In Today’s adventures of Bel is completely all over the place in his gaming free time… we see see a return to Destiny 2. This should shock no one given that Bungie did a big announcement trailer yesterday for the Year 2 content and the upcoming Forsaken “comet” expansion to the game. I feel like I need to spend some time explaining that term as it gets throw around a lot in Destiny discussions. When the original roadmap for Destiny was laid out they set up two expansions worth of content and then something they referred to as the Comet… or a sort of mega expansion that changes the world in a significant way. The comet for the original game ended up being The Taken King expansion which was an additional purchase and signaled the shift from Year 1 to Year 2 of Destiny.
Similarly in September we have Forsaken acting as the shift between Year 1 and Year 2 of Destiny 2. It seems as though they are solidifying the pace of content releases for Destiny 2 in forming a setup where each calendar year will have a major release in the form of the Comet, and then two follow up expansions the size of Curse of Osiris/Warmind making up the remainder of a “Season” in FPS gaming terms. To coincide with this they are selling annual passes allowing you to pick up the two expansions at a minor discount or you can bundle it in with the deluxe version of the game for a little bit more of a discount depending on how much you value you the extra in game bits.
If this is what it takes to fund constant development of Destiny 2… I am largely okay with it especially considering that maybe just maybe it sounds like they have learned some of the lessons that they should have learned in The Taken King. Namely that players need a wide diversity of activities to do and that Destiny 2 felt like a thinning down of those possibilities rather than an increase in them. I am super amped for the Gambit play mode which is a sort of competitive PVE thing, but I am concerned about the return of random rolls. There is supposedly a new mod system that may fix bad rolls, but we have yet to see much information about that. If I can in fact take a crummy drop and fix its problems with mods… then I would be largely okay with randomized rolls.
The return to Destiny last night however was marked by the beginning of a new Faction Rally event. I almost want to think of this as Faction Rally 2.0 because enough significant changes happened to warrant that sort of nomenclature. First off… you can only pledge one faction per account instead of being able to split the difference like I always have done and choose one of each. As a result I had to struggle a bit here… and chose New Monarchy because I like their old school shaders the best and still have yet to get the Ship or Sparrow. Additionally of all of the armor sets I like the design of the Titan one the best pending I apply a completely different shader to it in order to remove that whole mustard and ketchup appearance.
Additionally I just love the look of the weapon that is up for grabs as part of the rally. It reminds me of a Christian Hosoi Skateboard which I always thought was a great design… in spite of its problematic connotations with the Japanese Imperial Rising Sun flag. The truth is it will be hard pressed to make me change things up and stop using Merciless for my main Heavy weapon… but it would be nice to have a rocket launcher I at least like the look of. Additionally there is a version of the Antiope-D up for grabs as well that seems to have most of the same stats… making it something I am definitely going to grind for.
I have to admit I have not really followed the changes to the Faction Rally that closely, so I was completely confused when I was presented with two tasks… one to do a Lost Sector with 3 Renown and the other to do a Lost Sector with 5 Renown. Essentially now when you complete an event… you gain renown which is a gauge that shows up above your main hotbar of sorts showing you what your current ranking is. This caps out at 5 and doing stuff… makes it go up like Events, High Value Targets and Patrol Missions. When you enter a Lost Sector it scales in difficulty based on the number of pips of renown you currently have and triggers a bunch of negative effects… like the fact your health and shielding regenerates at a snails pace.
Reddit being the place that it will always be of course has a guide that explains all of the various things that allow you to get Renown and the stacking effects that trigger. Firstly you cannot fast travel at all while you have a stack of renown without resetting this back to zero… which gets annoying as the fastest way to stack renown seems to be doing events. When you die it removes a single pip of renown, which means if you are trying to stack up to do the 5 pip challenge you need to play more carefully.
I am not sure how many penalties you wind up with… but the shields very obviously stop recharging around the 3 mark and you also seem to move slower meaning you probably take an agility hit. Lastly each pip seems to make mobs deal more damage to you, but thankfully they don’t seem to take more damage to kill. I was still able to oneshot basically everything with a good hand cannon headshot. I hung out in game for long enough to get enough tokens to open four New Monarchy packages before finally calling it a night. I did however stumble across Scarybooster out in the wilds while doing some events on the EDZ which I guess makes sense because geographically we are fairly close to each other with me being in Oklahoma and him being I believe in Nebraska. It is always really cool when you see someone in game that you know… and unfortunately I didn’t have a simple wave emote on my bar at the time so I think I made a bowl of Ramen, did the salt emote, and danced for him.
omg the Hasoi skateboard design – I had that as a teenager too
The original Jason Jessee netpune design is my favorite deck ever… I wish I had that board still. I would hang the deck on my wall 🙂