Month: October 2019

Lunar Faffing

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First lets start off with the fact that I love this new character screen, where you see what sparrow and ghost shell you have equipped. Last night Shadowkeep launched as well as the New Light experience, and there were a lot of problems. That is not to say that the problems did not resolve themselves eventually. However we were stuck in the weirdest queue that would start at 16,000 jump up to 22,000… back down to 8,000… back up to 22,000 and then eventually at some point let me through.

I say at some point… because I had some real life stuff pull me away from the screen and about an hour later when I got back home I was sitting in game. All told according to Steam I played about 4 hours last night, which involved very little progress in the main story and a lot of faffing about on the moon. Because of the way that Steam tracks time in a game… I am guessing the entire time I was sitting in queue it was counting me as playing because I most definitely feel like I didn’t make 4 hours worth of progress.

The Moon is doing something that I not so secretly hope that we see a lot more of. It is revisiting an area from Destiny 1, expanding upon it and showing us what has happened since we last visited. If I am correct the above screenshot is roughly where we originally zone into the Moon in Destiny 1. I spent a lot of my time roaming around and revisiting destinations from the first game, because I spent an awful lot of time on the moon grinding random stuff, and knew it extremely well.

The only initial annoyance is that you start with effectively all of your gear at 750, and the moon is significantly higher level than that. I managed to get my light up to 770 and this area that I used to farm in Destiny 1 is still showing with all of the mobs having a Skull symbol, which I believe means they are higher light than I am. Everything hits really freaking hard right now so it is going to take some time to get my feet back under me. I am wondering about maybe grinding out some strikes to see if I can get my light level up a bit before doing much more of the sort of thing I really enjoy… wandering aimlessly.

One thing I am noticing on the lunar surface is that I am finding a bunch of chests that look like this that are currently unopenable. I am guessing that something at some point will give us access to these through some sort of a minigame like have existed in other areas. There were so many intricate farms on the Dreadnaught that I am really hoping that this is the sign of those existing here. I remember farming chest keys and then going through the process of tracking down how to find the chests. I’ve taken screenshots of two of these, and they have the same symbols on the front, which I assume will mean something at some point.

The only real frustration that I have is that there appears to be no way to play through that first mission of the New Light experience. It has me contemplating sacrificing my Warlock… which I have done nothing on since before Forsaken… in order to play it through the new starter experience. I am also completely confused about how content unlocks work in this new area of the game. I logged into my PS4 copy and I had access to all of the areas and was flagged for showing that I had access to the seasonal path. However it also prompted me upon logging in to buy Shadowkeep. So I am deeply confused as to if I do or do not have to buy it on multiple platforms. I don’t have much of an opinion yet other than the game as a whole is going to take some adjusting to.

New Light and Shadowkeep

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Later today something really cool is about to happen. Firstly the new expansion for Destiny 2 is launching and Shadowkeep will be playable on all platforms around 10 am CST. There is a complicated release matrix that is available , but alas for me I will be at work and won’t get to play until this evening. The other cool thing that is happening is that Destiny is launching its Free to Play experience. So this morning I am going to do a bit of an informational post for new players and players who maybe have not followed any of the happenings of the last few months.

What is New Light?

New Light represents a re-imagining of the new player experience for Destiny 2. Instead of throwing you in the middle of the Red War Campaign, it sort of eases the player in a bit slower with doing various activities associated with the destinations and guiding the players through that experience. Additionally and most importantly it is completely free for anyone to download regardless of platform, and includes a shocking amount of content. You are essentially getting all of the Destiny 2 “Year One” content, aka the base game (Red War), Curse of Osiris expansion, and Warmind expansion.

This also gives you access to all of the core activities like Strikes, Crucible, The Leviathan Raid and various reoccurring events like the Iron Banner. You also apparently get access to some of the year two content like the Black Armory Forges, Gambit/Gambit Prime and The Menagerie which is sorta like the LFR version of Destiny 2 raid content. In addition to all of this… you can be viable to hop in and play with you friends in content on day one minute one. They have changed the way the world scales and you could hop in and do a strike moments after you first create your character.

You can get New Light on the following platforms:

  • Steam
  • Playstation 4
  • Xbox One

Destiny Moved to Steam?

Yes as part of the divorce from Activision, Bungie is no longer going to be available through the Battle.net client. For me this was largely a positive since the vast majority of the games that I own and or play are through the Steam launcher. For some people however this might be a negative as I found out from one of my friends yesterday. Of the various platforms that Destiny could have moved to, I feel like Steam was probably the best option. There would be way more gnashing of teeth had it moved to the Epic Games Store for example, or insisted that we install yet another game store client on our machines.

At the time of writing this all of the Bungie systems are offline for maintenance. However if you played on Battle.net and are wanting to continue playing that character you will still be able to move after the systems come back online later today. You need to go to Bungie.net/PCMove to initiate the process. However as the above advisement states it will not be an instant process and there may be some lag time before your character shows up on steam. Ultimately the process requires you to log into your Battle.net account and then into your Steam account and it creates a mapping and starts the character move process. If you did this prior to the systems going offline, then your Steam character should be sitting there waiting on you when you install either the New Light client or Shadowkeep.

What is Cross Save?

Again the systems are offline, but when they come back online later today you will be able to configure Cross Save. Essentially if you have played Destiny 2 on any platform in the past, you can keep your characters and move them forward with you if you choose to swap platforms. For example I had characters on both the PC and the PS4 and once everything was linked up, I was able to choose which set of characters would be my “Cross Save” and available on all platforms. Since then I picked up Forsaken when it was on sale on the Xbox One and have been able to play the same characters on all three platforms seamlessly.

To make it work all you need to do is go to the Bungie.net/CrossSave page and associate the accounts for each platform with your Bungie.net account. It will then ask you to select which account you are going to promote to your cross save. Now these other accounts won’t actually “go away” but will instead be suppressed as the characters from your chosen platform loads. You could in theory go back and reverse the decision at any point and play different characters on each of the separate platforms. My hope is at some point in the future they give us full cross play as I have friends that choose to play on each of the platforms, but my chosen platform is the PC. I could however load up any of the clients but I am limited to only that group of friends on a given client.

How do I Convert Heroic Events?

One of the most common activities in Destiny 2 is that of the public event. Some activity will spawn in on your destination and you can get good experience and some gear by completing it. However you get significantly better experience and loot if you manage to convert it to the heroic version. At times the process of converting it is directly in competition with actually completing the event, and as a “KinderGuardian” you can frustrate players by not knowing how to transform the event. As such I feel like one of the more important steps is learning what you need to do to convert each activity. I wrote up a post some time ago, but since then a bunch of new event types have been released. Thankfully Mesa Sean released a video today walking through the process of converting every single event.

I Feel Like I Am Missing Some Lore

There is a lot of story to Destiny, and sadly most of it is not told through the natural flow of in game narratives. It is instead told through things you interact with in the world, side quests, items that drop and add notes to your grimoire, and some of the higher end content like raids. Additionally there is a wealth of knowledge that never transitioned over from Destiny 1, and as a result you can feel like you are at a massive debt of knowledge as you enter this world.

Destiny 2 is not really a narrative experience. It is a game about excellent gunplay and fun activities that you can complete with your friends. That however does not mean there is not a mountain of interesting lore behind the game. As such I once again am pimping this excellent video from Byf, that outlines everything we currently know about the lore of Destiny. It is a four hour long video that outlines the origins of the various factions and Guardian doesn’t even factor into it until around the 2 hour mark. If you want to understand what came before… then watching the first 2 hours and 56 minutes is well worth your time as that takes you up through the beginning of Destiny 2.