And that has what to do with this discussion? How has the base game been negatively impacted? Turin Tur complained about not being able to join a playlist that wasn’t in the base game.
An MMORPG? Like Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft? Ok. Let’s go that route. Not owning the various expansion packs for those games doesn’t impact the base game content negatively either.
Maybe I missed something, what was is not available any more if you don’t have the DLC? You can still do strikes and Crucible. The public events still work. All the quests and exotics are still there. They added a new Strike playlist to account for the level increases.
In Destiny 1, the base game was definitely negatively impacted. In Destiny 2, they gimped the base game from the beginning, by not having a hard difficulty option that they could later mess up, and not having a tough option for Strikes like they did in Destiny 1 that you could no longer play after the expansions came out. In other words, they learned their lesson from Destiny 1 by gimping the game in advance.
I’m reading the patch notes now. They upped the base light level for the Nightfall and the Raid. You can still technically do them without the DLC but that’s some bullshit.
Also why didn’t we get a new raid? Wtf is this expansion? Is Mercury considered to be the equivalent of a new Raid?
You don’t need having the level increase from the DLC for the new Strike playlist. The important part is the Power level.
And the original Strike playlist is boring once you get over 160 power.
The base game ends at 290-300 power, right? So I would like a new Strike playlist for that power level, which exactly is what the new Heroic playlist is. You don’t need DLC to reach that.
There is a new raid, it simply hasn’t launched yet. Think I heard it was next week.
All I can say is that I have I think a different metric I’m using for my enjoyment of the game. I like the shooting. I like the environments. I have only dabbled in PvP and Strikes, and may never get to do a raid, but I have received my money’s worth and still enjoy roaming around doing stuff even if it’s not terribly remunerative. I will probably burn out eventually, but that happens with every game, at least for me.
Now, if you are into ever-ramping challenges, need a meaningful loot progression system, and stuff like that (all very legit needs, too), I can see the complaints. And Bungie is terribad at pretty much everything other than the actual shooter mechanics and environments.
There’s no new raid, they’re just bolting some new content into the existing one. It remains to be see how substantial these “raid lairs” actually are, but even Bungie is describing it as a shorter experience. So I’m really not expecting much.
There won’t be a new raid in the second expansion either, which I’m sure makes all season pass holders very happy.
Prior to the Trials of Osiris, you could do the Leviathan Raid or the Prestige version of the Leviathan Raid. The prestige version had a higher minimum power level, a few tweaks to make the encounters more difficult, and exclusive armor pieces as rewards.
Osiris adds a new raid that isn’t live yet—it’s still on the Leviathan (a big Cabal ship/city/thing), but will have different encounters. Think “new raid mechanics, reused art” at this point (we don’t know for certain).
Osiris also raised the level and power caps. So the existing Leviathan Raid and its Prestige version have had their power requirements and difficulties tuned upward to the new cap.
That’s all a-okay by me so far, but the catch is that the prestige version of the existing Leviathan raid now requires the Trials of Osiris DLC. So if you only have the base game, you can’t do a thing you used to be able to do. That the difficulty scaled up isn’t really the point.
That’s kinda bullshit.
I agree with merry that if you’ve been playing Destiny all along, you’ve already come to expect and realize this. Technically you never have to buy any DLC and you can keep playing Destiny as you bought it with a few minor improvements over time added for everyone (Quality of Life enhancements; the level caps raise for everyone DLC or not, etc.), but realistically this isn’t the first time things have been tweaked so that DLC is either literally required or effectively necessary to keep enjoying activities you could do in the original game.
But I don’t agree that everyone should know or expect this. I think it’s another bad design decision by Bungie. A subscription should be a subscription, DLC shouldn’t erode the existing game if you don’t buy in.
The prestige (more difficult) Nightfall and the Trials of the Nine (a competitive multiplayer playlist on the weekends with power level advantages enabled) are also locked now if you don’t have Trials of Osiris.
Oh man, I still want to do a nightfall raid, I better get on that before DLC releases lock me out.
Nothing wrong with a shorter experience. Whether or not you consider it a “new raid” is simply semantics. The fact that it takes place on the Leviathan is irrelevant. It is new environments, new encounters, new loot, etc.
Actually, the prestige Raid is something you could do before that you now can’t do without the DLC. I would agree that sucks.
So my friends and I raided up until last week and I never knew there was a prestige raid until I saw you guys mention it. Apparently none of us cared because unlike D1 they completely made the rewards meaningless (same for strikes, heroic strikes, etc…).
I haven’t even done the normal raid yet. Just mentioned it as it supported the argument made earlier.
That’s definitely fair. I’m not sure if the “DLC Subscription Model” thing is discussed in reviews, but it should be.
For me, I don’t see why I would bother playing Destiny if I wasn’t playing the new content so it’s kinda irrelevant that they change the base game a bit. I understand that’s not true for everyone though.
I would like greater transparency in reviews and marketing so people understood that the “base” game of Destiny is just that. That it’s not a complete and static game.
It does seem that like many games this one is really a service, and the paradigms that define it have been constructed in that light. That is, to Bungie/Activision, there is no “base game,” only a mutable experience you sign on for. So, when they adjust the requirements or gateways for certain content, or the content itself, it’s simply part of that ever-shifting service.
The sin is, as noted, in not being crystal-clear that that is what they are doing, and seemingly being ok with letting people think it’s one thing when it is in fact entirely another.
Bingo, that’s put much better than I managed.