And the games that have defined my leisure time.
(A quick note to those that aren’t in the know, I’ve played video games since my early years. Starting with the NES at my grandmother's house, and up to the Xbox One that eats up so much time these days.)
The Games That Started It All
I’m not even sure how old I was when I thudded down onto the carpet in front of my grandparent's CRT TV and played Super Mario Bros. for the first time. I’m guessing around the age of 5. I could of course make an attempt to verify my starting age with either of my parents, but my mother will most likely have forgotten that I ever played the NES my grandmother owned and my father was more interested in getting his own hands on the controller for himself to play through Top Gun to the aircraft carrier landing level more than he was interested in letting me play through the same levels of Mario, over and over again.
Somehow though I found a way to gain control of the NES, and play I did. And while I did get my try at the aircraft carrier (I remember failing consistently with that level), I was always far more interested in slashing my way through Ninja Gaiden (Which oddly enough I would play nonstop with my uncle and eventually would make a big comeback for me again on the original Xbox) and exploring the vast lands of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda. (The Legend of Zelda of course leading to my most beloved gaming series) I’m sure it was annoying for my parents to drive the 90 minutes to my grandparent's home just to have me run to their TV, blow into the Ninja Gaiden NES cartridge, and start slicing through enemies instead of roaming the forests of Northern California that were just outside the acres of grassland where my grandparents kept their horses. If you think about how annoying it is nowadays to have a child (or an adult, even) watch someone else play through games on YouTube, I wonder how confusing and infuriating must it have been when it was the late 80’s and the early 90’s and your child is visiting relatives but they’d prefer to sit in front of the TV, completely engrossed in the pixellated struggles of a small boy in a green tunic getting lost in the digital woods of Hyrule instead of going out and literally getting lost in the real woods just past the front door. I have only asked my mother once what her opinion was of the games that I’ve played, and she seemed to be much more indifferent than I would have expected. But if I were to ask her how she felt initially, back when I was a child and had just begun playing these video games, I would imagine that she’d not really have understood the allure of being a digital ninja, or a plumber that likes to step on mushrooms. Asking her about the games I play now, wherein I’m a revivable Guardian that shoots aliens across the universe for almost no reason would probably result in nothing but a contemplative stare. Or maybe just a, “Why?”.
So you're this Italian plumber, right? And you eat mushrooms, and then. . . you're not really listening, are you Mom?
Regardless of my parents opinions, I’ve played video games ever since. That means 20 years of video games, with only 1 year that I can think of that I stopped playing and that was only just recently. From the NES I hogged up, to the Sega Genesis my father bought for our home some years later (I’m dreaming of you, Toejam & Earl), and then the joy I felt when I got my Nintendo 64 for Christmas (Ocarina of Time, nonstop, everyday, all day), or the jaw dropping ecstasy I felt when my high school girlfriend gifted me an original Xbox (Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo: Combat Evolved. KOTOR. Halo 2. Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo: Combat Evolved. Ninja Gaiden. Did I say Halo: Combat Evolved?), and then the inevitable upgrade to the epic Xbox 360 (Halo 3, the gritty storylines of Gears of War 1, 2, & 3, Halo: ODST, Halo: Reach, and eventually Halo 4, not to mention all of the other amazing games available to play through), and now we’ve come to the latest and greatest (More on that "greatest" part here in a second), the Xbox One. And initially, there was only one game that I had for the One. . . and it was a Call of Duty game. I can’t STAND Call of Duty, whether it's the gameplay or the storylines. I think they’re redundant, cliche, and generally catering to the lowest common denominator of gamers. In all of the Call of Duty games that I've played they've never brought anything to the screen that I really felt was worthy of the level of respect the CoD franchise receives. (I've played through Call of Duty 4, World at War, and Ghosts, and I've played through bits of Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops.)
And yes, I know that is a generalization, so if I get anybody telling me,
“I PLAY COD AND I DONT SUCK I BET I COULD PWN YOU HALO SUX COD FTW DOUCHE”
I want you to know that, yes, I meant you when I was talking about the lowest common denominator. You suck. Go away. Stop visiting my website.
So to say the least, I wasn’t too impressed with the Xbox One for the better part of a year. I felt that I bought the Xbox One only because I got an amazing deal through Amazon on day one of its release and I had the money at the time. I think that aside from Call of Duty: Ghosts the first year of regular use that my Xbox One saw was relegated to streaming Netflix. And let me say that streaming Netflix through the Xbox One isn’t even that great. Hell, the interface itself on the Xbox One by itself is pretty shit.* I feel sometimes while I'm using my Xbox One like I'm the old man sitting on his porch yelling at the neighborhood kids that found a way to let their baseball fall upon his browning grass lawn. “How did Microsoft fuck this up?? The 360 interface was perfect in every way!! It was so much easier to use!! Always stay the same forever!! Stop fucking everything up Microsoft!!” But sometimes those old geezers get it right. Because Microsoft over thought so much of the Xbox One operating system in ways that aren't beneficial to the people using the Xbox One. And holy shit, don't get me started on the way that both the Xbox One Kinect and controller disconnect randomly sometimes, always at the most inopportune times. But if I took all of my complaints about the Xbox One and boiled them all down, I would say my main quibble with the Xbox One interface has to do with button clicks. It’s a pretty easy concept. There are things that you’ll need to do nowadays when using a game console like check messages, send invites, mute other players, switch to a different game, etc., and the one way to make us all happy is fix this one quibble. And this can actually be extended to any kind of GUI, not just gaming:
*This post was started Nov. 4th, just a few days after the New Xbox One Experience was released to the public, and I don’t have a fully formed opinion on that yet
When you have actions that need to be performed on a regular basis, reduce the number of clicks that you have to click in order to complete that action.
tl:dr: Help us click less.
Um. I don’t have an InstaPin or a TwitGram, but maybe someone should hashtag that? Hashtag that, and then never speak to me again.
With the interface of the Xbox 360, I was 1 click away from a proper menu, either 0, 1, or 2 movements with a joystick to select what I need, and either 1 or 2 more clicks to get what I need done. At most, we’re talking 3 clicks, with up to maybe three moves. The Xbox One confuses and complicates this entire process. Three times the number of clicks and moves, not including the general feeling of being lost in an interface designed exclusively by designers with no input from a gamer. An interface that has what you need hidden away from you at all times. Half the time the shortcomings in the interface make it feel as though you're required to use the search function for what you need or turn to Google to find the location of what you need. This is a pain, down to something as simple as adding friends to a party, sending messages, or redeeming a code
Which can sound like it's not a huge deal. A few more clicks, pin a few of your common tasks to the home section of the OS, find yourself a workflow that gets you what you need. And I’d assume that for the general public the interface made do. But being from the tech side of things, and having a bit of an attention to detail, the interface always really bothered me. And when the interface bothers you it makes using whatever device you’re using less enjoyable. So during what was already turning out to be a lackluster year of Call of Duty and Netflix, I had very little interest in using my Xbox One for anything else. Hell, I was still playing games on the Xbox 360 with friends more than the One at that point. (Borderlands 1 and 2 are awesome). Thankfully for my Xbox One, this was helped a good bit by the release of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, bringing all of Halo 1-4 (And eventually Halo: ODST as well) to the Xbox One with more content and achievements for all to enjoy. But c’mon. A new console used just to play reskinned games from an older console? Who cares?
And then my friend tells me about a game that’s being developed for both the 360 and the One. A game that he’s incredibly excited about, that’s going to be absolutely amazing. A massive multiplayer online game where you drop in and out of games with friends at will, exploring and fighting together as fireteams. A game with amazing gameplay mechanics of Halo, chest after chest of cool loot to dig through like Borderlands, storylines that will expand over the course of years, not just hours.
A game called Destiny
Destiny sounded awful to me. An MMO on my console? I like big games in the vein of Knights of the Old Republic, which ended up at around 40 hours per play through (80 if you wanted to have two characters, one character who will fall to the dark side and one character that would rise to the light side), but a game where you’re expected to constantly play more and more to keep yourself in the game and up to the level of other players? That sounds more like a job. A game where your friends can pop in and out of gameplay with you whenever they get online? Well that’s not really a feature I’m going to care too much about since I usually play games solo. Lots of loot and customizable weapons and armor? I mean, sure these are nice. Borderlands gave us such a huge dump of loot every time you opened up a chest that you were buried and overwhelmed just halfway through the game. And every time I hear a developer say that something is customizable I roll my eyes since I’ve never felt that anything was really “customizable” in any game, ever. Maybe it's growing up as a DIY guy, but nothing is customizable in the way that things are really customizable in life. So this was always a nonstarter for me as well. Yeah, it’s got a different scope than the default, and only you and 1 million other players have it set this way. CUSTOM!! Psh. And then to top it all off, I believe that Bungie’s marketing for Destiny has always been awful. The terrible voice acting and incredibly obvious scripting of their gameplay walk-through (NOOOO!!! DARLA!!!) to their confusing use of Led Zeppelin during live-action trailers. (Led Zeppelin is in my top 5 best bands, but do I listen to them during a slick and sparkling space opera? No. Hell no.) Nothing appealed to me. But there’s a reason why we do a lot of things we do, and it’s because you go where your fellow alien-killing compatriots are going to be.
And my friends chose Destiny.
Vanilla Destiny
So here I am on September 11th (See? I couldn’t even bring myself to play on day one, I was so indifferent.) and I play through Destiny. And it's a beautiful game with marvelous gameplay mechanics, but with the lack of story, the short campaign, the general lack of interesting loot, the strange quibbles that have been remarked upon by all Destiny players. . . . I quit. Well, I shouldn’t say I quit entirely. I played off and on, very irregularly for about two months, trying to grasp why I was supposed to be enjoying this game. Why the hype was so high but the results were so low. And then I just stopped. I didn’t give Destiny any thought after that for nearly five months. Because why would I? I didn’t think Destiny was very much fun, I didn’t think there was any storyline that made any kind of sense, The Crucible wasn’t appealing in the slightest (The Crucible is Destiny’s player vs. player arena, aka PvP), and the majority of my friends weren't even playing anymore. There was almost nothing in Destiny that was appealing to me from the start, and nothing throughout the first two months of its release that sold me on this Massive Multiplayer Online First-Person Shooter.
Lucky thing that I bought the season pass for the downloadable content I guess?
The Dark Below & The House of Wolves
The Destiny DLC came in the way of two expanded storylines called The Dark Below and The House of Wolves. For me, The Dark Below came and passed with little to no fanfare, since I wasn’t willing to play through the giant missions known as raids that were introduced in Vanilla Destiny and The Dark Below. I had read all about these raids, but had wanted to play through them with my friends, not with random people. This was due to the time and teamwork required to complete these raids. When I played through the expanded story of The Dark Below hoping for a sizeable and noticeable update to Destiny to be delivered, I instead found myself playing traveling to the same maps, blasting the same enemies, and ending the missions in different spots on the previously stated repeated maps. And then came the House of Wolves, brought to Destiny to introduce a new place to do nothing in except hangout and pick up different missions; missions which still play through the same maps, and then kill the same enemies with different armor on, and then repeat. Some weapons are added, some tweaks are made, some little gotchas are tossed out for the players to keep them interested, but all of it fell short for me in a pretty big way.
I began using one website: destinylfg.com
And then I read one article: http://goo.gl/MIYsHt
And Destiny changed
Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku and the sister sites of Gizmodo and io9 have kept me up to date on a lot of Destiny information. All that it took was one well versed Guardian to give up a few secrets, and a lot of what Destiny is came together for me. Learning to get those extra materials or strange coins from other alts, finding out that I didn’t have to just sit around and wait for public events to just happen, bringing me up to speed on how to tackle Nightfall missions and how important they are, and most importantly? Listen to fucking music when you’re playing this gorram game!! It seems like such a simple thing now, but when I was playing through Destiny for the first two months I was expecting a story to pop out at me and I didn’t want to miss it! I was looking for new tidbits of story and character usage throughout the game and so I left the music out. But giving up on whatever Destiny calls a storyline and cranking Lamb of God’s Wrath and Resolution albums makes killing aliens so much more satisfying. Funny, how a tweak to the music can change things for the better. This became most important in The Prison of Elders. As mentioned previously, I like Gears of War. I’ve got all the games, played them like crazy (And yet coincidentally never got those fucking Seriously achievements) and generally raved about them to anyone that would listen. The gritty look of Sera, the terrifying creatures the Locust commanded, the brutal executions that were somehow insane yet not over the top visually. It’s brutal and unforgiving, and I loved it. One of the best things that Gears introduced was Horde mode, where wave after wave of stronger and stronger enemies crash over you and your team. Playing through these waves was incredibly fun, providing a good example to other developers how to create a tough challenge with a huge number of varied enemies on maps that were creative and striking. And Then Halo recycled the idea (Not as successfully, in my opinion) with Firefight in Halo: Reach. And now we have Destiny’s take, The Prison of Elders.
The Prison of Elders
The Prison of Elders introduced a solid recurring reason for me to play Destiny. The raids that I’d previously mentioned were the reason everyone else I knew was playing Destiny, but as I’d said, I wanted to play through these with friends and the friends on Destiny were in short supply. The Prison of Elders is not a huge commitment. Hell, at the basic level of The Prison of Elders even had matchmaking! (Matchmaking, to those that do not know is where the servers that are hosting the gameplay will find other players to play with you) So here I am, a low-level scrub that has no friends online, being able to play a modern-day Horde with people placed in-game with me automatically. Rewards start at good and go to great as you go up through the higher levels of The Prison of Elders. It’s also an infinite loop of awesome, since the rewards you received in The Prison of Elders bring your levels up so that you can then play tougher and better levels of The Prison of Elders. And the bullshit part of Destiny, playing through the same levels of the same enemies, with the same end goals, was tweaked just enough to make it work in The Prison of Elders’ favor. The enemies are slightly randomized, they’re tougher and tougher, they provide us with maps that have their own little tricks, with end-game rewards that were, until Year 2 was released, rewards you could use where you wanted to use them. It was just enough to push the appreciation for Destiny from “Meh?” to “Okay, I am really starting to get this!” And this started off the Destiny train.
The Tumbler helped too. . .
But the train also required the use of Destiny LFG; LFG being Looking for Group. As much as I appreciate my real life and digital friends, the time had come for me to take on Destiny full force and that requires more than 1 person. Yes, there have been hacks and glitches that make running the Vault of Glass alone a possibility, although some have been patched or are unrealistic unless you've got someone showing you how to perform them. And Crota can be run solo as well, but you’re looking at a long run through a relatively short raid, that isn’t going to make the experience anymore enjoyable or worthwhile. And if you try to take on the Prison of Elders all on your onesie you’re going to have to be in the top five Destiny players. I can’t even imagine how incredibly annoying it would be to destroy all three mines on a level 34 Prison run when you’ve got hive Thrulls rushing up your ass and a Wizard popping shots at you from ten feet in the air above your head while a Knight is lobbing boomer shots from the opposite side of the map. Your Ice Breaker would give you 6-8 shots with it’s recharge time, but it’s not gonna save you from all that hurt. So, in order to make sure that you can enjoy these complex raid full of puzzles and extreme teamwork, you need a team of up to 6 guardians, including yourself. But as I’d mentioned earlier, my friends either don’t play at all or weren’t able to get their schedules to sync with mine. DestinyLFG is a site that alleviates all of those Destiny fireteam woes, dropping you into parties with other guardians in a way that Bungie can’t even get right most of the time. And once you’ve got a good fireteam of 6 experienced Guardians, the Destiny experience really comes together.
The Vault of Glass
The Vault of Glass will wreck an entire afternoon, if you’re rushing through with a good team. The first time that a fire team ran through the Vault of Glass it was a 10+ hour event watched by streamers around the world and each member of the fireteam had nearly 1,000 kills each and 1,600 deaths altogether. The Vault of Glass is a mysterious part of a storyline that is nonexistent, so explaining that it’s a Vex dungeon with rooms and enemies lost to time, popping in and out of time portals, is really not all that important here. It’s the brutal battles and the puzzles that make it fun. Playing through the raid includes jumping puzzles, a huge boss in the middle of the raid that is an accomplishment to kill in and of itself, a maze where your entire team dies instantly if you’re seen by the roving keepers of the maze, and a final confrontation with a boss that enjoys randomly teleporting half of your fireteam into the future or the past on a different planet and you have to fight your way back to the other half of your fireteam that is fighting off exploding enemies that are only ever found in the Vault of Glass. It’s tricky, to say the least. And it’s incredibly entertaining, especially when the fireteam you’re playing with has experience, is willing to learn new tricks, and is generally full of fun people. It becomes a challenge that is immediately redeeming with the laughs and screams and new weapons and armor when any particular challenge is completed. And then you get to sigh a sigh of relief and tell yourself that you finally took down Atheon, Time’s Conflux (See? Even his name is confusing) and you’re fireteam stands tall at the terminus of the Vault of Glass.
Crota's End
But then, if you’re like me, you’ve taken down Atheon, Time’s Conflux and you’re now expected to dive into Crota’s End, the raid that was released with The Dark Below expansion. Most people who stayed on top of Destiny had to wait 4 months to dive into a new raid. I had all of Destiny effectively laid out for me at one time, remember? Crota’s End had a bit more story than the Vault of Glass wherein you avenge Eris Morn, a new character in The Tower that is the main headquarters for your Guardians. You do this by traveling into a gigantic hole in the Moon to find and kill Crota, the Son of Oryx. Crota killed Eris Morn’s five Guardian buddies and then proceeded to severe her connection to the light that makes a Guardian a Guardian and then blinded her when they made their own attempt at cutting off Crota's giant Hive head. She escaped only by becoming a sort of half Hive/Half Guardian and slowly built herself a ship to fly her way out of the dark stinky Lunar Hive hole over the course of several years. But, it’s a little less mysterious and a little less time-consuming and a little less of everything else, really. I have to admit, that I’ve never really had the chance to enjoy Crota’s End as a play through. Whenever I’ve played through this raid my team members have been grinding out the rewards that you receive throughout the raid. They’re not in this raid for fun, since really the whole raid can be done within 45 minutes and the gameplay was never as tricky as the Vault of Glass ever was. There’s some running (Don’t fall down the holes!) and then you kill some enemies (You can even have four Guardian’s die and just have one Guardian sit and wait for the sixth member to just snipe away all of the enemies that spawn) and then you kill some wizards in less than 3 minutes (Sing your song bitches, we’re gonna get you anyways) and then you kill Crota. Womb womp. Really, as fun as it can be, it’s actually a great example of what can go wrong with Destiny. The play through is slightly generic and not incredible like the Vault of Glass can be, but what ruins it are sometimes the same people who make the Vault of Glass so much fun. If a player is playing through the same damned experience over and over again just for the chance at a set of boots that will let you carry a bit more heavy ammo, then that player is boring and the developers have developed a loop that is no fun at all. I’ve never enjoyed the Crota raid because of these grinding players that soullessly play the loot chest lottery and are disappointed every time they get another Gjallarhorn but still haven’t received one Word of Crota. These are the people who I’ve played through Corat’s End with, and they’ve been a good example as how NOT to play video games and what to stay away from if you’d like to enjoy the game and not grind away in the world of Destiny.
The Prison
Which brings me back to what started it all. The Prison of Elders. Bungie found a way to take the grind out of the game, keep it challenging, and even tried to shoehorn an awkward story about runaway Fallen factions being captured and held in the Prison of Elders, where you and a fireteam of two others Guardians can challenge them in shootouts spanning across all of the enemies in Destiny: The Fallen, The Hive, The Vex, and The Cabal. Once you’ve worked your way up to level 34 you get to track down Skolas, the new leader of the Fallen that you capture in the House of Wolves extended storyline. You throw yourself through wave after wave of increasingly intimidating foes. The most fun I’ve had in Destiny, even throughout The Taken King, (with the exception of one super derpy and ridiculous Nightfall wherein they gave us a melee and an arc buff in one Nightfall, leaving the Arcblade Hunter a ridiculous charging beast of unstoppable swirling high-voltage katanas) has been conquering Skolas. I somehow found the best possible team I could find: One person that knew exactly what he was doing and that was willing to teach me how to take on Skolas, and another Guardian that was fun to play with and could hold his own. Together, we wrecked our way through five rounds of Hive, Vex, Cabal, and Fallen and approached Skolas with guns held high, ready for the challenges he held for us. And there’s nothing more tense I’ve done in this game, or any other game that I can think of. All three players have to be in sync and communicating at all times. Everyone must stay alive, which is a much bigger deal than you’d think when you’re getting shot at from every corner of the map by multiple enemies that are all a level higher than you are. You have to change the way that you’ve played every other level of the Prison of Elders, and keep moving at all times in a way that is reminiscent of when you first started playing through the Prison of Elders but didn’t have the defense rating to stay alive. You eventually end up in this mad dash, shooting anything that you can, while trading a plague called the Devouring Essence that will kill you after 30 seconds unless passed to another guardian, while taking down mines, and eventually taking Skolas down and showing him who really should be frightened here in the Prison of Elders. The group dynamic, the brutal waves of enemies, the struggle to stay 10 seconds ahead of a mysterious plague that will kill you if you don’t try and let it kill one of your fellow guardians, the overwhelming objectives that are the icing on the cake of this huge space opera war game, all lead up to a struggle that is well worth the time a gamer has to give towards a game. It shows what Bungie can do with the game that they’ve created and with the players that are actively fighting their way through the caves, mountains, craters, and alien structures of Destiny.
The full fireteam after the Vault of Glass
And that was all that Bungie was able to do with one year of Destiny. And that one year was never what it was intended to be and it was all developed after some insane revisions to not only the game of Destiny but the company of Bungie itself. (You can read more about that here: http://goo.gl/aEAgc6) When the time came for Destiny Year 2 to fall onto my Xbox One I had played enough Destiny to have all of my three characters (You’re allowed up to three different guardians at a time, effectively tripling your ability to gather items like weapons and upgrade materials) leveled up to their maximum level; no small feat on it’s own if you have a full-time job and a rock climbing schedule. And year 2 has brought with it The Taken King story arc, which amazingly enough, HAS a story arc!! Not to mention, more game play than the entirety of year 1 and packaged it all up with more Nathan Fillion than I knew I needed in my life (Watch Firefly or Castle while you play Destiny and it’s so much fun). We’re lead into the depths of the Taken King Oryx’s dreadnought in the rings of Saturn, a monolithic war ship that Oryx calls home. He has come in search of the guardians that killed his son Crota, using his army of Taken, soldiers that have been ripped between the dimensions that Oryx controls to give himself immortality. I’ve fought the Taken across Earth, the Moon, Venus, and Mars. I’ve crashed Eris Morn’s ship into the Dreadnought and destroyed the Hive Knights and Wizards in the Court of Oryx. I’ve jumped across hidden platforms that are lost between dimensions and memories and are held together by your ghost for only moments at a time, and landed in front of Oryx, feet solid against the floor, my Hunter's hands gripped tightly around the grip of the Hawkmoon hand cannon that she pointed at Oryx's three glowing white eyes. I’ve brought him down, only to have him rise again, 100 times bigger than before. I dived into the King’s Fall raid, finding teamwork more of a requirement more than in previous raids, jumping puzzles that infuriate my Hunter but are a joke for my Titan and Warlock. The fireteams of six that I’ve been in raid groups with have smashed into the Warpriest’s chamber and crushed him below the weight of his own monuments. We’ve dived down to Golgoroth’s Cellar and pulled his gaze (Which also seems to spark the King's Fall raid's more erotic themes, what with the oddly semen like characteristic’s of Gologoroth’s balls of darkness, or the dirty pool of santorum that you have to stand in to protect yourself from Golgoroth's deadly rage) while relying on my teammates to kill him slowly. I’ve traversed the walls through Oryx’s dreadnought as large pistons strive to push me into darkness (Seriously, they could’ve used any other inspiration for the pistons besides large throbbing HIve cocks and we would have all been so much happier). We’ve stepped into Oryx’s chambers and we’ve killed his daughters, the two Deathsingers. Oryx has made his best attempt at draining our light, of tearing us through dimensions, and we’ve destroyed the worm inside of him that ensured his immortality. We’ve knocked him down, and shoved his carcass into the gas giant Saturn below.
And then. . . we danced.
And then. . . I danced even more.
Seriously, how cool is that??
Destiny is a huge game, and a huge undertaking for both the developers and the people who play the game on a daily basis. Destiny is not the Top Gun of old, with minor struggles and a few levels of gameplay. Like Halo before it, it requires a constant team of developers bringing us the very best first-person shooter experience possible. Like World of Warcraft before it the story will grow and arc over the course of not just a few days but over the course of years. The team at Bungie has dedicated themselves to one cause and one story, believing that this is the right story to tell, and the right community to support. And that community has given so much of their time and money to enjoy the epic that is Destiny. Across multiple characters, across multiple DLCs, across patches and updates and mistakes and corrections. Bungie has served us, while we have served Bungie, an odd love hate relationship that I'm sure has strained the very fibers of both parties. For someone who doesn’t usually play well with others, I’ve had to step out of my comfort zones to play Destiny, what with all of the annoyances that have come along with the Xbox One all the way to the idea of even committing the time it takes to really enjoy this Massive Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter. I’ve enjoyed it immensely. Yeah, every now and then you are reminded that 6-year-old kids with very high-pitched voices play video games and that they will sometimes need to go eat dinner right in the middle of a raid, but the majority of the time I’ve played with other players from Australia, Scotland, South Africa, Brazil, and all throughout America. These player are always welcoming of other players; helpful when someone is playing for the first time, and always good enough to pick up on the totem sequence that you’ve been working on with four other guardians but that they just stepped into. It’s been a literal epic that has stumbled in places, completely fallen down in others, and then shown brilliantly many times. It’s an entirely different and yet very recognizable game. It’s nothing of what I expected, and a lot of the time it was nothing that I needed. But damned if I don’t want it now.
CeeDubH
-
Or in this case,
INTELLIGI
You can add me on the Xbox Live network
(No) Shout Outs
I couldn't really decide about a shout out for this post. I'd had a shout out planned, but I'm saving it for my next post. And recently I've been spending so much time online that it's hard to really point out a specific person that's recently stood out. Since this post was so ridiculously long, I'm not going to feel bad about leaving this spot blank.
