Destiny 2
Update: A team has now claimed to beat the raid, off-stream. Team Parabellum, and unknown squad. Bungie is confirming.
Original article follows:
Good morning everyone, no, no one has beaten Destiny 2’s Last Wish raid yet, Salvation’s Edge, which has just past The Last Wish, making it the longest world’s first attempt at over 18 hours.
A handful of teams are on the final boss fight against the Witness including community legends like Datto, Saltegreppo and ATP. The catch, however, is all these teams are so determined to be the one that wins that they have gone to extreme lengths to protect their strategies from each other.
While yesterday’s eight hour fourth encounter had these teams muting their mics and blurring parts of their screens featuring buffs and debuffs, now, all the top teams have gone full blackout mode. ATP is showing a still photo. Datto has a camera of just himself looking at the screen. Saltegreppo was streaming the actual fight on mute for a while, but now he has gone dark. The closest thing we’re now seeing to the boss fight now are colored lights reflecting off Datto’s face.
I understand why this is happening. These teams want so badly to be the first to complete the most important, most difficult raid in Destiny history. But as for this being a thrilling community event, it has essentially stopped being that entirely. They might as well be offline, given that at best we can hear a few combat sounds. Often not even that.
Destiny 2
There has been a call to implement “rules” around this, but that would largely be unenforceable as that would force anyone trying to beat the raid to be streaming the raid, and it’s always been the case that you could be playing privately and win that way, meaning no one is excluded from trying. I’m not sure what the answer is here.
As for the raid itself, many are already calling it Destiny’s best ever. The first encounter took a huge amount of time for many teams, including the initially most-watched streamer Aztecross who drew 100,000 viewers, but the encounter four puzzle room stumped all teams for eight hours, and most are still there. Given all the muting, I have zero idea how those mechanics work.
Now, with the boss, before everything went dark, there appeared to be a very quick insta-wipe mechanic with The Witness casting out a death wave if you didn’t do…something. I heard Datto’s team may have figured out how to DPS, but I’m not sure if that’s true. If it is, the end might be in sight, but we are 18 hours in, these guys are on no sleep and not thinking or playing as well as they could. Given past 24+ hour completions, we’ve seen this before with some teams, but yes, in terms of ultimate World’s First, this is now the longest. At a certain point I do wonder if Bungie will start worrying about player health. None of these finalist teams are stopping no matter what, not after all this.
I have mixed feelings on how this is going. The length and difficulty is great and it seems to be an all-timer of a raid. But the viewing experience of top teams has now gone from not-great to almost unbearable, and yet 70,000 people are indeed sitting around watching Datto’s face. Datto winning the ultimate raid race after so many almost firsts would be one of the best stories in Destiny history. I just hope we get to see it.
Update: A team has now claimed to beat the raid, off-stream. Team Parabellum, and unknown squad. Bungie is confirming.
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