Everything about Destiny is built around the multiplayer experience. You’re yelling at the clouds here…
Yet there’s a HUGE amount of content in the game, in the form of four campaigns of story missions, 8 planets public areas and missions, all public events, bounties, lost sectors, quests. All of which is now set to a difficulty childishly easy, and has been removed from the structure of the game.
That happened all at the sudden two weeks ago with this “reboot”.
On the other hand, the “forced” multiplayer experience with no matchmaking, the actually challenging content, comes in the form of ONE weekly mission (Nightfall the Ordeal), and an handful of raids (plus the PvP component).
This is like saying that on a client made of 90Gb, the only piece that is still relevant in the structure is like 15Gb. The remaining 75Gb is made of content made obsolete and gutted of any difficulty through a patch.
I don’t think this is normal at all and, once again, this something new they pulled off with this latest “freemium” release. I liked the Destiny that existed up to two weeks ago, and as a player of that game I can legitimately be pissed that it was changed for the worst. Even if the majority of players are content enough with a sliver of content to cycle forever, while the bulk of the content has been thrown away, for no good reason.
It’s like: “hey, this is a multiplayer game. It’s not for solo.”
So why 90% of the bulk of all content is solo?
My complaint isn’t that there isn’t enough of solo content. THERE’S PLENTY. It’s that the difficulty has been set too low by this last patch. That content has been destroyed. It’s not normal.
It’s as if in World of Warcraft everyone started from level 120, immediately making the remaning 100+ world zones of the game completely useless and impossible to be enjoyed anymore even if you wanted to. Sure, you can still go there. But with all the monsters and quests being grey (or “light green”, to be super accurate). How much fun is that? And how can this sort of move be praised?
This game has some of the worst loading times I’ve seen in games of this type, and that’s with having it on SSD. Typically 100gb installation sizes can be excused because lower compression generally leads to faster loading times but D2 got the worst of both worlds here.
What is your argument? And who is it for? Destiny is a MMO shooter, sharing the experience with others is at the heart of what they’re doing, and a huge bulk of that is in the endgame that I described. Like in any other MMO.
Choosing to omit the essential and challenging portion of the experience and then arguing that the game is too easy and boring doesn’t seem like a useful or even a genuine argument.
I think it would be great if they added extra difficulty settings to the single player missions but it might be completely intentional and they want to push people towards grouping. Shrug.
Didn’t they use to have harder versions of every mission? Was that just a Destiny 2 thing?
They only did that in Destiny 1. As @TurinTur pointed out (which I would have missed otherwise), they did have harder versions of the campaign missions in Destiny 2, but only after you finish the campaign, but at that point you’ve already finished all the missions.
This was at launch. I’m not sure how it works since the overhaul.
There are heroic story missions, accessible from the same panel with strikes and nightfalls. They are random from a playlist, though. I have no idea how many of them, but I read just yesterday there’s even a new Cosmodrome mission in Shadowkeep you can unlock and that seems to be added to this heoric playlist.
But on a 1 to 1 comparison an heroic story mission played solo now is slightly easier than the same mission of the standard campaign. So “heroic” right now is a difficulty slightly easier than what was the standard before. (as opposed to an heroic I tried two weeks ago that I had to quit because it was too hard, but I was under level)
Even if they fixed this there’s still a TON of non-mission content, like all planets areas and lost sectors. They would need just a “legacy content” kind of global setting. It’s not even technically challenging since they already have an universal scaling system.
They just don’t want to (because most people don’t care, because they want to push players to the newest content, etc…).
It looks like I found a small trick to take something back, manually.
Early today I tried a new strategy to play solo. I lowered the power level and selected one of the strikes that are directly available in a planet, instead of the random playlist. This indeed landed me in a solo strike, but it lasted half a minute because as soon I re-equipped my default gear other players joined in.
One of the things I really wanted to do and resented the game for not letting me, is playing the “Broodhold” strike. It’s a “new” strike because it was an exclusive PS4 a year ago, and it’s quite nice, it has an expansive area at the beginning with groups of enemies fighting each other, even a system of caves.
…But the strike itself is set in a inside a hole in the ground nearby, so what happens when you play in a group is that everyone beelines to the objective. I simply wanted the opportunity to explore the whole area at my own pace, and jump in and out of those fights just for fun.
I eventually tried the only solution left: set the Windows firewall to block the internet ports.
And it actually seems to work.
By default in the incoming connections tab I had a bunch of automatic Destiny 2 rules. This because I changed the client, so there were rules for the old Battlenet version too. I simply erased all of these, and then created two new ones. One for TCP, one for UDP. I set the rule to work on the Destiny2.exe only, and to block local and remote ports: 1935, 3097, 3478-3480
Then another two rules for the outgoing connection section too, same as before. I tried at first only with the two rules for incoming connections, but I still was getting matchmade. When I added the two outgoing ones instead it seems to have have done the job.
Now whenever I want to get back to default I just need to deactivate those four rules.
I didn’t have the time to test that strike to the end, but for the first time I was able to explore the area and realized there’s even a public event that can be triggered. I don’t even understand how it works, maybe strikes still have parts of the map shared with a public zone. In any case I was able to begin and complete the public event, solo, and from within the strike instance.
It’s something. Having some way to play the strikes is a very nice option to have at least a section of content that is fun to solo. Since this works for strikes then it means it works for Nightfalls too, the easier levels. The Nightfall version of the strike SHOULD also have level scaling, so I think there are options to manipulate those accurately. …Unless they have removed those too with the new patch.
Next time I want to figure out why the wikis list 17 different strikes, but the “achievements” in the game only show 15.
Sometime people complain too.
There’s a post on reddit right now that has the most upvotes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/djp1td/removing_the_mandatory_red_war_campaign_was_a/
One of the comments:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/djp1td/removing_the_mandatory_red_war_campaign_was_a/f493zu7/
Bungie has thought of everything. The port blocking trick doesn’t work either.
Apparently they have reserved some servers when peer to peer connection doesn’t work. So you play a strike all alone, but halfway through it you get joined (systematically, I tried this at least 30 times) by a group of chinese players and a guy named “Exploiter Addicted”.
I was playing the game in a window while monitoring connections through TCPView. There weren’t any connections to those guys, so there’s no way to block this.
I was having fun for the 5-10 minutes I could play. But the strike was quite easy even played solo with my baseline 750 power character. And again, I’m far from playing good.
I’m done with this game.
Call me when they have a “FUCK OTHER PLAYERS” DLC, I’ll buy it for $50.
I bought Forsaken. I couldn’t help it, I’m enjoying this so much. Decided as a new player to dive into the campaigns, so I’m currently doing the Red War and really enjoying it, especially now that I know what comes after. The last time I tried it, it felt like a slog because I didn’t know where the game was going. Now that I know I’m enjoying it immensely.
Wait, you still have to buy Forsaken? I thought they made all the old content free, and only Shadowkeep was paid content now?
It’s odd, they kind of chopped up Forsaken so that some pieces are part of the base free game (Gambit, Dreaming City, Tangled Shore) but others are unavailable without the Forsaken expansion (The story missions, heroic versions of them, exotic quests, raid, etc.).
Most of the content is free. Basically, the line is between Year 1 stuff and anything that came after, but there are some caveats.
If you want all the DLC content, you have to buy them.
You can still run Strikes solo, just requires use of a firewall.
The old means of gaining +light was better than now. Would’be been nice to do any content to get + instead of just certain areas, say you really liked one of the old Raids, why couldn’t you continue to do that for upgrades – its still a raid after all.
You’d have to better explain me how this works.
I tried adding to the old rules another two to block all ICMPv6 connections in and out, through the usual Windows Firewall, but it still the same.
I guess I could try blocking all IPv6 as well and see…
Basically the game has a set of IP ranges in AWS(?) that runs the game services, maps(?) and whatnot.
Then it will try to connect to other players through various ports, if those connects fails, you’ll start the instance by yourself.
I ran the ruleset above for when I tried to do the ‘event’ thing that required you to pickup a lot of chests and kill minibosses, 50/100 or w.e. it was, and other players would just rush through or I’d join games ending. With that ruleset I had instances for myself.
So I block ALL outbound UDP 3097, and UDP 32000-65535
Seemed to cover it mostly. I’ll try now that its on steam to see if it works differently.
Finished the Red War campaign today, started the Osiris one. Great stuff.
Forgot I had enabled those firewall blocks and loaded up a Nightfall that only had me in it… was a … tiny bit tricky.