DESTINY 2 September 8th....XBOX,PS4 and PC!

[Rorschach]

Playing this a lot more. The story sucks but some of the missions have been phenomenonal. Going back to the Black Heart from the first game was awesome and the secret exotic mission to get Vexcalibur was awesome. I feel the levels are becoming more grandiose and intricate. Nimbus is annoying as fuck though, worst NPC to date and massive backward step from the last DLC.

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[Peppermint Lounge]

Man the campaign took a dive. Final missions are super lazy design with small arenas and wave after wave of the same enemies. The final boss battle is terrible. Run around a cirlce and chip-chip-chip away. Strand grapple is rubbish in a pinch so I was runnnig a Stasis build at the final boss. It was fine for the first half but I got done in the second where Strand grapple appears mandatory for Hunter. Still struggling with how Lightfall looks too. Low poly cityscape and no textures leaves Neomuna looking like a high res 360 game.

[Peppermint Lounge]

I tried Calus again with Strand last night and finished it. Grapple actually saved me from falling off the arena a few times which was a relief as I didn't want to do it again. I'm not surprised to see Bungie offering a paid campaign bypass option for alts.

[Gamma]

I tried to engage in that encounter in a Spiderman-y kind of way, which seems to be the intention, but after a few wipes my Strand "strategy" for Calus became:

Code: Select all

10 Grapple-Melee Calus
20 Jump backwards hip-firing Osteo Striga at Calus
30 GOTO 10

Completely ignored the Tormentors and all of the other dickheads, which I absolutely shouldn't have been able to do.

[Gamma]

Playing this a lot more. The story sucks but some of the missions have been phenomenonal. Going back to the Black Heart from the first game was awesome and the secret exotic mission to get Vexcalibur was awesome. I feel the levels are becoming more grandiose and intricate. Nimbus is annoying as fuck though, worst NPC to date and massive backward step from the last DLC.

I feel the same. The campaign was weak, but the post-campaign content is solid. Even some of the little mini-games when collecting the Nimbus figurines are pretty fun, the "Belligerent Patron" in week 2 cracked me up. Beats just collecting a moth. If you're not aware, that Black Garden area in the mission is the Garden of Salvation raid in reverse, hence it looking so fleshed-out. Vexcalibur quest was sick though and that's all new. The new strike and lost sectors are all pretty top-notch as well IMO.

Still an awful lot of bugs and bullshit though. Running Strand consistently crashes the game on PS5 during Terminal Override- but always during the final phase of the final boss, ensuring you waste maximum time. Accessing the Commendations screen freezes the game if the wind's blowing in the wrong direction. Every form of Cabal technology on Neomuna is an absolute bullet sponge, and a huge pain in the arse. Most egregious are the Threshers, but the Interceptors feel overtuned as well, and I'm so fucking sick of the constantly-respawning turrets.

Then there's the Injection Rig public event, which previously could be made Heroic solo without breaking a sweat, but that I've yet to see go Heroic in Lightfall. I've been in groups of four or five where we're all dumping raid boss levels of DPS into the vents, and the best I've seen is the first set (of three) go down. Many of these issues are tied to framerate, which there's absolutely fuck-all I can do about on console. Can't imagine you PC players are lining up to drop back to 30FPS, even if it is a workaround.

There's a lot to dislike about Neomuna in its current state.

[Peppermint Lounge]

I'm also warming to it again. I ran some strikes last night. Needed five strikes to get my pinnacle vs the usual three - boo-urns to that. So strikes are harder now? I think I gleaned some extra difficulty but not much and nothing compared to Neomuna free-roam and in particular Neomuna public events. Crikey some of the public events are brutal. I don't mind some extra diffuculty but there are so many one-shot deaths now - hi Threshers. Game journo and Destiny content creator Paul Tassi says there's a framerate bug on PC where high FPS (>60) results in players copping more damage per hit. Locking framerate to sub-60 allows you to take more hits.

I love the addition of multiple load-outs. Bungie have integrated it to the existing and already super elegant UI really well.

[Gamma]

Threshers have been fixed thank Christ. Still haven't seen an Injection Rig go heroic on Neomuna though.

Strikes are slightly harder only in that you can't massively overlevel them now like you could before. If you're high enough level I'd suggest the Hero Nightfall instead, it's three runs instead of five, and you'll get an additional pinnacle. They're really not much harder, you just have to cover the champion types in case you're matched with people that haven't bothered.

I'm finding loadouts are a good addition but a little bit clunky- for example if you select one that includes a weapon that's not on your character, it's smart enough to pull it out of the vault and equip it, but not to put something from that slot back in the vault. There are a few little quirks like that which sound pedantic, but if I have to use DIM at any point during the process it sort of defeats the purpose, as it's had loadout features for a while now. The in-game one works fine most of the time though and is very handy. I just unlocked the four extra loadout slots so I'm looking forward to throwing some more builds together.

Played through Root of Nightmares, the new raid. The second encounter's a bit of a pain at first but overall it's great, and looks amazing more often than not.

Wasn't ready for how much of a gut-punch this week's story was in light of Lance Reddick passing. Played the mission, spoke to everyone at the farm, then just turned the game off. Very curious to see what happens tomorrow.

[Peppermint Lounge]

I'm struggling with this game. I did my best to like Lightfall and the previous season but it really was an exercise in ice-skating uphill. Once I'd finished the season story back in early April I gave D2 a break. I logged in to check out Season of the Deep a couple of nights ago. I enjoyed the opening mission and then the usual model layers opened up - artifact, seasonal activity, observing how much boring pinnacle hunting I needed to do to play the next quest activity. It's good there's no power increase this season but for people like me who bailed on last season we still need to put in the work. Down with power grinds. I've been playing a bit of Division 2 lately and it's so much easier to drop back into DIv2 after a break vs Destiny 2. No power grind, the ability to select open world difficulty - it's just way more accommodating to play what you want the way you want.

I like the aesthetics of the underwater areas but the so-called swimming is a joke and the air bubble mechanic is archaic. Not at all fun. The six-man seasonal activity is terrible. I hope it will get better as the season progresses? For now the wide open spaces, sparse enemies and slow-walking heavy objects over long distances is possibly the least fun thing I've seen in Destiny. The prospect of doing this activity again and again is enough for me to write this expansion + annual pass off as a loss and come back to see how Final Shape lands.

I'll give it some more time. Subsequent weeks should add more. I want to like it. I've paid for it. Between this and Lightfall overall I'm feeling pretty disconnected though.

[Rorschach]

I've been going back and doing old triumphs to break up the grind. I'm not minding the season so far - Lightfall has definitely underwhelming narratively however it has some high points. Particularly the Vexcalibur Exotic mission, Strand and by all accounts the new dungeon, Ghosts of the Deep. What's your level Pep? I'm on most nights, we should do some Dungeons

[Peppermint Lounge]

1770 lol. Have heard nice things about Ghosts of the Deep. Up for a game anytime, mate.

[Peppermint Lounge]

Destiny 2 is finally back. Season of the Witch update is very good. I'm enjoying revisiting old story beats via the new Timeline. I've even gone back to Neomuna to knock off the post-Lightfall quests and get the rest of my Strand aspects. Good lord the Tormentor boss at the end of Parting the Veil is a decent old sweat-fest.