I think you're looking in the wrong places (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, February 15, 2021, 14:15 (1165 days ago) @ kidtsunami

I’ve been highly critical of Beyond Light, but I’m starting to think that I may have underestimated how much damage Bungie has done to this game over the past ~16 months, especially with Beyond Light. It just feels like there’s nothing left in this game, which is crazy because there is technically tons of stuff to do. But I think the core pillars of the game, the bread-and-butter activities like strikes, crucible, and gambit are either boring (strikes), tedious (gambit), or a complete fucking disaster (crucible). Sunsetting has largely killed my investment in my gear, and I don’t see how the PvP side of the game will ever recover from the addition of Stasis.

While
A. I certainly think there's plenty Bungie can do better
B. I'm anti-power level

I think this season is pretty solid.

• Gambit and strikes as quick palate cleansers between other activities. Getting the weekly challenge pinnacles? That's a strike/gambit game per day max to get that. And there's so many pinnacle sources that who really cares if you're not getting both of those.
  
• I feel like in the past 16 months they've really upped their game with Nightfall strikes. There's a wide variety of difficulty levels, cool loot, and matchmaking at the lower levels.
  
• Legendary lost sectors, Empire Hunts, and Exo Challenge provide me the solo difficult content that I've always wanted out of Destiny but rarely got. And the cool thing is it doesn't even have to be solo!
  
• re: stasis and PvP, I feel like their recent nerfs have made it much more manageable and at the end of the day, I'm playing a wacky space wizard shooter, not a hard as nails military shooter, I like the wackiness... I'd also like to see the data on how Stasis is currently faring in PvP
  
• Love that they're giving some attention to Dungeons, some of the best content they've put into this game

I think they've done a better job of balancing where you feel compelled to go lately. For example, I've done most of the things that I want to do in battlegrounds for this week, and don't really need to dive back into them unless I'm having friendship time with someone else.

I just really appreciate that it feels like I can do whatever I want to level up and unless I"m truly trying to min/max my leveling, that I don't have to do everything if I don't want to. Don't feel like gambit this week? cool (and god knows I don't feel like gambit ever since I got the Reckoner title). I remember when Destiny had me running the strike playlist non-stop to struggly bus my way up the power curve, and this feels so damn far away from that.

Ultimately I take issue with people saying Bungie is out of touch with it's audience, in part because I feel like they've been nailing a lot things lately and these comments make me wonder "am I not their audience?". Where are the metrics, where's the proper analysis of player's time? Of public opinion?

All fair points, and I agree with much of what you’ve said. But I don’t think anything you’re saying contradicts my initial concerns. Like you, I appreciate that I can bounce around from activity to activity and level-up while doing whatever I want to do, but that doesn’t change the fact that most of the activities I may want to do have been negatively impacted by other decisions Bungie has made. For example, I think the crucible sandbox is in a fantastic place right now... except for Stasis. None of the light-based subclasses are drastically dominant over the others, and the breadth of competitively viable primary weapons is just wonderful. Just about every primary weapon type has a place and play style where it can excel right now. The crucible should be in the best shape it’s ever been, but Bungie went and upper-decked the whole experience with Stasis.
Nightfalls are another example for me. I have always enjoyed the Nightfalls. But ever since Shadowkeep, the combination of Champions and Artifact mods have made the whole experience feel increasingly restrictive. Every season, Bungie basically tells me which weapon types I’m going to be using for every single Nightfall for the next ~3 months. Between all the restrictive measures at play (choice of anti-champion mods, power levels, elemental types, costs of resetting the artifact, cost of juggling/replacing armour mods), the end result is that iI’m cornered into using variations of the same 1 or 2 loadouts for all end-game activities that feature champions. It is possible to experiment with a wide range of build diversity, but there are so many annoying or tedious points of friction along that path that the ends no longer justify the means for me. Once again, the stuff in the game that I really like is buried under stuff that feels unnecessary or even counter-productive.

I guess what I’m getting at is that yes, it’s nice that I’m not really forced into activities I don’t want to do anymore, but I’m also being driven out of activities I DO want to do because they’ve been underdeveloped, neglected, or flat-out ruined by relatively recent changes/additions to the game. I look back at the D1 Age of Triumph era, and what a blast it was to have such a wide breadth of great PvE and PvP content to play, and so much exciting end-game loot to chase. D2 at this point should feel even wider, and yet to me the game has felt progressively smaller and smaller since somewhere around Season of Opulance.