Destiny 2: how the mighty have fallen This probably long post will suffice my opinion on the world of destiny 2 and how it crumbled everything that we held dear about the first game and made it into a community nightmare that it stands today. The points I will cover are as follows, Story, World, PVE/Classes, PVP, End game, Eververse/community. Bungie have been always good at storytelling in my eyes, from Oni, a futuristic sci-fi shooter integrated with close quarter combat all the way to Reach, bungie have always dragged players through their world in such a way that you wanted to know what happened next, you wanted to fight till the very end because it just felt right to do. Characters had voices and personality, to the point that even a silent protagonist who only said a few lines to none at all could be read like an open book from the actions they took in cutscenes and their reactions and willingness to go above and beyond their limits to achieve their goal, may it be through fighting to the very end, to sacrificing themselves for the greater good. Destiny one had some of those features, as least to the point that your guardian was what you wanted them to be, you fought how you believed they would fight. The guardian spoke and had conversations with the other characters and though we couldn’t choose how they spoke in each conversation, we had least heard their voice and watched them build their characteristics on their own. From the simple line of “ We go down” after hearing a massive threat lurks below the moon to simply commenting on how the reef was “a graveyard” as the ghost and guardian piloted their ship through wreckages, you listened and you watched their reactions, their mild facial expressions, and you felt attached to them, or you skipped the cutscenes and this portion doesn’t matter to you but for me, I felt attached to the guardian I made and I made him look how I wanted him to Destiny 2, eradicated the character building formula and destroyed everything I held dear by the third cutscene in which the guardian was left behind to the all mighty ghost to take over every conversation for you. Powerful pillars of the vanguard were stripped of their radiance to be broken pieces whose sole goal is to drive a plot and be annoyances that needed a pick me up to only fall once more. Characters that held so much mystery and intrigue were changed to be nothing more than “Waifu lovers” and every hope we had for them was destroyed as their voices were drilled into our heads, or once their missions were done, were simply merchants with nothing more than a few words whenever you stopped by. At the beginning, I was shown my previous achievements in a slide show, showing who I fought with and when I did as the cleared destiny 1 of all of its challenges, upon which I was greeted with my 3 characters, my 3 guardians who I had raised to be powerful enough to take the mightiest of archons to the lowest of hive. However, my first glances saddened me as though their features remained, their armor was new, they held no resemblances of how I made them to be in destiny 1 and it was the start of my downward spiral into my hatred of the story. Not even a simple missions wearing the old destiny 1 gear was too far of a stretch for bungie to do, or to even write how your guardian, broken from his light, had to scavenged new armor as the old was too broken to be used ever again, not even my old ship could be seen but was replaced with a random one and not the one I farmed for and fought for again and again to roll the dice and obtain. It didn’t take long into the story in of itself to realize that my guardian was just a third wheel to the story of the almighty ghost, knower of all and speaker for the helpless guardian who knew nothing more besides nodding his head or struggling to survive in the harsh world around. I felt like buying an uncharted game just to burn the disc so I didn’t have the hear ghosts voice in my ear ever again, I have nothing wrong with the voice/actor itself but the amount of time hearing it go on and on drove me mad. With the loss of the grimoire, dead ghosts, and other logs to keep track of what you had unearthed through your travels, the lore of destiny 2 becomes more cumbersome to read through as there is no central area to simply look up the things you learned or the things you missed like the dead ghosts of old to see how everything went down around you. All in all, if destiny 2 had a more in depth story, revealing characters dialogue that was more than the ghost speaking for me or even driving into why/ how the others guardians survived in their lightless land would be enough to at least make me enjoy the story, but none of that is touched and a goldmine is left undisturbed, never to be seen again WORLD In destiny 1, each world had a similar pattern to it, more or less an outer circle that can be taken to see all the sights as well as a few inner paths to cross section the circle and make shortcuts to other locations. Each new area brought a different story to tell from dead colony ships to giant cabal ships, wrecked and on fire all for the simple purpose of victory. Though the land itself wasn’t all that great a looker, it at least made people think the first time they went through each area and finding the dead and the wreckages of years past all astern about to tell a story that only the reader could create. Take the moon and the very pit that the hive created, exploring it told guardians tales of how demonic the hive is and how you had only scratched the surface of their lair as you looked down into the abyss below. Destiny 2 has little to none of that feeling as I walked through each zone, not yet obtaining a sparrow at the time to explore each area more fully then the next. Even though the areas had new settings to them from destroyed/aged buildings to giant fortresses on water, I felt no attachment, no thought as I walked and shot my way through the enemies to further the plot along. Though earth, IO, and Nessus have a large play area to explore and dive into their lost sectors, Titan and mercury, even though they do have their other explored areas through strikes and missions, I feel as though bungies chances to create and elegant landscape was wasted to just get an area done and over with to never see it again. Take the rise of iron dlc from destiny 1, even though we had seen earth hundreds of times in our travels, the new version made us wish to go back through what zones we could and see how the snow and time had changed from the landscape we used to travel through and what new areas awaited us beyond. With the curse of Osiris, mercury was just a massive PVE arena pitting guardian vs cabal and vex and that’s it. The infinite forest I will not classify with the rest of mercury mainly due to the fact that through randomly generated, their promises to make it a space to travel through again and again and feel like you haven’t done it before wasn’t kept so it’s simply a side corridor like the edges of titan for me. Destiny 1 had a reason to explore its world for hidden treasures and little discoveries here and there, destiny 2 was just a walk and gun simulator until you got a sparrow, then you added fast travel into that simulator and that’s it. PVE/Classes This section mainly talks about the difference between who destiny 1 took their classes and destiny 2 and by far destiny 1 did it better. In destiny one, your stat lines you made for your armor only helped your abilities recharge faster and the random rerolls allowed you to create a look that you wanted without sacrificing the stats you cultivated. Destiny 2 made each armor piece the same stats on each piece causing you to sacrifice how you wish to look for better resilience or recovery because mobility is only good for a slightly higher jump then other people. In destiny 1, skills trees were made for each class so you could differentiate your playstyle to how you wanted it to be. Did you want to throw 2 knives as a hunter to make your super throw out a line instead of an aoe field that only hit around you. In destiny 2, just by how they melee you can tell what style they are and how to effectively counter it. Did that titan just striker charge me? well I had better watch out for his 2 pules grenades and his aoe super from now on, or in a strike, did my friendly hunter just poison a group of enemies and blinded them, well I better hope he’s not our last man standing or he won’t be able to invis to save us from a wipe. Stats and skills make each character unique to one another and though there might be meta builds that shake the worlds of pve and pvp, it was up to the player to decide what they wished to do and destiny 2 took that away to focus us down simple lines of classes which made everyone the same as the guy next to them, except with a different paint job. PVP When looking at games like battlefield who boast massive matches of 24+ players, the maps are made to accommodate that massive brawl so you’re not just in tight corners all the time but instead have choices in your attack and lulls in your combat to find a better position or get to an objective better. That is because in shooters there is a concept of chaos and control that needs to be maintained to create the best shooter experience. When more and more players are added into a pvp match, chaos starts to reign as the players move into smaller groups and end up dead because the other team planned for such events and gunned them down for easy kills. Take what would happen if you took 64 players and dropped them onto the map guardian in Halo 3’s pvp, it would just be utter chaos from the moment the first trigger was pulled and the first grenade thrown.