- haveblue
- Aug 15, 2005
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Toilet Rascal
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Destiny 2 is an FPS/RPG hybrid set in a post-apocalyptic world where the last bastion of humanity on Earth is threatened by dark powers converging from across the universe. It is also a hot mess where you spend half your time killing the same 100 dumb grunts for a 5% increase in one character stat and the other half getting your face shotgunned off by a guy who won’t stop leaping and dodging around and also threw an ice tornado at you.
Why should I play Destiny 2?
All kidding aside, D2 has the best-feeling shooting in the industry, top-tier art and sound design, reasonably balanced PvP with a high skill ceiling, a wide playground for buildcrafting, unique puzzle-and-combat cooperative scenarios, and a sci-fi/fantasy setting that ranges from pleasantly earnest to absolutely wild depending on how deeply you dive into the voluminous lore and side material.
What’s new in the next expansion, Lightfall?
- A new destination, the hidden 80s-tastic Neptunian city of Neomuna
- A new fifth subclass, Strand, which comes with a brand new and very flexible grappling hook movement system
- A long-overdue reworking of the sprawling mod system into something more comprehensible and integrated with other build elements
- An in-game loadout manager
- An in-game LFG tool
- Guardian Ranks, a way of collecting and displaying achievements
- A new raid, about which we know very little
OK, how do I play Destiny 2?
This is a fair question! As a live service game, D2 is comprised of a free-to-play base, a set of yearly expansions, and a set of quarterly seasons, all of which enable different pieces of content in the game and are available in different combinations.
TLDR: Install the free-to-play base game and wait three weeks. If you’re having fun, buy the Lightfall deluxe edition. If you’re having a lot of fun, buy some of the other expansions listed here.
If you go to your favorite game buying place and look for Destiny 2, you will find:
- Destiny 2. This is the free-to-play base. It is required to play the game at all, and allows you to use the three basic elemental subclasses, play strikes (three-player PVE missions), compete in crucible (PVP, with a variety of modes), try some Gambit (a hybrid PVE/PVP activity where you farm AI enemies and periodically get killed by other players), earn a basic subset of gear, and go through short previews of the other premium content drops. You should play with this for a bit before deciding to put money down for the rest, especially since a new expansion is imminent and thus all currently available premium content has a short shelf life.
- Lightfall. This is the upcoming expansion, which will be released on February 28. It’s looking good, but it’s a tall ask to tell people to preorder this before they’ve even played the game, so just keep in mind that it’s out there if you do end up hooked.
- The Witch Queen. This is the most recent expansion, which focuses on the Throne World destination. If you immediately fall in love with the game, buying this grants access to a fairly meaty and challenging story campaign, the Vow of the Disciple raid, and a few other things. You have three weeks to do them before the new hotness drops, but it’s still a good time.
You will also find a number of other things that are not very good value right now, because most of their content has been retired, de-emphasized, or the player base just moved on:
- The year 5 Season Pass. This grants access to content released since Witch Queen. Unfortunately all of this content is going to be retired on February 28, so buying it today will leave you very little time to explore it, especially if you also want to get through Witch Queen.
- The 30th Anniversary Pack. This contains one activity, one dungeon, a few fun exotics, and a lot of cheeky references to Bungie's previous games.
- Beyond Light. The year 4 expansion. The most notable thing this adds is the Stasis subclass, but right now it’s kind of a redheaded stepchild and not really essential unless you play a hunter who does a lot of PVP.
- Shadowkeep. The year 3 expansion. Not really remarkable at this point.
- Forsaken. Half of the year 2 expansion.
You may notice that there is no mention of season passes earlier than year 5, the recurring word “retired”, and the weird description for Forsaken. This is because, as a constantly growing live service game based on a decade-old engine and developed across a wide variety of business plans and ownership structures, Destiny 2 must be periodically trimmed down by having chunks of content removed, a process the studio euphemistically calls “vaulting”. The seasonal content from years 1-4 and the missing half of the Forsaken expansion are no longer in the game and cannot be played. The same thing is about to happen to the seasonal content for year 5, which is why buying access to it today is not recommended. It took them several tries to settle on a way to do this that balanced fairness to the paying player base with the technical needs of the game and the scope of development their teams were capable of, and opinions vary as to whether they have now achieved it, but as of right now the plan is that with each yearly expansion the seasons of the previous expansion are removed. This has naturally turned the game’s slate of activities at any given time into a patchwork of out-of-context story snippets and the ongoing world-building effort into an intimidating mess of fragments that can only be pieced together by spending a lot of time watching lore mavens on Youtube. But you don’t need to know any of this to shoot the man and collect the shiny thing that pops out, so don’t worry about it unless you want to.
I’ve got it installed now. Again, how do I play Destiny 2?
Destiny 2 has a famously terrible new player experience, complicated by Bungie’s habit of dropping new players into the latest seasonal activities with no warning, context, or suitable gear for the challenge. Once you complete or escape that…
…the first thing to do is to seek out the official new player quest chain, which, if it doesn’t automatically force you to start it, is available in the Cosmodrome (right icon, bottom of the main menu). This will lead you through the basics of setting up and outfitting a character, what options for powers and abilities are available to you, and how the game’s fiction is structured. It may also show you how to look through the game’s content and pick an activity to do, I haven’t actually done it myself but it should.
The second thing to do is, post! There are a lot of quirks and non-obvious things about the game, and a lot of advanced topics with no in-game guidance at all, and most people here will be happy to explain them or link to something that will.
The third thing to do is to join the Destiny goon discord, Serious Overchill, where you can not only chat with goons in real time but locate fireteams for late- and endgame team activities.
I feel reasonably comfortable with the game now, what else should I know?
- Power levels: Your overriding goal in a game like this is to make number go up, and you make number go up by acquiring new gear pieces and putting them on. Each gear has an associated power level, and you character level is calculated from all the gear you have equipped. As you climb through the power ranks, there are 3 magic numbers to keep in mind:
- The soft cap is the point below which almost every piece of gear you receive is higher than the one you already have. The gear you are receiving at this point (whites, greens, and blues) is mostly not worth keeping so trade up often and give every kind of weapon a try. Once you reach the soft cap, you will start to be concerned with…
- The powerful cap. Between the soft cap and the powerful cap, leveling greatly slows down and most of your drops are not power upgrades. The ones that are are powerful drops, which are mostly dropped from activity completions and are rationed to a limited number each week. Activities that will drop powerfuls are called out on the director. You will also receive a couple of “prime engrams” each day, which are also powerful (and which bank, so you don’t actually have to play every day). Once you reach the powerful cap, you will start to be concerned with…
- The pinnacle cap, also called the hard cap. Between the powerful cap and the pinnacle cap, leveling greatly slows down (again) and powerful drops are no longer power upgrades. The ones that are are pinnacle drops, which drop from advanced activity completions- raids, dungeons, and high-level PVP. There are a few of these that are easier to obtain, but if you aren’t doing these three things your leveling will be even slower.
The soft, powerful, and pinnacle caps are raised by 10 each season and by much more each expansion (which tells you how slow pinnacle leveling is) and are currently at 1530, 1580, and 1590 respectively.
- Mods: Each of your legendary weapons and each of your legendary or exotic armors accepts from 1-4 mods, which are small modules that alter its behavior in some way. There are a vast number of mods available, some of which boost one stat or another, others of which grant access to whole new gameplay systems that let you set up feedback loops and paths through the mechanical possibility space that buff your character in various ways. There are far too many mods for a quick explanation, and the whole mod system is about to be overhauled in Lightfall, so google around or ask here for more details.
- Apps: The Destiny 2 servers have a public API, and a number of second-screen tools are available to make interacting with the game a little less painful and time-consuming.
- The official companion app. This is mostly useful for buying bounties between activities without having to visit the social spaces and for locating public fireteams to do group activities that aren't automatically matchmade.
- Destiny Item Manager (DIM). This is a much better UI for managing your inventory than the game provides, and includes an indispensable loadout feature (the game does not, until Lightfall) for saving and restoring configurations.
- Light.gg. A database of every piece of gear in the game, should you need to look up more details about something you found or saw someone else using.
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Feb 9, 2023 02:38
