Limited Content Frustrations

Last night I spent my evening trying to catch up on Destiny and quite honestly failing miserably at doing so. The Dawning has been a complete failure for me in actually getting it finished. Over the Christmas break I fell into a giant Witcher shaped hole that I have yet to pull myself out of. The game that suffered most because of this is Destiny 2 and for the most part I am okay with this. What it ultimately means is that I never finished unlocking the sparrow because I didn’t deliver 200 packages, Again I am mostly okay with this because I have been trying really hard to play what I want when I want rather than forcing myself down some tube towards specific chase content. A lot of my actions over the last several years have been governed by FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out. Games have factored themselves in a way as to tweak your anxiety centers and make you feel like you need to do a certain thing within a certain time frame or you are in some way failing. This is all to drive up the concurrency numbers so that it feels like the game is alive and well. As a result so much content is doled out in limited time bundles that require significant commitment in order to successfully gain whatever carrot happens to be dangling from the stick. The problem here is that when everyone is doing this thing it means that you are always going to feel somehow like you are failing leading to a pretty miserable gaming experience. I’ve never been the sort of player who only plays one game, and it feels like so much of the design of modern online games is focused towards trying to make players only play the one game. As a result for the last few years I have sat back feeling unsatisfied with my gaming, knowing that while I was playing game A I was missing out on something in B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L. The Dawning for example was the only holiday event that I participated in during the 2019 extended holiday season. Pretty much every game had one going on, but I decided to nope out of all of them for my own sanity. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy Holidays in games, it is just that I am tired of being forced to consume content on someone else’s schedule. There is nothing I enjoy more than the feeling of returning to a game and having a massive stack full of content to enjoy. When I return to SWTOR or FFXIV I tend to do so with enough of a lag between visits that I have a few weeks worth of catching up waiting for me. Nothing feels worse however than finding out that you missed out on something cool because the devs decided it was only going to be available during a brief window. I would personally so much rather see development time spent towards evergreen content that is always going to be there and available to the players rather than limited time flash in the pan gimmick content. Much of why I have never quite returned to Anthem for example is that they keep setting up limited time events and doing nothing to broaden the total game experience as a whole.
The one thing that I do appreciate about Destiny is that while I never seem to complete any of the content during a specific season, they seem to give me more wiggle room about this. Generally speaking if you get one of the big set piece quests for a season, you can then chew away on completing it over however long that it takes. For example during the Season of the Drifter they introduced a Gambit themed Heavy Machinegun called 21% Delirium which involved a ton of grinding to get. The final step of which I achieved last night by getting the “Notorious Hustle” triumph. I had been on the Envoys and Primevals defeated step for what felt like several seasons, because you have to be the person who scored the final damage on a target in order to get credit.
I am now the proud owner of another HMG, this time dealing Arc Damage… which I believe is not something I had in a legendary package. Traditionally if I needed an Arc Damage Machinegun I rocked Thunderlord taking up my Exotic weapon slot. All it all it seems like a pretty solid weapon, but I also have not had much time to spend with it as I mostly did Gambit and Crucible last night. The funny thing about the entire process is that I did in fact log in to see how far I was from completing the Dawning event, and when I saw that I still needed like some 60 packages I realized it was not going to happen. There is a part of my brain that is screaming, but I am desperately trying to deaden it as I figure out how to play on my own terms again. 2020 feels like a significant year because I am trying to do a bunch of things that I want to do. So far the reading every night thing is going extremely well, apart from the fact that several nights I have stayed up reading way later than I had intended to. I’ve finished one book and am 27% through the second book which is about par for the course for how fast I read. The Bel Folks Stuff thing is also going really well as shockingly most everyone I have talked to about it has accepted. Still in the process of reaching out to people, but like I only have had one no and one maybe for very valid reasons. Pretty much everyone has just been on board with this nonsense and I am kinda floored by it. On the gaming front however I am still very much adapting to trying to do what I want to do and stop chasing that forever game. It is going to take some time, because I spent a decade letting my anxiety over missing out on something cool dictate my gaming schedule.

Games of the Decade: 2017

Horizon Zero Dawn – PS4
Once again I am continuing down the path to 2019 as I talk through the games of this decade that were important to me. Going back this morning and assembling my picks for 2017 made me realize what a freaking phenomenal year for gaming this was. There are so many games that would have been game of the year… were they not up against other competition. Once again a preface of that this is my personal list of the games that were important to me during the year. Your list probably looks a bit different and there are a few games that were left off because I never quite got into them the way that I should.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Nintendo Switch
Lets be honest… this is the game that sold a bunch of switches. This is absolutely the reason why I bought mine and even managed to start out on the WiiU and then rebought it and restarted from scratch when I ultimately purchased my Switch. I have issues with one gameplay mechanic, and that is the breakable weapons. However even taking that into account there is no denying how good of a game this is. I ultimately greatly prefer playing it now on Cemu running the WiiU game on emulator so that I can apply a mod that removes weapon durability. There is just something about this game world and the pacing that make me want to get out and explore. The fact that through climbing and stamina you can both gate your progress but also feel like you can get anywhere if you try hard enough kept me pushing forward and trying to find the next secret. If I could remove the gyroscope nonsense and the weapon durability this would have been the perfect game.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins

Assassin’s Creed: Origins – PC
I’ve made attempts in the past to break into the Assassin’s Creed series but there have ultimatley been two obstacles. Firstly they are games that were designed for the console in mind and seem to be way more reasonable when played with a controller than a mouse and keyboard. Secondly they were games that felt defined by a bunch of mini games and things like rooftop chases, which some sneaking around that felt forced and limiting. AC:O pushes the Assassin’s Creed game into a full open world experience where you explore large swaths of the Ancient Egyptian countryside and get a real sense of place and setting that make it feel like you are part of something much larger than effectively being trapped in a single city. The combat itself also seems to be way more forgiving of my desire to rush into combat and not stealth at all, which makes for a better experience personally. I love this game and at some point I will get around to playing the follow up Odyssey.

Night in the Woods

Night in the Woods – PC
While there are significant issues surrounding the co-creator of Night in the Woods, I cannot write the game off because it is extremely powerful. It spoke to me on such a primal level because it effectively could have been my story. I grew up in a tiny town much like the one depicted in the game, and was one of the few of my friends who successfully transitioned into college… but the fact that I lived at home for the first two years commuting back and forth made for a bizarre experience. I was living in two different worlds… the world that remained the same as High School where I saw the same people I did then on a regular basis… and this new fledgling world of experiences as I took my first steps into college. Like Mae I reached a point in my Junior year where I came perilously close to dropping out of School entirely. This game means so much to me, and nothing is probably ever going to change that.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

Mass Effect Andromeda – PC
While this game was universally panned by critics and social media… I loved it and will be forever saddened by the fact we wont see more of this setting. This is the game that YouTube killed because of some pretty bad issues in the early release candidate that were more or less fixed in the first patch. However by that time all of the damage had been done and all of the demo real of horrific facial contortions was shot giving it an endless stream of memetic images. I liked what this game did to Mass Effect by opening it up and bringing us to an entirely new galaxy with its own issues, while at the same time providing hints of the conflicts from the original game that ultimately lead to the splintering of the Andromeda project. I want to see more of this setting and I am hoping at some point EA allows Bioware to revisit it.

Destiny 2

Destiny 2 – PS4/PC
I love Destiny as a franchise, and while I would have greatly preferred that Destiny 2 didn’t exist from the standpoint of that I would have rather seen the first game transition to the PC and get the necessary upgrades it required, I was okay with the reset because it meant I could finally play the game on my platform of choice. Destiny 2 had a rocky road but today we are experiencing a renaissance of some of the best content that has ever existed in a game of this sort. All of that ground work comes back to the transition from the first game to the sequel and the subtle changes that were made to the way the game functioned. It has been an interesting ride but one that began back in 2017, and for that it will always deserve a space on these sort of lists.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn – PS4
Horizon Zero Dawn was easily my game of the year for 2017, and would be a heavy contender if I was trying to make a game of the decade. I love the setting and how it takes the post apocalyptic genre into some very new and interesting directions. I love Aloy the protagonist because she represents a new kind of character that we really haven’t seen much of to this point. I am absolutely hungry for more of this series and I fully expect to see a new game in this sequence release as a launch title for the PlayStation 5. I would love to see this release simultaneously on the PlayStation and the PC at the same time, but I somehow doubt that is actually going to ever be a thing. If you have yet to play this… it is worth the purchase of a console just for this game alone.

Cookies for Vance

The dawning event is live and once again we are baking cookies for the various NPCs that can be found in Destiny 2. This was a really fun event last year and was worth a mountain of experience. This time around it seems as though we can keep doing bounties indefinitely as Eva once again has the ability for us to buy more bounties. I didn’t get time to play nearly as much as I would have liked last night because we had holiday errands to run, but I did manage to knock out the first few quests and unlock both the chase weapon and the first form of the sparrow. Something of note… the game seemingly remembers all of the packaged you delivered last year and as a result I already had the “deliver packages” requirements finished.
Last year I posted a long list of all of the ingredients, and these are largely still valid. However I am going to copy and paste from that original post to keep them concise. Essentially every recipe requires three components, a green item that you get by killing specific types of mobs, a blue item that you get from specific kinds of kills, and then dawning essence which drops from pretty much everything while the event is going on. You get 5 for example from completing a Heroic Public event, a few from opening chests etc. you are going to need 15 to craft anything until you can “masterwork” the oven… which last year was unlocked by crafting one each of all of the packages if I am remembering correctly.

Green Items – Based on Mob

  • Cabal Oil – Kill any Cabal Enemies
  • Chitin Powder – Kill any Hive Enemies
  • Dark Ether Cane – Kill any Scorn Enemies
  • Ether Cane – Kill any Fallen Enemies
  • Taken Butter – Kill any Taken Enemies
  • Vex Milk – Kill any Vex Enemies

Blue Items – Based on Kill/Damage Type

  • Bullet Spray – Kills made with “Machine Gun” type weapons – Auto Rifle/SMG/HMG
  • Delicious Explosions – Explosive kills aka Class Grenades/Rocket Launcher/Grenade Launcher
  • Electric Flavor – Arc Damage based Kills
  • Flash of Inspiration – A kill that generates an Orb of Light – Supers or Masterworks
  • Impossible Heat – Solar Damage based Kills
  • Null Taste – Void Damage based Kills
  • Perfect Taste – Precision Damage Kills – aka Headshots
  • Personal Touch – Melee Based Kills or Melee Abilities like Thrown Weapons
  • Sharp Flavor – Sword Kills… not sure if Hunter Knives can proc or not
  • Finishing Touch – kills while using a Finishing move
  • Balanced Flavors – kills with marksman weapon types so Bow, Scout and Sniper
  • Pinch of Light – drops rarely while generating Orbs of Light, appears to not drop from Masterworks
  • Multifaceted Flavors – occasionally happens when registering a multi-kill on any mob type
  • Superb Flavor – drops from super kills against any mob type

The Recipe List

Each recipe requires 15 Dawning Essence for the base oven and I believe 10 once you can Masterwork it.
  • Alkane Dragee Cookies (Sloane – Titan) – Chitin Powder and Bullet Spray
  • Burnt Edge Transits (Master Rahool – Tower) – Any two ingredients other than those of the recipes below aka the failure state item
  • Candy Dead Ghosts (The Spider – Tangled Shore ) – Dark Ether Cane and Flash of Inspiration
  • Chocolate Ship Cookies (Amanda Holliday – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Null Taste
  • Dark Chocolate Motes (The Drifter – Tower Annex) – Taken Butter and Null Taste
  • Eliksni Birdseed (Hawthorne – Tower) – Ether Cane and Personal Touch
  • Gentleman’s Shortbread (Devrim Kay – EDZ) – Ether Cane and Perfect Taste
  • Gjallardoodles (Zavala – Tower) – Ether Cane and Delicious Explosion – This was a freebie though and the mats Eva gives you
  • Ill-Fortune Cookies (Petra Venj – Dreaming City) – Dark Ether Cane and Impossible Heat
  • Infinite Forest Cake (Failsafe – Nessus) – Vex Milk and Impossible Heat
  • Javelin Mooncake (Ana Bray – Mars) – Chitin Powder and Sharp Flavor
  • Radiolarian Pudding (Asher Mir – Io) – Vex Milk and Electric Flavor
  • Strange Cookies (Xur – Varies Weekly) – Taken Butter and Electric Flavor
  • Telemetry Tapioca (Banshee-44 – Tower) – Vex Milk and Bullet Spray
  • Traveler Donut Holes (Ikora Rey – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Flash of Inspiration
  • Vanilla Blades (Lord Shaxx – Tower) – Cabal Oil and Sharp Flavor
  • Fractal Rolls (Brother Vance – Mercury) – Vex Milk and Pinch of Light
  • Ascendant Oatmeal Raisin Cookie (Eris Morn – Moon) – Chitin Powder and Finishing Touch
  • Hackberry Tart (Benedict 99-40 – Tower Annex) – Cabal Oil and Multifaceted Flavors
  • Hot Crossfire Buns (Ada-1 – Tower Annex) – Ether Cane and Balanced Flavors
  • Fried Sha-dough (Visage of Calus – Triumph Hall?) – Dark Ether Cane and Superb Flavor
  • Lavender Ribbon Cookies (Saint-14 – Sundail?) – Vex Milk and Personal Touch
  • Thousand-Layer Cookie (Riven – Dreaming City?) – Taken Butter and Delicious Explosion
Having not made all of these recipes yet, there are a few I am not quite certain about how to deliver them. Namely Visage of Calus, Saint-14 and Riven… and for those I have given my guess. But also indicated that it is a guess by slapping a ? at the end.
The chase weapon I got pretty quickly after doing an initial series of turn ins. It looks and feels like a slightly modified Antiope-D. The slightly faster rate of fire makes it feel a little more jumpy than the Antiope, but all it all it is a reasonable option for a primary slot submachinegun. More than likely I will keep using Exit Strategy in this slot when I have need for a Kinetic submac, but this is a reasonable option and is kinda cool looking if gold and blue is your thing. There is an ornament on the store that makes it look really nice, but has the standard 700 silver pricetag attached to it.
I am a much bigger fan of the vehicle this year. The sleigh was somewhat entertaining… but the sound effects associated with each time you boosted got on my nerves. I’ve not had a chance to actually use this one but it seems like it is more standard fare with each unlock just adding an additional perk as opposed to the gimmicks like glimmer explosions. It is more or less a snow mobile and I am fine with this. My hope is tonight to spend more time working on both the Saint-14 quest and baking more cookies. I’ve already gotten 3 levels however since starting the event, so I feel like it is a good time to grind things up. What were your thoughts about dawning so far? I like that the event took the packages delivered last year into account for rewards. I am bummed that SRL the Sparrow Racing League did not make another appearance. That is the one event from Destiny 1 that I miss the most, and I am hoping that someday they bring it back as an actual game mode.

Martyr’s Retribution

It was a thoroughly frustrating weekend, so instead of a post in the games of the decade series, you are instead getting a general Destiny post. I took off work Friday and thought I was being awesome, running around and taking care of a bunch of things like renewing my drivers license. Then Friday night I got a text that would ultimately dominate the entire weekend. I have a warning set on my account to text me any time a transaction over $300 is placed against my bank account. At 6:13 pm I got a text saying that a “check” for $797.51 was written against my account. I knew I did not have any bills queued up for that amount, so it lead me to go sifting through my bank account where there were three other unauthorized transactions. This lead to a back and forth with the bank call center Friday night, and by the end of the evening them realizing that it wasn’t just some sort of a printing error and that someone had faked out checks against my account under what appeared to be the actual name of the person commuting the fraud. Saturday this meant we had to go to a branch location that had lobby hours and close out our original account and open a new one… which then meant I spent the rest of the day trying to make sure everything that I had set to bank draft for utilities and such was pointed at the new account. We also had to file a police report, which I don’t actually expect to go very far… even though we were more or less able to find the guy with a series of google searches. It appears the guy used his real name, real date of birth and potentially real drivers license number when writing the checks and there is a felon that matches both name and birth date in the OKC metro where two of the checks were written.
Between flurries of dealing with the stress I played an awful lot of fairly incognito Destiny, and apparently am really bad at paying attention to messages that are coming in while I am playing. Poor Squirrel tried to reach me on practically every platform to see if I wanted to run a Nightfall. Thalen similarly tried to ping me multiple times over the weekend, and I was seemingly unaware of any of it until much later. My mind was likely going through the permutations of “which account did I forget to move over” while mindlessly grinding away in Destiny. I did however in my travels manage to pull the Exotic sparrow from the Arms Dealer nightfall which was kinda cool.
The hero of the weekend is Martyr’s Retribution… or Marty as I have heard the community referring to it. This is a brand new type of grenade launcher that fires a Titan thermite grenade out along the ground that follows the grenade being ejected. As a result of this behavior you use this basically like you are throwing an extra grenade to help soften up any enemies in front of you. This can be used to devastating effect in the crucible where I racked up several medals in the very short time I spent doing that this weekend. The most important trait for me personally is Auto Loading Holster, which allows me to play in a way where I fire this off, then immediately swap to my primary and then after getting some kills swap back to fire off another round that has been reloaded for me.
Another good get for the weekend is a significantly better roll of the Breachlight sidearm… which coincidentally pairs very nicely with Marty. I love this sidearm and having one with outlaw and multi-kill clip works well. I did really like Vorpal blade as far as new weapon perks go, but this one is overall better suited for my play style. I would have rather had something else in the second column than Drop Mag, but I guess this is the way of Destiny. There is always a more perfect roll out there somewhere waiting to be found.
The other take away I have from the weekend, is that I have started to see a bunch of weapons that I have not seen at all since Year 1. The Old Fashioned for example is one of those, and while this is not an amazing roll with hip fire and pulse monitor… it was interesting to see it show up regardless. This maybe means that we finally have the full compliment of weapons available from banshee again, as for some time it seems like I kept getting the same ones over and over. I am hoping to see a weapon that has eluded me completely on the PC… the Jiangshi AR4 Omolon Auto Rifle. It seems as though according to the Wiki you may be able to get Uriel’s Gift in random roll variant which would be similarly awesome. I hope the new week brings me some stress relief… but I know it probably won’t considering I have to do a ton of stuff to close out the year since as of next Monday I will be off for two weeks.