Destiny 2 Review (Soviet_Ponys)
This game continues to ruin itself because of the devs slowly stripping down whatever was actually fun about a space fps game where you are legit a god and making it more and more difficult for "fun." Every update they seem to make bosses absolutely nightmares to deal with, not because of hard and complex mechanics, but because of enlarged health pool and constant nerfs towards the players.
Player light is now capped on many, many of the casual playlists making it so you will nearly always be under light level of the enemies, making them do significantly higher damage, all the while reducing your total output damage, and buffing up enemy health on top of the already bad light level gate keeping.
Player ability up-time was nerfed across the board, forcing the game to now focus more on gunplay, but gunplay sucks if your basic guns are doing less than what a BB gun might do.
Builds were completely scrapped for a more streamlined system and while I do like it, it's clear the system is somewhat half finished and going to rely upon future work to get the whole system working properly, most likely for "balance" reasons. Bungie once again is backtracking on the ability to create orbs. No one ever thought orb creation in the past with weapons was that overpowered, but it's clear bungie is slowly trying to nerf us down with every little update, all the while completely reworking systems that already worked well in the past.
Several strikes were made longer, ruining old content that was considered more catered towards the casual player base in the past. Lake of Shadows and the Arms Dealers were considered to be fairly easy grandmasters, allowing newer players to destiny and more casual focused players to ease into the playstyle and difficulty, but with them being quite significantly change it's most likely these strikes are going to be a bit harder than they once were. No, they're not impossible... though I guess this can be a good time to bring up that one strike in particular is on the GM list and is know for being a nightmare for it's infinitely spawning ads in the boss room. It looks like this GM might actually be impossible for even fairly skilled vets of the game, if not impossible without a perfect god build. (All speculation since the GMs haven't been released yet).
All these issues are also compounded on the fact that lightfall is a complete dumpster fire lore wise, though guess we'll see in the coming weeks of writing this review. I'm fine with strand the way it is currently, though I doubt it'll hold up to well with GMs.
I hate to say it but lightfall and the current season might be one of the lowest points in the game's player base in the coming weeks when it comes to the realization to most casuals that most of the content is sadly scaled to be far more difficult. Even the open world is 1830 (I believe), that's +20 artifact level over maxed level gear. Do the devs really expect a majority of their player base to grind week after week just so they can shoot a few red bars in the face after work and not have to sweat just trying not to die?
Difficulty was upped across the board because content creators and the top 0.1% wanted more difficulty with their gameplay, and it seems flawless dungeons/ raids (+master), GMs, trials, day 1 raids just weren't cutting it for the people who play the game 15+ hours a day for their entire life.
I don't even want to get into what the sheer toxicity boils in the elitist community in destiny 2, but these sweaty players (and the devs for that matter) need to realize that if you want to gatekeep most of the content in this game and feel like a wet noodle killing enemies, you are going to absolutely destroy the casual player base that keeps the franchise afloat, or else you are going to repeat the exact same low point as Curse of Osiris. Call your casual player base babies, weak, pathetic, or whatever for not liking a slight difficulty increase, but a majority of players played destiny to come home from work so they could relax and (mostly) mindlessly shoot a gun and throw some grenades at enemies. You loose the casual player base and expect the next few seasons to be gutted with content all so Bungie backtracks once again to completely reworking the system they've reworked several times since the original release.
Let people feel powerful and have that power fantasy. I won't lie, I think most people can agree that some of the best seasons were seasons that were focused on several guns being buffed up massively and gameplay through raids, dungeons, and endgame content showed that off. It gave a mix of both legendary and very lightly used exotic weapons that shined dramatically, and you know what's funny? You'd think buffing up the players massively and making content would make people shift more towards that super heavy meta focused build, but no. Increasing difficulty destroys build creativity and forces everyone to use the perfect god roll of otherwise they get kicked out of an LFG for not already doing most of the content in the game. Making the game less difficult allows builds to open up and for meta weapons to shine far less compared to other viable options for build crafting. Bungie may not like to make guardians overpowered, but those were some very high and fun points in the game, where new players actually felt like they fit in even in raids because the requirements for entry were far lower than what they currently are.
Now (for the past year or two) a majority of posts for LFGs generally have "KWTD (or kick)" legit not 1 or 2 weeks after a new raid drops and it's 100% mandatory to watch after they say what weapons and builds can be used (can referring to what is "acceptable" by sweats). This mentality of most veterans (probably should say top 10%), even extends out to more casual parts of the game like even the weekly campaign missions, dungeons, and legend difficulty season activities where a large portion of these players can't even handle a single fail (because wouldn't you know, we're all humans and make mistakes) and kick on the first mistake. I know you can say most of these issues can be avoided by hosting yourself, or you know, having friends, but let's not cover up the nasty toxic attitude that a large portion of dedicated people in this game have, no excuses, it's unfriendly to the more casual player population.
tl;dr respect the foundation of destiny 2's player base and it's casual play style. Difficulty =/= Good game. Destiny 2 is a space magic, grenade lobbing, cosmetic driven, build diversified first person shooter. Let people actually enjoy a game and have a power high.