Destiny 2: Lightfall

[Oz]

 

[Nate Dogg III]

I think I actually hate him. 

[Mr Ben]

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/activisions-destiny-2-is-struggling-right-now-cowen-analyst.html

 

Quote

"We do think Bungie still has some opportunity to fix the game's problems over the next year and recapture engagement, but we're not sure they have the ability to pull it off at this point," he wrote. "We also note that Destiny currently has more serious competition in its genre from a refurbished Division (Ubisoft) and the indie title Warframe than it did three years ago, when D1 had its own share of player dissatisfaction."

All the things they've said they're going to implement over the next year sound like band aid fixes to me, and dont even bring it up to par with the original, so unless they pull something big out their ass (some amazing new feature), they could be in some serious trouble.

[Phelan]

5 hours ago, Mr Ben said:

 

All the things they've said they're going to implement over the next year sound like band aid fixes to me, and dont even bring it up to par with the original, so unless they pull something big out their ass (some amazing new feature), they could be in some serious trouble.

2

 

I agree. I have spent a lot of time with the game but I just don't really feel like there is anywhere to go with it. 

Feels like I'm at the end of a relationship that has run its course. I log on most days and it just reminds me that I should be playing Crucible and I don't want to.

[carlito]

12 hours ago, Nate Dogg III said:

Meanwhile, of the three people that played Destiny 2 last week, two backed New Monarchy, and the presumably rubbish gun they had to offer is available now. I might uninstall Destiny 2 tonight. 

 

I backed them! The other faction had armour that was made of old

blackboards.

[dogsout]

I just don't get how they ballsed this game up so badly. D1 lasted me years, and I'd spend hours every weekend trying to go flawless on trials. And I never got bored. The first weekend of trials in D2 was enough for me, pretty much. What a mess. 

[df0]

Perhaps D1 was a fluke.

[bobontheway]

Destiny 1 is the overlap in a ven diagram between what Bungie had intended to make and what the community probably wanted.

[Oz]

I can't imagine any PC players who have arrived fresh to this experience having any of these complains. say probably having not played D1 on console. it is probably the best feeling shooter on PC at the moment in my opinion. it has a relatively long campaign (compared to other shooters), good PvP with a low barrier of entry, the PvP can be fun even for low skill players (low barrier of entry in PvP unlike something like PUBG or Overwatch), a lot of gun diversity, a friendly community , an interesting universe, multiple and diverse looking interesting lore ridden planets to explore, greatly optimised, diverse and interesting enemy AI, brilliant art design and music, six player multiplayer raids (only FPS that has that on PC as far as I know), no lag on PvP even though there are no dedicated servers, the multiplayer is well balanced (except for the odd lens weekend), simple skill tree so you can focus on the shooting, lots of visual options to make it run on any PC, options to add key binding as required for any preference, excellent controller pad support (almost feels like it was made for a pad), wide screen support, HDR support from launch, option to run it up to 8K, it has never been down except for planned maintenance,  more content released barely a couple of months after launch (including a short but excellent new raid),  an xmas event a couple of weeks after that, a faction rally a couple of weeks after that,  a multiplayer event (Iron Banner) a couple of weeks after that,  micro-transaction are only related to cosmetic items,  all content provides top tier rewards (including very easy content such as public events and single player content), you can play any activity you want in any order and you would still get to max level in a reasonable amount of time (does not require a crazy amount of grind to get most if not all items in the game). In my opinion, if you are playing on PC just stay out of reddit and you will be fine. 

 

[Kevvy Metal]

20 hours ago, Nate Dogg III said:

I think I actually hate him. 

 

Man! Actually! .... I remember watching some Youtube video shortly after vanilla Destiny was released where some glazed-eye'ed fucking weirdo guy was being interview, just joylessly spouting disengage corporate rhetoric about how well the launch went. 

I thought he was fucking totally strange, I've just realised that it's that Deej guy.   

[RubberJohnny]

If you want first time PC impressions, I tried the trial a while back, before I'd heard of all the controversy. It gets you about half of the EDZ and Titan, and unlimited access to casual PvP. It looks great and runs well, and the movement/aiming feels leagues ahead of the last Bungie game I'd played (Halo 3). The UI is very slick and it's nice being in an open world with people, teaming up for public events and the like, without any sort of obligation that I have to form a relationship with these people. I really enjoyed the PvP, it felt quite casual and I was doing well with it - my only complaint was some of the maps (Bastion) were too big for the playercount.

 

That said, even without having played D1, it was clear a few aspects were "off", and they generally correspond with the complaints - grenades were useless in PvP, not even taking off a shield. They also recharged ridiculously slowly, to the point you might get off 2 or 3 a match, clearly nerfed into irrelevance. The weapon slot system felt weird - I often chose suboptimal stats just to some variety between types in the first and second slots, and every other weapon was limited to the third, meaning you never saw whole types drop.

 

I chose not to buy it, the campaign was middling, and the amount of content felt lite, I also wasn't too enthused by having to buy regular DLC releases on top for something I'd only play casually. Also to get a bit pseudy, there was always a mercurial feeling about Bungies older stuff, I'm quoting Eurogamer here:
 

Quote

I have always associated Bungie's artists' love and mastery of cloud forms with their composers' equal mastery of choral arrangements-both being ethereal, formless things that gesture at unspoken greatness with little specificity.

 

I got that feeling from Halo, and from Music of the Spheres, I don't get it with Destiny 2, the awkward humour and self-aware tone just reminded me of Borderlands.

[Oz]

So what did you end up playing instead  @RubberJohnny? Did you find a better coop shooter on PC? Or one you liked better that is.

[Mafro]

Imagine having to converse with Deej on a day to day basis and him talking like that all the time.

[Harsin]

As we enter a new week here at Bungie, the halls echo with the electrical hum of our codesmiths switching on their personal computers after a weekend of adventuring. We're always listening and simply love the passion our colleagues regularly display. We know that some of you have said that you can only face the day after indulging in the sustenance of a hot beverage. We have an exciting announcement to make, a strike team will soon be plumbing the depths of the kitchen, who knows what epic treasures wait within?

 

2 sugars in mine please Deej.

 

Okay.

[Purin]

Please make a Deux_BNG Twitteraccount and let's have more!

[Mr Ben]

This video (from the old Reef reveal) featured Chris Barrett (of recent twitter fame), along with Deej in his usual not-answering-questions-but-his-mouth-moves-nontheless, and of course Gothalion who did his best to ask some community questions (while ripping the piss out of Deej).

Obviously these sort of streams/videos are long gone now, and wont be returning it seems. Just highlights how different the old streams were compared to the more recent ones, especially the mood.

 

Also, there's this reply by Deej to Cozmo's post about tomorrows TWAB:

One of Deej's best posts, and one where he more or less admits they done fucked it up.

[Oz]

He seemed like he had a good time in that interview did he not. He was born to be a community manager. 

[Uncle Mike]

Anyone read the TWAB this week? Seems like they're really trying to turn things round. Raid armour perks, revised rewards in Raids, armour Masterworks, and so on.

 

It's odd though. I still find myself a little "so what?" about the changes. I'm not sure a perk that is "20% more elemental damage on the Leviathan" is what I was hoping for, although I don't know what I was expecting. I just get the feeling there's someone behind the scenes vetoing properly fun perks in the name of balance.

 

Max 15% damage resistance during a super seems like a weird thing to pick for a Masterwork also.

 

In happier news, I finally hit 335 last night. Nice.

[Nate Dogg III]

I think they tried to avoid anything too OP with the armour masterworks but went too far in the opposite direction. The orb-gen perk on MW weapons is obviously targeted at PVE, but this feels like more of a PVP thing. You only get one super a match most of the time, and there are few worse feelings in the PVP game than being killed while in your super. So fine, I guess, but it's not exciting.

 

But I agree. It's the best weekly update I can remember in terms of openness – the Bungie of old would never have specified the percentages on armour masterworks, for instance – and I appreciate tremendously the fact that they're shipping the system despite it having a small inconsequential bug, because that feels like a step forward. More broadly it's just nice to see them being open about what they're thinking, rather than just hinting at it. 

 

Yet it's still not enough to lure me back on the regs, and I think they realise that. At least things are moving in the right direction.

[Uncle Mike]

Yeah, agreed with all of that. I wish they'd notice the repeat trend now that people like being powerful (Mayhem, the crazy Prometheus Lens weekend) and ignore their bias towards "balance" for a bit.

 

Now I've just got to work out if I'm getting Monster Hunter, I guess.

[Broker]

It's all just tiny nods toward the problems, or it's utter bullshit "fixing" problems by making us equip something. So much f what they do is adding things that should be universal to the game as a "feature" to bulk out the perks of whatever identical shit they're adding.

 

As an example, they've added Raid mods, with specific perks. That's fine, but they've also announced that these mods are removable, which is such utter bullshit. I can just about cope with the shitty, random way mods, shaders and transmat effects are given out, but the fact that they're just used up is something people have been complaining about since release. That doesn't mean that we want that as a fucking "feature" of their new best mods, they've written the fucking code to remove these things and return them to us so apply it to all fucking mods. The "perk" on the new ghost for the raid means that you're more likely to get exotics you don't already have, another thing that should just be how fucking exotics work. I don't want to have to grind for a ghost for each activity to equip it to fix their terrible design decisions that make the game feel shit to play. They've fixed the shitty iron banner reward system which was fine in D1, but they've still not added light levels. It's all just working towards being D1, instead of moving forward.

[Harsin]

41 minutes ago, Uncle Mike said:

I just get the feeling there's someone behind the scenes vetoing properly fun perks in the name of balance.

 

Probably Jon 'slow cooldowns increases the potency of the moments when you get to melee/grenades/supers' Weisnewski.

 

 

 

 

[Larsen B]

If the Raid mods stack, some of the abilities will be space magic OP.

 

Nighthawk GG does insane damage against Argos. 6 members of the fireteam with 5 solar boosting mods with a 125% damage increase? 

[Oz]

4 hours ago, Broker said:

The "perk" on the new ghost for the raid means that you're more likely to get exotics you don't already have, another thing that should just be how fucking exotics work. I don't want to have to grind for a ghost for each activity to equip it to fix their terrible design decisions that make the game feel shit to play. 

It is funny to notice how the change in communication strategy clashes with the original vision and design. For example, we don't know how likely we are to get an exotic you don't already have as a base stat in the first place. That is, their buff is 50% applied to what exactly? Is that number static? Or does the base probability go up or down the more dupes you get? Or cashing in drops in succession? They are communicating a modifier to a stat we know nothing about.

[Gigga]

It sounds like every update is just adding rewards and nothing is actually fixing the bugs.

 

I don't give a fuck if there's a greater chance of me getting an exotic if I'm just going to keep my MK.44 Stand Asides streak going.

 

I've got every single possible set of titan legs at 335 now but it would be nice to get some of my other armour up to scratch.

[Mr Ben]

14 hours ago, Uncle Mike said:

Yeah, agreed with all of that. I wish they'd notice the repeat trend now that people like being powerful (Mayhem, the crazy Prometheus Lens weekend) and ignore their bias towards "balance" for a bit.

 

Now I've just got to work out if I'm getting Monster Hunter, I guess.

I'm probably going to get it (MHW) at some point, even though I had mixed reactions with the beta (due to the servers mainly). I liked what I saw, but the server seemed to throw a wobbly the one time I played with 2 other people, meaning there was some severe latency on some actions.

[JDubYes]

I uninstalled this weeks ago (having belatedly gotten halfway through the dlc and decided I didn’t care anymore), but can’t quite kick the habit of coming in here. I’m not sure if I’m still hopeful it’ll come around (I miss my Hunter, and so wanted it to be good), miss my fellow guardians, or if I’m just voyeuristically watching a slow-motion car crash unfold.

 

I think it’s interesting (and suggests I’m almost certainly not the only one in a similar boat, and that they’ve buggered the loot in this one) that no-one has posted what Xur has had at all since lightshow weekend. Throughout the entire life of Destiny, and the first few weeks of this, there’d be an update within minutes of the tentacle-faced tease showing up, but now no-one cares at all.

 

It’s a bit sad, really.

[Mr Ben]

To be fair, Gorf was usually the one to post about Xur, but Gorf's long since given up on the game entirely, and Xur hasn't had anything of relevance since laser tag either.

[Mr Do 71]

Xur should sell unique items, IMHO.

 

Plus the legendary gear you get, you should be able to wear all of it when doing high end stuff like Raids.

 

The spontaneous battles you get on the planets are good fun.

 

I miss those Arena battles you could do in D1. You did four/five (I can't remember) battles, then you dropped down that hole to get the loot.

[Oz]

Hi today is patch day!