Latest news with #Destiny2
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Destiny 2's New Metroid Ball Mechanic Might Be The Worst Thing It's Ever Added
Destiny is a game about orbs. It began with a giant orb (The Traveler) hovering over the last city on earth in a post-apocalyptic near future. The main thing you do in the sci-fi MMO is shoot enemies to get loot, which they leave behind in various colored orbs. Most raids involved at least one orb-based mechanic. And now Destiny 2 has taken the orb to its natural conclusion: transforming players into one. The newest expansion, The Edge of Fate, has a new mechanic called Matterspark that makes players become balls of light that roll around like little glowing Samus Arans to navigate secret tube passageways. It is without a doubt the worst thing Destiny has ever forced me to do. That's not hyperbole, nor is intended as a slight against the very thoughtful developers at Bungie. I simply do not like taking a break from what Destiny 2 does very well—shooting—to do something it does very poorly—platforming as a third-person orb. It feels floaty, sluggish, and a bit chaotic, like trying to navigate a marble through a wooden labyrinth using a magnetic tether. The effect is mildly dizzying. It's especially bad on PC. It doesn't help that Matterspark is one of the very first things The Edge of Fate campaign introduces you to. In addition to transforming into slithering sphere to reach new areas, there are also generators you can only power when you're an electric ball, forcing you to constantly shift between forms to bring down barriers and progress the mission. My friend came over last night for dinner. He's one of the people I keep trying to convince to play Destiny 2 with me. He saw me puttering around combat like a golf ball stuck in a sand trap and howled with laughter. There is absolutely no way I'm convincing him to buy The Edge of Fate now. I was skeptical of Matterspark, since Bungie originally revealed it in a livestream in May. Turning into a ball and reaching secret places in the Metroid franchise is cool because those games are specifically designed around exploration, backtracking, and experimentation. Destiny 2 is not. It's a game about loading into a sci-fi obstacle course and ruthlessly murdering everything in sight as quickly as possible. It's certainly played with more open-ended exploration over the years, both in terms of platforming and in terms of shooting puzzles that unlock hidden secrets. Turning into an orb, unfortunately, doesn't play to either of those strengths. It makes platforming feel worse and disables my guns. In that way, Matterspark is part of a worrying trend in modern Destiny, one that pursues novelty at the risk of sidelining the reason I actually want to play the game: the best-feeling shooting of any FPS ever. The Edge of Fate makes a pretty poor first-impression in general. My Destiny 2 hype train currently has a full head of steam, but it's already threatening to be derailed. I don't like Kepler yet, the new zone which is sparrow-less and feels overly constricted while at the same time lacking a clear vibe to spark the imagination. It's a lot of rocks with alien pustules growing on them. I don't like the new streamlined Ops menu that feels like a Call of Duty HQ funnel, or that the more creative planet map it replaces has been desaturated to signal its forced obsolescence. It's nice—a relief even!—seeing gear scores reset to 10 as we begin the power climb anew, but I would prefer to skip over the blues (rare loot) and get right to the good stuff again (purple legendries/exotics). The new gear chase and upcoming raid might be The Edge of Fate's saving grace. A completely new system means chasing new weapons and armor in order to take advantage of the most powerful builds. The grind could be fun. It could also be incredible tedious. But I'll take that over being subjected to another Matterspark objective. . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Forbes
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Destiny 2: The Edge Of Fate' Day One Review: Kepler's Awful, Lodi's Great
Lodi Destiny 2 has taken a leap of faith into the next era of the game, overhauling its format, launching into a totally new story and attempting to retain players while attracting new ones. That first step is The Edge of Fate, the Destiny 2 expansion that launched yesterday. I just wrote a piece about how numbers are…quite poor, less than half the players of the previous least-played expansions, but I'll use this piece to talk about the expansion itself. Keep in mind, these are just day one first impressions, and this is not a full review of the entire expansion, which I'll do later on. It's not great! So far, I dislike most of what I'm playing here other than a single aspect: The narrative, and I might as well start there. This is one of the only times I can remember where Destiny has created a genuinely interesting series of mysteries where I truly have no idea what's going on and have smacked directly into plot twists I've never seen coming. The lynchpin of all this is a new character named Lodi, who first appeared in trailers and drew the reaction of 'what is this exceedingly normal-looking guy in glasses doing in Destiny?' Well, that's part of the mystery! Lodi also excels because of his excellent writing and especially his voicework, which is the best I've seen in Destiny in a long while. Again, if there is a single aspect where this expansion shines, it's this, and while I'm not done with the campaign yet, it's excellent, and has me genuinely excited for this new era. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Narratively, at least. Destiny 2 The playable expansion itself? Woof. Kepler is probably the worst zone I've ever seen in Destiny. The art direction here is just non-existent, the place a hodgepodge of rocky outcroppings, architecture stolen from Titan and endless series of pustule-filled tunnels that all blend together. The Final Shape, The Witch Queen, Beyond Light, even Lightfall all had clear, quite good aesthetics, and that's one area Bungie has always shined. It's a huge miss here. Bungie has also made this zone non-traversable by sparrow to artificially increase its size. Rather, you're meant to get around by a series of destination-only powers that involve teleporting guns, Strand matter moving and a Samus Aran ball of electricity which might be the dumbest mechanic I've seen in this series. These feel like gimmicks for their own sake, and while there are maybe one or two puzzles where these systems combine to be kind of neat, overwhelmingly I find myself groaning whenever I'm told to use any of these, especially the electric ball (which, fun fact, is also making people motion sick). I've engaged with the new loot systems on a cursory level. One thing that feels weird to me is that there's going to be such a limited pool of 'new gear' to get season bonuses and hunt through the new Tier 1-5 system. Yes, you can use your old stuff, but I can't just try to go get a Tier 5 version of my Bygones now. For the millionth time, all this old gear will have to be reissued under the new Tier system, which already feels like an exhausting concept. How many times can we do this? Destiny 2 I can't quite make heads or tails of the new armor system yet. This is the first time we've had to regrind armor since Artifice armor was introduced. Some didn't even do that. There are very awkward aspects to the new system, like how exotics don't fit in at all, but initially it's hard to get your head around which new stats to invest into and when to replace your old faithful gear. I can't say if this is all good or bad yet, albeit I will admit that we needed some significant armor changes and reason to pursue it again. I have not engaged with The Portal yet. I've been entirely on Kepler. I remain skeptical of this system, with Solo Ops being entirely relegated to Lost Sectors, and Fireteam Ops requiring a premade team to get the most out of the new modifier-picker system. Otherwise you're just doing a playlist with preset ones, which is no different than before. And somehow Pinnacle Ops doesn't have a single dungeon or raid in it. All old content outside the Portal now feels useless as you cannot get new gear from it. I'm not feeling good about this expansion. Once I get through the (very good) narrative of the campaign, I'm not sure if the rest of this is going to be engaging from here, particularly if we're done doing week-to-week beats to return for. There is promise in the new era's story. I'm not sure if there's promise in Destiny 2 overall from here. But again, it's day one, and more to come later. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy
Forbes
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Destiny 2: The Edge Of Fate's Peak Playercount Is Less Than A Third Of ‘The Final Shape'
Destiny 2 It's time to get used to a new era of Destiny 2, both for players, and for Bungie itself. Destiny 2 has just entered its 'Fate' era, with the launch of its first post-Light and Darkness expansion, The Edge of Fate. And that expansion has just hit an unfortunate milestone as the least-played Destiny 2 expansion since launch, by a significant margin. The Edge of Fate just failed to top 100,000 concurrent players on Steam last night, clocking in at 99,193. This is under a third of The Final Shape's launch players a year ago, and well under half the previous least-played record of Beyond Light. Here's how the expansions stack up: Destiny 2 To dispel a few common notions, no, even though it's not the weekend/raid launch day, history says that literal launch day will be the overall peak. And yes, this is just one platform, but there is no reason at all to imagine these same declines are not present on console, as that would make little sense. I predicted numbers around this level last month when I used other pre-launch peaks to indicate how much players would jump for the expansion, and it was about a 3x multiplier. Here, those figures indicated a potential peak of 114,000 concurrents for The Edge of Fate, and it turns out that was an overestimate. This 99,000 figure is just 10,000 more than the launch of Destiny 2's Revenant Episode last October. Yikes. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Is this a disaster? I mean, it's quite bad, even if it's not unexpected. The question here is if delivering less yearly content for only a slightly reduced price is enough to cut costs to make a significantly lower playercount viable. That would also need to join probably some sort of increase in player spending. But we don't have access to all that data. Destiny 2 One question is if with these low numbers if Edge of Fate will be the peak indefinitely for the new Fate era. There is another similarly small expansion coming in six months, Renegades. It could draw in more players with its Star Wars-adjacent theme, or the opposite could happen. If people don't like Edge of Fate, they may just be done with the series from here. And I think in many ways it's easy to not really like Edge of Fate or all the changes Bungie just made to the entire game (more on that in a review I'll have up later). This is just where Destiny is now, and it was pretty unavoidable if the decision was made to keep pumping out live content indefinitely rather than take a break, regroup and put out a Destiny 3, which would no doubt have done very, very big numbers. Now, the next question will be what the new 'baseline' is going to be. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Forbes
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
The End Of A ‘Destiny' Era, For Real This Time, As ‘The Edge Of Fate' Launches
Destiny 2 There has been a lot of talk about how Destiny has had different eras over the years, but there's really only been one, even across two games. That has been the Light and Darkness saga, which began in the first game when we learned (very little) about the mysterious, power-giving orb, The Traveler, and a Darkness it was running away across the galaxy from. The ended ten years later in Destiny 2 with last year's The Final Shape expansion. The Darkness turned out to be a guy with a lot of arms and a smoky head, and the Traveler turned out to be kind of a dick. But it was a thrilling end to a wild swing of ups and downs over the course of the next decade. They stuck the landing. Cue applause. But to quote Dr. Manhattan, 'Nothing ends. Nothing ever ends.' That is especially true in the live-service world as Bungie now presses forward under massive pressure and expectations from Sony, plagued by poor leadership and mass layoffs. The Destiny 2 team is doing what they can with a studio half the size it was a few years ago with large chunks now working on non-Destiny projects. In the Forsaken years, this was once a company of 1300+ almost wholly devoted to a single game with even two support studios in tow. Now, they're down to hundreds, and whatever the opposite of support is, that's what they're being given. Destiny 2 Destiny 2 is changing with The Edge of Fate, live today. It's shrinking. There is a lot of wishy-washing about how much exactly it's shrinking, but it's going to be significant. The game has completely transformed from its large expansion/four seasons model into two smaller expansions and things called 'Major Updates' in between, smaller than a season and described more like an Into the Light bonus round-type addition. But in practice, the facts are that The Edge of Fate launches with: The goal now is to release expansion content, but moment-to-moment, herd players into a series of 'portal' playlists that range from the extremely basic, Lost Sectors for solo players, to a hodgepodge of Destiny's past in Fireteam Ops, strikes, battlegrounds, empire hunts, seasonal activities and all other manner of things. A final portal offers tougher missions, right now, just past exotic missions. All of this, all things we've played already, is meant to be juiced up using a new modifier system to make things more challenging (or fun) as you pursue a higher score for greater rewards. Gear is getting streamlined into a simple Tier 1-5 system where it's pretty clear what that means, and it's pretty clear where you get those gear levels, something Destiny has been missing for a while. But we're going to be in an awkward transition phase as 'soft sunsetting' slowly makes all gear not originally acquired under this system slowly worse (nothing you already own can or will be tier 4 or 5). Armor is being torn down and rebuilt altogether for the first time since the entire mod system was introduced in the first place. I can agree it was probably long past time for that. Destiny 2 The story is…well, we barely know anything. We thought we did, but none of it is going as planned. My theory, which mirrored many others, was that the Heresy episode would end with us taking the Dreadnaught out of our solar system, as promised, and heading to new worlds in the galaxy, possibly the homeworlds of some of our enemies. Rather, we're not doing that. We're stopping at the edge of the system at a made-up planet called Kepler, and this new era will put us into conflict/servitude with The Nine, the mysterious entity that has been with us since the first day Xur sold us exotics in Destiny 1. Since then, they've given us some seasonal activities, a dungeon and a game show hosted by a sparkling horse. Now, Bungie is coloring them in, each member getting their own personality and set of goals. On Kepler? We have little idea how this is all starting on this micro-planet that has somehow been pulling pieces of Earth's past through time. I mean it's all weird enough where I'm interested, certainly. This is a new, quieter era for Destiny. The player peaks of The Final Shape, the grand finale, are not coming back, and The Edge of Fate will be lucky to get a third as many players at launch. The question now is whether this new content has enough to retain the core players that make up the remaining base, but if Destiny can also simplify itself in its new post-Light and Darkness era to attract new players or at the very least, bring back some who got lost. Some aspects of this feel like they can do that. But the overall sense of 'it's just too late,' tends to pervade. I'll be there, as ever. Until the sun dies, it seems. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy
Forbes
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Destiny 2's New ‘Win To Unlock The Ability To Pay' Ornament Is Bad
Destiny 2 It's always fun when Bungie does something like let a community member reveal a new item coming to Destiny 2, but poor Benny Shmurda was given the short end of the stick when it came to revealing a new Trials ornament for Conditional Finality. Here's the gun and the idea: A 'Bungie Reward' is when a player achieves something, like beating a raid early, for the ability to order a physical item like a raid-themed jacket in the Bungie Store. It stands to reason that Bungie isn't just going to mass send out free jackets to everyone, so it's a relatively uncontroversial practice. This? No. No no. Changing this idea to an in-game system where you are now being asked to achieve something (go flawless in Trials of Osiris) to unlock the ability to buy a digital ornament for real money (this will cost about $7-10 depending on your Silver stores). Even if it will be 'free' for in-game Bright Dust later, it's still a frown-worthy practice. While most players and creators seem to be in my camp, I've seen a few pushing back, including a high-profile player like Saltagreppo: FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder No, it's different. Again, a Seal is a physical item that Bungie is not going to automatically ship to everyone, so paying for that is expected. It's also not the same as getting a dungeon or raid exotic and having the (admittedly annoying) pop-up asking you to buy an ornament after. That is a wholly new gun you just got, which is the prize. Here, the Trials ornament is the prize for a gun you've had a while. And you would expect it to drop as a reward from playing Trials itself, not simply unlocking the ability to pay for it. It's just not the same thing. The idea that Bungie will offer it for bright dust later feels like a half measure, and if they're going to bother doing that part of it to make it 'free' later, then just offer it as a drop (perhaps not a guaranteed one) from Trials, which lord knows always needs fun new rewards to chase in the decaying state of Destiny PvP. But this went from an idea that was an automatic community win to an example of desperate nickel and diming. It's worse than simply buying a Trials ornament for a gun in the store (available to anyone), which they've done before, given the way it's being presented and unlocked. Will the community cause a big enough fuss to change this? I don't know. Bungie has enough going on with the huge launch of Edge of Fate next week, so this may get put on a burner. But it would have to be resolved before people could start to pay for it, and Bungie may just throw up their hands and not bother trying to escape the controversy as the community moves on to something else. But if it becomes a regular thing? That's not going to be good at all. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
