Current Steam popular user-defined tags for this product: Capitalism, Crime, Psychological Horror.
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”
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.
They really want to lean into their villain and out of touch era.
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.