Destiny 2 - I don't have time to explain Bungie's MMO shooter 2.0

Yep… you’ve beaten the game and reached the jaded, nothing interesting left stage. That doesn’t mean you have to shit on people starting up and enjoying the discovery process.

Yeah, I don’t really get it. Once I’m done farming for a frame or weapon in Warframe, that’s no longer part of my gameplay loop either. I can’t think of a game like this where all the older content stayed in the gameplay loop years after release? I don’t expect that the gear I’m finding at L28 is going to remain relevant in endgame dungeons in other games.

In any case, for someone in my situation there’s too many things to do as it is. That’s part of the onboarding confusion. As it is, I’ll just keep running the supposedly non-gameplay loop content with a ton of other people are also running it, until I get everything I want out of it. Then I’ll move on to another area, which is how I could describe pretty much any of these online games. Eventually I’ll get bored and play something else, but I’m having fun with it and that’s all I really ask for in a game.

I agree with you that the game is easy and should push back more. But I don’t understand this part at all. Whatever quests are in the game or single player campaign content, for instance, it should very much be part of the gameplay loop for someone looking for a good single player shooter, right? Since the game is not challenging, you just have to sort of put your own challenges in place to not make it too easy.

And if people are happy with the challenge level, then there’s no problem right? The only problem seems to be that the game is really confusing about how it hides and doles out content now. The fun parts of a first person shooter from Bungie are the moment to moment gameplay activities that you do while doing X mission. Doing X mission is just an excuse to do the moment to moment dodging and shooting and melee and grenades, etc.

The big difference is that in the Halo games they give us 4 difficulty levels. In Destiny 1, they gave us 2 difficulty levels at launch, where one was for newbies and one was for veterans (then they patched the game and made it: one for newbies, one impossible). In Destiny 2, they gave us only 1 difficulty level: one for newbies. And that was it.

Is now the meaning of “shit on people” show them the reality of the game rather than feed them wishful thinking?

We live in the modern era: reality has been replaced by illusionism.

What I wrote is that the power level of a character isn’t being factored in the mathematical formula that calculates the damage. The number you have on screen is cosmetic. This is a simple fact and it is devoid of personal bias (outside of raids and similar). So you don’t need to chase better weapons as long the system sees all those weapons as equal to each other. This only happens on Destiny 2 and no other game with similar mechanics.

I guess there are two types of content. In Warframe you don’t have to collect all frames and all weapons, those are optional choices. I consider the content the stuff you use those tools on. So the missions are content, the tilesets, enemies, the two open areas. Warframe kept all that in the structure of the game. Destiny has soft-removed two years of content.

I’m not even comparing Destiny to some ideal game, I’m comparing Destiny right now to Destiny a couple of weeks ago. Destiny 2 after Forsaken had a much, much richer endgame, with diverse activities and “lots of stuff” to do. It had a much more elaborate leveling process that moved you from point A, to point B, to point C. All this ASIDE from the guns you can collect, or the mods and builds you can create.

Compared to that game, current Destiny has a really narrow checklist. They’ve made most of that content not relevant anymore. The Tangled Shore and Dreaming City are ghost towns (if not Flashpoints), and been replaced with very little.

So I’m simply commenting on this: with Forsaken we had a big expansion of things to do, and it added a lot of diversity in the game, made it feel a bit more concrete than a repetitive grind.

With Shadowkeep/New light, not only the expansion content is light, but they have removed the stuff that Forsaken added, so we are in a phase of significant reduction instead of expansion.

They even admitted this themselves, hinting they couldn’t handle a game “too wide”:

AND SO THEY SHRUNK (and players like me, who don’t raid and enjoy challenging solo content, were left out as collateral damage)

(imho, the annual pass was extremely anemic, and no story progress was made, so GO FIGURE, they cannot even keep up with that)

To this you add the stuff I personally complain about, and no one else cares about: the complete removal of challenging content you can solo (there’s NONE).

And then you add the stuff other players complain about, and that I haven’t touched: the progress past 950 is insane.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/dfvsy8/pinnacle_leveling_950960_is_broken_heres_why/

And that the itemization hasn’t been updated in ages.

Yet these last two are pretty common in all similar games. What’s uncommon is the lack of game progress, lack of difficulty, lack of reasons that make you work on your character.

Without challenging content there’s no reason to chase a higher number, or chase a better weapon, or work on a character build. Especially because this is a case where the higher number not only is not necessary (lack of difficulty), but totally ignored by the actual damage formulas.

All of this still doesn’t prevent anyone from going out and spending hundred of hours collecting all weapons. It’s just a completely different argument from what I was writing about.

Well whatever they did feels fun to me, so they can keep at it. Been having a great time with it since the release. I also haven’t played much since Forsaken so feels like a ton of stuff to do.To me Destiny is the weapon/armor hunting and digging into the hidden stuff so the mothballing of the old story content doesn’t phase me.

Same here, fun game. Challenge is there as well if you know where to look.

Answers like this aren’t useful. Motivate what you say. Describe what you are doing that feels challenging and fun.

He may prefer to spend his time playing the game as opposed to writing a dissertation on the subject.

There are 180.000 playing alongside him. We don’t need all of them to come on Q23 to tell us how they feel. It’s a discussion forum and no one is compelled to participate.

Nor it is a survey.

A forum thread is conversational. There’s a place for the lengthy and informative analytical posts you have written just as there is room for someone to say “Hey, yeah, I think it’s fun and challenging!”.

Hey y’all, I just dove into this since it moved to Steam. I got it a while back via Humble Monthly, but barely touched it. I really like this new version though. Very fun so far.

Sure. Basically pinnacle activities. A couple of examples

  • Nightfall Ordeal and Nightmare Hunts on hero+ difficulty. It poses champions with protections that requires you to use specific mods in co-operation with the other fireateam members to take them out - if you don’t do it in time you’re toast. Lots of fun, requiring communication and tactics and the right gear
  • The new raid is far from trivial, requires co-operation between team members to tether relays. Same thing with all Destiny raids TBH, very challenging activities each one with unique puzzles
  • Try to spend time to get seals (when you see for instance “Rivensbane” in purple under someone’s name). Rivensbane seal requires you to get through the Last Wish raid without any team members dying in one single go. The seals are filled with similar tough requirements, so there’s a lot of weight in wearing one. Sure some of them are grindy, challenging in a different way.
  • In PVP you can try out the competitive mode, where the best PvP players reside, it’s also the only way to get some of the best weapons in the game, like Mountaintop or Recluse. The score system is tough since if you lose a match, you lose points, so it’s not a grind in that sense, you actually have to win. Getting the Recluse earlier was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done in a game

Honestly, the story campaign is basically the start of the game, the real experience/challenge comes afterwards if you’re ready for the longer journey. And I personally think it is fine that there are parts that are easy, allowing people to jump in and get the core ideas of the world and the lore. There’s plenty of challenge waiting if you’re ready to go for the highest power level.

I bought the game when it came out, can I start a new character at the start and go right through the game to the end ina challenging enviroment or do I need the add on and have to start there?

I’m showing 169 hours for D2 on Steam and I’m 963 (950+13). I’ve beat the raid and the 980 nightfall. All of the story content is I think intentionally easy but the end game activities (raid and nightfall) are not. It took my group 6 hours to beat the first encounter of the raid and we couldn’t get past the second encounter until they took the challenge mode off. From reading others raid launch experiences I believe that to be pretty standard.

There are many samey feeling and shooting guns but there are also very unique guns as well. Something like Izanagi’s Burden is a game changer and while the stats on guns aren’t a big deal the perk rolls you get can make or break a gun. Stand out weapons I’ve used: Recluse, Le Monarque, Riskrunner, Monte Carlo, Outbreak Perfected, Lumina (really cool support exotic that you can actually heal your teammates with).

I really don’t get the point of complaining about being able to use a white gun to beat intentionally easy story content. Knock yourself out I guess? If you try to run it in a difficult nightfall or the raid you are a serious hindrance to your team and the score screen will reflect it in a big way.

That’s fine.

I’ve made plenty clear that I was discussing and analyzing from the perspective of non-raiding player, no organized activities clan-based type.

I’ve always said there’s no challenging solo content.

I’ve never said that raids are easy (especially their hard modes). It would be silly.

Because, again, alternatives do not exist.

If you look up at the origin of my comments, you could see that I resented that the new version of Destiny removed the possibility of challenging solo content. This possibility existed because they allowed to do content at a lower power level than recommended, and this put the challenge in all that story content.

This was removed, in strikes as well. Strikes would be fun to play solo, as they are generally soloable. But Bungie doesn’t let one play strikes solo as matchmaking is forced. And if you matchmake strikes they are once again too easy, and most players you group with will want to speedrun them.

Higher nightfalls are without matchmaking and not soloable.

So the content that would be fun to solo, cannot be played solo. The content you can solo, is not soloable.

And most of the content with matchmaking is generally too easy.

The comment about the newbie weapon reflects all content that doesn’t require a dedicated, not-matchmade group. Everything else too.

I write from the perspective of non-raiding player exclusively.

Everything about Destiny is built around the multiplayer experience. You’re yelling at the clouds here…

Yet there’s a HUGE amount of content in the game, in the form of four campaigns of story missions, 8 planets public areas and missions, all public events, bounties, lost sectors, quests. All of which is now set to a difficulty childishly easy, and has been removed from the structure of the game.

That happened all at the sudden two weeks ago with this “reboot”.

On the other hand, the “forced” multiplayer experience with no matchmaking, the actually challenging content, comes in the form of ONE weekly mission (Nightfall the Ordeal), and an handful of raids (plus the PvP component).

This is like saying that on a client made of 90Gb, the only piece that is still relevant in the structure is like 15Gb. The remaining 75Gb is made of content made obsolete and gutted of any difficulty through a patch.

I don’t think this is normal at all and, once again, this something new they pulled off with this latest “freemium” release. I liked the Destiny that existed up to two weeks ago, and as a player of that game I can legitimately be pissed that it was changed for the worst. Even if the majority of players are content enough with a sliver of content to cycle forever, while the bulk of the content has been thrown away, for no good reason.

It’s like: “hey, this is a multiplayer game. It’s not for solo.”

So why 90% of the bulk of all content is solo?

My complaint isn’t that there isn’t enough of solo content. THERE’S PLENTY. It’s that the difficulty has been set too low by this last patch. That content has been destroyed. It’s not normal.

It’s as if in World of Warcraft everyone started from level 120, immediately making the remaning 100+ world zones of the game completely useless and impossible to be enjoyed anymore even if you wanted to. Sure, you can still go there. But with all the monsters and quests being grey (or “light green”, to be super accurate). How much fun is that? And how can this sort of move be praised?

This game has some of the worst loading times I’ve seen in games of this type, and that’s with having it on SSD. Typically 100gb installation sizes can be excused because lower compression generally leads to faster loading times but D2 got the worst of both worlds here.

What is your argument? And who is it for? Destiny is a MMO shooter, sharing the experience with others is at the heart of what they’re doing, and a huge bulk of that is in the endgame that I described. Like in any other MMO.

Choosing to omit the essential and challenging portion of the experience and then arguing that the game is too easy and boring doesn’t seem like a useful or even a genuine argument.