First of all, welcome to my new blog! It’s very exciting for me to start writing about something I enjoy and can fuse it together with a class to make a grade. It’s incredible. So to begin, I’m starting with everyone’s favorite (and most-hated) console-based-shooter-RPG-Halo-Borderlandspalooza-happy-fun-time-I-only-play-games-for-the-story game Destiny:

My first Crota’s End experience was completely innocent. My raid party deliberately refrained from reading up on any strategies and we did our best to get through the raid on our own. And it was fun. It was the most fun I’ve had playing any video game in recent memory. Although we didn’t finish the raid that night (we had been going at it for about 4 hours), completing each part of the raid, figuring out the puzzles and mechanics on our own was such a rush. I’m still really surprised we made it to Deathsinger (the fight right before Crota).

cheese /CHēz/ noun – an exploitation of game design to make goals of the game easier.

That’s likely not the same story for most Destiny players, also known as Guardians. Up until now, everyone has breezed through the raid, using various exploits. You paid $20 for this expansion, and you paid $60 for the base game. Shouldn’t you feel cheated out of enjoyment of the game if you beat it by illegitimate terms? But did you cheat yourself by choosing to use the cheeses, or did the game developer, Bungie, cheat you by making cheese available?

2014 was a rough year for the gaming world, especially when it came to highly anticipated releases like Destiny, Halo: Master Chief Edition, and Watch Dogs. And you preordered all of them, didn’t you? But that’s a blog post for another day. The Destiny community found so many things broken about Crota’s End that it made a very difficult (although super fun) experience into a lame one. It’s a shame we’re a month after the release and the real fun is just beginning.

No longer can your host player leave the game to keep Crota in a kneeling position, making the final boss battle much, much easier. Here’s the glitch:

That makes things pretty easy, right? I can see how this might slip through the cracks in testing. It seems like more of an Xbox Live issue than a Bungie issue.

There is also a pretty major cheese in the bridge encounter where a Warlock can self-resurrect at the last second while the rest of the fireteam is dead to stop enemies from spawning. Then you simply snipe the Ogres on the other side of the bridge and TA-DA you’re on to the next phase. There are fixes for this in this patch as well, but it’s a little more vague.

There’s a few other highlights in this patch. You’ll now get gear and materials from defeating Deathsinger. The initial “Pit” chest will simply have materials. Now, that makes a lot more sense. Here’s the article from Bungie with the official patch notes.