Solstice Postmortem (DBO)

by Vortech , A Fourth Wheel, Monday, August 27, 2018, 07:59 (2283 days ago) @ Oholiab

Yeah. I love the community-activation effect solstice has had too. I also have really enjoyed that it made me go back and do a bunch of stuff I never really new was in the game. I have been kicking these thoughts around for a couple weeks so forgive a bit of thread-splintering.

Hunting down the region chests brought me to cool corners of the map that I had never seen because in D2 I can just fast travel everywhere and I had no dead ghosts to hunt for. The loot from the chests were so inconsequential so early in the game that I had not bothered finding them until I had to do it for solstice. The activities and story didn't ever bring me to these detailed environments I had totally missed out on.

Finding the latent memories had a similar effect for Mars (I didn't know the map is a big circle. I knew that within days on D1 Earth because I was taking my sparrow everywhere. I've really grown to think fast travel is a huge mistake, but that's probably best put in a separate post?)

Until I was told to get Sagira's ghost shell I didn't know how much content in the Osiris expansion I had missed out on. I thought everything after the campaign was just a pseudo-random dungeon engine, and having not enjoyed the homogeneity in the campaign and not having anyone who asked me to join them in doing the adventures I had effectively no understanding of what the game even was trying to offer me.

Researching these Solstice things led me to other discoveries of huge chunks of content I was missing, like the sleeper simulant quest line. I literally had no idea that stuff was in there.

I'm not sure why I was so unaware of all this stuff in the game I play more than any other. Part of it might be decreased posting on DBO, but I also would have zero surprise if people linked me to multiple threads about this stuff. I read almost all of the bungie updates, but I think Bungie wants you to find this stuff organically in the game. I didn't. The separate quest items page is a good start. Maybe something that would have designated those tasks as something special in the director checklist so I didn't just dismiss it as something that wouldn't help me level up so I could become welcome on a raid.

For sure some of it is a negative spiral where I didn't have as many people on doing activities, so I didn't hear from them about the existence of those activities, so I logged on less because it didn't feel like there was stuff I could do they didn't have as many people online doing things, so they didn't…

As much as I hate to say it, I think part of it is also the drop in Destiny twitch streaming compared to D1. I used to have some Destiny stream on while I was cooking or something and I think I probably picked up the fact that there were these sort of activities to do from having that as background noise.

A bunch of this is also probably attributable to the fact that I chose Xbox to do all my solstice work on, despite being further along on PS4 at the start. Having a list of people active is hugely motivating. No surprise to anyone, there, I'm sure, but it's worth noting both as a reminder that this should be Bungie's highest design goal and as a thank you to the xbox DBO community who have helped me out over the past 2 weeks.