This week for Destiny Bashing Video Game Tuesday I’m talking about the reasons the latest Destiny Expansion is a bust. It’s all about Why Rise of Iron is a Failure!
It just came out how can you be disappointed already?: Well it’s simple I was disappointed the day after the game was released because after finishing the meagre offering of “Story” missions that Rise of Iron came with, and doing both the Gjallarhorn and Khvostov Exotic quests on Day 1, I realized that the Light Level Grind from Year 1 was back. That is completely unacceptable, and Bungie knows better than to do stupid crap like that. By Day 2 there was already a farming method to get high Light Level engrams to drop quickly and it was incredibly tedious, but much less tedious than actually doing full Strikes for them.
How?: It involved Omnigul and required players to quickly kill her the first time you see her in her Strike. Doing so and than dying to the upcoming horde of Hive enemies that spawn behind her let you quickly and repeatedly farm her for 365 Light Level engrams. I and 90% of gamers, don’t want to cheat to be able to participate in what is undoubtedly the best part of Destiny, the Raids. However it would take most players with a very good string of luck, which let’s be honest never happens, a minimum of 30 hours to get from 335 to 365. That’s unacceptable considering most players have full time jobs and don’t want to waste 30+ hours doing the same 8 strikes over and over again repeatedly. Oh and most players would have to use matchmaking to get it done because their friends aren’t on at the same times all the time. If you’ve never used matchmaking in PvE content in any MMO let me tell you why it’s always a hassle. You get the worst players 95% of the time, players you have to carry from the first encounter to the very end. What should take 20 minutes takes 45 or more and than you have to repeat it all again, and again and again. Even the most patient player will quickly tire of that crap.
You mentioned Year 1, what about Year 2?: Year 2, or The Taken King, was great for raising the Light Level of players quickly and easily and required no strike grinding whatsoever. Bungie made a great feature called Court of Oryx and for the first few weeks you could reliably walk into the Patrol area and find a few players doing Court of Oryx over and over. Than you’d hop over and do some as well and even more people would come because it’s in a central area of the Patrol Zone. Doing this allowed players to easily get ready for the raid when it launched a few days after Taken King launched. Year 3 was supposed to be the same except the developers screwed up, again.
How?: Simple and it’s so incredibly obvious that it makes you wonder what they were ingesting when they designed the new patrol. Instead of having the new Court of Oryx, Archon’s Forge, in a central area where players would go often in the course of exploring in Patrol, they put in one of the furthest areas away from the spawn point. In addition they removed the ability to carry multiple tiers of activation “keys.” Oh and they don’t let you carry multiple of the one you do have. It also gets used up and is wasted when you die and screw up because no one is there to help you. In addition it drops almost no Engrams at all, Court of Oryx always had a chest and players could get items from it regardless of whether they were the ones to start the event or not. Archon’s Forge doesn’t have any of those things that made Court of Oryx so good.
What else?: Well the raid was cleared by 3 people, when the normal group of players would take 6, less than 24 hours after it launched. Even worse you can completely skip 1/3rd of the entire raid by just running past it and you still get half of the reward by doing so. Finally just this past week they removed the Omnigul farming method, but did nothing to help players raise their Light Level quickly. This is less than 14 days after launch, and it becomes quickly obvious that Destiny: Rise of Iron has serious issues that point to the Developers having no clue what to do. Plus the story is boring and almost as bad as Year 1.
That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday, I might cover the positives of Rise of Iron next week, but no promises.