It has been a long time since we’ve seen a proper Bungie game on PC. Outside of the first two Halo games ported well after the fact, the now Washington-based studio wasn’t always well known for their console releases. After splitting off from Microsoft and the Halo brand, Bungie worked on their next major project, and while it was met with mixed reception, it quickly became one of the biggest new IPs this generation, inevitably spawning a sequel. Destiny 2 was released last month with numerous improvement to the formula, and even though it didn’t completely blow everyone away, it still has a strong, dedicated fanbase. One group of gamers that still needs to experience the Destiny love is PC players, but finally that has been rectified. Activision and Bungie have released the multi-million selling sequel to the open platform, but is it what PC gamers had hoped for or is this a franchise better left on dedicated consoles?
As for graphical fidelity, Destiny 2 offers more than enough to make PC users happy. Outside of being able to enable windowed fullscreen with upwards of 4K resolution, we are given a Field of View slider, Anti-Aliasing, SSAO, Texture Anisotropy, Texture & Shadow Quality, and Depth of Field selection. In addition, there’s environment, character, foliage and shadow detail distance, as well as Light Shaft, Motion Blur, Wind Impulse, Internal Render Resolution percentage, HDR for those with HDR screens, Chromatic Aberration and Film Grain. There’s even the option to display your FPS. Whew. As we mentioned, there’s a lot of options to go through, along with a VRAM Usage meter at the top to get a better grasp of your hardware capabilities. The ability to play Destiny 2 PvP guide 2 at 60 FPS is a game changer, especially if you can play it at a higher resolution such as 1440p or 4K. This feels like a game that’s made for it, and you won’t want to go back afterwards. Overall, the developers have done an amazing job bringing this to PC from a visual standpoint.
I wasn’t a huge fan of any of the guns in the Destiny 2 Beta, although I’m usually picky and stick with the ones I really like, but they do seem different and cater to different needs. You’re also given a lot of options in the Beta which is nice, including the ability to test out all of the different kinds of guns. They’ve changed the organization of guns as well, and I’m not too much of a fan, although I could see it working once you have a whole host of guns to choose from. Instead of Primary, Secondary, and Heavy, it’s Kinetic, Energy, and Power. Heavy and Power are synonymous, while Kinetic means regular weapons with no energy ability attached and Energy simply means that they do. Energies, remember, are the Solar, Void and Arc powers that a weapon might come with. So now, if one is Kinetic and one is Energy, you could have two assault rifles, two hand cannons or any mix of what we think of now as Primary and Secondary weapons in those slots. What I ended up using, though, was a sidearm in the Kinetic slot and an assault rifle in the Energy slot, which meant I spawned with the sidearm, which was weird. It’s different, but I think that when I actually start using it it will make more sense.
Destiny 2 is laying the groundwork for outstanding storytelling and unforgettable moments. It’s setting a solid foundation for the game it always wanted to be, while delivering the things Destiny never could. It’s an exciting time to be a Guardian even if it means the Last City falling only to pick ourselves up one more time. At least this time, there are those worth fighting for.
There are a total of eight maps and five game modes. Supremacy, Clash, and Control are part of the Quickplay option, and new modes Countdown and Survival are part of Competitive. Unfortunately, there is no option to select the game mode you want once you select Quickplay or Competitive. If you really want to play Control, you have to hope that the game’s matchmaking doesn’t randomly throw you into Supremacy or Clash.
Other (obvious) additions to Destiny 2 are the new subclasses and extra abilities. I’m a Titan main, so most of my time was spent with the new Sentinel class, but I also got to check out the Dawnblade Warlock and the Arcstrider Hunter. All three are similar in a lot of ways to their previous subclass, but with more aggressive tendencies. The Arcstrider is almost identical to Bladedancer, save for the super, which gives you some mad bow staff skills. Dawnblade gives you a flaming sword and the ability to essentially fly around the map as you swing fiery blasts at everyone. That’s instead of Sunsinger, which brought you back to life and gave you unrestricted access to all the melees and grenades you wanted. Instead of Defenders and their Wards of Dawn, Sentinels will get a Captain America shield that they’re able to throw around and smash into people with. So while I think that the new subclasses are less tactical than the original ones, they grant new and interesting game mechanics to players. The new supers are about taking out as many baddies as you can, and in that case, all three are extremely successful.