A Lament For Destiny 2
The question most pressing on my mind when it comes to Destiny 2 is whether the game can ever be saved. Can the developers Bungie ever bring this game back to the levels of hype and positive internet chatter that the first game enjoyed at times? Most of the media coverage on Destiny 2 has been resoundingly negative. We ourselves here at LRM have been covering the game and those that have kept up with our coverage will know by now that I was a massive fan of the first Destiny game and have so far been heavily critical of Destiny 2.
For this piece I am going to assume you readers have a knowledge and understanding of the kind of game Destiny and Destiny 2 are, or should be. If this is all new to you, check back on our coverage HERE. You can go back and read each article and follow the ongoing critique of a game in serious trouble.
On YouTube, streamers abandoning the game in droves, and player populations down as low as they have ever been, Bungie has been stepping up efforts to make changes to the game and communicate far more openly with fans in both their own forums and the dedicated sub-Reddit. Bungie has released a roadmap for changes they are planning to make, which you can see HERE and the last article linked above covers this in more detail.
One of the things from that roadmap fans were waiting on was some more detail on the planned Sandbox changes that Bungie are going to start making to try and improve the game experience. You can find the full details from Bungie’s This Week At Bungie post from last Thursday, February 1.
Now whilst some of the changes being discussed here are good changes, and they are needed, they still don’t offer enough to entice many fans who have quit the game back. Let’s discuss why that is?
The Beginning of the End.
To explore what went wrong with the Destiny franchise we have to go back in time to September 15th 2015 and the beginning of the second year of the original Destiny game. This was when the massive expansion The Taken King was released, the largest expansion for Destiny yet and quite frankly it was a roaring success both financially and critically. The expansion was designed as far as we can tell by the same team who eventually brought us Destiny 2. The cinematic campaign, massive amount of content and quests, hidden exotic quests and general things to do, lifted Destiny above where it had been previously. But I’d also argue this is the point that Bungie started to head down a dark path. And as we know from the movies, once you start down the dark path…….
Destiny, only released a year prior to The Taken King, had not faired too well critically, bashed for a poor campaign and a badly told story. The casual players dismissed it quickly. Yet as the year drew on, Destiny started to grow its own unique fan base. This fan base grew and grew as the old meme from the time “Do people still play Destiny?” became a running joke amongst players who had found a nugget of something a little bit special. Online videos appeared of people screaming as they finally dropped some of the end game weapons they had been trying to get for so long. My own friends all picked up Destiny just before the second of its mini expansions were released, so we were late to the game.
I still remember one of my friends getting a Gjallarhorn to drop for him very early into his game experience. It then seemed like it took months for another one of our team to drop this mythical weapon and it happened to be me. That feeling is hard to explain, suddenly even though I was initially terrible at the game, I had become important to the team. So we started playing more and more, because we had found out about other god tier weapons we could get and I started to become better at the game as well. To get to the next level we were going to have to complete some of the six-man Raids, which we were worried we would not be good enough for.
We worked as a team and we slowly progressed through both Raids available at that time until eventually we completed them. Probably my favorite time in gaming thus far and even then there were more steps, to get access to even better weapons we would have to learn how to complete Raids in hard mode. A challenge indeed, because when one of your team dies, they cannot be picked back up. It took a lot of practice, but eventually we mastered these challenges as we ran these Raids 3 times a week and some times more so that every one of our team would have the best chance they could to get the weapons they longed for. Fatebringer, Vision of Confluence, Praedyths Revenge, Blackhammer, Swordbreaker and many others. Once we had these, we felt like a powerful kickass fire-team ready to take down gods and monsters wherever we found them.
To give you an idea what I am talking about you can watch this video of various people’s reactions when receiving their first Gjallarhorn rocket launcher, this is a feeling that just doesn’t exist in Destiny 2 yet.
When The Taken King Launched in Sept 2015, we were told that all of those god weapons we had acquired would not be carried forward. All the work we had done would be for nought, because they wanted us to use all the new weapons they had designed for the expansion. The problem was that none of these new items could hold a torch to the power we had at our fingertips previously.
The new Raid was magnificent in terms of its design and challenge level, but the guns were very average, and you could and would find better alternatives elsewhere in the game apart from 1-2 rare exceptions. Even the mighty Gjallarhorn rocket had been left behind, whilst many weaker and less used exotics had been carried forward. Bungie had decided that they had peaked too early, the things they had given us couldn’t be bettered and their solution was to take the toys away from us and start again. It was clear Bungie were also worried that only the elite players would be able to get their hands on certain weapons like elemental primaries that could only be attained from hard mode Raids. So again, they just removed them and didn’t allow anyone to get them. This was Bungie’s solution to every problem for a time, players are becoming too powerful, let’s make them weaker, this gun is being used too much, lets nerf it or remove it.
This was the point that my own group started to fragment and whilst a few of us carried on, it was never quite the same as it had been before and many of us were playing Destiny less and less. The team that made The Taken King, it seems were rewarded with being given the reigns to Destiny 2 and left the original game in the hands of a smaller live team. It took them a while, but by the end of Year 3 of Destiny that live team had essentially fixed a lot of the problems that started with The Taken King. They brought back Gjallarhorn (though it was nerfed slightly), they eventually brought back Fatebringer, Vision of Confluence and many others as well (though nerfed slightly) and some of us came back and had some fun. But it still didn’t quite feel the same as it had done. Every time it felt like players discovered powerful ways to do things or quick ways of doing things, Bungie would deploy the nerf hammer. Whilst players strove to become more powerful, Bungie was like an older sibling just holding us back a little, a fix here, a nerf there and ultimately keeping us from achieving our full potential.
The problem with Destiny 2 and something that still has not been addressed by Bungie is the power fantasy they won’t allow us to have. Guns in Destiny 2 are just not as good as they were in the original game, as always there is a meta, a few guns which perform better than others, but none of them would compare to the guns we used in Destiny. It baffled me somewhat when Destiny 2 director Luke Smith said that his favourite gun from Destiny was Fatebringer and that he would be sorry to let it go, but it must. What I have never heard him say is why? Why would we never be allowed to have guns that worked so well anymore, we liked them?
Having overpowered end game gear that is worth chasing for, that is worth finding a team to do things with, worth spending hours learning challenging content just for the chance to attain is what made the game so good. Destiny 2 has removed this gear chase completely. Replaced with a feeling of harmony where even the most casual of players can finish the story once and be using the gun experienced players use in the most challenging content. Bungie always said they wanted us using a more diverse range of weapons, but the truth is that I used a bigger variation of weapons pre-Taken King than I do now in Destiny 2. This was also further compounded by Bungie’s desire to keep their PvP modes more balanced. Destiny had too many people using snipers and shotguns they said, and these expert players made it tricky for new people to learn. So they basically killed them by placing them into the same categories as rocket launchers. Surely even someone who knows nothing of the game can work out that if you have a choice between a sniper rifle and a rocket launcher….you choose a rocket launcher. The balance they were looking for in PvP has ultimately killed it, no one is watching it on Twitch anymore, whereas people were tuning in to see expert players in the first game. The result of this change also stops these guns from being viable in the PvE realm, because again…a rocket launcher is always a better choice.
To explore What Now? Please click on page 2
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What Now?
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What Now?
Now, in Bungie’s latest sandbox update they mention many good changes that are coming, but they still haven’t touched on a few of the fundamentals which have made this game a shadow of what it was and could have been. You see, Destiny was not perfect, but it had huge potential. We could all see that potential, but it seems Bungie were blind to it. So what is still missing from this game?
Bungie still seems not to be willing to change the weapons slots back to the way they were in Destiny. Yes, they are trying other “fixes,” but….just switch it back, or tell us you will start working on doing so immediately. If they don’t, I can’t ever see a situation where some weapons like snipers and shotguns become viable choices again. Perhaps it cannot be done? If so tell the players why.
They still have not mentioned giving us back the customization we used to have in our subclasses, again worried we find combinations too powerful that we make the game easy or that casual player’s will find the builds too complicated? (That’s the fun of the game) In fact players generally wanted a deeper more customisable set of options in the sequel and were instead presented with a choice between two locked down skill trees only. Additionally, there is no mention of buffing some of the less used and less viable subclass options, (Dawnblade, Sentinel, Arcstrider). On a personal note I want my defender bubble back!!
The lack of god tier weapons to chase for has not yet been addressed, meaning there is little incentive to run Raids every week. (They have recently introduced Raid mods for armor which go some ways to improving the armor chase, but these mods can only be used in the Raids themselves, which was not the case in Destiny. (However the weapons themselves are still very average)
They did mention a balancing of exotics coming, but what we really need is more exotic gear with a higher level of power i.e. something to chase for. The game needs a Gjallarhorn and it just doesn’t have one.
So whilst I do not speak for all Destiny fans, I do speak for my own group of formerly dedicated guardians. Frankly, while the changes planned are all good things which need improved, the things we are not hearing about like those listed above are the reason none of us are going to be rushing back to the game anytime soon. At this point, I am sure Bungie realizes they have made some huge mistakes with this game, but I’m not sure they fully understand what made their original game so special. If you think you have already designed the best gun you can in Fatebringer and there is no way to better it, then I’m sorry, but that shows a lack of design imagination on their part. Instead of constantly trying to control our power, Bungie needs to let us loose to have fun. I want to see another Guardian in the tower with gear so cool and powerful that me and my team run high level content until we can get it for ourselves. I want to watch videos of professional gamers, show us how easy content can be bested once you have worked hard enough to get where they are.
Destiny 2 needs to reject its casual roots and start to embrace its RPG and MMO elements. Fans have been crying out for the game to become deeper than it was even in Destiny and yet in Destiny 2, this depth has been cut by more than half.
In a game that relies on its players running the same content continually, they have given us little reasons to do so and also made it less fun as well. Whilst Bungie can start communicating better, they can start implemented features that should have been in the base game and they can promise they are listening. Until we have some sort of acknowledgment from them that the changes they started making in 2015 were the start of their downfall and making promises to revert back to the game people actually fell in love with, then for me Destiny 2 will never be an essential game. And like my other friends, I will not be purchasing the planned big expansion in September this year (The Destiny 2 equivalent of The Taken King) until they start making the kind of changes discussed here. Not only that but they will have lost at least 30 customers (probably thousands more) when they release Destiny 3. Because as a consumer the developers are simply not giving us the game we originally became fans of. I no longer have faith in the company delivering a Destiny 3 that meets my expectations and it’s likely that other players feel the same.
Ultimately, it makes me sad, there is a part of me that hopes one day Destiny can be like it was back then, but my head tells me that Bungie just don’t want to give us that game back, and the longer they dig their heels in and believe they know better, the more the players are going to move on to experiences in other games that will match their expectations.
The Division, a game which was in my opinion a poor Destiny clone is now growing in players numbers after they almost rebuilt the game from scratch and are starting to gain players looking for something Destiny 2 will no longer give them. With other rivals on the horizon like EA’s Anthem, it’s possible that while Destiny gave us something different and unique, it will be other games that will take that concept to another level, while Bungie allow Destiny to fall into mediocrity and eventual death. At this point I’m not even sure if their initial design choices will ever allow them to make the changes we fans are asking for. Everything they are doing seems like putting band aids on a cut that needs stitching. Maybe it’s because Bungie have run out of stitches or it’s because the wound is so deep it simply cannot be closed. Either way, I have to say I ‘can’ see them trying, but I also worry it’s just not going to be enough. Maybe they will get it right again by Destiny 3, but at this point no one I know is willing to give Bungie enough faith to purchase the game on day one. And if sales are poor, the entire future of the intellectual property is at risk. For me personally I’d need to see them fix this game and make promises that the next one will take all this into account before I part with any more cash.
I’m sure many players out there will be happy with these changes and willing to give Bungie the benefit of the doubt, me? I think my patience with this game may be finally starting to run out. I already own the upcoming Gods of Mars expansion due to hit in May, so I will play it and let the readers know my thoughts on how the game is progressing. But from what I can tell, the changes I am looking for personally just don’t seem to be materialising. So what is my incentive to spend another $40 come September when they release their large Year 2 expansion?
Are you a Destiny gamer, if so are you happy with the changes being discussed or like me are you looking for something more? Let us know in the usual place and share this story if you agree with our analysis.
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The Beginning of the End
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