I took an important step today . . . (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Friday, August 09, 2019, 11:23 (1951 days ago) @ Korny

I just wasn’t having fun. It’s just not structured in a way that is conducive to me enjoying my time with the game. Over the next two weeks, I absolutely could have finished with little effort, and not even that much time.

But it was preventing me from enjoying myself. Every time I did something that wasn’t helping me progress the armor, I had that little nagging thought I should be doing armor stuff. It was better to just delete it and write it off.

The EAZ stuff was a large contributor, though. It took a fun little diversion and made it thoroughly unfun. In fact, it made every activity that had an armor requirement unfun. Instead of just enjoying the strikes, I had to fight two blueberries for kills so I could get the correct orbs. Making the requirements different depending on class was a really boneheaded move.

It's especially funny, because the EAZ was really neat the first day. It gave us all reused enemies under the new context of an open courtyard battle (and let Xbox players fight the PS4-exclusive Brood Mother wizard), gave us some parkour-friendly encounters in a race against the clock, complete with a timed hunt for rewards at the end (rewarding efficient miniboss kills with even more rewards!), and nobody had to worry about missing out on those rewards, since one player opening a chest gave the drops to everyone...

And then Bungie turned it into a chore, gave people incentive to be selfish jerks, and made us hate the EAZ.

You write that as though you believe it was done sequentially - Bungie built a cool space, then Bungie turned that cool space into a chore. It wasn't sequential - we just didn't see the chore at first. (Or, we didn't realize - and THEY didn't realize - that the pretty straightforward "kill minibosses" task would incentivize stupidity when we first saw the playspace.)

That is: all of the ingredients for dislike were there in minute 1 - we just hadn't realized it yet.

Wanna play some Competitive with me?