Destiny 2

Quote from AZ09

Aw, dont take Cayde, he's one of my fav characters. Besides, im still trying to get max light again.

oh yeah, thats going to take some time

I just got a bit over 350 (which probably isnt all that bad considering that i started playing last week).

The crashes all of a sudden stopped (I can not explain why) so I was able to play the faction rally over the weekend and get to rank 50 on New Monarchy (probably not the best choice).

I still have to play through the story on 2 of my chars and try to explore Mars but I guess Milestones right now have priority.

On Friday I tried to play a Heroic Strike while being on power lvl 338 and that was no good idea considering the recommended entry level for that activity is 350 meanwhile.

Just 5mins ago I collected my 2nd catalyst (Darcy) and got the one from the faction rally (sweet business). I got the impression warmind has much more gameplay to offer because of all the collectables.

and weekly missions involve doing heroic strikes

i got the first 3 done on one of my chars but that was really no joy

why do the devs think that its a good idea to spawn dozens of npcs near the player and give them a insta kill perk

at one mission ive spent +90 mins in a boss fight with my team before we finally gave up

some strikes are ok but when there is this stupid insta kill modifier on a strike which has tons of fast melee type enemies you are doomed to fail.

fun is something different.

OK

3 heroic strikes on each of my 3 chars done

when you know which strike is an absolute no-go and if you go nice is slow through it its possible to finish them

But its still strange that heroic strikes have a recommended entry lvl of 350 while nightfalls (which are supposed to be harder and also have better rewards) still have a recommendation of 270.

Here the developers have done something that defies any logic.

Ill add you when im back home

big difference to the console version?

yeah levelling can take a bit

It took me 4 or 5 week to get to 335. But I guess with an active clan it is going to be faster due to the clan engrams.

Atm I can't even tell if I have an active clan since there was a leadership dispute followed by a meltdown one week ago. The usual shit.

dunno

im not experienced enough guiding people through raids etc.

it would take some time getting into that and it would require a good amount of time getting enough active members that play together any earn engrams

i am a lousy zone capturer

Destiny 2 in its current state (a small review No.2)

I did a review previously about the game but a lot has changed.

Like: My very initial commentary on the inability to change the volume of the music compared to the voice is... well you get used to it. I dont notice it anymore. (it still sucks that such fundamental parts of the game are missing)

For recording reasons I switched the language to english and have to say that some stuff simply sounds better in german eventhough the english voice actors are great. Its just that german allows a really mean kind of humour. I like that. Germans can be so mean.

But ok. Lets see what the game currently has to offer.

The current state lasts until 4th September, then the new DLC gets released and I had to learn that the balance of this game changes completely once every few months.

I guess best example are the Strikes.

Strikes are small missions which you can play in 15-20 mins together with 2 other guardians.

All of the strikes exist in 3 different versions.

The Vanguard Strikes which are supposed to be the entry level that every player, regardless of experience and level can play.

Then we have the Heroic Strikes which are supposed to be harder versions.

And then there are Nightfall Strikes which were meant to be a special version with special difficulty but also special rewards (exclusive to the Nightfall).

A few months ago this was basically the way how strikes worked. Vanguard strikes really were something for the beginners that wanted to learn how the strikes worked before they went to the Heroic strikes. Heroics were more difficult but by far not impossible to do for a casual player.

Nightfalls were even more challenging and also offered a Prestige mode where players could increase the difficulty even more via modifiers but also got higher scores with this increased difficulty.

Well. Then the Warmind DLC got released and mixed this nice little learning curve.

Vanguard strikes are still easy.

Heroics which originally were easier than Nightfall now require you to be lvl350 while the Nightfall (the strikes with the special rewards) only require that you are at lvl270.

On top of that do Heroic Strikes meanwhile have their own modifiers. Negative ones which insta-kill you if you jump, or if you receive a melee attack... or they simply make you twice as vulnerable... all that on top of the 350 lvl requirement. The latest patch made these mods less severe but that were just minimalistic changes that player barely notice. When I get put into the Nokris Heroic strike when the Blackout modifier is active I really have to think twice if I continue to play or if I abort it right at the start because you get spammed with hordes of fast enemies which insta-kill you with melee attacks.

However, that explains a bit what I mean with "current state". The balance of the game constantly changes and sometimes I have my doubts that the developers really know what they are doing.

But ok.

Lets see what else this game has to offer.

There is a singleplayer storyline (which is relative easy) plus currently two small storylines from the DLCs.

With small I mean small. Bungie has created one of the most interesting game universes with Destiny but somehow the storytelling during the campaign is a bit strange.

I would blame it on the choice that my Characters dont have a voice and appear to be "passengers" instead of "actors". NPCs appear more important than the own character. You have no own story... you play in the stories of the NPCs and your only thing to do is to follow orders. "Go here", "do that".

Bungie used to be good at story telling but somehow they forgot how that works. Not that the story is bad, it just misses the personal touch. The part where you feel special in this world, the part where NPCs are more than just a few unimportant vendors.

Thats just my opinion on it. It is still fun to play... it's just a weird feeling after you finished playing it where you start to ask "what was my role in all of that?".

Playing the storyline is the very first you do in this game.

Your next step is to explore the public worlds. The European Dead Zone, Titan, IO, Nessus, Mercury, Mars.

Well, actually thats not 100% true. During the storyline you already do missions on these worlds. Beautiful places, thats for sure.

But what do these places have to offer after that point?

Well, every world has a vendor selling weapons and armor. And you need to earn token on these worlds to get your hands on these items. So you start exploring the worlds, discover treasure boxes, kill smaller bosses, take part in public events, do patrols or explore lost sectors.

Certainly there is no need to explain the discover and kill part of that, so lets take a look at the public events.

Public events are frequent mini-missions that happen in specific regions of these worlds. They repeat every 10-20mins (that depends on the worlds) and all players on the map can join them and fight together. For most of these Public Events you dont need other players to finish them... but it helps alot if you are not fighting alone.

There are multiple types of Public events... there is one where you have to destroy a large tank, one where you have to disrupt a hive ritual, one where you need to stop a fallen glimmer expedition, one where you have destroy a drilling platform, one where you need to kill a fallen servitor and one where you have to defend a crashed war satellite. A nice variation of events.

These missions are not that difficult and they are a great way to farm tokens. There is also a Heroic version of these events which unlocks when fulfill specifc requirements during a normal Public Event. The normal Public Even turns into a Herioc one and you have to kill an extra Boss enemy. That will double your reward and is always worth to aim for.

I actually like that part of the game very much... its a relaxed gameplay.

You can combine it with Patrols so its even more rewarding.

Patrols small mini challenges. "kill 10 enemies of this kind", "collect loot from x enemies", "scan this object", "explore this area". It's usually something I do between Public Events to increase my rewards.

All worlds have Dungeon like areas. This are the Lost sectors. In every Lost Sector you have to fight through a bunch of small enemies until you face a Boss. Once defeated you can open his chest and collect the loot. A straight forward mechanic. My personal opinion on this is that it would be alot more interesting if these Lost sectors were harder but offer special rewards (instead of the normal loot). I don't do them much because they are not rewarding enough.

I forgot to mention that there are also Adventures and Heroic Adventures on these planets/moons. That are small story quests which reveil more about the Destiny Universe. Actually pretty interesting but since its not very rewarding I don't play them much. I played them once (some twice)... thats enough.

After all the planetary stuff it is usually time to jump into strikes. I explained that stuff above already.

I guess people play alot Nightfall strikes because that are the only ones which offer special rewards. Items that you can't get anywhere else. The drop chances are relative low.

Some players got rewards after their 3rd try... others have done +150 Nightfalls and still havent got their special gun. I belong to the unlucky ones (just to point that out).

After 3 weeks of trying I came to the conclusion that I don't want to grind for Nightfall items anymore. If I get them in a random run then it's totally fine for me.

Next to the PVE activities I described so far there also is PVP. Yay!

I loved PVP... well... I loved it until last week the developers thought it would be a nice idea to change the way how PVP works. They changed the 4vs4 into a 6vs6. I wasn't all that bad in 4vs4, I have my problems getting used to the 6vs6.

I don't know why the developers think it would be a good idea to put even more players on these small PVP maps. Not only does matchmaking and loading maps take longer. The main problem in my eyes at the moment is that the maps are too small which currently leads to a large amount of spawnkilling.

Did I mention that I doubt that the developers know what they are doing?

After playing it the 2nd week now I got better in 6vs6 but the spawnkilling is still a problem that needs to be adressed.

Anyways, there are of course different PVP modes, one that is a bit like capture the flag, one ordinary "kill as many as possible", a supremacy where you not only have to kill the other but also make a 2nd point if you collect an engram which the dead players drop. Then there is a competetive mode where the team has 10 lives and once the lives are consumed then you lose. And on weekends there is the Trials of the Nine PVP game mode which I never played. Dunno what it is like... Can't tell you. It requires to have a pre-made team and it's not so easy to find such one.

The Warmind DLC introduced a new game mode called Excalation Protocol.

I face this one with mixed feelings.

When I explored Mars I did multiple tries with other (random) players to play this game mode and failed EVERY time .

Bungie designed this to be a game mode for a normal fireteam of 3 players. I tried it with up to 5 other random people and at best we got to lvl3 of 7.

I'm not sure what the developers believe what pro-gamers we are... it's just not realistic to complete it in the way the developers designed it. Oh... and my tries back then were after the difficulty was reduced already.

That however, does not mean that this game mode is not fun to play.

Ok. How does this game mode work?

It's relative easy. The team activates a platform and then from all directions multiple waves of enemies spawn. You have to kill them all while a timer is ticking. At the end of every level 1-2 bosses spawn which you have to defeat. Once the time runs out you lose.

IF you manage to kill all waves of enemies and the boss, you can advance to the next level and face even harder waves of enemies. Until you defeat the final boss at lvl7 and there you get your loot (extremly good weapons and armor).

How to beat it?

Well, players figured out that higher numbers do the trick.

They meet on Discord to form teams.

Then they switch instances until 3 players of that group are in the same instance and these 3 each invite 2 others into a new fireteam. So in the end with alot of effort they manage to get 3 fireteams with 3 team members (each) into the same instance and these 9 players then fight through the waves of enemies.

And what should I say... with 9 people this game mode is very easy. Originally the developers want this stuff being done only with 3 people. I was told that only one 3 man team ever did beat it (Im not sure if that is true).

Meanwhile I finished lvl7 about 30-40 times. The problem is the weapons from this game mode drop randomly with a very very very low chance. So you have to play it over and over again until you have luck.

Getting the armor is less gambling but also a matter of patience because you can open the final boss chest which contains the armor only once a week, because only once a week you can earn the key for that chest. So earning the full armor set takes at least 5 weeks.

I had a bit luck with the weapon drops... got them all (some of them multiple times).

My main point of critic on this game mode is the lack of proper matchmaking that would allow more than 3 players to fit into a fireteam. Setting up the team for this game mode, bringing them all into the same instance etc. takes longer than playing from lvl 1 to 7.

I like this game mode, it's just way too complicated to get a team together. Without discord you would be lost.

Last but not least... erm... what am I writing here.

My opinion about the raid is not good.

The fact that I have an opinion on it means that I finally have played the first of the raids layers.

The raid is supposed to be the ultimate endgame activity in this game.

Designed for 6 players it requires you to know what you are doing and to communicate alot with the other team members.

At this point I need to mention that technically the Heroic Strikes are combat wise (at least currently) harder than the raid.

The tricky part about the raid are the gameplay mechanics behind it, which require alot of communication and coordination. I am not against that... Im not neccessarily a big fan of that... I accept it the way it is.

My biggest problem is that these mechanics make absolutely no sense. There is no logic behind it.

The raid happens on the flagship of the Cabal emperor and your task is to kill that fat idiot.

You land on this giant ship and his guards do nothing... they let you in.

How nice of them.

Then you start killing some of them, stealing some keys and getting access to more rooms. Well, ok... fine with me.

The first one is the bathhouse of the emperor. The gameplay mechanic here is to take a buff, jump into poisonous bath water (the buff protects us for a short time), kill more cabals and at the end destroy the emperors bath supplement. What? Destroying bath supplement... that is what we are supposed to do? Why? WTF?

Ok, up to the next room.

The emperors garden... what are we going to do here? Oh we grab some pollen... sneak through that garden to some glowing plants while trying to avoid that the emperors dogs see us. There we get a buff and then we kill the poor dogs. Again, WTF?!? Whats the point of that? Why did these dogs have to die? I dont get it?

Ok, maybe the last of the 3 rooms makes more sense.

ROFL, the circus. One part of the team stands on platforms shooting at blinking lights while the other part of the team does a stupid ball game while running in circles and jumping through holes in walls. And at the end all 6 players have to do that ball game together.

Im giving up here.

I have no logical explanation how anything of that helped to defeat Calus the Cabal emperor. No, I cant explain it... Im feeling like in a madhouse and being and asshole for destroying the bath supplement and killing his dogs.

Wait, wait... the boss fight.

Of cource, once you approach the throne room Calus simply opens it, welcomes you and then the shooting starts.

The teams gets teleported into the void (how is that even possible?)... half of the team grabs some void balls and returns to the thrones room... shooting... shooting... doing even more strange gameplay mechanics just to realize that Calus is just a robot which in the end gets destroyed. Raid done.

I dont know how the raid even fits into the existing storyline and I have no idea why the stuff we have done in the raid was even neccessary. Everything felt completely misplaced, even unimportant.

Nothing of that had anything to do with the rest of the game. If it at least would fit to the story... but it doesn't.

At least I tried the raid... I don't like it. Maybe the upcoming content of the Forsaken DLC will provide better stuff.

Well, this was a basic summary of the content you can expect in this game.

This only covered the always available activities.

There are timegated activities which for sure are worth to be mentioned.

1. There are the faction rallies. They (based on the current state of the game) happen 3 time per season and are active for exactly one week. You have to decide which of the 3 factions (New Monarchy, Dead Orbit or the Future War Cult) you want to support and can pledge to them.

During that week you have to play specific activities to earn faction tokens which you can use to get access to special faction gear and faction weapons. At the end of that week the faction with the most player support wins and the players which pledged to that faction can a new gun almost for free.

2. Every few weeks there is the Iron Banner event which is a PVP mode in which players have to prove their worth. Again, you can earn token which you can use to buy special items. I considered this event special because it originally was the only one that was 6vs6 (which now is standward even in quickplay PVP).

3. There are seasonal events... Current the Solstice of Heroes is running which is nice if you look at the items you can earn and the revamped missions you can play. The grind in my eyes is a bit heavy but ok... its designed for 4 weeks. My main problem with this event is that you get forced into activities you dont want or can not participate in. E.g. many players currently have a problem with the way how PVP works. But there are two lengthy PVP requirements during this event so either you do PVP or you ignore this event altogether.

Same and in my eyes worse is the requirement to play prestige Leviathan raids and other normal raids. What do people do that do not have other players to play the raids with them? What do people do without microphone (raids require communication)? What do people do which can not do raids because of language barriers?

The PVP requirements in this event in my eyes are not even that much of a problem... if you invest enough time to do the PVP grind you will eventually get it done. But I think that the Raid requirements will be a real problem for a good amount of players. Probably the same can be said about a requirement that asked players to play 5 heroic strikes with another clan member? Solo players probably never get a chance to finish it.

4. Secret quests. I am not sure if I can call it an event since it's a weekly thing which started just 3 weeks ago (at least players noticed it the first time 2 weeks ago). The developers secretly introduced a hidden quest which can only be solved during the weekend. This quest is brutally hard (at least to the majority of players) and aims to satisfy the end game collectors. The objective is to patiently wait until a specific public event happens on IO (only on weekends) which then spawns a few smaller bosses you have to find and kill. Only then you can enter this quest (note: since the public events are a bit random in this areas some players had to wait +6 hours before they even got the chance to play this quest).

The quest itself starts with a sick jumping puzzle that drove me crazy in the beginning (I am bad at doing precise jumps but meanwhile get it done fairly quick) and then you have to fight your way to high-lvl enemies until you have not one, not two... but three high-lvl bosses that you need to defeat (I dont know any other activity in this game where you have to fight more than one boss at the same time).

And since that is not bad enough... you have to do all of that within just 20 minutes. If the time runs out you get kicked out of this quest and have to wait for the next public event (and pray that it wont take another 6 hours to spawn).

Reward is the currently best weapon in the game. So the motivation is high.

I failed... dunno... maybe 8 times. With every try you get better with the jumping part (which saves time for the finaly fights) and you are able to develop strategies how to kill the enemies more efficiently. I mean, I failed 8 times and then when I succeeded for the first time our team still had more than 6 minutes left on the counter. It's doable, but involves a strategy and several practice runs.

Thats actually the kind of content which I like. The player has it in his/her own hands to beat the mission and get the reward. It's not a random number generator which shows you the middle finger every time at the end of a Nightfall strike.

Oh... and when you did this mission once you need to do it on heoric difficulty a few more times to upgrade your weapon. Again more difficult than the first run but surprisingly I never failed it since my first successful run.

Fortunately once you have successfully finished the mission once you can instantly enter the heroic version of the quest and don't have to wait for the public event anymore.

This quests hold another "secret" item when you explore the heroic version a bit. You can unlock a special exotic ship when you find 6 hidden chests and solve a small puzzle.

Like I said... this is exactly the kind of content I like. A challenging task with a guaranteed reward.

I really hope that more of that stuff gets introduced later.

How will Destiny 2 change in just a few weeks.

Some info got released... alot of stuff is relative vague. But the way how strikes work will change. Heroic strikes will get removed (dunno if they return later). Nightfalls get more difficult and the Prestige version gets removed. Normal strikes will have 3 new difficulty levels and you can not play difficulty levels which are significantly lower than your current power level, so there always will be a challenge. Higher difficulty will reward better items.

Trials of the Nine get removed for the entire season (1 year). Flashpoints will only last 4 days and allow players to do Heroic Advantures on the current Flashpoint planet. Cayde-6 will die. Two new areas will be introduced to the game (one of them will be for normal story gameplay and regular gameplay while the other will be for endgame content only). New completely new weapon system, new mod system, item collections... etc.

Destiny 2 will change significantly in year 2 (launch 4th September).

Which brings me to the price tag of this game.

If I do the math and put together the launch price of the main game, the first 2 DLCs of year one, Forsaken and its 3 DLCs I get to a pretty shocking $160.

Yeah, thats not so nice. Especially if you consider that there is even an ingame shop where you can even spent more money on skins, animations and ingame currencies.

Well, to be fair... you really dont have to pay the 160$... the launch prices are not relevant to people which want to buy the game now.

I got the main game for free in when I bought my PC last October/November and paid about 25€ for both DLCs. Since Forsaken is new I would need to pay the full price for it and for the annual pass which includeds 3 DLCs in year 2.

So in the end the total costs for me would be 95€.

If you as a potential new player would want to get into the game you can buy a 20€ bundle which contains the main game and the first 2 DLCs. My advice would not to buy Forsaken and its annual pass in this game because you definitely will be busy playing the year 1 content for a few months anyways. If you like it and want to continue with Forsaken you still could buy it at a later point of time and most likely then the price will drop significantly.

That would be my recommendation in order to save a bit $$$$.

Is the game worth that money?

Well, that depends. At first it sounds incredible expensive.

When you buy a game for 50€ how much contend do you get? Sometimes you get a game that you play on an off.

Sometimes you get a game which has a 10-40 hours campaign and once done you never touch it again.

Sometimes you get a game you can not stop playing.

Destiny 2 has its flaws (more than enough of them) but for some reason it kept me playing for months. I cant judge about the upcoming content of Forsaken. All I can say is that the 25€ I spent on this game so far were worth it.

If you want to try the game... there is a demo you can try.

From time to time there also are demo weekends where you can play all of the game content for free.

remember when games were sold as whole games? And DLC was advertised as expansions and generally included lots of content like singleplayer campaigns, assets, nifty skins and sometimes a "making of" somewhere hidden on the cd?

good times...

For $160, I could play paintball saturday AND sunday
Or 8 fill ups at the pump (i put in $20 at a time usually)
I could upgrade my CPU and still buy a new game
I could pay my internet AND gas bill

I thought about getting Destiny 2, having not even played the 1st one, and it's not just the price point that scares me away, i prefer to buy video games that i'm gonna play for hours and hours on end, at least a minimum of 50 hours worth of potential gameplay when deciding to purchase a game, or worth revisiting after 6 months, 4 DLC releases, 2 updates that fix 7 bugs and a sale of all the DLCs

Plus, in-game stores are major turn off's. I understand that a business functions to make money, It just seems like PC and Console games are just "freemium" smart phone games you pay full price for

well in case of play time you might need much more than 50 hours

a few hundred hours