Is D2 Anti-Fun?

I’ll try to keep this as short as I can. This has been on my mind since release and I just don’t currently care enough to write out everything that has been on my mind. I’m hoping with the news release tomorrow that they will share a plan to fix some items that are on my list.

One of my favorite things about playing D1 was the ability to play with not only my clan mates, but also my friends both IRL and friends I met in other games. Jumping into raids, crucible, trials, nightfalls, strikes, etc… was pretty much a seamless activity. There are a few changes that has made a previously simple task much more laborious.

With D2 we have the following setups for activities:

Crucible, 4 people
Trials, 4 people
Iron Banner, 4 people
Strikes, 3 people
Patrol, 3 people
Nightfall, 3 people
Raids, 6 people

Back in D1 all activities were split between 3 and 6 people groups. This was great because now you could go raid, then do crucible together if you wanted to. Or you could split the group in half and then run and do a nightfall, or trials, or etc… This setup allowed you to remain grouped up easily. No one gets left out by the group changing activities. I really dislike the new group structure since it just makes things harder than it needs to be.

Another thing is that I miss is being able to quickly see both my clan list and my friends list from just opening the menu. Seeing the clan list is nice, but I have to go through a few more steps to see both the clan and friends list at the same time. This just seems like a cumbersome design decision. The UI in general is a step up in the right direction as a lot of the little changes are improvements over D1. Maybe I’m just missing something with this?

I find the rewards system to be extremely underwhelming. We get tokens, lots of tokens. Then we have to travel to the tower/planet/etc to turn in tokens for a reward. RNG on the light level at end-game is pretty awful (websites have been created to tell you when the rewards are max light). I just don’t understand the decision to force people to go turn in tokens for an RNG reward. Why not just make it to where you turn in tokens to pick a piece of gear, or better yet, just get rid of the tokens in general or go back to using legendary shards to buy stuff? After turning in enough tokens to get 60+ faction packages on each character I would hope I’d have a full a set of armor for two factions for each character at this point. But I’m short pieces on two different characters.

I’m just going to list some other anti-fun items:

In the prestige mode raid everything is just a bullet sponge. Not harder mechanics, just bullet sponge enemies. Bullet sponge enemies are not fun to fight.
No heavy ammo synths makes it where you never want to use heavy unless you are guaranteed you are going to get it back. I’ve had plenty of heavy ammo runs during the raid just so we can wipe and try again once we have heavy ammo back. Wiping over and over just to get heavy ammo is not fun.
Timers for strikes are just awful. It was fun being able to solo a nightfall. I think the bounty for finishing in under 30 minutes from D1 was a great compromise to the timer.
Running around only as a team to team shoot in crucible is just about as boring as you can get. You are pretty well forced to do this or you just get team shot.
The Vault and Inventory not being able to hold enough stuff. For a loot based game that says "there will be loot" the game sure does it's best to make it hard to store your loot.

This is just going to turn into a complaining session so I’ll wrap it up. The vast majority of items and activities for D2 are just less fun than they were in D1. It’s as if the game is actively trying to make things less interesting and less fun than we ever had it in D1.

I'm hoping for the best in the future with D2 as D1 allowed me to have some of the best gaming experiences and memories I can remember.

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The shortest way I can explain how I feel about Destiny 2 is that it feels like it was designed for all the people that were ambivalent about Destiny 1. And then all the changes that were made were specifically at the expense of the things people who loved Destiny 1 were the most passionate about.

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The shortest way I can explain how I feel about Destiny 2 is that it feels like it was designed for all the people that were ambivalent about Destiny 1. And then all the changes that were made were specifically at the expense of the things people who loved Destiny 1 were the most passionate about.

Care to elaborate?

As I see it, Destiny 2 is smart enough to just get out of its own way. It gives you mostly everything up front, no grinding required, and that's literally the best thing it could have done.

I understand unoudid's complaints with splitting fireteams oddly because of 4v4 PvP, but it's worth that price for me. I've had more fun in Destiny 2 PvP than I ever did with Destiny 1. I like 4v4, and I don't think it shouldn't be 4v4 just because it's messy to split a 6 man raid group down.

It seems like there's a split between the folks that want to just play Destiny forever, and those that are okay with putting it down after they've seen everything. At the risk of coming off as a little Calus (boooooooooo!), I don't honestly care all that much about the former group, when designing a game for them inherently makes it worse for the latter. As usual, we have the play for loot v. play for fun debate here, which I'm not interested in having anymore.

I dunno, I'm not particularly bothered either way. I just hate thinking about how a lot of folks feel about Destiny 2 and want to see a return to the shitty grindfest of Destiny 1 with random guns and god rolls, and I honestly hope Bungie ignores all of those people.

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Looking at the behavior of some, I honestly think that Destiny 1 was a game they should not have played or should have quickly given up. I think it distorted some significant part of the player base’s idea of what fun actually means. It’s, like, just my opinion man, but the way things like grinding a single Strike over and over on repeat until you get not just a specific gun, but a specific 1 in a 100 roll combination of that specific gun became the basis of continuing to play D1... Yeah, I think some people way overdid it and more or less broke themselves in the process.

And I totally agree. I think the vocal group of broken people who are demanding a return to what I see as worse systems that caused player fatigue, sandbox imbalance, and outright self-destructive behavior might just be on the verge of getting their way... to the detriment of all.

I’m actually a little afraid of what Bungie is going to say tomorrow.

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Zero comparable legendary guns, even with the worst possible roll, were worse in Destiny 1.0 than in Destiny 2. The grind for better guns is trying to make your Corolla a Ferrari. Destiny 2 has given everyone a Citroën 2CV. No upgrade ever. You're literally complaining about being able to get good guns.

This gives people a common goal so they can play online with their friends and work towards something. Yes, they can play the game with their friends for no goal, but something feels better about accomplishing something than accomplishing nothing other than killing time.

Cheapley is completely straw manning the other point of view. You play for fun. Loot is fun. I have played a lot of games instead of Destiny, because I think "I want to have fun. I can have fun playing Destiny for no reason with nobody, or I can play OOTP Baseball and get the Tigers to their 56th consecutive World Series, or play Madden and break every single franchise record, or go poison my neighbour's pets when they go into my yard. All else being equal, I'm going to pick the fun that has accomplishment built in.

You guys are shitting on this design for absolutely zero discernible reason to me. Yeah, now you don't have to grind a strike 50 times for a gun. Guess what? You didn't last game either. You just could. I cannot understand why you guys think a game with added incentives to play more and beyond the story, is somehow worse than a game which has no added incentive to play beyond the story.

What you are complaining about is the opportunity to get more stuff.

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Zero comparable legendary guns, even with the worst possible roll, were worse in Destiny 1.0 than in Destiny 2. The grind for better guns is trying to make your Corolla a Ferrari. Destiny 2 has given everyone a Citroën 2CV. No upgrade ever. You're literally complaining about being able to get good guns.

This gives people a common goal so they can play online with their friends and work towards something. Yes, they can play the game with their friends for no goal, but something feels better about accomplishing something than accomplishing nothing other than killing time.

Cheapley is completely straw manning the other point of view. You play for fun. Loot is fun. I have played a lot of games instead of Destiny, because I think "I want to have fun. I can have fun playing Destiny for no reason with nobody, or I can play OOTP Baseball and get the Tigers to their 56th consecutive World Series, or play Madden and break every single franchise record, or go poison my neighbour's pets when they go into my yard. All else being equal, I'm going to pick the fun that has accomplishment built in.

You guys are shitting on this design for absolutely zero discernible reason to me. Yeah, now you don't have to grind a strike 50 times for a gun. Guess what? You didn't last game either. You just could. I cannot understand why you guys think a game with added incentives to play more and beyond the story, is somehow worse than a game which has no added incentive to play beyond the story.

What you are complaining about is the opportunity to get more stuff.

The main thing here that I don’t agree with is the “loot is fun” angle you’re presenting. It’s not specific enough for me. USING loot is fun. But grinding the same activities for months in order to “earn” loot is absolutely not fun. And that’s where D1 repeatedly got in its own way. Guns like Fatebringer were SO MUCH FUN to use. They made the act of playing Destiny more enjoyable. But in order to use them, we had to grind the game into the ground, burning ourselves out on the game in the process. That’s why so many Destiny fans seem so continuously bitter towards the game; the fact that accessing the best parts required insane amounts of repitition of the less-fun parts (playing the raid over and over with boring weapons in order to get the fun weapons, or playing strikes over and over just to level up and play the raid).

Destiny 2 largely removes that loop, and that is purely a good thing, IMO. The problem, as you described, is that none of the weapons in Destiny 2 match the more crazy and fun weapons in Destiny 1 in terms of the pure enjoyment they add to the experience. Fun weapons and armor bring their own intrinsic replay value to the game far better than any grind to collect more stuff. Using Fatebringer made D1 wesome, but I would have enjoyed it even more if I wasn’t 90% sick of the game by the time I got Fatebringer.

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Fatebringer (which is a piece of loot) was fun. You didn't have to have it, though. I didn't for a long time, and didn't mind. I never felt the real push to get it, other than knowing it was a thing I could get if I kept playing. I never played intending to get that gun. I didn't use a Gyllenhaal constantly either; I preferred running double surplus field scout machine guns and snipers, and my main hand cannon was a Timur's Lash.

None of you ran that setup, and my game was different, perhaps exceptionally so, than yours. I didn't use an ammo synth for like 8 months. I could play my way, using random rolls I liked of wildly different guns. Destiny 2 makes me play Bungie's way, using roughly samey guns, getting ammo at roughly samey times.

Destiny 2 largely removes that loop, and that is purely a good thing, IMO. The problem, as you described, is that none of the weapons in Destiny 2 match the more crazy and fun weapons in Destiny 1 in terms of the pure enjoyment they add to the experience.

This is how it makes no sense to me. Destiny 2 removes the loop by removing the guns. Is Destiny 1 better if it was identical but the guns were worse and there were no good raid guns? Of course not.

I don't see how adding difficult to get, but really fun, guns hurts the experience.

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I don't see how adding difficult to get, but really fun, guns hurts the experience.

Because it hides those really fun guns behind stupid amounts of playtime, to the point that some people never got to play with them. That’s bad. Almost inexcusably so.

You’re conflating two different arguments. You can have really fun guns in the game without having to run the same activity 50 times in the hope of getting one. Destiny 2 not having a Fatebringer isn’t the same issue as Destiny 2 not having a stupid grind, and I will always argue that hiding the best stuff behind lucky drops is a stupid, awful way to design a game.

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I don't see how adding difficult to get, but really fun, guns hurts the experience.

Because it hides those really fun guns behind stupid amounts of playtime, to the point that some people never got to play with them. That’s bad. Almost inexcusably so.

You’re conflating two different arguments. You can have really fun guns in the game without having to run the same activity 50 times in the hope of getting one. Destiny 2 not having a Fatebringer isn’t the same issue as Destiny 2 not having a stupid grind, and I will always argue that hiding the best stuff behind lucky drops is a stupid, awful way to design a game.

That’s along the lines of what I’m getting at as well. I wouldn’t expect to turn on Destiny 1 and have all the best weapons immediately available to me (although there is something to be said for having an insanely fun weapon to use right out of the gate... Halo CE pistol, anyone?). But having a crazy and fun variety of weapons available all at once early on would make the game a joy to play, because you could keep things feeling fresh and exciting all the time.

Instead, Destiny 1 chose to take the drip-feed approach. Play the game for 40 hours, and you might end up with 1 or two fun weapons. Another 40 hours, maybe another couple great weapons. Or maybe not. This drip-feed means many players are already sick of everything they have by the time they get another fun item. It’s far better to have a bunch of fun weapons to play with available to you early on, when the rest of the content is still new and exciting for you.

This all plays into why I think the RPG 1-20 climb is terrible for the game (both in D1 and D2). Destiny’s combat sandbox isn’t nearly as fun when you remove all the cool powers and abilities. But that’s exactly what Bungie does during your first experience with the campaign. I don’t feel like I’m really playing DESTINY until I’ve got all my powers unlocked and a selection of cool gear to use... but by then all the content is played out.

If I somehow skipped the first 300 hours of D1... like if I just inherited an account from somebody who had already gotten a bunch of cool gear and unlocked all the class abilities, then I’d probably have way more fun with it than I had with D2. But as it stands, the best parts of D1 (which I fell ARE better than anything in D2) were too few, too far between, and came too late into the experience.

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You're seeing guns that you think should be there all the time. They can't do that; that's a balance issue. If they were easy to get, all we'd see is posts about Thorn or god roll Felwinters Lies and how they're unfair. Er...

Look. As legendaries became easier to get, they have to make them shit to compensate. They can't have everyone on God mode.

What you guys want is IDKFA on from the get go. That's not reasonable. In order to allow some guns to be good, they HAVE to be rare, or the whole game is now easy and people only use those guns.

You two see Ayers Rock and say "well we need to level that bullshit. I'm not going to work my whole life just to hope to get enough expendable income to go see Uluru. Obviously these cool looking rocks can exist, and it's unfair for God to have not given ME an Ayers Rock in my city." Then God (Bungie), sets rock size to lesser than 1 meter, because he can't have the entire planet be huge fucking rocks, that ruins his design. The rarity of the big ass rock was what made it special.

I understand the appeal of playing a game with every single possibility unlocked already. I like that. But we know what Bingle does in the interest of balance when people bitch about it. They nerf. They have made things better precisely once with the house of wolves shotgun buff. Everything else has been nerf, nerf, nerf.

We know from their behaviour that asking for what you're asking for is a virtual guarantee that the guns get worse. That is what it has meant at every. Single. Point. in this game. Yes, it theoretically means everyone gets Fatebringer. It practically means we get Destiny 2.

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https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=idkfa

Ayers rock

[image]

God

[image]

Meter

[image]

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Thanks, I had forgotten what a meter was, kept thinking it was kid slang for a meteoroid or something. Also who is the white guy? And I had no idea what IDKFA was or that Ayers Rock had two names? Cool, you learn new things everyday, except for the point you were apparently trying to make. Also, trolling is apparently fun.

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Thanks, I had forgotten what a meter was, kept thinking it was kid slang for a meteoroid or something.

Also who is the white guy?

Claude.

And I had no idea what IDKFA was or that Ayers Rock had two names? Cool, you learn new things everyday, except for the point you were apparently trying to make. Also, trolling is apparently fun.

It is, but so is actually having crazy opinions in which you wholeheartedly believe, like that every SW prequel was better than Return of the Jedi, which makes Blackstar want to shoot me.

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Thanks, I had forgotten what a meter was, kept thinking it was kid slang for a meteoroid or something.

Also who is the white guy?

Claude.

Lies! He looks like this!
[image]

And I had no idea what IDKFA was or that Ayers Rock had two names? Cool, you learn new things everyday, except for the point you were apparently trying to make. Also, trolling is apparently fun.

It is, but so is actually having crazy opinions in which you wholeheartedly believe, like that every SW prequel was better than Return of the Jedi, which makes Blackstar want to shoot me.

And I wholeheartedly enjoy crazy opinions. I replied to you because I honestly didn't know what you were saying because you were referencing several things I had no idea what they meant. I assumed Ayers Rock was a massive rock in the middle of nowhere. At that point I either had to google each reference, which I eventually did in subsequent posts, or just ignore it and move on.

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It is, but so is actually having crazy opinions in which you wholeheartedly believe, like that every SW prequel was better than Return of the Jedi, which makes Blackstar want to shoot me.

Blackstar would not be wrong for shooting you.

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It is, but so is actually having crazy opinions in which you wholeheartedly believe, like that every SW prequel was better than Return of the Jedi, which makes Blackstar want to shoot me.

Blackstar would not be wrong for shooting you.

Thank you. I'll go get my gun.

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And I had no idea what IDKFA was or that Ayers Rock had two names? Cool, you learn new things everyday, except for the point you were apparently trying to make. Also, trolling is apparently fun.

It is, but so is actually having crazy opinions in which you wholeheartedly believe, like that every SW prequel was better than Return of the Jedi, which makes Blackstar want to shoot me.

No no; that makes everyone want to shoot you.

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You're seeing guns that you think should be there all the time. They can't do that; that's a balance issue. If they were easy to get, all we'd see is posts about Thorn or god roll Felwinters Lies and how they're unfair. Er...

Look. As legendaries became easier to get, they have to make them shit to compensate. They can't have everyone on God mode.

What you guys want is IDKFA on from the get go. That's not reasonable. In order to allow some guns to be good, they HAVE to be rare, or the whole game is now easy and people only use those guns.

You two see Ayers Rock and say "well we need to level that bullshit. I'm not going to work my whole life just to hope to get enough expendable income to go see Uluru. Obviously these cool looking rocks can exist, and it's unfair for God to have not given ME an Ayers Rock in my city." Then God (Bungie), sets rock size to lesser than 1 meter, because he can't have the entire planet be huge fucking rocks, that ruins his design. The rarity of the big ass rock was what made it special.

I understand the appeal of playing a game with every single possibility unlocked already. I like that. But we know what Bingle does in the interest of balance when people bitch about it. They nerf. They have made things better precisely once with the house of wolves shotgun buff. Everything else has been nerf, nerf, nerf.

We know from their behaviour that asking for what you're asking for is a virtual guarantee that the guns get worse. That is what it has meant at every. Single. Point. in this game. Yes, it theoretically means everyone gets Fatebringer. It practically means we get Destiny 2.

But “rare” does not equal “good”. Good = good. Yes there is the unarguable fact that people are drawn to exclusivity, they want what they don’t have, etc... that’s not what I’m talking about (although that is very much what D1 was built around).

What I’m talking about is the fact that 90% of the weapons in D1 were boring to use, and the 10% that we’re actually fun were locked behind a combination of huge time investments and RNG. I’m not necessarily saying that everything should have been unlocked right from the very start (although I might not be opposed to that), I’m saying that when you make a game, you want the player’s time with that game to be enjoyable. So you give them fun stuff to do. And if the game is really fun, people will play it over and over and over. D1 failed in this regard, up front. They put a bunch of boring stuff up front, and only after an insane amount of playtime did the good stuff become available, slowly, through a drip feed.

I know you are adamant in your stance that D1 offered players the “choice” to grind or not, and that is technically true... but I don’t see it as a fairly weighted choice. You *could* choose not to grind and be stuck with a boring, inferior version of the game. Or you could *choose* to grind for hours and hours to get to the stuff worth playing with. We can question the reasoning behind making those choices, but I’d rather go straight to the source and call out the shitty design choices that lead to that dynamic at all.

Destiny 2 eliminates those problems, and I applaude Bungie for that. Unfortunately, D2 falls flat on its face when it comes to including gear that is exciting enough to create replay value. But IMO, THAT is the problem or weakness to focus on. The GEAR itself, not the endless grind that it took to acquire the gear in D1.

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Except gear in vanilla wasn't boring. The alphabet soup scout rifle with field scout, explosive rounds, and Firefly was buyable for anyone. The Devil You Know was arguably the best hand cannon available, and a top roll was available for purchase. The Vanquisher ruled the crucible. We all loved our vanguard Shadow Prices.

Iirc, Bungie said that the intent was not to get gear from drops (outside of the raid), but to get gear from buying it. Legendaries were so rare because they were all good.

Remember when TDB came out and all the guns were crap? Remember Gothalian acting like an absolute maniac asking for the high impact auto rifles because they were gone from the game? That's what you get when the guns are easy to come by. You must be remembering the craptastic TTK guns or HOW guns and stuff.

FFS, I used my vanilla guns that weren't retroactively nerfed into oblivion (proof of how good they were) in crucible until the end of the game. Light/BEWARE was always available on my dude for some fusion kills.

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Except gear in vanilla wasn't boring. The alphabet soup scout rifle with field scout, explosive rounds, and Firefly was buyable for anyone. The Devil You Know was arguably the best hand cannon available, and a top roll was available for purchase. The Vanquisher ruled the crucible. We all loved our vanguard Shadow Prices.

Iirc, Bungie said that the intent was not to get gear from drops (outside of the raid), but to get gear from buying it. Legendaries were so rare because they were all good.

Remember when TDB came out and all the guns were crap? Remember Gothalian acting like an absolute maniac asking for the high impact auto rifles because they were gone from the game? That's what you get when the guns are easy to come by. You must be remembering the craptastic TTK guns or HOW guns and stuff.

FFS, I used my vanilla guns that weren't retroactively nerfed into oblivion (proof of how good they were) in crucible until the end of the game. Light/BEWARE was always available on my dude for some fusion kills.

I think we’re talking slightly past each other... or at least partially. I’m not judging weapons based on effectiveness or efficiency. I’m talking about how “fun” they are (which is a vague and subjective umbrella). There were plenty of effective weapons in D1... but IMO, most of them were boring AF to use. Yes, Fatebringer was insanely overpowered compared to many other weapons, and that influenced how fun it was to use, but it also felt good, sounded awesome, and caused things to explode all around you. It was crazy FUN. My favourite weapon in D2 is the Tractor cannon. Often useless, but I laugh every time I pull the trigger.

In terms of effectiveness, the weapons in D2 are mostly fine. They get the job done. They’re just generic and boring for the most part, same as 90% of the weapons in D1.

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Single “identity” perks on fixed rolls are imo the cause of this “functional-but-not-fun” armory. My favorite non-Raid Legendary in all of Destiny was a Zarinaea-D with crowd Control and Glass Half Full. Not a meta weapon. Not crazy good perks for most engagements. But it got going and kept going. Hence fun. Now I can have one or the other.

Most of the Raid Weapons had these positive-pair perk set ups. Even good guns in D1 would get sharded if the perks weren’t good. And part of that is a lack of synergy in perks. Generally bad perks could be fun in the right combos. If only we still had combos.

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That’s complete horseshit, and I’m honestly astounded anyone thinks like that. And you’re talking to me about straw men . . .

Making things rare is not a good answer to the balance problem. It’s probably the worst way to solve that problem. Depriving a huge percentage of the player base of the best and most fun weapons in the pursuit of some warped since of balance is awful. That’s exactly what I’m talking about when I say it makes the game inherently worse. You either have to get lucky or grind for endless hours to have the optimal, most fun experience the game can provide.

Halo didn’t have this problem. Bungie designed a campaign and gave you the weapons they wanted you to have every step of the way, and it was honestly a much better game for it. Can you image having to run The Library 20 times in a row to get the shotgun? That’s what Destiny 1 was, and D2 has taken huge steps towards getting rid of that sort of shit.

Again, you don’t have to make guns rare and locked behind luck and grinding to make them fun. You just have to be able to competently design the rest of your game around good, fun weapons, and Halo showed us that Bungie is more than capable of doing so.

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Again, you don’t have to make guns rare and locked behind luck and grinding to make them fun. You just have to be able to competently design the rest of your game around good, fun weapons, and Halo showed us that Bungie is more than capable of doing so.

The problem with this is that you don't know what a given player will have at any given time. With traditional single player games this is easy. You would have players acquire skills or weapons, and then scale the difficulty of the content to match. So you might learn the basics of a new move and dominate, but then the next section of the game forces you to not just know the basics, but master the nuances of this move. But if you don't know what the player has, you can't design for that.

The solution is difficulty levels. The idea of Prestige is great. First of all, every single activity, from campaign level to strike to raid should have a prestige mode. Second, the prestige mode should be markedly different than the normal mode. It should not be 'do almost the same thing, but with minor changes and bullet sponge enemies'. It should be such that you have to master and exploit crazy weapons you might have come across. Out of the box thinking. Different scenarios entirely.

If care is given to design a wide variety of good guns, and design the prestige modes with a wide variety of usable tactics, then you minimize the risk of nobody having something that they can masterfully use to win.

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Right. Most of the fun guns are fun because they are good, with some exceptions like the tractor cannon. Make the game harder, they are less fun. This is the bullet sponge effect.

If you want all the best guns at the beginning, do you play Doom with the BFG always out? You might sometimes, but I bet you don't.

You're saying you have to grind to have the most fun experience the game can provide. Yes, I agree. What you're saying now is that because all the guns are worse, the game is better.

Destiny had those insane rolled guns in there because they were rare. They didn't have to balance for them. You know what happened once enough people got them? Bungie balanced the guns with nerfs, ruining the fun. Your idea that they set some kind of fun level, then make guns that are 60% fun, then make Fatebringer at 100% fun is false, and can be shown, again, by them nerfing things as soon as enough people get them, every single time. That cannot be refuted. Every gun deemed too good, fun, and prevalent has gotten a nerf. I defy you to provide me with an example otherwise. Occam's razor suggests that they only bother balancing when a critical mass is reached.

What they did is set a fun level at about that of TDYK and the Alphabet Soup and Shadow Price, and then allowed some game breaking good rolls and really good rolls on raid guns because they are rare and didn't really need to be balanced. Again, we can see this, as the very moment good rolls became prevalent, the guns were nerfed.

Destiny 1 is a dinner where, if you eat enough steak, you can get some candy. You're not a big fan of steak so it will take you a while to get some candy.

Destiny 2 is a dinner where, if you eat enough steak, you ate steak. You get no candy. You want to deprive people of the candy because you think it's unfair that some people get candy who like steak earlier than you. You would rather there be no candy.

There is no world where we all have the all powerful über guns we each specifically want in an always online loot game. They will be patched out. These guns will always be in the hands of a select few for a select time. The rest of people will have to deal with slightly less desirable guns for themselves. By eliminating the all powerful über guns, distributed roughly equally based on playtime by random chance, you have literally, and objectively, removed fun things from the game. This makes it less fun. By definition.

Yes, you may feel happier, as you may feel a sense of good riddance as someone crashes his Lamborghini into a tree, but the world is now worse because of your desires. Lol.

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You’re missing a key thing here.

I really, really love candy. I want to have some. I don’t want to have to eat 15 pounds of slightly above average steak to earn some candy. I’d rather just not have candy than do that.

At some point, it doesn’t matter how fun the reward is, being forced to grind for it makes the entire experience as a whole less fun than if that great reward just didn’t exist to begin with.

I still fundamentally disagree that making something rare is a good solution to having to balance them. I also disagree that completely equalizing everything to be boring is the answer.

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We agree technically, but practically, we know what Bungie is doing, and what is practical to have in an MMO loot game. We know how Bungie balanced guns, and we know what they have done for Destiny 2. We have to be realists and know the results of this will be lame guns.

Also, just quit liking candy so much. Duh! :D

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Also, I find it astonishing that your viewpoint on what may come to pass with Destiny is literally the opposite of what it's trending towards.

In Destiny 1.0, all guns were good and had random rolls. Each expansion limited the rolls progressively for balance. The grinding for one particular type of gun was just something people did because they like playing Destiny, and it was one of the only ways to get a good gun again, like at launch. Destiny 2 has no random rolls. Gun rewards are random, but it's still a small pool of guns with set rolls.

Max level could only be gotten through raiding, then through Iron Banner, then through Trials, and now you can just get it from playing. It had a use in level related activities. Now, levels are virtually pointless. You may want to do the hard mode raids, which need a high level, but there are zero extra rewards, and by and large it will just strain your friendships.

All Bungie has ever done is address the complaints of people with similar viewpoints to you guys, eliminating the grind of virtually every currency and resource completely. Why on Earth do you think this trend might reverse?

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I think some people invested not in their character, but invested in the eliteness of their character. That is to say having that perfect Grasp or Fellwinters made them feel both unique and powerful, and they misconstrued the long playtime to obtain such items as equivalent to skill or worth.

D2 eliminates lots of the prestige. It's random, so you can get most items by luck. This is also very frustrating, because you can't spend a weekend grinding a perfect grasp or rerolling your fellwinters (full disclosure - I never got a Fellwinter's drop or a Matador).

The teamshotting in crucible is very reminiscent of Halo, and as we have similar TTK it's too be expected. It's much the same as late game Trials of Osiris, where team shotting was king once snipers were nerfed. It's too be expected, and is the end result of the high end crucible players wanting to eliminate the shotgun/sniper/melee meta that they felt allowed unskilled players to defeat higher skilled players. really you had this same feeling in 6v6 death balls, but more common supers meant that it was also more dangerous.

Bungie could do things to break up the groups. Larger grenade radii, more weapons that induce status effects and such. More speed. I feel they also need to do something about auto rifles, as Uriels is too good at range compared to any other weapon. It's just too easy to disengage at range, and getting up close is very risky. With 3 melee's needed to kill, it's just to hard to get into a group and do any thing. Theoretically, this is where the arkstrider blind punch should shine, but bungie intentionally made that not work in crucible.

So I think they leaned too heavily into the "pro" and sweaty players for feedback, and D2 reflects that type of game.

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I don't honestly care all that much about the former group, when designing a game for them inherently makes it worse for the latter.

I cannot fathom how this is so, only the other way around. Can you please explain?

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I don't honestly care all that much about the former group, when designing a game for them inherently makes it worse for the latter.

I cannot fathom how this is so, only the other way around. Can you please explain?

Grinding sucks, and is bad. It’s really as simple as that. Destiny 1 had tons of it, and it’s inherentjy a worse game for it, but that’s what kept people playing, if the majority of complaints are to be believed.

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I don't honestly care all that much about the former group, when designing a game for them inherently makes it worse for the latter.

I cannot fathom how this is so, only the other way around. Can you please explain?

Grinding sucks, and is bad. It’s really as simple as that. Destiny 1 had tons of it, and it’s inherently a worse game for it, but that’s what kept people playing, if the majority of complaints are to be believed.

Grinding isn't inherently bad. Grinding because everything was RNG based sucked though. But grinding is a different way of saying you were working towards a goal in the game.

I would have much rather had a system in place where you can unlock perks on a weapon based off of using it. Say something like every 200 kills in PvE you unlocked an upgrade or every 50 kills in PvP with that weapon you'd unlock something else.

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I don't honestly care all that much about the former group, when designing a game for them inherently makes it worse for the latter.

I cannot fathom how this is so, only the other way around. Can you please explain?

Grinding sucks, and is bad. It’s really as simple as that. Destiny 1 had tons of it, and it’s inherently a worse game for it, but that’s what kept people playing, if the majority of complaints are to be believed.

Grinding isn't inherently bad. Grinding because everything was RNG based sucked though. But grinding is a different way of saying you were working towards a goal in the game.

I would have much rather had a system in place where you can unlock perks on a weapon based off of using it. Say something like every 200 kills in PvE you unlocked an upgrade or every 50 kills in PvP with that weapon you'd unlock something else.

A system like that could potentially be neat, but not for unlocking perks. I could see doing challenges like that for new shaders or ornaments or other cosmetics, but hiding gameplay relevant things behind that sucks, I think. That’s like going back to grinding out XP to fully unlock a weapon.

I’m not opposed to having things to work toward. I’ve posted about it quite a few times. Just don’t make those things weapons and gear that I might otherwise miss out on.

I think the real issue comes back to micro transactions and Bright Engrams. If those didn’t exist, and those items were spread around as actual rewards for specific activities, or Destination specific loot pools, I think the game would be better for it. The game would feel like it had more worthwhile things to chase even with the actual amount being the same, it would give those that want it more things to chase, and it still wouldn’t be hiding the fun stuff behind a chase.

I don’t disagree that Destiny 2 perhaps went too far to compensate for the complaints about Destiny, and there’s some middle ground there. Just don’t make me chase the fun/good weapons.

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I would have much rather had a system in place where you can unlock perks on a weapon based off of using it. Say something like every 200 kills in PvE you unlocked an upgrade or every 50 kills in PvP with that weapon you'd unlock something else.

You mean like the system in D1? Personally, I hated that. I was so glad that guns were "whole" with no extra work in D2.

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I would have much rather had a system in place where you can unlock perks on a weapon based off of using it. Say something like every 200 kills in PvE you unlocked an upgrade or every 50 kills in PvP with that weapon you'd unlock something else.

You mean like the system in D1? Personally, I hated that. I was so glad that guns were "whole" with no extra work in D2.

The D1 system was a pile of hot garbage. You spent tons of time unlocking perks only to find out that the gun was trash.

I'm probably in the minority on this idea. But I'd love to see all the variations of the same archetype of a weapon go away. Just give us a fully usable High RoF auto (or whatever) from the moment we receive it, no grinding to level it. Then as we use it more it could unlock something for that weapon. This could be a weapon skin for getting 200 EZD kills with that weapon for example. From that point on, that skin is forever unlocked for you to use on that weapon, even if you change skins to something else.

I'm thinking of the potential perks as more of a crafting system than a leveling system. You get weapon A, and then mod with passive perk 1, passive perk 4, active perk 3. If you don't like the perks, you can change them without having to grind for another random version of the weapon you wanted. keep the mods within reason, but don't have 6 different versions of the same archetype that are different skins of the same base gun just with a small subset of perks. Just have one weapon per archetype that you can use and build to your liking. This would have made things a lot better in D1. I probably have a few dozen weapons that have great perk synergies sitting in my vault that have a scope I hate because RNG decided to give me a weapon I would 90% love instead of 100%.

If I remember correctly, Titanfall 2 has a pretty good weapon crafting system. I just hate all the dumb RNG that is forced on Destiny.

I'm just thinking for us to "become legend" that Destiny forces so much RNG on us that you luck into legend rather than build your own story.

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The shortest way I can explain how I feel about Destiny 2 is that it feels like it was designed for all the people that were ambivalent about Destiny 1. And then all the changes that were made were specifically at the expense of the things people who loved Destiny 1 were the most passionate about.

Care to elaborate?

I understand unoudid's complaints with splitting fireteams oddly because of 4v4 PvP, but it's worth that price for me. I've had more fun in Destiny 2 PvP than I ever did with Destiny 1. I like 4v4, and I don't think it shouldn't be 4v4 just because it's messy to split a 6 man raid group down.

Well, here's one. I loved Y1 Destiny PvP. Played tons of Halo multiplayer for years and years, got Destiny, and it blew my mind. The rhythm and pace of the game were just so incredible, you could pull off the craziest things. It was wonderful chaos, but not just random chaos, it was also competitive. When Trials came out it took things to even another level.

Then, for the past 3 years, Bungie has been slowing things down and making things worse, until we get to Destiny 2. It's been obvious where this is going for a long time, so it's not like I'm surprised, but I am disappointed and confused that Bungie's vision for what Destiny PvP "is" doesn't really resemble what I originally fell in love with.

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You've pretty well summed up a lot of my feeling about crucible lately. It was an amazingly fun experience and has progressed downhill over the years. You need to be able to allow for some silliness to happen from time to time.

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You've pretty well summed up a lot of my feeling about crucible lately. It was an amazingly fun experience and has progressed downhill over the years. You need to be able to allow for some silliness to happen from time to time.

I for one like what PvP is right now. I'm not saying there isn't room for improvement, there always is. I'm also not saying I'm good at it, but I also feel like I make more of a difference on my team than I ever did in D1.

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If Destiny 2 and fun came in contact with each other would they annihilate each other?
If you held Destiny 2 in magnetic confinement could you mix it with fun to power a starship’s faster than light engines?
Is Destiny 2 so freaking bad that there is not any fun to be had in it at all?

“Anti-fun” to me sounds exactly as useful a term as “objectively bad.” It’s over the top. It’s nonsensical. And if you really meant it you’d have outright deleted Destiny or thrown the disc in the trash or whatever.

Your case for finding Destiny 2 less fun for you ain’t half bad. But anti-fun? Nah. It ain’t that unless you want to take a pretty serious ax to the English language as we know it.

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If Destiny 2 and fun came in contact with each other would they annihilate each other?
If you held Destiny 2 in magnetic confinement could you mix it with fun to power a starship’s faster than light engines?
Is Destiny 2 so freaking bad that there is not any fun to be had in it at all?

“Anti-fun” to me sounds exactly as useful a term as “objectively bad.” It’s over the top. It’s nonsensical. And if you really meant it you’d have outright deleted Destiny or thrown the disc in the trash or whatever.

Your case for finding Destiny 2 less fun for you ain’t half bad. But anti-fun? Nah. It ain’t that unless you want to take a pretty serious ax to the English language as we know it.

Anti-fun is a useful and specific term. In game design, specifically PvP games, it usually refers to a mechanic or strategy which isn't just 'not fun', it actively denies or removes fun from the other player — for example, a resource denial strategy in a card game like Magic, or a MOBA character with a lot of stuns. Both prevent the player on the receiving end from making any decisions.

Contrast with a weapon with a very high skill ceiling (say the AWP in Counter-Strike) which is not much fun to be on the receiving end of, but which does not deny you any choices in reacting to it.

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If Destiny 2 and fun came in contact with each other would they annihilate each other?
If you held Destiny 2 in magnetic confinement could you mix it with fun to power a starship’s faster than light engines?
Is Destiny 2 so freaking bad that there is not any fun to be had in it at all?

“Anti-fun” to me sounds exactly as useful a term as “objectively bad.” It’s over the top. It’s nonsensical. And if you really meant it you’d have outright deleted Destiny or thrown the disc in the trash or whatever.

Your case for finding Destiny 2 less fun for you ain’t half bad. But anti-fun? Nah. It ain’t that unless you want to take a pretty serious ax to the English language as we know it.

Anti-fun is a useful and specific term. In game design, specifically PvP games, it usually refers to a mechanic or strategy which isn't just 'not fun', it actively denies or removes fun from the other player — for example, a resource denial strategy in a card game like Magic, or a MOBA character with a lot of stuns. Both prevent the player on the receiving end from making any decisions.

Contrast with a weapon with a very high skill ceiling (say the AWP in Counter-Strike) which is not much fun to be on the receiving end of, but which does not deny you any choices in reacting to it.

So from the examples you just gave, do you think it's fair to apply that term to an entire game!? I'm gonna side with raga on this one, that is a little over the top (hopefully to make a point) and maybe Unoudid should get rid of Destiny 2. Apparently Destiny 2 is "removing the fun" from him.

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I would consider any pervasive level (i.e., occurs frequently enough to be common and repeatedly noticed) of fun-dimishment to make a a game “anti-fun.” I don’t think any real games are designed with that intent. But I can see where someone can have enough experiences of the sort to feel like the game is against their enjoyment.

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Does Destiny have a lot of mechanics designed to deny the player what they want? I don't know, I haven't had a chance to try it.

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D1's sandbox design really turned me off (where's all the wild physics and lifelike AI from Halo?) and I haven't seen anything suggesting D2 is different, so I've been working through other games on my backlog. I religiously read all the lore and flavor text, though!

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D1's sandbox design really turned me off (where's all the wild physics and lifelike AI from Halo?) and I haven't seen anything suggesting D2 is different, so I've been working through other games on my backlog. I religiously read all the lore and flavor text, though!

Des2ny is exactly like Destiny in terms of feel, sandbox and AI. The only difference is that it largely gets out of your way regarding the grind. If you didn’t like the act of playing Destiny, you wouldn’t like Des2ny.

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If I were to make a game explicitly to annoy people who liked Destiny 1, I would make Destiny 2, with a few added annoyances.

Bingle didn't do that, I don't think. I think they tried to make a better game for the first 30 hours to beef up those initial impressions and review scores (remember how Destiny got shit on by everyone the first, and obviously superior, year?), but in succeeding, made a demonstrably worse game for the next 2370 hours.

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It is anti illusion of fun.

Some people would rather believe in the Wizard than the professor behind the curtain.

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It is anti illusion of fun.

Some people would rather believe in the Wizard than the professor behind the curtain.

Is that the same Wizard that just "makes things awesome"?

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It is anti illusion of fun.

Some people would rather believe in the Wizard than the professor behind the curtain.

Is that the same Wizard that just "makes things awesome"?

Everyone laughed, but years later I seem to be right:

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The vault is anti-fun, but more because it appears to be just completely slapped together from garbage by an unpaid intern than because it was intentionally designed to be anti-fun.

PvP is definitely anti-fun though. Advanced movement and player control is gone. fixed builds is lame. the guns for pvp are soooooo boring and uninteresting. 4v4 only is lame. No custom modes is lame. "competitive" and "casual" are gross misnomers which in no way reflect the real game. Control remains a grossly imbalanced game mode where one side of the map is almost always at a distinct advantage. The lag from D1 has not been addressed in any meaningful way and you still die to guys around corners or who don't fire until after you're hit by the bullet. Matchmaking takes upwards of 3 minutes to match 2 pre-formed teams of 4 players each. That's absurd. There's a youtube video someone took of the game disconnecting them for inactivity while they were waiting for matchmaking. That's shameful.

Power level isn't anti-fun, but it's meaningless, so why have it at all?

Lost sectors aren't anti-fun, but they're meaningless, so why have them at all?

The chest loot timer that makes your 2nd cayde chest empty is absolutely anti-fun. I'm genuinely curious why this was implemented at all.

Whatever mechanic is used to determine which strike you do next or which pvp map you get next is terrible and frequently rolls the same level two or even three times in a row. hard to say if this is anti-fun intentional design or (more likely) a terrible oversight.

There's other examples, but my point is that some of the stuff is just weird or sloppy looking, and some is certainly anti-fun. The main, core game, was pretty great, imo. Some of the later levels especially shine and I wish that the other guardians streaming through your missions was implemented more throughout the game, as well as integrated more into the core story of the narrative. It's so great; I want more of it!

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The main, core game, was pretty great, imo. Some of the later levels especially shine and I wish that the other guardians streaming through your missions was implemented more throughout the game, as well as integrated more into the core story of the narrative. It's so great; I want more of it!

I agree that the core game and some of the levels were really great. Driving around in a space tank was a fun experience. Seeing others in your story missions at the beginning was fun.

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Part of the reason I find the weapons in D2 anti-fun is that there are nearly zero weapons that are just fun to use and make me feel like the powerful guardian I'm supposed to be.

D1 had The Last Word which in the right hands could be deadly. It was a high risk, high reward weapon that forced you to play near enemies and looked awesome.

Fatebringer was another weapon that was inherently just fun to use. It was a solid gun to use in general but the perk synergy is what made the weapon awesome. I think they had it finally right in Y3 when they took away the elemental damage but left the perks intact. That weapon was just fun.

Gjallarhorn was Fun. Overpowered for sure, but it FUN.

No Land Beyond is another weapon that was just fun to use. Sure, it was infuriating to play against people who were awesome with it. But using the weapon could be an amazingly fun experience. It forced you to get better or to die trying.

In D2 there's only one weapon that I can think of that I would consider to be a fun weapon. That's the Tractor Cannon. It's a weapon that just pretty well sucks as a powerful weapon, but it makes for a fun experience to use in PvP. Again, it's a high risk, high reward weapon.

One of the issues I have with D2 weapons is that everything is just given away easily. There's no excitement when you get something because there's nothing to really chase after. I bet most people can tell you when they got their first Gjallarhorn or the Mythoclast. In D2 there's no real grind for anything. To me grinding doesn't necessarily equal bad design choices. What holding back those weapons does is to make for some higher highs and lower lows in the gameplay experience. Once you had whatever weapon you were chasing drop then there was a real reason to be excited. I just don't get that experience with D2. The only raid weapon I'm missing right now is the sniper and I don't really care because snipers as a whole are worthless in D2. If I wait long enough I'll probably just get the weapon from an engram thanks to other clan mates playing the game for me.

In D2 there's no chase, no standout weapons, and nothing that makes you feel powerful.

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I don't think they are, unless you make them. In Destiny, you used whatever heavy you had and then finally got your Guggenheim. In Destiny 2, you use whatever heavy you have and then finally you'll die of old age. You never get the high mark.

In Destiny 1, it's not like you were forced to use, by and large, bad rocket launchers with inconsistent blast radius, 1 rocket in the chamber, and no alternative for high DPS. You had a fairly good rocket launcher the whole time.

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I don't think they are, unless you make them. In Destiny, you used whatever heavy you had and then finally got your Guggenheim. In Destiny 2, you use whatever heavy you have and then finally you'll die of old age. You never get the high mark.

You just described Destiny as a game that required you to get 1 good heavy weapon to be good. They finally changed that in D2, I'm so happy that they did.

In Destiny 1, it's not like you were forced to use, by and large, bad rocket launchers with inconsistent blast radius, 1 rocket in the chamber, and no alternative for high DPS. You had a fairly good rocket launcher the whole time.

This is the exact opposite of what you said in your first paragraph.

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I don't think they are, unless you make them. In Destiny, you used whatever heavy you had and then finally got your Guggenheim. In Destiny 2, you use whatever heavy you have and then finally you'll die of old age. You never get the high mark.

You just described Destiny as a game that required you to get 1 good heavy weapon to be good. They finally changed that in D2, I'm so happy that they did.

You see, what I actually did was describe an accurate experience for many people who use the Gimsøya, and an accurate experience for those who play Destiny 2. If we continue on in my post, to the very next sentence...

In Destiny 1, it's not like you were forced to use, by and large, bad rocket launchers with inconsistent blast radius, 1 rocket in the chamber, and no alternative for high DPS. You had a fairly good rocket launcher the whole time.

This is the exact opposite of what you said in your first paragraph.

In fact, I just said the point of the post. The previous set of sentences was the foundation on which this needs to be built. I'm not always the best at communicating, but one literally follows the other. Let me use the exact structure but a different subject.

At School 1, you used whatever pencil you had and then finally got your Bic Stic. In School 2, you use whatever pencil you have and then finally you'll die of old age. You never get the high mark.

In School 1, it's not like you were forced to use, by and large, pencils made of infected heroin needles and coals made of your favourite books, burnt as punishment for looking out a window [something we all know is common at School 2]. You had a fairly good pencil the whole time.

Surely, in this situation, you would know that the paragraph before the one about the quality of the pencils is simply information about the pencil progression in the two schools.

School 1: good pencil, eventually Bic Stic. At this point you are free to choose good pencils or Bic Stic. I, as I have said elsewhere and have said for years, rarely used the Bic Stic. I used a set of Field Scout Double Surplus pencils that never ran out of lead.

School 2: infected pencil, eventually nothing. At this point you are free to choose one infected with chlamydia, the best of the infections available.

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School 1: good pencil, eventually Bic Stic. At this point you are free to choose good pencils or Bic Stic. I, as I have said elsewhere and have said for years, rarely used the Bic Stic. I used a set of Field Scout Double Surplus pencils that never ran out of lead.

School 2: infected pencil, eventually nothing. At this point you are free to choose one infected with chlamydia, the best of the infections available.

[image]

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I don't think they are, unless you make them. In Destiny, you used whatever heavy you had and then finally got your Guggenheim. In Destiny 2, you use whatever heavy you have and then finally you'll die of old age. You never get the high mark.

You just described Destiny as a game that required you to get 1 good heavy weapon to be good. They finally changed that in D2, I'm so happy that they did.

You see, what I actually did was describe an accurate experience for many people who use the Gimsøya, and an accurate experience for those who play Destiny 2. If we continue on in my post, to the very next sentence...

In Destiny 1, it's not like you were forced to use, by and large, bad rocket launchers with inconsistent blast radius, 1 rocket in the chamber, and no alternative for high DPS. You had a fairly good rocket launcher the whole time.

This is the exact opposite of what you said in your first paragraph.

In fact, I just said the point of the post. The previous set of sentences was the foundation on which this needs to be built. I'm not always the best at communicating, but one literally follows the other. Let me use the exact structure but a different subject.

I have to say that I find it really funny that the one example you use is different grades of pencils in public schools (I assume) to someone who grew up being home schooled and didn't know there were different kinds of fancy pencils :D Also that your title is false, this is DBO after all!

Either way, after rereading it several times, I believe I get what you are saying.

At School 1, you used whatever pencil you had and then finally got your Bic Stic. In School 2, you use whatever pencil you have and then finally you'll die of old age. You never get the high mark.

I read this as you are a kid (gamer) from School 1 (Destiny 1) who used whatever pencil (rocket launcher) because he had to. Because what he really wanted was his Bic Stic (GHorn) and all the other pencils were stepping stones to his Bic Stic.

In School 2 (Destiny 2), you use whatever pencil you have because that is what you are given and then you finally die (are done playing). You never get the high mark (Bic Stic?).

So after rereading this a couple times I realize that you are saying that both schools (games) are identical other than School 1 (D1) has something to look forward to and hope to acquire which is the Bic Stic (GHorn). I disagree with this as it relates to both games because if you took the Ghorn away from D1, both games wouldn't be the same. The spread of D2 rocket launchers are used in variety because they are all good for what they do and there are multiples in their category. I D1, the base rocket launchers were okay, but they were so out shined by a very select amount of rocket launchers, Ghorn being one of them.

In School 1, it's not like you were forced to use, by and large, pencils made of infected heroin needles and coals made of your favourite books, burnt as punishment for looking out a window [something we all know is common at School 2]. You had a fairly good pencil the whole time.

Surely, in this situation, you would know that the paragraph before the one about the quality of the pencils is simply information about the pencil progression in the two schools.

The reason I said what I said is because I didn't understand what you were truly saying until you gave another example that I still had to reread a couple times. How I should have read it the first time was like this:

In Destiny 1, [sarcasm] it's not like you were forced to use, by and large, bad rocket launchers with inconsistent blast radius, 1 rocket in the chamber, and no alternative for high DPS. [/sarcasm] You had a fairly good rocket launcher the whole time.

If I had known it was meant to sound like this, I wouldn't have said it was exactly the opposite of your first paragraph. And the reason I was actually considering you were serious is because I didn't realize you were using sarcasm on the internet in text. That is a great way for your point to be misconstrued.

School 1: good pencil, eventually Bic Stic. At this point you are free to choose good pencils or Bic Stic. I, as I have said elsewhere and have said for years, rarely used the Bic Stic. I used a set of Field Scout Double Surplus pencils that never ran out of lead.

School 2: infected pencil, eventually nothing. At this point you are free to choose one infected with chlamydia, the best of the infections available.

I now realize you were just saying that D1 rocket launchers were pretty decent and you could use most of the pretty decent rocket launchers until you got to use the awesome Ghorn. D2 on the other hand does not have great rocket launchers and even worse is that you don't even have an awesome Ghorn to look forward to. You start with bad rocket launchers and die with them.

I agree that it's good to have something good to look forward to. I don't think it's a good thing that that awesome rocket launcher is the end all of rocket launchers. I also disagree that D2 has nothing to look forward to and has a bunch of crappy rocket launchers. I personally heard about the raid rocket launcher and really wanted it, so I played the raid and eventually got it without grinding for it. I know there are other good rockets out there because I am constantly killed by them in PvP :P

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WELL THEN WE WILL JUST HAVE TO AGREE TO DISAGREE.

SO THERE!

This is the most negative I have been in one chunk on a video game forum, possibly ever. I blame deeJ, as he said someone who can only be 3of9 told him that honest criticism is good for the community. It can be, but taking a dump on a game that you think is fairly good virtually exclusively is, IMO, not good. The negativity involved with honest criticism can become toxic to a community. Over at the subreddit, some people were shitting on Urk. They said he does zero work and is a bad guy. We all know Urk, and he seems nice. He does do stuff. They're shitting on Lukems, but not for his elitist attitude and its effect on the game, but his aloof personality. That's not cool. We don't do that, but the constant "ugh the grind is such bullshit" of last game and the "ugh there isn't enough grind" in this game can hurt.

We aren't just complaining, we at DBO usually have reasons for what we say, except Cody, and we spell them out. Bunglers read that and they know we are trying to talk about their game rationally.

All that being said, people don't like other negative people that often. It becomes a chore to slog through the negativity. It's why I limit my critical posts to, at most frequent, monthly complaints timed around updates, and never make my own thread, except when they killed Field Scout, which was so egregious I still can barely handle it. I can't believe they did that.

Anyway, we've mostly all said our piece on the subject. I hope the blog post gives us more discussion, but after we do that, maybe wait to continue crapping on what we all admit is a fairly good game until we get more info.

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Once I got those and pared it with the lower tree on my striker, D2 crucible has become "punch all the things". It's highly amusing and makes me feel very powerful. I'm envious my ark strider can't punch like that.

Quickfang on my Ark strider is also very NINJA.

While I miss my Mythoclast and such, the issue was that these were artificially restricted, and players were discriminated against for not having them. While I was excited to get my first Mythoclast, I also had to grind VoG 15 some times before it dropped, and it dropped after CE came out, so I missed out completely on it's heyday.

I much prefer the quest type structure for D2. I'd like to see more exotics like this, where you get some story behind them. I also like the paired exotics like Sturm and Drang, MIDA. That seems like a better way for people to care about their weapons.

I think D2 suffers from the fact that aside from MIDA and Arcus, most exotics are outshined by other more common guns. Frankly I think 99% of the guns I was shot by last night were Uriels and Last Hope. I had one game with people who tried to prefire Sweet Business, and that was at least enjoyable.

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While I miss my Mythoclast and such, the issue was that these were artificially restricted, and players were discriminated against for not having them. While I was excited to get my first Mythoclast, I also had to grind VoG 15 some times before it dropped, and it dropped after CE came out, so I missed out completely on it's heyday.

Legit lol. My one and only Mythoclast dropped after Wrath of the Machine came out. Heydey... heh. What's a heyday?

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We can have a parade and serve hot hors d'oeuvres...

[image]

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Part of the reason I find the weapons in D2 anti-fun is that there are nearly zero weapons that are just fun to use and make me feel like the powerful guardian I'm supposed to be.

D1 had The Last Word which in the right hands could be deadly. It was a high risk, high reward weapon that forced you to play near enemies and looked awesome.

Fatebringer was another weapon that was inherently just fun to use. It was a solid gun to use in general but the perk synergy is what made the weapon awesome. I think they had it finally right in Y3 when they took away the elemental damage but left the perks intact. That weapon was just fun.

Gjallarhorn was Fun. Overpowered for sure, but it FUN.

No Land Beyond is another weapon that was just fun to use. Sure, it was infuriating to play against people who were awesome with it. But using the weapon could be an amazingly fun experience. It forced you to get better or to die trying.

You apparently haven't tried that many guns or you just don't find that many guns fun. Both could be true.

Sweet business is truly an amazing gun in all aspects. It's a ton of fun to use, listen to, watch, everything about it. It's also a very risky gun to use because you have to spool it up before engaging. If you do it too soon you run out of your clip, too late and your DPS isn't good enough to take someone out.

In D2 there's only one weapon that I can think of that I would consider to be a fun weapon. That's the Tractor Cannon. It's a weapon that just pretty well sucks as a powerful weapon, but it makes for a fun experience to use in PvP. Again, it's a high risk, high reward weapon.

One of the issues I have with D2 weapons is that everything is just given away easily. There's no excitement when you get something because there's nothing to really chase after. I bet most people can tell you when they got their first Gjallarhorn or the Mythoclast. In D2 there's no real grind for anything. To me grinding doesn't necessarily equal bad design choices. What holding back those weapons does is to make for some higher highs and lower lows in the gameplay experience. Once you had whatever weapon you were chasing drop then there was a real reason to be excited. I just don't get that experience with D2. The only raid weapon I'm missing right now is the sniper and I don't really care because snipers as a whole are worthless in D2. If I wait long enough I'll probably just get the weapon from an engram thanks to other clan mates playing the game for me.

I understand the chase. Yes, that is entertaining and it's fun when you get something, but it's also not at all fun when you never get something. Bungie decided (I would guess) to eliminate both, because it was more likely that someone wasn't going to get something than someone have so much fun in the chase. I personally don't remember when I got my Gjallarhorn it was earlyish. I never got a Mythoclast or Fatebringer. And it's not because I didn't play that raid enough.

In D2 there's no chase

They do have weapon quests, which is a chase, probably just not as much of a grind as you are hoping for.

no standout weapons

You really aren't trying hard enough, there are a ton

and nothing that makes you feel powerful.

You must not be a Titan. that's only a half joke, you really need try all of Destiny 2. And if you have than you apparently don't like Destiny 2, like, alot.

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I think Destiny 2 is pretty fun. I thought Destiny 1 was fun also.

You're asking if D2 is anti-fun compared to what? Destiny 1? Super Mario Brothers? Sex? Getting your thumb smashed by a hammer? To me, it seems "fun" is something that has to be relative to the available options. Do I want to play Destiny 2 tonight or contact Maytag about our leaking dishwasher we bought last month...D2 wins. (My actual thought process last night.) Do I want to play Destiny 2 tonight or Master Chief Collection? MCC wins. (My actual thought process a few nights last week.)

I've pretty much stopped playing other shooters because they didn't feel as good as Bungie games. Call of Duty hung in there for a while but after Modern Warfare 2, I was tired of purchasing the exact same game every year for what was essentially a PvP experience of getting one-shot in the back, then one-shotting others in the back.

There are two FPS games that stand out in my mind as "game changers" Goldeneye on N64 and Halo on Xbox. Bungie nailed it with the feel and gameplay of Halo. The same feel and gameplay carried into Destiny. It just FEELS good. So anytime I try to play an FPS game, it feels jerky, clunky and not as fun. For my taste, Bungie is a developer that is making games that nobody else is making and they have a certain style that is generally more fun than other fps games.

They are trying to make a game that isn't already out there. I always make the joke that so many people play Call of Duty because they don't have the skill to play Halo or Destiny. Any schmuck can join a CoD game and get some kills but you need some grit to hang in a Bungie game. The fact that they are constantly trying to be different and changing things tells me that they are wanting to evolve and make things better.

(dang this is getting long and I'm worried I've lost focus on my original point.)

I guess what I'm trying to say is, Bungie doesn't owe us anything. They made a game and we can decide if we like it or not. If you like it, play it. If you don't like it, don't play it. That's what we did "back in my day" and it was great! (arguably, better.)

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Let me start out by saying that I think as a whole D2 at its core is a fun game. It just might not end up being a game for me though, time will tell on this.

There have been some great changes made to the game that I think is a net positive. Weapons being fully leveled from the start is a great example of this. Weapon quests are also a great change.

The feel of the game is still the same as it was in D1 which is great. The movement is very natural feeling and is still fun after 3+ years of playing.

My comparison of D1 to D2 comes down to this. D1 was an exciting, yet abusive relationship. There were all sorts of highs and lows. And even though things were bad at times, there was always a glimmer of hope as to what it could be. We worked towards making things better, and while there was change, it just was never enough. Now with D2, we are in a nice easy relationship after years of an abusive relationship. Sure, we are happy that things are better in some regards, but all in all its boring and not exciting. Another example would be D1 being bi-polar, and D2 is the same bi-polar person but on lithium to level everything out.

I just feel that D2 has swung too far to the "Everyone's a winner" side of things and has just handed out participation trophies to everyone. They took a lot of excitement from the game in order to make everyone happy.

I'm honestly hoping for the best of both worlds and for there to be a good middle ground. This might end up being in Destiny 3 though.

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I just feel that D2 has swung too far to the "Everyone's a winner" side of things and has just handed out participation trophies to everyone. They took a lot of excitement from the game in order to make everyone happy.

We absolutely need difficulty levels. Easy / Normal / Heroic / Legendary. There's no way to set this in the game currently.

Increasing the difficulty should not just make enemies stronger. They should get smarter, be placed differently, have different weapons, and perhaps be of different types.

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I just feel that D2 has swung too far to the "Everyone's a winner" side of things and has just handed out participation trophies to everyone. They took a lot of excitement from the game in order to make everyone happy.

We absolutely need difficulty levels. Easy / Normal / Heroic / Legendary. There's no way to set this in the game currently.

Increasing the difficulty should not just make enemies stronger. They should get smarter, be placed differently, have different weapons, and perhaps be of different types.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be able to go select a mission or strike (with random variations) and change the difficulty from the director? That sounds like an awesome idea.

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I just feel that D2 has swung too far to the "Everyone's a winner" side of things and has just handed out participation trophies to everyone. They took a lot of excitement from the game in order to make everyone happy.

We absolutely need difficulty levels. Easy / Normal / Heroic / Legendary. There's no way to set this in the game currently.

Increasing the difficulty should not just make enemies stronger. They should get smarter, be placed differently, have different weapons, and perhaps be of different types.

I feel like Bungie thinks that's what "light levels" are. Personally, I think they'd be better of dropping the light level and just having difficulty levels for content. So the hard mode raid is harder because damage is scaled or there are other additional challenges. Today, because of the light level stuff, once they bump the light level cap the hard mode raid become easier.

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Let me start out by saying that I think as a whole D2 at its core is a fun game. It just might not end up being a game for me though, time will tell on this.

Just a heads up, you probably shouldn't create a thread titled "Is D2 anti-fun" and then go on about how it's not fun if you actually think as a whole and at its core D2 is a fun game. It really makes it hard for, at least me, to even approach it.

Because when I read that title I just immediately went "woah, I already don't believe anything that is going to be said." Maybe that's just me, but that kind of a negative wording is quite powerful and can construe your actual point.

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Yeah, it requires knowledge of a specific use of anti-fun, where it's designed to make fun elements of the game less frequent, like trickle. Usually this is not done on purpose, as the developer thinks the metagame then becomes fun to make up for the lack of fun elements.

But honestly who cares. Why am I even here?

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Let me start out by saying that I think as a whole D2 at its core is a fun game. It just might not end up being a game for me though, time will tell on this.

Just a heads up, you probably shouldn't create a thread titled "Is D2 anti-fun" and then go on about how it's not fun if you actually think as a whole and at its core D2 is a fun game. It really makes it hard for, at least me, to even approach it.

Because when I read that title I just immediately went "woah, I already don't believe anything that is going to be said." Maybe that's just me, but that kind of a negative wording is quite powerful and can construe your actual point.

I've tried to think of a better way to word this for awhile but it's just what keeps coming back in my mind. I also worded it as a question instead of a statement. Now if I had said "D2 IS Anti-Fun" I would be expecting a full backlash against anything I had to say. I wanted this to be more of a talking point for the group than me just railing on the game.

The core game is still the same, just a ton of decisions that were made for the game development has deliberately taken the fun out of the game for me (maybe not you). I fall into the realm of a parent upset with their kid who just did something stupid... "I'm not mad at you, just disappointed".

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Let me start out by saying that I think as a whole D2 at its core is a fun game. It just might not end up being a game for me though, time will tell on this.

Just a heads up, you probably shouldn't create a thread titled "Is D2 anti-fun" and then go on about how it's not fun if you actually think as a whole and at its core D2 is a fun game. It really makes it hard for, at least me, to even approach it.

Because when I read that title I just immediately went "woah, I already don't believe anything that is going to be said." Maybe that's just me, but that kind of a negative wording is quite powerful and can construe your actual point.

I've tried to think of a better way to word this for awhile but it's just what keeps coming back in my mind. I also worded it as a question instead of a statement. Now if I had said "D2 IS Anti-Fun" I would be expecting a full backlash against anything I had to say. I wanted this to be more of a talking point for the group than me just railing on the game.

The core game is still the same, just a ton of decisions that were made for the game development has deliberately taken the fun out of the game for me (maybe not you). I fall into the realm of a parent upset with their kid who just did something stupid... "I'm not mad at you, just disappointed".

I just wanted to inform you that I didn't want you to think you did a horrible thing to make this topic, making sure you knew that it could be construed as a very hardlined topic.

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so yeah D2 by default makes me sad. I want good shotguns!!!

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It's funny, some of the most fun I've had solo was when they added grimoire for shotgun kills. I ran around on patrol on earth with a universal remote and my found verdict for hours just killing stuff. great times.

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too bad shotguns are toxic

I really wish on some things, devs would listen to the community less

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As much as I didn't like TTK, the primary burn (or was it secondary?) airborne nightfalls were hilarious.

Just Universal Remote doing like 20x damage to every bad guy as long as you hopped first.

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We get to watch a bunch of Taylor Swift avatars throw down

[image]

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Quite literally.

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Most of the original post has gotten plenty of discussion in this thread, but I wanted to address this:

Another thing is that I miss is being able to quickly see both my clan list and my friends list from just opening the menu. Seeing the clan list is nice, but I have to go through a few more steps to see both the clan and friends list at the same time. This just seems like a cumbersome design decision. The UI in general is a step up in the right direction as a lot of the little changes are improvements over D1. Maybe I’m just missing something with this?

To see my clan list, I have to press the menu button, then left bumper once.

To see both clan list and friends list together, I have to press the start button, then right bumper twice.

Menu and Start are right next to each other. I'm really having trouble seeing how the second one is much more difficult than the first.

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Most of the original post has gotten plenty of discussion in this thread, but I wanted to address this:

Another thing is that I miss is being able to quickly see both my clan list and my friends list from just opening the menu. Seeing the clan list is nice, but I have to go through a few more steps to see both the clan and friends list at the same time. This just seems like a cumbersome design decision. The UI in general is a step up in the right direction as a lot of the little changes are improvements over D1. Maybe I’m just missing something with this?

To see my clan list, I have to press the menu button, then left bumper once.

To see both clan list and friends list together, I have to press the start button, then right bumper twice.

Menu and Start are right next to each other. I'm really having trouble seeing how the second one is much more difficult than the first.

I look at it as needless confusion. Why have the clan list in two locations? The confusion is part of the carryover from D1 where you just went to a single menu to find your friends/clan mates.

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Is D2 Anti-Fun? (Destiny)

Is D2 Anti-Fun?

This too.

As usual, you guys are missing the point.

Different ideas of fun...

Exactly.

Exactly.

Exactly.

I think you guys are thinking about it the wrong way.

I didn't understand a single one of those references.

References

References

References

References

References

This. Also this branch makes Doomguy sad.

References

References

I think you guys are thinking about it the wrong way.

Yes, exactly.

Yes, exactly.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, okay.

I think you guys are thinking about it the wrong way.

I think you guys are thinking about it the wrong way.

I think you guys are thinking about it the wrong way.

I think you guys are thinking about it the wrong way.

I think you guys are thinking about it the wrong way.

And another thing

But the prestige man...

Is D2 Anti-Fun?

Is D2 Anti-Fun?

Is D2 Anti-Fun?

Is D2 Anti-Fun?

Is D2 Anti-Fun?

Weapon upgrade system

Some Elaboration

Some Elaboration

Some Elaboration

“Anti-Fun?” No. Next question.

“Anti-Fun?” No. Next question.

“Anti-Fun?” No. Next question.

“Anti-Fun?” No. Next question.

“Anti-Fun?” No. Next question.

Don't have a console?

Don't have a console?

Don't have a console?

No, but it feels like a troll.

No

No

No

More like

Anti-fun or sloppy hacky secondary systems?

Anti-fun or sloppy hacky secondary systems?

On weapons

But are the lows lower?

But are the lows lower?

I have never seen someone take something so out of context.

I have never seen someone take something so out of context.

I have never seen someone take something so out of context.

DISAGREE AND CALL TO ACTION WITH RAMBLING POST.

Mostly agree :-D

Synthoseps

+10

Synthoseps

Heyday? Why that's the Russian New Year!

On weapons

Is D2 Anti-Fun?

Some base clarifications

Some base clarifications

Some base clarifications

Some base clarifications

Some personal clarifications

Some personal clarifications

Some personal clarifications

Some personal clarifications

Shotguns are my fav weapons and the H1 shotty is the best

Shotguns are my fav weapons and the H1 shotty is the best