Bungie found a way to play FOMO

Most games build their fantasy of escape around the idea of ​​making your hero the center of everything. Fate does it rather by giving you, the person who plays the game, the the most intense FOMO.

Destiny 2: Abandoned is a new extension of the successful 2017 game that aims to straighten the ship after a difficult first year. Much of my first week with her has been characterized by exchanging instant messages and exciting interactive messages between long, almost excessive play sessions.

"Do you know Telesto cheese in Blind Well, right?"

(Translation: Did you know that there is an easy way to trick your way through a high level activity?)

"DUDE: I just have Trust Triple Tap / Rampage."

(Translation: I have a piece of loot that rarely falls, and he had some particularly good stats.)

"I'm living up to the expectation of a public event in the Four-Horn Gulch part of the Dreaming City quest and Destiny is once again terrible."

(Translation: My progress is halted because of a research stage on which the community recognizes that it is poorly designed and I am angry.)

Destiny fans make fun of these tiny details that are read as incomprehensible to outsiders. For everything he adds to the game in depth – new story, missions, equipment, activities – Abandoned is there to smooth tons and tons of these little details. And that's what makes it difficult to describe his success with non-fans.

Let's start with the basics: Destiny 2right now, it's the best there is. It's the best that the series has ever been, even. The scope of the changes Abandoned The introduction – many of which are easily equated with "quality of life" patches – is massive and the new content we are playing with offers new thrills and new ideas.

Bungie, the developer of the series, has judiciously cut the story down to the smallest detail: a major character death, a narrative expansion of the universe and a series of boss 'huntings' highlighted by a series of more complex missions. .

Wise, because Destiny has never been about written history. The game's legend has its fans sub-section in the wider community, but the elements that make this game click are much more related to the pending carrots that players are constantly looking for (as well as mechanical happiness). feels fun). It's where the FOMO comes in.

Destiny 2 is what is called a "live game", ie activities that you pursue and update from week to week and from day to day. Whenever a new version or a new extension occurs, the first few weeks are largely defined by the almost insatiable appetite of the fan community to explore each new novelty, to the point of intentionally breaking the game, often from creative way.

Abandoned is not different. The post-release news cycle on DestinyTheGame's subreddits and RaidSecrets, still popular from Destiny, has been updated faster than Donald Trump's tweet-based talk. There is excitement and anger and everything in between. Nothing new for Destiny.

What East What is new, however, is the fact that we always feel that we have only touched the surface of the secrets to discover. Yes, Abandoned only last week, and most of you think it's a short time. But the Destiny hardcore community is both big and dedicated. The secrets do not last long in this game.

For all that it adds to the game in a very important way, Abandoned is here to smooth tons and tons of tiny details.

Part of that has to do with smart design choices from Bungie. There are elements of Abandoned it just has not been published yet. We know a part of it; The raid, the flagship activity of Destiny for top players, will not continue until September 14, for example.

But there is still much to be done in the game. References to enemies that have not yet been found. Activities requiring the completion of named missions that do not exist on any of the game's cards. Bungie has not said anything directly, but the clues are all there.

C & # 39; awesome. Four years ago, Bungie fell back into a situation where the activity outside of Destiny had become a kind of game in its own right. Destiny Geekery is a social media sport that is played everywhere, from Reddit to social media platforms to Discord Discussion Forums, IMs and DMs. Playing Destiny is like talking about Destiny. S engaging with the speech is a feature, not a bug.

Without it, for example, the larger community would have taken much longer to find a secret sniper rifle that infiltrated the game last summer. The moment electrified the community, both because the gun was a joy to play with so much power and also because finding it, fighting it, unlocking it … it was all a community effort, by its very nature. design.

Abandoned is filled with things like that. Things like the new Dreaming City, a place of maximum level full of secrets and high-level activities, to happy accidents, like my "Blind Well Cheese" mentioned above.

The latter cases are often things that need to be corrected in the long run, but doing stupid stuff in the game to take advantage of an exploit is a longstanding mark of the Destiny experience. Not just doing stupid things – like jumping through unseen holes in the world to find a chest you should not have access to yet (true story) – but how the community exults together in these activities.

In addition to the accidental gameplay, there is also a significant amount of work that has been devoted to the things you do after the story, a game phase often called the "end of the game". In the past, hardcore Destiny fans have often come up against artificial doors that stop their weekly progression. Frustrating times, especially since Destiny's best-loved activities are part of the final phase.

Abandoned Still has these doors, but it offers many more options for passionate fans who just want more power. You end up reaching a place of diminishing returns every week, but the situation is better for Destiny in two main ways: (1) The expanded range of stimulating weekly activities, which has more than tripled, I think, and (2 Even when you knock on doors, there is still a chance – a minuscule value – to find material that propels you.

S engaging with the speech is a feature, not a bug.

I'm sure in a month, I'm going to scream at something I hate like any other Destiny player. This is how the conversation tends to unfold around this game. Its ongoing existence is shaped by a continuous dialogue between Bungie and her fans.

In this direction, Abandoned is a love letter. This is a sign of recognition for the community that has stayed with the game since 2014, when a group of us was still wondering how "Halo Studio" could possibly exceed its beloved Xbox series.

Yes Destiny 2 struggled at launch to swing too widely to find a wider audience, Abandoned recompose things with renewed interest for people who keep coming back. It seems smaller, but it feels bigger. For hardcore fans in particular, every day is not just a new toy to play. it's a new conversation.