Destiny Archives - Page 6 of 46 - Tales of the Aggronaut

New Light and Shadowkeep

October 1, 2019 by Belghast

Later today something really cool is about to happen. Firstly the new expansion for Destiny 2 is launching and Shadowkeep will be playable on all platforms around 10 am CST. There is a complicated release matrix that is available , but alas for me I will be at work and won’t get to play until this evening. The other cool thing that is happening is that Destiny is launching its Free to Play experience. So this morning I am going to do a bit of an informational post for new players and players who maybe have not followed any of the happenings of the last few months.

What is New Light?

New Light represents a re-imagining of the new player experience for Destiny 2. Instead of throwing you in the middle of the Red War Campaign, it sort of eases the player in a bit slower with doing various activities associated with the destinations and guiding the players through that experience. Additionally and most importantly it is completely free for anyone to download regardless of platform, and includes a shocking amount of content. You are essentially getting all of the Destiny 2 “Year One” content, aka the base game (Red War), Curse of Osiris expansion, and Warmind expansion.

This also gives you access to all of the core activities like Strikes, Crucible, The Leviathan Raid and various reoccurring events like the Iron Banner. You also apparently get access to some of the year two content like the Black Armory Forges, Gambit/Gambit Prime and The Menagerie which is sorta like the LFR version of Destiny 2 raid content. In addition to all of this… you can be viable to hop in and play with you friends in content on day one minute one. They have changed the way the world scales and you could hop in and do a strike moments after you first create your character.

You can get New Light on the following platforms:

Steam
Playstation 4
Xbox One

Destiny Moved to Steam?

Yes as part of the divorce from Activision, Bungie is no longer going to be available through the Battle.net client. For me this was largely a positive since the vast majority of the games that I own and or play are through the Steam launcher. For some people however this might be a negative as I found out from one of my friends yesterday. Of the various platforms that Destiny could have moved to, I feel like Steam was probably the best option. There would be way more gnashing of teeth had it moved to the Epic Games Store for example, or insisted that we install yet another game store client on our machines.

At the time of writing this all of the Bungie systems are offline for maintenance. However if you played on Battle.net and are wanting to continue playing that character you will still be able to move after the systems come back online later today. You need to go to Bungie.net/PCMove to initiate the process. However as the above advisement states it will not be an instant process and there may be some lag time before your character shows up on steam. Ultimately the process requires you to log into your Battle.net account and then into your Steam account and it creates a mapping and starts the character move process. If you did this prior to the systems going offline, then your Steam character should be sitting there waiting on you when you install either the New Light client or Shadowkeep.

What is Cross Save?

Again the systems are offline, but when they come back online later today you will be able to configure Cross Save. Essentially if you have played Destiny 2 on any platform in the past, you can keep your characters and move them forward with you if you choose to swap platforms. For example I had characters on both the PC and the PS4 and once everything was linked up, I was able to choose which set of characters would be my “Cross Save” and available on all platforms. Since then I picked up Forsaken when it was on sale on the Xbox One and have been able to play the same characters on all three platforms seamlessly.

To make it work all you need to do is go to the Bungie.net/CrossSave page and associate the accounts for each platform with your Bungie.net account. It will then ask you to select which account you are going to promote to your cross save. Now these other accounts won’t actually “go away” but will instead be suppressed as the characters from your chosen platform loads. You could in theory go back and reverse the decision at any point and play different characters on each of the separate platforms. My hope is at some point in the future they give us full cross play as I have friends that choose to play on each of the platforms, but my chosen platform is the PC. I could however load up any of the clients but I am limited to only that group of friends on a given client.

How do I Convert Heroic Events?

One of the most common activities in Destiny 2 is that of the public event. Some activity will spawn in on your destination and you can get good experience and some gear by completing it. However you get significantly better experience and loot if you manage to convert it to the heroic version. At times the process of converting it is directly in competition with actually completing the event, and as a “KinderGuardian” you can frustrate players by not knowing how to transform the event. As such I feel like one of the more important steps is learning what you need to do to convert each activity. I wrote up a post some time ago, but since then a bunch of new event types have been released. Thankfully Mesa Sean released a video today walking through the process of converting every single event.

I Feel Like I Am Missing Some Lore

There is a lot of story to Destiny, and sadly most of it is not told through the natural flow of in game narratives. It is instead told through things you interact with in the world, side quests, items that drop and add notes to your grimoire, and some of the higher end content like raids. Additionally there is a wealth of knowledge that never transitioned over from Destiny 1, and as a result you can feel like you are at a massive debt of knowledge as you enter this world.

Destiny 2 is not really a narrative experience. It is a game about excellent gunplay and fun activities that you can complete with your friends. That however does not mean there is not a mountain of interesting lore behind the game. As such I once again am pimping this excellent video from Byf, that outlines everything we currently know about the lore of Destiny. It is a four hour long video that outlines the origins of the various factions and Guardian doesn’t even factor into it until around the 2 hour mark. If you want to understand what came before… then watching the first 2 hours and 56 minutes is well worth your time as that takes you up through the beginning of Destiny 2.

Prison Break Problems

December 17, 2018December 17, 2018 by Belghast

First off I need to start this mornings blog post with a spoiler warning. If you have not played through the first mission in the Destiny 2 Forsaken expansion, then there are going to be spoilers included. Granted probably nothing more than was already spoiled with the Forsaken trailer, but I just felt like I needed to throw that out there. This weekend I spent some time playing Destiny 2 and while working on the Heroic Story mission queue I noticed one of the missions was “Prison Break” the first mission in the Forsaken storyline, and something I had not played through in awhile. I remembered really liking it a lot and opted to go replay it for powerful gear credit.

It was around this point that I realized the core problem with Destiny 2 and its story. It functionally operates in two modes… pretending that you never played Destiny 1 and re-educating you in all of the basics of the universe, or assuming completely that you were a Destiny 1 lore hound and giving you a big ole deep dive with little room between the two. The “Prison Break” episode plays out completely differently for players who were new to Destiny with the PC release and players who were veterans of the original game on the consoles. This disconnect begins from the very moment that you are treated to a cinematic between Uldren Sov and Cayde-6. This really hit me at the moment of the above screenshot… the “How’s your sister?” line either is extremely powerful or makes no fucking sense depending on your perspective.

“Prison Break” is a mission that almost exclusively references things that happened in Destiny 1… and worse things that were never introduced up to this point in Destiny 2. Sure if you went around scanning everything your ghost indicates you can scan you might have gotten snippets of information here or there but if you base things entirely upon what you see in the normal flow of Destiny 2 there are a bunch of problems.

The player has no clue who Uldren Sov is – we last saw him in the introduction to Taken King expansion for Destiny 1
The player has no clue who Mara Sov is… because again we last saw her in the introduction video to Taken King in the big Oryx space battle
The player really has no clue what the Reef is
The player has no clue that the Awoken were working with the Fallen and have no clue who Variks was/is
The player has no clue what exactly the Prison of Elders is
The player has no clue who Petra Venj is and why we already seemingly know her

These are all things that make this mission extremely confusing if you view it through the lens of a “brand new to Destiny 2” player. For veterans however this mission is a big romp as you roam through this place that you only managed to see a piece of before when doing trials for Variks. This is a destination I think that we all wanted to see more of and I was completely staggered by the sheer scope of the place when I first played the mission. For those who are not already familiar with it… it is just another busted ass location that is being blown up for some reason and that is largely hand waved away. There is no time spent on explaining what it is other than a Prison, and no time spent explaining who Petra Venj is other than someone who can apparently levitate her knife.

This is the core challenge of this expansion and why I think it had such split reactions. For me it was an amazing romp through places I had been and quite honestly miss greatly from Destiny 1, and for others… it is just another string of locations that were never really explained. The game does a really bad job of telling a cohesive narrative that does not require you to have watched every single Byf or Myelin lore video to understand. I was one of those players that gobbled up every little bit of lore about the first game… and as a result I sounded like a madman half of the time when I talked about it trying to defend it to the rest of the AggroChat crew as being this deep masterpiece. The game doesn’t just let players know these things, but instead requires them to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to be able to interact with the content. The Book of Sorrows is really interesting science fiction horror reading… that thankfully has been collected into an easy to read PDF or EPUB format… but to get it initially you had to roam around the Dreadnaught in Destiny 1 collecting over 40 Calcified Fragments.

The problem with this style of storytelling is it sets up a dichotomy of players. You have players like me who are willing to track down the story and chase it across various in game assets and other websites that help to summarize and condense the content into easily understandable chunks. You also have what I feel is the majority of players who just straight up bounce off of the story when it never quite pays off on the deep secrets they have heard people talking about through its storyline. If you were a lore hound, you immediately understood who the frozen hive were and why it was super exciting to see them. You also understood a lot of things about Rasputin and at the very least knew who Ana Bray was enough to be interested in meeting her. You also knew all sorts of things about Cayde-6 and his background and how someone becomes an Exo, and why Clovis Bray is the home of some really dangerous technologies.

As a new player… which is especially true for the PC crowd given that there was no option of playing Destiny 1 on that platform, you are simply treated to a list of names that have no real meaning. These are proper names which is at least an upgrade from Destiny 1 which treated you to “the traveler”, “the speaker”, “the exo stranger”, and “the darkness” among others. The names themselves however don’t have meaning attached to them if you didn’t dig for said meaning. Sure for the right kind of player this sets up a delectable puzzle that they are going to go digging for to find the answers, but you can’t expect EVERY player to want to do the leg work required to make any sense of it all. In the end I will defend the story that is being told as ground breaking, because the sum of all parts is amazing… but the game does no favors in actually helping players find it. It took me a long time to really see this point of view, but replaying through “Prison Break” was a bit of a wake up call to them simply not explaining why we should be caring about anything in this game.

Destiny Nostalgia

December 6, 2018 by Belghast

With my general disappointment I have over Black Armory and the direction the game seems to be going now… with focusing only on the end game and not actually giving us anything new that we can do the moment a content update drops. It got me feeling notalgic about Destiny 1 and some of the things I miss that have never quite made it over to Destiny 2. So I am going to take this morning as an opportunity to rifle through my vault and pull out the things I would love to see over here. This is mostly just me posting a bunch of pictures of weapons and talking about them, so if that is not your thing then today’s post is likely highly skippable.

Legendary Weapons

Destiny was largely a game about collecting the exotics, but there were a handful of legendary weapons that stood out and that I coveted. I figured a handful of these definitely needed to be talked about. There were a lot of them that I liked, but these were the weapons that I absolutely loved.

We are going to start things off with the weapon that I bring up so many times… my perfect roll Haakon’s Hatchet, or at least what I considered to be a perfect roll. It came from Year 2 Iron Banner and still has one of the overall best looking Iron Banner weapon visual aesthetics. It had Range Finder, Perfect Balance and Counterbalance so was insanely stable and while relatively short range… it could melt targets especially in the Crucible or Iron Banner. This also doubled as probably one of my favorite PVE weapons for just dealing a bunch of reliable damage to targets.

The Haakon’s Hatchet was eventually replaced with the Genesis Chain which dropped on my first time through Wrath of the Machine when I was super carried hard by my friends in Tequila Mockingbird. I admit a lot of why I used this weapon was because it looked cool and it had an interesting perk called Focused Firefly… which was essentially a much bigger version of the normal firefly that caused targets to explode when you to a precision kill. It also had this super satisfying noise that it made when you triggered one of these explosions… which I think is the real reason why I kept using it. It sounded sorta like the ping of kicking brass out of a Mosin Nagant in all of the WW2 era FPS titles with a bunch of reverb at the end.

I generally hated the look of all of the Year 3 Iron Banner weapons… there is just something about having a bunch of bits crudely cobbled together that didn’t do it for me. This is weird because in general the Fallen weapon aesthetic is very similar… but somehow works with all of its spiky nonsense. The main reason why I loved this weapon was its absolutely crazy high impact, and the fact that enhanced battery took the available shots up to 6… and with performance bonus it had a chance of refunding some ammo. This could just straight up melt any target in front of you, and was a pretty good option to help burn elites.

My heavy weapon of choice has usually always been a machine gun because it always feels like you have a lot more versatility due to the larger magazine size… or in the case of most of them drum size. Once again this gets a strike against it for the horrible asethestic of year 3 Iron Banner weapons, but it has a lot going for it when it comes to stats with Extended Mag, Hand-Laid Stock and Counterblance giving me a fairly high impact and very stable machine gun. Not much else to say about it… it was very much a utilitarian burn option that wasn’t flashy but got the job done.

Exotic Weapons

While we have ended up with a large number of carry over from Destiny 1 in the Exotics department, there are still a handful that I really enjoyed using that it would be nice to see reborn in one form or another.

I have to give an initial shout out to Hawkmoon, which was the very first Exotic that I ever got to drop. Now rumor has it that we are getting this back at some point in the upcoming seasons… but for the time being an equivalent does not exist in game. It was a high damage high capacity hand canon made interesting by the fact that two of the bullets would deal extra damage. Ultimately I replaced this in my line up with the Eyasluna which was essentially the legendary version of Hawkmoon allowing me more leverage in where I chose to use my exotic slot. It still bears mentioning however for introducing me to how cool exotics could be.

Another weapon that was also near and dear to my heart that absolutely no one else liked playing with… was the Fabian Strategy or the Titan exclusive exotic. I have always been a very run and gun player and as such was regularly closing the gap on a pack of mobs, which triggered crowd control and the front lines perk that increased weapon stability and rate of fire. The fact that a portion of the ammo was reloaded into the magazine on kills meant I could storm the castle and maintain a killing screen while taking out minions. This all fits my general play style and made me love this weapon far more than I should have given how many other people kept telling me it was garbage. Proof again that weapon choice is absolutely a personal preference thing.

Red Death was my go to for whenever I needed to sustain my life in a situation where I knew I would be taking a significant amount of damage. This made it the ideal weapon for those affixes that would cause your shields not to regenerate normally, or anything where there was a aura effect that would be slowly damaging you over time. Sure we got Crimson which is effectively a Hand Canon version of this weapon, but it feels lousy to play with in my opinion and as such doesn’t really count for me. I would love to see the original Red Death back. Given the storied past of this weapon it feels like the perfect option for a lengthy chain to unlock it.

Now for the weapon that inspired this post… Thunderlord is awesome and does a great job of melting a bunch of minions because of its arc damage proc… but the best version of that was on the Zhalo Supercell. Not only was it a really stable auto rifle, but the chain lightning proc made it perfect for clearing waves of mobs. It also held a special place as one of the few elemental primaries that survived the year one cull, which made it amazing for arc burn weeks. I would love to see a version of this gun back with a similar proc, especially given how many horde mode encounters we are getting in the game now.

While I never got to experience the grandeur of year one Gjallarhorn because I stopped playing shortly after launch… I fell in love with this weapon during Year 3 and it is impossible to make a nostalgic post without mentioning it. There was just nothing cooler than watching an entire pack of mobs melt to wolfpack rounds. During much of Year 3 this was pretty much the dedicated exotic that I used for everything because even if it was not solar burn week… it still was the best option for killing all of the things at once. Sure one might say that made it too powerful, but it was insanely fun to play with so it deserves on this list.

Another weapon that I would love to have back that we will probably never get back… is Invective or the shotgun that regenerates ammunition over time. Sure this and the Icebreaker the sniper equivalent were a little broken… but I loved this weapon so much in The Crucible because I didn’t have to care about the meta of trying to camp the special ammo. It looks amazing as well which as we all know goes a lot way to making a weapon feel good to use. Party Crasher+1 was the only shotgun I used regularly other than this one, but for most of my iron banner nonsense it was this in the special, Haakon’s in the primary and some machine gun in the heavy slot.

Sure we got a version of this with the Curse of Osiris DLC called Machina Dei 4 but it is nowhere near as good as this classic exotic version. It also looks nowhere near as cool. I would love to see a version of the original return, because again… this was an epic quest in the original Destiny and would give ample opportunity to make it a seasonal quest to recover the weapon. Everyone loved the Stranger’s Rifle and this was just an updated version of that, so would love to see it back.

These next two are largely situational, but I felt like they were unique enough that I wanted to include them as well. Touch of Malice was a must have raid weapon for the Taken King expansion, given that there were many burn phases where you were given an invulnerability effect allowing you to effectively pour rounds into the target without reloading with this weapon. It’s special effect allowed you to drain your own life and convert it into a bullet to keep firing after you have essentially emptied your magazine. This mean’t that it was super useful in a few clutch situations, but also was a great way to kill yourself if you were not paying much attention. In either case it was fun for the entire family.

Lastly we have Bad Juju that had two situations where it worked amazingly well. String of Curses did two things… firstly kills caused your ammo to reload and give you a damage buff. Secondly this effect when procced caused you to gain additional super energy, allowing you to charge your super significantly faster if you could be put in a situation where you had to kill waves of mobs. This made this the go to weapon in situations where you needed to have your super up regularly, which came in super handy in Prison of Elders and similar activities where you were both fighting a bunch of stuff and also getting additional credit for using your super. Other than that I was not a huge fan of the weapon, but I liked it because it filled a specific niche in my armory.

What were some of the weapons that you miss from Destiny 1? I largely excluded the elemental swords because I would have had to have included all three of them… because they were all great in their own way. Drop me a line in the comments below about your favorite Destiny 1 weapon that we have not seen yet in Destiny 2.

Monster Hunter and Destiny

April 25, 2018 by Belghast

While I am not quite ready to throw out a complete post about it… I am swirling around in my head the notion of rebooting Blaugust this year. If I did so it would be a slightly different affair and I am sorting out in my head exactly what that might entail. There was a period of time when we had a bunch of events happening at the same time… Developer Appreciation Week, Newbie Blogger Initiative and Blaugust. None of which really exist today in their current form and have not properly for a few years. So in remixing Blaugust I would be also attempting to fill some of the niches that the others provided as well by laying out a series of themed weeks. The rough idea is it would start with the last full week in July as a sort of “Prep Week” where the remaining elder bloggers would sorta throw out “how to get started” posts from an inspirational, logistical or technical manner. It is still an idea that is incubating however so I will do some sort of a larger post once it has solidified completely in my head.

The other general thought that has been going around in my head is that Monster Hunter World has become my new Destiny: The Taken King. That sounds counter intuitive I know since Destiny 2 is a much closer simulacrum to the original game than Monster Hunter World given that they are two completely different genres. However what I am talking about is more the way I engage with the game rather than the way the game actually plays. Destiny 1… especially during the Taken King era was this game I was completely obsessed with and wanted to know every tiny bit of lore I could find for it. It was this giant box of content that allowed me to engage with it in whatever method I chose to, and also always gave me one more goal to complete once I had finished the previous one. It was this title that I could just log in and play any given night without needing to bring into it a predetermined purpose because there were so many layered purposes available that I could easily latch onto one of them and proceed happily for an evening.

I had a small group of friends playing it, that allowed me to do bigger activities if I so choose like the various raids I completed with Axioma and later Tequila Mockingbird. That said most of my time playing the game was just me roaming around and doing stuff that suited whatever mood I happened to be in. There was always one more obstacle to overcome and one more piece of loot that I was chasing and never quite obtaining. It was a perfect storm of hooks for me personally and kept me entertained right up until the point when my head was filled with daydreams of Destiny 2 and what might be. I realize I can still log in at any point I want and play the game again… but it almost feels tarnished due to the greatly diminished community surrounding it.

Destiny 2 for reasons I cannot fully explain does not contain the same hooks for me that the original did. I tried very hard to stay focused on it, and for some time I have blamed my eventual malaise towards the game on the fact that I tried to play it twice. What I mean by that is that I played the game hard and heavy when it released on Playstation 4 and then immediately turned around and went through the same manic leveling process on the PC one month later. Effectively I ran up six characters to high gear levels back to back, and I had managed to hit 305 the then cap on PS4 before swapping over to PC and grinding up to that point again. That is a lot to ask of any game to sustain interested during that sort of nonsense and I largely explained my fading away from the title as simple burnout.

The problem is there was so much more that I have yet to completely unpack. The moment to moment game play in Destiny 2 feels amazing… but there is a problem with its feedback loop. What was missing was my drive to keep doing more of it once I had obtained whatever shiny baubles I wanted to obtain weapon wise. What was missing was some larger overarching pull that kept me going off and doing individual tasks that ultimately felt like they were adding up to some big payoff. In part the problem is a lot of those items that I used to grind for… now exist as Eververse cash shop exclusives. The other problem is that when they have put in longer grinds like the weapons of osiris… they feel extremely hollow because they are so horribly repetitive and involve you doing the same limited number of activities over and over. I realize they are still trying to fix this broken loop and some of the upcoming changes might help it… but I feel like their over reliance on timed mechanics is going to be a bridge I just cannot cross given now much anxiety they inflict.

On the flip side you have the game Monster Hunter World that I honestly did not expect to get into, given my lousy track record with the handheld versions. However I am engaging with it much the way as I engaged with Destiny during the Taken King era. I find myself looking up lore for the monsters if they have existed in the series before, and if not speculations about their origins and such that are floating around on Reddit. I find myself researching bits and parts for armor and what interesting builds surround them that exploit their specific attributes. I find myself able to log into the game any given night and just find something to do because I have this massive laundry list of things I want to go acquire. I can always use more elder dragon parts…. but similarly can use the gemstones that are rare drops off of almost any creature you can hunt. I became completely ecstatic last night when I got a double gem drop off Zorah Magdaros… that I cannot fully explain why I was bothering to do in the first place.

This is the feedback loop that used to drive me while playing Destiny 1 and it is the feedback loop that keeps me doing nonsense. I have an addiction to SOS Roulette which isn’t even really a thing… just something I made up in my head to relate it to the various roulette’s in Final Fantasy XIV. I like dropping into the middle of an assortment of random events happening that people need help on and trying to push the scenario to a win condition by my interaction with it. Sure there are times we fail miserably like Monday night… but then there are nights like Last night where we somehow managed to win every single boss fight I attempted including Val Hazaak and Nergigante. There will likely NEVER be a time when I cannot use at least one or two things off the elder dragons.

What makes Monster Hunter World so sticky is that eat time I get the parts to craft a new piece of gear, it ends up opening a whole bunch of possibilities to solve other problems… and often times leads me down a path of wanting something else to try some new build out. The way the gear sets interact in interesting ways means I am constantly searching for another piece of gear to complete a specific stat packages that I have decided in my head that I need. This was the same sort of nonsense that happened for me in Destiny 1 where I was constantly seeking out a slightly better stat package that interacted more perfect with the gear I had. I had a vault full of items that I didn’t want to shard because they were useful under certain circumstances and led me to want to keep them. I am having this same problem in Monster Hunter World where I am afraid I will legitimately hit the 1000 item hard cap on equipment.

Effectively what I have realized is that Monster Hunter World is my new Destiny, and hopefully I have explained a bit this morning what that actually means. It is that game that I can pick up and play without any real reason… and find a constant stream of activities that I want to be doing… that also feel like they are working towards some larger objective. Capcom is doing an excellent job of keeping a constantly flow of events and activities happening almost every week to keep us engaged and wanting to do new an interesting things. Kulve Taroth is phenomenal and might go down as some of my favorite content in any game… but the fact that they sprung it on us completely unannounced makes it all the more exciting. While I have had friends who have bounced off of this game… I still maintain an active enough community to be able to do things together if need be. The only problem is that right now I seem to be a couple of hours off what would be prime monster hunting time… given that I tend to wind down around 9:30 my time and that is when folks are getting online.

Ultimately while this might seem counter-intuitive… if you loved the original Destiny but largely have bounced off Destiny 2… you might give Monster Hunter World a try.