On the other hand… (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Saturday, May 16, 2020, 15:34 (1440 days ago) @ Vortech

I'm still archiving a bunch of crap in my vault on the off chance that some sandbox change makes me glad I kept it or because it reminds me of fun times past.

More than anything I don't see this as a very big deal*, but if they can't/won't expand the vault maybe this is at least a reason for me to let go of some stuff. It's WON'T, because I'm still too much of a packrat, but IN THEORY.

* 1. SO, end result is that some old items will be less useful than new items if you are in Iron Banner, Trials and new Raids a year from now, right? Or am I missing something? Honest question.
2. Lots of people seem to want them to make a D3 rather than keep working on D2. Won't that be this same problem an order of magnitude larger? I didn't;t like giving up all by stuff in the D1/D2 transition, but I do miss that feeling of hoping for some new hotness.

To address that last point first, I think the difference with a full blown sequel is that while it may suck to lose your old gear, jumping into a sequel usually entails so much “new” that it feels worthwhile. Plus, a sequel usually comes on the heels of the previous game’s “ending”, which would hopefully leave the player with a sense of completion, which then in turn leads nicely into something of a “fresh start” with a sequel.

To your first point about vault space, this is actually one of my biggest concerns with weapon resetting: the needs of “right now” will override everything else when it comes to how we manage our storage space. I wrote a post a couple months back about jumping into D1 for the first time in a couple years, and what a sour experience it was for me. I booted up the game with the intention of nostalgically revisiting a bunch of my old favourite gear, only to find that I’d been “forced” to delete a bunch of it due to obsolescence-via-sunsetting. Our D1 Vaults were a lot smaller than our D2 vaults, and as such, when faced with the choice between keeping weapons I loved but couldn’t use in endgame content vs new weapons that I needed for endgame content but had no attachment to, I kept the new stuff. Rediscovering this was a disheartening moment. I realized that the D1 I wanted to go back to doesn’t actually exist anymore. Many of the pieces of gear that I remember fondly are gone from my vault, and in their place is a whole collection of mediocre guns that I didn’t even remember existing, which I’d prioritized due to their light level.

This issue extends down into sandbox tuning as well. Using Fatebringer in D1 today isn’t as fun as using Fatebringer in D1Y1 because of the changes that Bungie made to hand cannons over the span of the game. I’m generally in favour of ongoing balance tweaks if they are done with the intention of moving closer and closer to a final conceptual state; a “feel” that the designers were aiming for from the start. But that doesn’t feel like the arch that Destiny is on. To me, it feels more like Tinkering for the sake of tinkering. The game isn’t really any more balanced or refined than it was 5 years ago. They just keep changing things for the sake of changing things. And this has created a situation kinda like George Lucas continuously messing with the Original Trilogy; whatever version of Destiny you prefer, it no longer exists. We might all disagree on which year or season had the most enjoyable sandbox, but most of us are in the same boat; our favourite version of Destiny is already gone, and won’t come back. And for the few players who prefer Destiny as it is right now, they just have to wait until the next update... then they’ll be in the same boat as the rest of us.