So after doing the first mission at the Cosmodrome, my new character had logged out. When I started it today, he was back on the Mars mission! Except this time it’s a new character with a couple of green weapons so I was able to damage enemies. Woohoo!
I have to kill enemies around this huge ship, collect things, then go over here and deposit them. Then that activates the next phase where I have to go over there and collect two things and deposit them somewhere else. Then I have to collect two more things and deposit them elsewhere. Then I get into the ship and go into a dark hole which leads me to killing two things so that I can collect things and deposit them.
So I spent two hours going through this mission with green guns. At the end, a couple of chests open up and I get purple and blue items! Woohoo! And then it says to go up the elevator, so I did.
Up the elevator after dispatching a few enemies, I have to make this jump into a small hole. This character has a jump that doesn’t go far on a single jump, an on a double jump floats up up up and up. So if I try to single jump into this hole, I can’t make it, I die. If I try to double jump, I go up and up and up and up, and then down and past the hole, even though I try to go forward as I’m coming down. I try this about 10 times.
On the 10th time instead of going into the hole, I end up going through a hole underneath me back out of the ship! Oh no! I’m out of the ship! How do I get back? The objective indicator is telling me to get back into the hole that’s closed now at the bottom of the ship. If I kill myself, I spawn right where I killed myself. Oh well. When I open the director, none of the missions available are actually available to me, since I don’t own the Witch Queen. So I guess this is like a special preview or something. Play our broken ass game by paying money, says Bungie!
I suppose there is one way to continue to where I was. Start a new character, play through the cosmodrome enough to get better guns. Then maybe the mission won’t take two hours. And then maybe I can pick a character who can jump into that hole up there.
So, like the crazy person I am, I did this. And this character got a Heavy weapon! So even though I only had grey weapons and armor this time (no greens), my heavy weapon was green, and the previous character hadn’t gotten a heavy weapon, and oh my god, it made things so much faster against the bosses who have just a ton of hit points.
So instead of 2 hours, it only took me 1h20 minutes to get to the same point again. And this character (hunter) has a jump that’s like a triple jump, so I made that impossible jump.
Phew!
But now it’s the start of a Hive mission, and I don’t have that kind of stamina. I quit to desktop, hopefully it will let me start that mission from that rally flag I planted.
So I got a random impulse to get back into Destiny after a long time off, and character build options are insane now? I was used to eight gear slots, choose the best gear for your playstyle and optionally grind for the exact drops you want. Pick one of three elemental class specialties and configure a few options about what grenades and jump powers to use.
Now gear (and previously cosmetic slots) are almost all craftable and upgradable and configurable with their own craftable and/or upgradable micro-upgrade slots. The elemental class specialties (of which there are now four) also have equippable micro-configurations of their own.
It was a bit overwhelming to wrap my head around as a returning player, but I’m impressed that when reaching the power grind stage I am flooded with goals to progress and every possible activity gets me something neat. They’ve got this skinner box well-calibrated.
I downloaded the free version on my PS5 to play around. The very first intro/tutorial gives me an assault rifle and a bad guy to shoot. But the enemy is immune to my bullets? They all bounce off with little ‘immune’ graphics popping up, and I die. The game says recommended level 1350. I check my gun, it says it is level 1350. I don’t get it.
The first guy you face you aren’t actually supposed to shoot, you have to defeat him in a dance battle. The best combo I found to defeat him was Moonwalk to Sprinkler to Running man.
I think the same thing happened to me. Destiny 2 is all kind of screwed up that way. I had to log out and log back in and then he started taking damage.
I kind of want a fighting game like Street Fighter now but everything is dance moves. Or there should at least be a character whose combos are all 90’s dance moves.
OK I worked this out. I was using a character that looked like was in my Bungie account from D1? Anyway it was at level 200 which is why it was not working. I rolled a new character that is at the right level.
That’s a pretty hefty sum of cash, far more than Bungie alleges Bansal made by selling Destiny 2 cheats. The studio calculated his earnings on the “Delta cheat” (downloaded 962 times) at between $9,610.38 and $124,098, while his profit on the “Ring-1 cheat” (downloaded 1,828 times) at between $36,377.20 and $455,172. Bungie said it has spent a “minimum of $2 million on game security staffing and software” in order to “combat the Bansal cheats and other cheating devices of Destiny 2.”
Bansal lives in India and that might make collecting on the ruling a challenge.
The comment at 28:59 was especially bizarre. Games produce revenue, part of that revenue will serve to pay for the development of the next game, be directly or indirectly, yes. But… that’s the case for Bungie for any and all developers, so how that justifies raising prices, from the pov of a consumer.
My take on the video is that it’s a little too hyperbolic. On the other hand, being a longtime player of the game, I just don’t see all the in-game messages free-to-play players get encouraging the microtransactions, so if the temperature of the pot is rising, this lobster hasn’t really noticed. That said, I have been annoyed by some of the trends I have seen, but “annoyed” is the word here, it hasn’t reached “hell” for me yet.
There are some parts of the video critique that strike me as unfair, like the part that you noted where money spent on the game doesn’t earmark it for improvements to that game. Though expectations may be different when it’s less of a discrete game and more live-service. But ultimately I agree with you. Inflation is a thing, and new games are funded from old ones all the time.
Right now Destiny 2 is in a bit of a content slump. One month into a new, 3-month season and various changes have conspired to leave players kind of bored, and then there’s summer and a new Diablo and Zelda and what have you. Throw in with that a bit of a controversy going on with Twitch, and quite possibly some streamers/Youtube commentators may be inclined to put forth a provocative take in order to generate discussion and/or traffic.
I played a million hours of Destiny, and then I played maybe half a million hours of Destiny 2… and then when I got my Series X, and Destiny 2 was on Gamepass, I started playing it again and got back into it.
Then, when it left Gamepass, I considered buying it… but ultimately didn’t because of how greedy and bullshit Bungie’s licensing for it was.
I mean, if Bungie had just charged for the new expansion, and given me access to all the old stuff? Like… every other game in the universe does? I would have gone for it, probably.
Instead, if you wanted to play Destiny, you had to buy the new expansion… AND ALL THE PRIOR ONES, if you wanted access to the stuff from them.
Oh, and what’s even better? A bunch of that old content that you’d be paying for? It’s not even in the game anymore! They “vaulted” a bunch of it… like, entire fucking planets of content, just removed from the game entirely… because of reasons?
Bungie’s management of content and purchases is just absurd and bullshit at this point, and it’s not worth dealing with.
Yeah, same. I played a million hours Destiny and about 20 hours of Destiny 2, and then tried to get back into it with Game Pass, but they had already vaulted a bunch of older content so I wasn’t sure which expansions I should even buy anymore if I wanted more single player content that was actually still around.
They seriously claimed a studio of their resources can’t produce more than a single PVP map in a year? Yet another studio being compared unfairly to Larian, I see!
