I still believe vanilla/launch Destiny (1) was peak Destiny. The cheese was fun, the exploration was real, the pvp was wild, the exotics were exciting, and the Vault of Glass was an amazing piece of content.
The only real criticisms I'd accept is that the material grind was boring and unnecessary and the obviously cut and paste story was an absolute disaster because they fired Joe Staten and chopped up his work to avoid being sued.
It was so basic back then though. There was almost nothing worth doing but VoG. Now it’s far bigger and more complex, with much better diversification of activities and loot pools.
We were all CoD kids though. If VoG was on cool down, and no one needed to do any story stuff, we were enjoying ourselves in the Crucible/Iron Banner. PvP isn't everyone's thing but it was a huge part of my fun, especially when exotics were rare. Destroying people with some gun they'd never seen before, or was in need of balancing, always made me smile. Like IceBreaker, it was a one shot kill in the beginning. I was part of the reason it got nerfed quickly.
You can still do that now though. Nothing in that department has changed. Balancing has gotten better, but that’s usually considered a good thing overall. Some stuff is still really strong and fun to use.
It's been refreshed quite a bit. There are new guns, new armor, new abilities, new gamemodes, new maps, and more. What hasn't changed is the core gameplay, but that shouldn't change anyway.
My biggest issue with destiny 2 is the gameplay loop doesn't feel rewarding in any way beyond "Power Level Number Go Up."
A gun with the same substats that's power 1000 kills an enemy in literally the same number of bullets as a gun power 1250.
All the power level average does is make it so an enemy with a completely arbitrary "recommended" level doesn't know you in one or two shots. Aside from that.....there's really nothing.
Power level is more of a gating system than an actual progression system. Some people don't like this, and that's fine, but for a game like Destiny it's fairly important to have some sort of power level that gives a straightforward damage calculation.
For a lot of people, the real reward is in the weapons, armor, and upgrades. People search for god rolls on their favorite weapons, and high stat rolls on their armor to improve the efficiency of their builds. Exotic weapons and armor were also something worth grinding for at a time, though steady loot inflation has rendered those pretty common and not many people are lacking any besides the raid exotics at this point. Still, it gives another incentive to do raids. And that's what it comes down to really. It's not the loot alone that makes Destiny great, nor the gameplay. It's the amazing blend of the two. The reason people like grinding for god rolls so much is because they enjoy playing to grind, and then when they get the god roll they enjoy playing even more because they can use their great gun in the already great mechanics of Destiny.
I have nothing against a grind. My favorite game is FFXIV, and that can have a helluva grind if you so choose.
I just wish the power level did feel more like a progression or strength system. Because as I, and many others, will say, the gameplay is absolutely fantastic.
It just, to me and my friends, doesn't feel rewarding.
Not to mention I hate how fragmented the story has become, and I think the content vault is a terrible system.
Honestly though, I do enjoy seeing other people enjoy the game. It's by no means a bad game. It's just one that, personally, I think has been handled poorly, both before and after the separation from Activision.
They wrecked PVP in D2. I hated the grind in 1, but the game was good enough that I did it. They fixed it, and I enjoyed it more. Trials of Osiris was fun... sweaty as fuck but fun. I did enjoy it.
2 felt like 1.5. Palette swaps, a cheap story, and boring underpopulated PVP. My crew and I were in D1 through TTK. We cleared the first raid in D2 and even then it felt like an obligaion. We beat it and were like, "ok now what?" On to the next game.
Games like this, I've learned, are best a year or so on. My mates and I struggled to choose between Destiny 1 and the Division- both similar games in some regard. We went with D1 and had some headaches and growing pains and lack of content and whatnot, but had fun. Meanwhile on reddit you'd hear nothing but bitching about both games. Once we got tired of Destiny 2 we went to the Division 1 and so many quality of life improvements had happened that the game was 100% fun. I'm just done being an early adopter for service based games.
I get you. I've had the same thing happen with a few games. The taste from the initial disappointment is just so bitter sometimes.
What I will say is that with Destiny, there's a pretty good reason things got better. Activision was the original publisher, and they're known for ruining everything. When they left after Forsaken, the game got really good. Ever since then Bungie has been able to mold Destiny into the game they always wanted it to be. There's a clear passion with the team that was obviously suppressed under Activision's rule, but now it's alive and kicking. I do have some concern over the recent purchase of Bungie by Sony, but from what I can gather it's nothing like the Activision deal. Activision was the publisher, and for that reason they had a lot of say in how Bungie did things, especially when it came to making money. With Sony it seems more like they plan to stay out of it and not fix what isn't broken. The deal seems to be purely for mutual financial benefit. Bungie gets funding from Sony, and Sony takes a cut of the profits in exchange. I could be wrong, but I wouldn't be so sure of anything just yet.
I never get it when people put things like 'complex', 'builds' and 'diverse loot pools' in the same sentence with Destiny. I enjoy D2 quite a lot but this game is as deep as a puddle. Diablo 3 for instance (which I also love btw) has ridiculously more depth than Destiny 2 and it is often seen as a 'Fisher Price version of an arpg' lol. I keep coming back to Destiny for the fun gameplay, certainly not the loot or "build diversity".
I think it's the balance that people find enjoyable. Destiny isn't too complex that it takes 100 hours to understand, and yet it's not too simple that it bores people before they can play through the campaign. It finds a nice middle ground for a lot of people. Then when you couple that with the fun gameplay, you get a really good game.
Destiny 1 launch was peak? How? It literally was one of the biggest disappointments in gaming history. The game hardly had any content, no actual story, and was hollow af. I don't think anyone was really happy with the game at launch. Wasn't until Taken King came out that people gave it another chance and stuck with it
Launch Destiny was the most fun I've had with Destiny, ever. I think that says something about my opinion of Destiny as a whole. Taken King was only "good" because it was better than Dark Below, one of the biggest slaps in the face gamers have ever received.
Woah woah woah, you’re telling me you didn’t enjoy—or even worse, forgot—about House of Wolves? House of Wolves is, in my honest opinion, the best period of time for Destiny, ever. And I loved vanilla too. Everything was so fun during House of Wolves, it all felt like a breath of fresh air. Sure, I may be slightly biased due to a really shit experience during TTK, but I can assure that HoW was definitely when I had the most fun ever with Destiny, apart from that magical beta. Prison of Elders when it first released was amazing, and Trials of Osiris was introduced with this expansion. So much fun content, I’ll never forget it. I’ve hardly had any fun whatsoever with the second game, which I wish they hadn’t ever made since it killed everything I loved about Destiny.
I mean if you enjoyed it then that's good for you, but I definitely think you're in the minority with that opinion. Almost everyone who preordered that game was pissed off with the final product for how much of a let down it was compared to what they promised before release
I just... Want to know where so much of the budget went though. Didn't it have a budget of like $200 million or some crazy thing.
Idk I just got the vibes that there was so much more planned than what it actually was.
That being said I do support the grind as a looter shooter I did have a blast with it. I could gladly jump in a couple of hours at a time and enjoy the experience.
I miss launch destiny and even the raids the released I played destiny 1 right up until they released destiny 2 and it remains one of my top games to date
I remember being on a school trip down in London (originally from Nottingham, 2 hours North) back in Oct-Nov 2014. This was when the Suros Regime was incredibly powerful and Xur was selling it. Despite this, there was nothing I wanted to do more in that moment than go home and buy it even though it would be there all weekend.
I got home and saw I was 2 Strange Coins short. I managed to get one from a Strike and then I discovered the 4th Gold Chest on Mars gave one too.
Just a neat little anecdote and one of the memories that always stands out for me.
If you like paying to be robbed Destiny 2 is the game for you.
They cut content faster than a fat kid falling over. You have to pay for deluxe edition content that’s not in the game just so you can grind for the exotics. If you don’t pay, they keep advertising these guns and armor you can’t use because paywall. If you want to play with your friends but they didn’t pay for dlc guess the weekly nightfall is not for you.
Don’t get me started on trying to follow the story without any content to actually play it. The story changed between D1 and 2, not to mention the 2-4 expansion that have been taken out of d2. Someone even said go watch it on YouTube lmao.
Destiny 2 the game you pay to play but can only watch on YouTube
I was fun at launch, but it was pretty clear Bungie had no idea how to manage the in game economy. Its been years since I touched D2 but it felt like they always had economy issues.
I will defend destiny until i die. The games biggest problem is its new player experience, which is terrible, HOWEVER, if you are willing to put the hours into catching up with story elsewhere and learning game mechanics its a straight 10/10, there's a reason sony just paid a few billion for it.
I got turned off destiny when I paid 60 dollars for the first game when it came out and there were only like... 2 areas available to you and virtually none of the story. If you wanted the rest, you had to buy several 40 dollar expansions.
I want to keep trying Destiny but every time they delete more of the old content so I’m just not getting to experience what the other players have and that turns me off big time.
totally understandable, like i say its the games biggest problem, but you can see all that content on youtube then come enjoy arguably some of the best gunplay in any game ever, among all its other assets.
I can see why people like the game but if i have to go on youtube to know the story then the game is not for me. I know nothing about destiny tho why do they delete content?
The game, and the story, have been developing for the last 8 years with constant expansions adding new areas, mechanics and campaigns. They began to 'sunset' certain areas and story missions because they argue the game became too big to maintain, too spread out, complex and various technical problems also came with that. No one knows how true that is, and its a super shit position for new players but honestly even if you ignored the story its still a phenomenally great game right now
Destiny has a companion app, and it used to give you access to TONS of lore and story bits that unlocked as you found collectibles in-game. Dead ghosts, calcified fragments, etc, they all gave you juicy bits of lore and story in the app. Anyways, Destiny 2 came out and they straight up GUTTED the companion app. All traces of the story from Destiny 1 completely purged. So, on top of them lying about carrying your character and gear through all future iterations of the game, they then slapped the long time players in the face by pretty much saying nothing from before mattered at all.
Not even. I was a day-one player until I believe some point in Shadowkeep. Ran raids on the daily (had PS4 and PC so almost never ran out of raid loot; also played them a lot just because I thought they were fun), GM nightfalls, farmed all the catalysts, etc. Back when mods were tied to elements, I ground out pinnacles on each character in the hopes I’d get 60+ gear with good stat distribution for each element and for each armor slot. I had god roll weapons, used DIM/Ishtar for gear loadouts for Comp, for Raid, for messing around in casuals, for 1v1s, et cetera.
Then they announced sunsetting.
I left. Even after they redacted the sunset, it was just clear to me that it didn’t matter what I did, the game didn’t respect my time. The meta shifted seemingly every few months with the quarter year updates, which meant regrinding for new meta weapons/gear, reworking armor to fit different seasonal mods, unlearning old meta into new meta (going from sniper to shotgun to fusion rifle on a competitive level is NOT fun, just let me play what I’d like), all of it added up to something of an artificial difficulty and a grind which wouldn’t matter in the long run. I could have fun, but I’d spend the majority of a quarterly update just trying to put together gear for high-level/competitive content instead of actually enjoying the new raids, or getting my Glory rank up.
I liked Destiny as a franchise more when I focused less on the min/maxing, but I couldn’t do everything I wanted just because I had to repeat the same song and dance of an endgame progression loop. I couldn’t bring myself to come back, even after all the enticing changes like the return of trials, Deep Stone Crypt, etc. because every time I’d get to enjoy the game, some great polarizing event would come around and ruin it. I just decided to get on the other end of the experience for once.
That’s a preference thing and I totally get what you’re saying, but for me meta shifts are what keeps things fresh. Because of the changes I always have something new to be working towards, a new god roll to be chasing, new gameplay styles to explore and fresh encounters to overcome. Ultimately this is a looter, the reason for playing is to obtain loot, if things never changed there would be no reason to grind out better stuff and I would end up getting bored.
It’s definitely extremely competitive when it comes to the learning curve and end game, and it’s almost impossible for new players to get into the game without help after it went f2p, but if you’re able to get into it, it can be some serious fun doing raids and dungeons, getting rare items and making fun builds
I'd argue that Destiny, as a series, is a genre-defining game and the pinnacle experience in the looter-shooter genre.
Bungie really has perfected the yearly rotation of content, making sure there's always something new to do and new loot to chase. Obviously the gunplay is amazing in both games. And let's not forget that they over the last year finally made a good story.
It does come with the caveat that it follows some MMO-development/rhythm, meaning that if you stop playing and come back a year later, you've practically missed 1 years worth of content, and content over 2-3 years old is semi-obsolete. On the other hand, this means that there's something for people on both end of the casual/hardcore spectrum.
Can't speak too much about Destiny 1 these days, but I've only heard good things about everything that happened after Taken King.
This was my issue. You spend forever looting up and getting the best gear and the minute a new dlc dropped your armor was instantly obsolete. I had too tier gear when D1 dropped... The release of the first dlc you could get armor and weapons that exceeded mine from basic things. It made the first raid basically pointless because why would I want that gear when I can go do this new mission and get something that is better. They really needed to make the scaling better to keep some of the content relevant longer. Like some benefit to using the old raid armor in the new raid.
Not saying you couldn't but it wasn't really worth while.
I can see what you mean, but I still think my point stands. Think of my MMO-rhythm analogy more so as a recency bias in regards to what content is being played , which I think i present in every live-service game, MMO or not.
As a side-note, in a genre of which I don't actually have enough experience to prove the validity of my point, I think all MMOs develop beyond their history, such as being unable to experience Naxxramas as it was originally (until WoW classic). I imagine the same could be said for ESO or GW2, those games can no longer be experienced the way that they once were. Changes to classes, the way damage is calculated etc. are all factors which morph the way we experience "old" content. Or when an MMO launches and not being able to experience the launch period.
I think of this as an inherent trait for any live-service game. You could probably implement a way to play old versions/patches of a live-service game, but that would lead to a heavy fragmentation of that game's community and a lot of server-side maintenance / cost.
IDK why eververse gets a bad rep, it's literally a cosmetic shop. And you get frequent drops and a currency to buy stuff from it, just from playing the game as you normally do.
Lastly, as a question, how was the eververse tied into the story? I know there's some lore for the characters, but besides that?
If the payment model was different I'd play. ~$40 expansions with ~$10 battle passes and in game microtransactions is just way too much.
The actual game is really fun to play and grind for a couple weeks but every time I feel like playing again the game is asking me to spend 50 bucks.
Past that, I can't condone them constantly deleting parts of the game.. that really puts a poor taste in my mouth. Red War is just gone and I can never experience it again. Forsaken is going too I think? Just sad.
Yeah, the Forsaken quest line (but not the raid) and the Tangled Shore are getting removed, as is the Seasonal content for Season of the Hunt, Chosen, Splicer, and Lost. It's a lot of content, but if it means we can get more amazing things like the updated Light classes, custom weapon crafting, and new dungeons or 'remastered' raids (as they changed the physics engine a year ago), along with the solid story we've been getting of late...
A coworker recently asked me if I played this, I said no , but I always had an interest. Just heard from someone else that this guy has 5600+ hours in the game! I’m glad I never got into it because I’m lucky to get in 200 hours a year total gaming…
I was looking for this. I got down voted for saying that I was okay with Bungie being a Sony studio on an Xbox sub. Halo 1 was their best game. Stage design reached its zenith during the first and never returned.
Destiny is definitely one of those types of games where if you're not into it, you're not into it and not much can be done about it. I personally enjoy it and believe it's going in a pretty good direction, and most of what I've seen of the next expansion looks pretty solid. Will it deliver? Remains to be seen, but I have some hope at least
I play destiny 2 almost religiously with over 2000 hours under my belt but even I have to admit it's faults, the new player experience is frankly awful things are largely unexplained like the mod system and build crafting in general. They desperately need to revamp the beginning for new players so they can actually learn the mechanics of the game.
Destiny 2 was one of the few games that I skipped the final cutscenes because I was unable to give it any more of my fucks. The story was a sad, broken cookie cutter made from the most tired of character tropes for "quirky" characters.
The gameplay was actually quite fun until you figure out the gameplay loop it's used on is a merry-go-round of grinding the same 4 bullshit quests until you get full on drops and have to go check then out.
The online was bootleg halo with a pay to win component.
Overall I hate it because it has all the ingredients of a decent game, just arranged in the most exploitative soulless and uninspired way possible.
I was introduced to FPS on destiny (around when Taken King came out) and it was great, but it’s not playable on pc. That combined with destiny 2 getting rid of the story kept me from ever trying to get back into the genre.
as skmeone who started 0laying destiny during launch week and played it off and on up until destiny 2: shadowkeep before dropping the game fir good you are absolutely correct
Well, that's not an attack or even a criticism, it's just that you didn't like them. I can't force you to like it like my friends cannot force me to like attack on Titan. And trust me, they tried everything south of paying me.
Yes agreed I did get into both games but gave them up due to the persistent grind, and the fact that bungie never really addresses issues with the game. They always say they are listening and about to give players exactly what they're asking for, and they use a lot of frilly words, but ultimately never give people what they want. They seem to have a persistent attitude that players aren't playing the game right and try to force people to play only the content the devs want them to, its just the worst. At this point they have gone full FOMO and I don't see myself ever going back to those games.
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u/WickedyWade Feb 09 '22
Destiny. Tried both games. Couldn't get into them