Sweet sweet freedom (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, April 22, 2015, 16:14 (3343 days ago)

About 2 months ago, I set a goal for myself: To acquire and upgrade every single exotic weapon in Destiny before HoW. I don't have a good reason for this... the hoarder in me just took over. I had most of the weapons I needed, but most of my exotics were barely upgraded. So over the past 2 months, my Destiny playtime has been split between raids/nightfalls (best chances of getting the exotics I still needed) and running bounties to upgrade what I already had. Lots of bounties.

Finally, last night, I finished upgrading Universal Remote... and my collection is (almost) complete. The only exotic I'm still missing is the Necrochasm. My Eidolon Ally is upgraded and waiting, so whenever the Crux finally decides to drop for me, I'll have the complete set.

After taking this screenshot, a funny thought occurred to me. In the process of upgrading all these exotics, I've also upgraded every single Legendary weapon in my inventory (or at least unlocked all the upgrade nodes). All the armor I use is also maxed, which means...

I don't have to even think about running another bounty until HoW.

The feeling of joy that came along with this realization surprised me. For months, I've been min-maxing my XP gains by doing the activities that would allow me to complete the most bounties in the shortest time. I was having fun and working towards my silly goal, but now that I'm done, I feel like I've got a clean slate with Destiny. I can now do the activities I want to do, when I want to do them, without feeling like I'm not being as productive as I should be.

Even as I write this, the words sound ridiculous to me. It's a videogame, I remind myself. I should just be doing the stuff I want to do all the time, I say. And yet I painted myself into this corner. As I said earlier, I was still having fun, but the bounties really did begin to feel like a chore I needed to take care of in order to achieve my goal.

I guess what I'm getting at is this: wouldn't it be nice if there were more "open ended" bounties in Destiny? More bounties that didn't require running a specific mission or killing a specific enemy? I would always breath a sigh of relief when I visited the tower and found a collection of bounties like "kill 100 enemies with headshots" or "get 30 melee kills" because I can complete those bounties doing whatever activity I like. I understand the idea that bounties can be used to give players a little nudge to try activities they might normally ignore, and I think that's great to a point. But I feel like the balance of the bounties is a little out of whack.

What do you all think?