JohnOfMars
Banned
Anybody want a 1500+ word essay on the history of cosmetics in Destiny and my concerns about this new shader system? There's so much good in Destiny 2, but this is truly frustrating for me. And I get that maybe this is trivial for you, but it's not for me, so maybe don't shit on people who don't feel the same as you? With that out of the way, it was a fun trip down memory lane to put this together and kind of eye opening how many factors go into these kind of design decisions.
Customization in Destiny has always been limited with no transmog & Single shader for all armor, but has steadily improved. At the beginning of Vanilla Destiny, there were 2 endgame item sets everyone had to wear and shaders were one-time drops. There was no kiosk to save Shaders, and the Vault was incredibly small by today's standards. The only shaders that were prestigious were raid and trials shaders. A once and done treat that was guaranteed when most loot was not. For example, I ran Skolas a dozen times and never got an elemental weapon, but I got the shader that I could show off. In House of Wolves, Etheric Light could be used to upgrade any legendary armor to end game levels, thus giving people control over their armor appearance and shaders. Trials of Osiris was introduced which gave people largely cosmetic rewards for going flawless.
Starting in Taken King, Kiosks were added to collect shaders and infusion was added to allow people to have full control over their armor appearance. Kiosks allowed people to begin to collect shaders AND informed people about which activities granted which shaders. For prestige, a second raid armor set was added that had unique appearance and would need to be grinded for. Chroma was added in the April Update (AKA The Taken Spring). Chroma was single use and cost glimmer to apply. It was also heavily tied to microtransactions. I never bothered with it because it wasn't my style. But this is crucial: Chroma was optional AND was a layer on top of shaders. You didn't have to interact with them and they complimented the current system.
Rise of Iron kept the infusion, kiosks and hard mode armor sets. It also introduced ornaments. Ornaments were purely cosmetic additions from end-game challenges like going flawless in Trials or completing raid challenges. Ornaments were also added to exotic weapons via microtransactions. Ornaments were an interesting implementation because they were tied to gear sets. Trials ornaments went on Trials gear and Raid on raid. This set a limit to the amount of grinding needed, while also giving people chances to grind more for ornaments if they get a better armor piece, but within the limits of those fixed sets.
Enter Destiny 2, which has removed all of our old shaders, as well as kiosks for retrieving them. In exchange, they are drops that can be applied to weapons (3 slots), armor (4 slots), as well as ghosts, sparrows and ships. This is a massive increase in the number of things that can be shaded. Shaders drops frequently and from a variety of locations. There is no way to know where they are from anymor other than going to each vendor individually and previewing their rewards (which you cannot do unless you turn in all the tokens to them, which is frustrating since in a wonderful quality of life upgrade inventory is shared between characters and you might be saving tokens for an alt and thus don't want to turn them in.) We don't know about the raid or Trials at all to know if hard mode armor sets are in. Now one thing that has a significant impact is that gear is much more fixed now. Armor and weapons have one roll only and then have modification nodes that can be swapped out. What this means is that armor grades are a thing of the past and changing from an 89% Jovian Guard gauntlets to 96% gauntlets won't happen anymore. So we will need to change armor less often. However, the flip side of this is that with fixed perks on armor, we again have to make the choice do we favor looks or perks. And this is where Shaders in the past have always been helpful that even if you were unhappy with your appearance due to perks or light level, you could have a shader that you could apply freely to maintain your appearance. I favored Rose Gold throughout Years 2 & 3. One cool thing is shaders now have 4 part icons which actually show all the colors and textures of the shader!
Here's a summary. As you can see, Bungie has played around A LOT with gearing, end-game cosmetic rewards.
All that said, we're still very early in the game and haven't seen any of the endgame yet. So we don't have the full picture. But what we've seen so far is still worthy of addressing.
Here are my concerns:
So which is it? We'll be flush? and I don't need to be anxious or we'll need to grind more. It cannot be both.
Customization in Destiny has always been limited with no transmog & Single shader for all armor, but has steadily improved. At the beginning of Vanilla Destiny, there were 2 endgame item sets everyone had to wear and shaders were one-time drops. There was no kiosk to save Shaders, and the Vault was incredibly small by today's standards. The only shaders that were prestigious were raid and trials shaders. A once and done treat that was guaranteed when most loot was not. For example, I ran Skolas a dozen times and never got an elemental weapon, but I got the shader that I could show off. In House of Wolves, Etheric Light could be used to upgrade any legendary armor to end game levels, thus giving people control over their armor appearance and shaders. Trials of Osiris was introduced which gave people largely cosmetic rewards for going flawless.
Starting in Taken King, Kiosks were added to collect shaders and infusion was added to allow people to have full control over their armor appearance. Kiosks allowed people to begin to collect shaders AND informed people about which activities granted which shaders. For prestige, a second raid armor set was added that had unique appearance and would need to be grinded for. Chroma was added in the April Update (AKA The Taken Spring). Chroma was single use and cost glimmer to apply. It was also heavily tied to microtransactions. I never bothered with it because it wasn't my style. But this is crucial: Chroma was optional AND was a layer on top of shaders. You didn't have to interact with them and they complimented the current system.
Rise of Iron kept the infusion, kiosks and hard mode armor sets. It also introduced ornaments. Ornaments were purely cosmetic additions from end-game challenges like going flawless in Trials or completing raid challenges. Ornaments were also added to exotic weapons via microtransactions. Ornaments were an interesting implementation because they were tied to gear sets. Trials ornaments went on Trials gear and Raid on raid. This set a limit to the amount of grinding needed, while also giving people chances to grind more for ornaments if they get a better armor piece, but within the limits of those fixed sets.
Enter Destiny 2, which has removed all of our old shaders, as well as kiosks for retrieving them. In exchange, they are drops that can be applied to weapons (3 slots), armor (4 slots), as well as ghosts, sparrows and ships. This is a massive increase in the number of things that can be shaded. Shaders drops frequently and from a variety of locations. There is no way to know where they are from anymor other than going to each vendor individually and previewing their rewards (which you cannot do unless you turn in all the tokens to them, which is frustrating since in a wonderful quality of life upgrade inventory is shared between characters and you might be saving tokens for an alt and thus don't want to turn them in.) We don't know about the raid or Trials at all to know if hard mode armor sets are in. Now one thing that has a significant impact is that gear is much more fixed now. Armor and weapons have one roll only and then have modification nodes that can be swapped out. What this means is that armor grades are a thing of the past and changing from an 89% Jovian Guard gauntlets to 96% gauntlets won't happen anymore. So we will need to change armor less often. However, the flip side of this is that with fixed perks on armor, we again have to make the choice do we favor looks or perks. And this is where Shaders in the past have always been helpful that even if you were unhappy with your appearance due to perks or light level, you could have a shader that you could apply freely to maintain your appearance. I favored Rose Gold throughout Years 2 & 3. One cool thing is shaders now have 4 part icons which actually show all the colors and textures of the shader!
Here's a summary. As you can see, Bungie has played around A LOT with gearing, end-game cosmetic rewards.
All that said, we're still very early in the game and haven't seen any of the endgame yet. So we don't have the full picture. But what we've seen so far is still worthy of addressing.
Here are my concerns:
- Shaders are an incredibly important factor in how your guardian looks. Hell, I'll argue they're the most important if you're like me and play around with armor quite a bit and use shaders to look consistent. This is not like changing how ghosts work or ships or anything like that. This is what you see on log-in, the menu and everything in 3rd person. Putting RNG limits on shaders for ongoing use is unpleasant.
- Shaders have been the one purely cosmetic free-to-use how you see fit option since Vanilla. Class items were co-opted into the light and perk system. Armor is continent on RNG for dropping and then for perks and stats. If you couldn't get the armor you liked (for me Jovian Guantlets), you could at least look the color you wanted. Now there are limits and cost placed on that.
- The ability to grind end-game activities is only viable while that activity is current. After the new raid drops, no one plays the old one and NO ONE will care about going back for shaders. Further, we are on a 3 content drop per year, so this window is much smaller than years' past.
- The current ability to change shaders per armor piece is clunky and does not allow for the player to preview how a whole armor set will be colored together. What I mean to say is I should be able to freely preivew shaders to all my armor at the same time and then if I'm happy, then commit them together.
- Shifting the end-game grind from stat perfection-ism (chasing max light level, perfect stats, Tier 12 cooldowns) to people who like to change their shaders a lot sucks. I never hit max light level on all my armor sets from Year 2 onward. Didn't need to. I found armor that I liked and played with that. I optimized my perks and stats well enough, but they were never flawless. I preferred my looks to stat perfection, which is why this stings.
- Prior prestige cosmetics were for limited number of items (flawless ornaments on flawless gear) and were purely optional ornamentation in addition to shaders. Addtionally, they were optional. This new system is a wholesale change for every shader. You do not have a choice to interact with these or not.
- It takes a long time to get shaders and longer to able to get gear worthy of applying them. Shaders don't start really dropping til level 20. But level 20 is power level ~200, nowhere near end-game, so most gear at this point is blue and disposable. So this is two issues: You must play 20+ hours to start getting shaders and then you must play tens of hours more til you get to gear "worth of a shader". I realize 30-40 hours is slight compared to the 1000+ hours we put in over the past few years, but please respect people's time, 30-40 hours is still a lot of time. People say "you'll have a ton of these eventually" have no answer to what it's like now.
- It's possible to have a great multitude of shaders and a small number of each. The loot pool for each vendor is small, except Bright Engrams, which are huge and cannot be grinded for nearly as quickly or easily as zone vendors.
- Shaders of small number become "too awesome to use" and will just sit there waiting. It gives me literal anxiety to stare at all these shaders with just a couple of options and try to figure out which ones I want to use and on which gear and if that gear is worthy of getting a shader or if I'll get a better one in a day or a week or oh my god, it's a shader, why do I have to think about it this much?
- Oh, and since the community is clearly upset about this, there's the added pressure of "hopefully Bungie will fix this, so maybe I shouldn't use at all them right now."
We expect youll be flush w/ Shaders as you continue to play.
With D2, we want statements like "I want to run the Raid, Trials, or go back to Titan to get more of its Shader" to be possible. (4/4)
So which is it? We'll be flush? and I don't need to be anxious or we'll need to grind more. It cannot be both.
