Season of Opulence

There has been a sequence of events that has happened recently that were a bunch of things that were totally out of my control. One of those occurred again yesterday. I was about to go into a 1 pm meeting that I could not miss or else a project was likely going to fail… and I got a call from my father saying my mother had been taken to the Emergency Room. The meeting wrapped early thankfully and I rushed up the highway to the hospital roughly an hour away. The short version is that she has a blood clot restricting blood flow to her lungs.

The prognosis thankfully seems to be good and they are pumping blood thinners into her expecting that to clear the clot within 24 hours. However it is a scary situation because so much could go wrong. I ultimately came home last night in part because I had to take my own meds and in part because she was not sleeping with us in her room and needed some rest. The goal right now is to head up once I finish my morning activities. I’ve texted both mom and dad but given that my dad also went home to take his meds I am wondering if he is still sound asleep.

I obviously did not get much game time yesterday, but I did poke my head into Destiny 2 for a bit since the season of opulence has started. This morning I am going to give you a fairly fragmented view at some of the changes that I noticed. First off when you get into game you will get a quest leading you to Nessus and to visit what appears to be Emperor Callus’s party barge hovering near a cliff face. There is an intermediary step where you have to go visit Benedict the reprogrammed sweeper bot, but quickly you wind up planet side working through a series of quests to refill a chalice. This serves as the progression system for the season and unlocking various talents on the cup give you various in game boosts.

The first interesting thing is that as you are completing steps in the quest you are being given 690 gear as a way of artificially boosting your light level enough to be able to start doing higher level content. Sadly I did not have a stockpile of infusion materials, and as a result I am mostly stuck using the blues in place of the purples that I greatly prefer. It is nice however to see that Bungie built in some sort of a catch up mechanic this time that does not involve auto completing content.

Another interesting thing is that we now have a pursuits tab in the director that has all of those annoying doodads that took up inventory space and effectively this becomes something approaching a proper quest log. I am not sure if you are limited to the number of items you can have in it like you were with bounties. It is however really nice to see an at a glance view of everything you are currently working on and what step in the quest chain you are.

Another thing that i noticed is that they changed the engine for displaying the shaders… which in theory tries to give you a more appropriate display of what they might look like on gear. It still isn’t perfect but it does seem to do a more reasonable job of faking out what the shader looks like actually applied.

The place with the biggest changes is the in game shop… aka the Eververse where they have swapped up a bunch of things. Namely while engrams still exist they are now seemingly removed from priority in advertising them. Right now they have “best of year one” engram that allows you to obtain items from anything that happened during year one. What is more interesting however is that they have a bunch of items that are now available as direct purchases for both Silver and Bright Dust.

For example they have a new seemingly exclusive sparrow with nifty animation effects called The Calypso that is purchasable for 800 silver. The minimum purchase needed to get enough silver is $9.99 for 1100 silver… you can do whatever math you want to dilute the amount of the cost of a single silver because like all cash shops the more you buy the cheaper it gets. However if you have no silver right now and you want this ride you are going to have to spend a minimum of $10 to get it. It is nice however to have a fixed price point rather than the previous answer of opening gachapon engrams until you got whatever it was that you wanted.

There is also a rotating inventory of things available for bright dust which can be obtained by breaking down items from previously opened engrams or from completing engrams. Among these is an exotic sparrow that looks like you are riding a single pod-racer engine. This should in theory give access to a different batch of new stuff rotating every seven days through a fixed stock of hopefully all of the items available during this season.

The gameplay itself feels different and I cannot quite put my finger on it. It might just be that I have been gone long enough that everything is starting to feel fresh again. My shotgun that I picked up from one of the boost packs however seems to be able to do things like one shot Vex Hydras… which is not something that I remember happening before. Additionally I seem to be able to one shot punch Vex Minotaurs… which again is not something that I remember being able to do. I am sure I will be playing more of this in the coming weeks but for now I am wrapping things up and heading to the hospital.

Keep my Mom in your thoughts if you don’t mind doing so. Hopefully everything works out okay but regardless it has been pretty scary.

3 thoughts on “Season of Opulence”

  1. Hope all goes well with your mom! Am curious to hear your thoughts on this season of Destiny. To me it was the final straw. Bungie just seems to up the grind ante every season whether it be for the pinnacle weapons (1000 precision kills in Gambit for the new bow!!!) or just the newest gear. The chalice system looks cool until you see how many bounties you have to complete to start filling out the slots via the tokens. I’m getting the feeling they are just dragging players along until Destiny 3.

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