Alright. I feel better now that I've ranted and vented. Someone can tell me I'm wrong. Either way, I really am starting to feel like my Titan has run her course. I had good times, and I'm sure I'll still have more, and I certainly got my money's worth, but I have serious doubts I can be convinced to drop any more money into this title.

You're… not wrong.

The leveling system in Forsaken is the number one thing that has soured the game so much for me. Even while playing the campaign I was constantly under leveled, because for some reason even the progression of light through the campaign is too high. Were they expecting me to take a break and diddle daddle around? I want to play the story…

Then there is the raid which I never got to do blind and still haven't finished. This one coming up will undoubtedly be no different. And to me this hurts the most.

You have to finish FORTY strikes for the fusion rifle. That's 10 hours minimum of just strikes which don't give you helpful rewards. Who has time for that?!

Then probably more than 10 hours to get the grenade launcher from Shaxx…

This is what happens when the game is more concerned with the time you spend playing rather than making the time you spend valuable. It's the opposite of streamlining the game for maximum fun per second. It's the opposite of making a good game. It's why even though Forsaken is Destiny at its "best", I have played it with the least frequency. It baffles me why they hide the good stuff behind bullshit.

I mean, let us 'bank' rewards for fuck's sake. At least then if you don't play a week you can not fall behind permanently. Wipe the bank clean between seasons if you have to but there are so many things that could be done that are player friendly that just aren't.

I completely understand where you're coming from. I really do. I was notably frustrating with the grind while trying to gear up for Last Wish. I still am not a fan of the soft cap stuff and milestones. Just let us play what we want and get drops like we used to be able to in the first Destiny.

That said . . .

The annual pass was explicitly stated to be end-game focused. It is not meant for the folks that play for a bit, then dip out for something else. It's meant for the people that play week after week, that have been at the light level cap for weeks now and need the next thing to go after.

That's not an excuse for whatever faults the new content has. I'm downloading the update right now, so I haven't seen it yet, but I've been on reddit a bit today. I'll admit to being a bit disappointed--I knew we weren't getting a campaign or anything like that, but I was expecting a bit more of a splash of new stuff on launch day. I think it's a bit silly to put the first new thing you can do out of reach until you grind more of the old content--it just doesn't seem like a smart way to introduce new stuff.

I'm still hopeful overall, though, and I still don't think this is a bad direction to go. At the end of the day, I think it's smart for them to focus on the people that do play Destiny week after week, at providing more end-game activities.

I understand how silly it is to even say this, but Destiny becomes much, much more fun if you let the light level stuff go. It's hard to do, I know, because the game locks so much cool stuff behind high light level requirements. But that stuff isn't going anywhere. I did my first Shattered Throne lase week! It was still awesome and exciting, even though I was two and a half months late. Destiny is better if you just play it when you feel like playing it, and play the aspects of it that you want to, rather than whatever is most efficient for light level progression. It's counter-intuitive, but it's a whole lot better, and a lot less stressful.

Maybe I'm just lucky, in that I really enjoy every part of the Destiny sandbox, so, even when I just play whatever I feel like, or whatever everyone else is doing and needs extra players for, I'm making good progress towards something.

This article from Forbes (don't ask me why Forbes is talking about Destiny, it just popped up in my feed) isn't a good sign.

Paul Tassi constantly writes gaming articles for Forbes, often just to complain about Destiny and other games (I could get paid to do that!?), giving them a lot of clicks from a market they otherwise wouldn't have. Usually his opinions are dumb and ignorable, but I can understand what he's saying in this article. There's no buffer to hook the casual player. It's instantly endgame mode, which is absolutely fine for the people who have hoarded their powerful bounties and the streamers who want to act over-excited about anything new, because they do need to make content for them... But everyone else just saw the goalposts stretch further out with nothing to visibly hold them over. They just have to keep grinding the same content as before.

I didn't buy the Annual Pass because it was a, frankly, pretty big dip into my wallet for a load of content that was vaguely defined, for a game that even then wasn't doing much to respect my time. Reading that isn't changing my mind in the slightest. You're telling me if I had actually purchased this content, I would basically be flashed the finger and told to fuck off until I'd wasted my precious time away grinding out goddamn engrams?

I'm lucky to get some solid hours for gaming in the evenings, but yeah. I used to juggle six characters, but the Forsaken changes dropped it down to one, until the Horror Story made two viable. On top of that, Destiny is not the only game that I play, so instead of hopping on to grind the same checklist every day, I go to other games, and have fun experiencing those, but I get left behind on content. I have no idea what a Wish Wall is, or what's going on in the Dreaming City. Heck, I barely found out what the Oracle Engine was last week. And forget raiding.

I dunno. I like grindy games, but I like my time being respected as well. The Mountaintop is literally the only thing I've done in Destiny the past week, and I'm 95% done with the quest, but I don't know what all I'll want to do after I get it besides hopping on to Crucible and Milestone stuff every once in a while, since I won't be buying the Annual Pass either.

I kinda feel the same way, perhaps a bit less enthusiastically. In the previous few months I have indeed felt like Destiny 2 was about the only thing I played, and while I didn't actually mind that most of the time, since I WAS having fun, it certainly didn't help me catch up on my backlog. Lately I've been so obsessed with No Man's Sky that I haven't picked up D2 at all, and I was thinking about picking it back up until I was reminded just now that I might have to buy an annual pass to really get the new content. I'm not sure my budget has space for that anymore, I'm really trying to pay off a couple of debts toward the end of the year.