I tried getting into Destiny a couple months ago. There is no hook for new players. It’s like watching a later season of some over the top, corny, convoluted show without ever getting to watch the previous episodes. The level design is just silly. Towns aren’t towns, they are mazes with a bunch static, talking props haphazardly sprinkled about. Every time I came back to the game it’d play some cinematic I don’t understand and throw me into some place I have never been with no instruction on how to get back. I did not play for long and won’t play again.
It’s not just maps that have dumpster fire design.
The original 4 enemy races were all incredibly well designed. They all worked really well solo to provide interesting encounters, and were decent in pairs of races, too. Everything after has been downhill. There have been a few that were “fine”, but nothing remotely comparable to the initial design. They just want shit to look cool, not provide cohesive gameplay.
And seasonal shit with different kinds of enemies that only take damage from specific gun types with the specific season perk? Absolute fucking horseshit. The beauty of original Destiny was that I could play something with my Hunter and high impact scout rifle from start to finish and barely touch my skills and be golden, and the guy next to me could be a Titan with an autorifle diving into anything that moved and constantly using his super and have the same quality experience.
Destiny, and I say this as someone who loved D1 and tried very hard to love D2, suffers from a mix of the worst of art-by-committee and the worst of art-by-auteur.
Every game director has managed to come across both a simpering sycophant and clueless tyrant, trying to cater to both the vicitudes of MTX optimization and the whims of their 50-hour-a-week players, both of which command Bungie’s ear to try to make the most addictive game on the least content.
As a result they are stuck to committing to a constant release schedule where they have barely enough time to create basic terrain and voice overs, throw in their usual stock of enemies and press-button-while-holding-a-shape game play. And they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t touch the PvP mode, where half the players are mad if they lose a single engagement in a single match in a single game while playing with the most optimized loadout, and the other half are the same but playing with random trash they found on the floor.
The gun play is great, but it’s clear they can’t think of anything exciting to do with it any more. All sense of mystery has gone from the old story, and the new story doesn’t have time to explain why they don’t have time to explain.
Their most recent season was focused loosely around pagan witchcraft, I’m a amateur (secular) Tarot reader, my wife and I are loosely (atheist) pagan celebrants, and they even had a custom tarot deck as merch - couldn’t hold my attention because it was still an easier Court of Oryx from Destiny 1, and the main game play is “shoot monster, go to the HAM radio which for some reason is the size of a fridge to listen to an alien with a Brooklyn accent chat shit about something that happened 2 years ago”
The disjointed random video dumping you to a new mission every time you log in as a new player is super weird. Really makes it hard to figure out what you were doing.
I tried getting into Destiny a couple months ago. There is no hook for new players. It’s like watching a later season of some over the top, corny, convoluted show without ever getting to watch the previous episodes. The level design is just silly. Towns aren’t towns, they are mazes with a bunch static, talking props haphazardly sprinkled about. Every time I came back to the game it’d play some cinematic I don’t understand and throw me into some place I have never been with no instruction on how to get back. I did not play for long and won’t play again.
It’s not just maps that have dumpster fire design.
The original 4 enemy races were all incredibly well designed. They all worked really well solo to provide interesting encounters, and were decent in pairs of races, too. Everything after has been downhill. There have been a few that were “fine”, but nothing remotely comparable to the initial design. They just want shit to look cool, not provide cohesive gameplay.
And seasonal shit with different kinds of enemies that only take damage from specific gun types with the specific season perk? Absolute fucking horseshit. The beauty of original Destiny was that I could play something with my Hunter and high impact scout rifle from start to finish and barely touch my skills and be golden, and the guy next to me could be a Titan with an autorifle diving into anything that moved and constantly using his super and have the same quality experience.
Destiny, and I say this as someone who loved D1 and tried very hard to love D2, suffers from a mix of the worst of art-by-committee and the worst of art-by-auteur.
Every game director has managed to come across both a simpering sycophant and clueless tyrant, trying to cater to both the vicitudes of MTX optimization and the whims of their 50-hour-a-week players, both of which command Bungie’s ear to try to make the most addictive game on the least content.
As a result they are stuck to committing to a constant release schedule where they have barely enough time to create basic terrain and voice overs, throw in their usual stock of enemies and press-button-while-holding-a-shape game play. And they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t touch the PvP mode, where half the players are mad if they lose a single engagement in a single match in a single game while playing with the most optimized loadout, and the other half are the same but playing with random trash they found on the floor.
The gun play is great, but it’s clear they can’t think of anything exciting to do with it any more. All sense of mystery has gone from the old story, and the new story doesn’t have time to explain why they don’t have time to explain.
Their most recent season was focused loosely around pagan witchcraft, I’m a amateur (secular) Tarot reader, my wife and I are loosely (atheist) pagan celebrants, and they even had a custom tarot deck as merch - couldn’t hold my attention because it was still an easier Court of Oryx from Destiny 1, and the main game play is “shoot monster, go to the HAM radio which for some reason is the size of a fridge to listen to an alien with a Brooklyn accent chat shit about something that happened 2 years ago”
The disjointed random video dumping you to a new mission every time you log in as a new player is super weird. Really makes it hard to figure out what you were doing.