Destiny

Destiny Got Better

October 2, 2015 by Belghast

Destiny Year One

For a few weeks now I have wanted to write a post to explain all of the things that I did not like about Destiny Year One, and talk a bit about how Year Two has just made things “better”. However it appears that Matt Lees, one of the lovely people behind the “abridged” e3 videos that I love so much… has done pretty much exactly that in video form. Seriously if you have not watched the abridged PS4 reveal video… stop what you are doing and watch it now because essentially that one video has given our group a whole slew of inside jokes for a few years. Despite Matt having done such a great job of this mission I wanted to do in the first place… I am going to attempt to do my own discussion. Destiny was one of those games that quite literally made me buy a console. Admittedly it was one of a long list of Playstation 4 games that I wanted to play, but it was finally the catalyst that got me to pick up a used unit and finally join the rest of my friends in owning that console. More important than that… it was the game that got me to shed my pc-gaming-hipster distaste of the thought of playing a shooter on the console. Prior to this game existing… playing a shooter without a mouse and keyboard was utter blasphemy in my household.

What we got however in Destiny Year One was this oddly disjointed and terribly uneven play experience. The single player missions were excellent, and in spite of dinklebot not having a personality… and never actually letting us in on the details that were happening in the universe, I found myself craving more of the game. The story is one of the big problems because so much of it was told through the collection of grimoire entries… that you could not even read in game. You had to trek out to the Bungie website, log in, and then you could find huge swaths of story-line for the events you just did in game. That design decision was confusing at best, and a laughable mistake at worst. Story issues aside… the moment to moment game-play was amazing… until you reached level 20. Then a completely different game started about item management and trying to maximize just how much “light” you had on your gear. This stat that simply did not exist before level 20 suddenly controlled not only how effective your gear was, but also what “level” your character was in game.

Grinding Light

Destiny Got Better — Not A Year One Shot… my current state in the game

The problem with the post 20 game was that it introduced so many things that you simply had not seen before that point. For example post 20 gear could be upgraded, and in fact this is something you needed to do in order to unlock the true potential and maximum light value. With each incremental upgrade you added a few more points of light here or there and could increase your level. In order to upgrade items you had to essentially grind out the rare materials that you had been picking up incidentally on planets but not really knowing what to do with them. In fact the game gave you a way of turning in huge quantities of these materials… for quick faction and experience boosts, but gave no indication of why you might not want to do this. As such I went into the end game with limited resources, and had to spend hours scouring the various patrol zones trying to find enough spinmetal or iron ore to pay for the upgrade of my items to the next rank. This is the point where the game lost me, in that I had all of my gear needing to be upgraded but nowhere near enough materials to actually do this.

The other frustrating problem with the light system was the fact that you could get a potentially better item, but not be able to afford to use it. What I mean by that is you would get say a weapon with a higher starting light, but after several rounds of upgrading your current weapon had more total light. So you knew that if you upgraded you could get high light level and as a result higher physical level by using this new item… but in the meantime you would have to suffer the penalty of losing light in the process. This made gearing a frustrating mess, and in those early strikes one level difference meant the difference between being able to actively participate and feeling like you were dragging down the entire team. What added to this frustration was the fact that drops in general were pretty scarce. I could log in and run around collecting iron on Mars for a few hours, killing tons of things in the process and maybe just maybe see a couple of greens. As a result the end game just felt disconnected from the awesome game play experience that we had getting there.

Year Two

When Taken King got its announcement, I have to admit I was originally highly frustrated with the fact that there was no initial offering that did not also include the base game and its expansions. They have since changed that and you can pick up a digital copy for around $30 that does not include all of the additional stuff. However I have to say that I agree with the branding because Taken King essentially takes everything about the original game and fixes it. For those who will understand the analogy, this is the Diablo 3 2.0 patch for Destiny. Even if you do not buy Taken King, I highly suggest you patch back up Destiny and give it another shot. Start a new character and revel in just how much better the overall experience feels. I did just this, and within a few days it convinced me that I should go ahead and pick up the digital upgrade to Taken King. Firstly the loot scarcity is no longer an issue at all. I can play for a few minutes and I will have a stack of a dozen engrams that I need to decode on the tower. Similarly the engrams themselves are more truthful. If you get a blue engram, you will get at least a blue item. If you get a purple engram you will get at least a purple item. That said I have actually gotten a handful of purple items from blue engrams… which is insanely exciting when it happens.

As far as the light grind… it is essentially no more. Your light rating becomes something akin to a gear score in modern mmos. It is a number that is an average of the attack and defensive ratings of all of the gear you have equipped. Why this feels better is the fact that you can incrementally increase your rating, whittling down a few points a night giving you the feeling of constantly moving forward. As far as upgrading gear goes, I have never run into a problem where I do not have the resources needed to upgrade an item, even though they still require the materials gathered on planet. What has changed however is the fact that these nodes are far more plentiful. There was a point last night that I was on Venus and could see four different spirit bloom nodes from where I was standing. What makes this easier as well is that the Ghost is an actual item that can be upgraded. You collect “shells” that change the appearance and defense rating gained by your ghost, and as you upgrade it they often have perks like the ability to increase the amount of a given resource that you gain. When you bring up the ghost menu, that you would normally use to return to orbit… you get additional benefit now of the ghost scanning your surroundings and pointing out anything useful. This gets used quite a bit in the later missions to help you map out your surroundings or show things that are invisible.

What has helped me at least is the fact that it feels like I have a bunch of little things that I can be doing at any point. I am actually enjoying doing my bounties each day, and I just started working on my Gunsmith reputation. That one is pretty interesting in that each week you can purchase a series of weapons from the Gunsmith and “field test” them. Each weapon has different requirements to help it “gather information”. For example I did one last night that only gathered information by killing Vex Minotaurs, and another that only gained completion if I got double kills with a sniper rifle… which as far as I could tell just meant two kills in quick succession without reloading my clip. Once you have gained some reputation you are able to place “Armsday” orders, which apparently means that every Wednesday the Gunsmith will give you a rank appropriate weapon of the type you ordered. All of this and more gives me the feeling that there are simply a bunch of things that I can do to improve my character in small and meaningful ways without really feeling that I am grinding without purpose. I can quite literally lose entire nights playing this game right now, and last night I had every intent of logging in and playing for an hour… then going off to do something else. I ended up playing all night, because I kept finding one more thing that I wanted to accomplish. I’ve now actually started playing through the game again on a Warlock, for when I want a break from my Titan main. If you too were disillusioned with the original Destiny experience, I think you owe it to yourself to patch up the original game and give it another shot. Even without the expansion you are still going to be able to experience new encounters in the old patrol zones, and at least get a taste for what “The Taken” as a race feel like. If you are playing on the Playstation 4, hit me up with a friend request on Belghast my PSN account.

Bounties and Newness

September 30, 2015 by Belghast

Shiny Newness

Right now the bulk of my social infrastructure is on fire with people returning to Wildstar. September 28th at Midnight EST was the official launch of the Wildstar Reloaded free to play experience. They are going through the same sort of growing pains that everyone goes through when they launch a game, or in this case relaunch it. When I got in last night, and managed to fight my way through the queue, I was greeted with a “server going down in 15 minutes” message as they were needing to do some sort of emergency maintenance. This is absolutely par for the course for an event like this, but nonetheless disheartening. I absolutely get why they were bringing the server down however because the tiny bit of time I was able to play the lag was horrific.

I did however manage to do what I had intended to do this morning, which was rifle through my bags… dump everything that was not needed in my bank, and start to clean out my mailbox. With the change to the way the crafting system works, a lot of the old crafted items were consumed and instead we were mailed a stack full of equivalent materials. I had seven or eight of these messages from Protostar, all containing things I have no clue what to do with them. Thankfully however pretty much everything seemed to fit just fine in my tradeskill bag so I don’t have to care for this very moment. I was able to consume all of the perks that I got through the whole cosmic points system. I am one step away from tier 6, and as of last night I got some perk that causes me to gain omnibits faster which is kinda cool. With new toys comes a new outfit, which I cobbled together this morning before sitting down to right a blog post. For the time being… I think I am going to stay off the servers until things calm down a bit.

Daily Bounties

One of the things I am still enjoying quite a bit is my daily routine of logging into Destiny and getting new bounties. I am not sure how a game goes from feeling oppressive and grindy, to fun an exciting in a single patch… but whatever the case Destiny did just that. I think more than anything it is the increased drop rates that make things feel interesting, because when I know it is highly likely that I will get something for my time spent, I don’t mind spending time doing something. I love the random chance of finding something cool, and maybe once I am geared enough to no longer care about drops… it will feel different. However every single engram that I see glowing in the distance is a chance at finding something to increase my overall light and as such make me more formidable. Largely my key goal this week however has been to try and stock pile strange coins again in the hopes that on Friday Xur will bring me something awesome and exotic.

I still have so much story that I have yet to complete, and I have barely scratched the surface of the strikes that are available to me. For the time being however I seem to get the most enjoyment from grabbing my bounties and going to some planet to whittle them down. There is just something relaxing about this process, and in many ways it reminds me of the way I felt about the daily hunts in Final Fantasy XIV… that is until I no longer really needed the currency to improve my gear. There is something calming about having a routine and right now popping into Destiny is pretty much the first thing I do each night. In the above video I decided to record a bit of me working my way through my daily quests, and that is actually my second attempt given that I had been recording for a bit only to realize that it was not picking up my mic. Essentially I changed the way I am recording so that I could pull my boom mic out and be able to capture audio while I am playing on the PS4 easily. The video itself was recorded through my Elgato HD, which I have hooked to a switch so that I can record any of my consoles. The end product just looks better than the default video recording options on the PS4.

Balmorra and Oryx

September 28, 2015 by Belghast

Awesome Wife Update

My wife is always awesome, but every now and then she does something so cool that I have to brag on her. This weekend she was out shopping with a friend when I got a series of excited texts from her about something she found for me. Awhile back I picked up some Star Wars shoes with this “A New Hope” artwork spread across the two shoes. The problem being that they were expensive as shit and I hate the idea of wearing them out in my normal shoe rotation. I wear a mixture of Vans and Airwalk slip on style canvas shoes and I seem to be able to destroy them pretty effectively. My wife however found the above pair that is absolutely Star Wars print but not to the level that I wouldn’t want to wear them constantly. She didn’t end up picking them up, mostly because she wanted me to try them on. We get up yesterday and they were apparently also on sale at Target, so I am not sure how much we paid but I think they were under $20. I just think its awesome that she saw the shoes and immediately thought that I would want them. My wife isn’t necessarily a geek like I am, but she has always “gotten” the fact that I am and supported me in my quirkiness. I am exceptionally lucky, and every now and then I feel like I need to acknowledge that fact publicly.

Starting Balmorra

I had all of these intentions to make a big push yesterday in Star Wars the Old Republic, but in reality I only ended up playing it in the evening while watching television. I did however manage to finish up all of the end of chapter one back and forth for the smuggler. I now have Risha as an official companion rather than just someone hanging out on my ship. Granted I will likely never end up using her, given that the Tank/Healer combo of Treek and I allows me to pretty much take on anything with ease. Overall I do like the character of Risha and it is going to be interesting to see how the rest of the game plays out. I figure she is going to remain being a vocal participant in the content. Now we are going to enter into some spoiler territory, so you might want to stop reading if you have not completed the smuggler story line and intend to do so. One of the absolute best moments in the game so far… was when I finally got to take down Skavak. Up until this point I kept thinking to myself… god why will this game not let me just kill this guy already!

Now that we have moved into Chapter 2 we get a new set of bad guys. At this point I don’t really care much about this Voidwolf character, but I am absolutely all about taking on Rogun the Butcher. Up until this point I have had him looming over my head and he has sent the occasional bounty hunter after me. My hope is that when I finally am able to take him down it will be just as sweet as it was for Skavak. I feel like as a smuggler I probably shouldn’t want to have a stand up fight against these Kingpins, but then again Leia did slay Jabba in rescuing Han… so there is that example to follow. There are moments in this game that I know are traps… but you pretty much have to go through them anyways. The “rescue” mission on the derelict freighter for example, was absolutely going to be a trap and it was. I did not however expect Port Nowhere to be the trap that it ended up being. I guess it makes sense, because pretty much EVERY map you go to that is not on a main world ends up being a trap. Looking forward to pushing through Balmorra because I can tell you right now I am ONLY doing class story quests here. This is the planet that often kills my progress on Sith side, so will be looking forward to getting through it here on Republic.

Heroic Light

Yesterday was a day almost entirely lost to Destiny. After finishing my blog post, advertising the podcast, and finishing up the youtube version we ended up running out to Target to pick up my shoes. We got home around 11:30 and from that point until around 3:30 I was engrossed in this or that activity within Destiny. I wound my way through the Taken King story, largely because I wanted to open up the Dreadnought patrol zone. I have to say Oryx was one of those fights that was probably way worse in my head than it actually was in reality. The entire time during the fight I was tense beyond reason because I did not want to die and have to start over again. So I spent most of my time dodging and running away while trying to regroup and get some solid shots in. I don’t want to go into too much detail for those who have not done the fight, but there is a moment where he goes invulnerable except for a specific moment when you can attack. This phase… freaked me out more than anything I can remember in this game.

I kept trying to time my sunbreaker super attack for when he was becoming vulnerable again all the while dodging taking damage. The only negative about the encounter is that the adds definitely felt like nothing more than ways for you to regenerate your ammunition, and they were less of an issue once I realized this. At first I kept trying to run from them and focus down Oryx, but I quickly realized that if I kept doing this I would get overwhelmed. The big takeaway from the weekend is that I managed to hit 240 light, which is the first heroic level. I did a couple of the Vanguard strikes on the play list, and I am going to keep trying to do those periodically. I also started getting quests to do various “end game” content. My main goal for the week is to regenerate enough Strange Coins to be able to buy something next Friday if Xur has anything interesting. I am really happy that I had enough to buy Hawkmoon since I pretty much exclusively use Hand Cannons on my Titan. At some point I plan on working my way up on either a Warlock or a Hunter, but for the time being I am really enjoying leveling Sunbreaker. I am not sure exactly why Destiny has this renewed life for me… but for whatever reason I am grabbing on with both hands while the fun lasts.

Week In Gaming 9/27/2015

September 27, 2015 by Belghast

Week of Playstation

This week was very much a week of me waiting on something to happen on my PC while pivoted to the side and playing the PlayStation 4 instead. The strangest thing has happened and I am not sure exactly when it did. For years I was a diehard Keyboard and Mouse gamer… and if you suggested that I play a shooter with a controller I would give you a dirty look at best… and at worst give you a thirty minute rant about why that is a sloppy control mechanism. The thing is… shooters now have a significant amount of aim assist regardless of what platform you happen to be playing them on. Sure you can get closer to pixel perfect aiming with a keyboard and mouse… but I am finding for extended gaming sessions a controller just feels more comfortable. Destiny was essentially the game that forced me to learn how to play with a controller, and now… I am finding myself replaying some games that I played exclusively on the PC on my PS4. Over the week I picked up the Borderlands “Handsome Collection” because it was silly cheap on PSN, and I have to say… I am finding the game more enjoyable over there. While I won’t necessarily say I have abandoned the keyboard and mouse… I am finding myself equally comfortable with a controller and it seems so strange to be typing those words.

Week In Gaming 9/27/2015 — Exotic Weapon FTW!

This week the game that I spent the most hours playing was without a doubt Destiny. I am not sure why but the game feels fresh and new, and all of the frustrations I had over gearing for light are just gone. Instead light has become this number based on the average attack power and or defense of your items, and seeing it climb is awesome… but at the same time not something oppressively holding me back from doing interesting things. I now think of light much more like a traditional gear score system in MMOs. There is some content gated on that number, but it doesn’t feel like something that is extremely grindy to get. I happened to luck out this week and Hawkmoon this seasons exotic hand cannon was available on Xur. I had enough coins to buy it and bam I am now rocking a really awesome weapon, which only serves to improve my experience. I’ve heard that you can send blue engrams to low level characters as a more efficient way of farming Strange Coins, and I might end up doing that as I pretty much depleted my entire stash on this one item.

Other than that I am slowly working my way through all of the story content that I have not played since launch. It feels strange to be progressing in three different storylines at essentially the same time, doing whichever happens to suit me at the moment. The big thing I am trying to work towards right now is I really need the dreadnought patrol zone opened up because I keep getting those as daily quests. I am not sure how far into the story that happens but I keep working on creeping that storyline forward in the hopes that the next one will unlock the patrol zone. Other than that I unlocked Sunbreaker and am completing most of my content as that, in the hopes of leveling it quickly. There is something satisfying Fist of Havoc, but I have to say super fire hammer brothers is also pretty awesome as well. You can whittle down objectives super quickly while throwing those hammers. I’ve taken Taken bosses down to half health during my “hammer time” but the only problem is it essentially leaves you out in the open and vulnerable. So I end up having to run for cover as soon as I’ve spent all of my energy. Needless to say I am having a lot of fun with Destiny and probably going to continue playing it over the coming weeks.

Creativerse

I’ve blogged about this game already at length this week, but I have to say I am still really liking it. I am also digging that the company is from McKinney Texas which isn’t terribly far from me. Not sure if I can rig this but it would be kinda awesome to go down and meet that team at some point. I am hoping that they end up doing Pax South this year, because the game has so much potential. I called it “Pretty Minecraft” but really that is selling the game short by a large amount. I will say that it has pretty much killed my desire to play Minecraft at all from this point out. I get what people say about the mods, but in reality I never modded Minecraft that much other than adding in quality of life things like a mini-map. Regardless of how I modified the game it just felt like I was playing the same thing over and over with varrying differences. This game however feels fresh and interesting because the world itself is something that I don’t know the formula behind. I talked about this a bit the other day, but I think part of it is the fact that I have no real resources to rely on yet. I can’t go on a wiki and find out that obsidian spawns between these two coordinates or if I need an item for a recipe I have to find it the old fashioned brute force way of exploration. If you are in the mood for a building and exploration fix I highly suggest you check it out.

Star Wars the Old Republic

Last night during and after the podcast I finished up Alderaan on my Smuggler. In the time it has taken me to get this far on my Smuggler, I found out that Tam has leveled like three characters from 1 to 50. How is he doing it? Well he is doing ONLY the class storyline, and I think maybe he has made a convert out of me. I shot through Alderaan last night only working on my class storyline and gained three levels in the process. Mostly at this point I just want to see the class storyline on several new classes before Fallen Empire comes along and changes a good deal of it. I think the rest of the day I am going to likely work on my Smuggler and see just how close to the end I can manage to get. My hope is that even after Fallen Empire they come up with a way to speed characters to the post 50 content. I need to circle back around and do the Shadows of Revan content on my Jedi Knight, but honestly I am having so much fun with my Sawbones. This is still such a great game, if you just treat it like a subscription. The free to play options are complete and total bullshit, and feel like the most punitive way to play a game I have seen period. If you can stomach the fact that you have to pay a subscription to really enjoy this game… then it seems like a really enjoyable experience still.