Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

New Light and Shadowkeep

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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.

Green and Orange

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This morning I am struggling to come up with anything worth writing. Allergies are killing me and I am in sorta a histamine daze. We have a very lovely screenshot of what it looks like to be in Swamp of Sorrows… where everything is either orange or green. Were it not for my glowing eyes you would have trouble making out my facial details. This is an era in the game where objects don’t really throw off proper lighting, and as a result the campfire that I am standing beside is doing nothing to illuminate the scene.

Last night I more or less finished Badlands, minus all of the quests that involve Uldaman, which we still need to run. There are some quests in zone that I could do but they were higher level than was efficient for me to grind out, and also in a super dense and dangerous area of the zone. As a result I hopped a flight to Stonard and have been whittling through the quests that I had in Swamp of Sorrows. They also are largely higher level, but the zone as a whole is pretty spread out allowing you to keep from getting a bunch of multi-pulls.

That all may change as I am about to start hunting the murlocs along the eastern coastline, and we all know how they love to chain pull. In theory I really need to gather up a group of people and make an attempt at Uldaman, to knock out a bunch of the quests there. That might be an objective of this evening but the biggest challenge is the time zone thing. Last night was just a case of people logging in within a very staggered manner never quite giving us a party of five until Tam/Ash/Kodra had already committed to running some Wailing Caverns on their alts.

Forty really is about the halfway point in the leveling process not 2/3rds as the numbers would make it seem. Things have really slowed down significantly and each level seems to take way more effort than the previous one. I think this is around the point where I started to lose focus in the initial game launch, because I never quite made it to 60 at launch. I think I got to somewhere in the 50-55 range before wandering off originally and going to play Everquest II with some friends for awhile. I then came back and pushed through the rest of the levels and started the traditional level 60 activities.

I know next week my attention is going to start being split, and this weekend is the Tulsa State Fair, which means I am not going to get much leveling done on Saturday. The hope is on Sunday I can pour on a few more levels so I have a shot in hell of keeping up. Destiny 2 Shadowkeep launches on October 1st and I know I will start spending a bit of time each night in that as well. There is also Monster Hunter World Iceborne that I have yet to really touch. I don’t want to lose focus but we have officially entered the doldrums where that becomes a challenge.

Busting Rocks

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Last night I was a bit scattered in my gameplay. I had a few goals, and none of them were really met. Firstly I wanted to knock out a bunch of quests in the Badlands, because I am slowly being lapped by many of the 40 something dungeon group. One of these involved killing a ton of wildlife that drop various meats. After much slaughter I wound up with two stacks of Red Wolf Meat, which made me realize that I had no recipe to get cooking skill points from. This of course lead me to go over to WoWhead classic and figure out which recipes used that item, and where to find them.

This then lead me to realize that I would need to make a trip to Camp Mojache in Feralas, which is a zone I had yet to visit so far. Were I thinking about speed I would have flown to Thousand Needles and run north, which would have gotten me to my destination pretty quickly. Instead I mistakenly flew to Desolace and ran South, causing me to traverse almost the entirety of the zone. To add insult to injury… I seemingly forgot I had a mount and ran almost all of it by foot. I did however buy my patterns and move on to Thousand needles to farm the Mithril nodes up in the perch area.

The hardest part about this phase in the game is how spread out everything feels. Once you are in a place you feel fairly committed to it just because there is no easy way to bounce to the other continent. By this point my hearthstone was up, which I have set in Orgrimmar which I then popped over to Undercity on the Zeppelin. Without a doubt lately I have been running up on the Zep tower just as the one I needed is pulling away. From there a long flight path down to Kargath got me back to where I started the evening… the Badlands.

The other mission I had for the night was to get Blacksmithing to 225 so I can start the quest to unlock the later levels of that profession. The cruel irony is that in theory I should be killing up off Iron, and I need a metric ton of it. There is a quest that I need to craft 4 Steel helms and 4 Steel chests… so I am focused on creating those and seeing where it gets me skill wise. The suggestion is that I bank all of my Mithril until I have 235 skill, which is a long way from where I am. Also seemingly Iron became valuable on the auction house again, so buying my way out of this rut isn’t exactly viable. So instead… I will be mining the copious amounts of Mithril and Iron available in the badlands while I knock out as many of the quests as possible.

This leads me to the title of the post. I spent a very long time last night killing rock elementals because I need 10 small rock shards. The drop rate of these seems to be almost nonexistent, so I will probably get the rest of my level just killing them without touching any of the other quests. The positive however is that pretty much all of the areas with Rock Elementals have several ore node spawns. So I can hang back, slaughter rocks and grab the nodes each time they pop. This is apparently my life now.

Generous Benefactor

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I am now the proud owner of a Blue Skeletal Horse, that I did not earn at all. I feel weird in saying that, but last night I was beginning my farming runs when I got a message from a friend. They asked how far away I was from my mount and when I told them they said there would be a message in game coming shortly. I didn’t ask them for it and they were very specific in saying that it was a gift and not a loan, but I still feel fairly indebted. I am not sure if I can fully express how grateful I am that I can stop trying to get to a specific amount of gold, because for me at least that is very much not my focus in an MMORPG.

I plan on paying it back, but I think probably the best way for me to do this is to finish the leveling process and be geared and ready for when they need something in the future. I want to be a functional dungeon and raid tank, and now I also very much feel “unstuck” because I would have avoided doing anything until I managed to get the amount of gold needed to get off high center and move on with my life. The biggest challenge now however is that while I have been all over the world in my quest for a farm spot, I have spent zero time actually focused on doing any of the content.

For now I think my main focus will be on the Badlands and completing a bunch of the quests there that will eventually lead their way into Uldaman, which I believe is the next real target for our dungeoning aggression. There are a few quests that start out in the zone, and one in particular that is a chain that comes drop a dropped item. So my focus tonight is probably going to be on tracking that down and doing whatever quests I can come across along the way. The parking brake is being lowered and I am going back into leveling mode again.

I did spend a little bit of time last night on Belgrave my Hunter as well. I am not usually big on playing female characters, but generally speaking if I am going to play an Orc or a Troll I am going to play the ones that aren’t hunched over. The real truth is that I wish both factions could play together. The current events happening in game are teasing that maybe just maybe this could be a thing. I would be all too happy to be running around on a Human or a Dwarf with my Orc or Undead friends. In the meantime however I am enjoying the process of seeing the game through Horde eyes, because really I did not see much of this side of the world back in vanilla. I think the highest characters I had back then were in the mid twenties.