Destiny

Last night I spent the entire night playing Destiny 2, and I am now starting to feel a little guilty about not logging into World of Warcraft Classic at all. So much so that right now my plan is to play tonight and see just how far behind I am in the curve. There were a few players pulling ahead of me and I feel like I am probably going to be several levels behind the pack. Unfortunately… I have been having a blast in Destiny 2 and just have wanted to spend my entire evening playing that. It would be easier were I sitting at the level cap in WoW to alternate back and forth between the games.

Yesterday I posted a picture of these ominous Hive themed Yeti coolers on the moon with Symbols on the front. When I encountered them they appeared to be locked, and when Deej made some post yesterday about our moon findings… I replied with a picture of the chest as a joke. However I got some very serious replies, including what exactly we are supposed to do with them. I apologize for the crappy quality picture but I am trying to illustrate something badly. You notice there are symbols on the front in a specific order I personally refer to them as E A and 0 because the first looks like an E without the back and the last looks like when you draw a zero with a slash through it to differentiate between it and an O.

This is going to require some squinting maybe, but if you look in the upper left corner of the image you will see the E symbol and if you look in the middle of the right hand side you see the A symbol. How spread out they are is the reason why you got a rather crappy image to illustrate this point. Behind where my camera is currently is a column with the 0 symbol. Essentially to open the chest you shoot the symbols in the order shown on the box. If you are doing it right the symbol will begin to glow with that ominous shadowy hive energy. When you have shot them all you end up with a normal chest that you can open and usually a piece of gear.

Another thing that I spent my evening doing is punching things. Like I normally punch a lot of things already, but what I mean is that I used finishers to punch them into oblivion. I had not quite figured out the finisher system the night before last, but I have it on lock now. Essentially when an enemy gets low you will see a glowing orb over their head and they will start to shimmer a little bit. This is the indication that they are primed and ready for your finisher, much in the same way as it works in the 2016 Doom game. My finisher was set to the G key but I rebound it to 7 which is the key that I use on my mouse as my combo point dump in MMORPGs.

The interesting side benefit of using a finisher is that apparently it counts as the damage type of whatever sub class you have equipped, but also doesn’t consume a melee charge. This meant that when I landed on Titan and got a Destination Bounty of kill 30 things with Void damage… and I had no Void weapons on me… I was able to punch things to death for fun and profit. Normally speaking I would have just logged into Destiny Item Manager on my second monitor and swapped over a void weapon. However while that appears to be fixed now, for awhile that was not updated to work against the new user interface. I would imagine that it will also count for those “Void Class Abilities” bounty objectives as well, since your damage is being dealt by the class, but I am not 100% certain on that.

The highlight of the night however is that I found out that you can in fact get back into the Cosmodrome without deleting a character. When you log into the game a bunch of stuff happens, especially if you had the Solstice of Heroes armor waiting on you. Banshee gives you several objectives so I completely missed that you also gave me an exotic quest called “Pain and Gain”. This involves going into the Cosmodrome and in the area is a Fallen Walker that you can defeat over and over. Doing so drops one of the items that you pick up from the New Light experience.

So you can essentially farm the walker until you have gotten all of the items that you would have gotten had you deleted your character. The first time I took down the walker the chest that spawned gave me the Arcadia-Class Jumpship from Destiny 1. The second time I got the item I was hunting for… the Khvostov 7G-02 or the weapon you start the game with. This is still among the best feeling guns in the game and I am really hoping we get the exotic quest at some point during this expansion cycle to go get the version of it from Destiny 1 that had swappable perks. I loved that weapon so much. The other item I could have gotten was the white “Generalist Shell” but honestly I didn’t care enough about it to stick around and kill the walker a third time. Supposedly it is capable of showing up on the Heroic Mission playlist as well.

If you keep going with the mission you end up discovering a completely new area of the Cosmodrome which involves a really nonsense jumping quest. Thankfully I was forged in the fires of the Dreadnaught and managed to do the entire sequence on the first try. In the grand scheme of things none of the jumps are terribly difficult. The hardest bit is trying to figure out where you should jump to next especially in the last set of jumps before arriving at the treasure room. You are rewarded a copy of the Risk Runner exotic which I had and if you keep moving you end up fighting a boss that awards you its catalyst which I did not have. Risk Runner has become one of my favorite weapons in Destiny 2 and more or less takes the place of a shotgun as one of my secondary weapons of choice.

All in all I am having a blast in Shadowkeep, and I feel like I have really not even scratched the surface. I need to do a strike which I have not done to progress the storyline. Instead I wound up doing a Nightfall… which thanks to the new mode allows you to matchmake and queue for them. There are things I miss… like all of the different ways to get powerful gear. I feel like this is going to turn into a rant at a later point when I am sitting at 900 light and have no real way to get higher. However for the moment I am having a blast. I really want to get the 100 levels of the seasonal pass thingy as well, so we will see how the grinding goes.

Tonight however… I plan on likely being back in WoW Classic to try and catch up with what has been going on over there.

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.

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.