I am a Destiny 2 player. That may be stating the obvious, but the implication there is that I would like to play Destiny 2 when I can, when there’s something that interests me there. Currently, that’s the fact that I’ve just reached a point where I can get Tier 5 drops all the time across the Portal and now the Festival of the Lost holiday event because of my power level. But actually attempting to play Destiny, we are at a point where it is so broken in so many places that the game is often physically preventing me from doing so.
Here’s how playing the game has gone the last few days:
- Hopping into Festival of the Lost’s Haunted Altars, in at least three runs, I’ve experienced the boss “soft lock” where you have to wait for a number of shriekers to close and stop firing at the boss before you damage him too much, lest the encounter break. You can reset this by wiping, but few of your six-man team will know that, just like they won’t know about the shrieker thing.
- I had at least two instances break during the third stage of the activity, again, seemingly tied to a shrieker shooting at a miniboss. But in the Dread stage there, the game’s performance tanks with enemies glitching around and bizarre behaviors like you getting yanked inside an insta-death bubble or killed by things you didn’t see coming because of frame drops and other issues.
- Attempting to play Reclaim for Ash and Iron loot, I’ve had two instances where the game glitches out after teleporting to a new zone, where new objectives will not spawn. Wiping does not fix this.
- All Reclaim activities are matchmade, meaning you cannot change modifiers. Two are predicted A rank, the third is predicted B rank for me. I thought that may be wrong and we could probably surpass the score. We did everything and could not, making the run a waste of time. After all this time, Portal scores remain confusing or just plain wrong.
- I then tried a Battleground to pick up three bonus drops I had there. Two times in a row, the predicted A rank ended with a C rank, supposedly because you need to wait for waves of enemies to spawn rather than killing the boss quickly. I’m not sure the boss kill itself even counted. This has been happening in some arenas since The Portal was introduced five months ago and is still not fixed.
In the end, I was about 50/50 in terms of “normal” runs, where I completed it without glitches and got the rank I was supposed to. The rest were being locked out of a run or ending it with trash loot despite playing the activity perfectly normally.
There are always complaints about Bungie bugs, but at this point, QA has been cut there to the point where every new update either introduces new bugs or breaks old ones, and leaves bugs in place for months that can brick activities. With so few things to actually play now because of The Portal, what is there has to work. And half the time, it doesn’t.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.