Where I am with Destiny now (Destiny)

by squidnh3, Thursday, December 04, 2014, 16:15 (3882 days ago)

So here's where I am with Destiny (I apologize for covering some of the same issues noted in other recent topics, but this isn't really a response to anything specific).

I've played 120 hours. Given the last 90 days of playing, that's 1 hour and 20 minutes a day. Not a ton, but certainly not a trivial amount. It's been a ton of fun, and the more I play, the more I find I enjoy it. Crucible is excellent, the strikes are cool, and I have a good time playing the daily story missions, which are usually what I spend at least a part of the hour per day doing. To me, this game really captures the 30 seconds of fun, and I think the investment system is working on me like Jason Jones described, where it provides polite suggestions/excuses about what to do (I love Halo, but I've rarely played the story missions because I just don't think to myself, "I should play Silent Cartographer today"). I haven't had a chance to do a Nightfall strike, or even attempt the Raid, as the timing hasn't worked out with any of the DBO coordinated ones, and my IRL friends play way less than I do.

I really enjoy using handcannons, and had the good luck of getting a Red Hand IX when I got to rank 3 in New Monarchy. I've been using it ever since as my primary primary, both in PvE and PvP. I literally just finished ranking it all the way up today. These past few weeks I've all of the sudden gotten a lot of good drops, including Exotics, and my store has filled up with a bunch of really cool weapons with perks I like. I was really looking forward to trying them all out, especially after Tuesday's update that seemed to streamline weapon upgrading for the better. I'm actually a Level 29, since I made an effort to get the Iron Banner gear in hopes that I'd be able to jump right to the Crota Raid with DBO people (I really want to experience the Raid fresh, since that's been hyped up as pretty darn fun). So, I was really optimistic after Tuesday, but then as we got more news about the Expansion, things sort of swung the other direction.

Hearing the Crota Raid started at 30 was unfortunate because it didn't work out with my plans, but I figured that was a pretty unique circumstance, so I could work around it. However, the details about raising the level cap to 32 have really left me down in the dumps. I was pretty nervous about how that was going to work even before they announced it, and now it seems like my worst fears have been confirmed. I just got a great stable of Legendary weapons, and now they are worthless? The Exotic stuff doesn't both me as much, because at least there's some way to bring them with you (and I've barely leveled them anyway), but the Legendaries that I've grown to love, and the ones that I was looking forward to trying out I should now expect to just get rid of like all the greens and blues before? No thanks. That wasn't what I was looking for in an expansion. I feel like the expansion is subtracting just as much content as it is adding (for me at least). Just because I wasn't able to play as much for the (only) 3 months the game has been out means I don't get to experience the things other people have? I was looking forward to the next 100 hours, getting my other characters up to a higher level and distributing my gear, making good builds, and now I feel like I've been sent quite a ways back. And what's worse, now that I know it's going to be like this, I know that when the next expansion comes out, the same thing will happen, and I'll never get to take my time with the content how I'd like. Like I said, the first 100 hours have been great, but I was really looking forward to the next 100 hours, and now I feel like I at least have to repeat the last 50 instead of moving on to different things.

Obviously I understand I'm not being persecuted by Bungie: they have to make a choice whether to support the higher time players with more things to do. However, I really was hoping they'd find another way to go about it. I'm pretty sure Cody is right (#): raising the level cap is a bad idea. It seems like there is plenty of design space for them to make equivalently powered weapons and armor without making all the old stuff obsolete. And why not add vendors in the tower for the new stuff, or at least start a rotation with the new and old stuff? These seem like solvable problems.

In fact, these details seem to suggest to me a lot of answers about how Bungie conceived this game, and the weird advertising they did for it. I now suspect this game was never specifically designed to be one thing, and Bungie planned on changing it based on how people played it. I think they've been surprised at how much time people are spending, and and really leaning towards implementing a very MMO-oriented model. Unfortunately, this is taking away from some of their original stated goals, like being able to play with your friends at different levels (you can, but it's not very fun), and not having to play all the time to experience the full game.

I really hope the guys at Bungie think a bit more about things moving forward, about players like me (I feel like I can't be alone), and whether raising levels and driving the your fondly-gotten stuff into obsolescence is truly the best way to go about this. I refuse to shard the Red Hand, he's an old friend at this point.