Anyone on PS4 available to do the Nightfall in the next few hours? Send me a PSN message at “WhollySchmidt” or tweet me @WhollySchmidt so you can get my attention if I’m not checking the forum.
One thing I’m kind of amazed by in Destiny 2 is how often I get lost in missions. You really have to use a combination of the compass telling you where to go next, and a really keen eye on where you could be asked to go next.
I remember this used to be a huge problem in video games. Especially a lot of first person shooters. I’d get lost all the time and wouldn’t know how to make progress. “Where am I supposed to go next?” was my most common refrain back then. And then developers wised up and started putting some effort into guiding the player. Put a light over here to draw the player’s eye. Paint the area where the player is supposed to go a different color to draw their attention. All these techniques were used, and we were none the wiser. We were being guided without it being too obvious. Quite brilliant actually.
It’s just something I’ve gotten so used to, that getting lost in Destiny 2 is weird. Why do I keep running into seeming dead ends and missing turns and dark hallways I was supposed to turn into but missed. It’s like the secret pass that developers make to draw my eye without me even knowing didn’t get made in a lot of Destiny 2.
In other Destiny 2 news, I guess I have completed the blue missions on all 4 planets now. So I think that’s it for the single player content?
So the four quests were:
- Drang and Strum: I finished this with @Don_Quixote. We both got our Strum weapon.
- A quest that requires me to finish the Raid as the first step. Ouch.
- A riddle something to do with rats? WTF?
- Mida Multitool quest! Yay! I’ll tackle this one this week. I was so happy to get this last night.
This weeks nightfall was quite tricky, the first week one was the easiest so far imo.
There is a lot of blue-thingies to shoot for time, best to have one guy focusing on them while the other two just keep on killing and pushing forward. Some areas you could skip some of the mobs to push ahead.
Use rockets, snipers and Supers. If you have a good arc sword, it is great vs the knights, just make sure someone else is taking fire at that time.
The strike two weeks ago with the boss that keeps disappearing and electrifying everything had an area where someone could wait and keep shooting respawning anomalies while the other two players continue ahead. You max out the total available time at 30:00 though, so once the player on anomaly duty hits the cap, they catch up and then everyone goes to end together.
That didn’t work well with the first group I played with. We tried three attempts and the time we “gained” never offset how the two of us that went ahead had our progress slowed by our lack of firepower.
When I did it with two other people (via the guided game queue), we didn’t try any respawning anomaly hijinks, we just all stayed together and worked as a team—the slow is smooth and smooth is fast approach. Finished with time to spare.
This week’s has a similar area, where someone can hang back and keep shooting respawning anomalies for a while while the others proceed. I did it with some randos for my Warlock and it just took two attempts, and the anomaly trick was helpful.
But since I didn’t know where that trick was last night, I tried again last night for my Titan our group just all stuck together, and it did not go well. Didn’t even make it to the boss on either of our attempts.
So maybe the anomaly trick is the way to go this week, that might be what we try tonight.
Final PC requirements announced:
Minimum specs
CPU Intel: Intel Core i3-3250 3.5 GHz or Intel Pentium G4560 3.5 GHz
CPU AMD: AMD FX-4350 4.2 GHz
GPU Nvidia: Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB or GTX 1050 2GB
GPU AMD: AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB
RAM: 6GBRecommended specs
CPU Intel: Intel Core i5-2400 3.4 GHz or i5 7400 3.5 GHz
CPU AMD: AMD Ryzen R5 1600X 3.6 GHz
GPU Nvidia: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB or GTX 1060 6GB
GPU AMD: AMD R9 390 8GB
RAM: 8GB68GB of free hard drive space and Windows 7 64-bit, Windows 8.1 64-bit, or Windows 10 64-bit.
My PC’s CPU is below those minimum reqs. I have 8GB RAM where they list 6GB as minimum. And the GPU is barely above it (I have a 7950, and they list a 7850 as the minimum), and yet, the beta ran really smoothly for me. I think that CPU requirement is over inflated. It’s a conspiracy with CPU manufacturers.
Did the beta have the open world map sections though?
Only as part of the Strike. So you’re right, maybe it wasn’t a good test for the more taxing parts of the game.
So are we all pretty much done with Destiny 2? I haven’t logged on in about a week. I hit level 290, did all the content save for the raid, and I’m not feeling any compulsion to go back. Had a fabulous time and I’ll definitely be back for DLC, but for now I think I’m good.
It’s weird… I played iron banner a bunch, but overall, the PVP seems less fun.
Likewise, while the open world is way better than the first destiny, I’m already kind of bored with it.
I think that part of the problem is that finding loot is boring…
I already have damn near every exotic in the whole game. What’s worse, none of them are really that great.
It’s cool that the drop rate for exotics meant you found them more frequently, but they didn’t really make many new ones. So after playing it for a few weeks, you kind of find everything that’s good, and now there’s no sense of progression.
Normally I wouldn’t care that much about the progression aspect, but since the PvP feels so flat, I dunno.
The growing sentiment on reddit, which I mostly agree with, is that Destiny 2 has been flattened out. Systems large and small were streamlined and refined from D1*, improving a lot of things you’ll notice quickly if you were a D1 player for a good first impression, but over time you realize they also took some of the excitement, variety, and challenge out of the long term rewards—both in game rewards, and just the feeling of being rewarded for your time. Balance is a big part of this narrative too, that in seeking balance (between weapons and classes, in PvE and PvP) so everything is “fair”, the fun has been diminished. For example, Iron Banner (PvP playlist that rotates in and out every few weeks) was completely neutered. It no longer factors in player power (light) level like D1, a key distinction, and the gear—like all of D2 gear so far—is no more powerful than what you can get with any other activity and enough time (also a raid complaint, the high level raid used to be the only PvE way to get the most powerful gear, now it’s all the same power cap).
I get that, and I feel the same way, though I’m not ready to jump ship yet, I’m not frustrated to the extent that /r/DestinyTheGame is. They’re just saying a lot of things I agree with.
My Warlock just it 305 (the current power cap), my Titan is one good helmet away from 305. I’ll start my hunter next and get them maxed out too (should take about a week at my pace). I care enough about cosmetic differences that I’m going to grind a little more with the Warlock and Titans to get particular armor sets (no real in game difference). Public events are the way to grind the faction tokens I need for the specific stuff I’m after, and that’s the easiest, “most fun” thing to grind. It’s a limited pool of activities, but it feels good to just jump in with strangers and wreck a boss in a couple minutes and then zip off to another location to do it again.
I haven’t done the raid at all because I just haven’t had the time, but I definitely want to run through it a few times. I’m looking forward to that for the experience, even if the rewards apparently aren’t that great.
The big question mark for me is how D2 will change going forward, because D1 changed a lot over time. It seems obvious there’s a lot that could already be improved in D2, but at the moment I suspect the lack of meaningful change to anything fundamental is because the PC version still hasn’t launched. I hope that once that’s up and running we’ll start to get a better picture of the future of D2 and whether we can expect them to address its weaknesses, or if this averaged out, fun-balanced-out, version is just the way things are from now on. I’m not ready to write the game off, and of course I’ll return for the DLC (at least the ones I’ve already “bought”).
*and when I say “refined from D1”, sadly I don’t mean refined from D1 as it stands now. The story is that apparently the D2 team split off from D1’s live team far enough back that a lot of basic quality of life updates D1 made are missing here, which is very frustrating. With all the management/development problems D1 had, it sounds like D2 hasn’t been able to turn that around much yet. Maybe things will move better from here on out, but it’s discouraging to actually see a few glaring regressions in QOL that can’t be explained by anything other than development that’s either poorly managed or constrained in some way.
The only thing I’ve done for two weeks is log in once when some friends needed a 4th for Trials. Missing both milestones and Xur twice in a row, and totally fine with that. I would like to do the raid a couple of more times, but other than that I’m done. And I’m too lazy to organize a raid party, so in practice that’s not happening either…
Every aspect of the crucible is just garbage; nobody I know played it for any reason other than the milestones and the Trials achievement. I’ve done every public event dozens of times. I’ve probably seen every content variation of every strike. All my characters are 300+, and grinding out the last couple of points wouldn’t achieve anything. Where’s the part of the game that’s worth playing?
I’ve already paid for the DLC, so hopefully be back for that. But this is not at all the curve I expected after all the talk around original Destiny.
A major problem with the crucible is that you can’t pick what type of game you want to play.
Wtf?
Other problems with the crucible:
- Insanely long queue times. I do not understand this at all. You need 8 players for a match; this is a game with millions of players, and all of them are funneled to the same rubbish playlist. How can it take 2 minutes to get a game?!
- Horrible matchmaking despite the long wait; having premade 3-4p teams play against single players is not fun for anyone.
- Mercy rules so strict that I’ve literally never seen one trigger.
- Game design that pretty much forces the players to stay together in one big blob.
I was wondering that myself last night. i never really had fun in Destiny 2. The game never pushed back, unlike Destiny 1. I was hoping I’d get to play with my friends more, and we’d get to do a raid, but one of them has crap internet, and one lives in Poland now, so the timezone never allows us to play together. So Destiny 2 has been a complete bust for me.
I’ll try those missions from Ikora you guys keep telling me about that have difficulty levels. That’s my only hope left for challenging single player content.
Whew! I guess I can miss this on PC then!
I personally am not done with Destiny 2. I am, however, pacing myself. I will not be doing the daily checkin to run activities and gain marks (can’t gain marks in D2 anyway), instead I pop in every few days, maybe once a week, see what’s going on. Get some exp for the clan, grab more engrams, but not to the point where it feels like a grind. Figure I can stay in for the long haul way better that way.
I think one issue with D2 is that the gear itself just isn’t exciting enough. Where’s the awesome stuff like Icebreaker, Fatebringer and Obsidian Mind. The gear just is all so homogenous that there isn’t anything worth grinding for.
For me it’s less about higher light, but rather super badass play. I want those crazy things dropping in raids and nightfall’s so there is a prize for doing them.
It’s not even cross-platform play is it? So all these console players who are ‘pretty much done’ won’t affect the PC user base?
Or do you mean the five- six weeks of play people got before dropping it indicates an insufficient value proposition?