izigame.me

Ah, Destiny. I love so much about this franchise. The gameplay, shooting, jumping, throwing lots of grenades, dismantling guns.. Destiny is a franchise I've spent a lot of time in. I've accomplished some of the hardest achievements in the game. Low man raid encounters, solo flawless dungeon completions, Conquerer seals, etc.
My honest opinion on this game is that it's the best PvE FPS experience out there, ruined in multiple ways by problems that honestly shouldn't be hard to fix or at least shouldn't have been a problem for this long. I'll start with the good:
- Top tier gunplay and class feel
- The in game movement is an underrated part of the experience in my opinion, each class has it's own traversal tech if you really want to git gud
- The raids and dungeons oh my god, they're so awesome. Almost worth the time to invest into alone
- Some of the coolest moments in the history of online gaming have happened in Destiny (just look up the Whisper mission)
- The seasonal stories over the past year and current campaign as of writing this (Witch Queen) have great storytelling
- Guns. So many guns. Almost a gun for every situation. Most of us in the community have actual real nostalgia for the muscle memory of some of our guns that we can't use anymore.
- Tons of content to check out for a new player
- Regular weekly updates from the dev team on Thursdays (TWAB = This Week At Bungie)
- On top of that, the dev team is pretty active on Twitter when the more unhinged members of the player base aren't sending them death threats
- The soundtrack is incredible
- This is gonna sound like a meme but for real, the enemy AI in this game is pretty incredible. It can bug out sometimes of course but especially in harder content, different enemy types approach you different ways based on the weapons you use or the places you stand.
- If you like the Diablo experience of just mowing down packs of enemies, D2 can fill that spot in your heart
Now for the cons:
- We're all addicted. You'll see this whole "lol 5k hours I don't recommend but I'll log back in tomorrow" jokes and honestly, there's some truth to that. It's a grindy MMO game. Some elements of it are designed to keep you playing.
- All the classics are here: weekly drip-feeding of new content, bad communication on certain long-standing issues in the game for months and even years at a time, and a general level of jank and bugginess to the game that doesn't really ever go away.
- Certain parts of the game are massively undeveloped, but forced into the same grinds every season. Crucible, the main PVP mode in this game, only just got it's first new map this season (4 weeks ago at the time of writing) in over 3 years.
- Gambit, another main playlist, has been reworked like 4 times(?) since it came out and has somehow gotten worse each time. Also hasn't had a new map since it came out, and has in fact actually lost content since it's release.
- The whole game runs on peer to peer servers. This isn't super noticeable for the majority of content in the game, as most of the content in Destiny 2 is team based PvE content or story missions etc, but this makes the PvP just generally unplayable to a lot of people who try it. Crucible can be very fun but there's always a layer of "oh wow I just headshot that guy with my reticle at least half of my screen away from him"
- The cosmetic shop in Destiny 2, the eververse, is not one of the worst systems I've ever seen but it's not super great either. It's a pretty classic case of all of the best looking armor sets in the game, and virtually ALL weapon ornaments (weapon cosmetics in regular terms) being locked behind either a real money purchase or PRAYING it goes on sale for a currency you can earn weekly in game. Some cosmetics in the eververse haven't been available for bright dust in years.
- Sunsetting, a big process that happened about 2 years ago, removed a ton of content from the game that most of us paid real money for. Entire expansion areas, weapons, quests, etc. were "vaulted"
- Bungie has a history of taking a really long time to fix more wide, sweeping issues with the game
- Bungie's current season system has a few good elements to it, but overall the way they've designed seasons has become pretty stale over the past 2 years or so
- Bugs, man. Destiny 2 is always a buggy game, more than most in my experience. Most of us learn to live with the general jank, but it can be really frustrating sometimes. This season (Season of the Haunted) has been even worse than usual.
- The main 3 playlists, Vanguard Ops (short PvE missions such as strikes and battlegrounds), Crucible, and Gambit, are roughly 40% or maybe more of your playtime each season, yet they haven't updated them in any meaningful way in at least 3 years.
- The pricing of this game. Realistically, D2 should've never been pushed as a free to play game. If you wanna access, and I'm not exaggerating, 95% of this game, you have to buy the expansions anyway. There's no "previous expansions" bundle at a reduced price, and nowadays there's even stuff like the 30th anniversary pack that gives you a dungeon and a rocket launcher for 30 bucks. It's hard to get new players into this game when you have to open with "well I know it says free to play but if you wanna realistically do the endgame content in this game (Trials/GM Nightfalls) you'll have to spend like 200 dollars for all the expansions"
- The UI is kinda slow and bad. There's a decent amount of item bloat so if you're like me and hate having like 10 new flashing items in your inventory, you're gonna spend a lot of time holding your F key to dismantle things
Destiny 2 is a game that is super great at it's core, but tends to shoot itself in the foot a lot of the time. It's a conflicted game, with most of the dev time in seasonal content seemingly going towards releasing new things and rarely improving the content we spend the majority of our time grinding. It's also a game that's going through a big transition period right now. Currently Bungie has made it pretty clear that they're developing D2 for the long term right now, so some things are just being pushed to the side for the overall health of the future of the game. I don't know how much I believe that, but if you're reading this and you know what I mean when I say Path of Exile 2, I salute you.
One thing I haven't really mentioned so far is that realistically, the best content in this game really requires a group of friends to enjoy at it's fullest. I've been lucky enough to make some real long-term friends in my clan, and legitimately spend a lot of my time teaching new players how to do raids/dungeons/GMs. If you're a solo player, many activities are either straight up impossble (raids) or they require significant time investment to complete solo (dungeons, GM nightfalls, etc). It's a game all about building your vault of items so you have something for every situation. New weapon roll for this build, crazy armor roll with great stats, etc. This can take a long time and kind of creates this weird situation for newer players where they can just go months without getting a certain exotic weapon they need.
To cut things short, I love this game and have obviously spent a lot of time with it. I can't currently recommend it to newer players unfortunately. If you're returning, maybe. The Witch Queen campaign on Legendary difficulty is some of the most fun I've had with my friends in this game in years, and the seasonal stories really do get better and better. If you have friends and the disposable income, give the game a shot. If you want the game to respect your time, look elsewhere.