I am not sure how to fully explain how happy I am to be in this location again. For those who did not play Destiny 1, this was the location where we spent our first moments in the game. If you do the New Light experience you go through a somewhat condensed version of that intro as well. This is where our ghost first found us among the wreckage of rusted out cars, and now some six years later we are able to once again roam freely around the outskirts of the Cosmodrome. In Destiny each location has a story that you have to dig hard to find… and while this turns off most players there is something magical about uncovering the past that has kept me at connected to this setting.
Last night I finished the main storyline of Beyond Light and as a result got my hands on No Time to Explain once again. This also is a reference back to Destiny 1, as it was the legendary rifle you were given then by the Exo Stranger for completing the Black Garden mission. It came back later in the life cycle of the first game as an Exotic, and it is a variant of this that we are now able to wield once more in Destiny 2. The weapon is pretty nice, though I have to admit I do miss the full auto variant that we first took away from the Black Garden. This one summoning a little echo of a sort that fires bullets at your enemies though is rather tasty… and it seems to be a way better shot than I am.
While the main story is relatively short, it does provide a lot of answers… specifically about the relationship between the Eliksni and the Traveler or as they refer to it the Great Machine. Much like Humanity, they were once the chosen of the Traveler and for them the Traveler fled the darkness leading to the downfall of their civilization. This is well trodden canon, but the final moments of this expansion give us a very brief glimpse into what Eliksni life and their planet might have been like. I am now working my way through the follow up sequence of quests now that I have mastered Stasis for my own. I think the jury is out right now on what I actually think of Behemoth spec and the Stasis powers. It seems terribly useful for the Crucible but significantly less so for PVE encounters.
Another game that I spent some time with yesterday was Godfall. Unfortunately I do not have my PS5 as of yet, but at 2 am I did get a shipping notice telling me it was on the way. However Godfall was a game I had always intended to play on the PC so that I could use my control scheme of choice the keyboard and mouse. That said everything about this game seems to have been designed for a controller, so if you have been considering getting it… you might want to hook one up and save yourself some control scheme frustrations. I am not entirely certain what I think of the game yet. I enjoy some aspects of it, but avoiding attacks seems to be a fiddly and weak aspect of the moment to moment gameplay. I don’t feel terribly effective dodging out of the way of incoming blows. Maybe this changes with time and the way you spec your warframes.
Lets be honest… this game is Warframe with melee weapons and more MMORPG loot. From what I can tell your brother is Evil and he is attempting to ascend to godhood and you are trying to stop him from doing this. This means you have to traverse the various realms of the Monolith… which appears to be an equivalent to the World Tree. The intro mission is just getting through this large temple to enter the Monolith, but after that you begin traversing various realms… the first of which being the Earth realm. I believe it means Earth in the elemental sense and not literally Terra. This area is more open and allows you to freely roam around completing objectives, which admittedly already places this higher up on my scale than Warframe since it doesn’t really have an equivalent of a Destiny Patrol zone.
Your mission into the temple is to recruit this creepy machine face lady thing, which allows you to unlock the various systems of the game. Your first action is to forge a new Warframe or as they call them Valorplates. You can equip them with different build outs and then swap things up to change the way you are playing. Unfortunately they are all melee which is going to rule out a lot of my friends who are not melee friendly. What it is doing is not really tricksy enough to entice Tam, and the lack of proper magic is going to rule out a lot of the AggroChat folks. So I am not really sure this is the sort of thing that would take off very much within my immediate friend group. I am enjoying myself, but not enough that after a few hours of playing it I didn’t immediately return right back to Destiny 2.
Are you exploring Beyond Light in Destiny 2? Did you try out Godfall? Drop me your thoughts in the comments. I am curious especially if Godfall is clicking for anyone else, or if it is destined to be yet another game in this lobby game/looter genre. I fear that much like Avengers… this one is not going to gain traction as we have reached maximum saturation in yet another gaming trend.
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by ‘equivalent of a Destiny patrol zone’, but Warframe has two pretty huge open world areas, the Plains of Eidolon and the Orb Vallis, and another medium sized one named Cambion Drift.
Having played Destiny 2 for a while after release I do feel that the bounties you can do in the aforementioned zones are not much different from Destiny’s patrols.
As to your question, I don’t intend to go back to Destiny 2, and at the moment I don’t have Godfall on my radar either – still playing a heck of a lot Genshin Impact.
So the problem I had with Plains of Eidolon and Orb Vallis is even though they are open world zones they are still sorta guided by an overarching mission? You still queue in with a fixed group of players and there is some overaching objective that you are all trying to accomplish. In a Destiny Patrol zone or a traditional MMORPG zone… you can just roam around freely for as long as you like doing whatever the hell you want in completely undirected play. That is my favorite mode of play for Destiny and most MMOs and it is the one thing I was really missing from Warframe. I didn’t want to queue for a mission, I just wanted to go “fuck around” for awhile and level weapons and gear while doing it. Structurally that is just not the way Warframe works.
Hm…I have to disagree there.
Sure, you ‘can’ pick up a bounty in Cetus/Fortuna, go out there with a group, finish the bounty, rinse and repeat.
I never do that though. I just go out without a bounty and do whatever I want, just like you describe. I fish, I mine, I close rifts in the Vallis (if the recurring event is running) or kill ghouls on the Plains (ditto), do the K-Drive races, and ‘maybe’ I’ll also pick up a bounty if I feel like it and do that.
It’s not the exactly same, sure, but I think the way I play those zones is not that much different from what you’re looking for. It’s a solo experience though, so that’s a difference of course.