Destiny 2

System played: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC
Game completed: Yes
Logged at review time: 350 hours
Experience: Played the beta. Played Destiny 1 at 1700 hours.

You can't mention the Destiny brand without having two camps be formed: fanatics who loved the game and people who wanted to love it but stumbled over its many flaws and roadblocks. I belong to the former, putting time into the game was something I did without regret. As many others would agree: it is the way it plays. No other shooter really matches the feel of firing weapons within the possibility space of gameplay it presents. There have been several games where firing a weapon felt that much better than usual, such as RAGE and Wolfenstein. There have also been games with gameplay enhancing abilities such as Borderlands 2. There has never been one that has been able to combine the two and create a sandbox that demands your attention and requires you to master the intricacies of its combat system to increase your effectiveness.

Destiny 2's toughest challenges can't be completed by average players. It doesn't allow you to overlevel to the point of trivializing that content, it requires you to be adept in order to pass. This also means you need to enjoy being challenged however, if you are expecting an RPG-like that allows you to become stronger in order to crush the challenges put in front of you, you're going to be disappointed. Skill bests this game's most intriguing content, character progression does not.

After three years of Destiny, it is important to manage such expectations I have found, as leader of a clan that is welcoming to new players. Genre's are difficult to define in this day and age in only one word. At its core, Destiny 2 is a first person shooter with an emphasis on character abilities, the grenades, melee and Super ability, that focuses on putting challenges in front of you while expecting you to be or become competent in its combat system. These challenges are then completed multiple times for the sake of becoming better at them, similar to how a Souls game is often replayed for the purpose of becoming better at the thing you have already beaten.

In order to create incentive to do any of this content over again, the game has loot as a core feature. The important distinction here with a game like Borderlands is that loot is seemingly not the main draw of the game, rather something there to make the repeated activities more fun. You can engage them in different ways depending on the guns and subclasses you use. Nevertheless, loot also plays a big role in your effectiveness. This is a game where a meta is formed around certain guns that allow you to defeat the challenges it presents more reliably.

In the first game, fanatics rallied behind this core game design, noting the difficulty and need for strong cooperation, while still noticeably putting emphasis on skilled players in any group, as the game's biggest draw. Raids are only completed through cooperation and having sufficient skill to best them. Better players could potentially cover the flaws of less skilled players in such activities, but the accomplishment was only achieved in this manner, not by the level of your character of the gear you possessed. This also made it not very friendly to players that did not want to spend hundreds of hours in the game, developing their skills and acquiring gear that made effective play possible.

Destiny 2 corrects for this, creating a game that is less challenging in most of its content outside of its most prestigious activities and streamlining the experience of obtaining gear, so that those that don't have a lot of hours to burn still own the top tier meta guns and other equipment. In this streamlining process, fans that came to the game for that challenge and everlasting development of their skills and gear are in a sense left out in the cold. The person that booted up the game a week or two ago will have access to the same arsenal as they do after putting hundreds of hours into the game. Not only that, the lack of more complex armors and weapons means they have nothing to chase that makes them stand out.

That leaves the challenging content. Luckily, those are in great order. The reworked Nightfall is not just fun but also challenging in all the right ways. Conquering it feels rewarding, week after week. Meanwhile, Leviathan is Destiny 2's first Raid and arguably one of the best ones they have ever created, even for longtime fans. It is a challenging endeavor with great combat encounters. After a sketchy first run, it begs to be mastered. Before long, with the help of lots of community initiated testing of weapons and skills, the Raid is quite an easy activity to complete for experienced players. That is not to say that is a bad thing, the time of running a Raid in an hour or less is what makes it so rewarding. You have come to the point where you and your 5 friends destroy any hope it has of stopping you, while it came so close the first time you launched it. These easy quick runs are victory laps you love making.

It is at this point that the Prestige activities take over. These are much harder versions of the existing challenges, such as the Raid. In Destiny 2, the Prestige seems much more harsh than it ever was in the previous game. This is mostly due to what I think is some poorly designed encounters, specifically the Baths. Destiny 1 had a Raid that was notorious for being merciless on new players, King's Fall. It had mechanics that required individual players to be at very specific locations at very specific times, doing very specific actions. This led to 'make or break' gameplay, as your entire group was doomed if someone was unable to perform. You couldn't help your less experienced or less skilled players, because you were demanded to be somewhere else. It was a hard team-skill check. If you had one player that was not able to do their job, they would have to be replaced, unless you were willing to retry over and over until they could pull it off.

The Baths in the Leviathan is one of four combat encounters that is designed in a similar way. It leads to a very static approach, which isn't very engaging even for the best groups and initiates a failure if one person can't do what they are supposed to be doing. This is more forgiving in the Normal version of this Raid, but the mechanics' static nature is exacerbated by Prestige mechanics and difficulty. If one person cannot perform their role, that's it. You will never finish that encounter until they do, no matter how good the other players are. Luckily, the Baths is only one poorly designed encounter among a handful of fantastic ones that are a ton of fun to complete as a group, rather than individuals that are in the same room. Requiring communication, cooperation and tactical approaches to most of these encounters, especially the final boss fight, is a co-op experience unlike any other and the pinnacle of what Destiny has to offer.

It does lead to one aspect of the game that is in dire need of changing: the endgame progression. As it stands, because the game deals out gear to new players to enhance their experience, there is just no reason for fanatics such as myself to keep playing the game in order to look forward to new things to play around with. The playstyle I had after hour 50 is the exact same one I utilize at hour 350. No new elements are introduced outside of very small cooldown reductions on certain skills, but these don't actually change the way you play or enable different types of plays in moment to moment combat encounters. They just allow you to enable a play slightly earlier than you normally could. Certainly nice, but not enough to keep the progression of my character and skill as a player interesting for long.

In solving the problems of the previous game, specifically acquiring loot and enabling an effective playstyle, Destiny 2 has introduced the issue of irrelevance to hardcore players. Because the optimal way to play is available to you at hour 50, there is nothing to strife for beyond mastering your own thumb control. I have finished all of Destiny 2's most challenging content. The issue at hand is not that I am able to defeat all these challenges on a friends account who only has 50 hours into the game. In essence, there is nothing wrong with the result of such a system. I should be capable to overcome challenges based on my accumulated skill as a player. The issue is that, however small, there are no progressions I can make in my playstyle or the way I engage in combat whether I have 1000 hours on a character or 50.

In my blood and bones, challenging gameplay with mechanics that allow skill progression and mastering of those challenges is what I enjoy most. While this was always true for me, I realized this first when I was younger playing Ninja Gaiden. After that many other games followed, such as Dark Souls. Pretty much all of these games allow you to destroy their challenges if you mastered their mechanics and had the skill to perform, whether you pressed 'New Game' or continued in NG+. As such, I am one that is less susceptible to the flaws of Destiny 2's endgame. The prospect of reward incentives is not the reason why I play videogames and it is not the reason why I engage in challenging content. While there was no reason for me to complete the Prestige Raid since the gear and other rewards are identical to all others, I did it for the fun and because I wanted that challenge. There certainly is no reason for me to do it ever again, which is a sentiment that is echoed in the Destiny community a lot, yet I will. I want to become better at it and I want it to crumble under my team's coordinated approach. That is the reward I care about most.

That said, I am not completely immune to incentives and would prefer more of a reason outside my own to tackle these activities. On top of that, I want to keep growing as a player in this game with new possibilities to play and engage in combat. Destiny 2 will not give that to me, no matter how much more I will play of it. Of course, such a point will always be reached in any videogame of this type, yet Destiny 1, a game that was criticized heavily for not having enough 'stuff', had way more of this than Destiny 2 does. Looking at its progression system, you can't help but feel some odd decisions were made from the perspective of a dedicated player. Seemingly all decisions were made in favor of players that wanted to play and see everything only once. You play the story for a nice experience, keep playing some of its content until you are high enough level to do the Raid, then you do that and stop playing to come back later.

This design decision makes sense when looking at it through that lens, but it is so easy to see ways in which they could appeal to both audiences; the blood of the players looking for a fun new game to play that make the game succeed financially and the heart of the dedicated players who will praise the game into glory. You don't want to kick your largest audience between the legs and make them horribly underpowered, out-geared and without any hope of competing when they return to the game after a month to a bunch of savages that have been playing every day that entire time. But the more casual players do not need to be alienated to appease the hardcore players with reasons to keep playing. The differences can be small. So small that the occasional players won't care about obtaining such things, while the dedicated relish in the thought of obtaining it.

Destiny 2's way of attempting to do this is through cosmetics, but this is a short sighted solution to a more complex problem. I do not want to see that I have played more, I want to feel it. I do not care what anyone else thinks of how my character looks, I want my story to be my own. My weapons should be different from those that have only put 50 hours into the game. They do not need to be more powerful, they do not need to have better stats, they just need to be different in something other than the shader I put on it.

Even something like subclass skills are hard-locked into choices I am not allowed to make myself. While most of the subclasses are great fun and well designed, every player will play identically with no build variety, which is perhaps Destiny 2's biggest let-down-design-choice that was made so that I cannot find new ways to play that others wouldn't have found if I could.

The only distinguishing aspect in the endgame at the moment is the modification system. Armor and weapon mods. However, the armor mods are a tedium to obtain as they are entirely enabled through glimmer, which is best obtained in anything but the endgame activities. In fact, the most basic world activities that you do as you just start the game is the best way to obtain it. Then, the randomness of the system ensures you will have to keep earning glimmer to buy more until you get what you want, but since the glimmer earning process is such a chore to a player like myself, it doesn't seem worth it to chase. As such, I just kept playing endgame activities, which lowers the amount of glimmer I earn, but at least allows me to have fun while slowly acquiring these mods. When finally obtaining the mods, my playstyle does not alter or enable new plays, it just enables it to rotate slightly quicker than before.

The weapon modification system is practically non-existent in this regard, even less so than armor mods. One can't help but think all aspects of the modification system can be expanded and improved upon: complexity, depth and earning methodology.

These last few paragraphs illustrate a criticial view of the game but that always comes from a place of passion. At this point, I can't imagine a game I would rather play than Destiny 2, even in its current state as a dedicated player. I haven't addressed everything about the game, such as the PvP, but that is largely because I have very little criticism of its PvP component. The game is very well balanced for the first time in over three years and I enjoy playing it a whole lot. Skillful plays make me stand out in matches and dumb plays make me die to the opposition. There isn't a lot to add, besides Trials still being my favorite PvP mode in a shooter to this day. A ranked mode would be welcome in regular PvP for someone like me, but I am more open to wait what the future brings on this aspect.

While the game might be flawed in its current state, these are all flaws that seem very easy to address in future updates. Unlike the first game, Destiny 2 has a very strong foundation to expand upon, which makes me very hopeful for the future while I still enjoy playing it on a daily basis today.