I’m standing in the Skywatch area of the Cosmodrome, Old Russia, in Destiny 2, with a few other random players, and we’re waiting for enemies to spawn. A Hive Tomb ship appears in the sky right over my head and drops off exactly two enemies, and I blast away at them with a machine gun. The other players sprint over, swooping in like hawks, but I manage to snag the two kills before they can, so they jump back onto rooftops and boulders to wait for the next batch of baddies and try again. A lot of long, boring seconds pass before any more enemies spawn and we all repeat the scramble.
I’m shooting these particular fish in this particular barrel because it’s a requirement to unlock the Legend title, a social marker of in-game achievements that appears beneath your name. Another player getting a kill means I don’t, so we’re all competing against each other to spend the least amount of time here. Developer Bungie added this title to the game in honor of the 10th anniversary of the original Destiny, and the objective I’m working on is a joking nod to the early days of that game. We have to kill a bunch of enemies in the Skywatch and loot “engrams,” or weapon/armor drops, from them.
Hello Darkness, my old friend.
See, back when Destiny launched in 2014, the grind to increase your level and reach the requirements for its endgame content–the Vault of Glass raid–was awful. After a certain point, your strength was determined by the stats on your gear, so you were always chasing weapons and armor with higher levels. Gear was dolled out stingily; you could get it from playing Strike missions, but only in unpredictable fits and starts, and from random drops when you killed aliens. But the gear was never guaranteed to be better than what you already had.