Destiny 2: It’s the most wonderful time of the year
“It’s the most wonderful time of the year, with Guardians singing and where sparrows go zinging”…..wait…”queue record scratch”… No. It isn’t. It’s the same old grind man where is the Dawning spirit, where is the fun and frivolity… I mean there isn’t even enough snow on the ground for robots to make snow angels…what the hell is this fictional world coming to?
The original Dawning Event was really a lot of the fun, with Sparrow races which included two new tracks and new armour sets as rewards for complete objectives related to the SRL (Sparrow Racing League) and a Dawning record book which provided a fun way to achieve various quests that resulted in some great loot.
Destiny Two’s Dawning event is, as expected, very different, just not in a good way.
Each day you get a daily schematic for a gift which you need to give to one of the npc’s, as a little thank you for all their hard work keeping humanity from ground under the heel of the never ending horde of alien invaders hell bent on its destruction… and if you complete the combination of grinding and farming, in return you get a gift of your own, which so far has been four sparrows and four ghosts each are cosmetically the blue, white and gold of the Dawning and each essentially the same thing in terms of the randomly generated ability.
I know this is the luck of the draw, but this feels a lot like getting the same four pairs of socks for Christmas, which are a slightly different shade of blue…or 4 different cans of deodorant that all smell like musk sticks. There are some milestones to get dawning themed engrams as well if you complete enough strikes or mayhem crucible matches but again, this can get tedious pretty quickly.
This was my fundamental problem with the original Destiny, after a certain point you lose interest, particularly when there is little return on the investment of your time. Destiny has always been about style over substance, and don’t get me wrong their visual artists produce some truly stunning work, but there simply isn’t enough depth to the game outside the single player storylines, which in Destiny 2 was much improved over the original destiny.
Activision seems to have decided that it was strapped for cash coming to the Christmas period, and is dealing with this by milking a little bit more money of the fans, by putting most the decent gear, like armour sets, or emotes or ships, in loot crates which costs real money to obtain.
Activision executives have stated that digital downloads for Destiny 2 in its first week where in the mid 30’s up from the low 20’s for the original, but they haven’t provided total sales figure (digital and physical) and there is speculation that overall sales are down, as have not provided figures like the press release in 2014 which stated that they had earned $325 million from the original title in the first 5 days. So there may be some shortfall to make up, one engram at a time…
There are 300+ plus Dawning themed items which you can get from through engrams (Destiny’s version of a loot crate), but at best you might get one of these engrams a day, on average, which means over the course the three week event you could get the chance to get less that 10% of the the total items on offer. I don’t know what the odds are on the crates to get a complete armour set for your character, and have refused to spend any real money to work it out, but given my luck so far I’m guessing it isn’t high. Which then leaves the only way would be to earn spend real money, to buy in game currency, even then this isn’t a guarantee you’d get everything you wanted with your investment…also a quick note to Bungie….and I apologise in advance for the language, but…. ENOUGH WITH THE DAM SHADERS OKAY !!……there I said it….I feel better.
Last year’s approach of getting armour set components when completing milestones in the from the dawning book, seemed a much fairer mechanism, and less of thinly valid attempt to get just that bit more money from the fans.
This following on from the fiasco around earning of XP, and the first of two pay to play expansions, which again looked stunning, but once the single player campaign was over your back to grinding your way to getting themed weapons, and I wonder if other players feel this way, and bungie and Activision are doing themselves a disservice, to what I think has been a pretty loyal fan base, and the fans aren’t happy if the Destiny 2 subreddit is any indication.
Don’t get me wrong there were some nice touches in this year’s Dawning event, like the ice hockey rink with the giant hockey puck in the hanger section of the town, or the snowball arena that has been set up on the soccer field at the farm, but I still feel like a vex, snuck in the middle of the night and stole the Dawning, and left us a simulation seed.