by Paul Tassi via Forbes
The rivalry between Xbox One and PS4 Destiny players is years old at this point, with the Sony version of the game always ending up with more content thanks to a never-ending deal with Activision. Continuing into Destiny 2, this really works against both groups, seeing that things like a PS4-exclusive sniper rifle can never be sold by Xur, or a PS4-exclusive strike can never be the Nightfall, yet that’s not enough of an issue for this partnership to be dissolved.
I finally got fed up with missing content on Xbox One, so for Destiny 2 I switched over to PS4, which always happens to be where most of the playerbase resides, given the console’s massive marketshare. It’s been…fine. I haven’t really noticed a difference because once you have all those missing items, you just view them as part of the game, not some special bonus. This is opposed to just being sad about not having X thing on Xbox, which is a hallmark of a deal that really does nothing except upset half your playerbase.
But I won’t lay into this deal for the 50th time. Rather, this is about another issue, one that gives Xbox One players the upper hand for the first time in Destiny’s history.
They can actually play the damn game.
I’m not joking. Destiny 2 on PS4 is reaching a point where playing it is more exhausting than it’s worth because of one error specifically. I cannot reach the Tower without a maddening series of glitches, crashes and restarts.
Yesterday, over the course of about two hours, I desperately tried to reach the Tower to decrypt engrams and turn in faction tokens for Faction Rally to try and secure the last few pieces of armor I’m missing.
What followed was a comedy of errors. Either my ship would get stuck in an infinite loading loop, floating above earth or trapped in an endless tunnel of light and color, never reaching its destination even if it sat there for 5, 10, 20 minutes. Or if I was lucky, the game would just crash outright right away, at least sparing the sense of false hope that I might actually reach the Tower.
I ended up having to go to the Farm (the Farm!) for the first time since the story campaign. There I could load in just fine, and seeing how there were about 20 other level 20 people there, I assume this is a common workaround. But while you can support the lesser-known Cryptarch that lives there by having her decrypt your engrams, you still need to access to the Tower to reach all three Vanguard vendors, the Gunsmith, and most pressingly this week, all three Faction vendors.
I would say I was able to reach the Tower maybe one out of every three to five attempts yesterday. This is not just some minor error. Every time the game crashes or you get stuck in a loading loop, you have to restart Destiny 2, load the title screen, load the character selection, load to your ship, and set the destination again and hope it works this time. It is not a quick process, and by the fourth Tower failure in a row late in the day yesterday, I had to set down my controller and literally walk away from the game. This was just a waste of time.
Bungie and Sony are aware of this issue, or at least some version of it. Previously, there was an error where every time you logged out of the game either manually or through inactivity, Destiny 2 would blue screen crash. That was fixed in a new patch, but now Bungie says they’re working with Sony to resolve this Tower crash, and hopefully the infinite loading loop as well, which is almost worse.
The common thread here? This is a Sony-exclusive error. Every time I complain about it online, I get a dozen Xbox One players saying they’ve never had a problem loading into the Tower since launch, followed by a bunch of jokes about how this is karma for me switching to the “enemy console.”
They’re right! I hate this. I really do. Destiny is already a time consuming game already, but wrestling with the basic functionality of going to the most important social hub of the game makes me want to stop playing until the issue is fixed. To me, it feels like it’s getting worse. I’ve had some Tower issues before this, but never what I experienced yesterday.
I hope this is resolved soon, but until it is, Xbox One players, enjoy your temporary victory. Lord knows after all these years you deserve one.
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