Given how this game's expansions and whatnot work, it's hard to talk about Destiny as a whole without an excessive amount of extra annotations, like how expansion in x months will completely eradicate any criticism had prior to it, or how you can no longer experience the base game's story, but what comes with the package is a fairly intricate shooter that has more depth than Halo but never comes close to something it wants to parrot like Diablo or Borderlands, all while once again having several asterisks tied to it.
Starting off is the incredibly high production value. Now Activision funding is partially to blame for the game running as nice, looking as nice, and sounding as nice, but given years later after splintering off from that deal and production quality staying all the same only showcases that Bungie had all the magic. Guns feel incredibly nice to use, killing even the most basic of trash mobs brings equal catharsism that you would gain from headshotting grunts in the Halo titles. I don't have much history or knowledge of who's still around and who left the project, but point being is the quality never waivered from their initial sales pitch of the first game almost 10 years ago.
The gameplay not only benefits from the sheer display of amazing presentation, but there's also an ample amount of skills and differentiations between each of the 3 classes, and each of their 3 (currently 4) subclasses that really makes what you're playing feel unique, and given how incredibly easy it is to switch subclasses on the fly, you'll most likely gain a ton of mileage out of 1 character. There are some guns that do feel rather weak, and given that there are still relatively useless stats like mobility and intellect that have been meager investments since launch, but besides some brazen nitpicks the entire gameplay package remains incredibly sound.
I've hope I've gassed the game up enough to where the punches I'm about to throw will really make the game sound horrendous. First off the story, it's always bee disjointed. Destiny's biggest issue with storytelling is having 90% of its exposition put into lore books or lore files, with campaign missions that have 1 character explaining a situation while another will be putting on his best Tony Stark impression, meaning you'll be grinding out a Destiny wiki if you actually want the bigger picture, but it gets worse than that. As mentioned, you cannot play the original campaign anymore, and it's due to their incredibly wonky engine that Bungie has been forced to exorcise older expansions and campaigns. One of the most popular characters in the franchise was killed off almost 5 years ago, and your only options to experience the content is either through a youtube video or a text dump. I really cannot think of any other game that handles content like this, and it makes late investors into the franchise dissuaded from actually learning about the world, the lore and the story, which is a real shame that such worldbuilding is put to such waste here.
But it doesn't really stop there, as more than half of Destiny 2's content runs on expansion content, which again some of which you can't experience fully anymore, but are still expected to purchase. If you're looking for a simple Halo Wizards Edition for PvP, then for the most part you'll be left to your own devices. But if you're looking to run some of the post-game PvE content like nightfall or raids, then it's a complete dice roll on whether or not you have that expansion. Don't have the $20 Forsaken Upgrade Expansion? I guess you aren't doing nightfalls this week, sucks you have to miss out on gear like that. Most other similar MMO games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 will eventually bundle their prior expansions together with the latest one, meaning newcomers just have to pay the one-time fee and be completely up to date on all the content, while Bungie will ask more and more from the player as you invest more time, which on some level is fair, but given the game is aping MMO's it just makes the entire experience look incredibly expensive from an outsider's perspective.
So just to paint it in the worst light imagineable just to get the point across; the base game is free. There are 4 expansions currently and a new $50 one releasing at the end of February. If you want the complete package, you'll be spending $145 minimum, potentially more if some expansions leave their current sales period and if you want to invest into the battle pass. The game does have a battle pass by the way, and a cash shop to boot. I understand that investing in your own project with no publishing backer like Activision is really rough, but this kind of stuff scares away new players. This is what has them glancing at the game from outside and just buying Borderlands 3 or Diablo 3 at a significantly discounted price.
For a bit of history, I was an early investor of Destiny 2 at launch and subsequently dropped the game after the first expansion dropped because there was simply nothing to do, and from then to now that's almost night and day to where we are now. There's almost TOO much for me to do and I barely even touched on how great raids and dungeons are as we'll probably never get such mechanic heavy content in an FPS outside of this. It's just a shame that FF14 of all games is much easier to recommend comparatively because of all the negative stipulations tied to it.
So I don't want to downplay this game, and the talent that's over at Bungie is still extremely talented. Just know that it's still a hard commitment to a game that's roughly 7x the asking price compared to most other games also worth your time right now.
Starting off is the incredibly high production value. Now Activision funding is partially to blame for the game running as nice, looking as nice, and sounding as nice, but given years later after splintering off from that deal and production quality staying all the same only showcases that Bungie had all the magic. Guns feel incredibly nice to use, killing even the most basic of trash mobs brings equal catharsism that you would gain from headshotting grunts in the Halo titles. I don't have much history or knowledge of who's still around and who left the project, but point being is the quality never waivered from their initial sales pitch of the first game almost 10 years ago.
The gameplay not only benefits from the sheer display of amazing presentation, but there's also an ample amount of skills and differentiations between each of the 3 classes, and each of their 3 (currently 4) subclasses that really makes what you're playing feel unique, and given how incredibly easy it is to switch subclasses on the fly, you'll most likely gain a ton of mileage out of 1 character. There are some guns that do feel rather weak, and given that there are still relatively useless stats like mobility and intellect that have been meager investments since launch, but besides some brazen nitpicks the entire gameplay package remains incredibly sound.
I've hope I've gassed the game up enough to where the punches I'm about to throw will really make the game sound horrendous. First off the story, it's always bee disjointed. Destiny's biggest issue with storytelling is having 90% of its exposition put into lore books or lore files, with campaign missions that have 1 character explaining a situation while another will be putting on his best Tony Stark impression, meaning you'll be grinding out a Destiny wiki if you actually want the bigger picture, but it gets worse than that. As mentioned, you cannot play the original campaign anymore, and it's due to their incredibly wonky engine that Bungie has been forced to exorcise older expansions and campaigns. One of the most popular characters in the franchise was killed off almost 5 years ago, and your only options to experience the content is either through a youtube video or a text dump. I really cannot think of any other game that handles content like this, and it makes late investors into the franchise dissuaded from actually learning about the world, the lore and the story, which is a real shame that such worldbuilding is put to such waste here.
But it doesn't really stop there, as more than half of Destiny 2's content runs on expansion content, which again some of which you can't experience fully anymore, but are still expected to purchase. If you're looking for a simple Halo Wizards Edition for PvP, then for the most part you'll be left to your own devices. But if you're looking to run some of the post-game PvE content like nightfall or raids, then it's a complete dice roll on whether or not you have that expansion. Don't have the $20 Forsaken Upgrade Expansion? I guess you aren't doing nightfalls this week, sucks you have to miss out on gear like that. Most other similar MMO games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 will eventually bundle their prior expansions together with the latest one, meaning newcomers just have to pay the one-time fee and be completely up to date on all the content, while Bungie will ask more and more from the player as you invest more time, which on some level is fair, but given the game is aping MMO's it just makes the entire experience look incredibly expensive from an outsider's perspective.
So just to paint it in the worst light imagineable just to get the point across; the base game is free. There are 4 expansions currently and a new $50 one releasing at the end of February. If you want the complete package, you'll be spending $145 minimum, potentially more if some expansions leave their current sales period and if you want to invest into the battle pass. The game does have a battle pass by the way, and a cash shop to boot. I understand that investing in your own project with no publishing backer like Activision is really rough, but this kind of stuff scares away new players. This is what has them glancing at the game from outside and just buying Borderlands 3 or Diablo 3 at a significantly discounted price.
For a bit of history, I was an early investor of Destiny 2 at launch and subsequently dropped the game after the first expansion dropped because there was simply nothing to do, and from then to now that's almost night and day to where we are now. There's almost TOO much for me to do and I barely even touched on how great raids and dungeons are as we'll probably never get such mechanic heavy content in an FPS outside of this. It's just a shame that FF14 of all games is much easier to recommend comparatively because of all the negative stipulations tied to it.
So I don't want to downplay this game, and the talent that's over at Bungie is still extremely talented. Just know that it's still a hard commitment to a game that's roughly 7x the asking price compared to most other games also worth your time right now.