This evening I am going to go see Star Wars Rise of Skywalker, and I am sure tomorrow I will be posting my thoughts about it. However this morning I am going to continue our journey down memory lane as I talk about the games that were important to me over the last decade. Each time I think I am walking into a slow year… I sift through the titles that released and keep finding things that were extremely important to me. Let’s get started.
Elder Scrolls Online
Elder Scrolls Online – PC
I am not sure if there are words to express how important this title is to me. I could have in theory included this game on 2013, because it also played heavily into that year for me as I began testing it in February. I’m a member of the Psijic Order, the original team of testers that stayed with the game as it progressed through various phases and I am super proud to have stomped a bunch of bugs… or at least reported them prolifically. This game mattered me to not only because it is Elder Scrolls a setting that I adore, but also that one of my good friends worked on it. While this didn’t turn out to be the “WoW Killer” like I had hoped, it is a game that I keep revisiting to spend time wandering through its amazing storyline. In fact it seems like it might be time to dust off my characters and pay another visit over the holidays.
Transistor
Transistor – PC
This game was the game that more or less inspired the AggroChat game club concept. It was a title that spontaneously we all happened to be playing at exactly the same time, and then as a result we recorded what felt like three full shows worth of discussion as we dug deep into the title and our feelings about it. We tried to make this function artificially as we constructed the concept of the Game Club, but it never felt quite as fresh or in the moment because there was always a time when more than one of us were never really that into the chosen title. Supergiant Games is a phenomenal studio and I am willing to play pretty much everything they put out. Transistor was this fluid fusion of music, story and interesting ARPG gameplay that created a total package that we all kept returning to over and over. Collectively we deemed this to be the game of 2014, and it still holds up. I would have loved to have played this on the Switch as it is now my modern platform for this type of game.
Wolfenstein: The New Order
Wolfenstein: The New Order – PC
I love Wolfenstein as a franchise and I have been a huge fan since I first got my hands on the original Apogee title from a shareware disk sold by the local bookstore. I obsessed with the game and editing new levels for it, and then as each new game has released I have spent time playing it. After Return to Castle Wolfenstein the quality of the games fell off significantly, so I was completely excited to see a brand new game being worked on by Machine Games a Zenimax studio. This game is both a sequel and a re-imagining of the entire experience and I loved every moment of it. The screenshot is from one of my favorite sequences where you are scaling the side of the eponymous Castle Wolfenstein, but the images never quite do it justice. There were so many really cool big set pieces in the game, and it wove with it a really interesting storyline that provided the action I craved and the character development that Kodra craved. It is a magical time when a game is planted firmly in both of our wheelhouses.
Divinity: Original Sin
Divinity: Original Sin – PC
This game is going on the list for a few reasons, but not because I necessarily played it over and over and managed to find deep revelations in it. The first reason why it is on the list is because it presents something that has never really existed in my memory before this game, a two player classic PC role-playing game experience. You can start the game as either one character with a swappable NPC, or you can have two different players controlling each character that is on screen and as a result end up having competing goals and objectives. The other reason why it deserves to be on the list is the sheer depth that this game has. You will go insane trying to track down every single thread and quite honestly this paralysis lead me to not get terribly far in the game as a whole. When I encountered the first town I effectively spent all of my time doing what seemed to be a near endless number of side quests and completely tilting my way out of the main story. I want to revisit this game but set some guidelines about what sorts of quests I am willing to partake in.
Destiny
Destiny – PS4
Destiny is the reason why I bought a Playstation 4. It was the single game that was willing to sell me on purchasing a console and I did so more or less to play in the Alpha that was exclusive to that platform. I saw in this game so much promise that I absolutely wanted to be in. However the initial game-play experience was a little lacking for me and I bounced out of it only to return when Taken King released. From that point forward however there has never been a time when I have not at least been playing Destiny a little bit, and I never quite realized just how much this franchise would come to dominate my game time. I love everything about this world and its rich lore… and the subtle mechanical differences between each weapon that make them all feel so unique to me. I view Destiny and Destiny 2 as a continuum and together they are probably my favorite game of this decade.
Where Bel Was Mentally in 2014
It was a really interesting year because it marked the birth of our weekly podcast AggroChat. It also marks the year that I officially transitioned into management or at least was an official supervisor. Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls also dominated my play time, but since I had already talked about it in 2012 I figured that was probably enough of that. It was a pretty good year and considering we record AggroChat 280 this weekend, we set up a firm foundation that seems to still be working.
The dawning event is live and once again we are baking cookies for the various NPCs that can be found in Destiny 2. This was a really fun event last year and was worth a mountain of experience. This time around it seems as though we can keep doing bounties indefinitely as Eva once again has the ability for us to buy more bounties. I didn’t get time to play nearly as much as I would have liked last night because we had holiday errands to run, but I did manage to knock out the first few quests and unlock both the chase weapon and the first form of the sparrow. Something of note… the game seemingly remembers all of the packaged you delivered last year and as a result I already had the “deliver packages” requirements finished.
Last year I posted a long list of all of the ingredients, and these are largely still valid. However I am going to copy and paste from that original post to keep them concise. Essentially every recipe requires three components, a green item that you get by killing specific types of mobs, a blue item that you get from specific kinds of kills, and then dawning essence which drops from pretty much everything while the event is going on. You get 5 for example from completing a Heroic Public event, a few from opening chests etc. you are going to need 15 to craft anything until you can “masterwork” the oven… which last year was unlocked by crafting one each of all of the packages if I am remembering correctly.
Green Items – Based on Mob
Cabal Oil – Kill any Cabal Enemies
Chitin Powder – Kill any Hive Enemies
Dark Ether Cane – Kill any Scorn Enemies
Ether Cane – Kill any Fallen Enemies
Taken Butter – Kill any Taken Enemies
Vex Milk – Kill any Vex Enemies
Blue Items – Based on Kill/Damage Type
Bullet Spray – Kills made with “Machine Gun” type weapons – Auto Rifle/SMG/HMG
Delicious Explosions – Explosive kills aka Class Grenades/Rocket Launcher/Grenade Launcher
Electric Flavor – Arc Damage based Kills
Flash of Inspiration – A kill that generates an Orb of Light – Supers or Masterworks
Hackberry Tart (Benedict 99-40 – Tower Annex) – Cabal Oil and Multifaceted Flavors
Hot Crossfire Buns (Ada-1 – Tower Annex) – Ether Cane and Balanced Flavors
Fried Sha-dough (Visage of Calus – Triumph Hall?) – Dark Ether Cane and Superb Flavor
Lavender Ribbon Cookies (Saint-14 – Sundail?) – Vex Milk and Personal Touch
Thousand-Layer Cookie (Riven – Dreaming City?) – Taken Butter and Delicious Explosion
Having not made all of these recipes yet, there are a few I am not quite certain about how to deliver them. Namely Visage of Calus, Saint-14 and Riven… and for those I have given my guess. But also indicated that it is a guess by slapping a ? at the end.
The chase weapon I got pretty quickly after doing an initial series of turn ins. It looks and feels like a slightly modified Antiope-D. The slightly faster rate of fire makes it feel a little more jumpy than the Antiope, but all it all it is a reasonable option for a primary slot submachinegun. More than likely I will keep using Exit Strategy in this slot when I have need for a Kinetic submac, but this is a reasonable option and is kinda cool looking if gold and blue is your thing. There is an ornament on the store that makes it look really nice, but has the standard 700 silver pricetag attached to it.
I am a much bigger fan of the vehicle this year. The sleigh was somewhat entertaining… but the sound effects associated with each time you boosted got on my nerves. I’ve not had a chance to actually use this one but it seems like it is more standard fare with each unlock just adding an additional perk as opposed to the gimmicks like glimmer explosions. It is more or less a snow mobile and I am fine with this.
My hope is tonight to spend more time working on both the Saint-14 quest and baking more cookies. I’ve already gotten 3 levels however since starting the event, so I feel like it is a good time to grind things up. What were your thoughts about dawning so far? I like that the event took the packages delivered last year into account for rewards. I am bummed that SRL the Sparrow Racing League did not make another appearance. That is the one event from Destiny 1 that I miss the most, and I am hoping that someday they bring it back as an actual game mode.
It was a thoroughly frustrating weekend, so instead of a post in the games of the decade series, you are instead getting a general Destiny post. I took off work Friday and thought I was being awesome, running around and taking care of a bunch of things like renewing my drivers license. Then Friday night I got a text that would ultimately dominate the entire weekend. I have a warning set on my account to text me any time a transaction over $300 is placed against my bank account. At 6:13 pm I got a text saying that a “check” for $797.51 was written against my account. I knew I did not have any bills queued up for that amount, so it lead me to go sifting through my bank account where there were three other unauthorized transactions.
This lead to a back and forth with the bank call center Friday night, and by the end of the evening them realizing that it wasn’t just some sort of a printing error and that someone had faked out checks against my account under what appeared to be the actual name of the person commuting the fraud. Saturday this meant we had to go to a branch location that had lobby hours and close out our original account and open a new one… which then meant I spent the rest of the day trying to make sure everything that I had set to bank draft for utilities and such was pointed at the new account. We also had to file a police report, which I don’t actually expect to go very far… even though we were more or less able to find the guy with a series of google searches. It appears the guy used his real name, real date of birth and potentially real drivers license number when writing the checks and there is a felon that matches both name and birth date in the OKC metro where two of the checks were written.
Between flurries of dealing with the stress I played an awful lot of fairly incognito Destiny, and apparently am really bad at paying attention to messages that are coming in while I am playing. Poor Squirrel tried to reach me on practically every platform to see if I wanted to run a Nightfall. Thalen similarly tried to ping me multiple times over the weekend, and I was seemingly unaware of any of it until much later. My mind was likely going through the permutations of “which account did I forget to move over” while mindlessly grinding away in Destiny. I did however in my travels manage to pull the Exotic sparrow from the Arms Dealer nightfall which was kinda cool.
The hero of the weekend is Martyr’s Retribution… or Marty as I have heard the community referring to it. This is a brand new type of grenade launcher that fires a Titan thermite grenade out along the ground that follows the grenade being ejected. As a result of this behavior you use this basically like you are throwing an extra grenade to help soften up any enemies in front of you. This can be used to devastating effect in the crucible where I racked up several medals in the very short time I spent doing that this weekend. The most important trait for me personally is Auto Loading Holster, which allows me to play in a way where I fire this off, then immediately swap to my primary and then after getting some kills swap back to fire off another round that has been reloaded for me.
Another good get for the weekend is a significantly better roll of the Breachlight sidearm… which coincidentally pairs very nicely with Marty. I love this sidearm and having one with outlaw and multi-kill clip works well. I did really like Vorpal blade as far as new weapon perks go, but this one is overall better suited for my play style. I would have rather had something else in the second column than Drop Mag, but I guess this is the way of Destiny. There is always a more perfect roll out there somewhere waiting to be found.
The other take away I have from the weekend, is that I have started to see a bunch of weapons that I have not seen at all since Year 1. The Old Fashioned for example is one of those, and while this is not an amazing roll with hip fire and pulse monitor… it was interesting to see it show up regardless. This maybe means that we finally have the full compliment of weapons available from banshee again, as for some time it seems like I kept getting the same ones over and over. I am hoping to see a weapon that has eluded me completely on the PC… the Jiangshi AR4 Omolon Auto Rifle. It seems as though according to the Wiki you may be able to get Uriel’s Gift in random roll variant which would be similarly awesome.
I hope the new week brings me some stress relief… but I know it probably won’t considering I have to do a ton of stuff to close out the year since as of next Monday I will be off for two weeks.
While I am starting to dip my toes back into World of Warcraft, I am still spending an excessive amount of time in Destiny 2. I am a huge fan of the new Altars of Sorrow event and it has rapidly become my downtime activity. Between activities? Lets hop down to the moon and see if there is a group up and doing the Altars. Of note Escalation Protocol also used to be my group activity of choice back when it was actually happening on the regular. There is just something about the zero commitment drop in nature that I really love.
I mean part of me wishes there was a sure fire way of getting a successful group of players together to do it, apart from queueing in groups. One thing I noticed is that when I queue solo, I get matched with groups way more often than when Thalen and I were trying to drop in and do some Altars as a pair. In most of those occasions it seemed like it was just the two of us attempting to do content clearly designed for a full fire team. Regardless it is a good way to get a handful of weapon drops. They are on a daily rotation and Reddit user Letuch created a spreadsheet to track the rotation and what some of the rolls you might be interesting in are.
Yesterday was shotgun day, and I have yet to get a roll I am super happy with. For now this is my current best option which is Quickdraw and Rampage. I also have a variant with Swashbuckler and Auto Loading Holster which might be interesting. The truth is this isn’t exactly my jam as far as weapons go because it is a strange archetype of slug based shotguns that fire a single high powered round rather than a spray of shrapnel. If you are dead on with this you can drop targets really fast and it is basically a legendary Chaperone.
I’ve talked about it before, but for now this has become my new kinetic shotgun of choice. It comes with 8 in the magazine, One Two Punch and Threat Detector and the reload speed is nonsense on it. This is the closest I have found to a shotgun that replaces my beloved Ikelos. Sadly for a lot of players this is going to be much easier to get given that no one seems to be running Escalation Protocol. I wish they would turn that into a playlist similar to the Vex Invasion so that people can still have access to the items. Occasionally Thalen and I drop down onto Mars to see if it is going on because I still lack two of the three available weapons, and he has none of them.
The other weapon that I have firmly in the not sure about it camp is the Apostate. I am not much of a sniper user at all, so I am not sure what represents a good roll here. Snapshot Sights and Range Finder seem like a viable combo given that this feels like the type of sniper you would want to try and quick scope with. That particular build seems to aid that process. Post in the comments if you have an idea what a better option might be for me to chase. In truth I am doing the event because I am enjoying it and the weapons are more or less just a bonus.
I posted about the curated roll for the Rocket Launcher that I got a few days ago, and in truth… I am probably never going to find a better roll on a rocket launcher than one I already have in my inventory. Bad Omens is the Gambit rocket launcher and at some point in my travels I picked up one that has both Cluster Bomb and Tracking, making it as close to a Destiny 2 Gjallarhorn as I think I am ever going to find. This is effectively what I use to nuke Invaders in gambit, because it is super easy to target in and destroy them.
On to other things… I am nearing the end of this seasonal journey. When it started and when the Mastery tree was introduced I was not entirely certain I would play enough to hit rank 100. However as of last night I am about halfway to 97 and will easily hit 100 this weekend when I play some Iron Banner. I gotta say there are a lot of issues with this sort of Fortnite style progression path, but it does give me some constantly focus and a drive to keep playing in order to get those final items. For me… it maybe adds the overarching sense of purpose that Destiny 2 was lacking once I reached the item cap. I’ve been sitting at 950 for weeks and knowing there are more things to unlock has kept me engaged.
