(Thanks to Eric for the reference, click here for the full effect.)
As I mentioned earlier, granting access to the public Destiny Beta was a master stroke for Bungie’s latest creation to sink its meat hooks into my imagination. I preordered the game proper, and the PS3 version was shipped to me, “Day One”. I laughed at the poor XBone saps who would be waiting for the whole thing to install to their hard drives before playing. I then watched a slideshow while listening to Destiny Muzak, as 6 Gigs of data slowly installed.
OK, now I was ready to go! I created my dude, an Exo Male Warlock, and hopped in. It played EXACTLY like the Beta, but no problem, I’d get to the new stuff soon. Then halfway through the tutorial mission, I was booted out. I tried again a bit later, and was kicked out DURING the opening pre-rendered movie! Ha! OK, this was the first day and thousands of nerds were hitting the servers at the same time. I would try again later.
One week later, the tutorial level played fine, but at The Tower game hub, I was promptly booted out multiple times. I think the error codes were something like Centipede, Ringworm and Sphincter. After perusing help.bungie.net, it seemed like the problem might be on my end. The suggested fix involved running network cable directly to my console and tinkering with my router. Moving the cable would involve pushing the cable into the floor in one room, then heading into the crawlspace, finding the cable and shoving it up into another hole further within said crawlspace. Let just said the adventure eventually turned into this scene with Lance Henriksen in Aliens…
…but with dirt everywhere and I was on my back, and that was the easy part! Learning the Greek of how to setup a PS3 with a Static IP and clearing the necessary firewall ports for both the PSN and Destiny servers was dirty business and took about two hours, but huzzah it worked! (Thanks Port Forward.)
I’m back in the game, and again, it felt about the same as the Beta, but a bit harder. Maybe I was impatient with playing through the same content, or maybe the Scout Rifle wasn’t for me. Eventually The Moon opened up and I jumped at the chance for a new locale. It was, as the saying goes, a harsh mistress. My Guardian’s ass was handed to me with a bow on it. (The Fallen are very considerate.) I’ve since played more and, let me be clear, I am having a grand old time. I am thrilled that a new AAA game plays on ye olde PS3, but man…I never thought I would have to go to this amount of trouble to play a game.
The times, they be a changin’.
Cheers,
Ben