Vault of Glass looks both amazing and depressing.

So the new raid, Vault of Glass, just unlocked and people are streaming it (Here, for example.). The first two encounters are already more interesting than any of the other PvE content in the game. On the first boss you have to keep yourself cleansed of poison while keeping both the left, right and middle areas under control. On another phase of that boss, one person has to hold what appears to be a shield, which has its own super that penetrates the shield of the boss, allowing the other 5 players to damage it, the person holding the shield is essentially the tank for that fight.

This is really cool, but really irks me at the same time. Why are no interesting mechanics like these in any of the main story line or strikes? A lot of people simply won't get to see this content. It requires a lot of grinding to get to level 26+, hours and hours of doing repetitive patrol missions and strikes to get enough marks and rep to buy legendary gear, cause god knows the loot system won't give you enough. Even after you get all that, you then have to find 5 other people who have put in all that time as well, and have everyone sit down and do a 5+, or however long, hour raid. That is a mighty tall order.

I really hope they add these kind of interesting, challenging mechanics outside of these raids. I honestly don't know if I'll put in enough time to even come close to having enough gear for this thing. Does this annoy anyone else? Going through the story, I was dying for something, anything, besides defending my ghost from a wave of enemies. All 6 strikes involve you just killing wave after wave, and fighting 2-3 bosses that kind of sit there until you pump enough ammo into them.

Destiny is quickly revealing itself to be a game for a very narrow slice of the gaming demographic. Or rather, a very narrow slice will get to experience the fun things Bungie had in store all along. I simply cannot parse their decision on the matchmaking. Why would they make a multiplayer centric game and not even give you the option to match with other random people online? If nothing else, Destiny continues to astonish me with it's design choices.

As a long time WoW player, none of this is new to me. This is exactly the sort of stuff raiders in that game would have to do to see end game content. You join a guild and you go about arranging a time and place to play the game together.

I'm not going to say it's not strange that they don't let you matchmake at all, since even WoW now lets you do that. But WoW also trivializes the difficultly of the bosses when you do matchmaking that you might as well just watch a video of the fight being done properly.

Yup i feel they looked them self up for five years. And didnt play any other mmo. A looking for raid system would be Nice.Also destinys mmo mechanics feels Like one from a korean mmo.

Man, I need to get myself to 26....And get five friends that are 26.

I dunno if that's enough to pull me back in. I'm already bored of shooting the same sounding/feeling auto rifle and seeing the enemies do the same things again and again. I put my time into Destiny (about 30 hours) and I came away swearing never to play it again until more interesting content is released. This may qualify, but not if I have to spend another 10 hours getting myself from 22 to 28.

The matchmaking decision is baffling to me. Bungie's reasons for doing it are pretty bad, why not give people the option?

Any criticisms I make are probably going to be moot, considering how much the game has already sold, but what exactly ARE the targeted demographics for this game? It plays like an FPS that would appeal to those who love their Halo or CoD (especially Halo) and was advertised for the most part as such, yet it seems to have the progression of an MMORPG like WoW or one of those really grindy MMORPGs. Fans of these things don't overlap all that much.

@adequatelyprepared: Both. The game has two ways to progress once you hit the max level.

If you like PVP, just play PVP and earn crucible marks to buy your gear or hope you get a nice drop from the events.

If you like PVE, just play PVE and earn vanguard marks to buy your gear or hope you get a nice drop from the raids.

If you like both, hurrah!

@adequatelyprepared: It basically plays like a good FPS. Playing through the story doesn't take long, neither does getting to 20. It doesn't get grindy until you're trying to advance beyond 20, and really the only reason to grind is to raid, which I suspect is not that interesting to many, including myself. Currently I am mostly playing some PvP and enjoying myself with the game, and any loot I get is a bonus. And when PvP gets dull, there's always some random strikes which seem perfect in length for some casual gameplay. So far, I am enjoying myself.

I think its dumb that they expect you to grind out 6 extra levels on top of the level cap in order to experience the "real" endgame content. I feel like whoever is making the design decisions for this game is trying to inject their 'ideal' raiding experience from other games into Destiny, and I just don't think its fitting.

That said, it looks kind of neat, but I'm not sure if/when I'd actually be able to see any of this content.

I really don't get this sentiment that you can only get to a point where you could undertake the raid by ginding for hours and hours. I got to level 24 almost entirely through PvP drops, and unless you consider the entire selling point (competitive MP) of games like Call of Duty, Halo, and Battlefield to be grinding I just don't get the complaint.

With a crucible mark payout of 3 per win and 2 per loss, you only have to play between 34 and 50 games of multiplayer a week to reach the weekly cap on earnings (that's only like 5-8 hours of play a week at ~10 minutes per game), and if you take and complete as many crucible bounties as possible you'll have no trouble getting to crucible rank two (the requirement to buy legendary gear) in a fairly short amount of time. Legendary chestpieces, gauntlets, and boots cost 65 marks each (only a couple hours worth of multiplayer to earn) and helmets cost 120 (a bit more of a time investment, but not overly).

Sure, it'd takes several weeks to fully outfit yourself in legendary gear, but you could easily reach level 26 with one or two pieces of legendary gear and the rest the rares you're all but guaranteed to get as drops simply for playing crucible games (I can't tell you how many rare armor pieces I've gotten in only about 25 post level 20 PvP matches, probably something like 1 every 2 or 3 games).

The only reason you'd have to grind for hours and hours in order to get to level 26 is if you have no desire to play PvP at all and spend all your effort on vanguard activities, because they are certainly more of a grind. However, if you like PvP I 100% guarantee that you'd be at least level 26 after less than 2 weeks of like 1 hour a day, quicker if you play more than that.

hmm... interesting.

They are intentionally going for what WoW did when it was new. WoW didn't even do that intentionally (be boring through the leveling process and then get interesting for raids).

What an odd design choice.

@mooseymcman: Thats why the game is structured the way it is. I guarantee you at some stage they had a much more sensible matchmaking system, and some marketing fuckhead who is now a "big deal" because he/she is in charge of rolling around the wheelbarrow of money says "We need to encourage our end users to introduce other users into the cycle. The end game content needs to be exclusive enough and different enough that people will pressure their friends into either picking it back up after they quit, or buy the game if they dont own it."

That, in my opinion, is the only possible reasoning for having the matchmaking the way it is. They have statd that co-ordination is required because the end game raids are so difficult. I would say that the end game raids are so difficult, co-ordination is required. And this means your RL friends apparently, because god knows nobody ever plays well together on the internet when randomly matched up (except in every online game ever)

I was with you until:

My 20+ years experience gaming online has taught me that this is 90% of the time not the case. Playing with friends is usually ideal.

Also, I didn't bold that quote- the forum did it and wont let me remove it. I dunno *shrug*

Edit: also it should be mentioned my timeline is exaggerated.

@ll_exile_ll: I have two pieces of legendary armor, still level 25

And yeah a lot of people have no desire to play the PvP in destiny, it's not the draw it is in BF or CoD for me, in fact im pretty sure i hate it more then the PvE grind. Also asking your payers grind pvp in order to gear up for pve content is not a good design choice.

@CornBredX

I get what you are saying, but it's on online FPS. You have a single skill you can use, and after that its just a handful of different weapons. It's no where near as complex an experience as a MOBA or most online RPG games. If they are worried about people griefing then they could introduce a simple weighted rating system and force the griefers to play with eachother.

I have had lots of fun randomly grouping up with folks in borderlands, diablo, etc. It is always a good time. Yes, it is more beneficial to play with friends, but the same can be said about any online game. The reason there is matchmaking is because some people dont want to play with their friends, or maybe they dont have many friends who play the game. The second part of that statement is highly significant. If you manage to play mostly solo to 20, you now cannot access what seems to be the most dynamic content in the game without a regular raiding group. Thats horseshit, and a completely transparent carrot on the stick ploy to try get you to sell more copies for them, and get your friends into it just so you can get all the content you paid sixty bucks for. Marketing has their shit plastered all over this matchmaking stuff.

Bungie put way too many caveats on the "cool content" of their game and not enough variety on the way to keep my interest so that I can grind my way to level 26 and play that.

I don't actually hate Destiny, but this game turned out to be a huge bummer.

Especially since this is a game primarily for the new consoles - you'd think they would make it as accessible as possible. Even so.. I don't understand either. Why can you matchmake for strikes but anything else is "friends" only? Destiny would benefit SO much if they simply patched in Matchmaking for every game mode.

A mix of PvP and PvE certainly alleviates the grind. Regular ass loot drops remain frustrating as fuck though. Like getting multiple legendary drops that turn into useless garbage once you identify them.

Upgrading the defense of your current gear (if it's all lvl 20) should put you over 26. You get additional light from defense upgrades.

At what points in the past can you remember decisions similar to this one that made no sense yet were integral to the game? I am going to go with the size of Cities in Sim city, and the fact it had to be always online. That was a ploy that meant you had to expand out into several cities, thus engaging with the multiplayer, thus keeping it always online and turning what was once a fantastic single player experience into one where you needed multiple people to play the game properly. The matchmaking in destiny is on the same level, to me. I am frankly annoyed that the raids are turning out to be so different and so much an improvement over the main game. I will eventually play destiny, but I guarantee that none of my friends will. It's not their kind of thing. I will never be able to convince them otherwise. I am going to have a shit time at endgame if the matchmaking is not improved.

EDIT - I do really want to play this game. A 3/5 does not a bad game make. It looks like my kind of game and I will be able to have fun with it. I am just really bummed out with marketing decisions affecting the game.

The strongest reason I can think of for the matchmaking decisions are that it will push more sales, that's it. It is the reason that greatly benefits them financially, and does the least amount of damage to their image (i.e. if they put micro-transactions in). I don't think Bungie had much of a say in that decision, as they would have fought to keep the game as accessible to as many players as possible. It sounds like they had to give something up to marketing and this bizarre matchmaking stuff was what they had to give up.

This is what happens when your marketing budget is so huge. They dont just do advertisements and viral marketing, they hire incredibly expensive marketing consultants who pick apart every last bit of the game and send a big filthy list of ways to make extra money to the bosses, who then pass that off to the developers and say "hmmm have a look at this good chap.". Then the developers shit themselves because they dont want ANY of that crap in the game, but they have to give something up so it might as well be restricting matchmaking to encourage sales.

Don't worry. Even if you did all that and managed to complete this raid you would just get a bunch of encrypted gear that would just turn into crap. That's been my experience will all the strike missions I've done so far.

It's not really a "grind" though, you just play PvP. I can sympathize if you're not into PvP, but most people that are into multiplayer oriented shooters do enjoy it, and like I said you can get to the point of being able to attempt the raid after like 10-20 hours of PvP. Considering millions of people play Call of Duty hundreds upon hundreds of hours every year I don't think that's too much of a barrier.

@splodge: I'm not going to say that you're not right that finance might have held some part in their decision. All your points make sense. But I think there is a solid reason for making it so that you can't matchmake for raids and that's so they can make those raids hard.

Going back to my WoW example of how it used to be, if you tried to PUG your way through even the dungeons of that game you would get face rolled unless everyone was dedicated to it. Never mind the raids of the game. Now, the game is a joke in terms of difficultly. The Shattered Halls still stands out in my mind as a 5 man dungeon that needed everyone on point to do before the nerfs came to allow PUGs to get through it. And when that happened, the dungeons became boring.

By forcing you to seek out a group of like minded people, you're going to hopefully filter out the people who wont be dedicated to putting in the effort required to play the game at that level of play. There's no compromise in it. Last night I did the weekly heroic with two duders here and we had a really hard time of it, but we stuck with it and got through it. From my experience in WoW, I feel like if I wasn't playing with those people who went to seek out another like minded player, one of them would have just said "fuck this you fucking scrub noobs, l2p", quit the instance and then we'd be sat on our tod's until another player was found.

You mentioned Borderlands there as a game that's good to PUG through, which it is. But when you PUG'd through that, did you and your groups attempt the harder raid bosses?

@ll_exile_ll: If by attempt the raid you mean lvl 24, yeah good luck with that. But for a sane effort at it it will take far better gear and hence more grind.

No, I meant 26. You can buy legendary armor via crucible play, two pieces will get you to 26 after you upgrade them and that would cost 130 crucible marks (between 44 and 65 games of MP) which would be around 10 hours at an average of 10 minutes per game.

Yeah, I'm starting to feel really sour on the whole thing too. I've been enjoying the combat, and Bungie has always been pretty good at nailing their art, but the way the game is structured is just beyond boring. Seems like almost all of the content is taking the little robot somewhere so he can scan something, sometimes fighting waves of dudes while he does, occasionally punctuated with a boss or an object you have to shoot a few times to blow up. I've even had missions where all I do is go somewhere and he scans something and that's it. No exposition, no combat, nothing. It's almost like it's meta-commentary on how people will just eat up anything that has loot and not give a shit about anything else that's going on (or not going on) in the game.

I've been watching a raid attempt today and it looks utterly brutal and draining. And then I think, is this the end game content that Bungie seemed convinced would have swayed review scores?

@pyrodactyl: All my gear is upgraded lvl 20, the 2 purples would require 36 ascendant shards to upgrade.

And to upgrade your purples you need 6 ascendant shards for each final tier, thats 3 upgrades x2, 36 ascendant shards total. I have been playing for a week for hours a day, i got 6 shards total so far.

I don't think this is getting enough attention. It just goes to show how half-baked the main game is that this end-game encounter is more interesting than anything else in the game not by virtue of how awesome or intricately designed it is, but largely on the fact that it's different, the fact that they added in any sort of mechanic to differentiate it from regular strikes. I watched a few minutes of the stream, however, and it still looks boring to me.

I see WoW mentioned a lot as a good example comparison, but Everquest was far more brutal.

Both games eventually tuned the endgame encounters to let more casual players experience them.

Bungie doesn't want to see it's flagship raid content facerolled in the launch window.

I peeked into a raid stream. It looks way more interesting than the leveling content simply because there are additional mechanics involved.

The raids seem neat conceptually, but after watching some of one, it cements my suspicion that I will never experience one. No fucking way. I'd be curious to see if the next expansion incorporates some mechanical variety into the non-raid content, though.

Except it is being facerolled. The hardest thing about it is the time commitment.

Is it? So far according to Bungie no-one has beaten it yet (as of 38 minutes ago), that is, what, over five hours it has been open.

Unless it is ridiculously long and that is the reason it isn't beaten yet, then I wouldn't say that it is being facerolled.

There are apparently weapons that drop within the raid that you then have to level up (!) to gain a specific skill on it that will help you defeat a boss in order to progress. This might take a while.

Not saying that they've blocked some of the encounters from beating (made it impossible to later on lower some stats to make it possible), that is what Blizzard have done alot in new content with WoW.

That all sounds incredibly tedious, no offense to you or others who enjoy that kind of gameplay, of course. Really glad I waited on buying this, though, as the more I read about it, the more I realize Destiny is probably not for me.

It's like they learned nothing from WoW. There's a thin slice of people who play MMOs for end-game raiding (with the associated hours of grind to prepare, serious raid time commitment, and required team cooperation). The vast majority of people without the time or inclination to raid just experience the main content. Blizzard has done everything possible to make raiding and high-level content more accessible because they realized they were spending most of their time designing new content that most people would never see.

WoW wasn't popular because of raiding. It was popular because it had tons of zones and quests to explore prior to end game, plus the satisfaction of leveling and outfitting a character over dozens of hours. Locking all of your interesting gameplay behind an MMO end-game construct is insanity. It's basically designing your game for 1-10% of players.

Looks like brad got a purple shotgun at lvl 21. What a dick...

Apparently people are getting stopped on the third boss. I stand corrected for the face rolling. I bet it will be beaten within a couple of hours.

good luck finding 6 friends who are willing to do the bullshit you have to do to level up after level 20. Its asking a lot and sorry random matchup people are toxic and terrible, if that's your only means ok I guess you're used to it but its no good. Im over here at level 21, highest level person I know is level 23. I think maybe I should have waited on this game, cus this is clearly early mid game content in the larger scheme of their plans, but they feel the need to make it super hard to reach, like endgame content, cus (right now) level 26 is endgame. Where if I waited till the next proper expansion Im guess this stuff would take less grinding to reach because now they'd be looking at level 30 content or whatever. Not a fan at all of how they gate this game. Like running against a dude who's immune to everything, I had to look up on the internet to find out what does damage to it, and of course the thing that does damage is another thing you have to grind out. This whole thing quickly became a chore.

The raid takes 5 hours???? I mean i'm level 25 right now but i definitely don't have 5 hours of straight free time to play this game right now lol. Also don't have enough people to do them anyway though. :-(

Vault looks like the only interesting piece of PvE content in the game and it requires hundreds of hours of grinding to even beat it. The enemy core design is too simple to be skill based aside from figuring out the relatively easy (but still interesting enough) mechanics, MMO combat, which is ridiculously trivial for most classes, is more interesting than Destiny's due to the simplicity of the enemy design. I do like the in between boss sections but ultimately they'll be really annoying if you get someone who is bad at jumping or doing simple stealth sections and those people will be out there. Unless I'm missing something: there are only 2 bosses being streamed thus far, the rest of it was just "checkpoint" hopping.

@deathpooky: WoW was popular because of raiding, it was just popular because of Karazhan (which is an unbelievably good, accessible instance) or Zul'Aman. The mystique of lategame content probably kept 5% of people interested, the other 95% fell into the various categories you described, but I'd say a solid 25-40% played BC (which is the only expansion in MMO history to grow the playerbase beyond the first month of it) because of Kara and nothing else, that's just how compelling that instance was. Raiding has nothing particularly compelling about it anymore so it's probably like 1% of the playerbase actively continues to play the game just to raid; everyone else plays for social or novelty reasons (they might raid as well because why not but not as their primary motivation).

If the 5 mans were like BRD (which is the closest thing to Karazhan) then you'd probably have a whole group of people that were really interested in those as well, but they're all hallways with 3-4 bosses now.

@oursin_360: Apparently you can save at anytime and restart it later. Anytime before the week is up. But you can only start it with the same exact 6 people.

@sterling: People have been replacing individuals over the course of their raids so I think it' s just a "you enter the instance you're saved to it" type of deal, for practical reasons there's no reason to do this since you won't get the initial loot but as far as "progession" people go you'll always have more replacements available.

The original issue with Diablo 3 was that they subscribed to the view that "hardcore only play at this level" (5% of the players see 100% of the content) which was definitely a ruinous attitude and belief to have. When they backed off this, the game got a lot better and way more fun. This is something Destiny should embrace where they should design the game such that 95% of the players can see 100% of the game instead of the elite few.

@extomar: Well I think Inferno could have been as hard as it was and just balanced better so everything didn't literally one shot you; that just killed the hope for most players (and made those of us that did it feel like idiots after the fact for doing so). The big problem was the Auction House and the loot systems. Also 5% is a gross overestimation at this point, it might eventually get to 5% but that will probably take a few months.

I think the most recent raid content is always going to be that 5% thing, I just hope they don't release the next planet expansion like assuming everyone is at level 28 by now. They shouldn't ever assume anyone is past level 20 for bigger content, because leveling gets significantly more fickle at that point. But at the same time, how hard would it have been to have a level 22 option. That would have been a reasonable level to assume most people are at.

I agree it could use matchmaking and will probably get it at some point, but its not that hard to get level 26 and if you don't have friends either make some or just go on the internet and find 5 other people.

It looks great, but as you state, the mechanics of getting people together is too bothersome for me to ever go through it. Oh well.