Quick Look: Destiny 2 PC

It definitely does feel like a cakewalk if you have some good weapons. But there are some missions that just throw huge amounts of enemies at you, which probably isn't the best way to stimulate difficulty, honestly.

I was thinking about it during dinner, and I guess what I mean to say is that I know the monitor comments were overdone when I got the thing and couldn't stop talking about it, so I apologize. But it's a great piece of tech and I'm super enthusiastic about it, which I kind of don't feel like I need to apologize for? We still live in an era where PC ports might have capped framerates or not work with ultrawidescreen resolutions, or otherwise not take advantage of the gaming rig I've put together, and even if that information isn't useful to everyone, I can't imagine that it's not useful to anyone. Mentioning that might feel like braggadocio or whatever, but if I bring it up during a show I'm usually trying to make a specific point about a PC game, not just mentioning the monitor just to be mentioning it. If other staff members want to follow it up with a "did you get a new monitor?" joke, sorry! Not really going to tell them not to do what they find funny.

@rorie: I just wanted to make clear that I wasn't picking on you. I only meant a 21:9 monitor seems like an exciting new piece of display tech, which has varying levels of support atm and sometimes none at all! I can recognize your excitement and earnest interest in the tech, and I don't think it is annoying when you bring it up in that way.

Rorie rules!!!

I had that issue and after looking around I saw a lot of people saying it fixed it when they left their clan. I tried it and, sure enough, the problem was cleared up. It's speculated the current bug with clan rosters not working right is making your game constantly check for it which causes performance issues. It sucks, because I want to be in a clan but have to wait until the issue is resolved.

Hope it helps you too.

Edit: Apparently your question was already answered numerous times here. My bad.

I switched regions instead of leaving my clan, that did the trick for me. Not the best for Crucible because of ping but it gets rid of the stuttering at least

@rorie: Sorry for being an ass about it. I know you're proud of it and you're not the one that keeps this going.

Hopefully this makes up for it

@rorie: As someone with a 21:9 monitor it's nice to hear about the support. Overwatch is a disappointment. They crop the top and bottom of 16:9 to fit.

21:9 is the only way I can play video games now.

@arcadefire: This is a bug with the game at the moment. It's stuttering like crazy if you're in a clan with lots of people. All our stuttering issues disappeared when me and my brother left our 85+ people clan.

Huh, PvP has been fine for me. Matches just as fast as the console version did. Maybe it's a region thing?

Anyway, I had the same trepidation about the game. Not so much that I'd stick with the console version so much as "If I don't get the PC version, I'm simply not going to play anymore." I was able to max my level and beat the raid on the first and second week just fine. But the limitations of the gamepad really, REALLY come into play during intense firefights and especially PvP. The inability to quickly turn, combined with being so reliant on auto-aim (i.e. being deprived of what I consider the most vital FPS skill: aiming) and that sluggish 30 FPS just took its toll.

So I said screw it, had my friends pick up the game, and have been guiding them through the less obvious parts, like powerful gear. Couldn't be happier with my choice. Getting all my gear back has been surprisingly easy. Leveling after you've seen the story already is a friggin' breeze since you can skip all the cutscenes. The load times are dramatically reduced. Still too high, but nowhere near as long. The firefights are more fun because you're more agile and capable, but still challenging enough, since just landing tons of headshots is only part of the battle. But I can also jump into the air, spin around, shoot something, spin back around and chuck a grenade, all without thinking about it, and without landing. Much more of a power fantasy than holding the right stick in one direction for what feels like eternity and hoping the auto-aim is on your side.

I'm already back up to power level 275 with one or two more powerful gear milestones to go before the reset. Even beating the raid twice, I only got to 300 on console. So I don't feel like I've lost a lot. In fact, I did what I didn't do on console and leveled a second character, who is now 272. And I feel like I haven't put an excessive amount of time into either. It's just so quick. And I've been very happy with all the exotics I've gotten, I'm not missing any one item. I got my hard light, I got my silly wardriff coil, I got my chest and head pieces, I'm good.

It feels like the game just came out of a beta or something and now I have the proper, finished version.

@rorie:

Keep at it! Soon it will become funny again.

Aside from that, it's important to know whether stuff like 21:9, G-Sync/Freesync, Steam Controller are supported.

@rorie: No worries; I apologise if the tone of my comment sounded mean.

Soooooo Destiny says, "Look at this, we wanna be an MMORPG! Lookit, you can slashdance! Lookit, public quests! Lookit, group raids! We're an MMO now!

What, you want to chat via your keyboard? What do you think this is; an MMO?!"

Also, there are also Taken enemies in this game? Man, Destiny 2 really does seem like just an expansion pack for Destiny 1, but with a premium price tag.

If it goes on sale for a decent discount, absolutely. I'm not in any rush though, so could be 2019 even.

You can actually text chat but only with people in your fireteam which is probably for the best. Maybe it's because I didn't play much Destiny 1 but I am really digging 2 whole bunch.

Clan "Better late than never"

I'm with you @rorie I have the same monitor and I think mentioning 21:9 support is still a valid point as not all games seem to support it.

Well honestly, until literally yesterday, I thought Legendary items were the top of the line in the game and not exotics. Seems I was wrong. You can wear as many legendary items as you want but only one exotic armor and weapon at once. Seems I've been doing things a bit off so far lol Still, just finished the "single player" portion so now I'm just accruing gear I guess. PVP seems better since yesterday, so maybe I just had a few bad matches in a row of waiting etc. Also did my first strike (well, I did the spire one in the beta) - the one with the laser grids...that shit was pretty fun gotta admit :D

Just started this on PC and man, the higher frame-rate really makes a difference, particularly on a 144hz monitor. Faster is one thing, but it's so damn smooth... I can't go back, I'm spoiled. :)

yes

If anyone in the UK or Western Europe is looking for a clan on PC then 'Roys Boys' are recruiting. We're a fun, laidback clan but we are mostly interested in endgame pursuits - Nightfalls, Raids, Trials of the Nine etc.

Hit me up at: https://www.bungie.net/en/ClanV2/Chat?groupId=2193339

@thor_molecules: from what I've seen, the content disappears in the end game, right? The GB guys seemed to enjoy everything up to that point. Is this type of faux-MMO (for lack of a better term of the top of my head) really reliant on that end game? I played the first Destiny single player, thought it was ok, and ended up selling it off not long after, so I did not really bother with any stuff after the "story" was done.

Not sure why people complain about viewing menus. If all you want is game footage, its 2017 y'all, look Anywhere. I'm down for some menus.

Agreed, the more info on these sorts of things the better.

All your saved data for Destiny is saved server side with Bungie and you can link your PC, PS4, and Xbox profiles to a single Bungie.net acct - so it seems odd you can't transfer character data between platforms like Brad wants.

There was never aim assist when using KB/M in the Destiny 2 beta. I think Brad got some misinformation there or misread something. Unless there was some exploit that you could do using the controller, it was just people whining that aim assist gave controller players an advantage in PvP even though it doesn't.

@rorie Regarding the AA: MSAA, which is a "aware" of the geometry of the rendered image and only acts on the edges of polygons, is pretty much dead in modern games because it's incompatible with modern rendering techniques which do a lot after the main geometry rendering pass. In particular, deferred shading, which is away that lighting is applied to the image after the geometry rendering is completed.

FXAA and SMAA are both pixel shader based AA methods, which act on a frame after all other rendering passes are done. In a sense, you can think of them as Photoshop filters and every frame as a JPG. Because they are essentially just acting on a 2D image and not aware of the actual geometry used to construct the image, they generally introduce some amount overall image blurring as a side effect of the techniques used to figure out what's an edge since they can't really distinguish between an edge of a polygon and an "edge" that's simply a sharp detail within a texture.

SMAA uses a more "intelligent" edge detection method that results in less general blurring, but it also misses some real edges as a result. FXAA will result in more general blurring, but is correspondingly is better at softening edges.

Personally in Destiny 2 I prefer FXAA. It's still plenty good looking even with a little loss of sharpness in textures and the jaggies bug me more than that.

Good tech talk! I'm never quite as on top of the AA methodologies as this, so thanks for chiming in. I'm never really as bothered by jaggies as I am by low framerates, so the lack of an amazing array of options here doesn't really bother me as much as I might have implied.

Appreciate this quicklook Rorie, awesome to see they did a decent job with the port and its features.

AVOID! :)

Get a 4k with HDR and G-Sync when they come out, if you can afford it. Otherwise, OLED 4k w/ HDR (and a good response time or "display" lag, check into that for each model you consider - you want less than 25ms if possible, but less than 60ms is fine unless you're doing competitive games which require very quick reaction time).

Unless you're at 144Hz fan (I'm not, simply because they all sacrifice color quality and black/white contrast quite a bit to achieve that because they use TN or VA panels, and you need really low end games or low in-game graphical settings to get your FPS up over that anyway).

Plus, quite a few games still don't support 21:9 and never will.

Finally, 4K and HDR is just going to be more standard in general, so you'll have fewer headaches due to tech or just not-supported issues, and I find HDR is more important than 4K anyway (1080p or 1440p with supersampling/upsampling looks almost as good anyway, better in some cases due to the jaggies being blurred quite nicely with those settings - looks better than most AA to me). HDR and G-Sync are where it's at, and I really hope for a nice OLED with all of those things soon. I don't know why it hasn't happened yet (maybe it just has, and I haven't checked in the last month!)