Destiny 2 - MMOFPS-ARPG - PC/PS4/XB1 - Oct 24th/Sept 6th. - by EvaUnit02
EvaUnit02 on 4/1/2018 at 19:01
The cat is out of the bag on Destiny 2's development history.
TL;DR:-
* Destiny 2 was rebooted halfway through development. The current incarnation of the game was made in ~16 months.
* Bungie felt that releasing expansions every few months was too hard, so they got Activision's permission to drip-feed new content through micro-transactions.
[video=youtube;JW10kMwhGa8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW10kMwhGa8[/video]
henke on 2/9/2018 at 09:34
This is one of the PS+ games this month so I gave it a whirl. Not bad! The shooting's solid and the graphics are pretty. I'm past the tutorial bit and I've gotten my LIGHT back. When do I get to ride the hoverbike tho? I am mainly here for the hoverbike.
Malf on 2/9/2018 at 11:32
I think you need to be level 20 before getting a Sparrow.
henke on 2/9/2018 at 11:42
Aww Christ. I'm only level 2, that's gonna take forever isn't it?
Malf on 2/9/2018 at 16:18
Not if you find someone to play with. Levelling's a lot faster with company.
Thirith on 3/9/2018 at 06:56
If the first Destiny on PS4 is anything to go by, the community's pretty friendly; I played with randoms fairly often and never had a bad experience. At worst we played next to rather than with each other, but my impression is that tight cooperation isn't all that important anyway.
I'll be playing D2 on PS4 every now and then for half an hour or so in the evenings, if you ever want to team up. I've only just started, though.
Malf on 3/9/2018 at 09:50
Did a couple of raids last night. Finished off a Spire of Stars run that we started on Friday night, then did a prestige Leviathan run.
Raids in Destiny 2 require a lot of communication, and have some really weird mechanics.
I'll explain the last phase of Spire of Stars, and only that, because if I had to explain every phase of every raid, I'd be here for days.
Spire of Stars we needed to finish after bungling the last phase numerous times on Friday night. I hate to admit it, but I think the main reason we failed so much was down to one poor player who got replaced last night. We finished it off on the second attempt, where Friday night we were banging our collective heads against the wall for 3-4 hours.
Spire is probably the most complicated raid in the game, and definitely the most complex raid in any game I've ever played.
The idea is that Emperor Calus of the Cabal is being attacked by the Red Legion (another faction of the Cabal, and the main antagonists of the Destiny 2 campaign).
He has somehow managed to get the Guardians to fight for him (previous raids and quests explain this), and this last phase involves the guardians attempting to destroy an attacking Cabal fleet while fighting off a boarding party (at least that's the way I understand it).
But of course, you can't just have a trigger to pull. No, that would be far too easy.
Instead, after fighting off an initial wave of Cabal, the big bad guy stood on the building in the middle of the arena blasts out a field of energy that engulfs all the players. This applies a debuff called Greed, which if it stays on a player for 10 seconds, instantly kills them. At this point, a ball of energy will be spat out and has to be passed from each player to the next, with the final player to touch the ball then throwing it at the big bad. After passing the ball, the Greed debuff is removed.
This triggers another wave of enemies, after which four team members have to stand on four circular pads that trigger a beam of light that acts as an elevator.
At that point, one team member, and one team member only, can go up the beam of light, whereupon they'll find themselves inside a holographic representation of space with several enemy ships. But not just any player can go up; out of the team of six, three random players will get a buff called "Superior Retainer". Only one of those players can go up. We call this player the scout.
We play this with 4 people designated to particular pads, with the remaining two players roaming. This usually guarantees that at least one roamer gets the buff, and so they can go up the beam of light.
Two of these ships will have symbols above them, commonly referred to as square, circle and triangle. The player shouts out the symbols, and if it weren't complicated already, this is where it starts to get nasty.
In the centre of the arena is the squat 3-sided building with doors on each side that the big bad guy is stood on top of. In front of these doors are mosaics with the symbols on that the scout called out.
Two balls of energy will be spat out to the elevator pads, which must then be charged by carrying them through pillars of mist on top of the squat building. These balls must then be thrown through the doors that correspond with the symbols called out by the scout earlier. However, for the doors to open, players must be stood on all three mosaics. And to make things doubly worse, if this is not done in a timely fashion, a massive bombardment is triggered killing every player.
Once the balls have been thrown through the doors, more balls will be spat out, and now two of the players with the Superior Retainer buff need to charge a ball with mist, go up the elevator, then chuck their ball at one of the ships with the symbol above it. Of course, that means that if one or more of the Superior Retainer players are on an elevator pads, one or both of the roamers will have to stand on their pad while they go up the pillar of light.
This then triggers what we call the ball-passing phase.
We split the team in to three, one player, then three, then two. A ball will be spat out once again, which again needs to be charged. This applies the Greed debuff, so the single player picks it up, charges it, then passes it to the group of three, whereupon they start juggling it between them in order to not die from greed. Once one ball is out, another gets spat out. The single player once again charges it with mist, then passes it to the group of two, who start passing it between themselves. Then a final ball gets spat out, which the single player picks up and charges.
About five seconds after the last ball is charged, the big bad will raise his hand in the air, which will then glow purple, which is the signal for each player holding a ball to throw it at his hand. This takes down his shield, at which point you've got ~10-15 seconds to do damage to him.
It's really hard to kill him outright in this phase, so the whole rigmarole starts again.
So once you've done this dance a second time, you'll get him down to his last sliver of health, whereupon he triggers an emergency shield and six balls are spat out. Each player needs to pick up a ball (and not more than one), then throw it at him. If you've done this right, you should be able to kill him. If not? Yeah, you've got another phase to repeat. I think. Or you may instantly die? Dunno, things get hazy around about this point.
Oh yeah, and in case it wasn't apparent, during each and every one of these steps, you're having to fight of waves of Cabal.
Needless to say, the poor guy whose first time it was on Friday couldn't quite get to grips with the whole thing. Last night, when he was replaced by someone who'd played Spire of Stars before, it went really smoothly.
Oh, and there's a hard mode as well, which we had a go at recently, but couldn't quite finish. That one applies various nasty modifiers such as weapon restrictions, tougher enemies and amplified elemental damage.
Yeah, that's for the masochists out there.
Thirith on 3/9/2018 at 09:56
Okay, that does sound a lot more involved than my memories of the first Destiny. In your experience, though, is that kind of cooperation needed any time before the endgame content? When I played Destiny, I rarely if ever ran into any major obstacles; I did die a couple of times, but on the whole I could play the game pretty well as a single-player experience. Coop was a nice diversion, but it never really felt necessary for the plot missions.
What you're describing sounds a lot like MMO raids, though, which isn't a gameplay style I know particularly well. Is there much (or any) space for improvisation in the coop/raid gameplay?
Malf on 3/9/2018 at 10:10
Nah, that style of gameplay is pretty much exclusive to the raids. And no, they're not very flexible. If you don't perform each step the way it's prescribed, you're going to fail. More than which, there are few to no cues as to what you're supposed to do, and Bungie offer little to no help when releasing a raid. So the first time a raid is played, you will fail as you won't know what the hell you are meant to be doing. Only after hours of repetition and consultation with other raiders will players define the pattern.
Seriously, while it's less complex, some of the stuff in Leviathan had me completely baffled as to how players figured out what to do. There's one phase in a garden with dogs, flowers and beams of light that is so opaque it might as well be a wall.
I don't think I have the patience to be one of the first people to play a raid and puzzle this stuff out. I mean, these puzzles would be complicated enough if a single player were able to do them, but to make it so that six people have to coordinate their actions?
Yeah, that's an exercise in wrangling cats.
It's complicated enough even when everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing. Going in blind takes a special kind of bloody-mindedness.
Starker on 3/9/2018 at 12:03
Coordinating six people is an exercise in wrangling cats? I take it you didn't play vanilla WoW, then.