So anytime I see discussion or news related to Destiny 2 I find myself kinda dismissing the game as something not for me or simply as a game i'm never gonna play. But then I remember the I played like 50 hours of the first game and that I really enjoyed the PVE and PVP, finished the main story and the dlc and hit the level cap.

Anytime I stop to think about Destiny I remember really enjoying myself but in passing I remember it as a kinda disappointing footnote. I wonder if it might have something to do with me only getting in after Taken King. Do any of you get in a headspace like this or am I a total outlier?

@darkshaper: You're probably spending a bit too much time around here, where Destiny 1 is kind of the red headed stepchild of gaming. The game it's ok to hate! It's gets hard to separate your own feelings from that of the horde.

I also bought Destiny on sale after The Taken King was included. I played over 100 hours of it, completed everything story-wise, and raided a bit. I never got the final calcified fragment, and I never played trials but that was about it. I loved the gameplay and did 99% of the content solo. I don't know if I'm going to buy D2. I didn't care for the Warlock jump in the beta, and I think Destiny might end up being a one time obsession. I bought the latest dlc on day one and was shocked at how small it was. Destiny was great because when I started playing, there was a year of content to get through. I think I'll buy D2 a year from now, maybe November 2018 in the black friday sales.

I have a love/hate relationship with that game as well. I'm semi excited for D2 but I'm not spending 1200+ hours of my life on this sequel.

It really is interesting the way this community as a whole has reacted to Destiny. Obviously Destiny didn't achieve all that it could it have or that people hoped it would, specifically vanilla Destiny, but it remained one of the most popular games on PSN/XBL, on Twitch, on Youtube, and just in general for the entirety of the three years since it released. Plenty of people were disappointed by it, but millions upon millions of people liked it a lot and played it continuously for three years.

Given all that, it's interesting that Destiny is treated by many around these parts as some sort of utter failure, an abomination the likes of which is rivaled only by Big Rigs and Bad Rats. Obviously Giant Bomb also has a pretty avid and active Destiny community, but it feels everyone not among that group will jump at any chance to remind everyone how terrible they think Destiny is, whether they've actually played it or not.

For the record, I don't care if other people don't like a game that I like. I've enjoyed most of my 2000+ hours of Destiny immensely, and someone else disliking the game won't take that away from me. I always just found it interesting that Destiny brought out so much vitriol among so many on these forums. For quite a long time it seemed like every Destiny related thread got at least one drive by "Fuck Destiny" or snide "You shouldn't play Destiny" answers to legitimate questions posed about the game.

It seemed like the mere fact that many people enjoyed Destiny really bothered a lot of people.

I played over 100 hours of Destiny and I'm not jumping at getting Destiny 2 at launch.

Destiny is one of the best feeling games out there. It's gun play is second to none. I had many hours of fun just running around blasting heads off fools and riding a speeder. But then it wore thin. I stopped enjoying PVP. There wasn't enough for me in the PVE and the reward system was unrewarding. There's enough niggling little things about it that slowly over time felt worse and worse and eventually it all overshadowed my enjoyment of the game.

I stopped playing and then a while later there was a good deal on TTK - €20 for it and the two previous expansions. I played it and enjoyed it, but didn't feel like going back into the two expansions that much.

If Destiny 2 ends up fixing all those problems I had and has a good plan going forward I might get around to it. But as of now it registers so little on my radar that I'm not even paying attention to their marketing campaign.

@ll_exile_ll: You're really blowing out of proportion the reaction this community had to Destiny. Most sentiments and critiques were in regard to specific points about the game and not that it was a downright failure of a game. It had a lot wrong woth it and people pointed it out but nobody ever gathered a pitchfork mob over it.

Where you'll see a lot of the shade being thrown is in the development cycle of the game because that was a shitshow.

There an old saying that you only have one chance to make a first impression, and Destiny really squandered that opportunity with many actual and potential customers.

I was in the Giant Bomb discord the other day, and someone new to the series was asking about armor and cosmetic differences, when someone else said something like "In the end, everyone just ends up looking the same, because they want to wear the highest level armor." I had to explain that hasn't been true in Destiny for a very long time, and how the armor level on any legendary or exotic can be increased.

But was it really wrong of someone not to know that? Was it wrong for them to think that the broken system the game launched with was the system still in place? Of course not. Not everyone keeps up with that sort of thing, and they shouldn't be expected to. Perhaps worse still, Destiny didn't just have one failure with it's initial launch, but many failures over time.

Base game: not enough content, awful writing and storytelling, legendary engrams that decode to rare, etc.

DLC1: not enough content, overpriced, an especially poor value if you don't do the raid, etc.

DLC2: not enough content, overpriced, doesn't even include a raid, etc.

The Taken King: finally good writing and a good amount of content and value.

For those who never made it to The Taken King, I can't blame them for having a negative impression of Destiny, and the blame for that rests with Bungie. But for the people who did play with friends, and did play The Taken King DLC, and did do the raids, and did enjoy the PVP, and did watch the game evolve and improve over the years, we're all really looking forward to the sequel. Those who still have a knee-jerk "Destiny sucks!" reaction anytime the game is mentioned might want to keep that in mind, or they could miss out on a really good game.

But I think reviews should help a lot with people's misconceptions of what Destiny has become, as should the big "2" at the end of the title. Not to say that you can't find tons of "Destiny 1.5" drive-by comments on you tube trailers or whatever, but if the game reviews well and the people playing it have good things to say, I think that perception will start to fade.

If anything he is being mild with his description of the hate. I and many others have been accused of falsely representing our opinions when we said we loved the game. 'At best, you can sort of like the idea of it', was one argument, 'but saying you love it is being dishonest'. Another argument was that we were suffering from Stockholm syndrome, the fact we spent so much time with the game only proved that we were incapable of rationalizing just how bad it was. If you think Exile is overblowing it, then you simply weren't here in the first few months when that game launched. Or you weren't interested enough to read most of the threads about the game when it all went down.

Which is also why I think the community's reaction was not very interesting at all @ll_exile_ll, I found it to be a predictable backlash that was generated by the staff's impressions. I think Brad was insufficiently able to articulate what made Destiny such a great game to play. His argument never boiled down to anything more than admitting the game had lots of faults, but that he liked it in spite of that. But he failed to describe adequately what it was that propelled it so far ahead of what it seemed to be on the offset. This is why I think most people around these parts reject Brad's push for getting Destiny on the list, because the most front center lover of the game had no strong argument, while the Jeff named plenty of reasons to hate it.

The community reaction to that is just logical. The problem is that the community sometimes places way too much value on the opinions of the staff. I feel like people need to be reminded every so often that critics' opinions carry no more weight whatsoever than anyone else's in regards to being true for another person playing it. That is to say none. Critical discussion is moreso a form of entertainment, is something I've come to realize, than it is to project you a prognoses of whether you're going to like something or not.

Sometimes people forget that. They use the staff's or any other critic's impressions or reviews as evidence to try and claim something is bad, as is what happened when Destiny was around. The fundamental problem with this is that the evidence only relates to the particular person who stated it, since it is entirely subjective. There is something that happens with people where they can't completely discern that from an objective truth all the time. They see that review score, they hear someone who they deem to be trustworthy say something and they just take it as truth instead of the subjective take it is.

How many times do you see someone being way excited for a game and then a critic they trusted says it's shit and they won't buy it? It happens all the time. And how many times do you see that person eventually picking up said game later on a discount out of curiosity, only to realize they love the shit out of it? All the time.

People need to stop giving critical opinion so much weight in those situations. If anything, critics often know way less about any particular game because they are tasked with playing so many. They end up only reaching the surface of most of the games they touch compared to a dedicated player. What happened with Destiny and some of the statements made by hateful people were rooted in this problem.

I have to remind myself how much that game let me down and all the locked content behind dlc when the main game didn't feel complete. Looking forward to seeing how this game ends up but i doubt i will get it until all the dlc is released and the game is complete.

Destiny is's a co-op shooter with loot and it's not the deepest or longest game. It plays well, the art is pretty cool, and it's fun with friends. That's good enough for me and better than most of the other big FPS manage (CoD has been boring for years now). The giant, RPG MMO shooter that I guess certain people set their bar at? What game has ever really been like that before? It hasn't been done yet, and that's for a reason. You can't quite do that yet. They can of course do better but from what I've seen, that looks like Taken King and Destiny 2 are them learning.

There are definitely a lot of people that go overboard hating on Destiny, in the media, here on GB with the staff, and you see it on this forum. Not that I think remotely everyone needs to like it, but I just don't think there are games out there blowing Destiny away. I'm hoping 2 is good so people will shut the fuck up about it.

Same, partially or opposite reasons. I found myself overwhelmed after Rise of Iron launched and almost immediately fell off the game; though to be fair, by that point I'd been regularly playing the game for at least two hours a day since the days of vanilla with only a slight drop off during The Dark Below era since I was never a Raider/Crucible player (I did try to compete in Iron Banner, and I found myself better at Destiny PvP than any other FPS other than Goldeneye/Perfect Dark, it's just not a style of game that speaks to me), though even then I completed all the story content with each character. It was only after House of Wolves the content became substantial enough I could no longer find time for all three characters and became strictly a Titan Defender player.

But for how much I played it, I'm not sure I remember anything about The Taken King's April Update, and the only thing about Rise of Iron that sounds familiar is the SIVA virus, which leads me to believe I may have installed it, seen all the new things to do and backed away almost immediately. In other words, I'm in this weird position where I loved Destiny until it actually had so much content you had to schedule and prioritize rather than just sort of mindlessly bang it out while listening to podcasts, and it sort of became less my kind of game.

I'm very curious if a total refresh will make a more substantial game more palatable to me; I can't wait to find out.

At least you can constantly remind yourself that you liked it. :-P

Like @spaceinsomniac said, Destiny did a very poor job at making a good first impression. I bought it at launch, beat the campaign and most of the random open-world tasks in twenty hours, and wow. The shooting and movement felt great, but the writing was awful, the recycling of content in even the base campaign was risible, level design was atrocious (oh, this door's locked. Wait here for three waves while I unlock it to find... another locked door!), the story was nonsensical (and predominantly included via a "codec" card system not even accessible in-game), the itemization was busted all to heck, and it had no matchmaking for end-game activities so you'd have to use third party websites to find groups (great game design, there). Oh, and it had an excessive amount of end-game currencies for upgrading weapons. The whole thing felt like a hollow, off-kilter skinner box and I bounced right off of it after a dungeon that was literally the Mars hotel campaign level, but in reverse and with one extra room at the end. Screw that, haha.

I'm not buying Destiny 2. Granted, it sounds like Bungie fixed their content pipeline somewhat by the time of The Taken King and it sounds like the itemization has had a complete reworking with the help of Blizzard... but I have no interest in this franchise anymore, outside of chiding it. It lay bare its skinner box, gambling core before me and I want nothing to do with that kind of game. They also had a bunch of really scummy stuff go on during development and a few too many scandals regarding their contempt for their player-base (yeah, the only way to get these emotes is to buy the collector's edition of Taken King that includes 3 things you already own and one new thing... but that's how it goes. If these emotes are really that important to you, just buy the collector's edition. We know you're going to. Heh heh heh, whales).

Eh, to each their own.

Its a luxory of getting to a point where i have a little disposable income, but ive found that I like "pretending" im the reviewer with no expectations going in, other than a general excitement of whatever it is. I jumped into the first game day one and really enjoyed it's structure and thought the grind was fine for someone who played the game a few hours a week after they beat the game.

Had i just sat there and listened over and over to the sea of disappointement before jumping in by doing the "right" thing and reading reviews I think I would have looked at some of those systems differently, and actually not enjoyed the game as much.

Same here. There were a lot of things I liked about Destiny but man...that game pissed me off more than almost any other I can think of. Beyond the ridiculous price of the DLC there were the stubborn, nasty, design decisions that forced you out of the game if you wanted to look for a raid group or even read the story (the 'grimoire' remains one of the worst decisions ever made by any game design team, and to my knowledge they never fixed it - they never created a way for you to view that content from within the game. Inexcusable!) and the various 'events' that were complete and utter crap. There was the shallow as hell 'quest' system, the terrible patrol missions, the horrible load times, the withholding of strikes as console specific content in a game that CLEARLY did not have enough strikes, the terrible dialog and complete lack of characters, the absolutely awful engram system etc...etc...

The game had shooting that felt terrific and some really cool atmospheric visuals and well designed enemies. It had interesting environments and some decent powers for the characters. It definitely had...stuff...going for it. But there was so much about it that seemed clearly designed to manipulate or just spite the player that I regret basically all of my time with it, even towards the beginning when I was legitimately having fun. It tempted me into the skinner box and then kept me pressing long past the time when I found it rewarding.

I have to keep reminding myself that when I think about buying the new one. Years removed the first thing I think of is the good shooting and movement, but the spiteful design choices were a huge part of that game too, and not something I want to reward or, of course, experience again.

I'm also still salty that the design team never seemed to have owned up to their terrible choices. They apparently corrected certain things in the Taken King and Rise of Iron, but I'll never forget Luke Smith crowing about how people would throw money at their TV screens in exchange for his piddly little emotes. I don't generally have strong feelings about people in the games industry, but that interview alone made me hate that guy. And for that alone I have to remind myself not to buy his stupid game, even if Brad is going to talk it up every bombcast for the next few months.

@flashflood_29: Like @zevvion said, @ll_exile_ll really isn't. It was a perfectly reasonable assessment of how many around here have reacted to Destiny due to the failures presented by Destiny 1. Trust us, we've read all the hate. The 4 of us who have responded, including @spaceinsomniac are 4 of the top posters on both the Destiny 1 and 2 forum. All that being said I wholeheartedly agree with Space in that I don't fault those players who have that reaction though. Bungie made some massive missteps early on in Destiny 1. Most of us talk and joke often about those, and how horrible a lot of those design decisions from launch were. But it's funny to us when those things are mentioned as being "Destiny" and how it works because Destiny has always been such a living breathing and ever changing game. Almost every Destiny complaint I see here on the forums makes me laugh, because 99.9% of the time, those issues have been dealt with years ago. Destiny has often been a very broken game, and while we don't always like what Bungie does to fix those broken things, they have honestly been very on the ball in fixing their own mess in retrospect. That is one of Destiny's biggest strengths as a franchise, outside of being, at least in my opinion and that of many others the best Co-op game ever created. And one that, from all we can tell, is only getting better with Destiny 2.

@hestilllives19: They never put the grimoire cards in the game. They updated for years, charged more then the price of the base game in DLC, remade huge numbers of systems, and they never bothered to put the grimoire cards in the game, which would have been a simple fix creating a menu option to view them like dozens of other games have to let you view their lore.

They also never made more interesting patrol missions in the 4 original game zones, didn't initially update the levels of strikes to make old strikes more viable at higher levels (maybe never did this?) which also meant that when the exclusive PS4 content arrived on Xbox (to the extent it did) it was useless, continued to add weird currencies etc.,..etc...

The game evolved and changed, and it's great that a subset of people loved it, but the idea that they addressed all the problems in the original design is just not true.

@bigsocrates: Yup, feel this 100%. I was pissed beyond belief with that game, like irrationally so lol. And that's despite having put 60hours in, like i never had a game make me actively dislike it after initially having fun with it. It didn't just get boring, it pissed me off lol.

@bigsocrates: They didn't put Grimoire in game, something Destiny 2 is fixing kind of (by removing it but increasing the lore in other places such as larger lore on weapons and "elective environment" locations, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yoMyTp2uSY&t=4s. The entire price of all of the DLC's at their highest was $110, so I guess that's true, granted that also quadrupled the size and scope of Destiny so I'm not sure how that's even a valid argument. Also, most players did not pay even that much. They did add forms of Patrol missions in DLC's, but to call any Patrol Beacon mission in Destiny 1 interesting would be more than a stretch. What they did add though in Patrol zones are two of the best activities that ever existed in Destiny in Court of Oryx in the Dreadnaught and Archon's Forge in the Plaguelands. I had a ton of fun on multiple occasions doing those. To make things even better in Destiny 2 they are expanding upon that with Adventures, Lost Sectors, Public Event timers, Flashpoints, Treasure Hunts, Fast Travel, and an entire new Bounty system that appears locally on Planets in Patrol rather than being picked up at the Tower. They've not only updated Strikes on multiple occasions, they've actually gone back and remade Strikes and changed how they function several times. They also had a rather large update over this past Christmas that added Strike scoring and revamped how strikes worked all together called The Dawning. Sooo.... yeah, that's just completely wrong on every front. Exclusive content on PS4 sucks for Xbox One players, and it always will. But if Sony, Activision, and Bungie are to be believed those are in game Strikes, Weapons, and items that just wouldn't exist if Sony wasn't paying for them. Who is to say unless we were in on that inner circle on how that works, but I tend to believe them. As far as the continued to add weird currencies that also couldn't is a bit tricky. I want to say it couldn't be further from the truth, because they have constantly stripped away the unneccessary leveling currencies that have existed since Vanilla, and given multiple uses to existing currencies such as Motes of Light being able to Power Level gear by using them while that item is equiped, but they have added two currencies for each Raid to drop additional loot in Moldering Shards and Siva Key Fragments (Keys). They also added another item for the new 390 Raids in the newest free update that grants free bonus gear for completing the weekly Raid. But personally I don't view these as bad things, they are free loot you wouldn't have obtained otherwise. If you are talking about 3 of Coins from The Taken King, those are free chances at Exotic Weapons, again not necessarily a bad thing for average players (if anything they watered down Exotics because they became too frequent). This is also another major overhaul that is coming in Destiny 2. As far as we can tell there are only 4 Planetary Materials, Legendary Shards, and Glimmer. If there are more currencies, we haven't seen them. This is a drastic reduction from Destiny 1.

Like I originally said, Destiny has changed many times, and mostly for the betterment of the game. And from all appearances, that will continue into Destiny 2.

Most games that have problems seem to have them because there weren't enough resources to achieve the vision of the design team, or they had a good thought that didn't turn out how they wanted, or they just weren't talented enough to pull off what they were going for.

Destiny seemed actively hostile to the player.

The Grimoire, the issue where legendary engrams would sometimes decode as rare, the fact that you had to go to your ship to change your activity even on the same planet, the terrible late game drop rates, the sheer grindiness of gathering materials to upgrade weapons etc...etc... It felt mean spirited. And while some of that stuff (like the engram thing and some of the upgrade grind) got fixed, a lot of it did not.

The biggest issue for me was probably refusing to put looking for group for raid or nightfall functionality in the game EVEN THOUGH LOTS OF PEOPLE WERE DOING IT ON AN EXTERNAL WEBSITE. The design team just stubbornly stuck to their meanspirited, narrow vision and refused to compromise or take player feedback.

Then they sold an expansion pass with two sub-par DLCs, and then for ANOTHER $40 gave the actual good DLC, which really felt like a slap in the face.

A boring game I can deal with. I fell off the Division WAY before I fell off Destiny (mostly because the Division didn't have anywhere near the quality of gunplay that Destiny did.) I didn't even really mind vanilla Destiny's TERRIBLE story, which was incomprehensible, clearly carved up, badly written, and led to them literally replacing a voice actor in a live game in part because they didn't like his performance (to be fair I didn't think Dinklage gave a bad performance, I think the writing was the problem with the Ghost.)

Those flaws were forgivable for me. Even the lack of content was sort of forgivable because hey, it was a $60 game with no subscription fee so what do you expect?

But the nastiness of the development team, the tendency to throw out half-assed events and act like you were giving out gold, and the arrogance just because a lot of people were either addicted to the reward system or just wanted a shooter/chatroom and thought Destiny was good enough for that...it still rubs me the wrong way. Obviously, given how much I've written in this thread.

There are a lot of bad games out there, and in many ways Destiny is not a bad game. In some ways it's even a great game. But it's a game that is also contemptuous and hostile towards players, and that makes me much angrier than mere incompetence.

I think it's fine to feel that way. Especially if you didn't have a group of people to play Destiny with. I personnaly wouldn't feel strongly about the first game if I couldn't rely on a tight group of people to do raids and end game PvP. This is where most of Destiny's value lies and if you had to find random people to run those activities or couldn't engage with them at all, Destiny would certainly be kind of foot note in line with The Division and other, less successful, online RPG shooters.

@bigsocrates: Well i hope they don't do the same with destiny 2 because it plays incredible on the pc and i do want to play it, but the taste from one is still bad for me as well.

You might really enjoy watching this:

[edit] Looks like I was beaten to the punch, but that Byf video didn't include the question itself, which was the best part from a comedic perspective.

Raids focus on challenge and team coordination during shooting encounters. Platforming and stealth (only present in the first raid/4) are small sections to break up the gameplay experience. They're maybe 10% of the raid experience. It's fine to not want to do the raid. They're pretty far off the laid back strike experience that many enjoy. Don't pass on them because of the platforming unless you literally can't stand it. It's really not the focus of the experience.

I honestly don't understand why the first Destiny has such a bad wrap to it.

Its a Diablo-like game, pure and simple. Its based around good shooting mechanics and loot. Its best experienced when listening to podcasts or playing with friends. When you understand this, the game is pretty amazing.

Destiny 2 seems like the first one but apparently with a better story and missions. What is there not to look forward to?

Just gonna leave this here...

I hope Bungie provides a good experience out of the gate for more casual players. I got Taken King, ate up all the single player stuff and moved on but pricing on Destiny 1 seemed way too expensive if you wanted to keep up from the get go.

The thing I'm dreading is not the game but the weekly tennis match on the podcast about how shitty but good the game is. They just couldn't let it go. I must be exaggerating but, it felt like it went on for like a half a year.

I'm kinda on the same boat. Everything that makes me doubt that this is gonna be a truly great game I kinda get by on by reminding myself that it's almost certainly gonna be a really great playing game, with co-op and loot. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Man, this weekend while looking at leaks I found myself diving deep into Destiny story wikis and holy shit it's like night and day between the game and the lore. Everything sounds so rich and strange and vague (to a still enticing degree). The God-King Oryx and the Darkness, the Black Heart being a shard of the latter, the nature of the Taken, the Worms, Malok, Savathun, the Nine, Uldren's continued exploits, the Leviathan. It's all genuinely goddamn fantastic.

But then I thought about how this sort of stuff manifests in the game (or doesn't, in the case of grimoire) and everything there just comes across as bigger knight, or bigger minotaur, or bigger whatever. Such a shame, but I guess that's Destiny in a nutshell. "Really fun and such a shame."

Fuckin hell, I'll probably pre-order tonight so I can play it at midnight. If every mission has as much stuff going on as that beta mission (or is given the same amount of care; I can't rightly expect every mission to be as crazy as the Tower getting blown to bits), 15 more alone would be a significant improvement over vanilla (and I'd say even Taken King, which brought their storytelling forward some but was far from any kind of saving grace). 5 (+1) strikes, more substantive patrol activities, a raid, and a fairly fleshed out main story. That all sounds fine. Plus of course getting some written lore stuff in-game now.

In a weird way having just finished the absolutely stellar Wolfenstein: The New Order has made it easier to accept Destiny 2's story potentially not being that great, so long as it's not flat-out bad. God, that game is so fucking awesome. Made New Colossus shoot right up to the top of my most wanted list.

@zevvion: I guess I'll just have to take your guys' word for it, then, if you were in the thick of it, cause I must have somehow missed it all. Anything I read on the forums, and even going back through the history now, seemed pretty level-headed. It's too bad if that kind of stuff was there because it definitely seemed that most people could see the flaws but still enjoy the game.

My impression of the Destiny forum was that most people were quite level-headed about the game. On either extreme we had a small minority who said the game was garbage, then we had the Destiny Defense Force who had to jump into every topic to tell people why their opinions were wrong. I hope Destiny 2 topics aren't a repeat of the same thing.

I had a lot of fun with Destiny. The biggest problem for me was always playing solo. It restricted certain elements of the game for the majority of my playtime. I also reached a point where I didn't have the ability to reach the "end game" (which were the raids), so I didn't have an incentive to keep going past a certain point. I remember loading back up the taken king briefly however many months back and I just turned it off as soon as I got into a mission. I felt no point to keep going.

Now, when I finally joined the Gb clans here and had access to playing the raids it reignited a fire for Destiny in me. I fell back into the game hard like a week before the sequel comes out. I played all the raids with other duders and had a blast. Of course I had to prep my light level and this time it was an enjoyable experience. That social incentive really changed the way I approached the game. And I look forward to that a lot this time around.

I was super-unimpressed with vanilla Destiny but revisited it in year 2 after the DLCs changed the post-game. Playing together with my wife I've subsequently had a completely different, and improved experience. So much so that I'd now say that there are no other games this generation that I've sunk the same degree of time into. I would never have imagined it after year one but now I would rate my time with Destiny 1 as one of the top three that I've had with video games over the last 5 years.

Really.

Can't wait for Destiny 2.

I'm in an odd place with Destiny 2 I have the game pre-orded and booked a week off work I know D2 gonna be great but atm I'm not very excited at all and I'm kinda dreading the grind and routine again.

I was the biggest Bungie fan for a long time. I actively played and enjoyed Destiny 1 despite the generally negative attitude towards the game.

Having said that, Destiny 2 has not even been a blip on my radar. Probably because what I love about Bungie games (single player gameplay and story) was so obviously an afterthought that I just accepted the fact that it was time for Bungie and I to go our separate ways. I'll probably snag Destiny 2 "game of the year" edition or whatever in a year or so for 20 bucks to see if I was wrong or not. It really is a shame though that I'm in no hurry to find out.

Year 1 was a little of a nightmare tbh. You need to do a lot and invest a lot of time to get a little progress e.g ascendant shards, materials farming(dear god the dullness of farming materials on patrol) just to level up after a certain. But, I think Bungie learn a lot from there, mainly that people want to play their content(nightfall, strikes etc.) at their own pace, with as minimal grinding as possible.