Thursday, November 06, 2014

Destiny: My Journey for Flawless

So when I first started Destiny, I didn't really expect to earn a lot of the trophies in the game. I didn't expect to play online with people or join a group on a regular basis. But it turned out I ended up playing a lot more with a dozen different people over the days quite often. Most were from NeoGAF in particular. I'm pretty active in the DestinyGAF thread so I got to know a lot of fellow Guardians there.

As I started to accumulate more and more trophies from just playing the game, I ended up focusing on the Flawless Raider trophy. One of three trophies left for the Platinum. So what the hell is it about? Well, the only way to earn this trophy was to complete the Raid without ANYONE in your Fireteam dying. Yup, basically any deaths will kill your progress. This includes disconnects or leaving the game and coming back afterwards. You need to play through the entire Raid in one go. Checkpoints are meaningless. Because of the strict requirements you not only have to play with an experienced group of players, but you also need a group who are dedicated enough with their time to play the whole way through in one sitting. Not too easy considering most guys I played with had families or jobs to deal with so setting up a time to play together was quite a hassle. Anyway, I was able to find people to play with me so it was fine.

The first time I attempted this was with my main Raid crew. We played together often and had completed the Raid a few times together so it was a no-brainer. A few members actually got the trophy already. I was asked to join during their original attempts but I had no faith in the infamous platforming section at the time so I abstained. Well, guess what? It turned out I screwed up that section in my first attempt. I did the platforming fine but I slid off the ledge and died. What made it worst was we decided to finish up the Raid and we had no issues so if I didn't die we would've gotten it right there. The next few retries were a few dumb deaths by random people and one of the other guys also fell off at the ledge. People gave up and the run was dead and that's when the nightmare began.

Bungie had announced they would patch Atheon to try and stop the cheeses and also randomly teleport players. In its prepatch state, people were able to push Atheon off to easily defeat him and teleporting was predictable and easy to manipulate. Well, Bungie didn't like that so they came up with a patch to "fix" it. In any case, after my first Flawless attempt failed, Bungie decided to push out the patch the NEXT day while I was trying to get it with another group. We got disconnected when the patch kicked in when we were more than half way there. Boy, what a clusterfuck. The new patch not only didn't fix the cheesing (people found other ways to push him off) but it also introduced a flurry of new glitches that broke the Atheon fight even more. What was possible became almost impossible for all the wrong reasons. The glitches during Atheon's fight were bad enough already but it became even more common after the patch.

During the next few days and maybe even weeks, many people I played with tried and tried to get the trophy without success. Their horror stories were numerous. It was either they ended up with a bad player or encountered a random glitch that had ruined their chances towards the end of their run. I kept trying as well and we kept hitting something that would kill our run over and over until it became a joke. But we didn't want to give up simply because we knew we could do it and we wanted to get it. I'm not gonna lie, it became quite a bonding experience. Oh the sad stories we could tell...

A few guys I knew wanted to try again yesterday and I joined them on a whim. What was funny was that there was only one guy I had played with the most in our party. Three other guys were guys I had only played with a few times and two new guys joined us. In fact, the new guys never even tried the Flawless run before so I wasn't even expecting much from them. We went through the Raid as usual while coaching the new guys the methods we learned from all our past efforts. When we finally got to the platforming section, we made it through with no problem. The new guy decided to use a risky move to get by but he made it and that was scary, lol.

Once we had completed the platforming section, we spent a few minutes forming our plans with the new found glitches and any other possible glitches. It was pretty nerve-wracking but we had a good leader. Once it started we only had a few close calls with the enemies but we did fine against the first half of the fight. Atheon finally appeared and we stuck with our plan. But it turned out the glitch was a bit helpful here. Atheon didn't teleport any of us so we kept clearing out the Supplicants and kept shooting him. We didn't get Time's Vengeance as a result so it was taking a bit longer than usual to shave off his life bar. We had to take him down asap before Enrage started (an annoying part where he would summon even more minions to overwhelm players). What was funny was that once we had him down to a sliver of life, he decided to teleport two of us. We kept shooting and then I finally heard someone scream "HE DIED!" We waited a few more seconds and there it was...




I can't tell you what a relief it was to finally obtain one of the hardest trophies in the game with the stupid glitches in the way. I was really happy it was finally over. My group was ecstatic. I've never worked so hard for a trophy like this. It required time, patience, skill, communication, teamwork and a lil bit of luck with the glitches. I think this was the intent of Bungie for the trophy but the stupid glitches really made it harder than originally intended. Hopefully they fix their game but I'm happy we got the trophy through such circumstances. It really was quite a memorable experience in all my years of gaming.

 

Now I'm going to have to level up two other classes and get that Platinum. Maybe I'll play some other games finally, lol...