So almost everyone has taken a dump on this game at some point, may as well take 15 minutes to occupy that bathroom while I can, it‘s gonna be pretty long. I’ve spent nearly a month playing it so I feel I can form an opinion on all it has to offer atm. Game was hyped like crazy, barely paid attention to the ads myself. My brother bought a PS4 and a couple of games, this being one of them. Didn’t actually start playing it until one of my real life friends started, he’s already moved on though & I could agree with the many issues he had. Before I get carried away I just wanna say I actually
like the game…the gameplay that is. You got three character classes to choose from, and they both have 2 subclasses to switch between (but the second isn’t unlocked until level 15). You can carry one primary, secondary & heavy weapon, and can swap around skills & armor to suit different play styles. Unfortunately there isn’t very much variety outside of messing around with the stuff the 3 classes get. The story is almost non-existent to the point where I didn’t pay attention to cut scenes, the only way the game feels it can make enemies harder is to give all the “tough” ones (yellow HP) noobtubes so the splash damage is the thing killing you.
The game gets far worse once the “story” is done & you’re past level 20, now the never-ending grind can begin. There’s 5 types of equipment. Whites, greens, blues, purples & yellows. The last two are legendaries & exotics. While greens & blues were upgraded with stuff like weapon parts & armor scraps which were easy to gather after a while, the last 2 go overboard by having you collect like 70-80 of these random materials around from one of the planets and ascendant shards or energy depending if its armor or a weapon. Exotic armor requires 16 to fully level while legendaries require 18 (which is weird since exotic armor is overall better, but you can only equip 1 exotic). You can
occasionally get shards or energy from doing random daily events on any of the four planets & 3-starring it, but again, these are random. There’s a website to say when they should show up but I rarely do these anymore since there are times I’ve had to wait up to 45 minutes just for one to finally show. Even then it’s a waste of time if one like ‘Eliminate the enemy’ shows up since they’ll likely spawn a beefed up enemy with a shield that will regen within 5 seconds if not constantly shot, and you lose if he reaches a certain area. It’s possible to kill the spawns that don’t have a shield, but even then, twice the game randomly za warudo’d the enemy halfway across the map while I was throwing grenades so by the time I reached him it was too late. If the enemy has a shield and there’s no other player close by, I just keep on going.
Other ways to get shards, legendaries, exotics & other endgame stuff is doing the daily heroic missions, weekly heroics, the nightfall strikes & of course, the raid. For a while I couldn’t do any of these, at least not at a level where it mattered since they start at level 20. For dailies you get crap at 20, you gotta do the level 24 one to get just one ascendant, then the level 28 if you want two. Dailies are just story missions with somewhat tougher enemies thrown in & a random modifier to handicap you, like no ammo drops for your current weapon, extra enemy melee damage, unflinching enemies etc. The weeklies have difficulties at 22, 26 then 28 & you get 3-9 strange coins depending on which you do. Those coins are used to buy exotics from this trader called Xur who only shows up on weekends with a random selection, sells armor for 13 coins, weapons anywhere up to 27. Weeklies are just strike missions but harder just like dailies. Nightfall is a weekly with several handicaps thrown at you & expects you to be level 28, and since the level requirement is one of the highest, you have a better chance to get endgame gear there. For a while I hated having to do this stuff since I was stuck at level 27 for a while against level 28 guys. Y’know how in Borderlands if you were a level or 2 below the enemy you had a big damage & defence loss while being above them meant you could mow them down casually? Not here, that sh
it still applies to enemies but not to you. They’re just beefed up to be on the same playing field, while you can expect to get one-shotted as a level 26 against a level 28 boss. Melee deals ridiculous damage against you at that point regardless, most often I’ll die from a random swing and it’s total BS.
The bosses tend to be bullet sponges normally, especially Valus Ta’aurc (the biggest bullet sponge I‘ve seen in years), the first weekly I
tried to do. Normally they match you up with random players when you choose to do a strike, but there’s no such system for weeklies. You either find a group or do it solo, and though 1 level before the intended, I was able to get through the massive horde of enemies all the way to the boss…twice. Yet I couldn’t kill him. Dude was roided as hell, had gallons of HP, could kill me in 3-4 shots from his minigun & regularly spammed barrages of missiles that would probably kill me with a direct hit. Worst of all he kept spawning mooks every 30-40 seconds, hell,
every strike boss does this, which makes it frustrating when they’re around your level so it sometimes takes 10-20 minutes of hiding in certain spots & poking your head out briefly to get a few shots then running if the boss gets near. While clearing out about 14 spawns in the middle of all this. There was a cheese spot for Valus but it only works for nearly half the fight, then you gotta run out & draw him over to his starting position with enough damage. After wasting like 15 minutes pumping like 50 clips into the dude, he randomly killed me as I tried to get back to the spot. After seeing his HP fill back up I just quietly turned the game off. They recently made changes to scale less for three players, or at least it seems easier. Either I got better & had good teammates or it really does scale less now.
The raid, Vault of Glass, is…actually pretty good. There’s a lot of teamwork involved. It does have it’s flaws though, like activating the portals to get in, and the whole confluxes part taking much longer than it needed to, and there was no need for the dumb jumping puzzle, but whatever. The whole team is also likely to die if someone fu
cks up at some spots. The boss fight with Atheon is also rather glitchy. Which is due to players cheesing Atheon a long while ago by pushing him off the edge for easy kills in order to get raid gear, since actually reaching max level requires you to have it, but it’s entirely luck based to get it and you can only get rewards once a week. So when they patched it, along came glitches like Atheon sometimes only teleporting one person to a different place, or only two, which can get the whole team killed if they die there without someone to cover them. They made a massive update recently with a whole bunch of changes & upcoming strikes with a second raid, and while the glitches are well-known by now, Bungie still never bothered to fix them, clearly they don’t give a s
hit.
Now to my main beef with the game that I’ve been bypassing repeatedly: the levelling system. After level 20 you reach a cap, and instead get motes of light after every 50-100k xp gained. To go above that you need armor with light on it. Early blues will have anywhere from 2-13 on them, they increase as you upgrade them. You need 21 to reach level 21, then 11 more for every level. 32,43,54,65, etc. Legendaries can’t go above 22 without using your ascendant shards or energy so the highest you can get at 88 light is level 27. To get just one character to 28 without an exotic it’s around 36 shards. Remember what I mentioned earlier? 2 ascendants from the daily? Level 28 mission. 9 strange coins? Level 28 weekly. Nightfall in general? Level 28. Everything feels one level higher than it should be because of this asinine idea to have level be based entirely off gear, which I feel is just bad game design. Sure, you can do these at level 27, but I never had much fun with the damage I was taking & dishing out by being lower. The raid actually expects you to be at least level 26 and the enemies to start off are roughly around that, the enemies in Atheon’s room are level 28 though, so yeah…hard mode raid supposedly goes up to level 30 too, and requires maxed out raid gear to reach, but the helmet only drops randomly on hard mode, so you can only reach 30 with an exotic helm if you don’t have it. Almost all the endgame stuff is decided upon RNG, this game loves that system more than Disgaea 4 did.
Oh, forgot to mention, you can buy legendaries from vendors in the hub and will probably be where most of your early ones come from. Before you can buy them you gotta get your reputation up with that faction. That’s done by doing bounties, just random stuff in story missions or planets that give xp & rep. There’s 12 everyday, 6 for PvE, 6 for PvP. Oh, and with everything mentioned previously, creating a 2nd and 3rd character will help you get more upgrade materials & give you more chances for rarer weapons & armor, but that means it’ll be even more of a grind. You start at rank 0 for all factions, rank 1 takes 1,500xp, rank 2 is 3,500xp, rank 3 is 6,000xp. Bounties will only give between 50-100 for each one, and patrol missions will give 10 with the easiest one being to kill some dude giving 25. Rep isn’t shared between characters, there are around 5 factions to level and they each have armor & weapons that differ. At rank 1 you get jack (you can buy emblems but who cares about that?), at rank 2 you can buy armor, and at three you can buy weapons. The majority of these vendors cost crucible marks too, from the PvP. You get 3 marks for winning a match, 2 for losing. But your cap for the week is 100 marks, yet the weapons all cost 150. Oh, you can’t hold more than 200 marks either. Vangaurd marks are gotten doing stuff like daily events, heroics, strike playlists, weeklies & nightfall, but they move at a much faster rate even though vanguard has only one weapon vendor.
Crucible is okay. Yeah. A lot of random nonsense happens. What works for the enemy rarely works for me, lag makes it so their rules aren’t my rules, just gotta accept it. I don’t care anyway, I’m average at best & only there for the marks to get certain stuff. What truly pis
ses me off are the ones running around using nothing but a shotgun or fusion rifle, basically OHKO weapons, the whole match. And of course shotgun users will OHKO me from like 10-15 feet away yet I have to be within like 3 feet of them to do the same. Fusion rifles are basically mid-range shotguns that have a charge rate. But since you can tell when someone’s nearby due to the radar, it doesn’t matter. Many times I’ve seen someone come round the corner & instantly vaporize me before I could even raise my gun, hell, once I got blasted before the guy was actually on my screen. Don’t even wanna start on the random supers & how screwed you are against most of them. A few times in a FFA I got fed up with that crap & just decided to go Leeroy Jenkins on everyone. Somehow I regularly got within the top 3 when I decided to stop caring, rush right at players & bash their skulls in till they die. Apparently most players don’t know what to do when I dodge their initial shot & get right in their face. I once actually won a match doing nothing but this, didn’t even have to use my
AR AK, gotta say it was a good day.
Oh, and before I finish, the loading times, can’t believe I forgot about those. Good lord, it’s Sonic 06 tier, that’s not even a joke. 50 secs-1 min, that’s how long I’ve seen it take to load maps, I rarely take note of the seconds unless it’s just that bad. Of course, for every complaint I list they’ll be people who proudly defend such dumb decisions. Sometimes the words they use will make me wonder whether or not they’re playing the same game. On the other hand people will whine & complain about anything that’s not wrapped in a neat little bow for them. Now onto my full list of whining & complaints in the form of questions:
Why do ¾’s of the factions use nothing but crucible marks? Why can you only get 100 a week and why can you only hold 200 at most? Why must every “tough” enemy carry nothing but noobtubes? Why are “tough” enemies the only ones who drop glimmer (the currency)? Using RNG items dropped by enemies lets all enemies drop bits of glimmer when used for a short while, but only between 1-15 for each kill, why don’t they all naturally drop that much? Why can you only hold 25,000 glimmer? Why must I run in circles collecting 70+ planet materials to finish upgrading my legendary gear? Killing enough enemies on a planet will give you a bonus of sometimes getting 2 material drops, but only
sometimes, why not permanently? Why aren’t the cut scenes skippable after you’ve seen them once? Why does the game randomly take away half my special ammo & all my heavy ammo when I log out? Hell, why do I lose half my current ammo when I switch to another weapon,
even if it’s another weapon of the same type. Why do I need at least 36 ascendant shards to reach level 28 if you don’t have any exotic armor, even though you need the shards the most before you reach 28? Why do the accessories for all three classes cost 25 motes of light each for any piece?
So I think that’s it, pretty burnt out over this game, it seems to want to eat away as much of your time as it can doing the same sh
it, day in, day out, week after week and hoping RNGesus has given you his blessing. If you like FPS and thought Disgaea 4 was way too lenient on the RNG then this one’s for you.
