Halloween Events in general are my favorite in games, in spite of never actually getting the Headless Horseman mount in World of Warcraft. In Destiny we have always had the Festival of the Lost which arrives and decorates the tower in a spoopy theme. The festival has become a bunch of things over the years but traditionally it has focused on two objectives… wearing paper masks of various critters from Destiny lore and swapping candy. Starting last year Bungie introduced the Haunted Forest and with it a weapon to chase that would spawn in with maximum power level and fully masterworked.
This year that chase weapon is the Braytech Werewolf and I managed to finish mine last night. This is a reskinned version of the Braytech Winterwolf and comes with a curated roll of Armor-Piercing Rounds, Zen Moment, Multi-Kill Clip and a mastery stat of Range. All in all it is a pretty solid Auto Rifle and I spent a little bit last night running around with it. The only negative is that it has a goofy recoil direction of 74 making it impossible to easily correct for its deviation unless you push it well past 100. There is an excellent video that explains the recoil direction stat that I would check out. The short of it is that recoil direction is a wave that decreases in amplitude as you approach 100. Even intervals of 10 are going to skew up and to the right, Odd intervals of 10 are going to skew up and to the left and intervals of 5 or pushing the number all the way to 100 will produce recoil that is more or less straight up. So having 74 makes it CLOSE to vertical but just slightly to the left.
Getting this mask is locked behind the Master of Disguise triumph that asks you to get all 5 of the masks from Eva Levante during the 2019 Festival of the Lost. These masks are all gained through spending Chocolate Strange Coins. The most expensive and the creepiest of these masks has to be The Drifter pictured above. The humanoid masks always end up feeling the weirdest, but then again Michael Myers in the Halloween series is supposedly wearing a low budget William Shatner mask so I guess that is part of it as well. In order to get all of the masks you are going to get a total of 150 Chocolate Strange Coins. The prices are as follows:
Once you have earned this Triumph you have to actually go into your triumphs screen and click on it in order for the game to register it successfully. Eva Levante will then allow you to purchase your own Braytech Werewolf for 1000 candy. After getting your first Werewolf you can pick up random rolls from that point forward for 250 Candy, 5000 Glimmer and 5 Legendary Shards.
There is a sixth free mask available but it is tied behind the Days of the Dead triumph that asks you to complete seven other triumphs during the season. Doing so will get you the paper mache visage of Eris Morn. These achievements range from collecting candy and chocolate strange coins to completing the candy trading quest that I talked about yesterday. There is a secret triumph that I am betting is requiring you to hit at least the 9th branch of the Haunted Forest. Last year there was a similar Triumph associated with the 7th branch.
With a number of the achievements and bounties each day associated with the Haunted Forest, you are going to be spending a lot of time in there. I ran around over the last two nights with my friends Thalen and x1101 and without really pushing it we were pretty easily capable of getting seven branches each time. Were we to focus a little more and get x1101 a little more light, we could probably start doing nine clears. The thing about the Haunted Forest is that thanks to your masks that you have equipped… Heavy Ammo drops like candy. I plan on infusing up a Thunderlord and trying to see how far I can make it without using any other weapons. I have a feeling that will greatly speed up our clear times.
One of the hold outs from the original Festival of the Lost is the Candy Trading quest. This involves starting at one NPC and eventually working your way back to that same NPC, swapping candy each time with another that might be interested in the item you just got. In the original Destiny this quest chain more or less died at Eris Morn who gave you a Box of Raisins… and nobody wanted a box of Raisins. This year it begins with Eris on the moon who still has her raisins. However it turns out that maybe the Spider in the Tangled Shore is interested. This kicks off a chain of events and mini quests that require some candy and some of the ever so important Chocolate Strange Coins. Since I had not really seen a run down of the sequence I thought I would create one this morning.
Spider – The Tangled Shore
Spider gives you the quest called Even Handed, which requires the following kills with any weapon or ability.
12 Scorn
12 Fallen
12 Cabal
12 Hive
Handing in the quest will give you an item that you then need to take to Ana Bray.
Ana Bray – Mars
Ana will give you the quest Armed to the Teeth which requires you to get kills with different types of weapons while on Mars.
10 Power Weapon
10 Energy Weapon
10 Kinetic
Turning in will give you an item that a certain gensym scholar might like.
Asher Mir – Io
Asher will give you the Precisely quest that asks you to make precision kills on two different types of mobs that appear on Io.
10 Precision Vex Kills
10 Precision Taken Kills
Asher will give you an item that he thinks the Followers of Osiris might like.
Brother Vance – Mercury
Brother Vance asks you to make kills with specific elements with the In Your Element quest. These can be done with abilities or with elemental weapons.
10 Void Kills
10 Arc Kills
10 Solar Kills
When you turn in he gives you some Splice Drops that look pretty and taste horrible, aka the perfect candy for an AI.
Failsafe – Nessus
Failsafe is going to give you the Touched by the Light quest which asks you to defeat enemies with your abilities. Since my hammer throws are easily repeatable by reclaiming the hammer each time I used this to get through the quest quickly.
5 Cabal Ability Kills
5 Vex Ability Kills
5 Fallen Ability Kills
Failsafe gives you a treat that maybe your friend in the EDZ might like.
Devrim Kay – EDZ
Devrim tarts the Foregone Conclusions quest which asks you to perform finishers on mobs of various types. To get Fallen I went into the Hallowed Grave lost sector in The Sludge.
5 Taken Finishers
5 Cabal Finishers
5 Fallen Finishers
Upon turning in you get a piece of candy fit for someone in the dreaming city, and off we go to there.
Petra Venj – The Dreaming City
Petra gives us the quest The Best of My Abilities and asks us to do a number of specific ability kills.
5 Melee Kills
5 Grenade Kills
10 Super Kills
After turning in we get a piece of candy that sees us travelling over to Titan.
Sloane – Titan
Sloan wants us to help clean up the rig and gives us the Not In Our House quest asking for kills in specific regions of the rig.
30 Kills in Solarium Region
15 Kills in Festering Halls Region
15 Kills in Arboretum Region
This sends us back to Eris with some candy we think she might like.
Eris Morn – Moon
This quest asks us to equip a specific dance and dance in front of Eris with The Dance of My People quest. This is the dance that we got as kinderguardians and likely no longer have equipped. For each race use the following dances:
Human: City Dance
Awoken: Graceful Dance
Exo: Popping Dance
Satisfied with our performance she hands us a bag of goodies… that includes a toothbrush because she is that kind of killjoy.
I am not sure if this is a fixed number of items in the pouch or if this varies. In my particular satchel I got the following items.
5 Fright Night Shaders
5 Chocolate Strange Coins
3 Enhancement Cores
1 Toothbrush
I also got an achievement unlock as part of it, so for me at least it was worth the extreme time sink. Additionally each step of the quest rewarded a couple of the chocolate strange coins and you need a silly number of those to get all of the masks required to get the new auto rifle.
During the Iron Banner weekend Bungie ran a Double Valor event, and I managed to get two full resets and most of the way to a third. Now things get a little fuzzy, because I swear at some point I saw a note stating that this past weekend was a Gambit Double Infamy event, which caused me to focus in on playing an obsessive amount of Gambit Prime. Now at face value, it feels like it takes way longer to get through a match of Gambit Prime than it does a Crucible match. As a result the entire process of leveling your Infamy feels sluggish at best. So I opted to try and take advantage of whatever resources I happened to have to make it a better experience.
That said… I realized at some point last night that I don’t actually think there was ever a double Infamy event and I have no clue where I saw that stated. That means I ground a completely nonsense amount of Gambit and did in fact get the reset on my own. The reason behind this was that as part of the Notorious Hustle triumph that gates the 21% Delirium Heavy Machinegun I had to get a reset at some point during a season. I find it funny that I knocked out my multikills without issue and now have the Infamy Reset, but am still needing a bunch of Envoy and Primeval kills. I think this is in part because I have gotten randomed into a lot of groups stacked against clan teams lately.
For resetting my rank I picked up a really nice curated roll of the Trust Hand Cannon, which also had a nifty shader I had not seen applied to it called Gambit Chrome. In truth… I am more excited about unlocking a new shader than I am about picking up a curated hand cannon. It is an interesting build with Genesis and Explosive rounds, and I plan on playing around with it a bit in the crucible. Too bad it is not void damage to help out with the Thorn quest. Speaking of which that is probably going to be my next big nonsense push, in order to try and knock that out. I did however get the Lumina quest to 78% buy running around with rose equipped during most of my Gambit matches. That is actually a shockingly good Hand Cannon.
All of the time spent in Gambit allowed me to finish out this seasons Gambit Pinnacle weapon the Exit Strategy. I’ve yet to spend any time playing with it, but I figure at some point I will give it a shot. I love my SMBs but I tend to prefer them in the secondary slot with an energy affix rather than kinetic ones. I may play a few matches with Trust in my energy slot and Exit Strategy in my kinetic, which is effectively a similar loadout to what I have been running of late. SMBs have more or less replaced shotguns for me because they can burn things down super fast but don’t run into the ammunition woes that Shotguns do during strikes. I have an Iron Banner SMB with High Caliber rounds which is nice for staggering out a major while I burn it down.
I think I talked about this a bit yesterday, but I hit a weird streak where Gambit was paying out like a way too loose slot machine. I managed to pick up three of this exact weapon within the span of two matches. I mean the curated roll is fine, I like that it has multi-kill clip on it… I am ambivalent to it having slideways since I am not used to sliding a ton in battle. Again it serves the problem of being a kinetic slot SMB when I am not sued to using them in that slot normally, but I could mix things up a bit. Deconstructing the spares however was a good source of materials.
Also as I said before I picked up seven different exotics dropping from random majors in Gambit. I’ve become another one of those Titans running around with the One-Eyed Mask equipped. I gotta say it is damned handy in Gambit for finding where the invaders are. There are a lot of times you get tagged by someone while running across the map and One-Eyed Mask does an excellent job of drawing a giant bullseye on them so you can go hunt them down. I still think it was just weird that I hit a spot in the randomizer where the game was paying out significantly. I wish I could somehow get banshee on the other hand to keep handing me the same three weapons.
All in all it was a fun grind, and I have reached a point where I like Gambit Prime a lot better than I realized. I have an inventory full of synths and I need to sort out what exactly to do with them. I should really play some Reckoning so I can get a full set of the Reaper armor given that apparently that is the role I play the most often in Gambit Prime. I like burning down those High Value targets. I wish I was a little better at invading and also killing invaders, but apparently I spend the least amount of time picking up large quantities of motes. This week however… is going to be all about the Festival of the Lost and getting myself a Braytech Werewolf.
I wrote a little bit about this on Friday during my send up of Fallout 76 and the Fallout First subscription. The Outer Worlds came out at some point on Thursday night through the epic games store and then on Friday seemingly through the various sundry Microsoft game stores. This has been a game I have been looking forward to for quite some time, but I have to say cautiously so. What I mean by that is that everything I had seen to date gave me hope, but quite honestly we are living in a time when my hopes are pretty often dashed against the rocks when it comes to new games. What Outer Worlds promised was not only a new game but a brand new IP that seemed like it would be drift compatible with Obsidian games work on the Fallout franchise.
The first and most important step is to see if I can create a proper “Belghast” in this game. After some quick fiddling I managed to dial in what tends to be fairly close to the traditional appearance of all of my characters. The game could have used for a few more beard options but I ultimately went with this nice full beard. As to ponytail options the only thing that was available was some sort of a bun nonsense and as a result I just went with long locks instead. In order to get the over the eye scar thing that I tend to put on all of my characters if it is available, I had to accept some other scaring and I finished things off with the little nose slash makeup. First step passed as I have a character that I am perfectly happy to be playing.
Next we have our setting. At the highest level The Outer Worlds is like you dumped Bioshock, Fallout New Vegas, Firefly, and Paranoia in a blender and mixed up a delicious dystopian slurry. Where Fallout is a game built upon rebuilding the world after a nuclear apocalypse brought on by war, Outer Worlds is a game about what happens if you allow capitalism and corporatism to run amok. You start your life as a colonist that has been stranded on board “The Hope” on the outskirts of the Halcyon system for roughly 70 years. It seems that something went wrong with your colony ship and rather than trying to fix it the corporations just cut their losses and left it out there floating in the void as a stranded hulk.
You begin your life in the cargo hold of one Doctor Phineas Vernon Welles, a fugitive scientist wanted by the Halcyon Holdings Corporate Board. He has figured out a chemical concoction that can be used to revive folks stuck in cryosleep on the Hope. You are unceremoniously deposited on the planet of Emerald Vale and told to meet up with a smuggler who is going to take you the rest of the way to your final destination. Your escape pod happens to land on top of said smuggler… Captain Alex Hawthorne… and which point you are asked to make your way to their ship. It turns out the ship has a blown power regulator which sets you down your primary decision path.
It seems that you can either get a power regulator by helping out the corporate townsfolk, or by helping out a band of separatists. Helping one group means almost certain death for the other group, so you are given a weighty choice almost immediately. The Outer Worlds is a game about choices more than anything. Do you accept the harsh bounty of corporatism, or do you strike out and try and help the little guy whenever you can often times knowing that innocents will suffer in the process? Corporatism is so invasive that it has literally become the religion of the land, and in spite of constant scientific achievement the reality of the world has gotten skewed by whatever is going to make the most profit.
The first colony you visit is Edgewater, is owned by the Spacer’s Choice corporation. Not just the land and the buildings but the people are all property. One of the early missions that drives home the starkness of your situation is that the town is concerned about having to deal with a suicide. This is considered to be damaging company property, and the rest of the townsfolk are going to ultimately have to pay back the Spacer’s Choice corporation because of this. There is another situation where you are trying to help out someone who managed to get sick, and they are unwilling to take any medication because the brand you happen to find while scavenging the world is produced by a rival corporation.
If you played a lot of the Fallout series, the game is going to feel immediately accessible to you. In many ways it feels like Fallout New Vegas, but set in space and swapping the radioactive threat for a corporate totalitarian one. The game is not at all subtle about the messages it portrays, and as a result it ends up being pretty dark, which is weirdly contrasted by how bright and vibrant the game world itself is. The game takes the Fallout format and evolves it a bit by adding better gun play and weaving in some of the companion mechanics from the Bioware games. The end result feels extremely good… that is so long as you didn’t lean heavily on VATS in Fallout games. I personally hated them and because of that the time dilation system feels good and useful, but the end result largely destroys any sort of tactical gameplay.
The writing is excellent as is the voice acting. I am not sure if I could be more happy with the end product and the total package that is The Outer Worlds. I am not terribly far into the game, but what I have played has been excellent. I played the game all of Friday night and for the most part all of Saturday until we recorded the podcast. I have roughly 10 hours of total play time at this point and am at what is I think the third destination? I’ve heard that the game itself is relatively short if you are the sort of person who cares about beating games and following the critical path. I have a feeling that for me personally this is going to be somewhere in the avenue of a 40-60 hour game based on the way I roam around aimlessly and slowly clean areas out of all of the tasty “bits”, aka the currency of the game.
I really don’t want to say too much more, because the game gets really interesting. After comparing notes with Kodra after the podcast we made different decisions and I managed to find a solution to a problem that he didn’t even know was possible. That tells me this is a game with deep replay capabilities, and also that maybe you shouldn’t just accept blindly when the game tries to give you an A or B solution path. There is often times a C and maybe event a D and an E. If you were like me and liked New Vegas way better than the other modern Fallout games then you should stop reading this and go buy Outer Worlds. If you like this style of game in general, you should probably still go buy the game. If you liked the setting and feel of the Bioshock games, then again you should probably buy the game. If nothing else you can try a month of Xbox Games Pass on PC and play the game through that if you are uncertain.
