Tag Archives: Destiny

I guess I can’t really get away from Destiny.

Last night, I watched my housemates try to clear the “Eye of a Gatelord” mission in Destiny on their PS4s. They couldn’t. Maybe they’re just not good at shooters in general. Maybe I’m just too good at the game.

The PS4 controller is certainly an improvement on the PS3 controller for two reasons:

  1. I don’t feel like I’m going to break the damn thing while using it and,
  2. the thumbsticks on those things is a vast improvement over the previous generation.

But, I picked it up and without too much fuss–or dropping the boss battle for that matter, and cleared it no problem. It’s amazing what you can do when you can circle-strafe.

So, when I woke up this morning to a bit of a snow day, I pushed a change for a client and then fired up the Xbox One… to play some Destiny.

I played through the Heroic Daily on “The Black Garden” at 30 and the Heroic Weekly on “Valus Tu’arc” at 30.

And that was it.

I suppose I could’ve gone on to play my other two characters, but there’s a point where the addiction and compulsion would return and I’m not quite sure I’m ready to return to that level of constant disappointment.

Yet.

Ugh. I’m screwed to repeat this whole Destiny thing, aren’t I?

I was perfectly happy with Destiny until I attempted a raid, but I’m still playing it.

The inconsistency that is showcased in the raid make me question Bungie’s direction for all of their coop plans that ask for more than a single fireteam’s number of players.

Missions in Destiny are filled with cryptic narration that doesn’t necessarily explain the procedure to complete the current objective, but they attempt to give you context by throwing foreign terminology next to obvious direction. “The Fallen from the House of Winter is wanted by the Queen per a bounty. Let’s get them!” Here’s what I just heard: “the enemy something something clear everything out to win.” That’s typical tunnel-vision-esque focus.

To contrast, the raid is simply throwing you into mechanics that you may have used for another missions. I’ve heard this explained as the raid’s progression teaches players the mechanics that are needed in the final counter, but I’m not entirely sure that it’s obvious to a lot of players.

Of course, Bungie wants you to find five other players that you think are competent enough to figure everything out between yourselves. It’s the same rationale behind Nightfall strikes. I don’t buy that these moods should not have the matchmaking capability that the Strike playlists do.

Another example: when you find the first Relic, it’s not explained to the player that picks it up how to use it. To a player that is going into the run line, the only hints given are that it has some sort of extra ability is that it looks like a shield and that your Super gauge fills up way faster than normal while you’re holding the Relic.

For a game with such a tremendous budget and premier voice cast, how hard would it be to add in a few lines of direction? Even Dinklebot spouting an off-the-cuff analysis would have worked out just fine. “The cleansing aura’s power transformed into something. This relic looks like it could be powerful enough to bring down the Templar’s shields.”

The Vault of Glass feels disconnected from the rest of the game. I wish that either the rest of the game were modeled after the raid or that the raid was modeled after the rest of the game.

It won’t happen, but it’d be a nice thought. Bungie wants people to figure everything that isn’t part of a story mode mission out for themselves, and that’s fine if they ended up using the same designers or at least the same standards implemented with the rest of the game. I just wish they picked a direction and went with it.

Destiny is pretty much all I’m doing lately.

Screen Shot 2014-09-23 at 9.00.17 AMIf you’re playing Destiny on the Xbox 360, check out my profile (image-linked to the right) and send an application to my group. I’m trying to build out a small group of folks who don’t mind randomly helping other members with quests, and want to run harder level missions and strikes, all the way up to the goal of making weekly runs of the Vault of Glass.

It’s the second time that I’ve really tried to gather a collection of gamers for any sort of constructive purpose (although that pirate Ragnarok Online server I ran nearly a decade ago barely counts as a first attempt). I’d really like for SOLR to work out.

A full account of what I think about Destiny is proving to be difficult to compose. I think it’s because of the massive proportion of the hoping/wishful crowd were disappointed that the game is not being made available to them at launch. Bungie’s said that they have a decade-long plan for Destiny, and while I don’t think it’ll span ten years in the end, it should be expected that they would slowly distribute a considerable amount of content that they have produced over the accepted year-long cycle of a mainstream console shooter.

That’s not to say that I can’t write out my full thoughts on Destiny as it presently is, but that it’s proving pretty difficult. I can understand some decisions that Bungie made in developing the game as more of a platform, but others seem to be disharmonious from that same goal. It’s not the easiest thing to wrap my head around securely enough to pull out a logical thought. I am working on it, though. Expect to see something in the coming weeks.

In unrelated news, it seems that the Columbus studio is real and MLG is going to start using it. How interesting…1

  1. MLG: Major League Gaming Announces MLG.tv Columbus Arena Showcasing World-Class Competition Year Round ↩