Thoughts of Dark Below So far (No spoils) (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Tuesday, December 09, 2014, 05:19 (3874 days ago)

The new story content will last about 2.5 hours. It's generally very good. Most missions are shorter than Destiny's story missions, but not all. The strikes are cool, and are an improvement over the current ones for sure. Bosses are more interesting, but they could still be even better. It's a shame the xbox people don't get the Vex Mars strike, since it's very good.

I'm sure the raid will be fun, and we're going to tackle it tonight.

The biggest thing I notice is that there really isn't any new level geometry. Two of the story missions take place areas that you could glitch into in the beta. There was no additional geometry in the Dark Below. What you saw in the beta was what you played here. In fact, I didn't have to download any data when the expansion hit, which means it's all on your drive. Bungie has committed the sin of having you pay to unlock content you already have on your disk.

Most of the other story missions are on re-used geometry.

It seems to me like a few guys with a level and script editor could easily have created many more of these missions in short time. The fact we only got 3 real ones and a few mini ones was disappointing. In fact, the missions are the type of thing that I had expected the Queen's Wrath to be. They were fun, but given their nature (same level geometry just new enemies), I would have expected a ton more. Am I wrong to assume that artists and designers building the spaces takes more time than placing enemies and scripting encounters? For 20 bucks, I feel like we should have gotten a shit load of these missions, not just 3.

The nightfall on the new strike was fun, and I got myself a Gjallarhorn starting at 302 attack. Woohoo!

With regard to Legendaries - it appears that if you acquire old legendaries during the dark below, they will get the higher max attack stat of the new legendaries. I got Prestige IV, and it topped out at 331. So it appears that you can still get and use old legendaries that are beefed up, but you simply can;t upgrade your current ones, and they are harder to get since they only come from engrams now.

In addition don't throw away all the blue guns you get. I got a rare hand canon that had more impact than Devil you know, and as many rounds with a mag size upgrade. It tops out at 297 attack. Should be good in crucible, or even in older PvE content.