Sort of (Destiny)

by Durandal, Wednesday, January 03, 2018, 09:55 (2357 days ago) @ INSANEdrive

I think the D1->D2 transition had limitations from two different teams working on two different projects.

Recall ROI was made by a separate team then D2, and somewhat concurrently. The innovations in ROI where then limited by engine and technical limitations that they worked around instead of engine development.

D2 seemed to take most of the complaints from D1 pre-ROI and AOT and try to move on from there.
That is where the two groups kind of separated, and this is why most of the innovative things from ROI AND AOT didn't make it into D2 (Strike modifiers, armor embellishments, etc).

D2 also had technical goals for PVP and PVE from D1. The first was to make nightfalls challenging without turning them into hidden camp fests. The time limit is the big example of this. Also note that all of the bosses in D2 have stages. We don't have large bosses that just sit on their stage and shoot all the time, interspersed with mob spawns. There is lots more movement.

The second was to improve PVP. At the time, the PVP scene was dominated by "sweaties" where people progressively banned exotics, OHK grenades and special/heavy ammo. So D2 slowed the abilities, eliminated OHKs, and tempered exotics.

Finally, they made a bunch of long requested QoL improvements like maps, no sprint cool down, individual shaders for everything and eliminating most of the currencies and moving to tokens.

I think the main issue is that D2 didn't take into account all the good work done on the later D1 expansions, and the marketing only sees it in relation to D1 up to TTk. From a gameplay standpoint the new raid is good, the new raid weapon is interesting, but for all the good things added to D2, we lost a number of things from D1, and without that D1 progress people quickly tired of it.

How hard would it have been to include the old maps into D2? To make the old armor perks like extra orbs on headshots or longer range grenade throws into armor mods? To have NPC characters in more that the first mission? To let people keep their stores of Exotics?

Too much of Destiny (and our persistent characters that were supposed to grow over 10 years) seemed to be thrown by the wayside in the move to D2, and that lessened the impact of all the good improvements of D2. Then you add on all the minor annoyances of D2 such as broken RNG, unrewarding token drops in raids, and disappointing lost sectors and you get the current level of salt being spread around.