Destiny – Page 64

Light and Poms

March 21, 2016 by Belghast

Losing Light

This marks the second weekend of attempts to get a black spindle, and I am quickly reaching a point where I no longer want it. The first weekend was a tale of me largely spending the entire day either waiting to get a group or making attempts on it. For whatever reason Bungie seems to keep choosing Sunday as the day for Spindle runs… which is not exactly prime time for people playing the game. On top of that… Sunday is normally a day that I have stuff that needs to get done, and instead for two different weekends my world has focused around trying to get a Black Spindle. I reached a point yesterday where I wanted to reach through the internet and punch whoever it was that designed this mission. The individual parts aren’t all that bad… but combined together is just maddening. If you could simply respawn at a checkpoint before the 10 minute timer starts on the Ketch it wouldn’t be so bad. I would happily grind that until we finally got it… but instead it is the frustration of having to clear to a boss… then do the run across the temple… then unlock the various chambers… then FINALLY go up into the ketch and do the “real” mission. So you have 10-15 minutes of bullshit before you reach the point at which it is omg serious mode.

We tried several different methods of attempting to down the boss, the main one being that we jump to the middle and burn him down with swords. Towards the end we started trying to just whittle his ass down while keeping the adds under control, and honestly neither really worked well. Anytime we ducked outside of the entrance tunnel we would get wrecked, and almost one shot. I guess that is the biggest frustration is that the room has no place where you can really set up OTHER than the entrance tunnel and clean out the adds. The geometry of the room means that someone is always getting hung on something and stuck awkwardly out in the open… which means they are essentially dead. I am not sure what is up with the mission but it felt like we did significantly worse than the last time… and this time around I am 304 and decked out in raid weapons that deal extra damage to taken. I know I am the albatross around the neck of the group, but I am not exactly sure what I am doing wrong there. At this point I am not likely to spend another weekend of attempts on this stupid weapon… when I have two sniper rifles that I enjoy using already. Sure this is the best sniper in the game, but if it quite literally makes one of my party members slam their controller down against the desk breaking it… it is not worth the hassle or frustration.

Pom Pom Squad

The highlight of the weekend however for me was getting a Pom Pom Beanie on Friday evening while playing Division. Strangely enough this seems to be the chase item for most people because they are actually rather rare. I have given food and water to every single person that I meet along the street asking for it… and have a huge amount of clothing options… and have gotten exactly one pom pom beanie. Now these also can apparently appear on the appearance vendor that unlocks with the security tier, but I have yet to see any there. What is awesome about mine is the fact that it fits so perfectly with the colors that I already choose… black and green. Other than that last night I got a string of awesome weapon drops… and I finally abandoned my beloved LSW for a couple of ACR variants and eventually a P416… which all seem to feel the same when firing them. I also found an upgrade for my SRS marksman rifle but unfortunately the upgrade was only a green so it won’t last nearly as long. That seems to be my combo of weapons of choice… a fairly accurate assault rifle that fires well in single shot/bursts and a marksman rifle for headshots. This allows me to either spray and play, for random two mob encounters on the street… or get more strategic for larger groups.

I am consistently amazed at the wide variety of feelings this game can make me feel. There are moments when I feel stirrings of patriotism and sentimentality like when I come across a memorial like the one above, or improvised banners hanging out of windows that say slogans like “Can’t Keep NY Down”. Then other times the game gut punches you with feels when it comes to finding a phone message from before the infection, or as society was crumbling. Like last night I picked up a message from two parents that were coming into town to see their child because they missed them… and it feels all the more tense knowing that they had no clue what they were walking into. We had a lengthy AggroChat show talking about the morality of this game… and for whatever reason it stirs something completely different in me. I absolutely feel like the good guy, the one trying hard to bring some sort of order to a fallen city. Sure the only thing that separates me from the looters is the badge I am wearing… but I am also saving countless random people from executions or muggings as I roam the city streets. I might be more vigilante than righteous crusader, but I am okay with that. I think you miss some of the nuance of the game if you are constantly focused on this objective or the next, and aren’t really participating in the events that happen on the street. I cannot count the number of times I have rolled up on a group of Rikers with their guns drawn on a civilian, and even though it is a nameless faceless NPC… I saved them from certain death. Had I been a little slower on the trigger finger they would be dead on the ground, and those are the moments I feel heroic. Those are the moments when I don’t question what I am doing in this game.

Of Immersion

March 17, 2016 by Belghast

That Word

One of the things that I have come to realize over the last few days is that apparently immersion in a video game is not really that important to me. What I mean by that is that sense of “losing yourself in a game” and for lack of better verbiage start thinking like your character. This is one of those things that role players do amazingly well, and something that I have honestly always struggled with. So what ends up happening when I play a pen and paper game for example… is that I ultimately always play a version of myself. The same is true for MMOs that I create this “super me” where I change my features to match what I guess internally I consider the idealized version of myself. I created the above imagine some time ago to illustrate that point, that essentially I keep creating the same character over and over… and the games that refuse to allow me to create that character… I quickly lose interest in. The reason why this has reared its head once more is the fact that I keep reading Division reviews that say the same thing. There are a host of critics that find it jarring that they are having to fight people in essentially heavily armored hoodies. There are so many that state that it “breaks their immersion” to fight something that takes so many bullets to make it fall over, even though they are not terribly well armored. This is not the first time something like this has come up, and each time it makes me question… am I ever really immersed in a game?

The thing is… I geek out about the lore and world-building that happens behind the scenes of the worlds that I am inhabiting. I use the world inhabit because there are times I feel like I am wandering around through a realistic looking setting. I remember the sheer awe I felt the first time I left Kaladim in Everquest and turned around to see just how massive the entrance really was. I am a screenshot junkie and I am constantly snapping photos of the various vistas in the games I am playing. I get thoroughly impressed when I am wandering a game like The Division that makes me feel like I am actually wandering Manhattan. The thing is… there is never a point for me where I don’t realize I am playing a video game. I’ve yet to really experience that transcendent moment that some folks talk about, where they blend into the story and get swept away as though it were really happening. I mean a game can tug on my emotions, and make me feel all sorts of things… but it is always a game, and I am always me experiencing it not some other character. I got to thinking about the reason why this might be… and I finally landed on a possible answer. When I am playing games… there is never a moment when I am not also doing something else. If I am downstairs, the television is almost always on in the background, or I am carrying on a conversation with my wife at the same time. If I am upstairs I am monitoring slack, discord or instant messenger conversations on my second monitor (or at least making an attempt at doing so) and while playing PS4 I am constantly waking my PC up when the screen goes to sleep so I can do the same. Even back in the day when I would play a Nintendo or Super Nintendo game in my childhood bedroom… I would be listening to music or trying to jot down notes about where I found this or that. I guess I have always been a habitual multi-tasker with one foot always in the next activity, or the one after that… and because my mind is always thinking about other things and other possibilities it is very hard to get all that engaged in the one I am currently doing. So when I play a game… I want a really awesome world with really fun game mechanics… but a lot of the sticking points that seem to bother other people just simply don’t even register until I read it from someone else’s perspective.

Going Dark

A good chunk of last night was spent doing Mythic Dungeons in World of Warcraft. The normal Wednesday night raid group did not meet this week because we were down four or five people. When I got home I popped into Discord and ultimately wound up logging in and tanking a couple of Mythic dungeons, something that for whatever reason I had never actually done. Of note… unless it is late in the evening there is never a time when I am going to turn tanking for a full guild group. Now if we are having to pug people… you are likely going to see me check out completely, but I really do enjoy tanking for friends and friends of friends. After a couple of runs however I had my fill and ultimately logged from WoW for the evening. I popped into The Division and did a cleaners mission that was super stressful and wound up with me rezzing at the check point a number of times. The problem I have been having is that I am starting to feel severely under geared for my level, so after having watched so many dark zone videos where the loot seems to drop like candy, I decided to make my way over there even though I have heard so many times that “solo dark zone” is a bad idea. Within a few minutes of wandering around, I was absolutely slaughtered by a rogue agent… but the thing is it didn’t really bother me that much because I had yet to actually pick up anything decent. Instead I opted to simply hunt right around the nearest Extraction point, where I noticed there were lots of people who seemed completely happy not to shoot me in the back.

I wandered around for a little bit and in that time managed to successfully extract a couple of loads of stuff. A few of the items were blue upgrades… but the bulk was simply just stuff that I could sell and push me closer to my goal of a nice weapon available on the main base weapons vendor. I had quite a bit of fun, and I can absolutely see how exploring this super dangerous area would be amazing with friends. My schedule has been pretty damned wonky over the last few weeks so I am kinda hoping that I can connect with some of my other friends playing this game over the weekend and do some dark zone fun. I realize that I am in an awkward level not being 30 yet, but I still think it could be a lot of fun to wander around out there and see what we can take down. Last night I finally dinged 15, which again makes me so far behind the pack it isn’t even funny level wise. Lately I had been pushing my way around the lower zones trying to finish them, when in truth I probably should just skip ahead to the 15ish areas and do whatever is available out there. I poked my head into Flatiron and immediately started seeing greens that were massive upgrades over what I happened to be wearing, so I am guessing that is precisely what I should be doing. The problem is… I have spent so much time wandering aimlessly that I have out leveled the areas I still have some quests in. I figure I can always go at a later date and mop those up after I have hit the cap.

Deforestation

March 16, 2016 by Belghast

So Much Change

So one of the things you will pick up on if you have read my blog for terribly long, is that I don’t exactly handle change well. I can do pretty well with juggling new information or new ideas… but when it comes to fundamental changes in my home or work lives it stresses me the hell out. Basically I need a place of stability somewhere, and right now that is very much not home. There has been this sequence of changes that are all positive, but all worrisome for me personally. The worst of it was during the renovation work on the house, namely the fact that it drug on as long as it did and that there were constantly other people inhabiting my space. Last night however… it reached a new point when I got home from work. We’ve never done much of anything with our backyard, and this year we are trying to change that. We set up the patio off the new door to our bedroom, changed out the deck boxes, got a bunch of new chairs… and even a wind chime (something I have always wanted) all in the name of making the backyard space more usable. I don’t have a great “before” picture of my back yard, but I will be using one from this winter as a point of reference. You see the trees that we have around our back deck? Those are apparently not trees at all, but are intended to be a hedge. The hedge in the photo is supposed to be about a foot and a half or so tall in front of the other hedge that is now a tree. As a result of this we talked to a friend who does landscaping with the hope that he could sort things out for us and get things back under control.

The problem is I was not exactly prepared for the reality of what that meant. There is what looks like the limbs of an entire forest dotting the backyard, and this panoramic shot was taken before they were actually finished. They have since taken out the bulk of the second tree and cut it back hoping that it will start greening up again in a more manageable fashion. Neither my wife or I were really prepared for the fact that we went from having lots of green blocking the view of the green belt behind our house and the neighborhood across the way… to having almost zero. I have faith that things will grow back and the end result will be much better… but man does it look like shit right now. I guess this is what happens when plants are allowed to grow unchecked for twenty years. At some point I guess I need to learn how to trim things like I probably should have been all this time. I grew up in a house without any real landscaping so I guess I just assume that things needed to be left alone and allowed to do whatever they hell they wanted to. This just adds one more stresser to the pile that seems to be growing. On a positive note that garage is awesome again, and I have been going out each night to work out in our gym… that we have not really had access to for a decade it feels. I even went out quickly for a bit after the raid last night to work out some of the excess post raid energy, which was kinda awesome.

War Priest Challenge

Last night was also my second time attending the Axioma Clan Rookie Raid night. I have to admit I have been looking forward to this since going to the last one on the previous Tuesday. While I have been enjoying The Division, there will always be a special place in my heart for Destiny and I have been logging in and playing for a bit pretty much every day. I have to admit part of this has been easy access on my laptop while downstairs using Twisted’s Remote Play app. The only problem that I have so far is the fact that there is no way to really chat over PSN party chat, which means that while I can do random strikes with strangers… I can’t really group up with friends reliably. Otherwise the connectivity is good enough that I could in theory use it all of the time. Now I doubt I would want to trust it for something like the Kings Fall raid when timing is extremely tight on things like the jumping puzzles. Speaking of that I failed considerably less this week… at least on the ships. On the annoying bit where the giant penis shaped pistons push you off of the wall… I think I actually did worse but I am choking that up to the fact that I am normally in bed by the time we got to that area. The raid itself started an hour and a half later than the previous week, which was a bit of a thing… given that I get up at 5:30 each morning, and my friend Squirrel had to get up at 4.

Regardless I had a great time last night, and I felt like more of a useful member of the team. I still failed quite a bit at various things… like for example on the Daughters fight I ended up getting torn, which meant I had to do the jumping puzzle. The only problem there being that I had never done the jumping puzzle before. I sadly failed and wiped the raid, but I feel like I could probably do better next time. Of all of the dumbass things that I did the cake is the fact that apparently in the two years I have been playing this game… I never realized that a Titan could cancel their jump by pressing x in midair allowing you to pretty much drop straight down at will. All of this time I have been doing jumping puzzles by trying to time just the perfect amount of momentum to carry me over a gap and still be able to land safely on the other side. Once I was told this… and actually Grokked what people were saying… the jumping puzzles seemed way easier. Once again the loot gods were favorable, because I managed to pick up a bunch more items… the highlight of which is probably a 310 raid sniper rifle. I also managed to pick up a 308 fusion rifle, but given that I have Telesto… and I don’t really even like fusion rifles I will probably eat it to power up another sniper rifle. A couple of the other items will likely get fed to my hunter or warlock to help them get their light up. Now that I can hit 304 light, I need to apparently farm all of the strikes in the hopes of getting Exotics that should have a fairly decent chance of dropping at 310, that I can then turn around and use to power up my other gear.

Sleeper Awakens

March 11, 2016 by Belghast

Real World Rifts

Yesterday I took the day off to manage getting a dumpster delivered. This was one of those odd situations where they would not really give us a time of day for it to be delivered, but instead wanted to call on their way. As a result I felt like I was pretty much in a holding pattern until that event happened, largely because we wanted it dropped off in the yard… not in the drive way. So I treated yesterday like a normal work day, except instead of shuffling off to work after posting a blog post… I booted up and played The Division for a bit. I had been months since I attempted to stream anything, and I was also kicking the tires of the new OBS Studio… which seems to obfuscate a bunch of the settings. So the first few minutes of the stream were apparently a slide show narrated by my voice. After that I fiddled with some settings until I finally landed on a combination of levers that seemed to produce a nice watchable streaming experience. The thing about The Division is that I feel like I am constantly doing something… even if it is not the thing I intended. One of the aspects of Rift that I loved was the fact that the world was constantly spawning rifts and invasions that I had to deal with. It felt new and fresh… up until the point that it didn’t anymore. The happenings in The Division are varied enough that I hope they remain fresh, but I worry that there will be a time where I start avoiding the little things going on around me… just so I can complete the thing I am actually trying to focus on.

The other potential issue due to the dynamic interactions is that most of the time I feel like I am not actually making any progress. I might set off in search of this or that… and get distracted by six things that happen along the way. For example last night I was trying to do one of those missing agent location quests, where you pick up on their trail and follow them to what unfortunately usually ends up being a log book. While on the final step of one of those chains… I also got the shout over the radio that looters were attacking a supply drop. Instead of going over and defending I tried so hard to keep following the trail of clues. All the while I was actually feeling like a horrible person for not helping those NPCs. The game makes me feel the weight of my decisions in a way that most games don’t, and I think it is because this game bridges the uncanny valley gap so damned well. The world I am wandering around feels so real to me… that I could step out of the screen and into the real Manhattan and not really notice the difference. It also makes me wonder how amazing a game like City of Heroes would have been… if it were rendered with this level of detail. Right now I am feeling so completely behind in everything I am doing, but I am currently knocking on the door of level 10, whereas lots of other folks are hitting the level cap. I am not really going to worry about grinding my way up, because really… I don’t want to burn out on this title.

Completing Quests

The strange thing about yesterday was that I had the entire day to play The Division, but instead I largely focused on working on stuff in Destiny. I have been a slacker when it comes to completing any of the end game content, especially if it requires tedium. For example one of the big goals is collecting Calcified Fragments, and they are hidden damned near everywhere on the Dreadnaught. Most of them can be obtained “in the open” while doing patrol missions, but a handful of them are only exposed during strikes or story missions. Even others involve doing events like Skyburners Deployment Code or Wormsinger Rune. The other night while doing the Kings Fall raid, the nice folks made sure that I got all of my fragments from there, which took a big obstacle out of the way. There is a long drawn out quest called “Hunger Pangs” that involves doing a bunch of silly stuff for Eris Morn. Several of the steps are gated by the number of Calcified Fragments you happen to have collected at that point. To do the final part of the quest you have to have found 45 of the 50 total fragments that currently exist in the game. So yesterday during the day I managed to solo most of the quest line, including a rather tough version of the Undying Mind strike. I was however stuck on the final quest, which is a pretty insane version of the Phobos quest that starts the Taken King. Thankfully Squirrel and Jex helped me out last night, and I now have a shiny new Touch of Malice which will come in handy during the raid.

Since they were looking for something else to do… I coerced them into also helping me out with my Sleeper Stimulant quest. I had been on the final stage of this quest since I believe last October, but didn’t have a ready group of people to talk into helping me with it… and had zero luck pugging it. The quest requires you to run a Nightfall level version of the Saber strike, which is somewhat insane to survive given that you get bombarded by Fallen ships at the start. I had always heard that if you could simply manage to make it through the first sequence… that the rest of the strike was really not that bad. I agree at least in part, that is until you reach the final boss. That encounter was absolutely insane… but we managed to take it down pretty easily. Then feeling our Wheaties turned around and attempted the exact same strike as the weekly Nightfall. The combination of Match Game and Fresh Troops made it so much worse. Towards the end we were ping ponging around the room trying to stay alive long enough to resurrect the next fire team member, usually only ending up getting wrecked ourselves in the process. Through a bit of dumb luck and perseverance we managed to pull out the victory on our third attempt at the final encounter. After that I was needing to log, because in truth I only really intended to do the Malice event but ended up staying upstairs on the PlayStation for like three hours. Was a pretty great night and I feel better having knocked a couple of big goals off of my list in the game.