Notes from Week One of Destiny 2

The Destiny 2 experience is at once familiar to Destiny veterans. The rough edges have been polished through myriad quality of life improvements: gone are the frequent pitstops to the Tower.

I am very fond of the generously-sized vault! I tend to hoard items that I collect in-game, and the new vault means that I can go longer between purges of my inventory.

Developers within the community took advantage of the Destiny API to create a suite of tools that served as a bandage for some of Bungie’s oversights in their original design of Destiny. One tool stands out in particular: Destiny Item Manager (destinyitemmanager.com). DIM’s developers beat out Bungie’s Destiny 2 Companion App to openly allowing players to move their gear, resulting in some curious observations. Take, for instance, the ability to preserve the power level 100 armor that you are equipped with at the start of the game’s first mission, Homecoming (reddit). While it was buggy at first, forcing me to resort to Bungie’s Destiny 2 Companion App for the first few days, the DIM team is adept at quashing bugs, and Destiny Item Manager will continue to be a staple in my toolkit.

The addition of a world map, complete with public event timers, renders sites like DestinyPublicEvents.com to a bygone era. This, coupled with fast travel, means that players will find themselves in good company as they engage in public events. No more idling in Skywatch as you wait to catch Urzok, the Hated.

One of the chief complaints that stuck with me through Destiny was Bungie’s lack of respect for player’s time. Until update 1.0.2, vanilla Destiny’s Cryptarch would sometimes decrypt legendary engrams into lower-quality rares, much to the chagrin of players. This is still evident in the mechanics causing luminous engrams to decrypt at lower than expected power levels for players who have created multiple characters of the same class.

Questions

Is it worth spending glimmer on power level upgrades before reaching the level cap?

I noticed I was having a hard time dismantling items – something was stopping the action from completing. It may be linked to NPCs talking. Is anyone else experiencing this?