After leveling 2 of my 6 guardians.. both hunters, and having not yet touched Warlocks or Hunters in Destiny 2, not in the release version of the game or beta that is.. I don’t know that I want to just now.
Why might that be?
Well after the first few days with my Hunters which I retained after they were automatically transferred to Destiny 2 on their respective platforms.. leveling both of them up has stalled out in the 26-270 range. I know in theory how to get them to 280+ and I want to get them there as soon as possible so that I can run the higher versions of the Nightfall on them.. but I’ll end up running into diminishing returns.
There’s the already diminished returns in terms of what I could achieve on them as is from the next couple days because there’s isn’t as much stuff to do that will drop as many exotics and legendaries as they already have versus spending another 32 hours between now and reset on Tuesday morning powering the Warlocks and Titans through to the level cap. The diminished returns will hit them once they get into the 260 range also, however that’s only a problem IF for some reason it isn’t possible to get as many good drops as I already got.
This is only a problem because since release I’ve only had to work 1 day. The rest of the time I virtually no lifed those two hunters.
I’ll somehow have to do 4 characters tomorrow because that’s all the time I have, having wasted so much on those two hunters. And that’s if I don’t sleep.
Could manage it. But I won’t be able to do the higher tiers Nightfalls this week an just call it a loss.
So then having thought about all that it occurred to me that the time that I ‘wasted’ is basically the time that it should be expected to have budgeted to each character. It wasn’t wasted. In fact there’s shit I haven’t completed down.. and I now know that I can skip with regards to the other 4 characters I need to level.
They all have the campaign to run through and it is unreasonable to expect that could be possible in the first week. Not with a full time job. Also and especially not having spent to much time needlessly exploring and trying to understand the game by brute force.
Having spent that time in the game just makes me aware of what I need to do after the campaign runs if I can manage them all.. before the week ends. And what would normally need to be done in the course of a week for someone insane enough to run 6 characters which isn’t typical.
In Destiny 1 that was the higher level stuff. The Raid unless you already collected everything from them, and the Nightfall, unless you’d already collected all of the exotics you need. In both cases the answer was no because up until the end of Destiny 1 you could still keep trying to collect things because the drop rate was so low even though you already had collected sufficiently useful stuff. The ship and shader from the last raid especially were hard to get. It took 65 raids across Xbox and PlayStation to just get the ship and the shader never dropped.
I don’t mind.
For Destiny 2 though.. there’s much more that you can do that will drop higher end gear but they are much more time consuming. I wasted a few hours just trying to solo the Nightfall in Destiny 2. I got more than half way through but the last two parts are overwhelming for a solo player.
The argument here was that it couldn’t be that hard. I’d gotten used to solo’ing the Sunrise bounty in Destiny 1 and could manage it without dying most weeks.
Destiny 2’s night has been solo cleared but there’s challenges attached. Seeing that the dude that posted the video on YouTube is 295 I’m impressed but also he’s massively overpowered for it. The bigger accomplishment is being 295. But then that’s not that impressive when I see the monstrous bank of Silver he has. I’m not judging or pointing this player as evidence that the game is pay to win or anything but..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miASk9CO2Ls
But.. my point is the time investment.
After all is said and down with clearing the campaign and all the extra busywork bullshit on each world, you’re going to be left with that daily list of challenges and set of weekly refreshing activities to run through.
Given that the Nightfalls are now timed and are reasonably challenging.. failed twice on both first runs with a fire team then cleared it with seconds to spare on PSN and minutes to spare on Xbox.. there’s hope that even the Nightfall once the characters are over powered, will not take that long.
That just leaves the challenges. These are really time consuming because some of them depend on sht spawning during patrols or during activities like particular Strikes that you have no control over. Having to drop and join a new Strike playlist several times just to get the right Strike is idiotic. It’s another thing that was changed from the first game that didn’t need to be touched.
If you needed a given Strike (which you didn’t after the game’s bounties were reworked) you could just go to the games Director and pick the Strike. For God only knows what reason they stepped hat back to a state that’s worse than the original game. While you can jump to anyplace you want from any other place without needing to first go to orbit, Strikes and other activities like the campaign missions aren’t on the director also they aren’t part of the campaign either. Dumber than that is that you can revisit some of the campaign missions via meditations from the Ikora quest giver once you’ve completed the campaign. This limits your ability to level rep with her.. and makes no sense at all compared to how that playlist ended up being at the end of Destiny 1.
Dumb. I say it is dumb to the point of idiocy because that’s all the hype about this game has been. You’ll get sick of it there’s so much story in this game. That’s right I am sick of it, but I was sick of it before I even played the game because the story of Destiny is idiotic design, the subplot being a campaign that pure dry gibberish nonsense about space magic to no one could possibly relate to.
The improvement we asked for and should have been explored is the story of each of the main vanguard guardians that guide us. Nope.
The improvement could then have been seeing that they are really heros.. NOPE.. they all pussied out when they lost their light and either got trapped and required rescuing or ran off to hide while leaving few remaining humans to fend for themselves.
But that’s just me being stupefied by the overall bullshit of this game’s campaign.
In practice as I’ve mentioned before this campaign and gameplay work well to keep the action going like a well written block buster……without being that well written. ?!
There’s only a couple of missions that are actually atrocious, Cliffhanger being the worst mission offer in the franchise so far.
As a whole it makes sense for Destiny no matter what I think of what they actually are doing because it was told well through the gameplay.
And yet.. I have the same reaction to the gameplay.. as good as it is when I’m looking at it as an improvement over the original game.. it could have been so much more.
From the incomprehensible lack of vehicle diversity in patrols, like letting the player(s) take over the siege tanks as we did the early Halos.. to the lack of really big vehicles, offered in later versions of Halo.. I can’t bring myself to accept that this is what Bungie wants for Destiny when Halo is still fresh in some of our minds.. and not just a forgotten relic.
It feels like Family Guy or the Simpsons almost where the main characters (Guardians) are involved in their own bullshit while the real characters (the townsfolk, and remaining human survivors of the collapse and invasion of the Darkness into our solar system) are just random people trying to go about their business.
What both games lack, unlike Halo, is seeing those people. You’re never aware of them as any other than dumb side characters that have something to prove (to who though?) because they aren’t guardians and they don’t have light to help them fight. While the non combatants are almost utterly invisible in Destiny 2.
Given that Bungie wants to impress us with how much improved the game is in terms of characters on screen.. there’s far fewer people and misery and death.
Ghaul could have been less of an ambiguous character if he had actually had his troops rounding up and massacring the people in the Last City. Although this supports that he’s ‘as human’ as the other guardians. He didn’t need to destroy the last city, it was just in his way of conquest and as such the survivors were of no consequence. What would he have done after the campaign has the Vanguard failed? It doesn’t seem to matter.
All I’m left thinking is how little the game has changed then. The last city which you see in the distance is just as low res as ever.. but at least this time you get to walk through it. By the time you have that opportunity though.. it’s empty.
All surviving humans should be on their way to the far but that doesn’t look like it would be able to accommodate that many people. Engine limitations? Art time/budget limitations? Is that also why the vehicles are missing? Is that why even though Rise of Iron SIVAfied stuff looked intricate that same can’t be said of the new units from Destiny 2. Couldn’t the siege tanks have had shields too? Or at least the nameless fallen house could have another heavier vehicle class or more mobile walker designed to do more specific things like have a rapid fire sniper turret? You don’t get that feeling like we’re able to use their tech against them as much as we’re just using the light and our abilities and our brute force. But that’s always been Destiny’s mantra.
Taking a look at that solo Nightfall run again.. seeing just how impressively powerful a Titan can be. AND it is validating to see he’s using the weapons I actually talked about, Nameless Midnight (because it causes so much damage),
I’m just saying that at some point even if it is just in a pre-rendered cut scene, you should be able to see crowds of people scattering. Even better if you could see the Vanguard members fleeing the devastation wrought by Dominus Ghaul as it happens. At least this is covered in the story by your character being knocked out while that all happened. Once you’re back in action though.. it’s the same cannon ball run until the big bad guy is toppled until the Raid comes out next week (in a couple of days). In the meantime this isn’t just a Cabal expansion turned into a sequel.
So as much as this is a good effort in terms of a sequel, it’s still really just Destiny Too.. as in also a Destiny game filled with really bad design decisions but at least it has good implementation this time around and without stooping so low as saying that so many years of putting up with Destiny has just lowered the bar so far that this shit is all acceptable.. from the story to the menus features.. to game play.. it all works cohesively.. most of it better than in the original game even. But this base game should have been so much more.