Big Guy on Gaming: Destiny 2 (PC)

I am unabashedly part of the PC Master Race, and due to that fact, I had to wait a little while for BlizzardActivision’s latest game Destiny 2 to come to my preferred gaming platform. Was it worth the wait? Read on below.

I like lore

Nathan Fillion voices Cayde-6

One of the things that always interests me in a game is the story. I have played many games though their campaign and walked away happy to never touch it again. I grew up in the age of Final Fantasy 7 and Secret of Mana, and eventually, World of Warcraft.

One of the things I found lacking in the original Destiny was a compelling story. It wasn’t nonexistent, and it served its purpose of guiding you through the solar system, but it didn’t captivate me. Combine that with excruciating load times on my Playstation 4, and it added up to me walking away from the campaign barely a quarter of the way in.

Destiny 2 solves this problem handily. The story is cut together not only with your own exploits, but vignettes of your end foe’s exploits. I really feel like what I’m doing serves a purpose, and I don’t hit hard stops to the story as often as I did in the first game.

Of course, this time there is a big differentiation between my experience from the first game.

This game was meant to be played on PC

PS4 vs PC courtesy DropaxPlays

Which is funny, because they had to do a lot of tweaking to add richness to the PC experience. Dealing with the kick of your gun is very different between a controller and a mouse. Also, you can’t do aim assist for mouse players, because that would just drain all difficulty from the game. So they did a full pass to make sure the game was actually polished for a PC gamer.

Of course, I also get to play the game at 4K resolution 12 inches from my face, with an uncapped framerate constrained only by my last-generation Nvidia 980Ti graphics card. A framerate and resolution that my original-spec Playstation 4 can’t hope to match.

Better yet, for a guy with big hands like mine, the PS4 controller just isn’t the ideal solution. My giant hands need room to breathe. My brain also needs to be able to remap functions to my Razer Mamba TE mouse so that my hand motions are all natural and fluid.

I don’t usually do this, but…

I fell out of love with first person shooters years ago, but I can credit Overwatch for bringing me back. It softened me up for the experience, and then did the things I’ve been craving from Overwatch (see story). So, I actually approached Destiny 2 with quite a bit of apprehension.

Now I’m about halfway through and just having a blast. Unfortunately, this game is not without its problems. For the PC port, the social component was left to be resolved in a future patch. For a game that occasionally requires three man fireteams for dungeons, finding folks can get hard. The strangest part of it all is that on PC, it is incorporated with the Battle.net Launcher, but none of the launcher’s excellent social tools (including a great integrated voice chat) are supported by the game. It’s very strange.

Worse, this game lives all by itself in a new Activision header on my launcher. I know Blizzard and Activision have been one and the same for a decade now, but there’s something disquieting that Destiny 2 might soon have neighbors like Call of Duty and Crash Bandicoot. Well, I’m not as worried about Crash, but there’s a new Call of Duty every six months. Does that mean my launcher is about to get filled up with Call of Duty: Dirt is Good and Call of Duty: Dudebro Assault?

I sincerely hope not.

I’m off topic though, let’s review Destiny 2

Pros:

• Great story
• Awesome graphics
• Super fun!

Cons:

• Where’s the Clan Chat?
• Where’s the Recruitment Channel?
• Where is everybody?

Verdict:

Get it if you like shooters, Nathan Fillion, or science fiction.