Video Game Tuesday: Having fun with exploits

Michael Blaker
Game Industry News is running the best blog posts from people writing about the game industry. Articles here may originally appear on Michael's blog, Windborne's Story Eatery.

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For this week’s Video Game Tuesday I’m going to be talking about having fun. It’s all about exploiting the bugs for amusement/gain.

For the past week I’ve been reviewing Destiny: The Taken King, and while I’ve got the review submitted and it should be up by the time this post runs I’ve also been exploiting Bungie’s mistake for my own gain. Normally I would never ever condone this, but given my history with Destiny’s RNG system and the fact that DeeJ, the Community Manager for Bungie said to “enjoy it while you can” so I did.

What is this exploit?: Xur came for his weekly trip with a new consumable item called Three of Coins. It allows an Ultra, read named, enemy to possibly drop an exotic engram. If it doesn’t drop the next time you use one of the items again and kill an ultra it has a better chance. This repeats until one drops. The old Scourge of Winter mission allows you to respawn right before the boss of the level allowing you to bring him down far enough to kill with a single rocket and you’d run up to him and shoot at point blank range in order to die and restart at the checkpoint. If he dropped an engram it would stay on the ground.

Why did I take advantage of it?: Because I know they are going to nerf this item to the ground, and I might as well get as much use out of it while I can. I spent every single strange coin I had on buying the items and farmed that mission for a few hours. About 130 items later I came out with a Hawkmoon, Zahalo and Hereafter as well as 20 other Engrams I haven’t decoded yet. I’m saving them for the off chance I actually care enough about the game to bother with getting to the next Light Level tier and have them boosted to the maximum values upon decode.

Why is this fun?: Because it’s taking a system and breaking it by using the rules against the developers intended choice. Also because I like to stick it to Bungie for all the crap they put me and other’s through since launch day of Destiny last year.

Am I spiteful because I did this?: I don’t think so, at least not overly spiteful. I missed the Loot Cave last year, which was arguably the best unintended player interaction that happened after the launch of the game. So I wasn’t going to miss this chance.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday!

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