destiny 2 – Page 33

More Warmind Impressions

May 11, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I managed to hit the first soft cap of 345 through doing some of the content that happens immediately following the completion of the main story. I am still a bit dismayed at how short it ended up being. The core problem with the experience is there was a disconnect between how the NPCs were acting and the events that were actually occurring. What I mean by that is when we took down Ghaul… he had done enough to interfere with our lives to make us really hate him by the time we reached the point of final confrontation. With Warmind… they end up treating the Worm God we are fighting with similar contempt… even though we only found out one exists on Mars a few minutes earlier. Sure I get the fact that the Worm Gods are one of the galaxies great sources of evil and they were key in creating the Hive in the first place. I’ve read the Book of Sorrows and understand that all… but the average player has not.

The average player would be going into that scene wondering what in the hell a Worm God is and why these two NPCs seem so freaked about it. The problem being that the game didn’t really give us enough run up to reach this supposedly epic conclusion. It feels a lot like the campaign in Rise of Iron where you have some epic things going on… but nowhere enough lead up to make them feel like that epic nature is earned. Sure taking down a giant SIVA enfused Iron Lord was a slick final fight just like taking down a Worm God was a slick final fight… but in both cases it felt like we lacked significant reason for what we were doing. I mean the “Guardian” is the Deus Ex Machina to fix all problems much like the Warrior of Light is in Final Fantasy XIV. The problem is it feels like that role is earned in FFXIV whereas we sorta just magically are able to best everything in Destiny without really knowing why we are so much better than apparently every other Guardian out there.

Tam and I get into these discussions a lot and he is usually the one raising these points. The funny thing is they generally revolve on why he quit playing a game, and for me this is an annoyance but by no means a game breaker. I feel like there is a magic formula that keeps me engaged in a game. First you have to have a core mechanical loop that I enjoy, for example in Destiny I love the gun play and the movement which makes me feel awesome as I traverse this beautifully rendered world. The second point of that magical formula is that there has to be something in the game that I want to do. There needs to be some objective out there that drives me forward and keeps me engaged with the game when the shiny newness of the mechanical loop wears off.

Please note what I said there… something I want to do. For example in a game like World of Warcraft there can never be a possible way that I would ever run out of things to do and content I have not actually seen. Similarly in Final Fantasy XIV there is just too much content to ever find a true end to it. The problem is in both of those games I have rather regularly reached a point where there is simply nothing left that I care to do. Either the content left involves something I don’t much enjoy like Player versus Player interactions or it feels like it has more stick than carrot attached to it. I reached this point after Trials of Osiris in Destiny 2 where the mechanical loop simply was not enough and the repetitive and unrewarding nature of the Infinite Forest made it so that I just didn’t feel like logging in anymore.

While Warmind is an extremely short expansion… it feels like it might be a fairly intricate one. What I mean by that is there are already a bunch of post credits items that the game is asking me to do that spawn new opportunities to go off on adventures. I am sure there will be an end to this, but in some ways it reminds me of the style of interaction that happened on the Dreadnaught in The Taken King. There are puzzles to be solved and items to interact with in ways that I have not quite figured out. There were weapons to collect that are associated with questing, and others that folks don’t even know how they work as of yet. There are drops that can be used to improve most of the exotic weapons, and in it a bunch of interesting ways to feel like I keep moving forward.

On the other end however the new grind is real. After hitting 345 and finally accepting my Milestones for the week… each one of those rewarded a 351 item… 6 levels of movement off the base whereas before we were regularly getting upwards of 15 levels of movement from the same milestones. This means that journey to 385 is going to be an extremely long one when you have a very finite number of weekly options to give any sense of movement. This means that if I find myself engaged in this game again I will by nature need to push the Hunter and the Warlock through Curse of Osiris so that I can have three sets of weekly upgrade options instead of one. Sure the armor won’t swap over but those weapons can keep pushing up slowly over the course of multiple characters.

The game needed something and in truth at this point I am not sure if this is what that need was. The problem with Destiny 2 is that on paper it looks like the sequel I wanted for Destiny. However in practice it has always felt lacking in part because it felt like we sacrificed so much cool stuff from the first one to get this as a result. Nothing I have seen from this game justifies the reasons why we had to reset back to ground zero. I know they felt like they wanted a fresh start, to shed any bad blood from the first title. However I feel like that plan backfired horribly. I’m interested to see where they can go with Warmind and if they can give us justification going forward to buy the “Comet” expansion that has been looming on the horizon and leaked via the Canadian Walmart website. The one act that would go a long ways to building good will for me personally… would be to port the old patrol zones to Destiny 2 and make it feel like we didn’t abandon half the world to get this game.

I made a mistake

May 10, 2018 by Belghast

This morning I committed one of the classic blunders… I attempted to fiddle with my computer before finishing a blog post. This lovely screen is the result, and I have no clue how long I will be staring at it. I attempted to apply the lastest Nvidia driver since I have been having issues capturing screenshots in Destiny 2 via the shadowplay interface. At this point I have been watching this screen for twenty minutes as my cats keep check on my sanity.

The truth is that I really did not have a lot to talk about this morning. Keeping with tradition however I am banging out a post on my phone. If I’ve made any horrible mistakes I apologise, but a cellular keyboard sometimes has a mind of it’s own.

I did finish the Destiny 2 expansion last night and finished leveling to 30. I am nearing the first soft cap of 345 light, which means I will soon be in raid/trials/milestones only territory for getting light upgrades. They have significantly slowed the grind because that is apparently what the players wanted. I do agree that the game needed more meaningful friction… but I doubt this is the right combination. Ultimately the inability to get upgrades from things like Iron Banner or the faction rally are the worst feeling parts. I am apparently back for a bit, so we will see if the game manages to hook me further.

[Edit]

Almost like clockwork… the moment I posted this from my cell phone… the computer rebooted and I seem to have the ability to take screenshots again. Oh well tomorrow you will get a proper post

Mirrorball

May 9, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I spent a not insignificant amount of time playing Destiny 2 Warmind. You will have to excuse the garbage screenshots but I was largely chilling on the sofa with my laptop and it runs the game at the potato resolution of 1366 x 768. I say potato because scaling down to that from the 4K display I have upstairs is quite the adjustment. It however allows me to be flexible where I am gaming, and last night allowed me to hang out with the mrs while still getting to do the thing I wanted to do. I’ve had a bit of a falling out with Destiny 2 over the last few months and I am not entirely certain why. It is just like after the release of Curse of Osiris I lost my forward momentum and stopped caring that I was no longer getting those engrams every day. Based on the fact that I was the only person online in my clan for most of the night… I am guessing everyone has had this same thing happen to them.

That said I was extremely interested in this expansion because it is the return of three things that I love in the Destiny universe… The Hive, Rasputin, and Clovis Bray lore. The last bit takes the form of our companion during this expansion Ana Bray… a heir to House Bray and former golden age scientist turned guardian. There is a rule among the guardians that they are not supposed to go digging into their past life before they died and were resurrected with the light, but when you are a Bray… this gets a lot harder knowing that so much golden age tech that remains was potentially created by your hands. As a result you get the impression that Ana Bray is no longer a Vanguard member… and not even a real guardian in the eyes of Zavala… because she broke the rule and started digging into Bray tech when she first realized it recognized her and would respond to her commands.

I am not far enough into the story to fully understand the other parts of the equation that I love… The Hive and Rasputin. The polar ice caps of Mars seem to hide a group of frozen hive that include several new troop types and modifications to the others as well. There are now Knights that wield a shield making it extremely difficult to attack them, and versions of the Acolyte called Adherants that seem to snipe you with long beams of energy. In addition there are more heavily armored versions of the Ogre, but this might just be one of the boss models for this expansion that gets used on ultra units. The map area itself is a little bit bigger than Titan in scope… which is somewhat disappointing but a significant step up from the tiny and repetitive Mercury.

What I enjoy the most so far is that it feels like this is as tightly packed with secrets as the Dreadnought was in The Taken King expansion. I’ve already encountered a bunch of objects that say I need to have a specific item or buff to be able to interact with them, meaning there are secrets to be unlocked hidden out there much like the Skyburner Deployment Codes. On the director map there is a note out to the side saying that I have found 0 or 45 Latent Memory locations, so this feels like something along the lines of the Calcified Fragments or SIVA Clusters of old. This is the sort of stuff that Destiny 2 desperately needed, to give us a downtime activity to strive for in getting out and exploring the world.

There are of course a bunch of cool items that came in with this expansion. At one point I got to choose from three weapons… one of which was essentially Uriel’s Gift minus high impact rounds but with Dragonfly… so I had to take it. I’ve not finished the main campaign and not hit level 30 yet so I am not super focused on gear at the moment. That said I have picked up a bunch of cool items through the eververse doodads you get while leveling up. My Ghost is now a floating mirror ball that I eventually colored neon green via a shader. I’ve similarly picked up an exotic ship and an exotic speeder as well. They seem to have tweaked these exotic shells a bit so that they have the same two perks…. the first being summons your mount faster and the second being universal elemental telemetry. The last perk seems to now be some sort of a cache based perk for a given planet. This mirror ball for example works on Nessus, which is handy since that happens to be the weekly zone.

I have to say I really like the set of gear that you get through turning in tokens with Ana Bray, and I can already tell this is going to be something I try and collect in its entirety. So far the story has been interesting, but I have a feeling that I am nearing the end of it… and if that is the case it is also very very short. Maybe there is more going on than I think there is… and maybe the boss I am just about to face is only the midpoint. However it certain feels like it is pushing me towards a supposedly epic conclusion… and the way the NPCs speak sounds in terms like we are doing this massive struggle… when it feels like I only just arrived on the planet. Reading a little blurb on Reddit just now confirms that I am in fact on the final quest… so essentially there are five quests in a chain that had I not been dawdling probably could have completed in an hour and a half.

Granted I like the other parts of the game more than I do the story… but it feels like a bit of a let down. During Destiny 1 the justification they gave for the need to reboot the game and create Destiny 2… was that the way D1 was build was particularly difficult to build content for. They blamed the tools for the fact that we kept getting recycled areas instead of completely new maps and raids. The problem is… neither Curse of Osiris with its rampant recycling of the Infinite Forest and its tiny planetary area… nor Warmind so far really prove that the sacrifice the players made was worth it. I say sacrifice… because in coming to Destiny 2 we gave up a lot of things that we still have not gotten back. We were promised a better gaming experience and on some levels it is… but on other levels it is just a less interesting game.

Ultimately I will be around for awhile because it did feel good last night to shoot things. The new event type that they touted however was a bit of a let down as well… given that it is mostly just another planetary event that involves hunting wave after wave of hive and doing some stuff to destroy crystals. Sure it was fun but also I can see it will get pretty repetitive. However it does fill that Archon’s Forge/Court of Oryx niche in giving something repeatable that can give decent rewards. The protect the Warsat event type is back and I had missed it greatly. I am not exactly sure how you can push that one into heroic mode, but I am sure it will involve something silly like blowing up one of the hive ships. There is an open world version of the Hive Ritual event that seems really cool because I was so used to doing that in the one space it appeared on Titan. All in all I was happy to be playing again… but still a bit grumbly about how cool this game could have been.

Rudderless

May 4, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was largely spent cleaning up quests that I have had in my log for a long while over in Monster Hunter World. Since the Kulve event is over… I feel like I don’t have as much of a pressing goal as I previously did. I could of course just farm things like Nergigante for parts that I need to make awesome weapons, but the Kulve event sorta robbed me of a bit of the drive there. Apart from the bow… I have a reasonable weapon option of every type right now. Sure there are things I want to make but the need isn’t there in the same way that it once was given that I have a box full of decent options. At this point I am hunter rank 70 and the meter is climbing extremely slowly on doing normal stuff. In theory I should be engaging in a bunch of tempered fights but I really don’t like soloing in Monster Hunter World that much, and I also didn’t much feel like SOS Roulette last night… so was stuck just wandering around and knocking out things that have been sitting in my log for awhile.

Monster Hunter World has more or less become my MMO of choice right now, and as a result it is making every other MMO feel really weird to play. I’ve largely been checked out of Final Fantasy XIV for awhile now, and the Battle for Azeroth changes are making me not that keen on World of Warcraft. I have the desire to play Elder Scrolls Online… but I find myself lacking the focus since that is a game that requires all of my attention. I realize this is an odd thing to say given that Monster Hunter World is way more reactionary than ESO is… but I also have to play MHW upstairs and with Elder Scrolls I can chill out downstairs with the laptop while watching television. I find my mind wandering or paying too close attention to something that is on television and end up in a horrible spot in Tamriel. The other game that is sorta calling my name at this very moment is Star Wars the Old Republic because I really would love to play through the rest of the content I have missed. I have not done any of Knights of the Eternal Throne, in fact the first quest of that expansion is sitting waiting there on my Jedi Knight for me to pick up and start playing.

Lately I have been trying to ease my way back into Destiny 2 given that the new expansion lands on Tuesday. The moment to moment PVE gameplay is still every bit as fun as it ever was… but my current problem with this game is actually a silly one. I have been out of inventory space for a very long time and the pain of having to juggle items between characters or dismantle things immediately upon getting them wears me out. When I have an MMO and my bags are a mess or I am lacking enough bag space in general… I find myself extremely demotivated to play it. This is in part what is going wrong with Project Gorgon at this very moment… I have next to no bag space and as a result I am constantly having to play the inventory management game which is the exact opposite of fun. The expansion is adding another 100 slots and supposedly some of the kiosks we used to have back in Destiny 1 so we will see how this improves my opinion of the game by not having to care quite so closely about what was in each inventory slot. In theory I would love to push my Warlock and Hunter through Curse of Osiris… because that is a sign of just how hard I stalled out on this game. The expansion landed and I only managed to get one character through before legitimately giving up and moving on to other things.

I’m in a really weird space with gaming in general right now and it seems like I spend more time getting ready to play a game… than actually sitting down and playing a game. There is an intangible wanderlust that has effected me and I am not sure what the cure is. It is almost as though I am too stressed on a daily basis to actually sit down and enjoy the things I am supposed to enjoy. I’ve been through these periods in the past and sadly it has also cut off any desire I had to stream or be engaged with other people in any way. It has been a rough several weeks and I have a feeling that at some point it has to let up… and the clouds will part once more and I will feel like a human being. Apologies to anyone who is attempting to interact with me right now because I am sure the experience is lacking.