Good Morning Folks. I’ve been a big proponent of Destiny Rising for quite a while on this blog, and I still play it pretty much every single day. At a bare minimum, I pop in and do the daily quests, send off some of the Iron Commander missions, and then do whatever I can to chip away at the Guild’s map discovery. Then, usually once per week, I run with Ace and do some more serious content as we knock out Calamity Ops and our Grandmasters. Collectively, I am still enjoying my time in the game, but it sort of feels like something is changing. This morning I am going to present the case that Destiny Rising is not long for the world, because it appears as though NetEase is throttling down on the amount of time and effort they are spending on the game.
Character banners are critical to the livelihood of a Gacha game. They are supposed to inspire us to want to pull for the character on them, and devote time and hopefully money to spending on currency in order to get more copies. I’ve happily pulled every ounce of currency that I could gather up on Gwynn, Estella, Helhest, Maru, and even Jaren, whom I initially thought I would not be that big a fan of. This pattern stopped, however, when we got Kabr the Resolute… which is effectively a rework of a free character that you unlock in the game by completing the story. It is not so much that I hate Kabr… I just find him thoroughly uninteresting as far as characters go. The rework also essentially makes him worse than the base version as far as I am concerned, and dips into an archetype that I already have a bunch of characters that can fill… namely Helhest. As a result, I have been banking “pink ships,” aka the premium currency, waiting for the next banner, and hoping it was going to be something interesting.
This was announced a few days ago, and we are getting Ikora the Hidden… aka another retread of a character that you get for free by completing the campaign. This is the point where it really set in that NetEase is not devoting any new resources to this game. Effectively, we have gotten all of the characters that were introduced during the testing phase of the game, and now, instead of introducing brand new characters, we are getting reworked versions of some of the original characters. From what I can tell, it isn’t even that the new Ikora 2.0 is getting new weapons… reportedly, it is also still going to be a Single Shot Grenade Launcher and Rocket Launcher character. Which begs the question… what is even the point? Unfortunately, I think the answer is to give the illusion that new content is being added to the game, without requiring much in the way of resources to make it happen.
There were a number of articles that came out in September pegging the initial partial month earnings for the game being around $9 million dollars in revenue. This is apparently far less than NetEase was expecting, at least compared to other games like Diablo Immortal that earned $39 million dollars during the same period. I’ve said before that Destiny Rising is exceptionally generous with its gacha mechanics, and this seems to be translating into players not feeling like they need to spend money on it. I know I generally do the cheap monthly subscription option for around $5, and that feels like it generates enough premium currency to get me all of the characters that get released. Additional articles came out in December indicating that November revenue was down 80% over the September numbers. All of this is deeply sad because the game itself is pretty freaking fun, and I will be sad when it eventually shuffles off this mortal coil.
The bigger problem, however, is that players are disappearing. I’ve pretty consistently friended folks while playing the game and doing some of the harder content, and there are a lot of names and faces that I have not seen in months. Specifically, there is a mechanic that allows you to borrow characters from other players, and it really benefits you to friend some of those whales out there that are getting maxed-out characters off every banner. The problem is, a lot of those Whales have disappeared as well. The first contacts I have in my list have been offline for 157 days… but some of the folks who were super active have been offline for over a month. It is getting noticeably harder to queue for anything because there are just not enough players actively playing the content. Generally speaking, the only time groups happen pretty easily is when both Ace and I are queueing together, which usually means we only need to pick up a third to make it happen.
In the middle of October, we got the “Threats from Beyond” teaser trailer that seemed to indicate that in 2026, we were getting some significant expansion of the game. However, as time passes, I am starting to question this. It shows our character in a ship travelling off-world, but the big tease is Crota, which we have already gotten access to through some sort of time gate, allowing us to travel to the Destiny 1/2 universe and face them. I think one of the biggest challenges to the game is that we effectively still only have three play areas… the social hub of Haven, the Jiangshi Metro, and Red Sea Rift… all of which are located on Earth. A huge part of Destiny is traveling to other planets in our solar system, and it feels weird that we are this many months past the release of the game and have gotten no new patrol areas to explore. Technically, we have visited the moon through story content, but it isn’t an area we can actually explore.
Speaking of which… that “story” content is quite possibly the most laughable content I have ever experienced in a game like this. We are getting a series of quests labelled “Obsidian Secrets”, all of which are comprised of a couple of hologram conversations that we witness as the player, but have no interaction with. The first ones were extremely bad because apparently they could not get back the voice actor for Radegast, and instead of dialogue… we just got grunts each time he was saying his lines. Now it is mostly Felwinter talking to random people, and for all I know, they might be AI voices. It seems like it is teasing a bunch of elements from the existence of Rasputin, Clovis Bray, SIVA, and The Splicers, and also indicating that likely the Hive have infected our moon and not just the one from the alternate reality. However, I am not sure this is actually going anywhere.
It feels like maybe there was a plan to release some large content drop in 2026, but things are being scaled back. This is seen in the shitty quality of the quest missions we are getting, and how they are not really using any new assets and are mostly just hologram cutscenes with limited animation. This is also seen in the fact that our last two character banners have been reworks of original launch characters with limited cosmetic changes. It seems as though Destiny Rising is not the cash cow that NetEase hoped for, and as a result, they are bleeding it of the resources needed to actually make enough change to keep the players engaged. Gacha players expect something new and fresh coming around the corner every few weeks, and while we have gotten a few new game modes and a recurring sequence of the same events over and over, it might just not be enough to keep players for long. All of this is deeply sad to me, someone who really enjoys the gameplay.
Ace and I have already begun talking about what game we will be trying to play next for our “sibling time” routines. I figure by the end of this year, Destiny Rising will be sunset, because it feels like we have been herded into the pasture that is “maintenance mode” without actually ever admitting it.
The post Destiny Rising: Out to Pasture appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. This has been a really weird week for Destiny Rising. Yesterday was “sibling time” and Ace and I did our normal Grandmasters and Hang thing… but it was far less chill than normal. We started the evening with another attempt at Calamity Ops, but still could not get out of the relegation zone. We had what felt like a perfect run, or as close to perfect as we were likely going to be getting… and still came up short of progressing. So in theory on Thursday we will drop down a rank, but so long as we both drop at the same time life should be fine. Hopefully we can have a really good double progression during the next two week period and move back up again. We struggled a bit with our Grandmaster Strike after that but it was nowhere near as bad as our worst week ever so we were doing pretty good. Mostly we both just came off as exhausted and spent the next hour or so chatting while doing random stuff in game.
We’ve also had a really weird week when it comes to the Pack Hunt map. Thankfully we have another guild member that has been helping us out. However until last night, every single three node that could be a stronghold has not turned into one. A few weeks back Ace came up with this theory on how to move around the map and we have been continuing to test that theory, and for the most part I think it works. I can’t say for certain we understand every aspect of it, but there does seem to be a method to the madness when it comes to moving around the map and avoiding large obstacles like mountain ranges and lakes. This is in large part why you see such weird patterns of movement that we have made on the map, because there are a limited number of total moves that we get during a week, so want to try and make as much progress as we can with those.
So essentially the theory is this… the nodes that reward 1000 Energy are always going to lead you in the right direction. This could be just towards a potential stronghold objective, or towards a break in an obstacle wall. if you see 1000 Energy available as a node reward, far as we can tell you ALWAYS want to take it. Next up is if you see three resoruces being rewarded at the same time… this seems to signify one of two things. Either you are going to get a combat node, which often times serve as breaks in obstacles like mountain ranges or lakes… or you are going to for certain uncover a stronghold when you get to a three node block. What you want to avoid however is 500 Energy nodes and single resource nodes, because these often are indicators of a mountain range or another obstacle, or that you are heading towards one. Essentially there seems to be this minesweeper type logic that you can follow to figure out how to route around the map. Sometimes you are going to have to just yolo it and try a node, hoping you find one of the breadcrumb nodes later however because there is not always a good node up to follow.
I have multiple accounts set up for Destiny Rising, in part to help us unlock nodes on the Pack Hunt map, and also gain energy to keep funding the “bitcoin miner” in our guild hall. I spent a good chunk of last night while hanging out and talking with “Erasure” trying to get my second account set up to the point where I have three Iron Commander missions every day, so that I can get an easy 60 pinnacle rewards done for daily progress. At some point I really need to get my third account through the main story so that I unlock more options there as well. I wish we could recruit more people to the cause, so that neither Ace or I felt the need to run alt accounts…. but alas this seems to mostly be a sibling endevour. So long as we can technically keep making things happen with just us forcing it, I am okay with that.
In other news I am probably going to be trying to ease back into Final Fantasy XIV soon. “Erasure” never got through A Realm Reborn, and I have been drafted to the cause of helping her get through some of the content, specifically the content that does not have trust support yet. Some of this is probably going to be doing a bit of nerves bolstering as we queue together for Crystal Tower, so that I can hang out on voice and explain some of the mechanics to make it a bit less fraught. My hope is that this gets me back into the swing of playing my Warrior main, and can start chipping away at the post patch content for Dawntrail. I’ve picked up some gear so that I can move forward in the MSQ, but just need to get back to the point where my muscle memory will take over again.
Anyways. I hope yall are having a most excellent week. I am starting to get worried for next week because I am out due to a colonoscopy, and it is my first one…. so yeah a bit worried about how that will go. I am not sure how much blogging will happen, because it will ultimately depend on where I am both nerves wise and health wise throughout the week.
The post The Thousand Theory appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday was the day that the Anthem Servers went offline officially. This poor game lived such an ignominious fate, and in truth I had not really thought about it in years. However my friend Carthuun reminded me of its passing yesterday, as did a bunch of YouTube channels. It was a really important game for me… until it wasn’t. I wanted this thing to be so much more than it was, and I tried the hell out of making it my next Destiny. It has so many problems, so little content, and so many hamfisted decisions. There was a fun core there, but in an effort to slow players down and keep them from grinding through all of the content… they made the game feel deeply unrewarding and lost me in the process. If you want a proper eulogy for the game then I would suggest that you check out the video Paul Tassi posted yesterday.
I think for me personally I am going to prefer to remember the good bits. There was a really fun gameplay loop when it worked, and roaming around the big open world in an Iron Man suit was a fucking blast. Once they dialed it in, the controls felt amazing and all that it really needed… was more content. However that is unfortunately the most expensive thing to create… and it felt like EA was trying to foist this game out on us and not really fund it. I am not sure what came after those first six months, but supposedly the game improved over time. I don’t think it actually got much in the way of more content, but there was a weirdly devoted Reddit to the game. The thing I am probably going to remember the most is the soundtrack and how much I really loved it. I would love it if someone figured out a way to make this game work with emulator servers, since we should be able t still get the client via steam. However I doubt it had a large enough player base to support that sort of nonsense. You were a cool idea Anthem, but sadly Electronic Arts is a shitbag that did not allow you time or funding to turn into something cool.
I’ve been back in Path of Exile a bit working on challenges and this morning I checked my mappers and finished up Legendary Leagues. Essentially I would really like to hit 34 challenges, and I am sitting at 32, which of course means that I need to squeeze out two more. There are some that I could just pay for carries to complete, but I always hate doing that because it feels like failure. There is one for having run a bunch of map modifiers and fragments, and that one just takes immense time mapping in order to knock out. In theory it is relatively easy to do so, I just have to play a lot, and if I put on an audiobook I can burn through that. However I have not been on my audiobook game lately because I have wanted to spend every moment I can with “Erasure”. However last night we just hung out on voice chat while we both did our own things and that was extremely nice.
This morning I rolled a bunch of originator maps in an attempt to get several that did not have truly onerous affixes on them. That is my core problem with Tier 16.5 is that they have the same pure butts modifiers that T17s have. In theory I should be able to burn through these without much issue, and since I am already level 100 on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, I don’t much care about taking deaths. I know yesterday at one point I took a death, momentarily cringed, and then remembered I was max level and it was no big deal. I think leveling in Path of Exile II made me once again conscious of the damage loss penalty, and I am having to remember that I already beat that boss in Path of Exile 1. I am off today so I am probably going to throw on a book and grind maps at some point.
I also played a bit of Minecraft last night, working on my world that I created named after “Erasure”. It continues to pay off significantly and I found some pretty early diamonds at -5 Z height, or just shortly after ending the deep slate layers. This allowed me to craft my first diamond pick, and sped up my progress descending to bedrock. I’ve harvested so many resources while hollowing out my 8×8 chambers on the way down. I’ve got worlds of iron, gold, copper, redstone, and lapis and an overabundance of raw rock resources. In theory I am probably going to start using the deep slate in combination with cobblestone to build up my tower a bit more so that I can see it even further from base. I also made some shears and got some wool. When I deforested the top of the hill I was building on, it made it so more farm animals spawned giving me much better access to resources.
In theory I need to find some wheat so that I can start breeding cattle. I have tons of cows roaming around near my base and in theory should probably go with the good ole tried and true “meat hole” approach for infinite food production. In order to do that however… I need grain, and in order to find grain…. I am going to need to roam around a bit. The tower is going to make sighting where I am in the world much easier so that is probably the next major expansion project. I should also start to create an above ground fenced in area for crop production and the eventual creation of said “meat hole”. I did hit bedrock and at some point I am going to start setting up branch mining, because once I have access to diamond… I want more of it because diamond picks speed everything in this game up so much.
Tonight is going to be sibling time. We need to make another attempt to get out of relegation territory in Calamity Ops. In theory it really does not matter to much other than it being a point of pride, but we just need to stay together in rank so we can keep doing it together. We also have a new set of Grandmaster keys so we will be doing that tonight, and during the day I might try and unlock the full tower defense mode so we can do some of that. I am not sure when Morgran’s Hunt begins, but I know it is soon as well. Thursday is reset so we may get together really quickly that night and try and get in some early Calamity Ops then as well. I love sibling time, but I am also trying to coax “Erasure” into joining us if for no reason to hang out and listen to the nonsense that Ace and I get up to.
Anyways! I hope you are having a great week. I am pretty freaking happy at the moment, or at least happier than I have been in awhile. I kind of want that for everyone.
The post Goodbye Anthem appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I am sort of all over the place when it comes to gaming right now. The primary game that I am playing… is spending time obsessively chatting with “Erasure” and pretty much everything else is falling by the wayside. I have been remembering to log into FFXIV however to collect my weekly cactpot so that is at least something. At some point I want to return to the game and catch up, but nothing has really prompted me to do so. I would also like to play my secondary set of characters over on Dynamis, but I doubt I actually do that until Ace is also in the mood to play the game… which may be never. They were a matched set and we pretty much only played them as sibling time, which was a heck of a lot of fun for awhile until we both wandered off like bored toddlers. I figure my mains on Cactuar I might actually play whenever the next expansion is announced because I tend to have a bump in my desire to play whenever that happens.
I am still playing some Path of Exile II, but I also sort of feel like I have “beaten” that league. I had a lot of fun being a demon bear hopping all around the place blowing things up, but I’ve been kind of getting the itch to finish things up in Path of Exile 1. As a result I spent a chunk of yesterday working on some of the achievements that I left dangling. I respecced away from Incursion and just picked up more Heist stuff on the atlas tree to speed up the total time it takes to run each map. I was working on the meta achievement for running a bunch of super serious mode league content, and have almost finished the step where you have to run 20 Rituals with blood filled containers. I think I have one more of those left, and then I need to figure out one more thing to do in order to finish up that challenge. I set a bunch of mappers running last night, but I have a feeling that I will not be lucky enough to have gotten enough 100% completions in order to knock that meta out. I did just pop in to check and I got 9 completed at 100% so… honestly 15/30 is not too shabby.
I am still playing Destiny Rising, but mostly as a daily maintenance mode game. Essentially I have been focused on trying to uncover a lot of stuff for the guild so that we can keep paying upkeep. I am not playing all three accounts, but I am at very least playing one quite a bit each week. I got my Jaren up to 70k which should be useful so long as we have Fire Damage on the meta for this season. I sort of miss my girl Helhest a bit, and really enjoy when her exotic bow procs and blows a ton of shit up. I also miss Estella being the god empress of all content, but I get that they are wanting to convince people to build new characters. I still absolutely consider this to have been my Game of the Year for 2025 not counting the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2. It is so damned much fun, I just wish I could convince more of my friends to play it so we could keep upgrading the base without going broke every week.
Something that I have honestly played a lot of this past weekend is Minecraft. I have this dumb habit of making seeds based off my friends and then seeing what they offer. I made a seed based on “Erasure” and it was pretty wild. There was a shipwreck beside where I spawned into the world, tons of sea turtles everywhere, some surface lava, and forests as far as the eyes can see. While I once did a Hardcore Minecraft series, I mostly just play casually. In fact I tend to go tweak a bunch of the world settings so that I don’t have to care about getting sleep every night to prevent phantoms from spawning, and also make it so that creepers cannot blow up my hard work. So in truth these days I plan on pretty fucking softcore mode, and I am fine with that. I like milling around in the world and building dumb things.
Of course the biggest challenge of a new spawn is finding that initial coal. The last world that I created was so forested and so devoid of coal, that I had to start burning logs to get my initial start. This world however, within a few blocks of the side of that initial hill I struck the motherlode of coal deposits and was able to make two full stacks of torches. This was more than enough to fuel most of my further explorations. I am a weirdo in that I mostly stay inside cave systems in Minecraft, and go full on Dwarf mode as I hollow out the earth looking for riches. So the first thing I did was start to hollow out a base in the side of the hill, while being very careful not to break back out into the world. I put a piece of dirt in the entrance to wall off my little safe chamber and then began structuring something reasonable to work in, slowly adding pieces of equipment as needed.
This of course led me to do what I always do… and start a shaft down to bedrock. I am not entirely certain how deep I am at this point but I have broken into the layers of deep stone. Essentially the central shaft has a winding staircase around the outside of what is effectively a series of eight by eight rooms, with three block tall ceilings. The amount of Iron, Copper, and Coal that I have come across in my “spelunk” has fueled my further expansion. The only real challenge with this world so far is that I have yet to find a single sheep. I should probably go off on a mission to find a breeding pair of those so that I can farm them for wool. I do have enough steel to make shears, so I should probably do that rather than killing them. Essentially more than anything right now I need some wool so that I can make a bed and then reset my spawn point inside; my catacombs.
The next big project however is deforesting the hill that I dug into. My intent is to start building up and make a bit of a tower, so that I can see it clearly from above ground. Right now it is just a hovel in the side of a hill with a bunch of torches, and that is hard to see when I am off exploring the world. Sure I have my mini-map mod, and sure I could set waypoints…. but I would far rather give myself a nice big visual landmark to see from the surrounding area. So effectively I am going to harvest all of the birch trees up on top of my hill and then begin to build similar eight by eight chambers upwards into the sky. I will have to figure out what I want for the design for these to be as I build up. I most certainly have MORE than enough materials from my downwards expansion to fuel some above ground mega structures.
I guess as far as things go with “Erasure” I should probably give an update. It was a dramatic couple of days for various reasons. We had the first thing that really checked our relationship, and a lot of it was me being in my head about things. However I think we exited on better ground than we started, so that is pretty good. The harsh reality is that I do not know how to go slow. The relationship that I had with my wife of thirty years… was one that pretty much transitioned from being “just friends” to being a “couple” that was inseparable in over the course of a single weekend. I am really not good at casually seeing someone, and I am working on that. It probably seems like the most counter-intuitive thing to anyone who has dated around at length… but it is just the way my brain and heart works. I am having to learn how to pump the brakes a bit, but will ultimately be better for it. Luckily she did not run away, and luckily is willing to work with me through it.
Anyways. That is my weekend. A bunch of random games, that took a backseat to my continued getting to know someone that I’ve cared about for twenty years… but am starting to care about in new ways.
The post Dig a Hole, Find some Coal appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
