The Group Who Conquered Destiny's First Raid

Bad loot was a bug.

It was mentioned earlier in this thread, but I thought it worth repeating.

Interesting interview, and there's something to be said about the raids be super difficult and having no match making, I actually like it, forces you to do it old-school like Vanilla Wow or older mmo's like Everquest, and you really get to know one another, it can create a strong bond and community between your guild/clan.

But this is the very first raid of this game that has been very prominent and just released. I highly doubt we'll see another article like this for any subsequent Destiny raid. That's why the other MMO raids don't matter because those first raids were years ago.

I don't understand why this is an article.

"I wouldn’t wish that upon my worst enemy to try and do that with just random people. It would be nightmarish."

I wouldn't either. It sounds so poorly balanced and purposefully insane in difficulty that only an elite guild of people so fanatical that they require resumes would be able to beat it... after ten and a half hours and over a thousand deaths. :-/

They've sold 320 million dollars worth of this game. They must know that most of those purchasers will never have this kind of obsessive, 8 month long devotion to the product. They've effectively made the end game content accessible to only a few thousand users at best. Eh, more power to them.. I guess. I have absolutely no interest in this kind of thing, let alone researching online for strategies. I did that for Wrath of the Lich King and scrawling notes on college-ruled paper for how to properly whack something's ankles is not on my to do-list ever again.

@mbradley1992: They said before the raid came out that once people figure it out and you know the strategies Vault of Glass should take ~3 hours. They expected it to take about as long as people were playing the first time through. Here's a quick outline. It was pretty common for games like WoW to have raids that would take people a few days to crack. Might be a problem specifically for players in your situation but other people love this type of stuff.

@xbob42:

I agree, having to orchestrate with 6 of my "friends" every time I want to do a raid is stupid.

10 hours of getting your balls broke.

No loot.

What a game.

Great article. I'm going to keep chipping away at it and hopefully try this at some point.

@rodin: it's not, it's a human interest piece. You don't have to read it, you know.

Well that solidifies if for me: Destiny is not for me. I was a hardcore endgame raider in WoW for years and have no desire to revisit that life ever again. Good for them for the accomplishment though. It's pretty badass.

So this mystical end game content that Bungie speaks so highly of consists of 10-hour long raids that are only achievable by a close knit group of hardcore players with deep competitive video gaming backgrounds... oh and by the way, it's still a bit buggy. Slap that quote on the side of the box.

Great reporting, however the takeaways are disappointing.

“First and foremost, we’re gamers,” said Smith. “We wanted to be the best, we wanted to be world’s first."

If that's the sort of shit that's supposed to define what a gamer is, then count me the fuck out.

It's a website about video games.

Nothing at all about that sounds even remotely fun. Playing it for that long to receive little to no reward and then be presumably (at least at these guys' level) left with no more new content after the raid is mindblowing that they're willing to stick to this game, but I mean that's their decision. Just as it was Bungie's decision to release this hacked up game...

After Bungie saying the best stuff is to come after release, they're really not hitting it out of any parks with this. It's disappointing how much this game is not for me despite how much I want it to be.

I watched one of the raid groups going through this when the raid first came out. They made it to the last phase of the last boss and then stopped to leave and improve their chrs. They came back the next day and completed the whole raid (It didn't save their progress because of a bug) in 1 hour 50 min.

It looked really cool and it looked like they had alot of fun doing it.

It definitely reminded me of raiding in WoW with the coordination and communication that is required. But the fact that it was in an FPS made it seem more interesting.

I just ordered a PS4 and Destiny but I doubt if I will ever see this raid. That being said it looked really cool and might be the answer for people that feels Strikes are to simple.

Great feature, Machine God Klep-Tok! Thanks for continuing to put written content out along with the Dumptruck. Really useful, and I would hate for the site to move completely away from the written form.

Anyway, Destiny is a ton of fun. Legendary Engram Twitter is amazing. I feel like the loot algorithms are too stacked to slow progress, especially in a game where the same algorithms will drop gear that is not for your class (something WoW got rid of long ago).

There are many instances of Bungie not learning from Blizzard's lessons. Oh well....

Cool beans.

I don't quite get the hype surrounding a "World First" on raids and bosses in MMO's. But I guess it's the highest achievement for a guild in those kinds of games (in PvE anyways).

That's cool, didn't know Destiny had such hard content. How many people is that raid? 4 people? I wanted to hear more about picking the right people.

Sooo, if I were to play Destiny purely solo, I would never be able to see this content. Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of shitty?

Oh please. I play final fantasy XIV for 16 hours a day.

And 10 hours? How about 80 hours, I once took a job from level 1 to level 75 in final fantasy xi by staying awake for over 72 hours, that was by choice, and I woke up after a nice sleep to play more.

Filthy casuals

@robertorri: be glad? from what I'm hearing Destiny has a severe lack of things to do. The flow chart you posted is just a huge list of things to do.

Scoops!!

Wait, no loot?

Guys I don't think GB gave Destiny a fair chance.

I demand they put in the hours and get geared for the raid, then try and manually find others that have also put in the time, to do the raid for 10+ hours. To then complete it and get zero loot.

This way they can knock off a star and give it the review it deserves.

There really is no point to this game, is there?

“All we got was a shader and a couple of high-level materials,” said Preu. “I don’t think either of our groups got any actual loot. I’m sure they’re going to fix that.”

This is what I call high quality marketing. These guys sound like freaking drones.

Losers play Destiny and Kirby. Winners play Diablo and Colin McRae Rally. CHILD of light??? What a kiddyname! Play a real game like Bulletstorm!

I don't understand why this is a comment.

There are comments before yours saying that that's a bug and that Bungie mailed the loot to Primeguard...

Lack of matchmaking in this and weekly strikes = some bullshit.

@trafalgarlaw:

Did you, like, read the article? The part where it explained what happened? Like -- any of the article?

I can understand a raid in something like World of Warcraft, it's a special game in our industry, revered by many it goes down in history for being the grandaddy of everything in its genre.

But Destiny... why would you dedicate so much effort into something so... dull?

Bungie is surely revolutionizing gaming, hating Destiny is a huge metagame right now.

I have 4 Legendary and I just got an exotic Hand Cannon from a Legendary Engram a few minutes ago. I love this game.

The shooting feels great, using Hand Cannons without aiming down the sights is like being a space cowboy. Doing Bounties makes me feel like Bobba Fett and the Bladedancer super is like being a Jedi Knight. Is it repetitive? Yes. CoD, B4 and Titanfall are repetitive as fuck, so what?

The ironic thing is that this story of victory has completely turned me off of playing the end-game content of this game, past the normal story missions. I don't plan on even touching the raid now.

seems like a really smart thing for Bungie to do - to go down the exclusivity route, the whole scene has become too casual by far. i'm past the point of being able to compete in things like this, but it's great that these are gaming events worth talking about, and achievements that actually mean something.

I don't think I'd go as far to say that what they're doing is revolutionary but its more iterative. Doesn't mean its a bad thing though, it's still a good game although it does have some glaring flaws.

“We were very, very pleasantly surprised,” said Smith. “It was a big, major difference. If people think the raid is just a tougher version of the strike, I’ve got news for them. They’re going to be completely blown away."

so... The game doesn't start til after 40 hours of bullshit? COOL!

10 hours and 5 people? Try spending 10 hours just for preparation, to a raid that's only about figuring out the patterns of a single boss with 39 other people, that's what Vanilla WoW/BC raiding had been like. .

Not to belittle their "first", but all of this does not really sound that extreme and a lot of his claims, about the difficulty, seem to be blown out of proportions. Two days ago a couple of strangers already managed to beat the first 3 bosses in 5 hours.

Imho there are probably people out there who beat it before them/shortly after them. It's just that most people realize this ain't an MMO and bragging about beating that kind of content, in this time and age, feels kind of outdated. Next he's gonna look for sponsorship?

Feels like modern console gaming just catching up with the stuff that made PC gaming awesome, like 10 years ago ;)

I don't know that I'm the person to be answering this, since I've neither participated in the Vault of Glass nor watched a single playthrough from front to back.

But I did catch some of it on stream last night.

Saddle up. This could be a long--and completely inaccurate--post.

---

It looked like, matter of factly, that the raid's difficulty is dictated by two factors:

1) The number of moving parts in the combat scenarios.

2) DPS -- that is, the DPS typhoon the bosses and infinite mobs can dole out + the relative lack of damage players do to both of those entities.

Concerning Point 1: Players (in the scenario I witnessed) aren't fighting a boss and squads of regular enemies in a simple shoot-em-up. The boss has a shield that can only be deactivated (for a few seconds at a time) with a raid-specific weapon. Some kind of sword. The player wielding the sword can only deactivate the boss's defenses if they have built up their super ability, something that regenerates once every few minutes, or more quickly if Orbs of Light are dropped when other supers nearby are used.

When the shield is deactivated, it only remains so for a couple beats. This is more or less Point 2 in totality--players don't hurt the boss very much, and when they do, they can't hurt it for more than a few breathless moments every few minutes. The high-level enemies and boss, however, can leave an entire team in cinders with one or a few well-placed attacks, or as a result of lapses of judgment/coordination on the part of the team.

Meanwhile, as the team struggles in this war of attrition, entities called Oracles spawn around the boss room, which is large and intricate. The Oracles generate a team-wide debuff that are removed by being within close proximity to a point very close to the boss location. Basically directly underneath the boss itself.

As the players fight against these Oracles and the boss and the mobs coming in endless droves, the boss will trap individual players inside red globes. These globes can only be destroyed by another player, and will kill those trapped inside if not destroyed promptly. I'm talking, like, within a matter of seconds. While inside the globe, the player can still fire their weapons, but cannot move and will still suffer damage from enemy fire. Nearer to the end of the battle, multiple players will be caged inside globes at once.

So, the raid requires a lot of communication simply because there are numerous situations that offer incredibly brief actionable windows. If you don't have a complete and total awareness of the situation, you will miss an opportunity. And that missed opportunity will either prolong an already protracted encounter, leading to odds being further and further stacked against the player team, or will lead to one or more players being killed instantaneously.

And I think what I saw was just the first of three major encounters.

Ultimately, the raid presents as a ferociously-involved combat puzzle. Bungie's penchant for having players incorporate and change engagement strategies in real time (e.g., needing the right gun for the right enemy, flanking and double teaming when necessary) gets turned up to its highest possible zenith.

It struck me as uncontrolled bedlam in a game that, otherwise, doesn't really condition its players to prepare for it.

why are we still talking about this game....it was a let down (almost brought a ps4) and in a few years will be forgotten unless they just keep throwing money at it to keep it alive.... T__T

Yeah, essentially they spent so much time and effort on something literally 99% of the game's population will never be able to play. And when it comes to extending the life of the game you know they will point almost exclusively to raids.

This makes me more interested in Destiny and makes the game make a little more sense. Probably did themselves a disservice not talking about it more like an mmo. Back loading the coolest stuff in a shooter doesn't make nearly as much sense an probably a big reason it's gotten such a tepid response.

This is a total non article for anyone who has raided in any other game. But congrats to those guys for being the newest group of people to do something first, soon to be replaced by another group doing another thing first. (It didn't seem like there was anything special about this first though.)

People are still talking about Destiny because they are having fun with it. If you don't like it or don't play it, then feel free to skip Destiny articles and topics and move on to something that does interest you. Thanks.

It was a joke. The revolutionary game I'm talking about it's the "Hating Destiny Metagame". It's huge. Biggest game out there.

Because the ways in which it is a let down, and the fact that--despite its myriad flaws--it can still command so much attention from its players, are completely fucking fascinating.

How about because a bunch of people actually like it a lot? I, for one, love the shit out of it. Sure, the variety in content is lacking and the story is bad but the content that's actually there is incredibly fun to play. The multiplayer is great and rewarding in a way I haven't felt since modern warfare 2. I'm really looking forward to trying out that raid and so is a lot of people. That's why we're still talking about destiny.