My Destiny with Destiny 2

There are games, that you just find interesting and follow along because of their art style, their world or story premise, weapon or armor design, the game play loop or simply because you have a friend who is a huge fan of this game. My story with Destiny is long and intertwined with passive and active times of play, so please bear with me on this one.

When Destiny was released for consoles in 2014, there were several aspects that teased and interested me. The world looked fantastic, the avatars looked fantastic, and the story’s told surrounding this game were fantastic to follow (e.g. loot cave). Nevertheless, playing a first-person shooter with a controller was not my cup of tea at all back then, but still I tried to play on my Playstation 4, but very quickly became hopelessly frustrated, stalled, and just forget about it. Still, I followed the later released expansions and stories told on Kotaku and by talking with my friend.

When Destiny 2 was released in October 2017, I played the demo on PC and got instantly sold on the game. I started on day one, but rather quickly stalled (again!), as I felt quite lonely within the game and had no clue what to do and what to work for. Around eight months later, some friends picked up the game in a Humble Bundle and we started to play together, and then suddendly all of Destiny’s magic came together and I played a lot(!) of Destiny 2, especially when the expansion Forsaken dropped; the game and the expansion were just awesome. The gunplay was awesome, the pacing of events and exploration was awesome, the loot, jumping puzzles, and exotic quests were also awesome. A really awesome state for a game.

Everything is awesome!

Of course, looter shooters are fun and work as long as the next „big thing“ feels like just around the corner, but Destiny’s year 2 with the expansion and additional seasonal release rhythm transformed all of it into a bloody chore. Not, that it has not been like that before, but these seasons placed a sort of limitedness & pressure to everything, which consequently turned out to become rather nasty in effect, especially for me and my service-game-completionist-issues.

So, it became more and more difficult to complete the content within each consecutive season and I felt increasingly dismotivated to log in and do dailies and weeklies and grind the Armory or whatever needed doing. Until I ultimately stalled somewhere in May 2019 with a good amount of aversion and frustration.

But another expansion was coming up – Shadowkeep, returning to the moon with new seasons and new armor 2.0 stuff attached, new challenges and a refresh in how those seasons should play out. And I was hyped again to return and play together with my friends and grind the hell out of everything.

The beauty and greatness of Final Fantasy XIV’s Shadowbringers expansion, together with a lot of work on my job, did delay my start from October to November, but when I started in November with full speed, I quickly accumulated 94 hours until December and at least enjoyed the first weeks tremendously. But soon the new mechanics started to show and I quit the game after completing the season path around December 9th.

So what did turn me off so badly? (in no particular order)

  • A hell of a grind.
    The grind in Destiny 2 is real. And I mean really real. There is so much you would have to do every day, and every week. Fill this bar, and that bar. Increase your level to continue the season path, your triumphs to get the season title, your power level and artifact to play more difficult challenges, and so on and so forth.
    Don’t get me wrong! – I am a big fan of making grind worth it; meaning if I put in an exotic, a title, or whatever, people should go and grind for that. It should not be given away to easy! But flooding my questlog with quantity and not quality is maybe not good design. Abundance is not always a good decision to motivate people. I just enjoyed the balance of Forsaken way better than Shadowkeep set it up.
  • Too many drops – less satisfaction.
    Later in the season I more and more lost interest in all the items and stats and what not. I just dismantled everything. Every item I got. I did not care anymore. Of course I did upgrade my power level on items and checked for a good build, mods, and weapon perks, but all these item stats / points on each items: I did not feel that caring for them would change or impact anything. Actually, the longer I played I felt it did not matter at all anymore to tweak around. A bit like in Diablo 3 with their rain of legendaries – you just start destroying everything for mats sooner or later …
  • Too many progress bars.
    I want to touch on this again. Logging in required me to make decisions on where to continue to grind my bars. I would have to strategically plan ahead for every evening and go to NPCs and pick up these bounties, quests, upgrades, and missions. Go to the tower first – decide; then decide a planet…. etc. Overall, there was just too much stuff to do. And me having completionist tendecies I want to complete my bars, I really do! But looking at so many each and every day… I felt like I will achieve nothing any more. It became so depressing, especially after logging out: What did I achieve in these hours? What’s the value of all this? Was it worth to play this game? What is my goal in all these activities?
    This was one of the major reasons that made me stop playing.
  • Obfuscated mobile game mechanics at work.
    I paid for the season pass and paid for the additional loot and got a season time limit to complete everything. And yes, I know the game is in its basic version free-2-play, so such mechanics should be in order… well.. or not.
    But, the combination of all those progress bars, time limits and a season path feels like you have to log in every day and do at least something. If you do not, you got a crawling bad feeling about your absence, as your progress towards the deadline will be less. A strong sense of Fear-of-missing-out. At the beginning I felt fine, but the longer I played, the worse it started to nag that I should not not play Destiny 2.
  • The story is just a collection of epic bullshit bingo words.
    The story tells me it is epic, but I don’t experience any epicness. The story tells me that it’s cool, but I do not know how and where to find this coolness. Maybe in these Triumph story reports? But they make no sense. They are collected in a random non-sensical order and when you finally read them in their order, they still make no sense. I have never seen so much lost potential on a very interesting world premise. Then, when I go to an NPC and hand in a story quest, I have a short text to read for my quest and listen to the babbling of the NPC at the same time. I cannot focus on either. I tried so hard, but still cannot concentrate on reading anything of Destiny’s story. Because I do not understand – what the hell – they talk about! I watched video summaries for more than an hour, and they were really well done and narrate a very good storyline, but I cannot find anything of that in the game. Nothing is explained. No expansion story arc or even thread has been followed up later. Nothing is concluded. Why Bungie, why?
  • Little information from Bungie on everything.
    Interestingly, with all these time limits in place, it was until the end of the season not clear, which quests will end and which will still be achieveable. Anyway, Bungie’s information policy is a topic for itself, so i won’t touch too much on this.

Ultimately I feel quite sad.
I played a lot with a friend of mine and he is an awesome player. One of those guys who knows the game inside out, because he played since the release of Destiny. He helped me so much and ran together with me through everything, that he had done hundreds of times already. So now, I feel like I left him behind and have a really bad conscience about it.

Again: the game is cool! Destiny is a great game at its core. But the way Bungie did re-imagine what players have to do, what is relevant and what optional, the mess of everything is so difficult to unravel and often just not rewarding. All you do feels like a trivial check on a very – very – long list of things to do.

Destiny 2 is a monster.

It will stun you with its awesome gunplay and loop systems. It will entangle you with its many tentacles and progress bars. It will slash its teeth into you and its dailies will suck you dry. And even when facing eye-to-maw with the monster, you will find your devouring experience … very enjoyable!

I had to incomplete for the sake of my mental stability and preserving my will to continue to play other games. With tears in my eyes.

A very … very difficult decision.

The Incompletionist

So I made a Spreadsheet…

Considering my previous resolution, I would I say I did not that bad.

Still, a new year seems to call for a new resultion, and as such I did what probably everybody who is considering new years’ resolutions is doing: I reflected on my last months and how to move forward.

Good things accomplished

From August to December I actually completed a whooping amount of three(!) games:

  • The Wolf among us (9 hours, 85% achievements)
    The first Telltale-Formula game by … uhm Telltale. Quite a good game with a good story, but some drag in the middle. Loved the atmosphere though.
  • Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (8 hours, 92% achievements)
    Visually expceptional with a mind-bending story, but with ridiculous combat mechanics.
  • Middle-Earth – Shadow of War (71 hours, 65% achievements)
    More of the same from the first part Shadow of Mordor. But, as with all open world sequels, more of everything does not make a better game experience, which turned this game into a tedious grindfest instead.

All three games were very nice on various levels, considering the different types of their genres. Especially Shadow of War was long overdue on my list, as I liked the first one and wanted to finish the series for quite a while.

Additionally, I also played a lot of Final Fantasy XIV (300 hours since end of June) and Destiny 2 (94 hours since October), but with both being service games, this somehow does not count, although a lot has been accomplished in both of them.

Bad things burned out

I had to skip Dragon Quest XI, which i really wanted to play, but could not find any motivation for. In addition, neither did I re-start Life is Strange nor Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and I fear these two have to wait a bit longer.

What became very intense again was me entering my viscious cycle around mid of December. Especially Destiny 2‘s season grind was very aweful. It felt like so much work to do every day and so much to achieve in various game modes every day, that I had no motivation to play at all anymore and really needed some change again. My burn-out from service games is so strong currently, that I do not even want to go back to Final Fantasy XIV anymore… and this really is something!

A new re-established Resolution

Considering these last months I at least had the feeling, that my chosen games were probably too ambitious. I felt something was amiss. So, when I had a talk with my brother last week, he casually mentioned during a talk about what we played recently, that “it would be best to just start with all games from the letter ‘A’ and then move down. Just do not decide.”

And then, somewhere – somehow – something, inside me, like a bell, started resonating.

“This is IT!” I cried. “This is how I will proceed with my pile of shame and finally get started. I just get handle the choice variable better!”* And so I pondered on and thought about, how to finally re-start great again, how to finally get control back and not side-step around and get nothing done.

After a short while it was already clear, that it would not be helpful to start with the first game in the alphabet, simply because this would take forever to come down to e.g. the Witcher games. Or, even worse, I would have to play through all Assassin’s Creed games in a row!

No, something needed doing, and here – big reveal – is the result of my pondering:

  • All games on Steam were categorized as followed:
    • Games I really want to play (to-play),
    • Games I completed (complete),
    • Games I probably will start (maybe),
    • Games I will start somewhen/never (somewhen), and
    • Games I do not care/ignore (don’t want to play)
  • Then I transferred all these games alphabetically into a spreadsheet.
  • I also added all other games from GOG, Origin, Uplay, and PSN.
  • This resulted in a list of 106 games across all platforms. Keep in mind, these are all games I really would like to play!
  • Then I divided this list into quarters, resulting in three columns with 27 and one column with 25 games. You can find my list of games below.
1st Quarter 2nd Quarter 3rd Quarter 4th Quarter
Aarklash: Legacy Darksiders 1 Last of Us Soul Calibur VI
Assassin’s Creed Darksiders 2 Legend of Grimrock Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 1
Assassin’s Creed II Deus Ex – Human Revolution The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2
Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood Deus Ex Mankind Divided Life is Strange Steins:Gate
Assassin’s Creed Revelations Devil May Cry 5 Lightning Returns The Surge
Assassin’s Creed III Divinity Original Sin Mass Effect 2 Sword Art Online Fatal Bullet
Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag DmC Devil May Cry (4) Mass Effect 3 Sword Art Online Hollow Realization
Assassin’s Creed Liberation Dragon Age 2 Mass Effect Andromeda Sword Art Online Lost Song
Assassin’s Creed Origins Dragon Age 3 Metal Gear Rising Tales of Berseria
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Dragon Quest XI Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zero Tales of Symphonia
Assassin’s Creed Rogue The Dwarves Metal Gear Solid The Phantom Protocol Tales of Zestiria
Assassin’s Creed Chronicles China Earth Defense Force 4.1 Mirror’s Edge To the Moon
Baldur’s Gate 1 Edge of Eternity Neverwinter Nights Tower of Time
Baldur’s Gate 2 Elex A New Beginning Transistor
Bastion Final Fantasy IV Nex Machina Trine 2
Bayonetta Final Fantasy VI Phantom Doctrine Valkyria Chronicles
Blackguards Final Fantasy IX Pillars of Eternity Warhammer 40000 Mechanicus
Blackguards 2 Final Fantasy XIII-2 Pillars of Eternity 2 The Witcher 1
Blashphemeous Hitman Planescape Torment The Witcher 2
The Bureau – XCOM Declassified Hollow Knight Quantum Break X-Morph Defense
Child of Light Horizon Zero Dawn Ruiner XCOM enemy Unknown
Code Vein Hyperdimensional Neptunia re:Birth Satellite Reign Yakuza 0
Crosscode Icewind Dale 1 Seven  Yakuza Kiwami
The Dark Eye – Chains of Satinav Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth Shadow of the Tomb Raider Ys Origin
Darks Souls Kingdom Come Deliverance Shadow Run Dragonfall Ys The Oath in Felghana
Dark Souls 2 Kingdoms of Amalur Shadowrun Hong Kong
Dark Souls 3 Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light Sleeping Dogs

Ok. So what’s deal now:
In order to find the – next game – I will play, I will start with the first row and am now comfortably provided with a selection of four games from my to-play category. From these four games I will then simply choose one, as chances are high that some games are selected, which I had forgotten a long time ago.

So from my first set of games (first row) – Aarklash: Legacy, Darksiders 1, Last of Us, and Soul Calibur VI – I chose Darksiders 1, and already started playing. And it’s really a lot of fun – I wanted to play this for such a long time anyway.

But of course some considerations still need to be made:

  • When a game from a series is chosen, no matter which part, I will always start with the first part of the series.
  • When a game is completed, it will be removed from the table and therefor the order within the table will change.
  • In order to choose the next game, I consider two variants:
    1. Always stay in the first row, and complete games within this row only. Games will change anyway with the elimination of the completed game from the list. Only the first row will only change, unless I finally re-start playing Aarklash: Legacy. This gives me some breathing time until the first Assassin’s Creed comes up …
    2. I will not always start from the first row. I could consider another variable e.g. the current date for the selection of the row (even though I do not have enough rows for each day).

So far, this should be my modus operandi for this year and I will make adjustments as I see fit along the way. But with enjoying Darksiders 1 so much right now, I feel rather confident (and a bit proud!), that this mode will be more helpful in my endeavor – Recapturing my Pile of Shame.

*The dialogue with my brother has been re-framed for dramatic purposes.

Game selection process.

Update: 09. February 2020

  • Deleted Aarklash: Legacy (moved to maybe list)
  • Added Darksiders 3 (found on PS4)
  • Added Shadow Tactics
  • Added Frostpunk
  • Added Okami HD
  • Added Pathfinder Kingmaker

How to select my next game

In order to find the next game I decided for the following process for my selection. My libraries have been pooled and categorized in the following scheme:

  • All games on Steam were categorized as followed:
    • Games I really want to play (to-play),
    • Games I completed (complete),
    • Games I probably will start (maybe),
    • Games I will start somewhen/never (somewhen), and
    • Games I do not care/ignore (don’t want to play)
  • Then I transferred all these games alphabetically into a spreadsheet.
  • I also added all other games from GOG, Origin, Uplay, and PSN.
  • This resulted in a list of 106 games across all platforms. Keep in mind, these are all games I really would like to play!
  • Then I divided this list into quarters, resulting in three columns with 27 and one column with 25 games. You can find my list of games below.

In order to find the – next game – I will play, I will start with the first row and am now comfortably provided with a selection of four games from my to-play category. From these four games I will then simply choose one, as chances are high that some games are selected, which I had forgotten a long time ago.

1st Quarter 2nd Quarter 3rd Quarter 4th Quarter
Assassin’s Creed Deus Ex – Human Revolution The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky Soul Calibur VI
Assassin’s Creed II Deus Ex Mankind Divided Life is Strange Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 1
Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood Devil May Cry 5 Lightning Returns Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2
Assassin’s Creed Revelations Divinity Original Sin Mass Effect 2 Steins:Gate
Assassin’s Creed III DmC Devil May Cry (4) Mass Effect 3 The Surge
Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag Dragon Age 2 Mass Effect Andromeda Sword Art Online Fatal Bullet
Assassin’s Creed Liberation Dragon Age 3 Metal Gear Rising Sword Art Online Hollow Realization
Assassin’s Creed Origins Dragon Quest XI Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zero Sword Art Online Lost Song
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey The Dwarves Metal Gear Solid The Phantom Protocol Tales of Berseria
Assassin’s Creed Rogue Earth Defense Force 4.1 Mirror’s Edge Tales of Symphonia
Assassin’s Creed Chronicles China Edge of Eternity Neverwinter Nights Tales of Zestiria
Baldur’s Gate 1 Elex A New Beginning To the Moon
Baldur’s Gate 2 Final Fantasy IV Nex Machina Tower of Time
Bastion Final Fantasy VI Okami HD Transistor
Bayonetta Final Fantasy IX Pathfinder Kingmaker Trine 2
Blackguards Final Fantasy XIII-2 Phantom Doctrine Valkyria Chronicles
Blackguards 2 Frostpunk Pillars of Eternity Warhammer 40000 Mechanicus
Blashphemeous Hitman Pillars of Eternity 2 The Witcher 1
The Bureau – XCOM Declassified Hollow Knight Planescape Torment The Witcher 2
Child of Light Horizon Zero Dawn Quantum Break X-Morph Defense
Code Vein Hyperdimensional Neptunia re:Birth Ruiner XCOM enemy Unknown
Crosscode Icewind Dale 1 Satellite Reign Yakuza 0
The Dark Eye – Chains of Satinav Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth Seven  Yakuza Kiwami
Darks Souls Kingdom Come Deliverance Shadow of the Tomb Raider Ys Origin
Dark Souls 2 Kingdoms of Amalur Shadowrun: Dragonfall Ys The Oath in Felghana
Dark Souls 3 Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light Shadowrun: Hong Kong
Darksiders 2 Last of Us Shadow Tactics
Darksiders 3 Legend of Grimrock Sleeping Dogs

But of course some considerations still need to be made:

  • When a game from a series is chosen, no matter which part, I will always start with the first part of the series.
  • When a game is completed, it will be removed from the table and therefor the order within the table will change.
  • In order to choose the next game, I consider two variants:
    1. Always stay in the first row, and complete games within this row only. Games will change anyway with the elimination of the completed game from the list. Only the first row will only change, unless I finally re-start playing Aarklash: Legacy. This gives me some breathing time until the first Assassin’s Creed comes up …
    2. I will not always start from the first row. I could consider another variable e.g. the current date for the selection of the row (even though I do not have enough rows for each day).

So far, this should be my modus operandi for this year and I will make adjustments as I see fit along the way. But with enjoying Darksiders 1 so much right now, I feel rather confident (and a bit proud!), that this mode will be more helpful in my endeavor – Recapturing my Pile of Shame.