Destiny 2

Destiny Rising: The Sequel We Deserved

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Good Morning Folks. Now that I have largely pushed Path of Exile II aside for the moment, I am diving with full force into Destiny Rising and spent pretty much all last night playing it. I’ve not arrived at the second world zone called the Red Rift and with it comes both new enemies and npcs to interact with. This is the realm of the world under the control of Saladin that we are VERY familiar with from Destiny 1 and 2. The thing is… he is a much different Saladin than I remember, way angrier and way more impulsive. The further into the game I have gotten, the more the story really matters and the better it has gotten. There are a few moments pretty early in the campaign that feel like throw away story bits, and there is some weird voice actor changes at times… where it feels like NetEase assumed any English voice was good enough. However the further into this game I get the more polished it seems to be.

From what I remember the first area was all that was available in the alpha, and it largely focuses on the Space Age China equivalent of Jiangshi and its battle with both the Fallen and the Hive. Red Rift however focuses around a group of plucky miners trying to harvest this resource that is used to activate the remaining bits of a dead sentinel, whose wreckage serves as the general shell of their main town. Instead of Fallen and Hive, we are introduced to the Cabal and later in the missions quite possibly the most dangerous enemy type in the Destiny universe, the dimensional and time hopping Vex. What is really cool is that in both cases… they are not just recycling themes we have already seen in the core Destiny games. We are getting new unit types and new locations that we have never experienced before. The visuals are fucking fire, like this weird vapor-wave chamber where we teleport into to fight a big Vex boss… and we can see in the distance a group of Vex worshiping some big statue… reminiscent of the very end of Destiny 1.

The other thing that is wild is just how damned much content this game has. I am going to talk for a bit like I am a diehard Destiny player… because I absolutely was from the launch of the game in 2014… up until the point that I checked out in 2021. During all of that time… one of the features that the players have begged for was a return of a limited time event from Destiny 1 called the Sparrow Racing League… or SRL. Guess what Destiny Rising has? Yup! Every day during a specific period of time you can race sparrows on some wild tracks. I think I need to maybe break out a controller for this because the mouse controls felt a bit kludgy trying to stay on the Vex track I randomed into. On top of this Shadowshaper Duels is a very Gwent style strategic card game led by this games version of the Drifter. Fishing is also pretty great, and really something I should be doing every day. I believe Iron Bar is a PVP mode that only happens on the weekend, so maybe this games version of the Trial of Osiris.

Yesterday I also unlocked the Iron Commander mode, which is effectively this games version of AFK missions that you can send your unlocked heroes on. When you do this, you essentially lose access to those characters in some of the casual gameplay modes. However it appears that you can keep doing all of the more core content like planetary missions, and queued activities like Strikes. Essentially you pick a mode and choose three of your champions and then can run that over the course of a few hours at the end of which you are awarded some of the unique items that drop in that mode. This is going to be really cool for collecting resources from some of the gameplay modes that I don’t really personally enjoy that much like the chaos roguelike mode.

I’ve also spent way more time with the Wolf Pack and now really want to build our own. This thing has guild housing that unlocks by default, and I believe there are limited customization that you can do as a guild. If nothing else it gives you a private shared space to hang out and mingle with your friends before going off to do other events. The game is really pretty for a mobile game, and I am shocked at just how well it runs over an emulator. While the controls are not quite as tight as an actual Bungie game… it is way the hell more approachable than actual Destiny. Like I said I checked out in 2021, and I installed Destiny 2 yesterday… and seemed to not have access to anything but the Tower. The only options I was given was travel to the tower or to buy the latest expansion… so in theory I have been gone long enough that all of the content that I once owned… has rolled out of the game making it entirely unplayable.

The thing you will spend most of your time doing with the pack is doing this hex grid exploration mode called the Pack Hunt. Essentially you send your character out to explore spaces on this map, and sometimes you uncover resources that you can loot for yourself and the guild. Occasionally you will uncover mini world missions that you can run, or resource drops that will show up on square you have already uncovered. You are given a limited number of actions a day and these work in the background so you can flip over and send your character on a longer mission, and then queue up for some other activity or just explore one of the planetary zones. This is peak mobile gaming nonsense, but it is kind of fun and it feels good to uncover resources that everyone shares in. There is a currency you collect through doing pack actions, and the more active the pack is… the more of this resource everyone else can harvest.

I’ve also unlocked heroic content and with it a new gameplay mode called the Gauntlet where you queue up with six players in total. Now one of the cool things about all of this content is that if for some reason it does not fill in a timely manner, you get bots that replace characters and from what I have seen… they are really well scripted. Like I have heard of folks running the raids with the NPC bots, and them doing far better than the average random player. These six player modes really feel like where you want to be spending your daily activity currency, because the rewards are pretty phenomenal. They are not that much longer than a normal strike, but the things you are a fighting are a bit tankier, and you have to rely on other players to do some mechanics. For example there was a boss that we fought where every so often it would go invulnerable and we would have to fight mini bosses in three different rooms, so that we could flip a computer screen on… which then fired a blast at the boss when all three rooms were cleared which made it vulnerable to small arms fire again.

With the Gauntlet modes also gave me access to Mythic rarity weapons. These have a few mythic specific traits and then roll with legendary traits on the other weapon slots from what I have seen. Unfortunately I have yet to pull the Mythic Auto-rifle, but I did pick up a pretty sweet Pulse Rifle for Kabr. It seems like 60 gear level is really where the “endgame” gearing starts to begin. I believe the level cap for characters is 80, based on what I have seen in some of the activities. I look forward to reaching the point where I can really focus on trying to build something resembling a proper load-out. Right now I am mostly just using whatever weapon gives me the highest light rating at any given time. I have a few uniques, namely the grenade launcher that you unlock pretty early in the story missions, and Crimson which is an auto-pistol that I unlocked through one of the login bonus things.

I’ve leveled quite quickly, but put almost zero emphasis upon gaining experience. The game rolls out in a very structured manner where each chapter has various objectives that have to be completed to move to the next chapter. Each chapter usually has some sort of story bit associated with it, and then a bunch of activity unlocks or benchmarks that you need to hit with your characters. Once you finish unlocking everything… there is the option to refund ALL of the resources you have used during the campaign so there really is no negative in just choosing some characters and pushing them up to meet the benchmarks. For example I need to sort out my Artifacts and push up my power level a bit in order to move to the next story bit. The current game goes through Chapter 7-2 so I still have quite a bit to go. Ultimately I am trying to get caught up so that when the next story drop happens I will be ready to go.

I think I am going to give up on Hot Goth Waifu, and instead focus on gathering resources for attempts on Estela because a new banner starts in few days. I saw some early information that indicated that Estela uses an Autorifle and a Heavy Machinegun, which is a pretty favorable loadout. She is dressed like a Warlock, so I am going to assume that is her base class. Umeko on the other hand looks more like a hunter and I have no information as to what her loadout is going to look like. I would really like to find a Void character that I actually enjoy playing. Ikora is a bit too much of a one trick pony for my tastes, and the whole Grenade Launcher and Rocket Launcher gameplay… is awkward meaning that you mostly are going to rely on that one ability trick to kill everything. This is the first game where I prefer Hunter jumps to Titan jumps, because for some reason there is no way to do the rocket jump forward momentum thing that I loved so much in the first two Destiny games.

Right now I think I have all of the core areas unlocked that are currently in the game. I’ve only really just started in the Red Sea Rift area and I need to spend a bunch more time out there roaming around and looking for secrets. On top of that there are a bunch of quests associated with each character that you unlock, and you can only get access to these by actually playing those characters and leveling up their affinity system. Right now the only ones I have really played are Kabr which you unlock through the campaign, and Xuan Wei who is a very melee focused striker titan that I pulled from the perm banner, for which you get a bunch of free currency. Other than that I have Ikora whcih also comes from the campaign, and then Tan-2, Attal, and Finnala that all came from the perm banner free pulls. I would love to pull Jolder because they seem like a really strong defensive Void Titan, that is so far the only one that comes with the big bubble and shield throw nonsense.

Anyways… I am very engaged in this game. If you are like me and used to love Destiny, but bounced for various reasons as they started removing content… I highly suggest checking this out. Put aside that it is a mobile gacha game, because there is plenty of fun to be had here without spending a dime. All of that content that got removed… or that is limited time stuff that we remember fondly… it seems to be here. Destiny Rising really feels like the Destiny 3 that the players deserved.

Molten Zoomy Lad

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So yesterday my good friend Ammo decided to take up residence on Gamepad.Club with so many of us that have moved there. This is particularly relevant to me because I have so many different profiles spread throughout so many different platforms that I have given her credit for the Avatar that I use most often. The thing is over the course of the last decade, Ammo has crafted for me a plethora of hand-drawn versions of “Belghast” from different games. There are so many of these that we have finally come to the point where I am retiring one. Above is the “Destiny Bel” that she crafted in 2017, prior to the launch of the game officially. It was assembled out of a set of armor that was at my time the favorite from what was available in the alpha and beta tests. Given that I mostly played a Bubble Titan in Destiny 1… I assumed that I would spend all of my time playing the sexy new Captain-America-style shield-throwing Void Titan. So I had her create a version of that with a simulacrum of my head… charging in motion.

Issue number one… I never spent any significant amount of time playing Void Titan. Mostly I never really liked the way the grenade options felt and the super was really bad for burn phases. Given that I never really did much in the way of proper group play in Destiny 2 apart from being carried through exactly one raid… I didn’t have much reason to run Void for Weapons of Light. Sunbreaker had both my favorite grenade and favorite super… so I largely spent most of my time playing that subclass. Then there was also the problem that after they started sunsetting content… and removing some of my favorite places from the game… I stopped playing Destiny altogether. It has felt weird to me that the character occupied such a prominent place in my blog banner, while I had zero plans to return to Destiny at any point in the future. Now watch that actually TALKING about it… will manifest a desire to start playing it again.

The thing is… I really still liked the motion of that character and how it rounded out the end of my string of characters. So it got me thinking about what I could use to replace it. For anyone who has not been around for all of the commissions, what you see in my masthead is my Lalafell from Final Fantasy XIV, my Hunter from Monster Hunter, and more importantly my Palico that is based on Kenzie… a cat that is sadly no longer with us but will always remain close to my heart. Then you have a version of my character from New World wearing the level 40-ish set of faction armor followed by my Necromancer in Reaper form from Guild Wars 2. Next up you have the only commission that I did not make… a version of my World of Warcraft warrior meets Twitter persona that my friend Tam Commissioned, with my PSO2 RaCAST looming behind. Lastly, before you get to Destiny, you have my Elder Scroll Online Imperial character wearing the armor set I almost always have on transmog. Then there are moogles sprinkled in throughout who stole my stuff.

It was around this time that I realized two things. Firstly… none of the characters that Ammo has drawn represent my constant addition to the ARPG genre. That part of my love for games is completely missing from my banner. Part of this is due to the fact that MOST ARPGs don’t exactly have a robust character creation system. A Diablo III Barbarian for example… looks like an old man with a diaper or a young woman with a diaper, and not much past that. Path of Exile while not giving you any control over your character model, does offer a bunch of cosmetic options that allow you to decorate them how you like. In that game, I also have a “zoomy” character in the form of my Righteous Fire Juggernaut I have now played for the last two leagues as my main. I spend most of my time ignited and shield charging through packs of mobs, and quite honestly… I feel like I love that design so much that I will probably create a version of it in every league from this point forward.

So I did what I always do and gathered up a bunch of screenshots and thrust them in Ammo’s direction and said “Here make this!”. This was a weird case because so much of this appearance is tied to one specific microtransaction pack in Path of Exile. Thankfully there is still a video showing off this pack in detail that I was able to supply to her as well. As she always does… she takes my inane ramblings and turns them into something functional. Over the last few weeks, she has been supplying me with sketches and updates… but honestly, she was on the right track with this one from the start. The only regret I have is that the scaled-down version that now resides as part of the masthead of the website does not necessarily do justice to all of the detail she put into this one.

So last night officially, I replaced “Destiny Bel” with “RF Bel” in the masthead. I think the placement works nicely. The only thing I wish I had now were some more small characters like the Moogles to patch over the transition of the left foot. At some point, I know for certain that I want her to draw me a Choya Pinata on a similar scale to the Moogles and maybe a Quaggan… but more specifically the one with a Turtle Shell for a hat. Huge thanks to Ammo for continuing to translate my madness into picture form. I think what I dig so much is that while there are stylistic differences throughout the years, they all feel like they belong together because they were all crafted by the same person. While I absolutely love my new Molten Lad, I do sorta think that the best of these will always be Necro Bel from GW2. It is the feathers that really go above and beyond with that one. I absolutely have the best-looking blog on the internet that very few people actually care about.

Man on The Moon

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Good Morning Friends! I finished up the quest for the Zephyr last night and while I absolutely hate the design… it is cool to have a stasis element sword. I am not sure what it is about the whole Dawning design ethic, but it is awful. Like I get what they are going for… a sort of new years festival thing that isn’t dominated by either the Red/Green Christmas colors or the Red/Gold Lunar New Year designs. However there is just some about the shapes of the items that I don’t really like that much. I’ve never really cared for the “Nine” themed items either, and these absolutely seem to share a similar design ethic. I kinda wish you could create weapon skins similar to how you can create universal ornaments for armor, so I could just swap this to a weapon I don’t hate.

I am slow rolling my way through leveling my light, or whatever they call it currently. I am old… I will probably never stop calling it light level. Mostly I have been getting in, knocking out a few objectives and then calling it good for the night. I still really enjoy Gambit probably the most of all of the available modes. There is something about its specific blend of elements that I really enjoy greatly. Essentially I am getting daily bounties for Dawning and then trying to figure out who I can accomplish them the easiest. Last night I had Hive and Scorn bounties and thought since you get both of them regularly in gambit… I might be able to kill two birds with one stone. Unfortunately I wound up finishing the Hive one on Tangled Shore, and the Scorn one in a Dreaming City Lost Sector. Still having a lot of fun but very much not taking anything seriously.

Back over in Final Fantasy XIV, like I have said a few times I have been purposefully avoiding the login queues by playing other games. However I think either over the next few days or over the weekend I am going to start fighting my way in again. I have some dungeons to run that I have unlocked but never done before, and I think my friend Grace also has them unlocked as well. I figure it might be good shenanigans to run around and do them together and then loop in anyone else in the free company who wants to go along as well given that we have tank and heals covered for easy queues. The above image is not a story spoiler but makes me exceptionally happy because so much of the moon is pulled straight out of my Final Fantasy IV nostalgia.

I did stumble across something pretty cool last night if you are looking for something to watch. There is a multi-part docuseries on YouTube about the origins of the Xbox and the various travails that the console went through during inception as well as various missteps. This is edited in the format of a Netflix multi-part documentary so that it almost feels like something created by No Clip. They even got Laura Bailey to do the narration for the series which makes it feel all the more legit. While watching it you almost forget for a moment how brilliant this piece of marketing actually is. It is absolutely evangelism for the Xbox brand and paints it in the light of being this scrappy “by gamers for gamers” rebel. I was not an Xbox gamer, I jumped straight from Dreamcast to playing PC MMORPGs with a brief revisit in PlayStation 2 land. I do remember my friends getting super into it however and my neighbor across the street being extremely into Halo.

I am on part four right now of what is currently a six part series, and it is just self deprecating enough to feel fair. It would never do anything to paint Microsoft in a bad light, because it is produced from within the bowels of Redmond but it does let down the guard more than a few times in very strategic ways in order to feel like the behind the scenes story. Truth is I know a few people who worked on the original Xbox and this syncs up with some of the stories they had told me. I’ve actually seen one of those original metal Xboxes that they show off in the series in person. However never forget that this is absolutely brilliant marketing. I mean I just bought an Xbox Series X which means it is working, because Game Pass and XCloud really are phenomenal deals and my old school 90s VCR model Xbox One needed and upgrade.

Dawning Time

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I have to admit I had completely forgotten about the Dawning Festival being a thing, or how generally satisfying it is. For those who have not experienced it, this is a weird festival where you shoot bad guys to collect materials… to make deeply questionable sounding cookies. You then hand those cookies into people in the tower and other destinations… for reward packages that include in them a bunch of Dawning specific weapons. It ends up forming this really enjoyable loop of “do some stuff”, “get some stuff”, and then ultimately “get big rewards”. For me who is currently grossly under-geared, it also serves as the impetus to actually be doing some grinding which helps to remedy that situation.

Given my present mental and emotional state, this all seems to fit right now. I know I should be fighting through the FFXIV queue and working on collecting some bookrocks, but that right now seems so cumbersome and instead I shoot some dudes for a candy like explosion of materials. It is about all I can really handle engagement wise at this very moment. I am in a very active clan, but I can’t really bring myself to engage much in that either. I know activities are happening on the regular but the emotional toll of losing Kenzie I am afraid has caused me to slip back into turtle mode. I will dig myself out at a later date but for now I am sorta trying to heal.

I am slowly working on a series of dawning quests, and for right now the only weapon that I have unlocked is the Glacioclasm. I am not the biggest fan of fusion rifles, largely because of the very small ammunition pool. At some point Bungie made a massive quality of life change and made all primary weapons have unlimited ammunition reserves. This means I can just run around effectively forever with “white ammo” weapons and just not care about ammunition at all. This means I am way the hell more likely to use double primary instead of a primary/secondary load-out. I did however use this to knock out a few bounties and the weapon is “fine” but probably not better than my Cartesian Coordinate.

The item I think most of us are seeking is a good role of the new Stasis element sword that was introduced with this event. Slowly but surely I am working my way through that quest and once completed I can purchase packages that give me an increased chance of getting more copies of it to drop. For the moment this all seems to be right down my alley and I am going with it. I’ve not abandoned FFXIV or even New World to be honest… though I am mostly in a holding pattern on the later to see if they pull their head out of their ass. With Final Fantasy XIV I am waiting for queues to die down to rational levels to where I can realistically choose to play the game and get in within thirty minutes instead of needing to play my entire day around it.