Getting back to gaming, and Destiny (well, maybe...)

[wittyscorpion]

Long time no see, bros! How is everyone in the DenK family doing these days?

It feels like an eternity since I last played games (more than 3 years ago). But with this very unfortunate virus pandemic situation preventing outdoor activities, I have been slowly and quietly getting back to gaming again, primarily being sucked in by the sweet XBox game pass deal (got 1 year of gold then converted the entirely thing into 1 year of game pass ultimate for just $1).

With Destiny 2 New Light now being free to play, I installed the game as well, after overcoming the tremendous fear of possibly falling back into the super grindy black hole . Upon loading my character from D1 into D2, Bungie made this slideshow of my "triumphs" during the original Destiny, along with the friends I played with at the time. That brought me right back to the memory lane of raiding with many DenK bros here, definitely the most fun I have ever had from gaming

Anyway, just want to pop up and say hi. Hope all bros stay safe through this pandemic, and have fun gaming!

[wings]

From my understanding, Bungie has made a right hash of it trying to make the game "free to play" (this is a tactic to save face when numbers dwindle) as new players get overwhelmed by everything, have too many quests in their inventories, and most of the stuff available to them isn't really relevant any more anyway.

The game has increased the grind exponentially since launch but the reason to grind have decreased at the same rate. A lot of loot is just bad including legendary weapons from raids. For example, Last Wish is usually seen as the best raid in Destiny 2 and most players don't even use any of the legendary weapons that drop from there. Even King's Fall had better loot and I thought that raid's loot was bad. Armour has a lot of RNG with the stat splits (this is what D1Y1 got right), certain mods became elemental bound (e.g. shotgun scavenger perks can only be used if you're using an arc subclass because reasons?), and seasonal mod slots means you can only use certain mods (e.g. Taken Armaments for Forge and Outlaw mod slot, Hive Armaments for Opulent mod slot). Also, vendors have suffered from the lack of full vendor refreshes (besides Tess quelle surprise) so often players are only playing Gambit, strikes, and Crucible either for the power boost and/or Bright Dust bounties. The direction for rewards appears to have directed away from weapons and armour to titles and boring currency grinds. The titles were a nice idea but only if there weren't many of them and they were either hard and/or grindy to get. Now the only title that is worth 'wearing' is Reckoner.

[wittyscorpion]

From my point of view (as a total n00b), I am wondering about the following:

1) if I don't care much about the loot, can I just play primarily (if not solely) for the sake of enjoying the content?

In other words, I just want to play the content (which for me at this stage seem A LOT even without buying Forsaken/Shadowkeep) for the sake of playing them, (largely) free from the goal (burden) of obtaining some cool weapons/armors. I do understand that some content may require getting certain "things" in order to play them well, and these "things" require some grinding to get. In that case I would be OK to do some grinding, provided that a) the content I am after is really fun to play, and b) the grinding process is somewhat interesting and not boring.

When playing D1 I had an obsession of getting everything I can get, even at the cost of grinding through something really boring in order to get there. This time I decided to be free of that

I also couldn't care less about "titles" and "cosmetics"...

2) On a related topic: should I consider buying Forsaken / Shadowkeep?

They are on sale this week: Forsaken for $15, Shadowkeep for $21, and both (as in "upgrade" edition) even cheaper for $33.50. Based on what I read so far, Forsaken seems to be excellent while Shadowkeep is not so much, not to mention the "seasons" in Y3 look like a total mess.

3) Assuming that I won't be able to find friends to play with (as I have limited gaming time, at a hopelessly low level from both power and knowledge point of view, and don't know anyone who still play D2), how much can I enjoy playing solo (with matchmaking)? What content would be fun and what wouldn't?

[Pegasus Actual]

OMG it's wittyscorpion !!

I don't know so much about the state of D2 these days, I'm on the PC version and usually get bored a few hours into each expansion. That game really needs crossplay. I know that Dumien would happily run through D2 content with you though.

[wittyscorpion]

May 13, 2020 9:01:08 GMT -5 Pegasus Actual said:

OMG it's wittyscorpion !!

I don't know so much about the state of D2 these days, I'm on the PC version and usually get bored a few hours into each expansion. That game really needs crossplay. I know that Dumien would happily run through D2 content with you though.

Pegasus Actual, long time no see After dusting off my DenK profile yesterday, I found out that you and Dumien are the only friends I have left on DenK

On D2: after getting to know the state of the game a little deeper, I concluded that since I am hopelessly behind and won't be able to spend much time grinding, I probably will just take my time (i.e. an extremely slow pace) soloing through the free content for now and get to the soft cap first. Maybe only after that (provided I am able to make that far) ) I'll start looking for friends to help me with more "endgame" content, as well as thinking about picking up the expansions.

On the possibility of you playing on XB: although D2 does not have cross play, it did add cross save as part of New Light / Shadowkeep. So I imagine you can just link your XB account to your main on bungi.net, download the D2NL on XB for free, and play with both your PC and XB friends . I do understand that probably won't interest you much unless a) you at least buy the season pass on the XB side to have some things to do for leveling up, or b) you don't mind doing some re-runs through old content that are available on NL (which unfortunately probably won't help leveling beyond soft cap).

One dream (which probably will never happen) I have is to have us (the original D1 DenK bros on XB) getting together once in a while (montlhly? quarterly?) to run though D2 raids, not for the loot, but for the experience of gaming together (and laugh hysterically when a certain guardian keeps falling to his death... )

[wittyscorpion]

I guess that I can now use this thread as a newbie's stumble through D2 "guide"

TIL I don't need to spend real money on Forsaken/Shadowkeep, at least not yet. Why? Because of this: www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/gfyk0b/you_can_access_all_dlc_and_season_pass_for_free/

What I did:

1) sign up Stadia Pro for free 2 months trial

2) link Stadia account on bungie.net for cross save

3) play D2 on Stadia (through Chrome on my laptop)

The experience has been pretty good:

1) able to start playing D2 in under 5 minutes

2) can choose to play with either controller or KnM (keyboard & mouse). I am able to just use my XB Elite Controller, even with paddles & custom bindings

Maybe I'll even try KnM gaming as well sometime, to see whether that is more suited for me

3) Stadia performed fairly well, only had significant lag once during my play through of the first Forsaken mission

4) Able to unlock all subclasses behind paywall, and use them on XB!

[Usagi]

I didn't really care the endgame stuff personally. I liked the campaign and I did the first raid once then I lost interest in it. It's great that they made it free.

[wings]

I think with the latest announcement, perhaps only buy Forsaken if you are going to buy at all. It's a quality content drop at the time and Last Wish is a popular raid, contains one of the best strikes in the game even if blueberries are too dumb to know the ball throwing mechanic, and it has the best dungeon in Shattered Throne. You also get loot from the Dreaming City itself from anything that rewards an 'engram' like the weekly story missions, Blind Well bounties, and the armour sets are unique in the game (I think), same with Last Wish. Blind Well suffers from matchmaking issues just like Archon's Forge did in D1 where players were advised to crouch walk into the instance to help get matchmade. The weapons are so-so. Most of the time they are outclassed by other legendary weapons from other activities.

[wittyscorpion]

Alright, after reading and playing (and drowning) for a couple of weeks in a sea of deeply confusing content that are hopelessly disconnected from each other, I finally find my bearings and am able to actually orient myself in this game:

In a nutshell:

• Destiny is a shoot-to-loot(-to-shoot-to-loot...) game
• Overall the game still offers me a quite enjoyable experience with its core loop: shoot things to get betters thing to shoot with, then shoot harder-to-shoot-things to get even better things to shoot with, wash/rinse/repeat
• After breaking up with ActiVision, Bungie had an existential crisis. Y3 is a scape-by year, they had some highs but mostly lows with the community, but IMHO they survived
• Big changes are coming in Y4: content and story telling, loot restructuring, and a new focus of allowing people to jump back in at almost any time (preferably towards the start of a season), and more importantly not afraid to when want to
• The community is having a huge debate on Bungie's newly revealed plan of sunsetting weapons & armors. From my point of view as a player who prefer to get in and out of the game (essentially the shoot-loot-repeat-loop) from time to time with no attachment to use things I looted in the past (they can still be used in non-endgame-content, just not the endgame content), it is a good change. Of course a significant number of people are seriously pissed: the ones who spent a lot of time crafting their builds to perfection sometime in the past and now just cruise along without caring about looting new things at all. It is a totally understandable frustration, but in reality only the ones who no longer wish to get back to the shoot-loot-repeat loop will be seriously affected, and TBH these are the people that Bungie either want to entice back to the loop, or (if they choose not) simply don't care about.
  

Looking forward:

• The largely disastrous Season 10 (ironically named as Season of "Worthy") is now finally coming to an end
• Season 11 is most likely going to be light in new content (that few people really want to play anyway) and more focus on guiding the players towards Y4
• Y4 needs to be D2's TTK (The Taken King) moment to truly revitalize this game suitable for the seasonal model
• If successful (and Bungie has proved in the past they can if they really try), this will buy them 2-3 years for building D3. Under the old agreement with ActiVision, they were supposed to release D3 this year, so they should already have substantial new stuff built. They probably can take substantial content and re-purpose them into D2, while doing a reboot of D3 vision since the time pressure will be significantly off
• There are also rumors that they are engaging new partners, like their old pal Microsoft...

[wittyscorpion]

TL;DR of the post above: if you enjoyed Destiny in the past for its core shoot-loot loop but have already left the game, there are good reasons to think about coming back in Y4 with a fresh start , after season 12 with the new expansion (maybe even invest some F2P time in season 11 to get ready).

[malgato]

Hi. I'm still here. I've even played a few times with Dumien!

[wittyscorpion]

Lots of D2 news recently, quick recap for bros who have been away:

1) Legendary gears now have hard power cap, so they can no longer be used in end-game content after 4 seasons. They can still be used for content that does not have power cap (e.g. regular PvP, Vanguard strikes, etc.).

2) D2 will go on for 3 more years, with 3 expansions planed: Y4 = Beyond Light, Y5 = Witch Queen, Y6 = Lightfall.

3) Beyond Light will be released on 09/22. A brand new subclass type will be introduced, along with Solar/Arc/Void. Guardian will no only fight against the Darkness, but also use the power from Darkness...

4) Older content and 5 planets (Mercury, Mars, Io, Titan, Leviathan) will be "vaulted" to make space.

5) No more SBMM in most of the PvP playlists, back to CBMM for better queue time and a more relaxed and casual experience.

6) The last but not the least: Cosmodrome and Vault of Glass raid from D1 will be un-vaulted and playable in Y4! I am excited to be able to raid VoG again and relive the old days

Bungie also mentioned that they plan to support cross-play "in the future", but does not look like any time soon. That's a bummer. If that can happen someday, then people from different platforms can all play together as a single community (PvP excluded hopefully).

[hebbnh]

I’m still around too, just been a looooong time since I’ve checked in. I’ve been on PC almost exclusively for about a year and a half now, but still jump over to Xbox occasionally (mostly to avoid pvp cheaters in trials).

[wittyscorpion]

hebbnh / malgato / Dumien / Pegasus Actual

With D2's Cross Save support, at least the old X1 gang (the 54 Immortals ) can still reunion on XB for any free content, possible candidates:

1) This season's new dungeon is free to everyone, and the general consensus from the community seems to be "it is awesome". However, the suggested power level is 1040, so probably need everyone in the fire team to be at least 1030 to have a shot at beating it...

2) Y1 raid and raid lairs (which will get vaulted once Y4 starts, so probably a good time to do some runs before they disappear )

3) Nightfall

4) Gambit? I haven't played it yet, heard that the concept is solid, but the reality is the experience is horrible for solo players because everybody would play selfishly and that does not gel well with the game mode's intention. A stacked team is probably the best way to go, and just roll over the randoms

5) Trials? Probably only works if nobody cares about winning and just want to screw around...

6) Menagerie? Another type of content with limited shelf life as it is very likely to get vaulted once Y4 starts

[Pegasus Actual]

I watched the Bungie stream and their plans were less than exciting.

No real crossplay anytime soon. I thought a year after enabling cross-save wasn't an unreasonable expectation but here we are.

And they're just tossing vast swaths of content into the garbage... I mean vault. What even is their messaging here... "We're sorry about FOMO, we are going to stop doing that... but also we're just deleting entire planets and raids from the game"? I kind of get it, there's a lot of garbage in there that's not really worth playing, and anytime I try to log in my quests tab is a confusing mess. I don't even really know what a Raid Lair is, that's my level of Destiny engagement at this point. But I know they're going away. Does the loot from them matter? Did I see that the "Whisper of the Worm" was going away? I guess that's basically the Black Spindle from D1... the Black Spindle thing being one of the more fun things from that game. But with expansion power creep it's probably super easy to do at this point.

Playing on the new Xbox might be somewhat tolerable since they at least announced 60fps support. (though the new machine could easily handle a 90+hz VRR mode in like 1440p). I can't wait to see people on gen 8 hardware complaining about how unfair it is they're playing 30fps Crucible against 60 fps though.

I'm sure I've complained about it before, and I'll probably complain about it again... but the inventory in this game is so seriously tedious. Aside from the assualt on my senses that is the quests tab, there's also the alarm of logging and seeing that my vault is completely full of random shit where I don't know if any of it is good so I'm kind of scared to delete it. Another counter-intuitive thing they did a while back was add a way to buy back stuff you had melted down... great! But at the exact same time they added a random rolls system of stuff that weren't compatible with that new system. Why not just have it track all the rolls you've unlocked so you can buy anything back you need? Sometimes you might be deleting stuff that kind of sucks and then down the road balance changes could make suddenly viable.

Just looked at my Steam, last time I played it was in March... I remember logging in with the intention of finishing the campaign from the last expansion and for some really stupid reason that I can't quite recall I quit out without completing that goal. Like... the next step in the expansion was to get some kills with an LMG or something, and I didn't have any LMGs?

So yeah, I don't know. One of these days I'm going to log back in. I'm going to try to get the Whisper... and I'm going to finish the campaign from that expansion that I don't even remember the name of. But ya know. The one on the moon. Where the wizards come from. But if it's not fun then there's a good chance that will be my last login until at least the fall expansion.

[wittyscorpion]

Pegasus Actual totally understand your pain on multiple fronts.

1. Content get vaulted: due to FOMO I have to draw up a plan to play them before Y4 starts. The good news is that this season is long (15 weeks, 100 days left), so I have some time.

The plan:
- 3 campaigns in Y1
- adventures, quests and lost sectors (and maybe some exploration) on Mars/Mercury/Titan/Io
- Y1 Raid and 2 Raid Lairs (BTW, if I understand correctly Raid Lairs are just Raids in smaller scale)
- Whispers and Zero Hours (although I do believe that Bungie will try to keep these)
- Menagerie (there is still hope that Bungie might keep these)
- Black Armory Forge (this might be safe as the locations are not on to-be-vaulted planets)

2. The amount of crap in personal vault: I only started a few weeks ago, and my vault is already a mess. On Friday evening I decided to do a cleaning instead of playing, and it took me multiple hours.

On this front, I can offer some ideas on how to make cleaning less painful, especially if you haven't played a while and don't care about most of the stuff you currently have other than fear-of-shard-the-wrong-stuff:

- On weapons: visit www.d2checklist.com/gear/weapons, link your account, and then type "is:godroll" and "is:goodroll" in the search bar. Lock these weapons. It is pretty safe to shard the rest of purple and below (maybe minus the raid rewards, I haven't played any raid yet so don't know how they work).

BTW: if you want to see what weapons have fixed rolls (which can be pulled out of collection later and safe to shard), type "is:fixed".

- On armors: anything with total-base-stats < 50 (or 55 and even 60) probably can be safely sharded. DestinyItemManager, aka DIM, can be used to easily query this. You could even go all in by equipping the highest power level pieces at each slot and then shard everything else. They are all going to be obsolete anyway.

3. The crazy number of quests to deal with: I have 40+, at varying stage of completion. You probably have much less of a problem because you played off and on in the past.

[wittyscorpion]

The good news is that once you spent an hour or two to clean house, catching back up is not too bad. Play the new season intro quest to get the "Umbral Engram" started, then just play whatever you want to play. Umbral Engrams drop everywhere, and they can be focused to specific loot pool (e.g. this season's gear). Before long you'll get a new set of gears that will be relevant for a year, and at the same time easily hit the "easy" power cap of 1000.

- if you do care about the new Dungeon: then you'll need to do some grinding on powerful/pinnacle gears to raise your power cap beyond 1000. It is OK if you don't want to do that, as Bungie said the Dungeon will be in the game after season ends (due to technical reasons it will disappear next season, but will come back the one after)

- if you also care about the seasonal ranking: then you'll have to run around like a mad man to collect bounties. Completing them is largely painless, but getting them is quite annoying. Bungie did promise to 1) reduce the importance of bounties for ranking up, and 2) have much easier ways to pick them up, like right from the director. But unfortunately these changes won't happen this season.

[Pegasus Actual]

Good tips wittyscorpion. I will definitely give d2checklist a shot whenever I end up deciding to load up on Destiny. Peace of mind that I'm not melting down good rolls would clear my biggest barrier to trying the game again.

Oh there was one more of my usual Destiny complaints that I forgot to mention. Quest steps that require Crucible. That's a big nope for me. I suffered through it some in the original... and maybe even a little on D2 Xbox, I can't recall. But in D2 I played 3 games during launch week on PC just to see if I would feel better about it, won all 3, and retired. Because nope. Crucible just isn't good. And it seems like they still have no interest in providing alternate quest steps for people who aren't interested in their PVP. Though granted COD Warzone suckered me into going into regular multiplayer to level up some weapons... so I'm not entirely immune to the concept. But I'm happy that at least with Destiny I didn't waste my time. And frankly, as campy and lame as base multi is in MW, it's still a ton better than Crucible. And MW's Gunfight is still awesome, but I've been playing that from the beginning, it's just useless for focus-leveling weapons as you don't get to choose your loadouts.

[wittyscorpion]

On PvP:

1) don't do it on PC, too many cheaters, just go to XB and own with K&M over us-poor-controller folks like you always do ;
2) Bungie just changed the majority of the Crucible playlists to CBMM instead of SBMM. Looks like they finally realized that Destiny PvP is never going to be people's choice for pwn-ing experience, it is more like a range to experiment with different guns but on human players. With your skills most of the games should feel like walk in a park;
3) If you don't like getting killed by random crap (aka Heavy/Super/overpowered-"meta"-weapons-that-try-harders-sink-ginormous-number-of-hours-to-farm-godroll), then just play Rumble. Most of the engagements are 1 on 1 and people don't get to use super that much. Probably only the top fraggers can get 1 super per game. Lack of map knowledge is also much less of a big deal;
4) You don't have to play many Crucible games, just a few per week to get the Pinnacle (yes, they now drop pinnacles) gear then move on

Jun 14, 2020 15:27:18 GMT -5 Pegasus Actual said:

Oh there was one more of my usual Destiny complaints that I forgot to mention. Quest steps that require Crucible. That's a big nope for me. I suffered through it some in the original... and maybe even a little on D2 Xbox, I can't recall. But in D2 I played 3 games during launch week on PC just to see if I would feel better about it, won all 3, and retired. Because nope. Crucible just isn't good. And it seems like they still have no interest in providing alternate quest steps for people who aren't interested in their PVP. Though granted COD Warzone suckered me into going into regular multiplayer to level up some weapons... so I'm not entirely immune to the concept. But I'm happy that at least with Destiny I didn't waste my time. And frankly, as campy and lame as base multi is in MW, it's still a ton better than Crucible. And MW's Gunfight is still awesome, but I've been playing that from the beginning, it's just useless for focus-leveling weapons as you don't get to choose your loadouts.

BTW: are you still playing Siege? Looks like the game is still pretty much alive, one of the top played games on XBL.

I have also been watching Valorant on Twitch since Beta, the new kid in the block that gets all the hype. You are not interested in that?

On the CS clone front: Warface released non-F2P "Breakout" for consoles to experience CS, looks like argyle antiques played it, you did not partner with him for some duo domination ?

[wittyscorpion]

Jun 14, 2020 15:27:18 GMT -5 Pegasus Actual said:

Good tips wittyscorpion. I will definitely give d2checklist a shot whenever I end up deciding to load up on Destiny. Peace of mind that I'm not melting down good rolls would clear my biggest barrier to trying the game again.

A quick note on this: keep in mind that they did not yet have a chance to identify what rolls are "god"/"good" for the new seasonal weapons yet. So once you earned some of these, don't shard them just because they are not marked god/good on d2checklist

Also: fixed roll weapons are not marked as god/good either, some of them are good weapons. They can be safely sharded though because you can pull them out of Collections whenever you want.

[wings]

Just a heads-up, Gambit is power enabled for the invasion part so using sunset guns and armour will put you at a disadvantage. Looks like standard Crucible will be the only place to use sunset loot since even destinations are being replaced, and they will probably have a higher level cap requirement, along with everything associated there like strikes. Solo play can be rough but it's usually because randoms are playing for quests and bounty completions to the detriment of winning. Gambit is probably the hardest game mode to carry someone. There's not much you can do to stop Leroy Jenkins from dropping Motes all the time. Being rolled by premade fireteams isn't as common as it used to be since Bungie changed the matchmaking so those queued as a three/four stack end up getting harder opponents than they otherwise would had they all solo queued instead. That said forming premade fireteams is still the best way to win a match, despite all the average players including celebrity streamers crying over Armaments mods thinking they lost a match just because of that.

[wittyscorpion]

1 week into the new season, looks like the new weapons are well received, especially the two legendary swords, the pulse rifle, the exotic grenade launcher that uses primary ammo(!), and the catalyst that catapults the sub par exotic Trinity Ghoul to the top tier.

The new "Umbral" engrams not only get dropped everywhere quite frequently (not even talking about the crazy AFK farming that hopefully will get patched soon), but also can be focused to farm rolls.

All in all: if someone who has zero gears were to start play now, with season pass he can become well equipped in just a few hours. Even without season pass is not that big of a disadvantage.

Looks like Bungie is indeed delivering it's promise that a new or retuning player can start/resume playing the game at the start of any new season and be able to orient himself fairly quickly.

[Pegasus Actual]

So Whisper mission, I can get to the combat section in 4-5 minutes. I got to the last room with like 7+ minutes left and did maybe 1/3 damage to the three bosses' health pool. I'll have to figure out a loadout... and I probably need to upgrade some of my armor. I have yet to engage with the Armor 2.0 system but it seems like you have to install mods to upgrade your stats... so all my armor is in... poor shape. First time I tried to do the platforming part my character literally wasn't fast enough to get through the section where the walls push you off the ledge (early section, right after the 90 degree around-the-corner blind jump), lol. I had to dig up a couple of armor pieces that had decent base mobility just to get through there.

So I went and tried to do some other stuff. I started doing the new season stuff and immediately hit a roadblock where I couldn't take the Engram from Drifter because I was full of the seasonal engrams from doing random old content. And I couldn't decode any of those Engrams because you need to take Drifty's gift engram first. Lol. Did look up the workaround of just doing it on another character as that unlocks the engram decryptor thing account-wide. What's also kind of funny is that they said it would be fixed in Monday's (Jun 15) patch and clearly it wasn't.

Then I started working on Warmind exotic quests and... the thing where you have to unlock 'nodes' or whatever is just completely broken. Looked it up and Bungie is 'investigating' but it seems like everyone who is trying to do that content has been stopped dead in their tracks. Some people wasted their time trying to do it on new characters and all kinds of nonsense but nothing works.

Bungie, I'm not impressed.

[wings]

Jun 18, 2020 21:18:50 GMT -5 Pegasus Actual said:

So Whisper mission, I can get to the combat section in 4-5 minutes. I got to the last room with like 7+ minutes left and did maybe 1/3 damage to the three bosses' health pool. I'll have to figure out a loadout... and I probably need to upgrade some of my armor. I have yet to engage with the Armor 2.0 system but it seems like you have to install mods to upgrade your stats... so all my armor is in... poor shape. First time I tried to do the platforming part my character literally wasn't fast enough to get through the section where the walls push you off the ledge (early section, right after the 90 degree around-the-corner blind jump), lol. I had to dig up a couple of armor pieces that had decent base mobility just to get through there.

I can help with the Whisper mission if you're still interested. Polaris Lance was the top tier gun for players without Whisper and pick them off from behind the 'pillar' just before you drop down into the boss arena. Which character did you try soloing it with? I did the Whisper missions on my Titan.

[Pegasus Actual]

Jun 20, 2020 1:32:35 GMT -5 wings said:

I can help with the Whisper mission if you're still interested. Polaris Lance was the top tier gun for players without Whisper and pick them off from behind the 'pillar' just before you drop down into the boss arena. Which character did you try soloing it with? I did the Whisper missions on my Titan.

Thanks for the offer... do you still play on Xbox? I'm on PC at this point. I probably won't play much Destiny in the next week or so (I might log in to finish a couple of weekly bounties that I have decent progress on) while I play through The Last of Us 2.

I was doing the mission with a Titan. But with like blue armor / weapons for the most part. I like "challenging" content so I'm happy to lose a few times while doing it solo. I don't think it will be a huge deal once I put some effort into my build. I see Polaris Lance is in the Warmind stuff that I'm unable to proceed with thanks to Bungie QA... and ick, "16. Complete three Crucible matches". Yep, here's 15 PVE steps in this quest and whoops, now you have to go play PVP for some reason. I would love to give the guy who signed off on that type of quest design a swift kick to the nuts.

[wings]

Jun 20, 2020 15:09:36 GMT -5 Pegasus Actual said:

Jun 20, 2020 1:32:35 GMT -5 wings said:

I can help with the Whisper mission if you're still interested. Polaris Lance was the top tier gun for players without Whisper and pick them off from behind the 'pillar' just before you drop down into the boss arena. Which character did you try soloing it with? I did the Whisper missions on my Titan.

Thanks for the offer... do you still play on Xbox? I'm on PC at this point. I probably won't play much Destiny in the next week or so (I might log in to finish a couple of weekly bounties that I have decent progress on) while I play through The Last of Us 2.

I was doing the mission with a Titan. But with like blue armor / weapons for the most part. I like "challenging" content so I'm happy to lose a few times while doing it solo. I don't think it will be a huge deal once I put some effort into my build. I see Polaris Lance is in the Warmind stuff that I'm unable to proceed with thanks to Bungie QA... and ick, "16. Complete three Crucible matches". Yep, here's 15 PVE steps in this quest and whoops, now you have to go play PVP for some reason. I would love to give the guy who signed off on that type of quest design a swift kick to the nuts.

I'm still on Xbox and I forgot you went to PC. I could download the free version of the game onto my notebook, set up a Steam account finally, and activate cross-save and see if it runs smooth enough, although installations onto computers that are not desktops are not supported by Bungie. I won't, or rather shouldn't, need any DLC purchases to access the activity since it's on Io. If you don't mind using Discord for LFGing then discord.gg/DestinyReddit has a bucket load of PC players registered. I suggested them because Destiny 2 has performance issues (lack of optimisation) in recent seasons, and knowing my luck, my notebook won't run it like it should. Also, Whisper isn't really worth running unless you get the catalyst for it, which requires three Heroic completions that have to be done on separate weeks.

[wittyscorpion]

Pegasus Actual I thought that you still play on X1 sometime because I noticed that you were playing Warzone with Argyle a few weeks ago. Now I realize Warzone supports cross play. So you no longer play on XBox anymore? What is your plan when the next gen consoles come out?

wings It has been a while so I forgot you are on XBL as well. You are in Europe, right?

I spent most of play time in season 10 on Stadia, but now came back to X1 after picking up Forsaken+Shadowkeep (including the season pass for 11) for $33.50 when it was on sale, as well as a SSD so the loading does not take forever on my aging X1. I am going to be firmly invested on the XBox side mainly due to the gamepass (and Halo for nostalgia factor). Plan to pick up a X Series X once it is released.

Destiny wise I still have a ton of quests to finish, including Whisper and Zero Hour. Hopefully I can get to them later this season.

[wings]

Jun 22, 2020 11:45:05 GMT -5 wittyscorpion said:

wings It has been a while so I forgot you are on XBL as well. You are in Europe, right?

Yes although the times I'm online are sporadic because I'm on furlough and my body isn't tiring at times I would normally be since the gyms are closed as I used to spend a fair amount of time in the gym after work. I've taken up trail running and ended up in all sorts of places.

[Pegasus Actual]

Jun 22, 2020 11:45:05 GMT -5 wittyscorpion said:

Pegasus Actual I thought that you still play on X1 sometime because I noticed that you were playing Warzone with Argyle a few weeks ago. Now I realize Warzone supports cross play. So you no longer play on XBox anymore? What is your plan when the next gen consoles come out?

I don't think I've played anything on Xbox in about 3 months. I was doing some R6 Siege, then the new season started and we didn't hop on it right away and I just kind of fell off. And it's been a full season since then. A few days ago my PS4 Pro wasn't detected by my monitor so I stole the Xbox's HDMI cable to play Last of Us 2 (almost done). So now I'm *really* not playing Xbox.

Warzone crossplay is great. argyle antiques actually purchased MW on Xbox, so if we want to do Gunfight or something he has to play there, but he's been playing Warzone on PC, with a controller. He would cite FOV slider and higher frame rates as the major reasons to play on PC. And yeah, I'm extra harsh on Destiny's lack of cross-play seeing as it's more LFG than matchmaking based, cross-play would have the biggest impact. And all these other companies are getting it done while Bungie falls farther and farther behind.

I spent most of play time in season 10 on Stadia, but now came back to X1 after picking up Forsaken+Shadowkeep (including the season pass for 11) for $33.50 when it was on sale, as well as a SSD so the loading does not take forever on my aging X1. I am going to be firmly invested on the XBox side mainly due to the gamepass (and Halo for nostalgia factor). Plan to pick up a X Series X once it is released.

Stadia probably had good load times by Destiny standards? And it's 60 FPS I believe. Did you find it to be a clearly better experience than base Xbox? Gamepass is good value if you're someone who wants to play lots of games. Also available on PC btw. I haven't gotten a ton out of it, but there was a deal to upgrade your Xbox Live Gold so I have it I think for another two years or something.

So next gen consoles... I'm planning to get both of them. Not because I expect to play them a lot necessarily, but I just always get the new consoles. Going back to Sega Genesis I've gotten most major consoles during their release windows.

Series X is in kind of a weird spot. Microsoft is putting all their stuff on PC (and XCloud). In previous generations there were always decent reasons for a PC guy to also have an Xbox. I'm not sure that's the case any longer.

PS5 is a little more interesting. Sony has their big exclusives. They doubled down on SSD bandwidth. And their SSD might be the first true advantage consoles have had over PCs at launch in a very very long time. Xbox's SSD is really good too, but it doesn't seem like they put in as much engineering effort as Sony from the raw throughput they are quoting. Very interesting stuff. Xbox's solution is like 50x as good as current gen hard disks, which at first glance looks more than adequate. Sony is more like 100x current gen. Will devs really make use of the extra IO performance or was it overkill? From a pure resolution/frame rate standpoint Xbox is going to be a bit stronger.

The CPUs in both machines are quite good by modern PC gaming standards. That wasn't the case when XB1/PS4 launched. They were both married to AMD and AMD was just that much behind. And like last gen, both boxes share way more similarities than they do differences. It looks like they're both going to support variable refresh up to like 120hz which is really cool. But meanwhile Bungie is saying 4k60hz which is absolutely the wrong target to aim for IMO. And you gotta wonder, is a FOV slider coming (Destiny console FOV is the worst)? Is a 120hz mode coming? Some companies do better than others with this stuff on consoles. And Bungie has not proven themselves in that regard.

When Series X and PS5 launch, it looks like a really good time to be a console gamer to me. But I'll still be mainly PC.

[wittyscorpion]

Jun 22, 2020 17:12:14 GMT -5 Pegasus Actual said:

Stadia probably had good load times by Destiny standards? And it's 60 FPS I believe. Did you find it to be a clearly better experience than base Xbox?

Other than faster loading time (which was a huge issue for my X1 before buying the SSD), Stadia did not offer much advantages otherwise. I have an OK but not great internet (~30MPS download on a good day), so occasionally frames are dropped, audio out of sync, etc. Also, I am using an aged MacBook Pro to play Stadia, and from time to time the fans are going crazy and then the performance of the whole laptop starts going downhill.

That said: Stadia can be used as a good backup. It now has a free service, works well with the F2P side of D2. So if I need to do something quick (e.g. pick up bounties, or shard crap load of junk gears) I can just use Stadia.

Jun 22, 2020 17:12:14 GMT -5 Pegasus Actual said:

So next gen consoles... I'm planning to get both of them. Not because I expect to play them a lot necessarily, but I just always get the new consoles. Going back to Sega Genesis I've gotten most major consoles during their release windows.

Series X is in kind of a weird spot. Microsoft is putting all their stuff on PC (and XCloud). In previous generations there were always decent reasons for a PC guy to also have an Xbox. I'm not sure that's the case any longer.

PS5 is a little more interesting. Sony has their big exclusives. They doubled down on SSD bandwidth. And their SSD might be the first true advantage consoles have had over PCs at launch in a very very long time. Xbox's SSD is really good too, but it doesn't seem like they put in as much engineering effort as Sony from the raw throughput they are quoting. Very interesting stuff. Xbox's solution is like 50x as good as current gen hard disks, which at first glance looks more than adequate. Sony is more like 100x current gen. Will devs really make use of the extra IO performance or was it overkill? From a pure resolution/frame rate standpoint Xbox is going to be a bit stronger.

The CPUs in both machines are quite good by modern PC gaming standards. That wasn't the case when XB1/PS4 launched. They were both married to AMD and AMD was just that much behind. And like last gen, both boxes share way more similarities than they do differences. It looks like they're both going to support variable refresh up to like 120hz which is really cool. But meanwhile Bungie is saying 4k60hz which is absolutely the wrong target to aim for IMO. And you gotta wonder, is a FOV slider coming (Destiny console FOV is the worst)? Is a 120hz mode coming? Some companies do better than others with this stuff on consoles. And Bungie has not proven themselves in that regard.

When Series X and PS5 launch, it looks like a really good time to be a console gamer to me. But I'll still be mainly PC.

Regarding next era of gaming: I can see XBL vs. PS going at each other for another cycle, while PC continues to dominate for some time, then taken over by cloud gaming. The hardware divide are being minimized by the cross-play movement, and eventually will evolve into a war of service instead. Whichever platform offers the best service will win, most likely in the cycle after this incoming one.

In this regard, Microsoft is probably in the best position due to its combined strengths of owning windows, deep experience from many years of console war, and strong position in cloud computing. Best of all, they have a cohesive strategy that encompasses short, mid and long term, and the ability and willingness to throw huge amount of money into a business competition that deemed strategically important.

Sony unfortunately does not have anywhere near the intensity and may only have one major advantage left, the PS exclusives. And it does not help that multiple formidable competitors are entering the warzone to fight this soon to become game-as-service war: Google / Amazon / Facebook.

Google and Amazon have the business strengths in cloud computing, but their lack of gaming experience presents a big barrier of entry into this highly competitive space. IMHO they won't become major players until the next cycle. Out of these, I choose Amazon because of their impressive track record of doing well when entering a new business (Google on the other hand seems to be the opposite, fall flat or often on their face when doing things outside the core competence) and ownership of Twitch. Twitch Prime in particular is a brilliant (and natural) move.

Facebook's strategy seems to be forming an alliance with Microsoft, the most recent development is Microsoft dropping Mixer and supporting Fackbook. If the alliance works out, the computing power from MSFT and the social influence from FB can definitely be 1 + 1 >> 2, so each side can be more focused on what they do best. However, just like any wars, an alliance of 2 parties can often fall apart, and I certainly wouldn't bet on this one.