Video Game Tuesday: King’s Fall is a Success

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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This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m talking about why I think Bungie has made another Vault of Glass rather than making more mistakes in Year Two. It’s all about the King’s Fall Raid!

Why am I talking about it?: Because I thought Vault of Glass was some of the most fun I had with 5 other people in a video game in ages last year. But when Crota’s End was released I was severely disappointed in the design of the game where instead of making things rely on just mechanics it also relied on every single freaking thing being a bullet sponge. It was an absolutely terrible design and I hope the person who was in charge of making the final call on design choices for it was demoted at the very least. It was a miserable experience, and I’m not even taking into account all the various bugs, including the ones they included in their supposed “fixes”. Vault of Glass was buggy, but at least it was fun. Crota’s End was just a failure.

What did King’s Fall do right?: Well there a ton of puzzles, from jumping puzzles, to a literal maze in the darkness without your Ghost lighting anything up. It was fun to go through it, and I enjoyed it. Getting to the bosses was a lot of fun, and while there are still bugs that affect the raid they are a lot less frequent. For the most part at the least, I experienced a consistent bug where Oryx wouldn’t stagger and would consistently wipe us, despite having two Gunslinger’s use Celestial Nighthawks and their Golden Gun to try to stagger him when his chest cavity opens up. From what I’ve read online, a single one of the Hunter’s shots should have been enough to stagger him by itself. Instead it didn’t and even including the other Hunter and the rest of us firing sniper shots into his chest we consistently died.

My overall judgement: 90% of it is a success, but it’s marred by bugs that have been in the game since the Alpha and bugs in the raid itself. I’ll beat Oryx, and call it good. If my friends desperately need my help, I’ll help. Otherwise I’ll just play Destiny occasionally like I have been.

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