Worse than I thought! (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, December 20, 2018, 21:07 (2234 days ago) @ narcogen

Most of this dialogue hasn’t been particularly consequential. It’s just building the sense of frustration and desperation that the awoken in the DC are facing, trapped in a time loop. The meetings with Mara are usually just nice little bits of character development, but there have been a few surprises. On one occasion, our arrival interrupted a meeting with another visitor. And then this week, Mara herself was absent, but we got the cutscene (which is by far the most consiquential plot development so far).

Wow. That makes it seem even worse than I thought.

They've locked the character development behind a grind now.

I mean... kudos I guess for them being so meta about acknowledging all the repetition going on, but...

Listen, I hate the Destiny grind. A lot. I'm not happy with the Forsaken grind and I'm kinda hanging back a bit to "play catchup" every time the ceiling rises.

That being said, the Mara stuff was never behind a grind. On corrupted weeks especially, the Blind Well isn't hard to "matchmake" into and it really doesn't take long. Like, an hour a week for the lore isn't a grind, is it?

If you don't know it's there because the game doesn't tell you, if it requires a specific activity and that activity requires others, and if missing it one week means you don't ever get that content (I'm not clear if it works that way but it seems like it does) then perhaps "grind" is not precisely the correct word, but I would not call it a great experience to have.

Basically if you're fully engaged, playing on a daily or weekly basis, you have a chance to choose the activity that might lead to this and then you'd know to do it.

Otherwise read reddit and forum threads or watch others' videos and see what you're missing.

But if you're taking a break from the game and don't want what you're saving for later to be spoiled, it's sort of disconcerting to find out there's content you missed and is just gone.

It's sort of like online gaming now is the way live TV was back before you could record it. It's odd, is all.

I mean no disrespect here whatsoever ever, but the way your comments come across to me is as if you’re willfully making things out to be more convoluted than they are in order to paint them in a negative light. I’m sure that’s not what you’re actually doing though :) Let me back things up a bit, though.

The Foresaken campaign was short. You could get through it in 4-6 hours, easily. After you kill Uldren, you’re presented with a pathway to the endgame. You reach the Dreaming City, and you’re presented with an area that is clearly meant to be a destination that you’ll be returning to over time (this is made clear by the fact that many of the enemies and activities in the DC are above the ~500 power level that most players are at when they reach it).

Like all patrol zones, the DC has a vendor; Petra. You walk up to her and see that she has daily and weekly bounties. There’s also a Milestone that says “complete 2 of Petra’s Weekly Bounties in 1 week”, or something to that effect. Now, if you’re still playing the game at this point, you obviously have an interest in leveling up. So that milestone, and the other powerful drops provided by Petra’s weekly bounties (which are displayed right on the bounties themselves) should get your attention.

At this point, we know the significance of attempting to communicate with Mara, having just completed a mission that leads us to the Oracle. So when I see that one of Petra’s weekly bounties offers a reward that lets me activate the oracle, I jump straight towards completing that. And all I need to do to complete that bounty is spend some time in the Blind Well. This is also reinforced by the fact that the Blind Well is one of the only activities I’m able to complete in the DC at this time, because I’m still too underlevelled to do the other things I’ve come across. So I spend an hour or so doing some Blind Well, complete the bounty, then go to the Oracle and communicate with Mara. From that point onwards, I know that speaking to Mara is something that is available on a weekly basis, and it only requires a few runs through the Blind Well each week to access it. Which is why I don’t buy this argument that it’s all convoluted and hidden from the player and that the only way to figure it out is by reading reddit. It’s all laid out within the progression, and within the bounty system. Some players miss it. Fair enough. But it isn’t an impenetrable puzzle. If you’re paying attention when you pick up your bounties that first time in the DC, you’ll catch all the info you need.

None of this is overtly broadcast to the player via top-menu prompts or anything like that, but for players who are invested enough to still be playing after completing the campaign, it really takes very little time and a general understanding of how leveling in Destiny works to come across the communications with Mara. From that point, it’s easy to see how things could go in countless directions for different players. But the thing about the DC is that it is setup in a way that rewards investment, without directly requiring it. If you’re interested in uncovering the mystery of what’s going on there, you will continuously find little bits and pieces of the story as you go back and do more activities there each week. And that’s really all they are: little bits and pieces. You’re not missing anything of major consequence if you miss out on these interactions. But if you are invested in the plot surrounding the DC, you can catch all of the interactions with Mara by playing for an hour or so each week (more if you are also doing the story missions, obviously). And if you miss a week here or there, it really isn’t a big deal.