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Destiny 2 Feels

May 19, 2017 by Belghast

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So yesterday was the big reveal of Destiny 2 gameplay and I have to say I am not disappointed in the least. In fact at this very moment I am feeling inordinate amounts of Destiny love. There were a few things that were released that gave me all the feels. The first is the “Story of Zavala” trailer of sorts that tells the tale of how he came from being a corpse somewhere in the cosmodrome to being the leader of the Vanguard. Unfortunately I have not seen this trailer released separately so you have to catch it about 14 mins into the video that I linked… which is the entire Destiny 2 reveal stream dumped to YouTube. In that trailer you see a young Amanda Holliday getting her first look at a starship, so that in itself was completely priceless. The second cavalcade of feels comes from the gameplay reveal trailer… which appears to be cut from what is going to be one of the intro cinematics showing how the tower falls. There is a moment in the trailer for each class where they get to shine… and I absolutely got all the feels when I saw Zavala call everyone to him and raise a Titan bubble. There are similar badass moments where Ikora Rey Nova Bombs a Cabal transport, and Cayde-6 Golden Gun’s three Cabal troopers.

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Destiny 2 is a tale of starting over after a monumental fall from grace, which in itself is probably the best way of dealing with a power reset scenario. Having spent the last week playing through the Fallen Empire storyline in Star Wars the Old Republic… I absolute approve of the notion that sometimes you need to shuffle the deck to freshen up the game. What I like the most about what I saw though is that everything looked and felt like it was still Destiny… just with the Destiny-ness sliders moved all the way to eleven. They reveal that we are going to four new places… but in part I am hoping that given time we will also revisit areas that we have been to before. The maps themselves are supposedly more open world style, or at least the one that was showed reminded me of something on the scale of the Hinterlands from Dragon Age: Inquisition with lots of active hotspots to go explore and find adventures. This is definitely playing to my core desires as a player, but I am also hoping that it still has directed story missions for the folks like Tamrielo who tend to bounce super hard from “now go explore” setups in games.

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It sounds like all of the things that made Destiny awesome are coming back, but that they are adding a whole layer of new stuff on top. To be truthful if you look at my characters stats… I have spent a significant number more hours doing patrol missions than literally anything else in the game. Just as a reference according to my Profile on Bungie.net… on my Titan I have played a grand total of 14 days 15 hours… and of that time 7 days 4 hours was in Patrol mode. So giving me a big open world to roam in is absolutely going to serve my interests. However it sounds like the strikes and raids and crucible modes are all coming back with a vengeance with brand new concepts being introduced. It also seems like some of the specs are being tweaked… and I am not sure if each class is getting a wholly new sub class or if we are just losing one and gaining one. Titans for example I know have a Void class that revolves around wielding a shield like Captain America. Warlocks have a new sub class that gives them flaming angel wings and lets them wield a giant flaming sword. So I am not sure if those are in additional to the subs we already have… or if those are now replacing the Defender Titan and Sunsinger Warlock. I mean I am hoping we get something new… but Defender was absolutely one of those sub classes that was super niche and extremely hard to complete “kill with elemental abilities” sort of bounties.

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The biggest news from yesterday is that the PC client would be going through Battle.net… which is curiously being referred to as Battle.net and not the Blizzard Launcher. I said before that I would likely never stop calling it Battle.net, and I am guessing maybe they have rethought that branding decision… now that a non-Blizzard game is going to be using that infrastructure. This decision has a lot of positives and as far as I am concerned fairly few negatives. I’ve spent over a decade now cultivating a community inside of the Blizzard franchise games, and knowing that I can carry that ready made community into Destiny is going to be a huge bonus for me. What Bungie is getting from PSN and XBL is an account system that takes care of all of the day to day friend maintenance and messaging functionality and lets them just connect up a game to it. I mean the option that we all probably through they would be taking was to integrate this game with Steam completely, and rely on steam users for profiles. However to be honest, Blizzard does a far better job of policing its own network than Steam does, because quite frankly it is not in the interest of Valve to clamp down too harshly. The only negative here about any of this is that it sounds like the PC client will not be available on day one… and will instead be a console launch only. Ultimately I was going to buy this on PS4 and PC anyways… so this is not a huge deal for me… however it is going to suck for anyone who wants to hold out for the PC.

My dream that is likely to go unrealized is that I could have a single set of character spread across all of the platforms. I am perfectly okay with purchasing a PC client, PS4 client, and Xbox One client… and not necessarily being able to cross play between them. However I would love if my characters which are attached to my Bungie account carried over and worked on each platform. Let me play with my PC friends, PS4 friends and Xbox friends with the characters I have spent so much time building. I mean I managed to get my Xbox One character up to 370 light… but that feels pittiful compared to my stable of three 400 light characters on the PS4 side, each with access to a vault full of awesome stuff. Compared to the 14 days on PSN… I have only played 21 hours of the Xbox One gameplay because not having all of my toys was always a major set back. Since the characters are bound to the Bungie account… they could absolutely make this thing happen. They just need the will to do so. So I have hopes and dreams… but I am fully expecting them to get dashed in the long run. At this point however I am just riding the hype train and so freaking ready for this game to come out.

Addon Trolling

May 18, 2017 by Belghast

I am having one of those mornings that I am simply struggling to find any inspiration to write. It’s been one of those weeks, namely because I am juggling a huge meeting load and feeling like I am accomplishing nothing in the process. When you have a few 30 minute blocks between the rest of your schedule being in meetings, it becomes really hard to make any headway in anything. However I guess that is what happens when you move up to management. The problem being that when I finally do get home I sort of revert to a gelatinous state and struggle to find any forward momentum in games either. As predicted my forward momentum in World of Warcraft has stalled quite a bit upon getting the flight unlock. I could in theory alt all the things… but instead I am largely just logging in each day and doing whatever faction based world quest there is for a shot at fury friendly legendary items.

A few days ago I had installed an addon called Leatrix Plus, which adds a bunch of quality of life improvements for World of Warcraft. Among the tweaks were a few settings that I figured were largely good ideas. The first being to accept invites to groups from the guild/friends, and the second being to accept summons from the guild/friends. Last night however I learned that maybe this is not the best idea to run with enabled. Now in my head I had completely forgotten that Wednesday was raid night. I mean it was one of those things that I was aware of, but not completely cognizant of. So I found myself after eating dinner logging in to do my daily run at legendaries, and like I often do alt tabbed to do something else while the game finished loading in. When I finally tabbed back I found myself in a raid and sitting at the Nighthold summoning stone. While afk I had apparently been invited to the raid group and summoned… and my handy little addon absolutely allowed myself to get trolled. I bowed out once I realized what had happened because honestly I am not ready for “serious mode” raiding.

After doing my nightly bombing run on a legendary, I wound up logging and digging into Star Wars the Old Republic. When I started the night I was sitting on Chapter XIII and managed to play my way through to a good ways into Chapter XVI. The whole chapter thing feels odd considering I am functionally doing the same thing as Netflix binge watching. Its hard for me to see where the seams normally would have been between chapters, but I guess the content is naturally released in a format that feels akin to how Final Fantasy XIV does. Looking at the Wiki page it seems like originally the content was released roughly a chapter a month between February and August of 2016, with the initial content providing the first nine chapters at release. The only negative about binging the content like this is that I am not really spending much time with any of my newly acquired companions, since for the most part each mission requires me to use a specific combination. Also the reveals are probably less dramatic than they would have been if I was being drip fed the content. Whatever the case I am still very much enjoying it, and some of the shit is getting weird. Going to be interesting to see what it is like to roll into the Eternal Throne content.

Enjoyment and PVP

May 17, 2017 by Belghast

Last week there was a tweet that came across my feed that jarred something loose in my brain. I am wishing I had thought to save it because I honestly don’t know at this point who tweeted or at least on what specific day. It was one of those things that filtered into my subconscious and stuck there as it scrolled past. The general gist was asking what exactly a game would have to do to make PVP palatable for you personally. I was rushing between meetings when I checked Fenix on my phone, and never actually got around to replying. However it is something that I have been mulling over for days now. Why this was so sticky is the fact that I am a walking paradox it seems. I will claim not to like PVP at all, and will actively go out of my way to avoid it if it is happening in the world. If a game has one of those settings that prevents you from being accidentally flagged… I run with that on all of the time. If it is raid time… and one of our PVP centric members runs into the instance flagged and in doing so gets jumped by the Horde. I will sit there and watch them die, because in my mind they made a poor life choice for coming to a raid flagged in the first place.

All of that said… I also look forward to the Iron Banner in Destiny which is a monthly PVP event, and if I am bored I often times pop into the crucible which is their version of a battleground match making system. What I have never been able to reconcile is why player versus player activity in one game feels good and in others not great at all. All I have been able to sort out in my head is that in Destiny there is no negative side effect, and the rewards for participation are balanced in a way that it feels like no matter what there is a chance that I get something really cool in the process. Now Crucible hardcores in Destiny will tell you that the things that I love about it… are the things that frustrate them. Functionally loot is not tied to performance, but instead participation. Sure if you win a match you get more faction with Lord Shax the Crucible reputation vendor… but regardless of success or failure it feels like my time spent is leading towards the goal of something interesting. I am either going to get a faction package that gives me weapons or armor… or I am going to have the chance of getting interesting gear rewarded to me at random at the end of a match.

The other thing that has stuck out in my head is that in Destiny the total time of the match is relatively short ranging from 6 to 8 minutes… to at the maximum 15 minutes. Even more than that the time to engagement is also short, with the lack of long runs back to where the objective fighting is happening. I spent some time this weekend in World of Warcraft doing battlegrounds, since that system as a whole feels like a reasonable counter point to Destiny. I knew I was in for something when about 5 minutes into an Arathi basin map… I saw a pop up through DBM timers informing me that my team would win in 21 minutes. The length of that match just felt prohibitive to my enjoyment, and the risk of that time spent… had no real payoff waiting for me at the end. Sure there is the chance of random loot, but the loot seems to be based on my current PVP rank… and not relative to my gear level which is a huge positive for the way that Destiny handles things. So since I am late to the game, that means I would have to suffer through a lot of bad experiences in order to maybe have a chance of getting something that is going to be useful to me in the long run. The risk versus reward equation is just not good enough for me to keep throwing myself at the gristmill. So instead after a handful of maps I went back to grinding World Quests because they at least felt like they had tangible rewards associated with them.

Basically my take away is that in order for me to find PVP interesting… there has to be one hell of a lot of carrot waiting on me and very little stick. The truth is that PVP in general be it Crucible or Battlegrounds is the sort of thing that I might do if I have literally nothing else to do. I participate in Iron Banner so often because it is a limited time event… and it also is a loot bonanza. While I was working my way to the current 400 light cap in Destiny, a good chunk of that progress was gained through Iron Banner drops… which tend to be one every third or fourth match. In World of Warcraft I played a half dozen battlegrounds this weekend and got a single piece of gear that was 50 item levels lower than the rest of the gear that I was wearing, so another enchanting shard just doesn’t feel that exciting. I think the shortness of the match also helps my enjoyment, because even if we are losing horribly… it is a short term predicament and one that might be remedied in the next match. Additionally battlegrounds that focus on huge scale siege objectives tend to be soul sucking for me, and each time I have to mount up and run to the opposite end of the map it just feels bad. I guess I prefer quick skirmishes rather than protracted battles, especially for randomly queuing with strangers. The other huge negative about PVP in games like World of Warcraft is the fact that I am lumped into chat with a bunch of horrible people. Simply disabling the chat and making the maps clear enough not to need communication to complete objectives would greatly improve my experience. A good chunk of my joy in Destiny is the fact that no one can spout off racist slurs in global chat.

Finally Flying

May 16, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was an interesting night filled with running a bunch of the world quests out in Broken Shore in an attempt to get the faction needed to finish getting Legionfall over the revered mark. However after doing everything that was available, and the daily goblin treasure quest… I found myself still just shy of the finish line. I needed just shy of 400 faction, and after taking a break to get some food I roamed around aimlessly trying to sort out what if anything I should be doing. It was around then that I got pinged by a friend of mine and asked if I was up for tanking some mythic dungeons. Last week was the “run 4 mythics and get a chest” quest in Dalaran, and I had not touched it myself because I didn’t think I would have any semblance of a regular group. However when one reached out to me at around 8:30 I took the opportunity.

All told we ran Mythic Halls of Valor zero to get some keystones, and it also happened to be a world quest for a significant chunk of artifact power. We then ran a Mythic Maw of Souls because it is super fast and I believe we had a 3 keystone for it. From there I pestered the group to run Cathedral of Eternal Night, because I still had a quest for it and had never actually seen it. It was around this time that I shifted from tank to dps as someone who had tanked the place before took over. I am far from a reasonable dps, but I did okayish in the grand scheme of things… or at least well enough to get us through the dungeon. Finally I shifted back to tanking as we did a Mythic 3 Darkheart Thicket because it was either that… Eye of Azshara or Vault of the Wardens. We all sort of thought that Darkheart would be the fastest. We managed to three chest the dungeons, which largely meant we walked away with some extra artifact power.

After finishing the dungeon runs and turning in the quest I managed to cross the finish line with the faction I needed. So as a result I can now finally fly in the Broken Isles. The challenge now is… am I functionally done again with World of Warcraft for awhile? This was really the driving force for me returning was to finish off flight. I mean Friday was fun enough that I will try and start making that on a regular basis. However I am not sure how much I care to actually be logging in each day and doing stuff. I am sitting at 890 item level… and in truth if I am going to be dps I should get some more legendaries. The problem there is that the mathematics are stacked against me… since I have 4 tanking legendaries already. The thought of trying to get 2 more dps legendaries seems daunting. One of my legendaries is not a net dps gain… but it does at least give me some added survival because it heals me each time I spend rage. In theory I should at least keep doing the daily faction chests because I got most of my legendary drops from them.