Where I Have Been

It occurred to me when I posted yesterday that it's been weeks since I wrote on here. I kind of fell down a couple of different rabbit holes, aided and abetted by allergy medication. My allergies always flare up this time of year, and this time I sank into two really magnificent games as I was pulled down by the Benadryl haze.

At the end of July, I started playing No Man's Sky again, anticipating the update that was soon to roll out. The update didn't disappoint, and No Man's Sky consumed all of August. Then at the start of September, the Forsaken DLC was released for Destiny 2, and it has been magnificent.

No Man's Sky

On July 24th, Hello Games released the NEXT update for their 2016 title No Man’s Sky, marking the fourth major free update for the title. NEXT adds a lot of stuff, and changes things around. It was really interesting to play a lot just before NEXT was released, and then play immediately after. Materials were renamed, like the large red crystals jutting out of the ground went from being “Plutonium” to “Condensed Carbon”. Planets gained rings, the space stations grew in size and gained new vendors, and the NPCs started standing instead of sitting.

But the big deal was the addition of multiplayer. Up to three other players can join you to become an away team of four, and up to sixteen players can be in the same instance, though if you’re not a part of the away team, then you will be represented by a floating, glowing orb instead of by your player model. A 3rd person perspective was added, and you can customize your player model to your heart’s content, making your model look like one of the five races of the game.

I really can't describe the feeling of coming across a random player for the first time in No Man's Sky. The game was about solitude up to this point, about being a lone traveler trudging across alien landscapes. Coming across another traveler for the first time was magical. You're not alone any more.

No Man's Sky really fit the bill as the deep play game I had been seeking. I was able to set my own goals, and I had to build some mastery over the game to accomplish them. But what was really delightful for me was how non-violent the game is. Yes, you get attacked by space pirates and belligerent creatures, but the core gameplay loop doesn't revolve around shooting and killing, but rather exploration and learning. This was a game I could let my kids watch me play, and they loved it. It was really neat to get to share my hobby with them.

Hello Games is a small studio, and their QA testing leaves a lot to be desired. NEXT as released at the start of August was really buggy. To their credit, they worked quickly, releasing patch after patch, at least 8 in August alone. But some of the design choices were questionable. The multiplayer was grafted onto a single player game, and it was clear that it hadn’t been fully thought through. Even though the game wasn’t meant to have PvP, there was nothing stopping a random player from joining your game, killing you, destroying your base, and then leaving. Towards the end of the month, they finally added multiplayer permissions, allowing you to set what other players can do in your instance, but from the chatter on Reddit, a lot of people turned off network play all together until that was implemented. Still if you need a stable game to play, I don’t know if I can recommend No Man’s Sky with a clear conscience. While it has been a month since I last played, and I’m sure there have been more patches since, the game is very buggy, especially when you consider it to be two years old.

I had a lot of fun in No Man’s Sky, and sank a lot of hours into it, but ultimately it didn’t have much of an end game. I had mastered base-building. Making money wasn’t a problem, and neither were resources. I had completed the Path of the Atlas, the game’s story, and had journeyed to another galaxy. I got the platinum trophy for completing all the other trophies. I ran out of things to do.

Towards the end of August, Hello Games implemented the first of what it billed as “Community Events,” special quests that allowed you to earn a new currency and then spend that currency on cosmetic items. I guess it was a community event because everyone was working on the same quest at the same time, but there was no reason, or even way, to work together on it. Still, it was really neat to go to a planet and see sixteen players running about, or a hundred message pods that other players had left at the portal. I was hoping that the community events would provide that end game experience I was looking for, but I was a little disappointed. I haven’t participated in any since, so I can’t speak to how the experience may have evolved, but it seemed to be following the usual Hello Games M.O.— an interesting idea with a problematic implementation.

Forsaken

On September 4th, Bungie released the Forsaken DLC, the third and largest expansion for last year’s Destiny 2, the sequel to the game that really gave me the idea of deep play games in the first place. I played Destiny 2 for most of last fall, but ultimately gave up on it because of problems with the end game. A common criticism leveled at Destiny was that it wasn’t casual-friendly, and this is pretty accurate. It was a deep play game that required a good bit of mastery. It was an amazingly fluid shooter, but it was really hard to just pick and play for a little bit. Getting the good stuff required a lot of work, and a lot of knowledge of what to do next.

Destiny 2 was supposed to address that, to create a casual-friendly game that anyone could pick up and play. And it did, but unfortunately it sacrificed almost all of its deep play elements to do so, which caused the end game to stagnate. Destiny’s end game revolves around raising your “light level” which is way to make your character more powerful with basically the same gear. Light level acts like a multiplier in a way. Two characters with the same gear will have the same stats, but the character with the higher light level will be able to do more and take more damage.

The criticism leveled at Destiny was that this wasn’t casual friendly, because to participate in the end game activities, you had to be at or near the max light, and to get to the max light, you had to “grind”, i.e., do the same repetitive activities over and over to get the faction rep to get the engrams to raise the light level of your gear. The hardcore players liked the grind, but it put off casual players.

Vanilla Destiny 2 addressed this by gating the engrams that would raise your light level behind a handful of activities that reset weekly. You could jump on and play for a couple of hours and raise your light level by a point or two. The problem was it took away the grind to do so, and so the people who wanted to keep playing past that point really didn’t have a reason to do so.

Forsaken addresses these concerns, and honestly, feels like the game that should have replaced Destiny last fall. In fact, due to a number of tweaks to the game’s sandbox, changes to the weapons and weapon slots, new sub-classes, losing the token system, it feels a lot closer to Destiny 1 than Destiny 2.

But what is really impressive is Forsaken’s solution to the end game. I was initially trepidatious; I started out at light level 340, and by playing through the new campaign material very quickly advanced to 500. I was a little dismayed by that. The new cap is 600, and it felt like I would get there in a couple of days at that rate. Why couldn’t we slow this down and take our time?

Once you complete the campaign, you enter the end game area, and things slow down considerably. It took me a couple of days to complete the campaign, but since then I’ve only reached 530. The difference is that instead of reaching that in a few short bursts, the progression has been gradual and continuous.

Forsaken still has weekly milestones that grant the power engrams you need to advance, but it added daily milestones to the mix. These rotate every four days; one day it’s a daily heroic story, the next it’s a Crucible match, the next it’s a Gambit match, the next it’s a Strike, and then repeat. I don’t think that’s the order, but that’s the general concept. And it’s a brilliant, elegant solution to the casual/hardcore divide. Casual players can log in once or twice a week, and have plenty of things to do to raise their light. Hardcore players can grind constantly, and almost always have something to do.

But the really amazing thing is the Dreaming City, the new end game area. When I reached it, I almost felt like I was playing the original Destiny again. I was in a new area with a lot of secrets; I was under-powered, even though I had just beaten the campaign; and I was over-whelmed, which is amazing considering how much mastery I had acquired over not just Destiny 2 but this Forsaken expansion. But the beauty of the Dreaming City is that it is changing, providing new content, giving you a reason to keep grinding, to keep trying to raise your light.

The raid was released on the 14th, ten days after Forsaken itself was released. It took the first team to complete it over 24 hours to do so. But the really amazing thing was when I logged into the game and arrived at the Dreaming City after they had completed it, I found it had changed. Some plot point had been advanced, and things were different. Last week marked my third week in the Dreaming City, and things changed again.

Spawning points changed, which is something entirely new in my experience with Destiny. Part of the mastery you gain by playing Destiny is a knowledge of the map, and part of that knowledge is what enemies will spawn where. Three dregs will always be at this point, while two vandals are usually hanging out here. Some points have slight variances, like maybe substituting one mob for another, but for the most part they are pretty static.

After the raid had been completed, completely different mobs started spawning at different locations. This is entirely new to me, and caught me off-guard. I was so certain that I’d come around the corner and find one set of monsters, and wasn’t prepared to find a completely different set. New quests have popped up each week as well, so if you haven’t had a chance to play the raid yet, like me, then you can still feel like you are in this still unfolding story, and that’s really an amazing accomplishment.

Forsaken manages to provide a really nice grinding loop with multiple paths to follow to advance, and is providing new content that is slowly being unlocked. It’s a deep play game with a really functional end game, and it’s been taking up all my free time. I’m actually a little taken aback that it’s only been out twenty days, considering how much time I’ve sunk into it.

So, that’s where I’ve been. I like writing about video games here, but I like playing them more. These two titles were literally games I couldn’t put down (well, I still haven’t put Forsaken down). And there are several releases slated to be dropped in the coming months that look really promising. It’s really a great time to be playing video games, but not such a great time to writing about them, because in order to write, you have to put the controller down.