Destiny 2: Lightfall

[Uncle Mike]

Yeah, my work colleague is telling me all about mods and infusing and god rolls and such. I'm waiting until I see what weapons and supers I like for endgame.

[RubberJohnny]

I'm glad someone raised their head above the parapet and pointed out the campaign was proper dull.

[ph0rce]

The campaign is never the highlight, and I don’t think many people in here have been saying how great it is??

 

I thought it was good enough, some definite highlights & some bits where they just drew things out for padding.

 

The first mission was excellent, the intro to the City was brilliant & maybe half the adventures were ok. 

 

The End Game however, which is the real game, is superb so far. 

[lewismistreated]

Hey, Bungie figured out how to fix that Weekly Challenge bug! 

 

 

Thanks, Bungie.

 

Thungie.

[Nate Dogg III]

Ah, that’s nice. 

 

I think it took me and Donut about ten hours to exhaust all powerful gear rewards this week, except for the nightfall. And that’s before the raid happens. And we’ve still got quests and other things to work on. That’s pretty remarkable, really, and surely about as dense and busy as Destiny has ever been. 

 

Crucially it’s fucking good fun. All of it. Ascendant Challenges are probably the highlight for me — proper sphincter-clenching fear — but the Wanted bounties are just behind, with a real patient, defensive D1 Nightfall don’t-die vibe to them. With mechanics!

 

But even the low-level stuff is fun. Bounties mean that just about every activity (I’m still mad patrols don’t count towards flashpoints but I’ll get over it) has meaning, or at least can. It’s so nice to have a material reason to spend an entire strike charging about with a shotgun, or switch subclass for a bit because you’ve got a clan bounty expiring in three hours. I think there might be too many of them at the moment, and no doubt within a couple of months we’ll have min-maxed the process such that we only ever carry like a dozen around at a time, but for now it’s just lovely tooling around knocking things out. Lovely. 

 

Only downer is that I asked Donut at one point this afternoon, ‘do we even have a raid team for Friday?’ and err, no, we don’t. The fact it’s taken me a week and about 40 hours for that to even be a factor says a lot, I think, about how much stuff they’ve crammed in. 

 

Tl;dr I am building a granny annexe out of unwanted sidearms. 

[Hexx]

You could start a raid team!

[Mr Ben]

Nice patch tomorrow. Hopefully everyone gets the reset they should have got, and manage to get some drops that isnt another Edge Transit.

 

Reason for the nerf to Code of the Commander actually given by Bungie. Had a feeling it may have been raid related. They really are learning to communicate better:

So the spec should be more up to par next week it seems.

[BubbleFish]

Anyone else having difficulty with the ether harvest public event in Four Horn Gultch? It just won't spawn for me so I can't continue with the Talisman quest. All I get for the past 24 hours are glimmer extractions. Am I missing something? 

[Scruff]

12 minutes ago, BubbleFish said:

 Am I missing something? 

 

Luck

 

It's random which event spawns but you can usually tell which it'll be by the location of the flag. The ether harvest spawns next to, but outside, the white crater thing the escapee event spawns in. If the flag isn't there you can go and do something else instead of standing around for 5 mins hoping for the right one.

 

Good luck!

[BubbleFish]

Arse. 

 

Thanks for confirming I wasn't missing something (that I can control anyway)

[Nate Dogg III]

That's two weeks in a row I've wasted time trying to find something for a quest that doesn't exist in the game yet. Wonder how long it's going to take for everything to properly open up.

 

Meanwhile, after being a bit down on Gambit I ended up spending a couple of hours in there last night and am starting to work it out I think. My final game I had double the number of kills and motes of anyone else on my team, and didn't lose a single mote. I'm still a bit nervous to invade, and didn't really have the loadout for it because I was trying to finish the Gambit part of the Ace of Spades quest (got the final kill in the last match of the night, thank god) but that's the next thing to try. Sleeper's such a huge problem though, my god. A fusion should not be able to one-shot from that far away. I do worry, given the problems Bungie have had trying to balance gear across PVE and PVP throughout Destiny's life, that introducing a third axis to sandbox balance is maybe not the best idea. Anyway, good fun.

 

Not quite as fun as loading into a Nightfall that Donut and Wavy had in progress and finding them on the boss with a sliver of health left and about five seconds from death. I played my part (fired an arrow).

[Mr Ben]

Got 4 kills with Crimson in Gambit, and about to get my fifth, when a hunter thinks he's helping me and shoots the invader I'm killing (he's been suppressed by my Sentinel grenade, so he's fucked) with.....a linear fusion rifle (overkill much? He had a sliver of health) from the other side of the map

 

I'll probably get it the first match tomorrow now

[Kryptonian]

6 minutes ago, Nate Dogg III said:

That's two weeks in a row I've wasted time trying to find something for a quest that doesn't exist in the game yet. Wonder how long it's going to take for everything to properly open up.

 

What was that? You could spoiler your answer for others...

 

Thanks

[Nate Dogg III]

Last week was 

 

The Corrupted strike

 

This week was

 

Kill a Plague Of The Herald while Ascendant

[Thor]

I like how you can dip in and out and feel like you're making progress now. Had a productive little session before work this morning. But I won't be joining any raid teams. I've only just scraped 510 power. 

[Uncle Mike]

39 minutes ago, Nate Dogg III said:

Last week was 

 

 

  Hide contents

The Corrupted strike

 

 

This week was

 

 

  Hide contents

Kill a Plague Of The Herald while Ascendant

 

 

I have those exact two. Wasted quite a bit of time trying to do the second before I realised.

[Gorf King]

Though strangely, you can do the third one quite easily (and those of us who had it did).

 

Spoiler

Kill four of those big Ascendant Challenge Knights while ascendant. Though you have to land the killing blow, I think, so might take more than one run to do so. 

 

[Nate Dogg III]

Annoyingly I’d already done that before getting the bounty so I’ll have to do it again. Not sure my blood pressure has normalised from the first run just yet. 

[Marmite]

48 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

Though strangely, you can do the third one quite easily (and those of us who had it did).

 

  Hide contents

Kill four of those big Ascendant Challenge Knights while ascendant. Though you have to land the killing blow, I think, so might take more than one run to do so. 

 

 

I had that one last week too. Black Spindle and a nice little spot in a tree did the job for me in one go! 

[Hexx]

 

[Oz]

Something to discuss

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/sep/13/destiny-creators-made-the-game-less-addictive-and-players-rebelled

[Uncle Mike]

I do find it quite interesting. Like, it's definitely worse now from the perspective of someone who just wants to shoot the best guns whilst wearing the best armour. But also, there's no denying I'm finding it more fun. And also more addictive. It's a hard one.

[pinholestar]

On 13/09/2018 at 15:40, Oz said:

Something to discuss

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/sep/13/destiny-creators-made-the-game-less-addictive-and-players-rebelled

 

It's a balancing act with these sorts of games. I play FF14 too and it's quite interesting to see how over five years of expansions and regular content patches they've crafted a range of experiences that attempt to cater to the whole spectrum of players, from those who play a few evenings a week to those for whom it's basically their entire life. All systems that are in one way or another designed to keep players paying their monthly subscription. I imagine it's an incredibly difficult pursuit to design a game that covers all bases and it takes some devs years to get it right.

 

Destiny 2 was quite clearly geared towards being more accessible to the 'casual' player, with far less of a time commitment required, clearer indications as to how to level up your character each week and less reliance on RNG loot drops. The problem was that it left the game feeling incredibly lean after a month or so and with the removal of much of the said RNG (no random rolls, exotics dropping like confetti etc.) there was next to nothing for the more dedicated players to play for. The game had many other issues too and generally felt like a significant regression from the state of Destiny 1 at its end but the crux of people deserting the game in droves was this lack of meaningful and fun things to do, I think. It just got very boring, very quickly.

 

I'd pretty much given up on Destiny and hadn't played it for around 6 months until the siren call of Forsaken and its promises of a return to the long-form grind and deeper systems called me back and I think the game right now is in the best place it's ever been. They've done a fantastic job... of making it like Destiny 1 again, if I'm being honest. But credit to them for realising they'd taken a direction that wasn't popular with the playerbase at large and for the most part giving them exactly what they wanted. But having had time away from it and a little perspective you do get a sense of just how consuming of your time the design at the core of these kinds of games really are. There's a wider discussion to be had about the plethora of long-form, hobbyist, games-as-a-service or whatever you want to call them that are being made these days and it's something I think about quite a lot. They're all designed in one way or another to get you addicted and chasing that next dopamine rush in whatever form it takes. Digital Skinner boxes wrapped in sumptuous art and refined mechanics. Often brilliant in their execution but always somewhat insidious in their core design. 

 

That article is right in many ways but what Forsaken really does is give players a load of fun and interesting things to do again. The game is simply a hell of a lot of fun once more (allowing for the fact that it's all shiny and new for the time being) and it's tied character progression into a much wider array of activities right across the game. It follows that when you cram your game full of activities that make the player feel rewarded within its own context and require those activities to be repeated on a daily basis then the inherently addictive nature of it all will resurface and some will be susceptible to that.

[Nate Dogg III]

Agree with all of that. Nicely put.

 

I got an exotic drop from one of Spider's bounties earlier, much to my surprise/delight.

[Oz]

17 minutes ago, Nate Dogg III said:

Agree with all of that. Nicely put.

 

I got an exotic drop from one of Spider's bounties earlier, much to my surprise/delight.

lord of wolves?

[Mr Ben]

I got Queenbreakers Bow last night, but not from any bounty. Just a random drop from some enemy. Guess you dont need to do Spiders bounties for that, but may need to for others.

 

That was my first Forsaken exotic. It does feel like D1 for exotics, although I'm glad I already have Mida this time!

[K]

I’m enjoying Destiny 2 version 2, but it does feel a bit like they’ve confused longevity for faff. I know I bang on about this quite a lot, but the game feels pretty sluggish and unwieldy at times. It takes two minutes to get from the title screen to the character select screen. It takes another couple of minutes to load up the tower. Another minute or three to run around picking up bounties, decrypting engrams, getting Eververse packages, etc. Then you drop into the Tangled Shore after a minute or two of a loading screen. It takes you slightly too long to run to Spider to get some more bounties, then to run back out again. Etc etc. If you go back to orbit, then realise that you forgot to pick up any Vanguard bounties, then fuck it, day ruined. May as well yank the plug out of the socket and flush the PS4 down the toilet.

 

Couple that with the way that random rolls require you to open up the options screen, look at a gun, wait for the menus and nodes to populate so you can see what perks it has, etc. You can’t even see what the perks are just from the tooltips anymore, which is especially annoying when figuring out what ghost to use.

 

All very minor individually, but in aggregate, it feels like a significant chunk of the game is spent waiting or fiddling. I get the appeal of having the various areas as physical locations, but you could do all this through a menu and save me spending 10 minutes of every hour reading rllmuk while waiting for the game to start. Not to mention having to grind out mats to infuse weapons.

 

The actual value they’ve added to the game is in the form of stuff like quests, Gambit, the Dreaming City, the improved Vanguard and Crucible rankup systems, etc etc. It’s not in the form of random rolls, and wasting my time sprinting round the tower every time I load the game up. At least dump me in the tower when I log in, rather than in orbit.

[Shimmyhill]

1 hour ago, Oz said:

lord of wolves?

 

I got that yesterday, same old beast it always was!

[Scruff]

3 minutes ago, Shimmyhill said:

 

I got that yesterday, same old beast it always was!

 

Shimmy and a shotgun, crouching in a corner. You'd better go to him cuz' he's not gonna.

[Nate Dogg III]

Yeah, Lord of Wolves. Never had it in D1 so it’s like a whole new gun. 

 

I love how rare exotics are. Exactly as it should be. I’ve had one bit of warlock armour that’s absolutely amazing and I am never not using, and two weapons. Perfectly paced.