1786

I’ve been playing this since it went free. Had enough fun running through the campaign, and doing some public events. The gameplay loop you go through up to this point has been really shallow, as you never get anything “great”, it’s always a slight improvement that doesn’t really do enough to get you excited about drops. It’s one of those loot systems that’s far too controlled, and to me, there is just zero excitement in it.

After getting my character through the campaign, and leveling a bit after that, I decided to jump into some PvP, and this is where the game completely lost me. I actually like PvP quite a bit, and have been playing it since you had to play Doom via a BBS. My experience in PvP can be summed up as, ‘turn corner, die’. Not sure if it’s just my item disparity, or if the game is just that way, but it’s so blink and your dead, as to be kind of pointless. That’s a shame, as I was interested enough in the game, that if the PvP would have been great, it might have gotten me to pursue the game on a more serious basis. I’m guessing I’m not the only one that has had this experience.

1787

Unless you’re specifically playing Iron Banner events (those are marked and are separate from normal PvP), they normalize the weapons so that everyone is on the same playing field. No special properties or higher damage. A shotgun in a shotgun, no matter which one you use, no special properties on the weapons trigger, etc.

I didn’t try Destiny 2 PvP, but Destiny 1’s was very similar to Halo in how it felt. It usually took longer to die than in a Call of Duty game, for instance. The one exception is that everyone in multiplayer still gets to use their special, and those can be instant death. But they should be infrequent if it’s anything like Destiny 1.

1788

Are you sure about that? My understanding was that Light Levels are disabled (so no one does more/less damage inherently), but all weapons still retain all their perks, etc. I’m pretty sure this is right, via Exotics like the Mida Multi-Tool (retain radar while looking down the sights), etc.

I’ve been having fun with the expansion content the last few weeks. For the $33 I paid, that’s a ton of new content (the two small Season Pass expansions and Forsaken). I’ve got one guy up to 560+ (of 600), and am working through the Forsaken missions with another tonight before the weekly reset tomorrow morning. I’ve seen most of the new stuff (except raids, of course- I never really do those), and I imagine I’ll be finishing up my time here about when the new Warframe content drops.

The problem with the Destiny games (IMO, of course), and really most big-budget games from big publishers, is that they want you to never leave. You must keep playing day in and day out, or they don’t consider it ‘successful’. They keep trying various ways to have a constant revenue stream- monthly subs, regular (overpriced compared to the base game) DLC, micro transactions. I’m pretty much not interested in any of that.

The shooty mechanics of Destiny are fine. They’re fun for the about of time it takes to go through the content. Don’t charge too much, and I’ll come back to see what you’ve added. There’s no way I’m paying $40+ for the three small expansions they’re releasing over the next year, though. I’m not interested in the loot grind, playing the same content over and over. On some level, that’s something that Warframe has up on D2- the grind is the point, they don’t try to hide it or dress it up.

1789

I’ve also been playing this since it went free, I have one character up to level 20 so far - Titan. As @Don_Quixote says, the shooty mechanics are fine. In fact, I’d say almost too fine as I never have to worry about ammo except for my heavy blade, which I need to conserve.

Where the game falls apart is that you have this absolutely cool world which I have no incentive to explore because I rarely find anything at all in the nooks and crannies. There are all these interesting things laying about on all the various environments (I just got to IO), but it feels like an MP map where you are supposed to just run & gun and forget about anything. This is a real shame since obviously so much time has been spent on the environment.

I mean, on the first world in the dead zone, I had fun roaming about & trying to find all the hiding tunnels to go and do some battle. You learn the map, they are almost always interesting in some way, but I never have any incentive go to back. If I were to contrast this with borderlands - I’d go back b/c of some red crates and it felt like a real accomplishment getting to the end (until I over leveled the area). With destiny, I have zero incentive to go back.

And the loot is ever so forgettable. In fact, I will play for 2 hours and not even equip anything until the end, or I get full on a slot, so I have to go in & dump. I have never bought anything.

The platforming I hated at the beginning b/c of lack of control in the flight mechanics - I die almost exclusively falling off platforms / cliffs. I’ve gotten used to it, but I was ready to put the game down at one point. I’m not sure I’m glad I powered through it - yet.

With the worlds / maps, the biggest frustration is that so many areas I’m not powerful enough, so I just do the quests. The problem is that the game doesn’t tell me what is an appropriate level - so I figure maybe when I complete the game, I come back to these? Or will I be overleveled?

The single biggest gripe I have is the loading times and I’m frustrated that Destiny can’t keep up & displayed while I switch to another screen. This all-tabbing is very frustrating - and then it’s still not loaded, so I wish I could just keep the screen up while browsing on another screen.

1790

Hey, that reminds me, the first game had those dead ghosts that were sometimes hidden out in remote sections of the map, a little something you could find if you went exploring. Was there anything like that in Destiny 2? I forget.

1791

I think Destiny 2 had these weird little tunnels with little mini-bosses. I ran into about 3 in the whole game. I wish I’d been able to find more.

1792

I guess the hidden bosses are about the closest thing to what I’m thinking, but even those have an indicator on the map to tell you one is close. Still, it is an incentive to explore, so good enough.

1793

I don’t remember, either, for base D2. Forsaken doers have that for the second, new ‘endgame’ area, the Dreaming City. Remember the various Exotic Armor bits that look like bones (I think each class had one)? The Ahamkara pieces? And they never explained what an Ahamkara was? Well, in tucked away places on the Dreaming City you’ll find Ahamkara bones, and they unlock lore entries.

And @Tman man, you never really over-level content. The leveling system doesn’t work like that. You can certainly be under-leveled (when you die, look up in the upper right hand corner of the screen and it’ll tell you the suggested level for the content you’re fighting), but once you’re at that threshold, you don’t really do extra damage. Also, I don’t know if you’re planning on getting Forsaken, but they give you reason to go exploring all those places in the expansion. You get Bounties on Wanted Fugitives that are hiding out in those little side-dungeons that @Rock8man mentioned (they’re called Lost Sectors). It’s been kind of neat going back and exploring them since I didn’t do too many back when the game came out last year, either.

1794

After playing up to the (origina) level cap and completing a few runs of the first raid in Destiny 2 on the PS4 last year, I got busy and distracted and didn’t stick with it when the DLC rolled around (and the first D2 DLC “Trials of Osiris” wasn’t exactly well received at the time).

But I started playing again a couple months ago—starting over on scratch on the PC because a lot of friends from work are into it now.

I really like it, but I’m not always good at articulating why, and some of the stuff I enjoy sounds crazy when I explain it. But the gunplay is satisfying, I really kind of love the “platforming” and mobility options with the subtly different double jumps, and the grind keeps me coming back in a way I (mostly) enjoy. Here are some random observations and responses:

The exploration incentives in D2 are weird. There aren’t that many reasons to go off the path in missions or normal grinding, and what there is often only rewards you with progress on “Triumphs” (think Achievements) which rarely have any in-game benefit. And the few that do have rewards are also usually aimed at end-game stuff with complicated requirements and tied in with some of the more frustrating instances of dependence on luck for the right drops.

But there is stuff out there. Items to scan to fill up the Lore sections of your Triumphs, and a handful of hidden quests that do actually get you rewards. But it’s also so obscure I don’t know how people would figure out this stuff on their own. It almost requires a community effort (I find reddit.com/r/destinythegame invaluable), but at that point you end up with the opposite problem: you’re not discovering things yourself, you’re learning about what the community has worked out.

And yet it all still keeps pulling me in. There are always a dozen little side things I could be grinding out a little more progress on.

There are incentives, but they’re found elsewhere. If you stumble into a Lost Sector, the immediate rewards of some glimmer (almost useless), a few planetary materials, and some uselessly low level gear do not encourage you to seek out more Lost Sectors or repeat the ones you’ve found. But you can pick up bounties and quests that will send you back through this stuff. It’s weird, I don’t know why I don’t mind it, but it works for me.

Exotics can be satisfying to acquire through the quests. The loot is nothing like the procedural craziness of Borderlands, but it does feel good to find a gun you enjoy with even better random perks. It can just be hard to even know what you’re looking for without hours and hours of play time, or again, keeping up with a community like reddit.

The platforming is incredibly satisfying for me; I like the different jump boost styles and adjusting for them depending on how/who I’m playing. Knowing when to boost or glide, when to cancel the boost, managing to hit the ground sprinting to do it again, once it clicks I think it’s fantastic, but I don’t know. You might play for 100 hours and still not think it’s fun.

You will eventually be overleveled for most enemies that are wandering in the open of most of the major planets/areas in the game; they won’t provide a challenge as you’re just moving through the area. But the public events and high value targets can still provide some engagement even at high levels, and while specific adventures might be too low by the time you come back to them, the end game content and things like exotic quests can still give you mostly level-appropriate content in worlds you’ve already “finished” in the main campaign.

1795

Sort of! But I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head what all there is to scan an find or what Triumphs or other rewards it unlocks.

1796

Thanks! I know a lot of people love Destiny & it’s nice of you to spell so much of that out. I’m sticking with it for now, as the story & progression are moving along decently, and a lot of new areas. Most of my complaints are “it could have been so much better” rather than fun killing things.

1797

Also, the game just has some beautiful locations and vistas. That’s a mostly superficial aspect, but one I still enjoy.

1798

I’ll agree, and I’m especially liking the Forsaken areas. Going from a cool Mos Eisley-inspired hive of scum and villainy to the tainted Rivendell-esque Dreaming City was really neat.

1799

Yes! And, vague campaign spoilers: I didn’t realize the Dreaming City was truly a whole separate area to explore with missions and public events and lost sectors and all that jazz. I knew of it but I thought it was just the Watch Tower where the “final” mission is when you confront Uldren. I’d heard of the Blind Well and knew the raid had something to do with it, but I thought they would just be things launched out of that specific area of the Tangled Shore. I’d have moved a little faster on finishing that quest to open up the Dreaming City if I knew it was as big a deal as it seems.

1800

Heh. The concept of a campaign spoiler for Destiny or Destiny 2 is very amusing to me. I read your spoiler, I’ve played through the campaign, and still don’t really understand what you’re talking about, just as I never understood the story in Destiny 1 and 2 much.

1801

Haha, I did the same regarding your spoiler. I got done with the last Tangled Shore mission and just cruised around for days not really working on it, finishing up other stuff, figured I seen all the new content. Then I found out I’d only seen half!

1802

When you “finish” the Forsaken campaign (the final showdown with the emo guy Uldren and that other thing), you get the broken talisman from Petra Venj, which begins the “Awoken Talisman” quest. I’m not sure if you did that yet or not.

As in all Destiny/Destiny 2 regular and DLC campaigns, there’s the story you go through if you just sort of do the “single player” stuff, taking you from location to location and showing you inscrutable cutscenes between missions. But there’s also the real end-game content of the raid (or similar challenge) that’s geared toward high level groups of people. They sort of partition that off from the main narrative so people who will never raid still feel like they got a conclusion to the story they were playing (in as much as Destiny has ever had meaningful stories).

So when I finished with Uldren, I knew there would be the other end-game quests and stuff to unlock to grant access to the raid for Forsaken. But I misunderstood the scope of some of what gets unlocked through that Awoken Talisman quest; it’s significance isn’t really indicated in the game.

1803

Yup. I thought it was like the quant token you get to get access to the raid after vanilla D2. I eventually unlocked the Forsaken bauble and figured figured I’d go poke my head in. There’s a whole world in there! And as mentioned before, it’s gorgeous. I really like all the natural building materials- giant geodes, staircases cut through gemstone rock, etc. A huge and refreshing change from the tech/planet borg stuff that was getting a bit same-y.

1804

Past-Mercury in Trials of Osiris was also pretty striking, and made the Vex aesthetic feel fresh again.

1805

True! They’ve always had some fabulous artists working on this game. Past-Mercury was fun, but that was for like 1/4 of a single mission.

Thing I’ve really noticed- the difference in how the Blue Armor sets look vs the Purple (legendary) sets. Having to do the Light grind back up to the new soft max (500) reinforced how plain they look next to the fancier stuff.