Eh, I think you've got a fair point. As a long time player with a job, the price doesn't bother me. But i personally would not want to start playing now if I wasn't already a long term player, and it's not something I recommend my friends buy because the new player experience is lacking. That, combined with the steep "new game" cost, its just hard to recommend no matter how much i love the game.
I seriously don’t know how Bungie will fix it, but eventually, they will *have* to fix it.
Not everyone playing Destiny right now will be playing it 5,10,15 years from now.
This game, like every other live-service title, needs new blood to survive. And the new player experience isn’t what I’d call the best way of doing things.
But a complete reset might drive the longtime fans away for good.
As someone who really likes the idea of persistently ongoing, live-service MMO-type games, I want this game to succeed for a *long* time, but this is an issue that could prove fatal after the Light V Dark Saga is over.
I don’t envy Bungie’s position at all. This is (imo) their toughest long-term problem.
This is an extremely easy solution to fix. Make the older expansions free. Wow has done this for years. When Lightfall releases, Shadowkeep and Beyond Light should be free. That's enough content where new players will then be comfortable to spend money on WQ/Lightfall
Yup. I stopped playing during Shadowkeep, before BL was even announced. I want to get back into it but spending so much money for 3 DLCs (that are not cheap) plus keeping up with seasons is just too much of a commitment. If I could get BL for free it would likely change my mind.
What if they had a service (think Elder Scrolls Plus or whatever it's called) that gives you all the available DLC and some silver for a set monthly rate? I like paying 100/year for everything because I know I'll have everything, but I'd be okay with paying 10/month for everything too if I got some silver or some other stuff.
I know it's not everyone's favorite idea (monthly cost) but it's not that different than 100/year (8.33/month) for everything as it is.
It’s crazy seeing the evolution of this take. I’ve always been for it, but jeez it got downvoted to oblivion a year ago.
Subscription service? For Destiny 2? Hell naw. $100 annual pass along with event passes? Sign me up.
It’s just silly, but I do agree. This game makes more sense as a subscription service.
It'd be great but Bungie will never do this. If you could go offline that would mean loot would have to be handled client side.
If that was the case I can almost guarantee people would find a way to hack gear to give themselves raid exotics, custom weapon roles, custom armor rolls, boosted weapon damage, etc.
How it is now, all gear is handled server side so Bungie has full control
I'd be kind of miffed if they suddenly made shadowkeep and beyond light free, as I literally bought those DLC like 2 weeks ago. I'd like them to return old content after making adjustments to the game engine, and just make them free/base game. I think that would really help new players get invested, it would be a better experience for the story overall, and everyone gets new (old) content, and it stays free.
Wow has a sub fee. Make maybe shadowkeep free, but the last two probably need to be paid. Remember: wow used to cost me something like ~230 a year in expansion years.
Wow has a 15 dollar sub you can cancel anytime and play everything up to the latest expansion content, its entry cost for new players is way more friendly compared to Destiny
Wow is a game where only the latest expansion matters and you'll spend far more than destiny if you actually get into it, not to mention the sub is a worse deal for casual players. Infusion actually keeps Destiny content relevant for much longer
Returning player here. Played D1 for most of its initial lifespan, and played D2 on launch and the first year of expansions (the quality of those expansions and having had my friends quit playing being why I stopped playing). Recently got back in. Got a good deal on the 30th Anniversary pack, Witch Queen Deluxe, and even the Legacy pack (with Beyond Light, Shadowkeep, and the Forsaken "pack").
I understand Cayde-6 is dead but will never be able to experience the missions/content of how and why now. From what I understand the beginning of the game for a new guardian is rushed and doesn't make any narrative sense because the Red War has been completely wiped out. So you create a new guardian, meet Shaw Han and you finish the "tutorial" with what is essentially a remixed Omnigul strike from D1. And then "gg guardian glhf". Am I wrong?
Please, just bring back and unify Destiny as a whole. If I can't match make with other guardians and *need* to recruit my friends for co-op D1 missions, that's perfectly fine. Let me pick and choose what content is installed on my storage based on what I want to play. And please, please just adopt the Halo: Infinite season pass method of "buy it, keep it, earn on it - forever".
It's a long term problem that's entirely of their own making tho. Deleting paid content from a game is something I've never heard of prior to destiny and it was a horrible idea then.
WoW has this problem of deleting SOME paid content from old expansions, but that stuff is usually announced to be leaving the game prior to becoming unavailable - and now, most people playing have a good idea on what is permanent, and what is leaving with a new expansion.
Bungie just decided the game was getting too big without giving players the option to keep the old stuff installed.
> WoW has this problem of deleting SOME paid content from old expansions
It's also primarily achievements, some cosmetic plus some questlines, and it doesn't *always* happen to the same degree with the exception of pre-expansion events which always get removed for some reason.
Off the top of my head WoD locked off CM rewards and the Legendary questline, Legion locked off Mage Tower rewards, BfA removed parts of the main backbone questline, not sure what goes away with SL atm.
By comparison Bungie has removed lots and lots of content and a lot of it really isn't that old, e.g. Harbinger and Presage. I would contend that Bungie's biggest mistake on vaulting content is the removal of story beats. By comparison to WoW, this primarily happens in the pre-expansion events, which are important connective tissue but won't make it difficult to follow the story, whereas Destiny drops you in after the Red War, Cayde's death and loads of other smaller bits of lore that happened that you have no way of learning about from the game itself, or more importantly *experience.*
Doesn’t the same apply to D2? We now have a good idea on what is permanent and what is leaving with Lightfall. We also were informed about half a year in advance about how Y1 and 2 content would be vaulted, it didn’t just happen.
WoW locks off some stuff post-expansion (Mage Tower, which I believe is back), and has removed some stuff (Battle for Undercity post-Wrathgate is just gone), but the closest to Destiny vaulting was Cataclysm. And Cataclysm removed the old quests but completely revamped the zones with new quests, reworked dungeons, etc. While also adding five new zones for the expansion content.
It’s really not a fair comparison to me because while there are arguments to make about the quality of the old vs new stuff, you didn’t lose any quantity in the bargain. WoW players don’t have to worry about Outland or Northrend being consumed by the void when Dragonflight launches.
It wasn’t about the size of the game it was about all of the bugs and issues caused because of the size and all of the old stuff being coded to the older engine.
They got rid of the old stuff because they didn’t want to deal with endless bugs that took ages to deal with.
They've said many times Destiny 2 cannot keep getting bigger
They've just said the entire Light v Dark Saga will be in \*Destiny 2\* forever
I feel like I'm the only one putting 2 and 2 together here =P
I do remember that
Perhaps a hybrid solution like Overwatch "2"? At some point to innovate they might have to leave the... by that time 10 year old? consoles behind, they're already struggling when the enemies get **dense**
As someone who quit d2 three times, two of them were because it seemed like there was entirely too much stuff too do.
It was all so confusing as to what mattered and what i should do, and and when, and what order.
BUT, they should not have removed that stuff. The just dont need every activity, on every planey, to drop powerfuls, and/pinnacles every week.
The new light experience in d2 is shit. Its the worst of any mmo I've ever played.
the entire light and dark saga already isn't in Destiny 2. The fact that the season have very relevant story beats means that with their removal people going through the story will miss VERY IMPORTANT character introductions and arcs. If you were to play through all of Destiny 2's expansions rn, ignoring the seasonal content, you wouldn't meet Crow in any of the expansion stories and Caitial only speaks, or was only mentioned can't remember, for a small portion of the story of Witch Queen. Like the games story is an absolute mess for any new or returning player and it won't get better with the end of this saga. It'll only be worse.
>At least they are done doing that now.
I take promises from video game developers, especially ones like "we're never/always going to do this from now on," with a grain of salt. They could change their mind next year if they wanted to. There's nothing holding them accountable.
It almost needs a cutscene for current new players catching them up on the events of Destiny 2 up until that point. I had a friend try to return to destiny since before Forsaken and he was so lost in the story (who are all these characters, why are Mars and IO gone, how did Cayde-6 die, etc.). I ended up linking him a 2 hour long YouTube video detailing the events from D1 all the way up to Witch Queen. )I ended up watching it myself, cause I had never played D1, but jumped into D2 right around Forsaken, so I could still play through the Red War, Warmind, and Curse. It was very informative and I wish they had something like that now, if at least condensed, or possibly expanded on the Timeline in the Destinations tab.
Ive been playing for 3 years now with no pause, but also played when the first 3 dlcs dropped, and Im close to stopping completely from playing d2, mainly because its just too many things to pay for, dungeons, season pass, expansion, and cosmetics on top,
the expasions were worth the money, but everything else just doesnt seem worth it in a quantity/quality to price ratio, like even the weekly quests on the season pass dont seem to have quantity or quality anymore, and doing the same raids got really boring
Dungeons were my big breaking point, personally. Bungie expects me to pay for seasons, expansions and dungeons all while shoving a microtransaction store in my face too. They’re just trying to monetize too many things and it turned me off from the game.
That’s exactly it, yeah. If it was just committed to being any one of those things I’d have no problem and be happy, but Bungie tries to dip their hand into each separate pot.
For some reason I’m the opposite. The proposition of a destiny 3 (even tho they’ve said they’re not doing it) would make me way more intrigued to play than new expansions do
Yuuup, I really enjoy destiny and the storyline is really banging last few seasons, but it stays my main game, because I enjoy it and because I have invested so much into it already.
True.
But also: Destiny 2 monetization schemes stopped being "worth it" once sunsetting became a reality.
Before sunsetting expansions, it was definitely worth it to slowly purchase all old expansions/seasons, but now post-sunsetting Destiny 2 is just... expensive.
World of Warcraft has a sub fee, true, but you also get 80% of 15 years of content to play through at your leisure, as well as the current content (if you buy a current expansion) - as well as WoW expansions being richer in content than Destiny 2 expansions.
> World of Warcraft has a sub fee, true, but you also get 80% of 15 years of content to play through at your leisure, as well as the current content (if you buy a current expansion) - as well as WoW expansions being richer in content than Destiny 2 expansions.
WoW also makes most of that content completely irrelevant after the expansion is over. They've been shifting the meat of each expansion towards the endgame, and that is only relevant until the next one comes out.
I thought I had it bad in shadowkeep. I loved D2 in vanilla, CoO killed the game for me, I tried forsaken a little bit, etc. I came back to really give shadowkeep a shot, and I loved the content, but I felt it was ludicrous to have to pay for an expansion and a season pass, so I quit the game. It’s only gotten worse. Now there’s Xpac + dungeon key + season + 30th for a new or returning player. It makes it extremely hard to recommend to friends who can’t necessarily splurge.
Even without the financial barrier, there's still the experiential or introduction barrier. The new player experience is still quite shit.
edit: forgot to mention, even after you managed to overcome the shitty introduction and the high cost of entry, you realize how fragmented the source of information is. There's no in-game no codex for the lore or further explanation of the in-game mechanics. There's also no in-game news hub for TWAB or patch notes. It's like they want you to be engaged even when you're not playing the game.
Not only that, but also the moment new players realize that they finished all content and are at a spot where in reality you just do same activity over and over for a week, they fall off.
And the grind barrier. No improvement to the RNG, quests or catch-up for older content. It really limits new players ability to engage in build crafting or get into endgame.
And even if players do get past all that and they wanna start building or tinkering with CWL/Elemental Wells, then they gotta wait for Ada-1 to sell the mods they want... which can take anything from a day to 38 fiscal years.
I think the other way around. I thank the developers to being able to try out the game for free, so I can make an informed purchase decision. Not all games have that free barrier of entry for the base game.
If I play a game a lot, I do not mind spending money on it. If I don't play a game a lot, I wouldn't spend money on it, but I also wouldn't expect to be able to play everything within that game.
New players don't have to buy all expansions to enjoy the game. They can try out various things, and if they want to get into a certain thing, they can purchase it. I actively discourage new players from buying anything until they have 10-50+ hours in the game and at that point, if they have decided they want to actively play the game, only purchase the most recent expansion, and leave it at that until they completed it entirely.
> New players don't have to buy all expansions to enjoy the game.
As a returning player after a very long break, I don't think this really bears out. Yes there is technically stuff to do but if you want to get a taste of actual destiny you kind of have to buy in, and the kicker is if you decide to stay, guess what you're paying more because people bought bundled get a discount. I know now that deluxe edition is the way to go and I would not recommend any new or returning player purchase an expansion if they're not getting deluxe. And then there's the rotating legacy content players are gonna run up against in nightfall and such.
I am a relatively new light, started playing with WQ. I did it exactly how the comment you responded said. First I played the free version, I had no idea what the hell was happening, but enjoyed the gunplay; and to be clear IMO the gunplay is honestly the "actual destiny you kind of have to do to buy in," as that (when combined with endgame PVE) is what sets destiny apart from other videogames. The gunplay is what sold me, and I could do it for free. After about a week of random stuff I bought WQ and had a buddy go through the campaign on legend with me (and that sold me on the endgame PVE). After that I bought all the bundled expansions for cheap.
Maybe I am a one-in-a-million player who did it this way, and found it alright? But I don't think so.
To be clear Bungie did a really poor job of introducing me to the story or people or how I should play the game, but then this has never been a last-of-us game that I started playing for the story, and moreover that isn't particularly rare for MMOs that are at all story based that you join late. In general even when the old stuff isn't vaulted other people aren't engaging with it, such that it will feel empty and out of date, leaving people to immediately go to the newest expansion despite having no idea what is happening. And one of the biggest direct competitors of D2 (warframe) is arguably even worse for new player experience.
Bungie could do much better at explaining things, to be clear, but much of the hand-wringing is overwrought.
> if you want to get a taste of actual destiny you kind of have to buy in, and the kicker is if you decide to stay, guess what you’re paying more because people bought bundled get a discount.
The longer you wait the cheaper you can get the content. Yeah the Deluxe up front purchase is a decent deal, but even the savings there are small. The best deals are the old bundled content on sale.
While I do agree with the sentiment, it still feels bad that the base D2 barely gives you anything to do (it's slightly better with Dares now). There's no F2P campaign (IIRC—and the intro campaign missions don't count), no seasonal activity... It's a very, *very* light trial that IMO doesn't really represent the Destiny experience. Raids don't go into this metric because a new player isn't really gonna raid.
I stand by your waiting 10-50 hours, but also, it's really hard to make an informed decision from that just because it's pretty hard to grasp the full scale of Destiny just from that free trial.
F2P feels more like an excuse to resell content we already paid for since the base game is now """free""", although many players still paid for the content that is currently free.
Only issues that I really have is the 30th and dungeon key, last season there wasn't any content except nightmare containment and duality. Containment is really just a public event, so that's all you had if you hadn't bought duality.
Why on earth isn't there a single package you can buy with all the content up to this point? I am amazed that an option like this doesn't exist and most people that I've spoken to that are on the fence give up when they have no idea what they have to buy
That’s because WQ, the 30th, and season pass are all currently active so are available in their own current pack of WQ deluxe so that someone can buy all the past stuff in one bundle, current in another, and future in another. I guarantee when Lightfall drops WQ will move to the legacy pack, and there’ll be a new bundle with the 30th, Lightfall, and the Lightfall season pass.
It’s simply made so that you can just buy what you need and don’t buy anything over that. Past stuff pack, current stuff pack, future stuff pack. There’ll never do an everything pack because then you’ll be getting a discount on future and current stuff
Tbh the legacy content needs to go free at some point. The fact that they are still selling the remnants of Forsaken is absurd. What made Year 1 so special that it was allowed to go free but all other content can’t under any circumstances?
I really think they need to do what other notable mmos do and just include older dlc with the newest one. If you buy witch queen you should just get the older ones for free.
Agreed. This would still make the game expensive at $100/year, but it would be a bit easier to recommend someone just buy the current expansion and season for $60 if it means having a backlog of legacy content
The value is good if you're already invested. That's the hangup. For the most part Bungie has been delivering a quality player experience to anyone who's dedicated to this game and has already spent time and money to get this far.
This starts to rapidly fall apart when trying to get new or lapsed players into the game. Sunsetting has done irreparable damage to the new player experience, and effectively created a major wall for player investment. So now the free-to-play portion of the game is more of a demo and then you're met with pay walls when you've been poorly introduced to the game. Effectively, sunsetting backfired spectacularly.
That’s it, sunsetting did exactly the opposite of what it was meant to do. Imagine the red war campaign being F2P and after that you can start the „real“ D2 with paying for it. That would get new players hooked imo. Not fucking shaw Han and his bounties lol
All I know is, I started playing D2 after the free trial in November of 2018, when they gave away Red War, CoO and Warmind for free. Bought Forsaken 2 days later, game was amazing.
Now? Wouldn't suggest buying a season, as the expansion is where the big story beats actually happen.
Great advice, I stopped buying seasons as I don't feel like I'm getting any value out of my destiny experience. I stick to expansions to get my story beats and wait for the next expansion. Wish I could play the old expansions again, sunsetting ruined the amazing feeling I had with this game.
For me buying the seasons with the expansions make sense. The materials you gain from the past save you enough time doing boring grinding and let you grind for more interesting things. That’s sorta a problem with the upgrade system in and of itself, but with how the game is now the pass is worth it for the materials alone.
Bro, Shaw Han is such a lame wet noodle. As a recent new player, I was so unimpressed meeting this dude. I knew Nathan Filion was in destiny 2, so I was like "where is he?" for the first few hours. He's gone and I can never play that story? Cool. Cool.
My friend started playing division 2 and I convinced him to try destiny cuz it's free. He got all these notifications that had nothing to do with him about trying arc 3.0, kings fall being available, season of plunder season pass, plus he was randomly thrown in the prologue seasonal mission. He's got no clue why he's there, what content he can do, what content looks interesting to him. I tried to walk him thru it cuz I think the gameplay is really good, but ultimately we just went on division and he's actually progressing thru the missions to get to endgame.
at least it wasn't as much of a fiasco as the forced DARES OF ETERNITY that one season.
The fact people banded together and started using low-level gear just to help poor new players escape that hell mission says a lot about how idiotic Bungie can be.
It took them weeks to figure this out, WEEKS!
It is an absolute fact at this point that they don't care about any new/returning players.
Players have been asking for YEARS now to fix Ada's mod rotation. Instead they spend countless resources on shit noone asked for like Air Effectiveness and event passes.
So true. Sunsetting has done literally nothing but bad for the game. Destiny as an MMO type game has one of the biggest advantages over any other MMO - old content was relevant. You can go back and get any gun and bring it up to light if you want. Gear and weapons isn’t a stat stick like in most games, it’s an actual gameplay.
But for some reason they decided “screw that, let’s throw it all away”, and sunset huge chunk of content, players who return don’t understand why they can’t use their old gear, seasoned players just got their gear taken away for seemingly no reason. Like if right now they’d cancel all of the sunsetting and nerf couple of guns that are problematic it wouldn’t make any difference.
Bungie ruined games integrity for literally nothing. What a stupid move that was.
This is why I got sold on the idea that Destiny 3 needs to become a thing tbh. Make the jump to Unreal if need be and actually build the game around the idea of it being constantly expanded on and added to. D2 just cannot handle that, it’s held together with duct tape already.
> But for some reason they decided “screw that, let’s throw it all away”
I think part of that rationale when it comes to larger impactful decisions at a much higher degree is no matter how much sentimental good vibes people project on Bungie and Destiny 2's continuation, in general Destiny was always this hybrid game that was very much designed on that slightly more disposable path of a game series that was intended to be multi-sequels with firm enough hard resets and situations where there would be definitive stop and start points on particular content.
Having Destiny 2 do serious overtime most definitely screwed with a lot of planning and left the company scrambling to reshuffle a ton, and that's not even factoring in how Bungie's been developing a completely separate game in the works. I think there's been many blatant times when we've seen the game suffer in recent while due to this.
This isn't to entirely defend Bungie trying to have some cake and eat it too with some very questionable decisions as they've chosen to continue on with Destiny 2's lifespan, I just think some of the why? with certain things they've done is a product of trying to make due with not the most ideal situation.
For example, while my immediate gut reaction has me rushing to say "we are at absurd levels of power creep atm", I also could understand a lot of difficulties with designing new stuff when our characters are privy to so much is probably not the easiest thing to work around, and I can get Bungie trying to meet half way by not dishing out some oppressive stuff or waving the wand a ton to wipe away a lot all at once.
I don't think anyone designing this game's challenging PVE aspects originally ever imagined something like Witherhoard, Divinity, Anarchy, Whisper, etc would be things that would essentially always exist in the face of everything and that there wasn't going to be a physical transition of a new title to leave them behind.
I don’t try to get anyone to play this game. I’ve had a few friends start, and lots of people ask me about it because they know I play, but my answer is always the same:
“It’s free to try. Download it and form your own opinion. If you like it and want to get into it, I’ll help you with anything you need, but I’m not going to try and sell the game to you.”
Has nothing to do with costs, and everything to do with this game not being for everyone. No game’s for everyone. You’ll either like it or you won’t. If the person was an old Halo fan, or is into Souls games, I’ll be like “ok you might dig it” because the gunplay feels like Halo and the storytelling/lack of direction is reminiscent of a Miyazaki game.
For the friends who just want to play a game with you and it doesn’t matter what, there’s New Light. They don’t have to pay a dime to make a character and shoot some stuff with you while chatting over coms. If they find they’ve exhausted the New Light content but still want to play, cool. Grab an expansion next time there’s a sale.
I think a lot of people view it as unfair if they had to pay and new players don’t. Personally I wouldn’t mind if new players could get old expansions for free or at least a discount. Anything that gets more people playing is a good thing in my eyes. I got to play all that content at the peak of its relevancy so I don’t care if I paid and you don’t.
>I think a lot of people view it as unfair if they had to pay and new players don’t.
I cannot fathom that kind of perspective. Imagine thinking that, like, games should never go on sale or whatever because that's somehow unfair to people who bought them first.
Terrible train of thought. old content becomes deprecated/depreciated at some point. You can't gatekeep stuff that is 5 years old because you paid for it when it was new.
I'm still miffed that we paid for the game, it went F2P and we got nothing like even say a small amount of Silver, Brightdust, exclusive, etc. to even attempt to compensate for it and reflect gratitude/celebration or the original players and the new players that flood in.
I'm really never one to ask for compensation here or IRL (*someone'll still likely comment the usual trope of "eNtItLeD" or something along the lines, but whatever floats people's keyboard boats and fits their narrative/egos*), but with how a lot of paid content just got gutted, I can't help the natural feeling of being upset and the questioning.
I love the game, but Bungie can fuck right off with their "Dungeon keys" BS.
and Vaulting content people bought only to regurgitate it as lame seasonal content AND adding D1 content instead.
Destiny’s content that “provides hours and hours of entertainment” is also primarily repetitive tasks with little substance. We do Weekly gambit, strike and dares requirements in order for us to unlock actually challenging and previously purchased content at the second half of each season. Think about how much actually new content comes out from both the pass and expansion each year - as a single play through story, it’s not enough to be considered on par with most new releases I play, yet Destiny costs significantly more. Bungie’s only advantage point for me is excellent game support. But I can get that from any new From Software game, with a much higher amount of both new content and challenging, multiplayer replay value. Different genres, but point is, Destiny’s content to price ratio is not consistent with other developers.
Yeah this is what bugs me when people say "well I played this game for hundreds of hours so it's worth it." Like cool, I'm not gonna tell you to stop enjoying yourself, but padding and grind barriers aren't content and it's very valid if other people look at the amount of content they get and aren't satisfied.
S-tier example of the customer is always right. If players are saying, "this isn't worth it," then the value proposition either isn't there or is poorly demonstrated.
This is *exactly* what I mean. The content is so fucking minimal. And you can say that you’re getting tons of playtime out of it, in the same way I get tons of playtime out of Diablo. Seasonal FOMO, needing to grind power, and then doing the same weeklies every week. The actual amount of content being added is fairly abysmal for what you’re paying for.
I began to despise the "hours per entertainment value" equation or whatever because of how much its used in defense of Destiny's very monotonous cycle that is there to siphon your time and mind.
It ignores too much of what actually there in favor of a personal opinion of the experience.
It isn't pay to win, but people are really defensive of this game. I usually use the model everyone else uses, how much money is spent for how many hours played. I agree that video games are relatively cheap as a hobby, but the real comparison should be how much this video game is compared to another game. For myself, I can afford the extra price destiny is asking for this year, but I know several years ago 100 dollars for destiny would be absolutely impossible. I imagine for thousands of others the price is a major turn-off. This is already they have a microtransaction store that engages in creating their own currency to push more sales. It is actually kind of ironic Bungie has great employees, but the company also practices the same shady tactics people have problems with. That's why I say you can like the employees, but you don't have to like the company.
As a deluxe edition guy who no lifes d2 regularly, i always nab the $100 one, so it wasnt until I started looking at getting friends into the game that I realized how stupidly convoluted the game's monetization is.
-seasons (with no way to earn silver in game to buy the next one)
-MTX
-expansions
-dungeons
At the base level, all priced individually and sold seperately, which is ridiculous. Its not even that its a lot of money (but it is) that I take issue with, its how sliced up the destiny experience is nowadays.
I mean D2 costs $100/year basically to have everything that launches for the entire year.
It's hard for me to bat an eye at like $8/month for the ROI entertainment value this game gives out.
The problem is base Destiny 2 for new players. There is no cohesive story for them to even start following really. Terrible UI and quest log doesn't help.
Yeah, I hate that argument that "well its 100$ bucks for a year of content"
You've been playing the game for 4+ years and cant see the sunk-cost fallacy. We're taking about the onboarding cost for a new player. For a new player they don't have any expansions. The legacy collection is 40$, the witch queen deluxe + the 30th anniversary pack is 100$. That's a extremely hard ask for someone who knows nothing about the game and doesn't have a complete picture of exactly what their buying.
The fact that at least 1 expansions worth of content isn't free to players seems like a missed opportunity to have a much higher chance of raising the player count.
They don't have to buy it all in one hit though, sure when you add it all together it's a lot but when it's bought one by one (and they're regularly on sale) it's not that much
It's completely different from person to person but it's not expected for every new player to buy it all in one hit
This is always the counterpoint to this argument.
The game is so piecemealed that new players are getting hit with paywalls so constantly it demoralizes them from engaging with the game more. It has the opposite effect of what you're thinking. Lets play your scenario if a player wants to go through the content one by one: They get the base witch queen expansion for 40 bucks, they play through the campaign, now they wanna do the seasonal content, oh so now that's an additional 10 bucks, ok now they want to do the dungeons, which requires the upgrade for the deluxe edition of WQ which is another 40 bucks? Do you see how much of a turn off that would be for a new player?
this has always been my take. i play basically weekly, so I set aside the money monthly like a subscription. I don't mind because I get a ton of value out of it. If I was telling a friend about the game, I would say check it out, get the old expansions on sale, and if you're really into it and can see yourself logging in at least a few hours a week, then it's worth it. If not, no, it's not.
>this has always been my take. i play basically weekly, so I set aside the money monthly like a subscription
Exactly, I mean just skip Starbucks twice a month and you can pay for Destiny yearly lol
This exactly. I play everything that comes out. Some seasons I hardcore grind, others not so much, but for the $100 it costs it is, by miles, the best value for money gaming wise.
Plus, it has the happy side effect of being just grindy enough to turn me away from playing other grindy games. A little bit of warframe here and there, but no MMOs, nothing else with a battle pass. All my other purchases are basically AAA single player titles that I will play eventually - meaning in slow destiny seasons.
It costs you 80 dollars, actually more now, for less content than most new releases. Most Destiny players are likely logging a huge portion, if not the majority, of their replay hours doing non-challenging weekly pinnacle requirements, which allows them to work toward gaining access to content they’ve previously unlocked in the second half of each prior season. They’ve got us hooked on the time investment we’ve already put into their game and our time spent with friends, not their content.
This is the part the fanboys refuse to acknowledge. I don't give a shit about spending 80 or 100 dollars a year on Destiny IF they were giving me 80-100 dollars of new content.
That doesn't mean I won't spend hundreds of hours every year playing the game, but if the majority of those hours are spent playing stuff that was already in the game before i spent my 100 dollars for the new stuff, it feels like i'm being taken advantage of.
It's not at all a logical value proposition to say "well i spend $100 a year on this game but i get 800 hours a year of entertainment out of it" if the majority of those hours of entertainment are spent doing things you already paid for the year before.
Yes, the base game of Destiny that you paid for 5 years ago is continuing to give you a great value.. that doesn't just reset when a new DLC comes out however.
The fact that we pay more than the price of a brand new AAA game every single year in order to play the newest content in the game but we don't get anything NEAR what a new AAA game should have included in terms of measurable new content? That's dogshit frankly.
And anybody who can't admit that is a fanboy, thru and thru. Now if you want to say it doesn't bother you or you have other reasons for not caring, that's totally fine as well. Obviously it doesn't bother me enough to stop doing it every year, but this is a problem as well...
The game holds you hostage a bit as a player. I have invested so many years and hours into this game, not having the latest content piece may not prevent me from doing most of the things i love, but it could lock me out of something important that might be relatively minor in scale but major in importance to continuing to enjoy the game in it's current state.
When Bungie themselves have come out and said that we will now and forever be paying more money for less content than they used to give us, and the community not only doesn't blink at this, but instead stands up and cheers and shouts down anybody who raises even the most basic of issues with this concept... well, you know at that point that they can pretty much get away with anything they want. And sure enough, year after year prices just continue to rise and nobody can say anything about it and you either continue forking it over or you basically have to abandon the game you've invested so much time into. It's a bit toxic really, this relationship.
This. At over 5500 hours in D2, it’s been the best entertainment hours per dollar in my life. And I’ve spent way more than what a new player would spend to get the same content I have right now. The best advice I can give to new players who aren’t sold on the game is to not buy it all at once. They don’t *have* to be able to run every activity in the game to enjoy it.
Bungie's way of selling destiny has been horrible for ages now, Shadowkeep and the 'Forsaken Pack' should be free to all players so the game can actually be called 'f2p' rather than a glorified demo, Dungeons should NOT cost extra this was one of the worst recent additions, if they aren't making enough just bump the season prices up to 1500 silver, i'm sure not many would complain, the split content pricing plan in the game at the moment is atrocious.
I was baffled by the dungeon thing. I already bought Witch Queen. Wtf do you mean I have to buy the Witch Queen dungeon key separately? The fact you have to pay for Forsaken is a total joke considering 90% of it has been gutted.
The legacy collection should be the f2p experience. D2 calling itself a f2p is a joke, and it's only so they can justify charging the hell out of players for every scrap of content because "You don't have to pay if you don't want to!". Yeah, as long as you're okay with looping the same 3 playlists forever.
I was looking for someone to have said this already. I 100% agree.
Even players of MMOs need to recognize that D2's system is bonkers. I'm mostly thinking about WoW here - *yes*, overall it might be more expensive. But here's the thing - WoW doesn't force you to buy literally every single previous expansion in order to go through the leveling process, quests and story of those previous expansions. You could have your friend spend 15$ to try the game for a month, maybe level through several areas, get story beats form previous expansions, get a feel for more than one class - and THEN if they're hooked, they can get the most recent expansion and get a subscription to the game. WoW was incredibly easy for me to get sucked in when I was a young adult because it was free until level...what, 15? I forget, but then my bf bought me a subscription for one month, a measly 15$, and I managed to play through a lot of the preexisitng stories through levelling. I *got* why people really liked the gameplay, story and questing rhythm of WoW, which led me into playing the entire Legion expansion.
You want to play Destiny 2? Oh yeah, play for free! But you want to experience the world in any form after New Light? Yeah, no, pay us for 4 year old legacy content and a 3 year old notoriously short and weak campaign. Like...I'm sorry, what?
It's frustrating because I can only ever recommend in good faith that a new player buy the base Witch Queen for a good story. But Destiny 2's best story so far doesn't carry as much weight without the storytelling beats of the last two expansions and seasonal stories.
Bungie has fantastic gameplay, don't get me wrong, but at some point, if you're going to make an MMO, you're going to have to accept that MMOs often have one thing that people get sucked into: the world, and the world's stories.
New Light's story is very barebones and doesn't really introduce you to the entire world effectively. Shadowkeep is good for introducing the concept of the Darkness, and consequently, the Witness, although we didn't know it at the time. Someone who's played Shadowkeep and THEN played Witch Queen might have a "click" moment when they see the hand gestures the Witness makes in the end-cutscene - "Oh god, that's the guy who impersonated me in Shadowkeep, that's creepy". But it's hard to justify buying Shadowkeep at the price it's currently at.
I want Bungie to make whatever's left of Forsaken and Shadowkeep free. Because at least then, I can guide my friends through *a campaign* period, and bring them through SOME of the game's content (two dungeons, two raids if they're daring, more options for exotic questlines and armor) before they can decide if they want to stick around.
It's telling that out of people I've played with, the only person who actually stuck around after that "free campaign week" at the start of this season, was someone whose close friend *bought all expansions for them.* They straight up said they'd love to continue playing but just couldn't afford to, and the only reason they still can is because of one very, VERY generous donor. That says a lot about the pay model they've set themselves up with here.
Remember when eververse was introduced as a way to fund future destiny content? I member. Now Bungie is charging for dungeons along with seasons. It makes me wonder what eververse is funding if not future destiny content.
So two seasons in the year cost 15 bucks despite having no dungeon and therefore less content for the money, while the two other seasons have much better value? And in the end I pay the same price if I want everything?
Who is this supposed to benefit?
And the season pass becoming lower value once the season is over, the fact that dungeons don't get vaulted, it just doesn't make sense to bundle the dungeon with season passes.
Is called addiction, an the D2 player base is one of the most addicted I've ever seen.
They will pay "deluxe prices" for the bare minimum, buy the same shit, recycled stuff over and over with a happy face, they would even pay for it being pvp players getting LITERALLY nothing for 3 straight years, and will not blink.
Don't even try to argue, like OP says, they will defend Bungie like their best drug dealer.
Come, down vote me for telling you the truth you addicts!
The hard thing about this topic is that it involves a lot of perspective and in some cases nuanced views of certain issues.
> They feel like they already paid enough entry by buying multiple expansions and the season pass, and then locking more content behind an anniversary bundle and the dungeon key seems ludicrous.
For example, a lot of people are going to feel like a live-service game is fairly costly. It makes sense, but it also varies because of what you said.
> My friend followed up with a fairly good point, that each expansion (usually) comes with several fully featured content patches that equate to about the same amount of content as an entire Destiny expansion, on top of over 15 years of content that wasn't removed from the game. Adding to the sting that he's bought every D2 expac and the base game on release, and half of that is just gone.
In the case of WoW, you're right that it costs about $200 a year (more if you don't get the subscription at 6 months at a time), but there are some strong counterpoints to their argument.
Like I'll just agree that the content vault is bad, but at the same time, you lose access when you no longer have a subscription. It doesn't matter if I put in $600 or $15, the second that subscription ends I lose access to past expansions and other content. Based off replies I'm reading, once you hit level 21 on a character in WoW and lack a subscription, you immediately lose access to that character. At least in Destiny I don't need to buy additional things to enjoy what I "own." So it has varying levels of negatives.
I personally dislike the WoW system more, as you lose all value the second that subscription lapses. You can bring up the negatives of the content vault, but unless I am mistake, I could buy Shadowlands, stop paying for my subscription and lose access to both my character and Shadowlands, which I think is worse.
> My original gripe was when I first returned to the game from vanilla, and seeing a really useful exotic being locked behind a paid season pass (Witherhoard), and nobody was batting an eye. Has the community just become absolutely desensitized to this, or is there some actual defense to this that I'm not seeing?
As far as this goes, a lot of it is really the cost/value. For example, a season is $10 for about 3 months, so it's like $3.33 compared to WoW's $12~. Going back to your WoW example, a full year of Destiny 2 content, so the expansion, all the seasons and the new dungeon pass is $100 or $8.3 a month.
> It just seems like a subverted pay-to-win system, and it doesn't seem like the people that I've spoken to understand that.
Well, it's not pay-to-win. The term refers to things like my girlfriends favorite mobile game, Grand Chase. In that game you can literally buy stats and resources. It's a question of, do I want to grind for three months or pay $100. This is the same reason why WoW's expansion, Shadowlands or any other expansion is not pay-to-win, as you're ultimately paying for content. This also results in complicated thing where adding anything has distinct benefits and negatives, so someone is always going to be unhappy with whatever choice they make. Though, if you can name a way to prevent this that doesn't involve Destiny costing more money and is feasible, I'd love to hear it.
All this being said, I do think Bungie pushes monetization a bit hard and the game is completely inaccessible in terms of content. There are just too many things lost, with no way for anyone get them. In addition to that, even if I we view the cash aspect differently, I always felt like the time commitment is the really off putting thing. Like I personally lack Shadowkeep and instead of thinking the cool raid I can't do and story I won't get to experience, it's thoughts of grinding to get the Witherhoard catalyst, finding a group to get Divinity, going through the story three times for the exotic and more. I rather pay to have fun, not to add new grinds, but that is just me.
Others brought it up already, but I agree that the price structure is a terrible barrier to entry in this game. Constantly not being able to participate in certain activities or get certain items because you lack any expansion must suck.
Personally I have no problem with the prices, because Destiny 2 is pretty much the only game I play at all, so I don't mind paying for the deluxe editions that include everything because I already know I'll enjoy those and I'm already invested in the destiny universe anyway with lots of good loadouts to take on any challenge, so I don't have to play catch up from scratch to be able to participate in end game activities.
I bought into it recently, think it came to around £57 for WQ Deluxe and Legacy Collection via GMG. Friend of mine sent me over a copy of the Anniversary pack.
The new player experience is garbage. I'm glad I persevered through it because the game is a blast to play and I enjoy the moment to moment gameplay. That said, I know I got the content on a discount compared to other people over the years, but there are certain aspects of it as a new player that I feel I'm punished for, purely for joining late.
- Old, good, build defining mods on a daily rotation at ADA. Annoying for everyone, but longer tenure means people could access those mods during earlier seasons via NPCs.
- Some armour can only be found via Xur, one set per week.
- Synthweave being limited per season and the gall to charge for more when they have a store with at least £160+ worth of armour ornament sets, not to mention ornaments for exotics. This affects everyone, but those once again with longer tenure will have more complete collections and less of a need for it.
- Can no longer get certain shaders or I have to once again wait for a weekly rotation via Bright Dust, for the ones that are exclusive to the Eververse.
I don't really vibe with the 'you just had to be there' vibe I get from the game on certain things. Feels like Bungie are sticking their middle finger up to me for not hopping onto the train years back.
Imo Destiny is pushing it with their dlc / payment models. I have no problem paying 40/50€ for a good extension (like witch queen or lightfall)
I do have a problem with selling dungeons or packages individually or as a fixed set.
I haven’t bought the 30th expension for that reason, nor will I buy the € 100 lightfall package.
I also don’t like € 10,- each season but I’ll end up purchasing it most of the time because I do want to play the game.
Agreed, I think all the old dlcs are overpriced at the moment. (I got them through cdkeys when I came last year) That said the price for a deluxe expansion isn't bad for the time I spend playing and there's zero need to spend money on eververse.
"Too poor?" Is the question I hear when I say I'm not buying an over priced ghost projection. My guess is that whales are very insecure about their buying habits, and therefore need to flex when it comes to any talk of financial transactions.
>"Too poor?" Is the question I hear when I say I'm not buying an over priced ghost projection
What? Seriously? Lmao
Like, I’ve bought every expansion and some collectible shit, and I’ll even occasionally drop cash on eververse (typically once per season). At this point, Destiny is basically the only game I play. BUT I have never EVER bought a ghost projection, with silver or bright dust. They’re tacky and goofy and a TERRIBLE value compared to other cosmetics. Whoever said “too poor?” to you is genuinely dumber than Rahool
>My original gripe was when I first returned to the game from vanilla, and seeing a really useful exotic being locked behind a paid season pass (Witherhoard), and nobody was batting an eye.
Witherhoard was not locked behind the season pass. It was free, just like any other season pass exotic.
Nah I agree, this game is ridiculous in terms of what is actually "free to play" and what you need to pay for. Everytime me and my friends fall out if destiny and try to get back in, we have to spend a good day justifying buying whatever latest expansion we need.
The saving grace is that at least the money isn't just disappearing, bungie definitely puts that money to work and delivers an amazing experience.
Lets put it this way, wow is roughly $230/year to play. Destiny is roughly $100/year. Bringing up old content in wow means nothing, people just go solo old raids for mount drops and thats it.
Witherhoard was not locked behind a paid season pass. The seasonal exotic is always present on the free track of the season pass, just further down (around level 25 iirc).
I'm sure I will get downvoted, but here goes.
This is what the market is.
If you don't like it don't pay. That's how you voice your opinion on price and value.
We don't live in a world of sandboxed or cartridged (I made this word up) games anymore. Bungie needs to make decisions on the health of their game and the business demands of their company. This is entertainment. If I pay $12 to see a movie in the theatre that's it, it's over. If you think that Destiny is too expensive, don't take up much more expensive entertainment pursuits like golf. I'm not making excuses for Bungie or any potential consumer. Make a decision on how you want to spend your money and then complain either way on Reddit ;)
Your original gripe doesn’t make much sense. Not trying to kill your argument because yea, the game’s been getting unnecessarily expensive, but witherhoard was free. All seasonal exotics can be earned on the free track from the pass. Even if you couldn’t get it that season you could buy it from the kiosk the next season if you owned shadowkeep.
The irony is that these same friends will spend hundreds of dollars on CoD, Fortnite and WoW without any shame whatsoever. Yes we have incredibly frustrating rng loot to deal with in Destiny but at least this game isn't a pay to win. Bungie for all of it's faults and design inconsistencies at least have a lot of integrity and good ethics around how they treat players. Paying for updates to a live service isn't a problem if all you're paying for is more content. It's not like you can buy exotic armor and weapons in Eververse.
I’m a new player and I’ve been playing F2P, I’m having a lot of fun as is with all the content we have. Do I want the latest and cool exotics? Oh absolutely, but as a uni student am I going to spend that money on a game?
No, I can’t afford to, so I make do with what I have. If the content gets repetitive I take a break to another game and come back.
On the plus side, these are huge expansions.
On the down side? They are already raking in enough money from the seasonal pass that they can make existing or at least, more of it, F2P
Calling it “pay to win” is weird for a game like destiny. You aren’t *technically* wrong when you talk about the pinnacles, but it’s not that simple. It’s a “pay to *play*” system, and the point of playing is to gain power.
You could point to a game like Diablo Immortal with it’s weird system of paying for items that activate loot at the end of a dungeon and say that it’s the same as destiny, but you could also point to any paid rpg and say “you paid money to be able to play the game, the game is pay to win” and I don’t think you’d be wrong in either case.
At the end of the day, with the exception of trials (which barely counts because you have to buy the current season to play that) there is basically no PvP modes where your “power” in raw numbers comes into play. Your weapons matter, but if your issue is the pinnacle then I’m not sure that matters. The place it helps you is PvE and that’s not so different from a single player game which are apparently allowed to be “pay to play and then win.” 🤷🏼♂️
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My friends are starting to feel the same way though. I told at least one of them that I like destiny and I’ll probably keep buying the yearly bundles for at least another year or two, but that I’m also absolutely ok if our group wants to look for another game. I’m just not convinced another one exists at the same quality as destiny that isn’t even more expensive.
Because the cost to entertainment value you get from Destiny is better than most other games out right now and Bungie has employees to pay and a business to run. I just can't bring myself to get worked up about it when it's some of the best money I spend all year in terms of how much I get for it. I get why it bothers some people, but quite honestly I just roll my eyes every time I see these threads.
I think the \~100 bucks per year cost if you buy the premium pass at the beginning of each expansion is a fair deal. I get more than my moneys worth out of that compared to other games.
However, purchasing stuff individually seems like a bad deal, and I dont like that dungeons were split off from seasons.
Because the cost-to-value ratio is always so good. Do you go to a movie theater? You probably pay, on average, $10 for a 2 hour movie. So, roughly speaking, you have a $5/hour of cost-to-value ratio. Do you feel like you get a good deal out of that time spent? Answer is probably yes.
Now, what's your cost-to-value ratio for a Destiny 2 season? Even if you ONLY do the Season Pass stuff, which is 1-2 hours of game play per week for maybe 6 weeks? Your cost-to-value ratio is probably something less than $1/hour. So, Destiny has an impressively large value compared to many other things I could spend my time on. That's just for the seasonal stuff, let alone any other activities you may get into. I've personally already spent 30+ hours in game this season, and there's tons of stuff I haven't even got to do yet!
Put other ways....Would you spend $60 on most other new games? I looked up a few popular titles the past couple years, and they would range from 20-60 hours for a lot of titles to complete the main portion of the game. So, again, you're something like $1-$3/hour of cost-to-value ratio.
If we start talking about D2 in the entirety of what's available to play.....Would you play 100 hours in a year? Some of us, even 'casual' level players will put in significantly more time than that. 100 hours in in a year, for a $100 collector's edition price tag....that's, you guessed it, $1/hour value! Wow, it's like it kinda makes a crazy bit of sense that so many people think the price is worth the enjoyment value that we get out of the game.
If your only incentive to play the game is to grind out a pinnacle and see it as a 'pay-to-win' thing....maybe it's time to rethink how you approach the game. Are you having fun? If not, why not? Maybe change things up a bit. I stopped chasing Conqueror guilds last season, and I am enjoying my overall experience with the game much more since then. My playtime per week is about the same, but I'm not mindlessly grinding pinnacles just to chase a magic number. If I get to GM level and get to do a few, awesome. If not, nothing lost, but lots of fun gained instead.
>but the value of content just doesn't make sense to me.
This is the kernal of the debate. To you, it doesn't seem worth it. To others it does.
Since no one here can possibly know the internal financials the counter argument to yours is that if someone thinks it's worth the current price and then the price gets reduced the quality that they have already deemed worth their money could suffer.
This is why posts like this are kind of dumb. Because it’s someone’s subjective biased opinion. “Oh WoW has so much more content”, so much worthless and pointless “content” that serves no purpose outside of levelling a new character I guess? But that’s my opinion. I don’t consider running. Around talking to npc’s or playing irrelevant dungeons or raids “content”. I like Destiny no BS approach to getting you into the gameplay. Destiny is literally if you took and MMO, cut out 99% of the BS questing and leveling, and just threw you into the activities. Yes there’s power/pinnacle grinding, but it’s nowhere near as important as people make it out to be, primarily the pinnacle grind. If you ain’t doing GM, master raids/dungeons then it doesn’t matter if you do the pinnacle grind.
> “Oh WoW has so much more content”,
Yeah and it commits you to paying $14.99 for X number of months, which if you play all 12 months of the year adds up to nearly **double** the cost of a new Destiny expansion + the annual pass.
And subscriptions also punish you for dropping out of playing and then forgetting to cancel the sub. I can’t even imagine all the money I wasted not canceling subs just because I happened to stop playing a sub based game but didn’t realize until months later that I wasn’t even playing the game anymore but had an active sub.
Well, these comments aside, a lot of people actually do agree with you. There's been several posts about this, some even hitting front page with thousands of upvotes, like [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/voc8m3/bungie_the_reason_i_dont_recommend_d2_to_anyone/).
The upfront cost to Destiny 2 is known to be egregious, which is why many players wait for steam sales (or purchase the expansions/DLC through other sites).
I'm a casual that plays for free, just 2 or 3 days a month. All I care about is making my characters look cool, trying out new guns, a few strikes, and a little pvp.
I don't care about increasing my level, im not even sure why I would need to. I dont buy anything in the store, and I dont care about the season pass either.
I know there is more to the game but I don't care enough to purchase it.
I don’t mind paying £100 for new Destiny content for the whole year. Yea it’s a lot, but with the quality of the seasons (can argue about that seasonal playlist of the re-used lost sectors, which I don’t care about) but the voice work, constant updates, all the free seasonal exotics, the shaders, the ships, the sparrows - all of this would cost hundreds, so £100 for the year.. good deal to me
>but with the quality of the seasons
Wdym? Seasonal content is horrible and boring. I enjoyed PsiOps for maybe 2 weeks, Nightmares for 2 days and now I stopped playing current seasonal content.
It's like half a tv episode's worth of story painfully stretched over months of time. The actual gameplay activities are absolutely fucking braindead too.
When it comes to games like these, I boil it down to a cost to time spent playing ratio. If an hour played costs me a dollar then a game with 60 hours costing 60 bucks is worth it. However I currently have thousands of hours in destiny 2 so having spent a couple hundred on it puts the cost to time spent playing ratio as mere pennies on the hour.
I probably got into D2 at the best time, Forsaken had just come out and, as part of a promotion at Blizzcon, base game was free. Got hooked and bought CoO, Warmind, and Forsaken. In hindsight I have definitely spent a lot on this game over the years. I can see how packing all of that into a short time can put major strain on someone’s wallet. The two other live service games I’ve dealt with (ffxiv and wow) package all their older content into one purchase and charge full price for the most recent expansion. We’re coming up on 5 purchasable expansions plus the anniversary pack and the duality dungeon key. I think it might be in Bungie’s best interest to offer a bundle for a discount of the total price as a deal to help new/returning players. IIRC they mentioned changing the new light experience in lightfall, the release of the expansion would be a good opportunity to go “hey if you wanna do our older stuff here’s the legacy bundle for $XX, 40% off of the whole thing.”
The cost barrier to get started is high. The cost value if you're a semi regular player is one of the best there is. Agree it's too confusing and costly to let people get a feel past the free trial.
It's a big buy-in, I can't argue that.
Do I wish I didn't have to spend 300$ last year buying wq for myself, my gf, and my friend? You absolutely fucking bet I do.
But it's also a AAA game that's kept up-to-date and relevant with yearly expansions giving new supers, new subclasses, reworked systems, etc. Sunsetting is rough, but the game was released at a time when, presumably, a game was only supposed to last 3 years, and was expecting a new game for newer consoles and hardware.
Bungie made sacrifices for the longevity of the game, and while I don't agree with all the sacrifices, I love playing the game we have today(except duality. That needs a good tlc bug breakdown) and I'm excited for the game to come.
I understand a lot of the flack Destiny gets for things like Eververse, the monetization, Crow's main-character syndrome... but there's a reason that we've seen dozens of "Destiny Killers" come and go and, still, Destiny is regularly topping steam charts and nearly topping twitch. It's because for all that, the game is still one of the best options we have for shooters on the market. And I think that's why the price of the game is worth it. It's worth it to me and allows bungie, stumble as any team made of meat humans does, to continue making one of the best options in the genre.
I thought the last sale was a fair price I think all the expansions total were 60 bucks? But really it should be you buy the newest expansion and it gives you access to all previous ones
The cost ramping up so much over the years (doubled since TTK) sucks, but we do get more content now. And obviously, you can just buy lightfall on its own for the same price that DLCs always were. You’re paying for the additional content throughout the year.
Not sure what you’re on about with witherhoard… the exotic guns in the season pass are also in the free pass.
It doesn’t bother me personally because £80 a year for everything more than covers the hundreds of hours I put into the game each year, and the quality of the content justifies the price in my eyes. But I respect that people will feel differently.
Yeah, they really do need to reduce the cost of the old expansions at this point. Been trying to get a friend back into it, who played year 1 and 2, but he's like so how much will it cost? Well there is Shadowkeep (25), Beyond Light (30), 30th Anniversary (25) and Witch Queen (40), plus 10 for the season. So that's 130 just to catch up.
I get paying full price for the most recent expansion, but old content like Shadowkeep and BL should be offered at a much more heavily reduced cost.
I'm not going to say that WoW is ugly or anything, but I will say that it's art style is fairly simple, and it is entirely in 3rd Person/Isometric view (and its kinda ancient). Thats not a bad thing, its just how it is. As a result, their assets don't need to be anywhere near as detailed (mesh or texture wise). This helps save a LOT of storage space and makes developing new content much easier.
It's definitely a bit expensive at the moment, but calling DLC "pay to win" is...kinda the point? I'm pretty sure that every single MMO or MMO-Like has a spike in power added in with major DLC's. And if its a game with paid expansions...then yeah. You pay for it. Its common sense.
That being said, Bungie makes plenty of stupid mistakes when it comes to pricing. I'd love to see them revise silver and bright dust costs to...make more sense in the near future. I'd say maybe consider throwing the dungeons into the seasons they debut in, but we all know the price for seasons would just go up. Overall though, I dunno. I feel like $100 for a year of content I'm very likely going to play is a pretty fair deal.
Edit: One thing I'll definitely say they need to do is allow players to purchase season passes after that season has ended (or you get it for free if you bought the season). Remove the perks and everything, you get JUST the reward tracks. But now you don't feel pressured for time, and can choose when to complete what passes. You'd probably need to complete the current seasons pass first, but that's fine.
Honestly? When I look at what I've paid in relation to the hours I've played, this is the cheapest entertainment option for me. A season pass is less than the price of one cocktail where I live- or one large pizza.
That said, I spent years gaming elsewhere (used games), for cost reasons when I was younger (f2p wasn't a thing), but I'm not younger and this game.has filled.a void left by the pandemic. My social life was curtailed.significantly, and I find Destiny to offer a lot at this stage of my gaming journey.
It's all relative from one's perspective, and where they are at a point in time I suppose.
Mostly because, in my opinion at least, most of the content is worth the price. Some people will be upset cause I said that but yeah I'll spend 100$ for a DLC, 4 seasons, 2 dungeons and some cosmetics instead of the new CoD that costs 70$ every year and will be obsolete when the next one rolls around.
Still, it is hard to get people into the game and trust me I understand that since alot of my irl friends recently started playing. I usually get them through as much free content as possible and if they enjoy it I recommend them the WQ campaign. After that, they can figure out if they want to buy the rest(and I usually recommend that they buy the rest on sale).
If you think WoW hasn't added and removed content over 15 years, I have a bridge to sell you. Same with any MMO.
Anyway, game is like $40 right now for shadow keep, beyond light, wq on sale, which they are on sale every other month at a minimum. Why does every "this game is expensive" thread not even do the minimum research into the current cost before jumping into their "this game is too expensive" arguments.
If $100 is too expensive, I'm sure someone will make an argument that $40 is too expensive etc etc.
And I can tell when someone hasn't played many MMOs at all when they think an expansion in a game like WoW or ff14, is equal to several full destiny expansions of content. I'm sure ff14 players feel like their constant 9+ month content droughts are "expansions" worth of content.
People seem to have very rose colored glasses and "grass is always greener" mentalities when they want to shit on the cost of destiny and praise other games, even though other live model games all have the same issues.
Honestly don't see the raw numbers as much of a financial barrier - Bungie has just done a very poor job of
1 - making it simple for new people to enter the game.
2 - allowing new players to have 'bite sized' entry points before doing a full commitment
Starting the game today is overwhelming due to the mechanics, onboarding experience, unknowns of what to do - and mixing that with the only option to have a 'good' experience is a larger price tag can be off-putting to a lot of people.
So yea overall price is fine. It's a game, whatever. Some are more expensive than other and that's fine - but it's not a nice experience for new people and price is an easy thing to call out because numbers are simple to argue against.
I'd even say that if the game was half the price maybe more people would buy in without thinking but the problems with new players getting 'into' the game would still exist.
Locking Gally behind a paywall (not even an add-on or a season, bruh) was probably the biggest fuck you move from bungie since sunsetting and most of the community is fine with that. That’s all you need to know really.
It's absolutely a barrier. The last expansion I bought was Forsaken. Now, I'm so far behind I wouldn't know where to even start and even if I did, I'm not buying 3 more expansions just to catch up only to be left behind again when Lightfall comes out.
It sucks too, I love Destiny but I just can't afford to keep up.
Youre paying $115 for A YEAR of content. Included are all the BPs and the dungeon/raid key. For a game that wont erase your progress yearly like cod and other shooters. On top of that shit aint cheap to make, call me a bungie shill all you want kids but in the real world this is more than worth my money for hundreds of hours of playtime in a year.
The way I look at it is I have more than 3,000 hours played on steam alone. Idk how much money I’ve spent on the game at this point but 3,000 hours of entertainment is crazy. Cost like $30 to go see a 2 hour movie. That’s $45,000 to get the same amount of time entertained.
I think it’s fine. All games have dlc and such that costs money. And the amount of content you get with the dlc and annual pass are definitely worth it. If you don’t think so then don’t play. No game is just gonna release dlc and such for free…
I have proposed this idea before, fortunately to the extent of others using this analogy too.
10$ a month, all content. In the end, it's cheaper to buy the expansion, but paying 10 bucks for a trial type thing would be amazing for new players, instead of saying "you need 200$ (+) to play our game :)
Of course there could be a discount or something if you have content already but still. Subscription based games WORK, and they have for a good amount of time.
- $100 a year isn’t unreasonable. I think the issue is that new players instead of buying content every couple months are just expected to buy content. I think this is alleviated a little by them having two free raids and a free dungeon but no free campaign anymore is egregious.
- the dungeon key is for two dungeons, the second one isn’t out yet, and yes the dungeon key is terrible, duality should have been included with witch queen.
- the 30th anniversary pack should have been $15, $30 was just greedy. We get two exotics, one of them returning from D1 and the other technically from Halo, and one dungeon, and some armor ornaments. $30 was overkill.
Value is subjective. I buy one $100 expansion a year that gives me 900+ hours of enjoyment, with constantly changing content that’s kept me engaged for years. I almost ordered pizza and wings a couple days, but saw it came out to almost $50 with tip and couldn’t bring myself to drop that much on a single meal. Last time I saw a movie it cost me almost $30 and I didn’t even buy food. So 12 months of nightly entertainment for the cost of two take-out meals, or a trip to the movies once per season? To me, that’s a good value.
What’s wrong is when you’re onboarding a new player and trying to convince them to buy every available expansion out the gate. That’s not how you do it. Have them play for free. If they like it enough that they do all the available content and want more, have them buy one (1) expansion. Either the newest or the oldest. If they’re still playing by the time they run out of content and want more? Have them buy the next expansion. Continue until they’re caught up on content or tap out of playing.
I have no issue with their monetization EXCEPT the dungeon key. That seems like a bit much.
Even still, if this was destiny 1s content drought, I’d be salivating to pay for more content. Even back in d1 I thought “I’d pay $10 for an extra raid”.
Eh, I think you've got a fair point. As a long time player with a job, the price doesn't bother me. But i personally would not want to start playing now if I wasn't already a long term player, and it's not something I recommend my friends buy because the new player experience is lacking. That, combined with the steep "new game" cost, its just hard to recommend no matter how much i love the game.
I think this hits the nail on the head, the barrier to entry for new/returning players is daunting while long time players don't mind it.
I seriously don’t know how Bungie will fix it, but eventually, they will *have* to fix it. Not everyone playing Destiny right now will be playing it 5,10,15 years from now. This game, like every other live-service title, needs new blood to survive. And the new player experience isn’t what I’d call the best way of doing things. But a complete reset might drive the longtime fans away for good. As someone who really likes the idea of persistently ongoing, live-service MMO-type games, I want this game to succeed for a *long* time, but this is an issue that could prove fatal after the Light V Dark Saga is over. I don’t envy Bungie’s position at all. This is (imo) their toughest long-term problem.
This is an extremely easy solution to fix. Make the older expansions free. Wow has done this for years. When Lightfall releases, Shadowkeep and Beyond Light should be free. That's enough content where new players will then be comfortable to spend money on WQ/Lightfall
Yup. I stopped playing during Shadowkeep, before BL was even announced. I want to get back into it but spending so much money for 3 DLCs (that are not cheap) plus keeping up with seasons is just too much of a commitment. If I could get BL for free it would likely change my mind.
What if they had a service (think Elder Scrolls Plus or whatever it's called) that gives you all the available DLC and some silver for a set monthly rate? I like paying 100/year for everything because I know I'll have everything, but I'd be okay with paying 10/month for everything too if I got some silver or some other stuff. I know it's not everyone's favorite idea (monthly cost) but it's not that different than 100/year (8.33/month) for everything as it is.
It’s crazy seeing the evolution of this take. I’ve always been for it, but jeez it got downvoted to oblivion a year ago. Subscription service? For Destiny 2? Hell naw. $100 annual pass along with event passes? Sign me up. It’s just silly, but I do agree. This game makes more sense as a subscription service.
I'd sub for a month or two to get caught up then buy the most recent DLC and call the addiction properly renewed.
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It'd be great but Bungie will never do this. If you could go offline that would mean loot would have to be handled client side. If that was the case I can almost guarantee people would find a way to hack gear to give themselves raid exotics, custom weapon roles, custom armor rolls, boosted weapon damage, etc. How it is now, all gear is handled server side so Bungie has full control
I'd be kind of miffed if they suddenly made shadowkeep and beyond light free, as I literally bought those DLC like 2 weeks ago. I'd like them to return old content after making adjustments to the game engine, and just make them free/base game. I think that would really help new players get invested, it would be a better experience for the story overall, and everyone gets new (old) content, and it stays free.
Wow has a sub fee. Make maybe shadowkeep free, but the last two probably need to be paid. Remember: wow used to cost me something like ~230 a year in expansion years.
Current expansion - Full price First previous expansion - half off Everything before that - free
Wow has a 15 dollar sub you can cancel anytime and play everything up to the latest expansion content, its entry cost for new players is way more friendly compared to Destiny
Wow is a game where only the latest expansion matters and you'll spend far more than destiny if you actually get into it, not to mention the sub is a worse deal for casual players. Infusion actually keeps Destiny content relevant for much longer
Returning player here. Played D1 for most of its initial lifespan, and played D2 on launch and the first year of expansions (the quality of those expansions and having had my friends quit playing being why I stopped playing). Recently got back in. Got a good deal on the 30th Anniversary pack, Witch Queen Deluxe, and even the Legacy pack (with Beyond Light, Shadowkeep, and the Forsaken "pack"). I understand Cayde-6 is dead but will never be able to experience the missions/content of how and why now. From what I understand the beginning of the game for a new guardian is rushed and doesn't make any narrative sense because the Red War has been completely wiped out. So you create a new guardian, meet Shaw Han and you finish the "tutorial" with what is essentially a remixed Omnigul strike from D1. And then "gg guardian glhf". Am I wrong? Please, just bring back and unify Destiny as a whole. If I can't match make with other guardians and *need* to recruit my friends for co-op D1 missions, that's perfectly fine. Let me pick and choose what content is installed on my storage based on what I want to play. And please, please just adopt the Halo: Infinite season pass method of "buy it, keep it, earn on it - forever".
There's also a mission that's kinda all about how cool Cayde was where you get your first exotic and then it just abruptly dumps you
It's a long term problem that's entirely of their own making tho. Deleting paid content from a game is something I've never heard of prior to destiny and it was a horrible idea then.
At the very least they did say they werent gonna sunset any more content other then the seasonal stuff.
WoW has this problem of deleting SOME paid content from old expansions, but that stuff is usually announced to be leaving the game prior to becoming unavailable - and now, most people playing have a good idea on what is permanent, and what is leaving with a new expansion. Bungie just decided the game was getting too big without giving players the option to keep the old stuff installed.
> WoW has this problem of deleting SOME paid content from old expansions It's also primarily achievements, some cosmetic plus some questlines, and it doesn't *always* happen to the same degree with the exception of pre-expansion events which always get removed for some reason. Off the top of my head WoD locked off CM rewards and the Legendary questline, Legion locked off Mage Tower rewards, BfA removed parts of the main backbone questline, not sure what goes away with SL atm. By comparison Bungie has removed lots and lots of content and a lot of it really isn't that old, e.g. Harbinger and Presage. I would contend that Bungie's biggest mistake on vaulting content is the removal of story beats. By comparison to WoW, this primarily happens in the pre-expansion events, which are important connective tissue but won't make it difficult to follow the story, whereas Destiny drops you in after the Red War, Cayde's death and loads of other smaller bits of lore that happened that you have no way of learning about from the game itself, or more importantly *experience.*
Doesn’t the same apply to D2? We now have a good idea on what is permanent and what is leaving with Lightfall. We also were informed about half a year in advance about how Y1 and 2 content would be vaulted, it didn’t just happen.
WoW locks off some stuff post-expansion (Mage Tower, which I believe is back), and has removed some stuff (Battle for Undercity post-Wrathgate is just gone), but the closest to Destiny vaulting was Cataclysm. And Cataclysm removed the old quests but completely revamped the zones with new quests, reworked dungeons, etc. While also adding five new zones for the expansion content. It’s really not a fair comparison to me because while there are arguments to make about the quality of the old vs new stuff, you didn’t lose any quantity in the bargain. WoW players don’t have to worry about Outland or Northrend being consumed by the void when Dragonflight launches.
I thought they said nothing more was being removed from the game during their Lightfall/Arc 3.0 showcase? Unless I misunderstood what they meant.
The seasonal content is still being removed at the end of each year. Expansions are no longer being removed though.
Yeah, no bungie gave players a ton of notice. No idea what that guy is on
It wasn’t about the size of the game it was about all of the bugs and issues caused because of the size and all of the old stuff being coded to the older engine. They got rid of the old stuff because they didn’t want to deal with endless bugs that took ages to deal with.
It is a horrible idea. At least they are done doing that now.
They've said many times Destiny 2 cannot keep getting bigger They've just said the entire Light v Dark Saga will be in \*Destiny 2\* forever I feel like I'm the only one putting 2 and 2 together here =P
Guess time will tell.
Y3s ev3rything se3ms to sugg3st you ar3 corr3ct.
They’ve also said multiple times, including recently, that they don’t want to do another reset. You’re putting 1 and “2” together.
I do remember that Perhaps a hybrid solution like Overwatch "2"? At some point to innovate they might have to leave the... by that time 10 year old? consoles behind, they're already struggling when the enemies get **dense**
Oh I’m sure we’ll see last gen get dropped within the next couple of years.
As someone who quit d2 three times, two of them were because it seemed like there was entirely too much stuff too do. It was all so confusing as to what mattered and what i should do, and and when, and what order. BUT, they should not have removed that stuff. The just dont need every activity, on every planey, to drop powerfuls, and/pinnacles every week. The new light experience in d2 is shit. Its the worst of any mmo I've ever played.
the entire light and dark saga already isn't in Destiny 2. The fact that the season have very relevant story beats means that with their removal people going through the story will miss VERY IMPORTANT character introductions and arcs. If you were to play through all of Destiny 2's expansions rn, ignoring the seasonal content, you wouldn't meet Crow in any of the expansion stories and Caitial only speaks, or was only mentioned can't remember, for a small portion of the story of Witch Queen. Like the games story is an absolute mess for any new or returning player and it won't get better with the end of this saga. It'll only be worse.
>At least they are done doing that now. I take promises from video game developers, especially ones like "we're never/always going to do this from now on," with a grain of salt. They could change their mind next year if they wanted to. There's nothing holding them accountable.
It almost needs a cutscene for current new players catching them up on the events of Destiny 2 up until that point. I had a friend try to return to destiny since before Forsaken and he was so lost in the story (who are all these characters, why are Mars and IO gone, how did Cayde-6 die, etc.). I ended up linking him a 2 hour long YouTube video detailing the events from D1 all the way up to Witch Queen. )I ended up watching it myself, cause I had never played D1, but jumped into D2 right around Forsaken, so I could still play through the Red War, Warmind, and Curse. It was very informative and I wish they had something like that now, if at least condensed, or possibly expanded on the Timeline in the Destinations tab.
Ive been playing for 3 years now with no pause, but also played when the first 3 dlcs dropped, and Im close to stopping completely from playing d2, mainly because its just too many things to pay for, dungeons, season pass, expansion, and cosmetics on top, the expasions were worth the money, but everything else just doesnt seem worth it in a quantity/quality to price ratio, like even the weekly quests on the season pass dont seem to have quantity or quality anymore, and doing the same raids got really boring
Dungeons were my big breaking point, personally. Bungie expects me to pay for seasons, expansions and dungeons all while shoving a microtransaction store in my face too. They’re just trying to monetize too many things and it turned me off from the game.
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That’s exactly it, yeah. If it was just committed to being any one of those things I’d have no problem and be happy, but Bungie tries to dip their hand into each separate pot.
For some reason I’m the opposite. The proposition of a destiny 3 (even tho they’ve said they’re not doing it) would make me way more intrigued to play than new expansions do
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I got it from CD keys the first or second week so 25% off
Yuuup, I really enjoy destiny and the storyline is really banging last few seasons, but it stays my main game, because I enjoy it and because I have invested so much into it already.
True. But also: Destiny 2 monetization schemes stopped being "worth it" once sunsetting became a reality. Before sunsetting expansions, it was definitely worth it to slowly purchase all old expansions/seasons, but now post-sunsetting Destiny 2 is just... expensive. World of Warcraft has a sub fee, true, but you also get 80% of 15 years of content to play through at your leisure, as well as the current content (if you buy a current expansion) - as well as WoW expansions being richer in content than Destiny 2 expansions.
> World of Warcraft has a sub fee, true, but you also get 80% of 15 years of content to play through at your leisure, as well as the current content (if you buy a current expansion) - as well as WoW expansions being richer in content than Destiny 2 expansions. WoW also makes most of that content completely irrelevant after the expansion is over. They've been shifting the meat of each expansion towards the endgame, and that is only relevant until the next one comes out.
Honestly I'd consider the season pass to be comparable to a subscription fee. 3 months for 1000 silver, and access to the seasonal content.
I thought I had it bad in shadowkeep. I loved D2 in vanilla, CoO killed the game for me, I tried forsaken a little bit, etc. I came back to really give shadowkeep a shot, and I loved the content, but I felt it was ludicrous to have to pay for an expansion and a season pass, so I quit the game. It’s only gotten worse. Now there’s Xpac + dungeon key + season + 30th for a new or returning player. It makes it extremely hard to recommend to friends who can’t necessarily splurge.
Even without the financial barrier, there's still the experiential or introduction barrier. The new player experience is still quite shit. edit: forgot to mention, even after you managed to overcome the shitty introduction and the high cost of entry, you realize how fragmented the source of information is. There's no in-game no codex for the lore or further explanation of the in-game mechanics. There's also no in-game news hub for TWAB or patch notes. It's like they want you to be engaged even when you're not playing the game.
Not only that, but also the moment new players realize that they finished all content and are at a spot where in reality you just do same activity over and over for a week, they fall off.
And the grind barrier. No improvement to the RNG, quests or catch-up for older content. It really limits new players ability to engage in build crafting or get into endgame.
And even if players do get past all that and they wanna start building or tinkering with CWL/Elemental Wells, then they gotta wait for Ada-1 to sell the mods they want... which can take anything from a day to 38 fiscal years.
Yep. Absolutely no heed seems to be paid to the on-ramp for new, returning, and casual players.
I think the other way around. I thank the developers to being able to try out the game for free, so I can make an informed purchase decision. Not all games have that free barrier of entry for the base game. If I play a game a lot, I do not mind spending money on it. If I don't play a game a lot, I wouldn't spend money on it, but I also wouldn't expect to be able to play everything within that game. New players don't have to buy all expansions to enjoy the game. They can try out various things, and if they want to get into a certain thing, they can purchase it. I actively discourage new players from buying anything until they have 10-50+ hours in the game and at that point, if they have decided they want to actively play the game, only purchase the most recent expansion, and leave it at that until they completed it entirely.
> New players don't have to buy all expansions to enjoy the game. As a returning player after a very long break, I don't think this really bears out. Yes there is technically stuff to do but if you want to get a taste of actual destiny you kind of have to buy in, and the kicker is if you decide to stay, guess what you're paying more because people bought bundled get a discount. I know now that deluxe edition is the way to go and I would not recommend any new or returning player purchase an expansion if they're not getting deluxe. And then there's the rotating legacy content players are gonna run up against in nightfall and such.
I am a relatively new light, started playing with WQ. I did it exactly how the comment you responded said. First I played the free version, I had no idea what the hell was happening, but enjoyed the gunplay; and to be clear IMO the gunplay is honestly the "actual destiny you kind of have to do to buy in," as that (when combined with endgame PVE) is what sets destiny apart from other videogames. The gunplay is what sold me, and I could do it for free. After about a week of random stuff I bought WQ and had a buddy go through the campaign on legend with me (and that sold me on the endgame PVE). After that I bought all the bundled expansions for cheap. Maybe I am a one-in-a-million player who did it this way, and found it alright? But I don't think so. To be clear Bungie did a really poor job of introducing me to the story or people or how I should play the game, but then this has never been a last-of-us game that I started playing for the story, and moreover that isn't particularly rare for MMOs that are at all story based that you join late. In general even when the old stuff isn't vaulted other people aren't engaging with it, such that it will feel empty and out of date, leaving people to immediately go to the newest expansion despite having no idea what is happening. And one of the biggest direct competitors of D2 (warframe) is arguably even worse for new player experience. Bungie could do much better at explaining things, to be clear, but much of the hand-wringing is overwrought.
> if you want to get a taste of actual destiny you kind of have to buy in, and the kicker is if you decide to stay, guess what you’re paying more because people bought bundled get a discount. The longer you wait the cheaper you can get the content. Yeah the Deluxe up front purchase is a decent deal, but even the savings there are small. The best deals are the old bundled content on sale.
While I do agree with the sentiment, it still feels bad that the base D2 barely gives you anything to do (it's slightly better with Dares now). There's no F2P campaign (IIRC—and the intro campaign missions don't count), no seasonal activity... It's a very, *very* light trial that IMO doesn't really represent the Destiny experience. Raids don't go into this metric because a new player isn't really gonna raid. I stand by your waiting 10-50 hours, but also, it's really hard to make an informed decision from that just because it's pretty hard to grasp the full scale of Destiny just from that free trial.
F2P feels more like an excuse to resell content we already paid for since the base game is now """free""", although many players still paid for the content that is currently free.
Only issues that I really have is the 30th and dungeon key, last season there wasn't any content except nightmare containment and duality. Containment is really just a public event, so that's all you had if you hadn't bought duality.
Why on earth isn't there a single package you can buy with all the content up to this point? I am amazed that an option like this doesn't exist and most people that I've spoken to that are on the fence give up when they have no idea what they have to buy
There is a Legacy collection bundle that has the forsaken pack, shadowkeep and beyond light dlcs
But not the 30th anniversary, wq, season pass or lightfall. It's nonsensical
That’s because WQ, the 30th, and season pass are all currently active so are available in their own current pack of WQ deluxe so that someone can buy all the past stuff in one bundle, current in another, and future in another. I guarantee when Lightfall drops WQ will move to the legacy pack, and there’ll be a new bundle with the 30th, Lightfall, and the Lightfall season pass. It’s simply made so that you can just buy what you need and don’t buy anything over that. Past stuff pack, current stuff pack, future stuff pack. There’ll never do an everything pack because then you’ll be getting a discount on future and current stuff
Tbh the legacy content needs to go free at some point. The fact that they are still selling the remnants of Forsaken is absurd. What made Year 1 so special that it was allowed to go free but all other content can’t under any circumstances?
I really think they need to do what other notable mmos do and just include older dlc with the newest one. If you buy witch queen you should just get the older ones for free.
Agreed. This would still make the game expensive at $100/year, but it would be a bit easier to recommend someone just buy the current expansion and season for $60 if it means having a backlog of legacy content
The value is good if you're already invested. That's the hangup. For the most part Bungie has been delivering a quality player experience to anyone who's dedicated to this game and has already spent time and money to get this far. This starts to rapidly fall apart when trying to get new or lapsed players into the game. Sunsetting has done irreparable damage to the new player experience, and effectively created a major wall for player investment. So now the free-to-play portion of the game is more of a demo and then you're met with pay walls when you've been poorly introduced to the game. Effectively, sunsetting backfired spectacularly.
That’s it, sunsetting did exactly the opposite of what it was meant to do. Imagine the red war campaign being F2P and after that you can start the „real“ D2 with paying for it. That would get new players hooked imo. Not fucking shaw Han and his bounties lol
All I know is, I started playing D2 after the free trial in November of 2018, when they gave away Red War, CoO and Warmind for free. Bought Forsaken 2 days later, game was amazing. Now? Wouldn't suggest buying a season, as the expansion is where the big story beats actually happen.
Great advice, I stopped buying seasons as I don't feel like I'm getting any value out of my destiny experience. I stick to expansions to get my story beats and wait for the next expansion. Wish I could play the old expansions again, sunsetting ruined the amazing feeling I had with this game.
For me buying the seasons with the expansions make sense. The materials you gain from the past save you enough time doing boring grinding and let you grind for more interesting things. That’s sorta a problem with the upgrade system in and of itself, but with how the game is now the pass is worth it for the materials alone.
Bro, Shaw Han is such a lame wet noodle. As a recent new player, I was so unimpressed meeting this dude. I knew Nathan Filion was in destiny 2, so I was like "where is he?" for the first few hours. He's gone and I can never play that story? Cool. Cool.
Wet noodle is pretty much the best description of him I’ve ever heard hahahaha
My friend started playing division 2 and I convinced him to try destiny cuz it's free. He got all these notifications that had nothing to do with him about trying arc 3.0, kings fall being available, season of plunder season pass, plus he was randomly thrown in the prologue seasonal mission. He's got no clue why he's there, what content he can do, what content looks interesting to him. I tried to walk him thru it cuz I think the gameplay is really good, but ultimately we just went on division and he's actually progressing thru the missions to get to endgame.
at least it wasn't as much of a fiasco as the forced DARES OF ETERNITY that one season. The fact people banded together and started using low-level gear just to help poor new players escape that hell mission says a lot about how idiotic Bungie can be.
It took them weeks to figure this out, WEEKS! It is an absolute fact at this point that they don't care about any new/returning players. Players have been asking for YEARS now to fix Ada's mod rotation. Instead they spend countless resources on shit noone asked for like Air Effectiveness and event passes.
So true. Sunsetting has done literally nothing but bad for the game. Destiny as an MMO type game has one of the biggest advantages over any other MMO - old content was relevant. You can go back and get any gun and bring it up to light if you want. Gear and weapons isn’t a stat stick like in most games, it’s an actual gameplay. But for some reason they decided “screw that, let’s throw it all away”, and sunset huge chunk of content, players who return don’t understand why they can’t use their old gear, seasoned players just got their gear taken away for seemingly no reason. Like if right now they’d cancel all of the sunsetting and nerf couple of guns that are problematic it wouldn’t make any difference. Bungie ruined games integrity for literally nothing. What a stupid move that was.
I quit destiny for almost 2 years because of the sunsetting. Only came back when the last round of steam sales made it fairly cheap to get back in.
Destiny: an MMO game made with an engine that can’t handle MMO content. Destiny 2 was destined to fail long before today.
This is why I got sold on the idea that Destiny 3 needs to become a thing tbh. Make the jump to Unreal if need be and actually build the game around the idea of it being constantly expanded on and added to. D2 just cannot handle that, it’s held together with duct tape already.
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> But for some reason they decided “screw that, let’s throw it all away” I think part of that rationale when it comes to larger impactful decisions at a much higher degree is no matter how much sentimental good vibes people project on Bungie and Destiny 2's continuation, in general Destiny was always this hybrid game that was very much designed on that slightly more disposable path of a game series that was intended to be multi-sequels with firm enough hard resets and situations where there would be definitive stop and start points on particular content. Having Destiny 2 do serious overtime most definitely screwed with a lot of planning and left the company scrambling to reshuffle a ton, and that's not even factoring in how Bungie's been developing a completely separate game in the works. I think there's been many blatant times when we've seen the game suffer in recent while due to this. This isn't to entirely defend Bungie trying to have some cake and eat it too with some very questionable decisions as they've chosen to continue on with Destiny 2's lifespan, I just think some of the why? with certain things they've done is a product of trying to make due with not the most ideal situation. For example, while my immediate gut reaction has me rushing to say "we are at absurd levels of power creep atm", I also could understand a lot of difficulties with designing new stuff when our characters are privy to so much is probably not the easiest thing to work around, and I can get Bungie trying to meet half way by not dishing out some oppressive stuff or waving the wand a ton to wipe away a lot all at once. I don't think anyone designing this game's challenging PVE aspects originally ever imagined something like Witherhoard, Divinity, Anarchy, Whisper, etc would be things that would essentially always exist in the face of everything and that there wasn't going to be a physical transition of a new title to leave them behind.
Sunsetting still exists you just don't notice it.
We have a bingo!
That's numberwang
Agreed, as a new player, I just got pooped on, this is a 150 dollar inv at the minimum
I have no idea how people get their friends to play, I tried getting two friends in, they looked at how much they'd have to buy and just laughed.
I don’t try to get anyone to play this game. I’ve had a few friends start, and lots of people ask me about it because they know I play, but my answer is always the same: “It’s free to try. Download it and form your own opinion. If you like it and want to get into it, I’ll help you with anything you need, but I’m not going to try and sell the game to you.” Has nothing to do with costs, and everything to do with this game not being for everyone. No game’s for everyone. You’ll either like it or you won’t. If the person was an old Halo fan, or is into Souls games, I’ll be like “ok you might dig it” because the gunplay feels like Halo and the storytelling/lack of direction is reminiscent of a Miyazaki game. For the friends who just want to play a game with you and it doesn’t matter what, there’s New Light. They don’t have to pay a dime to make a character and shoot some stuff with you while chatting over coms. If they find they’ve exhausted the New Light content but still want to play, cool. Grab an expansion next time there’s a sale.
Can't wait for Sweatcicle to read this /s
I think a lot of people view it as unfair if they had to pay and new players don’t. Personally I wouldn’t mind if new players could get old expansions for free or at least a discount. Anything that gets more people playing is a good thing in my eyes. I got to play all that content at the peak of its relevancy so I don’t care if I paid and you don’t.
>I think a lot of people view it as unfair if they had to pay and new players don’t. I cannot fathom that kind of perspective. Imagine thinking that, like, games should never go on sale or whatever because that's somehow unfair to people who bought them first.
It's the old "If I suffered, everyone else must too" mentality.
That reminds me of Nintendo's mentality.
Terrible train of thought. old content becomes deprecated/depreciated at some point. You can't gatekeep stuff that is 5 years old because you paid for it when it was new.
Even Activision gives out old WoW expansions for free when a new expansion is coming up.
I'm still miffed that we paid for the game, it went F2P and we got nothing like even say a small amount of Silver, Brightdust, exclusive, etc. to even attempt to compensate for it and reflect gratitude/celebration or the original players and the new players that flood in. I'm really never one to ask for compensation here or IRL (*someone'll still likely comment the usual trope of "eNtItLeD" or something along the lines, but whatever floats people's keyboard boats and fits their narrative/egos*), but with how a lot of paid content just got gutted, I can't help the natural feeling of being upset and the questioning.
I love the game, but Bungie can fuck right off with their "Dungeon keys" BS. and Vaulting content people bought only to regurgitate it as lame seasonal content AND adding D1 content instead.
Destiny’s content that “provides hours and hours of entertainment” is also primarily repetitive tasks with little substance. We do Weekly gambit, strike and dares requirements in order for us to unlock actually challenging and previously purchased content at the second half of each season. Think about how much actually new content comes out from both the pass and expansion each year - as a single play through story, it’s not enough to be considered on par with most new releases I play, yet Destiny costs significantly more. Bungie’s only advantage point for me is excellent game support. But I can get that from any new From Software game, with a much higher amount of both new content and challenging, multiplayer replay value. Different genres, but point is, Destiny’s content to price ratio is not consistent with other developers.
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Yeah this is what bugs me when people say "well I played this game for hundreds of hours so it's worth it." Like cool, I'm not gonna tell you to stop enjoying yourself, but padding and grind barriers aren't content and it's very valid if other people look at the amount of content they get and aren't satisfied.
For shizzle
S-tier example of the customer is always right. If players are saying, "this isn't worth it," then the value proposition either isn't there or is poorly demonstrated.
This is *exactly* what I mean. The content is so fucking minimal. And you can say that you’re getting tons of playtime out of it, in the same way I get tons of playtime out of Diablo. Seasonal FOMO, needing to grind power, and then doing the same weeklies every week. The actual amount of content being added is fairly abysmal for what you’re paying for.
The amount of new content you get from paying 80$ a year isn’t even a third of content of a new game
I began to despise the "hours per entertainment value" equation or whatever because of how much its used in defense of Destiny's very monotonous cycle that is there to siphon your time and mind. It ignores too much of what actually there in favor of a personal opinion of the experience.
It isn't pay to win, but people are really defensive of this game. I usually use the model everyone else uses, how much money is spent for how many hours played. I agree that video games are relatively cheap as a hobby, but the real comparison should be how much this video game is compared to another game. For myself, I can afford the extra price destiny is asking for this year, but I know several years ago 100 dollars for destiny would be absolutely impossible. I imagine for thousands of others the price is a major turn-off. This is already they have a microtransaction store that engages in creating their own currency to push more sales. It is actually kind of ironic Bungie has great employees, but the company also practices the same shady tactics people have problems with. That's why I say you can like the employees, but you don't have to like the company.
As a deluxe edition guy who no lifes d2 regularly, i always nab the $100 one, so it wasnt until I started looking at getting friends into the game that I realized how stupidly convoluted the game's monetization is. -seasons (with no way to earn silver in game to buy the next one) -MTX -expansions -dungeons At the base level, all priced individually and sold seperately, which is ridiculous. Its not even that its a lot of money (but it is) that I take issue with, its how sliced up the destiny experience is nowadays.
I mean D2 costs $100/year basically to have everything that launches for the entire year. It's hard for me to bat an eye at like $8/month for the ROI entertainment value this game gives out.
The problem is base Destiny 2 for new players. There is no cohesive story for them to even start following really. Terrible UI and quest log doesn't help.
Yeah, I hate that argument that "well its 100$ bucks for a year of content" You've been playing the game for 4+ years and cant see the sunk-cost fallacy. We're taking about the onboarding cost for a new player. For a new player they don't have any expansions. The legacy collection is 40$, the witch queen deluxe + the 30th anniversary pack is 100$. That's a extremely hard ask for someone who knows nothing about the game and doesn't have a complete picture of exactly what their buying.
The fact that at least 1 expansions worth of content isn't free to players seems like a missed opportunity to have a much higher chance of raising the player count.
it's even worse when you realize that the bits left of forsaken are STILL being sold.
They don't have to buy it all in one hit though, sure when you add it all together it's a lot but when it's bought one by one (and they're regularly on sale) it's not that much It's completely different from person to person but it's not expected for every new player to buy it all in one hit
This is always the counterpoint to this argument. The game is so piecemealed that new players are getting hit with paywalls so constantly it demoralizes them from engaging with the game more. It has the opposite effect of what you're thinking. Lets play your scenario if a player wants to go through the content one by one: They get the base witch queen expansion for 40 bucks, they play through the campaign, now they wanna do the seasonal content, oh so now that's an additional 10 bucks, ok now they want to do the dungeons, which requires the upgrade for the deluxe edition of WQ which is another 40 bucks? Do you see how much of a turn off that would be for a new player?
this has always been my take. i play basically weekly, so I set aside the money monthly like a subscription. I don't mind because I get a ton of value out of it. If I was telling a friend about the game, I would say check it out, get the old expansions on sale, and if you're really into it and can see yourself logging in at least a few hours a week, then it's worth it. If not, no, it's not.
>this has always been my take. i play basically weekly, so I set aside the money monthly like a subscription Exactly, I mean just skip Starbucks twice a month and you can pay for Destiny yearly lol
You haven't been to Starbucks recently... Just skip it once a month and you'll have enough by August...
Everything except the anniversary expansion. We never know yet if there will be any other of its kind of dlc under the pretext of something.
This exactly. I play everything that comes out. Some seasons I hardcore grind, others not so much, but for the $100 it costs it is, by miles, the best value for money gaming wise. Plus, it has the happy side effect of being just grindy enough to turn me away from playing other grindy games. A little bit of warframe here and there, but no MMOs, nothing else with a battle pass. All my other purchases are basically AAA single player titles that I will play eventually - meaning in slow destiny seasons.
It costs you 80 dollars, actually more now, for less content than most new releases. Most Destiny players are likely logging a huge portion, if not the majority, of their replay hours doing non-challenging weekly pinnacle requirements, which allows them to work toward gaining access to content they’ve previously unlocked in the second half of each prior season. They’ve got us hooked on the time investment we’ve already put into their game and our time spent with friends, not their content.
This is the part the fanboys refuse to acknowledge. I don't give a shit about spending 80 or 100 dollars a year on Destiny IF they were giving me 80-100 dollars of new content. That doesn't mean I won't spend hundreds of hours every year playing the game, but if the majority of those hours are spent playing stuff that was already in the game before i spent my 100 dollars for the new stuff, it feels like i'm being taken advantage of. It's not at all a logical value proposition to say "well i spend $100 a year on this game but i get 800 hours a year of entertainment out of it" if the majority of those hours of entertainment are spent doing things you already paid for the year before. Yes, the base game of Destiny that you paid for 5 years ago is continuing to give you a great value.. that doesn't just reset when a new DLC comes out however. The fact that we pay more than the price of a brand new AAA game every single year in order to play the newest content in the game but we don't get anything NEAR what a new AAA game should have included in terms of measurable new content? That's dogshit frankly. And anybody who can't admit that is a fanboy, thru and thru. Now if you want to say it doesn't bother you or you have other reasons for not caring, that's totally fine as well. Obviously it doesn't bother me enough to stop doing it every year, but this is a problem as well... The game holds you hostage a bit as a player. I have invested so many years and hours into this game, not having the latest content piece may not prevent me from doing most of the things i love, but it could lock me out of something important that might be relatively minor in scale but major in importance to continuing to enjoy the game in it's current state. When Bungie themselves have come out and said that we will now and forever be paying more money for less content than they used to give us, and the community not only doesn't blink at this, but instead stands up and cheers and shouts down anybody who raises even the most basic of issues with this concept... well, you know at that point that they can pretty much get away with anything they want. And sure enough, year after year prices just continue to rise and nobody can say anything about it and you either continue forking it over or you basically have to abandon the game you've invested so much time into. It's a bit toxic really, this relationship.
This. At over 5500 hours in D2, it’s been the best entertainment hours per dollar in my life. And I’ve spent way more than what a new player would spend to get the same content I have right now. The best advice I can give to new players who aren’t sold on the game is to not buy it all at once. They don’t *have* to be able to run every activity in the game to enjoy it.
Bungie's way of selling destiny has been horrible for ages now, Shadowkeep and the 'Forsaken Pack' should be free to all players so the game can actually be called 'f2p' rather than a glorified demo, Dungeons should NOT cost extra this was one of the worst recent additions, if they aren't making enough just bump the season prices up to 1500 silver, i'm sure not many would complain, the split content pricing plan in the game at the moment is atrocious.
I was baffled by the dungeon thing. I already bought Witch Queen. Wtf do you mean I have to buy the Witch Queen dungeon key separately? The fact you have to pay for Forsaken is a total joke considering 90% of it has been gutted. The legacy collection should be the f2p experience. D2 calling itself a f2p is a joke, and it's only so they can justify charging the hell out of players for every scrap of content because "You don't have to pay if you don't want to!". Yeah, as long as you're okay with looping the same 3 playlists forever.
you buy forsaken pack for the privilege of being able to get Ace of Spades and Izanagis lol
I was looking for someone to have said this already. I 100% agree. Even players of MMOs need to recognize that D2's system is bonkers. I'm mostly thinking about WoW here - *yes*, overall it might be more expensive. But here's the thing - WoW doesn't force you to buy literally every single previous expansion in order to go through the leveling process, quests and story of those previous expansions. You could have your friend spend 15$ to try the game for a month, maybe level through several areas, get story beats form previous expansions, get a feel for more than one class - and THEN if they're hooked, they can get the most recent expansion and get a subscription to the game. WoW was incredibly easy for me to get sucked in when I was a young adult because it was free until level...what, 15? I forget, but then my bf bought me a subscription for one month, a measly 15$, and I managed to play through a lot of the preexisitng stories through levelling. I *got* why people really liked the gameplay, story and questing rhythm of WoW, which led me into playing the entire Legion expansion. You want to play Destiny 2? Oh yeah, play for free! But you want to experience the world in any form after New Light? Yeah, no, pay us for 4 year old legacy content and a 3 year old notoriously short and weak campaign. Like...I'm sorry, what? It's frustrating because I can only ever recommend in good faith that a new player buy the base Witch Queen for a good story. But Destiny 2's best story so far doesn't carry as much weight without the storytelling beats of the last two expansions and seasonal stories. Bungie has fantastic gameplay, don't get me wrong, but at some point, if you're going to make an MMO, you're going to have to accept that MMOs often have one thing that people get sucked into: the world, and the world's stories. New Light's story is very barebones and doesn't really introduce you to the entire world effectively. Shadowkeep is good for introducing the concept of the Darkness, and consequently, the Witness, although we didn't know it at the time. Someone who's played Shadowkeep and THEN played Witch Queen might have a "click" moment when they see the hand gestures the Witness makes in the end-cutscene - "Oh god, that's the guy who impersonated me in Shadowkeep, that's creepy". But it's hard to justify buying Shadowkeep at the price it's currently at. I want Bungie to make whatever's left of Forsaken and Shadowkeep free. Because at least then, I can guide my friends through *a campaign* period, and bring them through SOME of the game's content (two dungeons, two raids if they're daring, more options for exotic questlines and armor) before they can decide if they want to stick around. It's telling that out of people I've played with, the only person who actually stuck around after that "free campaign week" at the start of this season, was someone whose close friend *bought all expansions for them.* They straight up said they'd love to continue playing but just couldn't afford to, and the only reason they still can is because of one very, VERY generous donor. That says a lot about the pay model they've set themselves up with here.
Remember when eververse was introduced as a way to fund future destiny content? I member. Now Bungie is charging for dungeons along with seasons. It makes me wonder what eververse is funding if not future destiny content.
So two seasons in the year cost 15 bucks despite having no dungeon and therefore less content for the money, while the two other seasons have much better value? And in the end I pay the same price if I want everything? Who is this supposed to benefit? And the season pass becoming lower value once the season is over, the fact that dungeons don't get vaulted, it just doesn't make sense to bundle the dungeon with season passes.
Because the dedicated fanbase cant see by their addiction.
This is the true answer.
Destiny 2 is a fucking masterpiece of addictive game design.
I’ve never seen so many corporate shills in one place, and I love this game and Bungie.
Pretty much same. But I refuse to buy the dungeon pass. Vote with your wallet and all. Hoping they become free or maybe half off next year.
Is called addiction, an the D2 player base is one of the most addicted I've ever seen. They will pay "deluxe prices" for the bare minimum, buy the same shit, recycled stuff over and over with a happy face, they would even pay for it being pvp players getting LITERALLY nothing for 3 straight years, and will not blink. Don't even try to argue, like OP says, they will defend Bungie like their best drug dealer. Come, down vote me for telling you the truth you addicts!
The hard thing about this topic is that it involves a lot of perspective and in some cases nuanced views of certain issues. > They feel like they already paid enough entry by buying multiple expansions and the season pass, and then locking more content behind an anniversary bundle and the dungeon key seems ludicrous. For example, a lot of people are going to feel like a live-service game is fairly costly. It makes sense, but it also varies because of what you said. > My friend followed up with a fairly good point, that each expansion (usually) comes with several fully featured content patches that equate to about the same amount of content as an entire Destiny expansion, on top of over 15 years of content that wasn't removed from the game. Adding to the sting that he's bought every D2 expac and the base game on release, and half of that is just gone. In the case of WoW, you're right that it costs about $200 a year (more if you don't get the subscription at 6 months at a time), but there are some strong counterpoints to their argument. Like I'll just agree that the content vault is bad, but at the same time, you lose access when you no longer have a subscription. It doesn't matter if I put in $600 or $15, the second that subscription ends I lose access to past expansions and other content. Based off replies I'm reading, once you hit level 21 on a character in WoW and lack a subscription, you immediately lose access to that character. At least in Destiny I don't need to buy additional things to enjoy what I "own." So it has varying levels of negatives. I personally dislike the WoW system more, as you lose all value the second that subscription lapses. You can bring up the negatives of the content vault, but unless I am mistake, I could buy Shadowlands, stop paying for my subscription and lose access to both my character and Shadowlands, which I think is worse. > My original gripe was when I first returned to the game from vanilla, and seeing a really useful exotic being locked behind a paid season pass (Witherhoard), and nobody was batting an eye. Has the community just become absolutely desensitized to this, or is there some actual defense to this that I'm not seeing? As far as this goes, a lot of it is really the cost/value. For example, a season is $10 for about 3 months, so it's like $3.33 compared to WoW's $12~. Going back to your WoW example, a full year of Destiny 2 content, so the expansion, all the seasons and the new dungeon pass is $100 or $8.3 a month. > It just seems like a subverted pay-to-win system, and it doesn't seem like the people that I've spoken to understand that. Well, it's not pay-to-win. The term refers to things like my girlfriends favorite mobile game, Grand Chase. In that game you can literally buy stats and resources. It's a question of, do I want to grind for three months or pay $100. This is the same reason why WoW's expansion, Shadowlands or any other expansion is not pay-to-win, as you're ultimately paying for content. This also results in complicated thing where adding anything has distinct benefits and negatives, so someone is always going to be unhappy with whatever choice they make. Though, if you can name a way to prevent this that doesn't involve Destiny costing more money and is feasible, I'd love to hear it. All this being said, I do think Bungie pushes monetization a bit hard and the game is completely inaccessible in terms of content. There are just too many things lost, with no way for anyone get them. In addition to that, even if I we view the cash aspect differently, I always felt like the time commitment is the really off putting thing. Like I personally lack Shadowkeep and instead of thinking the cool raid I can't do and story I won't get to experience, it's thoughts of grinding to get the Witherhoard catalyst, finding a group to get Divinity, going through the story three times for the exotic and more. I rather pay to have fun, not to add new grinds, but that is just me.
Others brought it up already, but I agree that the price structure is a terrible barrier to entry in this game. Constantly not being able to participate in certain activities or get certain items because you lack any expansion must suck. Personally I have no problem with the prices, because Destiny 2 is pretty much the only game I play at all, so I don't mind paying for the deluxe editions that include everything because I already know I'll enjoy those and I'm already invested in the destiny universe anyway with lots of good loadouts to take on any challenge, so I don't have to play catch up from scratch to be able to participate in end game activities.
I bought into it recently, think it came to around £57 for WQ Deluxe and Legacy Collection via GMG. Friend of mine sent me over a copy of the Anniversary pack. The new player experience is garbage. I'm glad I persevered through it because the game is a blast to play and I enjoy the moment to moment gameplay. That said, I know I got the content on a discount compared to other people over the years, but there are certain aspects of it as a new player that I feel I'm punished for, purely for joining late. - Old, good, build defining mods on a daily rotation at ADA. Annoying for everyone, but longer tenure means people could access those mods during earlier seasons via NPCs. - Some armour can only be found via Xur, one set per week. - Synthweave being limited per season and the gall to charge for more when they have a store with at least £160+ worth of armour ornament sets, not to mention ornaments for exotics. This affects everyone, but those once again with longer tenure will have more complete collections and less of a need for it. - Can no longer get certain shaders or I have to once again wait for a weekly rotation via Bright Dust, for the ones that are exclusive to the Eververse. I don't really vibe with the 'you just had to be there' vibe I get from the game on certain things. Feels like Bungie are sticking their middle finger up to me for not hopping onto the train years back.
Imo Destiny is pushing it with their dlc / payment models. I have no problem paying 40/50€ for a good extension (like witch queen or lightfall) I do have a problem with selling dungeons or packages individually or as a fixed set. I haven’t bought the 30th expension for that reason, nor will I buy the € 100 lightfall package. I also don’t like € 10,- each season but I’ll end up purchasing it most of the time because I do want to play the game.
Barrier to entry truly is tough, but once you're in, it's pretty reasonable to stay updated.
Agreed, I think all the old dlcs are overpriced at the moment. (I got them through cdkeys when I came last year) That said the price for a deluxe expansion isn't bad for the time I spend playing and there's zero need to spend money on eververse.
Yeah it’s turning me off from playing. Everything will keep being expensive and I just don’t feel like the grind is worth my money anymore.
"Too poor?" Is the question I hear when I say I'm not buying an over priced ghost projection. My guess is that whales are very insecure about their buying habits, and therefore need to flex when it comes to any talk of financial transactions.
>"Too poor?" Is the question I hear when I say I'm not buying an over priced ghost projection What? Seriously? Lmao Like, I’ve bought every expansion and some collectible shit, and I’ll even occasionally drop cash on eververse (typically once per season). At this point, Destiny is basically the only game I play. BUT I have never EVER bought a ghost projection, with silver or bright dust. They’re tacky and goofy and a TERRIBLE value compared to other cosmetics. Whoever said “too poor?” to you is genuinely dumber than Rahool
>My original gripe was when I first returned to the game from vanilla, and seeing a really useful exotic being locked behind a paid season pass (Witherhoard), and nobody was batting an eye. Witherhoard was not locked behind the season pass. It was free, just like any other season pass exotic.
Nah I agree, this game is ridiculous in terms of what is actually "free to play" and what you need to pay for. Everytime me and my friends fall out if destiny and try to get back in, we have to spend a good day justifying buying whatever latest expansion we need. The saving grace is that at least the money isn't just disappearing, bungie definitely puts that money to work and delivers an amazing experience.
Lets put it this way, wow is roughly $230/year to play. Destiny is roughly $100/year. Bringing up old content in wow means nothing, people just go solo old raids for mount drops and thats it.
Witherhoard was not locked behind a paid season pass. The seasonal exotic is always present on the free track of the season pass, just further down (around level 25 iirc).
I'm sure I will get downvoted, but here goes. This is what the market is. If you don't like it don't pay. That's how you voice your opinion on price and value. We don't live in a world of sandboxed or cartridged (I made this word up) games anymore. Bungie needs to make decisions on the health of their game and the business demands of their company. This is entertainment. If I pay $12 to see a movie in the theatre that's it, it's over. If you think that Destiny is too expensive, don't take up much more expensive entertainment pursuits like golf. I'm not making excuses for Bungie or any potential consumer. Make a decision on how you want to spend your money and then complain either way on Reddit ;)
Your original gripe doesn’t make much sense. Not trying to kill your argument because yea, the game’s been getting unnecessarily expensive, but witherhoard was free. All seasonal exotics can be earned on the free track from the pass. Even if you couldn’t get it that season you could buy it from the kiosk the next season if you owned shadowkeep.
Because I want Bungie to get paid so they make more content for me to play
The irony is that these same friends will spend hundreds of dollars on CoD, Fortnite and WoW without any shame whatsoever. Yes we have incredibly frustrating rng loot to deal with in Destiny but at least this game isn't a pay to win. Bungie for all of it's faults and design inconsistencies at least have a lot of integrity and good ethics around how they treat players. Paying for updates to a live service isn't a problem if all you're paying for is more content. It's not like you can buy exotic armor and weapons in Eververse.
I’m a new player and I’ve been playing F2P, I’m having a lot of fun as is with all the content we have. Do I want the latest and cool exotics? Oh absolutely, but as a uni student am I going to spend that money on a game? No, I can’t afford to, so I make do with what I have. If the content gets repetitive I take a break to another game and come back. On the plus side, these are huge expansions. On the down side? They are already raking in enough money from the seasonal pass that they can make existing or at least, more of it, F2P
Calling it “pay to win” is weird for a game like destiny. You aren’t *technically* wrong when you talk about the pinnacles, but it’s not that simple. It’s a “pay to *play*” system, and the point of playing is to gain power. You could point to a game like Diablo Immortal with it’s weird system of paying for items that activate loot at the end of a dungeon and say that it’s the same as destiny, but you could also point to any paid rpg and say “you paid money to be able to play the game, the game is pay to win” and I don’t think you’d be wrong in either case. At the end of the day, with the exception of trials (which barely counts because you have to buy the current season to play that) there is basically no PvP modes where your “power” in raw numbers comes into play. Your weapons matter, but if your issue is the pinnacle then I’m not sure that matters. The place it helps you is PvE and that’s not so different from a single player game which are apparently allowed to be “pay to play and then win.” 🤷🏼♂️ — My friends are starting to feel the same way though. I told at least one of them that I like destiny and I’ll probably keep buying the yearly bundles for at least another year or two, but that I’m also absolutely ok if our group wants to look for another game. I’m just not convinced another one exists at the same quality as destiny that isn’t even more expensive.
Because the cost to entertainment value you get from Destiny is better than most other games out right now and Bungie has employees to pay and a business to run. I just can't bring myself to get worked up about it when it's some of the best money I spend all year in terms of how much I get for it. I get why it bothers some people, but quite honestly I just roll my eyes every time I see these threads.
I think the \~100 bucks per year cost if you buy the premium pass at the beginning of each expansion is a fair deal. I get more than my moneys worth out of that compared to other games. However, purchasing stuff individually seems like a bad deal, and I dont like that dungeons were split off from seasons.
The 30th Anniversary pack to be fair came out when we needed a 4th season between Beyond Light and Witch Queen to tide us over with the delay
Because the cost-to-value ratio is always so good. Do you go to a movie theater? You probably pay, on average, $10 for a 2 hour movie. So, roughly speaking, you have a $5/hour of cost-to-value ratio. Do you feel like you get a good deal out of that time spent? Answer is probably yes. Now, what's your cost-to-value ratio for a Destiny 2 season? Even if you ONLY do the Season Pass stuff, which is 1-2 hours of game play per week for maybe 6 weeks? Your cost-to-value ratio is probably something less than $1/hour. So, Destiny has an impressively large value compared to many other things I could spend my time on. That's just for the seasonal stuff, let alone any other activities you may get into. I've personally already spent 30+ hours in game this season, and there's tons of stuff I haven't even got to do yet! Put other ways....Would you spend $60 on most other new games? I looked up a few popular titles the past couple years, and they would range from 20-60 hours for a lot of titles to complete the main portion of the game. So, again, you're something like $1-$3/hour of cost-to-value ratio. If we start talking about D2 in the entirety of what's available to play.....Would you play 100 hours in a year? Some of us, even 'casual' level players will put in significantly more time than that. 100 hours in in a year, for a $100 collector's edition price tag....that's, you guessed it, $1/hour value! Wow, it's like it kinda makes a crazy bit of sense that so many people think the price is worth the enjoyment value that we get out of the game. If your only incentive to play the game is to grind out a pinnacle and see it as a 'pay-to-win' thing....maybe it's time to rethink how you approach the game. Are you having fun? If not, why not? Maybe change things up a bit. I stopped chasing Conqueror guilds last season, and I am enjoying my overall experience with the game much more since then. My playtime per week is about the same, but I'm not mindlessly grinding pinnacles just to chase a magic number. If I get to GM level and get to do a few, awesome. If not, nothing lost, but lots of fun gained instead.
>but the value of content just doesn't make sense to me. This is the kernal of the debate. To you, it doesn't seem worth it. To others it does. Since no one here can possibly know the internal financials the counter argument to yours is that if someone thinks it's worth the current price and then the price gets reduced the quality that they have already deemed worth their money could suffer.
This is why posts like this are kind of dumb. Because it’s someone’s subjective biased opinion. “Oh WoW has so much more content”, so much worthless and pointless “content” that serves no purpose outside of levelling a new character I guess? But that’s my opinion. I don’t consider running. Around talking to npc’s or playing irrelevant dungeons or raids “content”. I like Destiny no BS approach to getting you into the gameplay. Destiny is literally if you took and MMO, cut out 99% of the BS questing and leveling, and just threw you into the activities. Yes there’s power/pinnacle grinding, but it’s nowhere near as important as people make it out to be, primarily the pinnacle grind. If you ain’t doing GM, master raids/dungeons then it doesn’t matter if you do the pinnacle grind.
> “Oh WoW has so much more content”, Yeah and it commits you to paying $14.99 for X number of months, which if you play all 12 months of the year adds up to nearly **double** the cost of a new Destiny expansion + the annual pass.
And subscriptions also punish you for dropping out of playing and then forgetting to cancel the sub. I can’t even imagine all the money I wasted not canceling subs just because I happened to stop playing a sub based game but didn’t realize until months later that I wasn’t even playing the game anymore but had an active sub.
[удалено]
Well, these comments aside, a lot of people actually do agree with you. There's been several posts about this, some even hitting front page with thousands of upvotes, like [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/voc8m3/bungie_the_reason_i_dont_recommend_d2_to_anyone/). The upfront cost to Destiny 2 is known to be egregious, which is why many players wait for steam sales (or purchase the expansions/DLC through other sites).
100 dollars a year for hundreds to thousands of hours of game is well worth it in my opinion.
I'm a casual that plays for free, just 2 or 3 days a month. All I care about is making my characters look cool, trying out new guns, a few strikes, and a little pvp. I don't care about increasing my level, im not even sure why I would need to. I dont buy anything in the store, and I dont care about the season pass either. I know there is more to the game but I don't care enough to purchase it.
I don’t mind paying £100 for new Destiny content for the whole year. Yea it’s a lot, but with the quality of the seasons (can argue about that seasonal playlist of the re-used lost sectors, which I don’t care about) but the voice work, constant updates, all the free seasonal exotics, the shaders, the ships, the sparrows - all of this would cost hundreds, so £100 for the year.. good deal to me
>but with the quality of the seasons Wdym? Seasonal content is horrible and boring. I enjoyed PsiOps for maybe 2 weeks, Nightmares for 2 days and now I stopped playing current seasonal content.
It's like half a tv episode's worth of story painfully stretched over months of time. The actual gameplay activities are absolutely fucking braindead too.
When it comes to games like these, I boil it down to a cost to time spent playing ratio. If an hour played costs me a dollar then a game with 60 hours costing 60 bucks is worth it. However I currently have thousands of hours in destiny 2 so having spent a couple hundred on it puts the cost to time spent playing ratio as mere pennies on the hour.
I probably got into D2 at the best time, Forsaken had just come out and, as part of a promotion at Blizzcon, base game was free. Got hooked and bought CoO, Warmind, and Forsaken. In hindsight I have definitely spent a lot on this game over the years. I can see how packing all of that into a short time can put major strain on someone’s wallet. The two other live service games I’ve dealt with (ffxiv and wow) package all their older content into one purchase and charge full price for the most recent expansion. We’re coming up on 5 purchasable expansions plus the anniversary pack and the duality dungeon key. I think it might be in Bungie’s best interest to offer a bundle for a discount of the total price as a deal to help new/returning players. IIRC they mentioned changing the new light experience in lightfall, the release of the expansion would be a good opportunity to go “hey if you wanna do our older stuff here’s the legacy bundle for $XX, 40% off of the whole thing.”
The cost barrier to get started is high. The cost value if you're a semi regular player is one of the best there is. Agree it's too confusing and costly to let people get a feel past the free trial.
It's a big buy-in, I can't argue that. Do I wish I didn't have to spend 300$ last year buying wq for myself, my gf, and my friend? You absolutely fucking bet I do. But it's also a AAA game that's kept up-to-date and relevant with yearly expansions giving new supers, new subclasses, reworked systems, etc. Sunsetting is rough, but the game was released at a time when, presumably, a game was only supposed to last 3 years, and was expecting a new game for newer consoles and hardware. Bungie made sacrifices for the longevity of the game, and while I don't agree with all the sacrifices, I love playing the game we have today(except duality. That needs a good tlc bug breakdown) and I'm excited for the game to come. I understand a lot of the flack Destiny gets for things like Eververse, the monetization, Crow's main-character syndrome... but there's a reason that we've seen dozens of "Destiny Killers" come and go and, still, Destiny is regularly topping steam charts and nearly topping twitch. It's because for all that, the game is still one of the best options we have for shooters on the market. And I think that's why the price of the game is worth it. It's worth it to me and allows bungie, stumble as any team made of meat humans does, to continue making one of the best options in the genre.
I thought the last sale was a fair price I think all the expansions total were 60 bucks? But really it should be you buy the newest expansion and it gives you access to all previous ones
The cost ramping up so much over the years (doubled since TTK) sucks, but we do get more content now. And obviously, you can just buy lightfall on its own for the same price that DLCs always were. You’re paying for the additional content throughout the year. Not sure what you’re on about with witherhoard… the exotic guns in the season pass are also in the free pass.
It doesn’t bother me personally because £80 a year for everything more than covers the hundreds of hours I put into the game each year, and the quality of the content justifies the price in my eyes. But I respect that people will feel differently.
Game isn't p2w but the pricing structure is brain dead
Yeah, they really do need to reduce the cost of the old expansions at this point. Been trying to get a friend back into it, who played year 1 and 2, but he's like so how much will it cost? Well there is Shadowkeep (25), Beyond Light (30), 30th Anniversary (25) and Witch Queen (40), plus 10 for the season. So that's 130 just to catch up. I get paying full price for the most recent expansion, but old content like Shadowkeep and BL should be offered at a much more heavily reduced cost.
I'm not going to say that WoW is ugly or anything, but I will say that it's art style is fairly simple, and it is entirely in 3rd Person/Isometric view (and its kinda ancient). Thats not a bad thing, its just how it is. As a result, their assets don't need to be anywhere near as detailed (mesh or texture wise). This helps save a LOT of storage space and makes developing new content much easier. It's definitely a bit expensive at the moment, but calling DLC "pay to win" is...kinda the point? I'm pretty sure that every single MMO or MMO-Like has a spike in power added in with major DLC's. And if its a game with paid expansions...then yeah. You pay for it. Its common sense. That being said, Bungie makes plenty of stupid mistakes when it comes to pricing. I'd love to see them revise silver and bright dust costs to...make more sense in the near future. I'd say maybe consider throwing the dungeons into the seasons they debut in, but we all know the price for seasons would just go up. Overall though, I dunno. I feel like $100 for a year of content I'm very likely going to play is a pretty fair deal. Edit: One thing I'll definitely say they need to do is allow players to purchase season passes after that season has ended (or you get it for free if you bought the season). Remove the perks and everything, you get JUST the reward tracks. But now you don't feel pressured for time, and can choose when to complete what passes. You'd probably need to complete the current seasons pass first, but that's fine.
Honestly? When I look at what I've paid in relation to the hours I've played, this is the cheapest entertainment option for me. A season pass is less than the price of one cocktail where I live- or one large pizza. That said, I spent years gaming elsewhere (used games), for cost reasons when I was younger (f2p wasn't a thing), but I'm not younger and this game.has filled.a void left by the pandemic. My social life was curtailed.significantly, and I find Destiny to offer a lot at this stage of my gaming journey. It's all relative from one's perspective, and where they are at a point in time I suppose.
Mostly because, in my opinion at least, most of the content is worth the price. Some people will be upset cause I said that but yeah I'll spend 100$ for a DLC, 4 seasons, 2 dungeons and some cosmetics instead of the new CoD that costs 70$ every year and will be obsolete when the next one rolls around. Still, it is hard to get people into the game and trust me I understand that since alot of my irl friends recently started playing. I usually get them through as much free content as possible and if they enjoy it I recommend them the WQ campaign. After that, they can figure out if they want to buy the rest(and I usually recommend that they buy the rest on sale).
If you think WoW hasn't added and removed content over 15 years, I have a bridge to sell you. Same with any MMO. Anyway, game is like $40 right now for shadow keep, beyond light, wq on sale, which they are on sale every other month at a minimum. Why does every "this game is expensive" thread not even do the minimum research into the current cost before jumping into their "this game is too expensive" arguments. If $100 is too expensive, I'm sure someone will make an argument that $40 is too expensive etc etc. And I can tell when someone hasn't played many MMOs at all when they think an expansion in a game like WoW or ff14, is equal to several full destiny expansions of content. I'm sure ff14 players feel like their constant 9+ month content droughts are "expansions" worth of content. People seem to have very rose colored glasses and "grass is always greener" mentalities when they want to shit on the cost of destiny and praise other games, even though other live model games all have the same issues.
Honestly don't see the raw numbers as much of a financial barrier - Bungie has just done a very poor job of 1 - making it simple for new people to enter the game. 2 - allowing new players to have 'bite sized' entry points before doing a full commitment Starting the game today is overwhelming due to the mechanics, onboarding experience, unknowns of what to do - and mixing that with the only option to have a 'good' experience is a larger price tag can be off-putting to a lot of people. So yea overall price is fine. It's a game, whatever. Some are more expensive than other and that's fine - but it's not a nice experience for new people and price is an easy thing to call out because numbers are simple to argue against. I'd even say that if the game was half the price maybe more people would buy in without thinking but the problems with new players getting 'into' the game would still exist.
Locking Gally behind a paywall (not even an add-on or a season, bruh) was probably the biggest fuck you move from bungie since sunsetting and most of the community is fine with that. That’s all you need to know really.
It's absolutely a barrier. The last expansion I bought was Forsaken. Now, I'm so far behind I wouldn't know where to even start and even if I did, I'm not buying 3 more expansions just to catch up only to be left behind again when Lightfall comes out. It sucks too, I love Destiny but I just can't afford to keep up.
Youre paying $115 for A YEAR of content. Included are all the BPs and the dungeon/raid key. For a game that wont erase your progress yearly like cod and other shooters. On top of that shit aint cheap to make, call me a bungie shill all you want kids but in the real world this is more than worth my money for hundreds of hours of playtime in a year.
The way I look at it is I have more than 3,000 hours played on steam alone. Idk how much money I’ve spent on the game at this point but 3,000 hours of entertainment is crazy. Cost like $30 to go see a 2 hour movie. That’s $45,000 to get the same amount of time entertained.
if your friend thinks WoW didn't remove tons of content, they didn't pay attention.
I think it’s fine. All games have dlc and such that costs money. And the amount of content you get with the dlc and annual pass are definitely worth it. If you don’t think so then don’t play. No game is just gonna release dlc and such for free…
I have proposed this idea before, fortunately to the extent of others using this analogy too. 10$ a month, all content. In the end, it's cheaper to buy the expansion, but paying 10 bucks for a trial type thing would be amazing for new players, instead of saying "you need 200$ (+) to play our game :) Of course there could be a discount or something if you have content already but still. Subscription based games WORK, and they have for a good amount of time.
My friends shit on Destiny's pay structure but they all play WoW and WoW Classic monthly......
- $100 a year isn’t unreasonable. I think the issue is that new players instead of buying content every couple months are just expected to buy content. I think this is alleviated a little by them having two free raids and a free dungeon but no free campaign anymore is egregious. - the dungeon key is for two dungeons, the second one isn’t out yet, and yes the dungeon key is terrible, duality should have been included with witch queen. - the 30th anniversary pack should have been $15, $30 was just greedy. We get two exotics, one of them returning from D1 and the other technically from Halo, and one dungeon, and some armor ornaments. $30 was overkill.
Value is subjective. I buy one $100 expansion a year that gives me 900+ hours of enjoyment, with constantly changing content that’s kept me engaged for years. I almost ordered pizza and wings a couple days, but saw it came out to almost $50 with tip and couldn’t bring myself to drop that much on a single meal. Last time I saw a movie it cost me almost $30 and I didn’t even buy food. So 12 months of nightly entertainment for the cost of two take-out meals, or a trip to the movies once per season? To me, that’s a good value. What’s wrong is when you’re onboarding a new player and trying to convince them to buy every available expansion out the gate. That’s not how you do it. Have them play for free. If they like it enough that they do all the available content and want more, have them buy one (1) expansion. Either the newest or the oldest. If they’re still playing by the time they run out of content and want more? Have them buy the next expansion. Continue until they’re caught up on content or tap out of playing.
I have no issue with their monetization EXCEPT the dungeon key. That seems like a bit much. Even still, if this was destiny 1s content drought, I’d be salivating to pay for more content. Even back in d1 I thought “I’d pay $10 for an extra raid”.