Destiny 2 is, to me, what I imagine marmite must be like to a person with dementia. They might hate it, forget the taste, love it the next time, forget that, and go on this love/hate cycle every time they try it. This makes D2 so hard for me to “review” because whatever I rate it constantly hinges on my feelings towards its state during a particular expansion or even a season. My reasoning for this stems from a lot of Bungie’s choices and just general burnout from going on a massive binge for one season and then ending up completely skipping out on the follow-ups, then being utterly confused at what I missed when I return. Around early Shadowkeep, I would absolutely recommend it, but now it’s hard to recommend it if you don’t really have the time to commit nor the patience to learn all of the story prior to what is currently available.
I feel like there’s a massive disconnect between the Destiny 2 that is advertised by Bungie, and the Destiny 2 that is actually put out there for people to play. Bungie wants to make Destiny 2 friendly to new players, yet from my experience speaking to new players, the New Light experience is ridiculously overwhelming and barely makes an effort to explain the game. This combined with the vaulting of the pre-Shadowkeep expansions has made it hard to explain the events prior to that point. They’re mainly acknowledged via passing remarks in dialogue and a summarized retelling of the events via the Timeline section in the director screen. Sure, it’s at least something but years worth of storytelling should be told by actually engaging with it rather than stripping it away and punishing you for not having been there. Now, I will admit that I doubt a new player would go back to play D1 before stepping into D2, but at least the content is still there, you can play through its entire story to this day. In D2, however, there’s a massive gap in the story and playable content that won’t be coming back asides from maybe some raids, dungeons and strikes, with the occasional returning story mission. The stories weren’t masterpieces by any means, but the base Red War campaign and Forsaken were good and really should be in the game.
Bungie has said time and time again that they want to make it so that players can design their own playstyle, yet this is contradicted by a restrictive meta that is cycled every season with artifact mods favoring very specific loadouts and playstyles. I am really not fond of the system and it’s one of the main reasons I can’t stand doing most of the game’s high end content. It’s just not fun. The only time running through that content was any fun was when weapon crafting was bugged so you could make auto rifles and grenade launchers with the Aggressive Shotgun Frame. And while I understand why that had to be taken away, that was the one time when I truly felt like I was allowed to design my own playstyle.
Something that irks me is that there is a vocal set of fans that insists on defending a lot of Bungie’s horrible decisions, including the vaulting of Forsaken, with their justifications ranging from the fact that players agreed to the EULA which states that at any given point, Bungie can remove any and all content from the game, to the probability that new players aren’t going to know who Cayde-6 is without prior knowledge of Red War or D1. The major flaw in that justification is that it can be applied to pretty much all of the existing expansions, and you can start a domino effect to justify the removal of the entire game from Shadowkeep onwards by applying the exact same logic that was used to justify the vaulting of content until you’re left with a quarter-baked New Light experience. I have honestly never seen a bigger case of Stockholm syndrome within a fandom.
Unfortunately, I am now in a constant state of worry over the game’s state in the future, and in a constant state of confusion over the story because of the way Destiny 2 presents its storytelling via a seasonal model which insists on you continuously playing the game, while at the same time being like “nah you can skip a whole year’s worth of content and come back in the next expansion, it’s all good.” Only for you to be absolutely lost as to what went on in your absence. Granted, this format is supposedly being changed with Final Shape, but I don’t want to spend another 100 dollars to find out if it works this time or not. The sunk cost fallacy has trapped me long enough.
As the end of this saga draws nearer with The Final Shape’s upcoming release in a few months and my favorite character in the series returning, I could not feel any more jaded. I’ve had some great times running content and fucking around with my friends, some bad times staying up until 3AM trying to clear raid encounters, and some very meh times trying to make my own fun with those same friends as we stood around waiting for hours for the most overhyped and underwhelming spaceship crash to happen, and several bank statements that make me weep to this very day. It’s been quite the adventure, but I don’t think I can be asked to stick around for one last hoorah.
Frankly, I don’t think there is really any way to “fix” the issues Destiny is currently facing outside of a complete reset of the entire franchise, but it’s too late for that at this point.
I feel like there’s a massive disconnect between the Destiny 2 that is advertised by Bungie, and the Destiny 2 that is actually put out there for people to play. Bungie wants to make Destiny 2 friendly to new players, yet from my experience speaking to new players, the New Light experience is ridiculously overwhelming and barely makes an effort to explain the game. This combined with the vaulting of the pre-Shadowkeep expansions has made it hard to explain the events prior to that point. They’re mainly acknowledged via passing remarks in dialogue and a summarized retelling of the events via the Timeline section in the director screen. Sure, it’s at least something but years worth of storytelling should be told by actually engaging with it rather than stripping it away and punishing you for not having been there. Now, I will admit that I doubt a new player would go back to play D1 before stepping into D2, but at least the content is still there, you can play through its entire story to this day. In D2, however, there’s a massive gap in the story and playable content that won’t be coming back asides from maybe some raids, dungeons and strikes, with the occasional returning story mission. The stories weren’t masterpieces by any means, but the base Red War campaign and Forsaken were good and really should be in the game.
Bungie has said time and time again that they want to make it so that players can design their own playstyle, yet this is contradicted by a restrictive meta that is cycled every season with artifact mods favoring very specific loadouts and playstyles. I am really not fond of the system and it’s one of the main reasons I can’t stand doing most of the game’s high end content. It’s just not fun. The only time running through that content was any fun was when weapon crafting was bugged so you could make auto rifles and grenade launchers with the Aggressive Shotgun Frame. And while I understand why that had to be taken away, that was the one time when I truly felt like I was allowed to design my own playstyle.
Something that irks me is that there is a vocal set of fans that insists on defending a lot of Bungie’s horrible decisions, including the vaulting of Forsaken, with their justifications ranging from the fact that players agreed to the EULA which states that at any given point, Bungie can remove any and all content from the game, to the probability that new players aren’t going to know who Cayde-6 is without prior knowledge of Red War or D1. The major flaw in that justification is that it can be applied to pretty much all of the existing expansions, and you can start a domino effect to justify the removal of the entire game from Shadowkeep onwards by applying the exact same logic that was used to justify the vaulting of content until you’re left with a quarter-baked New Light experience. I have honestly never seen a bigger case of Stockholm syndrome within a fandom.
Unfortunately, I am now in a constant state of worry over the game’s state in the future, and in a constant state of confusion over the story because of the way Destiny 2 presents its storytelling via a seasonal model which insists on you continuously playing the game, while at the same time being like “nah you can skip a whole year’s worth of content and come back in the next expansion, it’s all good.” Only for you to be absolutely lost as to what went on in your absence. Granted, this format is supposedly being changed with Final Shape, but I don’t want to spend another 100 dollars to find out if it works this time or not. The sunk cost fallacy has trapped me long enough.
As the end of this saga draws nearer with The Final Shape’s upcoming release in a few months and my favorite character in the series returning, I could not feel any more jaded. I’ve had some great times running content and fucking around with my friends, some bad times staying up until 3AM trying to clear raid encounters, and some very meh times trying to make my own fun with those same friends as we stood around waiting for hours for the most overhyped and underwhelming spaceship crash to happen, and several bank statements that make me weep to this very day. It’s been quite the adventure, but I don’t think I can be asked to stick around for one last hoorah.
Frankly, I don’t think there is really any way to “fix” the issues Destiny is currently facing outside of a complete reset of the entire franchise, but it’s too late for that at this point.