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Destiny 2 Feels

May 19, 2017 by Belghast

So yesterday was the big reveal of Destiny 2 gameplay and I have to say I am not disappointed in the least. In fact at this very moment I am feeling inordinate amounts of Destiny love. There were a few things that were released that gave me all the feels. The first is the “Story of Zavala” trailer of sorts that tells the tale of how he came from being a corpse somewhere in the cosmodrome to being the leader of the Vanguard. Unfortunately I have not seen this trailer released separately so you have to catch it about 14 mins into the video that I linked… which is the entire Destiny 2 reveal stream dumped to YouTube. In that trailer you see a young Amanda Holliday getting her first look at a starship, so that in itself was completely priceless. The second cavalcade of feels comes from the gameplay reveal trailer… which appears to be cut from what is going to be one of the intro cinematics showing how the tower falls. There is a moment in the trailer for each class where they get to shine… and I absolutely got all the feels when I saw Zavala call everyone to him and raise a Titan bubble. There are similar badass moments where Ikora Rey Nova Bombs a Cabal transport, and Cayde-6 Golden Gun’s three Cabal troopers.

Destiny 2 is a tale of starting over after a monumental fall from grace, which in itself is probably the best way of dealing with a power reset scenario. Having spent the last week playing through the Fallen Empire storyline in Star Wars the Old Republic… I absolute approve of the notion that sometimes you need to shuffle the deck to freshen up the game. What I like the most about what I saw though is that everything looked and felt like it was still Destiny… just with the Destiny-ness sliders moved all the way to eleven. They reveal that we are going to four new places… but in part I am hoping that given time we will also revisit areas that we have been to before. The maps themselves are supposedly more open world style, or at least the one that was showed reminded me of something on the scale of the Hinterlands from Dragon Age: Inquisition with lots of active hotspots to go explore and find adventures. This is definitely playing to my core desires as a player, but I am also hoping that it still has directed story missions for the folks like Tamrielo who tend to bounce super hard from “now go explore” setups in games.

It sounds like all of the things that made Destiny awesome are coming back, but that they are adding a whole layer of new stuff on top. To be truthful if you look at my characters stats… I have spent a significant number more hours doing patrol missions than literally anything else in the game. Just as a reference according to my Profile on Bungie.net… on my Titan I have played a grand total of 14 days 15 hours… and of that time 7 days 4 hours was in Patrol mode. So giving me a big open world to roam in is absolutely going to serve my interests. However it sounds like the strikes and raids and crucible modes are all coming back with a vengeance with brand new concepts being introduced. It also seems like some of the specs are being tweaked… and I am not sure if each class is getting a wholly new sub class or if we are just losing one and gaining one. Titans for example I know have a Void class that revolves around wielding a shield like Captain America. Warlocks have a new sub class that gives them flaming angel wings and lets them wield a giant flaming sword. So I am not sure if those are in additional to the subs we already have… or if those are now replacing the Defender Titan and Sunsinger Warlock. I mean I am hoping we get something new… but Defender was absolutely one of those sub classes that was super niche and extremely hard to complete “kill with elemental abilities” sort of bounties.

The biggest news from yesterday is that the PC client would be going through Battle.net… which is curiously being referred to as Battle.net and not the Blizzard Launcher. I said before that I would likely never stop calling it Battle.net, and I am guessing maybe they have rethought that branding decision… now that a non-Blizzard game is going to be using that infrastructure. This decision has a lot of positives and as far as I am concerned fairly few negatives. I’ve spent over a decade now cultivating a community inside of the Blizzard franchise games, and knowing that I can carry that ready made community into Destiny is going to be a huge bonus for me. What Bungie is getting from PSN and XBL is an account system that takes care of all of the day to day friend maintenance and messaging functionality and lets them just connect up a game to it. I mean the option that we all probably through they would be taking was to integrate this game with Steam completely, and rely on steam users for profiles. However to be honest, Blizzard does a far better job of policing its own network than Steam does, because quite frankly it is not in the interest of Valve to clamp down too harshly. The only negative here about any of this is that it sounds like the PC client will not be available on day one… and will instead be a console launch only. Ultimately I was going to buy this on PS4 and PC anyways… so this is not a huge deal for me… however it is going to suck for anyone who wants to hold out for the PC.

My dream that is likely to go unrealized is that I could have a single set of character spread across all of the platforms. I am perfectly okay with purchasing a PC client, PS4 client, and Xbox One client… and not necessarily being able to cross play between them. However I would love if my characters which are attached to my Bungie account carried over and worked on each platform. Let me play with my PC friends, PS4 friends and Xbox friends with the characters I have spent so much time building. I mean I managed to get my Xbox One character up to 370 light… but that feels pittiful compared to my stable of three 400 light characters on the PS4 side, each with access to a vault full of awesome stuff. Compared to the 14 days on PSN… I have only played 21 hours of the Xbox One gameplay because not having all of my toys was always a major set back. Since the characters are bound to the Bungie account… they could absolutely make this thing happen. They just need the will to do so. So I have hopes and dreams… but I am fully expecting them to get dashed in the long run. At this point however I am just riding the hype train and so freaking ready for this game to come out.

Enjoyment and PVP

May 17, 2017 by Belghast

Last week there was a tweet that came across my feed that jarred something loose in my brain. I am wishing I had thought to save it because I honestly don’t know at this point who tweeted or at least on what specific day. It was one of those things that filtered into my subconscious and stuck there as it scrolled past. The general gist was asking what exactly a game would have to do to make PVP palatable for you personally. I was rushing between meetings when I checked Fenix on my phone, and never actually got around to replying. However it is something that I have been mulling over for days now. Why this was so sticky is the fact that I am a walking paradox it seems. I will claim not to like PVP at all, and will actively go out of my way to avoid it if it is happening in the world. If a game has one of those settings that prevents you from being accidentally flagged… I run with that on all of the time. If it is raid time… and one of our PVP centric members runs into the instance flagged and in doing so gets jumped by the Horde. I will sit there and watch them die, because in my mind they made a poor life choice for coming to a raid flagged in the first place.

All of that said… I also look forward to the Iron Banner in Destiny which is a monthly PVP event, and if I am bored I often times pop into the crucible which is their version of a battleground match making system. What I have never been able to reconcile is why player versus player activity in one game feels good and in others not great at all. All I have been able to sort out in my head is that in Destiny there is no negative side effect, and the rewards for participation are balanced in a way that it feels like no matter what there is a chance that I get something really cool in the process. Now Crucible hardcores in Destiny will tell you that the things that I love about it… are the things that frustrate them. Functionally loot is not tied to performance, but instead participation. Sure if you win a match you get more faction with Lord Shax the Crucible reputation vendor… but regardless of success or failure it feels like my time spent is leading towards the goal of something interesting. I am either going to get a faction package that gives me weapons or armor… or I am going to have the chance of getting interesting gear rewarded to me at random at the end of a match.

The other thing that has stuck out in my head is that in Destiny the total time of the match is relatively short ranging from 6 to 8 minutes… to at the maximum 15 minutes. Even more than that the time to engagement is also short, with the lack of long runs back to where the objective fighting is happening. I spent some time this weekend in World of Warcraft doing battlegrounds, since that system as a whole feels like a reasonable counter point to Destiny. I knew I was in for something when about 5 minutes into an Arathi basin map… I saw a pop up through DBM timers informing me that my team would win in 21 minutes. The length of that match just felt prohibitive to my enjoyment, and the risk of that time spent… had no real payoff waiting for me at the end. Sure there is the chance of random loot, but the loot seems to be based on my current PVP rank… and not relative to my gear level which is a huge positive for the way that Destiny handles things. So since I am late to the game, that means I would have to suffer through a lot of bad experiences in order to maybe have a chance of getting something that is going to be useful to me in the long run. The risk versus reward equation is just not good enough for me to keep throwing myself at the gristmill. So instead after a handful of maps I went back to grinding World Quests because they at least felt like they had tangible rewards associated with them.

Basically my take away is that in order for me to find PVP interesting… there has to be one hell of a lot of carrot waiting on me and very little stick. The truth is that PVP in general be it Crucible or Battlegrounds is the sort of thing that I might do if I have literally nothing else to do. I participate in Iron Banner so often because it is a limited time event… and it also is a loot bonanza. While I was working my way to the current 400 light cap in Destiny, a good chunk of that progress was gained through Iron Banner drops… which tend to be one every third or fourth match. In World of Warcraft I played a half dozen battlegrounds this weekend and got a single piece of gear that was 50 item levels lower than the rest of the gear that I was wearing, so another enchanting shard just doesn’t feel that exciting. I think the shortness of the match also helps my enjoyment, because even if we are losing horribly… it is a short term predicament and one that might be remedied in the next match. Additionally battlegrounds that focus on huge scale siege objectives tend to be soul sucking for me, and each time I have to mount up and run to the opposite end of the map it just feels bad. I guess I prefer quick skirmishes rather than protracted battles, especially for randomly queuing with strangers. The other huge negative about PVP in games like World of Warcraft is the fact that I am lumped into chat with a bunch of horrible people. Simply disabling the chat and making the maps clear enough not to need communication to complete objectives would greatly improve my experience. A good chunk of my joy in Destiny is the fact that no one can spout off racist slurs in global chat.

Destiny 2 Hopes

May 5, 2017 by Belghast

Even though I am playing playing much of it this very moment… Destiny holds an extremely special place in my heart. I love this game and I love what it has become over the course of the two expansions… and multiple content patches. They promised a setting as deep and rich and Star Wars, and while a lot of people will disagree with me… I feel that they ultimately delivered on that. The problem however is that they did not deliver in a contiguous story that was easy to learn. Instead they sprinkled the game with environmental storytelling and nuggets of information that the faithful had to gather up and piece together to learn what was happening in the world. Personally this made me want to know more about the world because each time I uncovered a truth it was like discovering another piece that fit into a giant puzzle I was trying to assemble in my head. For many others however… including the vast majority of my friends… they bounced hard. For them it was of the utmost importance to have a clear narrative that they could follow, and not be forced to do some admittedly silly nonsense in the form of the grimoire cards.

Fix the Narrative

The first hope with Destiny 2 is to do just that… give us this big bold epic space opera that you originally promised. Like I said it is absolutely there.. . but buried deep under the surface and in places that only the most lore hungry can find. There is an epic tale in the game, but you have to piece it together through doing things… and it never actually gives you any sort of threaded tale that you can then experience as a whole when you do finish gathering the pieces. I’ve linked the Book of Sorrow as read by Myelin games… one of the best Destiny Lore channels available. For those who are unfamiliar with it, each time you collected a Calcified Fragment on the Dreadnaught or one of the Taken related raids/missions in the Taken King expansion you unlocked a piece of the Book of Sorrow. Combined together they make a five part tale explaining who the Hive are and where they came from… and how exactly the Taken came to be. The problem is… were it not for lore videos like this one… this is an epic tale that would stay submerged and largely unknown. Bungie, you can craft amazing tales… just present them in a manner that the common player can grasp them.

A Larger Sense of Presence

Destiny is a game that constantly teases us with vistas we will never be able to explore. A prime example of this is that we as Guardians inhabit a Tower overlooking the last city on earth. We are told this time and time again… and if you look off the balcony you can see what appears to be a thriving city below in the shadow of the traveler. However we can never actually go down there and explore the area where all the lights seem to be bright. When we travel to a planet, instead of being able to explore its surface freely we are given a single path that loops around and connects to itself. The hallmark of MMOs is that you can go walking in a direction and more often than not reach whatever it is that you can see in the distance. To some extent I want to see this happening in Destiny 2. I want to find neat hidden areas of the world with interesting spawns or treasures. I want exploration to be a factor in the game, rather than just being somewhere at the right time when the right event fires off. With the Dead Ghosts, Calcified Fragments, and SIVA Clusters… you can tell they want to give us this sort of exploration already. However I just want to see this done on a much larger scale with hidden lairs, that are a challenge to get to… but also extremely rewarding for completing with your friends.

Item Drops

I think everyone at least on some level likes looking out and surveying the scene and seeing a bunch of green, blue, purple and sometimes orange engrams laying there on the ground. The novelty however wears off quickly, and when I am in an area like the Archon’s Forge I know that every so often I am going to have to return to the tower and do some inventory maintenance since you can only have twenty items in your mailbox… before you start losing loot. What ends up happening as a result is that players just straight up delete engrams, so that they can stay out longer. Later patches in the game even implemented a system so that when you pick up a green engram it automatically disassembles into the respective parts. This tells me that they release that the engram system is deeply inconvenient, and since later items like hoard chests drop actual items… I think they see the error of their ways. What I want from Destiny 2 is the ability for actual gear drops like they do in the raids and from item chests. That way I know if the item is useful instantly without having to go back to base and get a decryption. This serves a bunch of purposes… namely that you can then start using gear if it is an upgrade or something interesting. Secondly you can keep clearing your inventory without having to worry about getting that rare chance of something good dropping from a blue engram.

All Infusion All The Time

One of the things that Destiny eventually nailed is the item system. The funny thing about it is that I sort of wish all games had the item infusion system that we have now. So my hope is that Destiny 2 just manages not to fuck this up. Leave it alone… keep things exactly as they are now. Let us infuse gear into items we already have in our inventory, and keep upgrading the weapons we like using. That is the big thing that separates Destiny from other games for me… is that I become emotionally attached to my gear. Folks have talked about the feeling of when they get that first exotic, or the one that they have been chasing for months. For me… I get the same thing when I get that perfect roll on a weapon and know that from that point on I can just use that instead of using some crappy version of it that I had been holding on. The prime example is the Year 2 Haakon’s Hatchet that I use now as my primary weapon. I love this thing and the ability to keep using it into Year 3 had been a huge thing for me. Sure I try out lots of other weapons as they come across my path… but at the same time I know I have this old reliable friend sitting waiting on me whenever I want to return. Let me keep bringing my “companions” along with me in my journey in Destiny 2.

Platform Agnostic Account

This is one of those situations where I think Bungie had an intention but then for whatever reason could not get it to work as intended. When you play Destiny you have a Bungie account, and then those accounts are associated with either your Playstation Network or Xbox Live account. I’ve played Destiny on my original platform of Playstation 4, but I’ve also owned a copy for Xbox 360 that I then upgraded when I got my Xbox One. When I go to the Bungie website I can see both accounts worth of characters, but they are separated by this invisible barrier. What I want to see is for that barrier to fall. My <Tequila Mockingbird> Clan tag extends between the platforms so that even when I am playing on the Xbox I am representing my solely Playstation based group. So that tells me there is already connective tissue, but that things are just not working as they should be. With Destiny 2 there will be three possible platforms at launch: PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One. Right now I plan on shifting my focus to PC because there is a whole group of players that wanted to play… but just were not console folks that I have been waiting to play with. However if I knew that I could rush out and pick up a copy for PS4 and Xbox One that then take the same characters and play with them? I would do so in a heartbeat. I understand the challenge of making Xbox Live and PSN talk to each other… and the weirdness that happens when an account crosses those boundaries. However the data is just data… and since it is dialing home to Bungie servers to retrieve that data that I can then see through the web interface… it would make sense just to let people have a single batch of characters and inventory spread across all of the platforms. If this expansion I could have taken my Titan main from PS4 and play it with my friends that are Xbox folks… I would have done that a whole lot more rather than trying to level an entirely different set of characters. Granted I did manage to get my Xbox One Titan up to 370 light… but I am also mildly insane.

These are just my hopes and suggestions for things that would improve my Destiny 2 experience. I am curious what exactly my readers would want in the new game?

Lobbing SIVA Charges

January 11, 2017 by Belghast

Last night did not go entirely as planned, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a pretty amazing night. The original plan that I had in my head was an attempt at completing the Nightfall bounty on as many characters as I could for shots at the Icebreaker. However as the day went on that plan slowly morphed into going to my very first Wrath of the Machine raid. So around 8pm last night we managed to pull together the six players needed for the raid and I shifted into full on learner mode. Destiny is one of those games where I am constantly amazed at the level of dedication the community has. A raid in Destiny is this complex sequence of events that have to be completed in a specific way… and the first time I step into one of the encounters it is full on information overload. I find it interesting how fast the community as a whole crowd sources the solution to the fights, sharing tidbits of information and ultimately mapping strategies for how to complete them. I say this because the fights themselves are actually messaged somewhat poorly as to what you should be doing at any given time. Since I am very much a “learn by doing” player, it means for the first few raids I ultimately feel completely lost.

What is extremely interesting about Wrath of the Machine versus Kings Fall is that the “roles” are not necessarily fixed. In Kings Fall you could essentially put your most seasoned player on the job of doing whatever was the most important task on a given fight. While there was a certain measure of randomness, like who got chosen to run the spark on the invisible platforms… others like the person getting Golgoroth’s Gaze were very much something you had in your control. As a result to some extent it was much easier to carry a new player through and allow them to see the fights in motion, before they were ever expected to take up a key roll in the fight. That is very much NOT the case in Wrath of the Machine given the game shifts the roles around quickly and while you might be dpsing one moment, the next you might be needing to toss SIVA charges at fixed markers. The hardest of these fights for me to grok was the Aksis encounter where the raid divided up into three sides, and the game randomly empowered three players at a time… sometimes requiring you to shift around quickly to cover a side if it did not have an empowered player. The end result is that new players ultimately have to learn quickly because you never know exactly when that key role is going to fall on your shoulders.

There were several points during the night where I absolutely know I failed at various mechanics, but while moving through the content I started to get a feel for what I was doing wrong and how to correct it. Now with Kings Fall, most of the encounters were fairly easy… but it was the jumping sequences that were the bane of my existence. With Wrath of the Machine, the encounters themselves seem to be the challenge, and while I died a few times during the much shorter jumping sequences they didn’t see anywhere near as nerve wracking as disappearing ships over of a giant open chasm. Last night was also important because it marked the first time I had really done large group content with Tequila Mockingbird my clan. It has been over six months since Axioma clan was dissolved in a fit, and [TQMB] was formed out of the ashes. It definitely feels like we wound up with the absolutely best natured of folks for the reboot. Within minutes I felt right back at home, which I guess is a strange statement considering I have been proudly sporting the clan tag since the moment the reboot happened.

So while I had no real intent of raiding last night, I am super happy to have seen the content now and to have gotten some of the really awesome stuff that drops there. There seems to be a massive problem with duplicates from the SIVA key caches. On the first boss encounter I got the Ether Nova fusion rifle… and then turned around and got the same thing from the cache. From the second encounter I managed to pick up Arms, that I am extremely happy about given that they have the crazy heavy ammo trait. From the third encounter, I picked up an Artifact which is decent but it is really hard to get excited over an artifact when I am apparently now swimming in 400 light ones. From the final phase of the Aksis encounter I walked away with the Genesis Chain auto rifle, and then spent a key and got an exact duplicate. Past that I wound up with three exotics from the run: 4th Horseman, Hereafter, and Crest of Alpha Lupi. The first two turning into shards since I don’t really like either weapon, and the last from an engram serving as infusion fodder for the Twilight Garrison I had yet to upgrade.

I spent a bit of time after the raid running around in the Plaguelands patrol zone to play with both the Auto Rifle and the Fusion Rifle and I like both. The Genesis Chain feels really awesome when you get headshots and cause the firefly to proc since it has a unique sound effect that goes with it. The Fusion Rifle… largely just feels like a competent Fusion Rifle. I sincerely doubt I will be giving up either The Branded Lord or Saladins Vigil for it, but it is nonetheless a reasonable weapon that is probably going to get ferried off to one of my alts. I have heard it works really amazingly in Crucible, so I will have to give it a shot there. It is bizarre how I have gone from being someone that NEVER used Fusion Rifles, to being someone who largely now favors them over Shotguns for close to medium range engagement. The other really awesome thing that happened is that I am now flagged to do the Outbreak Prime quest, which honestly could be an entire post in itself. It turns out that Lexy is also stalled on this quest, so that gives us Hunter and Titan… and we just need to find a Warlock to ride along with us since that quest requires you to group up all three classes to progress. Wondering if maybe some point this weekend we can knock out the required pieces so that by the time the reset rolls around we are working on the final step which is the run the raid again.