Destiny 2: Lightfall

[Scruff]

10 minutes ago, Shimmyhill said:

 

Ahh so it’s not extra content alongside Forsaken but likely 3 shitty things like Osiris/Warmind?

 

Yeah, although they're not going to be like Osiris/Warmind in that they were full fledged DLC (however bad in the Osiris case) whereas no one outside Bungie is actually sure what the new stuff is going to entail apart from some exotics and possibly strikes/cruci maps.

[Stanley]

Finished the main campaign and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's Halo in all but name. And therein lies the problem for me and Destiny. It's Halo shoehorned into a structure that doesn't really work and is designed solely to keep you spending money whilst offering little of extra value and including what really should be there as standard. 

 

The whole premise is just weird. You go over the same areas again and again with enemies endlessly respawning and acting as nothing more than pop up targets at a fun fair. Even just playing through the campaign there's no getting away from this as you move beyween areas or backtrack. It just doesn't feel right and as a result the story lacks meaning or gravitas. It's a Halo amusement park. 

 

The other thing is that it's a backwards step after Halo, which was originally released 18 years ago. Whilst the shooting is improved upon and better than ever enemy AI and behaviour makes them all seem a bit dumb, just waiting there to be shot over and over. Gone are the classic fight or flight scraps you'd have with Elites. And vehicle content is woefully lacking with no flying craft at all now. 

 

Crucible is, frankly, crap. Despite saying it levels everyone out it still feels unbalanced with everyone using different weapons and move sets. Compare it to any Halo PvP and it doesn't hold up. 

 

So despite enjoying the campaign I find little to go back to now it's over. Halo 5 attracts criticism but as a full and complete package it pisses on Destiny and in PvP it's night and day. 

[Scruff]

The real meat of Destiny has always been the raids and to a lesser extent, the Nightfall. They're an anomaly in the FPS genre but it's the beating heart of the game; unless you love PvP for some God forsaken reason.

[Stanley]

Yeah that's fine if people enjoy it for that but I don't think it separates it out, or frees it from criticism in other respects. It's very slick and polished but there's no getting away from the fact that it is designed solely around players handing more and more of their cash over to repeat broadly the same content. 

 

People will always defend Destiny by saying it's about the raids. But to me it's no different than smokers who can't give up convincing themselves they enjoy it. The truth is that as a game Destiny does nothing to expand upon what Bungie had achieved with Halo.

[Scruff]

Well, you're not exactly handing over more and more money. You're not obligated to buy any of the Eververse cosmetic stuff and you get maybe 2 bits of small DLC a year and one full size expansion. That's no different than any game which has a season pass or paid DLC.

 

Your criticism (and I'm not knocking it, I hate the way the industry rinses paid DLC) is just strange because pretty much every game that drops more content is asking you to pay money to "repeat the same content" whether it is Destiny or Mario.

[Stanley]

I don't agree with you there. Just because other games do it too doesn't mean it's any better. I mean how much in total do you need to spend to continue playing Destiny with everything up to date, and is it really that different from what was there to begin with? 

 

If each expansion had a solid story campaign it'd be fairer but from what I understand it's short-lived yet premium priced.

[Uncle Mike]

Destiny is not, at its core, a game about playing through a campaign and done. It's a loot game and a team game about getting to grips with the subtleties of your character's build and exploiting those to full effect in the endgame content.

 

Admittedly, I think D2 is less good at this then D1, as the loot is less compelling and the variations in skills is less complex.

 

It's certainly possible to play through the campaign, dip your toes into Crucible (and I think most players would agree with you that Crucible is naff) and be underwhelmed, but that's because you haven't engaged with the point of the game. You can't just not do that, and hand wave it away as being a sideshow. It's literally the point of playing Destiny.

 

Again, I don't think D2 has achieved the same level of excellence there as D1 did. But it's still a compelling set of activities to do if you're willing to do so.

[Stanley]

Destiny is whatever I chose it to be. I don't feel disappointed by the campaign, on contrary I loved it and thought it was better than the first game. But ignoring the criticisms raised just makes it look like players are in denial.

[Uncle Mike]

14 minutes ago, Stanley said:

Destiny is whatever I chose it to be.

 

I mean, it's not. That is a nonsense statement. It doesn't suddenly become an RTS or develop a medieval theme because you said so. It's a loot-focussed FPS with a set of content designed to walk you up to the endgame, then a collection of stuff to do (and yes, repeat) at the endgame in the pursuit of loot.

[Scruff]

Yeah, you may want to put down that bag of monkey dust Stanley!

[Stanley]

Well you can convince yourself of that if you wish, but to me it's a tightly focussed FPS for which I enjoyed the campaign but feel that the rest is just artificially dragged out for monetisation. I'm not trying to turn it into something it isn't. I played and enjoyed what was offered. Loot is a red herring to me. At its heart there are only a handful of weapons, and they all feel broadly the same even though the game does a good job of trying to convince you otherwise.  

 

Look I'm not criticising players who enjoy the loot feedback loop and just the pleasure of playing the game, it's a great game. But for me it's a huge backwards step after Halo.

[Oz]

current list of pointless shit in D2:

1) gear power level

2) three of coins

3) Xur

4) NF scoring

5) Night Fall

6) Mercury 

7) Heroic adventures

8) Adventures

9) 150 speed sparrows

10) the competitive playlist with no radar 

last but not least.....

11) Avalon Teal

Seriously FUCK avanlon teal!

 

[Stanley]

All the various currencies, clans etc. is just a barrier to me playing the game. 

[Gorf King]

1 hour ago, Stanley said:

Well you can convince yourself of that if you wish, but to me it's a tightly focussed FPS for which I enjoyed the campaign but feel that the rest is just artificially dragged out for monetisation. I'm not trying to turn it into something it isn't. I played and enjoyed what was offered. Loot is a red herring to me. At its heart there are only a handful of weapons, and they all feel broadly the same even the game does a good job of trying to convince you otherwise.  

 

Look I'm not criticising players who enjoy the loot feedback loop and just the pleasure of playing the game, it's a great game. But for me it's a huge backwards step after Halo.

 

You didn't play and enjoy what was offered, though - you played and enjoyed a fraction of it. It doesn't look like you've played most (any?) of the post-campaign content at all, which actually makes up the bulk of the game. Obviously it's fine to do that, but you can't expect your opinion of the content you've never played to be taken very seriously - especially when you say it's artificially dragged out for monetisation. There's a bunch of strikes, nightfalls, and a raid, that you haven't even touched. All the endgame stuff, basically. Yet you've paid for them already - there is no 'monetisation' involved (I take it by that you mean DLC, but it's really not clear, and I suspect it's not clear to you either). 

 

One of the problems with D2 vanilla is not that all this endgame post-campaign stuff is in there - it's that there wasn't enough of it in there, and it didn't mean enough, or reward well enough. There wasn't enough hidden stuff, enough challenging, exciting, surprising stuff post-campaign. They'd stripped away a lot of that to make the game more like Halo (especially in PvP, with far more 'balance', everything being fours, etc). It was far less an RPG with the focus on endgame than D1 was. So your dream of it being more like Halo was actually partly realised - and it was a dreadful mistake. Players quit in droves after the campaign and a little bit of the endgame revealed there wasn't all that much to it. What Bungie have been painstakingly doing since December is trying to add all that back in - a longer, fuller, richer endgame, with more varied activities, and better rewards, and a more satisfying sense of power progression. All the stuff you don't want. And it seems they're getting there now.

 

Those who are still playing it, and are pleased to see Bungie rectify those errors and build the endgame back to what it used to be, are therefore unlikely to agree with your assertion that the game should be more like Halo, because they tried that and it turned out that it sucked. And your premise - that Destiny is a huge backwards step from Halo - is simply ignorant. No offence, but it is literally that, because all the stuff in Destiny that people love (apart from the core shooting) is stuff that's never been in Halo and never will be - and is also stuff that you've never even played. You literally have no knowledge of it, which is what leads you to say stuff like 'the weapons are all the same' (er, really, spectacularly, no) and the endgame is strung out to monetise it (it, er, isn't monetised). It's fine if what you imagine a raid to be is repulsive to you, or you haven't the time or commitment to get involved in that - but you really can't say that all this represents a step back from Halo. Because you really have no experience of it. And it's in some of that harder endgame content that you really do learn the difference between weapons, and classes, and abilities, and the mechanics start to develop way beyond what you'd get in Halo. As does the requirement for proper strategies and tactics, and actual co-operation, in combat scenarios - it's not just 'we all shoot everything and duck for cover occasionally'. Try that and you'd get nowhere in a raid.

 

Your whole opinion is based on the one bit of the game - the non-challenging bit - that people only generally play through once before getting to the meat of it all, but then you declare anyone who's played more than you to be an addict, and that you get to decide what the game is, not the people who've actually played it all because they're just addicts kidding themselves (despite it being super-obviously objectively true that this is a loot-based game with the focus on grinding endgame activities, like an MMO). I dunno about you, but nothing says 'in denial' more than someone judging a game based on a fraction of its content, and the fraction that is the least valued part at that. What would be more accurate to say is that you don't like MMOs or looters, you don't want to get involved in heavy team-based stuff like raids, but you love Halo; so please, Bungie, stop making MMO-lites and shared-world looter shooters and just make a standalone single-player shooter that's got a campaign and some PvP and that's it. I'd get that totally. I get why some people want that. 

 

What I don't get is that you say this game is in fact what you say it is - an inferior Halo. It's really not that game at all, bar the basic shooting mechanics, and if you insist it is you really are missing the point.

[Stanley]

Well then I'm missing the point and shame on me for not grinding away for another 200 hours in the vain pursuit of it. 

 

Saying that the game only really begins after it's finished is, again, just falling for what the publisher Activision, wants you to believe. Because from a design perspective that makes no sense to me, apart from to keep people hooked into your money making eco system.

 

Also 'endgame' is one of the more weird descriptions that we use now isn't it? And isn't it also a coincidence that the term was coined around the time the 'games as service' model arrived?

[Scruff]

End game has been MMO parlance for nearly 20 years 

[Gorf King]

32 minutes ago, Stanley said:

Well then I'm missing the point and shame on me for not grinding away for another 200 hours in the vain pursuit of it. 

 

Saying that the game only really begins after it's finished is, again, just falling for what the publisher Activision, wants you to believe. Because from a design perspective that makes no sense to me, apart from to keep people hooked into your money making eco system.

 

That's your own contradiction though - 'the game only begins after it's finished'. The bulk of the game starts after the campaign is finished, is the reality. That's the same in lots of online games. Look at Diablo. Look at any number of MMOs. The endgame is what keeps players coming back to PvE content. The endgame is the bulk of the game. The campaign is just part of the game, but you stopped there. And that's partly why you think all the weapons are basically the same (they are absolutely not), and probably have a lot of other fundamental misconceptions, such as the combat being dumber than Halo's (it's not - not in raids and the like, in fact it's more complex. It's just that the complexity arises in different ways than it does in Halo).

 

Obviously the idea is to keep players playing, to keep them hooked. So they buy more stuff later. Because they love what they're playing. It makes perfect sense from a design perspective, as well as a business perspective. All publishers want to keep people hooked into their money making eco system. Nintendo are, I believe, especially good at it. That doesn't mean they make bad games - quite the opposite. I don't think all fans of Zelda are hopelessly deluded addicts - well, maybe some - even if they do buy the DLC, a bunch of amiibos, and whatever others add-ons they feel like buying. Certainly not just because Nintendo are making shedloads of money off them when they do this. They probably just love the game and can't get enough of it.

 

The whole industry thrives on this 'addiction' and the financial exploitation of it. Destiny does a lot of things differently to other games - having proper raids and an actually challenging endgame in an online shooter is pretty much unique, for now at least - but in having DLC, and what is in effect an annual sub for owning new content, it's really not doing anything different to what many MMOs have done for decades. Which it isn't quite, but then it doesn't actually require a sub either - just money for the expansions, basically. Playing the campaign and then switching it off is fine, if you think you've got your money's worth or don't want the bulk of the experience. But you are definitely missing the bulk of the experience, and there's no two ways about it. Judging the game based purely on the campaign is like judging Diablo without ever having done a rift, let alone a greater rift; or WoW without raiding. Sure, you've got an idea of how the game works, but you could just muddle through the campaign stuff without any real effort or understanding of what you're actually doing.

[Stanley]

Well I'm missing the bulk of the experience then, luckily I enjoyed what I played incomplete or otherwise, but I've had my fill.

[Shimmyhill]

1 hour ago, Stanley said:

Well then I'm missing the point and shame on me for not grinding away for another 200 hours in the vain pursuit of it. 

 

Saying that the game only really begins after it's finished is, again, just falling for what the publisher Activision, wants you to believe. Because from a design perspective that makes no sense to me, apart from to keep people hooked into your money making eco system.

 

Also 'endgame' is one of the more weird descriptions that we use now isn't it? And isn't it also a coincidence that the term was coined around the time the 'games as service' model arrived?

 

Pfffft, 200 hours is how much I played when I didn’t like the game!  

[Stanley]

Is it a case of Stockholm Syndrome now then 

[Oz]

2 hours ago, Stanley said:

Is it a case of Stockholm Syndrome now then 

You should at least do one raid. There is nothing like it in gaming these days. Don’t bother with the other grind if you are not keen. Also do a whisper of the worm quest, what a fucking mission. Really hard though. You need friends for all this. And the real loot is friendship. 

[Stanley]

I'll give it a go for certain. How do I go on a raid or attempt that mission?

[Shimmyhill]

2 hours ago, Stanley said:

Is it a case of Stockholm Syndrome now then 

 

It more that Bungo have completely thrown out their vision of a sequel and folded to player power and making it great again.

 

/Trump

[Oz]

You need to get on a certain light/power level. That is the investment and the boring bit. You get there mainly by doing weekly milestones and just playing the game basically. It is not that much time in D2 I would say. Then get 5 other people from here on the online folder... easy! You are on PS4 I assume? If not, the PC crew raids every week. You need a mic and to talk to some others. You will not regret it. Following the raid ask about whisper to your raid mates. Then take the red pill and embrace the void. If you make it that far, congratulations you now play destiny and you’ve becomed that guy.  @Stanley

 

 

 

[Oz]

 

4 minutes ago, Shimmyhill said:

 

It more that Bungo have completely thrown out their vision of a sequel and folded to player power and making it great again.

 

/Trump

So you don’t consider it fixed now shimmy?

[Oz]

I tractor cannoned my way to a ‘run out of medals’ medal during the last faction rally. The gameplay is not much to look at but I am particularly proud of that medal and that I was quick enough to pause the game midflow and turn on recording on NVIDIA in the middle of the match! I am never recording gameplay on PC so capturing this was the real achievement. 

 

 

[Shimmyhill]

7 minutes ago, Oz said:

 

So you don’t consider it fixed now shimmy?

 

Nah, it’s still miles behind Destiny but it’s getting more fun to play and Forsaken appears to be the next step to that dream of Destiny 1.5 - it should have been there a year ago....

[Oz]

1 minute ago, Shimmyhill said:

 

Nah, it’s still miles behind Destiny but it’s getting more fun to play and Forsaken appears to be the next step to that dream of Destiny 1.5 - it should have been there a year ago....

So you are all in with forsaken? 

[Shimmyhill]

1 minute ago, Oz said:

So you are all in with forsaken? 

 

Ive plays enough the past week or so to want to be back with my fire team, I’m all in baby!

[Scruff]

1 minute ago, Shimmyhill said:

 

Ive plays enough the past week or so to want to be back with my fire team, I’m all in baby!

 

So you get to carry Ben through Destiny again, as well as Fortnite?

 

Such broad shoulders Shimmster!