Destiny 2: Lightfall

[Larsen B]

20 minutes ago, Oz said:

1) the rumble of the controller is sorely missed to give the game a sense of weight and feedback. clicking a mouse is just not the same. and the visual queues to let you know you are being hit were designed with this rumble in mind. so it is easier to die when you are not noticing you are taking hits until you are about to die and the screen goes red. 

 

There's an easy way to solve that!

[Gorf King]

I don't recognise many of these descriptions of D1 at all, especially not the one that reckons it was all about chasing a god roll followed by 400 hours of busywork. If anything, D2 feels more like busywork, because the grind is purely for XP and purely to get cosmetic rewards, and the raid (and everything else) is all about cosmetic rewards as well. The main things D2 has abandoned which make me think a lot less of it than D1 are:

• The feeling of being powerful has been reduced massively, both in PvE and PvP. This leads, for example, in raids to no real 'clutch moments' where you pull something amazing out of the bag just in time to save the day (this is apparent in the underpowered/slow to gain abilities and supers, the redesign of weapons, the new death mechanic that means one death can be a wipe, and numerous other mechanisms that combine to make the whole affair feel less 'heroic' somehow).
• The weapons that come from endgame - the exotics and raid weapons, not random rolls - just don't have the same game-changing effect, and the desire to get one (usually earned in endgame) just isn't there so strongly, nor is the joy of getting one.
• Raid armour doesn't progress your character or actually help with the raid - this is an issue because, again, you don't feel like you're progressing or the raid's getting more manageable the more you do it; it's a big disincentive for repeat play.
• In general, getting to be a higher level doesn't mean much, because even in Trials you can just grab a blue weapon and be good to go; one of the better snipers (though none of them are great any more) is actually something you can pick up in your first hour or play. The combined effect of this is to make you think: 'why bother having levels and power gates for 'endgame' at all?' You might as well just get rid, and not pretend to be making a progression-based game. Just do a shooter with no levels, power, gear at all. Simple - balance issues solved. D2 feels like a mock RPG/looter. It's ultimately shallow.
• To add to this, all the decent lore has simply been removed from the game. The story, aside from the cutscenes in the vanilla campaign, is worse than ever. The whole thing has no depth or interest to it. Just some snarky Ghosts/AI/joke NPCs chatting shit about kicking ass. It's boring at best, irritating at worst.
• The raid - the crown of the PvE endgame - is a series of disjointed minigames, and the whole thing is tonally off and makes no sense whatsoever. Raids in D1 felt like a journey which reached a conclusion. They added to the lore and the world. Leviathan is just like a cosmic joke.
• PvP - many feel - may be better balanced, but it's far more dull to play, and infinitely more dull to watch. Just ask the dozens of streamers who made their business streaming D1 PvP and have more or less given up on it.

 

There's a dozen other issues too, but they're some of the main ones. None of them is about the loss of grinding or of putting in 400 hours of busywork. They're about having a sense of rewarding challenge, a journey, a backstory with some occasional depth to it, exciting weapons, proper material advancement as you get better, proper customisation of characters and abilities, a sense of real power, and so on. And yes, of course if all those are there you'll play a lot more hours than if you're not, because they all give the game legs. It's D2 that feels as if it's abandoned all this for the sake of some meaningless grind that only appeals to loot box junkies. The most telling thing about it is that designer on the Crucible Radio podcast who said they removed a lot of perk trees and stuff because, basically, it was 'too complex for people to talk about with their mates'. Say what? The whole feeling I get from D2 is that they think their audience is dumb as a bag of frogs and can't handle the sort of mild complexity/depth (and it was only mild) that D1's systems contained. Which is probably why they binned the lore and all the rest of it too. And that's also why there's precious little to talk about aside from when a scandal such as 'oh noes I can't get my bright engrams as quick as I thought' strikes.

 

If Bungie really want to get rid of these things that were core to D1, and are so obsessed with 'balance' in PvP, they should just go back to making 'proper' shooters again. And going from what Jason Jones said the other week, I think their next project might be just that. I'm sure that'll please a lot of people, and it might even please me. But for now, they've instead made a fairly poor RPG-like persistent world shooter with a great shooting mechanic at its core. And every reward channeled into cosmetic rewards, the most attractive of which you can largely just buy anyway. (For an idea of how important meaninglessly grinding out XP is by looking at how the BRIGHT ENGRAM EARNED screen blots out everything else, even to your distraction when doing some tricky endgame activity - it's like, 'this is the real point of the game', not the activity itself or its ostensible reward - usually a bunch of tokens you hand over to a janitor in a broom closet some hours later.)

 

I don't think any of this will be changed in a hurry (if it's changed at all, it'll take major design goal rewrites), and I don't think Bungie want to. They may be making more money this way, and that'll be the key factor. But it's telling that there's only any lively talk in here when some scandal erupts over bright engrams, and it's telling that there aren't any heroic gifs or videos or stories to tell about the endgame (either here or elsewhere), or amazing moments from the Crucible, or anything else mildly interesting. Because they aren't in the game any more. 'Slow, considered and tactical' PvP doesn't make for great viewing, and for a lot of people that's not what Destiny was about. Well, not Destiny 1. It was about having riotous fun, about massive power fantasies, amazing clutch moments, and wild shots with outrageous weapons. That's what took it to the top of the Twitch channels, and its the loss of all that which has pushed it right back down the heap. Quite ironic, given that the dev on the Crucible Radio podcast said they'd wanted to make D2 work better on Twitch. And the same is true for the people who wrote about lore, uncovered and explained hidden quests and secrets, made raid videos, played fucking Crota's End solo using bongos, etc etc - there's no content for them to make either. All the imagination and excitement as gone from the thing.

 

So yeah, meh. D1 was about that, not about meaningless grinding for hundreds of hours. I'm sure they could have kept - even made better - the good stuff and cut down on the grind. But as recent events show, they chose to get rid of the depth and interest and rewards of D1, but keep the grind in the form of Eververse cosmetics and make that the endgame instead, with the obligatory 'save time and just buy it with cash' options attached. How anyone, fan or not, can be in favour of this approach is beyond me. Yet here we are.

[K]

49 minutes ago, Weavus said:

 

The basic answer is they knew the system would be massively unpopular with their player base so they did as much as they could to hide it from being discovered. What if the rest of the game is as rigged as the XP system was? Who's to say the any of their RNG systems are actually random and has not been engineered to get people to chase the loot and buy silver (something I have suspect for a long time) without any hope of winning. Bungie have completely destroyed any trust I had in them with this terribly anti-consumer system. Fool me once and all that.

 

I look forward to see how they try and spin it on Wednesday. 

 

That's the thing though - if they were honest / accurate about reporting how much XP you earned, why would it be unpopular? I seem to get a bright engram roughly every 90 - 120 minutes, which seems fair enough. I don't feel like I should be getting more than that. All that happens is that the bar at the bottom of the screen doesn't go up as quickly as it should. If they were upfront about saying "XP scales so that all players will receive bright engrams at roughly the same rate", then I really can't see what the problem is, or what they would gain by hiding that. Ditto the current setup - if they said "we've removed the weird scaling thing, but we've doubled the amount of XP you need to get a bright engram", then is that such a big problem?

 

I'm not really trying to defend what they're doing, it just seems baffling that they're tying themselves in knots trying to cover-up something that doesn't need to be covered up. I mean, maybe it was a mistake, and they weren't covering it up so much as were just unaware of it. Seems less likely than the alternative, but that makes a bit more sense than tripping themselves up by going all Watergate on cosmetic item drops.

[Oz]

17 minutes ago, Larsen B said:

 

There's an easy way to solve that!

 

[Weavus]

7 minutes ago, K said:

That's the thing though - if they were honest / accurate about reporting how much XP you earned, why would it be unpopular?

 

An XP cap that meant you get a few % of the normal XP you get once you play for more than a short space of time? That would be about as popular as a system that invisibly stopped you getting more than a few chests or planetary materials per few minutes.... yeah I can't see anyone complaining about systems that punish you for playing.

[Broker]

I genuinely can’t understand how they thought any of the changes they’ve made would make it better to watch on Twitch. I guess because they make it more like other FPS games that people watch on Twitch? But those games already have established identities/communities, which Destiny had and has thrown away. 

 

Has any game that was developed to be an eSport and had the developers loudly going on about that ever succeeded as one? I feel like all the most popular ones it was a surprise, or they’re games that predate modern eSports.

[K]

1 minute ago, Weavus said:

 

An XP cap that meant you get a few % of the normal XP you get once you play for more than a short space of time? That would be about as popular as a system that invisibly stopped you getting more than a few chests or planetary materials per few minutes.... yeah I can't see anyone complaining about systems that punish you for playing.

 

I dunno, it doesn't seem that bad to me. XP only goes towards cosmetic stuff, I can't say I really care if I only earn them at a certain rate. I care more about the game not being straight with me. If they'd said "don't collect too many chests in rapid succession, as we've put in a cooldown to stop people farming them" then I'd be (broadly) OK with that as well. The problem is with opening a chest and getting nothing, and not really knowing why.

[Mr Do 71]

Yes! Got the Mida Multi-Tool at 304.

[Gorf King]

lol

 

Classic old-skool intervention.

[Gorf King]

14 minutes ago, K said:

I dunno, it doesn't seem that bad to me. XP only goes towards cosmetic stuff, I can't say I really care if I only earn them at a certain rate. I care more about the game not being straight with me. If they'd said "don't collect too many chests in rapid succession, as we've put in a cooldown to stop people farming them" then I'd be (broadly) OK with that as well. The problem is with opening a chest and getting nothing, and not really knowing why.

 

Yeah, I'd broadly agree with that in principle - I don't mind xp scaling as long as it's transparent to the user. It's not uncommon in MMOs anyway. In fact - well, maybe not in fact, cos I may have got this entirely the wrong way round and therefore be shelling my own position - didn't WoW do something like this in the early days? Didn't they have a massive drop in XP gained after you'd been playing x hours? And then they repackaged it later to say that during the first few hours after you log on you get the 'well-rested bonus' (100%), and after that the normal rate (50% or summat), but it was exactly what they'd had before albeit spun positively?

 

Or something like that, or something completely different. But regardless, it's the way Bungie presented this that's the real pisser, cos it does seem like intentionally misleading (and maybe worse, underestimating) your audience. Anyway, it's all the other stuff underlying the reason this seems important in the first place that's more of a concern to me. Like why fucking bright engrams even exist, let alone why they represent most of the rewards people get for playing and therefore people value their 'xp' so highly. It's just trash you're getting quicker. I'm almost thankful that the mod system (another failed RPG/customisation system) is so underdeveloped and ineffectual as to be largely pointless, cos otherwise the fact that Eververse also gives you mods would make this a genuine scandal. Got to be grateful for small mercies, I guess.

[Hexx]

The problem is Brengrams. 

 

If it was just Motes of Light from leveling up - I doubt many would care that much.

But Brengrams have a "real world" cost (not that  many people would pay it given how lackluster most of the costmetics) - but everything about them is now associated with that cost.

 

It's not "On I didn't get 10 more Brengrams I don't really care about I should have"

 

it's "Oh I didn't get the  £4 Brengrams I don't really care about I should have, Bungo clearly were trying to get me to buy them!"

 

 

[Gigga]

I've been playing this for a couple of weeks and enjoying it but I don't understand why they made all the pvp changes. 

 

Getting your super once and at the same time as everyone else makes it a single roll to get maximum 4 kills minimum none and this usually decides the game, which doesn't make for a lot of fun. 

 

Moving shotguns, snipers etc to heavy and making heavy ammo hard to get just means you use auto rifles and that's it. Everyone has uriels gift or whatever and that's the whole game. 

 

Grenades being slow to recharge and almost entirely ineffective makes them pretty much none existent too. 

 

And then there's the 4 v 4 - which makes no sense at all. 

 

I feel like I'm doing better in this multilayer, but I don't get the same excitement of pulling off kills against the odds, or going on a rampage with a heavy weapon. I can't switch up my play style if things are going wrong, or change my load out to any effect. 

 

[Hexx]

But don't you feel balanced.

 

[Mr Ben]

So in the midst of all that, this is announced on twitter:

Good luck with that Bungle.

[Harsin]

The reviews for this t-shirt. 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Mens-Tokens-Blue-Shirt-Black/dp/B077PH4M9L/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511863126&sr=8-1&keywords=Two+tokens+blue

[gospvg]

With the weekly rest today, are Meditations worth doing?

Do you get any decent loot from these?

I am sure I did not last time I completed one of these missions.

 

I usually just do the flashpoint, treasure maps & call to arms.

Tried Nightfall but hate the pressure with the timers.

 

[Broker]

2 hours ago, gospvg said:

With the weekly rest today, are Meditations worth doing?

Do you get any decent loot from these?

 

They won't reward you with powerful gear but they give you gear from Ikora which may include a piece of her unique set of armour.

[Mr Do 71]

21 hours ago, Mr Do 71 said:

Yes! Got the Mida Multi-Tool at 304.

 

Hmmm..., I think Namesless Midnight is better.

[gospvg]

10 minutes ago, Broker said:

 

They won't reward you with powerful gear but they give you gear from Ikora which may include a piece of her unique set of armour.

 

Thanks, unique set does not interest me I want the powerful gear.

I'll do the usual milestones then and get my 2 or 3 engrams.

[HarryBizzle]

2 hours ago, Harsin said:

The reviews for this t-shirt. 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Mens-Tokens-Blue-Shirt-Black/dp/B077PH4M9L/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511863126&sr=8-1&keywords=Two+tokens+blue

 

 

Bravo, James.

 

 

What are everyone's thoughts on the new trial and rather rapid price cuts on D2? I don't want to read too much into it - D1 had a trial after all, but I get the feeling the player counts are not what they had hoped.

 

[gospvg]

Yep. expect player count has dropped a lot, I played D1 almost every day & I now only play D2 just once a week.

Maybe the new DLC might tempt some back.

 

Spoiler

Glad they are bringing back a weekly strike

 

[Gigga]

18 hours ago, Gaz said:

I've been playing this for a couple of weeks and enjoying it but I don't understand why they made all the pvp changes. 

 

Getting your super once and at the same time as everyone else makes it a single roll to get maximum 4 kills minimum none and this usually decides the game, which doesn't make for a lot of fun. 

 

Moving shotguns, snipers etc to heavy and making heavy ammo hard to get just means you use auto rifles and that's it. Everyone has uriels gift or whatever and that's the whole game. 

 

Grenades being slow to recharge and almost entirely ineffective makes them pretty much none existent too. 

 

And then there's the 4 v 4 - which makes no sense at all. 

 

I feel like I'm doing better in this multilayer, but I don't get the same excitement of pulling off kills against the odds, or going on a rampage with a heavy weapon. I can't switch up my play style if things are going wrong, or change my load out to any effect. 

 

 

Just to add to this..  because there's not enough late to the party ranting in this thread.

 

Why are grenades so weak? I'm pretty good with sticky grenades, I used to be able to drop a grenade on someone and boom.. now they don't even take someone's shield down. Who made that decision? What for?

 

I played a couple of games last night to get the IB challenges, which were a piece of piss, but I got my super with one minute to go in a game where we were a handful of points behind, but then so did the rest of my team so we couldn't all use it at once, I was focussing on precision kills for that challenge so I left mine till nearly the end, managed to get a couple of kills with it and we won by a point. That should have felt like a huge victory but it was actually just a slog and there was a huge amount of pressure to make that super worth something.

 

Why have I got the same gold pulse rifle from the three exotic engrams I've had. What is that about? Didn't they bring in an update to D1 to make this less likely? Did they change their mind?

 

I finally got to 260 so I can get into end game content now, but I don't know what the point is? I'm not going to be excited about another scout rifle that's the same with bigger numbers, whatever I get armour wise I'll just infuse into my shit I've got now, there's not even anything cosmetic I'm looking for. I got all the IB armour in a week and bought a stupid helmet from Xur and I've made it all the same colour.

 

My character does look splendid now though..

 

[BBBBBB]

This free trial not showing up on Battle.net. What time today is it open?

[Hass]

I never poured days into the D1 end-game but I can testify that D2 has attracted some of my more casual gaming friends in a way D1 never could. It's ultimately much more geared towards 2 sessions of 3 hours a week. Which I like because that's what I can give.

[pinholestar]

I’m very much one of the Destiny 1 1000 hour+ endgame grinders who is hugely disappointed in D2 as it stands & hasn’t played it for weeks now. However, I’m in a small faceboook group of 10-15 or so, mainly consisting of fathers in their 30s who don’t have hour upon hour every evening to play. They’ve all been really enjoying Destiny 2 & are still playing a couple of nights every week together. I suspect that my anecdotal example is not uncommon & I think if Bungie were attempting to appeal to a more casual market then they’ve succeeded quite well. Easy to forget that the likes of reddit & rllmuk represent a very small but vocal minority of very dedicated players. For all the countless threads & comments decrying the lack of a meaningful or rewarding endgame there are thousands of players who are just playing a few hours a week & loving every second. They outnumber the likes of us considerably.

 

That’s not to say that Bungie haven’t fucked up massively by completely & utterly failing to cater for that hardcore playerbase & I think if they don’t sort that out soon the long term future of the game will suffer severely. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their player metrics are showing them exactly what they wanted to see in some respects. 

[Weavus]

 

This video encapsulates a huge set of basic reasons D2 is so fundamentally flawed imo.

 

I can't see myself going back to it without some wholesale changes I don't think Bungie will be willing to make. 

[Mr Ben]

2 hours ago, pinholestar said:

I’m very much one of the Destiny 1 1000 hour+ endgame grinders who is hugely disappointed in D2 as it stands & hasn’t played it for weeks now. However, I’m in a small faceboook group of 10-15 or so, mainly consisting of fathers in their 30s who don’t have hour upon hour every evening to play. They’ve all been really enjoying Destiny 2 & are still playing a couple of nights every week together. I suspect that my anecdotal example is not uncommon & I think if Bungie were attempting to appeal to a more casual market then they’ve succeeded quite well. Easy to forget that the likes of reddit & rllmuk represent a very small but vocal minority of very dedicated players. For all the countless threads & comments decrying the lack of a meaningful or rewarding endgame there are thousands of players who are just playing a few hours a week & loving every second. They outnumber the likes of us considerably.

 

That’s not to say that Bungie haven’t fucked up massively by completely & utterly failing to cater for that hardcore playerbase & I think if they don’t sort that out soon the long term future of the game will suffer severely. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their player metrics are showing them exactly what they wanted to see in some respects. 

Oh I agree, but I dont think they've got the playerbase numbers they wanted though, and thats the issue. Luke Smith being wheeled out tomorrow wouldnt be a thing if they did.

 

I think they've captured the audience they wanted, but lost everyone else, which means the numbers have fallen below D1's or is almost the same, which is why they're likely worried. The suits arent happy, obviously, and want to sell more copies or get the playerbase back.

 

Also, you can have a grindy game and still appeal to casual players - in fact Blizzard did so with World of Warcraft in Wrath of the Lich King. Why Bungie doesnt seem to take notes from other companies is baffling, especially as Activision is the publisher for both.

 

Weapon system is the core problem, and I hated it in the beta, and I still hate it now (for the same reasons in the video Weavus posted). The shield thing is such a non issue in the long run that having an elemental "primary" (secondary primary? Such a shite term) is a waste of time. In the raid, you'll fire a power weapon at that yellow/orange health mob with a shield and its gone instantly anyway. It was ok at launch, as it was something new in strikes and patrols and other low level content, but its pointless past that. Also, I think I used a sniper once in all of Destiny 2. They're totally worthless, as are shotguns other than The Legend of Acrius exotic. Going back to Destiny 1 and using a sniper, a machine gun and a good primary all in one loadout is amazing compared to Destiny 2. The combat is so much better.

 

Tomorrows stream will be interesting, though it it likely wont have the comedic highlights of last week unfortunately.

[Marmite]

Stream tomorrow is cancelled, looks like we have a blog post incoming instead...

 

Hey, there.

Tomorrow, we had planned to conduct the final stream prior to the launch of “Curse of Osiris” to show off some of the weapons and armor the expansion includes. Instead, we are investing all our efforts into delivering some higher priority information about Destiny 2. You’ll hear from studio leadership about their assessment of Destiny all up, they’ll talk about our goals for the game going forward, and you’ll also learn about how we’re reacting to your feedback with some game updates that will arrive in the next few weeks.

That will appear on the Bungie Blog on Wednesday.

Thank you,

DeeJ

 

https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/239336750

[Shimmyhill]

2 minutes ago, Marmite said:

Stream tomorrow is cancelled, looks like we have a blog post incoming instead...

 

Hey, there.

Tomorrow, we had planned to conduct the final stream prior to the launch of “Curse of Osiris” to show off some of the weapons and armor the expansion includes. Instead, we are investing all our efforts into delivering some higher priority information about Destiny 2. You’ll hear from studio leadership about their assessment of Destiny all up, they’ll talk about our goals for the game going forward, and you’ll also learn about how we’re reacting to your feedback with some game updates that will arrive in the next few weeks.

That will appear on the Bungie Blog on Wednesday.

Thank you,

DeeJ

 

https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/239336750

 

[Nate Dogg III]

So angry about that opening comma I just threw my PS4 on the fire.