u/Hi5ive81

Found this while I was at the mall today, old heads know what’s up

Basically the title, but I was one of the many people who got their Steam Controller reservation in probably day 1 of the reservation system being offered and was immediately disappointed to see that I wouldn’t be able to buy it until 2027. I happened to try and put away the $100 dollars for the controller just in case I got my purchase offer early, and I’m happy to say that Santa delivered and Christmas is coming (really) early this year!

Don’t know about the state of things overall, has Valve been really trying to get on top of supply issues or have that many people removed/missed their reservation?

I’ll keep this quick I promise

During Covid and some following years I played upwards of 16 hours a day. I have 3,700 hours, which is a lot objectively but I recognise is nothing compared to some. That’s not the point. You end up walking around every single nook and cranny fighting the Hive for the billionth time and I happen to also like photography as a hobby and realised that Bungie put a lot of work into their environments. I was looking back for nostalgia sake thinking how “I was pretty proud of those fun screenshot things, they were probably pretty bad” and was promptly proven wrong.

This is a gold mine, 16 year old me was onto something. There’s dozens, maybe a hundred of these that are pretty good
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EXTENDED:
I was a bit of a data hoarder and I have like the old blizzard launcher version of the game’s files on my pc still. I just never clean it out, it works great and it’s built like a Toyota. Here’s a screenshot by screenshot commentary because these screenshots do also mean something to me. I recently met a friend for the first time who I met through Destiny 2 when I was 14/15. I’m 21 now, and we got to spend two days exploring interesting and beautiful (and he would probably note, delicious) parts of the UK together. He introduced me to game design concepts and some of the methods used to make games, and with my childhood experience of making and playtesting a game I made in elementary school with my friend, i was hooked on how Destiny was made. I used to dream of working at Bungie and would tear into every little bit of info I could get from exploring their maps out of bounds to interviews to research online about their jobs and how they make games and their engine and stuff. Anyways, thanks for reading my following rambles. Here’s some commentary:

1. “How did you get/make these screenshots?” I had a 1060 at the time, so I normally played with pretty mid to low settings. I would crank everything to max, reload the game, and go and explore areas one at a time and find the best screenshots. You could hide your whole hud and switch between two heavy weapons to hide your hands then, and time it right to get the shot.

2. i KNOW yall switched from hating Titan to loving it. Titan was ALWAYS my favorite and I got clowned for it a million times from my friends and YouTubers. The depths of the greens and the variety of textures that guide your eye around the room to naturally explore it in various ways is both nice to look at and practical from a gameplay perspective, which they utilised with multiple missions going through this area to different doors. Titan is a good area and yall hated it back in the day.
   Now that my anger’s out for getting bullied, I’m very glad everyone seems likes Titan. I have a lot more screenshots from Titan on my pc, they aren’t all loading on my phone.

3. Most of these that will be shown were taken during the Season of Arrivals. The reason is tenfold; all of this content was disappearing and I wanted to preserve it, but also my screenshots had gotten better. I practised with Mercury for the most part since the sun and ship were dramatic and easy to frame.

4. This was my favourite spot in the game. In part for reasons I’ll mention later I loved and still do love going out of bounds in games, but it all started with Destiny 2. This led me to naturally explore the whole map to find exploits and I think I found like maybe a couple hundred areas I don’t think more than a dozen other people have found. It’s all I did. I found this spot while searching and I loved it because it wasn’t really that exploitable. Most spots like this would be really easily abused to get up and over in some way, but this was sealed. It was a safe, calm little corner of the world, seemingly hidden in the fog. It was kind of beautiful.

5. This is where I was when the servers went offline for the Beyond Light update. I had saved this area for last for some reason. It was packed with people riding around on their sparrows, but I got a lot of good shots from that final evening.

6. Demonstration from those earlier sessions. They vaulted my favorite activity as a speed running enthusiast! The Festival of the Lost’s Haunted Forest was so much fun to try and beat the clock as much as possible and just keep flying around with swords across the interesting parkour. It was so much fun and I only got one year of it, I don’t think I played it my first year it was around and I was playing.

7. The Leviathan. My favorite raid (unpopular opinion, I know). I loved the complexity of the environment, how you could go there pretty much only by loading the raid but need to do completely different things depending on why you were there. It didn’t expand the physical area all the time, which is better to do once in a while, but it kept it relevant and usually expanded my idea of what all the Leviathan was. I would regularly go into the raid just to go out of bounds and explore. It was like a maze and I knew I was one of a few people who wanted to try and completely unravel it and understand it. Plus the raid layers were cool, I met a lot of my Destiny friends doing those raid layers.

8. I do love old Mars, new Mars got too much under-appreciation. There was so much going on there, across such a vast area, with so many meaningful rewards, and so many interesting quests happening there.
   Now that I’ve gotten the personal Mars glaze out, I think it’s very well varied across design languages and gameplay designs / environment grayboxing. It’s very dramatic pretty regularly, and the cabal were knocked down a peg for a number of years after the Red War and Warmind (2018-2023 only seasonal).

9. Garden of Salvation can be 100% explored without activating the first boss. The Black Garden wasn’t shown enough later on in the franchise, it’s absolutely gorgeous. Environments like this are what makes Destiny stand out to me. My friends and I once fought the final boss for 8 1/2 hours and still didn’t beat him. The early days were rough, shoutout Outbreak Gang shoutout the veterans of WW3.

10. I have a lot of these, I’ll probably keep posting some across the coming months when there’s Destiny news. I’m excited to re-explore these areas, break the ones I couldn’t figure out before (looking at you, Forges. They patched you from time to time).

Thanks for indulging me