#like destiny is such a good game in so many ways but bungie's choices... bad

[zahra-hydris]

I really wish I could get back into destiny and consider playing the final shape (since I've heard it's actually good?)

but bungie's bullshit approach to seasonal content (can't follow the story unless you play every single season and you can't play the seasonal stories after the season has ended) really killed my interest in the game

anyway this is my way of saying please spoil me lmao (but also tag your spoilers for those who don't want to be spoiled!)

[thefirstknife]

I think a lot of what's happening is that many players are legitimately burning out because of the way bungie models the game (people don't call it FOMO: the game for no reason, there's definitely a truth to that feeling), increasing prices putting further strains on wallets as people continue to struggle financially (getting priced out of a beloved hobby is painful), and various genuine harmful choices over the life of the series, etc. but all of that's being co-opted by bad faith actors who are looking for a reason to tear Bungie down--I think you're at least partially right that there's a lot of anti-LGBTQIA+ people targeting them for being visible allies (and members of our various communities!) and just just hollow rainbow capitalists. And there's probably people who just want to stir up drama because they find it fun. So they're all distorting the actual complaints and making it so hard to have a frank discussion about good and bad practices. The real stuff gets drowned out and people tired of the BS shut down genuine complaints without realizing because it's hard to sort through it all. I think the technical term for the current situation is "clusterfuck"

For real. Burnout is a real problem that very few people recognise and often they just refuse to recognise it when it hits them personally. And like, burnout isn't just "I'm a little bored of this," continuous burnout can lead to actual health problems.

I always tell people that if you log into a game and you're not feeling it, you're only there to mark a checklist and you're annoyed by every moment spent playing, please take a break. FOMO stuff is also a real issue, but I also always tell people to just try and think about it from a broader perspective. Will you miss out on stuff? Probably. Will this matter to you, truly, if you have no interest in the game anymore? Like, if you think about it, missing out on content from a game that doesn't bring you joy should not be that big of a deal. You're not enjoying it anyway, so who cares if you miss things that you don't enjoy?

FOMO design is really awful and it's unfortunately everywhere and it takes so much energy to get yourself out of thinking that everything around you is super urgent and you have to latch onto it NOW or else.... In truth, this is just a sneaky method to keep people hooked. It's not real, you're not really missing out on anything. Even if you are, I promise that it's better to "miss out" than fall into burnout. You're the only one who can break your own FOMO.

A lot of gamers don't get it and don't even try to get it and actually get super defensive when you tell them that they're exhibiting symptoms of burnout. This is also another way that people try to deflect criticism. Sometimes someone will incessantly shit on a video game and you'll tell them "you have burnout bro, you need to take a break for your own sake" and they'll insist that you're just saying that because you're bootlicking a company or whatever.

On the other hand, sometimes you will criticise something legitimate and people will try to shut you down with claims that you're just burned out. Differentiating between these two is super difficult, especially when the community is acting like the Destiny community is acting like now. As you said, we're dealing with a clusterfuck. There's legitimately burned out people hateplaying the game who refuse to recognise it and there's people who want to talk about genuine problems and the former are making this an incredibly difficult conversation to have.

Two other related asks under:

It's utterly bizarre. The cynicism is so high that people are literally ignoring easily verifiable facts they can find with one google click away because it means they get to join their pitchforks against Bungie. And like, you can hate a company all you want but at least hate the real things they've done? The Bungie Foundation is legitimate work that helps people all over the world. This one aint' it chief.

This is the reddit thread where people were having a meltdown over the post about the foundation stuff for Bungie Day to the point that a moderator had to make a pinned post about this and there's one other most upvoted post about it just beneath. A lot of the shitty comments have been deleted and some are still there but downvoted, but people for real showed up to say crap about Bungie and lie on a call for charity.

It happened on twitter too (link if you're brave enough to go into replies and quote tweets, I don't recommend it), because of course it did. People are largely upset that some of the bigger goals have an emblem and shader as a reward and now they're calling it the "100k $ shader." And like. It's not for you. You don't need these two items. They're not here for you to buy. They're here to incentivise donations to charity. Bungie isn't getting rich from this; they will literally not see this money. It's going to charity.

I could bet my entire ass that the same people crying about this shader being unobtainable (we don't even know what it looks like btw) are the same people who are standing by their favourite streamer when they say that some in-game activities and rewards shouldn't be obtainable to the majority of the players. It's baby behaviour, and worse now because the post about Bungie announcing a charity is littered with comments from ghouls who think that THIS is the right moment to stick it to the big corpos (and ask to "fix servers").

LMAO! Literally though. I, unfortunately, play a Blizzard game and like. I'm sorry but you will not convince me that Destiny has worse monetisation than Overwatch. Like, maybe you can convince people who don't play anything else, but I do.

And honestly, if some other game is better to someone? Please feel free to play that then. I do my absolute best to limit the amount of money I will ever again give Blizzard to as close to 0 as possible, but if Blizzard's monetisation and morals are fine to you, go wild I guess. Applies to any other company for that matter. I personally find it baffling that we've spent YEARS learning about all the ways Activision is actually being led by demons from hell and that they deal with lawsuits every few months and treat their employees like crap, but we're totally fine hyping up Diablo 4 (and I guess we forgot all controversies from before about Diablo 3 and Diablo Immortal and everything). But to each their own. I'm not on Diablo twitter posting about this. It's not my problem. Hell, I'm not even engaging with Overwatch stuff because I know that I will just be negative about every aspect of it, even though I'm still playing here and there. I disagree with what they're doing so I play less and don't buy stuff and then I'm not angry about a video game every day of my life. Life hack.

[macgyvertape]

thoughts on season of splicer ending

warning: spoilers for the entire season, general discussion of leaks, and absolutely being Bungie critical. Basically trying to write this out and figure out my own thoughts in the writing

I guess my first thoughts are what everyone's talking about: Osiris.

All the wild theories about if he's been replaced, controlled, playing 5d chess, etc. tldr: leaks say that from season of the Hunt it hasn't been Osiris but Savathun. Yeah I've read people's compilations of proof until I rapidly got bored with them. I'll be bluntly honest, if Bungie is going for some sort of imposter story-line then they're doing a fucking awful job at telling it.

a) A good imposter story-line needs to establish to the audience that there is the possibility or replacement/control

b) characters in the story themselves should be aware of point A and be actively considering it in their decision making

c) if the imposter is doing something the original didn't than clearly show audience the imposter is there.

I would say Bungie didn't do any of these, no the lore page of Savathun's human disguise falling apart around her doesn't count, because Bungie has long had a problem of putting story relevant plot details in lore pages and then not referencing them ingame. Lore should accentuate story, not provide key details to the story.

If you want to see a good imposter story-line look at Forsaken, and how they worked to make it obvious to someone who didn't know who Mara Sov was that something was up.

Most of the proof people cite is either cherry picking ambiguous things Osiris has said, or pointing out inconsistencies in writing. IMO not much of the evidence holds up because multiple characters this season (Saint, Lakshmi, Mithrax) have been written inconsistently with past appearances and without nuance; because their character has to carry the plot in a certain way or there are limits on recording dialogue for override/expunge.

My point in recapping the Osiris thing, is that from a thematic view at the end of the season Osiris is Osiris and I'm judging the story from the view of the season not how will the story be in the future.

very cynical take that as much praise as Bungie wants for working to make a high profile gay relationship be shown in game after a writer confirmed it on twitter

if leaks are right: if  Osiris hasn't been Osiris for the past 3 seasons then none of the scenes with Saint are real or matter, and it invalidates all the emotional grief of Sagira being dead. It's 3 seasons of character development and effort wasted

or: they took the first chance they could to make one of them an unsympathetic villain and write him out of the story.

(yeah destiny has other queer character but how many of them are alive and matter to the story? When was the last time Ana's girlfriend was mentioned?)

The game is clear that for all the talk about "vex tech influence" Lakshmi's views and choices were her own, so the same for Osiris: he is responsible for helping Lakshmi and is responsible for all the civilian deaths, he's the 2ndary Human villain of the season.

Which brings me to my point (that I've seen others say) is that Bungie should have given a second thought to having their all of their human antagonists be PoC characters this expansion. Osiris, Lakshmi, and Saladin last season. For Lakshmi and Saladin they weren't just antagonists, they were written to be bigots for the community to dislike. Yes Destiny has a lot of PoC characters and anyone can be a villain, but IMO its a bad look from a company who talks so much about social justice. It wouldn't matter except Bungie wanted the message of the season to be anti-racism, and I'm comparing it within the context of how often minorities are the villains in games/US media. I don't think it was deliberately done, I just think it is something that like last season's issues with proving grounds and antisemitism they didn't care or bother with a sensitivity reader.

It's obvious this season they were going for a very obvious reference to Trump and modern day fears about refugees with Lakshmi, and it's a bad look that they did with a Indian female character and refugees are the enemy crab aliens. I'm also not saying that female characters can't be villains, but did the Bungie writers not think about just how nasty gamers would get in either slurs, insults, or expressing wishes for violence, and how pervasive and visible it would be?

I'm genuinely curious why the writers went for such a heavy handed analogy, and a story-line that feels like it comes from an afterschool special. The Eliksni have been enemies in atleast 4 expansions now, there could have been a more nuanced story other than "House of Light is good keep on killing all other Fallen". At the end of the season the game treated the attack on the City being Lakshmi and Osiris' fault, and all the people who don't like the Eliksni (say the people doing hate crimes in the lore) left with the factions so "problem resolved" . Lakshmi gets a simple karmatic death, in an area where multiple reddit threads express how they love tbagging the corpse. The ending cutscene didn't feel super inspiring to me it just felt unrealistic not just in real life where things aren't that simple but also within Destiny's story; the "you are my family" line felt cringe to me, probably because it felt unearned.

That's kind of the problem of the season isn't it, that the earliest planned game based decisions like having a Vex seasonal enemy and getting rid of the Factions determined the cast of characters with ties to the Vex and factions. So you just fight x many Vex bosses until you defeat Quria, then there's a break for Solstace, but on Reset-Tuesday with no warning things escalate because its epilogue time.

Sadly I forget who said that "it felt like the plot needed to hit one beat a week" meaning one issue had to get resolved enough for the community to talk about (except for when we take 3 weeks off for solstice). Each week there has to be some sort of hook to avoid the overblown "content drought". So multiple times you will have characters change their mind or their deep held beliefs after one counter argument is presented. (big example is Saint changing his mind not over the season but after one cutscene). City politics and factions don't matter aside from dialogue in a few different weeks because they'll be gone at the end of the season but in the meantime characters needed to talk about something to prompt fandom engagement. example: the fandom argues about governance of the last city for a while before the argument burn out since the relevant lore wasn't designed to hold up to close scrutiny.

just, I'm a politically active leftist in a red conservative state so maybe i just find this exhausting since I deal with similar issues irl and am more prone to thinking this season was tone deaf.

tldr: that wow this turned out really negative. Which I didn't really expect considering how much I enjoyed the first few weeks of the season. I enjoyed a lot of the gameplay this season (I really enjoy fun gambit aka Overrides and VoG). But as for replaying the story on my other characters, I don't think I'll bother.

[nyanyanolio]

The final remaining issue from the acti-split. Seasonal Disconnection.

I had a thought today about the Xpac/Seasonal split between content drops in Destiny 2. I’ve thought for a long time that perhaps there are many people who play D2 that are not experienced with MMO content cycles and the way that developers support their Xpac content. Perhaps I’m misreading that situation but given how people online seem to react to most anything Bungie does nowadays i can’t help but wonder. Overall I do think that we have a community based issue/misunderstanding but I also think that Bungie kinda feeds the wolves on this one by misrepresenting what seasons are meant to do.

Destiny 2 currently drops an annual expansion with 3.5 seasons (I’ll talk about this later) to support it. With World of Warcraft (my other main MMO) as my main example, I want to draw some parallels. World of Warcraft has set a lot of examples for MMOs, especially in the form of content drops which are based on patch numbers (BFA was 8.0-8.3//Legion was 7.0-7.3.5//Warlords was 6.0-6.3.5) and even FF14 follows almost the exact same pattern, but up to x.5.

With D2, we can say that Shadowkeep by the end will have been from 3.0-3.3.5. I include the .5 because throughout Shadowkeep we have gotten an event about 2/3 of the way through the season that wraps up the main content and provides a renewed avenue of progression to finish the season off, much like the .5 patches of WoW.

With Both D2 and WoW having at one time been published by Activision and the fact that they have in the past set unrealistic expectations or even force restarted development on Destiny releases, I think it’s reasonable to say that both games strategies may have become more aligned that originally thought (look at armor 2.0 vs the corruption armor system from 8.3). To put it simply, I think that the final remaining issue in Destiny 2 from their time with Activision is that the seasons too closely resemble previous Destiny DLC releases, specifically the D1 Xpacs.

On one hand, I think the loss of both support studios can be cited as a good reason for Bungie not being able to make seasons as substantial as they were during Forsaken. In fact they literally said as much last year in Luke Smith’s first Directors Cut series. However this just leads me to frustration that they didn’t slow the release cadence.

On the other hand, I find it insanely confusing and almost insulting as an MMO player that I have to observe so many people expressing frustration with the seasonal system as a concept. There seems to be a lot of players who are convinced each season is a new xpac instead of a patch, and in a way I think Bungie actually fuels this belief by having none of the seasons directly interact with Shadowkeep’s story and content while still framing seasonal threats as being on the same scale as an Xpac big bad (Ghaul/Riven/Pyramids).

This exact problem has been an ever increasing issue in WoW for multiple expansions now. While in WoW; things like the war campaign help bridge story gaps and maintain flow from one content patch to another, Destiny 2 only really has the lore drops on Bungie.net to do that.

I think to fix this issue, Bungie needs to make seasons much more intertwined with the story of the expansion. I think Armor 2.0′s seasonal mods are a step in that direction in terms of game play, but overall we haven’t had any additions to endgame PvE since Garden of Salvation dropped. Trials and soon Grandmaster Nightfall Ordeals are welcome additions to the game, but even Trials in on the brink because of poor loot acquisition choices and GNO’s are just more of the same strikes with even more purely negative modifiers which I think will inevitably cause the same reaction as the Prestige Leviathan where people get upset over having no choices in play style due to strict modifiers.

Moving Forward, I do have high hopes for how Bungie will handle this issue. Luke Smith’s most recent Director’s Cut post seems to communicate that Aspiration will be returning to the game in a big way, and given the very iterative nature of Destiny thus far I think this philosophy with bleed through just the next Xpac and hopefully into more connected and smoother seasons. I think the biggest improvement Bungie could make given the current structure we have is to Reduce the number of seasons per Xpac to 3 instead of 4 both to give players more breathing time between content drops and to also give Bungie the time they need to make these seasons as great as possible. Xpac based story or content beats every or some seasons would probably also be insanely helpful; very close second place.

------

I’m currently finishing up Pt.1 of my Season of the Worthy Review in Progress video and it should be up this coming Saturday (April 11th) it will be covering the first 3 weeks of the season with Pt.2 coming April 25th disccussing the IO bunker and the second 3 weeks. I realised I was a bit ambitious to assume I could make content once a week so RiP videos will release the week after every 3rd week of the season. I also might take some posts like this one and turn them into videos over time as well.

[thesevenseraphs]

This week at Bungie, Calus pays tribute. You’ve sought the Truth, and found it. You’ve lit your path through darkness with Lumina. Now, Calus is mixing things up a little. In case you’ve been out of the loop, an imperial invitation is waiting for you in the robotic hands of Werner-99 on Nessus. Guardians have been earning a menagerie of loot since the beginning of the season. Now we’re entering a time of celebration. Moments of Triumph and the Tribute Hall became available on Tuesday, each of which commemorate your accomplishments as a Guardian. 

The Tribute Hall comes with a small price to pay. Calus couldn’t make things too easy for you, now could he? You’re a Guardian after all. As you enter the Tribute Hall, you’re greeted by walls of gold and platforms to place trophies representing your history within Destiny 2. Each trophy requires a sign of your devotion, ranging from an offering of planetary materials to glimmer. Calus offers you four bounties a day to earn discounts for each trophy, so if you’re strapped for Data-Lattice or Bright Dust, you can eventually work your way to a far lower price. After placing a few of your trophies, Calus brings a little Bad Juju to the fold…

Alongside your hall of tributes, Moments of Triumph are available to complete. While some Triumphs won’t be available until Solstice of Heroes, players can start gaining progress towards the Moments of Triumph 2019 Seal. For more info, make sure to check out the Bungie Day blog post.

GUARDIANCON RECAP

Last week, we had the privilege to spend some face–to-face time with players at GuardianCon (now known as GCX) in Orlando, Florida. Moments like these are refreshing, as many of us started in the same community that we were celebrating throughout the weekend. If you weren’t able to make it to the event, there are recaps of the Bungie Opening Ceremony and the Whisper/Zero Hour Ride Along available on Twitch.

World First Titles were awarded to representatives of their fireteams. Never call these trophies just ‘belts’, or Big Show might show up on your doorstep with a few choice words. Guardians also spent some quality time with Eris, and we can’t thank Morla enough for her marathon signing sessions.

To everyone who took a chance in our Risk/Reward matches, thanks for stopping by! Good games were had and loot was earned. It’s always a blast hosting Crucible matches at events and we loved watching players that had never met before overcoming some pre-formed fireteams. Never underestimate your opponents, no matter how strong the bond with your fireteam may be.

BLINDING THE WELL

No matter how much you prepare, a little bug may crawl into your luggage and find itself on a one way trip to the Dreaming City. The Player Support team has been navigating the waters of the #Help forum, gathering information on what players are seeing in the wild since Destiny 2 Update 2.5.1.1 went live.

This is their report.

Resolved an issue where players could not activate the Witch’s Vessel in the Crown of Sorrow raid without a team wipe, blocking flawless runs.

Resolved an issue blocking the Drifter and Vanguard Allegiance quests from progressing.

Resolved an issue where Werner 99-40's weekly bounties no longer gave powerful rewards.

Resolved issues where Sturm did not reload non-Drang sidearms, and would play reload audio on every kill.

Additionally, as of today’s background maintenance, issues encountered by players in the Blind Well have been resolved. Players who visit the Blind Well in the Dreaming City should be able to spend any-tier Charge of Light to once again initiate this activity. For the full list of changes, please see our Update 2.5.1.1 Patch Notes page. Vital Information: High Roller TriumphWith the launch of the 2019 Moments of Triumph, we have monitored player confusion regarding the unlock conditions for the High Roller Triumph. Here is what is required:

Players must complete a Nightfall with a minimum final score of 100,000 points

Players must have a complete loadout of weapons and armor from any the following sources equipped. These can be mixed and matched:

The LeviathanEater of WorldsSpire of StarsThe Menagerie*Crown of Sorrow

*Armor from The Menagerie must be from an “Opulent” armor set.

 Eligible weapons include:

Austringer

Beloved

Calus Mini-Tool

Drang (Baroque)

The Epicurean

Fixed Odds

Imperial Decree

Death’s Razor

Goldtusk

Throne-Cleaver

Destiny 2 Season of Opulence Known Issues

Listed below are the latest player-impacting issues discovered in Season of Opulence, as reported by players to the #Helpforum.

Ryzen 3000 CPU: We are investigating player reports directly with AMD, where players describe being unable to launch Destiny 2 with Ryzen 3000 series CPUs on PC.

Countdown and Survival Crucible: We are investigating an issue where players cannot be revived upon death in Countdown and Survival Crucible matches after Update 2.5.1.1.

Conflux Lost Sector Imperials: We're investigating an issue where players slot a rune before the required quest step in the introductory "An Imperial Summons" quest, blocking them from completing the rest of the quest.

Drink Deep Triumph: We're investigating an issue where this triumph doesn't unlock for all players who claim the Masterwork slot in the Chalice of Opulence.

For the latest known issues as soon as they are discovered, players should visit our Destiny 2: Season of Opulence Known Issues thread. For archived known issues, players should visit our Destiny 2 Known Issues support article.

System of Peace

Lastly, this week we’d like to clear up a recent miscommunication regarding the Bungie Foundation’s iPadsforKids fundraiser donation reward.

In an in-game message, we incorrectly stated that players who donate $50 or more would receive the Sign of our City emblem. The actual emblem for participating in this fundraiser is the System of Peace. To correct this issue, any player whose donation qualifies for this emblem will receive both emblems after July 14.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Whose woods these are I think I know. 

Destiny has been for me, more than I ever could have dreamed when I first logged in back in September of 2014. It came into my life at a time when not a lot was really in the best place for me and it gave me an escape and a world I could throw myself into and, for a little while at least, forget about the problems of the real world.

I've experienced Destiny a lot of different ways over the last 4+ years. I dabbled in Crucible in Vanilla but strikes were really my jam. I would grind them for hours and hours as I leveled, trying to get the highest kill count and I loved how diverse and incredible they all were. I remember when Queen's Wrath dropped and I was still under-leveled for it and there was the strike in Winter's Run and I tried to do it but wasn't able to get past about halfway. I was disappointed and so I started really trying to level up more to be able to experience endgame and the next Queen's Wrath when it came around.

Of course there weren't more Queen's Wrath events, but there were the Nightfalls with their chances to get exotic drops and I wanted exotic drops. So at level 26 I headed into my first level 30 Nightfall solo. It was The Summoning Pits and the depth of the challenge was felt immediately upon walking to the first doorway and facing the Knights and Wizard. I don't know how many times I RTOd before putting together a successful run, but when I did, that run took me over 4 hours, but it was one of the greatest gaming experiences I'd ever had and I was hooked.

One of the coolest things looking back on those early days is again, seeing all the different ways I would play, level and progress. While soloing the Nightfall on all 3 characters would become the first thing I'd do each week thoughout year one, as we got to the end of vanilla and into TDB, I became completely hooked on Crucible and Iron Banner. I started in Crucible when I first got Suros and it was Dumbo's feather for me, giving me the confidence to feel I could compete. I almost immediately switched to MIDA and then in TDB found Coiled Hiss and Fusion Rifles.

Not everything was roses back then of course. The game had a lot of issues and growing pains, from the initial backlash to what shipped verses what players expected from pre-release hype, to TDB locking players out of Nightfalls, to the desire for matchmaking in raids because come on, Vault of Glass. Then HoW released and suddenly, as a solo player, it became much harder to play Destiny.

With the inclusion of Trials, there was endgame PvP with no matchmaking and Prison of Elders added even more PvE endgame that required fireteams but didn't add ways to be matched in-game. This was the first time I really felt like, as a solo player, that I really didn't have a place in the game in PvE and it sucked. I still did my Nightfalls, but outside of that, I was only playing PvP by the end of the expansion. The PvP itself was phenomenal and truly the Golden Age of the Crucible with everything at pretty much the height of its D1 power.

TTK was another shift. It made sweeping and dramatic improvements to the PvE experience. Grinding, leveling, getting gear and all the QoL changes were incredible, but it also marked the beginning of the end for what was D1 PvP. All our favorite year one legendary weapons were left behind and the great nerfening really began as Thorn, Red Death, MIDA and on and on found themselves neutered to shells of their former glory.

I had loved the TTK content release, but I found myself really struggling to find the same feeling HoW had given Crucible. Where I'd had weapons that felt so perfect and fit how I played so well in HoW, I couldn't find anything I liked in TTK and it got to the point where I took about a month off from the game and just wasn't sure if I'd keep playing, but then something happened. We'd started a community podcast to bring on everyday forum community members to talk Destiny and on our 6th episode I met RedWingGirl1999 when one of my co-hosts invited her on as a guest.

Once I met RWG, we became friends and the way I played Destiny changed again as I joined her raid team and we raided or chased Triumphs and Exotic quests pretty much every day through the second half of TTK. It was also from that point until the end of D1 that I started cycling through favorite characters. I really got back into my Hunter after we started playing together, then Rise of Iron was all about my Warlock and Age of Triumph saw me playing a bit of everything.

And Destiny evolved and devolved along the way as well. PvE got better and better, but the state of weapon balance and PvP continued to implode and those implosions all too often bled into PvE as well with the nerfs to ammo economies, artifacts and anything that players could blame for them not succeeding in the Crucible.

I want to take a moment to recognize that throughout this process, the developers were really trying to build the game they thought we wanted and while communication was not optimal in 2014, there were tremendous strides over the lifespan of D1. I know I have a special and more unique take on this because of the relationships and friendships I was able to make within the studio and I'm truly blessed to have gotten to experience, but from those experiences I've gotten a much more humanizing insight into the people who create this game.

RWG and I got to experience the D2 reveal event and all the hope and excitement going into the sequel and though there was the immediate uh-oh we had when they said PvP would all be 4v4 (we feared it would hurt 6 player raid teams that would no longer be able to stay together and play PvP, and unfortunately it did just that), overall the gameplay had been incredibly fun and felt like a genuine evolution of play.

At this point a thousand things can be said about what year one was and there were a lot of issues and things that didn't work how the developers had envisioned, but it was always extremely unfair to say the game was trash or a dead game. No one who still played and enjoyed year one ever said the game was perfect and everyone knew and everyone acknowledged it needed to be much better, but while there wasn't enough to chase and grind for, D2 was incredibly welcoming to be played how and when we wanted and also a lot of things that the studio felt would keep players invested with timed content to keep things fresh- Faction Rallies, IB, etc, just fell flat, and PvP that had been so reworked to be the best Crucible experience ever based on D1 feedback, turned out to not be what anyone really wanted.

Things went south.

When Bungie began to lose the streamers and YouTubers everything hit the fan and suddenly Destiny 2 found itself with the most toxic community in gaming and after initially turtling a bit (I'm sure out of shock as things went sideways), we started to see one of the most honest and open outreaches from a game company to their community as Bungie acknowledged the mistakes they'd made and started working feverishly to correct them, giving us road maps of what we could expect and when.

I got to be a part of the Community Summit and though there was a lot of mistrust in the community as to its goals and motivations, I felt very strongly that though it was mostly high profile content creators, that the fact that players like myself, Mercules, Aer0knight and others were invited showed that it wasn't just about the streamers and what they wanted.

I am incredibly grateful to this day for the opportunity to experience that and get to have so many face to face conversations about the game with the people who make it and these are really, really incredibly down to Earth and just awesome people. Anyone who thinks the developers don't care or that Bungie is just a greedy corporation just don't get it. They're just like you and me. They're human beings with lives, families, passions, dreams, loves, fears and hopes, and like us they are capable of success and failure, good days and bad.

That's called being human, and to be human is to understand that sometimes things don't turn out the way we or others want or expect, but life goes on and it's up to each of us to decide how to keep going forward and when we or others fail or succeed, we have a choice; to support and work to elevate them, ourselves and everyone to try to better things or as is all too common these days, try to bring people down to our level or keep them below us when we succeed.

I 100% know that everyone's voices are heard within the studio and that Forsaken has been a monumental turnaround for Destiny 2 and in many ways a real love letter from the Devs to the community, but I think that there has also been a larger focus on the community that play and stream Destiny for a living and I don't think it's a case of the studio trying to consciously cater the game more that direction, but rather an overcorrection in the desire to have them back onboard, because let's face reality, they have tremendous influence over how the game is perceived not just on forums, but also in print and social media.

Which brings me to why I'm writing all this today. Yeah, I write a lot about Destiny and I've covered a lot of this is past posts, but things are different for me in the game and I'm not sure the game Destiny is becoming has a place for me in it. It's so weird to actually write that, but I also know it's becoming increasingly difficult to feel like I can experience this game and universe how I want.

I play Destiny much differently these days from the last couple years and strangely, my experience has almost been a perfect bell up and back down to where I began. Our raid team mostly survived year one to the end, but our 6 player groups that used to PvP the rest of the weeks were no more and things really began falling apart with Spire and all its excessive mechanics.

We weren't a coordinated team anymore. We weren't a cohesive group of friends traveling the Destiny universe together and failures led to frustrations and tensions that didn't exist before, or were more muted by the ability to say “let's stop for the night and just play Crucible”. When suddenly the raid ends and people are left behind for new activities, it's a recipe for disaster, but Forsaken brought the hope of a new beginning and what ultimately did turn out to be an incredible Destiny experience and worlds, but again, just not for everyone.

The raid release was the end for our raid team. The pressure to grind 10+ hours a day trying to get ready (and for me getting drop after drop in spots I didn't need and below what was equipped because of the harsh return of RNG caused huge anxiety going in that I'd let everyone down not being high enough light). Still we all took off work and were incredibly excited to go into the raid, and the first forays in were just beautiful, but then like 99.999% of the players who stepped into Last Wish that day, we were all power checked.

We actually figured out the mechanics and understood how to beat the first boss about 20 minutes in, but after a couple hours of attempts, we knew we just weren't high enough light and that was it. We never raided as a group together again.

Of those of us there that day, everyone but myself has gone on to complete the raid. I've finished it up to Riven, but never completed that fight and it's just sad, and certainly there's more to our falling outs than how the game has been designed and content released, but it's also very true that for what Destiny wants to be a far as a social experience bringing people together, it has never done the best job of translating that into the actual in-game experience.

I kept playing after that, though mostly solo since and I do truly love the content in Forsaken, but I never really got to experience any of it how I wanted or felt excitement about drops that I knew I wouldn't be able to use consistently because of the incredibly punishing infusion system.

I loved year one and that I could play so many different ways, but always how I wanted and I could experiment with different weapons and armor at my choosing and not things I know I hate, but had to use because it's what I had at level.

A day into Forsaken, I stopped using shaders. There was no point when nothing has permanence and it was frustrating that here we had the content and things to do with the gear we loved that was so missing in year one and I couldn't play it with the gear I loved.

I don't know how others experience the game, but I played 850 hours of D2 Y1 and a large part of what kept it fresh for me was cycling through maining different characters and subclasses, as well as using all the countless new loadouts D2 allowed. So I continued playing all 3 classes into Forsaken. For the first 5 weeks, I ran almost every single powerful bounty in the game on all 3 characters and I found myself hating everything.

I didn't like any of my characters. I didn't like my weapons half the time and I started seriously questioning what I was grinding for if I couldn't ever use any of the things I got that I loved. So I took a big step back and started just focusing the Dreaming City each week since those were the highest drops and not running much else outside of teaming up with friends for Gambit, Crucible or a Nightfall occasionally.

All throughout Destiny up to Forsaken, I'd loved and played different aspects of the game and leveled up in different ways as those interests changed. Forsaken changed that. We couldn't just play strikes if that's what we loved, or PvP or Gambit, and I'm not saying that was necessarily a bad thing, but when it was combined with all the insane RNG (titles? Yikes!), punishing infusion and 100 level endgame grind, it was just too much.

I finally hit 600 halfway through November. I got there on my Hunter and Warlock and I hit 596 on my Titan and I just couldn't do it anymore. I hated my Titan desperately at this point, and not because the new subclasses aren't fun, but because I was tired of looking like a clown. I got a really good gear set on my Hunter, put the mods and shaders I wanted on him and I was done. With my other characters and with PvE. Destiny just isn't a game I feel I can keep 3 characters going anymore, and that's kinda how it began and I've thought that, well maybe over the next year, there will be time to go back...

Then Black Armory released and not only raised the power level another 50 levels, but brought back "meaningful infusion". This system championed by streamers who play for a living and has ultimately little too no effect on them. Most of them are already at 650, while 9-10 hours in, I'm up to 604 and I refuse to wear the higher gear I hate and I'm not burning my infusion cores. I'm up to 60 of them. I buy them everyday from Spider, but I refuse to grind for ghost fragments to then grind bounties for them.

I've played 280ish hours of Forsaken and probably 30 of those playing how I wanted using what I wanted, I'm not spending even more hours grinding content I have no desire to play just to be able to use what I want.

Even PvP as incredible as the sandbox is, is completely RNG who wins and loses as no sbmm means uneven teams and one team usually with one or two much higher skilled players than the rest.

Matchmaking was just addressed in the TWaB, but it's only Comp and the complaints of solo vs fireteams and low glory facing much higher glory and I don't understand how it's an issue in Comp, but solo vs fireteams and lower skill vs much higher in QuickPlay is perfectly okay.

I love the game. I love the community. I love Bungie and have friends there and care about everyone who makes this game and it hurts when days like Tuesday happen and things go sideways and there's more negative press, but that never should have happened. It's the exact same mistake that was made with the Last Wish raid release and power locking everyone but Joe and Jane streamer out of it.

So here I am, writing one more novel hoping for the best and maybe that is where we are and this is what Destiny needs to be going forward and maybe it's just not a game for a player like me anymore, but I still believe it can be everything it's wanting to be for the players it's trying to cater to without leaving a player like myself behind, and I don't think it would take a lot to get there.

I'm burned out on PvE and leveling because of infusion that adds NOTHING to the game and the inability to just play what I want and continue to level.

The daily and weekly bounties are fine, although the weeklies should drop higher gear than the dailies, but regular legendaries are deflating now. They are blues for all intents and purposes and they need to at least have a chance to drop higher.

Valor now gives Legendary drops every rank and it's tiered like Gambit, but those drops are meaningless because 1) I already have the gear/perks I want and 2) they drop 15-20 levels below my character power. Why not make them powerful drops? Who cares if I play an hour or two in Crucible for a powerful drop verses run around doing other bounties? To me it just adds to the experience. If you want variety and to experience a lot of different things in smaller portions, all those bounties are there. If we just love PvP, why can't we just play it and get drops at about the same rate (or a bit slower). Strikes could be tiered the same with ranks and resets.

I think about what it would be like to walk into the Destiny franchise for the first time right now and I can't even imagine how a player could ever begin to experience all of what the game has to offer with 150 levels to grind to endgame and starting with no materials, no cores, no Legendary shards, and yes games like WoW have those heavy investments and focusing on one character for a long time, but the way D2 is currently formatted, I don't see a near future where I'm able to or would want to go through this leveling experience again on my other characters if I'm going to hate them and (by proxy) the game because I can't play and use what I want.

So that's it and I'm not trying to bash or say the game is bad because it's not and when the teams are remotely fair, PvP is the greatest thing since HoW, but this world is really fucked up right now and my life outside the game is in an as bad or worse place than it was when I first stepped into these worlds, but I'm not finding escape and freedom anymore. I'm finding I'm stepping into a job that I don't want to be at and I wish things were different. Thank you.

  Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year. 

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake. 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

-R Frost

[a-curious-wednesday]

Today! On Unpopular Opinions: Destiny 2, Warmind

Destiny 2′s newest DLC, Warmind is borderline trash.  Now, when I pre-ordered it, I, initially, went through the usual rigmarole.  Foolishly placing my hopes and expectations that this $20 DLC would right all the wrongs that have plagued D2 since its outset, and then coming to the cold realization that by the time Bungie was willing to entertain listening to its Destiny fanbase, Warmind was likely all-but completed.  Meaning that it would either be the same as DLC1, Fall of Osiris or negligibly better.

I realize there’s a lot of reasons for this.  Bungie agreed to a ridiculous content schedule with Activision, where they were forced to pump out new content and games on a schedule that disallows for proper development and growth.  That, the new direction of Destiny is Call of Duty w/Space Losers.  That, because, for the second time, Bungie changed D2′s game direction in the eleventh hour; brought in new people who did not understand the lore or what the game was supposed to be, etc, etc, etc.

And yet, here we are.

The campaign Warmind is alright.  And I mean that in the loosest of senses of the term ‘alright.’  I have many problems with its story direction. Some of them, a lot of you have previously heard before: silent protagonist, uptight, kiss-ass ghost, stiff character development.  There are other issues I take up, however. Issues that just left me scratching my fucking head in a general mystified and annoyed manner. (Note: there be spoilers)

1)  Once again your Guardian follows along with some half-assed plan to save the universe. (Which, if I’m being honest, the Universe never felt threatened during Warmind.  It’s more of a, “hey, can you help me get rid of these guys who’re crashing my place? They smell bad, eat all my food, don’t clean up after themselves and are generally ungrateful jerks.”)  This plan, borders the epitome of asinine, mind you. It amounts to:

Zavala: “Hey, let's take a piece of the Traveller and bait this giant-ass snake-god thing.”

Ghost/Guardian: “...”

Ana: “Then, what?” (Ana, who is suddenly an expert in the Hive asks curiously.  Meanwhile, your ghost, who should have wised up and remembered that you fought ORYX, the Black Garden, Skolas, SIVA (which, were, generally betterish plans) should have had concerns.)

Zavala: “We wing it.”

Ghost/Guardian: “...”  (Both of you should have protested, citing how we winged it with the Almighty and Ghaul and that didn’t really work out.  The Almighty is still slowly destroying Mercury, but NOBODY mentions that.  The next time you’re on Mercury, stop what you’re doing and look around.  The planet is still being ripped to chunks and pulled into the Almighty.)

Ana: “What?  We could use Rasputin--”

Zavala: “No! Absolutely not.”

We use Rasputin.  

How?  His “relic weapon” a super-heated/conductive spear that we literally chuck at a god.  I mean, why not, right?  We took down Oryx who was (pre-”established D1 canon is hearsay and folklore and not fact”) literally the strongest God we’ve fought since the quasi-para-casual tentacle thing that was supposed to represent the Darkness embodied.  At least, in the Black Garden, they had the good sense to have us beat the damn god by proxy.  Defeating Xol was just lazy writing. He’s a fucking Worm God!  You know, the thing, Auresh/Oryx took/consumed to become the taken King and literally lead the Hive out of the Fundament/Deep.

But, hey, it’s cool in the end. After all, Xol was the weakest, puniest Worm God of the bunch.  It's not like it/he had power only rivaled by the OTHER WORM GODS. Let’s chuck a nuclear spear at it.  That’ll kill it. Because science!!

2)  Your Guardian is sent to the Deep/Fundament by a fucking God.  Xol literally transports you to another plane of existence, cutting you off from the Traveller’s Light (because your plan is so asinine) in order to kill you slowly.  Mind you, this place is a horror show of horror shows. The Deep makes Hell look like a vacation to Mazatlan. There are things there that preyed on the Krill/Hive, things that we, humans and guardians could not comprehend without the Books of Sorrow/Toland.

Do you understand the wasted potential for story this was? It was monumental.  Monumental! Me, an Exo, was transported to the Hell of Hells by a literal God, because I wasn’t worth its time.  I’m there, floating around for, I don’t know, minutes? My annoying ghost is freaking out. Meanwhile, Xol has had enough of our shit.  He’s gone to destroy Rasputin (which, he might have done anyway, but hey, nothing like 3rd party intervention to up the timetable). With the Warmind removed from the gameboard, Xol has a clearer line to solar conquest.  Why? Dunno, it's never mentioned why a God would wish to conquer Sol. It never really seemed to care that the Traveller slept above Earth before it awoke.

It didn’t seem to care that the Traveller had.

Meanwhile, my Exo titan is floating in something that vaguely looks like blood.  There’s some weird stills of probably torture? Good thing, I’m an Exo. Don’t feel pain, because robot.  Don’t need to breathe or eat, because robot. Don’t get tired, because robot. And, then, miraculously, my guardian climbs up from a crevasse, obviously drained and near death.  My ghost is quick with the first aid and I’m good to go.

...Seriously?  Okay.  Okay. I can kind of see how that works if your guardian is an Exo.  Because robot.  But, human?  Awoken?  How?  Just how?  You were in literal mortal danger *again*.  Presumably, you needed to figure out what the Hellscape the Deep was and how to navigate it. You would need a way back to your native dimension, which would require you to seek aid from the natives.  Except, the natives have never seen your kind and they all want to kill you. And this would take time. Somehow, against all odds, you find someone who’ll help you escape and you make the journey together, because let's be realistic: there’s always that one person who knows the way, but was too chickenshit to go it alone.  That person dies getting you to the “portal” which’ll take you back to your dimension. By the way, you’ve got no Ghost. No Light. Limited ammo. No food. Nothing to repair your weapons and armor. No oxygen to breathe.

Somehow, you climb your way out, just like the Kratos climbed out of Hades.  Or, from an actual literary standpoint how Orpheus and Eurydice.  Dante and Virgil.

Except, not, because you get treated to a 30 second cut-scene of flashing images and your guardian clawing their way up a crevasse.

Kudos, Bungie.  Good job.  If the fanbase of Mass Effect could flip shit over the ending of ME3 to such a degree that they had the game’s actual ending redone (via post-production patch that was FREE) to better please them and work with the meta of the MEU, what do you think the fanbase of Destiny will do?  Don’t answer.  I know its buy shit from Eververse.

3)  Rasputin.  The titular reason we’re even on Mars.  The whole reason Anastasia Bray (Clever, Bungie.  Clever.  Rasputin and Anastasia.) has gone to the Hellas Basin.  She didn’t go there to go home. Not really. She went there to connect to a thing that she built that transcended all known laws and bounds.  It was alive, but alive in a Godly sense. Not bound by the constructs of Human morality.  Oh no.   Ana might not initially know for sure why she was drawn to Clovis Bray.  Sure, she awoke to her second life with her name badge on her person. And then was summarily told not to investigate her past. As if she were an Exo or concerned about DER.  She might not have consciously known she was seeking Rasputin, but she always was.

Meanwhile, Rasputin is a God, created by man to protect Us All.  Given sovereign to do so as he saw fit. Think about that. Think about Humanity as a whole currently.  In what universe would all of Humanity greenlight the creation of something like this? Never mind that, think about Humanity collectively since the dawn of science fiction writing.  When has it ever benefited Humanity to place their safety in the hands of others? My Skynet senses are tingling. But, wait, it's okay guys. Moon X/the Traveller is here! None of us understand what it is, but let’s go meet it.  While they’re doing that, let’s sanction a civilian company to build a guardian that thinks for itself, learns independently, is prudent, wise and plays the long game. Let’s make it so its not bound by Human morality so it can make the hard choices, us Humans would flinch at.  Nobody knows how a Moon is moving on its own or terraforming whole planets!  But, we’ll put our faith in a machine.

By the way, none of us truly understands or can comprehend this thing that we’ve built.  Oh, and there’s no way for is to. All of which, happened during the Golden Age, before the Collapse.  Interestingly GA mankind already knew of the Vex, so most likely reverse engineered Vex tech went into the creation of Rasputin.

Oh, and it's just Rasputin.  Whose always been on Mars. Sure, they retcon/bungiesplain it away well enough, but still.  Where the hell is Charlemagne, Jys or Virgil? It was established that Charlemagne was the Warmind of Mars, but now its a submind.  They’re all Submind. In other words, the children of Rasputin.  Story potential!

...Never mind, that’s not D2’s development team’s prerogative.

Fast forward to the present and Rasputin has become active because the Traveller has awoken.  His old foe, his biggest threat. The one thing Rasputin still doesn’t comprehend. Its awake/alive again.  Its parasites (guardians) have been doing a terrible job of policing Sol and protecting Humanity. Not their fault, their still human.  Rasputin was fine with letting the parasites struggle. It could focus on (presumably) the triangle ships, holding back the Red Legion, Eliksni colony convoys, Tomb convoys and other nightmares.  It was smart, cunning. Playing a very real and deadly game of chess. He couldn’t reveal too much of his might or himself, that would draw unwanted attention. Then the Traveller awoke and the rules changed.  So, he throws off his disguise and swings into full production/activity. Warsats activate that have been dormant for centuries. Orbital strikes occur all throughout Sol, hammering the Legion, Hive, Vex, Fallen, Taken.  And Xol thaws.

Yet, still, Rasputin is incomprehensible to us.  And we, “the” guardian, aid a shortsighted, single-minded Doctor in unshackling it. Yup, we did that.  Nearly killed him in the process, but we did the damn thing.  Doesn’t matter, though, in the end, right?  Because Rasputin is a machine, built for us.  Except, not.  No.  He’s more than that now.  Now, Rasputin is completely Free and he proclaims that he’s going to protect his ants.  Yeah. Good job, Ana.  Oh, and Zavala still has complete faith and trust in us.  Despite!  Despite having solid reservations in utilizing Rasputin.  Despite the fact that we ignored our Commander and leader.  It’s cool, though, right?  We’re celebrity status.  We’ve taken down 2, count ‘em, 2 Gods.  Crota was a Demigod at best.  (But, he got his own Raid... Nokris.)

Does Anastasia know this?  Nope.  She never mentions it. Never mentions Oryx or Crota or the Black Garden or how we did what no one else could.  And we did it with no plan and 3 to six other insane guardians with annoying, uptight ghosts.  To her, we’re just a guardian with a ghost that has a stick up its USB port.  Weird, right?  We’re Iron Lords for crying out loud!  Young Wolves. Bounty Hunters for the Reef Queen.  Prison of Elder gaolers.  Emissaries of the Cult of Osiris and now the Nine.  Oh, and some of us are Faction Heralds.  Standard Bearers for Dead Orbit, Future War Cult or New Monarchy.  If you got the exotic class item from DO, FWC or NM in D1, youse a Herald and Standard Bearer.

Is there ever mention of this?  Nope.

4)  The Hive finally gets snipers/sharpshooters and shield-wielding swordsman.  Both of which seem like obvious no-brainers to have always been incorporated.  Except!   That goes against the Sword Logic. So, sincerely, you get a plus for adding them to the heretical, “cowardly” faction of the Hive. 

Question for you, though. Why would you knowingly (God, I hope it was knowingly) honor previous canon in this instance, but not with others? Like, where Xol is concerned?  Or the Deep/Fundament? Or Rasputin? Why the cherry picking?

5)  Why even bother naming yellow-bar area and mission bosses or units if you won’t bother explaining who they are, what they do and what they want?   Because, I honestly, lost interest in reading the named enemies once I realized there was no information about them in or out of the game.

From a Gameplay standpoint, it's what you’d expect from Destiny 2.  Up-tempoed action with moments of intensity and hopeful triumph.  If you play smartly, it rewards you. If you overextend yourself, prepare to get ganked.  Horribly. Progression is more inline with its predecessor, which might make the casuals pause.  Thankfully, it isn’t like Day 1, Vanilla Destiny, where it was impossible to reach Light Level Cap solo and without completing Raid/Nightfalls.  Except, no one would take you if you didn’t have G-horn or Icebreaker. Ah, the Good ol’ days of the Grind and the Loot Caves.  My point? The action is more reminiscent to that feel, just with all the current bells and whistles, which is a good thing.

Exotic weapons finally feel fucking worthwhile.  I played the whole Warmind Campaign with the combination of Sweet Business and Actium War Rig and I absolutely love it!  Add the Galliard-42 or the Kibou AR3 for some added fun and thrills. Pairing the Tractor Cannon with Sentinel is immensely satisfying.  That punk, Nokris didn’t stand a chance. And neither did his minions. Melts the opposition. Plus, its just really satisfying to watch 5 charging Knights (with sword and/or shield) get punted halfway across the room or into a wall or over a ledge.  I finally feel like how those damned Taken Phalanxes must feel. The Borealis is a fun choice, too. Although, I haven’t spent much time with it. The payoff for matching damage types and busting shields is well worth it.

The added cosmetic gear is neat.  My new favorite jumpship, hands down, is Currus Gloriae XLII.  As a Titan, having a spaceship that looks like it can go to war and do some damage is a welcomed plus.  The sparrow, Azure Azazyel looks really awesome. Even though it doesn’t have an interesting contrail effect, it still is fun to ride.  It feel like it belongs in Akira or Bladerunner and I dig it.  What I’ve seen from the new emblems, they’re decent.  

The updated effects of the new guns is much needed. Dragonfly on an autorifle?  Yes, please. Rampage on a Handcannon that you don’t have to grind for? I’ll take it.  The new Ghost shells are blase at best. The emote wheel is a nice touch, but seems a bit late.

Hoo boy, Override Frequencies and Memory Fragments.  Gotta hand it to you there, Bungie. I could not figure out how to get those until you unlocked them.  And those Fragments? I didn’t even figure out how to unlock them. Or I did, but it didn’t work?  Don’t try shooting them until after you unlock Hellas Basin.  Found that out by accident.  Thank you, random Guardian who was just shooting at a ledge!

So, like I said on the outset: Warmind, as an expansion is alright bordering on trash.  It is entirely redeemed in its Gameplay, but woefully drops the ball where the story is concerned.  Is it worth the $20? Eh. You’d probably still be better off waiting for the comet expansion to drop and for Bungie/Activision to repackage and re-release Destiny 2 this fall/winter.  There will be some that will find it a $20 well spent and others who won’t, who’ll swear off the franchise completely.  As for me? Its an investment. Like investing in Roseart and hoping they turn into Crayola. One day, they just might.

[wednesday-editorials]

Destiny 2: Faction Rallies, Forsaken and Disasters in 3, Oh My...

Saturday, June 9th 2018

Written by: A Curious Wednesday

When it comes to Destiny 2, growing pains have become expected.  In a game with more potential than a designated hitter can swing at, this is ultimately very frustrating.  With the arrival of Season 3 of D2 and the announcement of Forsaken, the trend of uneasiness continues.  In a previous post, I talked about my concerns for Warmind, something that any narrative driven player can relate to.

To briefly recap:  the story aspects of Warmind are abysmal at best.  You get 5 story missions that introduce you to a new NPC and two new villains.  We (wrongfully) assumed that the new host of characters would be properly developed.  Ana Bray, for instance, is a legendary guardian who’d been MIA since Crota and Luna, I believe.  During that pitched battle, she fired her golden gun with such focused power and will that the light from it lingers still.  That battle was supposed to have happened centuries ago. She also has connections to Clovis Bray and is, perhaps, the premiere Gunslinger.  Even better than Cayde-6, whom like her, is an original Risen. Now, this is never really conveyed in those 5 missions. None of her legendary feats are ever really mentioned.  She’s essentially relegated to a throw-away NPC and Vendor.

Compiling this problem, Zavala, the leader of the Vanguard and Consensus is not developed any further.  Instead, he continues to be pigeon-holed as “Den Mother” to all guardians. All you need to do to confirm this, is speak with any of Destiny’s fanbase.  Most, if not all, will agree that Zavala is everyone’s overprotective mommy.

When it comes to the two new characters, both are abused and mistreated.  Nokris has soo much story potential.  He is the exiled son of Oryx and the runt of his brood.  He’s the smart one. A necromancer (possibly a male wizard), which is a rarity amongst the Hive/Krill.  He attempted to usurp his father’s power and place as king and failed. His co-conspirator, Xol (a worm god, a being of unimaginable power, eternal life and knowledge) is essentially defeated as a strike boss, which is an insult and disservice to Xol and the grandeur that is supposed to be the “Worm Gods”.  In fact, both are ultimately just strike bosses. Beating either during the campaign is unfulfilling. Being sent to the Deep by Xol is a joke and possibly the greatest offense for me.

So, with things on the narrative side of the spectrum so weak and lacking, you’d hope that Bungie would make the new season’s Faction Rally topnotch.  Personally, I don’t mind the “Renown” mechanic in principle. During the grind to faction rank 50, it adds to the challenge. However, the vehicle for this delivery is problematic.  By skewing each firefight in favor of the AI whenever a player has active “Renown” it has ended up making every open-world activity more difficult than it should be. With the arrival of Escalation Protocol, this oversight becomes glaringly apparent.  Escalation Protocol is a new feature and endgame mode where you join up with other guardians to take on wave after wave of Hive opponents in increasing difficulty. Ideally, 3 level-capped. 385 light-level guardians should be able to complete all waves if they can communicate and work together.

In practice, it’s usually one fireteam that sparks it once they notice 3 or more random guardians patrolling the Hellas Basin.  Since all guardians need to complete Escalation Protocol waves (a least once), any available guardian generally comes running when EP is activated.  Currently, this means that 1 team ends up trying to complete an EP with underpowered guardians, culminating in failure and frustration.  With the arrival of the first Faction Rally this season and the release of “Renown” its made an already challenging open-world event more difficult, by further handicapping the player in favor of the AI-controlled enemy.

The trend of handicapping the player to up the difficulty is nothing new.  Its an established procedure carried over from Destiny.  Any time you enter a darkness zone (iow “Boss fight”), for instance, you are effectively de-buffed, weakened by the overwhelming presence of Darkness and cut-off from the Traveler’s Light. You’re left with your own strength and light to see you and your team through.  Why does this happen?  Perhaps, each of these areas are influenced by the taint of Darkness to such an extent that it manifests physically.  At least, that is how I like to think of it. As it adds a narrative reason for the game mechanic. 

However, by further handicapping the player, it ultimately diminishes the feeling of grandeur and heroicness that you’d normally experienced as a maxed-out, veteran guardian (player).  Destiny did a good job of preserving that feeling of being a walking, talking badass.  You were/are the prophesied guardian. The one Saint-14 looked up to, perhaps even idolized.  You were the one that did what no other guardian could do. And, if you were capable and competent, you did it alone.

Destiny 2 does a great job of stripping you of that feeling, making the overall experience occasionally frustrating and lackluster.  The grind to rank-level 50 is long enough and made worse by the fact that some of us have limited time to invest in D2′s grind.  Now, here’s where the two schools of thought diverge. School 1) everyone should have access to and the ability to get everything, so you must level the playing field; School 2) only the dedicated should get everything since they put in the time, effort and hardwork.  I, myself, fall into the second camp or a variation of it.

I believe the unexpected problem that is “Renown” could be fixed by tying the effect to a faction’s emblem, class item or both and enabling factions to recruit and have relevance all year around, like they were in Destiny.  Thereby, turning Faction Rallies into something special and unique.  Something on par with Crimson Days, Festival of the Lost, Sparrow Racing League and the Winter Solstice event.  Perhaps, each faction, dependent upon their beliefs structure needs to accomplish something significant.   Perhaps, its a month long competition for bragging rights and something else.  Something more.  Something like supremacy or even, just something as simple as which faction gets the lion’s share of funding for the rest of the fiscal quarter. 

In Destiny, factions were always relevant.  As soon as you reached level 20, you were allowed your choice of which faction to pledge to, and you could, after a week, decide to pledge your loyalty to a different faction.  Rank progress was limited and constricted. You had to work to progress through the rank levels in Destiny.  You had to represent your chosen faction on your guardian.  As the benefits of pledging to a faction were only available when you, the player, equipped a faction-specific class item and/or emblem.

Once you did that, it was an uphill slog to those coveted exotic items.  Uphill, but worthwhile. Like many of the more obscure features of Destiny, you were rewarded for the time you put into it.  It wasn’t gifted to you; you earned it. There was no time limit.  Thus negating the feeling of artificial pressure. It didn’t matter how long it took you to get those coveted items as long as you were willing to put in the work to get them.  It took me 2 years or so to get Dead Orbit’s exotic cloak.  I didn’t mind the wait.  I also didn’t stick with Dead Orbit exclusively.  A more dedicated player would have gotten that item and others much faster.

In Destiny 2, this psychological/societal feature is not present.  It’s almost as if the Vanguard took pity on those surviving guardians of the Red War.  As if they became Oprah during her final season of her talk show: “you get an exotic! You get an exotic!”  “You get raid gear!” “You get trial gear!” This analogy can be and has been applied to Hawthorne.  I imagine this is what Hawthorne would shout in her best Oprah impression as she tossed out specially encrypted engrams to the throngs of clamoring guardians with their hands out.

Of course, I know better than to believe that fantasy.  There’s no narrative reason for these decisions. There’s no real narrative pull for participating in the Faction Rallies to begin with.  There is for Strikes, the Crucible and the Iron Banner. Strikes, from a narrative perspective are high-level, precision operations that makes assassins out of you.  In order to protect the remnants of humanity from Darkness. The Crucible, on the other hand, is a way to hone your skills and abilities; to sharpen you. It also serves as a way to resolve grievances.  Nothing like a sanctioned fight to the death, to prove your point.  “Fight me for what you believe!” The Iron Banner honors the fallen Iron Lords thru glorious gladiatorial combat and serves to further hone your abilities and skills. Of course, the Iron Banner is also not what it used to be.  Now that level-advantage is disabled, it's no different from the Crucible. This is too bad, because the added difficulty made participating in previous iterations of the IB savoring. It gave rise to water-cooler moments and bragging rights.

The concept of Faction Rallies overall is neat.  However, in practice there’s nothing special about them.  The weapons you can claim are ultimately reskinned versions of likely superior Vanguard and Crucible weapons.  There is no meaningful choice behind siding with a particular faction. Arach Jalaal of Dead Orbit raves about escaping a defined end and little else.  Lakshmi-2 of Future War Cult raves about the inescapability of war and how we all need to prepare for it. Executor Hideo of New Monarchy is obsessed with protecting and preserving humanity’s cradle, Earth.  Beyond some ambient dialogue you might chance upon by standing before each vendor, there is no way to know what each faction stands for or why you should care. The experience has devolved into a loot-grab for the shiniest prizes.  Oftentimes, this means that New Monarchy wins each faction rally because their armor, vehicles and weapons are the most appealing.

For those of us who know what each faction stands for, this is a deathknell of sorts.  I, myself, am a Dead Orbit loyalist. I could be accused of being a fatalist, but by that notion, so too are the Fallen/Eliksni.  They abandoned their homeworld after the Whirlwind, just like Dead Orbit and Arach Jalaal want to do. That is something I agree with.  In Destiny, it was why all three of my guardians sided with DO.  I’ve always distrusted the Traveler. It brought ultimate war and destruction to our doorstep.  Through the usage of the former grimoires I learned that it did similarly to the Fallen and Cabal.  When those two species/peoples could no longer protect it, the Traveler fled. Abandoned those people to their fates.  Dead Orbit believes the Traveler will do that to us, should the time come. I agree. So, they’ve prepared a fleet of ships and supplies.  They fund scouts to search out our galaxy for a home untouched by the Darkness and Traveler. And while, each faction acts with the best interest of humanity in mind, DO is the only one pragmatic enough to plan long-term and realize the survival of our species.

Future War Cult are, in some ways, battle-crazed zealots.  Fanatics that believe crushing their enemies here, now and in the future is the only guarantee for victory.  I consider that to be short-sighted, but still a noble cause. They don’t wish to abandon earth any more than New Monarchy does, but they are willing to if it means our survival.  They also have ties to the Vex and some misunderstood, wonky machine monikered, “The Device” that allows individuals to glimpse future, alternate timelines.  It’s how they prepare for the wars to come. They prepare, though, which is a key difference. They don’t try to avoid those future conflicts.

New Monarchy, on the other hand is the most obstinate.  They are not interested in entertaining a future where humanity no longer resides on earth or in the Sol system.  They are not interested in a governing council. They are not interested in exploration, but rather, reclamation. Their shtick is reclaiming what was lost.  Reclaim the Earth and Luna. Reclaim the Golden Age. Reclaim Earth’s dominance. Sire tons of children to build up our population numbers. They are interested in the absolute power, authority and rule of one individual.  Executor Hideo is a zealot. A diehard. It’s the only way to become an Executor.

Again, without having prior experience, how many of you would know all of this about each faction?  All you’d readily know is that NM offers armor reminiscent of medieval regalia and bold colors of red, gold, brown and teal-green.  DO offers armor reminiscent to what you’d scavenge in the wild. Something homemade. Its weathered, worn. It’s got miles on it. History.  Their colors are black, white and brown. FWC provides modern, mass-produced armor that strikes a balance between full-plate protection and padding (think “kevlar”).  Theirs is a further balance between the grandiose of New Monarchy and the practicality of Dead Orbit. FWC believes in standing out. Therefore, their colors are white, purple/blue and gold/orange.  This all means that when choosing who to represent, its really a matter of what look you’re going for with your barbie. Maybe, just maybe, one faction has a weapon that is superior to the rest.  And that influences your decision.

I’m all for glamorizing my guardian on occasion or when the mood strikes me, but overall, I’m driven by the narrative.  Wherever I can find it.  It’s why I originally sided with Dead Orbit 4 years ago. It’s why I’m so crestfallen about the state of Destiny 2.  Why I’m so apprehensive about Forsaken.  If you logically think about it, Bungie has likely already finished working on Forsaken.  They’d already finished Warmind by the time they called their “summit”.  Which meant that there was no fixing Warmind, further exacerbating the underlying issues plaguing Destiny 2.  Issues that many have already brought up via Youtube channel hosts.  The likes of My Name is Byf, Mylien Games, Darkside Royalty Lore have all articulated similar points better than I could have.  

Forsaken, undoubtedly, will probably be better than everything prior to it.  The Taken King elevated Destiny to a new level.  It delivered on some of the promises that had until then been cast aside.  Therefore, its an educated leap that the same will be true of Forsaken. Nevertheless, if the underlying narrative problems aren’t rectified, it’ll ultimately be a hollow victory.  Again, take this season’s Faction Rally as an indication. The “Renown” mechanic sounds like a good idea. It could have been a good idea. The Good Idea Fairy would agree. This, is, however, why we don’t acknowledge “good ideas”.  In order for a good idea to be implemented properly, it needs to be tested and tested and measured and reigned in by the physicalities of the circumstances. This is why you only deliver on things you can promise.

By stripping D2 bare in the 11th hour and starting anew, they threw away too much to make way for a different direction.  A disastrous direction that they are now scrambling to retract. All the features that Forsaken is adding back in, should never have been removed in the first place.  To charge for it is narcissistic at best. If you have doubts, look to this month’s Faction Rally and last month’s Iron Banner (the one about that emote.).  Exotic ornaments and catalysts are available dependent upon which faction you choose to pledge to. However, you can only pledge to one. Meaning, if you want them all, you must grind to 50 in each faction ranking system before the Rally event ends.  The decision isn’t based upon a narrative reason. It isn’t based upon which faction best suites you. Its based upon the loot offered. If you’ve got a busy life and can only hop into Destiny late at night or on the weekends, you’re s.o.l. Bungie attempted to fix this by making loot rewards from all activities available to all, regardless if said player contributed or not.  That didn’t work out well. The playerbase decried this practice. So it was rescinded in the form of a compromise: instead of getting high-level engrams from anywhere, you’re now only rewarded high-level engrams from either the Vanguard or Crucible engram pool.

Previous iterations of the Faction Rally had systems similar to this rally’s “Renown”, skewing combat in the the favor of the enemy and penalizing idiotic player practices.  Those proved unsuccessful as well, which is why they were removed. Like the Dodo, “Renown” will likely disappear as well. It will be replaced with some other, newer good idea that will ultimately not pan out as intended and the cycle will continue.  Until Destiny 3, where Bungie gives up on their plans of creating a new sub-genre: MMORPG-based FPS and settles on a Call of Duty clone/knockoff/lesser version.  Except instead of the “good” CoDs, it’ll be Black Ops IV with no narrative or campaign, entirely multiplayer and group-content driven.  Does anyone remember Shadownrun?  How can I predict this? Bad things happen in 3s. We’ll experience some other, new Faction Rally system and gimmick before Bungie gives up on that and attempts to circle back to D1 standards for factions, by which point it may be too late.

[meredoubt]

I was being a little hyperbolic, which may not have come across adequately.

I would agree it is primarily a pve game. However, as a solo player, what gets me to log in every day between story content drops is...PvP. The fun chaos of your good old 6v6. Otherwise, there’s not much to do daily once I’ve spent 20 minutes getting materials on all three characters. I have no real interest in raids/dungeons beyond how they advance the story, I don’t really have patience for anything that would take me that long to complete tbh. Destiny is a fairly calm game for me. If I’m not in PvP, I’m listening to music and chilling on patrols just enjoying the gunplay and emoting at other Guardians in the wild lmao

Spectral is absolutely annoying. I’ve been calling for massive nerfs to that tree for forever. I’m really not a fan of the massive advantages many trees have over others in PvP (see: how unbelievably salty I am about Dawnblades as a Voidwalker main. Unshackle my Blink, Bungie! Treat Best Jump right 😔). There’s a reason something like 40% of players in PvP pre-Beyond Light were Spectral Hunters lmao. But the same reason I hated the unchecked nature of Spectrals is exactly why I also hate Stasis: there is no adequate counter, in most cases, and more importantly, there is no downside to playing Behemoth and Revenant. Both are...the definition of safe. Maybe that’s a narrative choice Bungie is setting up! We’ll see.

I would, respectfully, disagree. Perhaps this is based on how I prefer the game to feel, though! For example: I firmly believe nothing but the big one shot Supers should be able to kill a Titan bubble, right? That’s the tradeoff. But Stasis builds have given players grenades and and melee abilities that consistently are able to kill Titans within the Ward of Dawn, something that previously only one off, high damage Supers could do. That’s...not balanced. Given that abilities can recharge extremely quickly. My Hunter build can give my melee ability back every eleven seconds if I play my cards right. If I used Stasis melee instead of my goofy explosive knife, this would be...very bad! Given that I have personally been bodyshot by a sniper, dodged behind cover, and then killed because they threw their Stasis melee ability 1/3 of the way across the map as cleanup. That’s not going to teach players to work on their shooting. Using your melee ability as a cleanup for a long range weapon is not...great tbh. Don’t love Celestial Fire or whatever the reworked Dawnblade melee is either for much the same reason. Or the Throwing Hammer, certain seasons. It just builds bad habits.

As for weapons, I mean. The most broken PvP weapon still rn is available to all players in the kiosk. Enough so that it got special shoutout for incoming nerfs. And as much as I want every gun for the even playing field...that’s not Bungie’s philiosphy, at least at the moment. Look at how they’ve handled exotics since Beyond Light. If you look at stats, there is a marked difference in how many people are acquiring new exotics that aren’t tied to season pass because of the rotating Lost Sector system. I’m never going to get any of those strike specific guns because...I don’t play strikes unless required. I don’t mind it particularly. I’m more bitter about the exotics tbh. How can I know how to counter Shift if I don’t have Bakris? etc.

On balancing, we agree. Let people be crazy strong in pve, I’d be 1000% okay with it. But I want the weapon and ability sandbox balanced in PvP. Crucible is supposed to be about improving your moment to moment awareness. I find that playing in stacks, Stasis, etc are to the direct detriment of this very goal. And more importantly, I don’t find them fun. It’s not fun to constantly be either mercied or mercyinh players based on which team has more Stasis players. It’s not fun to throw yourself against fireteams of Unbrokens/Flawless using Sparebenders 2, all rocking Stasis. I hope the incôming nerfs address at least some of my concerns in a way that still allows pve to be fun.

Édit: geez, sorry this got long. I was trying to address your points thoughtfully, um.

“why don’t we take a game mode entirely about speed, knowing the maps, and nailing your shots...and instead hyperfocuse on abilityspam that slows you for 65% of matches, tanks your weapon accuracy, removes player agency, give tools that drag you out of cover or track you around the map”

[entergamingxp]

DualShockers’ Favorite Games of 2019 — Meaney’s Top 10

December 29, 2019 10:00 AM EST

Even as I descend into the new year as a cranky old man, I still managed to find some time for video games. Here are my favorites of 2019.

As 2019 comes to a close, DualShockers and our staff are reflecting on this year’s batch of games and what were their personal highlights within the last year. Unlike the official Game of the Year 2019 awards for DualShockers, there are little-to-no-rules on our individual Top 10 posts. For instance, any game — not just 2019 releases — can be considered.

2019 is the year when I decided to finally own the fact that I’ve become a cranky old man. On the whole, I straight up just don’t care about most AAA console games anymore. They mostly feel so toothless and “built by a focus group” feeling. To me, at least. Whatever, it’s my list.

By the same token, I have absolutely become a devout lover of the goofy, sloppy razor’s edge of brilliance that is virtual reality. I’ve also really enjoyed digging into my backlog a bit.

Here are the games I enjoyed the most in 2019.

10. Creed: Rise to Glory

Years ago, my wife made me a special The Good, the Bad and the Ugly movie print for my wall. It was a gorgeous and extremely thoughtful gift. Long story short –mid-punch, I cocked back my elbow and accidentally smashed that treasured memory.

Later, I lost track of where I was facing and punched my bookshelf, knocking off a flower statue from a late relative. The statue lost a petal, but I guess it’s mostly fine.

My brother went full-pickle bloodthirsty trying to murder someone. He lunged forward and head-butted my Ikea TV stand, crashed the game and the PSVR visor while nearly giving himself a concussion.

Highly recommended experience. Try not to punch your grandma.

9. WipeOut Omega Collection

For those who don’t play VR games, you’ve probably heard of something called “comfort settings.” These vary by game, but basically, comfort settings are the equivalent of admitting you’re too weak and feeble to handle a little baby video game.

Choosing to enable them is the equivalent of saying “this porridge is too hot!” and then including your “opposition to hot porridge” in your Twitter profile. Obviously, I never use comfort settings.

On a completely unrelated note, I vomit hot red wine on the carpet every time I play a few WipeOut Omega races. Then I lie in bed, screaming “Just give me five minutes?! I have a headache. A headache from work!” at my wife and child for the next few hours.

The point is that WipeOut Omega totally owns. This game is excellent in both VR and flat flavors.

Check out DualShockers‘ review for WipeOut Omega Collection.

8. Sea of Thieves

I’m still loving Sea of Thieves. In the past year, they have added a tremendous amount of content to the game. This includes Goonies-style treasure hunts, a dedicated PVP mode and plenty more. In all, the free updates have basically been a full-blown sequel for Sea of Thieves. Rare should be commended for their efforts, now and forever.

Beyond that, Sea of Thieves requires you to make your own fun. That’s the point. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. We don’t get many games that give you the freedom to live without a specific required path to follow. It respects you too much to pretend a guided tour is the same thing as an adventure.

Sea of Thieves is quite possibly my console game of this generation. At the very least, it’s the one that’s provided the most laughs.

Check out DualShockers‘ review for Sea of Thieves.

7. Ultrawings

Make no mistake, Ultrawings is basically “a new Pilotwings.”

Confession: I never really liked Pilotwings on SNES and Nintendo 64. It seemed very boring. I just wanted to shoot things, but Pilotwings kept wanting me to care about obstacle courses and smooth flying. Today, in VR with a stick and throttle, I suddenly get it. The thrills of flying carefully through checkpoints and diving close enough to feel the spray of the ocean are suddenly very appealing to me.

It’s one of the great VR experiences that doesn’t get enough recognition. It’s a simple flight sim that anyone can enjoy. Throw on a VR visor and aim a fan at your face. Ultrawings is one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played.

Ultrawings is absolutely a must-have experience for any PlayStation VR owner, and it shows great in party settings. And let’s face it, that party aspect is pretty important for VR stuff.

6. Destiny 2: Shadowkeep

Look, Bungie added more lore and added a whole bunch more PVP stuff. That’s all I asked for. I’m happy with this. At this point, you know how you feel about Destiny 2. I don’t buy video game merchandise…but I own two Destiny Ghosts and both physical Grimoire volumes. I’m in too deep. I serve in the Crucible at Lord Shaxx’s pleasure.

But I absolutely understand why you might hate it.

5. Planescape: Torment

If you’re someone who cares about story and choice in gaming, but hasn’t played Planescape: Torment, hop to it. This was my third play-through of this classic game.

Planescape: Torment is straight-up one of the best-written games ever. If you value quality storytelling, world-building and player agency: this is the game you’ve been searching for.

That’s it. It’s terrific. Play it, Chief.

4. Shadowrun (Genesis)

Back in the console wars of the early ‘90s, I bled Sonic blue. Admittedly, us Genesis fans lost that war. Sonic is now an indentured servant to Mario in his little racing/fighting games.

But somehow, in spite of my zealotry, I never played Shadowrun. Because I’m an idiot. This is EASILY my favorite RPG from the Sega Genesis. It feels like an old-timey PC game that’s been somehow smashed onto the Sega Genesis.

The main mission is to uncover the mystery of your brother’s death. BUT, to do so you’ll need to become a pro-tier hacker guy. And once you get good at this, you’ll make so much money that it will make the main mission trivial. Basically: you play as a hacker/thief/hitman. Your skills involve detective work, computer hackery and shooting people in the backery. You do what you want, when you want. When you get a free moment, you push the story of your brother’s murder, confident in the knowledge that you will eventually brutally murder those responsible.

Shadowrun is so open-ended that it’s downright heartwarming. If you’ve never played it, but enjoy retro games with a bit of jank, it’s a great way to pass the time until Cyberpunk 2077 finally arrives.

3. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

I absolutely adore the first Deus Ex. It lived in that raw “CONSPIRACIES ARE FUN!” Art Bell Coast-to-Coast space. But times have changed. I get it. These newer Deus Ex games had to tone down the red-pill dispensary stuff. I don’t blame them. Devs need to make money. That’s fair.

That said, I was pleasantly surprised by Mankind Divided. It dropped most of the global conspiracy stuff in favor of a cool cyberpunk Phillip Marlowe detective story. Surprisingly, it works without feeling like a cop-out. The conspiracy stuff is revealed in the first game, but these are prequels. In the end, I really, really loved it.

On the downside, the ending cuts off a bit too close for comfort, so I hope we get a third Adam Jensen game. That said, it wraps up the smaller mysteries and I really dug this one.

Check out DualShockers‘ review for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

2. Death Stranding

Look, enough has been written about Death Stranding to fill a crater on the moon. Let’s cut it short and say that I’m on the supporting side. I adore this game.

Sue me, but I love Hideo Kojima, and I love that they let him run naked through the wildflowers for this one. It’s a damn solid hiking game and a fun open-world. I totally understand why a lot of people don’t like it. For me, it’s basically Dark Souls: American Truck Simulator…and that is directly up my weirdly specific alley.

Check out DualShockers‘ review for Death Stranding.

1. Elite Dangerous

Speaking of trucking sims, Elite Dangerous is basically space truckin’. You get a job, then you fly for a VERY LONG monotonous time across space, pick up your cargo and bring it back. OR, you can mine asteroids for rare minerals. Or murder idiots for bounties. Or smuggle contraband like Han Solo. Or a combination of all of these.

The emphasis here is on simulation. Elite Dangerous is a painstaking recreation of what it might be like if your engine were to go on fire while you’re in deep space…but you’re not sure why, so you have to quickly dig through menus to find a malfunctioning component. When you finally stop that terrible alarm…space-pirates are outside.

I have three copies of this game. I’ve reset my character multiple times just to try out new user experiences. I love Elite Dangerous.

Hell, I bought a new chair so I could attach my HOTAS to the seat.

I bought a cheap Odyssey+ VR headset so I can look around my ship.

I purchased an onboard computer AI voiced by Brent Spiner so I can listen to Star Trek’s Data explain the cosmos while I tool around in space.

Elite Dangerous is basically a slow-moving night job that I utterly adore. It’s gorgeous. It’s complicated, and it terrifies normal people. I’ll be playing this for years.

Check out the rest of the DualShockers staff Top 10 lists and our official Game of the Year Awards:

December 23: DualShockers Game of the Year Awards 2019 December 25: Lou Contaldi, Editor-in-Chief // Logan Moore, Managing Editor December 26: Tomas Franzese, News Editor // Ryan Meitzler, Features Editor  December 27: Mike Long, Community Manager // Scott White, Staff Writer December 28: Chris Compendio, Contributor // Mario Rivera, Video Manager // Kris Cornelisse, Staff Writer December 29: Scott Meaney, Community Director // Allisa James, Senior Staff Writer // Ben Bayliss, Senior Staff Writer December 30: Cameron Hawkins, Staff Writer // David Gill, Senior Staff Writer // Portia Lightfoot, Contributor December 31: Iyane Agossah, Senior Staff Writer // Michael Ruiz, Senior Staff Writer // Rachael Fiddis, Contributor January 1: Ricky Frech, Senior Staff Writer // Tanner Pierce, Staff Writer

December 29, 2019 10:00 AM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2019/12/dualshockers-favorite-games-of-2019-meaneys-top-10/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dualshockers-favorite-games-of-2019-meaneys-top-10

[spencer-says-stuff-blog]

Destiny 2 is Good Gaem

I remember many moons ago, hearing the news of the original Destiny. Being naive, downright stupid, and a massive Halo/Bungie fanboy, I fell entirely for the initial hype. When it came to pass that the game was an MMO, I lost all interest and was inconsolable for weeks. I’m exaggerating slightly but the point still stands, I was not interested in an MMO, and much as I love Bungie.

Coming to the last couple weeks, Destiny 2 was the Humble Monthly Bundle game of choice. I buckled, decided I’d play Bungie’s MMO that’s not an MMO and see where it took me, and honestly I’m glad I did. I fell somewhat in love, the core gameplay loop isn’t all that bad. It feels good to shoot, no issues with control. I have some...let’s call them gripes however.

THE CHARACTERS. My god the characters. Spoilers slightly ahead, not that the story matters as I’ll get to later. The 3-4 characters they give personalities too are amazing. Cayde-6, Hawthorne, Osiris and his ghost. Great characters, have chemistry, talk like normal people, despite being a bit cliche and never stopping with the jokes.

But Zvala, Devram, no character. Being slightly British and cynical is not a character. Being the stern Titan Vanguard is not a character. Stern is not a character, it's a trait.

And the warlock vanguard, Ikora, I literally had to google her name to write this review. Her ‘character’  is that she’s scared to die and was taught by Osiris. She’s got more of a character than Zvala or Devram, but she’s just so bland and has 0 depth they all fall into the same category, boring people.

The story itself, what little there is of it, is good. It kept me interested all the way through. Until the end came so abruptly that the friend I was playing with told me this is the last mission of the main story. The ending feels...undeserved and random. We didn’t do enough as characters or grow enough for it to be rewarding.  The expansions feel similar in being to short to be as good as they could be. Osiris if given more time could have had super interesting interactions with some of the characters like Cayde-6 or more time with his star apprentice Ikora. There’s greatness just beneath the surface I wish Bungie had more time to work with.

Moving away from bland blandness onto mechanics. The loot is fun, exotics usually feel pretty unique and have very unique looks to them, despite some being not so useful. The game however features no transmogging of any kind. Which royally pisses me off at times. I want to use my beautiful but semi useless chest piece with my actually useful helmet, as you can only have 1 exotic equipped at time. ‘BUT SPENCER THAT WOULD MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO SEE WHAT ITEMS PEOPLE ARE RUNNING IN PVP.’ I hear you random moron, I hear you. Just disable it in PVP. Simple. Make everything load looking like the base item. So simple.

Long ass rambling first review short,  good game. Makes me wish I had played the original actually. For long time Halo/Bungie fans there’s an underlying layer that’s very Halo-esque without being intrusive. For newcomers, it’s just a solid experience despite being an MMO. The next expansion plans to be huge and bring a lot of positive change to the game. Like being able to run 3 shotguns as your weapons. Thanks for reading nerds.

[barbosaasouza]

Destiny 2 - All Exotic Titan Armor

As Bungie releases more content for Destiny 2, the conversation about which piece of exotic armor to put on becomes more complicated. What might have been an easy choice when the game launched will need some thought. What activity you’re in, what subclass you're using, and what modifiers might be preset are all necessary considerations, which is why we've accumulated a complete list of exotic Titan armor in Destiny 2 and provided details and advice on when to wear it.

List of Exotic Titan Armor in Destiny 2

Use the links below to jump to specific Destiny 2 exotic Titan armor listings to learn more about each piece's type, trait, and intrinsic perk.

ACD/0 Feedback Fence Actium War Rig Aeon Safe An Insurmountable Skullfort Armamentarium Ashen Wake Crest of Alpha Lupi Doom Fang Pauldron Dunemarchers Eternal Warrior Hallowfire Heart Helm of Saint-14 Khepri's Horn Lion Rampant Mask of the Quiet One Mk. 44 Stand Asides Synthoceps Wormgod Caress

For more information about other exotic armor in Destiny 2, be sure to check out our guide to all Exotic Warlock armor as well as our guide to all Exotic Hunter armor.

ACD/0 Feedback Fence

Type: Gauntlets Trait: Plasteel Reinforcement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Fury Conductors - Melee hits build energy. Being struck by a melee attack reduces incoming damage and unleashes the energy in a devastating explosion.

Good or Bad: You’ve got to melee things to build energy, then depend on something hitting you with their melee, which will then release the built-up energy in a huge explosion. That’s a lot of criteria to meet to make these gauntlets useful. I’d blow these up for the extra Legendary Shards until such a time that they receive a buff from Bungie to become relevant again.

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Doom Fang Pauldron

Type: Gauntlets Trait: Plasteel Reinforcement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Horns of Doom - Void melee kills give super energy. While Sentinel Shield is active, melee kills recharge your grenade and grenade hits extend your super.

Good or Bad: In their current state, when paired with a Sentinel Titan, this is probably the best exotic in the game. It will be nerfed as soon as Bungie can push an update. As it stands now, a Titan could use their Sentinel Shield indefinitely.

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Synthoceps

Type: Gauntlets Trait: Plasteel Reinforcement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Biotic Enhancements - Increased melee lunge range. Improved melee and Super damage when surrounded.

Good or Bad: Great. The Synthoceps are all about increasing the effectiveness and damage of your melee. To start, your melee range is increased from 5m to 7m just by wearing them, which means you can melee long before you’d think to. Secondly, when surrounded, your melee damage increases from 90 to 180 damage, which is double. This is all without considering the increased super damage while surrounded. Thanks to CoS Gaming for the detailed information.

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Crest of Alpha Lupi

Type: Chest Armor Trait: Plasteel Reinforcement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Survival Well - Generates an additional orb of light from supers and a healing pulse when the barricade class ability is activated.

Good or Bad: Useful in controllable and predictable ways, which is good. You know what you’re getting, even if it isn’t great. Four orbs of light generated from your super ability would now be five, and the idea that you get a healing pulse when using a barricade makes a lot of sense, because Titans tend to use their barricade when damage is incoming, which is the ideal time to heal.

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Actium War Rig

Type: Chest Armor Trait: Plasteel Reinforcement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Auto-Loading Link - Steadily reloads a portion of your equipped auto rifle’s magazine from reserves.

Good or Bad: Good. I use this a lot for the Calus fight when playing the through the original Leviathan raid in Destiny 2. This works well for shooting skulls, and it’s great for maintaining damage on Calus if you run low on heavy ammo, which is almost certainly going to be the case. Any time you’d prefer not to reload, consider the Actium War Rig for the job.

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Hallowfire Heart

Type: Chest Armor Trait: Plasteel Reinforcement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Sunfire Furnace - Greatly improves the recharge rate of your solar abilities while Hammer of Sol is charged.

Good or Bad: Nah. You must have your Hammer of Sol super ability fully charged for this exotic to work its magic. Even then, the benefits just aren’t there compared to other exotic armor pieces. You might find a situation where weekly modifiers make this useful, but I can’t think of any of the top of my head.

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An Insurmountable Skullfort

Type: Helmet Trait: Mobility Enhancement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Transfusion Matrix - Kills with Arc melee abilities trigger health regeneration and restore melee energy.

Good or Bad: I don't really see the big sell here, and I’ve used this helmet a fair amount. Once again, the benefit depends on you using your melee ability. I suppose it’s great if you’re getting overwhelmed and you kill an enemy by punching them, initiating health regeneration when you’re in a bad spot, but still not my favorite.

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Mask of the Quiet One

Type: Helmet Trait: Mobility Enhancement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Dreaded Visage - Grants melee, grenade and class ability energy when damaged. Void ability kills grant health regeneration.

Good or Bad: Good. Any time you take damage you are getting melee, grenade, and class ability energy. You don’t have to be using the Sentinel subclass for this. Of course, using the Sentinel subclass means that you can chain the benefits of this exotic helmet together. Take damage and you get your ability energy. Get an ability kill and you repair the damage. Great cycle of events there if you work it correctly.

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Lion Rampant

Type: Leg Armor Trait: Mobility Enhancement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Jump Jets - Provides additional aerial maneuverability and enables accurate hip fire while in the air during Left.

Good or Bad: Good for highly skilled players who want to have some fun in PvP. Because there is a bump to hip fire accuracy, they work even better when paired with a weapon that provides the same benefits. In PvP, players will often have a hard time tracking players who use height to their advantage, especially when you jump before they come around a corner, and the Lion Rampant can make for some fun plays if used correctly.

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Dunemarchers

Type: Leg Armor Trait: Mobility Enhancement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Linear Actuators - Increases sprint speed. Sprinting builds up a static charge. After melee-attacking an enemy, that charge will chain damage to nearby enemies.

Good or Bad: The fact that the Dunemarchers increase sprint speed is the primary selling point for me, but I tend to value mobility over other benefits. I’ve used them a lot and the damage chaining from melee attacks is cool, but players at full health in PvP are going to survive it, and your primary PvE strategy isn’t like to be running melee attacks. Could find some situation use, but unlikely that you’ll use these as your main Titan exotic.

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Aeon Safe

Type: Gauntlets Trait: Mobility Enhancement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Aeon Energy - Summoning a barricade grants ability energy to Aeon Cult allies, such as grenade energy to Warlocks, barricade energy to Titans, and dodge energy to Hunters. Non-Aeon Cult allies receive a fraction of the benefit.

Good or Bad: A great idea that doesn’t really materialize. Aeon Cult allies are other members of your team that are wearing Aeon armor. So, Hunters with the Aeon Swift and Warlocks with the Aeon Soul. If you can get your entire team to use these exotics, and you communicate effectively, these could be useful to a degree. You pop your barricade and the Warlock has their grenade back. The Warlock throws their grenade and you have your barricade back. The chaining possibilities are good, but this exotic is almost entirely useless unless you coordinate with your team.

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Khepri's Horn

Type: Helmet Trait: Plasteel Reinforcement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Solar Rampart - Solar damage kills recharge your barricade, which unleashes a blast of solar energy when summoned.

Good or Bad: It’s okay. Solar damage kills can be weapons or abilities, so that’s good. The primary selling point is getting your barricade back quickly, so any situation where you benefit from frequent Rally Barricades, such as a boss fight where instantly reloading a rocket launcher is beneficial. The blast of Solar energy is cool, but it’s never been a game changer for me.

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Helm of Saint-14

Type: Helmet Trait: Plasteel Reinforcement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Starless Night - Your Ward of Dawn blinds enemies that enter it. Guarding with Sentinel Shield temporarily blind nearby enemies.

Good or Bad: This exotic helmet is only useful for Sentinel Titans, so already it’s no good for two of the three subclasses, which is fine. It’s situational. My team and I used Ward of Dawn during The Whisper, the quest you must complete to get the Whisper of the Worm. Unfortunately, there are just too many other options for Titans to make this a viable solution to most problems.

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MK. 44 Stand Asides

Type: Leg Armor Trait: Mobility Enhancement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Seriously, Watch Out - Grants and overshield when sprinting at full health with Seismic Strike, Hammer Strike, or Shield Bash equipped. Hits with these abilities recharge a portion of your melee energy.

Good or Bad: I’m not a fan. To get the overshield you must be at full health and sprinting, so it’s going to be problematic in PvP right away. Melee hits in PvP tend not to be one-shot kills, so the idea of sprinting around the map looking to deliver a melee hit is silly. The major benefit is the cooldown for scoring hits with your melee. A normal melee cooldown is about 60 seconds, and this cuts that in half. Again, that isn’t much help in PvP where a melee hit often won’t score you a kill.

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Ashen Wake

Type: Gauntlets Trait: Plasteel Reinforcement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Bring the Heat - Fusion grenades now explode on impact and gain increased throw speed.

Good or Bad: Only useful to the Sunbreaker Titan, and even then, you don’t appear to get a damage buff on the Fusion grenades, they just travel faster and explode on impact. I don’t see how anyone would find a value here that outweighs the Armamentarium.

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Wormgod Caress

Type: Gauntlets Trait: Plasteel Reinforcement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Burning Fists - Melee kills increase melee damage for a period of time. Additional kills extend duration and increase effects.

Good or Bad: They’re fine in PvE, but useless in PvP. The entire point of the exotic is to get melee kills, which will increase your melee damage for a time, allowing you to get more kills. Melee kills are unreliable at best in the Crucible. Even if you get the first level of the buff, it’s probably not enough to one-shot another player. In PvE, however, killing a few low-level enemies can apply a significant damage buff that could be used to melee an enemy with more health. Could come in handy.

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Armamentarium

Type: Chest Armor Trait: Plasteel Reinforcement Mod Intrinsic Perk: And Another Thing - Gain an additional grenade charge.

Good or Bad: Phenomenal. You know an exotic is good when it doesn't need a big paragraph to describe its intrinsic perk. The Armamentarium gives you an additional grenade, and Bungie knew that was enough to make it great. The only negative is that when wearing this with my Striker Titan and using the Code of the Earthshaker tree, it was useless. I already have a second grenade charge, so this exotic is best enjoyed by the Sentinel and Sunbreaker.

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Eternal Warrior

Type: Helmet Trait: Mobility Enhancement Mod Intrinsic Perk: Resolute - Gain an overshield when activating Fists of Havoc.

Good or Bad: Closer to bad than good for several reasons, one of which is how ugly it is. Seriously, though, it’s only useful to Striker Titans and only when they cast their Fist of Havoc super ability. This means you get usefulness from it once or twice during each round of PvP, and every few minutes in PvE. If you’re dying a lot when you cast Fist of Havoc, this could help you solve that problem, but you could also solve that problem by making a few tweaks to the way you play.

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That's it for all of the exotic Titan armor in Destiny 2. For more information about other exotic armor, be sure to check out our guide to all Exotic Warlock armor as well as our guide to all Exotic Hunter armor. There will be more to collect and try out once Destiny 2 launches its Forsaken DLC this September 4, but until then, these are all of the options for Titans. You can check out our other content by visiting our Destiny 2 complete strategy guide.

Destiny 2 - All Exotic Titan Armor published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

[thefirstknife]

The higher ups at Bungie are 3 for 3 in terms of bad deals? You would've thought they would've learnt a lesson or two from leaving Microsoft and Activision.

I highly doubt Sony will ever be willing to let them go.

I feel like them getting into these deals is a sign that there's people at the top at Bungie themselves who are ultimately responsible. Like, these big corpos can be as shitty as possible and we can blame them for how they treat employees, but at the end of the day, management at Bungie is the one that decides to get into these situations.

I'm not even sure if there would be any point in Sony letting them go, even if they wanted to. Like, at this point with all the layoffs, it doesn't change anything anymore. They could go back to being independent and they wouldn't have enough resources to re-hire everyone laid off anyway. And it's questionable if anyone would even want to be re-hired.

Two more asks under:

I'm not sure either. I don't think we have any fully official numbers of how many were laid off. The 40% number is the most commonly reported right now. This includes all of Bungie, not just Destiny btw.

The theory would make sense, although as of now we really don't have enough information. But it makes sense with the general vibe of what's happening and with the claims that Sony wants to move away from live services and the fact that Bungie did not announce any new expansions.

Additionally, it would make the most sense that a lot of these veterans have wrapped up their contributions to TFS (a lot of concept art for example gets done really early, and even with music, it could've been written by now and just waiting recording) and since no new expansions are planned (presumably due to the incoming change in how Destiny will function after), Sony/Bungie did not want to keep these people on the payroll. They essentially won't need them if expansions aren't happening anymore.

This doesn't make it any less tragic or awful, of course. It's super extra disappointing, first and foremost to everyone who got laid off, because they were promised that the deal with Sony will not result in layoffs:

Though Bungie employees said leadership has assured them there will be “absolutely no layoffs” and nothing “major” in terms of restructuring once the Sony deal closes, the acquisition represents a notable shift for the Washington-based game developers.

Ofc, this was over a year ago. Things change. But it's still horrific because it means that the deal absolutely accounted for potential layoffs at some point in time and the employees were essentially lied to. Especially since this seems to be coming from the idea that they want to restructure how Destiny will work after. And for a lot of devs, that's something they wanted too, but this isn't being done in a way that benefits them at all. So many of those people were laid off in the first place.

In a way, there wouldn't be anything bad with cycling people through the industry. Sometimes veterans (in any industry or job or field) can preclude new people from ever getting a chance. It's overall a good idea to refresh the workforce every so often and get new people with new ideas a chance. Who knows how many, for example, absolutely stunning composers there are out there who can't get a chance because the veterans are employed for life. Like, these things are generally not supposed to be this devastating.

But like this? Absolutely not. Mass layoffs with basically no notice? People not given a choice? Ripping people out of on-going projects? Leaving remaining workers understaffed and demoralised? Treating employees essentially like expendable cattle that can be fired over night without any real explanation? Changing projects and goals mid-way through development? Leaving devs to scramble to salvage what can be salvaged while they're fearing for their employement?

This also probably involves hiring new talent just so you can excuse lower salaries. Because they HAVE been hiring recently. Now a lot of the job listings are gone, but there's been newly hired people coming in. And like I'm all in favour of new people getting a chance, but I've seen how this works and hiring new people just so you can pay them less is beyond shitty; it's essentially expecting entry level workers on entry level salaries to do jobs that used to be done by people with 15+ years of experience. And then when they finally get experience, they will be fired too. Even worse, this can sometimes make absolutely desperate workers with a lot of experience getting entry level jobs with entry level salaries because there's nothing else they can do. With the state of the industry right now (over 6000 layoffs this year), you can see why workers would be desperate to apply for anything.

I wouldn't go that far yet. Obviously we don't know anything for sure, but I don't believe TFS will be cancelled. Or that it can be. Again, Destiny is the only thing making money for Bungie. Studios can be shut down any time for sure, but even the most insane out-of-touch CEO would not shut down a video game at this stage in its life that is actively earning money. Like, that would be extraordinarily unprecedented.

But even in the showcase for TFS we've seen signs that they are looking to change how Destiny will work after. If anything, it's the stuff after that might be on the chopping block, but not TFS itself. Either way, we've seen that they did not announce any new expansions and that the original plan was to change seasons into episodes as, presumably, the full scope of content for the game going forward.

Without having to work on expansions, they don't need as many people to work on the game after. One of the main stresses for the dev cycle is having to churn an expansion each year on top of making content all year long for seasons. With expansions gone, that's a significant reduction in workload. And apparently in employees too. Obviously I think that's a bad choice. Even with expansions not happening, any content coming after would benefit from employees who have been working on the game for years. Except you know, someone up on top clearly doesn't think that content needs that many people who are on the highest salaries.

We'll see where this goes. As I said before, emotions are high right now and it hasn't even been 24 hours yet. Stay cautious and lower expectations, primarily to give remaining employees a break. No need to go full into the worst case scenario yet, mostly because we simply don't have enough information and I don't want to give the impression that we don't care anymore or it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's also going to be a lot of rumours and unverified information going on for a while. I'd wait for things to settle and get confirmed before any further drama.

[nazih-fares]

A while ago, I finished an interesting written by my colleague Jason Schreier over at Kotaku called Blood, Sweat and Pixel, telling the stories and problems of 10 different AAA and indie developers faced when creating their games. One of the chapter was all about Destiny, and it got me realize how much one of the biggest commercial successes of recent years, was a flawed title that took almost three years to get on solid grounds, numerous studio creative changes, but yet became something that involved a huge community of players all around the world including myself (proud hunter right here). Despite somewhat lukewarm criticism and negative feedback from early adopters, this shooter like no other has found its way, after a series of free updates, 2 DLCs and 2 expansion packs (The Taken King and Rise of Iron). Now almost 3 years after its first release, comes the sequel, Destiny 2, a way to fix many core issues from the original and hopefully start off fresh.

To say that the first Destiny was criticized by the press and players is something lots know already. This merge between MMO and FPS had lots of flaws during the past three years: a story badly written and incomprehensible unless you visited the Bungie site (to read Grimoire cards), grindy, too expensive with all the DLCs, and let’s not forget about the plethora of bugs that whether were abused for good intention or not is a different story (I’m looking at you all Raid cheesers). Nevertheless, players stuck around, and devout Guardians continued to voice their discontent at the game, in hope that Bungie will listen, but it seems they had other plans: create a sequel that will become a fresh start for everyone. Now clocking more than 35 hours of play in Destiny 2 (a shy number in comparison to my 923 hours on the first Destiny), trying a plethora of activities, finding new loot, I’m pretty sure there is still much to discover, but at least I can say one thing: Destiny 2 deserves your time, because it finally fixes some of the core issues of its predecessor.

Throughout my reading of Blood, Sweat and Pixel, I learned the main issue behind Destiny’s rather lack of story. Months before the first planned release of the game, Bungie studio executives had asked that the script be rewritten, due to a lack of clarity from the original one. Too linear, according to them, this new change of order had consequences on the development of the game, as one could imagine, and sadly Bungie gave birth to game that was praised for its shooting mechanics but pretty much nothing else. As sad thing, coming from the studio that create epic stories of challenges and rise to power (the Halo series), but throughout the 3 years of the first Destiny, The Taken King and Rise of Iron became a testing ground to put some sense in the lore of the game and its rich story (and plus we got amazing content creators like My name is Byf decrypting and explaining the lore better than the game makers). With Destiny 2, the studio had the chance to start on a good foundation, almost reminding us of the days of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, a clean wipe for everyone, so they build upon what worked and what needed to be fixed.

Destiny 2 takes place a small year after the SIVA crisis introduced in Destiny: Rise of Iron. Crota and Oryx are just bad memories (or good memories for you accomplished raiders), and the game recounts a short summary of your past exploits in the previous version, if you played it. It recalls the date of your rebirth on Earth Cosmodrome; the day you triumphed over the Darkness in the heart of the Black Garden, your first victory in the Vault of Glass raid; the day you reached the Lighthouse on Mercury; when you became an Iron Lord; and so on. It is also an opportunity to remember with whom some of these accomplishments have been done, and like many Destiny players around the world probably believe: the experience is not necessarily to know how you play, nut with whom you play. This small introduction was therefore quite moving, I must admit, enough to almost shed a tear among those who spent hundreds of hours on the first opus. The newcomers though, will be introduced to the universe of Destiny by a summary of the previous events in a well done, if not better than actually playing the first game. Destiny 2 did well to differentiate between the veterans and the beginners, adapting the numerous dialogues of the game; incorporating the enormous – hidden – lore of the series in an easier way for new Guardian, who can thus discover a brand new world. The others, who have known the horrors of The Dark Below, fought the blight of the Takens and saw the snowing peaks of Felwinter are treated as they should: as Destiny Veterans.

The script of Destiny 2 is finally quite simple in its own way. The last city on earth, still standing since its creation, is suddenly attacked by the Red Legion, an elite faction of the Cabal Empire. Encountered in the first game, the Cabals had until then constituted only a vague threat; a few outposts on Mars were filled with exhausted troops, but never truly a representation of the terrible power of this military empire. The Guardians are rapidly outnumbered and the city falls into the hands of the invader; the player, in a final desperate attempt, tries to attack the mothership and falls head-to-head with Dominus Ghaul, the leader of the Red Legion. You then understands that Ghaul’s aims is to seek out the power of the Traveller, a divine entity that has been dormant for centuries, after protecting humanity and to whom the Guardians owe their powers. What happens next is that Ghaul encloses the sphere god in a sort of gigantic harness, which has the effect of depriving all the Guardians of their Light, becoming vulnerable and mortal, and are eliminated one after the other, while the few survivors are forced to retreat.

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In short, Destiny 2 tells the story of the Guardians’ long struggle to get back their City, free the Traveler, and triumph over the Red Legion while getting back their lost powers. Without telling you too much, know that the adventure will lead you to four corners of the solar system, like the first episode, but this time to organize the resistance or counter-attack. Overall, the game has some solid good writing and offers some of the most epic moments of the series, probably because of a switch in creative writing leads, including Senior Narrative Lead Jason Harris. Well served by numerous cinematic and plenty of dialogues with new and old characters, the plot progresses at a good rhythm and remains clear, from the beginning to the end. Screenwriters also had the good idea to include the point of view of the other side; with a set of cinematics that show what’s going on with Ghaul while you progress through the story, and obviously helps understand the Red Legion’s intentions, and their final goal. If it never really surprises, this campaign has the merit of being straight to the point and even emotional, recalling what the studio did better back in the early 2000s, as we remember the epic stories of Halo to Halo Reach. The first moments of this defeat against the Red Legion reminded me of Halo Reach’s eight campaign mission New Alexandria, in which the Noble-6 landed wounded and almost unarmed, in a city invaded by the Covenants forces. Destiny 2 however, retains its own identity, avoiding to pour the theme too much into the suffering of humanity, with dramatic moments, well served by an excellent soundtrack done by Skye Lewin, Michael Salvatori and others… Some tracks are fit of epic movies, and I can’t stress on how amazing they are in terms of composition but also variety, so I’ve included a sample of one of my favorite one which you can hear below. Plus, I’d like to thank whoever was in charge of the sound effects this time, as the weapons aroused my senses, like the low throbs of the Graviton Lance pulse rifle, or the volley of rockets coming out of the Wardcliff Coil rocket launcher.

While Destiny 2 is all about a fresh start, the game still uses key characters known to fans, such as the trio of Zavala, Ikora and Cayde-6, but also introduces some new ones, all rather well done, starting with my personal favorite called Failsafe. The latter is an AI, one of the only survivors of a golden age mission on Nessus (roughly 500 years before the event of Destiny), which now suffers from a multiple personality disorder that makes it rather amusing. Sometimes jovial and helpful, Failsafe can be more squeaky and sarcastic without any logical transition. On Io, the player will meet Ashar Mir, an awoken scientist whose personality is closer to your grumpy uncle than a helpful nerd, then on the EDZ (which we’ll explain more later on), you’ll meet one of Bungie’s first ever gay characters, Devrim Kay. These characters aren’t just there for show, but important to each planet as they give the player many information about the places but also dedicated quests. In the end, the Destiny 2 campaign finds a certain balance here, with its epic clashes, its moments of doubt and its hard blows, without taking itself too seriously. It’s a formula that may not please everyone, but the regulars of the studio production will recognize the Bungie tone, which likes nothing more than drop fun jokes even when the end of the world is near.

Dominus Ghaul, leader of the Red Legion

It easily took me around 10-15 hours to see the end credits of Destiny 2, which followed a sort of linear path that is at the choice of the player. Technically, Destiny 2 guides the player to concentrate on key story quests, but you have the choice to do other things like sidequests called Adventures. On the other hand, since some story missions are only accessible when the player has reached a certain level, it was necessary for me to go into PvP or Strikes (matchmaking cooperative missions with three players) to get enough experience and obviously better gear and weapons.

While the first Destiny was finally quite simple in its unlocking system, players gradually unlocked new planets, and from space he could choose a mission, whatever it was, or go for a stroll on the planet of his choice to do patrols or just farm for ressources. Bungie has thoroughly reviewed the way its game was built, and now every Destiny 2 planet has several landing zones, but also different missions and quests, which are all up to the player to decide what to prioritize. Story missions are even located on the map, so you have to go there to activate them, but you’ll end up finding other things to do on the way, such as Adventures, which act as smaller scripted set of missions, or explore Lost Sectors, (secret zones which house mini-bosses and loot boxes), or a plethora of public events that guardians in the area can join, and of course returning patrol missions. Destiny 2 broadly resumes the basis of what its predecessor did, but constantly enrich the experience, like The Lost Sectors, for example, are only an evolution of these small dark caves in which sometimes there were no real interest in discovering.

The planets themselves follow the same logic of evolution of Destiny 2. Larger in size, they are also richer, with vast areas filled with varied visual elements, enemies, secret chests and all sorts of loot to discover. The game makes the effort to propose even more complex levels to invite the player to explore each planet, and succeeds on all front with some interesting verticality notably on Nessus and IO. If the first Destiny had us visit Earth’s Cosmodrome, the Moon, Mars and Venus, Guardians in Destiny 2 will visit previously mentioned IO, Nessus, and Titan, one of Jupiter’s satellites. Gone are the Russian plains of the Cosmodrome, as we discover the lush forests of the European Dead Zone, well known to PvP enthusiasts; in fact, several maps of the first Destiny were located precisely in the EDZ, like the Widow’s Court. In general, each destination has its own identity, almost making it a character of its own: Titan is a hostile planet, abandoned by humanity, home of methane research centers and arcologies.

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The latter have unfortunately been invaded by a well-known enemy of the players, the Hive, which almost gives a sort of Alien movie side to Destiny 2. Nessus on the other hand reminds me of Venus, full of warm colors and impressive alien vegetation, home to vast vex ruins. IO finally is know as the last thing the Traveller touched before the Collapse, a “religious” place for Warlocks, and home of the biggest vex building you’ve ever seen.

You will spend plenty of time on these new planets as the game offers many missions. If I liked them to be higher in count in comparison to the first Destiny, I must admit that the developers have learned the lessons of the past. Destiny 2 stands by itself with the current content, even though expansions are planned for the months to come. With a total of 35 hours of play with the core game, I still have a lot of things to do and endless grinds, as the most hardcore of us fans will seek to reach the highest power level of 350, and without the need of replaying missions and other tedious tasks from the original game. Because yes, if anything, Destiny main problem was this weird cycle of having to replay story missions with different modifiers such as harder difficulties (Heroic missions). Numerous games do the same like the Diablo franchise, but these mechanics were not something that players really liked, and throughout the Destiny cycle these were pushed to the side. Instead the Destiny 2 introduce different weekly and daily activities that surely will have you venture in the same locations of the games, but without a feeling like you’re doing the same thing every time, namely Milestones and Challenges. The later are small secondary tasks that are dependent on either the game mode you are playing, or which planet you’re on. For example, it could be a task to kill 75 Fallen enemies on Titan, or maybe kill 5 Guardians with heavy weapons in the Crucible. There’s basically 3 challenges per activity (Crucible, Raid, Strikes) as well as per planet, giving you the chance to build XP and rewards faster. The other more important tasks are Milestones, which are usually more complicated, but will give you larger rewards such as powerful gear (usually higher power level than the one you have), and usually are linked to the most challenging part of the game like finish the Raid, Nightfall Strikes, newly introduced Flashpoints and Lord Shaxx’s Call to Arms (I’ll get back to all these later in the review)

All this mention about loot made me realize that we should probably talk about its new system, and especially how it affects the character that adorns and wields it. Like in the first Destiny, players will be able to pick one of the three classes: Titan, Warlock or Hunter, which will each have, after several hours of play, three different sub-classes. While most expected a new class or at least sub-classes to be added in the game, Bungie’s choice makes sense as it would be too random to add it at this point. Instead Bungie introduces redesigned subclasses, especially on the front of the starting ones like the Titan’s Sentinel, Warlock’s Dawnblade and the Hunter’s Arcstrider, which ultimately are an evolution of respectively the Titan’s Defender, Warlock’s Sunsinger and the Hunter’s Bladedancer.

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This does not mean that the subclasses haven’t really changed since the original Destiny, but on the contrary, have completely different skill trees. While the logic is still to have a cooldown ability of a grenade, your subclass skill, and a Class Ability Modifiers on top of your Super, the changes are dramatic for Destiny veterans, which will need to revisit their strategies. In my case, as a Hunter, I had to learn the hard way that gone are the invisibility perks of the Arc class, but instead, the Arcstrider is an agile high-risk subclasss with numerous tricks to lower your cooldown timers for all abilities. On that front, cooldowns are no longer subjected to the stats of your armor, since the trinity of Discipline, Strength and Intelligence have disappeared, instead relying on your nodes activated in your skill tree. This is a great thing for skilled players, especially when it comes to PVP, as they will be able to reload their skills fairly quick and inflict more damage because of the way they play, instead of betting on the armor stats like in the previous Destiny.

On the other hand, improving your character still depends on your loot and gear. The good news at least is that the system is much clearer than in the first game (and trust me, I’ve seen numerous changes in the past three years). In Destiny 2, loot can be found almost everywhere and in all activities, with revised drop rate on all front, so it won’t take you days before you find a legendary engram. The same thing applies in crucible, where I got my first exotic after a mere 8-10 hours of. On top of that, the original Destiny reputation system has been scratched, in favor of a system of tokens that are more interesting. The Vanguard have their own led by Zavala, Shaxx for Crucible, but also each planet’s key character has their own “ranking” system. Basically, the more you do task that help each person, the more you get token which you can hen redeem and level up your “allegiance” to eventually unlock Legendary Engrams, which decrypt into a series of themed weapons and armors (shaders and other cosmetic loot as well). Plus you can now join actual clans with all your friends (the old groups), which has its own reward system on a season basis, as well as buffs throughout period of time.

The new loot system is redefined to reduce endless grind

In short, the possibilities of the new loot system are numerous and if you were already addicted to that in the first Destiny, then the sequel will probably eat all of your spare time as you hunt for the best. There is however a small change that will not please all Guardians and especially devotees of the RNG gods: the rolls on weapons are no longer random. If in the first Destiny you could have three completely different scout rifles for example, with their own perks, and the most hardcore of all Guardians would keep on playing until he gets that god-roll. With a fixed roll for each weapon, this hunt is over, but at least we don’t need to spend a bunch of glimmer (the in-game currency) and farm for resource to upgrade everything anymore. Another small detail that also makes a big difference in terms of weapons and gear, is the addition of the mod system. First of all, since weapons now are split into kinetic (non-elemental weapons), elemental weapons and heavy slot, your loadout is now more strategic than before, since you can literally equip anything in all three spots. Are you more of a long range shooter? Then put on a Kinetic scout rifle, an elemental one in the second slot, and maybe a sniper rifle in the heavy slot. The choice is yours, and once you start playing around with the mods, which can drastically alter a weapon core to the point of turning an Arc rifle into a void one, the possibilities are endless. Finally I’d like to end a note on the front of the weapons with the simple fact that I’m glad to see that overused original Destiny weapons like Sniper Rifles and Shotguns are now considered heavy weapons, which changes drastically the way Guardians have been playing online competitively, and I welcome the new weapon types which are the submachine guns and grenade launchers (Machine guns on the other hand are gone).

Speaking of competitive gaming, Destiny 2 offers its dedicated PvP game modes, known as the Crucible. At launch, it allows the player to choose between two dedicated playlists: Quickplay or Competitive. The first is undoubtedly the more casual, with a compilation of classic game modes like Control and Clash; while the Competitive playlist focus on more complex modes. It’s thanks to the latter that two new game modes have been introduced. The first is directly inspired by Counter-Strike, known as Countdown, requiring a team to place a bomb on one of the two spots on the map; while the other team must either defuse the bomb or kill their opponents. The second game mode – Survival – pits two teams in a classic death match, except each side has a limited number of respawn.

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Even though it’s lacking custom games, or the ability to just play specific modes, Destiny 2’s crucible marks a real good evolution when compared to the first game. The first reason is that since weapons have fixed rolls, it brings an easier way for developers to put balance in the game, even when it comes to each class strengths and weaknesses. If, at first glance, the Striker Titans or the Warlock Dawnblade seems dangerous, they are counterbalanced by weaknesses and key changes which shouldn’t be overlooked. For example, a Titan Shoulder Strike does not kill instantly, but actually can slightly imbalances its wielder, who must yet quickly chain the charge with a headshot in hope to defeat his enemy. Very often, the defending guardian has enough time to respond even before the Titan may have deal the fatal blow.

The other important change in the game’s crucible is the change to a 4v4 system, which is closer to what competitive shooters are opting for nowadays (with the exception of Overwatch of course). This decrease of set teams has helped Bungie to shrink the size of their Crucible maps, but turning them more complex and full of key clash area

The bravest of all guardians can now try their skills in the Trial of the Nines

All this would be a real pleasure if there were no defaults, and sadly the first one is important for me: when it comes to design, some maps seems like they were done better than others. Without really being bad, Vostok is a map located near the Iron Temple, which is too large and sadly constricts Gaurdians to clash in the middle area, within the corridor path in the mountain. Players are also scattered away from each other at each respawn, which often results in a second, fast but painful death, alone against two enemies that are going in a rotation. The second issue is that even though weapons are rather balanced on paper, auto rifles seems to be everywhere, due to their higher than normal reach and unbelievable accuracy that makes the use of slower weapons such as Scout Rifles or Pulse Rifles obsolete (unless you have the Mida Multi-Tool). Yet, I’m not worried on that front, as Bungie has always been very responsive and quickly balancing the Crucible, so I’m pretty sure it will happen soon.

Back in Destiny, the Trials of Osiris was the ultimate test for PVP, pushing guardians to go through an intense challenge of winning 9 games in a row of elimination mode, to eventually be granted access to the lighthouse on Mercury for some of the hottest armor and weapon loot (all themed after ancient Egyptian mythology). This time in Destiny 2, our challenge is the Trial of the Nines, which change every week, with a challenge to pass through 7 consecutive wins, and discover some strange prophecies from mysterious Nines.

The new Levathian Raid bring all the best from the previous edition in one package

Before we wrap this up, shouldn’t I talk about the raid? This ultimate test of teamwork still requires squads of six players, in order to overcome the numerous events in a large scale mission and eventually beat the final boss. This first raid – since I assume more will come with the upcoming announced two DLCs – is really well done. Directly linked to the lore of the Cabals, the Leviathan raid took the best of the four previous original Destiny raids and merged them into one. This raid is staged with relay systems as was the case for the Oryx one, and even a stealth phase like the Gorgons Maze of the Vault of Glass. The game also added two features that makes the job harder for those used to cheese things around. First of all, the Raid are now free of checkpoints, meaning there’s no way of coming back to any part of it after returning to orbit. The second key thing added is on the front of respawn mechanics. Each player has one resuscitation token for each area in the raid, and once the token has been used, he cannot revive anyone else. This makes things complicated, because if one member of your party stays dead for more than 25 seconds, then the whole team is wiped.

Finally, take the time to thoroughly explore the raid as it seems that the developers have hidden many secrets and some of them have yet to be discovered. Note that it is now possible to use a matchmaking system, and join another squad to do the raid via something called guided activities, led by “shephards” which should allow solo players to do all activities more easily.

Destiny 2 was reviewed using an Xbox One digital copy of the game purchased by the writer. The game is also available on on PlayStation 4 and coming soon on PC via Battle.net. We don’t discuss review scores with publishers or developers prior to the review being published.

Without aiming to revolutionize the recipe, Destiny 2 does exactly what you’d expect of it: to correct the numerous defects of a game which had the base of becoming a legendary experience. A while ago, I finished an interesting written by my colleague Jason Schreier over at Kotaku called…

[aurimeanswind]

DESTINY!!!—Sunday Chats (9-10-17)

Yeah, Destiny 2 is out. There is a lot I want to say and talk about. But luckily, you can just LISTEN to me talk about a great many of those feelings on a brand-spanking new Destiny podcast I help host called Farm to Tower, and you should give it a watch!!

In short: we’re really excited about this new project and show, and I’m really excited for its future!!

Normally here I’d have a big editorial to kick things off, and I have a few things mulling around in my head to talk about. I’ll be honest, I’ve just had a couple of really long days and finally have some time to relax now that the above recording is done, so I am just going to skip past many of the normal segments of Sunday Chats in favor of questions, because I did get a ton of really great questions from all you lovely readers and I’m excited to answer them.

So. To summarize. It’s been 7 years since a Metroid game came out and it was Other M and it wasn’t that great. I finished Nier Automata and was disappointed by it. Destiny 2 is really excellent in all of the right ways. Uncharted The Lost Legacy seems super fantastic for reasons I did not expect at all. And I had Chipotle for lunch today.

...

That last one was more just, ya know, for me.

Anyway.

Questions

If you want to have your questions answered here on Sunday Chats, find my tweet on Sunday afternoons (Eastern time) with the hashtag #SundayChats in it, send a reply to it, and you did it. Good job!

So you had joked about this to me Ben but I wasn’t really aware of it really until just looking it up. It seems pretty interesting. It doesn’t seem like there is a cast for it yet (I could be wrong) and it’ll be an Americanized version of the show, which i know, tons of eye rolls coming from folks, especially after the recent Death Note movie, but I dunno. I like to see new interpretations of things. The trouble with them is they will often focus in on something different than what the viewers, like myself, latched onto.

For example, having not watched it, it seems like Death Note may have lost sight of the intellectual battle between Light and L, and how that really defined the tone of that show. I hope that SAO’s live action show holds on to what made the game itself SAO super interesting and even tantalizing. To the psychological damage that happened there. And to the love that Kirito and Asuna found in it. Like, it’s a whole story about the good that comes from the bad.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see though! Either way, I don’t mind. I’m not a complainer or anything. Make your thing and try it out! If it ends up being good, great! If not, it doesn’t change how important the original is to me.

I don’t know what the anime is nor do I care to know what it is or what it’s about. I can confidently endorse this 100% and ideally all of Jaden Smith’s characters’ lines will be formatted the same way as his tweets were.

Anytime! Well, I say anytime, but I don’t actually game with other folks very often, haha. I like to play my games alone mostly because it’s just my preferred way to play them, but also because I like listening to podcasts when I play games, so it makes it tricky to do that and talk to folks. 

Destiny 2 would be a great time to do so though!

And it is Carly Rae Jepsen, queen of pop and all things music.

Going to assume it was meant to be “aside from this year”.

For me, it’d probably be 2008. It’s the year Fallout 3 came out, but also the year Rock Band 2 came out, Dead Space, Bioshock on PS3 (where I first played it), Little Big Planet, Gears of War 2, marking the moment I got an Xbox 360 for that and Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts, and Left 4 Dead. 

It’s worth also shouting out 2013 for the likes of The Last of Us, and of course to 2015 for Ori and the Blind Forest, Life is Strange, The Witcher 3, and Metal Gear Solid V. Woooo, what a year.

This is definitely the best in my lifetime though. Because whoa damn.

I think the biggest take away from Destiny’s lineage is redemption. That making a single video game and putting it out, especially a multiplayer game, doesn’t mean it’s over. The ripples of that across the industry have been massive, for sure, especially to a publisher like Ubisoft. Looking at the legacy of something like Rainbow Six the Siege is really reflective of what happened to Destiny.

The ultimate story is that Destiny went through hell and came out half-baked. They spent a long time course correcting, but it worked out. The Taken King was fantastic. Rise of Iron was excellent. And Destiny 2 is really the culmination of those lessons, and the fact of the matter is, Destiny 2 would not be as successful if Bungie didn’t double down and commit to making Destiny 1 a better product. They didn’t just abandon it and go right on to making Destiny 2, they changed it, almost from the ground up, and it paid off. They made the original Destiny a much bigger and longer-lasting product then I think they initially planned, and they’ve not released Destiny 2 to what seems like a roaring success.

With stuff like The Siege and The Division, we’ve seen other multiplayer games commit and thrive. Games like Player Unknowns Battlegrounds will thrive in a similar way for years to come I think. Overwatch continues to grow, and Blizzard has always stuck to this model to amazing success. And now we’re starting to see that be profitable for other game developers too! And look at games like No Man’s Sky and Final Fantasy XV, single player games that had varying degrees of mixed reaction, still updating and changing and evolving to this day. It’s just a really exciting implication for the industry, because it evolves on that sequel-driven industry concept, and it also holds developers far more accountable for their products. Plus, even if No Man’s Sky launched at a 6.0, it’d be amazing if by the end of it we can say it’s an 8.0 or a 9.

YES! Finally a new Metroid game, it’s 2D, and on 3DS! There was no Metroid game on the DS and has still not been one on 2DS, and it’s about damn time! I’m really excited, because I actually went back and played Metroid 2 once waaaay back when on my old Game Boy growing up, and really dug it even though it certainly has a ton of issues. Seeing it redone and touched up is gonna be super exciting.

I do! Hearing Ben talk about it is definitely a big thing, but I’ve played a bit of Ys Origins, a random entry I picked up years ago on a Steam sale and really dug it. I’m always out to look for a new action RPG, and while Ys is a bit grindy and drawn out, I think those games have a really awesome style to them.

See above, but Destiny 2 is fantastic. I think it’s just truly a great video game, on it’s own merits. In a lot of ways, it really is an open world RPG with more massively multiplayer aspects to it, but it does being one of those exceptionally well, on top of also having all the things that made the original Destiny quirky and unique and fun in the first place. It’s a really best-of-all-worlds situation, and I am endlessly impressed with how immediately different and familiar it feels, absolutely nailing the line.

I put well over 100 hours into the original Destiny, coming in at The Taken King, and I am blown away, honestly.

This. Is. Such. A. Great. Question.

Oh my god. Fuck....

Uh...

Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Day ‘n Night by Kid Cudi, and I think that’d be a good fit. Very much the feeling of routine and solemness and self-disgust and solitude, but I think it would slowly progress into Katy Perry’s ROAR after a bit, because like I’ve done so much in the last three days oh my god.

This is a great question Jon, and thank you for asking it.

About four days. I actually sleep with a fan blowing in my face, and can’t sleep without it, and so I went up to my dad’s house and stayed with him for a few days since I couldn’t sleep without a fan. It was a little bit torture because the bed was a little uncomfortable and he lived on the water and the sunrise into my bedroom was sooooo bright it woke me up every day.

This is a veeeery excellent question. My one is almost always Joel from The Last of Us, because I think I’d just love to see him interact with someone else. Maybe discuss fatherhood with another character, possibly a Booker Dewitt (ignoring the fact that both characters are portrayed by Troy Baker) or a Lee Everett. 

Also like wouldn’t Crash Bandicoot and Bowser in the same room just shooting the shit be the greatest thing ever?

Nathan Drake talking to Spyro the Dragon because what the fuck is this new mythological creature in front of me who can speak english and was played by Elijah Wood in one of the games??

Link and Alundra in a room not talking because they’re both silent protagonists?

So many good choices.

Please god stop with these jokes Nate.

I really like Hawthorn, who is a cool different look at the outside of The Last City right off the bat in Destiny 2. But, I’m not terribly deep into the story at the moment, so I don’t know for sure. Having just met Failsafe, and hearing good things about her, I think it’s safe to say she will be Number One.

I mean the Tomba games being remade on new consoles is pretty much begging to happen. Oh, and I really want the original Spyro trilogy back too. Most of the big ones I would say are already there. The Darksiders games, the Batman games, the Kingdom Hearts remasters, even at 60fps on that one too. I’d say here are some big ones:

The Metal Gear Solid series

The Resistance Trilogy, especially 3, which is by far the best one.

Dead Space. PLEASE!

Bring Persona 3 (remastered, preferably) and Persona 4 Golden to them. Xbox One as well so those folks can play too! (and Switch, yuh doyyy)

The Tales games, including Tales of Vesperia PS3 with all the new content, to the west, for the first time.

And the absolute biggest one: DARK SOULS ONE. REMASTER IT. PLEASE!!!!

I really did not like the hand canon I used, but there were a few choice ones from Destiny 1 that were good so I haven’t ruled them out yet.

For me, it’s aaaaalways the Scout Rifle. Weirdly enough, in most first person shooters it’s not reflect for me to aim for the head. I just dont, and usually aim for the body very poorly. I always get half way through shooting them before I realize “oh I should be aiming at the head” and change fire to they really slowly, and I always forget. It’s just not instinct for whatever reason. But in Destiny. It’s just there. Most of my hits are “critical” or headshots, but just in Destiny. It just feeeeeels soooooo goooooood. Easily up there with a Mario or like, a DmC Devil May Cry as far as just nailing what it’s going for. 

To me, it just feels like you have soooo much more control in Destiny. Shooting, running, turning, everything about the feel seems controlled and metered. While it’s no Overwatch or Call of Duty, it’s certainly a twitchy game, and so it balancing that speed and the control the player has is incredible. Thus, the heavier weapons that shoot single shots, which I typically do not like, just feel that much better to me. That much more controlled. The Scout Rifle is boss.

*Edit: I put this question aside to come back to write the answer to at the end, and then I totally forgot. So I am coming back later and doing it justice!

As someone who suffers from clinical depression, and gosh I know that sentence sounds like I am using it like a crutch or a casual conversation point, trivializing it, which I am not, I am someone who deals with that overwhelming negativity a great deal. Whether it manifests as “morbid thoughts”, straight up suicidal thoughts, feelings of insignificance, low self-esteem, low self-worth, feeling like wanting to isolate yourself, closing yourself off, frustration, a short temper, or otherwise (even though I pretty much covered the gambit there), I’ve dealt with it. And it’s hard. But really, the big thing, I say coming out of a pretty bad depression, is knowing it’ll change. It’ll evolve. 

My lows in negativity only ever last so long. Sometimes it has been six months, and it has been really, really hard. But I come back to full swing at some point. Holding onto that does help me.

Video games are obviously a really good escape, but honestly coming into music was a big part of that evolution for me. Ever since I played Journey the first time, not only have I begun to notice video game music that much more, but music in general, empathizing with lyrics, artists, pleas, and more. Leaning into sound that really just epitomizes your feeling too, like sound that feels like a color, or an emotion, stuff like that. Run With The Hunted was a really fantastic album for me in a really stressful period of my life, because it evoked that stress, and frustration, and fear, and also sadness and hope. Like, it hits so many notes, thus it being my favorite album of all time.

Exercise has also been a good thing for me. Exercising releases endorphins which are an actual chemical in your brain that just makes you feel happy or satisfied. It’s an actual way to force yourself into feeling just a little bit better, and walking around Lake Elkhorn, a fantasy-esque lake near the outskirts of my house has been so meditative, because the place is just soooo beautiful, that it’s helped me think of ideas when I find myself in a rut.

Here is a shot from Saturday morning that I took:

So those are things I’ve used. Trying to not sleep to much, eating a bit better, drinking less soda, generally doing healthy things also starts to just help those good vibes creep back into your life. It’s hard, it’s soooo so hard, but those may be some ways to help.

Kaylie hush! I’ll always come back to Overwatch, and we can play anytime!

I am certainly still open to the Overwatch circuit, and if folks want to get into that Halloween event with me when it starts, I will happily oblige!

Long live Overwatch! Yaaaaay!

...

But like probably.

I have only seen the Dawn Blade class so far, as a primary Warlock player. Everything just generally is the same but evolved and updated right? The only other class I had before was Titan, and I know the flaming hammers are still in Destiny 2, so I am pretty happy considering that was my favorite class. 

Also, I primarily played sun singer when I played original Destiny, so Dawn Blade being the replacement subclass in Destiny 2 has me a bit bummed. For folks who don’t know, the big thing you could evolve the Sun SInger’s super into is a self-revive, which could save entire teams from horrifying team-sweeping events. Also, it could get the remaining team mates out of a pinch. Dawn Blade just gives you a cool flame sword, but still, is really rad.

I’d probably bring the self-revive feature back into Dawn Blade somehow, or at least alter things so you could change the full effect of your super like you could in the original.

Uh... Why is my picture in this...?

Well, anyway, I don’t have a lot! Is it fair to say the Persona 4 Arena games? Haha, I mean they’re kind of an anime based on a video game, but they’ve very much anime video games, and they’ve very good!

I played a Full Metal Alchemist game on PS2 once and was very bad at it, so I don’t think that counts. 

It’s probably corny to say, but Dragon Ball Z Boudikai 3 is just the best DBZ game there is. I love Boudikai 2 though, I’m not gonna lie. Flying around in B3 is awesome and fun and feels like you are a part of the world. Secrets like using the Dragon Radar to find all seven dragon balls in each story arc is also super cool because it unlocks tons of new things and secrets. It’s just a really rad game.

Good god Roger. What have you done?! I say this in concern because I know this means you’ve purchased more fidget spinners, and this needs to stop please god.

The Checklist

https://www.okbeast.com/2017/09/08/sword-art-online-episode-17/ - A+ Anime Podcast - Ian Preschel and Nato Johnston

God knows I love to pimp my own stuff here, so this was a podcast I was on! A+ anime is cool and they’re doing a thing where they talk about the first episode of big anime and rate it and talk about it in reflection of the series. I was on with just Nato, and we had a great chat! Longtime A Blog’s Story readers will remember I wrote 4000+ words on Sword Art Online, so go dig those up from the archives!!

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/qk779d/giant-bombs-alex-navarro-joins-us-to-spoil-nier-automata - Nier Automata Spoilercast - Waypoint

Patrick, Austin, and Alex Navarro from GiantBomb all got together and did a great and succinct NA spoilercast earlier this year, and having just finished it this week, It was great to get their perspective. While I’ll save the Nier thoughts and frustrations for another day, this cast really did help put things in perspective for me, and deepen those ideas a bit. Worth a listen if you’ve played!

Whoa man. It’s been a crazy weekend for me, stepping back up my life, and launching a cool new show! Stay tuned for more Farm to Tower, and thank you all so much for participating and reading. Honestly, you all are the best.

Do me a solid in return:

keep it real.

[thesevenseraphs]

Bungie Weekly Update - 3/28/19

This week at Bungie, Lord Saladin is watching you.

The Iron Banner rages on. Once again, players are invited to test their mettle in Crucible combat—with Power enabled. The Iron Burden and Wolf’s Favor are new features we’ve added to mix things up, and rewards have been refreshed to offer two updated weapons and the new Iron Symmachy armor set for each class.

If you haven’t jumped in just yet, Iron Banner bounties have been updated with new objectives, and each bounty will grant a powerful reward. Some quest steps for Thorn and the Recluse also progress faster in the Iron Banner, so if you’re on the hunt for these rewards, now’s the time to grind them out!

Today, we’re focusing on change.

Destiny 2 Update 2.2.1 is on approach, and we have another round of server-side changes coming to Gambit and Gambit Prime Matchmaking to tune your experience.

Refreshing

Each Tuesday, Guardians look forward to a new set of objectives and challenges to complete in the world of Destiny 2—rotating Crucible modes, new bounties to complete, and every so often, a Curse Week in the Dreaming City.

For some time now, we’ve been encountering issues where some of our resets would catch bad streaks, preventing players from completing various Triumphs or earning their desired Titles. We’ve taken some time to address these issues and wanted to give an update on status.

Nightfalls

This week, the Corrupted is available for Forsaken owners to complete. If this is the last checkmark you need for the Dreaming City Seal, make sure you head to The Dreaming City before the weekly reset!

Moving forward, we’ll be putting effort into preventing streaks where specific Nightfalls appear multiple weeks in a row or don’t appear at all for months, and we’ll be making sure your experience tackling strikes associated with Seals isn’t feast or famine.

Ada-1 Weapon Frames

While weapon frames aren’t tied to any specific Seals, we understand that players are on the hunt for new and exciting rolls on their favorite weapons. Since Black Armory released, there have been a few streaks where Sniper Rifle or Machine Gun frames didn’t appear for many weeks in a row.

In Destiny 2 Update 2.2.1, Ada-1 will begin offering all weapon frames each week. While players will still be limited in how many different frames they may acquire per week, we are removing the weekly rotation.

As Destiny 2 continues to evolve throughout the Annual Pass and beyond, we’ll continue to deliver quality-of-life changes like the ones described above to address common feedback items. Some changes may come more quickly than others, but we’ll continue to deploy updates to provide a better player experience. Speaking of these changes, read on for a quick preview of our next update!

Destiny 2 Update 2.2.1 Preview

Tentatively planned for April 9, Destiny 2 Update 2.2.1 will bring a variety of quality-of-life changes and bug fixes. Below is a short list of topics that we commonly see in the wild. Note, if any issues are found in the final weeks of development, the following may change or be delayed. We’ll be sure to keep you updated on status as we get closer to release.

Dreaming City cosmetics

Drop rates for the Ghost, ship, and Sparrow have been doubled, tripled, or more for their respective activities

Last Wish cosmetics

Drop rates for the Ghost, ship, and Sparrow have been doubled, tripled, or more for their respective checkpoints

One Thousand Voices

This Exotic will continue to be rare among players, but we’ve tuned the drop weights to give slightly better chances than what are currently available

Increasing drop rates for various Lore Books

Cayde’s Stash

Dreaming City

Tangled Shore

Invitations of the Nine

Currently, players must complete an Invitation of the Nine by Tuesday reset in order to have a new invitation appear on Friday

After Update 2.2.1, players have through Thursday’s reset at 10AM to complete the invitation

Nightfall Power Handicap

In Season of the Drifter, the Five of Swords card was updated to apply score multipliers only after setting a Power handicap of 100+

In Update 2.2.1, we’ll be adding +25 and Max Handicap buttons to help players set their handicaps more efficiently

Destiny 2 Update 2.2.1 will also kick off Arc Week. Be sure to check back next week for information on how we’ll be celebrating Arc Energy in Season of the Drifter.

Security Update

Members of our Security Response Team spend their days swinging the banhammer against those suspected of cheating. They also inform players they they need to work on improving their network connections. This week, we have a few updates on their efforts.

Security Response Team: Our mandate is to safeguard the experience of our players against those opponents who would detract from your fun in the Destiny universe. Today, we want to talk about two different initiatives we’ve been focused on recently.

Aimbots vs Macros

It’s important to us that people with disabilities be able to use accessibility tools, which sometimes include simple automation. It’s one of the reasons why we fixed the Titan Skating macro issue in-game, instead of simply punishing people running automation tools. However, there is a clear line between macros and aimbots. Players who stray into the latter territory will find themselves no longer welcome in the Destiny universe. We’re currently in the process of banning a number of players on PC who have been detected using aimbots to unnaturally augment their skill. Defeating your opponents, whether they’re AI or other Guardians, should always be about your own skill. We’ll continue to make sure that’s the case.

Plugging In

In December, we announced that we would begin issuing warnings and restrictions to players with extremely poor network connections that lasted for a prolonged period of time. We’re happy to report that 90% of the players who received a warning have not been detected for having a poor connection again.

For people who have struggled to improve their connection after receiving a warning, we want to be clear: Stability is more important than speed. Latency and Packet Loss are the biggest concerns for Destiny, not throughput (mbps). Here are a few choice quotes from our Network Troubleshooting Guide: “While average bandwidth usage is considerably lower, Destiny may request up to 1 Mbps download and upload bandwidth. Destiny creates connections between a player's console, Bungie’s servers, and other players in a unique way. As such, network performance in other games and applications is often NOT a good indicator that the network is setup for a stable connection to Destiny. The most common sources of lag and frequent disconnects are high latency and packet loss.”

We encourage players who receive a warning or restriction due to their network connection to visit the Latency and Packet Loss section of our Network Troubleshooting Guide.

Finally: Thank you to the players who have used the Player Report features in-game and on bungie.net to help us identify opponents who are hurting your experience. While we’ll never rely on Player Reports alone to issue restrictions, it is incredibly helpful for corroborating the hard data we gather.

Time for Prime

Two weeks ago, we made some adjustments to Gambit Matchmaking to help even the playing field. To give a refresh of what the change was and why it was made, here’s some context from a previous edition of ‘This Week at Bungie’:

Gambit is a team-based activity. As such, players who are in a pre-made fireteam have a communication advantage. To offset that advantage, we've raised the internal skill rating of pre-made fireteams to pull in higher skill enemies to fight against. With this change, even as a solo player, you'll still have a chance. Plus, your other matched fireteam mates should be higher skilled as well.

After modifying normal Gambit settings to try to create fairer matches, we re-evaluated the settings and have further tweaks to try to get them even fairer. We’ve also now had a chance to collect data on Gambit Prime and are applying these changes to Gambit Prime matchmaking to take advantage of our findings. The changes to Gambit Prime matchmaking are live now. If you encounter any issues, please report your experience to the #Help forum on bungie.net.

Iron Support

Whether you’re on the road to increasing your Power or taking your first steps as a Guardian, Destiny Player Support is at the ready to get you the information you need for success. If you need an assist, you can find then in the #Help forum, or content authored by the team on help.bungie.net.

This is their report.

Saladin’s Pride

This week, we kicked off the first Iron Banner for Season of the Drifter. Unlike other activities, which may require Destiny 2: Forsaken or Annual Pass ownership, Iron Banner is available to all Guardians in Destiny 2 who wish to test their mettle.

Last week, we highlighted some key differences in this season’s Iron Banner experience. For players joining us in progress, we’ve got a convenient summary below.

Changes in Season of the Drifter:

Iron Burden: This consumable reduces a player’s Power by 100 in Iron Banner and is available for purchase from Lord Saladin.

Wolf’s Favor: This consumable increases a player’s Power by 100 (to a player’s cap) in Iron Banner and can be earned by daily and weekly challenges.

Wizened Rebuke: This curated and Masterworked Fusion Rifle is unlocked by defeating 500 enemies in Iron Banner while under the effect of Iron Burden before Season of the Drifter ends.

Weight of Guilt: This emblem is unlocked by completing all weekly bounties during an Iron Banner event. Weight of Guilt tracks higher-Power opponents defeated while under the effects of Iron Burden.

Bounties: All Iron Banner bounties will now grant a powerful reward upon completion as well as unlock direct-purchase rewards from Lord Saladin.

We are also tracking two issues that players may encounter in Iron Banner:

The Weight of Guilt Emblem: We're aware of an issue where the cost to purchase The Weight of Guilt emblem is not exposed to players after they unlock it for purchase from Lord Saladin.

This emblem costs 40 Iron Banner tokens once players have unlocked it for purchase by completing all of Lord Saladin's Iron Banner bounties during a single event.

"Iron Ruby" Iron Banner Shader: We're investigating an issue where players can't attain this shader.

For more information on Iron Banner, players should visit our Iron Banner Guide.

Delayed Invitations

In recent weeks, Xûr has begun offering Annual Pass players his Invitations of the Nine. These invitations are short-term pursuits that reward players with powerful gear and lore experiences.

Players who accept these invitations should be aware that they must be completed by the following weekly reset in order for Xûr to offer a new invitation in his next visit. Players who complete an Invitation of the Nine after the weekly reset will need to wait another week to become eligible for a new invitation from Xûr.

Prime Time

This week, Gambit Prime features its final map before all maps enter the Gambit Prime playlist rotation. Players who want to get their uninterrupted fill of Emerald Coast have the rest of this week to do so, until the weekly reset next Tuesday. If, at that time, you and your clanmates decide to relive the glory days of uninterrupted gameplay on your favorite map, we’ve got good news! Next Tuesday (4/2), Gambit Prime unlocks in Gambit Private Matches for Annual Pass players. There, players can choose their favorite Gambit Prime setup, including map, encounter variants, high value target spawn availability, and whether or not Power is enabled during invasions.

If you’re itching to learn the ropes and set up your own Gambit match, classic Gambit Private Matches are available right now for Destiny 2: Forsaken players.