Destiny

September 2017 Gaming Goals

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Oh crap it’s September already! Aside from the semester starting and my stress levels kicking into overdrive, it also means it’s time for my monthly gaming goals update.

August Goals recap:

FFXIV: Level my AST. I did it! Hooray! I still can’t decide whether I like AST or SCH better though.

Clear at least 1 boss of Omega Savage. Nope. We got the first boss down to something ridiculous like 0.1%, but that group ended up disbanding. Sadness.

Diablo 3: Finish Barbarian set mastery. Nope. I’ve been super unmotivated in D3 and combined with terrible luck with drops I still don’t have the last set I need to try the 4th dungeon.

WoW: Get back to the Robo-squids project. Yes! We got through Blackfathom Deeps and Gnomergan this month. News flash: I still hate Gnomer just as much as I ever have (which is a lot).

I got half of my goals for the month done. That’s not too terrible!

September Goals:

WoW: Get my shaman class mount. I leveled her up to 110 in August. Now it’s a matter of gearing up and getting through the Broken Shore quests to unlock the mount questline.

Do more Robosquids stuff. I’ve been loving this project but it’s hard to find times when all 4 of us can play. I resolve to pester my friends until we get it back on the schedule. (You’ve been warned, guys!)

Horizon Zero Dawn: Finish a second playthrough to see all the updates. It’s this month’s Aggrochat game of the month so I’m doubly motivated!

D3: Finish the Barbarian set mastery. I know I can do this. I just need a push. And I really need to get it done before Destiny 2 releases on PC and starts filling the “murder monsters, get loot explosion” slot in my gaming time.

Legendary: Get a maxed-star card of every color. Legendary: Game of Heroes is a mobile game with a super boring name and very sticky gameplay for me. It’s like a much slicker-looking, slightly less confusing Puzzle and Dragons. The weekly-ish events give pretty good chances at strong cards and materials to upgrade them, so hopefully I can get a maxed-out team by the end of the month.

You’ll note that FFXIV has fallen off the list. I’m just not into it lately, and forcing myself right now is likely to end in a full stop instead of a brief pause. I do still want to try to show up for raid nights more to hang out with my friends than anything else.

I think this month’s goals are pretty reasonable. I just need to remember to play HZD for the main story and not all the side content or there’s no way I’ll finish in time…


September 2017 Gaming Goals

For the Puppies

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I’ve rattled on over the last few days at some of the things I have been disappointed thus far in the Destiny Demo experience, or at least airing some of my concerns and misgivings.  I thought I should probably spend some time this morning talking about one of the things that they are doing amazingly well with the launch of Destiny 2.  One of the core reasons that most of my friends bounced off of this game…  was the lack of story.  Don’t get me wrong…  there is plenty of story to be had…  they just lay it out in a way that is largely nonsensical.  Only by hoarding weapon and armor descriptions…  hundreds of grimoire cards… and then cross referencing those against missions in the game and random nonsense that is in the background of the level design…  do you actually get the true picture of what is going on.  Please note… that I didn’t actually do this on my own but at some point I stumbled across the Myelin games channel and drank deeply of the font of lore theory.  If you want the story in a much more digestible form then I refer you again to the amazing Lore Primer video that MyNameIsByf created where he attempts to lay everything that we know for certain out in a linear timeline…  that happens to be an hour and a half in run time.  Prior to launch they claimed the game would have a story line rivaling that of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Star Wars…  and we all balked.  In truth however it does in fact have this story woven through the fabric of the game… but makes every possible attempt to disguise it from us and make it harder to figure out than is humanly reasonable.

This time around however they swore they had changed, and when we got our hands on the PS4 demo…  as I have said before there is literally more story in the Homecoming mission than there was in the original game sequence leading up to the Black Garden.  I am not trying to be hyperbolic here… but in truth there is way more character exposition than exists in any form in Vanilla Destiny.  We were introduced to a cast of characters…  like The Traveler, The Speaker, The Stranger…  and a handful of characters that I could tell we were supposed to care about that served as our class leads….  but never actually did much in the way of leading.  We also had a nonsensical enemy in the form of “The Darkness” which sorta felt as stupid as attempting to go to war against “Terrorism”.  We lacked anything resembling a big bad Villain that we the players were focused on…  and when we did get raids…  we had no emotional payoff in taking down Aetheon or Crota…  because they were just another name in a long line of names that meant nothing to us.  One of the best experiences I have ever had was when I finally took down Arthas… the Lich King for the first time…  because I had an entire expansion focused on combating the forces of the scourge and playing cat and mouse with him across a continent.  When it finally resolved and we got to see that cut scene for the very first time…  there were literal tears of joy in my eyes.  With the Taken King we got a better shot at a big baddie…  but even then we didn’t really have enough time to learn to hate him the way we should have.  The emotional payback element was largely missing because he zoned into our solar system… blew up a bunch of Awoken… and then wrecked a ship that wasn’t even ours.  We had a dozen or so missions to get into her head, and by the time we took out Oryx…  it was cool and definitely felt epic but was still lacking any resounding payback theme.

The core problem there… is the Taken King content and our supposed “war” with Oryx happened disconnected from anything that we actually cared about as players.  The Tower… our home for the last three years remained largely unscathed…  as did the Reef other than a few NPCs swapping places.  There was no sense of loss to fuel our desire for revenge, and while it is a freaking amazing expansion and a leap forward in storytelling…  but still not quite there.  With Destiny 2 there are so many things changing… and in truth they needed to.  There will be players that lament the loss of their shiny vault full of weapons… and I won’t like there are a lot of things I will be sad to say goodbye to.  However what we are getting is a tangible reason for fighting and that means so much more than any given piece of loot could…  and the folks that know me really well will be shocked to hear me say that.  The history of the city is built on the backs of major flash points that we can only really find out about in legend… or in the name of locations.  Growing up I heard about all of the things that my Grandfathers went through with World War II…  how one Grandfather stormed the beach at Normandy…  got shot up by a gunner and just happened to fall into a trench with a medic that could patch his punctured lung.  That was his story though… and not mine…  much in the same way that the tales about the fabled Guardians of the past are just legends and didn’t really factor much into my day to day game play.  In Destiny 2 we start the game by living through the fall of the Tower and the loss of our Light as a source of power…  as well as the potential loss of our constant companion the Ghost.  We have reason and motive to want to take back what was ours from this Chubby Darth Malgus.  I am so ready to hit the ground and start taking down Cabal as I at the same time attempt to fortify and rebuild our new home…  the Farm.

Another thing that the Taken King did better was start to give our class leads a personality.  Cayde-6 went from being a random Exo Hunter in the tower…  to Robotic Mal from Firefly.  Zavala went from being that dude that sold me crappy Titan gear…  to being the Stalwart defender of the tower and the “worrier in chief” about everything.  Ikora Rey went from being someone I never actually talked to… because the Warlock jump is horrible…  to being this sassy arcane dynamo.  The Homecoming mission took all of these elements and built on it, and they have been carrying this mission forward in the form of a flood of videos about Destiny 2.  I’ve been linking them in and out of the paragraphs of text, and they do this amazing job of packaging up the elements of the world that you might want to care about and delivering them to you on a silver platter.  Yesterday the live action video shipped and it is truly amazing… and I said this before but there is no song better for a “getting shit done” montage than Sabotage by the Beastie Boys.  Leading up to this however there have been five character vignettes… one for each of the class leads:  Cayde-6, Zavala, and Ikora Rey…  as well as one for Hawthorne the person who is going to be helping us a lot at our new home on The Farm…  as well as one for Ghaul our new bad guy focus.  They’ve done more in the months leading up to the release of this sequel to set the stage and give us a reason to care about it…  than they did in the entirety of three years of the original.  For me…  its like getting to share this gift with all of my friends because I was the only one mental enough to actually go digging into the lore.  For the last few years my friends have had to listen to me rattle on about this or that from Destiny without actually knowing any of the context.  Here is a giant fucking context sandwich…  and it gives me a lot of hope for the future.  I think Bungie gets it… and they understand that you cannot just throw a train of breadcrumbs in your game and call it good.  They started in the middle of an established story…  but never gave us enough bearings to be able to really find our way clear of caring about what was going on.  I’ve said before that the central focus of Destiny is shooting space monsters with space guns… and I still stand by that.  If you are really not into that premise then no amount of story is really going to make you want to stay.  However…  it does give you some reasons for why you might want to shoot those space monsters…  and understand where exactly your space guns game from.

 

The Farm

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The Farm

The PC demo of Destiny 2 so far is following the same basic pattern that the PS4 weekend did, including a brief two hour window for players to explore the new Farm social space.  During the PS4 weekend I didn’t actually get the participate in this because it happened during a Saturday afternoon when I was out running errands with my wife.  As a result I was more than amped to be able to actually see what would ultimately be our new home as Guardians.  Are we even Guardians now without the light?  The space is gorgeous though I have to admit I am constantly feeling like someone is just about to line up a sniper shot on me.  The only times we have been able to be in the EDZ aka the European Dead Zone as player are during a handful of Crucible maps…  one of which has this insane corridor down the center of the map where everyone snipes you.  The farm as a whole though was a fairly dead experience given that there are no NPCs at all…  nor is there even the fabled Chicken.  That said I think the farm is going to work a lot better than the Tower did, as everything we need seems to be greatly compacted.  I liked this about the Temple of Iron, but the only problem there was we didn’t have access to the various faction vendors.  I am however super pumped that Tyra Karn is the Cryptarch we are keeping rather than Master Rahool or the charlatan Master Ives at the Reef that was constantly bugged.  This is the point where the AggroChat crew gives me crap for knowing the names of the Cryptarchs.

The Farm

I think more than anything I am curious to see how this space populates with stuff.  I’ve heard rumor that this is going to be a lot like Meredil was in World of Warcraft, that as you roam around the world you “save” people and bring them back to the farm.  If this is true then I guess it makes sense why there were no NPCs showing up… because there may simply not be a basepop for the zone.  What is available may load based on your progression in the game, with some sort of an instancing tech.  Either that or they may have just stripped everything out for the sake of the demo.  There are folks in my clan that reported that the social space worked their CPU and GPU harder than any other area we have seen, and I can only imagine that is due to all of the models being tracked.  I am not sure what the new social space limits are, but it definitely seemed like a sizable bit larger than tower.  During one of the heated football matches, there were probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 players actively on the farm.  This is small by MMO standards but pretty decent sized for something that is functionally a shooter lobby.  The other big takeaway is just how damned gorgeous everything is.  There are docks leading out on the lake… and I am hoping that we maybe get a few boats to explore.  The area surrounding the Farm in game supposedly has lots of signs and directions in German… so in theory that places this area in Germany?  Considering all we have really seen of Earth is the area surrounding the Baikonur Cosmodrome, it is going to be awesome seeing completely new vistas.

The Farm

After some time roaming around the farm, I gathered together with a few clanmates to run the strike since Tony aka DrGoob had not seen it.  The clan is slowly in the process of migrating from Band to Discord…  to some success.  The primary reason is that the PC chat built into Destiny 2 is absolutely horrible.  I mean on some level it is functional chat, but it sounds worse than any audio on a PC should.  In many ways it reminds me of the way that the original implementation of voice chat sounded in World of Warcraft.  Functionally it is tinny and quiet and compressed to living hell to make it take up as little bandwidth as humanly possible.  The other night Grace and I attempted to use it, and ultimately fell back on other voice comms because it was just too bad to stomach.  Apparently Tequila Mockingbird reached the same conclusion and finally latched onto Discord with both hands as providing a reasonable chat experience.  The voice chat on PSN was always horrible… but you sort of put up with it because it was a console.  It is a complete sin to use something this bad on the PC where there is Discord, Teamspeak, Mumble, Ventrilo, Skype and a plethora of other options waiting to be used.  The real interesting thing ahead is to see how the game shakes out… and where everyone ends up.  Thus far pretty much every PS4 player that has access to a machine that can run this game…  is heavily leaning towards the PC version.  The PC running on the lowest preset… looks better than the stock PS4 running the game.  Let that sink in for a moment.  In truth I would say the PC running at Medium…  looks better than what I have seen from the PS4 Pro captured footage.  My three year old gaming laptop runs the game well enough to give my PS4 a run for its money.  Now I plan on playing both platforms because I like the PS4 and I like having multiple copies of Destiny…  but It is almost 100% certain that I will be playing almost exclusively on the PC for awhile when it finally launches in October.

New Spaceships

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Yesterday was a very full gaming day for me, and many others in my (admittedly tiny) social sphere. Not only was it the start of the Destiny 2 PC beta, but it was also a major patch day for WoW. They didn’t let us peasants that haven’t preordered yet download the beta until mid-day yesterday, so I had to queue up the download after I got home from work. Then I had to pause that download long enough to let WoW get patched up. I let D2 download in the background while I checked out my new WoW spaceship and headed off to another planet.

I only played enough WoW to unlock the new set of world quests on one character, but it’s been a pretty great experience so far. Argus feels huge and dangerous. The opening sequence feels suitably epic, although it still manages to have Blizzard’s trademark “lore character swoops in for the kill steal” moments. Here on the first day of the patch it feels more like a mini-expansion than a mid-expansion update. We shall see how well all of the content on offer holds up in the coming weeks. At least we are promised a bit of meaningful questing as the Argus story unlocks. Anything is better than Broken Shore favorites like “hand Dadghar some currency so he can make a joke at your expense,” and “I don’t know, just go away and kill some stuff I guess.”

Thinking about those quests makes me mad both because they felt like a waste of time and because I had to do them to unlock flying, which is now useless in the new zones. I don’t want to get in an epic rant about flying in WoW but the back and forth of having and losing flying is getting very old. I appreciate the idea that going without flying at the start of the expansion lets them design the zones and questing experience in a more immersive way. I don’t even mind that earning flying requires a bit of effort now. What feels terrible is spending all that effort to get flying for one patch, and then having it taken away again. My $0.02: If you’re going to take it away, don’t make us work so hard for it, or if you’re going to make us work hard for it don’t take it away.

Flying rants aside, I greatly enjoyed my time in Argus up until exactly the moment when the D2 download finished. Then I commenced an epic battle with error codes, graphics drivers, and windows updates until I finally was victorious and could launch the beta. It looks and feels very slick on my machine, and it played nicely with my controller. The small amount of PvE questing available was fun enough, and felt perfectly Destiny-y. I’m not sure how much the story will make sense to someone who’s never played the first game, but I expect that they’ll be too busy struggling with the controls to worry about it since there’s no tutorial of any kind. I hope the full version of the game does a better job of easing people in.

I did get the chance to try out the strike with a couple friends, and I’m glad I did. It felt fairly similar in difficulty and length to the few strikes I’d tried in Destiny before, although the last boss was more complicated than I’m used to. I’m very glad I got to do it with friends so I could enjoy the sights and not feel super rushed. I haven’t tried any of the crucible offerings yet, and I’m not sure if I will during the beta. Most likely I will make a few new characters and play through the quest sequence again until I decide between keyboard/mouse and controller, and figure out the settings that work best for me.

If you’re curious or on the fence about Destiny 2 I’d suggest checking out the beta while you can. It’s definitely not full access to all the game’s content yet, but it is a reasonable sampling that should give you an idea of whether you’d enjoy it or not. I’m definitely looking forward to being able to play the full game!


New Spaceships