Is D2 Anti-Fun? (Destiny)

by unoudid , Somewhere over the rainbow, Tuesday, November 28, 2017, 20:08 (2631 days ago)

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.