Huh? (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Friday, May 20, 2016, 18:46 (2906 days ago) @ Claude Errera

We just play this game so, so very differently that communication about its problems is difficult. :(

If we all thought the same way about everything, the world would be a very boring place :)

I got a Chaperone after SRL - because when I first received the Jolly Holliday quest, I tried it out, decided I wasn't interested in playing Crucible a way I didn't enjoy, and forgot about it. SRL came along, and suddenly there was a trivial way to finish this quest, so I did, and got the gun. And yeah, it's fun to play with (though I'm so crappy with shotguns in general that I didn't do much more than try it out before putting it into my vault). But not having it for a year didn't bug me in the slightest.

I didn't get a Thorn for well over a year; it was too much of a pain in the ass to try and figure out how to make Fusion Rifles work well enough to earn the points needed (a Void FR was the only void weapon I had at the start), so I just ignored it. Eventually, I had a Word of Crota, a Void LDR, and a Truth - and suddenly the requirements were pretty simple, so I completed them. It's a nice gun - but I'm not very good with it (I was a Last Word fanatic at the time I got it, and it just fired too slowly for my taste), so it's mostly in my vault. I never once felt like I was missing something.

In my head, I have no problem with any of what you described because it was all completely up to you. You didn't feel like completing the requirements, and you could come back to them at any time because Bungie created concrete ways to earn those weapons.

When I talk about feeling like I need to do a bunch of stuff I don't like just to reach the stuff I do like, I'm talking about a few different things at once. Some of it comes down to my enjoyment of the content itself. Using Vanilla Destiny as an example, I absolutely loved a couple of the end game activities, but really didn't enjoy most of the game leading up to those activities. The story missions, the 1-26 grind... it was a total drag for me. So that created a dilemma for me. I really wanted to have multiple characters so I could experience the end game activities using multiple classes. But to do so, I would need to invest a massive amount of my time into playing parts of the game that I didn't want to play, so that I could reach the stuff I enjoyed. Ultimately, I went ahead and brought multiple characters up to raid level. And I'm glad I did, because of all the fun I've had with those characters since, but it was only barely worth it for me. Plus it is a recurring problem. To this day, I haven't loved any of the story content that Bungie has introduced into Destiny. I enjoyed the TTK campaign more than the rest of the story missions, but not enough to want to play it multiple times. And yet that's exactly what I have to do if I want to continue having fun with my alts in the end game.

So that's the loop that Destiny creates for me. The parts I love, the parts that all my friends love doing together, are always at the very end of a long and often tedious (for me) process. So that's why I'm so hyper sensitive to every little design choice which I feel is less player-friendly (ie needlessly time consuming) than it should be. That's why it bothers me so much when Bungie adds content like the new quest in the April update: it's so mediocre, so half baked, adds nothing in terms of truly new or unique experiences... it's just filler in a game that already has to much filler IMO.

There have been many times over the past year that I've considered scrapping 2 of my characters and just playing as a single guardian. Yes, I would miss playing as my alts, but it would mean I'd need to spend so much less time with the parts of the game I don't want to replay. But then RNG comes into the mix. Going back to the examples you brought up, Bungie has gotten better when it comes to adding more clear, direct paths to some of the loot in the game. But a lot of it, most of it, is still RNG dependent. And to this day, Bungie stacks the RNG odds so far against the player that without 3 characters, I'd probably never get to use 90% of the gear I want to play with. Much as they've streamlined some of the process, it is still a major time commitment to get the gear I want to use, bring it up to Trials level, upgrade all the nodes... If I were limited to 1 set of activity drops per week, I would be missing out on huge amounts of the fun that I currently have with the end game. I love coming up with specialized builds and unique combos of perks, weapons, and armor. If I only enjoyed playing story missions or patrol, that would be easy. But again, the activities I enjoy are so dependent on light level that creating those options for myself takes A LOT of time. And I really don't feel like it should. Not to the extreme that it does.

I sort of hate flashy armor. Most of my characters are clad in black. So Chroma was irrelevant to me. I tried it out (and I've colored a couple of weapons just to make the stupid yellow outline on their boxes in my inventory)... but I really couldn't care less about it. Which means I have a vault full of all colors of Chroma. If, at some point, I change my mind and decide I like the concept of glowy armor... I can have as much as I want, in whatever color I want. Zero grinding, because it falls frequently enough that if you don't actually use it you build up a mountain.

So that's pretty much how I approach it as well, with a couple exceptions. Even so, it quickly becomes a pain in the ass. I have more pieces of Chroma than I'll probably ever use. That's not the problem.

I really like the new Titan Spektar armor. I finally got a full set, and I thought it would all look badass with blue chroma. But none of my pieces came with a blue slot, so I had to re-roll each piece many times before I finally landed on blue slots in each of them (seriously, I rerolled my chest piece 5 times in a row, landing back on yellow every single time, before the 6th roll finally came up blue).

Finally, I got my armor all re-rolled and ready for blue Chroma. I fired it all in... and I didn't like the way it looked. Didn't turn out the way I thought it would. So I decided to try red. I went through the whole process again, spending a bunch more time and glimmer. This time I was happy with it. I LOVE it. It looks totally awesome. But doesn't that seem like a completely insane process to need to go through for a silly cosmetic tweak? Doesn't every other game that offers any kind of armor color selection just let you choose the color and detail lines that you want from a menu? Why would anyone at Bungie think this is a good experience for the player? I don't care if it only took 10 minutes, it should take 30 seconds. Bungie puts so much work into making certain aspects of the game as smooth, efficient, and user-friendly as possible (UI, for example). Why add SO MANY HOOPS for me to jump through just to add some red lines to my armor? #FlipsTable #EndRant

Anyway, hopefully that all makes sense :) Just sharing my own perspective on this. I know I play the game differently than many others, and I'll run into different situations or issues. Just enjoy talking about this stuff with you and everyone else here :)