^ This right here ^ (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, September 18, 2017, 09:25 (2628 days ago) @ Cody Miller

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.