Just to point out... (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, March 05, 2020, 17:21 (1728 days ago) @ Claude Errera
edited by CruelLEGACEY, Thursday, March 05, 2020, 17:32

All this talk about "I worked hard to get X/Y/Z roll on my favorite gun, and now Bungie says I won't be able to use it!"

We need to remember the context. They won't be taking the guns away, they'll simply be limiting your abillty to infuse them 9-15 months after you get them.

Usefulness matters. Despite the size of our vaults, many of us are running short on free space. When we’re forced to choose between keeping weaponry that we can use in ALL activities, vs weaponry that we can only use in *some* of the game, it’s obvious which gear will get trashed first.

I recently jumped back into D1 for the first time since D2 launched. I was feeling nostalgic, and was looking forward to equipping a bunch of my favourite D1 gear and jumping into the crucible. When I opened my D1 vault, I was sadly surprised to (re)discover that much of my favourite gear was no longer there, because I’d trashed it after they’d been “left behind” with the power jump in Taken King. All my year 1 Trials and Iron Banner armour, a bunch of Trials Adept weapons... all gone. I was so disappointed that I just shut the game off. More on D1 in a bit.

1) That's irrelevant for any non-power-enabled activities. Wanna use that godroll Bygones in Quickplay? It'll be as good at the end of year 4 as it is right now.

This is clearly one of those YMMV situations, but personally speaking, just about everything I do in Destiny is power enabled activities. The lone exception to that is quickplay crucible, but that’s a separate can of worms that I’ll get into below.

2) Even for power-enabled activities, you're still looking a year out. Are you using the same weapons right now that you used a year ago? Have you really not received any weapons in the last year that became important in your rotation because they're fun, or good, or whatever? Do you really believe that this pattern will break, going forward (that is, that you'll never again get a gun you enjoy using, rendering your entire collection useless because you can't use old stuff and you don't like new stuff)?

Yes, I still use the same weapons that I used a year ago. And I use new weapons as well. A vast, diverse range of effective weapons is what gives Destiny its replayability. Experimenting with various loadout combinations, maximizing build efficiency... that’s basically the entire game for me. That’s what makes running nightfalls and dungeons and raids continuously fun for me.

Yes, there are guns from more than a year ago that I still play with regularly. But if you took them all away from me, I'd STILL have a ton of stuff I enjoy using, because they keep adding new, fun weapons. Some of you might have used Traveler's Judgement 5 for the full 20 months it's been available; I certainly GOT one a long time ago. (I finished all of the Prophecy weapons within a month or two of Warmind dropping.) But I didn't start using it until the buzz started recently - it was well after the Tower Obelisk was built. (I think I got my first one a week or two ago.) It is now my go-to Crucible energy weapon, replacing both Recluse and Jotunn for most games.

I agree that they keep adding fun new weapons, but to me that just proves that retiring old weapons is fully unnecessary. No, I’m not going to be excited to use any old hand cannon that they add into the game at this point. It has to look great, feel great, and ideally have something unique about it that sets it apart from the pack. It doesn’t need to be better than the stuff I already have. Just different. But that takes work. And this is where I think Bungie’s TRUE motivations kick in...

I guess all I'm trying to say is that while it's annoying (personally, to me, and clearly generally, to many people) that I might lose access to something I really enjoy sometime in the future... it's not the end of the world. The Ikelos shotgun was a must-have for Gambit... until it wasn't. (So was Sleeper. Until it wasn't.) This is just a new way to make sure that the loot pool continues to swirl... and in the long run, it's not any worse than all of the other ways they've done that in the past.

All due respect, but IKELOS is a bit of a straw man argument in this situation. IKELOS came out at a point when there were really no other effective shotguns that weren’t exotics. Part of the reason it was so commonly used is it had virtually no competition. It’s still one of the best PvE shotguns in the game, and I still use it frequently... it just isn’t the only tool for the job anymore, and that’s great. Bungie introduced a wider range of choice into the game for us. Now, they’re effectively doing the opposite.

Speaking frankly, I have a HUGE problem with this decision to retire weapons. I’m going to see how it plays out, but it could very easily be a dealbreaker that makes me put the franchise down for good. It’s not just a concern over theoreticals... we’ve been through this before, and we know how Bungie handled it in the past.

When the D1Y1 weapons were “retired”, they weren’t replaced by a new wave of equally awesome and fun and exciting gear. Most of the D1Y1 gear was replaced by weapons of the same archetypes, with similar specs, and a similar selection of perks, but rarely quite as effective as their predecessors. And we got NOTHING on the level of Fatebringer, Black Hammer, Gjallarhorn, or any of the Other Y1 favorites. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind when we think of Taken King, because so much of the game improved so drastically at that point. But the gear situation sucked. After all the time I’d spent tediously grinding weapons that made the game fun, all the fun toys were effectively removed (yes, still available for low-level activities, but again, I almost never played low-level activities). But none of this served to give Bungie the freedom to go wild with a new set of crazy weapons. What they effectively did is made us re-grind to re-acquire “new” gear that was mostly just the same stuff we’d been using before with new names on them. And in hindsight, it really REALLY hurt D1 overall. I would have enjoyed so much of my time with that game so much more if I’d been able to use my year 1 favourites alongside the year 2 & 3 additions that I enjoyed as I played through all that year 2 & 3 content.

Jumping back to the current D2 situation.

As you and I both agree, Bungie is still releasing new weapons that are exciting and worth using, without making them more powerful than older gear. So really, the whole premise that Luke used to justify this move rings false to me. Getting us excited over new gear is not a problem. I believe that the problem Bungie is actually trying to address is “how do we release yet another 140rpm hand cannon that can roll with outlaw/rampage, and get players excited about it?”. IMO, this has nothing to do with truly NEW gear, and everything to do with releasing more of the same stuff that’s already in the game and making it “matter” again. And for anyone who thinks I’m being overly cynical, I’m only saying this because that is precisely what happened in D1.

“Ok, but you can still use all your old stuff in Quickplay” you might be saying. This is true. And I’m sure some people will continue to use old weapons now and then, there’s the issue I described above around storage space constraints. D2 has already hit a version of this thanks to Armor 2.0, and it sucks. I just had to go and delete most of my Year 1&2 armor because I needed the room, and even though I like most of that armor way more than any of the 2.0 sets that I have, it all got so badly neutered in the transition that I can’t justify letting it fill up my vault. Yet, as frustrating as that is, it still isn’t as bad as weapon retirement because at least I technically CAN use old armor in current end game activities.

There is 1 further issue on my mind that really bothers me about all this, and it related directly to both the crucible and the current armor/build craft situation:

Since the introduction of Armor 2.0, I have been slowly grinding away at perfecting 1 single set of crucible armor for my Hunter. It’s such a brutally slow process that I haven’t bothered trying to do it on my other characters yet. This specific set that I’m customizing is 100% built around using Not Forgotten and Mountaintop. For over 5 months, I’ve been using every crucible token I have to buy drops from Shax, hoping to get armor with decent stat rolls (which we all know is EXTREMELY rare for regular world drops). As I slowly get pieces that I like, I pour boatloads of materials into upgrading it and eventually masterworking it. I finally now have a full set of masterworked armor with the mods that I want, all tailored around those 2 weapons. Not “any hand cannon” and “any grenade launcher”, those 2 EXACT weapons. I don’t like any other hand cannons as much as Not Forgotten (note that NF isn’t even “the best” hand cannon anymore, by a large margin... but it’s my favourite), and if I can’t use NF, I’m going to use a totally different loadout, which negates the insane amount of time I’ve sunk into building this armor set. Not to mention the year it took me to finally get Not Forgotten, plus the 2 painful months it took to get Mountaintop before they made the quest easier.

Here’s the thing when it comes to crucible: my crucible gear is my crucible gear. I don’t want to sink all this time into creating optimized armor builds, and then not be able to use those builds in Iron Banner, or especially in Trials. And whatever gear I’m taking into Trials, I also want to be able to use it in high level comp and/or quickplay. I want to use that stuff as often and frequently as possible, so that I can really perfect my skills with them. I even take my Hunter’s crucible gear into high level PvE, just so that the whole loadout becomes ultra familiar to me (the feel of using boots with traction, the exact recharge rate of my abilities, every nuance of that exact build). This is how I like to play the game, and Bungie CLAIMS that they’re all about letting us craft our own perfect guardians. If that kind of long-term build crafting is supposed to be a pillar of Destiny’s endgame, then weapon retirement runs directly counter to that.

I’ll end by saying that I think it’s totally possible that Bungie really thinks this will help the game... but for that to be true, they must have a vastly different idea of what makes this game enjoyable from what I enjoy about it. For me, acquiring weapons is, at first, 100% a tedious chore. Most of the gear in Destiny is dull and mediocre. But as we acquire weapons that are fun and exciting, the combat transforms and becomes excellent. As I build a larger collection of fun gear, the process of grinding for new stuff becomes more fun, because the moment to moment combat is great and constantly changing (as I mess around with different loadouts). The way Luke talks about chasing new weapons makes me think that he thinks that chasing new gear is inherently fun. For me, that has never been the case. That initial, tedious grind is the investment which pays off when I get to USE the weapons I’ve acquired. USING great weapons is what makes Destiny fun for me, not CHASING them.

I’m not saying that I want to use the same few weapons forever. Far from it. I love mixing things up. But when I do so, I want it to be MY choice. Either because something new comes along that grabs my attention, or because I want to find a new solution to a gameplay challenge in front of me. I don’t want to have my favourite parts of the game ripped out of my hands. For me, there’s no question about it: the weapons make Destiny. I’d miss Mountaintop more than I’d miss any raid or strike or Dungeon. D1 never felt the same without Fatebringer or my other Y1 favourites (to the point where I still miss them even in D2), and Bungie is now talking about retiring 3 years worth of weapons. If they really do come out with a whole array of truly exciting new weapons, that’ll soften the blow. But it still wouldn’t make weapon retirement necessary, nor do I think that’ll even happen. Mark my words, some time next year we’ll all be grinding for a “new” 140rpm hand cannon called “Balstringer” because it has great range and can roll with kill clip/outlaw.

ps

For anyone who doesn’t mind ditching all their old stuff and exclusively using new stuff, you could always go ahead and do that at any time. You don’t need Bungie to force it on us.
Just my 2 cents :)