Destiny

So this mornings post is not going to be an enjoyable one for most people. Yesterday Bungie released a TWAB (This Week at Bungie) about the new transmogrification system aka Armor Synthesis in their language. For those who are unaware “Transmog” or “Transmogrification” has become the universal name for systems that allow you to change the appearance of your gear in a game. This term was popularized by World of Warcraft when it was released during the Hour of Twilight patch at the end of Cataclysm. It is not the best example of this system, and in fact when it first went in it was fairly horrible… however over the years it has improved to contain most of the same features as better systems. Given the critical mass of players that play World of Warcraft, their specific naming convention stuck to identify ALL wardrobe appearance systems.

Some other details that you should probably know going into this post, and why it took every fiber of my being not to call it “Fuck You Bungie”. Destiny is a pretty important game to me. When it first was announced I used it as the reason to buy a PlayStation 4 just so I could play the Alpha. Granted there were other games I wanted to play, but it was absolutely the catalyst for me wanting to buy into that console generation. I loved the first game and by the time we got Destiny 2 it was in a really amazing place. Even from that first outing however the one system I wanted more than any others was the ability to change my armor appearance. Nothing makes a game feel bad like running around looking like an Fury Warrior from Burning Crusade. Wearing matched gear makes me feel better about playing a character and in relation makes the entire game feel better as a result.

How Transmog in Destiny Should Work

Shortly after the release of Forsaken, a new system went into the game called Collections. If you picked up an item it ended up recording that fact in your collections tab and for a small cost you could retrieve a version of that old item at any time. This gave us some long term goals of completing collections because it was around this time that they began talking about possibly putting in a transmogrification system. In my mind it made sense that we were getting out accounts flagged for having owned a specific item, because the best Transmog systems in general work off item flagging. When you pick up an item you earn the ability to use its appearance. Some systems put additional rules that make this process worse, for example World of Warcraft and not being able to collect appearances of armor types other than the one your class uses but the basics of account flagging have been around for awhile.

In my mental picture of how this system would work, it would rely on everything that you have bound to your account. In a perfect world we would have an additional paper doll that allowed us to place any appearance we had collected on any armor slot. There would of course need to be a carve out for Exotics, given that those give functional information to the players about what sort of abilities they can expect from you as a result. So in theory equipping an exotic would ignore whatever appearance was assigned in the transmog system. This is clean and would build upon a system they already have had in place since 2018. If they really felt them needed to, changing an appearance template could cost a nominal amount of glimmer and/or legendary shards.

A Slightly Worse Way to Implement It

At the tail end of “Year One” they implemented a system called Armor Ornaments, that allowed you to change the appearance of a single piece of armor. It isn’t a great system but until now it has been the only cosmetic system we had in Destiny. In “Year Two” they modified this system to open it up to all cash shop armors leading me to actively start collecting these because it gave me some access to modify my appearance. It was not a great system but again it was better than nothing, and Bungie also began talking about creating some sort of more holistic transmog system. I was willing to accept it because it would tide me over until they had time to build the better system.

Again a reasonable way to implement a cosmetic system would have been to combine the collections tab with the armor ornaments system. This would in theory allow us to swap the appearance of any single piece of gear with any other piece of gear that we have already collected. Again you would have a carve out to Exotics because they have their own appearance system but it would be manageable. Again there would be a nominal glimmer and/or legendary shard fee for swapping an appearance out but it would just be adding in the missing items from the existing ornament system. When they started talking about turning armor sets into ornaments, I honestly thought there would be some sort of nominal conversion fee to make an armor set show up in your ornament menu. I was fine with this and this is ultimately what I had resigned myself that we were going to get instead of the better option.

How Bungie Completely Fucked It Up

At face value this screen looks awesome. It allows you to swap out the appearance and shader for a complete set of gear at a time. This is precisely that additional paper doll that I was hoping they would give us. However they found a way to completely ruin this system. Instead of making it a simple process to turn those items you have collected into transmog appearances they added a needless grind into the system. Here are the basics:

• ADA-1 is coming back into the tower and will offer you access to the Armor Synthesis System
• Killing Enemies in the world has a chance of dropping a currency called Synthstrand which I am sure will take up another damned inventory slot
• You can spend Synthstrand to get bounties from ADA-1 which reward another currency that will also likely take up inventory space called Synthcord
• When you collect enough of bullshit currency number two, you can turn these in to convert them into Synthweave
• You can spend Synthweave in your collections tab in order to unlock something as an armor appearance
• You can earn 10 of these per season for each of your characters

The thing is… they took the system and made it arguably worse than the system I was envisioning but I was largely on board with the whole nonsense until that final bullet point. You can only earn 10 of these tokens per season, or in real world terms you can earn 10 of them every three months. The first season they are being “generous” and allowing players to earn 20 of them per character, which again Bungie fuck you for deciding that was generosity. It sounds like the tokens won’t transfer between characters so you can unlock two full armor sets every three months for each of your characters… when there is a mountain of gear that has been accumulating in our collection since the day we started playing this game.

The Blatant Money Grab

So why did they put the stupid limitations on the system? The short answer is they want to milk silver out of us for a system we have been waiting on years to be implemented. Like I have given Bungie a lot of credit in the past for the way the Eververse store has worked, and I have been more than happy to spend additional funds because I felt like I was more or less supporting a fair game. The items that they were selling me felt like they were worth the money I was spending for them. However this crosses the line. Instead of being limited to 10 pieces of armor per season, you are going to be able to purchase universal synthweave items from the Eververse store and “priced to own” prices to borrow a bullshit phase from the Disney Vault era. The prices they announced are as follows:

• 1 Synthweave Token – 300 Silver aka roughly $3
• 5 Synthweave Tokens – 1000 Silver aka oughly $10

So we can “earn” as many appearance sets as we like, pending we are willing to break out the credit card and pay $10 a pop for the right to look cool in Destiny wearing gear we collected years ago. This is a really bad look Bungie and I am feeling like it might be time you and I officially parted ways.

Making things even worse… and me even more salty is that I am not even certain that I am going to be able to transmog to my favorite set of armor in the first place. I loved the year one Iron Banner armor set and I still have it sitting in my vault for the day that we FINALLY got a proper transmog system. However there is also a bit of a note about certain year one armor sets not being supported due to technical difficulties. One of those listed is the Iron Banner set and I am uncertain if they are talking about the entire set as a whole or only if you converted them to Armor Ornaments back in the day… which honestly I didn’t love the look of the ornamented set.

I am frustrated and all of my goodwill for Bungie as a company is gone. I thought we lost too damned much in the move between Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. I hated the fact that they decided to blow up half of the world with the Beyond Light expansion and took a number of my favorite places in game away from me. I kept a wait and see attitude but the Weapon Sunset was a horrible idea and served to only put another nail in this coffin for me. That solution was the equivalent of bringing down the hammer or entire group of people because one or two them were fucking up, and it was the chickenshit move because they didn’t want to nerf the few weapons that were out of line for fear of the backlash. When they reversed the sunset they did so on a half assed manner that still locked away some of my favorite items.

Finally delivering on Transmogrification and then making it a complete fucking dumpster fire… I think it is the final straw for me. Fuck You Bungie.

Hey Friends! So yesterday I was talking about the “inbetweensies” and one of my working theories as to why I bounced off Destiny Monday night was the impending reset. This more or less seemed to be correct because last night I pretty much played nothing but Destiny and had a grand ole time. I wish I could shape my mindset because in theory anything that was able to accomplish on Monday would have been a bonus, but instead I only saw the looming deadline that came with the weekly reset and resigned myself to not even try. This is what my brain does when you tell me something is a limited time event or something that is eventually going away. In theory it SHOULD get me to fly into action and do the things before the deadline, but it ends up having the opposite reaction.

This has been the case anytime something comes into game for a limited time. I think that I will buckle down and farm before the deadline comes up, but instead I end up bouncing under the anxiety of maybe just maybe not being able to get everything I wanted out of the event. The same is true with timed content in games. If you tell me that I am on a timer I will fuck up endlessly, but if you just sorta hide the existence of the timer then I will breeze through whatever it is. Anxiety is a thing and the older I get and the more removed from constant group interaction…. the more I find myself struggling with it. Like maybe it is just that my real world daily life is full of more high pressure interactions than it used to be, that I just do not want them at all in my gaming life.

This is the beloved Steelfeather Repeater that I have talked so much about in other posts. The roll that I ended up with that I considered a God Roll has Feeding Frenzy and Multikill Clip and I have loved this weapon so damned much. So one of my goals moving forward with this season has been to find a viable replacement for a Kinetic Auto Rifle. Pretty much I always have an Auto Rifle slotted and then alternate the other weapons around this, so as such I need something in that first slot to go along with my Gnawing Hunger which is my Energy Rifle of choice. I did a bit of research into some of the options and then last night I happened to get a few of them to drop.

I did not play at all during the season when Seventh Seraph weapons were actually dropping. As a result this Auto Rifle is completely new to me. For starters this appears to be based on the Khvostov which is one of my all time favorite weapons in Destiny. I got what I would consider a reasonable roll with Fourth Time’s the Charm and Vorpal Weapon. Looking however at what is actually available to roll on the weapon… it seems that I got one of the better rolls that I could have. The only thing that I guess I would have really changed were the barrel and magazine options. I guess this weapon can roll with Rampage so maybe I also want to see a copy of that weapon drop as well.

I did play when False Promises was a weapon that was dropping during Season 11, but for whatever reason I never really liked it that much. This is in a very slow archetype and it just doesn’t feel like it shreds in quite the same way that other Auto Rifles do. However last night I pulled a pretty solid roll that I am going with for now as I keep trying this weapon out. Feeding Frenzy and Rampage are solid, but I would have rather had High Caliber rounds in the magazine perks slot. It is a fine enough weapon and sorta reminds me of a Suros Regime on the slowest fire mode, which again was not really a thing I enjoyed that much.

Another thing that I managed to pull last night was the new Gambit exclusive Hand Cannon, or at least new to me. I remember once upon a time being desperate for a void Hand Cannon when I was grinding some past achievement, but I don’t know if that is still a gap in the itemization. It seems to hit really hard but could use a slightly larger number of rounds and faster reload speed. I have a feeling that Rangefinder and Multikill Clip are far from optimal for this weapon. Rapid Hit seems like a better choice all around since you are probably going to be firing off the full nine rounds anytime you are using it. Wellspring apparently can roll on this weapon so that might be interesting as well.

Finally I got a Seventh Seraph hand cannon, which again is new to me since I did not play during that season. I love the look of this thing but don’t so much love the way it plays. I wish it was a little harder hitting. The even rounds makes me think of the Hawkmoon, but this thing does not really hit terribly hard which is unfortunate. It was fun playing around with it last night but ultimately I would probably use the Gambit option to this one. The God roll appears to be Corkscrew Rifling, Appended Mag, Threat Detector and Feeding Frenzy. Maybe I will see something a little closer to that as I continue opening engrams.

This week is apparently Shadow Price in Nightfall Ordeal so I am probably going to spend some time in the coming evenings attempting to farm one of those up. Even if I don’t get an optimal roll it should at least tell me if it is going to be a weapon I like or not. I tend to have a pretty visceral reaction to weapons in Destiny, where I either like the thing they are doing or don’t at all and it comes down to a mixture of weapon look, animations and weapon sound. You could hand me the most optimal weapon and tell me it is the perfect roll but if it doesn’t “feel good” to use it… then I simply won’t and it will rot in my vault. So far of everything I have gotten I find myself using the Carbine the most, because it “feels” right.

Due to some technical difficulties, we are getting a bit of a late start to the blog this morning. Things appear to be functioning as normal right now so we are going to hope it holds together long enough to make a post. For the uninitiated the above image comes from Always Sunny in Philadelphia and it is an amazing show. However after this weekend the lore drops in Destiny 2… I have decided that this is legitimately what I seem like to my non-Destiny friends that I keep trying to engage in conversations. I am convinced that Destiny is one of the greatest science fiction stories to ever be told… but it is thoroughly inaccessible to all but the most diehard of fanatics.

Imaging writing an epic piece of fiction and instead of publishing it in books… you instead tore each page in half and then shoved the halves into bottles. You then threw those bottles out into the ocean hoping that someday people from all around the world would start to piece together your magnum opus. This is ultimately what being in the Destiny Lore Community feels like. We are given scraps of digital text and then expected to fit the pieces together to make sense of the greater cosmology of the setting. There are times you wonder if you are really going mad… and then something gets released that causes all of these assorted scraps of paper to align in just the right way as to present the clear path through it all. It is when these moments happen that you start to question if this is all part of some greater plan that started over a decade ago… or if this is just convenient use of dangling plot threads in order to make something that was spur of the moment feel destined.

That however is NOT what we are going to talk about, because quite frankly even the paraphrased version seems like nonsense. We are going to talk about Beyond Light as a whole and more importantly the experiment Bungie has foisted in front of us of “archiving” content in a vault and removing the first few years of the game the players. With Beyond Light came the sunsetting of weapons, because I admit that it has to be hard to find a way to balance hundreds of weapons at the same time and make sure the “sandbox” is performing as expected. I was largely in support of the notion of this needing to happen, and I did some prep-work during the Season of Arrivals to best figure out some of my favorite weapons that would be with me for the long run.

This sunset however has caused some significant issues like the fact that right now there is one singular Legendary Machine Gun that was spared… and to the best of my knowledge it is no longer dropping. Currently if you can get far enough into the content, we also have access to Thermal Erosion, which thankfully I managed to get over the weekend. I have no clue about the validity of the roll I received, but for now I am using it because it gives me a functional machine gun when I had none. The answer that most folks have leaned on is to use an exotic machine gun, but right now I only have thunderlord as I never got access to xenophage or heir apparent.

The challenge with removing multiple hundreds of weapons in a single pass… is that you also need to introduce a lot of fresh weapons to prime the pump. The dropping of these new weapons seems to be few and far between and most of what I am getting are what I considered vault trash back in year one. So the end result is that I am mostly still using things that I picked up during the Season of Arrivals because nothing terribly compelling has come along to replace any of it. It just feels bad because there have been so many times I thought “I need to do X element kills, I will just grab my trusty… ” and then realize that the thing I was about to reach for is now permanently stuck in the past.

The biggest challenge that Beyond Light has is that we are sitting here whether we want to or not… and making a valuation. Is what I just got worth the four planets, multiple raids and hundreds of weapons that I lost? The short answer is no… not yet. The Season of the Hunt has yet to officially start and I am hoping that the activities associated with it will add the lubrication needed to make it feel like the new drops are flowing once again. Right now we are in this awkward space at the beginning of something new and not entirely certain how it is going to shake out, but we also lost our own familiar stomping grounds in the process. I was probably one of the few players that legitimately loved Titan. I’ve likely spent more time on that destination than any others in Destiny 2.

Admittedly this was also the problem with the launch of Destiny 2 initially. It felt like we had just lost so much well tuned and polished content that we were familiar with in Destiny 1, as well as the vast arsenal of options we had stockpiled. Essentially Beyond Light is the launch of Destiny 3, without really intending to be. It has put us back in a position where we are having to deal with the loss of the familiar and comfortable with the promise of something great on the horizon. I am still enjoying myself but I am throwing out some significant questions on if this sacrifice was worth it yet.

Don’t get me wrong. Were I to judge Beyond Light simply on the merits of that expansion alone, it clearly goes down as one of the best designed expansions to date. There are a lot of really cool systems and we also managed to get an entirely new type of character class. While I am not in love with Behemoth for Titans, the concepts are really cool. I think the equivalent might be an expansion like The Burning Crusade where not only did you get new races and new starter zones, but the two factions also got access to the class they were missing so it felt like there were so many possibilities. Unfortunately no matter how good the new content is, it will always be judged against the content that is no longer available. I will never play another round of escalation protocol for example, which was legitimately something I greatly enjoyed.

I am not grinding hard in the manner that I used to with Destiny. Ultimately I don’t want to reach a point where I have burned myself out again. I am trying to figure out a way to play Destiny as one of many games that I am interested in rather than as a second vocation. I’m also trying to learn to live with the fact that there are just things that I will likely never get to see in the game. I don’t have the hours or the dedication to be able to get all of the things available in a single season before the next season rolls out. That is a really bitter fucking pill to swallow, because I hate the concept of disappearing content. I firmly believe that games as a service offerings should continue to grow over time rather than constantly keep shrinking back as more content is released.

So I find myself in this position where I am enjoying the present I am in, but I am still a little flummoxed about the past that we lost. I tend to be a packrat in MMORPGs and if nothing else this has given me reason to destroy a ton of gear because it is effectively useless now. I’ve held on to a lot of armor because I am not entirely certain how this supposed transmog system is going to work and I don’t want to lose out on some of my favorite appearances. If you are playing Destiny drop me a line with some of your thoughts. How are you faring after the sunset?