Destiny Archives - Page 18 of 46 - Tales of the Aggronaut

For the Puppies

September 1, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve rattled on over the last few days at some of the things I have been disappointed thus far in the Destiny Demo experience, or at least airing some of my concerns and misgivings. I thought I should probably spend some time this morning talking about one of the things that they are doing amazingly well with the launch of Destiny 2. One of the core reasons that most of my friends bounced off of this game… was the lack of story. Don’t get me wrong… there is plenty of story to be had… they just lay it out in a way that is largely nonsensical. Only by hoarding weapon and armor descriptions… hundreds of grimoire cards… and then cross referencing those against missions in the game and random nonsense that is in the background of the level design… do you actually get the true picture of what is going on. Please note… that I didn’t actually do this on my own but at some point I stumbled across the Myelin games channel and drank deeply of the font of lore theory. If you want the story in a much more digestible form then I refer you again to the amazing Lore Primer video that MyNameIsByf created where he attempts to lay everything that we know for certain out in a linear timeline… that happens to be an hour and a half in run time. Prior to launch they claimed the game would have a story line rivaling that of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Star Wars… and we all balked. In truth however it does in fact have this story woven through the fabric of the game… but makes every possible attempt to disguise it from us and make it harder to figure out than is humanly reasonable.

This time around however they swore they had changed, and when we got our hands on the PS4 demo… as I have said before there is literally more story in the Homecoming mission than there was in the original game sequence leading up to the Black Garden. I am not trying to be hyperbolic here… but in truth there is way more character exposition than exists in any form in Vanilla Destiny. We were introduced to a cast of characters… like The Traveler, The Speaker, The Stranger… and a handful of characters that I could tell we were supposed to care about that served as our class leads…. but never actually did much in the way of leading. We also had a nonsensical enemy in the form of “The Darkness” which sorta felt as stupid as attempting to go to war against “Terrorism”. We lacked anything resembling a big bad Villain that we the players were focused on… and when we did get raids… we had no emotional payoff in taking down Aetheon or Crota… because they were just another name in a long line of names that meant nothing to us. One of the best experiences I have ever had was when I finally took down Arthas… the Lich King for the first time… because I had an entire expansion focused on combating the forces of the scourge and playing cat and mouse with him across a continent. When it finally resolved and we got to see that cut scene for the very first time… there were literal tears of joy in my eyes. With the Taken King we got a better shot at a big baddie… but even then we didn’t really have enough time to learn to hate him the way we should have. The emotional payback element was largely missing because he zoned into our solar system… blew up a bunch of Awoken… and then wrecked a ship that wasn’t even ours. We had a dozen or so missions to get into her head, and by the time we took out Oryx… it was cool and definitely felt epic but was still lacking any resounding payback theme.

The core problem there… is the Taken King content and our supposed “war” with Oryx happened disconnected from anything that we actually cared about as players. The Tower… our home for the last three years remained largely unscathed… as did the Reef other than a few NPCs swapping places. There was no sense of loss to fuel our desire for revenge, and while it is a freaking amazing expansion and a leap forward in storytelling… but still not quite there. With Destiny 2 there are so many things changing… and in truth they needed to. There will be players that lament the loss of their shiny vault full of weapons… and I won’t like there are a lot of things I will be sad to say goodbye to. However what we are getting is a tangible reason for fighting and that means so much more than any given piece of loot could… and the folks that know me really well will be shocked to hear me say that. The history of the city is built on the backs of major flash points that we can only really find out about in legend… or in the name of locations. Growing up I heard about all of the things that my Grandfathers went through with World War II… how one Grandfather stormed the beach at Normandy… got shot up by a gunner and just happened to fall into a trench with a medic that could patch his punctured lung. That was his story though… and not mine… much in the same way that the tales about the fabled Guardians of the past are just legends and didn’t really factor much into my day to day game play. In Destiny 2 we start the game by living through the fall of the Tower and the loss of our Light as a source of power… as well as the potential loss of our constant companion the Ghost. We have reason and motive to want to take back what was ours from this Chubby Darth Malgus. I am so ready to hit the ground and start taking down Cabal as I at the same time attempt to fortify and rebuild our new home… the Farm.

Another thing that the Taken King did better was start to give our class leads a personality. Cayde-6 went from being a random Exo Hunter in the tower… to Robotic Mal from Firefly. Zavala went from being that dude that sold me crappy Titan gear… to being the Stalwart defender of the tower and the “worrier in chief” about everything. Ikora Rey went from being someone I never actually talked to… because the Warlock jump is horrible… to being this sassy arcane dynamo. The Homecoming mission took all of these elements and built on it, and they have been carrying this mission forward in the form of a flood of videos about Destiny 2. I’ve been linking them in and out of the paragraphs of text, and they do this amazing job of packaging up the elements of the world that you might want to care about and delivering them to you on a silver platter. Yesterday the live action video shipped and it is truly amazing… and I said this before but there is no song better for a “getting shit done” montage than Sabotage by the Beastie Boys. Leading up to this however there have been five character vignettes… one for each of the class leads: Cayde-6, Zavala, and Ikora Rey… as well as one for Hawthorne the person who is going to be helping us a lot at our new home on The Farm… as well as one for Ghaul our new bad guy focus. They’ve done more in the months leading up to the release of this sequel to set the stage and give us a reason to care about it… than they did in the entirety of three years of the original. For me… its like getting to share this gift with all of my friends because I was the only one mental enough to actually go digging into the lore. For the last few years my friends have had to listen to me rattle on about this or that from Destiny without actually knowing any of the context. Here is a giant fucking context sandwich… and it gives me a lot of hope for the future. I think Bungie gets it… and they understand that you cannot just throw a train of breadcrumbs in your game and call it good. They started in the middle of an established story… but never gave us enough bearings to be able to really find our way clear of caring about what was going on. I’ve said before that the central focus of Destiny is shooting space monsters with space guns… and I still stand by that. If you are really not into that premise then no amount of story is really going to make you want to stay. However… it does give you some reasons for why you might want to shoot those space monsters… and understand where exactly your space guns game from.

Traditions End

August 25, 2017 by Belghast

For the last several years there has been a tradition I have observed… and that is going upstairs and checking to see what is available on Xur for the week. For the unindoctrinated… Xur is an Agent of the Nine… a group that we know next to nothing about in Destiny. He also is somewhat of a garbage collector and brings trinkets for us to purchase each week either in the Tower or Reef social space. Various activities in the game reward a currency called Strange Coins… and these are then exchanged for various items that always include an exotic weapon and a piece of exotic armor for each class. The armor rolls are notoriously bad but it is still a reasonable way to get a jump start in light levels, and I absolutely abused this fact on my Xbox One account when I was leveling it. One of my favorite sources of Xur info is from Patrick Casey, and at the head of this mornings video he made a comment about how he is just about to never have to see this squid faced guy again. Not sure why… but it just sort of finally hit me… our time with Destiny is almost over. Within the next few days the PC Beta for Destiny 2 will begin… and then shortly after that the official launch of Destiny 2 on PS4 and Xbox One. This really is the last weekend when Xur really matters at least for me in particular because starting on Monday I will be playing Destiny 2 on my PC systems… and starting the following Wednesday I will be playing it on my PS4.

Destiny 1 as a whole has been an amazing experience, and I am looking forward to seeing Destiny Item Manager (the first screenshot) updating to start showing me all of my baubles that I begin collecting in Destiny 2. A huge chunk of my experience has been my clan, and it is awesome to see the clan page updated to fly a brand new banner in preparation for what things are ultimately going to look like in Destiny 2. I’ve worn the tag even when it didn’t really matter… like on my Xbox One account… and was proud to see it rise out of the ashes of Axioma. Right now my future in the Destiny universe seems a little up in the air. I am not entirely certain if I will be playing as a PS4 primary or PC primary… and even then I have no clue what my clan situation is going to look like. This is where my various gaming worlds begin to collide. Destiny 2 existing on the PC is going to bring a lot of long time friends out of the woodwork that are interested in playing the game. At that point I am not sure if it is better to flood TQMB… or just start something on my own. I am not even sure if you can have split clans based on platform… or if your Bungie account can only join one period. I would like to remain in Tequila Mockingbird on what seems like the platform that they will be most active on… aka the PlayStation 4.

It seems really weird to be thinking that I might be standing in the Tower for the last time. Sure Destiny 1 will remain in existence for a period of time… and I can always go back and experience things. The problem is… will I actually want to? Destiny 2 looks to be the first game with a ton more things to be doing… and it feels like something worth sacrificing an entire world for. Sure I have gotten used to seeing The Traveler floating just off in the distance… but I will get used to the new visuals of the European Dead Zone. I will miss my vault full of weapons that I have accumulated through hours of grinding… and bending the arm of Squirrel and Jex into helping me do random stuff. Destiny has been a magical time for me… and it feels like I have been away far too long. I am ready to dust off my controller skills and venture forth into the new world when it opens on September 6th. While I feel a little misty about the thought of abandoning the current one… I know bigger and better things are just on the horizon. The challenge I always struggle with in gaming is that I have more friends than I can ever possibly play with at the same time… but I always try and juggle this as best I can. I am certain that as we enter the new game I will figure out a way to balance playing with my awesome friends in Tequila Mockingbird… and all of the new people who will be giving the Destiny franchise a fresh chance.

Last Banana

August 4, 2017 by Belghast

It has been a very gaming light week for me, and I wound up heading to bed something like 8:30 or 9 ish which is very much not normal for me. Functionally I am coming off of a few really rough weeks at work where I have been in firestomper mode 24/7. As a result I get home and I am just too drained to deal with human beings… or in truth the possibility of human beings. This is where my “I” streak comes out with a vengence, and it has lead me to play a lot of games in a very low key and solo manner. Last night however I decided to go ahead and play some Destiny. Right now the very last Iron Banner before the release of Destiny 2 is going on… and with it the chance to get the sniper rifle and hand canon… neither of which I have a decent roll for. Additionally with the thought about going into Destiny 2… I am finding myself more than a little nostalgic for Destiny 1 at the moment. I’ve never been one to really work on the book achievements, but I am finding myself doing so at least in a limited fashion. September 6th begins a new adventure into the Destiny universe… and with it we are leaving behind all of the trappings of the last. As flawed at times as the original might be… it still very much feels like home.

The match type for this last Iron Banner is Control, which is also in part what is pushing me back to play some. Control is my favorite game mode because it gives me a reason beyond killing other players to be engaged. Deathmatching was something that I was a fan of when I was in High School… but once I have gotten older I find myself craving some larger objective to be working towards. While I would love to have role based gameplay along the lines of Enemy Territory… holding points on a map at least gives me some measure of that core focus. What ends up happening in truth is that players form what I call a “muderball” and then ping ping back and forth across the map capturing points. In Destiny 1 this game play is actually to some extent rewarded because the more people you have standing on a point… the faster it shifts to neutral and then to captured. In Destiny 2 however… points capture at a fixed rate so it is going to be interesting to see if players actually spend some effort focusing on defense rather than just constantly retaking points. I saved the above screenshot largely because this was as good as it got last night as far as kill to death ratio.

As far as a load out… it just feels like the special weapon slot doesn’t mean much of anything anymore. The limited amounts of ammunition you get, and the fact that it seems like Invective no longer recharges at a reasonable rate meant that for the most part I was using nothing but primary. I tried a few things as the evening went on. At first I had some early success with Oversoul Edict, but as the night went on I wound up breaking out my friend the Genesis Chain. I’ve never been a huge fan of the Suros aesthetic but I absolutely love this weapon… especially if you get head shots and trigger the firefly explosion effect. I love the way that sounds… its like a tiny “fuck yes” as you are running away to find the next engagement. What cracks me up about me and Destiny… is that I tend to bond with whatever weapon everyone else says that you should just shard. This lives in an archetype that no one seems to like and is functionally just a better version of “An Answering Chord” that is a available on the Vanguard Quartermaster. However it just feels better and seems to work better for me than that weapon ever did. I mean I also love the Fabian Strategy… which is a weapon everyone else seems to hate so my particular tastes seem to consistently go against the meta. Last night I managed to finish all of my quests from Lady Efrideet, but I have yet to get any weapon drops so I am thinking I might want to go ahead and try and make rank 5 during this final Iron Banner in the hopes of maybe seeing some decent versions of the Hand Cannon along the way.

Assorted Turtling

July 27, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was an exceedingly stressful day, and that combined with the fact that my wife is out of town… lead to a sudden bout of turtling. For those unfamiliar with the nomenclature… I go through these periods where I feel like I need to pull my head into my shell to attempt to remain sane. I’m thankful that I have a few friends that get it, and don’t give me too much hassle about it, but every so often I just reach this point where I need to disconnect from humanity. Last night was one of those nights and I cycled restlessly through a whole bunch of games to see if I could find something that would fit well enough to pass the evening in. The negative is that in theory this should have been a night I was tanking in Final Fantasy XIV, but I just could not handle communicating with others… or having anyone I cared about relying on me. The irony is that I wound up for a bit early in the evening in Destiny… and absolutely wound up carrying two other players hard through a random strike. I took a screenshot not because it is impressive… but because it shows the massive difference between my participation and that of the other two. This was on the Wretched Eye strike… and I wound up kiting the Ogre… and DPSing most things down… and resurrecting the other two people constantly. Now I know what Squirrel and Jex feel like when I run with them.

From there I wound up back downstairs and watched the last episode of Handmaid’s Tale… which is maybe not the best idea to watch when you are already feeling depressed. While doing so I ended booting up Rift and playing around some there. I am still level 67 and working on the Gedlo Badlands, which is not exactly my favorite zone so far. Moonshade Highlands is my jam, and I have never been that big of a fan of desolate desert landscapes… especially not ones where everything is on fire. That said I did make a lot of progress knocking out various quests and while it still feels like my experience bar isn’t really moving… the constant ding of planar levels seems to help the feeling of being mired. I have been running around with a heavy Warlord hybrid build, and while I have been absent it seems to have been buffed significantly. Previously I had a lot of problems with struggling to kill a given mob in time before it killed me. Now I seem to be able to run around and wreck things pretty safely. My biggest complaint with Starfall Prophecy now Prophecy of Ahnket… are the legendary morphs of abilities. Each of them seems to read like it is going to be universally better than the original… but after taking a few of them they seem to FEEL worse. The biggest problem here is that you cannot undo them without paying for a respec…and then you have to remember what the hell you chose as a spec down to the point where you screwed up and chose the wrong legendary morph. Personally I think the system should just be a toggle, and that you can have X number of legendaries toggled on equal to the number you have earned.

I also played a little Secret World Legends, which is something I seem to do just about every day… or at the very least I am logging in to get the rewards. I am not completely sold on the game but I am enjoying it enough to keep showing up and experiencing it. The combat feels fresh enough to make going through a bunch of quests I did long long ago feel worth it. My key complaint however is the game still does a piss poor job of clearly identifying which quests you have completed and which ones you have not. That was one of my biggest problems with the game is to log in and roam around through a sea of cutely named quests… that all sort of blend together in my head making it impossible to sort out if I have or have not completed them. This was even worse when it came to expansion content going into the game, and blending in among all of those other quests that I did a year ago. So far blade and elemental is fun enough, but I find myself really missing the shotgun… and with the way gear levels up in this game I feel like I am really not in a great place to switch gears at any point soon. I do have an extremely low level shotgun sitting in my inventory and I might try swapping it out at some point soon just to see if it is viable. I’ve moved on to the Savage Coast but there is honestly still a lot in Kingsmouth that I have never really gotten around to completing. My biggest complaint overall is as compared to the original… the drop rates of anything meaningful in the world is nonexistent. All of your gear seems to come from lootbags gained through doing quests… so I have a feeling that a big part of the “endgame” is going to be repeating quests on the daily reset to get more stuff to fuse into your gear. That doesn’t really bode well for those players that are not a big fan of grindy mechanics.