Due to some technical difficulties, we are getting a bit of a late start to the blog this morning. Things appear to be functioning as normal right now so we are going to hope it holds together long enough to make a post. For the uninitiated the above image comes from Always Sunny in Philadelphia and it is an amazing show. However after this weekend the lore drops in Destiny 2… I have decided that this is legitimately what I seem like to my non-Destiny friends that I keep trying to engage in conversations. I am convinced that Destiny is one of the greatest science fiction stories to ever be told… but it is thoroughly inaccessible to all but the most diehard of fanatics.
Imaging writing an epic piece of fiction and instead of publishing it in books… you instead tore each page in half and then shoved the halves into bottles. You then threw those bottles out into the ocean hoping that someday people from all around the world would start to piece together your magnum opus. This is ultimately what being in the Destiny Lore Community feels like. We are given scraps of digital text and then expected to fit the pieces together to make sense of the greater cosmology of the setting. There are times you wonder if you are really going mad… and then something gets released that causes all of these assorted scraps of paper to align in just the right way as to present the clear path through it all. It is when these moments happen that you start to question if this is all part of some greater plan that started over a decade ago… or if this is just convenient use of dangling plot threads in order to make something that was spur of the moment feel destined.
That however is NOT what we are going to talk about, because quite frankly even the paraphrased version seems like nonsense. We are going to talk about Beyond Light as a whole and more importantly the experiment Bungie has foisted in front of us of “archiving” content in a vault and removing the first few years of the game the players. With Beyond Light came the sunsetting of weapons, because I admit that it has to be hard to find a way to balance hundreds of weapons at the same time and make sure the “sandbox” is performing as expected. I was largely in support of the notion of this needing to happen, and I did some prep-work during the Season of Arrivals to best figure out some of my favorite weapons that would be with me for the long run.
This sunset however has caused some significant issues like the fact that right now there is one singular Legendary Machine Gun that was spared… and to the best of my knowledge it is no longer dropping. Currently if you can get far enough into the content, we also have access to Thermal Erosion, which thankfully I managed to get over the weekend. I have no clue about the validity of the roll I received, but for now I am using it because it gives me a functional machine gun when I had none. The answer that most folks have leaned on is to use an exotic machine gun, but right now I only have thunderlord as I never got access to xenophage or heir apparent.
The challenge with removing multiple hundreds of weapons in a single pass… is that you also need to introduce a lot of fresh weapons to prime the pump. The dropping of these new weapons seems to be few and far between and most of what I am getting are what I considered vault trash back in year one. So the end result is that I am mostly still using things that I picked up during the Season of Arrivals because nothing terribly compelling has come along to replace any of it. It just feels bad because there have been so many times I thought “I need to do X element kills, I will just grab my trusty… ” and then realize that the thing I was about to reach for is now permanently stuck in the past.
The biggest challenge that Beyond Light has is that we are sitting here whether we want to or not… and making a valuation. Is what I just got worth the four planets, multiple raids and hundreds of weapons that I lost? The short answer is no… not yet. The Season of the Hunt has yet to officially start and I am hoping that the activities associated with it will add the lubrication needed to make it feel like the new drops are flowing once again. Right now we are in this awkward space at the beginning of something new and not entirely certain how it is going to shake out, but we also lost our own familiar stomping grounds in the process. I was probably one of the few players that legitimately loved Titan. I’ve likely spent more time on that destination than any others in Destiny 2.
Admittedly this was also the problem with the launch of Destiny 2 initially. It felt like we had just lost so much well tuned and polished content that we were familiar with in Destiny 1, as well as the vast arsenal of options we had stockpiled. Essentially Beyond Light is the launch of Destiny 3, without really intending to be. It has put us back in a position where we are having to deal with the loss of the familiar and comfortable with the promise of something great on the horizon. I am still enjoying myself but I am throwing out some significant questions on if this sacrifice was worth it yet.
Don’t get me wrong. Were I to judge Beyond Light simply on the merits of that expansion alone, it clearly goes down as one of the best designed expansions to date. There are a lot of really cool systems and we also managed to get an entirely new type of character class. While I am not in love with Behemoth for Titans, the concepts are really cool. I think the equivalent might be an expansion like The Burning Crusade where not only did you get new races and new starter zones, but the two factions also got access to the class they were missing so it felt like there were so many possibilities. Unfortunately no matter how good the new content is, it will always be judged against the content that is no longer available. I will never play another round of escalation protocol for example, which was legitimately something I greatly enjoyed.
I am not grinding hard in the manner that I used to with Destiny. Ultimately I don’t want to reach a point where I have burned myself out again. I am trying to figure out a way to play Destiny as one of many games that I am interested in rather than as a second vocation. I’m also trying to learn to live with the fact that there are just things that I will likely never get to see in the game. I don’t have the hours or the dedication to be able to get all of the things available in a single season before the next season rolls out. That is a really bitter fucking pill to swallow, because I hate the concept of disappearing content. I firmly believe that games as a service offerings should continue to grow over time rather than constantly keep shrinking back as more content is released.
So I find myself in this position where I am enjoying the present I am in, but I am still a little flummoxed about the past that we lost. I tend to be a packrat in MMORPGs and if nothing else this has given me reason to destroy a ton of gear because it is effectively useless now. I’ve held on to a lot of armor because I am not entirely certain how this supposed transmog system is going to work and I don’t want to lose out on some of my favorite appearances. If you are playing Destiny drop me a line with some of your thoughts. How are you faring after the sunset?
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