Friends, I have been playing some Destiny 2 and having a lot of fun doing so. I knew that Beyond Light was creeping up on us, but I had not really been following it terribly closely after the launch reschedule. After participating in the final night prior to the release and watching the Traveler heal itself, I started to get a bit of hype going on. Destiny is one of those games that I have been a voracious fan of the lore and the setting. The world that has been crafted rivals any of the great science fiction franchises, and I will stand by that statement. The challenge is that the game has always struggled with actually telling that story in a way that does not require you to go digging through the archives of some wiki to piece together the details.
If you have a spare four hours, I highly suggest the extremely dense review of the lore from Byf that takes you from the origins of Destiny through the Shadowkeep expansion. The challenge however is that a lot of shit has happened since that video. This week he released a follow up video on the complete story The Darkness that I plan on watching at some point today. This one clocks in at an hour and a half and while I have stayed somewhat connected to the events that are happening… I still feel like I could use a refresher course. Essentially the key conflict in the Destiny universe is between the Traveler that represents a force known as The Light, and a forced that has been speaking to us since Shadowkeep known collectively as The Darkness. With Beyond Light, we begin to start wielding the powers of the Darkness against our enemies that are also suddenly Darkness infused.
Beyond Light feels in so many ways like a restart of the game. The events that lead to the launch of the expansion saw the Darkness claim four locations. Gone are Io, Mars, Mercury and Titan… and knowing that going in was a little frustrating. Titan was my go to location for farming public events and had some of my favorite lost sectors… I will miss you Greg. The way in which they have done it however feels like we are starting a brand new chapter of the game. Now we have Europa and access once again to the Cosmodrome, which feels really damned good to be exploring once more. More than this the lighting in the entire universe is a bit more harsh and sinister. Everything about the game feels a little darker including the UI which has flipped to black on white to white on black. All of this reflects the fact that we are now taking our first steps into becoming a “Warrior of Darkness” to borrow the term from Final Fantasy.
There are a whole lot of things that I am going to miss from the destinations that we lost. That said, Europa is one of the best designed worlds that I have seen from the Bungie team. You have these giant icy fields, areas infiltrated by Vex structures, and the cold and modern labs of Clovis Bray. I am sure there are probably other areas that I have not explored yet but those are the stark differences between environments that I have already seen. Everything seems to be the gorgeous color palette that varies from deep dark teals to fiery maroons. Again though as you can see through this screenshot above… there is a dark sinister nature to all of the lighting and color work. It feels like we are going places we were not supposed to be going.
The area I am most excited to be back in however is the Cosmodrome. This is where we began our adventure in Destiny 1 and probably the area that I spent the most time exploring in either its original incarnation or the later Rise of Iron SIVA infused version. I was admittedly a little sad that the SIVA areas are closed off, but I guess that makes sense as they would probably want to control its spread. The Cosmodrome that is available however very closely presents that experience I felt back in 2013 as I first explored Alpha and later Beta on my brand new PlayStation 4. There were so many locations that we lost in the jump between Destiny 1 and 2 that I would love to explore once again. I still desperately want a modern version of an activity like the Prison of Elders, and while Sorrows Harbor was great… I still miss the Court of Oryx and Archon’s Forge events.
I said earlier that this really feels like a fresh start for the game, and with that comes a wiping of the original triumph system. There is now a legacy area that lets you revisit your past accomplishments, but upon logging into the game we all started back at square one with a brand new set of triumphs to complete. I have to admit that while I claim not to be motivated by achievements… it has been really nice ticking new boxes in the system. The only thing that I have not found is the cosmetic system that they talked about, but maybe that was going to come out in a later release of the game. I did spend awhile cleaning house in my vault and dismantling anything that was not outdated that I did not have deep emotional attachment to.
Also in the theme of fresh starts, I have changed clans and returned to Tequila Mockingbirds the group I raided in Destiny 1 with and spent the early days of D2 on the PS4 playing with. I have passed the baton of Greysky Armada to Thalen as I think he might be the most likely to return to the game and has some real world friends that he invited to the clan. This had been something that my friends Warenwolf and JazSquirrel had been low key suggesting for awhile, and I figured with the start of an expansion it was a good time to make the change. I am hoping with an active clan that I myself will be significantly more active and maybe even start raiding again.
I am nowhere near finishing the main story, and it is paced in a way that leads me to become easily distracted. This may or may not be a positive to other players because between each mission there seems to be some open world activities that you need to engage in before entering the next story area. This personally fits my play style as I ground up to the soft cap of 1200… before actually starting the expansion story and I tend to space out story blocks with a lot of patrol activity anyway. However there will be folks that want to make a beeline through the story and might get a bit frustrated by that.
What I don’t know however is what the game is going to be like for brand new players. I am guessing that everything that existed previously on the missing planets is just gone forever? I would love to hear some clarification for anyone who did not do the Red War sequence previously, what that actually looks like now. Some friends asked me yesterday and I did not have answers, so if you do please drop them in the comments below.
The post Destiny and Dark Beginnings appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Last night I spent my evening with so many other players, hanging out in a new social space in Destiny 2 and watching a pulsating orb in the sky. My timeline was filled with pictures of the Traveler and various subtle changes as we counted down towards an undetermined event. When the almighty was shot down, something similar happened as folks watched it blow up and crash in very slow motion. Similarly I think we all sort of expected the traveler to subtly change as it began to heal itself. That however was not exactly the case, and what happened was considerably more interesting.
The first challenge however was trying to get through the login queue. I started this nonsense considerably later than most folks, and as a result I had to push through a queue of other 10,000 players. I had been watching Aztecross, because I did not really plan on joining in the reindeer games yesterday. I was not there for the explosion of the Almighty, and instead watched one of the many recordings that had been posted around and sped up so you could see the whole event that took place over a number of hours in a few minutes. I am not exactly sure what it was about last night however that made me want to log in and experience it for myself.
When you logged in there was a new mission called The Last City in the Tower where the Halloween events previously showed up. When you queued for the mission you were dropped down to a copy of The Last City that you’ve experienced in a few other events and you slowly make your way to a door leading to a brand new social area. There were a bunch of rumors scattered around about needing to do something while you were in that area, but it seemed like it was mostly just a vantage point to watch the world burn… or in our case the Traveler attempt to heal itself.
At various points during the night there were a number of subtle changings taking place. The random debris started to order itself into rings. There were lightning flashes taking place between the main body of the traveler and the larger chunks that had been floating around. Just ahead of 9 pm CST something started to happen and both Eris Morn and our own Ghost started talking to us. The surface of the Traveler began to pulse and shimmer as though suddenly liquid and waves of light started to cause a shimmering heat island effect in the area from which we were watching. You can somewhat see this happening if you look at the building on the right side of the above screenshot.
My good friend Jaz Squirrel recorded the event on their widescreen set up so you can experience the final moments of Destiny 2 before things changed. For those who don’t wish to watch it in video form… as we watched the traveler continue to pulsate brighter and brighter this is what played out between Eris Morn and your Ghost.
Eris Morn: Something is coming, I can feel it… Eris Morn: It is drawing power. Could it be enough to drive the Darkness away from us? Your Ghost: Every fireteam has returned to the City. Even the Hunters. They’re wit the people, keeping them safe. Your Ghost: Well, the last time this happened… the world ended. Your Ghost: I’m not worried. I’m not. Eris Morn: It is reforming. Healing its wounds. Eris Morn: This will not be the end. It will be an escalation.
When the sequence completed, the Traveler grew so bright that our visuals went completely white, upon which we were left with a cinematic. The Traveler fully healed radiating light to push back against the Darkness that now swallows the entire left side of the director map. In one swoop Io, Mars, Mercury and Titan are gone from us.
For those with particularly long memories with this Franchise, this visual might seem similar. In fact during the very intro video of Destiny 1, we saw a similar representation of how the Darkness came and engulfed the solar system. It seems that not only has the Darkness arrived, but we are once again being thrust into a new apocalypses of a sort. This time however the Darkness has reached out to us and has been courting all of the races that were once the chosen of the Traveler. The events of the last several seasons have lead us to question as to whether or not the Traveler is actually the benevolent force that we think it. It has also lead us to question if the Darkness is in fact evil, or has just been wielded to ill intent by our enemies such as the Vex and the Hive.
When the cinematic finished we were left with a very ominous server offline message. “The Light cannot save you. Seek us out on Europa.” So that is precisely what we will do when the servers come back online today. We will seek our fortune on Europa and begin the next chapter of Destiny.
The post The Traveler and The Darkness appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
The Black Armory season added a game mode that shooting glowing mobs, picking up orbs and dunking them into a receptacle in the center of the arena generally referred to as “The Forge”. There are two characteristics about this game mode, the first being you have a very short timer in order to complete it and each time you dunk a new orb you gain more points on the clock. Second it is set up on an endless play list where you will keep re-queuing for the forge over and over allowing you to farm it for drops. These two characteristics have lead to a few interesting circumstances in the past, setting up AFK farms.
With the Season of Arrivals, Bungie added in a chance for the new Umbral Engrams to drop from the end of any activity, including unsuccessful forge ignitions. This set up a scenario where players across the game have been AFKing their way to glory since June 9th when the season became active. Players knew about this in part because previously they could farm planetary materials this way. I tried it for a little bit yesterday afternoon and while afking in the background I racked up something around twenty engrams in total. This was patched yesterday evening after being active for six days and allowing folks to essentially grind up to maximum light in the process.
How did this work you might ask, because in theory your engrams should decode at your current light level. Essentially there appears to be another glitch currently active that allows armor-focused umbral engrams to occasionally decode as powerful gear, meaning it will be few light levels over your current level essentially forever ignoring the soft cap. The seems to only work if you purchase armor-focused Umbral engrams one at a time, but through this slow process of working up your armor folks have been able to max out their light at 1060 for the season. If I got roughly 20 engrams over the course of an afternoon, you can multiply that out over the length of six days of 24/7 AFKing with only a short trip now and then to clean out their mailbox.
This method of AFKing the forge largely worked because the AFK time out in Destiny is much longer than the fail condition of the forge. You are effectively matched with players of your own light level, and as a result afkers would artificially lower their light level to sub 700 with even New Light players starting at 750. The idea being that you would only match with players who were also afking, and as such every 50 seconds the match would complete on its own as a failure and then start a 10 second timer kicking folks back to orbit. So essentially once a minute roughly you had a shot of an engram dropping.
With yesterdays patch Bungie made a simple tweak that stops the Forge from queuing up players again, essentially making folks manually queue each time. The funny thing is… folks are still afking the forge even though they are having to queue back up every minute. If you are just wanting to farm Umbral Engrams, the fastest method I have found so far is one particular Nightmare Hunt, namely Dominus Ghaul. It doesn’t involve an awful lot of trash, Ghaul himself is pretty easy to take down, and in my experience you get an engram almost every time you complete the hunt. Better yet you are actually gaining experience which helps move your seasonal journey path forward.
It is my hope that with the breaking of this farm, that folks will actually start doing the planetary events again because in truth I find them pretty fun. However it was impossible to do pretty much anything that involved other players so long as the loot farm was active. I would have been fine legitimately farming forges as well, because it is one of my more favorite activities. However it is real hard to solo a forge when the other two players are perma AFK. I did one last night and even with two players it was a bit of a challenge to hit the timer, but we did it. This is not a grand start to a season, but I do seem to have the inkling to play once more knowing that come September a bunch of activities will be gone from the game. I think my play is more a farewell to the old world more than anything else at this point.
The post Questionable Gameplay appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday was the big reveal stream for where Bungie is going in the near future laying out a long term road map. As the countdown ticked to the show beginning, the screen showed a sequence of all of the places we visited starting with Destiny 1 all the way through Shadowkeep. All of this to hype us up for the big reveal, and then as the countdown ticked to zero we were presented with this screen. We sat in 8 minutes of 46 seconds of silence as a sequence of slides played out in front of us ending with a number of links to organizations that need our help in the Black Lives Matter movement.
I have to give Bungie huge credit for the way this played out. By hyping us to a fever pitch with the “best hits” reel playing out in the moments as the countdown ticked down, this came across with maximum effect. Those 8 minutes and 46 seconds that the Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck felt like an eternity. I guess I must be following the right crowd because I saw nothing but respect for the display. I still throw some serious side eye that it is to corporations we turn for solace in this time of global need… but it only makes me think more than we are sliding into a shadowrun esc corporate hellscape. That doubt aside however, I still greatly respect Bungie for their actions in not only donating to causes but also in taking time out of their big moment to make sure we remember.
Over the last week we have been getting fragments of a video showing two characters heading towards what we can only assume is Europa. Eris Morn and the Drifter have been characters that are all too willing to blur the lines between the Light and the Dark, so it is befitting that they represent what is ultimately the envoy in dealing with the Darkness. Over the last season the ships were a present threat looming on the Horizon, but now they have arrived and are interacting with the various planets in our solar system in what appears to be a similar manner to how the traveler was described.
The big reveal however is that we are adding a third to this rogues gallery. The Stranger is a character that we have heard nothing from since Destiny 1. She is the infamous source of the line “I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain”. She is also the one who called our Ghost “Little Light” and represented a character that knew far more about our circumstances and predicament than our then fledgling guardian first stepping foot into the Ishtar Sink on Venus. Now she has returned at the same time the darkness has returned and appears to be the individual ushering us into the new expansion.
I said earlier that Bungie laid out a roadmap, and in doing so they have announced the next two expansions and with that dispelling any rumors that a Destiny 3 was waiting in the wings. This in theory begins a regular release cadence of a new expansion coming out every September with the first being Beyond Light in 2020, The Witch Queen in 2021 and Lightfall in 2022. Additionally we have an established structure of four seasons per year, which in theory means every three months an infusion of new content. The feature addition for 2020 is that console generations will be able to play together without purchasing the game again as we transition between the PS4/Xbox One to the PS5/Series X. They also hinted that a feature on the longer term roadmap was unifying the players so that there was a single Destiny platform.
I played through the first mission, but that is pretty much as far as I made it last night. I’ve had this fraught relationship with Destiny since the introduction of the seasonal model. Especially with the season pass unlocking a number of items, but only if you manage to make it to level 100 each time. Instead of prompting me to engage and grind away, this has prompted me to check out since I know I won’t actually manage to achieve that goal unless I swap to ONLY playing Destiny. One of my frustrations has been that the seasons set up content that only lasts while that season is currently happening, and in theory content will be sticking around for several seasons afterwards solving one big problem I had.
They also however presented a new problem. They talked about the introduction of the Content Vault, and shelving old content that isn’t seeing much play time. This means that they are going to be removing a number of destinations and activities connected to them including the Leviathan with the release of Beyond Light in September. They said however that they were going to dig into the Destiny 1 vault and pull back out some content from there like the Cosmodrome. Pending they cycle content in and out of the vault on a pretty good schedule, then it might not be a bad thing. I am just not entirely certain how I will feel about losing what is currently my favorite grinding Destination… Titan.
In truth I am not really sure how I feel about the entire model going forward. Like I said, last night I only played long enough to make it through the first mission and even then only because the game didn’t give me a choice. As I loaded into the game the mission started without me having any ability to stop it. After playing through, I went to the Tower, did a bit of maintenance and then logged out to play PSO2. I am not nearly as the friends who are deeply engaged with this franchise. Yesterday for them seemed to be a re-ignition of a spark, and I am pretty jealous of.
It would be a lie if I said I would not be there playing Beyond Light in September. I like the concept of wielding the darkness and growing the abilities we have access to. However due to the stance of rolling out new content and removing old content, I am wondering what exactly we will sacrifice in the process. My preference will always be with constantly expanding the world, making it a more exciting and vibrant place to play. However it seems Bungie feels like they need to shrink it down a bit to keep from having to restart once again with a new game to keep the scope manageable. I understand that desire, and I absolutely do not want Destiny 3 to cause the same big reset that Destiny 2 did. For now I mostly just have to mull over these thoughts and determine at what point I will engage with this franchise again.
The post I don’t Even Have Time to Explain… appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
