Destiny 2's new $15 "Starter Pack" is a bunch of junk and the last thing the MMO needed right now
Destiny 2's new $15 "Starter Pack" is a bunch of junk and the last thing the MMO needed right now
I tried getting into Destiny a couple months ago. There is no hook for new players. It's like watching a later season of some over the top, corny, convoluted show without ever getting to watch the previous episodes. The level design is just silly. Towns aren't towns, they are mazes with a bunch static, talking props haphazardly sprinkled about. Every time I came back to the game it'd play some cinematic I don't understand and throw me into some place I have never been with no instruction on how to get back. I did not play for long and won't play again.
It's not just maps that have dumpster fire design.
The original 4 enemy races were all incredibly well designed. They all worked really well solo to provide interesting encounters, and were decent in pairs of races, too. Everything after has been downhill. There have been a few that were "fine", but nothing remotely comparable to the initial design. They just want shit to look cool, not provide cohesive gameplay.
And seasonal shit with different kinds of enemies that only take damage from specific gun types with the specific season perk? Absolute fucking horseshit. The beauty of original Destiny was that I could play something with my Hunter and high impact scout rifle from start to finish and barely touch my skills and be golden, and the guy next to me could be a Titan with an autorifle diving into anything that moved and constantly using his super and have the same quality experience.
Destiny, and I say this as someone who loved D1 and tried very hard to love D2, suffers from a mix of the worst of art-by-committee and the worst of art-by-auteur.
Every game director has managed to come across both a simpering sycophant and clueless tyrant, trying to cater to both the vicitudes of MTX optimization and the whims of their 50-hour-a-week players, both of which command Bungie's ear to try to make the most addictive game on the least content.
As a result they are stuck to committing to a constant release schedule where they have barely enough time to create basic terrain and voice overs, throw in their usual stock of enemies and press-button-while-holding-a-shape game play. And they are damned if they do and damned if they don't touch the PvP mode, where half the players are mad if they lose a single engagement in a single match in a single game while playing with the most optimized loadout, and the other half are the same but playing with random trash they found on the floor.
The gun play is great, but it's clear they can't think of anything exciting to do with it any more. All sense of mystery has gone from the old story, and the new story doesn't have time to explain why they don't have time to explain.
Their most recent season was focused loosely around pagan witchcraft, I'm a amateur (secular) Tarot reader, my wife and I are loosely (atheist) pagan celebrants, and they even had a custom tarot deck as merch - couldn't hold my attention because it was still an easier Court of Oryx from Destiny 1, and the main game play is "shoot monster, go to the HAM radio which for some reason is the size of a fridge to listen to an alien with a Brooklyn accent chat shit about something that happened 2 years ago"
The disjointed random video dumping you to a new mission every time you log in as a new player is super weird. Really makes it hard to figure out what you were doing.
Every time I read stuff like this I appreciate my indie games collection even more <3
It really is amazing how many good indie games and old games you can buy for 1 sub average ubisoft game.
The sub average ubi game will be 10 bucks in a few years anyway. Just in case it was somewhat good by accident.
The last ubi game I got at release was the first Mario vs Rabbids. It was great, and yet I still regretted getting it so soon. Because let me tell you what happened next : for 2 years, the cost of getting the season pass for that game was more than buying the full gold edition. They just didn't offer any discount on DLC, just the gold edition.
And for more bullshit, the season pass included stuff that could only be obtained through it (or in gold edition, of course). So until the full content was available, you had the choice of getting a season pass of content that didn't exist yet and on which you had zero guarantee , or getting individual DLCs when they drop, and already know that some stuff will never be available to you.
Of course I didn't get the second game on release. I haven't got it yet in fact. Guess what, exact same pattern regarding DLC pricing. Gold is already cheaper than individual DLCs. I'm sure it can go lower, I am not in a hurry.
And doesn't even need to be entirely that. Right now I am loving Wreckfest.
I think the worst part about this starter pack is that, not only is it mostly useless garbage, new players (who this targets) have no idea this is mostly useless garbage. They surely don't even know you can only equip one of these weapons at a time, let alone that they are far from meta.
D2 is just the absolute most miserable experience for new players and Bungie consistently makes it worse. It's baffling. Meanwhile, they try to milk their veteran players more and more every season by offering more for money, less for free, and making the game more of a grind.
The best part about Destiny 2 is it has personally put me on a hard line against any kind of live service game for the foreseeable future.
They really want to lean into their villain and out of touch era.
SAVE THE BLUEBERRIES
It’s called short term planning and profit maximization of a game on life support. Gamigo has been doing this since 2010.
Destiny 2 has been one of the biggest wastes of my money ever. Every time I put money into it they drop a DLC shortly after, so I just gave up. I liked it at first, but man it just didn't hold up at all. Warframe on the other hand has dope ass exciting things to do every time I log on and I have a ton of fun and have never had to spend any real money because the platinum trading system is solid and you can earn a good amount just playing the game.
Maybe it gets better once you've grinded a hundred hours but Warframe is clunky in comparison and every bit as confusing to a new player.
Not sure when you last played it, but they've revamped the new player stuff a lot to make the transition much better. I never had a big issue with how it was personally but I think it's gotten way better about introducing new players to how the game works. Definitely not at all the case that you need a hundred hours to get into it, that's just ridiculous hyperbole in my opinion. I think it may take a few hours of play to start getting into the habits and finding cool mods and stuff to experiment with, but definitely not a hundred hours of grinding. If you haven't in a long time, try it out, it's really great.
This game has been dead since beyond light. To actually get all the content it's somewhere like $300 or more. I think if they went on a standard MMO fee of $15 a month instead of the $15 every 4 months and an expansion every year or two it'd be a lot more reasonable for new players
I would never play it if it was subscription based. Fuck subscription based games.
I mean i wouldn't either, but now it's definitely worse than a subscribtion base. Now you pay for the expansion, dungeons keys, raids, battlepass...
Final fantasy 14?
It depends. If destiny was sub based and all additional content free? I might still recommend it. It plays like an MMO already, why not lean into it? Make players start at zero and play through all the campaigns so they know what's going on in the story, they have to unlock and learn all the trees, that sort of thing. That would be a damn sight better than dumping new players in at 1250 or whatever base power is and letting them figure it the fuck out themselves. It'd be a bigger time sink, which is what bungo wants anyway, but new players won't be dumped into a world they know nothing about with no tutorial beyond "press g to throw a grenade."
The problem is they're trying to split the difference between a long-play MMO and instant action shooter and only getting the worst of both worlds.
I was so deep into destiny 2, because it's just fun to play and mess around. I don't even care for the story much, so the bad lightfall story doesn't bother me. But still, the game felt really empty to me after that. It's like something died, and i went from playing pretty much daily to uninstalling it from one day to another.
The biggest problem with this game is the price and how fucking complicated it is. I started playing with friends and we all had no idea what we were doing, so i bought the forsaken and beyond light bundle because it was cheap, my friend bought the 30 year anniversary bundle and my other friend just free to played it. There was nothing for us to do, except for like 2 dungeons, that we didn't understand. Wanna hop online and go on some high octane patrols? Yeah, me neither
The lore was something that kept me interested for so long, but when they said that the awoken have a well over a million year long society and Mara Sov is 14 million years old is when I lost interest. I got to see the Ahamkara and that was a good send off for me
Wow, there's a lot of hate for D2... I played Destiny 1 almost daily, and enjoyed Destiny 2's launch. I fell off for a while, played a little Beyond Light, but didn't get any of the other expansions. I got back into the game during Season 21, Season of the Deep, and thoroughly enjoyed the content. I played the old campaigns (got them on sale for 75% off), then enjoyed Season of the Witch. Now, Season of the Wish just came out yesterday and I enjoyed the 30 minutes I had to play the game (busy day). Yeah, I pay for some things, story content mostly. The game play is really good, the story is fine, and we're coming up to the end of this huge 10-year saga between the light and darkness, the Traveler and the Witness. The Final Shape (next campaign) has been delayed, but Bungie is putting extra content into this season to make up for the extra long season we'll have, and it'll be free for everyone, not just people who bought the season. Everything has been building up to this point, and I'm so excited to see where it goes from here.
Sure, other games do a seasonal model better, other games have better writing or mechanics or less monetization. But I'm still having fun. Not everyone hates Destiny, even if Bungie has made some bad decisions in the past and lately.
I played the old campaigns
Run through them again and see if they still hold up.
I got back into the game in Season 21 and played all the campaigns then. I enjoyed all of them. Shadowkeep was very cool, I felt bad for Eris. Witch Queen was fun, I found the story gripping. Lightfall was kinda meh, but Strand is so powerful. Every campaign doesn't need to be amazing much like every season of a TV show need to be amazing, but I'll still watch Futurama and Bones and The Office over and over.
The only campaign I haven't played again is Beyond Light, which I mostly finished back when it came out.
I think the part I disliked the most of all the campaigns was getting Strand meditations for my Banner of War Titan. But the levels were fun to play even if the story wasn't great.
We're spending $15 every few months. That costs way less than a full season of a TV show or even a single movie, especially in the theater, and we play Destiny for many more hours than watch a TV season or movie.
What a dumb pay to win game. I did my crucible time. When the sequel came out, and I noticed there was nothing different about the crucible. It's like the devs didn't even try, like all they probably did was update net code or some security stuff. I saw no point in buying it. Just a stupid copy pasted game with a 2 at the end of it
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