My original plan was to have a blog written last Tuesday, so it would have been about my first week with the game. I had been thinking that I might make it a weekly thing, check in every week, but clearly it's too late for that now. Now the plan is to write what I want to write now, and just check in with Destiny in other blogs that I write, at least so long as I'm still playing the game regularly. But I do feel like, even though I'm not done with the game, and haven't technically done everything in the game, that I can say everything I need to say about this game, and nothing short of drastic amounts of changes to the amount of content, and to some of the "systems" in the game (for lack of a better term) will cause my thoughts on the overall experience of Destiny change radically. Did that sentence make sense? That was a run-on sentence, and I apologize for it, but this is about the third or fourth time I've tried to write this blog, so I'm not stopping for anything.

So, where am I in Destiny? Well, I've done all of the story missions, and all of the Strikes. Actually, I've done all of the content currently available in the game, aside from the (sole) Raid, The Vault of Glass. I'm not sure if that's literally the only Raid in the game, or if Bungie is just hiding the other(s) from us, which seems very possible. I've also spent a lot of time in the Crucible, which is the competitive multiplayer portion of Destiny.

In fact, I've spent a lot of time with the game as a whole. According to the stats screen on Bungie's website (because these stats are not visible in game), I've spent 2 days, 22 hours, 56 minutes, and 23 seconds playing Destiny. About 11 hours of that in the story missions, about 22 hours in the Strikes, about 23 hours in the Crucible, and about 13 hours on Patrol. Keep in mind, these stats don't take several parts of Destiny into account. They don't count the loading screens (which are plentiful and lengthy), and they don't count time spent in the Tower. I get not counting the loading screens, but I wish I could see my time spent in the Tower. Between it being the only location with vendors in the game, it's also the "social" area where the game goes into third person, and your character's helmet is removed so you can see the face you spent time making in the character creation screen. Speaking of which, here's the one I made.

As you may remember, this is pretty much what I went with in the Beta (which I put about 50 hours into, well, 50 if you include the Alpha). I made an Awoken male with blue skin, pink hair, and the most feminine face available. Under other circumstances, I might have gone with an Exo, which are the robots, but I really didn't like the dance animation they had in the Beta. It wasn't The Robot, it was some dumb Michael Jackson type dance, and I hate that stuff. Well, it's mostly because I hate Michael Jackson, but I don't want to completely derail this blog yet. I didn't go with a human guy because there's no beards in this game. None. I'm not saying the game needs to have anything crazy beard wise, but no beards at all is upsetting to me, as a bearded man.

And so far as playing as a lady goes, I dunno, but playing as ladies in these sorts of games has always felt...weird to me. It's hard to put my finger on to why, exactly. I think part of it might be subconsciously rejecting the old "Dave Snider Logic" for playing as a lady in a MMO type game, which if I remember correctly, was something along the lines of wanting to look at a lady's butt. Which, given that this is primarily a first person game where you don't see your character's butt, and I'm bi so I'd kinda get that with either gender, but I dunno. I play as dudes in games, usually. I got off topic again, oh well, but before I move on, here's another screen shot, this one of my current character screen in game, with all my gear and stuff.

So, I'm level 27, and most of my gear are Legendaries. The only ones that aren't are my Exotic (the highest tier in the game, so far) gauntlets, and my cosmetic class item, which...I'll get to in a few minutes. I want to at least mention the good parts of this game before I get into the meat of this blog.

Anyway, in addition to the normal things like higher defense, the armor in the game provides buffs to various skills that affect the cool downs of the three powers (grenade, melee, and super), and also some other bonuses, like faster reloads with certain weapons, carrying more ammo, etc. The weapons do too (well, not so much the cooldown reductions), and both can be upgraded over time. XP earned whilst wearing armor or using weapons also goes into the items in question, and at certain points they can be upgraded, and some, like the main skill trees, require choices to be made between different options. But you can swap between them at any time (both for the weapons and the main skill trees), so nothing is ever set in stone. Some upgrades only require Glimmer ("the" currency in the game), whereas others require materials that are found in the game, either in the environments, or as rewards for completing. But...I'll get back to that in a minute.

Or, no, I think I'll get to it now. I was going to do a big roundabout thing where I talked about the mission design, the shooting, the music, the graphics, pretty much everything else, but I'll just get to it now. This game is designed in a way that forces you to grind and grind and grind, and then wait until next week, at which point you grind some more. How so? Well, I'll get to explaining that.

The first thing about Destiny that you need to know to understand this is that there isn't a lot of content for the type of game that Bungie made. Not a first person shooter. If Bungie had taken the amount of level geometry in this game, and built more interesting missions around that stuff, they could have had a fantastic 8 hour shooter. The shooting and core game play here is absolutely rock solid, so I don't think people would complain if it was that sort of game, especially when this game has substantially more variety in enemy design and tactics than most first person shooters do these days.

No, Destiny is trying to be Diablo. Now, I haven't actually played any of the Diablo games, but the impression I get from people is that they're lengthy, right? Like, there's a lot of stuff in them, correct? It doesn't feel like there's a lot of stuff in Destiny. There's four main areas of the game: Earth, The Moon, Venus, and Mars. There's also a Crucible map on Mercury, and I feel like they went through a lot of effort for that Mercury sky box and the shots of Mercury from orbit for it to just be that one map (there might be another, I dunno, apparently that map was only in the free for all mode, so maybe there's another?), but who knows.

That's from the Mercury map.

Anyway, there's 19 story missions in the game, and only 6 Strikes. But one of those Strikes is a PlayStation exclusive, so that's only 5 if you're playing on an Xbox of any sort. And there's the Raid, but I haven't tried that yet. I don't know how many Crucible maps there are, because the Crucible is hella obtuse in letting me know about things, but I'll get to that in a bit.

So, to make up for this relative lack of content in the game, Bungie's implemented a bunch of systems meant only to be roadblocks to force you to replay missions over and over again, eventually at higher levels. The first of these is the level cap, which is only 20. But, once you get to 20, you start finding gear that has "Light." If your Light gets high enough, you level up. As I said earlier, I'm 27, which requires quite a bit of Light. What this means is that post level 20, leveling is completely dependent upon gear. That's fine, assuming you get gear at a reasonable rate.

See, in Destiny, leveling up to 20 is really fast. I didn't time it, so I don't know off hand, but the road to 20 feels fast. The road to any level over 20 is incredibly slow by comparison. Or, more accurately, it slows quite a bit until you get to 24, at which point it just stops for what feels like forever.

The blue gear (Rares) will only give you so much Light, and at a certain point, you need Legendaries to keep leveling. But the game drops Legendaries so rarely that it's become a joke. I've seen two separate (popular) Twitter accounts made just to joke about this. One is of The Cryptarch (the character in game that decrypts loot, as a lot of the loot doesn't tell you what it is when you get it), and the other is literally of the Legendary Engram itself. Engrams being the encrypted loot, if you don't know. The joke is that Legendary Engrams are incredibly rare, and then on top of that, most of the time they don't decrypt to Legendary gear, and even when they do, it's probably for the wrong class.

Seriously, the first three Legendaries that I got were all for the Titan class, and I'm playing a Warlock. And the one time I had a Legendary Engram decrypt to an Exotic item, it was for the Hunter class. I should also point out that by the time I had enough Motes of Light (one of the several other currencies in the game) to buy an Exotic Engram from Xur (a merchant that appears on Friday mornings and then leaves on Sunday morning), it decrypted to a piece of Titan gear.

(I found this gun on The Moon.)

Now, these things wouldn't be so bothersome if I could trade these things with other players. Hell, I'd GIVE them to some of my internet friends that can use the stuff, just so it'd be used. But instead, my options are to put them in storage in case I ever play characters that can use them, or dismantle them for materials. There's no way to sell them to vendors in game for currency either, because you can't sell things in this game. It's either keep it, or dismantle it. At least decrypting things is free, though now that I think about it, I'm a little surprised that it is.

But, fear not, there is a way to get Legendary and Exotic items in game without having to depend upon random drops! You can buy Legendaries from the various vendors in the Tower. But NOT with Glimmer. No, you need to buy them with vendor specific currencies, and only after leveling up with them individually. Well, mostly individually, because the Vanguards and Crucible technically have multiple vendors, with some for gear, and another for weapons.

So, let me explain how this system works. When you hit level 18, you start earning reputation for the Vanguards and the Crucible, the former for completely missions, Strikes, Patrol missions, the Raid (I assume), etc. And you get Crucible rep by playing the Crucible, and you get more for winning, which makes sense. And on top of getting rep, you also get Vanguard Marks and Crucible Marks, which are two more forms of currency in the game. You use Vanguard Marks to buy Vanguard things, and Crucible Marks to buy Crucible things. But it's yet more complicated than that. See, if you want to buy things from Dead Orbit, Future War Cult, or New Monarchy, you need to rank up with them as well. And you do that by buying a class item from them, and equipping it, at which point you get rep for them instead of the Vanguards, and then when you level up enough, you can buy things from them...with Crucible Marks, not Vanguard Marks.

Also, you can only get 100 Vanguard Marks a week, and only get 100 Crucible Marks a week. And the "start of the new week" is Tuesday, because of course it is. I hit the caps for last week on Thursday, I think. I could probably go back and check, but it was then or Friday, I forget. So far as I know, there is no cap on how many Marks of either sort that you can get, but more likely it's just so high that people can't have gotten to it yet. There's a cap for how much Glimmer you can have (25,000), and I've bought some stupid stuff like another new ship (which is purely cosmetic) just so I wouldn't be endlessly getting Glimmer without actually having more money. Kinda like buying stuff to keep from paying income taxes, in a way.

And it takes a while to rank up with these groups. I'm ALMOST rank three with the Vanguards, and still a fair bit away from rank 3 with the Crucible. I would be rank 3 with the Vanguards by now if I hadn't stupidly started trying to rank up in Future War Cult after getting some of the information about this from my internet friend Jay (I dunno his GB user name, but he's Chatman_Jay on Twitter, hopefully he'll see this blog). He plays a lot more of these sorts of games (not first person shooters, I mean Diablo types), and just generally knows more about the game than I do, so I usually go to him with my questions. We're neck and neck in terms of level right now, unless he secretly found a way past 27 while I was writing this blog.

There's my first, and so far only (for my class) Exotic item.

Anyway, we both quickly realized that it was better to just stick with the Vanguards and level them up instead. So far as I can tell, the only benefit to leveling one of the other vendors is to get branded gear for them, which seems dumb when I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to use one of the shaders you get access to after getting to level 20. I've been using this nice pink one for a while, because real men wear pink. And part of that is that after years of being in the closet and actively avoiding anything that would be perceived as "girly" or "gay," it's nice to not give a F any more and just make my character pink and dumb looking, but that's a topic for another day (though tomorrow is "Celebrate Bisexuality Day," so yay for that!).

I got off topic again. So, that's how you buy Legendary gear, and if you want Exotics, you have to pay Xur Strange Coins for definite items, or Mote of Light for an Engram that will probably not be for your class, because Bungie decided it was a good idea to give people items for not their class. You get Strange Coins and Motes of Light as rewards (some of the time) for doing things like Strikes, and you get a Mote of Light every time you would have leveled up, if this was a normal game where you leveled by getting XP for every level in the game.

Oh, and speaking of Exotics, you can only have one Exotic piece of armor and one Exotic weapon equipped at a time. Why? Hell if I know. I don't have any Exotic weapons yet, but I do have a Bounty for one. Oh, I haven't mentioned Bounties. So, Bounties are daily things where you are tasked with doing something, and they come in Vanguard and Crucible varieties. Vanguard ones are for things like killing 30 enemies with melee attacks without dying, or doing a specific story mission on a harder difficulty than the default. The Crucible ones are things like defeat 25 Warlocks, or getting 10 medals for going on a spree with a shotgun, that sort of thing. They're mostly manageable, and they're a good way to get rep, XP, and Marks for both the Vanguards and the Crucible.

Well, most of the time it is, at least. See, (and I know I've changed the topic, but I was going to discuss this anyway) some of the Crucible ones have been impossible to accomplish. How so? Well, having ones related to the Salvage game type when it's impossible to play Salvage matches makes it impossible. See, not every Crucible mode is open all the time. Last week (as in right after launch, not a couple days ago) Salvage was open, but then it was closed, and has been since. But that didn't stop playing Salvage from popping up SEVERAL TIMES as daily Bounties.

Which brings me to a bigger problem, which is the lack of options in the Crucible. As of this writing, there are four options in the Crucible. Control (capture points mode with 6v6 teams), Clash (team deathmatch with 6v6), Rumble (free for all with six players), and Skirmish (team deathmatch with 3v3). Now, this most recent weekend Combined Arms was open, which was team death match only on the maps with vehicles. But that and Salvage (which was a 3v3 mode where you need to control points until a meter runs down thing) are inaccessible. There's no way to play them right now. None. Zero. It's all dependent on when Bungie decides to let us play that mode.

And that is incredibly stupid. Not letting people play certain parts of the game because of some stupid whim on Bungie's part is horrible game design. Sure, it MIGHT get more people to play during the times when it is playable, but the correct answer is to just let people play it whenever they want. And the same thing applies to all the parts of the story/Strike/Raid stuff that don't have matchmaking. Yeah, it might be smarter to play with friends, but if someone wants to play with random people, then that should be an option. I would do the Raid if I had people to play with, but I don't have enough friends that are level 26 or higher. (Speaking of which, if you want me to join in on a raid attempt, just tell me and we'll try to figure out an okay time.)

This is even more baffling when you consider that Bungie's previous games are known for having TONS of options for the multiplayer stuff. I get not having that same level of customization if the game had to be rushed to get it out in time (and I bet it was), but not letting us play all the modes whenever we want is inexcusable. They should change that. Like the grind. I have a bunch of gear that I could upgrade so they have higher defense and Light, but can't because I don't have enough Ascendant Shards. How do you get those? By grinding the same missions and Strikes and the Crucible, except it's even rarer unless you're doing level 28 content. Jay and I were able to do a story mission at level 28, but it wasn't easy, and there's no matchmaking for any level 28 stuff in the game.

Which brings me back to the grinding. It's all grinding. Grinding, grinding, grinding. I was thinking about it, and Destiny feels like a free to play game, except you pay $60 and there's no microtransactions to buy in game stuff. Seriously, I checked. You can buy the game, and the expansions (either separately for $20 each or as a bundle for $35), but nothing else. On the one hand, I think it's good that there isn't, especially since this is an Activision published game, but on the other, this is still really bad design. It's grinding to make a short game feel long because of the lack of content.

It's a shame too, because there is a lot of great stuff in the game. When it's fun, it's super fun. Getting in and playing with friends is easy if they're on your friends list (don't get me started on how useless clans are for anything other than making a clan tag appear), the game looks great, and has some of the best music I've ever heard. Seriously, it's absolutely phenomenal stuff. To the point where I'm bummed that Marty O'Donnell left, because I just assume the great music is all from him and no one else. Well, I've been told the end credits music is terrible, but I didn't see the credits and it was done by Paul McCartney, and really, what were you expecting from one of The Beatles? Their music was bad then, it's bad now, and I bet anything he or Ringo tries to do musically now will also be bad. But I've gotten off topic again.

At its best, Destiny is one of the best first person shooters I've ever played. But at its worst, it's all the worst parts of free to play games, just without the part where you pay to get past the grind. Hopefully Bungie responds to the feedback and changes it for the better, but by the time they do, I might be done with this game....

Ah, who am I kidding? I know I'll buy the expansions and keep playing this stupid game. As much as I complain, I am still having a ton of fun playing it, and I don't plan to stop any time soon. Oh, right! I forgot about the Exotic Bounty! Let me get back to that quickly.

See, the first step of the Bounty was to do a Weekly Heroic or Nightfall Strike, which I did, then I had to do 25 strikes of any sort, which I did, and now my next step is to give a Strange Coin to Xur for something, but I have to wait until Friday to do that. According to the internet, the next step is to "kill Guardians in the Crucible." How many? I don't know! But I bet it's something absurd, like, a hundred or two hundred. But once I do that, I should have an exotic pulse rifle, which should be cool, I guess. I dunno.

This game is weird. It's kind of terrible but also kind of fantastic. I'm going to keep playing it. Oh, and I made a YouTube video with some footage from the game. I'll make a longer, better one at some point. Hopefully Sony adds direct upload to YouTube sometime soon.

I won't keep you for too much longer, but I do have a couple non-Destiny things I want to mention. The first is that I finally took my road test for my driver's license...AND PASSED! Which, would be less impressive if I wasn't turning 24 in a couple weeks and have been feeling bad for years for not having one.

In relation to "Celebrate Bisexuality Day" tomorrow, a couple days ago was the five month mark after the day I came out, so that's cool! Still one of the, if not the, best decisions I've ever made! Nothing else to say for the time being, but it's good to not be in the closet any more. :D

I played enough of most of this month's PlayStation Plus games to write about that, so I will probably next week. It'd be nice to have someone to play Sports Friends with, but if I don't, I don't.

I bought Super Mario 3D World off the eShop when it was on sale for $40 instead of the usual $60, but I haven't touched it yet. Been too busy with Destiny, but now that I've got some time before I can get going on my Exotic Bounty again, I'm going to start going on that.

And that's everything. I hope this wasn't too much of a rambling mess. And as I said before, if you are looking for someone to Raid with in Destiny, just get in touch with me. I'd prefer to do it with someone I kind of know (like Jay), but whatever. Actually, I'd say have two open slots, one for me and one for Jay. I feel like he deserves that after teaching me some of the more absurd systems in this game.

And now THAT'S everything.

Also, there's a dedicated dance button in Destiny, which is just great.