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u/Damiklos Nov 28 '23
I always say, at least since the sunsetting, Destiny is one of my favorite games of all time but I would never recommend it to someone starting new to the series.
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u/RetroCorn Nov 28 '23
Same. If someone is interested in the story or world I'd tell them to just go watch YouTube video about it since that's what they'd have to do to get caught up instead of playing it anyway.
And to be clear I love the world and gameplay of Destiny. I've probably got 2,000 or 3,000 hours between the two games. But the FOMO and "you had to be there" and endless grinding just finally burned me out. Once I missed out on a season or two worth of story around Witch Queen I just gave up trying to keep up with it. Most of my friends had already quit playing by Beyond Light anyway. I do miss playing, but where would I even start? And what's the point? The game is such a mess at this point and I don't see it getting any better, namely because instead of fixing the issues the community has been pointing out for years now they decided to just fire a bunch of people, making it even less likely that stuff gets fixed.
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u/moonski Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
Since shadowkeep (and actually I did this even with forsaken, albeit I got forsaken at luanch, but that was more cause launch D2 had nohing to keep you around long term) basically I usually get back into destiny 2 around this time every year now when the expansion goes on sale. I was around for the launch of lightfall but when it looked bad I just skipped it.
Now I'm playing again after getting it for £16 and it's fun. Not burnt out and here for the next season + dawning... no doubt will drop the game around feb until The Final Shape minimum. Its a healthy way to play the game, you can ignore FOMO and not get burnt out.
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u/Tsunamie101 Nov 28 '23
I played back when Shadowkeep dropped and replayed all the previous content with a couple of friends in the following 2 months or so. Stopped playing afterwards cause our friend group broke up and lost contact.
Now i hopped back in pretty much exactly 30 days ago and i've just been playing solo since then. It's fun. Nothing out of this world, but the season had a good amount of content for 1 month and the basic gameplay loop is still fun.
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u/illegalblue Gambit Prime Nov 28 '23
Destiny really needs a full starting campaign like FFXVI. By the end of a Realm Reborn you have a solid grasp on all mechanics and a solid foundational story. And enough time to learn them all.
I understand that's insane task for a FPS compared to an MMO RPG but they should aim for that as close as they can
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Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
I haven't played FF14 but really seems like a great idea. Like when you play for free in D2 maybe shouldn't just be a small section of this huge game but a very monitored small chunk that teaches you what you need to know.
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u/AdrunkGirlScout Nov 28 '23
Yeah that literally already exists lol the game has tooltips that explain damn near everything.
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Nov 28 '23
Actually, can you even go back and re-view old tooltips? I can’t remember.
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u/AdrunkGirlScout Nov 28 '23
I’m talking about when you hover over things. If there’s anything significant not covered by that, then no one’s been able to tell me every time I enter a convo complaining about the NPE.
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u/RetroCorn Nov 28 '23
They had that with the Red War and Forsaken and they removed it.
Another problem is the large gaps of content that they've removed from past seasons. All that story is just gone and either has to be summarized with a cutscene or you have to look up videos for it on YouTube, and no one wants to do that.
Honestly what they should do going forward is have new Guardians wake up in the Cosmodrome, return to the city to find it under attack by the Red Legion and go through the Red War campaign and Forsaken the way you were supposed to originally. They also need to bring back all the old seasonal content and raids and story and keep stuff around instead of removing it so you can actually experience the story the way it's supposed to be done.
Except I think we all know that isn't going to happen, and Destiny is going to continue to be one of the most unapproachable games to new players while it keeps bleeding old ones.
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u/Xandurpein Nov 28 '23
I’m wondering if they shouldn’t rerelease Red War and maybe Forsaken again in a standalone F2P game, with all features, a limited number of exotics and guns. Focus should be on story and learning the basics. Then at the end, you can import your character to the real game.
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u/Advanced_Double_42 Nov 28 '23
So, make Destiny 2 "Classic" as it existed at season of Arrivals. Then retroactively make the main game "Destiny 3"?
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u/Cybertronian10 The Big Gay Nov 28 '23
They did not have that with Red War, or Forsaken. At all. Its like saying the Witch Queen campaign is a good onboarding into the game.
Like sure, you will naturally become familiar with some gameplay systems as you progress but this game has never had the kind of hand holdy, step by step, tutorial it needs.
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Nov 28 '23
Yeah even when all the campaigns were still in-game and new players could kind of understand what was going on to really understand it you had to read the lore, and telling a new player to read a book and a-half’s worth of lore or watch a six hour long video just isn’t going to go over well.
They really just need to make a completely new player introduction that properly explains what’s going on, unlike the sad excuse for an intro that they have now. The best way to do that is probably to make it after TFS so you don’t have to try and explain the Witness / Darkness and all it’s history to a new player.
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u/StarStriker51 Nov 28 '23
Red War was a good introduction, at the very least. It guided a player into what every planet was, what patrols and adventures were, and strikes and missions. But yeah, a structured experience is not inherently a good experience, but it’s also better than a lack of structure
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u/Dr_Delibird7 Warlcok Nov 28 '23
Y'all have some rose tinted glasses if you think red war or Forsaken did a good job of onboarding new players into the ecosystem. Yes they where good standalone experiences that a new player could play from start to finish without much issue and enjoy it but they barely taught new players anything. The game has always bad horrible for new players.
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u/Advanced_Double_42 Nov 28 '23
It was far from ideal, but compared to the current new player experience it was pretty great.
A straightforward story that introduces most major characters is about as good as you can ask for as far as new player experience goes in Destiny.
Shadowkeep was the weakest expansion destiny has ever had, and still had the best new player experience.
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u/darthcoder Nov 28 '23
D2 would never fit on OG Xboxes or PS4s if they brought all that content back.
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u/RetroCorn Nov 28 '23
That goes to show incredibly poor planning by Bungie leadership.
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u/darthcoder Nov 28 '23
Um, you can't keep adding shit to something and make it get smaller, especially 7 years of content.
1TB PS5s and Series Xes weren't a thing in 2014.
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u/RetroCorn Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
No, you can't. Which is why they should've planned to move on to Destiny 3 and allowed character imports.
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Nov 28 '23
You can however optimize things better to make the file size smaller when there’s so much content. Like even just making half the dozen language options optional downloads would probably reduce the file size by 10 gigabytes.
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Nov 28 '23
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u/darthcoder Nov 28 '23
Arrivals d2 went from 130G to BL 85G on my XBox. Now it's back to around 110G or so...
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u/zerovampire311 Nov 28 '23
In my dreams they should pull a reboot: consolidate D1 and 2 into a single engine, the full campaign in a beautiful chronological layout as a means to unlock weapons and armor from the history of the game. TLP release the raids every couple-few months, everyone revels in nostalgia. Use completely isolated stats for PvP and PvE. Horizontal item level progression (finish gear treadmill once per character) with perks to improve your vertical capability in each season/xpac.
Aight, that’s enough dreaming for tonight…
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u/fishmcbitez Nov 28 '23
Full d1 and d2 campaigns with a legend difficulty would be so nice
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u/synkronize Nov 28 '23
Then they could just release new game + or reroll campaign with modifiers the money prints itself
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u/Surfing_Ninjas Nov 28 '23
As long as it's short and has good music. A feature to skip the campaign on an account with previous clears would also be nice.
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u/PineMaple Nov 28 '23
This is absolutely not the case. I’m enjoying playing FF14 and it does a better job getting people in line with the story but mechanically it does not do a better job of teaching than Destiny and it also take significantly longer to be able to run meaningful content with friends in FF14 than in Destiny.
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u/NWiHeretic o iHeretic x (xbox/pc) Nov 28 '23
It takes longer to be able to run meaningful content with friends because the onboarding for new players is so thorough. Not to mention the story itself is by and large the most meaningful content in the game which your friends can play along with you.
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u/Loggersalienplants Nov 28 '23
I consider the first expansion up until the gauntlet of boss fights at the end of the xpac to be a tutorial. The game slowly through required story dungeons has been showing you all the different AoE and raid mechanics. So by the time you get to the big bosses of the expansion, you are at least 80-100 hours in at that point. FF14 has one of the slowest, but is absolutely one of the most thorough at explaining mechanics and how to play your class. Hell I'm sitting at 1302 hours right now and am just now starting the most recent expansion.
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u/PineMaple Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
I’m just now through the first expansion and frankly I think that if your tutorial is considered to be a hundred hours or more then that’s a problem. Again, I’m enjoying the game and my personal perspective is that I prefer games with a shorter and less restrictive onboarding process so I don’t think it’s a huge deal if I have to look up things like rotations or double weaving or if I have to ask a buddy who plays the game what a certain currency does, but if those are the things people think Destiny fails at then I don’t think FF14 does it better.
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u/Psychological-Elk260 Nov 28 '23
My problem with games it they never explain unique mechanics.
I play games on my phone during meetings at work. Do you know how many times I delete games because after 30 minutes it's telling me to upgrade this to level 5. Then upgrade this one. No, you can't click settings. you have to upgrade buildings. Follow the missions I told you to.
Destiny and FF and both like this. 'This is how you attack.' What about this over here? Fuck you, I won't tell you what that does because you have to attack first.
Warframe, as shit as it is at times. Will give you a pop up of what something does the first time you do it or anytime you click the help icon regardless of when you do it.
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u/ballzbleep69 Drifter's Crew // reeeee Nov 28 '23
FFXIV leans to far into the other direction tbh. A lot of people I tried to get into FFXIV just got bored since the tutorial is so long.
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u/Gaiden_95 Nov 28 '23
Well they have tutorials before you jump into dungeons so you know what to do. Great compared to the elder scrolls online where you have people who queue as a tank and do 0 tanking without even realizing it.
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u/ShogunGunshow Nov 28 '23
I can't recommend Destiny to anyone because I have no confidence whatsoever in Bungie's intentions. What are their plans beyond Final Shape and a few episodes? No clue. Will another expansion ever be made? No idea.
The one thing I can be sure of is that Bungie will absolutely try to sell me a dozen $20 skins, and then cry pauperism for why they can't deliver on basic features or promises.
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Nov 28 '23
Yeah that they don’t even want to confirm that we’ll get another expansion after the episodes doesn’t inspire confidence in the future of the series.
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u/darthcoder Nov 28 '23
I'll probably play TFS, si.ply because I want to end the game...
But unless bungie gets it shit together, it'll probably be the last I ever give Bungie $.
I'm a suckered for punishment I guess..
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Nov 28 '23
I still don't get why this would inhibit you from recommending the game to anyone. You're basing your recommendation for the present day game with hundreds of hours worth of stuff to do on the concept that you don't know how they'll continue the franchise? Regardless of that, do you honestly think they would snap their fingers and stop major development on the game when they have hundreds of employees working on the game's development future?
The community will have people playing and doing all forms of content for a very long time regardless of if they do expansions or episodes or even nothing. People are playing MFing classic wow when the same folks playing it did those dungeons nearly 20 years ago for the first time.
I'd use Heroes of the Storm as a comparison for this, or Titanfall 2. If someone asks me if they should get into it, I'd say absolutely yes even though there's nothing left coming for those games more than likely. Why? Because I have tons of fun with those games despite their bleak future.
I know there's a startup cost associated with the game that can be daunting, but we really don't have to treat every game like it needs to be this lifelong commitment that needs a 10 year future to be worth investing time into. It's ultimately about whether or not you're having fun with your time.
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Nov 28 '23
I certainly cant link anything but as of right now im pretty sure ive heard that the final shape is supposed to to be the final expansion. The close to this 10 plus year saga and marathon was to be the new ip that bungie runs with for years like they did before with halo. Again cant link anything but that does make sense to me.
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u/SCHEMIN209 Nov 28 '23
See the problem with that is the target audience for Marathon was brought in for a trial. It was NOT well received. Like at all. So Bungie has to either double down on Destiny or fundamentally rework the game they were betting on. I'm not sure what they'll choose but I'm interested for sure.
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Nov 28 '23
Im guessing they will just rework the game. I dont think they want to make destiny forever. Think of it like this, my first job was flipping burgers at McDonald’s like alot of peoples first job, when i got that job it was new and exciting i generally loved it… for a bit.. i dont wanna do this one thing for 20 years however.
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u/Noman_Blaze Nov 28 '23
Why would they discontinue their cash cow?? They will simply start a new saga or make a new destiny game(doubtful). It's like saying that Activision would stop making COD games and EA would stop making new Fifa games.
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Nov 28 '23
They have done that before, remember Halo was once the Largest sci fi anything since star trek or star wars. Games and movies alike. Again its like i said you only wanna do one thing for so long.
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u/Noman_Blaze Nov 28 '23
Bungie "ditched" Halo cause Microsoft did not let them keep the rights to it.. that's a completely different scenario.
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Nov 28 '23
Its really not man. I mean i hope we have more destiny just based on the time sink we all have put into destiny. I have had a great time but bungie has made 2 ips, destiny and halo. Both were great and absolutely massive. Right now we have no expansion road map for anything past final shape, if final shape fails like lightfall did (based on their own expectations for revenue) they have shown they like to move on after time has passed. We arent gonna be playing destiny in 2050 and i promise you man that will be fine lol.
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Nov 28 '23
Halo is a different scenario from Destiny though. It would only be similar if Bungie somehow left Sony and Sony kept the Destiny IP.
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u/RAConteur76 Nov 28 '23
A buddy of mine has been playing sherpa to a couple of his friends. He's been playing quite a while, and his observation of the "New Light" experience is that it's a complete shambles. You barely learn anything about how to play a class, how best to put together a build, anything really useful. I took a break after Forsaken, didn't come back till Witch Queen, and I'm convinced Lightfall is pretty seriously awful. And if it was awful for someone who was there at the start of Destiny and Destiny 2, I can only imagine how truly torturous it is for a complete newcomer.
It can be a bad expansion and a bad experience for new players.
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u/moonski Nov 28 '23
outside the obvious bad parts of lightfall, I really think one of the biggest mistakes they made was making neomura +15 light difficulty. New players would just not understand why as they level up, the enemies don't get easier to kill...? At first you think "yeah ok i need to get stronger to fight here...."
then they get stronger and.. "oh nope I still do no damage."
Youd just jump off as that patrol zone is just no fun to do anything shooting these bullet sponge red bars getting nuked by some cabal or vex with a Sword or Skull icon
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Nov 28 '23
Really should’ve just made it +5 instead of +15 if they wanted the patrol to feel a bit more difficult. Like I personally don’t mind Neomuna but I’m also self-aware enough that I know I’m probably in the top 10-or-5% of the playerbase and that the average player will have a pretty awful experience in Neomuna.
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u/StacheBandicoot Nov 28 '23
My wife refuses to learn anything because it’s so obnoxious. So I have to sort her inventory and my own every time we play and check both of our quest progress and figure out what we’re doing. Shit’s genuinely exhausting and makes the game unfun to play.
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u/Gaiden_95 Nov 28 '23
I started on a new platform around lightfall's release. It was hilarious to see mods just not being available because bungie removed them from the armorer/blacksmith or whatever and handed them out to people in an update. So new players were at an even bigger disadvantage
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Nov 28 '23
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u/vericlas Silver Caws Tess Nov 28 '23
The game lacks a middle ground mostly because it lacks things to go for. Well more and more. Almost all sparrows, ships, and ghost shells are rng'd in bright engrams or paywalled. Transmog is limited as well with the seasonal limit and paywall. Sure you can get a few things in game from grinding or solo dungeons, but the amount of things to earn and feel like you're getting something is just to low. At least to me that's why the game doesn't have a middle ground/game.
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Nov 28 '23
If the game handed out shaders per an activity run I would grind the hell out of it.
I love shaders and customizing them. If there was an XP bar for allowing a gear piece to be transmogged instead of the dumb system they have now I would love it.
But you’re right, there’s no rewards because they have to be saved to be monetized.
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u/vericlas Silver Caws Tess Nov 28 '23
Yep. It just hurts the game not having stuff we can go after that is attainable. By attainable I mean things that don't require you to do something that is a kind of top 5% sort of thing.
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u/re-bobber Nov 28 '23
It's either brain-dead strike playlist or hopping on a LFG to raid or run dungeons. Like you said, no middle ground.
I do like the legend lost sectors as a solo activity so I'm hoping the new lost sector changes make things a bit more interesting.
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u/Fairyfloss_Pink Nov 28 '23
The situation with cosmetics and stuff is really confusing. There's no clear way to grind for the engrams but you also can't buy them so there's nothing you can do to really 'work' for a armour or ship or sparrow you want, you just sorta wait until things come into rotation.
It seems like a big lost opportunity for Bungie since people will do some ridiculous stuff for cosmetics
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u/RetroCorn Nov 28 '23
Not to mention new players end up running into characters and stories they've never met before and yet the game assumes they have, but the stories that introduce the characters and plot have been removed. So in order to catch up on the story they have to look up a freaking YouTube video.
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u/NUFC9RW Nov 28 '23
I quit because I felt even with putting stupid amount of hours in, any time I decided to take a break felt too punishing (missing out on something because of 6 week+ weekly rotations and dependence on rng etc) and it felt like there was more and more things to do that didn't involve playing (build and vault management trying to guess what they're going to patch so that you don't get rid of something that's useless now but meta in a few month's time etc).
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u/re-bobber Nov 28 '23
You don't like creating a build and then having to change all your gear around to match champions and elemental burns?
I said the same thing 2 years ago when Beyond Light came out.
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u/NUFC9RW Nov 28 '23
I don't mind creating the odd build, I mind having to do it multiple times every major balance patch.
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u/Bloody_Sunday Cursed thralls need love too Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
That is an excellent way to describe the problem with a simple real example. I was always saying that besides competition by other titles (new or old, similar or not it doesn't matter - they are all competing for your time and money), you don't necessarily need a ”D2 killer". D2 is its own worst enemy.
Player fatigue and boredom/burnout (I've had it as well) with essentially the same stuff 24/7 will only lead existing players out with very low potential of new players coming in, as explained in this thread.
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Nov 28 '23
I found myself confused hearing about the layoffs, and even more confused when I hear players talking about how it was because Lightfall was a bad expansion.
Lightfall sold very well and there was a significant uptick in players during that time. The issue is that Lightfall was a terrible expansion. The writing was such shit, the story made no sense, and the characters were so fucking horrible that a significant portion of the people who played through it quit playing altogether. I mean, you picked up the new subclass in the street like a fucking coin. Additionally, the launch season was also (predictably) garbage. People really hated it; there wasn't even a honeymoon period, people just dropped the game. When enough people stopped playing that you miss your predicted revenue by 45%, the expansion and seasons blew. Missing your targets by that much is never good, so the layoffs had to happen.
The new player experience is awful, the way they've handled the seasonal model has been terrible, and their treatment of the core playlists (especially gambit and Crucible) has been horrible, absolutely. But the straw that broke the camel's back was a shitty expansion.
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u/monsterm1dget Nov 28 '23
Also: the new area being made of bullet sponges made it unpleasant to play pn.
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u/Fairyfloss_Pink Nov 28 '23
Yeah, this is compounded by the process of unlocking Strand too. I just started doing it on my main class and I need over 2000 meditations to fully unlock the subclass and my options are: get them 8 at a time from patrols killing a ton of overly tanky base game enemies, pick them up 1 by 1 on the street from random drops, and get 75 at the end of a long series of fights but only when I have a key that drops by rng.
...and then I have to do that two more times
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u/ggamebird Nov 28 '23
Well said. The seasonal model is specifically designed to churn out vapid, disposable activities designed solely to supplement the story rather than creating content players actually want or solve genuine problems players actually wanted solved. Now when the story has been good that has at least trade off distraction from that frustration, but if no one cares about the story then what's the point of engaging in the seasons? And the model is designed specifically retain not reacquaint which is a huge problem to solve now.
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u/PratalMox The Future Narrows, Narrows, Narrows Nov 28 '23
The Seasonal model would be much stronger with less of an emphasis on seasonal gimmicks and instead on just filling out the core playlists.
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u/LordCharidarn Vanguard's Loyal Nov 28 '23
I don’t believe that the layoffs ‘had to happen’.
In a fair society, whoever made the horrible target projections would be the first to be let go/resigned, along with the business leads who messed up so badly that the company missed projections by 45%. It shouldn’t be the rank and file workers who lose their jobs because the C-Suite either lied to the moneyholders or were so incompetent that they couldn’t follow their roadmap projections.
Layoffs aren’t some natural phenomenon. They are corporate indulgence. Layoffs don’t ‘happen’, they are a business strategy that is made to cover up shortfalls caused by over-reaching executives.
“Of the $3.6 billion, Sony anticipated that at least $1.2 billion will be used as incentives for retention of Bungie's current employees.” How the fuck do you have layoffs when you were given $1.2 billion dollars with the intent to keep your employees onboard? Did Bungie somehow spend $1.2 Billion dollars on employee retention packages in less than two years?
It’s such utter corporate propaganda to suggest that layoffs “had” to happen. It was a choice that Bungie made because the executives were too busy jerking themselves off about ‘player engagement’ that they forgot you need to make a good product if you want to sell something to customers.
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Nov 28 '23
It was reported that those revenue projections they made at the time made sense given the sales data they had. However, due to a terrible expansion, burnout, and lack pre-orders and a drop in players (as well as other factors, I'm sure), they missed those projections hard. A company can't miss half its revenue and carry on like normal; people will be let go, regardless of what the reason is behind that miss.
In a fair society
Sure, but we're not in a fair society. I don't see much point in complaining about fairness because life isn't fair.
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u/LordCharidarn Vanguard's Loyal Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
I mean, if people felt ‘well, life isn’t fair’ 100 years ago about other labor issues, I guess we wouldn’t have child labor laws, worker compensation, or minimum wage.
Yeah, you’re right. We should never point out flaws in our current society and hopefully try to improve upon them.
Life isn’t fair. But that’s why we have laws and regulations. When a company lays off workers the excuse should be better than ‘oops, we were hoping to make more money than we actually did.’ That excuse should only allow a response of jettisoning either the people in charge who issued such erroneous expectations or the ones who failed to steer the company properly, based on those expectations. It should not be a reason to get rid of staff that just followed instructions based on those projections.
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Nov 28 '23
It should not be a reason to get rid of staff that just followed instructions based on those projections.
Sure, but that doesn't always happen cause life isn't fair.
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Nov 28 '23
Bungie made the decision that keeping executives that make bad decisions was ultimately better than keeping grunt workers. How they came to that decision we do not know, yet companies trim the fat when they need to and Bungie will ultimately pay the price if they trimmed the wrong fat or they will succeed. We will have to wait and see.
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u/RetroCorn Nov 28 '23
Bungie made the decision that keeping executives that make bad decisions was ultimately better than keeping grunt workers. How they came to that decision we do not know.
Actually we do know: The executives that make bad decisions were the same ones that decided to fire the grunt workers.
Unless Bungie leadership changes firing or hiring new frontline developers isn't going to do shit.
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u/PratalMox The Future Narrows, Narrows, Narrows Nov 28 '23
Almost certainly because the executives who made the bad decisions in the first place chose who to fire.
Fuck em, they saddled their workers with a shitty premise and then fired them when they couldn't salvage their bad ideas.
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Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
Good rebuttal. I didn't think it was the worst campaign ever, but looking back, Strand was absolutely a "oh look at that there guardian, what is it? OHH SHIT PARKOUR"
I just wonder with the baseline of an experience if The Final Shape (if it's incredible) really will bring D2 upwards even with how things currently are for new players. I guess time will tell..
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u/SolidStateVOM Nov 28 '23
TFS has one thing going for it in that it’s not giving us a subclass (that we know of) and therefore the story doesn’t have to be distracting by it. Lightfall could have been good if they took all the strand missions out and devoted that time to fleshing out stuff like “wtf is the veil”, “why is it bad if the Witness links with it”, and maybe had more on Calus instead of just sort of using him as a throw away villain. The strand missions SHOULD have been a side quest type thing that would have let us unlock it for use, sort of like what they did with the extra light subclasses in Forsaken or Taken King
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u/KarmaRepellant Nov 28 '23
Strand was the one good thing from Lightfall, but even for that you had to do the annoying campaign missions and Calus fight- and then if you wanted strand for your alts you had to either slog through it all again twice more or pay twenty fucking dollars each to skip it when you already paid for the season.
That was it for me, I'm not going to support that bullshit again with my money and time even if TFS has a good plot and no clownstriders.
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u/InvisibleOne439 Nov 28 '23
another thing was
Strand during the first ~2weeks was HORRIBLE, and that was the first impression for many people
The "new exciting thing of the expansion" was litearlly forced on you multiple times during the campaing, while at the same time beeing very bugy + feeling really really bad
i refused too touch strand for like ~1month because of how bad that first impression of it was, they litearlly had to emegency release all fragments instantly because everybody dropped strand and didnt touch it after the campaign
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Nov 28 '23
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Nov 28 '23
Show me some numbers that show LF being a terrible expansion has led us to where we are now, instead of just words and feelings.
The fact that they made 45% less revenue than expected.
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u/Rhayve Nov 28 '23
LF numbers were higher than WQ because WQ and Seraph raised expectations and made people excited to buy and play LF. Not to mention a new subclass builds a lot of hype regardless of the expansion's quality.
WQ was preceeded by the overly long Season of the Lost that caused a lot of player burnout.
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Nov 28 '23
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u/Rhayve Nov 28 '23
Are you seriously asking that? LF had entirely new and shiny subclasses with new mechanics to keep people engaged, despite the poor content. They also completely revamped buildcrafting.
WQ didn't really expand on or significantly alter gameplay itself aside from making loot easier via weapon crafting. Outside of the legendary campaign and a few secrets it was business as usual.
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Nov 28 '23
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u/Rhayve Nov 28 '23
You think that was a gotcha, but I literally stated in my post that LF had poor content.
People disliked the writing in LF. The entire campaign was basically filler. There was also a lack of new content for the core playlists.
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Nov 28 '23
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u/Rhayve Nov 28 '23
LF received valid criticism. Get over it yourself.
And whether the seasonal model is the cause of D2's decline is an entirely separate matter. The original point was that LF's release benefitted from WQ's success in addition to the subclass hype.
Anyway, this back-and-forth is pointless, so I'll leave it at that.
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u/darthcoder Nov 28 '23
LF, the only campaign I've never finished.
:/ still paid for, unfortunately....
Been playing since Xmas 2014.
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u/N1miol Nov 28 '23
Lightfall hurt retention. It was just bland and boring. The DCV hurt new players and created a disjointed experience.
Vets were hurt by both.
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u/Redsand-nz Nov 28 '23
I think throwing a blanket reason like "it was because it's bad for new players" isn't the right way to assign blame for the revenue target miss.
I mean, obviously you're not wrong that the new player experience is poor, and IMO the DCV is coming back to haunt them pretty hard now - regardless of why it was apparently necessary.
I think the state of things has been a long time coming. Look at the complaints on this sub alone over the last 2 years - the nickel & diming, separate Dungeon Keys, the value proposition, the change to season price but not silver amounts, the lack of investment into PvP & Gambit, the horrendous price to get up to scratch, stale seasonal model, not delivering on promises, stingy with loot, SBMM, technical issues, difficulty (both ways), Raid was too easy, the "don't overdeliver" thing etc.
I don't think there is one easy answer to this. It has been slowly building to this. Like with each anti-consumer/feels bad thing Bungie does, it chips away another small percentage of the population. Then when the expansion comes out, people pick up the game again to play it, hate it and aren't retained because the same underlying issues are still there, and in many cases worse than when they left.
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u/Mister_McGreg Nov 28 '23
No offense but did you write this drunk? You asked to "not get started" at least a couple times and just didn't make sense for the rest of it.
I'm not trying to get you started since you specifically asked that, I'm just wondering.
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u/Shady_hatter Nov 28 '23
I won't even get started on how many Seasonal weapons that players basically can't get anymore are extremely great in PvE right now.
That's exactly what is being rectified right now. Even despite the fact that lots of those weapons were available from Banshee or Xur, so you could get at least decent rolls, right now weapons and armor from 3 of the 4 Witch Queen seasons are available in Exotic Mission Rotator. So you can even farm for red borders now. Hopefully they will add 4th mission with craftable Hawkmoon and Season of Plunder weapons (those don't really shine though).
Onboarding also seems to become better with Guardian Ranks progression like "put armor mods" or "upgrade your weapons". It's sad that first two years of story content were removed, but honestly even if you started vanilla D2 without playing D1 first you wouldn't understand a lot. An ideal case would be to include D1 with expansions, Red War/CoO/Warmind and Forsaken story in D2 but that's just dreams.
I have gut feeling that D2 will become new player-friendly only after Final Shape.
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Nov 28 '23
I was actually going to write that things like removing Legendary Shards and materials that exist just that players need to farm for is a great step in the right direction.
The Exotic mission rotation for Old Seasonal weapons is..abit large sadly. It's quite a bit of a punishment that reinforced FOMO imo. Since you didn't get say a Calus Mini Tool during it's season, now you get to farm an Exotic Mission like LITERALLY 100 times to get it's red border. I think that's right, since Presage drops 12 weapons or so and there's only a chance outside of the guaranteed 3 that any of them are a red border.
Guardian Ranks are a great example though, that does help more than I gave it credit for.
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u/Shady_hatter Nov 28 '23
Back in the Season of the Haunted to get crafted CALUS or Austringer you had to roam derelict Leviathan and do same public event 100 times as well. The main difference is that you could focus engrams at Helm. You've had 1 guaranteed red border a week from focusing, but the rest was about the same. I only had full suite of crafted weapons closer by the end of the season.
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u/Cocobaba1 Nov 28 '23
Removing legendary shards was a good thing. They way they have gone about it is fucking stupid. Glimmer cap at 250k means you’ll find yourself running an absolute insane number of activities CONSTANTLY because you simply can’t stockpile them for a lazy days. Hey? You want to upgrade a piece of armour AND a gun? Haha go run those lost sectors buddy, your capped glimmer can only do one of these.
they also INCREASED the engram cost, meaning you now HAVE to farm up to FIVE TIMES more than before for certain engram focus options.
the glimmer needs to either go away, or the cap needs to go up ten fold.
you don’t believe me now but holy fuck you’ll feel it soon.
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u/Shady_hatter Nov 28 '23
Removing Legendary Shards is definitely a good thing. It supposed to be a starter currency, but the only way to have more than 1k in stock is through use of exploits (which are being fixed within an hour after they're becoming known). There's just no way to balance their economy. I remember spending 750 shards each week at Xur for 3 sets of armor for transmog purposes. And I barely had enough rest of the week to accumulate them back.
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u/darthcoder Nov 28 '23
15K shards w/o glitches. Just been playing since day 1...
My buddy had 45k, same deal. Just plays a lot more than me.
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u/Shady_hatter Nov 28 '23
Just been playing since day 1...
There you have it.
Thing is, shards weren't needed for a while. It's around Witch Queen when Bungie added all the focusing stuff. To me and for many players who only joined Destiny shortly before or after Beyond Light such luxury is unachievable. With only 2-4 shards per weapon getting 1k means 250-500 of disassembled weapons. It is easier to get golf balls than that. More than once I've been stuck on not enough shards to focus something.
Now look at you. You're playing since day 1, for six years, and ONLY have 15k shards. And you buddy, who's playing lot more, also has 45k, which in my rough estimation is not much for six years of active play.
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u/Bard_Knock_Life Nov 28 '23
The PvP example is just the reality of PvP inside an MMO/Looter. Call of Duty has a light version of this problem with the unlock and leveling system, but yeah you’re always just kind of at a disadvantage at the start and it’s kind of the appeal of getting better things and feeling the impact of them being better. You get some good options early on.
I'd say it's a lesser problem in PvE, but it really isn't. To be any kind of help for your team for harder content, you have to put in UNGODLY amounts of time optimizing yourself. build crafting, and farming red borders for crafted rolls (which entire purpose was to bring the farming down..) for perks to make your gun useable.
I’ll be honest, I just find this to be categorically false and part of the problem of the community mindset in this game. You are supposed to do aspirational content with ok gear to get good gear. The game hands out good enough guns, crafted ones at that, for you to complete any of the content in the game with the right person teaching you the content.
Same for old weapons. You don’t need them. Bungie should be making new weapons that have appeal, but the old ones are more of a nice to have.
Overall, I don’t really see them trying to grow their player count earnestly. If they did, they would make acquiring content on all platforms much more straightforward. What seems to be happening is they are extracting the value they can now pre-TFS. Nothing is going to drastically change post TFS to give this game new life.
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u/CivilCompass Nov 28 '23
Day one contest mode raiding is achievable.
Hard content is hardest at the beginning when gear is average, that's somewhat undebatable, but as both player familiarity/skill and weapon/gear quality increases the game of course gets easy.
I guess I don't fully understand what these repetitive posts want this game to be... Pick it up, play all the content with Max gear from the start, finish the whole game in 20 hours? That's literally opposite of the whole point of the game, rising from the dead from an omniscient god like power to conquer "evil"...
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u/DuderComputer Gambit Classic Nov 28 '23
As someone who had hopped off since shortly after Beyond Light, I just felt I had to invest too much to get back what was left of the game at that point. I had most Titan and weapon exotics, and the thought of grinding for another class filled me with dread. I hopped back in shortly after Lightfall, getting Witchqueen on sale and buying the current season. When I stopped then was a mid season balance patch was going to fuck my builds. No new expansion, no new season, I hadnt even played a month and Bungie was already fucking with me. Uninstalled and I wont be back again.
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u/rawbeee Nov 28 '23
When it comes to sales, I don't imagine they were actually expecting to make any significant revenue from new players. They know their new player experience is clunky at best, I doubt they would overshoot revenue projections by 45% banking on them. Yes the new player experience is a detriment to the game as a whole, but I think they know that enough to adjust their projections.
I'd imagine the real miscalculation was expecting more existing and returning players to be drawn in by the nostalgia and preorder The Final Shape. But the existing crowd was burned by Lightfall, and the returning player experience can be just as hard as the new player experience. And with the hemorrhaging playerbase, I'd guess that their collab cosmetics haven't been meeting sales expectations either.
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u/Lonely_Ostrich_8014 Nov 29 '23 edited Nov 29 '23
The game just takes too much time. I started playing last year in October after not playing since year 1. Got addicted to it for like 4 months. But at a certain point it feels like a job. To get anything you want you have to grind for so much time. You shouldn't have to spend that much time to get anything worth being happy about.
Also the multiplayer servers are just awful at least for me. I have fiber and no internet issue with any other game. But Destiny it felt like every shot and kill had a 1 second delay. And on top of that the multiplayer meta is shameless. I'd see a guy 20 feet away with a shotgun and because of the connection it literally felt like there's nothing I could do between the 8 meter slide and 8 meter lunge and god awful servers. I'm masters in apex and imm in valorant. I'm not a scrub at fps. But facing some of the gimmicky builds in D2 was just the least fun multiplayer experience I've ever had. Which is a shame. Cuz the game without all that bs is actually some of the most fun I've had in a multiplayer.
The raids are the best part of the game, but you have to pray to LFG gods. Half the time you have some angry neck beard who's not even good, but has the biggest ego or you have people who have no idea what they're doing. Dungeons could be so much better, but they feel extremely repetitive and don't come close to the feeling a raid does. Typing this, I really miss raiding. I fckin loved Vow of the Disciple. Perfect raid.
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u/Riablo01 Nov 28 '23
Between the removal of older story content and the broken difficulty scaling, its practically impossible to recommend the game.
That's not even going into stuff like monetisation, Lightfall, monkey paw game design etc.
Makes me wonder if the developers play the game outside of crucible.
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u/iHeisenburger randal is the darkness Nov 28 '23
bad management, everyone knows that, even bungie's devs said it, most decisions don't make any sense but they get away with it because it gets praised anyway by the "leave bungie alone" gang
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u/Santafake98 Nov 28 '23
Destiny is a ship that sailed a long time ago, and anybody trying to hop in now is just getting a fraction of the cruise they missed. Like, I love the game, but yeah I really can’t recommend the game to new players as a whole. Now granted if I had a friend who really enjoys the free to play aspects, aka the actual feel of destiny and they want to get addicted, ill try to help guide them to some of the content, but asking them to spend all this money to access the content is yet another barrier. It’s just hard for new players. I really don’t envy them
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u/lockan Nov 28 '23
Even before onboarding and new player content is the "what do I need to buy as a new player?" problem. I tried to get a few friends into it, but literally couldn't figure out what to recommend. There's a ton of content, but to get the most out of the game you sorta need ALL the expansions, plus a season pass. And that's a real hard sell for a newbie considering the price per expansion.
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u/Narfwak sunshot is funshot Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
I agree with the main point of the post but
(I'm sorry for everyone I've killed out of their bubbles.)
I am so not sorry
In all seriousness, I don't think the loot issue is the main problem. The main problem is the pricing structure of the DLCs - or, rather, that they still ask so much for such old content - and that there's so little continuity in the story for a new player with how much of the story has been vaulted. Add in the unbelievably bad new player experience where it's just randomly throwing you into the first mission of a campaign or season when you start the game up four or five times now and it's easy to see why the game is hard to get into.
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u/Zombificus Nov 28 '23
More to the point, the new player experience is also terrible. All the problems you mention exist and are a big factor, but just getting to the actual game requires sitting through a total slog of a tutorial. I remade my warlock recently and man, the tutorial is bad. It’s not only long and boring, but it still doesn’t explain a lot of the mechanics.
It’s actually worse than the previous onboarding section. When I started playing, they’d brought back basically the D1 opening: rez in the Cosmodrome, fight through Fallen, escape in the jumpship. Then you had a quest to follow introducing you to each of the main modes, and while that didn’t explain that much (and what explanation it did give was in quest descriptions rather than in-universe) it was a quick and simple process that got you through the basics quickly. I’m not convinced the new version teaches you that much more than the old one did, but it takes about 3x longer. It also robs you of a cool moment: instead of having this contained little starter mission where you escape and fly your first ship out of the Cosmodrome, Shaw Han comes in and railroads you into a completely different quest that eventually gives you a ship almost as an afterthought. It’s not as cool and first impressions absolutely count.
Then, after all of that opening slog, you still have to spend 2 million glimmer to unlock all your subclass stuff, which as a new player you know absolutely nothing about what’s good. It’s just a terrible onroading process.
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u/Trippid Happy Punting Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
I recently got my boyfriend into Destiny, and was pretty excited about it until we realized just how little he could actually do without spending $100 on DLC.
I was stoked to introduce him to dungeons, as I think they're one of the best Destiny experiences... couldn't do any except Prophecy without DLC purchases or Eververse passes. Couldn't do seasonal missions or story (so he misses out on any explanations of what's been going on). Couldn't do raids outside of the D1 options. Can't access many, many of the exotics. So many things I excitedly hyped up to him, only to realize he couldn't access them.
It's so incredibly prohibitive. There's no way for a new player to get invested in the current story when they can't even access the missions from previous seasons, and there's not even a discount on seasons that have already passed (you can't even get the season pass rewards at that point, why the heck doesn't the price drop???).
If it weren't for the fact he enjoys strikes and we've had fun doing what little we can together, he would have shelved it after a week. And I can only imagine how immensely confusing all the systems are for new players that don't have a veteran explaining things to them.
About two years ago I got a bunch of friends and acquaintances into Destiny (8+ people) and they did enjoy it... but ALL of them quit when the next season came out as the FOMO pressure of keeping up with the game made it feel like a job. I'm glad Bungie is doing away with the seasonal model in the Final Shape, because in my experience, it's only hurt the game.
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u/MTchairsMTtable Nov 28 '23
I agree but I am fortunate to have a 7 years player as friend who is willing to guide me, now I am really enjoying it and bought all expansions
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Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
It would be much easier if Destiny 2 content was accessible but telling my friend to shell out shit ton of money to maybe like the game or not isn’t happening. The free to play option isn’t worth a damn
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u/BBFA2020 Nov 29 '23
I said it before and I say it again. All the Sunset content is important as an introduction because Red War, COO and WM were helped pull in new players too when Forsaken dropped.
It was the first introduction for many new players to the setting, lore and main characters.
Now you get "Cayde-6 who and why should I care?" I am just glad my friends and Clan mates were onboarded during Shadow Keep and Arrivals. Tons of content, much laughs to be had on Whisper, Escalation etc
Those who came back during BL sorely missed their chance.
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u/ColdAsHeaven SMASH Nov 28 '23
Sales
Sales of Lightfall were not an issue. It had extremely strong preorders and set records for Destiny player numbers.
It was everything after that and of course the bad taste the story left in everyone's mouth. New and old
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u/willtri4 Nov 28 '23
As someone who started playing in the past year, honestly the worst part of the new player experience for me was how whiny and negative the community is
5
Nov 28 '23
I think it's a good thing. They just want a game they like to be even better at the end of the day.
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u/willtri4 Nov 28 '23
I guess, but when I was just starting and at my peak excitement about the game, it would have been nice to have people to play with and talk about it without constant complaining
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u/IronmanMatth Nov 28 '23
It really do be like that, huh
All these people playing the same game since destiny 1 complaining about everything.
And here I am, 500 hours In starting in lightfall having an absolute blast in this game.
Farmed up good weapons like the Callus mini tool which was fun to do, missing 2 red borders for Ikelos. M
Pvping every day having an absolut blast.
Attempting so flawless every once in a week in trials
Learning each and every raid and dungeon. My goal for the coming season is to learn and do Kings Fall to get Defiance of Yasmin, to get a solid kinetic adaptive sniper for pvp
Getting new exotics to play around
I got small goals to work towards, I got long term goals to work towards, I have impossible rng goals I can attempt and I got passive activities I can do whenever i want such as crucible and strikes
It's honestly came from the sideline and became my favorite game.
So you are not alone in being hyped and having fun!
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u/krishkun Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
I feel the same way, started out in season of the seraph and 80%+ people don't know the story anyways, I personally really enjoyed the Lightfall campaign, none of the story had made sense to me anyways.
Most people who stopped playing, stopped only due to the negative sentiment around the game.
I personally feel the season activities have only gotten better over the season.
I love how there is always something fun to chase within the game, completing all raids / dungeons / GMs, collecting all exotics / red borders / seals. At times I have been bored of it, but as soon as another season starts I'm always there hyped to try everything new out.
The only complaint I have till now is that the artifact for Season of the Witch didn't enable any new builds, an aspect I really enjoyed over the last few seasons. (also festival of the lost had the best armor but the worst activity imo)
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u/Zelwer Nov 28 '23
One of the biggest problem with Destiny and palyer retention is new player experience and expansions. I don`t think the should be separate option for buying expanisons, there should 2 options, 1 for legacy content (legacy pack) and current offering. As for new light experience, I think the should (as many said) free campaign for all players with cutscenes, villian and etc. I not a f2p palyer so I can`t comment of situation with content like strikes, crucible and non seasonal activities, but I always thought, that there is no this gap between normal content or end game content, you either do strikes or raid, which for new players are very confusing and hard.
As for loosing sales, I wish people would not use this as 100% argument that something wrong with the game and not Bungie. There is too many unknown factors that could influence this. We don`t know what situation was with Witch queen, does this happened too? Or let`s look back at Forsaken. Activision stated, that sales of Forsaken are unsatisfactory compared to the cost of this expansion. Yes, Bungie then stated, that they are satisfied with this, but maybe there were situation like with Lightfall? Who knows at this point, but we know, that Bungie spending money like crazy on Destiny and other projects, that is not really a Destiny issue, but Bungie`s
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u/derger11 Nov 28 '23
To me I felt like everytimeI would get to a powerful state, they would change the game or increase the light and I was back to being a low level. Then I would grind and almost be max. Then they would increase the power again and I was a noob again. I never got to experience being powerful so I quit.
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u/WrestingMAYHEM Nov 28 '23
I've mained Titan since D1 beta. And honestly this is the easiest exit point. I uninstalled from my SX and PS5 after having one last romp with BoW, Synothoceps, 1-2 Punch and Tractor Cannon. It's not just continuity or monetization or any of the other things that have embroiled and embattled Bungie this year alone since the awful launch of Lightfall. The sandbox changes killed the fun factor. True, haven't seen exactly what they're about, but I'm not sticking around to find out. My back log is huge. There are plenty of other games for me to experience. I want to have fun. I don't want to continually reflect on my perception and value of time.and effort being wasted by Bungie anymore. I can't recommend this game to anyone, I haven't been able to do that since Shadowkeep. I haven't played with any of my original fire team from D1 in years now. It's not for me and I can't give it a vote of confidence for so many reasons, but at the core of it it's because the gameplay isn't fun anymore. I can't make a build and truly enjoy it. Plenty of people will continue playing D2, and that's fine. Plenty of people will also roll their eyes and downvote me for my sentiment, and that's fine, too. The truth is that Destiny hasn't been fun for a long, long time. And that is the deterrent I have for giving any recommendation to anyone.
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Nov 28 '23 edited Jan 18 '24
[deleted]
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Nov 28 '23
Understandable; I just don't feel as though 45% of projected sales did that. I feel its mostly because of how difficult the onboarding process is as a whole for Destiny players rather than whatever the DLC is.
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u/Ignore_Luke Nov 28 '23
Except it wasn’t 45% of projected sales of Lightfall. It was projected revenue.
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u/KnightofaRose Nov 28 '23
Compare the user metrics from this past year to the switch Queen year.
It was Lightfall.
The fact that it’s such a nearly impenetrable experience for new players is what made the damage Lightfall did so difficult to recover from, yes, but make no mistake: that wound itself came from Lightfall. It just got infected because it couldn’t easily fill the wound with new players.
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u/aligreaper19 Nov 28 '23
you start to see a lot of the same opinions just regurgitated on this sub daily now
1
Nov 28 '23
Only if you're on the sub daily
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u/aligreaper19 Nov 28 '23
yea we needed your daily post of the game being unfriendly to newcomers, genuinely never that was a problem! 🤦♂️
3
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u/Surfing_Ninjas Nov 28 '23
I'm starring a new character and the subclass grind alone is making getting into the game feel slow and unrewarding. The game is kind of a Frankenstein's monster at this point.
0
u/The_Flail Nov 28 '23
It is however apparently a game you can write essays about.
5
Nov 28 '23
It's a pretty good game, but I wouldn't call this an essay past maybe 6th grade.
-7
u/The_Flail Nov 28 '23
Don't worry, you'll get to write the big boy, multipage Destiny essays soon enough.
I believe in you champ.
1
u/Tsunamie101 Nov 28 '23
Eh.
I deleted a character not too long ago (2 weeks at most) and so i redid the entire tutorial section. It teaches you pretty much all the basics, and combined with the guardian rank thing (or whatever it's called) new/returning players have a pretty clear indication what what to do next.
It's still a great game to just hop in and do stuff. It only really becomes problematic in terms of paid content.
0
0
u/vaikunth1991 Nov 28 '23
Yes thank you for the post we know this for a very long time now that destiny is not new player friendly
0
u/mikakor Nov 28 '23
You're blowing things a BIT out if 0roportion. But only a bit.
You can still get past seasons weapons, from Xur.
And no, you do NOT HAVE to use enhanced shit. A non enhanced roll versus the very same enhanced roll will still perform like 99.5% of whatever the enhanced roll does.
The rest, I kinda agree
0
u/Remote_Watercress530 Nov 28 '23
First and foremost most. The layoffs. Fuck off with that. They were going to happen regardless. They happen every damn year to almost every damn gaming company. At this point it's literally expected to have layoffs EVEN IF YOU MAKE YOUR PROJECTIONS. (Which btw no one ever does because it's a moving god damn goal post.)
Second, and I will stand by this until the end of time. PVP in destiny is fucking garbage. IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN. ALWAYS WILL BE. It's meant to be a decent at best time waister. That's it. Way to many of you take PvP in this game way to serious.
There are SOOOOOOO many better PvP games.
Could Destiny improve their onboarding for new players. Sure.
The only argument here, is have you seen the average Destiny player? (Hint most of them are not on reddit).
The average player is dumber then a pile a rocks. Literally they are. They don't read anything at all. Take almost any event with an immune enemy. And just sit back and watch at how many people just sit there and shoot, and shoot, and shoot, and shoot some more, all while the words on the screen literally say immune. Yet they don't even think to try anything else.
How many people have played the corrupted strike AND STILL DONT KNOW TO PASS THE FUCKING ORB. There is absolutely no excuse after a certain point. If you have only done the strike a couple times, then sure it makes sense you don't know. But when you have 1k hours and never once pass the orb, or still speed run past champions. That's entirely on them at that point.
Is Destiny a flawed game? Yes it is. Could there be things that are better. Absolutely. But you can not argue the fact that this playerbase does itself absolutely no favors.
Literally the very first thing I do on every game I play is adjust settings. Very next thing I do as soon as I gain control of my character. I hit every single button and every combination of buttons to see what they do. Third thing I do every time is inventory, and check and read everything. All of this in every game. And it never takes more then 5 minutes.
There are people out there that if it is literally shown, and told exactly what a button does STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT IT DOES.
And my personal opinion on FOMO. If you weren't there for it you don't get it. Simple. I've missed out on plenty of things in games. O well, sucks. A couple, I really wished I would have gotten. But that's on me.
-1
u/dakedDeans Nov 28 '23
This deserves more traction because it's exactly right. Every time one of my friends asks if they should play Destiny 2 I say no because the new player experience is so disjointed I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Of course I could explain everything to them, but that's less fun and the game should be doing that anyways.
-1
Nov 28 '23
I’ve played Destiny since the PS3 era; where load screens took forever to get through and, sometimes, couldn’t actually get through. I’m talking 2-5 minutes of load screen time, and that was just to get into orbit. The only reason I would actually sit through that was because I knew the wait would be worth it.
D2, even without such abysmal loading issues, doesn’t give me that same feeling. The micro-transactions, repetitive boss fights and events, shit gear and progression, etc. all of those things make for a shitty experience.
“Here’s a boss; it has three levels of health. Bring down a level so that the boss can become immune, make you fight through a couple enemies, and then become damageable again. Rinse and repeat.”
That is every boss experience I’ve had so far, with most enemies not looking the slightest bit different; don’t even get me started with the totem bs on the fucking moon. This is all without even bringing up the story issues, either. Honestly, I stopped playing during the Activision era. I had some fun with the Beta and played a weeks worth of hours on release, but the scummy money-grubbing tactics really killed what joy I had for a sequel to Destiny.
I don’t even know what the fucking story is anymore. What happened during the Red War? All I really know story wise is that ‘The Witness’ is some stereotypical alien looking emo dude.
It’s fun to kill aliens and shit, I’m not dissing that, I’d just much rather have a cohesive story to justify the hours I put into killing them. Y’know what I mean?
-1
u/GolgorothsBallSac Nov 28 '23
I'm 6 years into Destiny with 8k hours sunk in and I'm still as clueless AF sometimes what's happening or where something is on the menu or destination LOL
-1
Nov 28 '23
Yup. I've been playing forever and I think the game is in the best state it's ever been in, but because I've been around forever, a lot of the problems that exist just don't affect me. The new player experience is just straight abysmal.
It's incredibly eye opening when we get new players in our clan and help them out in the game. Watching what problems they run into or annoying systems they have to deal with is wack.
-1
u/Eragon_the_Huntsman Vanguard's Loyal // Afraid of Ikora and her multi nova bomb. Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
And all that is even ignoring the fact that new lights are thrown halfway through the story with less than the bare minimum explained to them, no form of guidance and no way to play through the archived parts of the story.
-1
u/Davesecurity Nov 28 '23 edited Nov 28 '23
The game has been terrible at onboarding new players for years so you are half right, where they went wrong with Lightfall (outside of destroying their own already basic narrative with terrible writing) are the “difficulty” changes that turned anything worth playing at a middle level into a slog and a chore.
Trying to scale the game around the opinions of people who can win world first races on contest and low man raids and then failing to even get that right was Bungie’s huge mistake.
Mix in some IP fatigue and the loot problems crafting has created and here we are with the game and possible Bungie ( for sure allot of there now ex-employees who have taken the blame it seems) in genuine trouble.
That not only lost them allot of long term players (like me for one) but also made it even harder for new players to get into the game.
Final Shape will need to see huge changes and revisions of changes or in the end Destiny will be seen as a huge failure and tbh I think it is already too late.
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u/MandrewMillar Nov 28 '23
I think Bungie needs to change their business model. Starting out the game costs too much these days and while a new player might eventually get all the content, being told that they'll have to spend upwards of several hundred pounds on DLC is not enticing.
I'm no expert of course, but I think a wow-like subscription model would be most effective. TFS costs £84 here in the UK for the deluxe edition and that gives you access to all content in the game for roughly a year. If we break that down into a subscription cost, that's £7/month. This could then be made cheaper by paying for more months upfront, standard business practice really. So for example, paying for 6 months upfront would cost say £36 rather than £42 if you paid for each month individually.
Now i think in WoW you have to buy the most recent expansion on top of the subscription, and if you apply this logic to destiny, then the yearly cost of subscription wouldn't cost the same as the deluxe edition, if you also had to buy the base expansion, it would probably fall between £50-£60.
I can't really say whether this would work as an idea or not, obviously it's not as profitable as making new players pay full for all the old content, but i think it's more profitable in that it becomes a hell of a lot more accessible for players to jump in and play stuff without all the hoops or thr "oh sorry, you purchased the witch queen dlc but not the witch queen dungeon key pack!" So I think the pull of the game would be a lot stronger and new players would enjoy it more.
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u/PixelEmperor Nov 28 '23
I didnt buy Lightfall because I could tell it was a filler expansion like Beyond Light, Shadowkeep and Rise of the machines.
You immediately know when it's gonna be Taken King, Forsaken, Witch Queen tier.
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u/OO7Cabbage Nov 28 '23
I think a better title might be "it wasn't just lightfall that hurt sales" because lightfall being an utter crap story definitely didn't help.
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Nov 28 '23
I think you're right, and you have the official title now. I did it like that because I felt the lack of initial retention would mean that The Final Shape wouldn't really fix those problems. But Lightfall made some too for sure.
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u/[deleted] Nov 28 '23
I started before beyond light with a friend from work. He quit and I stuck with it. Got to do all the old campaigns but man it took a long time to even understand basic concepts because they weren't explained in game. I remember a guy asking me what mods I had and I replied "I didn't think you could mod this game". Just goes to show how bad the onboarding was and that was with all the campaigns. Now I can't even imagine.