Destiny's biggest problem is that Bungie assume everyone is as invested in their game as they are. Every time I log in, there's a pop-up listing new activities, and it might as well be written in fucking Klingon for all the sense it makes to someone who isn't immersed in it.
I know the exact shopping mall felt is talking about. It was the moment I lost all comprehension of Destiny's story.
I seem to remember I was on a derelict oil rig, turned a corner, and suddenly discovered a space-age Westfield Stratford.
They're good at naming stuff though. I don't know if there's a name for this, but they give traditional high-fantasy names to Sci-fi stuff. It all sounds very cool, in isolation.
I don't know if there's a name for this, but they give traditional high-fantasy names to Sci-fi stuff.
It's pretty common in a lot of Space Opera stuff, I think. Anything with big Imperial dynasties stretching across the galaxy.
The evocative names were always my favourite part of Halo too. And that franchise also has a weird fanbase inexplicably fixated on the terrible lore. I remember the controversy when Reach came out and its story contradicted a couple of lines in a tie-in novel from ten years previously.
I know the exact shopping mall felt is talking about. It was the moment I lost all comprehension of Destiny's story.
I seem to remember I was on a derelict oil rig, turned a corner, and suddenly discovered a space-age Westfield Stratford.
That's Titan, that is.
I've reached that point where I now know, understand and appreciate the story in Destiny. It's weird. It's maybe one of the weirdest stories I've seen in a game.
Well now I'm curious to know more.
Well now I'm curious to know more.
How much time do you have?
The current season is called Season of Arrivals. Bad guys are arriving in the system and doing terrible things.
The Traveller, the big white ball in the sky over the tower, is currently chilling out and not doing much. It seems like it's in recovery mode after getting chunks ripped out of it at the end of the Red War (the original Destiny 2 campaign where Guardians lost their light, Dominus Ghaul and the Cabal showed up and wrecked shop before being turfed out by the player and their buddies). Trouble is, we could really use it doing something.
At the end of Shadowkeep (the most recent expansion) we found an artifact in a pyramid ship that had crashed on the moon a long time ago before being covered up by the Hive. The artifact started to pulse with Spooky Energy which led the players to The Black Garden, a place that's been hinted at in the lore for a good long time. While there this happened and we discovered that oh no the pyramid ships belong to the Darkness. They're pyramids, and they are working with the Hive and the Taken and other enemies.
The season before last had a character called Rasputin (an ancient warmind AI built during the golden age before the collapse who was on Mars and controlled a system wide defence network) had us completing public events to launch satellites to re-establish his defence grid. Everyone's very, very cautious about Rasputin because in the past he's done some pretty inscrutable stuff that's caused a lot of people to die. He's only recently started to talk to us and he seems good, but at the same time, the entire Cosmodrome is off limits because of a thing he did. Giving him access to a huge amount of guns might not have been the best idea anyone's ever had.
Doesn't matter, though, because at the start of this season, he pointed all those guns at a Pyramid ship as it entered range, fired them and the ship just kind of paracausal'd its way out of the shot. Rasputin, having fought the Darkness before in the Golden Age, then had a PTSD meltdown and went offline in a panic.
Since then we've been moving to evacuate planets to Earth. We've also been using technology created by The Driferter (Dredgen Camille Yor to use his full name and title) to draw The Darkness towards it, fight Taken and gather motes of darkness (you know those orbs of light that get created when you use your super? Like those but in reverse), stuff them in a container and process them into Umbral Essence which can be then used by a three-eyed goth wizard lady who's haunted by seven ghosts who's found a silver tree growing on Io, site of the Travellers initial landing in the system.
Like, that's the basics of what's happening this season.
The next Expansion is all about going to Neptune, going digging for golden age tech there, dealing with a Pyramid ship that's crashed there but is still active so maybe we can find some useful shit there, and working out what the deal with the Deep Stone Crypt is.
The Deep Stone Crypt is where Exo's are from. None of them really know where it is, except maybe Cayde found it but he died in the last expansion. When an Exo dies and is restarted (that's how Cayde 6 became Cayde 6; when you die as a guardian, your light brings you back to life so technically we're all zombies) their number goes up by one value. They also momentarily see the afterlife which is the Deep Stone Crypt.
Worryingly, that all still makes sense to me, to the point where I'm a little annoyed that I can't quite remember the name of the three-eyed goth wizard lady.
(Also, RIP Cayde - part of the reason my second character (I do one at a time, none of this three characters business) was a Hunter was that he seemed to be the one of the Vanguard with something like a personality.)
I think the last time I played semi-properly was maybe the second expansion of D2, and I think a legendary Warlock with a sort of Aztec or Egyptian kinda vibe (Osiris?) was back from/still fighting the Vex. It wasn't great though, and I didn't play much of it.
Did you ever play Destiny 1? I'm pretty sure you visit the Black Garden towards the end of the original campaign (and possibly since), though I remember it as being full of Vex rather than any of the other factions. I don't think the Taken were even a thing back then though, they might've been new in a later expansion (or even Destiny 2 itself).
Worryingly, that all still makes sense to me, to the point where I'm a little annoyed that I can't quite remember the name of the three-eyed goth wizard lady.
(Also, RIP Cayde - part of the reason my second character (I do one at a time, none of this three characters business) was a Hunter was that he seemed to be the one of the Vanguard with something like a personality.)
I think the last time I played semi-properly was maybe the second expansion of D2, and I think a legendary Warlock with a sort of Aztec or Egyptian kinda vibe (Osiris?) was back from/still fighting the Vex. It wasn't great though, and I didn't play much of it.
Did you ever play Destiny 1? I'm pretty sure you visit the Black Garden towards the end of the original campaign (and possibly since), though I remember it as being full of Vex rather than any of the other factions. I don't think the Taken were even a thing back then though, they might've been new in a later expansion (or even Destiny 2 itself).
Eris Morn, and I maybe filed off some of the sharp edges. We're probably getting a new Hunter Vanguard in the next expansion too; it's probably going to be Uldren Sov, the guy who killed Cayde. There will hopefully be an opportunity for Ikora to develop a personality during this because she liked Cayde and hates Sov.
Curse of Osiris kind of sucked, yeah. It was the first expansion to D2 and it came out not that long after the main game and you can tell it was very rushed by a team that were close to burning out. Osiris floats around occasionally but he spends most of his time fucking around in the Infinite Forest and being the source of a lot of problems while going 'you don't understand how many layers of 4 dimensional chess I'm playing right now fucks something simple up guardian i need your help to clean up this mess someone made.'
I missed D1 back in the day. You do visit the Black Garden, yeah and it was full of Vex. It still is and the raid Garden of Salvation happens there.
The Taken were a thing in D1 with the expansion The Taken King where Oryx, one of the Hive gods, is like 'hey, I can control taken, that's cool.'
Oryx was one of the Hive who learned to harness the Darkness; he ascended to demi-godhood by eating a worm(?) but isn't, like, an original deity or anything. He made the Taken.
It's been a while, but the lore stuff around Oryx is some really cool, weird, eldritch shit.
He ate a worm. That's how the Hive happened, I think?
Like, Destiny is incredibly willing to let you just shoot mans on an ocean planet but at the same time if you do any amount of digging you get into like- incredibly weird lore? Like, a Chinese generation ship sent out to colonise another planet gets sucked into a paracausal wormhole while two people are out doing a spacewalk and then some weird shit happens and time goes weird for them and somehow they make a pocket dimension.
Or the way that The Nine are aware that they're in a videogame, are aware that you're aware that they're in a videogame and are aware that your awareness of them being aware that they're in a videogame is something that's meant to be metatextual but is actually something that they know they can't change because that's not how videogames work.
Or, christ, how about the giant golden basking shark space ship that's eating a planet in the hope of turning it into wine for a robot?
Or just like… everything that the Drifter did in the dark ages
It's so willing to just throw massive science fiction ideas at you and just point at it and go 'right?' and hope that you're willing to go along with it. Sword logic, dragons that grant wishes and grow based on the desires of those they serve, races that exist across multiple plains of existence at the same time, a planet sized computer that's simulating every possible outcome whos simulations are beginning to leak onto the surface of that planet by sheer weight of thought from the creatures inside those simulations. It doesn't develop many of these ideas beyond 'isn't this fucking weird?' but I appreciate that it puts them out there.
Thanks Luscan!
It all sounds way more interesting than the bits of Halo lore I picked up over the years.
Amazing posts, Luscan. I mean, it does somewhat prove my point, but I'm delighted that someone understands this stuff. It sounds like some fun lore once you penetrate that thick membrane of inscrutibility.
To be fair, I play WoW and I couldn't tell you anything about the lore there beyond the Alliance and the Horde not really getting on. Except for the times when they do.
FFXIV lore is super simple, even with the in world fact that the reset and re-launch of the game is part of the history of the world. Shadowbringers definitely kicks things up a notch though.
FFXIV lore is super simple, even with the in world fact that the reset and re-launch of the game is part of the history of the world. Shadowbringers definitely kicks things up a notch though.
Woooah I'm nearly there, I'm living on a prayer
I've got seven more quests to go, I've got seven more quests to go
I've ran out of covers
I played the Avengers Beta over the weekend for a little bit.
If I were charitable, I'd say that there's been a serious fuck up by the production team on this game getting useful information from the QA team to the design and gameplay teams. Production has failed to properly convey just how deep some of the issues with the game are.
If I weren't charitable, I'd say that the design team have heard the feedback from everyone else in the office and said 'that's just not the kind of game we're making.'
If you're an RTW alumi, 'that's not the kind of game we're making' is a phrase that should send a shiver up your spine. There's so much going wrong here, it reminds me of APB. There's so much going wrong here it reminds me of Anthem.
It's that bad.
edit - just started thinking about how much money has been spent on this and why it's monetising its beta, why it has completed characters in the beta that are locked off as post launch DLC. Just thinking about how many cool, 8 hour single player games you could have made with the money and talent that's been wasted on this.
the fighting animation is so slow, oh my god. You push a button and there's a full quarter second of lag between the button being pressed and the action going through like it needs to be confirmed with the server that it's happened oh my god they made server authoritative pve content why would you do that
it reminds me of APB
oh my god they made server authoritative pve content why would you do that
Who was the lead designer on this, and did they spend any time in Dundee between 2007 and 2010?
I think it might be Crystal Dynamics all the way through, though. Like, a studio famed for making engaging single player games is exactly the studio you want to put in charge of a co-op looter-brawler game.
Unless it didn't start that way. Unless it started as a single player Avengers game, or series of games. You get 4 games or campaigns or something and play through those until you have the game at the end of the series where you have the four lead characters come together or whatever.
Except midway through development someone went 'it should be co-op, co-op games are huge, remember that ultimate alliance game series people liked?' so the studio pivoted to that.
And then midway through that someone went 'oh man we should add a loot game to this, the division and destiny are making a lot of money' so they added that.
And then they were like 'oh shit our co op doesn't work and our loot game is fucking terrible, we should build up the single player stuff some more' so they did that.
By this point they realised they'd spent all their money and been delayed by 18 months. No clear vision, no clear idea, a million technical ideas that were half thought through, half implemented and half supported. Shit ideas, shitly had, shitly made.
The narrative structure of Elder Scrolls Online is so impressive.
You know how in Oblivion or Skyrim, you'll come across a little village with a mystery to be solved – a self-contained gem of storytelling that stays with you long after you've forgotten the main quest? The zones in Elder Scrolls Online are just stuffed with those.
You'll have 10-15 standalone stories in each zone, each of which take maybe 30 minutes and have a proper beginning, middle and end. So you can play for half an hour and have a satisfying experience, every single time.
But then those 10-15 standalone stories feed in to, and bounce off of, the overarching zone story, which takes 5-10 hours and again, has a satisfying beginning, middle and end. So you're constantly experiencing these big Holy Fuck story moments, with earned pay-offs, twists, and recurring characters.
It's a real shame that the gameplay isn't quite there. It's got the usual MMO combat jank, but without any of its depth, so you end up hammering the same 3 skills over and over. If they'd nailed that aspect, ESO would be something really special. As it stands, it's a 10/10 narrative trapped in a 7/10 game.
Like, I don't even know how to describe it? Just sitting here trying to work out how to say 'it's a co-op brawler where the players take on the roles of the Avengers' doesn't do it justice.
It omits the loot game aspect where you have to get the right amount of gear score to keep up with the enemies around you. It omits the single player campaign stuff that you can play co-op, with its full character-switching rad moments. It has cutscenes that are fully performance captured and have had a lot of love poured into them and the writing isn't terrible even if it makes me want Kamala Khan to be on screen less, and Black Widow looks like the Ashens Knock Off figure Black Widow. It omits that it's got dungeons that you can run through to grind out particular pieces of loot. It omits that it's got a very clearly added-at-the-last-minute combat training space.
Fuck, there's so many networking bugs. When you fail to connect to a co-op session, you get dropped back to the title screen and have to log in again.
It's fucking wild how many bafflingly poor decisions went into this.
whispers
What's the crap Avengers game doing in the MMO thread?
I’m forever getting pulled into, then bouncing off, Elder Scrolls Online for exactly the reasons MPH describes: it’s an absolutely huge, beautifully designed world with really great writing and fascinating quests, then after 100 hours you realise you’re really just pressing three buttons over and over. The fact all the enemies are always exactly at your level doesn’t help. It’s a great game world, but sometimes a bit dull to actually play.
Now I want to go back to it though.
I do recommend the ESO plus subscription if you’re going to be playing for a while though, it’s not vastly expensive, the crafting bag will revolutionise how you play, and you get immediate access to every bit of DLC bar the very newest. Mixing up the zone quests with a bit of Thieves Guild or Dark Brotherhood is, as with the main Elder Scrolls games, absolutely the best way to play.
whispers
What's the crap Avengers game doing in the MMO thread?
It's an online loot game. If Destiny counts, this counts.
Yeah, I thought it was some kind of looty MMO. Hell, get Minecraft Dungeons in here.
I don't think Destiny counts to be fair. 
I don't think Destiny counts to be fair.
YEAH WELL I DON'T THINK YOU COUNT NOW WHAT, SMART GUY
oh no
I tried to tank in ESO and it might have seriously negatively coloured my perception of the game a lot, I don't really feel the game helped me unerstand how ESO tanking works and I tried looking up videos and if I was doing it right then I guess ESO tanking isn't for me. Didn't help that the first dungeon I did was a complete clown show.
Everything MPH said about the quests are true, and I'm sure the Morag Tong and DB quests in particular are probably amazing, but for if I wanted that experience I could just play Skyrim/Oblivion. Any MMO part of ESO just left me cold. :(
Then again you can to Morrowind, meet Vivec and then when you're tired of the mushrooms and swamps you can chill out in Skyrim and having played Skyrim/Morrowind they got the feel of both down pretty well.
They've fixed the HDR in Elder Scrolls Online!
… I'm not sure if I like it
Haha I tried it last night, I much prefer it. The interiors are still too dark, but the colours are so much better in my opinion.
There's a toggle in the Display menu if you want the rainbow look back.
Yeah I played a fair bit last night and it's lovely actually, takes a bit of getting used to is all after so many years playing with the crazy colours. Nights are way darker without the insane blue glow that used to permeate everything.
I do think it's a bit dark overall but then again both the Brightness and HDR Brightness sliders have got issues at the moment (both reset themselves every time you boot the game) so maybe there is an issue there. Setting them both to around 75%, ignoring the calibration images, looked pretty nice to me.
For some reason, LOTRO is giving away pretty much all of its content right now… any lapsed players, or those wanting to try a now fairly elderly but surprisingly atmospheric MMO, might want to make use of this.
All the non-expansion Quest Packs up to Mordor are completely free, and the expansions themselves are very cheap through to the end of November - you could easily earn the points you need for those just by playing the game.
The whole thing is fairly sedate and you can play pretty much all of it single-player, so just think of this as a massive Lord of the Rings game being given away for free.
Thanks for the heads up! I don't actually have a PC any more, and my work laptop is locked down with various admin wotsits, but I'll definitely reinstall this if I ever get a new laptop.
I never made it much past Rivendell, but I always loved LOTRO. Once had a beer (in real life) while sitting in a pub in The Shire (on the game), headset on, chatting with a mate, next to the fire. I weirdly remember that more than a lot of my real-life social interactions. Very cosy game.
It's one of those weirdly-coded old games that will both run on a potato PC, and yet still struggle a bit on more powerful hardware. I've managed to get it running on a very low-spec laptop and even with a lot of the graphic options turned down it still looks pretty good. Yet on my much better main PC I still get weird hitches and stutters, and you can't really run it at anything higher than 1080p because of all the tiny text.
I still really like it though, as always my current playthrough has stalled somewhere in the mid-30s but I am determined to push through this time and at least make it to Moria.
I might pop in for a wander around Middle Earth. It is a good MMORPG that isn't afraid of putting a lot of space in a map, which adds to the atmosphere. I remember the gameplay being a bit dull though, and I was annoyed that literally nobody got the joke when I named my hobbit burgler Asbo. Are you still on a US server, Gar?
No, I'm on Evernight these days, which is the biggest European server I think. A level 36 Beorning called Hurrgh ("Paddington" being sadly taken) if you fancy popping in.
I'd heard the game had had a bit of a resurgence in terms of subscribers thanks to lockdown (they did a similar giveaway last year) and that seems to be the case: I'm surprised how many people there are knocking around in the early areas still. I'd assumed the whole playerbase would be the other side of Mordor by now but places like Bree and the Shire are still pretty busy. Then when you do go off the beaten track it can feel genuinely deserted, which also works. I've not really investigated the actual multiplayer instances much at all but even looking in the instance finder there are usually shout-outs for pretty much anything you'd choose to do.
It can be a bit dull at times, it's very much in the "now go and collect 18 boar scrotums" mould of MMO, where only one boar in four seems to actually have a scrotum to collect, but it's a very nice world to hang out in and there's something satisfying about ticking menial quests off a list. Pure comfort gaming.
it's very much in the "now go and collect 18 boar scrotums" mould of MMO, where only one boar in four seems to actually have a scrotum to collect
jeez gar, the scrotum-less boar eunuchs of edoras was my favourite part of the LOTR directors cut, stop ruining it
All the names I usually use in MMOs are gone, as is everything else I can think of. Having run out of ideas, I clicked randomise, and it gave me the name "Farting."
My dwarf in World of Warcraft has been called Brian Blessed for fifteen years. After a while I kept expecting it to be deleted for copyright infringement or something, but he was still kicking a couple years ago when I last logged in.
Can’t run it on my Mac - requires Wine, which isn’t supported on OSX 10.15, 11 or 12
Boooo
Getting this thing running on a Mac has always been a technical nightmare. A lot of people just use Bootcamp these days I think, or keep an older version of MacOS they can boot into when they want to play LOTRO.
Looking at the LOTRO forums, there's a lot of talk of people using something called Crossover to get it running on newer OSX versions. I'm not a Mac person at all so can't really help you, but if you're keen to get it working, it looks like there are ways of doing it. Maybe this will help:
Popped back into LOTRO for the first time in a year or so to find it not only in rude health but seemingly going from strength to strength. They've now standardised the game's structure so everything up to and including Gondor is now free for all players, but they then seem to do giveaway codes once a year or so (there's one going around at the moment) that give you most of the rest as well anyway. So it's a big old game for pretty much everyone.
Right now - having bust through Mordor and beyond - they are now going back and adding new areas to the start of the game. The Shire has doubled in size, there's a whole new section in Breeland and there's a big chunk south of the Trollshaws now that you couldn't get to previously. The upcoming mini-expansion adds two new areas and an entirely new way to level from 1 to 30. And there's apparently a graphics revamp on the way too. Maybe they're aiming at a new audience brought in by Rings of Power but it's quite surprising that where most MMOs of this vintage (15 years!) are firmly in maintenance mode, LOTRO seems to be doing its best to both attract new players and give existing fans something new to do.
I'd bloody love to get back onto Lord of the Rings Online, but my laptop is oldddd and doesn't have a dedicated graphics card. I manage about 30fps with everything set to low, which isn't much fun. I'm keeping an eye out for something cheap on Facebook Marketplace, purely for this game.
I've also just realised that my character has been lost by the devs, which isn't ideal. They closed some old worlds a few years back, including mine, so my character is just… gone. No transfers available.
The latest 24 man raid that droppedy esterday for FFXIV was fucking amazing.
Spoiler - click to showYou fight Halone! As in the deity Halone! As in Paladin uses an attack called 'Rage of Halone! that Halone! I geeked out a little bit.
I'd bloody love to get back onto Lord of the Rings Online, but my laptop is oldddd and doesn't have a dedicated graphics card. I manage about 30fps with everything set to low, which isn't much fun. I'm keeping an eye out for something cheap on Facebook Marketplace, purely for this game.
I've also just realised that my character has been lost by the devs, which isn't ideal. They closed some old worlds a few years back, including mine, so my character is just… gone. No transfers available.
LOTRO's a weird one because it can run well or terribly on almost any configuration of hardware, and throwing more resources at it doesn't always help. It's a 2007 game that's had bits bolted onto it for 15 years now and it kind of shows. More RAM and a faster hard drive seem to make the most difference.
A couple of tips: you can run in DX9, 10 or 11 modes and it's worth trying each of those to see if it helps. Also, top tip, in the launcher options you can choose to run a 32-bit or 64-bit version of the code now and the 64-bit version tends to run much better. Not sure what it defaults to these days.
The missing characters is a very common complaint, sadly. There was a window to transfer those onto new servers but if you missed that window then you were out of luck. They keep promising to restore them but they've been saying that for years. For what it's worth, the opening sections of LOTRO are among the most fun in the game and if you roll a difference race to what you chose before then you are likely to have a completely different experience - it's not really a hardship to start over.
Okay I have a new laptop! Thanks HotUKDeals.
I've been out of the PC loop for so long, I didn't realise just how much you get these days with integrated graphics. This Intel Xe thing is magic: cheap, cool and quiet. It won't run Cyperpunk with ray-tracing, but my PC tastes are pretty old and undemanding. I'll leave the bells and whistles to the Xbox.
And SSDs! They weren't a thing the last time I had a PC. They're good aren't they. /old-man
It won't run Cyperpunk with ray-tracing, but my PC tastes are pretty old and undemanding.
A compilation of Dizzy games and the VGA version of Another World then, right? 
VGA?? Look at Mr Moneybags over here. More than 16 colours is just showing off…