It was the third week which meant the Gauntlet room was up first; a room I hadn’t encountered yet. The mechanics were explained and I felt good with the ease at which this seemed like it could be done. The Gauntlet room only echoed what the world-firsters had stated; those seeking to guide others through the raid were going to have a hell of a time. A certain party member who also was a seeker wasn’t talking much throughout the two hours spent trying to get coordination down. They kept wandering off, not listening and generally being unhelpful. It ended with them dropping out of the fireteam never to return even with party invites thrown their way. It was time to call it quits. Defeated the third seeker and myself thanked the Clan that had been the guides for their time and parted ways.
Whether you’re a grown adult or a child, who doesn’t love Pokémon? The release of the Gameboy Advance began arguably the best era for handheld games, and leading the march was Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire. These twelve year old games brought us the third generation of Pokémon we love today, so it seemed only fit for Nintendo to remake the duo. With their new 3D engine, Nostalgia hits hard for those who grew up in the late 90s and early 00s, as Game Freak was able to recreate everything you’ve come to love, while at the same time adding on top of it. While it would still be great to see new Pokémon adventures, this is one of the few cases a remake was warranted. Now all we need a second remake of Red and Blue.
Seeing as so many Destiny players invested time and money into The Taken King and Rise of Iron, it’s understandable that they’d want to see some of that content return. Luckily, The Taken King is well represented in Destiny 2. Rise of Iron? Not so much.
The people running Bungie and Activision aren’t stupid. It takes a great deal of smarts and business acumen to successfully run and grow any kind of company; they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re trying to make it sound like they’re doing their fans a favor, but we wouldn’t be seeing this if that were truly the case. If they really wanted to do their consumers a favor, they could do any of the following:
The competitive multiplayer experience in Arc Charge Destiny 2 2 has probably been the thing to see the most change from the first game, or at least the most noticeable. It seems like Bungie is taking cues from both highly competitive shooters of today like Overwatch, while also harkening back to their old series, Halo. In terms of new, the first things you’ll notice are the user interface changes and the four versus four setup. The UI shows new details, most notably the ability to see what subclasses both friendly and enemy players are using, if they are alive or not, and whether or not they have their super ready. This information is helpful. To my own detriment, I don’t usually adapt how I play first person shooters, but this small inclusion has made me think differently about how I was playing; how aggressive I was deciding to be, where I was going to go next. It’s a small but useful things. The 4v4 change doesn’t affect things too drastically, although sometimes when a big fight breaks out, it does seem even more hectic than the first game. Where Destiny 2 hearkens back to Halo is in the fact that there’s a noticeable difference when it comes to TTK, or time to kill. It’s a good deal higher, which means it’s going to take longer to get an enemy down.
The other side of the loot pool is the now titled “Illuminated Engrams” (previously Bright Engrams) which drop all sorts of cosmetic goodies and sometimes an exotic ship, sparrow or Ghost. Bungie is sticking to their guns with how these engrams function — aside from the debacle of XP gain — a minor complaint comes against it. With so many new cosmetics, mainly shaders, why can’t these items be locked like armor or weapons? Why can’t they be deleted in mass? Having to systemically break-down shaders one by one is tedious and a waste of time. No one wants to sit around and delete 65 bland shaders, “wooo, look how much fun I’m having.”
This new loot box is known as a “Prismatic Matrix” and works very much like a package gacha. The Prismatic Matrix has its own pool of ten possible items for players to pull out of it and players can make ten pulls per week. Once the next weekly reset hits, the matrix will refresh with a stock of ten new items. The Prismatic Matrix only awards items players don’t already have, so each pull will award the player with something new. It sounds good at first, but there are a few catches. Players only get one free pull per week and all the others have to be paid for with real money. Players can’t even bank their weekly pulls in order to guarantee themselves something they want because Destiny 2 will only allow players to bank a maximum of three free pulls. This means that the absolute most one could get for free in a week is four items. That…really doesn’t sound like much of an improvement does it? If anything, these boxes will encourage burst spending as overeager players race to make sure they have all the items available for a given week.