Europa is an Environment Masterclass (After Raid) (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Sunday, November 22, 2020, 06:21 (1460 days ago) @ cheapLEY

The new space is incredible.

I sort of wish Bungie would reevaluate how they designed these spaces a bit. The best ones, especially on Europa, are all big dead end hallways without a whole lot of reason to revisit. Sure, there are a few things that make you go to the far corners occasionally, but I wish they felt a bit more core to the experience.

I’m not really sure how they would even attempt to fix it, and Europa is the best they’ve ever done it. I just want more reason to spend more time in those spaces.

I’ve been struggling to find the words to describe how I feel about Europa, but I think you’re getting at my issue with it, at least partially. It’s BEAUTIFUL, no question. But by the 4th day of the expansion, I literally booted up the game, flew down to the landing zone next to Variks, stared at the screen for about 30 seconds, and turned off the game. By that point, I’d played through the BL campaign on 2 characters, and Europa felt completely exhausted to me. It’s got all these amazing looking locations, but there’s absolutely nothing to do in 70% of them.

I think the map layout is a big part of the problem. There are the 3 main hub spaces where we do all our patrol activities, and they’re... fine, I guess. And then there are the “spokes” that branch out from them; the Clovis labs, the fallen city, and the vex caves. And those 3 spokes are basically just linear paths with a couple branches. And these branches all lead to dead ends. Again, they’re beautiful. But functionally, they are long hallways that all lead to dead ends. Compare this to the Dreaming City, Moon, or even the Cosmodrome, where there are multiple connections between several of the zones which help create loads of different potential paths from location A to B. I find this makes exploration more enjoyable, but it has an even bigger impact on the story missions. Think of how many story missions sent us cris-crossing all over the moon or cosmodrome in different directions, starting and ending in different locations. It was ok that we were re-using many of the same playspaces. Now think about the story missions in Europa. Each mission sends us down one of these dead-end paths, and when they run out of dead-end paths to use they just re-use them and send us down each of them again. This makes the story missions feel extremely repetitive (some of them are darn near copy/pastes of earlier story missions).

I find this stuff all combines to make Europa one of the most artificial-feeling destinations in the game, despite the incredible visual presentation. It feels less like a real “place”, and more like a series of linear video game shooter missions that got bolted together via a few common “hub” zones.