House of Wolves: Wot I think (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Sunday, May 31, 2015, 23:56 (3466 days ago) @ Cody Miller

House of Wolves is largely better than Dark Below, except possibly for the end game.

Once again, Bungie has used my ideas by eliminating damage and defense upgrade nodes. This is a great decision, and everything is better now. No downsides. Slowly the tedium of upgrading gear is going away, and perhaps one day will be eliminated altogether (as well as RNG loot).

Have to disagree on both counts. Weapon leveling is now so effortless I don't notice it happening, so it feels like I'm not doing it at all. I've accumulated huge stacks of resources I'll now apparently never need, and yet the game is giving me more than ever for reasons I can't fathom. Not sure why the things spawn in the wild now at all.

Honestly I was afraid of something like this happening to weapon leveling because I couldn't imagine what Bungie meant when they said that the Dark Below mechanic where Xur replaces your exotic with a new one you need to re-level but with higher base stats was a "mistake". I didn't understand that because I couldn't imagine how they could both respect the input of time into upgrading the weapon and also up the base stats without either making the change so easy it would seem meaningless or causing repetition. So they've decided to make it perfunctory; weapon damage jumps straight from the base, which was the old max, to the new max after unlocking a couple perks.

It also means there's less variation in the amount of damage being done across the PvE portions of the game because Guardian weapons vary less, and I think that's a shame.

The story missions are getting better all the time, but still have plenty of room to grow. Especially with a more story heavy expansion, the missions should be even more involved, long, and complex. They should blow Halo missions out of the water, but don't. I understand why, yet given the terrible constraints Bungie has placed on themselves these missions were the best yet, at least in my opinion. Yet, there could have been even more creativity. The VoG platforms make an appearance in the final mission, but are not utilized at all except for a set piece. I was sure that leaping across them was a reminder of how they work, and following they'd play a role in the fight. Maybe cover appears and disappears. Maybe the ground vanishes occasionally and you have to rotate around the arena fighting. But no, that would have been too cool.

I'm guessing that Bungie knows that only a small portion of players raid, and perhaps this functions as a missing tutorial to get people to go into the Vault who haven't been; or, given the surprise involvement of the Vex in the HoW storyline, it's prep not for what comes at the end of that mission, but for what comes in the next expansion, which might be a surprise to people who have not played the Vault.

Why do the story missions top out at 32? Why can't I select them all at level 35 for more difficulty? Again Halo had it right: selectable difficulty. Story missions should have level 30 enemies but have 4 difficulty levels. Simple as that. Even though they were decently fun, they were also rather easy, and I selected 32. I'm not so keen on handicapping myself just to have a challenge.

If you can simulate that by delevelling yourself, why should Bungie put effort into creating the same scenario just to re-juggle the numbers "32" and "35" instead of "28" and "32"?

If Bungie already has variations on those for the daily heroic, why do you want to play them faster than Bungie wants to offer them up? Half the time you're complaining that there's not enough stuff to do, and the other half you're complaining about not having the options to burn through the content even faster.

Bungie needs to up their storytelling yesterday. Here, we have a decent idea for a story, but it's not really given the proper care it deserves. It's baffling. Bungie has done it with Halo, and they should be able to do it with Destiny. Comet is do or die. If they don't get their act together and give us a decent story that is also told well, then they've lost.

Lost... what, exactly?