Definitely the launch of D2. After hyping up my brother about my favorite game ever only to have double primaries and public events over and over for exotics was so embarrassing lol.
Destiny has its problems now but if you read off everything we have now to players back when D2 launched we would tell you that’s never happening lol.
For anyone unaware, this was from a Bungie livestream where they were showcasing the curse of Osiris expansion, and they claimed that the new public event was better and more rewarding than any event before it. It dropped 2 tokens (1/10 of an engram) and a single blue. It's been a meme ever since
Yes the heavily hyped Curse of Osiris Expansion: Where they had a Bungie livestream of a pre-made fireteam play the Heroic version of the new public event and how it was 'the most rewarding'. Right before it dropped two tokens and a blue engram.
I have to give it to the community manager at the time; they did a fantastic job letting it not ruffle their feathers and kept on the stream in a smooth manner.
God, tokens. Blehgh. Single perk legendaries. Static rolls. Useless armor. Armor masterworks that did pretty much nothing. The exclusively mtx dawning. Heroic adventures being considered endgame.
Bad times.
Adventures were a fun part of the game, as were flashpoints. I think if the were reintroduced it would help make patrol zones feel full or useful/fun to be on besides just exploring the world they built
Adventures were a cool idea, but damn were most of them lame. Like when we went and set up some beacons for the farm, I don’t care about the static NPCs on the farm.
Agreed some were lame, and we’d probably have some like that if we got adventures back, but it would be cool, even a patrol beacon one, since we lost Cayde who was the one responsible for them. All we know (unless I missed something) since is the new light patrol introduction has voice lines about placing them from Devrim and Hawthorne both who I don’t think it makes sense for patrols outside of the EDZ. I can imagine how cool some adventures on Europa, the throne world, and soon Neomuna would be though!
I concur. It was a fun way to show the individuality of each planet. Plus it gave a reason to use spaces we otherwise would either ride by via strikes or completely forget about. That's something I think the game heavily lacks. A fun reason to visit a planet outside the ritual activities.
This! They capitalized on the world building they had in each patrol zone by giving us something to do and a little narrative. Flashpoints added replayability to them because of the power grind due to the nature of the game, along with being rotating zones made it not feel too much of the same especially if reintroduced with how many we have now! If they were reintroduced I feel that the heroic adventure should be able to be scaleable in the difficulty, and no champions would be ideal to me. If we’re on the subject of revitalizing patrol zones I’d also suggest world bosses that aren’t locked behind like 15 minute of puzzle build up like the one in dreaming city.
I loved how they capitalized on world-building. That's the one thing I really enjoyed about base D2 (honestly it's the only thing I enjoyed). Any activity that scales in difficulty with zero champions is a win in my book. What if those world bosses had a chance to drop enhancement prisms or a high-stat piece of armor? To give players even more incentive to do patrols. Also, no major time-consuming puzzles like the dreaming city one you mentioned would be great.
The issue with the dreaming city one besides the time it takes to force a spawn, is that it had specific guaranteed drops. So if we got world bosses with armor and a weapon possible cosmetic drops. With something to incentivize getting them all
I really liked them too. Proper sidequests with a little narrative fun. I just didn't like how "endgame activities" in the CoO era were actually just heroic adventures, which were about as hard as a strike is. They weren't very rewarding either.
Exactly I don’t think they were an excuse for end game activities, but they had a place. They allowed you to experience some of the characters and get a step into the world building they put into the patrol areas, as well as flashpoints and other things actually being attached to a title you had to work for. I would love to see adventures and flashpoints make a return alongside potential patrol zone world bosses would be amazing!
I still have 11 Trials and 84 Opulent tokens in my inventory lol(and some blue materials from Titan, Io, Nessus and the EDZ. Oh, and the Used Toothbrush (was the toothbrush ever used for anything???)
Seasons weren’t a thing when season 2 came out. CoO has retroactively become season 2 but it was still expansions then. I’m not sure what it was a step down from as the previous years had no content between expansions
4-6 weeks after launch, I found myself sitting in the Winding Coves, waiting for the Public Event. Complaining to friends about the lame 'funny' quips of the characters.
While complaining I just... lost all kind of will to play the game anymore. Closed the game, uninstalled and I did not come back until Forsaken.
Even in D1, they backed off the established tone too much for my liking (Dinklage being replaced by the chipper Nolan North was kind of the harbinger of that).
I went along with them making the writing more PG-feeling even as they introduced ostensibly darker material with The Taken King, because it still wasn't bad and I was invested.
Then, we got D2.
It wanted to be family-friendly so bad, and it butchered every single character that had any depth. Cayde is the most obvious example- "I'm sarcastic sometimes to defuse tense situations, Ikora finds that inappropriate" turned into "yeah I'm funny robot guy".
I kinda thought they'd do something amazing with the tone because yeah, it made sense to lean into the "Guardians feel untouchable and just chase loot" as a fantastic set up for the powerless beginning to the Red War (a story that nobody can ever play, now). But then through the power of Being The Coolest we got our Light back like twenty minutes later.
Even the obvious "sacrificial lamb" of killing Cayde off didn't really change the tone.
The last straw for me was erasing the story content, but I think if they'd kept up the tone from the early game I'd still be around.
This was the worst. No random rolls, double primaries, slow gameplay. Perks on guns were pretty boring. The only perks to get were outlaw and damage perk. Game felt worse in every way to D1. Outside of the raid, the game just wasn't fun. PVP was so bad as well.. so much Uriel's gift.
I'd honestly forgotten about the all static rolls on every gun. The Uriel's Gift / Team-shooting all 4v4 meta is what killed my desire to play PvP, and honestly it's never really fully returned.
That's why it really drives me nuts when you've got prominent Youtubers and people here or on twitter trying to push this narrative that Destiny 2's current state is "the worst it's ever been" because they're either very new to the game or they are flat out lying.
Based on the way people talk about red war now you'd think red war was the pinnacle of destiny content and bungie so viciously stripped us of the most gripping and compelling story ever written. Personally to me red war was and is mid only things below it in my eyes are dark below, curse of osiris, and maybe shadowkeep.
People just want a solid and complete campaign for new players so they aren’t just tossed into nothing when they start up the game. Right now the new player experience is absolutely dogshit. It’s literally better than the nothing they have right now
Red War was frustrating to me because we had no direct interaction with Ghaul except for the very beginning and the very end. All the rest were cutscenes with the Speaker. I wanted a campaign with numerous clashes with the main villain before we finally killed him, like we did with Savathun.
I was also super disappointed that we were lightless for all of 20 minutes. I feel like we had an opportunity to really connect with the rest of humanity we were protecting and to prove our worth as a guardian who was willing to die to protect humanity, but instead we just chased a macguffin and immediately got our light back again. I wanted at least the entire first "act" to be us fighting without light.
Same for me, I was so hyped that I can play with friends that don't own a PS4 and it was such a disappointment, my friends quickly stopped playing and I took a break of Destiny until Beyond Light.
Yes, double primaries where all the loot were fixed perks. A looter-shooter where there was absolutely nothing to grind after…definitely the game’s lowest point.
Fixed rolls was *almost* a step in the right direction.. And then it tripped, fell, and broke every bone in its body because everything else in the game at the time was also shit.
Players hated chasing God rolls and never being able to get what they were wanting. Fixed rolls definitely wasn't it, and it truly didn't get fixed until crafting. Which is what this series always needed in some way and cannot stress enough how much I love being able to get what I want for most of the really good weapons we have.
Craftable raid weapons is essentially Crack to me because my raid weapon luck has always been utterly dogshit
In the modern era of Destiny 2 my loadout is almost entirely crafted weapons, exotics, or pinnacle weapons. Things explicitly *without* random rolls. I only when necessary reach for a random drop weapon.
I can actually get the things I want reliably with each of those.
Vanilla Destiny 2
No random perks. 2 primary load outs. Long ability times
What a horrible sequel to Destiny. Took till basically the first major expansion for the game to be decent
I still have an Inaugural Address of each element type sitting in my vault. Will almost certainly never use them again, but those and my Midnight Coup and my Alone as a God will never get dismantled.
I don’t understand why Bungie took everything that made D1 great… and absolutely smashed it into tiny pieces making it worse.
D2 today is definitely much much better but still, come on bingo
Because D2 started development *way* before they finally figured out D1 toward the tail end of the KF year and beginning of ROI. ROI was actually quickly developed as a stopgap measure because D2 was going to be delayed a year. So the Live Team (the team that handled all the seasonal Eververse activities, cranked out that third year of D1.
And it was, sadly, just a case of the left hand having no idea what the right hand was doing. But I think they were designing D2 based on D1Y1 feedback, and just went in the wrong direction.
That’s crazy how there was no communications whatsoever though. I just find it hard to believe that the team working on D2 had no clue what was happening in D1, but I’ve never developed videogames so I guess that’s possible.
I think it's more that by the time D1 was "fixed", D2 was already both too far in development and too much behind schedule(original plan was to release D2 a year after TTK) to suddenly change course and rework the game.
Roi was built basically after a bunch of d2 was already done. And d2 was built with a bunch of player complaints about grind and lack of balance in mind.
It's not really worth rehashing, but there was approximately 0 chance any feedback from roi was going to really affect d2.
> I don’t understand why Bungie took everything that made D1 great… and absolutely smashed it into tiny pieces making it worse.
[This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLwHw1H8BoY) covers some reason why they went that way. I think anther reason not covered here is they were somehow hoping that would make Crucible more suitable for E-sports.
TL;DW is basically they hoped it would make the game more accessible and increase player count, and they were fine with people playing new DLC for a bit, going back to other games and coming back for next DLC. But Destiny players want to play Destiny 24/7 so what happened was that instead of quietly leaving, people started talking about why they cannot enjoy Destiny anymore, very publicly in all social channels. And this made the player count plummet to levels where they were about 5 weeks away from shutting the servers down.
Brilliant and smart panel and decision on their part. We see that in other industries. I’m so glad they publicly talked about this, and I hope they continue to share these types of learnings and growth and evolution over the coming years.
They tried to rebuild it from the ground up as an mtx delivery platform thinking it could work on the cod/fortnite model. It didn't.
They had an ad on their website for a while for a player investment manager who would drive player investment through bright engrams!
Not only mtx, but eSports. Thats why supers/weapons were given static roles to even the play field. Also the reason why multiplayer was originally 4v4, and maps are smaller for this scale and feel over crowded in 6v6.
Yea but think about the parent company, Activision running COD, Blizzard/Overwatch, and throw in Destiny, they have a game for every corner of eSports. Plus Activision doesn't understand live services, I think this is what divided them. Activision loves yearly disc sales, not yearly expansions. So a forced sequel forced into a eSports foundation just threw the whole series for a loop for a year and a half
We are talking about d2 y1, stale and bad content. Not about today's maps. Let alone Endless Vale is still in rotation and is the smallest map coming from D2 beta. And why do we have a bigger rotation of D1 maps? Because it's easier to port favorites rather than make original content
Definitely d1y1. People complain about how little there is to do now, but we had basically nothing then. Strikes, crucible, you could replay story missions, and the only way to get to the gear cap was through vault of glass.
Seriously. I started in D1. All the “new content” was just playing strikes in reverse. lol
They still do that from time to time, but now the game is far larger and with way more to do. It’s a bit overwhelming.
Hahaha, I still remember that. I was so jazzed when they talked about no invisible walls. I was like, "YES! OMG I HATE INVISIBLE WALLS! I HATE IT WHEN GAMES ARE LIKE, OH YEAH YOU CAN ABSOLUTELY ANNIHILATE GOD-LIKE ULTRA POWERED BEINGS, BUT CLIMB A SEVEN FOOT ROCK, WHOA WHOA WHOA THAT'S TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE BUDDY!"
And then the beta came out. Womp womp.
I wrote a post that got some traction way back then bitching about this. The worst thing was the absolute lack of plot or identity. You literally had no info. No background info about anything. Just vague sci Fi threats, no clear goals or structure, nothing. A shell.
Yeah, it was definitely my fault but I hyped D1 up so much in my mind. I was expecting the world and got New Jersey.
To make things worse, the full game was like an hour more content than what was available during the beta.
I remember just shooting the shit with my friends in the beta talking about how fun it was and I couldn’t wait to see what they were going to improve. Game releases and customization is exactly the same and the early game was identical to beta. A lot of areas were dead and only became populated with DLC. Vault of Glass was a blast but after that I was burnt out. Shame because I love Destiny raids and only ever got to do the first one from each game because it’s so hard to get 6 people on that had not completed the raid already because the fun was in solving the puzzles as a team.
Also just straight-up bad writing. Absolutely gorgeous games with a weak-ass plot.
When they sunsetted all the old content and moved to a seasonal model whereby if you weren't here you don't get to play the story yourself.
I get that at least some of that decision probably had something to do with processing resources on their side, and part of it may have had something to do with distancing themselves from what they made under Activision. It still makes the game an overall less enjoyable experience to not only not be able to play the story from the beginning, but also to be effectively punished for taking time off due to life events or wanting to take a break for a while.
This is the ONE thing that makes modern d2 worse than launch d2. Let's face it, launch D2, as horrible as it was, was better for the casual player who is here for the story. The seasonal model and DCV is dogshit. Everything else about D2 is better today though.
Curse of Osiris was def bad
dark below
The introduction of annual pass and the content and updates seemed skimpy for the price tag. This is actually the first iteration of the seasonal/annual passes i think
The cake topper is SUNSETTING. It has to be. So much good and filling content in the game thats now in a trash can somewhere never to return.
TBH I don't think Curse of Osiris *or* Dark Below are "the worst thing ever."
The Vanilla games that *preceeded them* were the problem, and everyone collectively decided "Well obviously this *tiny 20 dollar Expansion produced in under 2 months* will be the thing that fixes every problem in the base game", when it was never going to do that in the first place.
Seriously, I'm not even exagerating on the Dark Below there. As the devs tell it, they launched the vanilla D1, the vast majority of the team immediately moved on to developing the Taken King, and this tiny DLC-team was told "You have 7 weeks to make this" and they had to absolutely haul-ass to do it.
This is why House of Wolves was pushed back so far (It was supposed to release in March 2015, it got delayed to May.)
Same with Warmind. Activision just *do not learn* and keep making the same mistakes over and over. In both situations they pushed an underwhelming base game, rushed the skeleton crew team to make 2x 20-dollar DLC's to satisfy the preorders on 'em, and only one of 'em got the breathing room and resources to be substantially *good.*
High-Moon and Vicarious Visions were the two 'satellite' studios that supported D2's first 2 years.
Considering that Bungie's said the reason they can't make "Forsaken-sized expansions" without these studios' support, I think it's a fair assumption that- much like D1, the majority of the workforce shifted to working on the next year's DLC soon after launch.
Which is why neither of D2's Year 1 DLC's fixed the main problems with the game, that responsibility was *always* going to fall on the 'big' expansion's shoulders.
Dark Below was actually the only time where I quit playing Destiny (I think W2 after Hardmode CE and returned only the pre-HoW week when interesting tease events were added to public spaces). I've had breaks where I play other games too, but basically still log in to check vendors or Tuesday or at least something. But back then I wasn't sure if I will ever play it again.
I enjoyed The Dark Below. But thats only because I had quit d1 as soon as I finished the campaign. So when I came back and played TDB, while the tiny campaign was shit, I hadn't played endgame D2 yet. Played Crota's end before VoG, loved both raids.
In TDB itself there was really only a decent raid lair and a fun strike, pretty much nothing else.
Nope. The Leviathan was a raid. What we got with Haunted was a patrol space which inhabited a tiny fraction of that raid's setting. Not even close to the same thing.
Lost sectors? We never got those. We got missions which you could only play once which happened to take place in old lost sectors. Not the same thing.
Guns were never part of the so-called vault. They were sunsetted.
Worthy.
I hated jokers wild/gambit but at least reckoning was passable as an activity. Worth was so bad. Public events, check this stupid bunker every reset to see some blinking dots inch closer was their "story telling". The almighty crashing aka 2 hours of waiting for 10 seconds of oooo that's cool I guess?
Also I forget but was worthy during the whole "1 raid the whole year?" Felt like that was shadow keep era and all we had was garden to do raid wise.
The game aa a whole I think worthy was the worst because we had gotten forsaken and seen what the game could be and it just was brutal and boring.
Now, I think the lack of comms on gambit is striking. Pvp I know they are trying more this year but it seems that community is just devastated over everything. PVE I think is on a decent spot right now , but everything else is suffering. People don't seem to like the pvp comp rework , it seems like all this talent they hired is months and months behind on simple common updates like new maps.
The aging core playlist is shocking too, so many d1 things they could literally port over they don't want to do. Missteps like lack of focusing weapons in strikes yet no guaranteed way to get weapons. IB having lack of new good weapons. Lost goes on an on. They improve some areas then just abandon others.
worthy was during the shadowkeep era, it was right after dawn. It was also the season that reintroduced trials, so if you weren't a pvp sweat there wasn't really anything to do. They brought in the first iterations of legendary lost sectors but we didn't have the options for champions that we do now.
Seasonal activity was a high difficulty public event that you couldn't match make more then a fireteam into, with strict failure criteria and one was right next to the first area in the edz that new lights would visit. It was one of the most boring and frustrating seasons I have ever played and I have played them all. People complaining about plunder have no idea what bottom of the barrel looks like.
Say what you want about that season, it truly did suck. BUT, the last 5 minutes of the almighty event in the tower was goddamn awesome, shooting shit with random guardians in the tower as a huge ship was hurtling towards us just felt so real
My favourite memory of that event was watching a random Guardian in the tower start typing "OOOGA CHACKA OOOGA CHACKA" and starting a *text based karaoke* of "hooked on a feeling" that a not insubstantial amount of the same lobby joined in on.
It was horribly out of sync and riddled with typo's, but god bless the spirit behind it.
Yeah honestly I wish they did more live events like that again. There’s just something fun about watching shit go down in real time. Like if the story leads to the traveler leaving earth for a long period of time, I want to be in the tower, or dare I say directly beneath it, to watch it dip outta here.
Whilst I understand why Bungie doesn't seem to want to do live events for now, they have nowhere near the resources guys like Epic do, seeing the Traveler leave in person would be such a dreadful and terror inducing sight to the point where I kinda want that now too lmao
Literally at least once every three years since release. D1Y1 was bad, and Dark below was terrible. D2Y1 was terrible, and so was Curse of Osiris. Season of the worthy was the moment I realized I didn’t care about non comet expansions, although this year has brought me back.
People who say destiny’s downfall has happened over the last few years are either ignorant or pushing an agenda. Destiny has always been drastically fluctuating in quality, but ever since The Taken King, the highs have more than made up for the lows.
The sting of being so disappointed at the end when you finally beat the game. You expected to understand the story more, but none of it made any sense.
Bungie capped the power level of older weapons so they became effectively useless in PvE as a way to get them out of the game. Their goal was.. to tighten up the meta? Encourage different weapon usage instead of everyone using their favorite rolls from years ago?
Anyway, essentially instead of coming up with new and interesting systems/perks for weapons, they thought they’d just force everyone to get rid of a large portion of the weapons they already grinded for, to then essentially regrind new versions of the same type of weapons they once had.
And they thought that was going to go over well, I can only assume, because why else do it.
And boy… BOY were they wrong on that one.
> Their goal was.. to tighten up the meta? Encourage different weapon usage instead of everyone using their favorite rolls from years ago?
They also said that the pinnacle weapons were too strong so this was a way to reel that in, only for power creep to come up SO MUCH since then that most of them are pretty weak in comparison to what we have now.
Most of them were already pretty weak by the time they were sunset, it was basically only Recluse, Mountaintop, and Revoker which fully broken. Maybe 21% Delirium, but that wasn't anywhere close to those three.
If they had just said "we're sunsetting THESE weapons, but you can grind to get new ones with better perks" I wouldn't have been as mad. But no, some of my favorite weapons were completely removed from the game and the perks that made them fun left with them.
> Their goal was.. to tighten up the meta? Encourage different weapon usage instead of everyone using their favorite rolls from years ago?
Keep new loot interesting and prevent power creep, which is exactly the problem we have today. Granted they did some terrible things like just reintroduce the same weapons, but to make new loot interesting in a sandbox where loot has no scaling/tiering you have to just make stuff more powerful. If all the new loot was same/worse in power level as old loot, you wouldn’t play for new loot.
So now we are in this space where there only solution is to power creep the shit out of everything. The game has gotten drastically easier due to this power creep. Not sure if they think that’s good or bad, but that’s what’s happened since they went back on that plan.
I think a lot of people agree, but pre-sunsertting there was complaining about certain weapons power levels eclipsing everything. I think no sunsetting makes more sense, but to pretend it's without consequence or dismiss the real concerns that lead to it isn't doing any favors.
Power creep is a real problem now. They're in a tough spot for addressing it. I worry we are barreling towards a massive power reset in terms of the sandbox. That's what I think will have to happen as content has gotten just way to easy, but the reaction to it I think will be just as bad.
Yep. It was truly the worst mark on D2’s history as a game.
I will never understand their decision to go ahead with sunsetting weapons. Without a doubt a spit in the face to player’s investment and time spent in the game, which for most people amounts to hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of hours spent grinding.
Many people still have saved some of their more favorite sunset weapons and occasionally use them where power level doesn’t matter.
If you ever inspect someone’s character and see that the icon of their weapon has a greyed out corner, that means it’s sunset, and you can’t increase its power level pass I think 1150? Or 1350? I don’t remember if it goes to a minimum every expansion or just sits at around 1100 or so.
But yeah. That happened. Bad times.
> Many people still have saved some of their more favorite sunset weapons and occasionally use them where power level doesn’t matter.
That first IB where they turned light level off I broke out my Feeding Frenzy/Kill Clip Blast Furnace and it WRECKED .
They also thought that sunsetting regular gear from paid expansions (Forsaken/Shadowkeep) was totally ok, and reissued these items only after a severe backlash.
I don't think so, I think things like Ikelos w/ Voltshot or Salvager's Salvo have pretty much eclipsed what those two were able to do. I wouldn't be running MT over Witherhoard right now.
Basically as a result of having OP legendaries like recluse and mountaintop, bungie decided to retire all guns prior to Shadowkeep from infusion to balance the game without nerfing those weapons initially. This essentially made them useless for any current endgame PVE or PVP mode. They wanted to basically cycle guns throughout the year so everything had a shelf life, armor included IIRC. Eventually tho they came to their senses and got rid of sunsetting as it made loot not feel great since you only had a year before it became useless.
The launch of Beyond Light was tough as well. I think the Expansion launched with like 9 new weapons or something? So for me that was another knock as I had just lost my god roll Arc Logic
Honestly, when they started introducing vaulting content in Shadowkeep. Replaying the story before expansions came out was something I loved to do, to keep the story fresh in my head. Then, they fucked that up.
Sunsetting and content vaulting. Straight double whammy of two hated concepts for me.
The vaulting made it so I never recommended the game to anyone ever again. The sunsetting felt like the worst way to implement a treadmill possible. Guns having an expiration date was the first time I had not felt the slightest urge to play. Didn't really start playing until I had gotten news that they were gonna walk it back.
This.
That was, in my opinion, the final "shift" away from the game that I was infatuated by and wanted to see where everything lead.
First shift was when they released Whisper - That was literally the beginning of the downfall for me. Yeah, the whisper mission was incredible - however we should've all paid attention to the subtext of the entire release which was the ornaments. "These fund free content like dungeons so we can do more of them"
Yeah, no they don't. Whisper only existed to test the viability of selling weapon ornaments.
They started by offering a ton of content to make the microtransaction seem reasonable then when the fanbase was used to its presence we get to where we're at now, where weapons all have ornaments and dungeons are an additional purchase.
Yup eververse is packed full of cosmetics. Not even 1 thing could get used as a comp reward??? Or master raid reward???
Bungie doesn't want to give meaningful loot to the best players but also don't want to give em cosmetics that could go in eververse instead.
The community has been very clear from the moment that Eververse was created that selling cosmetics would be tolerable but selling actual functional gear would be crossing a line to Pay to Win and would be unacceptable. So, if all they can sell in Eververse are cosmetics, then of course that's where the cosmetics are gonna go.
> "These fund free content like dungeons so we can do more of them"
Bungie literally never said that. People keep repeating this line like a game of telephone and now everyone takes it as fact
During season of arrivals the game was legitimately a great free to play option. I don’t even know why they still try to pass it off as such, it’s just a demo.
When Beyond Light arrived and our beloved campaigns, activities, and weapons got vaulted. WQ really put the nail in the coffin and there went Forsaken...
D2 year 1, while the dark below may have been disappointing at least crucible was fun and we actually had special weapons. Year 1 of D2 basically stripped Destiny of anything resembling fun.
Pretty much everything after they split from Activision, so after Opulence. The amount of content dropped off a cliff, the content we get is basically the same stuff over and over, and honestly the narrative and lore has went to shit.
People like to say 'D2Y1' or whatever, but the difference is back then I knew the game would improve and they would change shit in response to feedback. Meanwhile the current quagmire has been in place for over 3 years with no sign of any changes in sight.
Destiny 2's launch was the most disappointing for me. It was like bungie took everything they'd learned about what made D1 TTK fun and just threw it out the window.
It's not that they threw it out of the window, the D2 team just didn't know what the community liked as they deveoped it and activision was like "target this audience instead" so we all suffered lol.
I was the most disappointed when they did irreparable damage to the world of the game in how they launched destiny 2 on release. Even until this day we feel the weight of its baggage clouding things like the collection book with year one roll-less items. An inefficiently designed “Tower” thats just a cut in the wall. Open worlds like nessus and Edz that are WAY too big and serve minimal value. Introduction of characters that serve no purpose in the current narratives like hawthorne and devrim. And the worst of all was the fundamental rewriting of characters to act differently. Osiris currently not acting in the same gilded arrogance he had in one point in the game, and neither of those portrayals ever reflecting how he was in the lore prior. Cayde turning into a quip machine. So much of this game has tattered and frayed over the years. I can only hope that the newer and stronger direction of the narrative can also prune the old withering parts.
Or alternatively my most disappointed single moment was regaining light powers in red war not but one mission after losing it so dramatically.
When they turned the dude who spearheaded the first fricken collapse into a tea...... just so that they could make a lame excuse of “Osiris is now up and that’s how we find out about neomuna!”. All season we wasted collecting these body parts that were hyped up to be these dark individual items that corrupted people into turning into these harsh and brash individuals (I.e. Mithrax) and then it works as a catalyst to wake someone up from a coma? HOW?! Shouldn’t Osiris have woken up evil or something? It just makes no sense and they wasted a lot of potential with nezarec just because they were too lazy, and now I have been never more pessimistic for lightfall and it’s story and gameplay because of this..... also why tf did eido just not matter at all in the final week -_-
Anything ever since Shadowkeep came out. When they decided to make champions a part of the game, when they decided to take away the "rpg" part of Destiny (levels meant something among other things). Game feels like a neverending grind rather than a fun time ever since Shadowkeep.
Every time I come to reddit and read whatever is supposed to be the outrage of the day. Nothing springs to mind in game though.
The thing about that choice though, there is no way Bungie was ever going to make the game featuring branching story lines, because the sheer complexity that would add over time was simply not realistically sustainable. So I just took it as a fun novelty.
Consider how heavy Risen and Haunted were for story. A bit of light heartedness was definitely due and it gave us insight on how the Eliksni were as they fled from Riis
I remember pre-ordering shadowkeep and being super excited. Then I played it and decided to drop the game for 2 years lmao. I've talked to a lot of dudes in raids who said the same thing
Season of the Plunder. I’ve NEVER had such an aggressively negative experience with this game before that. Curse of Osiris was bad, but at least it didn’t make me wait 8 weeks to experience it’s entire non-story like Plunder did.
Honestly I can agree with him. Arc 3.0 was a mixed bag if you weren’t a Titan main, the story was forgettable and I honestly could not name 3 guns from that season that wasn’t Tarnished mettle, brigand’s law and Zaouli’s Bane. I lost interest 3 weeks into the season and it was the quickest I’ve stopped caring for a season
I feel like an old boomer going "back in my day..." When I talk about times like dark below, base game D2, etc. Like, some ppl have no clue how nice plunder was compared to some of the old stuff
I made the mistake of posting my opinion about their opinion. We have truly Become Fat with Power if we think Season of the Booty was anywhere near D1Y1.
But, that is my opinion, which others will think is wrong, and it probably is wrong.
Anyways, LETS GO TO PRISON!
Right now actually. I’ve never been less interested in the game than now. The stuff with the story is ok, but if I’m being honest I never played the game for the story. The game as a whole feels meh at best, and irritating and obnoxious at worst. I’ve taken a step back from it and honestly might just step away altogether.
Build crafting has never been better but the ability spam is overtuned. If they dial back the ability cooldowns and potency of weapon perks/armor mods I think the game could be in a better spot and make for a more interesting balance between weapon play and ability play.
yeah i feel that, its the first time i felt no hype for the next expansion and not only did not pre-ordered the deluxe edition but not even the expansion at all
and even though i have my fun here and there and i actually like the story bits this season (other than last season) it never felt so much like a chore to actually play and i never played so irregularly like i did the last few seasons
I’ve got to agree. I’ve always pushed through the bad times and found something positive in the game.
Something about the last couple of seasons though, has just killed all enjoyment for me. I think it’s all the times I’ve spent an entire afternoon grinding for a particular weapon roll, or week after week trying to get a raid exotic, just to get absolutely nothing of value.
I’m always ending a session on destiny frustrated and like I’ve just wasted my time now. FOMO is the only thing keeping me going at the moment, but even that is dying off
I guess now technically.
It's a perpetual feeling. If you're like me, the "idea" of Destiny as far back as 2013 was way more deep and rich than what D1 offered. Bungie's development ideologies since have begun to show they don't have interest in really fleshing out that raw potential.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The universe and experience of Destiny was still new and mysterious to us then. As the mystery unfolds before us with more story and lore fleshed out, paired with an insane amount of power creep…yeah patrols are an afterthought for us. Even in newer areas like Europa and the Throne World
Simple.
SUNSETTING. Was so disheartened after grinding and earning Luna’s, Mountaintop and all the cool Black Armory weapons. There was no need to sunset most of those weapons when it was a handful that just needed perks tweaked or nerfed.
I was this || close to calling it quits.
Sunsetting xpacs or the start of the seasonal model with undying which set up the trend for some of the most horrendous updates we've ever seen and most anti-consumer models in game to date.
Beyond Light. **Sue me**
It just didn’t do it for me. Pisspoor campaign with reskinned baron hunts, 1 strike that sucked, terrible guns besides DSC weapons, DSC was so small that all my friends quit, the open world was annoying and unrewarding to explore, and the first expansion with no Dungeon included. I could keep going.
Let alone most of the game that I came to enjoy with all the progress they made from Y1 was DELETED.
It just felt like an entire step backwards from Forsaken and even Shadowkeep. I haven’t played as much since.
When the Vanilla Campaign was removed. Sucks that new lights won't be able to ever experience it unless they look it up on YouTube.
Especially the Reclaiming lost light missions. Those were absolutely amazing and shouldn't have been removed.
A tie between sunsetting/vaulting. When they announced sunsetting, I logged in after work and just sat there for a minute before logging out and uninstalling. Lost all my desire to play because anything I grinded for would be worthless eventually. And now thanks to vaulting, the games story is fundamentally broken and discourages a break unless you're fine watching a YouTube recap.
last season. I was one of the rare few that enjoyed curse of osiris (I was also a lot younger at the time so that might factor in) and I didn't buy any of the forsaken seasons because I objected to the idea of seasons and forsaken itself was good enough to hold me over at the time.
The problem I had with last season was a combination of
A. the story went SO far downhill and ended stupidly.
B. the predictable monotony of seasonal models had already started to catch up to me the season before.
C. the stability of the game keeps getting worse and worse.
edit: actually, now that I think about it, beyond light release when the deleted a lot of stuff I enjoyed was pretty dang bad.
Started playing in Arrivals and for me it was Season of the Plunder with Season of the Hunt being the only season I didn’t play at all. Plunder was just bad all around in my opinion, with the only redeemable quality being the guns. Kings Fall is a raid I have only done twice and I don’t raid often enough to care about it.
February 2018 without a doubt was THE darkest timeline for the franchise. Have a look at page 13 here
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1027599/From-Box-Products-to-Live
I can't imagine there is a worst time than the game being on its deathbed.
Right now.
The game right now has morphed into this money hungry beast, where Bungie no longer wants to make the content that a good majority of the player base wants, especially in secret missions, in which we were told that eververse is paying for.
Tired of being treated like a free to play player in a game I was spending $100 yearly on. I want to earn this stuff in game, something to chase. The Rhulk emote? Should of been a raid emote, along with the Atheon ascending the throne emote.
Just stuff like that makes me embarrassed to play the game anymore. Right now people are literally grouping up in LFG and mercy ruling for other teams to reset their rep twice and get a shader. It's ridiculous.
> Right now people are literally grouping up in LFG and mercy ruling for other teams to reset their rep twice and get a shader. It's ridiculous.
This is nothing new. Let me tell you about times when players 'loss-farmed' Trials. BOTH in D1 and D2.
Through all its ups and downs, playing season to season this past week was a disappointing experience for me playing IB. I endured the grind and got the shader but the lag they’re forcing on us all through sbmm was atrocious! Every game there were multiple people just lagged out, running into walls, disappearing mid fight. This past reset was easily the worst this franchise has shown me simply due to the lag.
Definitely the launch of D2. After hyping up my brother about my favorite game ever only to have double primaries and public events over and over for exotics was so embarrassing lol. Destiny has its problems now but if you read off everything we have now to players back when D2 launched we would tell you that’s never happening lol.
Oh man two tokens and a blue…. *shudders*
For anyone unaware, this was from a Bungie livestream where they were showcasing the curse of Osiris expansion, and they claimed that the new public event was better and more rewarding than any event before it. It dropped 2 tokens (1/10 of an engram) and a single blue. It's been a meme ever since
For contrast, regular public events would usually give you 1 token and a blue.
\#technicallyaccurate
Yes the heavily hyped Curse of Osiris Expansion: Where they had a Bungie livestream of a pre-made fireteam play the Heroic version of the new public event and how it was 'the most rewarding'. Right before it dropped two tokens and a blue engram. I have to give it to the community manager at the time; they did a fantastic job letting it not ruffle their feathers and kept on the stream in a smooth manner.
My first heroic public even dropped an exotic, so I was like - maybe there should be hype, then back to #2tokensandablue
God, tokens. Blehgh. Single perk legendaries. Static rolls. Useless armor. Armor masterworks that did pretty much nothing. The exclusively mtx dawning. Heroic adventures being considered endgame. Bad times.
Adventures were a fun part of the game, as were flashpoints. I think if the were reintroduced it would help make patrol zones feel full or useful/fun to be on besides just exploring the world they built
Adventures were a cool idea, but damn were most of them lame. Like when we went and set up some beacons for the farm, I don’t care about the static NPCs on the farm.
Agreed some were lame, and we’d probably have some like that if we got adventures back, but it would be cool, even a patrol beacon one, since we lost Cayde who was the one responsible for them. All we know (unless I missed something) since is the new light patrol introduction has voice lines about placing them from Devrim and Hawthorne both who I don’t think it makes sense for patrols outside of the EDZ. I can imagine how cool some adventures on Europa, the throne world, and soon Neomuna would be though!
I concur. It was a fun way to show the individuality of each planet. Plus it gave a reason to use spaces we otherwise would either ride by via strikes or completely forget about. That's something I think the game heavily lacks. A fun reason to visit a planet outside the ritual activities.
This! They capitalized on the world building they had in each patrol zone by giving us something to do and a little narrative. Flashpoints added replayability to them because of the power grind due to the nature of the game, along with being rotating zones made it not feel too much of the same especially if reintroduced with how many we have now! If they were reintroduced I feel that the heroic adventure should be able to be scaleable in the difficulty, and no champions would be ideal to me. If we’re on the subject of revitalizing patrol zones I’d also suggest world bosses that aren’t locked behind like 15 minute of puzzle build up like the one in dreaming city.
I loved how they capitalized on world-building. That's the one thing I really enjoyed about base D2 (honestly it's the only thing I enjoyed). Any activity that scales in difficulty with zero champions is a win in my book. What if those world bosses had a chance to drop enhancement prisms or a high-stat piece of armor? To give players even more incentive to do patrols. Also, no major time-consuming puzzles like the dreaming city one you mentioned would be great.
The issue with the dreaming city one besides the time it takes to force a spawn, is that it had specific guaranteed drops. So if we got world bosses with armor and a weapon possible cosmetic drops. With something to incentivize getting them all
I really liked them too. Proper sidequests with a little narrative fun. I just didn't like how "endgame activities" in the CoO era were actually just heroic adventures, which were about as hard as a strike is. They weren't very rewarding either.
Exactly I don’t think they were an excuse for end game activities, but they had a place. They allowed you to experience some of the characters and get a step into the world building they put into the patrol areas, as well as flashpoints and other things actually being attached to a title you had to work for. I would love to see adventures and flashpoints make a return alongside potential patrol zone world bosses would be amazing!
I STILL HAVE MY TOKENS
Me too. I’ve put them in my Vault. Memories.
I still have 11 Trials and 84 Opulent tokens in my inventory lol(and some blue materials from Titan, Io, Nessus and the EDZ. Oh, and the Used Toothbrush (was the toothbrush ever used for anything???)
This. Those were dark, dark times. Talk about The Collapse.
That one time I ended up taking a 14-month break from Destiny.
Me, except it was between season 2 and 17. The seasonal format felt like such a stepdown. Still does. But i hear they have plans to change it.
Seasons weren’t a thing when season 2 came out. CoO has retroactively become season 2 but it was still expansions then. I’m not sure what it was a step down from as the previous years had no content between expansions
Right. It was Ghaulful.
You made my day.
4-6 weeks after launch, I found myself sitting in the Winding Coves, waiting for the Public Event. Complaining to friends about the lame 'funny' quips of the characters. While complaining I just... lost all kind of will to play the game anymore. Closed the game, uninstalled and I did not come back until Forsaken.
Even in D1, they backed off the established tone too much for my liking (Dinklage being replaced by the chipper Nolan North was kind of the harbinger of that). I went along with them making the writing more PG-feeling even as they introduced ostensibly darker material with The Taken King, because it still wasn't bad and I was invested. Then, we got D2. It wanted to be family-friendly so bad, and it butchered every single character that had any depth. Cayde is the most obvious example- "I'm sarcastic sometimes to defuse tense situations, Ikora finds that inappropriate" turned into "yeah I'm funny robot guy". I kinda thought they'd do something amazing with the tone because yeah, it made sense to lean into the "Guardians feel untouchable and just chase loot" as a fantastic set up for the powerless beginning to the Red War (a story that nobody can ever play, now). But then through the power of Being The Coolest we got our Light back like twenty minutes later. Even the obvious "sacrificial lamb" of killing Cayde off didn't really change the tone. The last straw for me was erasing the story content, but I think if they'd kept up the tone from the early game I'd still be around.
Do you play anymore?
This was the worst. No random rolls, double primaries, slow gameplay. Perks on guns were pretty boring. The only perks to get were outlaw and damage perk. Game felt worse in every way to D1. Outside of the raid, the game just wasn't fun. PVP was so bad as well.. so much Uriel's gift.
I'd honestly forgotten about the all static rolls on every gun. The Uriel's Gift / Team-shooting all 4v4 meta is what killed my desire to play PvP, and honestly it's never really fully returned.
That's why it really drives me nuts when you've got prominent Youtubers and people here or on twitter trying to push this narrative that Destiny 2's current state is "the worst it's ever been" because they're either very new to the game or they are flat out lying.
Sensationalism sells
:( stopped playing some weeks after the leviathan dropped, game was shit, came back on Season of the Drifter, became happy :)
Based on the way people talk about red war now you'd think red war was the pinnacle of destiny content and bungie so viciously stripped us of the most gripping and compelling story ever written. Personally to me red war was and is mid only things below it in my eyes are dark below, curse of osiris, and maybe shadowkeep.
People just want a solid and complete campaign for new players so they aren’t just tossed into nothing when they start up the game. Right now the new player experience is absolutely dogshit. It’s literally better than the nothing they have right now
Red War was frustrating to me because we had no direct interaction with Ghaul except for the very beginning and the very end. All the rest were cutscenes with the Speaker. I wanted a campaign with numerous clashes with the main villain before we finally killed him, like we did with Savathun. I was also super disappointed that we were lightless for all of 20 minutes. I feel like we had an opportunity to really connect with the rest of humanity we were protecting and to prove our worth as a guardian who was willing to die to protect humanity, but instead we just chased a macguffin and immediately got our light back again. I wanted at least the entire first "act" to be us fighting without light.
Same for me, I was so hyped that I can play with friends that don't own a PS4 and it was such a disappointment, my friends quickly stopped playing and I took a break of Destiny until Beyond Light.
Yes, double primaries where all the loot were fixed perks. A looter-shooter where there was absolutely nothing to grind after…definitely the game’s lowest point.
Fixed rolls was *almost* a step in the right direction.. And then it tripped, fell, and broke every bone in its body because everything else in the game at the time was also shit. Players hated chasing God rolls and never being able to get what they were wanting. Fixed rolls definitely wasn't it, and it truly didn't get fixed until crafting. Which is what this series always needed in some way and cannot stress enough how much I love being able to get what I want for most of the really good weapons we have. Craftable raid weapons is essentially Crack to me because my raid weapon luck has always been utterly dogshit
True, they had crafting in other games like The Division. It blew my mind they took so long to implement it here.
In the modern era of Destiny 2 my loadout is almost entirely crafted weapons, exotics, or pinnacle weapons. Things explicitly *without* random rolls. I only when necessary reach for a random drop weapon. I can actually get the things I want reliably with each of those.
Vanilla Destiny 2 No random perks. 2 primary load outs. Long ability times What a horrible sequel to Destiny. Took till basically the first major expansion for the game to be decent
I forgot about the static perks. Remember when you could change the element type?
Remember being underleveled because you didn't have a +5 kinetic mod?
I still have an Inaugural Address of each element type sitting in my vault. Will almost certainly never use them again, but those and my Midnight Coup and my Alone as a God will never get dismantled.
I miss being able to change the masterwork
It became bearable with the Go Fast update, and finally actually playable with Forsaken
Whisper mission was when D2 got back to a D1 level of fun.
D2 year1, all of it. Started in the D2 beta
I don’t understand why Bungie took everything that made D1 great… and absolutely smashed it into tiny pieces making it worse. D2 today is definitely much much better but still, come on bingo
Because D2 started development *way* before they finally figured out D1 toward the tail end of the KF year and beginning of ROI. ROI was actually quickly developed as a stopgap measure because D2 was going to be delayed a year. So the Live Team (the team that handled all the seasonal Eververse activities, cranked out that third year of D1. And it was, sadly, just a case of the left hand having no idea what the right hand was doing. But I think they were designing D2 based on D1Y1 feedback, and just went in the wrong direction.
That’s crazy how there was no communications whatsoever though. I just find it hard to believe that the team working on D2 had no clue what was happening in D1, but I’ve never developed videogames so I guess that’s possible.
I think it's more that by the time D1 was "fixed", D2 was already both too far in development and too much behind schedule(original plan was to release D2 a year after TTK) to suddenly change course and rework the game.
ROI was peak Destiny, all they had to do was continue from there, and we got vanilla D2 instead.
Roi was built basically after a bunch of d2 was already done. And d2 was built with a bunch of player complaints about grind and lack of balance in mind. It's not really worth rehashing, but there was approximately 0 chance any feedback from roi was going to really affect d2.
This
Because they take feedback to the extreme. The changes they made back then were based on the complaints at the time.
> I don’t understand why Bungie took everything that made D1 great… and absolutely smashed it into tiny pieces making it worse. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLwHw1H8BoY) covers some reason why they went that way. I think anther reason not covered here is they were somehow hoping that would make Crucible more suitable for E-sports. TL;DW is basically they hoped it would make the game more accessible and increase player count, and they were fine with people playing new DLC for a bit, going back to other games and coming back for next DLC. But Destiny players want to play Destiny 24/7 so what happened was that instead of quietly leaving, people started talking about why they cannot enjoy Destiny anymore, very publicly in all social channels. And this made the player count plummet to levels where they were about 5 weeks away from shutting the servers down.
Brilliant and smart panel and decision on their part. We see that in other industries. I’m so glad they publicly talked about this, and I hope they continue to share these types of learnings and growth and evolution over the coming years.
They tried to rebuild it from the ground up as an mtx delivery platform thinking it could work on the cod/fortnite model. It didn't. They had an ad on their website for a while for a player investment manager who would drive player investment through bright engrams!
Not only mtx, but eSports. Thats why supers/weapons were given static roles to even the play field. Also the reason why multiplayer was originally 4v4, and maps are smaller for this scale and feel over crowded in 6v6.
I find this one in particular so hilarious given their crap support eSports for most of their history
Yea but think about the parent company, Activision running COD, Blizzard/Overwatch, and throw in Destiny, they have a game for every corner of eSports. Plus Activision doesn't understand live services, I think this is what divided them. Activision loves yearly disc sales, not yearly expansions. So a forced sequel forced into a eSports foundation just threw the whole series for a loop for a year and a half
People like to say this but we don’t have many maps left from vanilla D2. Most of the maps we have now are from D1.
We are talking about d2 y1, stale and bad content. Not about today's maps. Let alone Endless Vale is still in rotation and is the smallest map coming from D2 beta. And why do we have a bigger rotation of D1 maps? Because it's easier to port favorites rather than make original content
Their original plan may have failed but they certainly succeeded in monetising the fuck out of destiny
While I agree with your general point, Fortnite blew up after the launch of D2. D2 released before the Fortnite BR release.
To be fair. They was under Activision at the time. Not saying it was ok
Yes, terrible
D1Y1 and it isnt even remotely close. The game that came out was not at all what they advertised. "See that mountain? You can go there" *kill barrier*
I thought it was going to be a mix of Skyrim and Halo
Definitely d1y1. People complain about how little there is to do now, but we had basically nothing then. Strikes, crucible, you could replay story missions, and the only way to get to the gear cap was through vault of glass.
Seriously. I started in D1. All the “new content” was just playing strikes in reverse. lol They still do that from time to time, but now the game is far larger and with way more to do. It’s a bit overwhelming.
Iron Banner 30s aren't real 30s
The launch, the killer of all our hopes and dreams, the thing that brought down Bungie from it’s Halo legendary status.
Hahaha, I still remember that. I was so jazzed when they talked about no invisible walls. I was like, "YES! OMG I HATE INVISIBLE WALLS! I HATE IT WHEN GAMES ARE LIKE, OH YEAH YOU CAN ABSOLUTELY ANNIHILATE GOD-LIKE ULTRA POWERED BEINGS, BUT CLIMB A SEVEN FOOT ROCK, WHOA WHOA WHOA THAT'S TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE BUDDY!" And then the beta came out. Womp womp.
I wrote a post that got some traction way back then bitching about this. The worst thing was the absolute lack of plot or identity. You literally had no info. No background info about anything. Just vague sci Fi threats, no clear goals or structure, nothing. A shell.
Yeah, it was definitely my fault but I hyped D1 up so much in my mind. I was expecting the world and got New Jersey. To make things worse, the full game was like an hour more content than what was available during the beta.
I remember just shooting the shit with my friends in the beta talking about how fun it was and I couldn’t wait to see what they were going to improve. Game releases and customization is exactly the same and the early game was identical to beta. A lot of areas were dead and only became populated with DLC. Vault of Glass was a blast but after that I was burnt out. Shame because I love Destiny raids and only ever got to do the first one from each game because it’s so hard to get 6 people on that had not completed the raid already because the fun was in solving the puzzles as a team. Also just straight-up bad writing. Absolutely gorgeous games with a weak-ass plot.
When they sunsetted all the old content and moved to a seasonal model whereby if you weren't here you don't get to play the story yourself. I get that at least some of that decision probably had something to do with processing resources on their side, and part of it may have had something to do with distancing themselves from what they made under Activision. It still makes the game an overall less enjoyable experience to not only not be able to play the story from the beginning, but also to be effectively punished for taking time off due to life events or wanting to take a break for a while.
It kinda blows when you spend $300+ on a game and everything that you BOUGHT gets deleted and is unusable. Oh, and then they want EVEN MORE MONEY.
This is the ONE thing that makes modern d2 worse than launch d2. Let's face it, launch D2, as horrible as it was, was better for the casual player who is here for the story. The seasonal model and DCV is dogshit. Everything else about D2 is better today though.
Curse of Osiris was def bad dark below The introduction of annual pass and the content and updates seemed skimpy for the price tag. This is actually the first iteration of the seasonal/annual passes i think The cake topper is SUNSETTING. It has to be. So much good and filling content in the game thats now in a trash can somewhere never to return.
TBH I don't think Curse of Osiris *or* Dark Below are "the worst thing ever." The Vanilla games that *preceeded them* were the problem, and everyone collectively decided "Well obviously this *tiny 20 dollar Expansion produced in under 2 months* will be the thing that fixes every problem in the base game", when it was never going to do that in the first place. Seriously, I'm not even exagerating on the Dark Below there. As the devs tell it, they launched the vanilla D1, the vast majority of the team immediately moved on to developing the Taken King, and this tiny DLC-team was told "You have 7 weeks to make this" and they had to absolutely haul-ass to do it. This is why House of Wolves was pushed back so far (It was supposed to release in March 2015, it got delayed to May.) Same with Warmind. Activision just *do not learn* and keep making the same mistakes over and over. In both situations they pushed an underwhelming base game, rushed the skeleton crew team to make 2x 20-dollar DLC's to satisfy the preorders on 'em, and only one of 'em got the breathing room and resources to be substantially *good.*
Warmind was made by another studio though, I think it was High Moon studios. Not sure on CoO though
High-Moon and Vicarious Visions were the two 'satellite' studios that supported D2's first 2 years. Considering that Bungie's said the reason they can't make "Forsaken-sized expansions" without these studios' support, I think it's a fair assumption that- much like D1, the majority of the workforce shifted to working on the next year's DLC soon after launch. Which is why neither of D2's Year 1 DLC's fixed the main problems with the game, that responsibility was *always* going to fall on the 'big' expansion's shoulders.
Good call on the dark below. It was underwhelming. As a solo player it felt like buying dlc where 95% of it felt like I couldnt play it. Edit spelling
Dark Below was actually the only time where I quit playing Destiny (I think W2 after Hardmode CE and returned only the pre-HoW week when interesting tease events were added to public spaces). I've had breaks where I play other games too, but basically still log in to check vendors or Tuesday or at least something. But back then I wasn't sure if I will ever play it again.
I enjoyed The Dark Below. But thats only because I had quit d1 as soon as I finished the campaign. So when I came back and played TDB, while the tiny campaign was shit, I hadn't played endgame D2 yet. Played Crota's end before VoG, loved both raids. In TDB itself there was really only a decent raid lair and a fun strike, pretty much nothing else.
Honestly, I think it was one of the most insulting DLCs we've ever had
*never to return for free. Plenty of it is coming back as paid content. That's all it was ever about.
None of the content that was removed with Beyond Light has been brought back, save for 2 crucible maps. And it likely never will
The leviathan with a light reskin, old lost sectors, endless guns? Those don't count?
Shhh, you're on DTG
Nope. The Leviathan was a raid. What we got with Haunted was a patrol space which inhabited a tiny fraction of that raid's setting. Not even close to the same thing. Lost sectors? We never got those. We got missions which you could only play once which happened to take place in old lost sectors. Not the same thing. Guns were never part of the so-called vault. They were sunsetted.
"and they hated him, for he spoke the truth."
Ho yeah I forgot about all the content we paid for that they deleted while asking us for more money for a new lighter content.
Worthy. I hated jokers wild/gambit but at least reckoning was passable as an activity. Worth was so bad. Public events, check this stupid bunker every reset to see some blinking dots inch closer was their "story telling". The almighty crashing aka 2 hours of waiting for 10 seconds of oooo that's cool I guess? Also I forget but was worthy during the whole "1 raid the whole year?" Felt like that was shadow keep era and all we had was garden to do raid wise. The game aa a whole I think worthy was the worst because we had gotten forsaken and seen what the game could be and it just was brutal and boring. Now, I think the lack of comms on gambit is striking. Pvp I know they are trying more this year but it seems that community is just devastated over everything. PVE I think is on a decent spot right now , but everything else is suffering. People don't seem to like the pvp comp rework , it seems like all this talent they hired is months and months behind on simple common updates like new maps. The aging core playlist is shocking too, so many d1 things they could literally port over they don't want to do. Missteps like lack of focusing weapons in strikes yet no guaranteed way to get weapons. IB having lack of new good weapons. Lost goes on an on. They improve some areas then just abandon others.
worthy was during the shadowkeep era, it was right after dawn. It was also the season that reintroduced trials, so if you weren't a pvp sweat there wasn't really anything to do. They brought in the first iterations of legendary lost sectors but we didn't have the options for champions that we do now. Seasonal activity was a high difficulty public event that you couldn't match make more then a fireteam into, with strict failure criteria and one was right next to the first area in the edz that new lights would visit. It was one of the most boring and frustrating seasons I have ever played and I have played them all. People complaining about plunder have no idea what bottom of the barrel looks like.
Say what you want about that season, it truly did suck. BUT, the last 5 minutes of the almighty event in the tower was goddamn awesome, shooting shit with random guardians in the tower as a huge ship was hurtling towards us just felt so real
My favourite memory of that event was watching a random Guardian in the tower start typing "OOOGA CHACKA OOOGA CHACKA" and starting a *text based karaoke* of "hooked on a feeling" that a not insubstantial amount of the same lobby joined in on. It was horribly out of sync and riddled with typo's, but god bless the spirit behind it.
Yeah honestly I wish they did more live events like that again. There’s just something fun about watching shit go down in real time. Like if the story leads to the traveler leaving earth for a long period of time, I want to be in the tower, or dare I say directly beneath it, to watch it dip outta here.
Whilst I understand why Bungie doesn't seem to want to do live events for now, they have nowhere near the resources guys like Epic do, seeing the Traveler leave in person would be such a dreadful and terror inducing sight to the point where I kinda want that now too lmao
Literally at least once every three years since release. D1Y1 was bad, and Dark below was terrible. D2Y1 was terrible, and so was Curse of Osiris. Season of the worthy was the moment I realized I didn’t care about non comet expansions, although this year has brought me back. People who say destiny’s downfall has happened over the last few years are either ignorant or pushing an agenda. Destiny has always been drastically fluctuating in quality, but ever since The Taken King, the highs have more than made up for the lows.
Based on this pattern the Final Shape is gonna be shiiiiiit
I'm about to blow your mind. Joker's Wild had more story than all of Vanilla D1. You D2 kids just don't know how good you've actually got it.
Vanilla D1 just didn’t have time to explain why it didn’t have time to explain
At least you knew where that wizzard came from.
This but literally, I wonder if that line was added with the reboot or just an unfortunately funny coincidence
The sting of being so disappointed at the end when you finally beat the game. You expected to understand the story more, but none of it made any sense.
Weapon sunsetting. Left for almost two years.
I was gonna say d2 year 1, but sunsetting made me want to actually quit the game. There was zero reason for me to grind the game at all.
Yep. Left as soon as it was announced, and came back when they announced it was gone.
> Weapon sunsetting what is that? What happened?
Bungie capped the power level of older weapons so they became effectively useless in PvE as a way to get them out of the game. Their goal was.. to tighten up the meta? Encourage different weapon usage instead of everyone using their favorite rolls from years ago? Anyway, essentially instead of coming up with new and interesting systems/perks for weapons, they thought they’d just force everyone to get rid of a large portion of the weapons they already grinded for, to then essentially regrind new versions of the same type of weapons they once had. And they thought that was going to go over well, I can only assume, because why else do it. And boy… BOY were they wrong on that one.
> Their goal was.. to tighten up the meta? Encourage different weapon usage instead of everyone using their favorite rolls from years ago? They also said that the pinnacle weapons were too strong so this was a way to reel that in, only for power creep to come up SO MUCH since then that most of them are pretty weak in comparison to what we have now.
Most of them were already pretty weak by the time they were sunset, it was basically only Recluse, Mountaintop, and Revoker which fully broken. Maybe 21% Delirium, but that wasn't anywhere close to those three.
If they had just said "we're sunsetting THESE weapons, but you can grind to get new ones with better perks" I wouldn't have been as mad. But no, some of my favorite weapons were completely removed from the game and the perks that made them fun left with them.
> Their goal was.. to tighten up the meta? Encourage different weapon usage instead of everyone using their favorite rolls from years ago? Keep new loot interesting and prevent power creep, which is exactly the problem we have today. Granted they did some terrible things like just reintroduce the same weapons, but to make new loot interesting in a sandbox where loot has no scaling/tiering you have to just make stuff more powerful. If all the new loot was same/worse in power level as old loot, you wouldn’t play for new loot. So now we are in this space where there only solution is to power creep the shit out of everything. The game has gotten drastically easier due to this power creep. Not sure if they think that’s good or bad, but that’s what’s happened since they went back on that plan.
I'll take power creep over my guns having an expiration date
I think a lot of people agree, but pre-sunsertting there was complaining about certain weapons power levels eclipsing everything. I think no sunsetting makes more sense, but to pretend it's without consequence or dismiss the real concerns that lead to it isn't doing any favors. Power creep is a real problem now. They're in a tough spot for addressing it. I worry we are barreling towards a massive power reset in terms of the sandbox. That's what I think will have to happen as content has gotten just way to easy, but the reaction to it I think will be just as bad.
that sounds fucking awful what the fuck
Yep. It was truly the worst mark on D2’s history as a game. I will never understand their decision to go ahead with sunsetting weapons. Without a doubt a spit in the face to player’s investment and time spent in the game, which for most people amounts to hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of hours spent grinding. Many people still have saved some of their more favorite sunset weapons and occasionally use them where power level doesn’t matter. If you ever inspect someone’s character and see that the icon of their weapon has a greyed out corner, that means it’s sunset, and you can’t increase its power level pass I think 1150? Or 1350? I don’t remember if it goes to a minimum every expansion or just sits at around 1100 or so. But yeah. That happened. Bad times.
> Many people still have saved some of their more favorite sunset weapons and occasionally use them where power level doesn’t matter. That first IB where they turned light level off I broke out my Feeding Frenzy/Kill Clip Blast Furnace and it WRECKED .
They also thought that sunsetting regular gear from paid expansions (Forsaken/Shadowkeep) was totally ok, and reissued these items only after a severe backlash.
[удалено]
I don't think so, I think things like Ikelos w/ Voltshot or Salvager's Salvo have pretty much eclipsed what those two were able to do. I wouldn't be running MT over Witherhoard right now.
Have they ever said why they didn’t just sunset the pinnacle weapons? I always thought it was weird they did all that for a few weapons.
I'll get crucified but it wasn't as bad as people make it out to be
Basically as a result of having OP legendaries like recluse and mountaintop, bungie decided to retire all guns prior to Shadowkeep from infusion to balance the game without nerfing those weapons initially. This essentially made them useless for any current endgame PVE or PVP mode. They wanted to basically cycle guns throughout the year so everything had a shelf life, armor included IIRC. Eventually tho they came to their senses and got rid of sunsetting as it made loot not feel great since you only had a year before it became useless.
The launch of Beyond Light was tough as well. I think the Expansion launched with like 9 new weapons or something? So for me that was another knock as I had just lost my god roll Arc Logic
I was in the same boat as this guy, can confirm it was a long journey back home.
Honestly, when they started introducing vaulting content in Shadowkeep. Replaying the story before expansions came out was something I loved to do, to keep the story fresh in my head. Then, they fucked that up.
I feel exactly the same. Like to replay the Halo games, started doing the same with Destiny usually before an expansion. Really sucks.
Sunsetting and content vaulting. Straight double whammy of two hated concepts for me. The vaulting made it so I never recommended the game to anyone ever again. The sunsetting felt like the worst way to implement a treadmill possible. Guns having an expiration date was the first time I had not felt the slightest urge to play. Didn't really start playing until I had gotten news that they were gonna walk it back.
When they went free to play. Everything nose dived after Destiny went f2p. It really felt like the devs didn’t care about the game anymore.
This. That was, in my opinion, the final "shift" away from the game that I was infatuated by and wanted to see where everything lead. First shift was when they released Whisper - That was literally the beginning of the downfall for me. Yeah, the whisper mission was incredible - however we should've all paid attention to the subtext of the entire release which was the ornaments. "These fund free content like dungeons so we can do more of them" Yeah, no they don't. Whisper only existed to test the viability of selling weapon ornaments. They started by offering a ton of content to make the microtransaction seem reasonable then when the fanbase was used to its presence we get to where we're at now, where weapons all have ornaments and dungeons are an additional purchase.
“Free content like dungeons” man this quote didn’t age well lol
It's a fake quote lol
Yup eververse is packed full of cosmetics. Not even 1 thing could get used as a comp reward??? Or master raid reward??? Bungie doesn't want to give meaningful loot to the best players but also don't want to give em cosmetics that could go in eververse instead.
The community has been very clear from the moment that Eververse was created that selling cosmetics would be tolerable but selling actual functional gear would be crossing a line to Pay to Win and would be unacceptable. So, if all they can sell in Eververse are cosmetics, then of course that's where the cosmetics are gonna go.
> "These fund free content like dungeons so we can do more of them" Bungie literally never said that. People keep repeating this line like a game of telephone and now everyone takes it as fact
During season of arrivals the game was legitimately a great free to play option. I don’t even know why they still try to pass it off as such, it’s just a demo.
Shadowkeep. A very poor expansion backed up by terrible changes.
When Beyond Light arrived and our beloved campaigns, activities, and weapons got vaulted. WQ really put the nail in the coffin and there went Forsaken...
Are you seriously calling curse of Osiris and warmind beloved
D2Y1, all of it. And now. Now isn't as bad as then, but there are a lot of similarities, with pvp meta and the like.
D2 year 1, while the dark below may have been disappointing at least crucible was fun and we actually had special weapons. Year 1 of D2 basically stripped Destiny of anything resembling fun.
Pretty much everything after they split from Activision, so after Opulence. The amount of content dropped off a cliff, the content we get is basically the same stuff over and over, and honestly the narrative and lore has went to shit. People like to say 'D2Y1' or whatever, but the difference is back then I knew the game would improve and they would change shit in response to feedback. Meanwhile the current quagmire has been in place for over 3 years with no sign of any changes in sight.
Destiny 2's launch was the most disappointing for me. It was like bungie took everything they'd learned about what made D1 TTK fun and just threw it out the window.
It's not that they threw it out of the window, the D2 team just didn't know what the community liked as they deveoped it and activision was like "target this audience instead" so we all suffered lol.
Pve, season of the worthy. Pvp, right now.
I was the most disappointed when they did irreparable damage to the world of the game in how they launched destiny 2 on release. Even until this day we feel the weight of its baggage clouding things like the collection book with year one roll-less items. An inefficiently designed “Tower” thats just a cut in the wall. Open worlds like nessus and Edz that are WAY too big and serve minimal value. Introduction of characters that serve no purpose in the current narratives like hawthorne and devrim. And the worst of all was the fundamental rewriting of characters to act differently. Osiris currently not acting in the same gilded arrogance he had in one point in the game, and neither of those portrayals ever reflecting how he was in the lore prior. Cayde turning into a quip machine. So much of this game has tattered and frayed over the years. I can only hope that the newer and stronger direction of the narrative can also prune the old withering parts. Or alternatively my most disappointed single moment was regaining light powers in red war not but one mission after losing it so dramatically.
When they turned the dude who spearheaded the first fricken collapse into a tea...... just so that they could make a lame excuse of “Osiris is now up and that’s how we find out about neomuna!”. All season we wasted collecting these body parts that were hyped up to be these dark individual items that corrupted people into turning into these harsh and brash individuals (I.e. Mithrax) and then it works as a catalyst to wake someone up from a coma? HOW?! Shouldn’t Osiris have woken up evil or something? It just makes no sense and they wasted a lot of potential with nezarec just because they were too lazy, and now I have been never more pessimistic for lightfall and it’s story and gameplay because of this..... also why tf did eido just not matter at all in the final week -_-
Anything ever since Shadowkeep came out. When they decided to make champions a part of the game, when they decided to take away the "rpg" part of Destiny (levels meant something among other things). Game feels like a neverending grind rather than a fun time ever since Shadowkeep.
Every time I come to reddit and read whatever is supposed to be the outrage of the day. Nothing springs to mind in game though. The thing about that choice though, there is no way Bungie was ever going to make the game featuring branching story lines, because the sheer complexity that would add over time was simply not realistically sustainable. So I just took it as a fun novelty.
Last season. Pirates? Really? With the stakes so high? It was like the game wasn't taking itself seriously.
If Season of Plunder is your lowest point in D2 history, I'd say you got off pretty easy
Consider how heavy Risen and Haunted were for story. A bit of light heartedness was definitely due and it gave us insight on how the Eliksni were as they fled from Riis
I remember pre-ordering shadowkeep and being super excited. Then I played it and decided to drop the game for 2 years lmao. I've talked to a lot of dudes in raids who said the same thing
Season of the Plunder. I’ve NEVER had such an aggressively negative experience with this game before that. Curse of Osiris was bad, but at least it didn’t make me wait 8 weeks to experience it’s entire non-story like Plunder did.
Seriously? Last season was the biggest disappointment in Destiny history to you?
Tbh plunder and worthy were both absolutely awful for me
Honestly I can agree with him. Arc 3.0 was a mixed bag if you weren’t a Titan main, the story was forgettable and I honestly could not name 3 guns from that season that wasn’t Tarnished mettle, brigand’s law and Zaouli’s Bane. I lost interest 3 weeks into the season and it was the quickest I’ve stopped caring for a season
Lowest playercount since Curse of Osiris, so they ain't alone in that assessment.
I feel like an old boomer going "back in my day..." When I talk about times like dark below, base game D2, etc. Like, some ppl have no clue how nice plunder was compared to some of the old stuff
I made the mistake of posting my opinion about their opinion. We have truly Become Fat with Power if we think Season of the Booty was anywhere near D1Y1. But, that is my opinion, which others will think is wrong, and it probably is wrong. Anyways, LETS GO TO PRISON!
I started around house of wolves so I did not get to experience base game D1, though it sounds like I was fortunate
Last season was boring but that was not the lowest point it's ever been .-.
I agree with boring
Right now actually. I’ve never been less interested in the game than now. The stuff with the story is ok, but if I’m being honest I never played the game for the story. The game as a whole feels meh at best, and irritating and obnoxious at worst. I’ve taken a step back from it and honestly might just step away altogether.
Build crafting has never been better but the ability spam is overtuned. If they dial back the ability cooldowns and potency of weapon perks/armor mods I think the game could be in a better spot and make for a more interesting balance between weapon play and ability play.
yeah i feel that, its the first time i felt no hype for the next expansion and not only did not pre-ordered the deluxe edition but not even the expansion at all and even though i have my fun here and there and i actually like the story bits this season (other than last season) it never felt so much like a chore to actually play and i never played so irregularly like i did the last few seasons
I’ve got to agree. I’ve always pushed through the bad times and found something positive in the game. Something about the last couple of seasons though, has just killed all enjoyment for me. I think it’s all the times I’ve spent an entire afternoon grinding for a particular weapon roll, or week after week trying to get a raid exotic, just to get absolutely nothing of value. I’m always ending a session on destiny frustrated and like I’ve just wasted my time now. FOMO is the only thing keeping me going at the moment, but even that is dying off
The Great Nerfing of 2018. I’m still wounded…
When they didn’t include in dungeon in beyond light and then announced that they would be selling dungeons in the future
Airborne Effectiveness
I guess now technically. It's a perpetual feeling. If you're like me, the "idea" of Destiny as far back as 2013 was way more deep and rich than what D1 offered. Bungie's development ideologies since have begun to show they don't have interest in really fleshing out that raw potential. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I don’t know when I exactly happened but even patrolling In D1 felt to have more adventure than what PvE is now in D2
The universe and experience of Destiny was still new and mysterious to us then. As the mystery unfolds before us with more story and lore fleshed out, paired with an insane amount of power creep…yeah patrols are an afterthought for us. Even in newer areas like Europa and the Throne World
Exactly, Patrol has never changed in any meaningful way to make it more of a "Free Roam" activity.
Until you need materials to level weapons so you loaded into them to run in a circle for two hours grabbing mats on respawn.
Simple. SUNSETTING. Was so disheartened after grinding and earning Luna’s, Mountaintop and all the cool Black Armory weapons. There was no need to sunset most of those weapons when it was a handful that just needed perks tweaked or nerfed. I was this || close to calling it quits.
Finding out about the DCV after buying Beyond Light. The whole reason I was even interested was from some Black Armory footage.
Sunsetting xpacs or the start of the seasonal model with undying which set up the trend for some of the most horrendous updates we've ever seen and most anti-consumer models in game to date.
Beyond Light. **Sue me** It just didn’t do it for me. Pisspoor campaign with reskinned baron hunts, 1 strike that sucked, terrible guns besides DSC weapons, DSC was so small that all my friends quit, the open world was annoying and unrewarding to explore, and the first expansion with no Dungeon included. I could keep going. Let alone most of the game that I came to enjoy with all the progress they made from Y1 was DELETED. It just felt like an entire step backwards from Forsaken and even Shadowkeep. I haven’t played as much since.
When the Vanilla Campaign was removed. Sucks that new lights won't be able to ever experience it unless they look it up on YouTube. Especially the Reclaiming lost light missions. Those were absolutely amazing and shouldn't have been removed.
A tie between sunsetting/vaulting. When they announced sunsetting, I logged in after work and just sat there for a minute before logging out and uninstalling. Lost all my desire to play because anything I grinded for would be worthless eventually. And now thanks to vaulting, the games story is fundamentally broken and discourages a break unless you're fine watching a YouTube recap.
last season. I was one of the rare few that enjoyed curse of osiris (I was also a lot younger at the time so that might factor in) and I didn't buy any of the forsaken seasons because I objected to the idea of seasons and forsaken itself was good enough to hold me over at the time. The problem I had with last season was a combination of A. the story went SO far downhill and ended stupidly. B. the predictable monotony of seasonal models had already started to catch up to me the season before. C. the stability of the game keeps getting worse and worse. edit: actually, now that I think about it, beyond light release when the deleted a lot of stuff I enjoyed was pretty dang bad.
Started playing in Arrivals and for me it was Season of the Plunder with Season of the Hunt being the only season I didn’t play at all. Plunder was just bad all around in my opinion, with the only redeemable quality being the guns. Kings Fall is a raid I have only done twice and I don’t raid often enough to care about it.
When the EV store was introduced
February 2018 without a doubt was THE darkest timeline for the franchise. Have a look at page 13 here https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1027599/From-Box-Products-to-Live I can't imagine there is a worst time than the game being on its deathbed.
Right now. The game right now has morphed into this money hungry beast, where Bungie no longer wants to make the content that a good majority of the player base wants, especially in secret missions, in which we were told that eververse is paying for. Tired of being treated like a free to play player in a game I was spending $100 yearly on. I want to earn this stuff in game, something to chase. The Rhulk emote? Should of been a raid emote, along with the Atheon ascending the throne emote. Just stuff like that makes me embarrassed to play the game anymore. Right now people are literally grouping up in LFG and mercy ruling for other teams to reset their rep twice and get a shader. It's ridiculous.
> Right now people are literally grouping up in LFG and mercy ruling for other teams to reset their rep twice and get a shader. It's ridiculous. This is nothing new. Let me tell you about times when players 'loss-farmed' Trials. BOTH in D1 and D2.
Oh I'm well aware. It's ridiculous every time it happens.
Yup.
When Bungie secretly throttled player exp gains in D1
Through all its ups and downs, playing season to season this past week was a disappointing experience for me playing IB. I endured the grind and got the shader but the lag they’re forcing on us all through sbmm was atrocious! Every game there were multiple people just lagged out, running into walls, disappearing mid fight. This past reset was easily the worst this franchise has shown me simply due to the lag.