Destiny 2: Lightfall

[Mafro]

Gonna try and get the Sunshot catalyst this weekend. Love that weapon so much, might even beat Red Death as my favourite exotic ever.

[K]

Some of the stuff in the Forsaken roadmap is a bit alarming. I was listening to a podcast with some of Bungie’s designers on it the other day, and they were saying that one of the design goals with Destiny 2 was to create a healthier game – i.e. one that didn’t encourage you to play for hours every day, to the exclusion of all else. I really liked that approach, and it’s a bit odd that they seem to have consciously decided to make their game less healthy.

 

Like, they’ve brought back the faction rallies with in-built mega-grinding! Randomisation is back too. Never mind that encouraging players doing the same activity over and over again to get a particular god roll is extremely boring and cynical game design, imagine getting that G0D R011!!!! Masterworks are now upgradeable over time! The grind is back, baby! Let’s bring back the need to level up your guns with motes of light and XP. How about removing some of the streamlining so that you have to go to the tower to pick up all the bounties when you start playing? That’ll kill ten minutes of time every session.

 

I’m being cynical, but at the same time, I don’t want Destiny to just become this time-sink again. I kind of liked getting bored with it after a few weeks, it let me do other things.

[Uncle Mike]

10 minutes ago, K said:

I was listening to a podcast with some of Bungie’s designers on it the other day, and they were saying that one of the design goals with Destiny 2 was to create a healthier game – i.e. one that didn’t encourage you to play for hours every day, to the exclusion of all else. I really liked that approach, and it’s a bit odd that they seem to have consciously decided to make their game less healthy.

 

We must have listened to the same one - that bit stood out for me. I think I've said in here a few times that I'm more worried that they've lost their vision for this and are left chasing Reddit rep than I'd like. Catering to the no-lifers does extend its legs and keep people playing (which I guess is something they need) but it would be nice to see them working out a way to keep me playing a "healthy" amount that doesn't require hours of soulless grind (and puts me at a disadvantage for having a job/family.)

 

Like, I fully accept this sort of game needs to be played as a hobby with a certain amount of commitment, sure. You don't clear a raid without the build, gear and (more so) effort. And I'd probably agree without too much reservation that the vanilla D2 moved the dial too far in the other direction and once you'd cleared the story and levelled everything up there wasn't anything enticing to play to try and get. But I hope they don't go down a road of just lengthening all the grinds and making stuff super-rare.

[K]

5 minutes ago, Uncle Mike said:

 

We must have listened to the same one - that bit stood out for me. I think I've said in here a few times that I'm more worried that they've lost their vision for this and are left chasing Reddit rep than I'd like. Catering to the no-lifers does extend its legs and keep people playing (which I guess is something they need) but it would be nice to see them working out a way to keep me playing a "healthy" amount that doesn't require hours of soulless grind (and puts me at a disadvantage for having a job/family.)

 

Like, I fully accept this sort of game needs to be played as a hobby with a certain amount of commitment, sure. You don't clear a raid without the build, gear and (more so) effort. And I'd probably agree without too much reservation that the vanilla D2 moved the dial too far in the other direction and once you'd cleared the story and levelled everything up there wasn't anything enticing to play to try and get. But I hope they don't go down a road of just lengthening all the grinds and making stuff super-rare.

 

Must have been the same one. I remember one of the developers sounding unenthusiastic about random rolls, but also being resigned to the fact that this is what the fans want.

 

The thing that is making me a bit cautious is the faction rally, and the time limited nature of it. Like, I really want that masterwork catalyst, but the fact that I have to grind the fuck out of a relatively boring activity to get it is stressing me out. I don't want to be worrying about that sort of thing when I'm not playing the game, and if this is a taste of what's to come in D2, then it's putting me off a bit. I preferred the "SHOOTING ALIENS IS FUCKING RELAXING" era.

[Varnsen]

28 minutes ago, K said:

 

Must have been the same one. I remember one of the developers sounding unenthusiastic about random rolls, but also being resigned to the fact that this is what the fans want.

 

The thing that is making me a bit cautious is the faction rally, and the time limited nature of it. Like, I really want that masterwork catalyst, but the fact that I have to grind the fuck out of a relatively boring activity to get it is stressing me out. I don't want to be worrying about that sort of thing when I'm not playing the game, and if this is a taste of what's to come in D2, then it's putting me off a bit. I preferred the "SHOOTING ALIENS IS FUCKING RELAXING" era.

 

I largely agree with you but at the same time, there'll be several faction rallies this season right? 

 

They're definitely struggling to balance what you described as a healthier game with an active game. I'd wonder if it's not just Reddit outrage their reacting to and just general player engagement which must be driven by some stats they have access to. I think that they're closer to that balance than before right now in that for the first time since D2 launched, I booted it up and had a ton of things I could put time towards that weren't just milestones for once. 

[Uncle Mike]

Your faction rep is maintained through the season, so I don't need to complete the full 50 ranks for the Graviton catalyst this week, yes. And as long as when we get to Season 4, those catalysts are still available and I can grind out a 2nd/3rd, then maybe it's not the end of the world. I'm not 100% sure if that's the case.

[Mafro]

I'm worried they're listening to the criticisms from the "content creators" too much whose reasons for playing the game differ from the vast majority of the player base.

[K]

We should ask Bungie to organise a summit for tired middle-aged dads/professionals, where half the people cancel at the last minute because their children have just projectile vomited all over the TV unit, and they read out a series of player requests on stage that all start with “sincere apologies for the delay in getting back to you”.

[Gorf King]

The pressures of life obviously do affect people's ability to devote more time (or set times) to play. But I always think it's odd when people call for a persistent online game to be something you rinse in a couple of hours a week and of which you've used up all the content within a few weeks or so, because 'that's all the time I have'. Great; if that's all the time you have, as long as it provides some shooty shooty alien action for a couple of hours a week, why are you bothered that people who play more, or a lot more, have other things to chase in the game? You don't have to grind for that god roll. You don't have to do that raid. Why not have a game that accommodates both? Adding in a longer level grind, for example, means you can do all that shooty shooty alien stuff without endgame for a lot longer and still be making palpable progress. You don't hit the endgame as quickly, where you are then presumably faced with the necessity of getting six people together in regular sessions for a raid. So it effectively extends the life of the game for you as well.

 

Of course, there's a balance to be had, and no system of progression, and grind, will ever suit everyone. There's no objectively correct system. One of the things I don't like about the current faction grind is, as some have mentioned, the fact that's it's time-limited to a week, albeit repeated with two more weeks this season. That does put pressure on you to do highly repetitive activities for too many hours per week - it'd be far better if the factions were active all the time, and you could pace the grind out if you wanted to do it. (The fact that it rewards the lowest-level activities far more than, say, strikes or the raid is another problem - heroic strikes give as many tokens as normal ones, and on getting to the last boss of the new raid last night we were each rewarded with.... 3 tokens. The way they've done it here means it's very boring, samey play that you're being asked to grind out.)

 

So I'm not saying the current or planned progression/grind systems are great - they've never quite got this right in Destiny, though Rise of Iron made a better fist of it imo - but almost anything would be preferable to what we had in vanilla D2. There was simply nothing to work towards after a couple of weeks for many of us. Everything was maxed out, we'd done the raid and every other PvE endgame activity, and all that was left was Eververse cosmetics and a few shoddy faction bits and pieces. That's the wrong way to approach a game for casual people, because it just means your more committed playerbase dissolves and when casual players get to the point they might fancy the raid, there's hardly anyone left to do it with. They really have to do better than that. At least here, interest will be engaged for far longer. If you just want to pop on for a few hours a week and shoot aliens, I don't see anything in this that'll impinge on your ability to do so. You'll just be able to do that for longer, while still making progress, and with a bigger body of players to join in with if you want to.

[ph0rce]

I welcome the return of weapon progression / unlocking of nodes, as well as more customisation options. I don’t really see how anyone can think it’s a ‘bad thing’. 

 

If you don’t want to wait, just use motes or in this case probably shards to unlock it instantly.

[Uncle Mike]

They've said nothing about adding back the gradual unlocking of nodes on guns. Just that guns will have randomised nodes. Personally, the levelling up of guns/armour when they've dropped was an example of "bad" grinding. Especially with how long armour took.

[Gorf King]

@ph0rce Well, we don't know you'll be able to do that. We don't know anything much, so it could be a terrible system they put in place with an unrewarding, soulless grind. All I'm saying is that some form of grind, aka longer-term progression and investment game, with tiered rewards that reflect a variety of tiered activities, is needed in an online RPG to sustain engagement and interest. D2 vanilla just entirely lacked that, and I don't believe that the vast majority (not just the, er, 'no-lifers', cheers Mike), actually liked that either. It just led to a dead game after a few weeks.

 

So you have to have a longer progression/reward curve than that, and rewards that are actually worth shooting for and investing your time in. Whether Bungie come up with a system that actually works in that respect is another matter - I certainly don't want crap loot that just takes an eternity of repetitive low-level slog to obtain or upgrade. But D2 vanilla was a huge letdown in that respect, offering neither great loot, nor interesting activities to grind, nor any form of customisation or elaboration beyond a couple of basic skill branches that were just dumped on you in the story missions and hey, you're done now.

 

I'm not really buying the speeches about their 'vision' for saving people from playing the game too much that people like Luke Smith made just prior to launch. Several senior designers have subsequently come out and said basically 'we just didn't have enough time to design this properly', and I think they obviously knew that back then, and knocked out a product they knew was half-baked. Part of what they're doing now is finishing the baking process. I don't think they're abandoning any vision there at all really - I think most of that was just PR fluff to wrap around an unfinished product. A finished campaign, but virtually nothing after that at all.

 

I think here they're trying to get round that crunch by ditching a lot of the 'campaign' aspects altogether - virtually no cutscenes beyond the initial expansion, probably little traditional story, and no mention of story missions at all yet - and putting the emphasis back on the stuff that comes after it. Putting their development time into the actual RPG/progression/reward systems; into the mechanics and payoffs of mid to endgame. Maybe in doing so they'll turn the dial too far the other way, who knows? But they simply couldn't leave it where it was - not in a persistent online world that demands what is in effect a yearly sub. People simply wouldn't have bought it, and, as I've commented before, if they wanted to do that they should just go back to making straight shooters again and ditch the RPG/MMO pretensions.

[Uncle Mike]

11 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

D2 vanilla just entirely lacked that, and I don't believe that the vast majority (not just the, er, 'no-lifers', cheers Mike), actually liked that either. It just led to a dead game after a few weeks.

 

I think I said I agree that vanilla D2 didn't have enough stuff to do. And I didn't mean to imply any specific no-lifers here at all, so sorry if you felt maligned. But I do wonder where the "right" place for the grind dial should be. I kind of figure that if it's in a place that me and you and @Mr Ben are finding a torturous slog, then it might be a little too turned up. Which is sort of the over-reaction they made to EP initially. They're going to need to work through the balance of that. I've enjoyed Warmind so far, because with the Nascent Dawn, Sleeper Simulant and Worldline Zero items, there is always something for me to work on at my own slower pace. I'm quite happy slowly grinding that out over a variety of activities.

 

It's this Faction Rally, really, that's got me side-eyeing Bungie again. Rank 50, and Lost Sectors being the only real viable route to do it, is a long boring journey. It's 60-plus cycles of that as a baseline (before you count daily reward tasks and extraneous extras and so on.) It's a long road.

[Uncle Mike]

But then, obviously (and you said this) progression and grind is only one half of the scale - the reward at the end of it is the other. There's not much incentive to run a Raid once, let alone enough times to get everything. There's nothing in there that I want.

[K]

33 minutes ago, Uncle Mike said:

It's this Faction Rally, really, that's got me side-eyeing Bungie again. Rank 50, and Lost Sectors being the only real viable route to do it, is a long boring journey. It's 60-plus cycles of that as a baseline (before you count daily reward tasks and extraneous extras and so on.) It's a long road.

 

Yeah, I was mistaken before - your rep carries over to the next rally. Still agree that the faction rallies seem like a bit of a slog, and the wrong approach for the game. It's fine to dangle rewards in front of the player but the rallies seem to encourage boring, repetitive farming activities - the exotic masterworks generally work OK as they don't incentivise grinding. It's still not ideal, though. I would have thought the rallies might work better as a series of quest steps rather than a pure grind.

[Gorf King]

Aye, I don't think anyone thinks the rally is great. One of the problems with the current rally - all rallies - is that it's got a strict time limit. If you have to hit rank 50 to get something, great, the grind can be ok in itself. The problem lies in saying you have to do it within one or more of three spread-out weeks, your time is cut off, and then they offer three different rewards, meaning you simply can't get all the rewards on offer unless you farm low-level stuff intensively in one week and then come back again and do the same in exactly a month's time for another faction. This I think goes back to their idea that you'd come back every week, or every so often, to do stuff. It's artificially time-gating the grind and the rewards. It makes neither the committed grinder nor the far more causal player happy, because the former can only do this for a week and then has to quit until next month to get the next thing, and the latter doesn't have time within a single week to put the hours in. And presumably no-one's pleased by the fact that you're doing just about the most menial tasks in the game to get the biggest per-hour rewards.

 

And I didn't feel maligned, Mike - I'm not a no-lifer, I'm a half-lifer at best. Terribly insulting phrase to use though.

 

It's Mr Ben who's the no-lifer.

[Uncle Mike]

It's like, Rank 50 was the limit on the factions in D1 for the Exotic Class Item, I think? And that grind was even slower. But no-one minded, because you could just do it whenever. You're right, it's the need to sprint in specific weeks that's exacerbating it. It means I need to be efficient, I need to be around, and it seems quite in opposition to the rest of their design philosophy/half-baked design of nice milestones that everyone can do.

[Mr Ben]

No-lifer here. I got to rank 50 with Dead Orbit last night (not long after you went off Gorf), and have the catalyst over 50% unlocked....though if I was a total no-lifer then I guess that would be 100% unlocked, so I cant be a total no-lifer at least

 

They really need to buff the amount of tokens that drop in non-lost sector activities, right the way across the board!

 

I'd say 5 tokens (both faction and raid tokens - 2 extra raid tokens wont hurt anyone) at least per encounter in the raid*, 5 in public events (as is - they're piss easy, so no need for a buff here), keep lost sectors as they are, but then strikes should be 10 minimum with nightfalls being the same, and then heroic strikes giving 20 - both types of strike being the same atm is shit, and heroic strikes having the most drop makes sense as they're the longest non-raid activity in the game apart from EP.

 

*Reason raid should be 5 is because you arent really there to get faction tokens anyway, they're just a bonus.

 

Edit: Heres dmg04's response to the issue:

So they are aware.

[Mafro]

I've just been doing loops of heroic events in the EDZ rather than lost sectors for the Faction Rally. Up to 22 so far after starting last night.

[K]

I bet that's the quickest way, as you get five tokens purely for participation, you can fast travel from event to event, and it feels like there are more PEs in the EDZ. Must be pretty dull, though.

[Mafro]

You don't have to worry about having full renown either and there's almost always plenty of other players there. I tried doing the recommended thing on Titan with the Ogre Lost Sector but it was a bit annoying.

[Mafro]

Hmmm, I've got the full set of FWC armour and the Titan method does seem to be quicker now since you just need to do a heroic public event then just a patrol or high value target for fun renown.

[Uncle Mike]

I'm rank 33 with Dead Orbit now. Starting to feel like I might get to 50 in the one week after all.

 

Plus, all this play has ended up having the game drop catalysts for Crimson and Tractor Cannon. Nice.

[Gorf King]

No-lifer.

[Mafro]

Plus point of this is I now have a shitload of legendary shards.

[Uncle Mike]

2 hours ago, Gorf King said:

No-lifer.

 

37.

[Gorf King]

42.

 

[Mafro]

Got the catalyst and done the masterwork requirements thank god.

[Spacehost]

I’m so out of the loop with this game. I just want to go do some public events and bash out some missions but I keep getting Faction Herpes whenever I so much as look at anything and my health stops refilling. Is this temporary or will I have to put up with it in this Foreskin DLC they’re bringing out too?

[Gorf King]

It'll end at the end of the faction rally this week. If you want to do PEs without a stack, and don't want faction rewards, don't pledge next time there's a rally and it'll never bother you again. Or do pledge, but fast travel between PEs which resets the stack each time.