Destiny

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Baryonyx

17,990 posts

158 months

Saturday 20th September 2014
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anonymous said:
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Reached out? What a stupid phrase. Every self important wker is saying it these days in lieu of saying what they've actually done ("we've sent an email etc etc ").

Switched this on earlier today but couldn't find much enthusiasm to keep playing it. With my friends now starting to wind down their Destiny activity and with some planning on dumping it for Forza Horizon 2 or Shadow Of Mordor there is less and less reason for me to keep playing. I can't see it lasting much longer with me unless there is a drastic change to the way the game works and I don't really see that happening.

Mastodon2

13,818 posts

164 months

Saturday 20th September 2014
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anonymous said:
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Maybe they have released half a game - as said, the exotic loot isn't even out / active yet, and the game at the moment does seem very limited. Dull, empty maps with nothing to see, and the strike missions are just boss runs, and difficulty modifiers aside, they're still very samey.

As I've said, I think the biggest problem is lack of player investment, there is little to see and little to care about. and while the gameplay itself is fun, it's not enough keep you coming back. The game is designed around the well established effort / reward cycle, except in this case there is not really any reward, just a repainted gun with slightly better stats than before, or a piece of armour in a different colour.

youngsyr

14,742 posts

191 months

Saturday 20th September 2014
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Mastodon2 said:
anonymous said:
[redacted]
Maybe they have released half a game - as said, the exotic loot isn't even out / active yet, and the game at the moment does seem very limited. Dull, empty maps with nothing to see, and the strike missions are just boss runs, and difficulty modifiers aside, they're still very samey.

As I've said, I think the biggest problem is lack of player investment, there is little to see and little to care about. and while the gameplay itself is fun, it's not enough keep you coming back. The game is designed around the well established effort / reward cycle, except in this case there is not really any reward, just a repainted gun with slightly better stats than before, or a piece of armour in a different colour.
The exotic gear is out - Pilchard8 from the BF4 PH clan has two pieces already.

dern

14,055 posts

278 months

Sunday 21st September 2014
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Can't understand the moaning if I'm honest. Had an awesome game this evening with a couple of mates trying to kill a chained up thing when it got unchained. Wouldn't want to play anything else at the moment.

Baryonyx

17,990 posts

158 months

Sunday 21st September 2014
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anonymous said:
[redacted]
It's a lot easier to stay enthusiastic when you're playing with good friends. If they're heading on to Forza Horizon 2 and Borderlands there is little point in grinding Destiny on my own. The mechanics are great but the content is lacking a bit. I'd rather join them on Borderlands.

Shinobi

5,072 posts

189 months

Sunday 21st September 2014
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anonymous said:
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We get it you don't like it, I don't understand your need to post everyday saying "that's it I've decided in not getting it" etc.

vonuber

17,868 posts

164 months

Sunday 21st September 2014
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If it is dull, then you can bet they will start the DLC train..

Baryonyx

17,990 posts

158 months

Sunday 21st September 2014
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anonymous said:
[redacted]
Borderlands is all about the PVE. As is Destiny, really. The PVP is ste. At least though, you're not forced to play it.

I had a laugh earlier on doing the Mars Strike mission, with the tank battle at the middle point. That is a great mission. I love dropping those Cabal, their massive heads attract the slugs from my hand cannon like magnets.


Guvernator

13,109 posts

164 months

Sunday 21st September 2014
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Yep not really getting all the negativity as I am still really enjoying it and the it keeps getting better and better as I level up. The Venus and Mars missions with the new enemies are great. I did start the game later then most so perhaps my enthusiasm will drop off once I get to level 20 but for now I am still having a blast.

Cunny DK

864 posts

178 months

Sunday 21st September 2014
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Guvernator said:
Yep not really getting all the negativity as I am still really enjoying it and the it keeps getting better and better as I level up. The Venus and Mars missions with the new enemies are great. I did start the game later then most so perhaps my enthusiasm will drop off once I get to level 20 but for now I am still having a blast.
I was ready to throw the towel in at about level 16 as I was getting bored. I ended up having a few hours playing with a friend and hit level 20. Id not done any bounties, didnt understand all the items. Didnt understand the factions and the Vanguard marks.

Now I have the gist of how to improve my character and how everything comes together after you hit level 20 and the other segments open up for you to chose from im enjoying it a hell of a lot more. Getting to level 20 is just like a long tutorial.

Trustmeimadoctor

12,526 posts

154 months

Sunday 21st September 2014
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Well I finished the story at level 17 now what the crucible seems a bit st I get on killed in one shot it seems but I've only killed 1 so far ! The big monster missions are just silly hard and very easy to loose interest in (that chained up thing is just stupid)

What else can I do as apart from grinding on that last moon mission I'm can't think how to get to 20 !

Baryonyx

17,990 posts

158 months

Sunday 21st September 2014
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Trustmeimadoctor said:
Well I finished the story at level 17 now what the crucible seems a bit st I get on killed in one shot it seems but I've only killed 1 so far ! The big monster missions are just silly hard and very easy to loose interest in (that chained up thing is just stupid)

What else can I do as apart from grinding on that last moon mission I'm can't think how to get to 20 !
The chained up monster is just the start of it! The boss in the Mars strike mission can absorb a massive amount of punishment.

It's a game that is very easy to feel elated about one minute and then think it's a bit naff the next. I'm glad I don't have to give a definitive score on it. Doing the daily heroic story mission earlier was good fun. The game is so much better for injecting a little challenge into the missions. Seemingly innocuous enemies like the Cabal Psions are much more interesting when they deploy in squadrons of three as 'Fleet' enemies. Tougher, more cunning and quite dangerous.


Sadly, the heroic story challenges are fun but they don't seem to be a worthwhile way of progressing. They offer no vanguard marks or reputation, so the only thing they give long term is glimmer and loot drops, so effectively they don't take you any closer to meaningful levelling other than via loot drops. And because loot drops are apparently tied to player level and not the difficulty you're playing on, the serious looters are just doing low level missions on easy difficulty where the enemies are easily wiped out in seconds, netting the same level of loot drops as any higher level/difficulty mission. Back to the tower to decode any engrams and then back into the low level mission for another smash and grab session.


It's a disappointment that they've included such ridiculous progression systems into the game. The shooting and gameplay itself is top notch but when you're banging your head against a brick wall to level up (or indeed, running one of the same bloody strike missions again) it saps your will to play. The only thing that brings you back is the addictive and satisfying shooting action. It's a far cry from Borderlands where every boss explodes in a shower of fantastic rainbow loot drops. On Borderlands you're lucky to get one armour piece and one weapon per mission/session, which is probably a fix on the mechanics to hide how samey all the weapons are.


Despite all their back pedalling, I bet Destiny are sweating back at their offices. They've had a commercial success and a critical failure, as many critics are now at the 'soft cap' and are seeing the game as it really was meant to be played (strike, rinse, repeat or crucible match, rinse, repeat) and are being quite vocal in their displeasure. Bungie have lost a huge amount of the faith and goodwill gamers had invested in them after a decade of great Halo games, and they'll have a mountain to climb if they want to make another Destiny game.

VeeDubBigBird

440 posts

128 months

Sunday 21st September 2014
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The story is best thought of as a TV series, and this is the difficult season 1. Every D/L will probably add further story content. Think of World of Warcraft and how each expansion extended on from the original story.

The other side to the story is that it’s not tied to just the story missions. Ghost fragments, item descriptions and even the race descriptions all give little tell-tale hints as to the back story and possible future twists. A bit like Dark Souls you make up the story as you go with the some basic fillers from Bungie.

Take the Exo, built before the traveller appeared to protect humanity but no one knows what from, some theories are that the Traveller invaded and enslaved us to fight for it, and erased the Exo’s memory and twisted our past to make it out to be the saviour.

The Awoken were humans who fled Earth before the Darkness arrived, what were they fleeing from and what caused their physical changes. Were they the ones we were fighting are they genetically altered or did they originally rebel against the Traveller’s enslavement.

I’ve got more but don’t want to build a wall of text, so will probably add them in as some of them fit together.

Flat-out

832 posts

194 months

Monday 22nd September 2014
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I feel like I am in a bit of bind with this game. I'm in the hunt for legendary armour and so I am trying to get the appropriate reputation and level of marks needed. The issue is I like the strikes but I also like the crucible and so split my time fairly evenly between the two. I therefore have enough marks and rep combined to get my hands on some decent loot but not enough separately. Very frustrating.

Gun to my head, the crucible is much better for quick rep/mark-ing (although it can be galling to see EVERYBODY be awarded purple loot except me during the random allocations afterwards frown) as this is guaranteed, win or lose. On the other hand, you can spend up to an hour on a tough strike, to be awared a piddly 3 marks.

Seems a little unbalanced.

Irrotational

1,577 posts

187 months

Monday 22nd September 2014
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Strikes should give more rewards relative to other content/methods yes.

PvP seems to drop some reasonable gear but I get lagged out of virtually ever game I play. There is something dodgy with my connection...almost certainly at BT's end and I can't face the call centres to try and get it fixed.

dalzo

1,876 posts

135 months

Monday 22nd September 2014
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Flat-out said:
I feel like I am in a bit of bind with this game. I'm in the hunt for legendary armour and so I am trying to get the appropriate reputation and level of marks needed. The issue is I like the strikes but I also like the crucible and so split my time fairly evenly between the two. I therefore have enough marks and rep combined to get my hands on some decent loot but not enough separately. Very frustrating.

Gun to my head, the crucible is much better for quick rep/mark-ing (although it can be galling to see EVERYBODY be awarded purple loot except me during the random allocations afterwards frown) as this is guaranteed, win or lose. On the other hand, you can spend up to an hour on a tough strike, to be awared a piddly 3 marks.

Seems a little unbalanced.
Have you tried any of the 3 factions, once you get one of their class items you start leveling up with their factions and can get legendary gear and weapons while playing.

Baryonyx

17,990 posts

158 months

Monday 22nd September 2014
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Irrotational said:
Strikes should give more rewards relative to other content/methods yes.
They should. They're a hard effort and rewards should not only be bigger, they should be granted for incremental progress through the mission. Since each strike mission tends to be three big event strung together, each area should come with a bonus, therefore if your connection drops halfway through you have something to show for it. Likewise, if your teammates drop out, you can still be rewarded for making an effort even if the strike then becomes unwinnable (drop ins are infrequent, sadly).

Flat-out

832 posts

194 months

Monday 22nd September 2014
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dalzo said:
Have you tried any of the 3 factions, once you get one of their class items you start leveling up with their factions and can get legendary gear and weapons while playing.
I did accidentally buy a cloak for my hunter from one of them hehe

That's a good shout, ta thumbup Presumably you acquire rep/marks across both strikes and also the crucible but obviously for the faction!?

Wrathalanche

696 posts

139 months

Tuesday 23rd September 2014
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Flat-out said:
I did accidentally buy a cloak for my hunter from one of them hehe

That's a good shout, ta thumbup Presumably you acquire rep/marks across both strikes and also the crucible but obviously for the faction!?
Yeah but you should know that you will stop earning Vanguard rep once you equip the faction class items. So if you're not Vanguard level 2 yet, you never will be until you take off that item again.

So as far as I can tell, the progression post-20 should kind of go like this:

Ignore factions at first.
Get Vanguard 2 by completing lots of bounties, so you can buy legendary armour and weapons from your Class Representatives (the guys at the long table) with Vanguard marks, which are earned through story mode activities.
THEN join a faction by buying their class item. Bounty rep reward will now fill up for your faction rather than Vanguard (but you should have maxed that out in the first step anyway). Once that hits level 2, you can buy the faction's legendary stuff, however you can only buy their stuff with Crucible marks IIRC, so you'll need to split your time between bounties and Crucible.
Once done with that faction, I presume you can switch to one of the other factions and repeat. If you do all 3 of them, plus Vanguard at the start, you will have access to 8 armour sets (each merchant carries two sets).
If you're enjoying PVP you will also see that the Crucible Quarter Masters work the same way - the crucible rep bar will fill as you work in the Crucible, and once at level 2 you can buy their gear with crucible marks.

So all in, there's 10 legendary armour sets: 2 story mode exclusively, 6 which are a mix of story mode and crucible earnings, and 2 that are strictly crucible. These seem permanently on offer, and don't refresh each day. You might decide that you only want one of those armour sets, and so there's no need to pursue all 10. But it can give you an objective for grinding.

The speaker sells gear, but only class items. So there's 2 unique items that can be bought from him for each class but I don't know if there's any benefit to them.

Then there's exotic - bought from a merchant who only spawns in the tower at weekends, and deals in strange coins and motes of light, apparently. I don't know if there are any other conditions you need to meet to buy off him.

Flat-out

832 posts

194 months

Tuesday 23rd September 2014
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thumbup

I am nearly there with rep for both Vanguard the Crucible and so will persevere with those until I can buy something from both. Then I'll sl*g myself to the coolest faction.

I can't help but think that Glimmer is utterly redundant passed level 20. They'll obviously have something planned in DLC etc but at the minute, there is nothing I can/want to buy!