I have been playing Destiny almost continuously since the first month that it was released. Some guys at the office encouraged me to buy it even though I was still on the fence. It seemed like Halo but even at that time I wasn’t sold on the concept of Space Magic.
That and the time scale of 10 years which Bungie was saying would be how long you could expect to be playing the game (and it’s sequels). 10 years at the time vaguely gave the impression of 3 games. However Bungie has been lazy with content releases such that one DLC was reshaped into the sequel, while the original game was expanded with The Taken king and a couple of other updates that could have been stand alone DLC. By lazy I don’t mean that the content wasn’t worth it. I mean that they took WAY too long to release those updates and expansions.
That also and the prospect of playing an online only game wasn’t appealing because of issues of lag and having to play with other people online. Having no online friends that meant having to seek out new people to play with.. All that turned out to be valid and even the game’s nonsensical story made it hard to care about the game. Most of the time it has simply been infuriating.
Little has changed with the sequel to Destiny which was released not too long ago, I like to say it is fundamentally the same game but with shinier pants.. but Destiny 2 does have big changes to important parts of the game that didn’t really need changing at all. While some of the infuriating stuff is still there and some really good stuff was taken out.
But wtv Bungie does what Bungie pleases with their game and we the players just deal with it.
Originally played on the Xbox One (it seemed hamstrung by also being released on the older consoles) and then picked it up the PS4 version around the release of The Taken King DLC.
I don’t see either platform being a focus but the game has run smoother on PS4 as a rule. Between Xbox One S and PS4Pro (although I play at 1080p using game streaming on both consoles) the PS4 Pro behaves significantly better than the Xbox One S version. The PS4 version doesn’t hitch as much as the Xbox version does while game streaming. I’ll have to play direct from the console, at 1080p, just to see if the behavior is the same.
For the original game, while playing on PS4, I was helping with Twitch streamers so had figured it would be advantageous to have the game on both consoles if I had ready access to competent fireteams for end game stuff that normal mortals can’t solo. At least that’s how it worked out most of the time. LuluSoccer plays the game verging on professionally but focuses on PS4. It was fun to help her run several Flawless Raider fireteams through Crota during Destiny 1. I don’t think I’d bother with a Clan again other than hers because of those kinds of runs.
Thing about Destiny is to be committed to the game you need to have a reason to play. One main reason to play is the loot. One infuriating aspect of that is that the loot system is based on RNG and as such is horrifically time consuming. After a while of collecting loot you might realize, or you might have to be told, that there’s a significant amount of depth to the loot system. One the one hand you can just find guns and armor you like and call it a day.. on the other hand you can dive into the pool of min-maxing and create a perfect build. To remedy that Bungie eventually offered purchasable items that would help you have more chances than you normally would have to get the items you want (mostly exotics with respect to useful stuff, but mainly for aesthetic stuff to help you make your guardians stand out). It didn’t change the time it took though to get perfect drops and fin tune the min-maxing of each item in a build. As I said above, it appeared, superficially, that some of that was stripped out of the game. So while most of the few thousand hours I poured into the game for Xbox and PS4 came from collecting loot. Since most of that loot was trash and the character inventory space is limited.. most of that loot got trashed. What little loot was actually good didn’t much matter at the end of the game because there’s only a few weapons that you really need to actually use. Not much has changed in that regard other than Destiny 2 gives you one of the best weapons in the game (imo) in the Sunshot. It is basically a win button.
The min-maxing for creating a perfect build has been refined with a much improved system requiring you to collect and judiciously use mods. I was disappointed with the lack of mods in the old game so I was really happy to see them applied to Destiny 2.. HOWEVER, the blue mods are fucking useless. What you need at the beginning of Destiny 2 while building your power level up to to265-280 are mods that help you reduce your cool downs. I had expected this system to be total ass before the game launched and that’s exactly what it is.
I’m told that after 280 that changes because the legendary mods are much better. UNTIL 280 then.. for now on both platforms it feels like pure cancer to play with characters that have such long cooldowns and such low movement speed even with mods applied.
But the real issue isn’t that the mods are useless. Useless in the way that it doesn’t make a difference if you use them or not, because that’s subjective, it’s that you can only apply 1 mod. You have what seems like a bottomless supply of mods but until you reach 280.. they are useless. You could spend hours buying more mods with the bottomless supply of the game’s currency, glimmer, which you have nothing else to spend it on anyway.. until you have stacks of the blue mods you want. Once you reach 280.. unless you delete the game out of boredom before then, you can convert them into legendary mods. HOWEVER, these aren’t transferrable so you’ll likely spend a crazy amount of time making a handful of good mods. If you fuck up and use them on the wrong weapon, all that time and effort will have been wasted.
There’s other differences between Destiny 1 and Destiny 2 regarding the loot system.
Both games feature a fairly large set of gear separated in several tiers. It’s funny but I get a sense of déjà vu when I describe this. You have white engrams which decrypt on the spot into common items (this stops are level cap is reached), green engrams decrypt on the spot into uncommon (same as whites), blue engrams decrypt into rare items, purple engrams (which you’ll find in the game world fairly regularly and from quest givers and vendors) decrypt into legendary items and again amount to the bulk of your loot finding interests. Being that they happen to be the weapons and armor you use most. Although to be fair, mentioning it again due to the high amount of energy ammo the gun holds and how much you’ll find in the world, there’s almost no point in using anything other than Sunshot.
And finally, Exotics. What happens in both games is that you’ll breeze up to the character level cap in 8 hours (according to Lulu, or 12-15 hours given how long it took me on PS4 and Xbox respectively), which happens to be 20 in Destiny 2. Once at 20 you have access to better gear. At that point you bid adieu to everything but Legendaries and exotics. Or at least in theory once you manage to collect enough legendaries that are better than the rares you might still have kicking around.
You’ll only need to use those other rarities, aside from legendaries and exotics through those first few hours of the game.
For Destiny 2 though, again due to the lack of perks, some rares remain viable up to 265 because they will still have good perks. But you can only keep increasing the attack power of legendaries so it gets harder and harder to hang on to rares with good perks but a low attack power. This is especially true for weapons that have perks that don’t affect damage, like the legendary grenade launcher (which are an awesome addition to the game once you’re used to firing them effectively) Flash and Thunder which has Blinding Grenades, and rares like Plemusa-B which has Proximity Grenades. When you have perks like than on Rares but they aren’t 265 it doesn’t matter as much if you’re using it for those perks because wtv damage you might cause with them is moot compared to the attacks you can put on them when the enemy is dazed and not firing back at you, or your fireteam, or other random blueberries nearby.
I spent about 13 hours getting to the level cap and completing the story on my PSN Hunter. Luckily I also picked up one of the best Hunter exotics, the Celestial Nighthawk (in addition to the Sunshot which you get to pick from a list during the story). It’s funny because I didn’t care about that helmet in Destiny 1 until someone told me to use it. Basically no reason to ever take it off (like Sunshot). As in during the story and through the majority of the other missions I’ve tried so far there’s few instances where you’d need a longer range weapon (which is bad design). When I do need a longer range weapon I go for my Nameless Midnight (any Kinect Scout will do in place of nearly every sniper in the game for PvE). That’s that. Sadly the next two exotics, Knuckhead Radar (utterly useless in PvE), and Luck Raspberry don’t matter to me. Their perks are garbage (as in so far I haven’t bothered with the Crucible and there’s no sections in PvE that requires grenades). This also highlights the horrific cooldowns again. Who cares about grenades when you bloody never get to use them. Granted that’s the purpose of the armor piece, there’s still the lack of call to use it in PvE when power ammo is so abundant.
On release day, for Destiny 2, before the servers went live for the public in NA, Datto quipped that the game gives you exotics right off the bat (during the story). Play 3 characters and you’ll only get duplicates. You’ll however also get many exotic engrams which when you’re playing 3 guardians means you’ll have a huge chunk of exotics by the time they are all 20 and through the campaign. There are a few more provided from quests/adventures should you choose to do them prior to level 20 (which I don’t recommend. Pre-ordering gives you yet another. I didn’t even unlock Cold Heart until after completing the story. I don’t even remember unlocking it on Xbox but I got 2 from the exotic engrams my Hunter picked up. It doesn’t make much of a difference to have Cold Heart because level design and AI behavior means actually being able to lase enemies for any amount of time is difficult to impossible. But I did see someone using it pretty effectively on Brachus Zahn during the Nightfall on Xbox today. It’s utter shit at mobs of small fry adds.
Point is both games have a huge number of guns that you’ll never need to use after those first few hours. You’ll be focused on certain legendaries and exotics. Given that they are all the same, meaning you’ll eventually know their perks by their names, you will just keep sharding every rare items you pick up. And you should care about picking them up and sharding them due to above mentioned cycle of sharding them for mods and glimmer.
Digression: Destiny, imo, borrows really heavily from Halo and several other games. So like while Halo ripped off sci-fi for its story but still managed to have a solid original narrative through its original campaign and several sequels… Destiny 2 just feels like it ripped off other games.. and while it still feels like Destiny, there’s aspects that feel like other games.
It is a Massively Effective romp around the Borderlands of the Last City on Earth fighting enemies from a Galaxy Far Far Away with a ghost in your backpack that acts like the guilty spark from Halo.
There’s a strong nostalgia feeling for the first two sequels to Halo while playing Destiny 2 especially through the vehicle sections. I don’t quite know what it is.. but it’s really unsettling. Too short of course but more than that, there’s no reason for tanks to be contextual. Still, continuing from the original Destiny, you’re not allowed to have other vehicles even though they are in the game.
Honestly Bungie had a golden opportunity to add shit like a wall crawling vex spider tank (no I’m not crazy, you just missed Saint’s Row if you think I am), any number of flying vehicles like Halo and any number of other open world games.. like Saints Row.. and just generally more vehicles.
One reason for this is that Bungie designed the game and they are really proud of the fact that you can’t even ride around on your sparrow.
Datto mentioned that this was appealing to him because it made the small play areas to seem bigger. I found that this struck as idiotic because HE knows better than anyone how quickly you’ll be on a sparrow again and once you are the patrol zones will seem small again in no time.
While yes they are much busier than in the first game they are no less boring. Which makes fast travel a godsend even if there are only a couple of fast travel points per patrolable area. Taking sparrows until after the campaign is done but letting them fast travel.. is idiotic.
Had they provided OTHER vehicles though, on both sides, meaning more tanks, and wtv the Taken would have in terms of vehicles, would have made the still boring and bleak patrol zones (for lack of human fighters and random monsters) less boring. Destiny 2 would have been a golden opportunity to expand on patrols because they really are too pointless and boring to just run around on foot. Remembering such massive things like Scarab tanks and thinking that THOSE are VIPs.. that would have been fantastic for Destiny 2.
The game also seems to borrow from Star Wars and Mass Effect. It’s like.. why was Mass Effect: Andromeda not made like Destiny? Mainly for all the same reasons as above but at least Destiny is a stellar step forward for the franchise where as Mass Effect is now dead.
We’ll have to wait for Anthem to see if that game works this way or not for BioWare. But I didn’t see any vehicles for that game so far. By which I mean that Destiny’s improved Zen has been improved, that aspect of having many things to do that really don’t take any mental activity to pull off. I’ve gotten so into it so often that when I got a phone notification that pulled my attention away.. once I got back to the game I had no idea what I was doing and was totally lost.
This is Destiny 2’s real power right now. It is like a great book that is just a page turner.. you can just keep flipping through activities that aren’t too difficult if you go into them prepared.
Back on topic of the loot system.. during that first half day going up through the rarities.. there’s a really big difference in terms of the weapons you’ll get attached to based on the perks they have. Again you have to remember that each weapon has a set perk. This means that each weapon’s name is equivalent to its perks and given time you’ll remember the good ones.
The difference is that for god knows what reason Bungie removed the need to level up your gear (which makes the progression in the game much faster because you can through away old guns as soon as you get them). Whatever you get though… that’s it. Everything that was important about your gear as far as what you could do to it besides pull the trigger is gone.
Yes mods are in, but they aren’t practical compared to the old old loot system. There’s no more motes of light (as a currency and to level up your stuff), there’s no ammo packs and weapon telemetry to the gunsmith to upgrade your gear faster.
Also the faction leaders appear to also have been removed (which I’m given to understand they will return later). This means you aren’t focused on earning rep with them and their exotic class items and such. Had they been in the game, there’s would be more reason to go into the crucible but they’d also give you access to more gear.
All of that means months of potential grinding.. and rewards.. is gone. In the old game you had to use guns.. in this one.. you just don’t.
So I tried to figure out what they put in to replace all of that gear stuff.
Well there’s plenty of exotic bullshit.. like emotes and mods apparently.
Probably has spoilers : https://youtu.be/YznzlJIGdUQ
This starts to be revealed once you get to level 20 and you roll the bar over again. A bright engram drops. You take this to Tess. I almost didn’t ever go up to Tess in the first game once she appeared because of the odius nature of her character (just listen to the innuendo she barks at you, and the shop in general which asks for real money which you use to not buy things directly, but engrams/loot boxes which have RNG.. and this game’s RNG is horrific) at least in Destiny 2 you earn the same engrams that you would buy. Nothing is locked behind a paywall or so I’ve come to understand from decrypting several of them. So this is really different. Having to steadily return to Tess to decrypt Bright engrams even though I’m mostly only getting sparrows with dumb perks and shaders I’ll never use.
I don’t know how I feel about removing the faction leaders (even if delaying their re-introduction to the game world along with other vendors mentioned by the game but who are still among the missing and presumably will return based on quests to be added later on), and replacing them with visiting Tess and seeing the constant nags to purchase Silver. Personally having never purchased any Silver, I only bought the record book for SRL’s first run, and as I feel no need to concern myself with it now because continuing the steady grind yields more of these engrams anyway.
Why am I annoyed with this system even though it is exactly what Destiny should have done?
2. I’m full of these useless mods.
3. You can dump them for glimmer.
4. Despite the glimmer cap going up..
Why not have perks in addition to mods then?!
I don’t know and I don’t care really. There’s enough to do just playing through the base game’s content and figuring out why there are other guns, and what they might be useful for when the game gives you Sunshot.
Long story short is that a hella lot of shit was removed from the game and you’re given next to nothing useful to replace everything that was stripped out, regarding the mods which are a great addition to the game (in theory but not in practice).
So what do you actually need to bother with? Gunsmith materials. That’s it. That shit is crack.
The first game had many types of materials that you need to upgrade things, again that’s all gone, the later game had refined that into a unified material which was still good for turning into glimmer.
Once you had enough you could spend it on buying heavy ammo, which you’d spend on faction reputation to earn their gear which was somewhat better than regular stuff but all of which is gone…
Again, you can’t buy anything with the glimmer so it will always be maxed out if you’re not buying mods from the gunsmith.
But so long as you play enough you’ll get many weapons and armor which you can dismantle to make gunsmith materials. Which is crack. You give it to the gunsmith and get a legendary same as you do by turning in rep tokens with the few patrol quest givers in the world. Yum.
This system is great because you’ll get more weapons and you’ll have a much higher incentive to shard shitty weapons immediately. But the result is that you’ll stick with a certain set of weapons and ignore even more of the weapons featured in the game. Your inventory might be clear of weapons and armor that you don’t need.. but you’ll also have shit loads of glimmer and mods, and probably shaders too.
I’m really disappointed in the new systems over all because they don’t incentivize diversity in your play style even between Destiny 1 and Destiny 2, or with your choice of weapons and armor. Seeing garbage exotics returning from the old game was also very annoying. Without any incentive to get more gear.. there’s not much point to putting the same amount of hours of play into the game anymore.