PlayStation.Blog interviews Deej on Sparrow Racing...

One very interesting takeaway; Sparrow Racing can net you some 320 Light gear, and Racing gear can be infused to your regular gear, effectively making the Quests and Bounties of this event another path to endgame-tier loot. Neat stuff!

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Good interview. Here's a few more takeaways:

- DeeJ said this is Destiny's winter event, so we probably won't have a festive Tower in a few weeks.

- You'll start out by talking to Amanda Holiday to get a SRL license that will upgrade over time as you complete races and quests and so on. It sounds like that license will also be what determines what tier of loot you can get. So, probably no 320 loot on your first race.

- It sounds like we'll be able to keep our SRL Sparrows beyond the three weeks of the event but we'll need to do something similar to glueing the Festival of the Lost masks to make our racing Sparrows permanent.

- DeeJ seemed to indicate you could bring your existing Sparrows into a race. Timebreaker was specifically mentioned. I'd guess you can bring any Sparrow in, but to be competitive you'd either want a top tier loot or upgraded Sparrow or you can probably get a cheap or free racing worthy Sparrow from Amanda at the beginning of the event. (I think it'd be cool if you only got your racing Sparrow after your first race, forcing you to attempt to compete with whatever you had on hand. Then Amanda could be all like: "Look, your never gonna win with that things... let me... here, I've been working on this special. Just promise you'll take good care of it.")

- As expected, the SRL gear is cosmetic like the FotL masks. So, I suppose that means you won't be infusing your racing suit into your armor but it was very clear that there will be plenty of things you can infuse. Maybe there's real armor loot drops as well?

- DeeJ mentioned the race for Ether Keys as being one of the more recent inspirations for the SRL. :)

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Good interview. Here's a few more takeaways:

- DeeJ said this is Destiny's winter event, so we probably won't have a festive Tower in a few weeks.

Well, just because it's the "Holiday Event" doesn't mean they won't dress up the tower a little. That said, this particular Holiday season is a hard one to universally decorate for. Halloween has an equivalent in most cultures, where the "Christmas Season" covers at least two religious holidays, and all kinds of cultural symbols for the season. Gift giving is universal though, so I expect the Cryptarch to troll me yet again this year :)

- You'll start out by talking to Amanda Holiday to get a SRL license that will upgrade over time as you complete races and quests and so on. It sounds like that license will also be what determines what tier of loot you can get. So, probably no 320 loot on your first race.

That was my interpretation as well, and it makes sense.

- It sounds like we'll be able to keep our SRL Sparrows beyond the three weeks of the event but we'll need to do something similar to glueing the Festival of the Lost masks to make our racing Sparrows permanent.

Maybe. That would allow us to "try out" many different sparrows without either forcing us to buy them all, or flooding the "market" with sparrows such that everyone has everything.

- DeeJ seemed to indicate you could bring your existing Sparrows into a race. Timebreaker was specifically mentioned.

I hope so too. I'm quite adapt at using my own sparrow right now. I'd love to see how far I can take it :)

- As expected, the SRL gear is cosmetic like the FotL masks. So, I suppose that means you won't be infusing your racing suit into your armor but it was very clear that there will be plenty of things you can infuse.

Racing suit VoG run anyone? :)

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Good interview. Here's a few more takeaways:

- DeeJ said this is Destiny's winter event, so we probably won't have a festive Tower in a few weeks.

Well, just because it's the "Holiday Event" doesn't mean they won't dress up the tower a little. That said, this particular Holiday season is a hard one to universally decorate for. Halloween has an equivalent in most cultures, where the "Christmas Season" covers at least two religious holidays, and all kinds of cultural symbols for the season.

The list this year is pretty ridiculous:

Multi-day:
Ramadan
Hanukkah
Christmas
Kwanzaa
Saturnalia
Yule

Single-day:
Eid al-Fitr
Eid'ul-Adha
Saint Nicholas Day
Fiesta of Our Lady of Guadalupe
St. Lucia Day
Three Kings Day/Epiphany
Boxing Day

I probably missed a few.

Whee!

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So, they play Christmas music starting in November, right? Christmas is only one day, and the twelve day long Christmastide is increasingly irrelevant, since normal music starts up only a few days later.

However, Ramadan's like a month long, right? And there's a lot of Muslims around. All we need to do is make a Ramadan song and we'll get CONSTANT radio airplay for at least the whole month.

I mean, it wouldn't even need to be wholly original. Barbara Ann -> Ramadan. Ra ra ra ra Ramadan! I'll split the money with The Beach Boys.

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Dec 25th (holy birth) to Jan 6th (the Epiphany)

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Christmas is only one day, and the twelve day long Christmastide is increasingly irrelevant, since normal music starts up only a few days later.

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I probably missed a few.

Whee!

Yeah, you forgot Festivus!

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I probably missed a few.

Whee!

Yeah, you forgot Festivus!

And Candlenights!

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Yeah, you forgot Festivus!

[image]

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Enemy AI is compatible with Crucible Matchmaking.

Imagine the possibilities...

Shaxx calls you over, says that he needs you and three other folks to scout out a new location for a possible Team Doubles map. The catch is that it is infested with Taken.

You and your three friends (or three folks from Matchmaking) accept his quest, and go there to drive the enemies off, only to find that the waves are endless, and they progressively get stronger and stronger (with increasing numbers of Modifiers as well), and Shaxx sends you ammo crates at certain wave intervals (so you have to be smart about when you pop them). Your team has a shared pool of lives (maybe 7?), and there are stages where you fight Taken Bosses that can drop loot equal to their Light Level.
Eventually, your team runs out of lives, and you all get a separate loot drop post-game that matches the difficulty of the wave that you made it to.

After the event is over, everyone gets a new Team Doubles map!

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Destiny would do good with Firefight put into it. Prison of Elders was a nice try, but not quite enough. I just want a return to that ODST style, 4 person survival. Give me that, and I will never play another game again.

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This makes me glad. Specifically how long it's going. Last year's holiday event was pretty lame because it only happened right around Dec 25th when the PSN network was down.

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This makes me glad. Specifically how long it's going. Last year's holiday event was pretty lame because it only happened right around Dec 25th when the PSN network was down.

There was an event last year? I seriously have no memory of this lol

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Yeah, it was pretty small IIRC. The Cryptarch was giving away a gift, I don't recall what it was, a purple engram maybe? I don't exactly remember. PSN & XBL were down so Bungie gave them out sometime in January, but at the time I was disappointed I couldn't go to the tower to claim my gift.

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Yeah, it was pretty small IIRC. The Cryptarch was giving away a gift, I don't recall what it was, a purple engram maybe? I don't exactly remember. PSN & XBL were down so Bungie gave them out sometime in January, but at the time I was disappointed I couldn't go to the tower to claim my gift.

Yeah I remember getting a Legendary pulse rifle as a gift and scrapping it instantly. I wasn't sure if there was more to the event than that, and I somehow missed/forgot about it.

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It's a 150 with boost, aren't there a few of those at this point, and doesn't everyone have one?

I'm really glad there will be faster sparrows. I was just thinking the other day that since I've mastered the speed of my 160 Ravensteel, that I'm ready for a 180 or higher.

Is there anything faster than a Ravensteel (160) currently?

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My guess is Sparrows will never get much / any faster than they are now. We're already near the point that the fastest ones like Timebreaker or an Xur upgraded rare can cross through many of the transition areas to force a game pausing Loading message. I also vaguely remember hearing that crossing through a transition zone too fast will cancel the matchmaking process and have you entering an empty zone.

It'll be interesting to see if the racing Sparrows are / feel faster in SRL events than they are in Patrol.

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My guess is Sparrows will never get much / any faster than they are now. We're already near the point that the fastest ones like Timebreaker or an Xur upgraded rare can cross through many of the transition areas to force a game pausing Loading message. I also vaguely remember hearing that crossing through a transition zone too fast will cancel the matchmaking process and have you entering an empty zone.

I knew that thought sounded familiar :)

Maybe if they can speed up net code and loading, then we'll see faster sparrows. For the racing, I suspect having a race limited to 6 players and a narrow path means they can load the entire thing into memory, or at least swap it out rather consistently since player progression is predictable.

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Maybe if they can speed up net code and loading, then we'll see faster sparrows. For the racing, I suspect having a race limited to 6 players and a narrow path means they can load the entire thing into memory, or at least swap it out rather consistently since player progression is predictable.

The loading zones when patroling/doing missions is there to connect you to a new server as you move between areas. Since the racetracks are on their own servers you don't need to migrate hosts and thus loading zones are unimportant. I suspect they can load the entire level in memory, but even if they can't I bet it they can dump old portions and load new portions fast enough for even a really fast Sparrow.

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I think they're also quiet areas typically without enemies, scripting, or palette changes so the next section can be loaded in and the scripting can be set up or reset as needed. Certainly they free up resources by limiting your view distance as well.

I do wonder how they'll do a long single track? Are they just thin enough that it fits into memory? Do they switch off matchmaking to free up resources? Is Destiny capable of bigger levels than we've typically seen but they don't do them as big for some reason?

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It'll be interesting to see if the racing Sparrows are / feel faster in SRL events than they are in Patrol.

I think this is the key to making racing fun. The feel of it and gameplay should be pretty epic, much more so than driving a sparrow around normally is.

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That number doesn't represent speed, it's durability. All normal legendaries go the same speed. The exception is Timebreaker/Graverobber (is there an Oryx sparrow?), which are slightly slower while on normal boost, but significantly faster on their special overboost.

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That number doesn't represent speed, it's durability.

Okay, Destiny doesn't make things painfully obvious in the stats department, but that there is the word "speed" immediately following "160" in the largest font I *thought* meant that 160 was speed. Am I wrong?

http://imgur.com/PPLd87O

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It appears that at some point, Bungie changed the way sparrow stats are displayed. Check this image (this is what I was imagining):

Your image is newer, I guess. I just logged in to Destiny to check and it looks like what you posted. I have no idea how long it's been that way. Anyone know? Anyway, I guess you weren't reading anything wrong. It just displays a number for speed now rather than durability, which makes more sense anyway.

What I said is still true, though - Timebreaker is slightly slower than a regular legendary on normal boost, and faster on full.

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It appears that at some point, Bungie changed the way sparrow stats are displayed. Check this image (this is what I was imagining):

Your image is newer, I guess. I just logged in to Destiny to check and it looks like what you posted. I have no idea how long it's been that way. Anyone know? Anyway, I guess you weren't reading anything wrong. It just displays a number for speed now rather than durability, which makes more sense anyway.

What I said is still true, though - Timebreaker is slightly slower than a regular legendary on normal boost, and faster on full.

Durability was a stupid stat to make prominent anyway. I can count the number of times my Sparrow has been destroyed on one hand . . . and I just immediately spawned another one. It's basically irrelevant.

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I think it's important. My sparrow explodes a lot, especially when speedrunning the Gaylord mission.

I prefer the old way. To answer Stabbim's question, I think it changed with TTK.

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One very interesting takeaway; Sparrow Racing can net you some 320 Light gear, and Racing gear can be infused to your regular gear, effectively making the Quests and Bounties of this event another path to endgame-tier loot. Neat stuff!

That's great news for me since I haven't even done the raid yet. :)

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PlayStation.Blog interviews Deej on Sparrow Racing... (Destiny)