tab for a few seconds. This is a small ding against the game (albeit a frustrating as hell one), to be sure, but I wouldn't have made an entire post about this if that was the only ding.

Now, just to clarify, this isn't isolated to just this episode. It just so happens that I didn't get a chance to play the final act of Ep. 1, so I was trying to do that before I began Ep. 2. One of the quests in the final act had you gather some parts from a lost sector--a standard filler mission, this isn't the complaint. The complaint comes from the fact that the 'item' you receive when you pick up each object is clearly a stand-in neon pink default texture. Really, they couldn't be bothered to give it any texture otherwise? Okay then.

Then, in this episode, we're introduced to the jankiest potion brewing mechanic ever. I would add "most confusing" as well, but I'll chalk that up to my inattentiveness when it came to the introduction of it. So you go to the table to select a recipe, which I think costs materials to select because sometimes you can only select one, other times two, but never all of them, but you eventually get all of them very quickly anyhow so gating them doesn't matter really. But then you go and grab the ingredients from the shelves, then you go through a series of button presses to play little animations. One of them was bugged for me, I guess, and I was meant to turn into a chicken but it was invisible for me. Maybe it was an invisible chicken? I doubt it.

The jank though comes from the item they put in your inventory, something which we've never really had happen before now. Before now, if Bungie wanted you to interact with an item, they'd put it in your Quest Log and have you right click on it from there. They did that this time around, putting the spot to view and drink your potions in your Quest Log. Only, if you try and open it from your Quest Log, it'll bug out and disable your mouse, preventing you from actually doing anything. Because the intended way of opening it isn't from your Quest Log, it's from your Inventory where this brand new tab appeared. So I ask, why even bother putting it in our Quest Log? I imagine because this game is held together by rubber bands and Kraft glue that it needs to be in your Quest Log in order to work at all, because instead of just building a new mechanic to allow you to open it from your Inventory, they had to just build on top of the mechanic they already had in the game to allow you to open it from your Quest Log. It's just kind of lazy, but whatever.

And then come all of the narrative snafus with this new episode. I knew something was off when the intro mission to this episode had us storm Riis Reborn to capture Eramis, and at the end we see this in-game conversation between her and Crow, where Crow very calmly asks her to come in so that justice can be served, but also so he can help her and her people who are being hunted by Fikrul. It's a very calm, collected conversation where eventually Eramis peacefully gives herself up to being captured. Then we immediately jump to a cutscene on the HELM where Crow's got a gun pointed at her, shouting about how she's a super dangerous criminal and telling her not to try anything. His aggro went from 0 to 100 in a second for no reason at all, it was just really jarring.

From this point on, Eramis is locked inside a prison cell in the new/updated HELM space Bungie made, which I will grant looks very nice all things considered. She's completely accessible by the player, by the way, a point which I bring up because later we get a quest step that says "Speak to Eramis on the Holoprojector" which I'd call lazy, but the irony is that I think it's technically more effort to create a Holoprojector conversation with Eramis then it would be to just have the player walk ten feet away from the Holoprojector to the prison cell she's currently held in, and talk to her there.

If you go through the portal to the old HELM, which is now partly destroyed and presumably in some hangar somewhere to be repaired, you can go to the front of the ship where the windows are, which are now broken and busted out. If you look outside of them, you can see the edges of like the skybox or whatever you want to call it. You can see the corner of the room object that the HELM space is held inside of. It's super janky looking. And like, Bungie's always had this kind of stuff, I realize that. But typically you have to go out of your way to find that sort of thing. Whereas with this, you literally just walk to the front of the ship and you see it. Like I don't know, Bungie, add in a smoke effect or something to obscure my vision of the seams. It just feels like whoever was supposed to finish the HELM got fired before they could finish, which is the "excuse" I've been half-jokingly making with all of these nitpicks.

This one you could theoretically chalk up to just being a nitpick because what I'm pointing out is merely just a narrative detail that I disagreed with based on how Bungie's done this in the past. One mission has us go to this Tangled Shore-looking map where we're trying to save a bunch of Eliksni. Crow TPs in where you spawn and says a few things, then points to a cave ten feet away from you where Fikrul is just chilling. He TPs away, again even though this cave is hardly ten feet away from us, but whatever. I get that Bungie doesn't have a standard running animation that they can use on NPCs to have them run to a certain point during narrative moments (oh wait).

Anyways, you go into the cave where Fikrul is. Deadbeat Daddy Crow TPs back in to talk to his son. His son hates him, go figure, and decides to turn all of the Scorn surrounding us at that moment against us. Now, in any other scenario, we would've gotten a standard "hold them off, Guardian, while I go chase after Fikrul" or something to that effect. Some sort of narrative indication that we're meant to kill the enemies surrounding us while the NPC goes and does NPC things. Instead, we get "DAMMIT!" before Crow TPs out, leaving us surrounded by Scorn. No acknowledgement that we're surrounded by enemies or anything, or how it's on us to handle it. Deadbeat Daddy Crow just ups and abandons us like we're his kid or something.

This wouldn't have bothered me as much as it did if I didn't already know and understand how Bungie usually writes these things. Yes, I'm aware the mission isn't difficult. I wasn't even slightly concerned with the fact that he left us surrounded by Scorn. The problem I had was that, narratively, Crow or any of the Vanguard would never just up and abandon the Guardian without so much as a word as to why they're abandoning them.

I think perhaps the biggest criticism I have so far though is that this is it for Act 1? The change they made between episodes to allow us to effectively binge all of Act 1 all at once I believe to be a good one, but now that I'm done with Act 1, I'm scratching my head wondering how the fuck they were ever planning to draw this out in the first place.

One of the missions they sent you on is like ten seconds long. You spawn in on Nessus, right at the spot where you need to be. You drink a potion at a table that does something I guess. Maybe like 20 Scorn spawn around you, only one yellow bar. You kill them in seconds and that's that. That's the mission. So I'm sitting here asking myself: "Holy shit, would that have been the weekly mission if this was still being time gated week-by-week?" A mission that seriously takes all of like 2 minutes if you don't include the dialog that you listen to after its over and you're waiting for the "Mission End" timer to go down.

Altogether, there's only three missions in Act 1. The mission where you capture Eramis at the beginning, the mission I just mentioned above where you drink a potion and kill some Scorn for two minutes, and the mission I mentioned even further up where Deadbeat Daddy Crow abandons you like you're his second child. And I've looked around and I'm apparently not alone in thinking this is crazy short.

Six weeks until Act 2 comes out, and seven weeks after that until Act 3 drops. I feel like Bungie blew their load in Echos, it being the first of these "Episodes" they introduced us to, and now comes the real new standard we should expect for Destiny 2's future. Our options are either an hour of content with a 6-7 week break in between, or an hour of content stretched unimaginably thin for 6-7 weeks. Either way, sad sad times ahead for Destiny 2. It seems like not only should we be expecting less quantity content, but less quality content as well.

Anyways, can't wait to play more of it. Blah blah blah, yap fest over.

#Destiny 2 #Bungie #Destiny #Revenant #Destiny 2: Episode 2 #Destiny 2: Episode 2: Act 1 #video games #random

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unpopularly-opinionated · 3 months ago

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Hi I'm in full agreement and honestly related too much to your post about Revenant and I wanted to point a couple incredibly nitpicky details put if you'd have it:

-Not only is the skybox fucked up in the helm but in the tower where the helm is parked you can see the windows exposed to open air, meaning you *should* be seeing the fucking city and tower. I think they intended for the blast shields to be fully down in there.

-in that mission with crow, he actually goes invisible Void style, you can see his shimmer and hear the sound effect. That was them getting around the lack of a running animation, not him Dipping, but then like you said he dips at the end so ????

-Tbh i think this content volume is exactly the same as Echoes, they just removed the step asking you to run onslaught 3-5 times in total but I'm sure youve seen that take everywhere else

-lastly: i relate to the "i critisize but ill definitely be back" i stopped playing and came back *entirely* bc of the last city area im so fucking easy

Sorry for the short essay lol my relationship with destiny sucks and is permanent and i related too much

I didn't even notice that you could see the HELM from the outside, yeah that's fucky. I watched a video where someone mentioned still seeing space outside of the HELM's windows, but I'm guessing that was a bug they've since removed, leaving behind just an empty void lol.

I didn't notice him going invisible, but I believe it. What I find weird though, and what I was trying to imply with my (oh wait) was that they literally do have a running animation. They've used it before in story missions when NPCs like have to run ahead or whatever. So I don't get why they didn't just use that, but oh well.

I have heard that the content volume is the same, but I have a problem with the way it's being framed. See, the thing people wanted Bungie to stop doing was time gating missions, but instead they've taken it a step further and removed all of the "filler missions" they'd normally pad the season/episode with. Only I don't really think people had as much of an issue with those missions, their issue was specifically with getting a new "play Onslaught 100 times" mission a week after you've been grinding Onslaught already for drops. We just want the "play Onslaught 100 times" mission right from the start so we can actually progress it without having to arbitrarily wait a week to get the next grind quest.

My concern is that Bungie is doing this deliberately so that they can look at the obvious negative feedback from this and walk back the decision to not time gate content. They're going to essentially say "see, you guys don't know what you want" and go back to what we had before, when all they had to do was give us the grind up front.

That being said, even if you ignore the filler missions from Echoes, I still think Echoes had more content. I could be wrong, I suppose. I'm basing this almost entirely on vibes. At the very least, even if mission count-wise we're getting the same amount of content, mission quality-wise we most definitely are not. With Echoes, we got multiple entirely new sections of Nessus added, whereas with Revenant thus far we've only had kinda one new area in the Tangled Shore (or Reef, I'm not really sure the difference) if you want to count the area from the Crow mission, but I'm not even sure if we'll ever be going back there so I'm not sure that even matters.

And lastly, yeah I feel ya. Playing D2 is being in an abusive relationship that you just can't quit, sadly. The dicking down is impeccable, but god does he leave you feeling bad about yourself afterwards.

#Destiny 2 #bungie #Destiny 2: Episode 2: Revenant #Destiny 2: Episode 2 #video games #asks #random

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