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Destiny's Destiny
47 Plays2 years ago
Join Dave, Jake, and special guest Justin as they talk about yard work, catch up on recent events, and then jump into a deep dive (no pun intended) on Destiny. What's wrong with the game, what can Bungie improve to finish strong, what's up with the loot treadmill, how do you baseline expectations for raiding, and maybe even some answers to those questions in this week's episode!
Intro:
- Destiny 2 - The Last City
Outro:
- Destiny 2 - Forsaken - Shell of What Was
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcasting Experiences
00:00:22
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Serpestone. My name is Jake, and I am joined by my co-hosts as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave? So fucking good. Oh.
00:00:34
Speaker
Got some work stuff done. Did a gym. Had a nice dinner. Uh, took the dog out. They did their stuff. Podcasting with multiple friends. Okay. I was wondering, wondering what
Guest Episode Ideas and Live Audience Discussion
00:00:48
Speaker
it was going to come in. I think this is the first time we've had a guest episode where you didn't immediately hand off to the guests. Where I flame you for not acknowledging them. I'm just going to sit here quietly. That's fair. That's fair.
00:01:02
Speaker
All right, that's Justin's participation for the rest of the section. Do not expect to listen to him. I'm the audience surrogate. It's fine.
Personal Anecdotes and Suburban Lawn Aesthetics
00:01:10
Speaker
It's good to have. Sometimes when we're recording, we'll say or cover something and then be like, in retrospect, we have no idea how that's going to come across as a podcast. So we got to get that live studio audience at some point, I think. Yeah, exactly. I don't want people to have the option to actually have
00:01:32
Speaker
Say like what organic responses it'd be really good if they just have like three buttons one of them's just like boo applause I don't know what the third button is you need the actual the light-up sign behind you that says applause now applause. Yeah Please clap, please clap. Yeah Golf clap, that's the other one. There's applause and then there's golf clap. Yeah How are you guys doing today?
00:02:01
Speaker
Doing okay. It was nicer earlier in the week, but I'm hoping that, you know, spring's getting here and, you know, it's just nice. Yeah. Had pretty good weather. Mowed the lawn yesterday for the first time this season, and I'm realizing that it's almost entirely weeds. Like, there's no actual grass there, and I'm probably gonna have to get a professional. If I, you know,
00:02:30
Speaker
Homeowner chat, our HOA covers our lawn care. And Rachel, if they ever move, I'm just going to put clover or something. Oh, yeah. The issue is I share a lawn with the adjacent neighbor. And I have a really good working relationship with my neighbors right now where I wave. They wave back. That's it. That's the extent of it. That's really good.
00:02:57
Speaker
I don't want to breach that level of trust. Yes, exactly. Well, I don't want to I don't want to screw up his lawn because he's also responsible. He like does lawn care around the neighborhood for a lot of the people. And I know that I had one discussion with him where I was asking, I was just like, oh, is there anything like I should do on my side? You know, anything you recommend or whatever? He's like, it's just grass. Oh, all right. I'm not going to worry about it too much. Don't overthink it. It'll do its own thing.
00:03:27
Speaker
Yeah, he's just like, it's not a big deal.
Gaming Motivations and Lawn Care Comparisons
00:03:29
Speaker
But his lawn is a lot nicer than mine. And I don't care about that, you know, traditional, you know, suburban dick measuring contest of how good someone's landscaping is. But I don't want my lawn to literally just make his lawn worse. That's fair to say. There's the decimal to be in the comparison and then be a visual assault to him. Like someone else has to look at this
00:03:56
Speaker
Mm. Every day, too. Yeah, I mean, I'm not even worried about that. If he looks at my side of the property and is like, that's trash, I don't really care. But I don't want like weeds to literally propagate into his lawn.
Destiny 2: Loot Systems and Player Investment
00:04:10
Speaker
You don't make more work for him. Yes, exactly. Yeah. See, I'm the opposite. When I take the dog out back to pee, I'm constantly kicking dandy. I'm like, grow, expand your domain. Yeah.
00:04:26
Speaker
But otherwise, yeah, weather's been good. So it's been nice. We'll have the the two weeks before it gets unbearably hot, basically. Yeah. The ozone just finishes burning off. Just we start this we start the non voluntary terraforming process to Arrakis.
00:04:52
Speaker
You know, it's going to be hot when I switch from going outside and pants to shorts and then from shorts to booty shorts. Some people look forward to that, though. It's a Groundhog Day like moment for your neighbors.
00:05:05
Speaker
My coworkers notice, uh, when I finally feel comfortable wearing shorts again, but it's, it's a hard inflection. So basically I will only wear pants and then I will only wear shorts. There's, there's no like, Oh, this way is too cold. Like, so I'll, I'll, if we have the cold days, if I switched too early, you have to go into work at like, it'll be 40 degrees out or something. You're like, aren't you cold? I'm like, just deal with it. Right. Yeah. My, my pants are in the wash. They will be for the next six months.
00:05:37
Speaker
constantly being washed or just caked onto the side of the washing machine it's where I store them mm-hmm yeah gotta gotta get through the process
00:05:52
Speaker
It's been nice. I've also had the week off, so I've been catching up on a couple things. Destiny? Destiny was big, yeah. I don't want to derail talking about all the Destiny stuff, but there is the Brave event going on right now, which is Onslaught. It's just Horde mode, basically. They brought back a bunch of old guns with a bunch of new rolls, perk rolls and stuff like that.
00:06:18
Speaker
for you guys that played more in the early days of Destiny. Guns and stuff from the Leviathan. Those are available like Midnight Coup, the hand cannon. Or what was the name of it? Blast Furnace, the pulse rifle from Black Armory, which was good.
00:06:41
Speaker
It's fun. Also just kind of figuring out what I want to figure out before the final shape drops. Make sure that I'm in a pretty good spot for that because I don't guess needs a question mark beyond the final shape for me, but I want to finish strong, so. Okay.
00:07:00
Speaker
Yeah, there I haven't had I get the the emails like, hey, you know, marketing. Yeah, they could be more effective. I think it's a little too on the nose. It's a new guy. He's like, how do we be very direct? But the the loot treadmill. Idea turned me off. So I mean, I'm sure they've made quality of groups because it's a live service game. So, of course, but
00:07:30
Speaker
In the same way that you guys are talking about having the loot filter in Last Epoch last week, I remember spending so much of my time just on inventory management, which is what my fear was when I went to play Destiny again last time. And it took a little bit to fit there, but a half hour of every other play session was basically
00:07:57
Speaker
What do I nuke using an external tool to figure out what to nuke instead of just killing stuff? It's either that or just mentally the loot doesn't matter. But then let's let's buy drive. Yeah.
00:08:11
Speaker
I mean, that's an interesting point, because they've tried a bunch of different strategies Bungie has across Destiny's lifespan for how to deal with loot. There was the traditional approach, which was seek the god role. It's like, oh, this gun only drops in the raid, and you're not guaranteed to get it. You're going to be raiding a lot, and maybe it doesn't drop with the perks that you want. I kind of dislike that. I'm not a fan of that.
00:08:38
Speaker
Well, the original Destiny 2, there were no random rules.
00:08:44
Speaker
as well. So once you did get that drop, it was it was the God. So you were chasing specifically the gun. So they had like the variants of it would have been like there would have been a world one that didn't have the right perks. They had the right like chassis. And then, you know, the the dungeon or whatever the next year up would have been fire team stuff would potentially drop one that had like one perk that was good. And then the raid one would have two perks that were good. But then once you got that one to drop,
00:09:14
Speaker
you were good for that specific gun. Yeah, that's fair. It's been a long time because Destiny came out a decade ago. So I don't remember all of it, but
00:09:25
Speaker
the short of it. I really liked crafting weapons. I don't know. You guys definitely got some time after the Witch Queen. What was your guys's impression on on crafting? I I was never huge on Destiny 2 was my practice. Like I played it a lot, but I pretty much did osteostriga. I was going to say osteostriga is a craftable weapon. I know that it's to account. But like when you go to Mars to do the craftable weapon.
00:09:54
Speaker
It's just like, hey, do you want to just make it better? And I was like, oh, yes. But once I found that gun, I didn't want to find and craft other guns for different use cases and have like, oh, I got to use this. OK. And then you had to get like red borders and you had to get enough red borders and do that. And for me, I'm just there to shoot stuff and have fun. And once we get past that, I lose interest. So I did not explore too much of that. But again, that's how I'm wired.
00:10:22
Speaker
I was definitely using the crafting system as, you know, the collectible stuff. Like I wanted to make, I wanted to have the check marks all in my list of like, I can access this stuff if I have availability of it. And there's very strong in the FOMO of like, Oh, this, this stuff was going away. So I spent a lot of time doing stuff that I wasn't necessarily enjoying doing. Grinding seasonal activities and stuff. Yeah.
00:10:51
Speaker
And they added systems to make guarantees, but how guaranteed they were.
00:10:58
Speaker
regularly ebbed and float. So like, you know, oh, I can finish this in three weeks and I'm guaranteed to finish it in three weeks or well, these two guns are guaranteed over the course of the entire season. But then this one only drops from this thing that you can only do once a week when that day of the week ends in a full moon. And you have to have a 20 percent chance for this guy to spawn at that
00:11:28
Speaker
Yeah, this is one of the reasons why I don't miss Destiny 2. It's like the gun stuff. Fun. Hey, we're going to go do some other stuff. Oh, what's OK? And just. So I'm going to turn this around, though, because if we're going to be critical, then we've also got to be. Well, we don't have to be, but we could be contributors to a better idea. So if you didn't like the pure RNG drops, Dave, and I know that you've gotten an above average
00:11:57
Speaker
number of drops from the end of raids for like, specifically, okay, this is the one from Last Wish, this is the one from whatever raid. For the amount of times that you actually raid, it doesn't actually make sense. But is there a system for Destiny 2 that could get you into gun crafting or drops or something like that that you think would be interesting? Or is it just there isn't an answer for that for you?
Seasonal Systems and Player Engagement in Games
00:12:25
Speaker
I think if they flattened it a little bit. So for me, they have the scout rifles, which is your mid-range. You keep left clicking. You don't have to hold it anymore. They made everything full auto. So you can just hold left click, regardless of the weapon type. It used to take a mod slot, but it doesn't anymore.
00:12:47
Speaker
But like they have so many different ones of these between all these different seasons. And to my brain, there is no fucking difference between any of them. Like there's such like minor stat things here or there. It's like, oh, it's this. No, it's the same one. It's the same exact gun. So for me, I'm not looking for.
00:13:07
Speaker
Having like the best one was like, Oh, what's the highest number? Cool. We'll do that. We need to do this type of gun or this type of weapon challenge. We'll have that equipped. But then outside of that, like it's not, there's not a drive for me to make that type of gun fun. But if I could craft a scout rifle into, Hey, you can specifically have your scout rifles do this.
00:13:31
Speaker
Or if it's just an craftable scout rifle and they didn't have so many variations. It almost sounds like you want a skill tree to focus on an archetype rather than the individual gun define everything.
00:13:48
Speaker
In that sense, I'd say yes, but part of it is just because a lot of these different guns seem to be almost identical. So I don't want to grind and craft this one and grind and craft this one and grind and craft that one. The changes are definitely nuanced. I mean, obviously, again, I don't know what's changed, but I remember having this particular cadence on a gun felt better to me, but you had to spend
00:14:15
Speaker
hours with a gun to really know that that was the case like the and and the situations where that matters like the oh having having seven shots with this hand cannon means that i get
00:14:32
Speaker
10% fewer reloads during this window so that the damage range ends up being better for raiding situations or getting like three pops in Crucible or something based on how I played. Yeah, like your time to kill in Crucible or something.
00:14:56
Speaker
I don't do a lot of PVP, but that's definitely true for PVE. I can, I can commiserate with Dave a little bit on this because there are a lot of perks that don't matter all that much. And then if you care about perks, if you start to care about it, that's pretty much a requirement to get into trying to pick like a specific gun, right? Cause there's, there are a lot of people who play destiny and it's like, I have a shotgun, right? Like I will use a shotgun here.
00:15:23
Speaker
But the reality is there's all of these different frames of shotgun. There's like rapid fire, aggressive slug, shotguns, all this stuff. And technically, yes, they can be better in other situations. But if you're willing to just let your number go a little bit down and still clear the content, like, um, you don't have to care about it, right? You don't have to care about one, two punches a perk. You don't have to care about all this other stuff. You can just shoot gun at guy and tell the guy is dead. Everyone gets loot and they're happy. Right. So.
00:15:52
Speaker
At its core, Destiny doesn't ask you to do more than that. So unless you're invested in like specifically, oh man, I love demolitionists because I can have more grenade uptime or whatever the crap. Where they start synergizing, I think is the interesting thing. Yeah, the build crafting that can go into it. But the guns aren't a huge part of the build crafting a lot of the time. They can be related, but not like essential.
00:16:19
Speaker
It might be like a damage type for most certain weapon, but yeah, a lot of it is just for how your characters laid out. And the, the destiny or
00:16:32
Speaker
Bungie being Bungie, part of it is, oh, this perfect weapon for this build was available, but is no longer available. So I have to wait for this, or, you know, make a suboptimal choice here and but you know that that's, that is thing that still exists, you're just not allowed to access it because
00:16:57
Speaker
vaulting, I'm willing to make this the destiny two episode. I'll say it right now. Um, cause like just rehabbing some of these conversations. Like I want to just again, go in on some of the stuff that I don't like about. Sure. I'll play D you guys can, you guys can both be on offense. Well, I think it's, it's, you know, switch sides if he wants, there's a larger, you know, how do you, how do you live service? So in,
00:17:25
Speaker
in a similar vein from last week's discussion where Diablo 4 suffers a lot because of his live service stuff. They are, we'll have to see how it turns out, but they are doing loot 2.0 for Diablo 4 coming up.
00:17:45
Speaker
which I'm going to play probably for a week and then not touch again, because that's just how that game has worked. That's how Diablo 3 worked too, but. Right. There's nothing wrong with that. Yeah. So I was never a huge fan of that. I prefer the Path of Exile thing where it's, hey, we added this new thing of content for like this ladder season. You could access it by not playing ladder and you can still access all of the previous stuff as well.
00:18:13
Speaker
Like, it just built onto itself. Like, I assume WoW does as an MMO. Right, you're adding expansions to the game. Yeah, it's not locking out content for like, oh, we can only have three things at the same time. Except Cataclysm. We got to call out Cataclysm is explicitly locking a bunch of stuff out.
00:18:29
Speaker
Well, then they they did that ebbs and flows like some of the expansion stuff was only during that expansion period. You can't go along like they would remove legendary quest lines and stuff like that because it's not in game anymore. And they but they ended up not being relevant anymore either because of the the vertical gear progression, literally just making it so that this
Game Reward Systems and Player Motivation
00:18:55
Speaker
thing is
00:18:56
Speaker
all but worthless. It's just a token of that time rather than, but again, it's been going on six years, I think, since I played WoW. So who knows where they have changed with any of that stuff.
00:19:11
Speaker
But not to interrupt Dave too much here. You were saying you like that they're tacking on more campaign content. Is that fair to say? Yeah, it's pretty much campaign stuff. If you like that stuff being carried through and still accessible, I do have a game for you. Is it Final Fantasy XIV? That also works. If you like campaign, that never ends. Final Fantasy XIV.
00:19:38
Speaker
the Honkai Star Rail, the JRPG turn-based gacha game, the
00:19:49
Speaker
all of the events that they run, you still have access to the only thing you lose is there's a limited reward path, but you can still do the entire event. So there's when when we first started playing it had been out for like there was five major patches. So there was five major events that
00:20:09
Speaker
you know, their story related, but they were just side content to do. That was just still available. And you still got rewarded for it, just not as good of a reward. Yeah, it's kind of you can implement it like the the MMO approach, right? Like MMOs oftentimes push the power cap or the level cap or the item score cap or whatever you want to call it, like with each new release. But by running the older content, you're going to be getting gear or items or whatever that was relevant for that release.
00:20:39
Speaker
doesn't always convert one to one if your game is giving you rewards in the form of almost a premium currency or something like that, but for a lot of RPGs that can work that way. The roulette issue with 14, where like, oh, you can still do all this content. It'll show up randomly in your roulette. And it tries to encourage
00:21:04
Speaker
max level players to still interface with that stuff. But it also is one of the ones that you can drop very early in your end game progression and not miss out on that much like balancing balancing that encouragement becomes a game design thing.
00:21:22
Speaker
Maybe you think you'd like give some type of just flat, here's your live service currency. Hey, you went back and did something from like the season two content. Okay. Well, we'll still give you 10 gamer bucks for you to use to get something in game. Right. And just have it be on par with something for like the current season.
00:21:47
Speaker
Yeah. Basically like you're not saying, Hey, we really want you to do just the new content versus the old content. Yeah. Cause if you're more incentivized to do the new content, why would you go ever go back and do the old content outside of just for the sake of it? Yeah. I mean, so I want to mention a couple of things that are changing and for destiny too. I know we, we branched out to a bunch of different games, specifically for destiny too.
00:22:13
Speaker
Um, so right now you can log in and just go to where the, uh, there's an onslaught social area where like shacks is and stuff. Cause you can focus specific weapons, but they're not craftable. So it's like, Oh, you want a midnight coup, my hand cannon. You can focus that. So it's more likely to drop as you run the activity, which I think is cool, but there's a chest there and it just has max power items. You can just grab for each of your character classes. So if you were to want to catch up.
00:22:43
Speaker
prior to the final shape. You just log in and grab the gear and you're at level cap for level cap as it exists in the game right now. Which is kind of nice because level cap doesn't matter anymore for them. They do that thing where I know the first season they raised it, the second season they didn't, that they continue to raise it after that in the subsequent ones. They've left it at 1810. Okay. That's the cap right now. You do get some.
00:23:11
Speaker
power from your artifact so if you're doing the latest season it's going to bump you up to like another 18 I think above that but that's all only applicable if you want to do the hardest content in the game where the enemies are over leveling you for anything else it doesn't matter those still had a hard cap so like they were
00:23:34
Speaker
It was the way that it worked when I played it was you had to do a certain amount of artifact grinding on top of having your gear to high enough so that you then had it available to go into. But then the light difference was basically a fixed light difference. Yeah, I don't I don't know if they're still necessarily doing that for any of the current content. I think if you're at level cap, you're basically good even without the artifact.
00:24:00
Speaker
There was also we were prepping for the raid I know at one point and the raid had special requirements where it's like Oh, you'll always be minus or whatever. Yeah, that's what I remember being like minus 20 or 30 early in the thing It was the whatever the top the top dungeons were to Not nightmare terminology Yeah
00:24:23
Speaker
Were, were locked behind, like they would both, they delayed when they were available during a season, like they weren't in the rotation until a certain point. And you had to have a minimum light level to get into them, even though that minimum light level was above what you would have an effective light level. Maybe you're thinking of grandmaster. That's it. Yeah. Grandmaster nightfalls. Yeah. Those are, those are still really tough.
00:24:52
Speaker
But the other change they're coming out with on final shape on top of the class and all this stuff, anything you guys want to know about final shape, I can try to fill in details. But the big change is they're doing fire team based light level. So whoever has the highest light level in a fire team.
00:25:09
Speaker
everyone's power is derived from that. That's nice. That normalizes the damage taken and everything, especially with it going with highest rather than average. So it's not bringing somebody who's just joining in down or brings the rest of your stuff down, where it's like, oh, I've been playing since day one and there's no chance of you having this light level for four weeks because of pinnacle drops and stuff like that.
00:25:33
Speaker
Yeah. So it's definitely nicer for people who just want to hop on or don't want to have time to do that grind, which I know was a constant issue with our group. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's fair. I mean, we had, we were in the situation where we are not a super hardcore rating clan or guild or whatever it's called, um, for, for destiny. So we, we, we had people who really wanted to run content, people who,
00:26:03
Speaker
wanted to run content, people who were willing to run content if it was like a social thing with friends, and then people who were like, kind of ready to not.
Raid Dynamics and Community Expectations
00:26:14
Speaker
And unfortunately, I think for our clan, it's kind of gotten to the point where it's a little bit, it's hard to get like the six together for a raid. So some of the last raiding experiences, like we've opened it up and pulled people in from outside.
00:26:29
Speaker
pretty good experiences overall, but a lot of it and the issues I've had with other MMOs is just the time commitment to accomplish that stuff. It doesn't feel like it doesn't necessarily always feel like it's respecting your time. Okay. I have it.
00:26:44
Speaker
Again, part of it is the way that the game's designed to have FOMO. If, oh, if I don't get all of my pinnacles for this week and the pinnacles are tied to doing this specific set of activities and each of those activities, each pinnacle takes an hour of content, but I need to get eight pinnacles on top of the things, the other goals that I set myself that I want to do balancing that and basically just encourages burnout or
00:27:12
Speaker
I'm behind in progression. So not having the light level progression is great, but you then still need to have an item strong. If I'm going for a certain item, I need to then have a fodder item of the correct power level to feed into that so that
00:27:30
Speaker
The item feels good, too. And I think you touched. I was going to say, I think you touched on basically one of the core issues with Destiny, which is like there are activities that you may want to do and a bunch of stuff that you've had to do across the game's lifespan. And unfortunately, they especially out of season, if you're like not doing the latest content and stuff,
00:27:58
Speaker
A lot of stuff that you have to do, say you're chasing pinnacles to raise your light level and things like that, you're like, all right, I'm doing Gambit, I'm doing Vanguard Strikes, I'm doing Crucible. Maybe you would want to do one of those things with friends, but if you want to play efficiently, if you want to catch up to your friends, whatever, you're doing all of them.
00:28:16
Speaker
I think that's the same issue I have like the Roulette's in 14. To be able to get my cap reasonably I need to run seven of these and I can just dedicate you know three hours to doing it but then I'm burned out from playing it this week and then just but then I don't have the
00:28:38
Speaker
strength to go back and do the thing that I actually wanted to do when I logged in or something. Yeah, it's always a huge time. It's a lot easier when you're doing it with friends, but what you're saying with the rotation of content
00:28:54
Speaker
I feel like it's just an extension of how they'll have like a mini quest for stuff with, oh, you need to kill enemies with this type of weapon or something else. And again, I'm somebody who like if I find one thing that I like, I want to stick with it and do that. And Dark Souls, I found like a giant weapon. I'm going to roll with that weapon until like it literally says like, hey, this ain't working. Right. And Dark Souls lets you keep your starter weapon to the entire game. So that it does.
00:29:23
Speaker
But like there were a lot of times like, hey, you have to kill enemies with a shotgun. I'm like, I've never enjoyed the shotguns. I don't want to do this, but I'd have to do it. Or you'd have to get grenade. Just all this other stuff that.
00:29:37
Speaker
If you have a certain playstyle that you really like doing, you're really forced to go and do this other stuff. You're forced to do Crucible, even though you hate PvP beyond a shadow of a doubt. I'll carry you through to ranked. See, even if I was carried, I don't want to be in there and doing it. So I feel like they need more stuff where it's, hey, here's an alternate.
00:30:07
Speaker
the the the problem that they run into is they also don't want the systems to get stagnant so like you'll have other games will have meta shakeups like oh this patch came out and now the meta has changed that forces people to change they were trying to have that meta shakeup come more
00:30:29
Speaker
organically or like into this in particular window. Hey, today, everyone's going to be using this mutator, but they encouraged it by rewards that felt like obligations rather than these are just forcing you to make a suboptimal choice in certain situations. Like it used to be a lot worse, but that's definitely true, especially the past of destiny when you're looking at weapons like
00:30:57
Speaker
like chase rewards where you're like, Oh, I'm going to get the recluse or the mountain top or some other sort of weapon that you only get by getting like completing 500 PvP matches or something absurd like that. Or, you know, making sure that you get
00:31:11
Speaker
200 multi kills with a grenade launcher which means and that is special ammo so you can only really carry enough ammo per life so you're encouraged to die to get an ammo refresh so you're counterproductive to your team winning but that way you make progress on your personal goal and that has that was a traditional problem Destiny had. We were talking about
00:31:39
Speaker
you know, having that progression for the season earlier, and, you know, you have the specific seasonal goals or whatever, or you can generic-size something. So, the Genshin Impact is by the same people that did Honkai's Slayer Rail. They have... In Honkai, there's a battle pass, but the progression for it is so generic that you're basically just... If you play for 10 minutes, you basically get that day's...
00:32:09
Speaker
progression done. Or actually, there's not even a daily, it's only a weekly based system now. In Genshin, there are specific things that you have to do to complete that day, which are pretty lightweight. And they have one of those is actually more generic than it implies initially. But you have to spend like a half hour and kind of keep that in the back of your mind. Whereas with Honkai, it's just, oh, it's a reward for just playing the game generically. And I enjoy
00:32:39
Speaker
the the honk I won the one that's just like oh here's some rewards for basically just playing the game however you want to right first like okay I have to make sure that I do this specific thing and if I don't then I'm missing rewards and and that kind of feels bad
00:32:55
Speaker
Yeah. Again, it makes sense because you want to play a game the way you want to play a game. It's after work, you want to hop on and do something for a bit. What you don't want to have after work is more obligations. I don't want to have to look up something and be like, what would be the most efficient way for me to do these 17 things? Well, if I do this content with this gun and this content with this gun, it shouldn't be that complicated.
Freedom and Challenges in Game Engagement
00:33:21
Speaker
I just want to hop on and do something fun. And if they're going to have a reward system, have it be more generic. And the devil's advocate state from the developer side is, well, you don't have to go for that. You can just play what's fun. But because you attach a reward system to it, you're
00:33:50
Speaker
encouraging that focus. So I don't think that's a valid argument. Encouraged behavior is really important when it comes to games, right? Like there's always a path of least resistance in the path of most reward. And ideally in good game design, those things don't just, they're not the same path, right? It goes back to like, I think Game Maker's Toolkit or Boss Keys did the Mario difficulty example where they're like,
00:34:17
Speaker
You can play the game through with a higher difficulty, a lower difficulty, you're kind of like a normal difficulty, and it will accommodate the way that you're playing, and you can actually jump between these different difficulties as you're going through. But if you're just popping off, if you're really good at Mario, you'll get more rewards throughout the game in whatever way that actually makes sense. And it's true for Destiny, too, I think, as well as these games. You guys are describing, you don't need the best guns with the best perks or whatever to kill a boss.
00:34:47
Speaker
Um, in fact, you could probably all just have the right type of gun, a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher, a sword, if it's Crota and like, that's good enough. Um, but for the people who want to engage on a deeper level and they're like, I kind of really like this sword because it works a little bit better in these circumstances and then go into the situational stuff, you can.
00:35:12
Speaker
But that being said, I 100% agree that I don't want to be forced into a moment to moment activity where I'm doing something I don't enjoy.
00:35:21
Speaker
Um, so, and, and finding that having that self-awareness that like, why am I doing this? Am I doing this because I'm having fun or am I doing this because I feel like I'll be missing out on something? And yeah, getting, getting there, but then also, you know, in a raid situation, it's like Hong Kong engine, purely single player. If I don't, if I miss a day and don't have progression on it.
00:35:45
Speaker
the only thing it does is push back my own personal time. Right. But if you have a personality that's not having your the weeds encroach on your neighbor's lawn. Yeah. You get that that feeling and the folding ideas guy on YouTube had a an essay about how it's rude to be bad at World of Warcraft. Yeah, I like that video. That's good. It's
00:36:14
Speaker
It's about how you interact with other people when you, you know, when you play games. And if other people are coming in at a certain level of commitment, it is good to also come in at a certain level of commitment. That's important. That was an important question for us to actually ask when we were raiding too. Right. Cause I, I described all those different categories of people who were willing to play with us in raids. Um, and you know, really grateful when we had somebody who can jump in and could fill.
00:36:42
Speaker
But, but if you really, really wanted to have an absolutely optimal rating experience, every should, everyone should be coming in with the same level of expectations. Like we're going to be, we're going to be going for the six hours. That's our command. We're going in until we clear. Like this is challenge mode. We're going to struggle a lot. That's fine. You know, we, we, we will clear or we won't. Um, but we're going to all be in it together. Right. Um, the reality was.
00:37:11
Speaker
You need to be accommodating of whoever, I don't want to say the lowest common denominator is, but the person with the lowest expectations of the group.
00:37:19
Speaker
for the rate, right? If someone's like, I can only do this for two hours, everybody has to be okay with going for two hours, right? There's also, and kind of what Dave was talking about was like, I don't want to have to come in and necessarily do a whole bunch of prep, but if someone else does, then like their effort has a different effect too. So like, in the moment, and it kind of comes back to a lot of that,
00:37:44
Speaker
There was a term either of GameMaker Circuit or someone else mentioned, but it's the thought of and the preparation for. The execution ends up being...
00:37:55
Speaker
not necessarily the part that I enjoy. It's the contingencies and preparation. It's the it's the farming, the herbs and like, OK, I have all of these. You're doing the monster hunter stuff. Yeah. Yeah. The rituals ahead of time or something like I am prepared for this encounter and the encounter after it and after it. Mm hmm.
00:38:15
Speaker
First I have consumables ready for the fight. He knows in his rotation when to use the consumer Well, here's the thing with that. He actually uses like the the click wheel to use his items Whereas there's some people who grew up playing Dark Souls and just mash the d-pad until they find their
00:38:33
Speaker
Rachel was mad at me because I did not use the quick access wheel and I was able to I was using it got to the point where I ended up dual managing both the the old item system the left and right arrows and the click wheel so I had certain items at different positions so that I could
00:38:53
Speaker
so that I had them at better access points. It's also, I can do claw grip specifically because of world, which is using the index fingers, the hit face buttons while keeping on the control states.
00:39:08
Speaker
Yes. And gaming is weird. I was going to say it back to that commitment and investment thing. Hmm. I 100 percent agree. We see this a lot with Dota, where like, let's say you're just playing Dota with nine strangers. Right. You've already fucked up. Check me on season two anyway.
00:39:34
Speaker
Like you're with nine other people and everyone kind of has their own goal and objective in mind. Obviously, they want to win, but for each of them, they have a different definition of how they're going to get to that end point. Right. And a lot of them. Yeah, sure. I queued as this one role. I'm not going to do it, though.
00:39:53
Speaker
Um, it's a lot of communication issues basically. Right. And it's a lot easier to completely viable. I don't know why you keep getting on my case about this. He does nothing. No CC.
00:40:08
Speaker
But yeah, if you're on the same page with people, it's a lot. You just say like, hey, we're just on to play a game. Let's try to keep it casual. Like we want to try and win, but let's also keep it fun. Fun and light. Yeah. Or hey, we really need to put our nose to the grindstone. Let's all focus up and try and make an effort.
00:40:25
Speaker
Yeah, it really sucks when you have four people who are like let's really try and do the thing and then one person who's like I'm on a clear like yeah, they're just like I did mechanics I was just really good at adding clear because of osteostriga. Thank you very much
00:40:45
Speaker
Uh, the personal anecdote along the same lines, though, um, I'm kind of just a shitty person when it comes to, uh, having codified, uh, expectations because Rachel was, was my wife, Rachel was telling the story of trying to play board games with me. It's the first time we're playing this game. Neither of us have any, you know, invested information in this particular board game and was sitting there and I'd be like,
00:41:11
Speaker
OK, so this is my strategy for winning based on the current situation. OK, this is fine. And she'd be like, I don't think I'm stressed out. I don't know how to I don't know how to win at this point. I don't know what I'm doing. So I just want to do I just want to accomplish X. I want to grow. I want to make sure that my tree gets biggest or something, whatever board game it's playing. And then back to my head, subconscious is like, well,
00:41:36
Speaker
I can win that goal too on top. So it adds mutators to my own progression that just kind of destroys how she has fun with it. And we don't play board games together very often because, again,
00:41:52
Speaker
kind of shitty about this. It's not necessarily intentional, but like, but I could win more is going in the back of my. You're an optimizer.
Balancing Personal Play and Group Dynamics
00:42:00
Speaker
Yeah. That person. Right. Like when we have, we have our channel in, in destiny, when you're active, like we have optimized the fun out, right? It's more than just a saying it's a way of life. Um, and I, I, I cosplay, I visit sometimes, uh, optimization continent where I'm just like,
00:42:20
Speaker
It's interesting here. I could see how people make a living doing this, but I don't do it all the time.
00:42:28
Speaker
It's it's one of those things where it's fun if it gets the gears going similar to like build crafting or something else. It's hey, I have like I just poured out like the Yahtzee cup of items and gear and other bullshit. And they started looking at it as this laid out and you start rearranging it into, oh, well, what if this? Oh, what if this? And then you feel rewarded because you're basically figuring out a thing that works for you.
00:42:56
Speaker
And that part of it can be fun. It's just when it's like, hey, do you need to have the perfect thing? And that's where I kind of get stressed out and like, I'm never going to have the perfect build or anything in any game. Path of Exile being a perfect example where.
00:43:13
Speaker
There is one perfect build in Path of Exile. There are five billion builds in Path of Exile. I mean, the other thing that's worth noting is there's a difference, too, between those two examples. One of them is personal perfection, and the other one is group perfection. And if your personal strategy is to optimize your own play to the best it can be, but then you don't really have expectations for how other people are going to play,
00:43:40
Speaker
That's good. I don't think there's that many people who specifically fall into that category. I think if you really care a whole lot about your own optimization, sometimes it can bleed over into other people's optimization.
00:43:52
Speaker
And a grand strategy, a more positive bent is you're like, oh, okay, how can we coordinate to have a strategy that's as a whole excellent for this, right? An example in Destiny, a very brief one, is there's the weapon Jallerhorn, or Jallerhorn, or however you pronounce it, Gahallerhorn.
00:44:12
Speaker
Which is like a rocket launcher that makes it so everyone else's rocket launcher get these basically cluster homing rockets. They increase the damage. They deal a lot. Right. If one person has that, it's really nice if everyone else can bring a rocket launcher. There are some that are better and some that are worse to play along with it. So you can optimize on the high end, but it requires a little bit of optimization for just like I have a rocket launcher.
00:44:42
Speaker
it's also been infused to a high enough power level, right? And so if you don't have everybody in your group at that level, it's not really an option. As far as coordinated boss DPS, then it's kind of just like, oh, use whatever you can, right?
00:44:59
Speaker
I feel like I've made an analogy in a bit. Don't look two minutes ago, but a lot of gaming for me is just meant to be like relaxing and fun. There's something about it that I'm enjoying. I want to experience it similar to if I was going to go out for dinner.
00:45:18
Speaker
Oh, I just want to go out and have a nice time with people, want to eat some nice food. Right. I'm not going there to be like, oh, well, we should order this drink because then we'll have that much alcohol and then we'll just dilute it with, you know, a certain number of fries. Actually, for this price point, we can get something better here. Like, I don't want to worry about that stuff. I just want to have the experience and call it a day. Right. I can't empathize. I go for a very specific amount of alcohol any time I go out.
00:45:47
Speaker
That's true. Jake has been weirdly consistent. She has this Erlen Meyer flask and everything. And that kind of goes with the game design too, right? Because raids provide pinnacle. So I want to get that kill. I want to get that clear. So I'm willing to spend six hours in this content. But I also want to feel like that six hours is spent.
00:46:16
Speaker
approaching the goal. Right. You don't want to you don't want to spin your tires on a particular encounter that you think that the group should be able to clear. I see you nodding just for the people who are listening right now. Justin is not. Well, even do you remember back in the days of Heroes of the Storm? I mean, the current days. Yes, I'm still in there back back when I played it a little bit.
00:46:45
Speaker
There'll be people who will have certain characters who will have some objectives or quests. Yes. And then if they achieve that, they can get a bonus. I remember specifically playing with AJ and he's like, I have to get this many kills or denies or something as an Evo.
00:47:04
Speaker
And it felt weird because I just wanted to play the game and then my gameplay is being restricted by somebody else's goals and plans like, hey, I need to get this lasted. I need to do this thing to achieve this objective. This is the reason I didn't join the team fight, right?
00:47:20
Speaker
Yeah, stuff like that. But again, that comes down to different expectations and then being able to communicate those. We're rather maybe coming to an agreement ahead of time versus in a game saying, hey, we're doing this thing. I've decided unilaterally. Yeah, I think that actually that kind of relates in a way to what DICE said earlier about like the generic or specific
00:47:45
Speaker
dailies, right? Whether they're quests, they're bounties, whatever you want to call them in what other system, you're dealing dailies. Like, because Hearthstone, as an example, used to have like really specific quests.
00:47:58
Speaker
and then they tried to make them a little bit more generic, and then they made it so you can complete with them against friends, just friendly matches, right? If your friend was just like, hey, I'll just sit here, you can play 50 pirates or whatever, right? Like, you can just complete it that way. And the reason was because they didn't want to have gameplay warping quests as much, and this is much more important for team-based games, right? Overwatch has a battle pass. It has challenges.
00:48:26
Speaker
if your challenge is anything other than you made progress towards winning, that's kind of a dangerous challenge, right? Same for Dota. Destiny's had that forever. Like, oh, in Gambit, I have to collect X number of motes at single point. But that means that I'm more susceptible, like, if they're invading, but I still need to get three more motes before I agree.
00:48:53
Speaker
Yeah, because to what DICE was saying, like, if you're spending six hours playing a thing, it sucks to be like, well, actually, I have to take I have to do it on pause because we want to, you know, do some other objective here. Right. And I can't win. My objective is to win this because that's all I need for my pinnacle. But your objective is to complete these quests that are counterproductive to mine. And that's where that frustration cycle comes in.
00:49:23
Speaker
Heavens forbid you ever have an objective, a quest, a daily, whatever in your game where the ideal situation is that you stall the match. That's the worst thing you can do. Valve made that mistake early in some of the Dota challenges around the compendium where it's just like, we are now winning. It's super advantageous if I just farm this person basically to fill all my quest progress.
00:49:51
Speaker
rather than just do the the fair play thing and win the game. Right. So the the league surrender and stuff like having a minimum threshold to surrender because you just need X number of matches played to instead of just the epic guy. I remember back in the day, there was always the guy like as soon as the surrender time, they'd always pop up. They're looking just for game completion, not victory or. Yeah.
00:50:18
Speaker
I think I will say in because I play Magic the Gathering Arena that comes up a lot too because you will have these daily quests and one might be like hey you need to attack with a certain number of creatures now it's not super annoying but like let's say I have like a big board state and I'm going to attack and I'm going to win and I'm also going to complete that daily quest
00:50:42
Speaker
The person on the other side knows already that they're going to lose. They are not incentivized to stay in the game and they will concede and leave. And it makes it harder for you to complete your objective. Now, I've been on both sides of this because that's how the community is. But like, if you know you're not going to get anything out of it, you're already going to lose, why would you want to stay? Right.
00:51:04
Speaker
I have an idea. There's no side effects. I wanted to say upfront. There's no downside to this idea whatsoever for magically gathering an arena. They add a random quest, make your opponent concede. There's no way that this ever backfires and generates a game state that's torturous to one player. It seems that the number of blue decks have skyrocketed.
00:51:30
Speaker
There and there is a there is an antithesis to it, right? There's how do you, as a game designer, get people to come out of their comfort zone a little bit or, you know, come out of whatever the the locally optimal mode is. So, like, that's true. In Genshin, I have this problem where like I have one team that is so built that it's almost futile to use any other party. It's both comfy. It does a lot of damage. There's no
00:52:00
Speaker
There's one small reason why for elemental resistances while I'm doing content, if they match the element, I don't do as much damage.
00:52:09
Speaker
But it's almost an oppressive strategy because it works in so many situations that I'm not forced to go and do something else. And that's what the Destiny things were trying to get you to try using a shotgun, try using a linear fusion rifle that you would no really never use. And like, OK, maybe you do find one. You picked it randomly from your inventory, or it dropped, and you're like, OK, oh, this architect's actually fun.
00:52:39
Speaker
how do you get that organically without having the forced meta shake up and then making people's builds feel nerfed and then leading completely? Right.
Game Design Challenges and Player Preferences
00:52:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's tough. I mean, obviously, it's nice to go with the carrot instead of the stick when it comes to game design. But the carrot, if you're only using the carrot, that just means you're buffing all of the unused archetypes all the time.
00:53:04
Speaker
which now means you have to buff the other weapon. And this is how some games legitimately do balance is they just buff everything that's underutilized repeatedly until they need to do some mass rescaling and be like, hey, the numbers are actually too high now. We're just going to make them all smaller. But I mean, yeah, sometimes sometimes you got to use the stick a little bit. And for players who aren't, you know, tracking patch notes or whatever, there's even the question of whether the carrot or the stick matters. Right. Like.
00:53:35
Speaker
Destiny, if you have a good weapon and it's still doing the job, why do you care, right? Grenade launchers, heavy grenade launchers, they just got buffed a bunch. They're probably pretty, they probably will break through to the meta and the new expansion, but everyone's been on rocket launchers for so long that they're just like, it still works. We're not doing anything that requires us not to use a rocket launcher. We're still going to use, you know, Apex Predator and Yellowhorn, but
00:54:04
Speaker
I don't know it's game design.
00:54:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's there's nothing to be like one. This is the only right answer that kind of globally applies to everything. I will say for me back when I played Overwatch, I liked having seasonal content. Hey, it's Spooky Month for Halloween. For October, we're going to have this game mode. If you play this game mode, you can lock these cosmetics. Cool. I want cosmetics. That's going to be a fun thing for me. I'm going to opt into that and play that mode. Right.
00:54:36
Speaker
This is like holiday events not like seasonal. Yeah more more specific to holiday, but something like that where it's Hey, here's a cool thing if you want to hop into it You can you get the bragging rights like oh, I'm walking around with this cosmetic. That's only available for
00:54:53
Speaker
this season or something. It's the Halloween costumes in Destiny or something like that. I was on the head. God, I hate the destiny version of it. But it's in that same vein of like, OK, that that event is a mutator that you are opting into. And it's nice when the reward is just do the thing rather than do these things that stall the content or something like that. Yeah.
00:55:21
Speaker
because I never necessarily minded doing those things, but they needed to have a long tail to make sure that this rotator always has enough people in it so that it fills quickly and stuff like that. Too many data points and too many options dilutes playtime, player base, stuff like that, and you end up with
00:55:48
Speaker
too much data rather than too much fun. If something is fun, people are going to do it. And if it's not fun, then people, you can force you to do it, but it's still not going to be fun. Right? Well, if I take an example, like Destiny, again, I was saying I'm not a fan of shotguns, right? But what if they made a
00:56:11
Speaker
maybe even like a temporary seasonal thing, holiday thing, where it's like, hey, for this game mode, everybody has a shotgun. And it's just basically like the old Halo 2 map is like, hey, smaller arena, everybody has shotguns. And that was literally a game mode. And it made shotguns really fucking fun because everyone's playing around that like,
00:56:33
Speaker
one hit kill within a certain range and just trying to manage that. But if you had something that made a certain weapon type fun, people would be like, oh, this is a cool weapon type that I haven't really given much thought or credit to. Maybe I'll try this more when I'm just doing other game content, right?
00:56:53
Speaker
I want to sell you on a shotgun, Dave. It's because of a specific perk. You can get it in the kinetic slot. The perk is Cascade Point, which allows you to overfill the magazine up to like twice capacity. I think when you get kills with another weapon, I believe that's correct. There might be another triggering effect.
00:57:11
Speaker
Get this on a full auto shotgun. Walk up to a boss, hold the left click button as you rapidly unload like 12 shots all at once on the guy. And it makes shotguns feel good. And I never use shotguns either. That is a very specific thing. Having to get kills with another weapon. I can't remember exactly what the trigger is, but it might be get kills with another weapon. Were you going to say something, Dice?
00:57:41
Speaker
No, I know there was like overflow mag and stuff like that as well. They they've done things like that. And I remember there there was some like edge case on if you had a certain reload or if you got the you crafted something with the perk, but it also then had an extra rocket you could overflow higher because of breakpoint at math. Yeah, yeah. Like backup mag or something like that would maybe put you up.
00:58:12
Speaker
Yeah, I like that. This is one nerdiest side, the perk reconstruction. Yeah, reconstruction is really cool. They added it to some, it was originally only in Deep Stone Crypt weapons, but they added it to some other weapons that are craftable now.
00:58:29
Speaker
And it's just like, if you're not using that weapon, it's reloading itself in the background and it will reload to two times normal magazine capacity. So it's just a rocket launcher that specifically has one barrel and it can fire two rockets. And you're just like, okay, we'll fire fire, switch to another weapon, wait a couple seconds, switch back, fire again. It's pretty good, pretty good. But
00:58:55
Speaker
We'll see.
New Prismatic Subclass in Destiny 2
00:58:56
Speaker
A bunch of stuff is happening in the final shape. Hopefully people pick it up. I'm not offended if no one does, or well, I'll be kind of surprised if no one does, but I'm not offended if people in our friend group choose not to. There's clearly a lot going on and it's dangerously close to Elden Ring, but what are you going to do? I'm going to wait patiently for Elden Ring. Probably fair.
00:59:23
Speaker
They're also doing a weird thing this time where the raid is coming out three days after the expansion drops for Final Shape. Instead of the usual 10. Usually can be 10 days. But they're not raising the light level substantially then does it?
00:59:42
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't think they've announced exactly what they're going to do with the light level yet. I don't think that's locked in stone, but in the past, it would have been, you know, plus 50 or something. Yeah, to be pretty considerable.
00:59:54
Speaker
Hopefully they don't, because it's going to suck if you have three days to try to rank up for the rate. Now admittedly, fireteam power would be an effect. So if you have one no lifer, that person can take off. Oh, it's going to be really hard to find somebody in that group. You tend to make the first race more interesting too, though, because
01:00:19
Speaker
that means that people don't have as much time to optimize like okay after the first week everyone has the same level basically like yeah there's there's there's small optimizations but hey this guy got lucky it can usurp it it's the it's the march madness versus the uh the baseball playoffs and that's a deep cut that i don't know how i'm supposed to be able to make yeah i can't relate those those sounded like sport things i think you said baseball
01:00:43
Speaker
the there's from a statistics standpoint there's this interesting thing where you get underdog situations more if there's a one chance to do something and baseball is the example where they play a series so it's best out of and right so usually you don't get eliminated from the bracket where the better team is more likely to win more consistently so they end up passing through so that's why you end up with the
01:01:10
Speaker
I can't remember the, the, the raid team, the fire team that was always like, they run the world first, like three tier releases at it out of whatever. Um, and like that it ended up being like the top 10 were the same people in roughly the same order, just because every, they were all basically going from the same information. Yeah. They were all very consistent within that.
01:01:35
Speaker
Alright, one other thing, I know we're basically at time, but since we were talking about Destiny and somehow it turned into the Destiny episode, are you guys familiar with what the last subclass is that they're adding to Destiny? Because it did get announced.
01:01:52
Speaker
but I know that you guys might not be tracking the news. Strand was like the frozen stasis was the other one. Those are the two darkness ones. Yeah. It has to be another darkness, right? That was the expectation at least. You would think so.
01:02:09
Speaker
The last one culminating the light and dark storyline for Destiny is called Prismatic. And it's one where you basically have a smattering of artifacts, fragments and aspects and abilities from all of the other ones. And you can just mix and match. So it's the it's the novice or the
01:02:38
Speaker
the free freelancer type of I'm not sure of the reference but the generic class where you basically able to pick just passives from different things and there's that it's
Upcoming Changes and Destiny 2 Expansion Details
01:02:50
Speaker
not a codified yeah it's kind of like a jack of all trades sort of thing but they have a special mechanic just for this subclass where if
01:02:59
Speaker
There's two bars at the bottom of the screen that are building towards the center, underneath your super bar. And one of them fills as you deal light damage, so that'd be arc, void, or solar. And the other one fills as you deal darkness damage, stasis, strand. And once they meet in the center, you enter this transcendent state, where you take a lot of this damage, your abilities recharge really fast, and you have access to basically
01:03:28
Speaker
a super, super essentially. And some cool stuff where it's like both of the abilities at the same time. So you throw like a light darkness grenade or something like that. I mean, the obvious question here is, is that then not the optimal subclass for literally everybody? You don't get access to everything, right? So it doesn't give you everything from solar and everything from void.
01:03:50
Speaker
it'll be a smattering of options. So I notably saw that I couldn't use sun bracers as a warlock because I didn't have access to solar grenade on Prismatic at all. But for people who like to build craft, it will be interesting to see like, does this sort of mosaic-esque build where you have like a stasis melee and a solar grenade or like a void grenade and Nova bomb
01:04:19
Speaker
as your super like it it almost sounds like in in old school wow when they had the the talent trees with the points and it was basically the the skill trees from like diablo 2 where you could multi-spec and like you don't get the capstone from a given spec you basically just take like you go deeper into the other spec it can potentially end up there but that was always
01:04:42
Speaker
generally that ended up being the worst style of builds. Like there was always edge cases, but there was, and with them doing specific tuning, like only having these things, like obviously they were doing balancing passes by sun bracers in your example. Yeah, exactly. So wait and see. Yeah, it's definitely going to be a wait and see. They did post in the update, like all of the abilities that will be available.
01:05:11
Speaker
for each class, but they also include the ones that aren't in the game yet. You see some things in there, and there's the new Warlock Solar Super is the one that's available, so they don't get Dawnblade or Well. If you're Prismatic, it's the third one. And they had something called Frost Armor, which was added to the game. And I'm like, I don't know what Frost Armor is. So I guess we'll see.
01:05:38
Speaker
It's cool. If you like the build crafting stuff, I'm sure there'll be a lot of potential there. The fragments are also adapted, right? Cause if people are thinking about it and you're like, so many fragments are like deal solar damage, like to become radiant or something like that, they'll usually have two where it's like, Oh, if you're picking fragments as prismatic, it'll buff two things. It's like, Oh, this is void or solar, or this is stasis or, uh, arc or something like that. But that's testing.
01:06:10
Speaker
That is Destiny. And you too can play Destiny if you want to spend... How much is the expansion? Well, it's free to play. Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. Putting the door, free to play. Onslaught is free to play right now. You don't need any money for Onslaught, so that's nice, which is the Horde mode. If you want everything for the final shape, it's probably around $100, I would think.
01:06:34
Speaker
That's the last expansion. That's like the deluxe version of the expansion. That's the expansion and then the episodes they're going to release in the expansion. The seasonal battle pass slash whatever they call it. I assume the expansion itself, and I'll I'll have to look it up to be sure, is probably 50 to 70 bucks, as you would expect.
01:06:59
Speaker
I'm going to patiently wait for Eltonry DLC. That's entirely fair. I think the player base will probably get six people together, so we'll see the raid. I still get compliments for the jacket. Random people are just like, that's a really nice jacket. Does anyone realize it's from Destiny though? Or is it just like, that's a cool jacket?
01:07:21
Speaker
No, it's been identified as a game jacket like one time. Uh-huh. But it was the wrong game that was identified. They're just like, wow, honey pop jacket. That's awesome. And you're like, that's not. That's a different one. Yeah. Honey pops are go to, go to joke example. It is a cool jacket though. I've worn it a couple of times. If you guys have a cool jacket,
01:07:51
Speaker
can tell us about it, send it in soapstone podcast at gmail.com or you can join the discussion on Facebook, facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. Thank you as always to dice Justin for jumping on being a guest for this. Um, always bring the solid analysis and the, uh, the, the optimize your point of view for some of these things. Thank you for referencing a previous episode last epoch or epoch. I'll, I'll concede that one.
01:08:21
Speaker
If you guys want to go back and listen to that, and if not, we'll see you in the next one, as always. Have a good night. Bye bye.