I fired up the free to play version of Destiny 2 since it runs at 60 FPS now on Series X/PS5 and was intrigued by the Lightfail DLC coming out
Immediately as soon as I start, I get bombarded with a plethora of advertisements to buy MTX, season passes, pre order the super deluxe edition of light fall etc…I get this is a F2P game but even for F2P standards the monetization is needlessly aggressive…let me play the damn game first and if I like it I’ll consider spending money on it
Now we get to the game…Holy shit it’s bad…lets disregard that you’re clearly locked out of certain content, fair enough, want to play gotta pay? I get it, no issue
Game has no clear indication on what to do, even to get started outside of the initial tutorial…now I’m at the tower and again, no indication of what to do…they give A LOT of side question and other busy work but if it’s difficult to try to play this as a single player campaign until you know how to navigate this cluster f*ck
Also…the fact that when using the UI, it treats the game as if I’m playing on a mouse…you actually have to move the cursor around with a controller …why? This is absolutely counter intuitive
What about the actual gameplay? It’s…it’s fine…nothing to write home about…it feels sluggish compared to other FPS and It seems like it’d be a nightmare to play this at 30 FPS…it’s serviceableI keep reminding myself that this is an RPG/Shooter hybrid so I’ll cut it some slack…
The gameplay is going to be subjected but from a system level the game is absolute garbage from the UI, quest/mission structure and the overly aggressive monetization model…
The game’s onboarding is terrible and it’s definitely not free to play, more like “free to exist”.
But can’t agree on the UI - I think it’s one of the best ones out there, and has been part of the game since Destiny 1. There’s a reason a lot of games (poorly) imitate it.
Yeah the new player experience is awful since so much grinding is needed to grab exotics from 4 years ago. The monument needs to be cut in half and dropped into the general loot pool already and there needs to be tutorial videos helping people out instead of having to YouTube every thing.
If you’re a new player, I can see this being too much. You will be overwhelmed with the amount of gear you must acquire before you get to the endgame content (or the best content).
My advice to any new players, find a guild that will happily go out of there way to help you.
And don’t enter multiplayer right away, you will get stomped
I’ve seen this in a few games and I’m never happy about it. I don’t know much about game development but it seems like such a simple thing to get wrong. And I’m talking about like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey here, they didn’t run out of time or money.
100% on the new player experience. The nice thing is that Bungie has publicly acknowledged that it’s bad and have committed to improving it, though it’ll likely be after The Final Shape in 2024. It straight up does not do a great job of showing the ropes or explaining why certain things are locked or even what the best course of action is to unlocking them, be it playing the game or buying expansions/seasons. Like I said, Bungie knows they need to improve that new player experience. Right now, they’re about to put out the penultimate expansion for a story they’ve been building on with this current saga since vanilla D1 in 2014, so I imagine that the best time to spend those resources are after it has concluded in ~2025.
UI is a big disagree, like FyreWulff said. The only other game that has gotten it right is No Man’s Sky, and only the more recent updates seem to have really gotten it into a place where it feels good. Destiny’s UI is almost universally praised for its intuitive design and presentation.
Gameplay wise, I think your take is also a big miss, dude. I’d like to know what games you’re comparing it to just for my own edification. If you’re comparing it to a COD or Battlefield, which are both inherently “realistic” shooters, then I’m afraid you may have picked the wrong game to play. Destiny is a game about space magic and monsters. The only games that I can think of with gameplay that could make Destiny feel sluggish would be Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal.
Destiny’s gameplay is among the best in the FPS genre, period. Ask anyone that plays Destiny, casually or hardcore, and they’ll tell you it’s the gameplay and PvE content that keeps them around. I genuinely don’t think there’s another shooter on the market right now that feels better than Destiny 2 does right now. I’ll admit, when you’re early on and you don’t really have much unlocked and you’re using like, green and blue tier weapons and armor, it doesn’t feel as good as when you’ve put some time into it to acquire some of the half decent gear, but even then, it still feels great.
Like you said, the gameplay is completely subjective, I totally agree, but I’d love to pick your brain about why you feel how you do about it.
I wouldn’t say terrible but it’s no where as good as people hype it up to be. I remember playing the original destiny for a couple of hours and I just couldn’t get invested in it, as I thought whatever was going on with the world wasn’t that interesting.
So I ignored Destiny 2 until the whole power of darkness campaign, I remembered thinking this sounds cool and then I played it and it turned out to be ice powers. It was very disappointing to me as that was the only thing about the game I found interesting. I thought the shooting was good and it felt nice, I remember running a couple of old content dungeons with randoms and it always felt like I was just running for cover while I shot bullet sponge enemies that had no obvious weakness(mostly my fault I didn’t bother finding out anything about the enemy weaknesses). But everything was in normal I think so it wasn’t really too much to handle at any point.
But after finishing the power of ice campaign there wasn’t really much keeping me tied to Destiny 2 and after doing some random world events I just quit and haven’t been back since. I get that people love this game but it was all kind of good enough, but not interesting enough to keep me returning to it.
Personally I think destiny is good, just the new user experience is very bad. I also think there is room in the market for a competitor all we have had is outsiders and the division it seems like.
Even then they felt limited. Destiny’s maps although not fully open world, they still give a sense of adventure not in many other games like it.
I’ve been playing for bit here and there, and every time I got an headache from all the currencies, Battle Pass and challenges nonsense. Everything is so obscure and tedious.
Gameplay and presentation is excellent but that’s about it. It’s really hard to get into if you’re playing casually.
Even going through the story bits is repetitive and boring. And if you’ve missed what happens last season, you’re out of luck. The world has moved on and you have to catch up on what’s going on from other sources.
I think it’s also important to me, for me as a hardcore Destiny fan with a @OneBadMutha Halo 5 amount of hours in just Destiny 2 (not counting the hundreds I have in D1), that Destiny is straight up not fun to play solo. Bungie succeeded tremendously in creating a demandingly social experience with Destiny, regardless of whether you think that’s a good or bad thing.
Destiny with friends > 99% of games, IMO
I know that’s a major statement, but I’ll die on that hill lol
Yea when Destiny 2 first cane out I love the game not as many advertisements then as it is now. Also, more bale to be soloed when you do not want to group. I stop playing long ago but no long ago I tried to comeback and was so confused I just gave up on destiny 2 my old brain not a sharp as it used to be But I hope they fix the issues make it better for beginners and returning players till then I play something else.
While there is a lot to know about and I have to admit, it is hard to get into if you haven’t played from the beginning/for a while.
But unfortunately, I can’t take OP seriously for saying this is a sub par fps and that it feels sluggish and the gunplay is probably the best, if not easily too 3 in the biz and it was one of the smoothest experiences at 30fps last gen. Can’t believe I’m actually reading that…
Good gameplay and graphics. I don’t like the gameplay loop or the design of the games in general
Now I’ve barely played 2. But 1 was a truly mediocre experience for me. But a lot of people do like it. It does have great gameplay…If I cared about FPS like I did 10 years ago I might have played it more.
As a diehard Destiny fan, I can’t disagree with how bad the F2P and new player onboarding is. At least when this season launched, they allowed a lot of paid content to be free for a week and even gave the 25th Anniversary content for free to keep. They should do that every new season at least.
But the gunplay is second to none in the genre. If you were just using white/green/blue weapons I kinda get it. But the core gameplay loop is getting purples and yellows. Beating the New Light campaign gets you the very popular Night Watch scout rifle and Riskrunner exotic SMG.
I bought the game at launch and I did not like it.
Never understood from where it comes this idea that this game has the best gunplay and that its a great game in regards of shooting.
I can see why people like it and I admit its not for me, but I just dont get the gunplay part. But I have the same issue with Warframe, where combat is praised so much.
Dont think neither are terrible games but seems kinda overblown in terms how people feel the game is vs how it actually is.
But I hope they fix the issues make it better for beginners and returning players till then I play something else.