Destiny's 'Prison of Elders'

Destiny's 'Prison of Elders'

Today was the third part of Bungie’s livestream debut of House of Wolves, the upcoming Destiny DLC that aims to provide fresh content for the game. The first stream showed how guns and armor would be upgraded, and was a walking tour of the new social space at The Reef. The second stream showcased the Trials of Osiris, a new high-end PvP mode. And today was supposed to be the reveal of The Prison of Elders, the Raid-replacing activity that’s essentially a modified version of Halo’s Firefight with waves of enemies to clear.

Except it was so hard, two Bungie employees and a community guest star couldn’t even beat it. After dying dozens of times, they finally called it quits in the fourth round, out of five. What the hell happened?

As it turns out, I can offer some additional insight, given that I’m one of the few members of the public who have played Prison of Elders myself. I did so at a studio visit to Bungie a few weeks ago, and I just published a lengthy analysis of Prison and the new Strike which I highly suggest you read here.

This is…a little embarrassing for Bungie. The reveal was supposed to go for maybe an hour, but at an hour and forty minutes with no end in sight, they pulled the plug. And they were honestly not even that close to beating it.

What happened? First, my own experience.

I played the level 32 challenge, with my fireteam and I all at level 32. We had different modifiers than what was shown on TV today, but parts were certainly challenging. We wiped completely maybe 4-5 times throughout the course of five rounds, and some of that was simply us not understanding some of the new rules (like mines switching from being eliminated by shooting them, to suddenly being defused by proximity). The final boss wiped us a solid three times, but in the end, we beat it, and it took less than an hour.

What happened here today? I think a combination of things.

The team here was all level 34 for the level 34 challenge, meaning they were the “appropriate” difficulty level for the event, and still one challenge tier down from the 35 “maxed out” challenge that promises to be even harder.

I think the intent of doing a higher level challenge was to show the audience that this is as tough as a Raid (at least the first few times you did it) and it requires the teamwork of a premade fireteam. I do not think they anticipated that two Bungie employees and a community vet wouldn’t be able to beat it at all.

Some of the problem was in their playstyle. I’m hardly the best Destiny player on earth, so it’s probably remiss for me to judge, but I noticed a surprising lack of restraint during gameplay from all three members of the team. They rarely stayed in cover, and while that’s required during a few in-round events like defusing mines, they all seemed a bit reckless. Despite a sniper rifle being a PvE staple, many were running around with shotguns. While yes, you can blow apart a tough enemy with one, you can also easily-get one-shot, more often than not. When my team took on these rounds, we realized we had to be pretty calculated in our actions. There didn’t seem to be much of that here. Perhaps that’s due to nerves, being on a livestream in front of 160,000 people at one point, but I think it was a significant contributing factor.

The other factor? The round they ended on, which they were not even close to beating, just didn’t seem physically possible to complete, skill level aside. It was against the Hive, and the modifier was Arc burn, meaning all the enemy heavy hitters like Wizards and Knights could essentially two-shot you. Usually, that’s beatable with your own Arc weapons and taking advantage of cover.

Here, however, there was another mine modifier, meaning that the players had to run to open air sections of the map and stand in place defusing a mine from anywhere from 5-10 seconds. And with the Arc modifier, you only need about 1.5 seconds to die. The mines spawn everywhere and often overlap their timers, so you can’t sit around and kill everything before you rush to defuse them. If you don’t, you wipe anyway. The objectives and the modifier seem totally incompatible with each other.

I’m sure that this particular round is beatable, as I’ve now watched the Destiny community do things like complete the Raid without using guns or while blindfolded or all other manner of craziness, but it was definitely too hard for a live reveal and a team who is anything besides the top tier of players the game has to offer.

So what did livestream audiences miss? A fifth and final round which contains a boss. I can’t speak as to who the livestream team was about to face, but in my game, we had a Cabal Centurion with a shield that changed resistance types.

After that, Bungie was supposed to show all of you the treasure room, a series of chests that dump legendaries and exotics in your lap after a hard day’s fight. The fact that they didn’t even reach the area is particularly ironic because we were outright forbidden from taking any video footage of the area to show you guys ourselves.

Honestly, I think they would have been better off doing a lower difficulty challenge, or just pre-recording a solid session. I had no idea that something like this could even happen, as the 32 challenge I did wasn’t a breeze, but it certainly wasn’t anywhere close to impossible. But that last round certainly was.

Not the best day for Bungie or Destiny, but I do have faith that Wolves itself will be something of a hit among players, once it debuts properly. I’ll have more to say about it in the coming days and weeks.

Update: I’m doing an AMA about my experience with Prison of Elders and other HoW stuff on reddit, so check that out if you have questions that weren’t answered by the abruptly ended stream.

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