Just a couple of things... (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Friday, April 17, 2020, 16:45 (1472 days ago) @ cheapLEY
edited by CruelLEGACEY, Friday, April 17, 2020, 16:50

You’re not wrong. Alas, too late for me. I bought the full pass with Shadowkeep, because enjoyed everything that was released before that. I guess I won’t make that mistake again.

And, I mean, no hard feelings on my end. The game isn’t what I want it to be right now, but I’m happy to put it down and play other stuff, and I’ll almost surely pay the next big expansion.

It’s difficult sometimes to keep expectations in check. The season pass isn’t really what I would consider significant content. Ultimately it’s really just something to do for the people who would be playing anyway.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying something along the lines of “I expected better” than what we’ve received these past 3 seasons. I’m sure there are plenty who will disagree with me on this, but I would argue that D2 was a substantially better game 1 year ago than it is right now. Now, there are activities and features that have been added over the past year that I greatly enjoy, but taken as a whole, I’d argue that the day-to-day experience of logging into the game and engaging with the endgame/progression system (even mildly) is far less enjoyable now. To Claude’s point, yes, there are still plenty of activities in the game that I can play whenever I want and have a blast doing them. And if u don’t enjoy the bounty-simulator-with-2009-mobile-game-mechanics that D2 has become, I can ignore those systems. But a year ago, the things I enjoyed were part of the progression system and endgame. Now, they largely are not.

There’s also the fact that, like you, I bought the entire year’s season pass along with Shadowkeep, because I was expecting the quality of year 2 to be maintained at the very least. I really didn’t think the game would tank the way it has. But this is what I find so infinitely puzzling about Bungie over the past 5-6 years. They keep forgetting or unlearning lessons they appeared to have already learned. And this applies to more than just new content. Even if I hadn’t spent any money on Shadowkeep or the season’s pass, the game that I was having so much fun with a year ago doesn’t really exist anymore. The damage model has changed in such a way that the basic combat doesn’t feel as satisfying as it used to IMO (someone on reddit pointed out that Bungie re-balanced crit damage in such a way that every primary weapon which used to 1-shot kill a red bar enemy now leaves them with a sliver of health instead, and this change was implemented at the exact moment that Bungie started selling finishing moves... I’m not ready to jump to the conclusion that selling finishing moves was the goal of the damage re-balancing, but I hate that Bungie created a situation where I even need to wonder about it).

All I’m getting at here is that I don’t think being dissatisfied with the current state of the game is necessarily a sign that your expectations were too high. D1 and D2 have both been in far better states than D2 is in right now. My main concern going forward is that it looks to me like Bungie is 100% dependant on community feedback to know if what they’ve created works or not. People can argue and nitpick over the details and never come to complete agreement, but it should have been painfully obvious to the team in the studio that Trials was NOT ready to go (just as an example). My hope is that someone at Bungie with some rock solid taste and instincts will take the bull by the horns and steer the ship in a more intentional direction, rather than the seemingly random “let’s keep throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks” approach that Bungie has taken lately.