destiny 2 – Page 20

Regularly Playing: September 2019 Edition

September 6, 2019 by Belghast

For those who are new to this blog, I run a semi-monthly column of sorts where I track what I have been playing over the previous month. This does a few things but largely it allows me to track over the course of the years what I have been into at a given time. My blog serves as a bit of a record to jog my memory and help me firmly plant when certain events are happening. Also it allows my readers a window into what I am up to and what my thoughts are about a thing in short form. I also generally try and use this moment in time as a point to “true up” my sidebar widget.

To Those Remaining

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – PC / Switch

This one is sorta hanging on by a thread at this point, not for want of desire but more for lack of time. I have however booted it up and made a bit more progress over the past month as well as starting the Switch version. Word of warning, I would say if you are ONLY going to buy a single version of this game, maybe don’t buy the Switch version. It has some slowdown issues and the graphical fidelity are not up to snuff from what I have been used to with the PC version. As it stands I own copies of this I believe for every platform… largely because I want to support the hell out of this title and see more games in this series released.

I have been playing considerably more of Destiny 2 than I had in the months leading up to now. There is a bunch of exciting stuff happening not the least of which is the enabling of Cross Save. I can now play my guardian on every single console platform in addition to the PC and have gone through the process of moving my character from Battle.net to Steam. I am super pumped about the launch of Shadowkeep coming up in October. Of note if you have ever played the PC version then it would behoove you to go through the process of moving your character from BNet to Steam because after October 1st it will not longer be accessible through the BNet client.

I legitimately thought this one would be leaving my list this month. A new season started at the tail end of August and with the impending launch of World of Warcraft Classic a few days later, I fully expected to just skip out on this season. However I found myself once again logging in on a Friday night for the ritual Grace and I have maintained for the last several seasons. It is enough of a thing that it felt weird NOT to be playing Diablo 3 on an opening night. I had a lot of fun and we ran Demon Hunters just to make the season a little easier to complete. I’ve made it as far as unlocking the seasonal rewards and I am not sure if I will push any further.

This one is going to likely maintain a permanent slot on my list. Unfortunately I don’t really have any new screenshots because I no longer play on my phone where it is super easy to take screenshots. On my Galaxy Tab S4 I have to do a complicated volume down and power button to take a shot so I never do it. On my ZTE Axon 7 phone it is a 3 finger gesture to take a shot, and I am wondering if there is a way to restore that functionality to the tablet with an application or something. This game keeps my attention because they keep rolling out new events, with either brand new or revisiting boss encounters for me to play with. I pretty much play enough each night to complete the daily objectives and then head to sleep.

I went from hot and heavy to barely at all on this one. I got in, completed the Shadowbringers story and leveled the Warrior to 80 and my Samurai to 80 as well. Then I disappeared once again because other things released that pulled away my attention. I will continue to play this it fits and spurts for the remainder of this month I am certain, because my attention is being funneled super hard away from almost everything else that I have on my plate. I would really like to level a Magic DPS and a Healer so that I can see all of the Shadowbringers role quests. Still a great game I just am waiting on more story content to drag me back into it.

My attention span for this game has been limited this month, but with the upcoming release content for Throne of Eldraine and the Brawl event happening right now I want to poke my head back in. I have to say though I would play this WAY more if I could play it from my Tablet. My winding down and bed routine would probably include a quick rush through Dragalia dailies and then a few matches of MTGA. I feel like they are missing out on a lot by not having a tablet client, though I guess in theory I could stream this from bed with Parsec. I should investigate how feasible that really is. I sorta wish that I could configure Parsec to work in a sort of console friendly mode where instead of my desktop I am presented with a board of icons of applications to launch.

To The New and Returning

I am a sucker. I did in fact buy this on the PS4 to be able to play it now… when I would way rather have just waited to play it on the PC. The PC version is so superior to the PS4 version for my purposes… however for some reason Capcom is maintaining a staggered schedule of releases. I still love the game and as a result they are getting two purchases from me. I am what is wrong with games and I know I should feel ashamed. I am honestly not sure how much time I will have to devote to this but I really want to poke around and try and get used to a PS4 Controller again.

This is the grand daddy of all things on this list and is consuming the most of my time. As of last night I hit 28 on my Undead Warrior and am about halfway to 29. I have plans already made to run Shadowfang Keep and Blackfathom Deep tonight with guildies, and this game is dominating my headspace at the moment. I cannot fully explain why it feels so good but god does it feel good to be back in Vanilla WoW. I knew I would be playing it because Grace had never gotten to experiment, but on some level I fully expected it just to be the two of us running around and doing nonsense. Instead we have a legitimately large guild full of friends all seemingly digging this experience. Long live House Kraken!

To Those Departing

This one largely lost focus somewhere around the Earth Shrine. I probably will return to it because I really like the idea of legitimately playing this without the Four Job Fiesta rules. That said on some level I agree with Ash on this one that the rules actually improve the game. Right now I feel like I need to do all of the things to min-max my characters, whereas playing under the rules dictates my actions. It limits the scope of what is available and causes me to focus on specific strategies. That said now that I know this is a reasonable option I might sign on next year for the Fiesta from my tablet. I just wish this version synced with any other version of the game so I could pop between playing on the PC for example and the tablet. Everything should have cross save.

Summary

The last several months have been pretty stable to be honest with not a lot of changes happening. Mostly a few things shift into focus as a few other things fall out of focus. I expect this month will be about World of Warcraft Classic with a side dish of Monster Hunter World Iceborne and a little bit of Destiny 2 especially as we get closer to the launch of Shadowkeep. Destiny has made me wish that literally every game had cross save if not cross play. I am mostly fine with having to buy a client for each platform, but I would love to be able to carry my characters over to it. There is no reason why Diablo 3 on the switch couldn’t have connected to Battle.net for example, and I have zero excitement over Overwatch Switch as it stands because I fully expect that it will not be connected to Battle.net either. I want more ability to play with my friends on the characters I have already spent time building, because quite frankly I don’t generally have enough bandwidth to level something new.

Hype, Cynicism, and Concern

August 21, 2019 by Belghast

First up this morning I am going to talk a bit about Bungie account linking and the Battle.net to Steam transfer process. Largely I am going through the motions here just in case someone out there has not been following the news related to Destiny 2 for some time. Bungie is divorcing Activision and part of the terms of the divorce is that they will be moving the PC version of Destiny 2 away from Activision Blizzard owned Battle.net. The new partner for account information will be Steam, a thing we all pretty much already have. However the data from Battle.net needs to be linked up and copied to your Steam account. As a result yesterday they opened up the process for doing this. I tweeted out the link yesterday but you need to go to Bungie.net and use the PC Move tool. Effectively this will walk you through the process of logging into a Battle.net account, verifying your characters and such that are owned by that account, logging in a Steam account, and finally verifying that everything is appearing on the Steam entitlement screen. It took me a few minutes and now Steam shows up in the list of accounts that I have linked. The truth is I am largely okay with this move because the integration with Battle.net never worked quite as smoothly as I would have liked it to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MspAKr8THf4

Next up in the “things I think are cool” department. With Gamescom comes a bunch of new trailers, and this time we have one for Shadowkeep showing off the finisher moves. This is something new going into Destiny 2 and seem to be similar to the finishing moves in Doom 2016. Essentially when an enemy gets low enough you can perform a special melee attack with its own unique animation and punch/kick/whatever the monster to death. The bad bit is that the cosmetic versions of these will be Eververse exclusive, but the mods you can associate with them that do things like spawn heavy ammo will be gained through gameplay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8mC5GaDoyQ

Next up we got a trailer for the first post-Shadowkeep Season, this time seemingly focused on the Vex and the Black Garden. I still think the Vex are one of the cooler enemies we fight, and I’ve always thought it cool that the radiolarian fluid that you see come out of them when you kill one is a sentient hive being of a sort. There are some rumors floating around as to why we are going back to the Black Garden, but in truth I don’t really care. I am just happy to see Bungie slowly clawing back locations that only appeared in Destiny 1 and putting them in Destiny 2. Next step… I want to see them simply recreate the Destiny 1 experience inside of Destiny 2 and rebrand the whole thing to simply being “Destiny”.

The other day I posted what was largely a throwaway tweet while watching part of the Gamescom Xbox show. It featured some of the most hyperbolic pitch folks I have ever seen, that were fake levels of excitement about every little thing that was being announced. That level of forced hype really is a turn off, which is sad because once I was able to get past that there were a bunch of cool things that they talked about. So I find myself wondering… how did I get into this state where I almost feel allergic to hype? E3 2019 was largely a disappointment, and what I have seen from Gamescom could be thrown in a similar category.

Is it just that I am gunshy from being burned so many times? I mean I poured my heart in soul into Anthem and largely found a really great game… but one that stopped being great after you burned through the initial story-line. That said I think the Anthem reveal at E3 several years back was the last time I was fully on board with a staged demo selling me on the notion of what the game might be like. It might just be that I have reached a point where I am skeptical about anything that is being announced, because while I lead this off with talk about Destiny 2 and the fact that it is in a pretty great place… it has taken them three years of ups and downs to get to that place. I think a whole other side of this is just the sheer concern of not knowing where I will find the time to play even half of the things that I am vaguely interested in. I already feel like I have a crushing back log pushing down on me of games that I really feel like I should be playing for various reasons. Then just looking ahead I have no clue how I am going to navigate all of the release dates. I just assembled this quick list which is in no way complete… but represents some of the bullet points on my radar for the rest of 2019.

World of Warcraft Classic – August 27th
Monster Hunter World Iceborne – September 6th
Borderlands 3 – September 13th
Destiny 2 Shadowkeep / Season of the Undying – October 1st
The Outer Worlds – October 25th
Death Stranding – November 8th
Jedi Fallen Order – November 15th
Pokemon Sword and Shield November 15th
Doom Eternal – November 22nd

There is a part of me that wonders if my challenge getting hyped about things coming down the pipe is a defense mechanism seeing as I know that I don’t have time to play all of the things I already want to play, and then for the rest of the year at a minimum of every other week something new is being released that I also really want to play. I have no clue how I am going to juggle all of this, and as a result I am just wondering if my brain is throwing up blinders and screaming at me that enough is enough. The level of excitement that I feel however seems to be hampered as well. Like yesterday I wrote about my love of Black Isle/Obsidian and everything I have seen about The Other Worlds seems like a return to the best of what I love from them… Fallout New Vegas. However I am finding it really challenging to muster more than a mild sense of excitement about it. My brain is stuck in a mode where I am trying to figure out how I will juggle my schedule to find the time to really devote a weekend or two to exploring it. Maybe I am just broken. Whatever the case though I really don’t want my ramblings to harsh the excitement someone else is feeling about it. My twitter comment really was meant as a sort of throwaway reaction, but maybe I need to watch those more closely. I don’t want to come off as a bitter old man, but maybe on some level that is what I am? It sucks. I want to feel child like joy when I watch a games presentation again. I miss having E3 or BlizzCon or any other major show to feel like Christmas morning.

Hype, Cynicism, and Concern

August 21, 2019 by Belghast

World of Warcraft Classic – August 27th
Monster Hunter World Iceborne – September 6th
Borderlands 3 – September 13th
Destiny 2 Shadowkeep / Season of the Undying – October 1st
The Outer Worlds – October 25th
Death Stranding – November 8th
Jedi Fallen Order – November 15th
Pokemon Sword and Shield November 15th
Doom Eternal – November 22nd

Two Goals Down

August 14, 2019 by Belghast

The first goal of the night was to finish up my purple armor set for the Solstice of Heroes event in Destiny 2. Over the weekend I had knocked out everything but the EAZ minibosses component, and I largely stopped there because I knew given yesterdays patch the requirement was being lowered to 50. I was sitting at 56 so my hope was that it would be as simple as logging in, equipping all of the gear and meditating in front of the statue. What I did not expect was that all of the gear would be 750, which was a nice boost in item level. I just need to get some powerful items to bump things up on the weapon front to 750 as well. The funny thing is… I will probably be farming EAZ over the next few weeks to try and get slightly better perks on each of the armor slots. As it stands the Helm is ideal for the way I play, but all of the other items could use some work. I opened the rest of the boxes I had in my inventory and picked up four additional pieces of the purple majestic armor.

With the first goal knocked out quickly, I moved on to the second goal of the night which was getting the last little bit of a level on the Samurai and hitting 80. I opted for the short queue of a Trials roulette and got quite possibly the easiest option: Cape Westwind. It legitimately takes longer for the new player to watch the cutscene than it does to kill the boss, so we hung out chatting while waiting on the fight to start. Upon dinging 80 I equipped whatever gear I happened to have available and managed to get my item level up to 425. From there I picked back up with the 74 Physical DPS Role quest, thinking the easiest and fastest way to gear would be completing the quest and getting the 430 gear from the smithy. It took some time though to chew through the remaining 74, 76, 78 and 80 quests so this consumed the majority of my play time last night. However I have now unlocked a second role and have access to physical dps gear. I wound up buying the 450 crafted blade, so I am now sitting at 435 which is enough to be able to dps Eden. Now that I am getting back into the swing of tanking a roulette or two each night, I should be able to bolster that level with tomestone gear.

Finally I spent the last hour or so catching up on the War Campaign quest series given that it appears to be the most coherent manner to catch up on story. I think I underestimated just how much story content had gone into the game since I left, because I keep chewing away at it and seem to be not actually making any headway. I started last night queuing for the pieced of the raid finder that involves the Jaina battle seeing as I needed that for the War Campaign. That was a fun fight overall, but I am not sure how I would feel about the middle section where as horde we are forced to fight Rastakhan? I like Rastakhan a lot. I think for the forseeable future I will be poking my way along these three different paths of catching up on World of Warcraft in getting back into the swing of the game prior to the launch of Classic. Then working on various objectives in Destiny 2 and probably leveling a healer in Final Fantasy XIV. It has been enjoyable to play for an hour or so and then swap to something fresh and new. It has also been nice hanging out and talking to my friends in Facepull once again.