Destiny 2

I had a totally different post planned for today, but since the news of the Activision and Bungie split was announced yesterday…  there really wasn’t another topic that I would be discussing today.  I also committed memery last night and cobbled together this…  since yeah it is sorta relevant.  So the details that we know…  in 2010 Bungie entered into a 10 year publishing deal with Activision.  Over the last few cycles Activision has been making a point of announcing that Destiny 2 as a franchise has been failing to live up to expectations.  Behind the scenes for quite some time Bungie devs have been leaking tidbits about them feeling constrained by that relationship.

So at this point we really don’t know how the split was started…  did Bungie buy out the remaining two years of the contract?  Did Activision decide that Destiny 2 looked bad on their balance sheet and kicked them to the curb?  Bungie learned the lesson with Microsoft and seemingly retained the rights to their intellectual property going into the arrangement with Activision, and as a result it appears that we have a newly liberated Bungie with all of the rights to keep making Destiny 2 and in theory Destiny 3…  but I will talk a bit more about that later.

I think the question on a lot of minds is going to be…  who’s idea was Tess Everis and the Eververse store…  and will this change see the focus on this as a monetization vehicle lessen.  In truth I think this was a “both of them” sort of decision and not necessarily something we can really pin entirely on the Activision Evil Empire as it were.  Going into Destiny 2 I think Bungie knew they had to have some vehicle for long tailed sales… and this new version of Eververse was their answer to that.  Now the shop has vacillated back and forth between being grossly unfair at release…  to honestly having the deck stacked greatly in favor of the player in its current state.  I talked a bit about my thoughts there in the Bright Engrams Revisited post, but I think we have seen all of the tweaks we are going to see to Eververse.

The hard truth is… there will not be a major game release that lives in the MMO space that does not include some sort of pay for cosmetics or loot box scenario.  The fact that Destiny 2 hands those Bright Engrams out like Candy for playing through the content, and the fact that you can break down anything into Dust and pick items up as direct sales during the weekly resets…  means to me at least that the system is actually pretty reasonable already.  Sure people would prefer to simply cherry pick the items that they want each season…  but I am okay with the amount of friction that exists.  It gives us a reason to keep checking the store each Tuesday and to keep doing the weekly Eververse Bounties to stockpile bright dust and whatever the cores are called that unlock items from the list.

The other burning question is…  who’s decision was it to move away from story driven content?  This is another one that I don’t really know the answer to either…  but I would tend to land that one more in the lap of Activision, given that they just pushed out a Call of Duty game with no single player story in it.  I would love to see them return to story beats each time we get a major update, rather than a purely activity driven focus.  I think ultimately we will have to see what Penumbra ends up being like to determine if everything is going to be like the Black Armory going forward or not.  With this change however I have a whole bunch of wish list items…  some of which are wildly speculative but would be amazing.

Shared Game Saves

If I understand it correctly… the Playstation exclusivity deals were between Activision and Sony…  and Bungie was not necessarily a party to them but in turn constantly effected by them.  I think what this means in the short term is that soon all of the formerly Playstation exclusive content will trickle down to the other platforms as soon as everything is finalized.  What I hope this paves the way for however is a shared save state between all of the platforms.  Sure I would love it if all of the platforms could play together at the same time…  but as an easier hurdle…  I would love it if I could log into my PC characters on the Xbox or PS4 so I can keep playing with friends on those platforms.  At this point it would require an account merge system but I could see various ways where that might work.

Since the game largely uses an entitlement system now instead of actual items for everything but Forsaken forward…  you could do some sort of a system where you choose a primary account and every other account would simply just copy over the achievements and entitlements.  Of course at some point I want the ability to play with my PS4 friends while playing on the PC… and with the consoles moving further towards accepting keyboard and mouse as an input option (something both Xbox and PS4 support in limited ways currently) it might be a reasonable option.  At the very least it should be completely fine for any PVE activity… with PVP being the outlier where they might still have a segregated “Console” and “PC” play lists.  Look we are setting up a wish list here….  so even if it is unrealistic at this very moment…  it still definitely falls on it.

Bring Back Destiny 1

It is as simple as it sounds…  I would love to see all of the patrol zones and activities from Destiny 1…  make an appearance in Destiny 2.  They have been cherry picking elements from the first game already, but a lot of us players from Destiny 1 felt a great sense of loss in losing all the places we loved from the first game.  It will take some work, but in theory they could start shimming in zones here and there as they release other content.  I would love to be able to do Prison of Elders again or take on Oryx.  You could even bring in some sort of a time walking like mechanic that lets you run older content without effecting the flow of the current storyline.  What if there was an ascendant realm that contained pockets of these old settings or something of that sort.  The Destiny story is kooky enough to be able to support it via space magic.

Table Destiny 3

Along the lines of the last topic…  I would honestly love to see them completely table the discussion of a Destiny 3.  Hell at this point my preference would be for them to rebrand Destiny 2 to simply be “Destiny Franchise” or something of the sort and start treating the game like a more traditional MMORPG with semi-yearly expansions that keep adding new content without doing a nuke from orbit reset every few years.  Sure a new game gives players a chance to come back into the game on the same footing of every else…  but I legitimately do not thing we will be gaining a much larger audience than the game already has.  Destiny 2 was a big push and burned a lot of people…  and getting those players back won’t happen with a new numerical release.

Keep the Course

I like the roadmaps that they are now doing… and I like that there are little trickles of new things flowing into the game every so often.  Ultimately my hope is that we will see more content without the thumb of Activision…  but quite honestly I am not sure that is realistic.  The company will be getting a larger share of the profits…  but those initial purchase profits are already a sunk cost.  They are going to have to prove to us that annual pass is worth it at this point, and I am not entirely certain that Black Armory did that.  Additionally they are going to have to give us other things to purchase to keep the cash flow incoming.  It will be interesting to see how things move forward as we clear the rest of this year.

If they straight up released Destiny 1 for PC as a stand alone game… I would probably throw money at the screen and buy it.  However if they released the content FROM Destiny 1 as an expansion to Destiny 2 that was not part of the Annual Pass content…  I would probably throw MORE money at the screen.  I do however think they might need to rework Eververse drastically however to give us more reasons to give them money.  That does not mean that I think they need to fuck with the math and make Bright Engrams stupid, but instead offer other avenues.  Like for example… if I could spend bright dust/silver to unlock shaders permanently…  I would probably do that.  SWTOR had that functionality of buying things as unlocked for your entire account, so in theory they could do something similar.

Additionally I would throw lots of money at the screen if they created an expansion that added better cosmetic options to the game, and allowed us to create outfits of our favorite gear appearances…  decoupling them from what we happened to be actually wearing.  Basically there are ways that they can keep improving the game, but also creating vehicles that get us to spend money with them.  There are folks that are predicting a switch to a free to play model like Fortnite, but I question if that would actually work.  Destiny 2 is not exactly a game that is great at onboarding new players, and they would have to think long and hard about how to address that problem.

At this point I have rambled at length… but these are some of my thoughts.  What are your thoughts about this announcement?

A couple of weeks ago I talked about my general disappointment in The Black Armory and how it does not really have any content that players can participate in immediately.  That much is largely true but as far as disappointment it is waning.  Once I hit 620 light the Forge Ignition sequence went from nigh impossible to pretty much a guaranteed thing.  The actually event itself is honestly pretty great, I just wish it would have scaled in a similar fashion to the way that strikes appear to, giving players a brand new activity to do at a much wider variety of light levels.  Now at 630 light burning down the final boss feels much like burning down a Public Event Boss…  somewhat time consuming but largely trivial.  Granted I have yet to ignite any of the forges other than Volundr, but I am up to the point where I should be doing Gofanon tonight.  I could have in theory done it last night but I spent my evening trying to mop up any remaining powerful gear rewards that I had available.

The Hammerhead is your first reward for taking down the boss and while I didn’t get an amazing roll…  I didn’t get a horrific one either.  I’ve since ignited the forge a few more times to get some of the blue weapon frames which apparently end up as one of a handful of weapons per type of activity being completed.  I did one that required doing three lost sectors on the Dreaming City and another that required taking down a couple high value targets in the Gambit and in both cases it rewarded a weapon from the pool from those activities.  I am working on one for collecting a bunch of materials, and as a result I am assuming it will be rewarding one of the planetary weapons as a result.  Now for some quick show and tell of some of the weapons I have picked up from the armory either as drops or as frames that I forged.

This is the weapon that I forged from a blue frame that involved running three lost sectors in Dreaming City.  I have to say I love this weapon so much in both look and the way it feels to use it.  I’ve infused it up a bit and it has more or less become my new main hand canon to go to.

The other weapon that I got from forging a blue frame is Bygones…  which weirdly enough is a weapon I had yet to get from any of my Gambit packages.  This one comes with kill clip and full auto and so far has been a blast to use because it honestly feels like you are firing a really slow rate of fire super accurate auto rifle.

As far as random drops…  Bad News was never an amazing Hand Canon to start with, and this way cooler paint job version isn’t necessarily amazing either.  The roll I got has explosive rounds and range finder… which is okay-ish but the reload speed largely precludes me from using this very often.

Baligant is also not an amazing shotgun in general but this version with Field Prep and Moving Target seems particularly bad…  I mean I guess you could slide to reload but not really my cup of tea.  I tend to ignore all shotguns that are not full auto.

Lastly I finally wrapped up my Hand Cannon Headshots in Crucible… and then completed the rest of steps and unlocked my Ace of Spades.  Yes I realize this is like six months behind the curve but whatever…  it knocks another exotic quest off the list.  I still have several that I need to do including the Rat King which simply requires me to go find some other people with the Rat King and do activities.

Have you gotten anything cool or interesting from the Black Armory Forges?