Sure was fun playing Des2ny and not being able to post about it. Thanks Beorn!

First of all, nearly everything is a huge improvement over Destiny. I’m at 275 light right now, and I haven’t for one second done anything I didn’t want to do, or grind in any way. It was so freeing to be able to take my time and enjoy the story campaign, especially when the missions are so much better now. I don’t know what light level the raid is going to require. 280 or below, and Bungie’s done right. Anything higher, and then we have a problem. 275 is about the point where it pretty much becomes impossible to advance any higher without grinding for exotics.

The particle effects and kinematics are amazing. It's incredibly satisfying to kill a cabal in a shower of sparks, and it's so cool how the psions jet across the battlefield. The fallen bend over and run… everything is so much more brutal and satisfying!

One thing Bungie did fuck up was the infusion system. You can now only infuse weapons of the same type into each other. Don’t like sidearms? Well fuck you, because you can’t use it to make your pulse rifle better anymore. Dismantle it for legendary shards. I wish I was in the room when the decision was made to do this. There is literally NO upside to the player. It doesn’t make the game any more fun. It only adds additional frustration where there used to be none. You are taking an existing system and making it worse! This was a bad decision pure and simple. Which is astonishing since almost everything else in the game is an improvement.

Likewise, the fact that you have to decode bright engrams at the Eververse™ is some slimy ass shit Bungie. It’s one thing to have a microtransaction kiosk that I can completely ignore, but now you purposefully design it so that every time you level up you are funneled to the store. Get the out of here with that shit. It’s manipulative as fuck, and really insults me as a player. Stop riding the line. You want to make more money? Have me pay for an awesome DLC campaign. The story campaign for Des2ny was easily worth more than 60 dollars to me.

So the music… I don't think it's bad, but I don't think it's great either. There are one or two pieces that really work, but overall it is just texture. Plus, the game is really bad at turning off the music. There's music for like 80% of the game. It's too much. The great thing about Halo was that the music would kick in and out as needed. In Des2ny… it kind of just stays on all the time. Also notice that they use Music of the Spheres in the ending cutscene :-p It's not as bad as I was prepared for, and it's definitely serviceable, but as I said it's more textural and enhancing of the emotion rather than really being bold and telling a story, being a character of its own, and creating an emotion. if that makes sense. Some of it was just flat out the wrong choice. When we first encounter the Vex on Nessus… that piece is completely wrong for that moment. A lot of people are saying they don't miss Marty, but I think it's really clear they lost something.

Adventures are pretty rad, and what I think patrol missions should have been all along. My only complaint is that I wish there were more of them! I love how the enemies they spawn and the set pieces they create appear to other players. I remember sniping away at the Vex mind while another player did “Cliffhanger” off in the distance, and I created quite the shitstorm when I accidentally lured a boss over into a public event!

I do not know why patrols are actually in the game. For me, patrols were the worst parts of Destiny exemplified: poor, simple missions meant for grinding. We would lose nothing if they disappeared and got more and better adventures instead.

The quality of the story missions was a huge improvement. Not only with regards to scale and set pieces, but with interesting enemy placements and encounters. It felt like there was a lot of variety that Destiny lacked. Others have already said how there were so many cool moments, but there were perhaps a bit too many callbacks to Halo. I mean, we basically played a section of AoTCR. I imagine they’d be even more fun with a group of two other guardians.

Public events are significantly more fun. There’s just so much mayhem now. I am not quite sure how I feel about the heroic events. Just doing a thing to activate them seems a little lame. I think it would help if there were multiple ways to trigger it, randomly selected as the event starts. In fact, I think more randomness could really improve public events even more. Take the Hive ritual one on Titan. It’s always stepping on plates, and wizards. But what if it could also be Ogres? Giant Knights? A mix of either? And what if it could be plates, or dunking relics, or something else? Right there I’ve added like 12 permutations to the event. It seems like there could be more stuff and mechanics borrowed from court of Oryx in that case. But yeah. If you build something with three legos, and you have 5 colors, then you can make your thing 125 ways. It adds up quickly. I’d love to see more permutations of the public events to keep if more fresh. I also think that the difficulty should scale up exponentially with more players and also rewards. Adding more players makes it exponentially easier, so it would be good if the challenge level was at a good spot regardless of how many players are in on it.

I am not sure how I feel about the new weapon system yet… It’s not really bad or anything, but it’s different. I am a little disappointed that matching shield elements seems to matter even less now. As long as you have an energy weapon, you are good.

The mods are… interesting, but ultimately I think will prove to be very one dimensional. Having mods that increase the light by 5 is a mistake, because that will end up being the mod everyone uses. Why couldn’t it have been play style perks only? Then we’d have more variety and freedom. Would 5 light even matter anyway in high level activities? I don’t know yet, but my gut says that the mod system will need an overhaul in the next Comet, because right now it’s not very interesting.

Nightfalls being timed are fun. I assume this is Bungie’s way of eliminating the boring way more people played nightfalls in Destiny, which was hang back with an elemental primary and slowly clear everything out.

The thing I am most happy about has been my ability to so far just play the game how I want to play it, and at the pace I want to play it, and not really ever have to worry about that number beside my name. I cannot stress enough how much this is appreciated.

I look forward to taking down the World Eater with the PS4 crew.

Adventures are pretty rad, and what I think patrol missions should have been all along. My only complaint is that I wish there were more of them! I love how the enemies they spawn and the set pieces they create appear to other players. I remember sniping away at the Vex mind while another player did “Cliffhanger” off in the distance, and I created quite the shitstorm when I accidentally lured a boss over into a public event!

Public events are significantly more fun. There’s just so much mayhem now.

Easily my favorite thing about Destiny 2. Just going out in the world feels like a worthwhile thing to do (and not just for the loot). There is shit popping off everywhere. The amount of enemies they cram in there is incredible sometimes, and it's a lot of fun.

Nightfalls being timed are fun. I assume this is Bungie’s way of eliminating the boring way more people played nightfalls in Destiny, which was hang back with an elemental primary and slowly clear everything out.

I love the new Nightfall timer. It was cool to barely get to the boss before the timer ended on the first run and then get better the next few runs before finally burning him down. And it was fun to actually fail a Nightfall for the first time in years.

Is right here, at the beginning:

Sure was fun playing Des2ny and not being able to post about it. Thanks Beorn!

Sure is neat how you blame the admin for handing down the consequence for something you did. Guess it'll have to happen a few more times. One would think facing that at launch, of all times, would do it.

~m

Is right here, at the beginning:

Sure was fun playing Des2ny and not being able to post about it. Thanks Beorn!

Sure is neat how you blame the admin for handing down the consequence for something you did. Guess it'll have to happen a few more times. One would think facing that at launch, of all times, would do it.

~m

I guess on the internet you really do have to post emoticons to convey tone.

- No text -

Is right here, at the beginning:

Sure was fun playing Des2ny and not being able to post about it. Thanks Beorn!

Sure is neat how you blame the admin for handing down the consequence for something you did. Guess it'll have to happen a few more times. One would think facing that at launch, of all times, would do it.

~m

I guess on the internet you really do have to post emoticons to convey tone.

If it had been the only mention of it, I might have thought it was tongue-in-cheek. However, I read the post directly after reading this one... and it sounded more whiney than light-hearted. Maybe you need to check your OWN tone.

Is right here, at the beginning:

Sure was fun playing Des2ny and not being able to post about it. Thanks Beorn!

Sure is neat how you blame the admin for handing down the consequence for something you did. Guess it'll have to happen a few more times. One would think facing that at launch, of all times, would do it.

~m

I guess on the internet you really do have to post emoticons to convey tone.

If it had been the only mention of it, I might have thought it was tongue-in-cheek. However, I read the post directly after reading this one... and it sounded more whiney than light-hearted. Maybe you need to check your OWN tone.

Nah, it really was supposed to be in the tone of the :-p emote.

Is right here, at the beginning:

Sure was fun playing Des2ny and not being able to post about it. Thanks Beorn!

Sure is neat how you blame the admin for handing down the consequence for something you did. Guess it'll have to happen a few more times. One would think facing that at launch, of all times, would do it.

~m

I guess on the internet you really do have to post emoticons to convey tone.

If it had been the only mention of it, I might have thought it was tongue-in-cheek. However, I read the post directly after reading this one... and it sounded more whiney than light-hearted. Maybe you need to check your OWN tone.

Nah, it really was supposed to be in the tone of the :-p emote.

Yep, I believe you if you say so - but it doesn't change the fact that when you do it twice in a row, it stops sounding tongue-in-cheek, no matter HOW you intended it.