Last night I dove head first into the Haunted Forest activity associated with the Festival of the Lost event.  There is absolutely no hyperbole intended… but this might literally be the best content they have created for Destiny 2.  The only unfortunate part is that it is associated with a limited time event, and it isn’t available for that much longer.  When they first talked about the Infinite Forest I pictured this mode where you go through a random series of changing and shifting segments until you face a boss at the end… that then gives you a chance at loot.  Basically I pictured it working a lot like the Court of Oryx or Archon’s Forge events in Destiny 1… and then was completely disappointed when it released and was ultimately nothing like that.  What we got felt super repetitive and didn’t have any real hook to make you want to keep roaming around in there.

The Haunted Forest is 100% recycled content, but re-purposed in such a way as we are descending into the nightmare visions created by the Vex that we saw bits and pieces of during Curse of Osiris.  Firstly instead of a washed out digital landscape, we have dark and brooding levels with very sparse lighting allowing for monsters to seemingly jump out from the Darkness.  Additionally there is effectively the stand in for Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head in the form of a giant Hive Knight that is indestructible and chases after places hitting you with a giant axe and doing nonsense amounts of damage.  Each time you dip into the Haunted Forest you are trying to kill a certain percentage of the projections of the various enemy factions within Destiny 2.  When your bar hits 100% you get transported to fight a Nightmare, or a version of one of the Ultra boss monsters that exist in other areas of the game.  Upon defeating the monster a timer starts that gives you a certain amount of time before the Haunted Forest collapses upon itself, and effectively you are trying to see how many times you can get to the Nightmare boss and defeat them before you run out of time.

There is a reward chest at the end after defeating your final Nightmare that rewards a currency specific to the Festival of the Lost called Fragmented Souls.  These are then used to purchase the paper masks and if you can manage to save up 120 of them… a item level 600 Auto Rifle called the Horror Story.  It is the last item that I am grinding for.  In previous iterations of Festival of the Lost the masks were purely cosmetic, but this time around they have a purpose and can be leveled up through doing content.  So while they add no item level, they do have a bunch of perks that tweak your gameplay in the Haunted Forest.  For example I went with Vampiric Touch that increases damage to challenging enemies and triggers Health Regen on precision kills.  There were three other options and each one was effected by a different type of kill, and I’ve managed to get a single upgrade so far that increases the drop of Heavy ammo, which speeds up the killing of Nightmares.

It also seems like you have the chance of getting Legendary drops from the various mobs inside of the matrix.  Can we talk about how much better it feels to have engrams decrypt immediately showing you if you got something useful in the process?  I managed to pick up Go Figure a really bad ass Pulse Rifle, and mine rolled with range boost which makes it silly to effectively snipe things with pulse shots from across the map.  It also has High Caliber rounds and High Impact Reserves making it stagger like crazy.  I am super in love with this weapon so far and I thought it looked coolest in the white and black color scheme that I ended up choosing.  So far… I am greatly enjoying my time back in Destiny 2, because things feel “better” in ways that I am not exactly sure how to quantify.  Time will tell if I feel the same once this event is over, but for the moment…  I am grinding Fragmented Souls for that Auto Rifle.

This was a busy weekend, largely because I spent most of it not in Oklahoma.  We opted to take a fall break trip down to Dallas, and in some ways it was a really awesome trip…  but in other ways it was not.  When we left town on Friday morning it was raining, and for the most part did not stop raining until some time over night.  This made for a very cold and wet trip, combined with lots of moments when it was raining so hard that I could barely see the road ahead of me.  This became more stressful when I was crammed between two lines of K-Rails and the two lanes of traffic felt super squeezed together.  We made it there safely, but the trip took way longer than it normally would have given the circumstances.  Under perfect conditions with zero stops, we can make it to Frisco where we were staying in the hotel in roughly 4 hours…  we were not under perfect conditions, and we stopped constantly to roam around.  Friday was largely spent meandering around hitting various places along the way.

This made for a very compact Sunday, trying to get everything that we normally have to do on a Sunday done as well as anything triggered by being out of the house for two days.  This mean’t that most of my gameplay yesterday was in several fragmented chunks which largely involved running Headless Horseman in World of Warcraft on all of my tanks, and leveling in Destiny 2 as I had yet to hit the level cap nor really make much traction in the story.  I am a little weird when it comes to approaching Destiny content in that I prefer to level up independent of the story, and then grind through the story knowing that anything that happens to drop will potentially fuel my later item level grind.  I largely took this screenshot because occasionally I forget that I end up getting paired with local people through Bungie’s matching algorithm that factors connection quality above pretty much anything else.  Notice the player GerthBrooks…  which made me chuckle at first and then was a little disturbed by it.  For the uninitiated, Garth Brooks is also an Oklahoman and while his girls were in High School literally lived in the same town as I do.

Another thing I found out this weekend is that Escalation Protocol is really damned good for leveling…  as there were groups I managed to get in the same instance with that were farming the level 7 boss.  This thing drops some shaders, but also a chest that requires some sort of key that I am going to have to figure out.  Upon some quick googling it seems like I simply didn’t do much content in Warmind, and as a result don’t have any keys to open these things with.  The truth is that I largely bounced hard after grinding up my second account worth of characters upon the PC release.  I managed to stick it through until the Curse of Osiris expansion, but the repetitive nature of that content left me annoyed.  I will admit however that so far Forsaken seems really cool, I picked up and did some more of the story last night.

My highest priority however is to sort out how to do the Festival of the Lost content before it disappears.  I had enough of the cash shop second chance currency to pick up this sweet corrupted ship.  Past that I hear there is a better version of the infinite forest that I need to check out, that has a chance of dropping what appears to be a really sweet auto rifle.  I contemplated playing God of War, but with the fragmentation of my play time…  I focused on something that I could drop in and out of quickly rather than something that would require my full attention for long periods of time.  Depending on how tonight goes… will determine if I return to Destiny for Festival stuff, or play some Dad of War.  Regardless I managed to hit 50 the new level cap and am at 500ish light, so now to finish the story and get geared again.  The lack of weapon options are driving me insane right now… but it is forcing me to use combinations that I never would have before.  I’ve been getting a lot of play out of sidearms since they game keeps dropping them for me.