Destiny 2 Review

Destiny 2
Developer: Bungie
Publisher: Activision
Platform: Playstation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One, PC via Battle.Net
U.S. Release Date: September 6, 2017 (PS4, XB1), October 24, 2017 (PC)

By now I have been an overly content owner of a Playstation 4 for a little over 3 years.  My first PS4 was the white Destiny Limited Edition console back in 2014, and this was something I of course lined up at midnight to get, ripped open, and stayed up all night playing.  I was hooked.  I beat the game that day, ran strikes till I was blue in the face, and just kept on going and going until I passed out around 1 am on the 11th.  Destiny has been a game that I have kept near and dear to my heart, not only because it was my first game on the platform, or my first Platinum trophy, but because the world that Bungie had so carefully crafted (even if it was locked behind the grimoire not in game) was something that I fell in love with and wanted every part of.  I was in love, and still am.  So naturally I bucked up, dropped the insane $250 for the Collector's Edition, and lets just say that it is possible to fall in love twice.

So, this entire thing is going to be riddled with spoilers.  Like a ridiculous amount of spoilers, especially considering I'm not even going to bother to post this until after I finish the raid (a little over a week post release).  Does that mean you should stop reading?  I'm not going to tell you not to, but there is a lot of spoilers, and later I'm going to throw on my spinfoil hat and talk about a few theories I have.  Sooooooooo, here we go:

******************************SPOILER WARNING *********************************

For anyone who played the open beta over summer, you'd know very well the setup to the game: Ghaul, a renegade Cabal badass, is here to take the light for himself.  Now, we've dealt with some pretty serious threats before such as Atheon, Time's Confulx, in the Vault of Glass, Crota and Oryx, literal gods of the Hive, Skolas, the Kell of Wolves who sought to reunite the Fallen houses, and even SIVA, the nanotechnology that was the undoing of the legendary Lords of Iron who were the first to bring order to humanity after The Collapse.  But none of those before hand have even come close to accomplishing what Ghaul did.

The opening scene shows Cayde-6 entering into the Vanguards outpost in the Tower, supposedly returning from slacking off somewhere, only to be greeted by Ikora and Zavala indicating that the perimeter seems to have been breached and the sensors are not responding.  And then the Cabal invaded.  Ghaul and his Red Legion seemingly sweep over the city like a plague that we guardians can barely stop as a massive six armed ship approaches the Traveler with his fleet laying waste to the City.  In the meantime, Ghost and our guardian are on our way back from a patrol mission when we are unable to raise the Tower to report in. We arrive to a partially destroyed Tower, where the Vanguard, Shaxx, and Holiday are mounting rescue operations for the citizens who are still alive.  We meet up with Cayde and Shaxx who help us press onwards toward Zavala, who is guarding against the onslaught, and Ikora, who is desperately searching for the Speaker.  When Ikora discovers her failure, she shows us why she is the Warlock Vanguard and proceeds to wreak havoc across the battlefield while you head to meet Holiday for a ride to Ghauls ship to cut off the head of their assault.

Arriving on the ship, in spectacular style I might add, you are tasked with disabling the shields to allow for a bombardment, however things do not go as planned as the Cabal are able to overcome the City's defenses and you are one of the only ones left in the fray.  Intercepted by Ghaul, he reveals his plan of entombing the Traveler to steals its light and cut it off from the Guardians, while spartan kicking you off his ship a la 300 style.  Naturally things don't go his way as you survive.  Desperate to make it to safety you recover Ghost, escape the city and are followed by a Hawk you glimpsed in a vision during your fall (predicting many things, including the enemy of the Traveler) that leads you to safety.  During your journey you come across a human by the name of Hawwthorne, a non-Guardian who lives outside of the city and was relatively unaffected by the attack, she is setting up a gathering point in Europe by the broken shard of the Traveler, her goal not to retake the City, but to build a safe haven that is defensible in case the Cabal come looking.  Helping her to set up her network and draw in other survivors you learn that Zavala is rallying the surviving Guardians on Titan to mount a counterattack, and while Hawthorne is hesitant, she agrees that this is your decision and you must do what you believe in.

Once landing upon Titan you discover the Hive have found their way there as well, and are attempting to summon Oryx's sister Savathun, as well to the system.  So naturally you get to work to foil their plans, and set up the moon for staging operations once again.  Though even with the power online, and some secret Cabal messages decrypted you're not out of the woodwork yet as the Cabal have a super weapon pointed at the sun ready to blow the galaxy apart should their plan fail.  Zavala calls on you to go to Nesus and rescue Cayde and find Ikora.  Arriving on Nesus you find Cayde stuck in a Vex teleportation loop, with a crashed colony ship AI, Failsafe, watching with pleasure as he struggles.He tells you to retrieve the teleporter he was working on, as he feels it will be necessary to get to Ghaul, despite the super weapon.  After some convincing he tells you Ikora is on Io, the last place the Traveler touched, where she frequently meditates.  On Io you discover a way to destabalize the super weapon with the help of a broken down Warmind (given the designation Jys, a possible reference to Charlemanges sword Joyeuse).

With the Vanguard at your back you return to Earth to formulate a plan of attack.  You need to slip up to the weapon, disable it, and escape before the Vanguard launch their assault to take out Ghaul in the city.  Hawthore tells them of a way inside and battle plans are drawn up which include you stealing a high ranking Cabal officers personal vessel, but like everything else that involves Cayde, the plan goes awry and it is up to you to square off against Ghaul in the end.  He is able to seize the power of the light and a fierce battle ensues, ending in Ghaul becoming a massive creature made of light and calling himself a new god.  But just in the nick of time the Traveler wakes up and shows Ghaul whose boss.

*********************************END SPOILERS**********************************

(mostly)

Whew, that was a fun summary, and believe me I skimmed over a good chunk of it hitting mostly the highlights.  Anyrate one of the biggest stand out features to me for Destiny 2 is the gun play, the first game brought us around two three different weapon slots with different types going in different places for maximum effectiveness in combat.  You had a Primary, Secondary, and Heavy, which while it worked out nicely in PvE, it really overplayed it's hand in PvP, however this new system which replaces Special and Heavy with Energy and Power respectfully fixes a lot of those problems.  The way this works is all Auto Rifles, Scout Rifles, Hand Cannons, Sidearms, Pulse Rifles, and the new Submachine Gun can be either Primary or Energy, with Primary dealing non-elemental damage, and Energy being around for those shielded foes.  This means that you no longer need to deal with people in PvP running around with godly amounts of Sniper Rifle ammo (formerly a Special, now it has been moved to Power weapon), but it makes your PvE games require a bit more foresight.  Beyond just what and how you can carry, each gun feels unique and different from each other, and acquiring the same gun twice isn't going to result in a different gun based on its perks, every gun with the same name has the same perks, so much less farming is required to get quality weapons.  Fighting and shooting is fun, engaging, and you can really tell Bungie nailed their "30 seconds of fun" mantra with this one.

Along with the weapons I would be remiss if I didn't discuss the games armor as well, as each set plays to the class descriptions very well.  Titans, the games beat stick, look much larger and bulkier than in the previous entry, where they didn't feel as large and at times would even come off as being quite slim.  Warlocks almost all wear longer robes now, more reminiscent of a scholar or researcher, while their bonds are very detailed and helmets sleek and streamline.  The Hunters as well have been slimmed down overall to appear more mobile, threatening, and stealthy with their cloaks.  The one complaint that, like many others, have is that the shader system is kind of a crap shoot.  You see shaders are set individually now, and can also be applied to weapons and ships as well as armor, and while that isn't a bad thing, a lot of the better looking shaders are locked behind the games Bright Engrams, which is a form of microtransaction.  Since you can earn these in game, I'm not all that upset, as you earn them rather quickly, but I am a little disappointed that there isn't an alternative way to get them whether that be spending Glimmer (the games currency), or being rewarded through other means it makes the game feel a bit more grindy than I personally feel that it should be.  Either way this issue should be addressed as it would only serve to discourage casual players down the road.

One of my favorite things that Bungie did was redesign the rank up system to better encourage players to play the game, farm activities, and increase the number of rewards that you recieve.  The way it used to work was you needed a sum of 1500 (at the first level) to 2500 (pretty much after level 5) reputation in order to level up, well unfortunately reputation, while it wasn't capped, was slow to earn as you earned between 10-100 per patrol, and around 125 on a Strike mission and Crucible victory (half for a loss), that's not even to mention sub factions which earned at half the rate of Vanguard and Crucible, so while you got it for all activities, it was a MUCH slower gain than your primary sources, and for players like me who almost never did crucible it was laughable.  The new system uses tokens, which can be gained and turned in on any character, so you are no longer locked into receiving rewards by playing that character.  So if you want to gear an alt, grind on a main and redeem on that alt, if you want to kit out your main in raid gear first, turn in all you raid tokens on them and get them all the sweet sweet raid loot.  Overall the system is much more rewarding as you can earn multiple rewards and ranks in a shorter amount of time than you could previously, which will only serve to keep casual players coming back for more and more Destiny.

Bungie, finally offers in game clan support for Destiny 2, and will actually actively reward players for being in a clan.  See now you have a clan banner which levels up over a season (unknown how long this will last) which allows clan members to enjoy increased rewards for playing the game and completing events such as completing public events, decrypting engrams, defeating Cabal, etc.  Plus with an in game interface it makes clans and clan management all the easier for the end user as you don't need to go online, or open the app, or any weird thing like that.

Crucible has also changed, in some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse.  All game modes have been converted to 4v4 away from either 3v3 or 6v6, and for competetive and trials the change is welcome and actually an improvement, in quickplay and casual the change really drags on your sanity.  See the biggest changes which affect that are the fact that there in an increase in the time to kill (TTK) for players, which translates to a larger importance being place on team play and team shooting, which while a positive aspect, doesn't help quickplay as it has historically been a place for players to relax and not really care about team play, or moving together, just getting out and doing some PvP.  In casual play you often encounter 3 or 4 stacks who will work together because their preferred game mode is there and they dominate over the other team.

The final two major gameplay changes come in the form of the Nightfall and Raid.  The Nightfall is no longer reset on wipe, but instead you get a respawn ticker of around 25 seconds, and the entire strike is timer based, starting at 11 minutes and working its way to 0, at 0 you are reset to orbit and you must start over.  Some weeks you have a variant option to increase the amount of time you have by performing a certain task, whether that is killing enemies, jumping through vex hoops (literally), killing oracles, or other means.  This makes the strike more forgiving for less experiences players, but still offers the challenge for more experienced ones.  The Raid on the other hand, is Cabal themed like the rest of the base game, but instead of fighting The Red Legion, you are set against Emperor Calus and his Loyalists who seeks to test you to see if you are worth joining him.  One of the biggest things is the fact that the Raid has 4 different wings which must be unlocked through a series of collecting and defending standards from and endless wave of Cabal forces, after you are able to collect and defend all 3 your way to the next challenge is open.  The challenges are genuinely fun and well thought out, even if not obvious at first.  Our team went in blind and only had one or two issues because of some non-obvious mechanics we encountered, overall though we ran into little difficulty and mostly just needed to refocus after getting stressed.  The raid also offeres a second set of loot in the form of underbelly keys, which reward engrams, tokens, and a chance at exotics, each of these chests however either must be found, or is locked behind a door that is protected by "watchers" who must be silently eliminated.  The final large change here is the addition of the guided games feature which allows players to search for a group for Nightfall and Raid activities (even though raid isn't quite out yet), then these allow clans who sign up to PUG (pick up group) players to be rated, and a higher rating means an easier time of getting people in the future.

The final thing that I would be remiss to not mention is the soundtrack.  Honestly when I think of Bungie I always thing of how wonderful their music and composition is.  Really they're one of the stand out companies for it (standing among CD Projekt RED and Bioware), and in Destiny 2 it shows.  The ambiance set is perfect, the highs are accentuated excellently, the lows are disheartening, and everything in between is executed to a T.  I have yet to look it up, but if there is a soundtrack, and I can get my hands on it I'm going to because I can honestly see myself at the gym working out with this music on in the background, it's THAT FUCKING GOOD.

Overall, while the game does have a few flaws, they are largely out spoken by the sheer amount of content to do, the improved drops and loot system, and the expanded and ease of access of lore in game.  Destiny 2 has some large quality of life improvements, genuine and unforced humor, and a fresh new take on the Destiny name.  I'm excited to see where Destiny 2 goes down the road with it's DLC, and I hope you are too.  Destiny 2 gets 9 completely incorrect names for Ghaul, out of 10.

Rantology: The new Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus Trailer has 0 chill and it's beautiful

So yesterday Bethesda released a new new gameplay trailer for Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, and it is absolutely beautiful.  It's full of Nazi killing, Fascist fighting, and Liberation fueled ass kicking.  Seriously it's almost as if Bethesda you know, paid attention to all of the press after their E3 reveal and were just like "Fuck it, might as well".  Anyrate, check out the new trailer bellow:

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus releases October 27th, 2017 on Playstation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam.  Be sure to keep your eyes out as I'll be reviewing the game here shortly after launch.

Rantology: Framerates

It is with more and more frequency that we see the gap between PC and console becoming closer and closer, whether that be in commonly shared games, hardware, or even capabilities (like streaming off on consoles).  Naturally that conversation always rears it's ugly head back to performance (instead of more valuable conversations like the costs of digital delivery, Steam vs PS/MS storefronts, and a discussion on cross platform play), and one of those primary components is framerates and how they affect gameplay and can make the game seem like it an overall better experience.  As a software engineer this is something I know a thing or two about, so I figured what a better way than to turn a heated debate into a passionate conversation.

So, the first thing that I feel needs to be addressed when having conversations like these is the idea that a higher frame rate means a more polished game, and while on the surface this can seem true, however when you get down to it that's not the case.  So what exactly does frame rates mean?  Well to put it simply it's the number of times a screen will refresh in a certain period, most commonly we look at it in terms of frames per second, or fps, another term for this is a Hertz, Hz, so something that has a rate of 1 fps (1 Hz) is redrawing it's screen once every second, now this doesn't necessarily mean that it is changing what is on the screen, just that is how fast the screen does a refresh.  This is a restriction by the hardware, but most modern TV's will have a minimum of 60 Hz, with a large portion going up to 120 Hz or 240 Hz.

So if thats what a Hz is, how does this affect framerates and our gameplay?  Well simply put when a game runs at 30 fps it is capable of rerendering that display once every 1/30 of a second.  This doesn't necessarily mean that the screen will change though, and even in some PC games that rate will fluctuate while you play based on background processes, which actually is an issue because it leads to tearing and creates an effect of removing immersion in the game and due to rapid change in framerate.  Ever play League of Legends and experience a perceived lag spike?  That's exactly what I'm talking about. On the opposite side of it the higher the framerate the smoother the animations look, the better the experience you're likely to have.

All of this sounds really simple so far, and it's pretty easy to see that framerates are one of the most noticeable aspects of your game, well what if you have an effectively unlimited framerate, but other parts of your game are causing you to experience slowdowns and issues?  Say, for example, you're playing a very intensive RTS and you're in command of massive WWII sized armies on a battlefield. Well this kind of game will undoubtedly be very processor intensive, but the graphics engine you're using allows you to run at 60 fps consistently.  This is a pretty good thing, but because you need to do so many calculations on this game at one point in time because this game is hyper accurate and bases shots and damage on the individual and not on the squad/unit every time a bullet collision happens it needs to check to see if the wound caused was fatal or not.  This is going to cause a large slowdown because now you're running very processor intensive operations every game cycle, and these calculations may not by the time you need to redraw, well even in an optimal setting of only being able to redraw every other cycle now you've cut your framerate in half and are effectively running at 45 fps at 90 Hz refresh.

So while you may be able to handle that sweet 90 fps, you're now effectively playing at 45 fps, which is a noticeable drop in how smooth your game runs.  This is actually a pretty generous example of a scenario like this as some more intensive games like Sins of a Solar Empire can slow down to around 15 fps during max processing.  How can we combat this and still achieve a maximum amount of smoothness?  Well the easiest way is to drop your refresh rate to run at a lower Hz, this will give you a higher effective framerate, while optimizing how smooth you can operate.  Lets use the above example.  Say our calculations actually take 1/50 of a second to run and prepare the screen, well if we drop our refresh rate to 50 Hz we can actually increase or frame rate to 50 fps, up from our formerly noticed metric of 45 fps.  So in this case while I can advertise my game at running at 90 fps, in practice, running at 50 fps will give the player a better experience.

Some of your better developers will actually account for this and adjust the framerate and optimize it based on calculations, League of Legends attempts this as do most other MMO's, but a lot of those are based on network traffic, which is a conversation for another time, though that does play into your framerate when you need to redraw the screen.  Ideally though, in ur perfect environment, we're working offline, as these are the games that tend to get the most flak for setting a "low ball" of 30 fps. While many arguments on both sides can be made about capping framerates on consoles and pc, and just about everything around the subject, the base of it is all the same, the fact that when you're dealing with a difference in systems and computing power it will all affect your framerate output to your user.

So how can we change this and better use our resources to optimize our framerates?  Well the easiest way is to better handle data.  More structured, and ideally organized data is faster and easier to process.  The idea is if we use a data structure that offers near constant access time to data the player cares about then the better we are using our resources.  Another way is to do what I call prioritized processing, or process data that the player will see first, and do "invisible" calculations afterwards.  I know that's confusing so let me explain.

The idea is if we know our player has a viewbox that is 60 degrees of a circle and can only see that we start with things happening in that view, and then the further something is from our view, the lower a priority it has to process thus allowing data to be updated in relative to how important it is for our view.  Let's use our example above.  Say we break our 90 Hz to 90 time units, in 1 unit I can process roughly 55% of our data, by the above optimization we run at 50 fps, of that 55%, 30% is our immediate view screen, and the other 25% is external data, well say we really want to squeeze out that extra 10 fps, so we need see how we can optimize our resources to achieve that.  Well we use this idea of easing out, or setting an ideal range away from the camera for data we deem important.  Let's say our ideal is half the screen at current view. Everything after that has the same priority of "doesn't need to happen now, but we shouldn't put it off forever".  So the idea is that every time unit, remember we reduced down to 60 fps, or 60 Hz we start off by checking our bounds, everything in that has a priority of 1, then every object moving outwards gets its priority modified as we move out, until we reach that easing line, and calculate its priority.  That is how we determine our movement calculations, seeing who takes damage, seeing what needs to animate, seeing what needs to disappear because it's been destroyed.  This way if, in that one time unit, we only get 80% of the way through our calculations before we need to clean and prepare for the next cycle, we slightly increase it's priority, and prepare for the next cycle.  This will allow us to hit that sweet sweet 60 fps by optimizing our available resources.

While framerates may not be the most important aspect of development, but they can look like it, and purely devoting resources to framerates isn't the only or ideal solution to improve this metric. They matter, but not as much as other things.  I hope this has been educational and you can go out and win some arguments you've been having with your friends.  Till next time.

Rantology: I'm actually okay with the micro transactions in Destiny 2

So  we saw the release of Destiny 2, and while my review will be coming after I clear the raid next week, I can tell you that I have enjoyed what I have played so far. Despite how refreshing the game is though, people have already taken to dismissing the game because of micro transactions that are hamfistedly shoved into it via Eve Levante and her Eververse. Now in the original Destiny these offered exclusive rewards (mainly cosmetic save for sparrows that could be used in SRL) and it was understandably upsetting due to it's paygating of content.

Destiny 2 however seems to have learned from past mistakes as the prestige system now awards guardians with these premium rewards for obtaining higher levels so even the cosmetic aspects to them can be acquired without spending a dime. This includes the controversial new shaders (which are consumed upon changing even though they are applied per item now), and exotic ships and sparrows. I'm....okay with this. I've never had an issue of a system like this that offers cosmetic options to come outside of a paid manner, it adds a level of "one more" to it to keep players playing, and not stay stagnant. I know some will argue against this, but honestly I don't have an issue, its an overall positive addition to a game that will only encourage me to play even more.