Destiny 2: Lightfall

[squirtle]

I would like to have played this some more, just to keep you all updated, but it's Easter Holidays and I can't get my son off bloody Fortnite!

[Jerec]

So this is still a thing?

[Hexx]

5 hours ago, Phelan said:

Not one of my clan still plays.

We were actively doing about 14 hours a week each before Christmas and now it has just died a death.

 

I chatted with some the other day and all of them said they didn't care about the next lot of stuff. They have all moved on to other games.

 

Gamerfriends/ex-clan were chatting playing MH last night. Of the 3 of us only 1 said I'd play through the PvE content in Expac. (Which all 3 of us have already paid for)

[Broker]

I can't see myself bothering to redownload and install the game just for the inevitable disappointment of a shite five minute story.

[instasis]

I'm tempted. I mean, the Osiris expansion was such a colossal misstep in terms of the campaign I've not played the game since, but it'd be nice to at least pretend I've got my money's worth out of it. I've not deleted either game yet, but equally I've not played either game in months.

 

I thought me and the lad may go back to it after the Fortnite craze settles down, but we've moved on to Ghost Recon instead. 

[Harsin]

22 minutes ago, Jerec said:

So this is still a thing?

 

Its fairly quiet now. Never see anyone on my friend list on it anymore. Anecdotal I know, but there’s enough tales of long matchmaking queues and constantly running up against the same people to indicate the player pool ain't great currently. The DLC in May might provide a bit of a boost. I think Bungie are really banking on their big expansion in September turning things around, it’s no coincidence most of the big changes on their roadmap are coming out at the same time. Personally, I think it will bring some people back, but nowhere to the extent Bungie/Activision are probably hoping.

[Uncle Mike]

The trouble with the games as a service model is definitely that once people drift off, it's hard to get them back. A lot of the model is based on keeping the "engagement"/addiction going. Once you've moved on, you've moved on. I see the patches in the short term (and this upcoming DLC) as stuff that needs to keep the dwindling base left still playing, and their real hope is to communicate (and achieve) that the September expansion is a D2v2.

[Purin]

It's permanently stained, it's time has passed. It could be the "best game in the world", but it's too late now and times have changed.

 

It's like expecting Halo 6 to become the number on most-played fps again, it just won't happen, no matter how good it is.

[K]

Random rolls on weapons is a really shit way of keeping people playing anyway – playing the same strikes hundreds of times so you can get the god roll version of a gun is not good game design. Either you enjoy the strikes / missions or you don’t. The thing is though, the random roll stuff is a bit of a red herring. I thought that, to a certain extent, this was Bungie’s plan all along – Destiny 2 was always supposed to be the Destiny you could dip in and out of, so wasn’t intended to reward people for just doing the same stuff over and over.

 

(although they did sort of introduce that with the weapon forge on Mercury, which was great – it gave you unique weapons that worked slightly differently to the guns from elsewhere. Crucially however, it was a series of steps you could work towards, rather than pure RNG – a much better approach).

 

The problem is that people are dipping out, but aren’t dipping back in again. I suspect the issues Destiny 2 is having aren’t just down to it not being sufficiently similar to Destiny 1, it’s a combination of things; I suspect a game like this relies heavily on network effects to keep it going, so if your friends list, your social media and your whatsapp is full of Destiny 2, then your interest is constantly being reinforced. So if there are a few things that put people off – a lacklustre initial raid, too many exotics that aren’t amazingly interesting to play with, lack of reward for doing harder activities, inflexibility around player numbers, endless Reddit whining, etc – then that damages the network, and that amplifies the negative effect of those (relatively minor) flaws.

 

Bringing back everything from Destiny 1 seems like a shortsighted approach, no matter what the game design geniuses of Reddit think. But at the same time, a really compelling new expansion could definitely bring the players back. The key thing is probably a new raid in a new location – the Leviathan raid lair was ace, but I suspect people are a bit sick of the aesthetic – and new things to aim for (that aren’t just random drops). That’s totally doable.

[Uncle Mike]

13 minutes ago, K said:

Bringing back everything from Destiny 1 seems like a shortsighted approach, no matter what the game design geniuses of Reddit think. But at the same time, a really compelling new expansion could definitely bring the players back. The key thing is probably a new raid in a new location – the Leviathan raid lair was ace, but I suspect people are a bit sick of the aesthetic – and new things to aim for (that aren’t just random drops). That’s totally doable.

 

+1

[Harsin]

They're flailing a bit right now. For instance they announced a prestige mode for the Raid Lair that would involve set weapon loadouts. Reddit hated it (Reddit hating something, what, never!) and now it’s gone from the roadmap. They're in a situation where their creative decisions fell absolutely flat and I don't think they know what to do, so are just trying to react to dozens of different community suggestions at once, just make it like it was in Destiny being one, without any sort of cohesive vision.

[Uncle Mike]

3 minutes ago, Harsin said:

They're flailing a bit right now. For instance they announced a prestige mode for the Raid Lair that would involve set weapon loadouts. Reddit hated it (Reddit hating something, what, never!) and now it’s gone from the roadmap. They're in a situation where their creative decisions fell absolutely flat and I don't think they know what to do, so are just trying to react to dozens of different community suggestions at once, just make it like it was in Destiny being one, without any sort of cohesive vision.

 

Exactly. I was saying this, I think, when the big updates started being talked about a little while ago. They seem to be in the worst of both worlds: their slow-to-change, limited comms style is fine when the strength of the creative vision is there, and the core of the experience is in place, but none of those things seem true currently. They're giving the appearance of being led by the nose by Reddit's vocal noise, and a lot of the things they changed in D2 was directly to suit reddit's contribution anyway. So it's doubling down on nonsense.

 

The roadmap is very uninspiring. Balance patches, random rolls, modifiers on Strikes. Why would anyone go back for that?

[Harsin]

Pure speculation, but I do think something is either seriously wrong with their development tools or Bungie's internal organisation/management or both. There is no way that a relatively minor QOL improvement like an emote wheel (something people have been asking for since they introduced emotes to equip in the original Destiny in 2015), should take 9 months to implement! This is the kind of thing that other devs are able to go from suggestion to implementation in a few weeks. I know priorities and all that, but they're a massive studio with multiple support studios also helping them. 

[df0]

Terrible thing to say probably, but I'd wish Bungie would forget about D2. Keep the game running and maintained for the who still play and enjoy it obviously, but spend the bare minimum of resources on it.

 

Get inspired, gain focus and make Destiny 3 someone's/the team's vision. You now know what your player base likes and dislikes, work with that. Release year: 2020 or 2021.

[Gorf King]

I think some people are underestimating the problems with this game. A lacklustre raid, flat endgame, lack of progression and meaningful rewards, mismatched team/player structure between PvP and PvE - these aren't minor flaws. They add up to a progression game with no progression. That's not something built for player retention. It's built, as K says, for people to casually dip into. Well, many people have done that, and now they've dipped right out again, because if there's one thing worse than playing the same thing over and over again for different rewards, it's playing the same thing over and over again for the same ones, which you didn't even care for the first time. 

 

It goes beyond that, though. The decent story/writing problem in D1 was that it was hidden behind lore that wasn't viewable in-game. D2's solution is to remove it almost completely and replace it with and endless parade of snarky characters with grating one-liners. There's no light and shade, no substance, and they've done a good job of removing any interest I ever developed in Destiny's story. The weapon slots should never have been changed to deliberately make them less effective. Nor should the supers and abilities. They basically flattened the whole game and made it less about hero moments - you just don't feel like a superhero any more, a space wizard or crazy hunter, able to pull off ridiculous acts of solo bravado as well as being part of a team. They reduced Crucible to one of the most insipid PvP modes of any game I've ever played - all team shooting and no exciting plays whatsoever - and then destroyed IB and Trials by basically making everything feel the same and giving no real rewards for completing them. No chaos, no glory, no overpowered, exciting, frantic clutch moments. Just a grey drizzle of a game mode.

 

And then there's taking away almost all customisation in the subclasses - which wasn't as developed as it should have been in the first place in D1. And tinkering with the aim assist and the radar, and movement, to make even their core attraction - the feel of the combat - just worse. Try jumping back into D1 and just feeling how that feels to play. It's better. How could they do that? And why did they think their audience was too dumb to discuss subclass perks? To discuss lore, or best rolls and setups for weapons?

 

I dunno, but they did. There's just too much they stripped away from D1 in order to make it 'accessible'. They succeeded in that, I guess, but at the cost of any depth. Not just in the progression game, but in customisation, in the ceiling for skilful play, in the creativity you could apply to any given situation, in the resonance of the lore to the game. Why did they get rid of the weird, amazing, hidden quests and truly exotic weapons? Why get rid of the great rewards you could get if you tried hard enough to find and get them? Imo, they did all this because they wanted to get people who found D1 too complex/difficult/demanding into D2, to maximise the purchasers of a) the DLC and expansions and b) all the Eververse stuff, on which way, way too much focus was centred. The game for the first six months was mostly about cosmetics and Bungie's attempts to parade their existence in front of you while capping your ability to earn them in-game and making the most attractive stuff a paywall reward. And a random one at that.

 

It's that aspect, as much as the deliberate shallowing of the game, the removal of its depth and interest, that puts me off buying any future Destiny stuff. I completely agree that they shouldn't just try to add bits of D1 back in to try to attract the old crew back to the game. That's so completely uninspired, and in any case doomed to failure, because even if successful what you end up with is a game you bought almost four years earlier, but with more annoying characters, less lore, worse raids, less customisation, and a lot more Eververse. 

 

It just doesn't feel like they really want to make a game with any depth - certainly not a progression game or RPG-style game that traditionally is supposed to have some, you know, progression. Some investment, some character/class/ability development. And some sort of meaningful endgame that you can get your teeth into. If that's the case, they really shouldn't continue to make them. They should go back to making a straight-up shooter again. But before they do that, they better look again at those weapon slots and that flattened-out movement/shooting system, because that feels as if it's falling behind a lot of the best examples out there, too.

 

Bungie are really starting to feel out of touch with how to develop successful games, even to the extent of not seeming to understand what kept the core audience invested in the first three years of Destiny. That's the worrying thing. They just seem to be reacting for the sake of it, desperately, without any real vision. Just lurching from one position to another, but glacially slowly so it has no real impact. I think they should just bin D2 and cut their losses at this stage, hash out some other deal with Activision, finesse it into a different product. I don't think they can get their audience back the way they want. I don't think they are trusted to deliver any more. 

[K]

29 minutes ago, Harsin said:

Pure speculation, but I do think something is either seriously wrong with their development tools or Bungie's internal organisation/management or both. There is no way that a relatively minor QOL improvement like an emote wheel (something people have been asking for since they introduced emotes to equip in the original Destiny in 2015), should take 9 months to implement! This is the kind of thing that other devs are able to go from suggestion to implementation in a few weeks. I know priorities and all that, but they're a massive studio with multiple support studios also helping them. 

 

I would guess that Destiny is a phenomenally complicated game, and implementing stuff like that requires insane amounts of testing. Like the thing with the silly walk emote that let people walk through walls - there could be some edge case where moving from one specific emote to another on the wheel lets you glitch through sparrowhawk woman and stop anyone from collecting clan rewards, or lets you move inside the map geometry in crucible or something. The way that all gear is shared across every single game mode must make testing a complete nightmare (which may also explain why they haven't added all the Destiny 1 patrol areas and other content).

[Shimmyhill]

1 hour ago, K said:

Random rolls on weapons is a really shit way of keeping people playing anyway – playing the same strikes hundreds of times so you can get the god roll version of a gun is not good game design. Either you enjoy the strikes / missions or you don’t. The thing is though, the random roll stuff is a bit of a red herring. I thought that, to a certain extent, this was Bungie’s plan all along – Destiny 2 was always supposed to be the Destiny you could dip in and out of, so wasn’t intended to reward people for just doing the same stuff over and over.

 

(although they did sort of introduce that with the weapon forge on Mercury, which was great – it gave you unique weapons that worked slightly differently to the guns from elsewhere. Crucially however, it was a series of steps you could work towards, rather than pure RNG – a much better approach).

 

The problem is that people are dipping out, but aren’t dipping back in again. I suspect the issues Destiny 2 is having aren’t just down to it not being sufficiently similar to Destiny 1, it’s a combination of things; I suspect a game like this relies heavily on network effects to keep it going, so if your friends list, your social media and your whatsapp is full of Destiny 2, then your interest is constantly being reinforced. So if there are a few things that put people off – a lacklustre initial raid, too many exotics that aren’t amazingly interesting to play with, lack of reward for doing harder activities, inflexibility around player numbers, endless Reddit whining, etc – then that damages the network, and that amplifies the negative effect of those (relatively minor) flaws.

 

Bringing back everything from Destiny 1 seems like a shortsighted approach, no matter what the game design geniuses of Reddit think. But at the same time, a really compelling new expansion could definitely bring the players back. The key thing is probably a new raid in a new location – the Leviathan raid lair was ace, but I suspect people are a bit sick of the aesthetic – and new things to aim for (that aren’t just random drops). That’s totally doable.

 

I think the reason people played the same strikes hundreds of times was the chance at unique loot, that is gone so no reason to play strikes outside of the fun of them, there are not enough strikes in D2 and the quality of them is nowhere near enough to get repeated play - there is no carrot on a stick being dangled in front of you setting off that chemical reaction compelling you to play.

 

 

[Uncle Mike]

9 minutes ago, Shimmyhill said:

there are not enough strikes in D2 and the quality of them is nowhere near enough to get repeated play

 

That there is the problem, I'd suggest, not just the idea that if you play it 50 times you might get 5 drops of a weapon, one of which would be good. That was a shitty mechanic in D1, and just rewarded people who'd queue up some farming exploit to kill the same boss literally hundreds of times to try for the God roll.

[Shimmyhill]

27 minutes ago, Uncle Mike said:

 

That there is the problem, I'd suggest, not just the idea that if you play it 50 times you might get 5 drops of a weapon, one of which would be good. That was a shitty mechanic in D1, and just rewarded people who'd queue up some farming exploit to kill the same boss literally hundreds of times to try for the God roll.

 

But that was the reason I played, we had done everything in the game you could do and PvP was fun so we just played all the time chewing the fat trying to tweak the build, I think Bungo underestimated how much of a social game it was so just needed things to tick over while you chatted with mates.

[Jerec]

I've heard Paul McCartney has been in talks to come back on board.

[Oz]

6 hours ago, Jerec said:

I've heard Paul McCartney has been in talks to come back on board.

thanks Jerec. I never thought I'd get another chance to post this.

 

[macosx]

Good tune, shite video

[Oz]

On 13/04/2018 at 10:50, df0 said:

Terrible thing to say probably, but I'd wish Bungie would forget about D2. Keep the game running and maintained for the who still play and enjoy it obviously, but spend the bare minimum of resources on it.

seems to me we are there already. judging from the 9 months to implement an emote wheel and add some vault space. 

[Oz]

got this bad boy with the positivity crew. I fucking love it.

 

[Oz]

On 12/04/2018 at 10:57, spork said:

 

Pretty sure @Oz hasn't!

no, I haven't!

[JDubYes]

On 13/04/2018 at 12:40, Jerec said:

I've heard Paul McCartney has been in talks to come back on board.

 

I’d come back for McCartneybot.

[footle]

The obvious question is “how do they add a battle royale mode” in the next expansion?

 

presumably the difficulty of fitting that into the lore is why they’ve not done anything

[Shimmyhill]

21 minutes ago, footle said:

The obvious question is “how do they add a battle royale mode” in the next expansion?

 

presumably the difficulty of fitting that into the lore is why they’ve not done anything

 

I heard they are rushing out a BR mode.... due 2021

[Qazimod]

Battle Royale with Destiny would just involve hurrying around to find equipment in chests and instead of weapons you obtain random shaders and currencies that get lost when you exit the match.

[Shimmyhill]

10 minutes ago, Qazimod said:

Battle Royale with Destiny would just involve hurrying around to find equipment in chests and instead of weapons you obtain random shaders and currencies that get lost when you exit the match.

 

Think of the Eververse $$$$$$$ tho