So basically it's just Bungie being Bungie. They don't care how messy their game is, and how they haven't changed it enough for a sequel, and how upsetting their various changes are to the game's existing fans.

After the May 18th reveal.. which seems to have has some of its thunder stolen by leaks, the community seems to be divided. Most are saying the new game is too similar to the old one and that it hardly matters what is added because Bungie is still being Bungie. The true 'Darkness' are the game's directors.

We know all the hardware manufacturers and Blizzard and Activision are doing everything they can to help but.. The new game isn't what it should be. It's the same feeling I had for the original and why I was cautiously pessimistic about it being any good.

For me it was all like:

Xbox (I didn't even have an Xbox One when it launched because I was building a new PC to play WatchDogs)
- At first upset that it wasn't Halo but felt way too much like a shitty Halo by Activision.
- At first very happy that it wasn't just another Halo because Halo is not as approachable as it could be.
- Already massively invested in online competitive shooters (not me personally as I'd given up after Halo failed).
- Online Co-op sounded great (at least because people were saying they wanted to play).

PS4 (didn't have PS4 when the game launched because I hate Sony)
- Interested in another AAA adventure shooter with PvP.
- Got many people to play online games.

PC (no PC port of Destiny 1 then or now)
- Although the game isn't on PC the community lives there. LFG is there. DIM is there and Destiny's Reddit community is there.

After buying the Xbox One (with Watch Dogs and I'm not sure what else) the early part of my Destiny experience was the PvE stuff with matchmaking. Don't remember if I was able to run Nightfalls before trying the raid. I played a few hundred hours of the game just running around shooting things because I didn't have anyone to raid with. I was informed about Destiny LFG and the rest is history. People have come and gone but for the most part I use LFG when I need to raid.

Even after going on LFG and learning to do the Vault of Glass it took a really long time to understand the game. How to match armor and weapons to the needs of a given activity. That mastery actually takes an incredibly long time because it isn't very intuitive and doesn't seem at all necessary.

Apparently Bungie is dead set against this format. They do not want people playing with random strangers. Not even giving them the option of matchmaking in things like the Nightfall strike even after it was nerfed. I could understand the old one because it would kick you to orbit and so you needed to have people you could count on to not do anything stupid and would revive you. This new Nightfall is just a strike where you need to know how to play the game in order to complete it.

Only after buying the PS4 around TTK in February last year did it even make sense why Sony's console and PSN are the better place to play the game. One of those reasons is being able to open up your fireteam from friends only.

That didn't exist on Xbox and still doesn't. What's so hard about going a step further and adding Matchmaking to there? Saying well look I'm in orbit or in an on-going activity, as the fireteam leader I should be able to open up my fireteam to seekers. IF they allowed further criteria like an active mic and experience at the activity....

What I do whenever I feel like it, is I play the Nightfall up to the end boss and then with usually 20 minutes to spare I invite 2 people in. That wouldn't play well with Matchmaking because it isn't based on the fireteam but on how the activity is set up. It speaks volumes though about LFG and the Destiny community that it takes longer to find a game than it does to just solo the Nightfall up to the boss. When you post that you're up the boss magically everyone wants to play. The rewards are junk regardless so it hardly matters if they participate. Right now the only reason to do it is the XP buff.

When I first started playing the game I had to do so mostly solo because the guys at the office that motivated me to play it, of those that were on Xbox anyway, opted to drop the game within that first month because it was in fact a steaming pile of shit. Half the story isn't even told in the game. I ignored the Grimoire cards. For Bungie to say yeah that was a bad idea so no more Grimoire is fine I guess.. but will they actually put deep lore into the game? Will it be text and pictures or have they put the effort into more cutscenes to fill in for the depth that supposedly resides in the Grimoire. PC players won't even be able to revisit the old deep lore so doesn't it become like pre-Disney Star Wars canon that's more legend now than canon?

Shrugs. Seems worse for Destiny because for PC nothing that happens before they pick up a controller matters. The 'herculean' effort of retelling all that BS for a new audience that only has a vague interest in it to begin with.. should be beyond Bungie.

I don't mind that because I know Bungie and their formula is simple. Playing the game will be fun, just don't look any further beyond that. The story doesn't matter and as long as there is a skip button I'm going to smash the shit out of it. Personally what I'd like them to add to the game is a button to mute Nolan North's Ghost. His voice and the repetitious nature of the game so you're his lines thousands of times makes me want to put a railroad spike through both eyes (his). You have to shut your brain off and just not think about anything while you're running around shooting everything. Same reason I muted the game's music years ago.

Especially don't think about Halo, and how that game evolved into a really great empire for Microsoft prior to it getting too big.

The bullshit about an amicable separation between Microsoft and Bungie being what it was.. I mean it was to be expected that anything new from them would take time to mature.

Today those communities are still pretty much the same as they were in 2014.

Xbox is looking forward to another Destiny. It even seems like some of them are willing to have a sequel that hits the ground running because it doesn't actually change much from the original formula. PS4 is looking forward to exclusives. PC well um..

The part about Bungie not changing much about the game IS a problem. Not changing the UI, the game engine itself, or the networking to something substantially more stable.. that shit is all shit that makes people want to ignore the game. Those are fundamental aspects of the game that have been shit since the beginning.

The games UI is fucking slow and nonsensical. Sure the Director is getting changed for the better, but SPACE BATTLES.. that's what we were asking for. A game about space that gives you a space ship.. but you can't fly it?

Yeah ok sure the original game's excuse about Xbox 360 and PS3 limiting what they could do. while bullshit was passable. The rest of the game was substantially fleshed out to make it ok that those cool looking space ships were just props on a ridiculous loading screen.

D2 - Fewer loading screens. Thanks for ignoring the problem Bungie.

When I say the UI is slow I mean it is linked to Bungie's horrendous servers such that every time you do anything in your inventory it has to reload everything. Normally that process isn't so bad and it works ok. Other times each change to anything in your fairly large inventory makes the whole page hang for a few seconds while it tries to contact Bungie's servers.

So people got used to using webpages for some of the inventory stuff and otherwise tried to stay out of the menu system as much as possible.

Using the same system again is like giving us a shiny new hammer.. that isn't shiny at all, it's the same dented rusted ass shit as before and they are like.. well keep beating yourself over the head with it because we're too lazy to even upgrade the UI.

And the game engine being the same.. Some people don't care because they like the look of the game. I put my palms up and shrug.

What we were told about it was that the game engine was not well optimized for the consoles and it was garbage for adding new content because it was slow to make changes and get new builds. You're telling me they want to build a bigger game and more content with this same system? Really? Instead of having used the money and time they had to either build a new engine or license one (from Blizzard like literally borrow Overwatch's tech).

Personally D2 looks too much like Overwatch and too little like Halo. I consider this a bad thing because instead of moving to a more realistic look for the game they seem to have made it look more cartoony.. more like No Man's Sky.

I suppose it fits the utterly outlandish setting and story that they built for it.. but it isn't cartoony and over the top enough to look like Overwatch. It's harder to take the game seriously if Bungie is trying to milk Overwatch's (and the rest of the cartoony mobas like Smite) fan base.

And unfortunately the issue of the games peer-to-peer networking even while they are saying they are working with Blizzard to use the Blizzard Launcher.. why not Blizzard's servers?! shouldn't affect PvE players except that those p2p connections have been horrific for the raids.

Like I have never taken Destiny's pvp seriously because the modes are very dumb compared to Halo and other modes from other pvp centric games, even ones with campaigns.. even those ones from Activision.. they focus on a great PvP experience.

Bungie seems to focus on nothing in particular because it's all so mediocre. Even mediocre would be fine if it wasn't for all the lagging, disconnections, cheating, griefing, poor balance , and constant ineffectual PvP balance chances that end up carrying over and ruining PvE.

It's just Bungie being Bungie.

It seems like it is too early to be talking about the game on PC because Bungie, being Bungie, isn't talking about the release schedule for the game. They also aren't saying anything about how it will perform on Microsoft's upcoming supposedly beastly Xbox Scorpio console. What Bungie did show was that the PC version is by far and away much better than the console version. If the Scorpio version can't live up to the bar set by the PC version it will prove once and for all that the Scorpio is just a cash grab from Microsoft and they've left it open (to failure) to bad decisions from game developers. Even if Bungie could have done better with it, by optimizing performance for the game on that console to be better than on Xbox One and PS4 pro.. They don't have to. If they don't then other developers would be left with that option. Just make the same game for Xbox One and Scorpio. Who's to blame Bungie anyway? They had trouble enough building the game for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3 and PS4 back in the day. Having to only build two versions of the game should be significantly cheaper and easier and they have all kinds experience tweaking performance on Destiny 1 that Destiny 2, not that much different from 1, should be excellent out of the gates.

All that effort, money, and time saved should be put into content then..

That line of think is what gets me mad though because content.. the stuff that made the first game greater than when it launched.. gets tossed.

Why?

I don't care about Bungie's reasons, that the tower got destroyed and all that BS.. But stripping everyone of their gear and attributing it to some in game event.. nah. Sounds like they were too damned lazy to carry all that gear over to the sequel and make it available to old players and new. The new weapon system doesn't seem to make it so that the old guns wouldn't work. It just makes it seem even more of a waste that Luke Smith decided that elemental primaries were too over powered and they dumped them. I'm angry that that decision got reversed right at the end of the game's life AND the new game would have accommodated them just fine.

It's like every decision Bungie makes makes the game worse somehow and flies in the face of everything the players want. The backpeddling is what makes it worse.

Even the silly 30fps on console (which does make the game seem more cinematic for PvE versus 60fps on PC isn't really that silly. PC users will expect 90+ fps from the game and will build their rigs accordingly.

It comes off as Bungie just being too stupid to make the game 60fps around the board and build the game up from there. Yes it means it calls for new consoles but until then, they need to make the most of what's available for the game they should be building.

Coming off saying that the current consoles are simply not powerful enough.. why?! Break PvE and PvP apart then! We've been calling for this since day 1. I look at Overwatch and think damn that game is shit without a real campaign mode. I know Blizzard is totally capable of building a campaign for it. Looks back at Destiny. Never mind.

Hell it's a shame Destiny managed well after its DLC packs or Activision could have folded them into Blizzard.

With Scorpio is right around the corner and Sony needing to get working on their next console too having Bungie slap them in the face saying Ps4 Pro wasn't designed to be powerful enough (we all knew this even with boost-mode).. I mean how is Sony supposed to take that after supporting them?! Hey assholes thanks for totally invalidating PS4 Pro. Microsoft is right around the corner with Scorpio trying to push it as the place to play 4K60fps.. Bungie saying nope because they can.

The issue is so not trivial that even MS representative had to say several times don't look at us.. wait for Bungie to make their announcements about their game on the platforms they choose to support. But with Bungie (potentially) saying the console isn't powerful enough who's going to buy it?

I like to say that MS is counting on the game being substantially better on Scorpio and more comparable to the Blizzard Launcher version because they need it to sell their console this winter.

So on the other hand part of this issue is still on Microsoft for not releasing more information about their plans regarding Scorpio. IF the developers, Bungie not withstanding because of their issues, can't really commit to putting the money into optimizing games for Scorpio, least of all Microsoft, then can they be blamed. Can Bungie be blamed if they don't do more with the Scorpio version of the game IF they could.

Meanwhile the important part being that Sony gets their lead on the market no matter what because Scorpio doesn't launch until later on in the year anyway. Bungie's idiot decision to clear everything actually gives people the real option of waiting. They can wait to make sure the game is stable. Confirmation of the game's stability might come from the beta and it might not because there won't be 10 million players hammering on the beta. And it means they can wait to see if the content (story and changes) is actual worthwhile. Lastly that the Scorpio version isn't heads and shoulders above PS4 Pro (if they have a 4K or even if not and they can justify buying a new console just to play the game better at 1080p).

Microsoft was saying there's no parity rules and so did Sony. This is a joke because at this point Microsoft is not in a position to make Bungie do anything.. but what they weren't talking about was Sony paying for the best version of the game they could get, because that's not the deal. Sony just want their version to sell better. It couldn't possibly sell better on Scorpio (because that console launcher months later) so far as I understand it Bungie is under no obligation with Sony to avoid making the Scorpio version of the game run better. Thus leaving the important details being withheld by Microsoft. What will it cost and how many do they plan to make so we have an idea of how many will sell.

At least it being an Xbox One means Scorpio owners will be able to take all the old games over to that console.. including Destiny which means some people might still even be playing Destiny 1 until they are sure about D2. Unlike a new console generation Xbox One Scorpio hits the ground running. The player base won't be as large as Sony's but it is very active. Will it still be by November? Who knows.

But unless Bungie's partners at Activision, Vicarious Visions and Blizzard put the effort in to make sure the game is optimized and ready for launch it seems like PC gamers are squatting in their showers, sweaters pulled over their knees, rocking back and forth. They'll be waiting for the game and are apparently thinking it will be months before they can play. Spending the money to buy the game on console so they can experience it first hand would be wasted because those characters can't be carried over to the Blizzard Launcher version of the game on PC.

I'm hearing them say they have to force themselves into an information vacuum so the game isn't spoiled for them. IF the PC version launches before Xbox Scorpio then Xbox players would be at a disadvantage IF they don't already own an Xbox. IF they do and will be trading up (raises hand).. no problem, same characters from Xbox One version of Destiny will carry over to Scorpio. AND the experience is enhanced. Leaving Sony's players as the only ones with no advantage other than a large player base.

One could ask if the DLCs will also launch together or have this bullshit staggered release window. I'd be more annoyed with the Raid and DLCs launching later than just the opening sequence of the game. Unfortunately it sounded like the raid would launch in October. While it seems most likely PC and Scorpio versions of the game will only be available in November (before Black Friday). The longer it takes the shorter the amount of time players will have to build their characters up to play the raid (and DLCs if they are coming this year) over the Holidays.

But that still leaving the Scorpio version the hands down, day 1 best version of the game in 4K for cheap (cheaper than buying a gaming PC) if you're starting with nothing. Will Bungie and Microsoft have their respective products ready and their stories straight. No and it seems the issues just keep piling up.

E3 will answer some questions but.. for some people the damage is already done.