Destiny 2

I'll hit the both of you up. I got it in humblebundle and I've been looking for a reason to give it a go

 

The humble bundle subscription with Destiny 2 is still going on for another 5 days. If I'm honest, due to a lot of the blowback it got at launch I was skeptical as hell. That said, I figured for $12, why not.

Been playing it for a few weeks now and I am genuinely enjoying it. Much like Haki referenced above, they know how to do gunplay in this game, and it is pretty as hell.

Looking back in this thread I saw a lot of comparisons to Warframe- basically comparing them directly and making it an internal decision between the two. Having played several hundred hours of Warframe, I feel comfortable addressing that point directly. Before anyone grabs their pitchforks, calm the fuck down, I am not going to go on a tirade about Warframe. It's a great game. That said, I really enjoy them both for very different reasons.

Warframe, to me, is the everpresent, beautiful, timesink. Due to the way the loot system works, next to nothing in that game gives me any sense of immediate reward. As a hypothetical- let's say that I want to grind out a new Warframe. I might run 4 or 5 40 min survival missions so that I can get the void relic that will take me to the mission where that chassis blueprint has a 13% chance to drop. Maybe I do a radshare and improve my odds and we actually get it. Then, provided I have the materials, I start building it and go off to the next piece. Assuming I don't plat rush it, I may have a shiny new warframe in a few days. Many guns are the exact same way. Let's say I want to really take a weapon or warframe to the next level- let's throw the formas on it and relevel it a few times.

Now, don't get me wrong, that grind isn't necessarily unpleasant with how it is handled in the game. Hell, it's pretty cool to see how you are progressing towards your chosen and self-selected goal. I think that's why so many of us (including myself) really enjoy it. However, although you select the goal itself, the progression feels halting and stuttered all along the way.

I think the biggest difference for me between Destiny 2 and Warframe is how they handle that sense of reward. In Destiny 2 going on a 15-30 min endgame "dungeon" (strike) will yield you with a few randomly generated weapons and/or armor of varying degrees of rarity. They may not be self-selected, but they're complete and good go. Prior to hitting the soft-cap, just about anything you find has a good chance of being an upgrade, which encourages you to expose yourself to weapons that you otherwise may never have tried out.

For me, that's really cool, because I can't tell you how many times I just have built a weapon in Warframe and let it passively level while stowed just because it was a shit weapon I was farming for mastery exp. Could they be alright? Maybe, but they sure as hell weren't going to be more powerful than my Opticor or Vectis. Thus, by being handed weapons that have a pretty good chance to be a stat upgrade, I have been encouraged to find what I really like. I may not necessarily select the weapon I am going to get at the end of a dungeon or event, but there is a sense of immediate reward. When you do get to that soft-cap (or even before), you can hone in on what you like by sacrificing other items that drop to power up your favorite weapons/armor, so I still get that sense of control when it comes to what I am working towards.

Haki, Gihz, and I have been playing together quite a bit and I'd love to encourage those who have a humblebundle subscription to give it a go. Even if you don't have a sub, consider signing up for $12 so you can get the game, then just cancel the subscription. Like I said, I was pretty skeptical myself, but it really has been quite a bit of fun. Certainly worth $12.

 

I would like to add that whatever the problem was with the cash shop when the game launched, it's gone now. Unless you absolutely HAVE to have blue armor with green highlights, there's no reason to ever spend a dime on this other than the purchase price.

 

‘Destiny 2’ Free To All Battle.net Members For A Limited Time

Starting Nov. 2 through Nov. 18, all Battle.net members will be able to download “Destiny 2” for free for a limited time. The game will be available via the Battle.net app for two weeks, and must be downloaded after being claimed. After that, it will remain a part of gamers’ collections forever.

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/bli...y-2-pc-free-on-battle-net-through-november-18

(I'm not going to try to change font size from my phone)

 

For what it's worth, I had a ton of fun with Destiny 2 prior to the expansion, and everyone I used to play with raves about how much endgame and replayable content the new expansion added. I stopped playing mostly because I feel like it lacked some of those things after I put 300 hundred hours in (and it was a great ride until then).

The most recent expansion is supposed to be very much in the spirit of the first Destiny and represents a return to many of the things the player base liked about it. I can't vouch for the most recent expansion personally, but I had a ton of fun with Destiny 2.

I've said it before and I'll say it again- Warframe is a great game, and they might seem similar, but the two games are very different in what they seek to accomplish and how they go about it.

 

I may, but I'm actually pretty interested in Anthem, so I'll probably be moving to that for my loot shooter. After EA stated they're going with no loot boxes, cosmetic only micros, that pretty much cinched it for me.

 

Im just saying, Destiny 2 has loot boxes, and I got several months of fun out of it. I never bought any, and had fun anyway. Assassin's Creed has xp boosters, and I'm having tons of fun with it. Microtransactions can be annoying, but they don't auto-disqualify a game from being good.

And you're right, I do like destiny 2. And while I was playing it, it was being published by a company just as shitty as EA in my opinion. It's still a fun game. I quit playing because we never had a group big enough for the end game content.

And I like Bioware more than Bungie. Destiny is the only decent game Bungie has ever made in my opinion. I HATED the Halo series.

But at any rate, I have the game already, so If people want to play I'll jump back into it.

 

That got a little derailed, sorry. Destiny 2 is still a fun shooter. I'm down for playing it if we get a group going.

 

I would be up for it again too. It is not a game I will play all the time, but it is fun once in a while. I just don't like the loot system that much in Destiny, that is one of the reasons I am looking forward to Anthem because it has more of a diablo style loot system. I will say the game feels very good, very solid and I think the things they have talked about they are going to live up to.

I do not like EA either, but I think they have been burned enough on this. But they said they would not have gameplay lootboxes in BF5, and there wasn't. They put in airlifts, but they are cosmetic skins only. Some may argue it is the same thing. The thing is, it is cosmetic, I don't care. Lots of games have cosmetic loot boxes, no one complains. The issue people had with the game play lootboxes is that you get power for spending real money AND you dont know what you get AND it is a $60 game. Even if Anthem does cosmetic lootboxes, I don;t care it doesn't affect game play.

 

So now their plan is to rip out everything pre-forsaken because it is too difficult to update and maintain. So I assume they have just completely given up on any idea of having a cohesive story since anyone coming in after this will have no context for the story. It also makes it incredibly hard to have any kind of immersive world and world building when you just rip parts out of the world. I am not sure I have ever seen any other MMO doing this. WoW certainly changed all of their zones, but the zones are still there. They didn't say well I guess only .3% of players are going to this zone, so lets just remove it.

This seems kind of crazy.

 

The D2 group I was playing with up til a couple of seasons back is pretty pissed.

The whole No-D3-but-we'll-do-years-worth-of-expansions-for-D2 plans being released landed rather poorly, seeing as the general consensus has been that the current meta, balance, and updates have put the game into a pretty terrible state.

 

Nah, because the general consensus is that the work being put into it isn't really improving it. The first and second games had a 3 year gap between the two of them. The community anticipated a similar thing for 2 to 3.

Instead, the message comes across as, "You don't want to put the work in to build a new title, so you're scrapping the current title and trying to repackage it."