1987

Yeah, I saw the collection stuff and my original thought was “What’s the point? It’s 20 gear score below”. It was similar to finding Exotics. I never cared, because at the end of my play session I was 30 light/gearscore/whatever beyond that.

Now I care about that stuff, and feel like I can invest resources into enhancing a weapon up to Masterwork because if I really like it, I can just infuse it with higher level stuff when I find it. It all just works for me now, whereas before nothing did and that’s why I could never get into the game.

1988

But the truth is that all legacy content, including the Megagerie, is irrelevant unless you need specifically a weapon for whatever purpose. The Menagerie for example is raid-like matchmaking to craft specific weapons. I’m not even sure you can actually find players now, as everyone has abandoned that mode. If the queues aren’t completely empty they’ll likely be in a couple of weeks when the amount of players starts going down.

The game is actually shallow to an extreme:

Up to 900 power you either play Shadowkeep or do whatever. It can be easily achieved in 6-8 hours of casual, aimless play.

From 900 onward all you can do in the way of progress is streamlined through specific checklists. And you would simply do nightfall or PvP on repeat. There’s basically a fixed daily and weekly checklist of a very limited and repetitive list of activities that give “powerful rewards”, and that keep moving your power level up.

There’s even a website for that. You don’t even need to register, you just give it your game tag and it tells what you’ve done and still need to do for that week: https://www.d2checklist.com/

If you remove the raid stuff you see how it’s all about nightfall, bounties and PvP.

The reality of it is that the game has a myriad of things, of which only a tiny 5% play a real role. It can take a lot of work to figure out which is which, what’s actually relevant and what isn’t, but once you get a clear picture you realize how so little is actually there with a function.

You can of course chase specific weapons, specific mods, fine-tune the armor pieces for the perfect build… But either you are super committed to specialized play like raid guilds, or all content is so easy that it doesn’t require anything like that. There’s a reason why I said you can play the whole game with the tutorial weapon.

All the progress in this game is a giant fake bait, of numbers that look higher but that have no practical effects. With the usual caveat: unless you are a dedicate PvP or/and raid player. Everyone else is chasing windmills.

As far as I know, this is false. The number of materials for infusion has gone up, and quite consistently so (especially masterworking).

What changed is that they have the season pass handing out ““free”” items, which isn’t so much different from buying mats with real money.

But it always worked like that, even before.

1989

Right. But I didn’t know/understand how that worked.

As for stuff being legacy and dead, I’m not buying it. Black Armory has a bunch of stuff I want and is instant queue. The only reason I know about it is people talking about it and running it. So I’m just not seeing it as being useless deprecated content (this is at light 925, anyway).

1990

Stuff you want is not stuff you need. You don’t need anything because the game lets you play everything with the tutorial weapon.

You still might want a specific weapon that looks and feels cool to you. Weapons are the only piece of content that stays relatively up to date. That’s why even year 1 exotics don’t get replaced (if not through “meta”).

But it’s not an activity you’ll engage with on a regular basis. Same as doing a quest to get an exotic. It’s not part of the “loop” of the game.

Besides this, I hear Black Armory activity is bugged and does crash on a regular basis. I think there are four of them, and two are bugged (seems to be fixed in today’s patch notes, though).

1991

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.

1992

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.

1993

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.

1994

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.


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.

1995

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.

1996

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

1997

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

1998

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

1999

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.

2000

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!”.

2001

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.

2002

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.

2003

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?

2004

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.

2005

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.

2006

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.