This isn't about some imagined grudge I have with Bungie. These are just legitimately the thoughts and feelings I'm experiencing.

The answer is that I probably won't play super frequently. And I'm super okay with that. Again, I cannot stress enough how awesome it has been to not have to grind or otherwise do repetitive, poor activities in order to advance. If the 'grind' is eliminated except for cosmetics, I am all for that. That way the people who bizarrely like grinding have something to do, while the folks who don't can safely ignore that aspect.

I didn't like the fact that I had to do that Destiny, but I liked just jumping into the strike playlist for an hour and getting cool drops. I'd love for a cosmetic-based loot economy, I just don't think there's enough there to support that, and I don't think what is there is all that good.

I feel like for the first time Destiny is purely about enjoying the world, story, and challenge. So I will be jumping in and raiding for fun, and certainly tackling the prestige difficulties when ready. But, no doing things over and over for drops. The fact that many exotics are unexotic and 'lame' helps me feel better about not getting them all.

I agree with that in principle, but ultimately, I don't think that stuff is quite good enough. The campaign was fun to play through, but it was still a pale shade of any Bungie Halo campaign in terms of both story and mission/encounter design. There's still and odd mix of design goals in Destiny 2 that don't necessarily work well together.

I was thinking about this last night after we were done raiding…

How much will I be playing this game after I complete the raid for the first time? I hear mixed things about Trials… SO what will my Des2ny ritual look like?

The answer is that I probably won't play super frequently. And I'm super okay with that. Again, I cannot stress enough how awesome it has been to not have to grind or otherwise do repetitive, poor activities in order to advance. If the 'grind' is eliminated except for cosmetics, I am all for that. That way the people who bizarrely like grinding have something to do, while the folks who don't can safely ignore that aspect.

I feel like for the first time Destiny is purely about enjoying the world, story, and challenge. So I will be jumping in and raiding for fun, and certainly tackling the prestige difficulties when ready. But, no doing things over and over for drops. The fact that many exotics are unexotic and 'lame' helps me feel better about not getting them all.

Cody just nailed what I believe to be the biggest and most important improvement they've made between D1 and D2. I'm not saying that the way Cody decides to engage with the game is the "proper" way or anything like that, but the fact that it is now an option at all.

In D1, if you wanted to experience the most challenging activities in the game, you would need to spend loads of time grinding to get there. And that grind was usually limited to a very narrow selection of activities. And if you wanted to have a flexible selection of gear to use during those endgame activities, the amount of grinding you'd need to do increased exponentially.

D2 is a totally different experience. In the 2 weeks since the game launched, I've already gotten 2 characters up above 280 light, with a 3rd character hovering around 240. But more important than the speed at which I've been able to get these characters leveled up is the fact that I have done nothing but play the game in whatever way I felt like playing at any given time. I've spent hours tooling around in patrol, or picking a planet and going through all the adventure missions, or wandering around the social spaces and taking in the sights. I've done some strikes, some crucible, a couple nightfalls, about half a raid, a bit of trials... I've experienced so much of what the game has to offer, and never have I run up against the kind of arbitrary barriers that were so prevalent in D1. And that is freaking awesome.

To Cody's point, some people will enjoy playing strikes over and over and over. Others will spend hundreds of hours in the crucible. Some will have weekly rituals with their friends like Nightfalls or Raids. Some players will live in Patrol or the story missions. But no matter your preferences, any of us will be able to do any of these activities without being required to spend obscene amounts of time playing other activities that we have no interest in.

There are a lot of things I could nitpick about if I wanted to. I think the new weapon loadout system sucks. I cringe at about 90% of the dialog in the game. The plot falls apart as soon as you put any thought towards it (all IMO, obviously). But at the end of the day, I can spend my time with Destiny 2 engaging with the activities that I actually want to engage with, and that is such a huge improvement over D1 that my minor gripes feel very minor by comparison.

I know I wasn't the only one saying it, but people literally made fun of me for saying this crap, and it continues to hold true. The PvP balancing, the removal of the grind, the lack of randomness, it literally makes the game worse.

Uh no. The removal of the grind and randomness made the game way better.

This is a great example of internet people, and likely Bungie listening to them, making the game worse.

"DAE hate grinding?" Bingle removes guns good enough to grind for.

In making guns easier to get, Bungie had to nerf them and remove god rolls. In balancing the game for crucible whiners, Bungie had to remove any character of the guns. To make public events more interesting more often, they have to make them obnoxious.

Good guns would harm a game like Destiny. If guns are randomly acquired, then you do not know how powerful a player's arsenal will be when they face a challenge. So you either you balance stuff around the good guns, which would make not having them suck, or you don't, which makes having them a breeze. The only way to do this is if there are fewer, more diverse guns acquired in predicable ways, so you can tailor challenges around mastering and exploiting them all. You can't do that if there's a chance your player will never get the gun!

You are in some sense correct, but only because Bungie only went half way with the fix. The solution is no random acquisition of guns at all. Then you can design 'God Roll' guns, that are godlike in specific circumstances, or while playing on a razor thin edge, and design your campaign around this.

Anything that moves the game away from avatar power towards player skill and knowledge is a plus. This doesn't mean you cannot power up your avatar; it just means you have to do it in defined and repeatable ways.

The game gets worse and worse and worse in terms of what you're actually doing. Every single patch from 1.0 to now, including Destiny 2, with the exception of HOW shotgun buff, has literally made the gameplay worse.

Define 'gameplay'. You need to be specific.

Destiny 2 is great, arguably a better game than Destiny 1, and I love how much stuff there is, and the 30 seconds of fun is still better than any other game. It's just getting worse.

How can it be a better game, yet getting worse?

It's still entirely too early to be making sweeping judgments, but I'm feeling less sure about this game as time goes on.

On paper, this game is nearly perfect and everything I asked for. It fixes almost all of the issues I had with Destiny. You can get to the raid with zero grinding, which is amazing. I no longer have to chase random rolls on weapons--the gear is just the gear and I don't have to worry about it. Loot rains from the sky at an astonishing rate.

And yet . . .

Something feels wrong, and I can't believe I'm saying it, but I think I miss the old ways (other than grinding to be equipped for the raid).

I think the issue is the soft cap. I'm at the point where doing the weekly activities for Luminous Engrams is the only way to progress (save the odd exotic drop here and there). I'm at 282 or something, and all my engrams not decrypt at 277, meaning they just sharded. I think they were aiming for having folks experiment with weapons that drop and then infuse them upwards, but so far, I haven't felt a need to do so. Weapons don't feel distinct. Every hand cannon feels exactly like every other hand cannon, every scout rifle like every other scout rifle, etc. The only real exception for that seems to be auto rifles, and that's really only because rate of fire differences are immediately noticeable there.

I hated random rolls on gear in Destiny 1, but, looking back, I think that's what made new weapons feel so different and so good to get. That's not as exciting or fun in Destiny 2, and it sort of sucks. I feel less inclined to switch up my loadout and experiment than I ever have.

I appreciate everything they've done with Destiny in an effort to make things more player friendly and accessible. I really do. I think maybe they overcompensated, though. After getting to 265, the game now just feels like a weekly checklist. I no longer feel rewarded for doing whatever I want to do--if it's not the weekly for a Luminous Engram, it just straight up doesn't matter once you hit that soft cap.

Luke seemed to indicate that they want people chasing cosmetics now, instead of RNG weapons, and I can respect that. But even that's not implemented well. I like the new shader system quite a bit, but the shaders themselves feel pretty lackluster (the Raid shader is real good, though!). None of the ships and sparrows look very cool, and there aren't very many of them. I've also been pretty underwhelmed by the armor I've earned on my Warlock and Hunter, and I just keep getting the same three sets over and over again, so there doesn't seem to be much variety there, either.

It's a loot game with a lack of good loot.

I think Destiny 2 is almost undeniable a better game than Destiny 1, but I think I still prefer Destiny 1. Maybe that's just the nature of a sequel. Even knowing how limited Destiny 1 was, it still feels like it was something special, where anything could happen. Destiny 2 is packed with more things to do, but as a result, it feels less mysterious and special.

Remember Urzok in Skywatch? That was amazing. I can't remember who I was playing with during House of Wolves, but we hit Urzok, a Pack of Wolves, and a Public Event all at the same time, and it was absolute madness. It still sticks out in my mind. Now Patrol areas feel like that is happening all the time. It's filled with things popping off left and right. And that was amazing during the first week. Now it just seems rote, and I'm not even sure I'd notice if an Urzok like event happened.

Don't get me wrong, I still love playing the game. As has always been the story with this game, it's incredibly fun to play moment to moment, and that trumps all of these issues, and will for quite a while, I bet. The Nightfalls have been excellent, the Raid is fantastic, and I'm actually really looking forward to replaying it quite a bit. I've even had some fun in the Crucible by myself, which literally never happened in Destiny 1.

I still look forward to playing this game every day, I'm still very happy with the game, and I have no doubt there is still plenty left to discover and some cool events to come, but it feel somehow less mysterious and special than Destiny 1, and I'm ultimately not completely sure how I feel about it.

P.S. Anyone want to try the Nightfall for Rat King this evening? (:

I know I wasn't the only one saying it, but people literally made fun of me for saying this crap, and it continues to hold true. The PvP balancing, the removal of the grind, the lack of randomness, it literally makes the game worse.

I disagree. I'll go point by point below and then sum up at the end.

This is a great example of internet people, and likely Bungie listening to them, making the game worse.

"DAE hate grinding?" Bingle removes guns good enough to grind for.

There are some really, really great guns. Just because you don't have to grind to get Sturm or the Rat King doesn't mean they aren't amazing. I've only gotten one raid gun so far, but the Conspirator is a BEAST of a scout rifle. Seven Six Five is very similar, but lacks the firefly type perk that makes Conspirator stand above the rest.

"Why do I have to do the nightfall 1000 times to get this one roll?" Bingle removes the roll.

Why is this bad? Doing the nightfall 1000 times sucked. Doing it one to five times to get the drop you want.. that's great.

"Nerf shotguns!" Bungie nerfs everything.

Fundamentally altering the pvp landscape is not the same as nerfing everything. First, shotguns are in a great place right now and they're super strong. "but muh ammo" yes, it's not okay for everyone to have a shotgun all of the time - that's what made D1 pvp so toxic, so now only one of you can have that ammo all of the time (seriously, the next time you go into pvp with a full fireteam, designate your best sniper to be the only guy picking up power ammo. Your team will WRECK. Needing to adapt to a different landscape doesn't make the landscape bad. Personally, I am really enjoying the pvp right now. It's different, but it's fun.

"Can we talk about how awesome the Urzok battle is?" Bungie makes basically everything you do have a big event going on at the time time.

Again, why is this bad?

The thing that made that stuff special is INFREQUENCY.

Oh, you only like awesome things that happen once in a long time rather than all the time. I understand that watching emergent gameplay unfold is super cool, and almost always better than simply watching a scripted event. But did you know this also happens in Destiny 2? I was on nessus doing a mining rig public event when someone's strike spawned in a tank and then a high value vex appeared and also a roving band of pikes came by... it was bedlam.

In making guns easier to get, Bungie had to nerf them and remove god rolls. In balancing the game for crucible whiners, Bungie had to remove any character of the guns. To make public events more interesting more often, they have to make them obnoxious.

There are still god rolls, they just have names now. The Etana SI4 sidearm, for example. Fires a burst, has high stability and impact, and holds enough rounds to kill 3 guardians without reloading. This gun is my new crucible go-to in close ranges. It is SO GOOD and blows every other sidearm out of the water (yes, including Dreng). For exotics I like my Vigilance Wing, but Mida, Sturm, the Rat King... all great. There are others, but I'm not going to list all of my favorite guns here, and there are several guns I've got that I have yet to properly test out.

I will say that mida mini tool is so good that almost all other sub machine guns are auto-deletes for me because they can't compete.

The game gets worse and worse and worse in terms of what you're actually doing. Every single patch from 1.0 to now, including Destiny 2, with the exception of HOW shotgun buff, has literally made the gameplay worse.

Again, this is just a matter of opinion. I think D2 has done great things to improve gameplay. Access to the best weapons is gated behind quests rather than RNG (something they started in TTK). This makes the playing field more level, allowing skill to win the day rather than simply having had great RNG that one time.

Destiny 2 is great, arguably a better game than Destiny 1, and I love how much stuff there is, and the 30 seconds of fun is still better than any other game.

I agree!

It's just getting worse.

What? "It's a better game than D1" means literally the opposite of "it's getting worse" D2 is, imo, better. It's better on nearly every front, which is impressive to me. This feels like the game I thought D1 would be. And I love it.

In summation: Opinions are opinions and we all have our own. That being said, it seems to me that you haven't found or at least haven't noticed the differences in the weapons that make some rolls great and some simply decent. There are even a handful of complete garbage guns. It's no longer "oh my The Devil You Know rolled with outlaw and firefly, and yours rolled with kneepads and vortex, sucks to be you" but is instead "oh I got an Annual Skate - that's great because it always has outlaw - and you got The Old Fashioned, which is a fine gun but has no perks to really write home about." The 'different rolls' you pine for still exist, but each roll has its own specific name and graphics so you know what you're up against.

And I'm telling you, those little differences matter and they matter a LOT. Sturm, for example, is a 3 shot kill as long as one of those shots is a headshot. It's spectacularly good. Annual Skate needs 2 headshots to kill in 3 shots, and even then some high resilience enemies will still need a 4th hit. Rat King is like a billion shots (probably 7?) but fires really, really quickly, so it handles more like a sidearm than a hand cannon. So if you're a Hawkmoon guy from D1, I strongly suggest Sturm for a similar feel. If you haven't got that yet (why not?) you can get by with Annual Skate and feel okay, but you won't be quite as effective. Or you can use rat king for that sidearm feel without actually using a sidearm, plus, you know, occasional invisibility.

The places where I notice the biggest difference in weapon quality is scout rifles. MIDA is the bar against which all others must be measured, and it's a very high bar. Seven Six Five is close. The Conspirator is, imo, better. Lincoln Green is far worse. In PvE, Nameless Midnight is a weapon I prefer to Mida because of the high impact, but I wouldn't take it into pvp because of the slow RoF. Different rolls for different situations.

Even if every gun was good, that wouldn't be a problem, that would be great design. The fact that so many are viable for different situations is GREAT. I can realistically imagine having Does Not Compute and Nameless Midnight as my weapons. Sure, they're both scouts, but they are sooooo different. Put iron sights on one and a long zoom on the other and you're all set.

Anyway, my point is that gun differentiation is certainly there, and since that seems like your primary concern, I urge you to experiment with the weapons a bit more.

Sure, that makes sense. But it also feels a little like saying the game is good so there's no point in saying anything good about it...

But you don't need to make a choice. You can just do whatever interests you at your own pace. You can try everything since nothing is mutually exclusive, and your time is never 'wasted' now. In Destiny, there was an opportunity cost to not doing the specific activities that advance you. In Des2ny, that is basically absent.