Destiny The Game

#61

Destiny ditches balance with PVP mode Iron Banner

This evening Destiny will add a new competitive multiplayer mode that ditches game balance.

Iron Banner, which opens this evening and runs till 14th October, enables level advantages. This means the attack and defense ratings for your weapons and your armour count in Destiny’s PVP mode, The Crucible. It is - deliberately - not a level playing field.

As with other factions in Bungie’s first-person shooter, Iron Banner has reputation levels for players to work through. At rank one you unlock an Iron Banner emblem and shaders, which each provide a stacking 10 per cent boost to Iron Banner reputation gains. At rank two you unlock Class Items, which again provide a 10 per cent boost to Iron Banner reputation gains. And at rank three you unlock Iron Banner armour items, which include legendary weapons and armour, as well as new emblems and shaders.

The Iron Banner launches alongside a new hotfix that improves the technology that lets players connect to the game. It’ll be applied at around 3pm this afternoon. Bungie warned the maintenance window for the hotfix will interrupt Destiny services for several hours, so you won’t be able to play.

Of note: the hotfix fixes a bug that allowed users to quick scope on some weapons.

Here’s the patch notes in full:

Client fixes
- Added more data logging for matchmaking systems
- Improved connectivity failure handling to reduce beaver (Kick To Orbit events) KTOs
- Improved logging of player disconnections
- Internal tools fixes to speed up our release process
- Fixes to the roster system to allow us to tune the frequency of roster updates on Xbox One
- Fixed a bug that allowed users to quick scope on some weapons

Server Fixes
- Security fixes
- Server performance improvements
- Fixes to reduce the frequency of some KTOs
- Better logging to help diagnose connectivity problems
- Fixes to some Centipede errors that were exclusive to specific player characters

#62
#63

Beat the raid finally. Got the raid gauntlets. Also got a cool looking exotic chest for my class from the nightfall.

#64
#65

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Finally hit Vanguard 2 and completed my legendary gear set.
Now to grind for those last 3 strange coins to get that exotic helmet from xur

I spent 23 motes on the engram and got the Titan exotic this week :frowning:

#66

I finally hit 29.

Have an alt up to 23 as well.

#67

Here’s what’s in Destiny’s The Dark Below expansion

Destiny’s first expansion, The Dark Below, launches globally on 9th December, developer Bungie has confirmed.

It costs £19.99, or it’s a part of the Destiny Expansion Pass, which costs £34.99. The Expansion Pass includes both Expansion 1, The Dark Below, and Expansion 2, House of Wolves.

The Dark Below adds new armour, weapons and gear to the game, as well as new legendary and exotic quality items.

The light level cap is raised from 30 to 32, and the new gear will facilitate progression beyond 30.

A new set of story content will be run through a new vendor character, called Eris, who takes up residence in the Tower social hub. She sends players on a mission against the Hive alien race in a bid to stop big bad boss Crota from taking over the Solar System.

On the competitive multiplayer side, three new arenas are added. Close quarters map The Pantheon is set in a Vex temple inside the Black Garden. Another smaller map is called The Cauldron, an abandoned Hive ritual site. There’s also a new vehicle-based map called Skyshock, an old interplanetary defence array.

One new strike will be added for all players, called The Will of Crota. As part of Sony’s DLC exclusivity deal with Activision, PlayStation players get an extra strike called The Undying Mind, set in the Black Garden, as well as a new exotic item.

The six-player raid is called Crota’s End, and is set in the Hellmouth. As the existing raid, Vault of Glass, unlocked some time after the release of Destiny, so will players have to wait for Crota’s End to unlock soon after the release of The Dark Below.

The Crota’s End raid was leaked as part of a glitch one player encountered back in September. A number of other activities were linked to The Dark Below, but they appear to have undergone a name change.

Elsewhere, Bungie will increase the number of bounty slots available to characters to 10 from the current five.

For more on The Dark Below and Bungie’s work to improve Destiny, head over to our interview with Harold Ryan.

A second expansion, House of Wolves, launches at some point in 2015.

#68

£20

For more of that.

Incredible.

#69

I agree. The price is tremendously steep for just adding a bit more of the same. Still, if I had more time to play I would have considered getting it.

#70

This old comic is fitting.

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#71
#72

2 soft levels

really

#73

I didn’t mention but I’m 30 now.

#74

My friends and I have been expounding on Destiny and why we like it, and how it has failed to deliver. It is interesting to think about how we could spend over a hundred hours in a game, that at the same time we feel has many faults beyond what is acceptable.

I still enjoy the game. I will still play it given that I have friends to play it with and I am not playing something else instead. I would love to know more about how it got into the shape it has, there are some juicy stories there I’m sure.

#75

Knowing the admittedly little that we know, it looks like a management issue that kept getting worse until crucial people jumped ship (lead writer for example). They were ambitious, development was rocking and instead of extending development time they started cutting and truncating. You can see it in the lore and in the assests. Some things get reused a billion times, while somethings only show up once and in what you would consider less important areas.You have a whole planet with it’s own orbit screen that only shows up for a single multiplayer map with no hints of it being expounded on in the two expansions. You have the raid, THE endgame content with zero story elements yet every other mission in the game beats you over the head with lore you barely understand. They’re addressing this directly in the first expansion by adding an NPC whose primary purpose (because they could have just given her bounties to any number of the other NPCs who barely do anything as is) seems to be to explain why you’re going to be doing this other raid.

You have NPCs voiced by prominent and popular character actors with only a dozen lines. I can’t find it now but im fairly certain one of them said something at a con along the lines of having done hours worth of dialog that somehow didn’t make it into the game. Gotta take hearsay with a grain of salt of course but I doub’t you’d hire Bill Nighy only to have him record less than 30 lines of dialog.

Even if you enjoy the game like you said, it’s hard not to view the game we got, and what they’ve done since release as nothing but some kind of stop-gap. A turnicate to stop the bleeding. Whether or not Destiny 2 will be more inline with the vision they had originally is hard to say. It took them five years to deliver this mess. Even with knowing what they know now I don’t have much faith in the next thing.

#76

I agree with all that you’ve said @toku but even still I have enjoyed the game. I somewhat intentionally ignored Destiny until this summer, so I ignored the hype and all of the promises they told and failed to deliver on. For me the core gameplay loop is really good, marred by the lack of unique content and character, not to mention the faulty RNG loot system.

I can only hope Destiny 2 will be better, but as I say this, I don’t expect it to be any better. Maybe that is to keep myself from being utterly disappointed, maybe it is just my natural tendency to weather myself against things I have no control over. I wish Destiny was a better game, so that more people would enjoy it and see the good things that are already there.

If the new raid has similar fundamental bugs and issues as we’ve seen in the current raid, that may push me to not keep playing long term. As the only thing more frustrating than seeing holes in a game you enjoy, is being constantly bashed over the head with bugs that strip away any enjoyment of being good at the end game content that you have trouble finishing due to the bugs.

#77

I enjoyed it too, I just got burned out. I guess we’ll just see how this next game pans out.

#78

No word on Destiny for PC, is there?

#79
#80

you should have posted part 2