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Yes I did beat the story in a day, but you have to remember I played 5 hours of launch night, and then played from 11am to 4am that day. At your pace Sledge, it would probably take you a month to beat the campaign. There is plenty to log back in for each day. It seems the planet challenges are daily? Earth and Io changed for me, but Nessus is still on what I was working on the previous day... maybe its 24 hours after doing all the challenges. The adventures could be considered part of the story, more appear after you beat the campaign. These must have replaced grimoire cards because they are actually lengthy side stories. The challenge missions are as well. Once you beat the challenge missions on each planet you get what amounts to the old style bounty for an exotic weapon. I had to stop doing those because they take up an weapon inventory slot just like the old ones. C'mon Bungie, why? Anyways, Ive played through a lot of these things and the stories are pretty neat. And you actually can repeat them if you like them enough. They become available at the planet's NPC rep vendor after you do them. My favorite one so far was ole Rasputin luring me into a damn Vex death trap, and then periodically trolling them with some type of hypnosis music while I killed them. I've also managed to reach power level 264 doing all open world PvE. To do the nightfall you must reach 230 for reference. I seems every time you do reach a new level of rep with these vendors you get a more powerful legendary engram. I'm pleasantly surprised. I like this game way more than I thought I would. If the DLC adds more planets, more adventures, and what not, it will be worth it for me. Even though I have all exotic and legendary gear, blues are still worth picking up for infusions. So doing public events and adventures that only give you rare gear, are still worth doing because they could drop a blue that has a higher attack power than what you have. They must have put someone else in charge of designing this loot system, because its the best I've seen in any RNG based game... and its crazy I can say that. What is even funnier, is I am seeing a few friends trying to acquire loot the old way. When I log on I see them doing strikes or PvP, and I'm like 20 points higher than them with a few hours less of playtime. Strider I meant that as a joke. Those milestones are just a short intro the first time you launch the game. I'm not sure if you can ever look at it again after that. I thought it was a cool tribute. I had a VoG clear, Crota clear, Made it to the Light House on Trials of Osiris, and The Black Garden. If all you did was VoG, then you'll only see 2 cards for that and us beating the last mission. Get it for what ever platform you want. Like you said our play times may not match up. I'm generally off on Sunday's and Wednesday's, otherwise I play from 10:30pm to about 3am central time. If you do get it for PS4, I'd be more than happy to team up when possible. It seems a few of these bounties require you to be in a fireteam of at least 2. On a final note.... The Taken are annoying as fuck. At least those of us that didn't buy any DLC outside of the season pass get to experience it in this game. I'm curious if they put in subtle alternate dialog for players based on their save date from D1. The first time I encoutered them the whole Oryx thing was explained, and it was the only time something like that was made out like it was brand new to me. Oh and Swords are bad ass. I didn't think I'd like them, but they are among my favorite power weapon. I have an arc one just to slay the shit out of fallen captains. The fact that you don't need to reload them ever makes them great for panic moments. Nothing worse than swapping to your power weapon only to have to reload it because you previously used up all the ammo.

Pfft, I wish. I pretty much instantly log into FFXIV, TOR, or Wildlands now when I boot my PC up. I really do need to get through that backlog though. DX you're supposed to convince me not to buy the game not giving me more reasons to go out and buy it Meh, I might break down this weekend and buy it on my PS4 (just for those milestones which I share 90% of them with you on my side (pretty much all but my one VoG clear)). I keep hearing good things about it everywhere I go and honestly if it gives me a reason to step away from FFXIV for awhile (at least a few days out of the week, I have nothing to do until Oct when the new patch hits) why not. Then again I'm backing down from my statement of not supporting Bungie and their lackluster game design (I still can't understand how the developers of Halo failed so fucking hard with D1, then again most of the Halo team stayed with Microsoft to form 343. The lack of understanding still stands).

Thanks for all the info on the game. Its good to read up on what I'm missing out on. I still don't think I'll be rushing out to buy this any time soon, but its good to know that Bungie is moving forward with improvements. Although I'm surprised they had those max server issues on day one. How many hours did it take you to beat the campaign? Now that you've had the game for 2 days, you're already at the end game content. How is it so far? Are you feeling compelled to keep logging in daily to get more loot? Or is the loot so plentiful now you'll get best in slot for everything within a matter of a few weeks and run out of things to do? Did you get through a bunch of your steam backlog now that you have a PC that can play everything?

Second Son is a lot of fun... If you take the evil route.

I'll also add a buyers beware. Destiny does have a loot box system called Bright Engrams. Once you hit level 20, you can earn these by continuing to level up. They give you shaders, weapon ornaments (which i guess are skins), ships, sparrows and most controversially... mods. People are calling it pay to win because you can buy silver to buy these engrams in bulk. I don't know if the mods will be usable in Trails or Iron Banner.. I'll assume they will be. Its things like +5 weapon damage and what not. It will also give you some power 10 legendary armor, which you can bring up to spec via the infusion system if you like the perk it has... that seems the least appealing with how easy legendary armor is to obtain now. Its the mods the people are worried about. I'm more interested in the cosmetics as I doubt I'll ever care about other people's mods. The PvP isn't my thing in this game, but I'd be worried too if it was. So far I've gotten 3 legendary ships, and an extoic sparrow that shoots out crazy booster flames. I'm pretty happy with it... but damn I miss my Crota ship.

But you wont get too see the milestone we shared together when we entered the black garden in 2014. I forgot to mention that the game does a little tribute at opening of all your accomplishments and who you were with when it happened. I thought it was pretty neat. So I finished the story and I was satisfied with the ending. It wasn't the best I've ever seen. Honestly they could have added a few more missions. I reached the level cap about half way through the story because I did a bunch of adventures on each planet as I got to them. Once I got to 20 I just focused on the story because I got tired of not having a sparrow. I mean wtf bungie? Thats so fucking stupid to make people do 75% of the campaign before giving you one. Completely pointless. So where this game shines is loot acquisition. Holy crap its so much better. In just open world PvE I've gotten more exotics and legendaries than the first few months of D1 I played. I'm not max power level yet, but I have all legendary and exotic gear. And here is the best part of it all: you can infuse a higher level weapon into your lower level leggy or exotic to bring its power level up to par... even if its a blue you are sacrificing to do it. You just have to keep enough legendary shards on hand by scrapping other legendary stuff. So this assures me my gear wont ever get shit on if I really like it. I would have loved this for my The Devil You Know in D1. I have a really good energy auto rifle that I'll keep on me forever now. Plus I've upgraded my Gravaton Lance along the way. The 3 beta exotics are low level gifts during the story. You only get to pick one though. I'll have to play through again to get Sunshot and bring it up to spec. I've gotten 3 exotic engrams from public events, and they weren't even heroic events every time. AND engrams always decode for your class... no more hunter gloves when you're a warlock. And as if it couldn't get any more convenient, every exotic you get is saved as a collection. If you ever scrap it and regret it later, you can buy it back for 10 legendary shards. I'm also pleased with the endgame PvE. There are challenges for each planet. I'm hoping they are daily, but they could be weekly... I'll report back on that tomorrow. Each area has 3 tasks that reward you with a rep package. Every planet has a vendor/mission coordinator type NPC. The more you do around the planet, the more coins you get to turn in. Each time you fill the rep bar you get a legendary. This also works for the gunsmith. After I beat the game I got access to him and got like 7 legendary engrams. I'm not 100% sure how you build rep with them. I guess I should see what I'm turning in. All I know is that I fill his rep bar faster than anyone. The trainers from the first game also offer tasks for rep. There are so many NPCs doling out legendary gear, its amazing. I also unlocked standard patrols... which are exactly the same from D1. But between challenge quests, adventures, lost sectors, and public events that have timers on the map... repetitive open world grinding feels rewarding. I've gotten so much decent loot just running around the open world maps, strikes aren't that exciting right now. I did 2 for a milestone challenge... sadly they were both Inverted Spire... It came up first, and my second strike was somewhere else, but both the other players left so I had to back out and got the same damn strike again. I was too irritated to try more after that. They still seem to have the typical troll/afker problem the first game had. Inverted Spire as a Nightfall is going to be a damn nightmare. I think I only beat it once without wiping on the final boss' last stage during the beta. Both times today my teammates left me last guardian standing, and I'd get knocked off the side into the toxic fluid and die. That seems to be the only way I die, and its very irritating. Its happens on missions, and adventures. I'll jump out of a cluster fuck and someone will do a shockwave move and it pushes you off the side with no way to get back as you float. Kinda stupid since you are in the air to avoid a ground attack. On a final note for now, the humor in this game is pretty great. Funny how they didn't want any in the first game and screwed the whole story for that reason.

So pretty much what I thought, Destiny 1.5. Based off of what little I've seen on streams (good god Streamers got access to it yesterday well before the launch window) that's what I've been able to gather. While I'm happy to hear there's a story (and its a pretty good one from what I hear) it's still a little to late for me. Adventures, as far as I've been able to gather, are one time only so once it's done it's done. The only repeatable content is story missions (besides the obvious ones) which sucks because why go to work to make these things and limit it to one play through per character. It also sucks because it pretty much puts you at the same place you were at when you got to max level in D1, gear grind and wait for raid/new dlc (and we all know how fun that was). Honestly I'm not overly impressed, I'm waiting for actual reviews to hit before I make my final decision on whether I want to buy this or not (and waiting on my co-workers impressions, he took all week off to play it so I won't find out what he thought until Monday. I look forward to your impressions on Strikes). I enjoyed the beta for what it was but honestly I don't think what I experienced was enough to buy this game. Only real reason I'm considering it is because I'm in a dead period for games now until Ace Combat 7 comes out and I'm burned out in both TOR and FFXIV (fuck I've been playing Ghost Recon Wildlands because I have nothing I really want to play (I can't seem to get my lazy ass in gear to beat Horizon (which I need to, DLC hits in December) or Andromeda (honestly bored with it and my need to finish everything in one play through burned me out quickly)) and before you ask no I did not buy it, I got a free copy of it when I bought my computer. I just finally got off my ass and installed it two weeks ago). Before you ask I'll probably buy it on PC if I do get it, for some reason console gaming is not really all that interesting anymore (gasp, I know. I'm turning into a PC master race gamer. I should shoot myself before it gets worse. And with your play times we probably wouldn't be able to play together anyways).

One of the free games out this month is Hatoful Boyfriend. I think I did the obvious in renaming the character Nicola Tesla before realizing I was playing as a girl.