Destiny In Progress Draft (as of now untitled)

Happy and Cringe Inducing Destiny Nostalgia:

I write this article with optimism for the future of the Destiny franchise. This positive feeling stems from my hundreds of hours history with the game and I draw much joy and feel the occasional pang of nostalgia for the agonizing stressful parts immortalized in past memes and gaming memories.

I’ve watched enough previews and the cutscenes pack on the sci-fi alien shooter carnage even more than the sci fi-alien shooter carnage of the first game. I think more of the same can be a good thing, but Destiny 2 is shaping up to be a bigger sequel with the addition of the open world and already vibrant gaming community gearing up for the release of one of the gaming industry’s respected heavy hitters.

I know the people I’ll be playing with again look forward to the September release of Destiny 2 more than I. I have other games pushed to my peripherals as of now in terms of currently playing games and awaiting the not too distant release of Shadow of Mordor 2 and Assassin’s Creed Origins, and Star Wars Battlefront 2.

Make no mistake I will be psyched when Destiny 2 arrives, I love it enough to pin an article of the best and worst components experienced by a player that’s played the vast majority of DLC content. but I think the totality of my experience with the prior game includes too frequent groans over an average to long play session.

Gjallarhorn

Ahh, the “most badass rocket launcher in any video game, ever” became the main sentiment when someone owning Destiny finally gets their hands on the Gjallarhorn Rocket launcher. The ability of the cluster tracking rockets, “Wolfpack Rounds,” enabled the Gjallarhorn to be the most coveted gun in the game. Many folks of the PvP and PvE community became enamored by the presence of this piece of Norse mythological inspired weaponry in their inventories or lack thereof. Gjallarhorn day, September 15th, a mere week after release Xur’s inventory stocked the weapon for a standard 17 Strange Coins. I remember those that bought it loved the shit out of it and used it in battle against Atheon and Crota. Many topics on GameFaqs read: Raid Help Gjallarhorn Required. The thing was a serious boss killer, was being the key word when the developers finally nerfed the weapon to oblivion.

Using five or Gjallarhorn blasts to take out a Raid boss ended up being manic peaks of gameplay experience. The wait to get the fucking gun was real. Many others echoed the same sentiment in much angrier terms than I did.

I obtained the weapon in the Omnigul Strike with PSN members Cheezedaddy and Deeznuts as an award for help killing off the Thrall’s bottom bitch. I screamed loudly as I have before with other video games. I knew the potential for what I could do in a raid now that I finally had that damn gun.

Loot Cave

Ahhhh, the loot cave. The duration of this adventure felt like an extended carnival mini game. The concept was a feature and not a bug. The Cave is a means of farming green, blue, and purple engrams by shooting spawning enemies. As the enemies spawn in a cave in the Russian Cosmodrome they die soon after and drop engrams.

Players congregate across a field by a cluster or rocks and pull out their blasters and fire their weapons in a storm against the spawning enemies and rush to seize the dropped orbs after enough blue and purple piles build up in the cave. They claim their share of engrams in one glorious pile and sail back to the tower to face the damn Cryptark. tThe whole adventure is to further please Cryptark Rahool and his devious ends and torture the gamer with his famous low success rate for decrypting those precious engrams.

Master Rahool,: Cryptark

The Cryptark in question does not look like a trustworthy Awoken male and his pretentious voice seems to suggests untrustworthiness. It’s an arrogant and high pitched Loki voice. He seems uninterested every time uncrypts an engram.
“These are forgeries. Someone is wasting our time!” The guy wastes our time by not having a reliable “encrypt all” button.

His blue face makes people yell at the screens as he says spews self-congratulatory crap at the player as he decrypts a series of twenty five blue engrams without any of them transforming into a legendary. That’s the shitty luck factor of Destiny at work. Master Rahool is a shitty character to deal with for anyone with a low tolerance of attention claiming annoyances every few seconds, like myself. I don’t like his yellow cloak or his glowing yellow Awoken eyes. I hope his storyline is axed or put to bed in a dramatic matter in Destiny 2.

Dinklebot

For a time Peter Dinklage voiced a key Destiny “character,” your ghost, the vertically challenged and robotic companion hovering over the player’s shoulder like a familiar. The quotes I loved most are lines from bits in the main story: “That wizard came from the moon!” The subsequent sample of the line appeared in a hilarious YouTube remix. Who could forget the perfect half assed attempt of surprise and fear of “We’ve woken the hive!” Dinklebot was a great tie in for the Fairly Odd Parents parallel “Dinkleberg” resemblance.

Dinklage’s lackluster performance led to a reimagining of the Ghost’s entire cadence and “soul” in the form of reliable voice actor Nolan North. Many gamers prefer NolanBot and yet others prefer the dearly departed Dinklebot. At least Dinklage was good for a laugh more so than being solely associated with providing the game with a lax attempt to voice a robot.

Being Stressed in Raids

10% of the Destiny community attempted the Raid missions, each one featuring a swarm of new mechanics. These raids are capable of making the player feel on top of the world to feeling defeated and stressed out. failing a stage dozens of times in a row causes tempers to fray and at times people leave the party in anger. I admit to feelings of stress after trying to be involved in the coordinated team Raids Destiny offers. I felf my patence was tested by the array of complex objectives. If you are the one that is messing the whole team up, one by one they will make this known. It’s happened to me and it’s happened to others.

RLG Trials and Tribulations

I believe this Destiny trait irked me the most more than anything else in the game. One of Destiny’s main flaws is the logic defying random loot generator. Let’s say as an example my fireteam wins a round of PvP team deathmatch and I rank 1st on my team. One of the potential too common consequences of victory is my other five team members may receive an item when winning while I am left with none. Another frequent scenario involves

Players Messing around in Tower

At the Tower, Destiny’s social setting, players interact without use of microphones. The only way to “speak” is with physical movements or suggestions of movements and gestures. One can perform the daily activities of running to the Tower Hangar area, the middle Traveler’s Walk control room, and the far North Tower and encounter other players participating in innate nonsense rather. These folks prefer t-bagging sprees, and creep on all female avatars or play dumb follow the leader routines. Accomplishing my item oriented goals as an Awoken female paints a target on my character for the juvenile urges on an opposing console located far away.

I remember annoying other players in this regards while waiting for other teammates to change out their gear in the Tower Kiosks

Xur

Old, crusty Xur, member of the nine. He is an old, bent, hunched over well traveled being of the universe. I can recall that exaggerated, loud old man voice even now. Xur, a merchant of sorts, is another roll of the Destiny dice.

This shadowy alien sells exotic weapons and armor for Friday and Saturday for a number of the Strange Coin currency. Plenty of folks in the community at large suggested something to the like of Xur Wanted: Dead or Alive because Xur had the tendency to have the same wares weeks and months before he arrives in Tower.
I did not voice my grievances to Bungie with text but I’d abuse Bungie vocally as Xur made the damn Thunderlord once again

Engrams

Even the fairly basic distribution of engrams could not be considered a deft success by the developers. The drop rate of legendries defies logic since the drop rates are increased at times. Drop rates range from frequent on rare occasions to scarce all other times. The game fails to compromise with a happy medium.

The illogic follows engrams right up to their decryptions in the hands of Master Rahool. And as a result mechanic and subsequent decryption mysteries

When Everyone gets Good Stuff from the Raid

As mixed as Destiny felt to me as an experience, the post raid distribution of legendary weapons and armor lead to excited shrieks of “Fuck yeah! I got the Helmet!” Yeah, bitches! Vision of Confluence, what now!?” These are some of the manic highs of Destiny and I hope the allotment of equipment during the post raid reward phase will be more generous next time around. When people have good equipment, we’re happy.

Upgrade System (spoiler: bad)

Players are guaranteed to make sacrifices to appease the abysmal upgrading system, another key flaw in Destiny. This is one of the recurring critical flaws that were not ironed out in any point since release. Players tried to address these concerns in the form of complaints to Bungie and their affiliates.

The system allows for gear to drop according to a player’s light level number ranging from one to forty two. A second number guided system

Nerfs and Buffs

The uneven spread of nerfs and buffs over the years allowed many intentional exploiters of op guns to creep up and seep into PvP combat. One of my friends had a KD of 45:0 one match after using the Vex Mythoclast in a vicious PvP match way back in the Atheon days of the game. The Thorn remained OP for the longest time before it’s poison effect was finally lessened.

Up until the Taken King content, the Gjallarhorn occupied too much of the attention of the player. People were obsessed with those Wolfpack Rounds. The same group of people were vexed when Bungie nerfed the super weapon so the owners felt they had no real viable heavy weapon option to use for Atheon and Crota. Others felt they had nothing left to play for when that desired weapon unncecesary amount of average Destiny gamer attention. These people felt they since they felt they had no more hope in terms of progression since the Gjallie was useless.

Shotguns remained powerful throughout PvP and Fusions were finally given that much needed buff right before the fourth DLC cycle came out. Additions like that fine tuned my PvP experiences and made me more aware of the nuances of Fusion Rifles, my favorite Destiny weapon. I

Community Notes

The main long-term benefit of enjoying Destiny leads me to interactions with a dynamic gaming community. I meet many cool people online I’m in regular contact with by the chain of people. I have a number of Fireteams to play with and a Twitch streamer carried me all the way to the Mercury Lighthouse. We shared the same grievances buyers had against Bungie like the endless amount of high priced expansion packs, four of them.

Gunplay

I sincerely hope Bungie can improve the core gunplay in terms of control and graphics. These were some of the most tightly executed elements of Destiny. Gliding through the air as a warlock, maneuvering around the side of a Titan boosting forward in mid air and blasting him with my fusion rifle feels amazing. The amount of control sensitivity in the air with the physicality of climbable and and on the ground I’d like better character models. I haven’t touched a beta but I’ve seen enough previews to grant me a feeling of optimism.

That being said all of the first game’s graphical aesthetics and overall feel in sensitivity control

[ZacharySchnellerParticipant]

focus: the good and bad of the effect nostalgia has hashed out in a video game canvas

[Travis TimmonsKeymaster]

Not bad. Definitely focus on actual experiences of things that happened to YOU. For example, for the Raids entry, talk about how, maybe, Crota, the boss of the X (I forget what it was called) raid needed perfect teamwork to be done, and talk about how either you or one of your teammates messed up and exactly what that did to the team. How many hours it took. Etc.

[Author]

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