shooter

A Good Death

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Good Morning, Folks. I thought I would talk a bit about a game that I have not talked about in a very long time. I have a deep attachment to Destiny as a platform, and have been playing since the first game on my PS4. I used to raid even in the game with a crew full of people that I met through my friend Liani, and many of them, like Jex, are going to be friends for life. We can talk about all of the various ways that Destiny failed its players, but the one that ultimately caused me to detach is when they vaulted content that we had paid for, for the second time. Like I was willing to accept that Mercury and Mars needed a rework because they did not really live up to the standards of content from Forsaken forward. However, when Forsaken itself was vaulted, it pissed me off enough to uninstall Destiny and move on with my life.

That is not to say that Destiny has not meant a massive amount to me. I wanted Destiny to do better and pull itself out of what seemed to be a concurrent player death spiral. However, that does not appear to be in the cards for the game, because Bungie has announced that the game is ultimately being sunset with a final massive patch. Bungie appears to have put all of its cards now in the Marathon basket, and I am not sure they can turn this around. I fear that we might be witnessing the death of a studio, more than just the death of one individual game. Marathon is so far from a game that I want to play that I am worried that a “PVE” patch won’t go far enough to bring former Destiny players into the fold. The worst part, however, is that other than Warframe, there is no one really in this space anymore. I wish that any of the competitors had succeeded…. Anthem, or Outriders, could have easily taken this place if they had the sort of support that they needed.

More than anything, I don’t want the death of Destiny to be the death of the Looter Shooter genre. While Destiny Rising continues to do a reasonable job of carrying that banner forward, the problem there is that they also seem to be in a content drought and largely recycling patches that have come from before. Is there just no player appetite for this sort of game anymore? Or has everyone just coalesced on Warframe as the one company that seems to be properly supporting these games? I like Warframe for what it is, but it has never felt anywhere near as polished as the Bungie shooter experience. The gear chase never felt as compelling, and while I like what is happening with the Tennos, it’s a wildly different game experience to me personally. Warframe is the Path of Exile of looter shooters, and what I really wanted was the light Diablo fare instead.

One of the big positives of this patch is that they seem to be restoring the game to a functional state. One of the biggest mistakes that they made was to remove the Director, and migrate everything to the Portal… which is effectively a menu system that limited the amount of content you had access to. The director felt like we were moving around the star systems, and made the game feel less shallow than what is effectively a handful of playlists. The director is coming back, however, as are some game modes that had been shelved, like Gambit and the Sparrow Racing League. Each of the game modes, including patrol destinations, is getting its own pinnacle drops and should, in theory, remain evergreen content. So while they are effectively killing the game, they are at least doing something to restore it to a functional state.

Being perfectly honest… I will probably return to the game when this content patch drops. That seems wild that the death of the game is bringing me back, but really…. this content update is most of what players have been asking about for years. Why did they wait this long to bring back the Sparrow Racing League, for example? This has legitimately been a thing that players have begged for since it was first taken away in 2017. Players loved this, and it feels like they have been sitting on it for almost a decade when it could have easily stirred excitement in the community and caused players to come back. I feel like the downfall of Destiny is the tale of a studio that did not respect what they had and thought that they could string players along indefinitely. I would have loved to have seen what Destiny could have been in the hands of Grinding Gear Games or Digital Extremes, because they seem to be the gold standard when it comes to studios respecting their player base.

All of this said, I am happy that we are getting this final patch, because it brings the game up to date and leaves it in a reasonable condition. Do I think Marathon will be able to pick up the Destiny player base? I doubt it unless they completely rework that game into what is effectively Destiny 3. I will give it a shot when the PVE-only modes go into the game. I have zero interest in the extraction shooter genre, and that seems to be the case for most Destiny players. I think what is more likely to happen is a mass migration to Warframe, since that is a game that supports its players and is at least mostly in this same genre. I think some will also pick up Destiny Rising, because while it seems like it is also in maintenance mode, it is at least really fun. I plan on giving the new patch a spin in between playing other games.

Do you miss Destiny? What are your feelings about this final patch? Drop me a line below.

The post A Good Death appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Ginger, Jollibee, and Pragmata

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Good Morning, Folks. This is Ginger, and we became friends yesterday, while I spent an hour milling around at my mother-in-law’s house waiting for someone. I had an exceptionally busy day that involved travelling about two hours away to sell my RV… that had more or less been sitting and rotting in my mother-in-law’s yard for the last decade unserviced. That was a phase in our lives, largely dictated by my wife and wanting to spend time with her sister… but when said sister passed, we just never used it anymore. Given that my mother-in-law had passed along several suitors looking to buy the RV, I took the hint that she wanted to get it out of her yard. It needs four new tires, a new battery, two new skylights, a resealing of the roof, and probably some work on the slideouts… so I figured I should probably get what I can while I can. With everything else going on in my life, it was so inconsequential that I did not even think about it. I forced my mother-in-law to take a third of the money because she needs it more than I do, and I told her to call it “lot rent”. I would have given her all of the money, but I knew there was no way in hell she would have accepted that.
Last week, we had the Anaheim FanFest for Final Fantasy XIV, and with it came a whole slew of new announcements. The highlight of this, however, was the above cat race. I would love it if we could play as this race… but I sincerely doubt that will be a possibility. Just know that I love these critters and will be spending lots of time in their town. FanFest did what it needed to do and rekindled a spark in me for Final Fantasy XIV. Dawntrail was weird, because while I mostly enjoyed it at the time… the longer it has sat with me, the less I actually liked it. It felt too much like a beach episode in an Anime, because it was wholly disconnected from everything that we had cared about to that point. Maybe it is just that Endwalker stuck the landing so thoroughly that anything after that… was going to feel like a letdown. With the announcement of Evercold, though, we are returning to the FFXIV that I care about… nonsense surrounding the reflections, this time going to the world ravaged by Ice. I am super interested in this whole FFXIV meets Northrend vibe that it has, as well as the Shadow of Colossus thing going on with the Kaiju-sized Automatons roaming around.
Another highlight is seeing this Jollibee Lovely cosplay, which was amazing. I wish we had Jollibee restaurants around here because I have always wanted to try it. The closest ones are five hours away down in Texas. This means I will miss out on getting the charming “Eat Chicken” emote, unless I want to pay the scalpers on eBay who are selling off emote codes. I am really interested to see what the evolved form of the classes that I care about looks like, specifically Warrior. I am honestly kind of amped about the whole concept of only needing to care about item level for one class, but still being able to play all of the others. I always liked leveling all of the jobs, but hated the process of gearing them, so any streamlining of that is going to be phenomenal. The one thing that I did not hear that I wanted to hear badly… is that they were doing away with the way that glamouring currently works. I want a system that collects the appearance when an item drops and then allows me to get rid of it immediately so I can clear out my retainers.
I jumped back into the game and started working my way through the post-Dawntrail content. I have to say it doesn’t really land super well yet, mostly because I did not love the place where the expansion left off. I am hoping that given enough time, I will start to vibe with the content again. One of the things that shocked me, though, was how fast the muscle memory came back. I have not tanked anything since 2024, and after the very first pull in the first dungeon, I was immediately going through the rotations like I knew what I was doing. I guess once those mental pathways have been burned in thoroughly after over a decade of playing the game… they are stuck that way forever. This is going to be something that I poke at over the coming weeks and months because it is not like I am in a massive rush to finish things up, given that we have until January. I might, however, join in the shenanigans on Thursday nights as folks chase moogle tomes.
I’ve also started playing Pragmata, and my lord this is a charming game. Imagine Brock Sampson from Venture Bros… having to keep track of a very precocious child that is always getting into trouble. Essentially, it is the best Resident Evil game I have ever played… if you replaced the zombies with robots. I say that mostly because it is a game about managing resources. You are given very limited quantities of things that hit hard and can take out things quickly, and this is paired with a hacking mechanic that requires you to really think your way through combat encounters. Over time, you get tools to speed this up in the form of an overload that buys you some time to deal with the robots individually, and another mechanic eventually that allows you to autohack things, but this is less efficient than manually hacking. Before long, you are able to chain attacks on every single robot in the vicinity and effectively take them all down at once.
What makes the game so damned charming through is the whole father/daughter relationship that develops between Hugh and “Diana”. Every so often, Diana even draws you pictures of your adventures. In your conversations, there are various things that are said that Diana takes note of. Like one of the first things you teach her is that high fives mean you did a good job, and then from that point forward… she wants high fives after everything. There is also this whole side mission of collecting what are effectively STL files to reprint objects from Earth so that she can learn about them. She is a completely blank slate when you first find her, and through your interactions, she grows and becomes a way more potent teammate as you take down the constant cavalcade of bots.
There are a lot of hilarious moments. Take, for example, the way that Diana learns knowledge by biting down on what are effectively giant SD Cards. There is another thing that regularly happens where, during hacking sequences, Diana will scream a sequence of zeros and ones at the boss. It is a game that does not take itself terribly seriously, but is also quite a bit of fun to play. I think I am probably about halfway through the game, or at least based on the map shown in the game, I am halfway through the known destinations. There is a lot of extra exploration that opens up once you have cleared an area, and at some point, I want to go sweep some of the zone that I have already been through, looking for more collectables and STL files to print stuff for my base. Unfortunately, I am probably going to be putting this game to bed for a few weeks, because I think it will require too much dexterity, and I am going into another chemotherapy week. With that… I have no clue what my posting schedule is going to look like over the next few days. Round Two was way worse than Round One… and tomorrow I start Round Three of Eight. I am HOPING that things don’t keep scaling as they did between the first two rounds. I know that I am also going to start getting Iron Infusions with every round of Chemo, which should, in theory, slowly improve the anemia. I just know that by Friday of the coming week, I am going to be dead to the world, and the worst days will be Saturday and Sunday…. and slowly I will begin to climb out of that hole next week. I did everything I needed to do to batten down the hatches for another week of lethargy, and I am running out at lunch today to pick up some fresh goods for the coming week. I guess I am saying… I will see you when I see you. The post Ginger, Jollibee, and Pragmata appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Destiny Rising: Out to Pasture

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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.

The Thousand Theory

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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.