Category: Hunter

The Dreadnaught

Ben: What did you think of the Dreadnaught? At first I was a little annoyed that I couldn’t use my sparrow in this new zone, but since the action is more compact in these areas I ultimately didn’t really feel like I needed it. That said, the Dreadnaught was plenty big, and I think there are a lot of little areas in there that I still have left to explore. The space is full of disappearing platforms and hidden alcoves, and it challenged my platforming skills a little more than other areas, which I liked. I also know that there is one exotic weapon Bungie has broken into 50 pieces and scattered across the Dreadnaught, so I’m looking forward to watching the community collect those pieces and unlocking that special gun.

Matt: After you run around for a bit, the absence of sparrows makes sense. There are so many chasms, tight corridors, and battlefields that I think it might feel weird to be zipping around on a speeder bike. As someone who has spent hundreds of hours in various Patrol zones, it’s also really thrilling to have a new place to run around, and one where I feel like the enemies are a real challenge. Plus, the combat experience is more varied than I expected — you’re running into Hive and Taken, but there are also a bunch of Cabal on board the Dreadnaught, engaged in their own fight against Oryx’s forces.

The other thing about the Dreadnaught is the way it acts as the broader endgame zone. There are a lot of quests, both there and in other places around the Destiny universe, that don’t open up until you hit level 40. Bungie has this structure called “The Taken War” which opens up after the initial story missions conclude. Some of those missions are really challenging.

Of course, that begs the question about leveling, so let’s talk about that for a bit. What was your experience like with the new leveling system?

Gear and Leveling

Ben: I love the new leveling system. It seems fair and it makes a lot more sense. Newcomers were always confused about the whole light leveling mechanic, and breaking light and gear off is a more straightforward system. I think longtime Destiny fans will be happy with it, because Bungie isn’t taking away anything from players; you get to keep all your existing levels. I also think it’s a nice touch that you can now sacrifice some of your weapons to upgrade other guns you actually care about, which gives you something to do when you get that fifth copy of a random exotic you don’t need.

Matt: I think it’s a smart move that a light value is inherent to all your gear now, even starting at level 1. Like with leveling, it offers a consistent and clear path to improvement, and it also gives Bungie a clear way to tell people what activities they should tackle. Every mission, strike, and raid now has a recommended light total as a guidepost for when you’re ready for it. Do you like the idea that light comes from both weapons and armor?

Ben: I think that’s also a smart move; it gives more value to each new piece you get no matter where it fits on your character. It’s great to see that light value number attached to your character. It’s a direct representation of your power and a good barometer to gauge the tasks and missions you can tackle with your friends. I also love how the wider range of gear gives you more opportunity to express yourself as a player.

Matt: Another interesting change shows up with your stats of intelligence, discipline, and strength. To be honest, that nebulous percentage value connected to those three abilities has always been a little unhelpful to me. What does it mean when I have 75% discipline? The new system breaks these stats down into tiers, and when you cross the threshold to the next tier, you know the exact benefit in number of seconds by which your grenade cooldown has been reduced.

I’m curious – did you end up getting any new ghost shells during your playtime?

Ben: A few, and I wish I still had them when I got home! I’m tired of having the same ghost as everyone else. One of the ghosts that I found had a cool orange/blue color scheme. However, these new ghost shells are more than just an aesthetic change; your ghost now boosts your light level, just like other pieces of gear.

Matt: Yeah, I remember at one point I got one called a Frontier Metropolitan Shell, and it had some neat perks on it [editor’s note: an earlier version of the text incorrectly labeled the new shell as a Frontier Shell, which actually came with the original Collector’s Edition of Destiny]. Sometimes these shells might offer a choice to boost intellect, discipline, or strength, and you have to choose which boost has value for your current build. The ghost shells also sometimes have cool effects, like the ability to sense nearby spinmetal or other resources. There was even a perk that offered increased glimmer for killing Hive.

It also seems as if Bungie is looking for increased ways to let you look and move the way that you want. Since you can now declare faction allegiance and get a faction badge, there’s no longer a need to put on a class item you don’t want. I’m really looking forward to wearing the Hunter cloak I like, rather than the one I need for more Dead Orbit reputation. In another nod to expression, I noted that the character screen now has a slot for equippable emotes right below my emblem selection. The game even lets you cycle through whether you show off your primary, secondary, or heavy weapon when you’re walking through social spaces.

We’re talking a lot about gear, which leads us to the Tower. After all the changes that we saw there, who is your favorite tower vendor now?

Yesterday, as part of Game Informer’s month-long trickle of Destiny news ahead of the release of The Taken King, they released a video that focused on some of the changes coming to storytelling in the expansion. The theme of the video is “a hundred little things,” and as Bungie’s Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy explain, that encompasses a bunch of smaller changes to Destiny to make story better in the game.

Story has been perhaps my longest-running frustration with Destiny since day one. As an avid sci-fi enthusiast both in gaming and elsewhere, Destiny’s almost entirely empty plot has left me unsatisfied for the better part of a year.

If I’m being entirely honest, I wasn’t terribly moved by many of the changes mentioned in the video. Destiny has huge storytelling problems, not minor ones, and I think it needs more than small or obvious fixes to pull itself out of that pit. So while showing the name of who is talking during a given voiceover is useful, that’s more common sense than really anything else. The same with say, using the enormous stable of actors they have at their disposal like Nathan Fillion and Gina Torres in actual cutscenes. I’m sorry, but I just can’t consider the idea of two characters actually talking to each other as some sort of storytelling revolution, yet sadly in Destiny, that’s what it feels like.

But there is at least one minor change I thought was kind of neat, the ability of your Ghost to scan objects in the environment and feed you bits of Nolan North-voiced lore that way. It’s a cool feature that reminds me of the current best storytelling mechanism in the Destiny universe, Grimoire cards.

Grimoire cards are bits of lore that players unlock by playing the game or performing various feats like killing a certain boss or finding dead Ghosts littered around the map. The long-running theory has been that they were written in relative haste as Bungie pulled out pieces of the vanilla game’s story in the year or two ahead of launch, a theory I am inclined to believe given the fractured state of the story currently in the game.

With that said, whoever was brought into the game to write them did a hell of a job. Far and away, they’re more interesting than any story element in the game itself. And yet, the biggest problem with the Grimoire cards is their inaccessibility to players. First, you have to unlock them, which can be a tedious process in and of itself, and it leaves many stories they tell unfinished if you don’t find them all. Secondly, they can’t be accessed in the game at all. You have to read them on Bungie’s website, their app, or a third party collection site. As such, I would amazed if more than 20% of players have read more than 10 Grimoire Cards since launch. I am also willing to bet that very, very few have actually read them all.

But I have.

To do so, I did not go on some giant pain-in-the-ass hunt to unlock them all. Rather, I just read them all in order on Destiny-Grimoire.info. Maybe there are better sites, but I liked this one because it just listed them all on one page and I could just through them scroll endlessly. Ninety minutes later, and it was like I’d read a short collection of short stories. Rather good short stories, in some cases.

The Grimoire paints a picture of Destiny as a vibrant, interesting, dark, mysterious universe, something rarely conveyed in the game itself, if ever. I’ll cite a few examples so you can get some idea of what I’m talking about. Here’s a short snipped about the possible origins of the Exo, one of the game’s races, an idea never even remotely discussed in the game itself.

“Why does a war machine have emotions? Why should a war machine have awareness? These are not useful traits on the battlefield. Don’t flatter yourself. They are not useful. So why should the Exo mind mimic the human architecture so closely.

You know what I smell on you? I smell the stink of anthropocentrism. I think you think that there’s only one way to think. That’s why the Exo mind is so human, you presume. Because all higher thought converges.

My friend, you should meet the Vex. There is nothing human in them.

Now. This is what I believe happened, back in the time before any Exo can remember. It explains everything.

I think someone wanted to live forever. “

Here’s Cayde-6, the Hunter Vanguard voiced by Nathan Fillion (with a larger role in The Taken King, it seems), describing the end of a battle where he accidentally found himself fighting Hive alongside a Fallen Vandal, who is eventually wounded.

“When I came down, empty on all guns, she was slumped against a bulkhead staring at me with all her tiny black eyes. Ether leaking out of her like smoke. The Knight hadn’t died easily. Downslope the last Wizard moved like fire behind another line of Thrall.

I looked at her and wondered how many innocent human lives she’d ended on those broken blades.

She did the strangest thing then. Took the last shock pistol from her bandolier and threw it between us, as if to offer it. When I went to pick it up she tried to knife me, but she was slow, and when I broke her arms and opened her throat she didn’t seem surprised.

To this day I wonder if she hated me, or wanted to make me kill her, or just felt she should spare me the choice.”

Here’s a rousing speech by Iron Banner master Lord Saladin to new Guardian recruits:

“Every world begins as a big pebble lost among trillions of pebbles. Every worthy sun was once cold hydrogen spread thin across the vacuum. Even the universe, this cosmic garden that surrounds us and awes us…this monument to Creation was once the size of an apple seed. And everything that’s splendid and great stands at the end of incalculable chance and mayhem.

Yes, you have talents. Enormous, wondrous powers. But you should put the smirk away. Do you know what a Guardian is? Not yet. Your name is another pebble. You are a cold apple seed.

But you will grow.”

And here’s part of a mysterious story about the darkness-forged weapon Thorn, which implies the Traveler and his “light” may not be all that benevolent, and its possible Guardians aren’t the heroes they think they are:

“At the end of the path grew a flower in the shape of a Ghost. I reached out to pluck it and it cut me with a thorn. I bled and the blood was Light. 

The Ghost said to me: You are a dead thing made by a dead power in the shape of the dead. All you will ever do is kill. You do not belong here. This is a place of life.

The Traveler is life, I said. You are a creature of Darkness. You seek to deceive me.

But I looked behind me, down the long slope where the blossoms tumbled in the warm wind and the great trees wept sap like blood or wine, and I felt doubt.

When my Ghost raised me from the sea there was a thorn-cut in my left hand and it has not healed since.”

There are many more of these. Not all are great, but many are good, and a few are really quite beautiful. Reading the entire Grimoire and seeing all these bits and pieces of stories and theories got me thinking about what the universe of Destiny could really use to expand.

Yes, the game-based answers are obvious. A way to read these damn cards in the game itself. More cutscenes, better use of the voice actors with better scripts they can work with. That was true at launch, and it’s true now. But I’m talking about something else.

What’s clear to me from reading a zillion Grimoire entries and finding a shockingly fascinating universe, or at least the hints of one, is that Destiny could really benefit from expanded universe fiction. As in, Bungie works with science fiction authors to craft Destiny stories outside of the game itself in order to better flesh out the world, tell some of these stories that are hinted at in the Grimoire, and invent new ones to boot.

My personal preference would be a fully-fledged novel or two penned by someone talented in the genre. But it could also work with a collection of short stories (but longer than Grimoire entries, please) or even a series of graphic novels.

While it’s true that Destiny has to keep many things under wraps due to the plot twists they want to unfold in the game itself, from reading the Grimoire there’s more than enough here to build a story around at least the past of the Destiny universe, and perhaps some current events going on in “real time” that parallel the progress of the game.