Destiny surprises me again!
Destiny has been a bit of a mixed bag for me from the start. I loved the shiny space epic, but then I learned to hate the PvP. I improved enough in PvP to earn Thorn, but now it’s best use is to be converted into an exotic shard. Even still, I was excited about the potential of The Taken King. Now that I’ve been eyeball deep in it for weeks, I find that I’m still riding the high of all the stuff there is to do in it. Waking up this morning to find a new mission available is exactly the kind of thing has turned this game around for me.
Okay, so the short story here is that Destiny finally feels like a game. Sure, it was basically a game before, but it felt more like an open sandbox full of bullet-sponges. Every Tuesday we’d go hit the new nightfall, maybe run a raid, then spend the rest of the week doing bounties on patrol to grind rep to chase the elusive revenant shader. Mowing down wall after wall of respawning meat targets with minimal goal or reward is only satisfying for so long. The Taken King added a sense of purpose with its flood of quests.
The other thing that Destiny seems to have gained from The Taken King is a sense of wonder and excitement. The secret hunters have been going nuts finding new paths through the heroic daily missions and uncovering secret lore and even exotic weapons. I’m not hardcore enough to blaze those trails, but I will devour the hell out of the breadcrumbs left behind by those that do. I still haven’t gotten my Black Spindle, but I did run through the hidden trail of ghosts left behind in yesterday’s mission. So what was so surprising in Destiny this morning? I’m so glad you asked!
It’s armsday–that Wednesday treat where the useless requisitions in our inventories turn into hopefully useful guns. Sometimes they turn into guns that then get turned into legendary marks. It’s like laser Christmas! So I get up early (to the dismay of my spouse) to log in and see what Santa Banshee-44 has brought. After picking up a few new test weapons, I went to orbit and found a curious quest icon over Earth. WTF is this? It’s a new mission that just popped up called “The First Firewall” and visions of the Sleeper Simulant immediately jumped into my brain as I mashed the button on my controller.
The search for the Sleeper Simulant has been crack for me since getting that first little random drop quest turn in. Bungie seems to be dragging out the release of the new Gjallarhorn and we are eating it up. Rumors and spinmetal hat theories have been flying around for weeks about how to acquire this handheld death beam. With this new quest line, it looks like the day of reckoning is quickly approaching. Having the acquisition of it being tied to a time-gated quest is a little irritating, but that’s not going to stop anyone from rushing to get it done as soon as each new part appears.
I’m not going to detail the entire step-by-step process of the quest line here. If you want that, there’s a well curated Reddit thread devoted to it. What I will say is that this is the kind of thing that I want out of Destiny. If Bungie can keep delivering more content like this, I’ll stayed glued to my Xbone each week to unlock the next big step. Will this lead to the now mythic Sleeper Simulant? I don’t know (though it seems very likely), but I can’t wait to find out next week!
