Destiny 2

Goddamn, I wish Destiny 2 was more rewarding to play. I've been having a total blast with it lately, and my light level continues to creep up by a point or two pretty much every time I jump on, but it feels weirdly empty, in a way that I can't quite put into words. It's just the grind, I suppose – leveling up for the sake of leveling up, with no benefit or reward besides that higher number.

It's so satisfying moment-to-moment, though - there are always bars to fill and loot to collect, and the gun I've taken to using - Crimson, a three-round-burst Exotic hand cannon with disgusting range - has even got me competitive in the Crucible. This is the first time since the DLC started to drop (and my clan drifted away) that I've hit all of the weekly targets, barring the ones that require a fireteam. There's a Faction Rally going on that gives more bars to fill and an additional daily challenge, so I'm doing my part to advance the Space Emo agenda for Dead Orbit even though I'll never rank up enough to get the top tier rewards.

All of which combines to leave me with the realisation that I will be getting the Forsaken expansion (and I'll probably splash for the year 2 Annual Pass as well, sucker that I am), which I'll solo and barely scratch the surface of. I'm not even bothered about the campaign/story stuff - I feel like I might be the only Destiny player who doesn't care about Cayde-6 ,or maybe that's just my anti-Hunter bias showing - which is weird considering I solo everything anyway.

Is anybody else still playing, or has the move to add-ons killed all Society interest except mine?

I think I said elsewhere, but the expansions just don't sound worth it, and it feels even more pointless to play a game when I'm not just not making progress, but not able to make progress.

I gave up a while back too - I think I realised around the time of the first expansion that I wasn’t that bothered about it anymore, and deleted that, along with every other ‘endless timesink’ game I own (bar Hearthstone) in an attempt to actually play other games.

I’ve started to download it again twice, once very recently, but I just can’t quite bring myself to start up again, even if I do miss my Hunter, and the moment-to-moment gunplay Ninchilla describes, at times at least.

The season pass is currently down at £16.99 on PSN, which is as close to tempting as I've ever seen it; still not sure it's quite enough, though.

There's enough stuff in there to justify £17 - if you're going to play it.

(I'll happily party up if you do.)

Dunno. I've added and removed it from my cart three times, but I'm just not sure.

Every time I'm tempted by pretty much anything these days, I remember that I really just want to play Sea of Thieves…

As with The Taken King in the first game, you apparently will need to own both of the Year One expansions for Forsaken to work; there's still no "everything" bundle for Forsaken (as far as I know) and it's possible that a Year One & Two combined DLC release will still work out as better value than the £77 you'd be paying for this Year One bundle and the £60 Year Two pass.

If I'm not buying the year 1 stuff at full price, there's no way in hell I'm buying the year 2 stuff full price.

Bungie seem determined, so far, to forget any lessons that they might have learned from Destiny 1. I'm not going to even consider Forsaken before some kind of consensus forms.

I would be pretty surprised if we get a Destiny 3.

The consensus will be "It's more Destiny", which will be both a good and a bad thing depending on the particular feature (changed or unchanged) that they're praising or criticising at the time.

In other words, there will be no consensus beyond "Bungie fucked up my favourite thing".

I don't know about that; general consensus on the current expansions is pretty consistently, "meh, lessons not learned".

I think mainly I just wonder if it'll hold my interest much beyond the first time I play through the campaign missions, and I'm still not quite sure it's worth £17 to find out.

There's a part of me that wants to be convinced, though.

Fuck it, I cracked.

EDIT: gods below, were the loading times always this bad?

Oh, yeah. I mean once you're on a planet it's fine, and crucible levels don't take so long, but it can be a bit of a wait. I usually use that time to do inventory management, check progress on exotic subquests, and other admin.

If you download Destiny 2, currently free, on Battle.net, you get to keep it forever.

No DLC included, of course, so they'll still be able to gouge you for that, but there's still plenty of stuff to do in the base game if anyone's desperate to give D2 a look.

There's a sale on PSN for the Forsaken expansion, which is down to £18. That's well within "tempting" range; only the combined size of Elite Dangerous and Hitman, and the constant barrage of complaints on the subreddit, are keeping my resolve intact.

I know it'd be good, though. Destiny's a pretty great way to waste away hours.

I've always found Destiny to be… okay. Like, the mechanics of pointing at things and making them die are solid, and (some of) the superpowers are fun, but I eventually realised that I don't really like the world.

The levels are lifeless, and too small to have anything to find or explore, and any time I boot it up since hitting max level, I don't feel like there's anything I want to do. Crucible is fine, I guess, but I don't often want to PvP, and the same half-dozen world events and strikes just don't hold attention.

And yet, I, too, am occasionally tempted by more.

Right. Is this now a good time to give Destiny 2 a go? It's had a Series X upgrade, the base game and the expansions are all on Game Pass, they've retired a bunch of old content I think…

Is it going to be hopelessly confusing or is there still a new player/SP experience worth checking out? I've never Destinied in any shape or form so it'll all be new to me.

Luscan had been posting about it somewhere in here. It sounds absolutely bewildering.

Crossplay in 2021 get in here Me And The Lads will carry you to glory in raids and you can experience the best shit.

I think that a lot of the comments about the word being kind of lifeless were extremely true of the 1.0 levels. Nessus, Earth, Titan and Io were pretty boring and I'm glad to see them gone (except Earth which is still around because apparently some people have an emotional attachment to the planet). The Dreaming City kind of solved that with the three week timeloop; every week, the Taken Corruption of the zone would increase, until at the end of week 3 all sorts of terrible shit was happening. Then it'd snap back. You could go in, solve mysteries and have things develop over the course of that three weeks.

Shadowkeep - the Moon stuff - really botched a lot of this; the expansion didn't nail the feeling of the living world at all, but the season pass content got it just right. The problem with that is that you buy the expansion, you don't get all the season pass content and everyone just kind of goes 'hang on a minute that seems pretty shit?' and those people were right. It was bad.

Beyond Light has been the exact opposite so far. Europa is a great environment with play that changes in parts of it on a weekly basis. Lost sectors change difficulty and offer different kinds of targeted loot. Debris rains from the sky over parts of it. You unlock different parts of the map as you gain more stasis powers. There are mysteries that are still being unlocked, triumphs that are gated behind weekly rotations, and everything's rolling along and changing. Weirdly, this season has been pretty Bum so far? The event brings back a character from the past but the actual event hasn't been great. It's a soloable boss hunt.

It's going to develop over the coming weeks; we're already seeing parts of maps change to show new locations for the event to trigger in. The exotic handcanon from this season is changing to become farmable with different rolls. Plus, it's Christmas time soon, and there's always weird stuff in the game for that.

The PVP is still the regular Bungie PVP; it's real good. There is one thing that you can reliably say about Destiny and that it feels real good to move, shoot and put bullets into badguys. Strikes have changed pretty sharply since 1.0. You can reliably expect to get through a strike in 10 minutes. A nightfall (a strike but with selectable difficulty) will at most take half an hour. Raids can take upwards of an hour, but should be less than 5.

Rolling a new character is fairly simple. You decide you want to make a dude. You pick your race (this is essentially meaningless but playing Exo at the moment is funny because we're getting into their backstory and fucking yikes) amd you pick your Class. You can pick any of the three classes. None of the classes really interact with each other in the old MMO standard but you want to pick Warlock because they get Massive Raid Buffs, easy self-healing, easy damage boosts, huge crowd control supers and the coolest jump (different classes have different jumps because ? ).

Then you see a cutscene. Then you wake up in the old cosmodrome. Stuff happens and the game tries to explain things to you. By the end of the game explaining things to you, you will have:

• Got a new gun
• Got a new piece of armor
• Got an exotic
• Been to the tower and met everyone useful there
• Run a patrol
• Run a public event
• Run a strike
• Done a few story missions

Brian is right, it is utterly bewildering but honestly if you have someone you can ask questions to you will probably do fine. Find a clan or something. Also, oh my god the websites that the community have made. Bungie decided they wanted to expose their entire API and the community were like 'fuck yeah ya did' and were like oh sweet you can log in here safely and see a list of recommended things to do or going to the vault in the tower is bad what if we just let you do everything there and more but in a website so you can do it at any point in the game? or whatever is going on in here?

game good but confusing 8/10

I would also say that if, like me, you're just going to play the story content and not bother with the 'end-game', it's wonderful.

You'll only get about ten hours of playtime out of all three expansions put together, but they're on Game Pass so it's not like you're wasting money. And what you get for those ten hours is a stunningly beautiful game with some of the best gunplay around.

I even sort of understood the plot. Sort of.

And so closes Season of the Chosen.

Last season was really front loaded. The release of Beyond Light meant that the actual seasonal content could be a little lighter than one might have hoped for. Beyond Light was - and continues to be - a fascinating attempt at the living world game thing while getting rid of a lot of the FOMO from previous years. Season of the Hunt was a disappointing thing that happened at the same time as Beyond Light, where the players did some stuff in single player activities and got pretty disappointing loot for it. It wasn't great, and it got boring towards the end of the cycle.

Season of the Chosen's been far more interesting, and there've been some fascinating developments in the way the metagame works. New weekly challenges - out of a 12 week season, 10 weeks have challenges in them that encourage certain kinds of play in certain activities - give titanic amounts of Bright Dust and XP. Umbral Engrams have returned, allowing the player the ability to focus their lootchase tighter sharper than ever. Sunsetting has been aborted - though it's effects haven't been reversed - and two reprised strikes from Destiny 1 have been returned with an extra layer of spit and polish.

Narratively, there's been a huge amount of effort put in this season, with the story progressing from Season of the Hunt in a logical way that's actually been nice to experience. Whereas most seasons tend to gas out towards the end as the content runs dry and the hype cycle for the next season spins up, this one rolled straight into the Guardian Games.

One of the best things to come with this season is the Presage Mission; it's an exotic quest that you can run solo (don't) or with a team (do), and you get a very powerful exotic weapon with some randomly rolled perks on it at the end. The mission itself is really, really great. It's spooky, atmospheric, threatening and tense. The whole thing feels like a treasure hunt on a cargo hauler spaceship that's gotten lost in the darkness.

Next season looks interesting and I'm still onboard.

I've started this with the kids. Is there anything that gives an overview on what to do on the free to play version and what the best route to buying in is (longer term)?

I have no real comment other than why the fuck on controller is the movement and ADS sensitivity on the same slider.

I'm honestly not sure what the free to play route is but there's been a rumor that Foresaken is going free to play next season or the one after it as it's likely to go the way of Warmind and into the DCV. Crossplay is coming next season too, though so we could party up if people are that way inclined.

Lots of crucible, the new player thing, strikes, gambit. Not sure about other content.

Is buying something like the Legendary edition worthwhile, or just named DLC? Older stuff is sort of archived or something isn't it?

So, the Legendary edition has Forsaken, Shadowkeep, Beyond Light and the season pass stuff in it. It is the jumboversion if you want to literally everything.

Do you have an xbox with Game Pass because Beyond Light is free on Game Pass I think. Maybe start there?

I can't play it on pad, as the movement controls feel super wonky, so PC only. But it might be on Gamepass Ultimate I suppose….

Alas, it is not a PC thing even with ultimate. 's just one of the slightly raw deals about PC Game Pass :(

I'll say one thing for it - the combat feels incredibly satisfying. The visuals are wildly variable - sometimes stunning, sometimes early 360-era. The HDR implementation is also strange in bits.

After only a few hours I do have to grudgingly accept that the Apex development team have played a lot of it and ripped off practically any bit of it they could get their hands on.

I can see the Legenday edition for 24 quid is on cdkeys. Might grab that. It is quite relaxing to play and the Bungie gameplay loop is in full force. Also the Warlock big purple throwy spell thing is very satisfying.

Oooh big purple is very satisfying. When you get a paid of Geomag boots for the warlock the memebeam becomes truly wonderful.

Also, the HDR stuff becomes incredible when you get to Europa. Best in class stuff.

I have my power above 1200. I don't understand any of the systems in the game. I like shooting things. No idea what's actually going on. PVP is brutal (though after playing it I went into Apex and went totally beast mode). The Strike where you have to carry a ball through electro forcefields can fuck off. I like shooting things. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do now. Shooting is good - when you fly in and grenade/purple death ball a room full of enemies you feel like a god.

If I see you online and unbuddied up I will join on you, show you around a bit if that would help?

How the fuck do you complete the prophecy dungeon?!??! It's insanely hard. 3 of us spent hours on it, we're all 1200, and it was brutal

Proph is fairly brutal.

Dungeon's are like… a step down from raids in terms of mechanics. How far did you get? All the encounters have different versions of the same mechanic. Killing a knight in the first section teaches the whole light and shadow thing, then it asks you to do that while throwing a huge amount of enemies at you. Things get weird from there.

Honestly, Proph is a huge amount of fun and has some spectacular visuals but it, Shattered Throne and Pit of Heresy are basically the 'let's check if you're gear's ready for raiding' checkpoints.

Run your powerful grind in a week to get your gear up then get your pinnacles. As a warlock, focus on getting 100 intellect, 100 recovery and then some resilience. What's the content that you're focusing in on at the moment? I can't see on your tracker if you've got the seasonal artefact but that can make things easier or give an idea what kind of weapons to focus in on. Do you have any umbral engrams you can decode? They're a great system for dialing in on loot you want.

We worked out the light/dark mechanic, but the (what I learn isn't actually the final boss?!??!) boss battle on the platform fucked us up. It ground on for ages - possibly because we were too weak, or shit, but we got one damage phase on him, and barely tickled his healthbar. Second damage phase we all got wiped and people gave up. Our CC was perhaps too poor, but everything felt like we were just too underpowered to get to grips with the orange barred monsters quickly enough.

As to the rest of it - I literally don't understand huge portions of the game and need to read up on it. The power level is…. meaningless? Like there's a soft cap or something. And after that you need to do stuff. I can't really work out what stuff, and how to get pinnacle gear or any of it. It's a bit like Monster Hunter, multiple games of deep impenetrable mechanics and content that my brain simply goes "meh" too. To date it's just been - pick up bounties from all the randos on the hub world. Do a random strike (get cross if it's a shit one), collect slightly better gear to edge the power level up. The younglings in our group are researching it and hopefully will just tell me what to do.

None of us have sunk money into the DLC yet as while we were enjoying it the Proph dungeon really took the wind out of everyone's sails. Especially when we went online and a majority of posts said it was easy (and people solo'ed it for fun etc).

One big thing encouraging me to try to work it out is the fact that unlike Monster Hunter the combat is mechanistically incredibly fun.

Anyway, I forget, are you on PC? We'll never get six for a Raid, so I'll pencil you in to smurf us to victory at some point.

That'd be the first boss. Looking at your equipment, you don't really have a boss/yellow bar killer equipped - a shotgun or grenade launcher in your second slot, a rocket launcher or a sword in your heavy is more or less the idea unless you're running a warmind cell build or something and need that second slot for an Ikelos gun.

Dungeon runs are 45 minutes+ in terms of time investment.

Power Level is basically meaningless at the moment and it's something Bungie are working on a fix for. The current Pinnacle cap is 1320 - that's the power level you can reach when all your gear is charged up with the 'you get seven of these a week' style drops. The Powerful cap (the one you get for doing other things) is 1310. Everything up until that point will get you to 1310 more or less as quick as it can. Once you have the seasonal artefact, all your XP goes into it and raises it's level. This adds to your power level but also unlocks seasonal artefact mods.

Don't worry about upgrading your gear at the moment; you'll be replacing stuff fairly swiftly. Honestly, there's not a huge amount of complexity in the game, it's just nothing's explained well at all. Bounties are a good way of getting XP but they're being depreciated a bit in the next season because they're kind of a big honkin' grind.

Proph's been in the game for over a year at this point so it's been optimized to hell and back by people that are extremely familiar with it, so don't feel discouraged.

I'm on PC. Iron Banner is next week which could be a good source of guns and loot. It's a PVP focused thing with power levels enabled - you will get killed a lot - but you get a lot of really good armor and really good guns from it. Iron Banner weapons can roll with Iron Banner specific perks, like handling/aiming enhancement and range increases that you don't really get anywhere else. Armor from IB bounties/quests also drops at 61+ stat which should help.

I am currently running this stuff. Xur is around from 12 PM EST on Friday and he will straight up just sell you an exotic weapon and an exotic armor piece. He pretty frequently sells very powerful armor rolls; I think my daily driver boots came from him.

Are seasonal things from the woman next to the shrine thing.

Let's say…. someone had got things from her and then just broke them down as they seemed to have lower power levels that stuff he was already wearing…. er…..

Eva can give you more of the same gear you already have. It even keeps your event progress.

Phew

You can also press shift on an item in your inventory to lock it, meaning you can't sell it or turn it into upgrade fodder.

ur like the gamesmaster on the telly

u gotta scrunch out the crunch

That was Patrick Moore's favourite catchphrase (in the bedroom)

That's an image lodged in the brain that'll take a couple of hours to clear out.