Morning folks. I am still playing an excessive amount of Destiny 2, but I am not sure if I have any new thoughts to add to it. Right now I want to be talking about how I wish Blizzard would pull their heads out and do the right thing so we could be friends again, however I get the distinct feeling you are sick to hell of talking about it. I know this because anytime I mention or forward it, I slowly bleed a few more followers in the process. I care less about that than it sounds, because really… I have no clue why the majority of you follow me at all at this point. You are either in it for me and my nonsense or you are probably one foot out the door already. Instead of writing something on my own I am going to share a few things with you. I have a fondness for YouTube think pieces. A lot of the conversation that happens back and forth between myself and the AggroChat crew is discussion of the pieces that make up gaming. Sometimes we record an episode that goes down these avenues, but more often than not that discussion just dissipates into the ether because it was for our own benefit and not necessarily something we wanted to share with the world. That is not to say that there are not an awful lot of great think pieces out there so this morning I am going to drop a few that I find cogent.

First off let me state that I have some issues with the presentation of this video. It bugs me to no end that he keeps saying the phrase “the lady that I live with”, but what he is saying is nonetheless interesting and a conversation that I have had a few times with Tam especially. Gaming has a vocabulary that we are just arguably better at speaking and comprehending now than we were at the dawning age of MMORPGs for example. There are extreme hurdles for someone to get up to that level of fluency and the games we play really don’t do any favors in that department. I dislike tutorialization as much as the next person, but this is still a worthy watch as it talks about the struggles of someone with minimal exposure to these “rules”.

Folding Ideas is a great think piece channel, and one of the better ones is once again relevant with all of the discussion of Fornite over the last few days. The video presents the treatise that modern games set out to create just a tiny bit of discomfort and shame so that we will spend more money in order to remove that. That they set us up for a world where we are constantly dissatisfied with the state of affairs and the only way out is to spend more money. I think this is key to understanding the “seasonal mastery track” thing that is infecting games, and why skins matter.

Since I am playing an awful lot of Destiny, I have also been getting quite a lot of Destiny videos suggested to me. This one is worth a watch because honestly it feels a lot like how I feel at times about the game. I am super positive about what the future for this franchise might hold in their presently untethered from Activision state. Shadowkeep in its “smaller size” is actually quite possibly the best expansion that Bungie has come out with yet. I feel like I have so many options at any given time and they are all equally rewarding with different sets of items that I could be chasing. The game feels better than it has since the end of Destiny 1, and personally hope they abandon the notion of ever creating a Destiny 3 and just keep making this version of the game better. That is all I have to share this morning. If you have some really good think pieces, feel free to share them in the comments below.

This weekend I spent most of my time in Destiny 2, and as a result I started working furiously on trying to knock out a bunch of objectives that had been clogging my inventory. During the podcast on Saturday night I spent the entirety hanging out with Thalen and working on some objectives he had surrounding the completion of escalation protocol on Mars. It is funny how much more reasonable that seems to be when you are grouped up with at least one more person. We managed to get it through I believe wave 5 before ultimately having to retreat and start over. I miss the days when you could drop down on planet as a solo and get all of the way to seven.

The highlight of the weekend however is that I finally got through the Last Word exotic weapon quest. This one features a few sections that are a colossal pain in the ass. The biggest of these is the pure Crucible section, that involves moving a gauge to 100. A guardian kill gives you 2 points and a death takes 1 point away. I apparently had a good weekend as far as crucible goes and found myself only a few kills away from completing this objective and thankfully managed to push through. The next step involved farming a bunch of things up… and then getting 25 “revenge” medals from the Crucible, which weirdly went way faster than I would have expected. Finally I had one painful mission to get through and a duel with a hive that I failed out like 20 times before finally getting through and claiming my weapon.

Another thing I spent time on this weekend was working through the Rat King’s Crew quest. I never really prioritized this one because it isn’t a weapon I would likely ever use. I really do not enjoy sidearms in Destiny. However it has clogged my quest log for ages and I spent part of yesterday getting Thalen caught up. Sadly I needed to run out and get some errands taken care of so we only got one of the two crucible matches in. I think after that we just need to run a Nightfall… of which I am really hoping that the modern Ordeal style ones will work.

I also managed to get the last piece of exotic armor for Titans this weekend, because apparently Xur’s overly expensive engram finally includes the Season of Opulence gear. I had read somewhere that this was the case so I went ahead and gambled a stack of Legendary Shards on it. There is apparently a super powerful build based around these legs that I might try at some point. Mostly I just wanted to check another space off on my list of exotics. I need to start working on the same for Hunter and Warlock as I am way behind on both of those.

All told I am up to 927 light and my Hunter is up to 919 without the best weapons swapped over. At some point I will push up the Warlock as well so I can have all three active and at reasonable light levels. Most of my running around with Thalen on Saturday night was with the Hunter, and I only swapped back to the Titan to get exotic quest steps done. In my downtime I am working on slowly knocking out other Triumphs that I never got when I transferred from PS4 to PC initially. There are a bunch of lost sectors that I have never quiet collected for example, or region chests opened. For the time being it seems like Destiny 2 is my main game, so I am settling in and finding stuff to keep me happy.