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thefirstknife · 8 months

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Getting real sick of a certain subset of Destiny players complaining that it’s a baby game and crying to Bungie to nerf exotics and abilities when their ENTIRE POINT IS TO BE STRONG in specific ways as if they are being locked into using them.

IF YOU WANT AN EXTRA CHALLENGE STOP BEING SUCH A DPS GOBLIN AND JUST EQUIP SOMETHING THATS NOT TOP TIER META AND STOP COMPLAINING JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

MOOD. Go off.

It's incredibly annoying to me. They always use the argument of "the game should FORCE me to do things, I should not SELF-IMPOSE challenges." And like. ? I'm sorry but what? It's a video game for a big audience, it's here to be playable and accessible to the widest possible playerbase. There are plenty of ways to make the game difficult for yourself, so knock yourself out if that's your thing, but don't force others into it.

Like, I enjoy hard content, I regularly at least attempt day 1 raids, I do master raids, GMs, solo and solo flawless content and all that. But only when I want to. Sometimes I don't and I don't want to suffer in a patrol zone or struggle in a seasonal activity I'm doing for the story. The majority of the players don't want that. Designing games for the professional gamers only has NEVER been a good idea and never will be. Fifty streamers can't sustain a video game. It needs casual players who will want to come back to the game instead of feeling defeated.

One of the reasons I really enjoy helping others is because I know that casual players tend to struggle in stuff that's basic activity for me. I've seen people unable to get through a strike. I've sat for 10 minutes rezing someone who couldn't do the jump in a seasonal activity. I want those people to be able to play basic content without feeling frustrated and I want them to know that there are people out there who will help them out.

And this doesn't apply just to basic content, although it should start with that. I think all dungeons and raids and everything should be things that all players can complete. Fine, doing a master raid with all challenges should be tough, but it should be achievable with time and practice, not impossible. What a lot of these "pros" want is just completely divorced from reality.

It takes days and days of practice every time a new master raid is out for me and my team (all with thousands of hours of playtime) to get comfortable to finally finish it. We're far from casual players and it still takes a lot of time to be able to finish hard content. Making it even harder is insane to me. Like, if something is so hard that my team full of people, each with 5000+ hours of playtime and a coordinated team that's been raiding together for years now can't finish it, that means it's absolutely impossible for probably 90% of the playerbase. That's wild to me. Raids and GMs should have more people playing them. If master raids are too easy for you, Mr. I-Play-Destiny-For-A-Living, that's on you buddy. Unequip the super god tier god roll meta guns and loadouts or play something else.

And ofc, another excuse they make is "if I don't use meta, I am not going to win a raid race!" Then don't. Idk. Let me play you the tiniest violin. This affects literally nobody except a grand total of 50 people. Run your meta in day 1, and play with random shit otherwise. Play raids with all white weapons. Play without mods. Play without a HUD. Do things solo only. I don't know, make up a way to spice things up for yourself. I'm not interested in that and neither are 99% of the players out there. The game is genuinely hard enough for the majority of the players. On top of that, I am here to feel like a powerful space fantasy superhero. I am NOT here to die to dregs in patrol zones. If there's ONE thing that I know for a fact that put people off from Lightfall (as in this year of Destiny), it's the difficulty changes. They're annoying, frustrating and for some a barrier to entry more than anything else.

#destiny 2 #gameplay #ask #long post #i really do love helping but i can't not feel bad because once the people i helped are out of my fireteam...#...there's no telling what other experiences they'll have #there's so many speedrunners and people who don't care and people who just aren't helping and are instead mocking others #you can only do so much for a few people you see in activities #this season's activities are super tough. every time so far I've played everyone in the team was struggling #i'm gonna have to start going into altars of summoning with my full support build warlock just to sit in there and help people #istg the 'pros' have to get their loadouts restricted. go play with non-god tier armour sets and guns #equip the same loadout that some casual player has available and let me see you then #this idea that everyone has minmaxed best equipment available at all times is bizarre. please get your head out of your ass #'i have perfectly rolled all artifice armour with perfect stat exotics for every loadout because i have infinite time to grind' okay dude #most of us aren't being paid to play destiny. lmao #'the game used to be hard' no. you got better. you mastered it #why is this so difficult to understand. everything is hard when you first start. 5000 hours later it no longer is #the game is fine. the 'health of the game' is fine. you mastered it and outgrew it #either impose challenges on yourself or find something else #like. when i first started GMs they were almost impossible for me #now i play them for fun. they're still challenging but they're not the same level of hard and I'm fine with that #i enjoy them as content and they're still entertaining #and when a new GM comes out it's a new challenge to master so it'll be hard at the start #as everything ever in the world #if that's no longer enough for you then you just outgrew the game and should probably move on #the only reason why some things used to be hard was poor quality of life that got improved over time #not being able to mantle in d1 is not difficulty. it's just not good design. it was fixed and improved #the bitching about light 3.0 as well. man. just don't use the 'OP' fragments. it's so easy to unequip them #i personally love the variety and all the options i have now as opposed to before #okay tag essay done. fhkajhakfhksjf

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thefirstknife · 6 months

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I had some questions about what Vance actually did with the infinite forest during arrivals, did he seal it off or did he shut it down? I wonder what he actually did becuase people were more worried about Asher and Sloane at the time that I didn't hear too much about Vance.

He sealed it! Last we saw, when he did that, the Forest was still functional inside, just sealed from within.

Unfortunately, we really have no clue what that means at this point. Since the Witness took Mercury, does this mean that the Witness could not access the Forest? What about the Vex? Can they access the Forest? Does Mercury being in the anomaly affect that at all? Are there still Vex on Mercury? What about the Vex from inside the Forest? This is what keeps me up at night.

There are some interesting dialogues from Osiris back from Season of Dawn when we were trying to stop the Red Legion from destroying the Forest. This one for example:

Sealing the Infinite Forest could have drawn unwanted attention from within the Vex Network. Your efforts have stymied another front from supplanting our focus. You seem to have a knack for averting crisis, Guardian.

This seems to imply that the Vex would know if anything were to happen to the Forest, like sealing it. But this doesn't help us now because Mercury is in the anomaly. We simply have no clue if the Vex can do anything about the Forest while Mercury is in there. More under:

It's also interesting to note that Osiris didn't really have a plan for doing anything to the Infinite Forest before Mercury got yoinked. He was super worried about it and he was incredibly upset about losing the Forest, but he never really said anything about needing to protect it or seal it to prevent the Darkness from messing with it during Arrivals. In Dawn, with the Sundial, he explicitly talked about not wanting it to be destroyed or made inaccessible because he still needs it. For example:

There are secrets still to be uncovered in the Forest. I cannot allow it to be sealed. Not yet.

And:

As tempting as it would be to watch the Infinite Forest burn, it's too monumental a shift for our timeline to withstand.

And:

To seal shut the passage into the Forest would breed far more harm than good.

And:

The Infinite Forest is preserved. For now. I wish to decide the fate of those endless passages myself. We have not yet reached the end of its usefulness.

Of course, this was all before a Pyramid landed on Mercury and before Mercury was endangered. Would Osiris want the Forest sealed if he knew Mercury was going to be taken by the Witness? We have no idea. But him insisting that we still need it and that its existence is important sure is interesting. Still, strange that Osiris did not take any measures to do this himself. However, Vance appears to have followed instructions he found written in Osiris' texts to be able to seal it himself.

I'm not sure anyone in-game fully knows what Vance did. He did tell us that he plans to seal the Forest and that we can help him, which was what we were doing for the Mercury evacuation quest.

"Quantum cracks yawn in the Forest where echoes of Vex, Hive, Cabal, and Osiris swirl in a gyre. Strike these stress points, and I could seal the Forest from within."

But as far as anyone is concerned, nobody really saw him go there. As I mentioned before, Saint even looked for him and when he didn't find him in the Lighthouse, he assumed that Vance just evacuated. But they do know now that he stayed on Mercury and is presumed dead, much like Asher and Sloane were. Ikora mentioned him back in Splicer when she was explaining Solstice of Heroes to Mithrax and listed him among the dead alongside Asher, Sloane, Cayde and Sagira (obviously at the time we believed Sloane to be dead on Titan).

We know from lore that he built something called the Infinite Simulacrum which he used to seal the Forest. He's shown building it at the end of Trials and Tribulations (the lore book about the tones). This is happening around the start of Arrivals, just before the Pyramids arrive. It's interesting that he was preparing this machine before the Pyramids showed up:

Vance stood in the old Lighthouse, frantically assembling the Infinite Simulacrum: a machine formed from bits of simulation seeds and connective Vex architecture to mimic a pocket forest. Textured notes and schematics derived from Osirian lore guided his hand.

He used "Osirian lore" to make this device and as far as we know, it worked. We have no clue how he did that and how it worked. But it did!

He struggled with his pack as a tempest beat on his eardrums. He withdrew his Infinite Simulacrum, impossibly small in this immense space, and with trembling fingers synchronized it to the frequency of the crack in the Forest. It ticked like a metronome and then… Silence. The Forest was sealed.

The rest of this lore tab is bizarre, as Vance manifests the golden copies of himself and then attacks one of them and blinds it, which is strongly implied to be the reason why he is blind in the first place. Time shenanigans possibly? But we don't know anything else and we don't know the state of the Forest right now. Again, the Witness must've taken Mercury for a reason and the Forest is probably that reason, but since it was sealed... It's unclear what the Witness may have been doing with it, if anything at all.

Vance strongly believed back in evacuation that the Forest and the Pyramid on Mercury are tied together and important:

"Osiris, the Forest, the Pyramid," he says. "There are connections here that go beyond simple prophecy—" He stops abruptly, then whispers in the silence. "As Guardians fall in the Trials, this Lighthouse chimes a dirge. Can't you hear it? Here, in the shadow of the Pyramid, the tones have grown richer."

And here:

Vance traces an arcing hypotrochoid spiral on a thick piece of parchment. "Osiris used obscene amounts of Fractaline to power the obelisks," he says, shaking his head at the paradoxes the old Warlock tempted. "Now I feel this taut reality tremble and groan. It anchors countless timelines, all pulling against the chronological center. And this Pyramid threatens to collapse them all." "The Infinite Forest is the key to all of this," he says. "How, I do not yet understand. Any help you could provide would be most welcome."

Cryptically and ominously, when the Pyramid arrived to Mercury, something that speaks in between the lines of text says this:

These additions to the text between | symbols only show up in the first lore tab of this lore book (where the Vex are shown pouring onto Mercury from a portal above it) and in the last lore tab where Vance is observing as the Pyramid arrives. Why is he "the implement"? The implement of what? I've not stopped thinking about this for three years.

So he definitely sealed the Forest, but we have no clue what's the true meaning of this. Did this prevent the Witness from using the simulation engine? Did this help the Witness? Was Vance tricked and used, manipulated through the tones? What about the Vex? Did this mess up something for the Vex or help them? We simply don't know, because Mercury is in the anomaly and we can't access it.

Since I'm hungry for literally any information, I went into unhinged mode over the state of the game article because it mentions a peculiar piece of information about that new pvp map, Multiplex. Yes, I'm at the stage where I'm looking for lore in an article about a new pvp map. However, consider:

Although many of us had been thinking about a lo-fi Vex map for the Crucible, the challenge of this palette was the possible lack of player orientation in the play space. We thought bringing the Mars palette into the Vex Network realm would be a great way to mitigate this while adding an evocative look. Narratively, the space is in the middle of compiling the Infinite Forest, so this is what you’ll see in action.

The Vex are doing a what now in the Vex Network? They're compiling the Infinite Forest? Like, the Vex have to be a major plot at some point in the future of the game so any of this might be setup for stuff that will resolve these questions about Mercury and the Infinite Forest. The Vex must know, in some way, that the Infinite Forest was taken from them by the Witness and also sealed from inside by Vance, which may or may not be a good thing for them (and may or may not be a good thing for us OR for the Witness).

I understand why people were more worried and interested in Asher and Sloane, but I was always most interested in this, ever since the tones. Seeing us get a closure for both Asher and Sloane makes me think (and hope) that at some point we have to also get closure for Mercury and Vance, which may also possibly tie into any Vex storyline because of how thouroughly the Vex converted Mercury into their machine world.

And of course, the Infinite Forest is there. This is super interesting to me in general now because Lightfall had a lot of stuff about simulations and virtual/augmented realities, as well as the Vex who are in the background of it all, but still not taking the central stage. They'll have to eventually and I'm hoping we'll get some information on Mercury and the fate of the Infinite Forest.

To fully add to the whole mystery, there's also the Veil. In Season of the Deep, Ikora and Osiris speculated about Titan's return and how it related to the Veil. Apparently, the Veil "noticed" when Titan returned:

"It's stronger… the Veil's signature." Ikora's voice carries a hint of learned suspicion. "Ever since we recovered Titan." "That is to be expected," Osiris retorts, now within the weave of droning Strand surrounding the Veil. The room around them trembles. "When Titan was torn back, the Veil took notice. It seemed to recognize Titan's arrival." Ikora tightens her grip on the Strand thread. "We have the Veil, our Ghosts… what are we missing? If we decipher the connection between Titan and the Veil, that connection might be what we need to follow the Witness."

And:

"Titan, Savathûn's throne world, every place we've found egregore… I haven't found the exact threads yet but pull one and they all seem to spin back to Neomuna. To the Veil." "You're getting ahead of yourself. Following some of my… less favorable tendencies. Nimbus says we must 'flow' to understand Strand; perhaps it is the same with the Veil." Osiris moves beside Ikora and reaches up, palm parallel to the threads drawn taut from Ikora's braid of Strand. "Sol remembered Titan, in a way. The Veil's signal spiked when Titan returned from memory to reality, when the rhythm of the solar system had been restored to order." Osiris drops his hand and looks to Ikora. "Perhaps we must simply find that rhythm before we are able to interpret the beats within it."

Would it then not help to also return Mercury and Io? Would the Veil react to that as well? Would that help us somehow? Restore the "rhythm of the solar system"? According to Ikora in this lore tab, spoken in such a way that I fully believe this to be a 4th wall break:

"We're too late in the game for something to mean nothing. It has to connect."

Yeah. It really has to. Put Mercury back right now and tell us what's going on with the Forest and the Vex.

#destiny 2 #vance #infinite forest #osiris #vex #lore vibing #long post #ask #there's something here i know it. there has to be #experiencing category 10 unhinged moments #i am vance's strongest warrior

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