Destiny: A View From Outside

As I toil away at Diablo 3 and Dishonored, working towards an end goal that seems no closer than it did two weeks ago, I've been unable to escape the Internet Hype Machine and what it says about Destiny. I've never been a huge Halo fan and, now that I have this achievement hunting OCD, I've become even less of one. Bungie has never had what I would call 'good' achievements. There are some that are genuinely interesting and worthwhile, like beating the game on Legendary by yourself, for instance. That requires skill and effectively tells people that you've willingly accepted the fact that you've given many hours of your life to overcoming a difficult obstacle.

That said, the majority of Halo achievements are just the worst, most boring slogs imaginable. From what I've seen about Destiny, it seems no different. If anything, it actually seems worse than anything a Halo game ever did. The reason I feel this way is simple, and I hope I can convey exactly why I have such an intense dislike for Destiny, despite never playing it or even seeing that much footage of it.

I played World of Warcraft for many years. I started in the twilight of the Burning Crusade and went up through most of Cataclysm. I started as a way to distract myself initially from the recent death of my grandfather and the miserable winter that had followed that event. I'm not sure why I played as long as I did, though. The only reason I didn't go into Mists was because my PC simply got too old to deal with the engine improvements. It kept hard-locking my system. The day I purged my system of WoW was a very cathartic day. I knew my characters would still be there if I ever wanted to return. But the cost of the subscription combined with the worry it would keep freezing my system meant that such a day wouldn't be soon.

But that wasn't what drove me away initially. I kept my WoW subscription going about a year beyond when I actually stopped playing. I thought Wrath of the Lich King was interesting, even though it got a bit grindy towards the end. There's nothing inherently wrong with a game being grindy. I like grindy Korean MMOs just fine, after all. Then Cataclysm came and with it, a complete change in mindset at Blizzard. See, I know that the second M is for Multiplayer. But to me, that extended as far as seeing other people running around and making cities populated areas. I was in several guilds over the years, across many characters, but they all ended with me either leaving or getting kicked. Why?

Raiding.

To me, that word is 100% synonymous with the word 'Suffering.' That is what raiding is to me. That is always what raiding was to me. Raiding is a second job, and your coworkers are the most inept people you could ever hope to run across. I can tell you the exact moment when I finally gave up on the dream of being in a good raiding guild, too. It was very distinct and is something I remember vividly to this day.

We were in Ulduar, as we often were back then. I saw the back half of that instance once, and it was only for a Mimiron encounter that we could not overcome. Mostly, we'd sit and wipe somewhere in the first half of the raid. Our guild leader wanted a full sweep of it, too. That meant clearing out every boss, including the optional ones. Including Auriaya. Auriaya is a stone giant that patrols around a ring-shaped room with large panther adds. She can be easily avoided and has a fairly short aggro range. I couldn't tell you what the ability was anymore, even when staring at the wiki, but she has an attack that absolutely had to be interrupted. Before staring, the GL would give the order we'd interrupt in and, over Vent, would call out whose job it was to go next.

Unfortunately, the attack had a very short cast time, and people don't always have the best connections. But even with good connections - something the GL actually required in order to be thrust into interrupt duty - people would not pay attention. Over the course of three sessions, each easily three hours apiece, we would wipe to Auriaya because no one could do their jobs. We would lose huge amounts of gold on repairs, we would fly back in, and we would run head-first into that brick wall once again. I got fed up with wiping on the first night, but I wanted to keep my place in the raid, so I stuck it out. I wasn't on interrupt duty because I didn't have the abilities required. My job was just to burn things down and, if needed, to push back enemies if they were chasing after the healers.

When I feel like I'm not making progress in something, despite sinking multiple hours into it, I get incredibly frustrated and drop into a foul mood. And if the people causing those feelings are joking around on Vent chat and yucking it up right after blowing up the raid, those feelings are going to find a target very quickly. By the end of the final night (that I was with, anyway. Presumably they kept on beating their heads against it) I had had enough. I let the tanks know they were awful for being thoroughly incapable of keeping a grand total of three mobs off of the casters. I let the healers know that they were being completely inept at actually focusing their heals on the people that needed it, often spamming heals on tanks who didn't need it. And I let the other DPS classes know exactly what I thought about them using 'joke' skills and abilities on day three of a boss we weren't able to put down when everyone was actually trying.

Later, I'd join a slightly better guild around when the final raid of the expansion came out (I think). The one that opened up Icecrown. I saw the lower half and I saw a lot of the upper half of that place, but we never reached Arthas. Despite being better, it was still filled with stoners and idiots and there's only so much of that I can take, especially with a five minute runback and a twenty minute pre-fight prep and speech by the GL. I dropped out of that one willingly and it basically was the end of my adventures in raiding. I never got into the Raid Finder when it was introduced because the only thing worse than guilds was dealing with randoms. The raids you got via the Finder were nerfed to oblivion and back, and people still couldn't beat them.

So I went into Cataclysm solo, and solo is not something Blizzard accepted at that point. In Wrath, you could get tiered gear by doing daily heroics and such, getting tokens and saving them up for your armor. You had to raid in Cataclysm to get anywhere near that gear. Cataclysm was savagely overtuned for most of its life, as well. Most guilds couldn't get better armor because there was only one avenue for it, and you had to be in a competent guild. Anyone who's played World of Warcraft can tell you that 'competent guild' is an alien term. The problem extended to random dungeons, though. Even standard, non-Heroic dungeons were overtuned to the point where you would be lucky to get even halfway through them. Forget about the Heroics themselves. Those often required raiding gear to stand a ghost of a chance.

The gear and content was gated in such a way as to actively punish anyone who didn't want to spend two to five hours a night, multiple nights a week, dealing with a bunch of dipshits over voice chat. That's when I bowed out.

This brings us back to the present, to Destiny, and to Destiny's Raiding.

There is no matchmaking in Destiny. You cannot group with randoms to do its raid content. Don't have enough people who A) play the game and B) want to spend multiple hours dying to bosses? Then sorry, you just don't get to experience that content. What reason would they do this? The raid content has been described as being 'too difficult' to do with randoms. It's Cataclysm all over again. The content is overtuned to where only a fraction of the playerbase will ever get to fully experience it. Bungie thinks this is actually an intelligent thing to do.

I don't know anyone who bought Destiny. My friends list is completely devoid of Destiny popups. But even if I did know a handful of people who wanted to raid, no one wants to spend hours trying to make progress, only to be stymied by shit that's often out of their control. That brings us back to getting frustrated at not making progress, which leads to not wanting to play at all.

Raiding is a dirty word to me, worse than any swear you can think up. I cuss like a sailor and I don't like to say the word, because to me it represents everything wrong in games. Especially when it goes out of its way to block content - something you paid to get to see and experience - due to difficulty and a lack of competent players. And, in Destiny's case, it's also locked behind a friends-only barrier. If you don't know enough people who play and aren't the type to go on forums just to seek out people who join you, then you don't get to see it. Full stop. And let's say you do seek out randoms via boards. That only shows that the concept is fucking stupid, because it's easy to get around! And that's still no guarantee you'll make it through the raiding content because you're dealing with randoms!

You don't know these people! You don't know their commitment level or how good they are at the game! You're playing with them because they're in the same boat you are - they don't know anyone who plays and, instead of using an in-game matchmaking system to find random people, they've gone online to find random people! There's literally no god damn difference in these things except for the fact that you have to go outside the game, wait for replies (which could take hours or days), manually add them to your friends lists, and then you can take a stab at the content you wanted to play two days ago!

Destiny has raiding achievements, and that's really where the source of all of this anger lies. Beating a raid. Beating a raid with only clan members, which I'm assuming is just another layer of bullshit you go through on top of requiring them to be on your Friends List. Beating a raid without anyone dying. Beating a raid on Hard. These are 'achievements' in the sense that they would require effort to get. But do you really want to try getting them? Do you want to go through the tedious process of hunting down people outside of the game to get around Bungie's systems? Do you want to devote hours and hours and hours, dying to the same thing? Do you really want to try getting everyone in the group through a raid without anyone dying? Above all else, that's an achievement that's 100% dependent on other people. That's something you may never get, and there's nothing you can do to help that fact.

Like I said - I don't know a whole lot about Destiny. Maybe the raids were overhyped in regards to difficulty. Maybe these achievements are easy to get! Or maybe they'll get nerfed ten DLC packs down the line! That doesn't matter to me. The annoyance involved in getting a good group together, and depending on them to perfect the game is the kind of thing I cannot stand in games. I would hate this system even if I didn't achievement hunt. Even with fans doing things like this to try and coordinate out-of-game matchmaking, that's a step that should not fucking exist.

In doing this, Bungie is also insulting the intelligence of every single person playing their game. They are actively saying "No, you and this ragtag group of players you've assembled are too stupid to beat this overtuned content we've developed."

But then you add them to your friends list and magically, you become smart enough to go raiding?

All this is doing is adding extra steps to an already tedious process. Raiding is not fun under any circumstances. I have never had a raid experience that was fun in any way, across any of the games that have such a thing. I know that isn't the same for everyone, I admit I'm probably in the minority, and I know some people get hard-ons for content that very, very few people will ever complete. It's like they let TotalBiscuit decide how raids should go. Back during the Cataclysm beta, the videos he uploaded made his stance on difficult content very apparent. To him, randoms shouldn't be allowed to beat content. If you didn't spend days grinding for gear, you shouldn't even be allowed to enter dungeons. Heroics were overtuned to the point where you'd wipe nonstop and he found that delicious. He thought it was good game design and saw nothing wrong with the fact that it meant most players would never ever get to complete the content.

That's the kind of stuck-up attitude I'm seeing with Destiny's raiding system. There's nothing stopping you from adding people you find in town (or whatever) just to circumvent the idiotic lack of a matchmaking system. You're manually matchmaking by adding people, and that's not going to get you any closer to completing the raid than an actual matchmaking system would have. It's exactly the same, they just want to make you jump through hoops.

I can't speak for most of Destiny's achievements. But this is the reason I will never lay a finger on the game myself. As someone who has to perfect games in order to satisfy her OCD, I would never be able to put up with other players not knowing what they need to do, or actively trolling players they've grouped with. I simply do not have the patience to go outside the game for a group, coordinate when to do a raid, and then spend hours wiping over and over. That is not fun. That is, in fact, the very opposite of fun.

Difficult achievements will always exist. And when these achievements are not dependent on someone else not fucking up, then that's fine. I've beaten games on the hardest difficulties, I've ground out Challenges for weeks in Borderlands 2 and Colonial Marines, I've beat my head against the nigh impossible Extreme Campaigns in Arkham City. I've gone through a lot of tedious, frustrating, maddening achievements and I will not get anywhere near Destiny purely from the raiding content.

I apologize for this rather lengthy rant on the subject and, with any luck, will get back to normal discussions on achievements shortly. But the blog is titled Achievement Reviews, and I suppose this is just another method of reviewing. It's not the typical kind of post I'd make, but seeing raiding content gated in such a stupid way just sets off long-buried hatred of how MMOs work, I guess. I think certain things in gaming need to die out and raiding will forever be at the top of that list.

Dishonored: Art of the Shadow

As of this writing, I'm sitting at 41 of 80 achievements completed in Dishonored. I can tell you already that it's going to be a long and very... unpleasant, shall we say... breakdown, once I finally finish. That may not be for some time, however. It all depends on a number of things going my way and, as anyone who's ever tried to perfect or speed run the game could tell you, the RNG in Dishonored does not like you. What's the holdup? Well, where do I begin?

I beat both Daud DLCs finally. The second is better made than the first, but both are incredibly sub-par in comparison to Corvo's campaign. I fully understand that I am in the minority when it comes to that line of thought. The Knife of Dunwall (the DLC, not Daud) has very poorly constructed levels, for one thing. I'm not entirely sure what the developers were even going for with Daud. His Blink pauses time as long as he's standing still. It's Baby's First Stealth Game mechanics. But then it gives you these buildings with multiple floors and very cramped quarters, completely choked with dudes. From my perspective - someone who will play the Rogue or the Thief when given the chance - these levels were not designed with stealth in mind. At all.

The most apparent level in that regard is the final one in Knife of Dunwall. You're revisiting Daud's hideout. That's the one where you can either swipe Daud's key or assassinate him as Corvo. It's clogged with Overseers and music box guys. The music box guys block your Mystical Emo-Dude Powers. This wouldn't be too bad if the level wasn't a half-destroyed building filled to bursting with guys you won't be able to see in most cases. You have to rescue four of Daud's men during the second part of the stage. I'm not sure how the final bit plays out, as I was thoroughly unable to do Low Chaos. Try as I might, everything just went pear-shaped and so I ran with it. I killed more guys in that mission that I have in 2 full playthroughs of the main campaign, no joke.

I got Low Chaos very easily in Brigmore Witches, on the other hand. And while the levels are a little more lenient in regards to slipping through undetected, I'm still puzzled at how I'm going to do certain things. I'll say this - priority 1 is going to be Time Stop. I have to get it as early as humanly possible. The third stage of Dunwall and the second of Brigmore (hell, the third's pretty bad too, but I was able to choke/dart/Blink dudes with little issue) are going to be a nightmare if I can't.

But that's the DLC, and it'll be awhile before I return to it. Let me talk about the main reason I'm writing this up. Partly it's to vent, because I just wasted a little over an hour with nothing to show for it. I did get through Coldridge without being spotted, and I remembered to make a save there specifically so I never have to watch the intro sequence again. It got me an achievement, and that's likely to be the last one I get for a good while.

I'm trying for a number of things this playthrough. Mostly, I'd like to end up with Clean Hands (complete the game without killing anyone), Shadow (complete the game without alerting anyone), and Ghost (complete all missions without killing or alerting anyone. Seems redundant but okay).

Surgical, the achievement for getting from the prologue through Kaldwin's Bridge (roughly the halfway point) without killing anyone will come as I work on those others.

Holy hell, is High Overseer Campbell a pain in the ass. I sounded 2 alarms and I'm not entirely sure how. If it wasn't from spilling the wine glasses, then I'm baffled as to when it occurred. But I spilled them and so Campbell went with Curnow down to his Secret Room of Music and Trash. This involves going down a squared, spiraling staircase that typically has two guards. One that paths up and down the stairs, and one that paths in, looks through the keyhole of the door that Campbell goes through, and then goes off into a different room.

So you avoid those two guys, slip through the door (and close it behind you so peephole guy doesn't get suspicious) and then things get fun. You have to wait until Campbell opens the secret door to his back room (because there's a Sokolov painting in there, and collecting those is its own achievement), choke out Curnow, then Sleep Dart Campbell. Go in, grab the loot you want, and then buckle yourself in because it's a long haul from that point forward.

See, you have two goals here - to transport Curnow's unconscious body somewhere safe (read: A Dumpster) and to stick Campbell in the torture room's chair (and optionally Brand him). So you grab Campbell's body and go back upstairs to the peephole door. Trigger Dark Vision to see where the guards are, then try your damnedest to slip past (while closing the door again) and back upstairs, and maneuver through the rafters until you reach the room in question. ...Which does not have a door on one side. Strap Campbell in and Brand him or not. Either way, back into the rafters, back across the level, back down that spiral staircase, back through the peephole door, and hey it's Curnow.

Back up the stairs and through the peephole door. Back up the spiral stairs and through the rafters to the room where I spilled the wine glasses, outside onto the ledge, along the building, and down to street level where two guards path to chuck the idiot into his Safety Dumpster. Then you have two options, neither of which are any good.

Option A) Go through the door near the dumpster that leads back to the first part of the stage, where Samuel the Boatman is waiting. This is difficult because it spits you into a back alley with nothing high to Blink onto, just behind a series of guards that are harassing some civilians. One has his back to you and, at least judging from Dark Vision, one or two more guys down the little alley staircase. No idea how to get past them. So for the next time I get to do Option B) Going back up into the building, back down the spiral staircase, past the patrolling guards, and through a door one wall away from the peephole door!

Going through that exit puts you in a more advantageous rooftop position and you can Blink your way to Sam unmolested. It's an extra 5 to 15 minutes, because unless you've upgraded Blink's range, then you're not going to get back up onto the building from the dumpster you lob Curnow into. 

The obvious solution is to stop trying for multiple challenging achievements at once, but I don't want to replay the game a dozen times to get everything, ya know? I'll need a High Chaos ending run, and that's the one I'll get all the achievements for killing dudes with gadgets and using Stop Time to let a guard shoot at me, Possess him, then run him into his own bullet. Mostly Flesh and Steel, an achievement for never purchasing any Powers, will be its own run.

It's aggravating in a way that simply won't make sense to anyone who doesn't achievement hunt, I don't think. It's a level of frustration you'll never see just playing through the game like a normal person would. There are guides out there, but I'm trying to refrain from doing that. At least until Dunwall City Trials, which is going to do bad things to my mental condition. Not really a good time for that to happen, to be perfectly honest.

I'm calling it right now: Void Star will be the final achievement I get in Dishonored. That's for completing all Normal and Expert Challenges with a 3-star rating.

There's that word again: Challenges. And these Challenges, as with all Challenges, will be what I mop up last and what will likely cause the most anger out of everything. I'm just over halfway done, but I've got most of the mountain ahead of me. I've just climbed a small hill to get to that mountain. And at the top is a flag. The flag has a picture of a middle finger and it's signed by everyone involved with Dunwall City Trials being made.

Later today I'll start work on High Overseer Campbell again. Maybe I'll just accept the fact that playing the whole game just for one achievement will be faster than being stymied for hours on what should be simple tasks. I've hit the point in the game where I need to rearrange my doc on this game by runs instead of by category, just to sort out what all I can get done per run.

I'm sure I've said it before, and I'll openly say it again: Do not get into achievement/trophy hunting. It is bad for your mental health. And probably your physical health, as well. If you have OCD, you really should not get into it. It's a dangerous slope and the only thing you get out of it is the satisfaction that you beat the game, the game did not beat you. Very rarely is there a sense of joy at completing a game. Often there isn't even a sense of accomplishment. You're most certainly justifying the money you've spent, but is that always a good thing?

In the end, it all boils down to what type of life you have and if you need a way to extend a game out a little further. I've got an entire mountain range to cross here, and I have no idea what the other side looks like. If you have to do this as a pasttime, pace yourself. It's good to have two games to work on at once, so you don't fry yourself just beating your head against a wall over and over. Any more than that and you're just asking for trouble.

There's fun to be had in Dishonored. I know. I've had it! But this is not the part that is fun. This is the part that the struggle begins at. From this point to the time the 80th pops, it's work, and it isn't going to accomplish itself. That is what achievement hunting is, at its core. Work. I often equated raiding in WoW to having a second job. You go in for a set number of hours a week, you deal with complete assholes you'd never be caught dead with outside of the time you had to spend together, and you get absolutely no sense of accomplishment out of it, because your coworkers don't know how to do anything correctly.

Someone will always move when Flame Wreath is cast and the raid blows up. I'm not sure what that had to do with Dishonored, but it's 5:30AM and I'm trying to write a post about achievements. Making sense stopped a long time ago.

If I had to put an ETA on a breakdown article, I'd say two weeks? Give or take? Again, it's mostly dependent on how lucky I get in regards to the AI. I'll spend some time watching other people do Low Chaos/Clean Hands runs on both the base game and the DLC, and I'll most definitely watch people do Dunwall City Trials just so I have an optimal path set out. I work best on a tight deadline, after all. It's time to buckle down and get started.

September 1st, 2014 Update

Figured I'd post something to talk about the next reviews likely to go up and when to expect them. Real life has, as it tends to do, gotten in the way and slowed things down quite a bit. Still, I've gotten a handful of things in the pipe, so I thought I'd update the blog.

First up, Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition. This was an impulse buy and I'm kind of glad I did it. I haven't played Diablo 3 since the PC release 2 years ago. A lot of small quality of life improvements have been added, but the grind after L40 or so is still very real. It's not fun in any way, and there's an achievement for hitting level 70 on all six characters. That's a purple, time-sink achievement. The rest aren't too bad, but that one's slowing my completion down considerably. In the ~2 weeks since it launched, I've gotten a Crusader to 70 and a Wizard is being worked on now, currently in the mid-40s. It may take until October to finish since I'm splitting my time.

Dishonored was one of August's free Games With Gold on Xbox Live, and originally I hadn't planned to get it, since the DLC was not off. But then a sale happened, and the DLC was priced lower than the GotY version on Amazon went for. I was considerably in the clear for monthly bandwidth (AT&T is evil. 150GB a month. Overpriced BS!) so I figured what the hell. I was 21/80 achievements when I started, as I rented it when it first came out. I've gotten two or three since then just from replaying the game to shake off rust. Then I'll play through the DLC and then I'll actually start hunting.

Lego Marvel has been sitting idle for awhile. My plans to do it + Duke went down the drain when I got Diablo. That and the fact that I really need to be in a better state of mind to tackle Duke. I'm not in a position where I can afford to get pissed off at its rampant homophobia and misogyny just yet. I hope to get started next month, at the latest.

Lego Marvel may take awhile to complete, due to races and brick collecting and whatnot. Never tried to perfect a Lego game before. You certainly get your money's worth.

So that's where we're sitting. I'm close enough to the end of D3 that in a week or two I could probably just do the breakdown post for it. After all, beyond a point all I'll be doing is level grinding the entire original cast, and the difficulty seems dramatically lowered from the original PC release. That'll come first, but I don't know which of the three others will follow.