Tag: destiny

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video game

Saint-14 Lives

I’m really fucking tired of dead Guardians in Destiny. This is an in-game trope that has basically haunted us since vanilla D1. Basically every time you get sent to address some kind of distress call, you can rest assured that on the other end of it, the guy you’re helping out is either already dead, or possibly going to die while you’re listening. That’s even the plot of an entire strike in Destiny 2 (Savathun’s Song), where you get to meet the total badass that is Taeko-3 via radio, just to hear her off herself on the line so you can go on to beat the boss.

Exception: You get to rescue Cayde during the D2 campaign. Oh yeah, and then he bites it in Forsaken. Maybe the player character Guardian should just stop trying to rescue people.

I was pretty upset in D1 when there was a story mission where the conclusion was the corpse of Praedyth, a character we’d all gotten to look up to via lore cookies on gear named after him. I haven’t been looking forward to personally adding more legends to the massive pile of dead Guardians we stand on as players.

Which brings us to Curse of Osiris. Where we get sent to see the tomb of my personal favorite legendary Guardian, Saint-14. (Look, I’m a Titan at heart. Bite me.)

To this, I say no. Saint-14 isn’t dead. And this isn’t just me being in denial because I am tired of dead Guardians.

Let me explain.

The entire way you get to Saint-14’s tomb is via the Infinite Forest, which is a giant ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. The entire point of the Infinite Forest is that it’s a simulator that runs on an engine of time travel bullshit that enables the Vex to try to calculate a future where they get all of the things they want. Well, considering what an unholy terror Saint-14 supposedly is, it’s no surprise that the Vex want him dead, right? So right off the bat, you cannot trust anything the Infinite Forest tells you, because it’s only calculating futures and possibility trees; it’s not a picture of current reality, but rather what the Vex could do if they traveled to some other point in time and changed things.

Another factor to consider: we get told repeatedly that the Light of the Guardians is one of the few things that the Vex can’t manage to simulate. So when we get to Saint-14’s tomb, Ghost tells us that there’s no Light here, despite the fact that what’s led us here was “traces of familiar Light.” Which sure, could be a way for the Destiny writers to be yelling, “LOL HE’S SUPER DEAD, TROLLED YOU AGAIN.” Or it could also be an indication that Saint-14’s corpse is just an approximation, an empty shell because the Vex can simulate a mannequin that looks like Saint-14, but they can’t actually make it be him. The fact that this tomb is also in the simulation we’ve seen before, the awful-looking place where the Vex have won (or are about to win) cements that for me as another argument that they’re figuring Saint-14 being super dead is necessary for that to happen.

Also, Saint-14 is a big enough badass that he made a whole rift full of his Light in the Infinite Forest. So what’s that about? We’re following traces of his Light smeared all over the damn place, but he’s simultaneously utterly gone? I don’t buy it. The Vex aren’t known for utterly destroying a Guardian’s Light the way the Hive do. Praedyth kind of survived being dead as a ghost. You can’t do that with no Light. Kabr still had his Light and was able to turn himself into the Aegis, even while he was getting brain-eaten by the Vex. (Kind of like whatever horrible Vex transformation happens to Asher, it’s eating his body from the outside in, not his Light.) So if Saint-14’s Light is utterly gone, it wasn’t the doing of the Vex, that’s for sure. The Perfect Paradox lore says that the Vex created a Mind to drain Saint-14’s Light… and also that he killed it. Like he’s literally talking to you while sitting on its corpse. That Light went somewhere, that’s for sure.

But let’s say, even for the sake of argument that the tomb of Saint-14 is “real,” or as real as anything in the Infinite Forest can be. It’s the goddamn Infinite Forest, and Saint-14’s Light is actively in it. He’s still wandering around in there, and may have even stopped by his own tomb to drop some more Vex corpses on it. It’s a world powered by time travel bullshit; anything and everything is possible in it.

Sagira says it best: “Nothing could stop that old Exo.” As much as it pains me to agree with the Drifter about anything, I’m with him–I don’t believe Saint-14 is dead for one minute. Because what’s the point of building a game out of space magic time travel bullshit if your heroes don’t come walking out of death once in a while to tell you to buck up? He’s going to come walking out of the Infinite Forest some time soon to ask for his shotgun back, and welcome to the new DLC, motherfuckers.

And goodness knows we need some more Exos at the rate they disappear from the main cast.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

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video game

Dear Rando

Dear Rando With Whom I Was Apparently in Some Crucible Matches Today, Not That I Noticed Because I Was Paying Attention to My Own Fucking Business,

Wow, thank you so much for taking time out of your no-doubt busy day (I mean, come on–only the most important and high-drive people are playing Crucible at noon on a Friday, right?) to let me know that I suck at PvP. I never would have guessed that without your insightful and helpful messaging over Xbox Live. Like wow, I thought my negative K/D ratio was a great thing, like what do you mean PvP doesn’t have the same kind of scoring regime as golf? Gosh, my face is red.

But this is a very important thing, since my sad playing in a whole two or three matches disturbed your zen enough that you felt the need to take valuable time and energy to message me, a complete stranger, with your obviously valuable opinion. I guess I should be honored to have been given the gift of time by someone so much better at a small portion of a video game than me. I’m humbled, really.

Because god knows what might have happened, if I’d dared to keep playing. The internet might have blown up in the fires of my absolute failure to shoot video game people in the head with a gun made out of math. The massive weight of my sucking at PvP could have warped space and time and caused a singularity to fall into the center of the earth and destroyed life as we know it. Hyper intelligent aliens, on the verge of contacting humanity, might have taken one look at that match and been like, “well, we were totally going to give these sad monkey people the cure for death and the answer to all poverty, but that bitch can’t even hit someone with a grenade so lolbye.”

(Oops, except I did keep playing, by the way.)

I mean this is a Big Deal that I somehow messed up your ability to win an Extremely Important Video Game Thing for maybe an hour while I was playing. Because god knows you must be more important than me, and your enjoyment of the game must be more important than mine, and your feelings about this game that we have literally paid the same amount of money for are way more valid than mine.

We don’t need to get into the fact that the only reason I’m even grinding in PvP at all is because Bungie keeps forcing it on us by making quests and weapons that have to be completed in PvP. We don’t need to get into the fact that the only reason I’m there to ruin your match with my unbridled suckitude is because I’m being compelled to, and I want to be there as little as you want me to be there. And we don’t need to get into the fun vicious cycle of how you can’t get good at a thing unless you do it, but when other people make doing the thing unpleasant because you’re not good, you don’t want to do it, and… well, does that even matter?

Obviously not to you. Because only you matter, right? Only you exist in your sad little world of one, where your video game accomplishments are so important that they’re worth being shitty to a stranger about, I’m guessing because you literally have nothing else going for you.

In conclusion: I invite you to eat all of the dicks. And while you’re working your way through that pile, marinate in the knowledge that you being super awesome A+ lolgitgudnewb at PvP has exactly the same effect on where you sit in the world as me being shit does: none. Zip. Your power is as fictional as glimmer and even less useful because it has no place in even the made-up economy of a game.

Enjoy your dick salad with dick dressing followed by a steaming plate of dicks alfredo and maybe a nice dick mousse with macerated dicks on top for dessert.

Sincerely,

The Titan Who Sucks at PvP and Gives No Fucks

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video game

Destiny: I don’t even go here

According to the Destiny app on my droid, between two characters I’ve now spent 3 days, 7 hours, and 40 minutes playing this video game. Even more startling is the fact that I have a droid app for this fucking game to begin with. Destiny is a science fantasy game by Bungie, the people who brought us Halo. This would be more relevant to me as a gamer, had I actually played Halo or any of the following games. But I haven’t, because I really, really, really hate first person shooters. Mostly because I suck at them terribly. I get twitchy and sort of randomly fire in all directions and then die, over and over again.

And yet. Over three days of game time. Rachael, what the hell are you even doing with your life?

Simple answer: I have friends who play it. Friends who don’t live in the same state as me. Friends who will consistently poke me when they want a warm body to fire a simulated handgun with a self-consciously badass name like Thorn in random directions while they reassure me on Skype that I am totally doing fine shhhh, shhhh have another beer, it’s cool. I’m weak to that kind of shit. It’s an amazing way to hang out with friends I would otherwise never get to talk to, because fuck phone calls, I can’t handle that holding a little slab of metal to my ear and trying to think of something other than the weather to talk about thing, but if you want to have an in depth discussion of just how many dicks are in the big bag that Bungie has given a blue face and named Rahool I am so there.

I wasn’t even going to get sucked into the friend game vortex, but then I had a back spasm and basically couldn’t do anything for three days except sit on the couch in a drugged stupor while a heating pad slowly cooked my back. I played a lot of Destiny those days. I think. I was on a lot of medication, but I came out of it with a character at level 32, so I’m guessing that’s what happened.

And it’s all so hilarious because there is so much about this game that just gets on my tits. It’s a pretty game, but the back story is so goddamn thin that it would make a Michael Bay film look densely characterized in comparison. If you want to even know who the fuck half the NPCs are and why you should care, you can look up “grimoire cards” on the Bungie site or via the app, but even that just gets you enough to feel really fucking annoyed about the whole thing. There are characters (notably Lord Shaxx and Lord Saladin) where we don’t even know what species they are. You do know they’re mentee and mentor respectively, you know they fought together at some battle in a war that’s described in the vaguest terms and because of some unnamed thing that happened they don’t really talk any more, and that’s it. Maybe not even enough to squeeze fanfic out of. It’s like some kind of asshole psychologist worked with Bungie to come up with the bare minimum amount of detail guaranteed to drive people absolutely batshit with curiosity if you then refuse to ever tell them more.

Story missions constantly end on such vague terms (“They were beaming an unknown signal to something at the edge of space I guess, and this sounds super important but oh well, we’re never going to talk about it again!”) that my not-so-inner writer no longer screams with outrage, just beats its head against the TV and whimpers.

Cut scenes you can’t skip. Ever. No matter how many times you’ve seen them.

No maps.

Let me say that again.

No. Maps.

There’s technically one area that has a map: the Tower, the home base you go to so that Rahool can be a massive bag of dicks to you and shit on all your engrams before he hands them back as useless weapons you’re just going to dismantle for a pittance of money. It’s basically the one area straightforward enough that you don’t even need a goddamn map. But everywhere else, including the oh-fuck-you-forever-Bungie enormous Shrine of Crota have. No. Maps. Just ask my friends about the number of times they’ve had to answer a pathetic little “guys? I’m lost, please come find me” whimper on Skype. On second thought, don’t ask, the answer isn’t one I need to know. But I have spent more time lost in this game than I did in Descent, with its unbelievably awful and enormous 3D wire frame maps, and that’s a massive achievement on my part. (Descent is, incidentally, another game I sucked at but played anyway because friends did. Or more accurately, a high school crush did.)

Everyone is DPS. Everyone. There’s a sort of vaguely tanky class (Defender Titan) and a sort of vaguely buff-y class (Sunsinger Warlock) but you still spend 99.9% of your time going pew-pew-pew (or in my case pew-pew-urk-help-guys-I-need-another-res). My kingdom for a healing class, that’s where I’m not actually dead weight that needs to be stowed in someone’s Baby Bjorn and carried through a strike.

Though there is one thing about this game I really love, other than its prettiness. It’s the fact that all of the characters wear body-covering armor, regardless of gender. No boob windows. No armor bikinis. I like the fact that the alien species (Fallen, Hive, Vex, Cabal) are truly alien and lack any kind of ridiculous sexual dimorphism that we see constantly in other video games.

Just don’t get me started on why the fuck Exos, which apparently were non-sentient robotic war machines to start, were created with gendered bodies. I’m talking roboobs. WHY.

If all my friends stopped playing Destiny tomorrow, I could walk away from the game and never feel a pang of regret. And no doubt get sucked into whatever new thing they’re playing, no matter how much I suck at it. I’ll just hope forever that next time it’ll be a real MMO, with maps, like World of Warcraft or FFXIV. (Both of which I already play, so the chances are slim to none.) And on the day that happens, when the no-neck mook cat starts throwing a tantrum because he wants me to sit on the couch with the footrest up so he can cuddle my feet, maybe I’ll put my newfound sucking-ever-so-slightly-less-at-first-person-shooter game skills to good use and finally start playing the Halo games. I’ve got a friend who wants me to do that too. I hear there’s actual lore.