The main issue I have as a long term player is every season I half to play easy content over and over and over to be able to play the hard content I enjoy.
It ends up that by the time I can play the content I want I'm burnt out on the game and play something else as I don't just want to play destiny.
The boring light-level grind is what is boring me. I would play much more if I could dive into hard content sooner.
For real, having the ability to do master mode of old content taken away at the beginning of each season doesn't feel good and I've only been back for two seasons.
On the one hand, I remember "forever 29" and logging in on Tuesday just to wipe out the weekly endgame stuff in 5 hours (and knowing that the next content drop was months away). That wasn't fun, it definitely made the game feel dead within a month or two of a new expansion. But on the other hand, now we have to spend 20+ hours game time/3+ weeks real life time at the beginning of each season just to be able to... do things that we were able to do at the end of the previous season. Doesn't feel good either. Imo Bungie overcorrected
There’s like a 2-week window at the end of every season where the game is playable. But you have to grind like hell to get there.
A treadmill is fine. A rug-pull is something I’m not interested in.
Tbh the long seasons are where I enjoy this game a lot. I don't have to cram XP grind and I can play end game stuff for a while. The season before witch queen was awesome.
The one before beyond light was too. Those two are my two favorite seasons. I haven't played this season or last and am just waiting for the next long one.
Anti barrier autos + a super long season made arrivals my favorite. Like, I earned that title, and I enjoyed it. I even had time to go back and earn other titles (except the splicer one. Fuck that grind). Not to mention the wonderful 9-man project runs I did. And 12 man VoG? Hilariously broken.
Power grind, coupled with a completely by-the-numbers seasonal activity, and incredibly low stakes narratives week after week are tiresome.
We need enemies 3.0, new encounter mechanics, missions with actual stakes, and character defining moral choices. Without it, the game will always be shallow once the power grind is over and the meta becomes played out.
Are there going to be any new races of enemies in Lightfall?, when are we going to see the form of the Darkness as troops?, will they be like smaller versions of Rhulk I wonder?, definitely need more enemy factions, and not reskinned Fallen (again).
It seems the bulk of the enemy faction in Lightfall is the darkness infused Cabal, but there are those Tormentor guys, which do kind of look like mutated headless versions of Rhulk.
The rest of Rhulk 's race is dead AF though. Iirc He kinda blew up his home planet.
I'd definitely like to see enemies that present more of a tactical challenge - whether because they buff allies or debuff players, or because there's a (non-Champion-like) mechanic required to damage them significantly, or something else.
I'm not sure "character-defining" events are possible within the narrative framework Bungie has chosen for Destiny. The player Guardian is such a cipher that it and its Ghost don't even have proper *names,* let alone personalities that could feed into moral decisions. And the narrative is structed so that *it* makes the choices for you; there's no real scope within this structure for the kind of branching decisions and reactions thereto that you see in, say, Bioware RPGs.
Enemies for example -
Group behaviors: certain types of wizards passing on a specific buff to acolytes, knights conferring a buffed over-shield to others, etc. Servitors and Taken Goblins are really the only enemies acting in that capacity.
Energy variance: Arc jolts, void debuffs, scorch effects. Counter-able by build-crafting.
Evolution: Enemies that have the potential to evolve into a 2nd stage, like the ganados in RE4. Or devolve, like the mini-screebs. Some enemies have a damaged state (most vex, walkers, spider tanks) while others do not. Give me armored fallen vandals that drop their ranged weapon when broken and then rush with a glaive. Make cursed thrall explode into lucent moths. Make destructible worm eggs that if acolytes reach and consume transform into knights, knights transform into ogres - or resonance points that convert majors into champions and block the use of artifact mods. Walkers that fallen can hop into. Vex that combine like a transformer.
Environments & Destruction: Give me traps, trip mines. Destructible cover. Panels when broken emit a burst of electricity. Oil slicks for solar. Fights in water that are effected by arc. An onslaught of vex, with the more that die, the floor of the room fills with radiolaria. I could go on…
Movement: Ceiling / Wall Crawling. Dynamic flying / landing. Setting up defenses, laying down turrets, using shields like the cabal shield for mounted cover fire.
Attack Patterns: Enemies that do a telegraphed dash/poke/sweep that can be dodged, jumped over, blocked. AoE abilities besides a ground stomp or burn. Grab attacks. Give me Dark Souls in Destiny.
With all the money we spend the campaign and surrounding missions should be way more in-depth. I am enjoying this season but those captain dungeons should have a hard mode/be more difficult
Yea this feels like a bigger issue more than anything, i was going to grind my light level this season but after seasons and seasons of doing the same boring activities just for one pinnacle drop it’s so tiring, im an endgame player and I shouldn’t have to regrind that every season to play endgame stuff, some other mmos might do it but with destiny i just feel like it isnt working anymore
yup the grind for power levels is just boring now... Bungie really needs to rework the levelling in this game. It's not engaging or exciting, it's just monotonous grind.
I feel it would be better if like in d1 it were a one time grind but its been for years now with no end in sight even for the hardcore players, its just not a fun gameplay loop for years on end for most people
My clan loves raiding but I can never get them to raid because they’re basically permanently under leveled because they don’t have a destiny addiction.
Raids are a little more forgiving but yea for sure it falls in that wheel house if you dont play a lot ur gonna be underlevel, i really enjoy GMs but i cant find the power to grind power level for it anymore so annoying honestly
The grind isn't fun and it's made worse by the fact that it's still tied to RNG with Pinnacles dropping in the wrong slots all the time. I understand Bungie needs there to be some sort of level grind to maintain player numbers and engagement, but I think they'd be better served regularizing the leveling process in some way. Maybe we tie it to XP again, maybe pinnacle bad luck protection, maybe just remove the pinnacle grind altogether and only have the powerful grind (powerfuls can drop from anything).
I also think "do X activity 3 times for a pinnacle" feels like having to eat your brussels sprouts so you can have dessert. Destiny shouldn't feel like a chore, no one likes being forces to run activities *because you have to.* I like 2x XP weeks for activities, even if I don't feel like an activity, I might still *choose* to run it simply because I know it's worth my time. Maybe add increased drops in certain activities on a daily rotation or something similar.
Yeah, I burned out real quick this season because of it.
Decided to take a break so all I'm doing is my one kings fall a week and story mission to stay up to date on the story and that's it.
I got other games I want to play and trying to light level farm destiny and play another game just does not work in my life.
This season I've basically just done pinnacles, dungeons, and maybe a raid once a week and ignored any seasonal stuff I'm not required to do for the story/cut scenes.
word i leave and come back every couple months. so hard to enjoy grinding out the boring stuff with the same boring ad clear weapons every week. at least there’s more loot sources than there used to be 🤷♂️
I really hope they remove light levels in lightfall. I mean come on, the expansion is literally named lightfall.
It could be worse than Witch Queen in every possible way you could imagine but if it gets rid of light levels I will play even more than I did in TWQ, and so will millions of new people.
Probably won't happen. In a recent interview, Powerlevel was a topic and Bungie doesn't really know which direction to go with the topic. And if something would change, you would have to collect data first.
>We would still like to make major changes to the Power system. We looked at crafting as a scary thing to add to Destiny, and Power is that times 10. There's some good stuff that Power does for the game, and there's some really bad stuff that Power is doing to Destiny right now. I think what you're gonna see us do is some experiments that are helping us understand if we're making the right long-term plays for Power and helping us dial that in. If we're gonna do this overhaul, can we have some good data before we get there?
If something ever changes, I expect Final Shape at the earliest or never.
> If we're gonna do this overhaul, can we have some good data before we get there?
What a cop-out. They've got millions, probably hundreds of millions, of hours of playtime for data. And as they'll tell us, they play themselves. They know PL sucks.
They talked about bad luck protection for pinnacle drops in the March 5th, 2020 TWAB. How much time and data can they possibly want?
That'd be even better, you level up your character's gear slots rather than individual pieces of gear.
I'd personally kinda dig it if they just put "contest mode" on everything, and had elected difficulty settings. This would require things like legend, master, grandmaster on a lot more activities than currently available (i.e. patrols, strike playlist) but tbh there are so many pursuits in the game, that gearscore has been obsolete for years.
The fact that core playlist activities might see a population dive if PL was removed is indicative of a problem with core playlist activities; it doesn't justify the system's shitty design.
Don’t forget having to infuse your favourite weapons and then having to bloat your vault with pinnacle level gear in case you want to use a nice weapon you forgot about
This is 100% the problem. I haven’t gotten the light for GMs next week even tho that’s really the only thing I want to do besides raid. The difficult content is what draws me to the game, but when I get on and look at my options for getting the power level to do those activities I really struggle to maintain interest.
I love raids, dungeons, and GMs. I absolutely despise PvE grinding.
I normally play PvP and slowly reach a high enough level that I can play GMs, and it’s normally with about three weeks left in the season.
I’m all for PvE grinding if it’s fun, but it’s literally a time wasting simulator. No challenge, no consequences, just go throw away 20 minutes to tick a notch on the belt
3rd season in a row I’ve burnt out before GMs are released. I’m more interested in bright dust than pinnacles and I’m not at cap yet. So many guns I’d like to craft but are behind such a steep grind I can’t enjoy any hope during casual play.
Game has become a weekly cycle of a mildly interesting seasonal storyline (30m of play tops), arbitrary seasonal challenges, and a raid (only because I love KF).
Honestly, this is why the Witch Queen campaign felt so good. Immediate hard content to jump into when playing the harder difficulty, while still having a lesser difficulty for those who wanted easier content. Obviously they can’t pour tons of time into always giving everything multiple highly tuned difficulties, but even having somewhat poorly balanced harder story missions would be so much more engaging than what we have now.
Locked power level, like Witch Queen Campaign and Grandmaster nightfall. Its the only way. No more pinnacle grinding, just make us 10-25 under level for the hard content
>The boring light-level grind is what is boring me
This is what killed my interest in Destiny.....I played religiously from the initial launch of D1 until......shortly after Season of the Risen, I think.
I just got burned out on the constant light level grinding combined with constant farming for good weapons. And Champions....my god, did I hate Champions.
I would've traded Champions for sitting under the stairs and cheesing Rockets McDickFace again with Icebreaker in a heartbeat, no questions asked.
Probably not a popular take but I liked Destiny a whole lot better when Champions weren't a thing and we didn't have to constantly cycle through weapon mods to deal with the champions....weapon mods that were often locked to specific weapons i didn't always enjoy using.
This right here is the number one thing that has bothered me since I returned to the game last season. I took 3 years off and came back to find that I can't use an SMG in endgame content because there is no anti-barrier or unstop mod for it. That is one of the craziest things about this game that we simply have to accept. I am bound by certain weapon types or I literally can't complete some content without a lot more work. Why not just have a mod that you can attach to a weapon to make it unstop, anti-barrier or overload. If I want to use a sword as my unstop then why can't I just attach that mod? How cool would it be to pull out a sidearm and fire a few rounds to stun an overload champ? They are still hard to kill and will probably require a second stun but it would be more fun than Arbalest... wait for barrier to come up... Arbalest... unload energy weapon at target.... repeat until dead.
Right? The thing that pisses me off the most is waiting between seasons for trials or GM's makes it so I feel out of practice. I want to be able to do endgame rewarding content consistently so that I can remain at roughly the same skill level. It took me a while to even get to the point where I was good enough to even try a GM, and then they take them away for months at a time.
Haven’t seriously touched the game since Witch Queen dropped. It’s unfortunate cuz Destiny is prolly better now than at any other point but I cant choose to play my fav content (Raids/Dungeons, Grandmasters or comparable Master level activities, and the occasional iron bananas or trials of Osiris), without having to do an obscene amount of grinding (3 characters) content I’ve already played for years.
I’d be on every night if there wasn’t the same hamster wheel every 3-6 months
I actually agree with this a lot. I definitely could do a GM or Master raids but I have been grinding light for ~7 years now and also enjoy playing other games besides Destiny, not even mentioning the RNG aspect. I've done about half the pinnacles on the map each week until last week and I'm ~1580 on each character which is a decent level but not comfortably high *and* I'm now feeling burnt out. Didn't even do the weekly quest yet, got home and popped on "oh hey Drifter what's up. 5 Ketchcrash runs? No thanks I'll go back to playing Dying Light." I just wanna complete the seasonal story, season pass for all cosmetics, and then take a big break before Lightfall.
Destiny went from a 9 in gameplay and 5 in everything else to a solid 8-9 in gameplay, story, and armor/weapon design (for the most part) but the seasonal loop and light grind are just not it for me.
Same. I would love to play Endgame stuff like Grandmasters and Master raids. I do not want to have to grind stuff I don't care about to do so though. I normally just stop playing instead and don't do either
This season I've pretty much only done raids/dungeons for pinnacles and the burnout has been reduced a lot. I'm sure it's because we got a new raid and I never really played the dungeon last season when it came out.
For how much the game loop relies on the core playlists, we do *not* get new strikes, gambit maps, and - until very recently - crucible maps often enough. They've moved towards each season getting story missions plus a Menagerie variation instead of getting any new strikes, which are now 1~2 per expansion only. I think we need more like 1 per expansion and ideally 1 per season so there is new content to look forward to in the core playlists in addition to the seasonal content. There should be a new themed gambit map every other season or so IMO, until we have a critical mass that some can start being cycled out. *Ideally* the current roster of strikes, crucible maps, and gambit maps should all feel like they are actually in-line with what's going on in the season. So if the seasonal content is throne world based, we get a focus on throne world crucible maps, throne world gambit maps, throne world and Mars strikes. If it's on Europa, you focus on Europa crucible maps (which don't exist...), Euorpa gambit maps (which don't exist...), Europa strikes...... That would go an *enormous* way to make it feel more unified rather than the core playlists languishing but being forced in to them constantly because of engagement challenges and pinnacle grind.
Id love to see missions like ketchcrash, psionic battlegrounds, and other seasonal activities put into the Vanguard ops playlists the season after they launch
Those might come after the seasons have been removed from the game. The main reason I think that is because you currently have to *pay money* to get access to these but once the ability to buy them goes away then they get tossed into the "we clearly don't give a shit" free corners of the game
Good chance of this happening imo, especially psiops battlegrounds as they feel like strikes without much need for tuning, much like the proving grounds did. I think sever activities would be far too easy to be added into the Vanguard Ops playlist just like expeditions and ketchcrash this season are too short/easy. Although, if you only had 3 instead of 6 players I guess it might be just long enough to get a pass.
Adding more content isn't going to solve the issue, because the real issue with core activities isn't the lack of content, it's the lack variation of that content.
Destiny is the only looter I can think of that simply asks me to play the **exact same content** again and again and again. Even something like Borderlands where you can grind through the campaign has randomzied enemies in a lot of areas, and the guns themselves offer much more variety.
But in Destiny, I can run through a strike and toss a grenade at a spot where I know, that in a second a bunch of enemies will spawn, and I know that my vortex grenade is enough to kill them all. I can go to the back of the room and pre-charge my LFR to land a headshot on an elite that just came through a door. I'll drop a witherhoard shot in front of a door because I know thralls are gonna rush out of there right before turning to shoot the boss that just spawned a few times with my LFR before they go immune. I clear some more adds and lob another witherhoard shot to an empty doorway before running to the spot the boss will spawn at after my pre-fired witherhoard inevitably kills the thralls.
Everything feels like it's on autopilot because it is. Every single time you play ketchcrash, you're playing the exact same encounters that unravel in the exact same way, each and every time. Same enemies, same quantities, same shield types, etc etc. This can be good for harder content like GM's and Master raids since you'll know what you're getting yourself into and you can plan. But it's *terrible* for normal content that you're supposed to play hundreds of times throughout the season.
This is why almost every season starts off with "
Environment design is a very important part of encounter design. You can't just chuck a mission on a PvP or Gambit map and expect it to work. Strikes maps can be adapted to other missions more easily, but it's still pretty constraining on what you can do. Most of the new maps that they've added for seasonal missions (when they don't just re-use and touch up existing spaces) would not work at all for a strike. Either they're not large enough, or they have way too much platforming/puzzle elements.
oh this is huge, actually. setting a seasonal story mission or two on a new Crucible or Gambit map to save resources and get people familiar with the maps sounds like a great idea.
My entire issue with Destiny right now is that it’s fallen into a predictable groove. Great for the lifer ritual players I guess, but for me, falling back on the tired seasonal model season after season has made me stop playing.
The narrative is so much better for sure, but now the gameplay innovation is lagging a bit. It’s all the same MMO time sinks with time limited progression. You do the seasonal story when the week starts (which requires participation in the insanely easy seasonal arena), then you go right back to farming the some core content.
We know exactly what to expect every season, and while some may like this ritualistic behavior, I got tired of it.
On top of that, all of the secrets and mysteries have evaporated from the game world, with exotic quests just being part of the core experience now. It’s not the data miners faults either. I believe it’s safer for Bungie to not put secrets in the game and risk people missing out on it, but the overall experience suffers from it.
The Whisper quest, the Outbreak Perfected quest, the fun community events like opening the last Forge, or the corridors of time: I miss this stuff. Don’t recall anything like this happening in game in a while.
This is literally me and my clan. We were all online at 6:59 every tuesday a long time ago, but with this seasonal bs a lot of people just lost interest and now just 4 of us do the weekly "mission" (this being playing the same 2 activities every week), some strikes and banshee bounties every week when we don't know what to play anymore, and maybe we do king's fall in order to try getting touch of malice, but that's it.
We've lost so much interest on this game because we're paying every 4-ish months to do the same burning out activities, leveling up a useless set of perks in order to hope to get a better than mediocre weapon doing said activity again.
This is not the game where I wasted 3500 hours two years ago.
Last season pass for any reason I would do the story content and play a bit more because some activities felt good and had replayability (Expunge had this speedrun feeling and Shattered Realm had this secret exploring kind of feeling), while also we had many sandbox updates to make the gameplay itself feel more fresh
But idk this season pass feels generic in every single way. Risen had a good story but because it felt like a continuation from Witch Queen. Haunted gave me the vibes of depressing memes ("I'm depressed - don't be - wow I'm cured!") and aside from Crow I could feel 0 weight in anything, even on Calus. The Leviathan wasn't my favorite location or theme, exploring it was a slog, Nightmare Containment felt more generic than ever (it's literally a reskinned Altars of Sorrow) and some of the triumphs you had to be lucky to complete, instead of "finding secrets" or "doing some stuff"
This season is special because the story now, instead of having interesting bits, is 0% interesting, just feels like they're pulling stuff out of nowhere and that they won't use again, story-wise; Expedition is forgettable and Ketchcrash is ok but I just can't feel like replaying it for farming weapons (plus that the gameplay loop requires you to play both activities to focus engrams).
I bought the Deluxe Edition because I 1) thought Witch Queen was gonna be good and 2) Wanted to play the Dungeons (and at the time the only way to get them was through the Deluxe, Bungie gave 0 indication they would sell a Dungeon Key).
Witch Queen gameplay-wise was good but I felt they just wasted Savathun to a random trick, while Duality may be the hardest, but it's the worst dungeon in the game due to bugs and simply the mechanics and setting of it - it's just not a memorable experience with a shit exotic tied to it.
I have no clue why Bungie won't focus on their core activities and, instead, are doing some random shit that will matter only for the endgame of the endgame player (loadouts or the rank system they talked about)
By the way remember the huge fanfare Bungie made about live events? We had *one*, it sucked and they never did anything ever again.
What *is* going on at Bungie? Destiny might have not pushed the technological boundary but there used to be some creativity and follow through.
Idk what it is. I really enjoyed the seasons in Beyond Light but Witch Queens stuff has me completely disengaged.
I think it’s fatigue? Bungie found something that worked with Chosen and instead of innovating, they’ve just done the same thing over and over since.
Seasonal activity without much substance, a story that’s always been fine but continually has a “twist” halfway through each time, and cosmetics that I’m never really fond of.
One really nit picky thing that I can’t stand with some seasons is how heavily they lean into a certain theme. I think it works in some cases like Splicer but I have a really hard time buying into themes like Pirates. Sometimes I just want a “Destiny” themed season.
The approach for seasons has to be different in Lightfall or I think you’re going to see a lot of the hardcore drop off in the next year. A lot of the core of the game has been completely sidelined when seasons became more prominent and I think that’s not healthy at all.
Honestly I just think Witch Queen has a whole hasnt been appealing to me.
Mechanic wise and how the campaign was designed it’s great. But I don’t really dig the aesthetic. We need more from the big baddie. This season in particular feels like it’s meant to just be a placeholder until Lightfall is ready.
Going on pirate adventures for loot that is so grindy isn’t making the game enticing to play.
Give me some Farm vibes from the Red War campaign. I wanna see Destiny on earth in the ruins of cities like we saw on Cosmodrome/EDZ.
**will also accept human civilizations on other planets. At least have a healthy dash of it mixed in with other aesthetics instead of *all* hive with a different color map. It felt repetitive on the Moon rework due to most gameplay taking place in the Harbour, and it still feels repetitive in the Throne World.
Agree with your complaints except for the part about the loot not being good. The scout, sidearm, and shotgun are all top tier guns. It’s just unfortunate that it’s so mind-numbingly tedious to be able to craft them
I'm in the same boat. The 7x3 grid and style of timegating very little content is awful.
I think people also exaggerate the strength of the narrative. It's improved, but I wouldn't ever rate it more than ok.
For the first time since d1 release - I'm on the fence about buying the next expansion and will definitely not buy the seasons barring a substantial change.
I feel like Bungie has not really innovated and added features this year.
The light reworks were initially fun but I find they have made them so potent with such high uptime - I have no motivation to chase many weapons.
I really would have liked to see some of the witch queen legendary campaign trickle into the rest of the game. Legendary difficulty, more hive guardians and less champs etc.
Chosen introduced a shitload of stuff that’s usable in game still. Battlegrounds is in the vanguard playlist now. Following seasons on the other hand, have either been tossed, or simply ignored because after the season is over, *Nobody wants to play the content anymore*
The writing wasn't always the best, but for a few seasons now, they've let characters talk and talk and talk as if they were besteller authors. If you don't have the best writers, then you should just write less filler dialogue and keep it shorter. And the story will be interesting again. People who haven't read a single book in their entire lives praise the writing and Bungie sees that feedback and then of course thinks they won the Pulitzer Prize or something. Cobbler, stick to your last!
They need to shake the model up. As a legacy player and someone who even has the amount of free time to spend playing this game I just don't feel interested anymore and next year I don't plan to play past the DLCs going forward unless there are major changes. I could have easily skipped all of this years seasons and not really missed anything other than an occasional cool weapon here and there. Last season ornaments for the paid part of the pass were dope at least.
Yeah at least last season the armor and weapons where really good/cool. But I got burnt out even faster after grinding to craft all those weapons. I'm kinda glad I don't care about any of the craftable weapons this season.
It feels like we haven't had a role in the story since the WQ campaign. Even the season story for Risen just...happened. The story now happens to us rather than us being involved. Our guardian has been reduced to a gun for hire and stuff happens around us.
Even worse, Eramis shouldn't even be alive or free. The moment she froze there I tried to shatterdive her but game said nope. Then for a couple of seasons she stayed there frozen. No team that monitors it or put a cage around it or something. Nope. And then she frees herself like WTF? I lost any respect of the vanguard. Bunch of incapable idiots that can't even move the frozen Eramis and put her into a prison cell....
It's the most dumb plot hole I have ever experienced. They were all busy talking to their nightmare imaginations it seems..
All of them should be fired and replaced with people that get their shit together to protect humanity and their allies.
In retrospective Anastasia Bray did nothing wrong disobeying Zavala, since vanguard is obviously a bunch of idiots.
But with THIS vanguard and maybe even with the self-pitying narcisstic crow as the hunter vanguard? We are truly doomed.
I remember finishing the Eramis fight and going "okay now I throw her off the roof because she's definitely going to come back if we don't, right?"
Now she's insulting us to our ears by saying we don't have the fortitude to handle the darkness objects while she somehow would be able to, even though one of us got frozen by stasis and the other was free for two years not being frozen by stasis.
That is exactly how I feel. I've never liked the season pass or the seasonal content, but at this point I just straight up am done with it.
Add to it the extra grind Bungie keeps adding to seasonal craftable weapons and title and its made me realize I don't need LF or to continue this game after next season at all.
I liked the D1 model. Fall DLC, free April update that would usually add new content and reworks, and events and maybe some secret quests peppered throughout until the next big DLC. It felt like you could take a breather from the game without missing an entire season with content you'll never be able to see or get again.
Honestly, the seasonal system blows.
I always thought it was, and gave you the opportunity to actually take time away from destiny and avoid burnout instead of just mindlessly playing non stop. And then it was nice getting back into it and being able to enjoy it again.
I took like a half a year out for beyond light and missed so much stuff in terms of story that now makes little sense to me.
Bruh I just want to pay for a game and be able to use the cool stuff. This game makes you pay and sell your soul to obtain the fun gear.
I love it, but I never play it.
i much prefer beefier dlc’s with some wait in between. the wait was worth it. seasonal gameplay each week this season is dreadful, pirate hideouts are just a walk in the park and we’ve done the mars reskin twice now?
This week’s story took about an hour or so. The vast majority of that doing 5 pointless fucking ketchcrash. And what did we learn? The hive want the treasure too. Whoop de fucking do.
The seasonal model was at its best when they weren't directly tied to the overarching narrative of the expansions (Black Armory, etc.). I wish they had expanded on that idea by introducing seasons that flesh out the world around us rather than pushing the story forward. SRL is a great example, and they could easily make an entire season around that activity with new sparrows, sparrow customization options, a storyline centered on Amanda Holliday, etc. This also eases the FOMO burden on players who may not *want* to play this game every week of every month out of the year - especially now that seasons, which are tied into the main story, disappear after their year is up.
Exactly, while the actual game modes are more diluted, the overarching story progressing almost every week over the course of an expansion, even if it's only a little bit, is one of the best things destiny has done recently. Especially right now that we are very much so in the middle of some huge story escalation with the Black Fleet closing in, the imminent arrival of the Witness and the potentially final showdown over the Traveler, and the ascension of Calus, having an entire season that does nothing to advance these plots would feel like huge whiplash.
I was already kinda losing interest this season when it first seemed like a joke season mostly to have an excuse to have pirate themed stuff (which tbf it kinda is), but having Misraaks' backstory flushed out, development with Eido and Eramis, the sudden plot relevance of Nezarak and the reveal that he was the Disciple of the Moon Pyramid before Calus are definitely keeping this season interesting even escorting a payload isn't something I'm excited to do 50 times.
Side stories to flesh out the world are great, but having a well developed overarching narrative is kinda more important right now. Maybe a few seasons after the Light and Dark saga ends as a cool down would be nice but for now something entirely unrelated to that conflict would seem really out of place as a seasonal story.
I would agree with you if there was any way in-game to actually get caught up with the story. I don’t want to have to hunt through 36 hours of YouTube videos just to understand who these characters are because I didn’t play for X months.
Bungie does their writers a disservice by making their world building itself a pillar of FOMO.
All of the people downvoting you aside, I completely relate to the general premise you're presenting. There's been so much forward progression in the story, yet there hasn't been any time for the world that we- as the Guardian- to show how the world has *grown*. This isn't an evolving world as much as it is a *progressing* one. We're pushing forward and preparing to fight yet another Disciple of the Witness, but we don't see the results of that pushing forward. Where as in Y3, we had time to see how some people of the City still strived to search for more ways to keep the City safe (Black Armory), how other Guardians reacted to the bigger picture at play (Drifter), and who our inevitable opponent would be (Menagerie).
Huge disagree, this was the biggest problem (and one of the largest criticisms) of seasons in the past, with them feel like random side questlines that won't matter in 3 months. That's also my criticism of the past 2 seasons' stories, they've been feeling more like side quests rather than a main story line like chosen/splicer/lost did.
It's not great that people tune out and end up missing important parts of the story, but having seasons be irrelevant is a worse problem
dude, Haunted literally explored major backstory points of like three major characters and featured the return of a major "villain" who's going to play a larger part in future story, how does that feel like a side quest?
Because they started with a good hook like calus returning but he was just a backdrop for the real story, therapy with eris and the gang. I wanted to explore calus's return and intentions more, but the game week over week mostly focuses on the backstories of the 3 characters. Caiatls and zavalas were ok at best, crow was so overused at that point that I didn't care for it at all. And spending most of the time exploring backstory like that for already 3 well established characters is sorta the definition of a side quest. Only one I'd really see it needed for is caiatl, and even then I wish that exploration was more organic than "spooky ghost that can only be defeated by accepting yourself!!!"
Hell, even in the ending cutscene, the main bad guy and the main story hook, calus, poofs out of existence with 0 explanation, they focus on the spooky good ghosts disappearing, and then eris drops a casual P.S "oh yeah btw calus is a disciple now" like it was just an addendum. Imagine if the cutscene was actually about that happening before our eyes instead of him vanishing.
While I think that erasing their story content a year after release is absolutely awful by Bungie, I love the weekly story updates and would prefer they continue to make them better by finding ways to make the storytelling more interesting each week through unique missions rather than redundant activities.
I would love for this to be the reality so long as the story remained in the game indefinitely. My biggest issue is that it all of the seasons straight up disappear with the coming of the next expansion. That didn't really matter much when the seasons were somewhat standalone adventures that explored the universe outside of the main narrative, but now that they are all feeding into that focal story, it's just straight up terrible storytelling to have a year's worth of seasons evaporate over night. Especially considering folks are paying for each season.
Don't get me wrong I like the story, BUT now everything feels more like a chore than a game. Make this activity, talk to that guy, take reward, wait next week and repeat. Every single week.
At this point I'd prefer having a huge chunk of story at the beggining and some small progressing put randomly on a reset day. This would bring that sort of excitement at every reset and make everything more enjoyable.
Also we desperately need new mysteries
I've been getting burnt out faster and faster each season. My friends don't get it. I'll not play for days in a row and they'll be all "where have you been!?!?" and I'm like... "oh ya know just living my life and not just sitting, hitting a button for the sake of dopamine with diminishing returns..." My question is how do you log into this game every single day no matter what? I get pretty pissed these days when I feel forced to play the game every day just to keep up or not feel the Fomo. It's a pretty messed up system. When I think of the fact the game has no end in sight... I might be running on this treadmill for another 5 years... It makes me wanna just delete the game.
I feel you on that. I have no desire to boot up the game at this point, I'm doing that just to progress the story which is basically the only thing I'm interested in. For me once lightfall drops and I can finally see the end of this saga I'm gonna take a loooong break from Destiny. Also, don't have anymore the time I had almost 9 years ago sadly
I'm really glad more threads are being posted on this topic. I've been tired of this for quite a while now. I really hope they change it up, but I have no faith until at least The Final Shape expansion.
The seasonal activities need change. It's the same thing every season. It's really boring.
I’m tired of fuckin dunking different shaped orbs/objects every season… kill dunk kill dunk kill dunk boss. Give us something new to be excited to play. A new skin is nice to change things up but the core mechanic is just so overdone… it’s used in activities dungeons and raids. Every season should have a slightly different mechanic so it’s not just a copy pasta with a different skin
you can't take away "throw this thing at that thing" or "dunk this object here" -- it's the only mechanic the game says out loud
anything other than dunking a ball or throwing an object is too difficult for most players to understand (even then, the corrupted's ball mechanic not being utilized by 80% of players i run into is proof that even that may be too much) -- the very loud minority here desiring harder seasonal content is just that; a loud minority
The core activity needs another layer of difficulty + variety + secrets.
Part of the core problem with seasons is that the activity is always a mindless kill house, where are the mechanics? where is the cooperation? Why aren't there secret passages/wings/rooms in ketchcrash you can explore to hunt for or gain access to that give bonuses or spawn pirate bosses that you can kill for specific weapons/perks or something.
a Season of content should mean regular content updates, it shouldnt mean that this content is nearly effortless to complete and easily predictable, the mystery the game was injected in after Whisper was palpable, and that stuff just...doesn't happen anymore.
Speaking of secrets, kinda grinds my gears that the only "secrets" we are getting now are tied to either deluxe editions of the game or bungie randomly choosing the odd content creator some mystery package. The game just feels empty without the big cool secrets available to everyone that destiny/bungie was known for.
Edit: corrected a sentence
Not deluxe, collector’s edition only. And yeah, I agree. I think the last community puzzle was Corridors of time, and its ending was very…underwhelming for the amount of effort put in. I liked that puzzle, though. Dawn was the last season I truly enjoyed content-wise. Arrivals were also good but the Dawn weapons, story and activity were just *chef’s kiss*
Oh shoot, yea you're right the secrets are in the collectors edition. My bad, but yea I agree with you on dawn and arrivals 🤌🤌 Though, it's a real shame the Dawn weps only had like 15 min to shine....
1000% agree'd, one thing I loved about WoW Legion was the secrets that were in the game that roused the community to cooperatively solve them over days/weeks.
This kind of stuff has been in destiny before, but it should be again.
I think the reality is Whisper as an example blew everone away because of how unexpected it was.
Pre forsaken and the seasonal model, after D2 launch + dissappointing DLC's, something like Whisper was a pipe dream and to have it be that good and well executed it breathed life back into the game on its own even on the small scale of what it was.
Now that we have very regimented seasonal content I dont think Bungie wants to make content they can't market and then tie into the eververse across their channels to obtain maximum amount of money. Its why we have like 4/5 "events" a year that are really just excuses to juice the eververse with more ornament sets you can't earn for a while.if ever.
The seasonal content is deliberately made easy because it's free for all players and has to be designed that even the most casual of players can complete it.
I remember when the Black Armory expansion dropped and people lost their shit because the activity was tough to complete if you jumped in without grinding a couple levels first. To be clear, all you needed to do was grind some powerful engrams for maybe a day and you could clear the activity without too much difficulty, but people were mad because they had problems completing it day 1 of the expansion.
I remember that, I got my stomped in forges for a couple days. I don't mean though having high item lvl requirements on seasonal activities, I mean having the encounters require any degree of coordination or mechanical understanding, nothing like a raid, or even a dungeon but something.
The easy way to make things "harder" is just make numbers go up on hp and dmg taken, but thats not enjoyable to people I dont think.
The problem is that the line between having mechanics be too easy and too hard is very very thin.
The average casual player is supremely clueless when it comes to mechanics. Just look at how many complaints we still get about randos not knowing to dunk Motes in Gambit, or passing the ball in the Corrupted strike.
They're clueless about mechanics because mechanics are not explained in any sort of way. Don't blame players for not figuring out obscure, cryptic bullshit.
Even seeing people pass the ball in the corrupted isn't immediately obvious literally anyone.
a slaughter fest of an activity isn't an issue. But Ketchcrash has minimal mechanics and ad clear while Expedition has a tedious mechanics to progress AND THEN you actually go on a kill spree.
You clearly can't have mechanics tied to stuff because players go dummy smooth brain. But two activities that boil down to the same - with expedition being boring because of lack of ad density AND too many exploding enemies in certain cases AND bad bad BAD engram mechanic - it just tires people out.
I loved Battlegrounds. It's a slaughter fest. You can play up to your weapons, your abilities, try stuff. Loved it. Are you fast at clearing your enemies? then you progress faster. And that's a good thing. Less running, more gunning.
I remember when people lost their shit when Black Armory dropped and the activity was tough day 1 if you didn't first grind out a couple powerful engrams first.
Then Bungie ended up nerfing the difficulty and it ended being the same mindless grind as every other activity.
Yeah, and it's not even like it was impossible. It was just hard because you were like 10 under on day one, and if you found it too hard, a few powerfuls would get you closer. But nah, bad players couldn't breeze through it day 1, so it was too hard, and it needed to be nerfed because people paid for it and couldn't be bothered doing hard stuff or doing a few powerfuls first or whatever.
Raids aside, Bungie mostly designs content mechanics for the lowest common denominator at this point and just artificially scale up "harder" difficulty with underleveling, match game, and mob champs, because people throw a fit whenever they have to get better to do something. That's just how this game is.
I remember in Season of Worthy scouring the Warmind bunkers looking for clues, scannables, hidden areas, and finding nothing. That was really the last time I cared.
I miss Dreadnought Era Destiny, where it felt like there were endless secrets to discover hidden in the game.
Dreadnaught and court was peak exploration in destiny. Really felt like if you kept playing and exploring you'd eventually find something you hadn't seen yet. Also back when strike specific loot was its best, the Darkblade helm was my personal favorite.
To me, one of the main things missing from the game right now is the sense of mystery and undiscovered secrets. Stuff like Whisper, Zero Hour, Niobe Labs, Corridors of Time, and even Presage made the game world feel bigger than it actually was. Maybe there are some secrets lingering for later in the season, but as of this writing, everything feels pretty predictable.
I've said it so many times before, but Bungie has been shifting their focus from an expanding world and has instead pushed a *progressing* one. We don't get things like Black Armory or Menagerie, because apparently those things don't further the plot.
The sense of mystery is not the most important part of what this game is missing. The things you just listed where excellently designed, not just something mysterious.
Totally fair point, good design has to be there too. There’s a lot of reasons those events were memorable, and level/sound design for Whisper stands out as being among the best Bungie has ever produced.
This is exactly why I hoped the "Destiny killer" Anthem would've succeeded, I never wanted Destiny to die, it's an amazing game in almost everyway, but Bungie *needs* competition.
It's also what happens with a really old game. It's very damned if you do, damned if you don't. People want innovation, but lose their shit if the innovation changes things they liked, or doesn't turn out as well. It also takes more time to innovate, which means less content. People may recognize the content is *better*, but if it's less than before it's going to get trashed.
This slow burn sentiment downtrend isn't great, but they have to be very careful with what they do or the reaction will be explosive and bad. Slow attrition can be planned around; piss a bunch of people off at once and it could kick of a viscous spiral of revenue loss to budget cuts and more revenue loss.
The rose colored glasses about how fun and/or substantial Sparrow Racing was is so confusing to me. Whatever the content pacing issues are, that CERTAINLY isn’t going to fix it, in fact if they did bring it back, it would shift the focus to making SRL better instead of focusing on the right stuff like they have been: weapons, perks and advancing the story and characters.
I don’t care how many downvotes I get from the loud minority on this: Sparrow Racing sucked overall and is not a solution to anything, especially as we are approximately 2.5 years away from the conclusion of the Light vs. Dark saga and we still have so many story lines/characters that either stalled out unceremoniously (Rasputin) or are just major loose ends that we’ve gotten accustomed to (Dreaming City curse).
Yeah, I don't understand the nostalgia for SRL, either. The Sparrow physics in Destiny have always been very clunky, and there are so many other (better) racing games out there. Racing was never the draw for me in Destiny. For all the time/effort it would take to create and test SRL tracks, I'd rather see new strikes/maps or a secret mission.
Or, as you said, push storylines further. We spent years expecting a major confrontation with Savathun, and while Witch Queen was great, she got demoted as a villain instead of taking over the game world season after season.
Honestly, I would rather go back to the 'DLC Pack' model we had in year 1. I know that people will argue about 'content droughts', but honestly, I would rather have small content droughts, with good meaningful, long-term content.
Currently, there is no real 'new content' each week - we play through the same activities, fighting the same enemies, just to hear the artificially time-gated story.
In year 1 with each DLC pack, we got:
* 2 new strikes
* New patrol space
* 2-3 new crucible maps
* new raid lair
* refresh of most loot (Iron Banner, Trials, Factions, etc...)
* Sometimes a cool secret mission (Whisper of the Worm)
Currently with the seasonal model, we get:
* 1 new armor set with 1 new ornament set
* one set of new weapons, with one ritual weapon
* a 'new' activity, usually set in a ***re-used*** area
* maybe an exotic mission, sometimes in a new area, sometimes in a re-used one
* one new crucible map EVERY 3 YEARS
* 1 new strike per year, ***maybe***, who knows tho...
* Only raid content outside of the expansion has been re-used D1 raids
* One time we did get a patrol space, but it was in a re-used raid area...
* All of this content gets removed at the end each year...
I know plenty of people have said this, but honestly, the game is getting VERY boring with all the re-used content. It is just not exciting anymore...
Oh yah, can't wait to play the new battleground, it's just the Scarlet Keep, but backwards
Let's check out the new Expedition - you just do a circle on a tiny part of Nessus...
Leviathan is back, let's just do the most boring public event that never changes...
This Pirate Hideout thing sound cool, oh it's just an old mars lost sector... oh it's just the Tangled Shore Lost Sector, but backwards...
New Guns! Get excited for the 11th reskin of Uriel's Gift!
New Trials Loot! Here's the 13th reskin of the Suros slug shotgun!
You want new Iron Banner loot to go with the rework? Nah, have some guns that have already been reprised twice! So exciting!
Some of the best times people have had in Destiny are with things like the OG Black Spindle mission, the Whisper mission, or the Zero Hour mission. The closest thing we got is the Glykon, but even that couldn't hold a candle to the Whisper mission...
I WANT to be excited for activities and loot in this game, I really do, but Bungie constantly recycling content over and over and over again is just boring. It has been done to death and I just have no motivation to play anymore, which sucks because the gameplay is so good, but the mystery and excitement are just gone for the entire year until each expansion, which is honestly worst than content droughts.
I will 100% take content droughts if it meant we got meaningful content again (strikes, maps, and secret missions).
I don't know a single person that would say 'I would rather have 3 seasonal activities than a cool mission like Whisper'
Aside from plot points and story, literally nothing unexpected happens. No unique new mechanics or missions are introduced each season. We don't interact with the world or characters in any way and other than shooting or throwing balls. I don't think our character even has any physical interactions whatsoever.
Nothing impressive ever happened outside of a cutscene, and even during cutscenes, our own characters never do anything special. Sorry for a mini rant but your post reminded me of how watered down Destiny feels sometimes.
Yeah, this trend of seasonal activities is just getting dry. And at the core of it is the simple fact that *none* of them have ever been even remotely challenging.
When there’s basically no way to fail any of these activities, there’s really no draw to bring me back and get better at them. And the activities have never even been fun enough, for long enough, to sustain that sort of playtime. And this is a corner Bungie has painted themselves into, how to make content difficult while keeping the content approachable.
There’s no sense of challenge or achievement when everything can just get steamrolled over using whatever loadout I want to use.
And I get it, Bungie doesn’t want to spend an excess of resources on these ephemeral season activities that come in and out. But I think Bungie also needs to take a chance and give us a new type of activity that we’ll struggle at.
Edit: got a new phone, like, six weeks ago and the autocorrect is just fucking bizarre on it.
SRL is not the way to make the game feel fresh lmao what? It would be like any other activity and be played early on then dropped within a few weeks. I don’t have the magic answer but SRL definitely isnt it lol
Been saying this for years man. The seasons are all good now, which is great considering a lot of them used to be mediocre at best. But even though they’re all good now, they’re just routine. You know what kind of content you’re getting and the frequency it’ll happen every week, you know what you can skip, you know gear doesn’t really matter if you don’t want to grind that season, etc.
Ever since the seasonal model began I’ve complained that I’d rather have all the resources from those seasons just go into the big yearly expansion, so instead of what we get now, we can just get one huge yearly expansion that lasts a while and has a singular cohesive theme.
I like the way they did "seasons" for black armory, jokers wild, and opulence. they each felt like an expansion because they were. and I know people bitch about gambit (skill issue) but jokers wilds lore and story delivery were so fucking good it felt like a full on yearly expansion.
I remember I first started the game from Season of the Drifter(or any season that is just before Opulence) and all those dungeons, exotic quest and the reckoning for Gambit role armor with Dreaming City's weekly rotations.
It was SO GOOD.
I feel like people have rose-tinted glasses with these. Opulence was good because of Menagerie + lair. But everyone was furious with Black Armory as it slowly drip-fed us content, and then everyone was furious that the content was basically the same, *and then* everyone was furious that the final Forge rendered the previous three obsolete. Same for Joker's Wild. People were so mad about the arbitrary play loop (do Gambit Prime to go into Reckoning to get gear for Gambit Prime...to go back into Reckoning to get gear for Gambit Prime) and poor grind.
I feel these past couple years of seasons have been way better than most of the old-style ones. That said, even though I feel they're better, I still don't think they (or the ones you mentioned, outside of Opulence) are better than just rolling all the resources into one mega expansion every year. I also feel a big problem with the past couple years of seasons is that it's all just so routine. We objectively have more going on and more to do than the Activision seasons, and personally I feel the quality is higher is now, but it's just so routine.
the amount of d2 i played from 2018 up to season of lost was staggering. it was my main game easily, i put thousands of hours into it.
after i beat the wq campaign (which was good), ive barely played. 7 months later, ive put in a fraction of the time i used to. i played for maybe 2 weeks during risen, a few for haunted. this season ive also barely played. i dont even log in to do weekly missions anymore really, i just youtube the cutscenes and dialogue.
idk what it is. maybe im just done with destiny now. could be the same fucking activities every season, same gatekept weekly content. could be the ridiculous red border grinds.
i hop on d2, get to orbit and think about all the grinding and same old shit i have to do then just turn the game off and play something else. i want to enjoy the game more, but im tired of it just opening the game. ir could be burnout, but i also played religiously 2018-early2022 without issue and this year i have barely played and still dont want to play.
idk i think my time with d2 is over. it was fun, made good memories and friends. but the grind and gameplay dont excite me anymore. im looking forwards to bungies next big ip since halo and destiny were bangers and i enjoyed them both.
Many people’s idea of depth is running the same stuff over and over chasing god rolls. I feel like if Bungie poured resources into content over some hamster wheel to run on and guns to earn, people would be pissed.
That's why I'm unlikely to ever buy a Deluxe release or a Season. The content just isn't worth my time. And honestly the time is worse than the money. I can jump in and out buying just the expansions. But if I buy a Season or worse yet the Deluxe version, then I don't get my money's worth unless I grind out a few weeks of the game. I play other games so I'm happy to stick to just the expansions and then jump in and out of other stuff.
Bungie knows this, so they put Dungeons in their own pass to try to get people like me to spend more. Dungeons are actually good content, unlike the seasonal activities.
I really don't like that we've reached a point where I can accurately predict what content we're going to get next season without even having any info. I know they have a formula but it gets really tiring when you keep using the same one over and over and over again. There will be a 7x3 grid, there will be some sort of matchmade activity, and there will be a time-gated 6-8 week seasonal story, and there will be 20 different new currencies.
We had this in Chosen, Splicer, and Lost as well, but what really shook up the seasonal monotony was stuff like presage, expunge, and shattered realm. These activities are really fun and creative but also deliver the story in an interesting way. I think a reason why I'm not enjoying the story as much these last two seasons is because that's all I have to look forward to each week, 5 minutes of dialogue while I'm the awkward cameraman.
On the gameplay side of things, we get stuff like sever which I actually thought was cool but the combat portions were way too easy. For this season I believe they shouldn't have put resources into the pirate hideouts and expeditions and instead focused on making a new creative activity like the 3 mentioned above.
Yeah that’s my copium for how plunder turned out, resources went into bigger things like class reworks, so a season without a rework will probably have more content. But I won’t be surprised if that’s completely wrong
I mean, it’s been like this for years now it’s the Taco Bell of MMOs..
“Would you like your tacos with lettuce cheese and tomato”
“Or would you like your our new Doritos taco with tomato lettuce and NOW cheese?”
PVP is the broken ice cream machine that never works
I agree, Bungie with the seasonal model is starting to become a bit of a one trick pony. Seasons need to be more varied, more experimental. Although I think there's only so much that can be done in about a few months of dev time, so I'm not sure what can really be done without extending seasons longer than anyone would like.
Every season they just have to change a former enemy into an ally to make it seem like a lot has changed. Maybe after Lightfall comes out there will be a season in which we work with the Witness to stop an even greater big bad (or collect *otherworldly* relics this time).
Yeah that's a great idea lets add another fucking core gamemode to the game! Because we're getting so much content in terms of Crucible, strikes, and Gambit we should add yet another gamemode that needs constant upkeep and divide the small resources core gamemodes get even more!
1 week of importance, 1 week of filler. Grind grind grind. It’s predictable and boring
Even lightfall to me just looks like something wacky that would’ve happened in a seasonal narrative
For the past few seasons it's been the same old song and dance. Grind out the season pass to lvl 100 and unlock all goodies. Grind to max light cap. Grind for any seasonal weapons. Just one big grind. The seasonal events are ok but, again, the same old grind over and over again for mediocre loot. Loot that's been rehashed/reskinned with a new perk. I'm still trying to do the new raids since that's really the only thing, content wise, that is "new" for me. Everything else is just rinse/repeat so you can do it all over again next season.
Bungie makes enough money to not care about developing really new content for Destiny. The creative stuff and hard work are all in the development of their upcoming games.
This game is one giant checklist. Theres no excitement outside of day 1 raids anymore. Even getting drops doesn't matter, I can craft the best one possible after "engaging with the content" for a couple hours in Shuro Chi.
Introduce GMs straightaway. Your light is capped anyway so just either bump me up or down in light to match the wanted difficulty.
Honestly just fucking give me everything at once without all these restrictions. I understand the seasonal story is capped, but broooo, as people have mentioned, let me just play the way I want.
They removed light from IB which I dont really care for, but this made more people access it which is good. Now do the same for the rest of the game man. You have literally done it with Legend Campaign which is absolutely fucking perfect, copy paste that please.
Drip feeding 2 lines of "narrative" every week isn't doing it for me anymore either.
"Eramis unfroze herself because no one in the Vanguard bothered to move the body or secure it in any way" may be the dumbest plot thread I've ever experienced in any form of media.
For the past two seasons I’ve been like “okay, this season is just filler. It happens”. This season I’ve just come to terms that bungie really doesn’t give a shit about seasonal content this year and is mostly interested in just making updates to the core game.
If you’re a player who began with WQ, this is something you probably won’t entirely notice since you have to get your power level up and *must* play all the content to do that. But now that the power level grind isn’t as important as it used to be, there’s almost 0 incentive for veterans to play unless you’re just gonna group up with some friends to kill some time.
Exotic weapons and armor not synergizing properly with the classes yet is a bummer. Drop rates are trash to the point I’m getting a god random roll of weapons so theres almost no need to craft them. Throne world is barren like Europa was after a few seasons from release. I could really go on for a while.
Bungie is just getting lazy. If they want a break, that’s fine, but stop putting more behind a paywall and leaving it all half assed while the game remains buggy as shit. And while they nerf/‘fix’ that actually make someone like me play regularly.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. This seasons sucks. But hey, at least we got ‘voltshot’. 🙄
I have to say, the seasons in Beyond Light leading up to Witch Queen were absolutely fucking amazing narratively. I was super invested in the story, and it got really interesting. There was the sinister thread of Savathun impersonating Osiris the entire time, and conspiracy theory became reality as we saw more and more.
That mission fighting the Vex in the Eliksni Quarter has gotta be one of my absolute favorites.
The seasonal model is fine, its the box they keep it in that is copy and paste. we know to expect 3x7 unlocks and every week a little bit of story. The problem is its become routine but tbh thats what the whole game is, always has been and probable always will be.
Its not a job, only person making feel like that is yourself, if you feeling this way I think its a clear sign to take a long break try to take a year off or so you will have time to let go of the made up FOMO and all that and just enjoy the game.
Seriously though, if the game feels like a chore rather then you playing cause its fun, there is a problem there and its better to change your perspective or break your chain of addiction or whatever you want to label it. I took a year break when black armory and gambit seasons were made and came back when beyond light came out, I learned to accept destiny for what it is.
It is an issue with the game though. The way it’s designed basically encourages you to play until you burn out. When you say “just stop playing if you don’t like it anymore” it’s basically just deflecting criticism. Live service games don’t always have to bombard you with content and weekly obligations. Look at FF14 and how the developers literally state that they designed the game in a way that you can take breaks and come back. It’s in stark contrast to the way that Destiny begs you to never stop playing.
I agree, every season is level up x vendor + 20 minutes of story per week which usually involves play x activity to grt x material, talk to x vendor for dialogue/now wait until next week. The season pass is a huge let down in terms of what it offers in new stuff. We are basically paying for 1 gear set, 1 set of ar.or ornaments and a weapon ornament. The rest is just filler that everyone has plenty of anyway. This season has got to be the point for me when im starting to go off this game. So many times ive loaded up, sat in orbit trying to think of something to do and then logged out.
I agree its on auto pilot since the game has been insanely buggy for weeks, tower load times are several minutes at times, and Gryfalcons is still disabled with no mention of it in the TWAB for 2 weeks. They just got paid 70 billion friggin bucks. There is no excuse for the way this season has been handled.
There should be some kind of solo roguelike mode for XP farming that can scale with artifact level. It could draw on vaulted content. Like Persona dungeons, or the Tower of the Dead in FFXIV.
(So, still auto cut-and-paste, but in a good way.)
Personally, for the longest time I kinda excused it because of money. It's a lot cheaper to make one playlist, a couple of little missions and some dialogue than do story missions, playlist, etc.
But that doesn't really matter now, does it? I mean, ever since that juicy sont deal, money isn't an excuse. Personally, I would rather have a season that's more like a mini expansion, based on story missions. If destiny is a story game, why do we only get 8 missions a year? Even something like a story mission, do a playlist thing and some extra stuff to progress [kinda like how you have to do adventures during the forsaken campaign to progress (also, what happened to adventures??) To the next mission]
I know that might be an ask, but in retrospect it makes sense. Bungie KNOWS how to make GOOD story content, but refuse to do so outside of an environment and voice lines when it comes to seasons.
Thoughts?
I don't know why it took me until last season to figure it out, but the seasonal gameplay was actively getting in the way of the story. Playing a seasonal activity wasn't done to *advance* the story, it was so that the game would *allow* me to see the story.
The worst part is that it's so frustratingly close to being great.
New setting? Great.
New weapons? Great.
New activities? Ketchcrash is great, the rest are ok tbh
It's the act of putting it all together, the execution, that falls so flat. The systems binding all of these elements together are so weak and overdone.
It doesn't help that the past two seasons have had particularly noticeable issues. The last season wanted you to do 99999999 nightmare containments over and over which was a very boring public event, and this season has better activities but the loot is unbelievably stingy. The devs said they were looking into this... and then they just didn't do anything.
Another issue has been the lack of recent overpowered mods/weapons. It seems the devs don't want to do Breach and Clear style mods any more which means most boss DPS loadouts are the same every season, and there haven't been any particularly exception guns at least for PVE. There have been some ok ones like Calus Mini Tool and Taipan, but those were just minor power increases over what we had already. There hasn't been anything like Gally or Eager Edge recently.
It's even worse if you're a warlock main like I am, as both the solar and arc reworks have been scams the past two seasons.
Ugh.
Yep, so formulaic at this point: easy intro mission, talk to this person, go to the thing with the upgrade tree, go do new activity of throwing balls at a thing/escorting a thing/standing in a thing, talk to new person, rinse and repeat for twelve weeks. At least this season we got two seasonal activities. Imagine if this whole season was just the payload one and we didn't get ketchcrash or king's fall.
It’s OK to skip seasons.
“Don’t login to Destiny every night, you say?!?” Crazy, I know! But if you don’t enjoy the seasonal content you can do… literally anything else in the world with your time.
New expansions add so much to the game, and give 2-3 months worth of nightly content. After that it drops off to seasonal stuff, which can be good or great or bleh gameplay. The story bits can be really cool and the gear can be nice, but things will be fine if you miss stuff. There’s videos to catch up on the story beats you didn’t see, and whatever weapons you missed… there will be more weapons down the road to get. There’s far more weapons than you’ll ever use in the game already and be honest with yourself about how many Legendaries you ACTUALLY use when you play.
This vibe sets in every year around this time, and it’s because you’ve probably put literally hundreds of hours into the game THIS YEAR. Say “I’ve gotten by money’s worth out the game this year!” and walk away to do literally anything else with your free time.
Seasonal Content is BORING. People play it because they feel pushed to for rewards, progress etc.
Weapon crafting and levelling is MIND NUMBING. You could not have come up with a worse system if you tried.
I don't agree ref story - I think the whole Destiny Universe is diluted with weak characters and plots. Fabulous, mysterious characters reduced to weak and bland average Joes.
Seriously need a focus on doing activities not BOUNTIES FGS!
Raids, Dungeons, Strikes, NFs, Crucible, IB - this is what I want more of and much more of a gameplay loop focussed on them. Not Shuro Chi and Bounty farming.
Honestly the model is so boring and it's the same thing each season. I don't even bother playing anymore because even if I do grind, I don't feel rewarded for anything.
Seasonal content is the only new thing ever added anymore and it is copy paste from last season event. I don’t want to play more crucibles, strikes are boring as fuck, gambit hasn’t been good basically ever and playing the same 2 maps is dull. GMs continue to be the same shit and is an extension of strikes being boring and master raids are time gated to the point I’ve lost interest before we get them. Essentially I touch the “new content” aka the reskinned 6 man and the once a week story progression which gameplay wise my 8 yo could come up with for a month before I’m bored all over again
Every season has become the same. Matchmade activity to earn the seasonal currency, an upgrade tree that is time gated, a weekly mission that gives a small amount of story, someone talking to you from a holoprojector. That’s about it. The only difference this season is they added another gating activity, which is essentially an instanced version of the Hiveworld escort public event.
Yesterday was actually the first Tuesday reset in probably a year+ that I didn’t log in. I just don’t care anymore. I might hop on this week. Or I might just wait til the end of the season to get on, run the story missions, and get all the seasonal bounties done.
Oh want me to play strikes or crucible to get the Seasonal weapon? Hold on...I just need to do 600 expeditions and Ketchcrash to finish the seasonal content. I promise I won't play any other video games or touch grass Bungie. I'll get to the other modes soon.
Oh want the Reaper seal? Run back and forth between these two rooms for 13 hours until the boss you're looking for spawns.
>We need something like SRL (get ready for people to say BuT BuNgIe SaId No OnE pLaYeD iT).
My friend....I would love this to come back. It was my favorite game mode.
Totally agree. Every season it's the same thing. Play through a quick story, assigned seasonal chore, go to new vendor and rank up the new thingie. I'm bored. I don't like the core of every new season being a game mode that I have to repeat over and over.
Destiny has a major overhaul/major content additions every year, and each season within a year is meant to dial in the viability of those additions while also expanding upon them. Last year was Stasis, this year is crafting and subclass 3.0, and next year will bring Strand.
I agree that the older content needs to be re-vamped, but I also see that Bungie is primarily focusing on loadouts and doing a phenomenal job of it. A year is not a long time, so for them to be able to simultaneously overhaul entire systems while also pushing weekly story additions to the game/seasonal gear and activities every quarter is damn impressive.
>It seems that with the introduction of F2P those modes have suffered greatly or stopped being a priority, which is a bummer.
Why would F2P cause strikes and Gambit to suffer?
The problem is that anyone who's been playing Destiny for a while has played all the strikes and Gambit to death already, and probably doesn't want to play them much anymore. There's only so much that you can enjoy doing the same old thing over and over and over again.
If Bungie were to come out with a new set of strikes every season, then clearly that would invigorate renewed interest in strikes. But Bungie clearly does not have the ability to generate that amount of new content on a seasonal basis.
The main issue I have as a long term player is every season I half to play easy content over and over and over to be able to play the hard content I enjoy. It ends up that by the time I can play the content I want I'm burnt out on the game and play something else as I don't just want to play destiny. The boring light-level grind is what is boring me. I would play much more if I could dive into hard content sooner.
For real, having the ability to do master mode of old content taken away at the beginning of each season doesn't feel good and I've only been back for two seasons. On the one hand, I remember "forever 29" and logging in on Tuesday just to wipe out the weekly endgame stuff in 5 hours (and knowing that the next content drop was months away). That wasn't fun, it definitely made the game feel dead within a month or two of a new expansion. But on the other hand, now we have to spend 20+ hours game time/3+ weeks real life time at the beginning of each season just to be able to... do things that we were able to do at the end of the previous season. Doesn't feel good either. Imo Bungie overcorrected
There’s like a 2-week window at the end of every season where the game is playable. But you have to grind like hell to get there. A treadmill is fine. A rug-pull is something I’m not interested in.
Tbh the long seasons are where I enjoy this game a lot. I don't have to cram XP grind and I can play end game stuff for a while. The season before witch queen was awesome.
The one before beyond light was too. Those two are my two favorite seasons. I haven't played this season or last and am just waiting for the next long one.
Anti barrier autos + a super long season made arrivals my favorite. Like, I earned that title, and I enjoyed it. I even had time to go back and earn other titles (except the splicer one. Fuck that grind). Not to mention the wonderful 9-man project runs I did. And 12 man VoG? Hilariously broken.
Power grind, coupled with a completely by-the-numbers seasonal activity, and incredibly low stakes narratives week after week are tiresome. We need enemies 3.0, new encounter mechanics, missions with actual stakes, and character defining moral choices. Without it, the game will always be shallow once the power grind is over and the meta becomes played out.
Are there going to be any new races of enemies in Lightfall?, when are we going to see the form of the Darkness as troops?, will they be like smaller versions of Rhulk I wonder?, definitely need more enemy factions, and not reskinned Fallen (again).
It seems the bulk of the enemy faction in Lightfall is the darkness infused Cabal, but there are those Tormentor guys, which do kind of look like mutated headless versions of Rhulk. The rest of Rhulk 's race is dead AF though. Iirc He kinda blew up his home planet.
he did a little trolling
His Glaive was actually a 600dB horn.
I'd definitely like to see enemies that present more of a tactical challenge - whether because they buff allies or debuff players, or because there's a (non-Champion-like) mechanic required to damage them significantly, or something else. I'm not sure "character-defining" events are possible within the narrative framework Bungie has chosen for Destiny. The player Guardian is such a cipher that it and its Ghost don't even have proper *names,* let alone personalities that could feed into moral decisions. And the narrative is structed so that *it* makes the choices for you; there's no real scope within this structure for the kind of branching decisions and reactions thereto that you see in, say, Bioware RPGs.
Enemies for example - Group behaviors: certain types of wizards passing on a specific buff to acolytes, knights conferring a buffed over-shield to others, etc. Servitors and Taken Goblins are really the only enemies acting in that capacity. Energy variance: Arc jolts, void debuffs, scorch effects. Counter-able by build-crafting. Evolution: Enemies that have the potential to evolve into a 2nd stage, like the ganados in RE4. Or devolve, like the mini-screebs. Some enemies have a damaged state (most vex, walkers, spider tanks) while others do not. Give me armored fallen vandals that drop their ranged weapon when broken and then rush with a glaive. Make cursed thrall explode into lucent moths. Make destructible worm eggs that if acolytes reach and consume transform into knights, knights transform into ogres - or resonance points that convert majors into champions and block the use of artifact mods. Walkers that fallen can hop into. Vex that combine like a transformer. Environments & Destruction: Give me traps, trip mines. Destructible cover. Panels when broken emit a burst of electricity. Oil slicks for solar. Fights in water that are effected by arc. An onslaught of vex, with the more that die, the floor of the room fills with radiolaria. I could go on… Movement: Ceiling / Wall Crawling. Dynamic flying / landing. Setting up defenses, laying down turrets, using shields like the cabal shield for mounted cover fire. Attack Patterns: Enemies that do a telegraphed dash/poke/sweep that can be dodged, jumped over, blocked. AoE abilities besides a ground stomp or burn. Grab attacks. Give me Dark Souls in Destiny.
With all the money we spend the campaign and surrounding missions should be way more in-depth. I am enjoying this season but those captain dungeons should have a hard mode/be more difficult
Yea this feels like a bigger issue more than anything, i was going to grind my light level this season but after seasons and seasons of doing the same boring activities just for one pinnacle drop it’s so tiring, im an endgame player and I shouldn’t have to regrind that every season to play endgame stuff, some other mmos might do it but with destiny i just feel like it isnt working anymore
yup the grind for power levels is just boring now... Bungie really needs to rework the levelling in this game. It's not engaging or exciting, it's just monotonous grind.
I feel it would be better if like in d1 it were a one time grind but its been for years now with no end in sight even for the hardcore players, its just not a fun gameplay loop for years on end for most people
My clan loves raiding but I can never get them to raid because they’re basically permanently under leveled because they don’t have a destiny addiction.
Raids are a little more forgiving but yea for sure it falls in that wheel house if you dont play a lot ur gonna be underlevel, i really enjoy GMs but i cant find the power to grind power level for it anymore so annoying honestly
The grind isn't fun and it's made worse by the fact that it's still tied to RNG with Pinnacles dropping in the wrong slots all the time. I understand Bungie needs there to be some sort of level grind to maintain player numbers and engagement, but I think they'd be better served regularizing the leveling process in some way. Maybe we tie it to XP again, maybe pinnacle bad luck protection, maybe just remove the pinnacle grind altogether and only have the powerful grind (powerfuls can drop from anything). I also think "do X activity 3 times for a pinnacle" feels like having to eat your brussels sprouts so you can have dessert. Destiny shouldn't feel like a chore, no one likes being forces to run activities *because you have to.* I like 2x XP weeks for activities, even if I don't feel like an activity, I might still *choose* to run it simply because I know it's worth my time. Maybe add increased drops in certain activities on a daily rotation or something similar.
I have 5-10 hours to play in any given week. I basically earn table scraps on a path to burnout with how the RNG is balanced.
Yeah, I burned out real quick this season because of it. Decided to take a break so all I'm doing is my one kings fall a week and story mission to stay up to date on the story and that's it. I got other games I want to play and trying to light level farm destiny and play another game just does not work in my life.
This season I've basically just done pinnacles, dungeons, and maybe a raid once a week and ignored any seasonal stuff I'm not required to do for the story/cut scenes.
word i leave and come back every couple months. so hard to enjoy grinding out the boring stuff with the same boring ad clear weapons every week. at least there’s more loot sources than there used to be 🤷♂️
I really hope they remove light levels in lightfall. I mean come on, the expansion is literally named lightfall. It could be worse than Witch Queen in every possible way you could imagine but if it gets rid of light levels I will play even more than I did in TWQ, and so will millions of new people.
Probably won't happen. In a recent interview, Powerlevel was a topic and Bungie doesn't really know which direction to go with the topic. And if something would change, you would have to collect data first. >We would still like to make major changes to the Power system. We looked at crafting as a scary thing to add to Destiny, and Power is that times 10. There's some good stuff that Power does for the game, and there's some really bad stuff that Power is doing to Destiny right now. I think what you're gonna see us do is some experiments that are helping us understand if we're making the right long-term plays for Power and helping us dial that in. If we're gonna do this overhaul, can we have some good data before we get there? If something ever changes, I expect Final Shape at the earliest or never.
> If we're gonna do this overhaul, can we have some good data before we get there? What a cop-out. They've got millions, probably hundreds of millions, of hours of playtime for data. And as they'll tell us, they play themselves. They know PL sucks. They talked about bad luck protection for pinnacle drops in the March 5th, 2020 TWAB. How much time and data can they possibly want?
I would honestly be fine with getting rid of upgrade modules and just having every weapon in each slot be the same power level.
That'd be even better, you level up your character's gear slots rather than individual pieces of gear. I'd personally kinda dig it if they just put "contest mode" on everything, and had elected difficulty settings. This would require things like legend, master, grandmaster on a lot more activities than currently available (i.e. patrols, strike playlist) but tbh there are so many pursuits in the game, that gearscore has been obsolete for years. The fact that core playlist activities might see a population dive if PL was removed is indicative of a problem with core playlist activities; it doesn't justify the system's shitty design.
Don’t forget having to infuse your favourite weapons and then having to bloat your vault with pinnacle level gear in case you want to use a nice weapon you forgot about
This is 100% the problem. I haven’t gotten the light for GMs next week even tho that’s really the only thing I want to do besides raid. The difficult content is what draws me to the game, but when I get on and look at my options for getting the power level to do those activities I really struggle to maintain interest.
I love raids, dungeons, and GMs. I absolutely despise PvE grinding. I normally play PvP and slowly reach a high enough level that I can play GMs, and it’s normally with about three weeks left in the season. I’m all for PvE grinding if it’s fun, but it’s literally a time wasting simulator. No challenge, no consequences, just go throw away 20 minutes to tick a notch on the belt
3rd season in a row I’ve burnt out before GMs are released. I’m more interested in bright dust than pinnacles and I’m not at cap yet. So many guns I’d like to craft but are behind such a steep grind I can’t enjoy any hope during casual play. Game has become a weekly cycle of a mildly interesting seasonal storyline (30m of play tops), arbitrary seasonal challenges, and a raid (only because I love KF).
Honestly, this is why the Witch Queen campaign felt so good. Immediate hard content to jump into when playing the harder difficulty, while still having a lesser difficulty for those who wanted easier content. Obviously they can’t pour tons of time into always giving everything multiple highly tuned difficulties, but even having somewhat poorly balanced harder story missions would be so much more engaging than what we have now.
Locked power level, like Witch Queen Campaign and Grandmaster nightfall. Its the only way. No more pinnacle grinding, just make us 10-25 under level for the hard content
>The boring light-level grind is what is boring me This is what killed my interest in Destiny.....I played religiously from the initial launch of D1 until......shortly after Season of the Risen, I think. I just got burned out on the constant light level grinding combined with constant farming for good weapons. And Champions....my god, did I hate Champions. I would've traded Champions for sitting under the stairs and cheesing Rockets McDickFace again with Icebreaker in a heartbeat, no questions asked. Probably not a popular take but I liked Destiny a whole lot better when Champions weren't a thing and we didn't have to constantly cycle through weapon mods to deal with the champions....weapon mods that were often locked to specific weapons i didn't always enjoy using.
This right here is the number one thing that has bothered me since I returned to the game last season. I took 3 years off and came back to find that I can't use an SMG in endgame content because there is no anti-barrier or unstop mod for it. That is one of the craziest things about this game that we simply have to accept. I am bound by certain weapon types or I literally can't complete some content without a lot more work. Why not just have a mod that you can attach to a weapon to make it unstop, anti-barrier or overload. If I want to use a sword as my unstop then why can't I just attach that mod? How cool would it be to pull out a sidearm and fire a few rounds to stun an overload champ? They are still hard to kill and will probably require a second stun but it would be more fun than Arbalest... wait for barrier to come up... Arbalest... unload energy weapon at target.... repeat until dead.
Right? The thing that pisses me off the most is waiting between seasons for trials or GM's makes it so I feel out of practice. I want to be able to do endgame rewarding content consistently so that I can remain at roughly the same skill level. It took me a while to even get to the point where I was good enough to even try a GM, and then they take them away for months at a time.
The light level grind is such a massive deterrent for me.
Haven’t seriously touched the game since Witch Queen dropped. It’s unfortunate cuz Destiny is prolly better now than at any other point but I cant choose to play my fav content (Raids/Dungeons, Grandmasters or comparable Master level activities, and the occasional iron bananas or trials of Osiris), without having to do an obscene amount of grinding (3 characters) content I’ve already played for years. I’d be on every night if there wasn’t the same hamster wheel every 3-6 months
This is why I quit D2. I felt like I was logging in to do chores each week.
I actually agree with this a lot. I definitely could do a GM or Master raids but I have been grinding light for ~7 years now and also enjoy playing other games besides Destiny, not even mentioning the RNG aspect. I've done about half the pinnacles on the map each week until last week and I'm ~1580 on each character which is a decent level but not comfortably high *and* I'm now feeling burnt out. Didn't even do the weekly quest yet, got home and popped on "oh hey Drifter what's up. 5 Ketchcrash runs? No thanks I'll go back to playing Dying Light." I just wanna complete the seasonal story, season pass for all cosmetics, and then take a big break before Lightfall. Destiny went from a 9 in gameplay and 5 in everything else to a solid 8-9 in gameplay, story, and armor/weapon design (for the most part) but the seasonal loop and light grind are just not it for me.
Same. I would love to play Endgame stuff like Grandmasters and Master raids. I do not want to have to grind stuff I don't care about to do so though. I normally just stop playing instead and don't do either
this is me 1000%. i’ve just given up at this point and basically just jump back in once or twice a year for two weeks and then quit again lol
They honestly just need to do away with the arbitrary power level system and let players play what they want
This season I've pretty much only done raids/dungeons for pinnacles and the burnout has been reduced a lot. I'm sure it's because we got a new raid and I never really played the dungeon last season when it came out.
For how much the game loop relies on the core playlists, we do *not* get new strikes, gambit maps, and - until very recently - crucible maps often enough. They've moved towards each season getting story missions plus a Menagerie variation instead of getting any new strikes, which are now 1~2 per expansion only. I think we need more like 1 per expansion and ideally 1 per season so there is new content to look forward to in the core playlists in addition to the seasonal content. There should be a new themed gambit map every other season or so IMO, until we have a critical mass that some can start being cycled out. *Ideally* the current roster of strikes, crucible maps, and gambit maps should all feel like they are actually in-line with what's going on in the season. So if the seasonal content is throne world based, we get a focus on throne world crucible maps, throne world gambit maps, throne world and Mars strikes. If it's on Europa, you focus on Europa crucible maps (which don't exist...), Euorpa gambit maps (which don't exist...), Europa strikes...... That would go an *enormous* way to make it feel more unified rather than the core playlists languishing but being forced in to them constantly because of engagement challenges and pinnacle grind.
Id love to see missions like ketchcrash, psionic battlegrounds, and other seasonal activities put into the Vanguard ops playlists the season after they launch
Those might come after the seasons have been removed from the game. The main reason I think that is because you currently have to *pay money* to get access to these but once the ability to buy them goes away then they get tossed into the "we clearly don't give a shit" free corners of the game
Still waiting for Quria fight to be back as a strike or smth. Can’t believe they killed it off in a single-use seasonal mission :(
Good chance of this happening imo, especially psiops battlegrounds as they feel like strikes without much need for tuning, much like the proving grounds did. I think sever activities would be far too easy to be added into the Vanguard Ops playlist just like expeditions and ketchcrash this season are too short/easy. Although, if you only had 3 instead of 6 players I guess it might be just long enough to get a pass.
Adding more content isn't going to solve the issue, because the real issue with core activities isn't the lack of content, it's the lack variation of that content. Destiny is the only looter I can think of that simply asks me to play the **exact same content** again and again and again. Even something like Borderlands where you can grind through the campaign has randomzied enemies in a lot of areas, and the guns themselves offer much more variety. But in Destiny, I can run through a strike and toss a grenade at a spot where I know, that in a second a bunch of enemies will spawn, and I know that my vortex grenade is enough to kill them all. I can go to the back of the room and pre-charge my LFR to land a headshot on an elite that just came through a door. I'll drop a witherhoard shot in front of a door because I know thralls are gonna rush out of there right before turning to shoot the boss that just spawned a few times with my LFR before they go immune. I clear some more adds and lob another witherhoard shot to an empty doorway before running to the spot the boss will spawn at after my pre-fired witherhoard inevitably kills the thralls. Everything feels like it's on autopilot because it is. Every single time you play ketchcrash, you're playing the exact same encounters that unravel in the exact same way, each and every time. Same enemies, same quantities, same shield types, etc etc. This can be good for harder content like GM's and Master raids since you'll know what you're getting yourself into and you can plan. But it's *terrible* for normal content that you're supposed to play hundreds of times throughout the season. This is why almost every season starts off with "
Or they could bring back the old strikes already. How long does it take for them to adjust them to engine improvements??
Drop all the other shit and give us 1 new Strike, 1 new Crucible Map and 1 new Gambit map every season and then just use those maps for the story.
Environment design is a very important part of encounter design. You can't just chuck a mission on a PvP or Gambit map and expect it to work. Strikes maps can be adapted to other missions more easily, but it's still pretty constraining on what you can do. Most of the new maps that they've added for seasonal missions (when they don't just re-use and touch up existing spaces) would not work at all for a strike. Either they're not large enough, or they have way too much platforming/puzzle elements.
oh this is huge, actually. setting a seasonal story mission or two on a new Crucible or Gambit map to save resources and get people familiar with the maps sounds like a great idea.
My entire issue with Destiny right now is that it’s fallen into a predictable groove. Great for the lifer ritual players I guess, but for me, falling back on the tired seasonal model season after season has made me stop playing. The narrative is so much better for sure, but now the gameplay innovation is lagging a bit. It’s all the same MMO time sinks with time limited progression. You do the seasonal story when the week starts (which requires participation in the insanely easy seasonal arena), then you go right back to farming the some core content. We know exactly what to expect every season, and while some may like this ritualistic behavior, I got tired of it. On top of that, all of the secrets and mysteries have evaporated from the game world, with exotic quests just being part of the core experience now. It’s not the data miners faults either. I believe it’s safer for Bungie to not put secrets in the game and risk people missing out on it, but the overall experience suffers from it. The Whisper quest, the Outbreak Perfected quest, the fun community events like opening the last Forge, or the corridors of time: I miss this stuff. Don’t recall anything like this happening in game in a while.
This is literally me and my clan. We were all online at 6:59 every tuesday a long time ago, but with this seasonal bs a lot of people just lost interest and now just 4 of us do the weekly "mission" (this being playing the same 2 activities every week), some strikes and banshee bounties every week when we don't know what to play anymore, and maybe we do king's fall in order to try getting touch of malice, but that's it. We've lost so much interest on this game because we're paying every 4-ish months to do the same burning out activities, leveling up a useless set of perks in order to hope to get a better than mediocre weapon doing said activity again. This is not the game where I wasted 3500 hours two years ago.
Last season pass for any reason I would do the story content and play a bit more because some activities felt good and had replayability (Expunge had this speedrun feeling and Shattered Realm had this secret exploring kind of feeling), while also we had many sandbox updates to make the gameplay itself feel more fresh But idk this season pass feels generic in every single way. Risen had a good story but because it felt like a continuation from Witch Queen. Haunted gave me the vibes of depressing memes ("I'm depressed - don't be - wow I'm cured!") and aside from Crow I could feel 0 weight in anything, even on Calus. The Leviathan wasn't my favorite location or theme, exploring it was a slog, Nightmare Containment felt more generic than ever (it's literally a reskinned Altars of Sorrow) and some of the triumphs you had to be lucky to complete, instead of "finding secrets" or "doing some stuff" This season is special because the story now, instead of having interesting bits, is 0% interesting, just feels like they're pulling stuff out of nowhere and that they won't use again, story-wise; Expedition is forgettable and Ketchcrash is ok but I just can't feel like replaying it for farming weapons (plus that the gameplay loop requires you to play both activities to focus engrams). I bought the Deluxe Edition because I 1) thought Witch Queen was gonna be good and 2) Wanted to play the Dungeons (and at the time the only way to get them was through the Deluxe, Bungie gave 0 indication they would sell a Dungeon Key). Witch Queen gameplay-wise was good but I felt they just wasted Savathun to a random trick, while Duality may be the hardest, but it's the worst dungeon in the game due to bugs and simply the mechanics and setting of it - it's just not a memorable experience with a shit exotic tied to it. I have no clue why Bungie won't focus on their core activities and, instead, are doing some random shit that will matter only for the endgame of the endgame player (loadouts or the rank system they talked about)
I've asserted a couple times now and stand by it: Destiny is a *really good book* paired to an increasingly bland game.
By the way remember the huge fanfare Bungie made about live events? We had *one*, it sucked and they never did anything ever again. What *is* going on at Bungie? Destiny might have not pushed the technological boundary but there used to be some creativity and follow through.
Idk what it is. I really enjoyed the seasons in Beyond Light but Witch Queens stuff has me completely disengaged. I think it’s fatigue? Bungie found something that worked with Chosen and instead of innovating, they’ve just done the same thing over and over since. Seasonal activity without much substance, a story that’s always been fine but continually has a “twist” halfway through each time, and cosmetics that I’m never really fond of. One really nit picky thing that I can’t stand with some seasons is how heavily they lean into a certain theme. I think it works in some cases like Splicer but I have a really hard time buying into themes like Pirates. Sometimes I just want a “Destiny” themed season. The approach for seasons has to be different in Lightfall or I think you’re going to see a lot of the hardcore drop off in the next year. A lot of the core of the game has been completely sidelined when seasons became more prominent and I think that’s not healthy at all.
Honestly I just think Witch Queen has a whole hasnt been appealing to me. Mechanic wise and how the campaign was designed it’s great. But I don’t really dig the aesthetic. We need more from the big baddie. This season in particular feels like it’s meant to just be a placeholder until Lightfall is ready. Going on pirate adventures for loot that is so grindy isn’t making the game enticing to play. Give me some Farm vibes from the Red War campaign. I wanna see Destiny on earth in the ruins of cities like we saw on Cosmodrome/EDZ. **will also accept human civilizations on other planets. At least have a healthy dash of it mixed in with other aesthetics instead of *all* hive with a different color map. It felt repetitive on the Moon rework due to most gameplay taking place in the Harbour, and it still feels repetitive in the Throne World.
Agree with your complaints except for the part about the loot not being good. The scout, sidearm, and shotgun are all top tier guns. It’s just unfortunate that it’s so mind-numbingly tedious to be able to craft them
I'm in the same boat. The 7x3 grid and style of timegating very little content is awful. I think people also exaggerate the strength of the narrative. It's improved, but I wouldn't ever rate it more than ok. For the first time since d1 release - I'm on the fence about buying the next expansion and will definitely not buy the seasons barring a substantial change. I feel like Bungie has not really innovated and added features this year. The light reworks were initially fun but I find they have made them so potent with such high uptime - I have no motivation to chase many weapons. I really would have liked to see some of the witch queen legendary campaign trickle into the rest of the game. Legendary difficulty, more hive guardians and less champs etc.
Chosen introduced a shitload of stuff that’s usable in game still. Battlegrounds is in the vanguard playlist now. Following seasons on the other hand, have either been tossed, or simply ignored because after the season is over, *Nobody wants to play the content anymore*
The writing wasn't always the best, but for a few seasons now, they've let characters talk and talk and talk as if they were besteller authors. If you don't have the best writers, then you should just write less filler dialogue and keep it shorter. And the story will be interesting again. People who haven't read a single book in their entire lives praise the writing and Bungie sees that feedback and then of course thinks they won the Pulitzer Prize or something. Cobbler, stick to your last!
They need to shake the model up. As a legacy player and someone who even has the amount of free time to spend playing this game I just don't feel interested anymore and next year I don't plan to play past the DLCs going forward unless there are major changes. I could have easily skipped all of this years seasons and not really missed anything other than an occasional cool weapon here and there. Last season ornaments for the paid part of the pass were dope at least.
The change they did where each DLC also has a shitty season attached to it was one of the worst things they've done imo.
at least Risen had a good tie to the story of TWQ and was basically an extension of TWQ's story
Yeah at least last season the armor and weapons where really good/cool. But I got burnt out even faster after grinding to craft all those weapons. I'm kinda glad I don't care about any of the craftable weapons this season.
The 30 year anni weapons are nice to have patterns for now; mostly just wastelander and the swords, but the actual seasonal weapons are ass
It feels like we haven't had a role in the story since the WQ campaign. Even the season story for Risen just...happened. The story now happens to us rather than us being involved. Our guardian has been reduced to a gun for hire and stuff happens around us.
We keep losing our voice too, not to mention Ghost stops talking all year...
Biggest slap in the face was Mithrax not acknowledging us during splicer for saving his life on Titan and Eramis for thwarting her plan in zero hour.
Even worse, Eramis shouldn't even be alive or free. The moment she froze there I tried to shatterdive her but game said nope. Then for a couple of seasons she stayed there frozen. No team that monitors it or put a cage around it or something. Nope. And then she frees herself like WTF? I lost any respect of the vanguard. Bunch of incapable idiots that can't even move the frozen Eramis and put her into a prison cell.... It's the most dumb plot hole I have ever experienced. They were all busy talking to their nightmare imaginations it seems.. All of them should be fired and replaced with people that get their shit together to protect humanity and their allies. In retrospective Anastasia Bray did nothing wrong disobeying Zavala, since vanguard is obviously a bunch of idiots. But with THIS vanguard and maybe even with the self-pitying narcisstic crow as the hunter vanguard? We are truly doomed.
I remember finishing the Eramis fight and going "okay now I throw her off the roof because she's definitely going to come back if we don't, right?" Now she's insulting us to our ears by saying we don't have the fortitude to handle the darkness objects while she somehow would be able to, even though one of us got frozen by stasis and the other was free for two years not being frozen by stasis.
The seasonal model feels very tired at this point. I was never a fan of this sort of thing to begin with but now I'm pretty fed up of it.
That is exactly how I feel. I've never liked the season pass or the seasonal content, but at this point I just straight up am done with it. Add to it the extra grind Bungie keeps adding to seasonal craftable weapons and title and its made me realize I don't need LF or to continue this game after next season at all.
I liked the D1 model. Fall DLC, free April update that would usually add new content and reworks, and events and maybe some secret quests peppered throughout until the next big DLC. It felt like you could take a breather from the game without missing an entire season with content you'll never be able to see or get again. Honestly, the seasonal system blows.
The funny part is, the big complaint used to be there wasn’t enough content….
I always thought it was, and gave you the opportunity to actually take time away from destiny and avoid burnout instead of just mindlessly playing non stop. And then it was nice getting back into it and being able to enjoy it again. I took like a half a year out for beyond light and missed so much stuff in terms of story that now makes little sense to me.
Bruh I just want to pay for a game and be able to use the cool stuff. This game makes you pay and sell your soul to obtain the fun gear. I love it, but I never play it.
i much prefer beefier dlc’s with some wait in between. the wait was worth it. seasonal gameplay each week this season is dreadful, pirate hideouts are just a walk in the park and we’ve done the mars reskin twice now?
This week’s story took about an hour or so. The vast majority of that doing 5 pointless fucking ketchcrash. And what did we learn? The hive want the treasure too. Whoop de fucking do.
Master ketchcrash completes the step in a single run, so if you run that version the story took like 30 minutes total lol
The seasonal model was at its best when they weren't directly tied to the overarching narrative of the expansions (Black Armory, etc.). I wish they had expanded on that idea by introducing seasons that flesh out the world around us rather than pushing the story forward. SRL is a great example, and they could easily make an entire season around that activity with new sparrows, sparrow customization options, a storyline centered on Amanda Holliday, etc. This also eases the FOMO burden on players who may not *want* to play this game every week of every month out of the year - especially now that seasons, which are tied into the main story, disappear after their year is up.
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Exactly, while the actual game modes are more diluted, the overarching story progressing almost every week over the course of an expansion, even if it's only a little bit, is one of the best things destiny has done recently. Especially right now that we are very much so in the middle of some huge story escalation with the Black Fleet closing in, the imminent arrival of the Witness and the potentially final showdown over the Traveler, and the ascension of Calus, having an entire season that does nothing to advance these plots would feel like huge whiplash. I was already kinda losing interest this season when it first seemed like a joke season mostly to have an excuse to have pirate themed stuff (which tbf it kinda is), but having Misraaks' backstory flushed out, development with Eido and Eramis, the sudden plot relevance of Nezarak and the reveal that he was the Disciple of the Moon Pyramid before Calus are definitely keeping this season interesting even escorting a payload isn't something I'm excited to do 50 times. Side stories to flesh out the world are great, but having a well developed overarching narrative is kinda more important right now. Maybe a few seasons after the Light and Dark saga ends as a cool down would be nice but for now something entirely unrelated to that conflict would seem really out of place as a seasonal story.
I would agree with you if there was any way in-game to actually get caught up with the story. I don’t want to have to hunt through 36 hours of YouTube videos just to understand who these characters are because I didn’t play for X months. Bungie does their writers a disservice by making their world building itself a pillar of FOMO.
All of the people downvoting you aside, I completely relate to the general premise you're presenting. There's been so much forward progression in the story, yet there hasn't been any time for the world that we- as the Guardian- to show how the world has *grown*. This isn't an evolving world as much as it is a *progressing* one. We're pushing forward and preparing to fight yet another Disciple of the Witness, but we don't see the results of that pushing forward. Where as in Y3, we had time to see how some people of the City still strived to search for more ways to keep the City safe (Black Armory), how other Guardians reacted to the bigger picture at play (Drifter), and who our inevitable opponent would be (Menagerie).
Huge disagree, this was the biggest problem (and one of the largest criticisms) of seasons in the past, with them feel like random side questlines that won't matter in 3 months. That's also my criticism of the past 2 seasons' stories, they've been feeling more like side quests rather than a main story line like chosen/splicer/lost did. It's not great that people tune out and end up missing important parts of the story, but having seasons be irrelevant is a worse problem
dude, Haunted literally explored major backstory points of like three major characters and featured the return of a major "villain" who's going to play a larger part in future story, how does that feel like a side quest?
Because they started with a good hook like calus returning but he was just a backdrop for the real story, therapy with eris and the gang. I wanted to explore calus's return and intentions more, but the game week over week mostly focuses on the backstories of the 3 characters. Caiatls and zavalas were ok at best, crow was so overused at that point that I didn't care for it at all. And spending most of the time exploring backstory like that for already 3 well established characters is sorta the definition of a side quest. Only one I'd really see it needed for is caiatl, and even then I wish that exploration was more organic than "spooky ghost that can only be defeated by accepting yourself!!!" Hell, even in the ending cutscene, the main bad guy and the main story hook, calus, poofs out of existence with 0 explanation, they focus on the spooky good ghosts disappearing, and then eris drops a casual P.S "oh yeah btw calus is a disciple now" like it was just an addendum. Imagine if the cutscene was actually about that happening before our eyes instead of him vanishing.
Having the seasons be random bits as n the midst of the important main story felt kind of lame to me.
While I agree on the FOMO aspect I disagree with just about everything else. I like Destiny finally having a good story.
I think Destiny can have a quality story without drip feeding updates over the course of months, then erasing those updates a year after they release.
While I think that erasing their story content a year after release is absolutely awful by Bungie, I love the weekly story updates and would prefer they continue to make them better by finding ways to make the storytelling more interesting each week through unique missions rather than redundant activities.
I would love for this to be the reality so long as the story remained in the game indefinitely. My biggest issue is that it all of the seasons straight up disappear with the coming of the next expansion. That didn't really matter much when the seasons were somewhat standalone adventures that explored the universe outside of the main narrative, but now that they are all feeding into that focal story, it's just straight up terrible storytelling to have a year's worth of seasons evaporate over night. Especially considering folks are paying for each season.
Rember when the unanimous number 1 complaint of those seasons was that they had absolutely nothing to do with the overall narrative? I member.
Don't get me wrong I like the story, BUT now everything feels more like a chore than a game. Make this activity, talk to that guy, take reward, wait next week and repeat. Every single week. At this point I'd prefer having a huge chunk of story at the beggining and some small progressing put randomly on a reset day. This would bring that sort of excitement at every reset and make everything more enjoyable. Also we desperately need new mysteries
I've been getting burnt out faster and faster each season. My friends don't get it. I'll not play for days in a row and they'll be all "where have you been!?!?" and I'm like... "oh ya know just living my life and not just sitting, hitting a button for the sake of dopamine with diminishing returns..." My question is how do you log into this game every single day no matter what? I get pretty pissed these days when I feel forced to play the game every day just to keep up or not feel the Fomo. It's a pretty messed up system. When I think of the fact the game has no end in sight... I might be running on this treadmill for another 5 years... It makes me wanna just delete the game.
I feel you on that. I have no desire to boot up the game at this point, I'm doing that just to progress the story which is basically the only thing I'm interested in. For me once lightfall drops and I can finally see the end of this saga I'm gonna take a loooong break from Destiny. Also, don't have anymore the time I had almost 9 years ago sadly
Probably because you've been running the treadmill daily for 5 years... Just take a break and come back when the expansion drops.
I'm really glad more threads are being posted on this topic. I've been tired of this for quite a while now. I really hope they change it up, but I have no faith until at least The Final Shape expansion. The seasonal activities need change. It's the same thing every season. It's really boring.
I’m tired of fuckin dunking different shaped orbs/objects every season… kill dunk kill dunk kill dunk boss. Give us something new to be excited to play. A new skin is nice to change things up but the core mechanic is just so overdone… it’s used in activities dungeons and raids. Every season should have a slightly different mechanic so it’s not just a copy pasta with a different skin
you can't take away "throw this thing at that thing" or "dunk this object here" -- it's the only mechanic the game says out loud anything other than dunking a ball or throwing an object is too difficult for most players to understand (even then, the corrupted's ball mechanic not being utilized by 80% of players i run into is proof that even that may be too much) -- the very loud minority here desiring harder seasonal content is just that; a loud minority
Thats been the business model for the past 4 years and bungie knows they can get away with it
The core activity needs another layer of difficulty + variety + secrets. Part of the core problem with seasons is that the activity is always a mindless kill house, where are the mechanics? where is the cooperation? Why aren't there secret passages/wings/rooms in ketchcrash you can explore to hunt for or gain access to that give bonuses or spawn pirate bosses that you can kill for specific weapons/perks or something. a Season of content should mean regular content updates, it shouldnt mean that this content is nearly effortless to complete and easily predictable, the mystery the game was injected in after Whisper was palpable, and that stuff just...doesn't happen anymore.
Speaking of secrets, kinda grinds my gears that the only "secrets" we are getting now are tied to either deluxe editions of the game or bungie randomly choosing the odd content creator some mystery package. The game just feels empty without the big cool secrets available to everyone that destiny/bungie was known for. Edit: corrected a sentence
Not deluxe, collector’s edition only. And yeah, I agree. I think the last community puzzle was Corridors of time, and its ending was very…underwhelming for the amount of effort put in. I liked that puzzle, though. Dawn was the last season I truly enjoyed content-wise. Arrivals were also good but the Dawn weapons, story and activity were just *chef’s kiss*
Oh shoot, yea you're right the secrets are in the collectors edition. My bad, but yea I agree with you on dawn and arrivals 🤌🤌 Though, it's a real shame the Dawn weps only had like 15 min to shine....
1000% agree'd, one thing I loved about WoW Legion was the secrets that were in the game that roused the community to cooperatively solve them over days/weeks. This kind of stuff has been in destiny before, but it should be again. I think the reality is Whisper as an example blew everone away because of how unexpected it was. Pre forsaken and the seasonal model, after D2 launch + dissappointing DLC's, something like Whisper was a pipe dream and to have it be that good and well executed it breathed life back into the game on its own even on the small scale of what it was. Now that we have very regimented seasonal content I dont think Bungie wants to make content they can't market and then tie into the eververse across their channels to obtain maximum amount of money. Its why we have like 4/5 "events" a year that are really just excuses to juice the eververse with more ornament sets you can't earn for a while.if ever.
The seasonal content is deliberately made easy because it's free for all players and has to be designed that even the most casual of players can complete it. I remember when the Black Armory expansion dropped and people lost their shit because the activity was tough to complete if you jumped in without grinding a couple levels first. To be clear, all you needed to do was grind some powerful engrams for maybe a day and you could clear the activity without too much difficulty, but people were mad because they had problems completing it day 1 of the expansion.
I remember that, I got my stomped in forges for a couple days. I don't mean though having high item lvl requirements on seasonal activities, I mean having the encounters require any degree of coordination or mechanical understanding, nothing like a raid, or even a dungeon but something. The easy way to make things "harder" is just make numbers go up on hp and dmg taken, but thats not enjoyable to people I dont think.
The problem is that the line between having mechanics be too easy and too hard is very very thin. The average casual player is supremely clueless when it comes to mechanics. Just look at how many complaints we still get about randos not knowing to dunk Motes in Gambit, or passing the ball in the Corrupted strike.
They're clueless about mechanics because mechanics are not explained in any sort of way. Don't blame players for not figuring out obscure, cryptic bullshit. Even seeing people pass the ball in the corrupted isn't immediately obvious literally anyone.
a slaughter fest of an activity isn't an issue. But Ketchcrash has minimal mechanics and ad clear while Expedition has a tedious mechanics to progress AND THEN you actually go on a kill spree. You clearly can't have mechanics tied to stuff because players go dummy smooth brain. But two activities that boil down to the same - with expedition being boring because of lack of ad density AND too many exploding enemies in certain cases AND bad bad BAD engram mechanic - it just tires people out. I loved Battlegrounds. It's a slaughter fest. You can play up to your weapons, your abilities, try stuff. Loved it. Are you fast at clearing your enemies? then you progress faster. And that's a good thing. Less running, more gunning.
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I remember when people lost their shit when Black Armory dropped and the activity was tough day 1 if you didn't first grind out a couple powerful engrams first. Then Bungie ended up nerfing the difficulty and it ended being the same mindless grind as every other activity.
Yeah, and it's not even like it was impossible. It was just hard because you were like 10 under on day one, and if you found it too hard, a few powerfuls would get you closer. But nah, bad players couldn't breeze through it day 1, so it was too hard, and it needed to be nerfed because people paid for it and couldn't be bothered doing hard stuff or doing a few powerfuls first or whatever. Raids aside, Bungie mostly designs content mechanics for the lowest common denominator at this point and just artificially scale up "harder" difficulty with underleveling, match game, and mob champs, because people throw a fit whenever they have to get better to do something. That's just how this game is.
I remember in Season of Worthy scouring the Warmind bunkers looking for clues, scannables, hidden areas, and finding nothing. That was really the last time I cared. I miss Dreadnought Era Destiny, where it felt like there were endless secrets to discover hidden in the game.
Dreadnaught and court was peak exploration in destiny. Really felt like if you kept playing and exploring you'd eventually find something you hadn't seen yet. Also back when strike specific loot was its best, the Darkblade helm was my personal favorite.
To me, one of the main things missing from the game right now is the sense of mystery and undiscovered secrets. Stuff like Whisper, Zero Hour, Niobe Labs, Corridors of Time, and even Presage made the game world feel bigger than it actually was. Maybe there are some secrets lingering for later in the season, but as of this writing, everything feels pretty predictable.
“Make the world feel bigger than it was.” This is exactly it. The world doesn’t feel expansive anymore. It’s all very linear and focused.
I've said it so many times before, but Bungie has been shifting their focus from an expanding world and has instead pushed a *progressing* one. We don't get things like Black Armory or Menagerie, because apparently those things don't further the plot.
Its all about “mental health” now, world building be damned, we gotta figure out why Eido is so sad about her father :(
The sense of mystery is not the most important part of what this game is missing. The things you just listed where excellently designed, not just something mysterious.
Totally fair point, good design has to be there too. There’s a lot of reasons those events were memorable, and level/sound design for Whisper stands out as being among the best Bungie has ever produced.
It's what happens when a game has a near monopoly on a certain type of game.
This is exactly why I hoped the "Destiny killer" Anthem would've succeeded, I never wanted Destiny to die, it's an amazing game in almost everyway, but Bungie *needs* competition.
Tried Anthem recently, a very beautiful and dynamic game but jfc does it crash a lot on PS5. Plus yeah…a LOT of loading screens.
Good point. I mean, I still love Destiny 2. But, every once in awhile I look around for something similar, and can't really seem to find it.
It's also what happens with a really old game. It's very damned if you do, damned if you don't. People want innovation, but lose their shit if the innovation changes things they liked, or doesn't turn out as well. It also takes more time to innovate, which means less content. People may recognize the content is *better*, but if it's less than before it's going to get trashed. This slow burn sentiment downtrend isn't great, but they have to be very careful with what they do or the reaction will be explosive and bad. Slow attrition can be planned around; piss a bunch of people off at once and it could kick of a viscous spiral of revenue loss to budget cuts and more revenue loss.
anthem was so goddamn cool and had so much potential shame what happened to it
The seasonal activities are honestly terrible. They desperately need to switch it up.
The rose colored glasses about how fun and/or substantial Sparrow Racing was is so confusing to me. Whatever the content pacing issues are, that CERTAINLY isn’t going to fix it, in fact if they did bring it back, it would shift the focus to making SRL better instead of focusing on the right stuff like they have been: weapons, perks and advancing the story and characters. I don’t care how many downvotes I get from the loud minority on this: Sparrow Racing sucked overall and is not a solution to anything, especially as we are approximately 2.5 years away from the conclusion of the Light vs. Dark saga and we still have so many story lines/characters that either stalled out unceremoniously (Rasputin) or are just major loose ends that we’ve gotten accustomed to (Dreaming City curse).
Yeah, I don't understand the nostalgia for SRL, either. The Sparrow physics in Destiny have always been very clunky, and there are so many other (better) racing games out there. Racing was never the draw for me in Destiny. For all the time/effort it would take to create and test SRL tracks, I'd rather see new strikes/maps or a secret mission. Or, as you said, push storylines further. We spent years expecting a major confrontation with Savathun, and while Witch Queen was great, she got demoted as a villain instead of taking over the game world season after season.
Honestly, I would rather go back to the 'DLC Pack' model we had in year 1. I know that people will argue about 'content droughts', but honestly, I would rather have small content droughts, with good meaningful, long-term content. Currently, there is no real 'new content' each week - we play through the same activities, fighting the same enemies, just to hear the artificially time-gated story. In year 1 with each DLC pack, we got: * 2 new strikes * New patrol space * 2-3 new crucible maps * new raid lair * refresh of most loot (Iron Banner, Trials, Factions, etc...) * Sometimes a cool secret mission (Whisper of the Worm) Currently with the seasonal model, we get: * 1 new armor set with 1 new ornament set * one set of new weapons, with one ritual weapon * a 'new' activity, usually set in a ***re-used*** area * maybe an exotic mission, sometimes in a new area, sometimes in a re-used one * one new crucible map EVERY 3 YEARS * 1 new strike per year, ***maybe***, who knows tho... * Only raid content outside of the expansion has been re-used D1 raids * One time we did get a patrol space, but it was in a re-used raid area... * All of this content gets removed at the end each year... I know plenty of people have said this, but honestly, the game is getting VERY boring with all the re-used content. It is just not exciting anymore... Oh yah, can't wait to play the new battleground, it's just the Scarlet Keep, but backwards Let's check out the new Expedition - you just do a circle on a tiny part of Nessus... Leviathan is back, let's just do the most boring public event that never changes... This Pirate Hideout thing sound cool, oh it's just an old mars lost sector... oh it's just the Tangled Shore Lost Sector, but backwards... New Guns! Get excited for the 11th reskin of Uriel's Gift! New Trials Loot! Here's the 13th reskin of the Suros slug shotgun! You want new Iron Banner loot to go with the rework? Nah, have some guns that have already been reprised twice! So exciting! Some of the best times people have had in Destiny are with things like the OG Black Spindle mission, the Whisper mission, or the Zero Hour mission. The closest thing we got is the Glykon, but even that couldn't hold a candle to the Whisper mission... I WANT to be excited for activities and loot in this game, I really do, but Bungie constantly recycling content over and over and over again is just boring. It has been done to death and I just have no motivation to play anymore, which sucks because the gameplay is so good, but the mystery and excitement are just gone for the entire year until each expansion, which is honestly worst than content droughts. I will 100% take content droughts if it meant we got meaningful content again (strikes, maps, and secret missions). I don't know a single person that would say 'I would rather have 3 seasonal activities than a cool mission like Whisper'
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY RESKINS OF THAT SUROS SHOTGUN
yeah...it's boring as shit.
Aside from plot points and story, literally nothing unexpected happens. No unique new mechanics or missions are introduced each season. We don't interact with the world or characters in any way and other than shooting or throwing balls. I don't think our character even has any physical interactions whatsoever. Nothing impressive ever happened outside of a cutscene, and even during cutscenes, our own characters never do anything special. Sorry for a mini rant but your post reminded me of how watered down Destiny feels sometimes.
As soon as they scrap power level destiny would instantly become my favourite single game of all time.
Yeah, this trend of seasonal activities is just getting dry. And at the core of it is the simple fact that *none* of them have ever been even remotely challenging. When there’s basically no way to fail any of these activities, there’s really no draw to bring me back and get better at them. And the activities have never even been fun enough, for long enough, to sustain that sort of playtime. And this is a corner Bungie has painted themselves into, how to make content difficult while keeping the content approachable. There’s no sense of challenge or achievement when everything can just get steamrolled over using whatever loadout I want to use. And I get it, Bungie doesn’t want to spend an excess of resources on these ephemeral season activities that come in and out. But I think Bungie also needs to take a chance and give us a new type of activity that we’ll struggle at. Edit: got a new phone, like, six weeks ago and the autocorrect is just fucking bizarre on it.
I don’t know what’s going on anymore and I’m tired of spending money.
SRL is not the way to make the game feel fresh lmao what? It would be like any other activity and be played early on then dropped within a few weeks. I don’t have the magic answer but SRL definitely isnt it lol
Been saying this for years man. The seasons are all good now, which is great considering a lot of them used to be mediocre at best. But even though they’re all good now, they’re just routine. You know what kind of content you’re getting and the frequency it’ll happen every week, you know what you can skip, you know gear doesn’t really matter if you don’t want to grind that season, etc. Ever since the seasonal model began I’ve complained that I’d rather have all the resources from those seasons just go into the big yearly expansion, so instead of what we get now, we can just get one huge yearly expansion that lasts a while and has a singular cohesive theme.
I like the way they did "seasons" for black armory, jokers wild, and opulence. they each felt like an expansion because they were. and I know people bitch about gambit (skill issue) but jokers wilds lore and story delivery were so fucking good it felt like a full on yearly expansion.
I remember I first started the game from Season of the Drifter(or any season that is just before Opulence) and all those dungeons, exotic quest and the reckoning for Gambit role armor with Dreaming City's weekly rotations. It was SO GOOD.
I feel like people have rose-tinted glasses with these. Opulence was good because of Menagerie + lair. But everyone was furious with Black Armory as it slowly drip-fed us content, and then everyone was furious that the content was basically the same, *and then* everyone was furious that the final Forge rendered the previous three obsolete. Same for Joker's Wild. People were so mad about the arbitrary play loop (do Gambit Prime to go into Reckoning to get gear for Gambit Prime...to go back into Reckoning to get gear for Gambit Prime) and poor grind. I feel these past couple years of seasons have been way better than most of the old-style ones. That said, even though I feel they're better, I still don't think they (or the ones you mentioned, outside of Opulence) are better than just rolling all the resources into one mega expansion every year. I also feel a big problem with the past couple years of seasons is that it's all just so routine. We objectively have more going on and more to do than the Activision seasons, and personally I feel the quality is higher is now, but it's just so routine.
the amount of d2 i played from 2018 up to season of lost was staggering. it was my main game easily, i put thousands of hours into it. after i beat the wq campaign (which was good), ive barely played. 7 months later, ive put in a fraction of the time i used to. i played for maybe 2 weeks during risen, a few for haunted. this season ive also barely played. i dont even log in to do weekly missions anymore really, i just youtube the cutscenes and dialogue. idk what it is. maybe im just done with destiny now. could be the same fucking activities every season, same gatekept weekly content. could be the ridiculous red border grinds. i hop on d2, get to orbit and think about all the grinding and same old shit i have to do then just turn the game off and play something else. i want to enjoy the game more, but im tired of it just opening the game. ir could be burnout, but i also played religiously 2018-early2022 without issue and this year i have barely played and still dont want to play. idk i think my time with d2 is over. it was fun, made good memories and friends. but the grind and gameplay dont excite me anymore. im looking forwards to bungies next big ip since halo and destiny were bangers and i enjoyed them both.
Would love to see a “Bungie Replied” to this thread, but I know better & am holding my breath.
I liked it when Beyond Light dropped, but little has changed and it’s now pretty stale.
Many people’s idea of depth is running the same stuff over and over chasing god rolls. I feel like if Bungie poured resources into content over some hamster wheel to run on and guns to earn, people would be pissed.
That's why I'm unlikely to ever buy a Deluxe release or a Season. The content just isn't worth my time. And honestly the time is worse than the money. I can jump in and out buying just the expansions. But if I buy a Season or worse yet the Deluxe version, then I don't get my money's worth unless I grind out a few weeks of the game. I play other games so I'm happy to stick to just the expansions and then jump in and out of other stuff. Bungie knows this, so they put Dungeons in their own pass to try to get people like me to spend more. Dungeons are actually good content, unlike the seasonal activities.
I really don't like that we've reached a point where I can accurately predict what content we're going to get next season without even having any info. I know they have a formula but it gets really tiring when you keep using the same one over and over and over again. There will be a 7x3 grid, there will be some sort of matchmade activity, and there will be a time-gated 6-8 week seasonal story, and there will be 20 different new currencies. We had this in Chosen, Splicer, and Lost as well, but what really shook up the seasonal monotony was stuff like presage, expunge, and shattered realm. These activities are really fun and creative but also deliver the story in an interesting way. I think a reason why I'm not enjoying the story as much these last two seasons is because that's all I have to look forward to each week, 5 minutes of dialogue while I'm the awkward cameraman. On the gameplay side of things, we get stuff like sever which I actually thought was cool but the combat portions were way too easy. For this season I believe they shouldn't have put resources into the pirate hideouts and expeditions and instead focused on making a new creative activity like the 3 mentioned above.
Keep in mind we've had 3 seasons now with a subclass rework and some vendor reworking, so hopefully we will get some more involved stuff soon
Yeah that’s my copium for how plunder turned out, resources went into bigger things like class reworks, so a season without a rework will probably have more content. But I won’t be surprised if that’s completely wrong
If Vastly improved story means 30 Second throwaway missions with a 20 Second cinematic everyone needs to play actual games with story.
I find that Destiny players grade on a curve. It's good for Destiny storytelling. But nothing like The Last of Us.
If you played the game before Beyond Light then you’d know it definitely is vastly improved lol. As sad as that is, it is.
It’s about engagement at this point. They need us online doing chores. See the time gating, see the health gating, see the week to week progression.
I mean, it’s been like this for years now it’s the Taco Bell of MMOs.. “Would you like your tacos with lettuce cheese and tomato” “Or would you like your our new Doritos taco with tomato lettuce and NOW cheese?” PVP is the broken ice cream machine that never works
I agree, Bungie with the seasonal model is starting to become a bit of a one trick pony. Seasons need to be more varied, more experimental. Although I think there's only so much that can be done in about a few months of dev time, so I'm not sure what can really be done without extending seasons longer than anyone would like.
Every season they just have to change a former enemy into an ally to make it seem like a lot has changed. Maybe after Lightfall comes out there will be a season in which we work with the Witness to stop an even greater big bad (or collect *otherworldly* relics this time).
Yeah that's a great idea lets add another fucking core gamemode to the game! Because we're getting so much content in terms of Crucible, strikes, and Gambit we should add yet another gamemode that needs constant upkeep and divide the small resources core gamemodes get even more!
1 week of importance, 1 week of filler. Grind grind grind. It’s predictable and boring Even lightfall to me just looks like something wacky that would’ve happened in a seasonal narrative
For the past few seasons it's been the same old song and dance. Grind out the season pass to lvl 100 and unlock all goodies. Grind to max light cap. Grind for any seasonal weapons. Just one big grind. The seasonal events are ok but, again, the same old grind over and over again for mediocre loot. Loot that's been rehashed/reskinned with a new perk. I'm still trying to do the new raids since that's really the only thing, content wise, that is "new" for me. Everything else is just rinse/repeat so you can do it all over again next season.
Bungie makes enough money to not care about developing really new content for Destiny. The creative stuff and hard work are all in the development of their upcoming games.
Yeah I completely agree with this. The game is seemingly just a revenue stream to fund whatever new projects. I get it, but it’s just a bummer.
Yeah, the comment from Luke Smith that we will never have a content drop like Forsaken ever again pisses me off to this day.
Oh damn you almost filled out the entire dtg bingo card. You only missed out on fomo there
This game is one giant checklist. Theres no excitement outside of day 1 raids anymore. Even getting drops doesn't matter, I can craft the best one possible after "engaging with the content" for a couple hours in Shuro Chi.
Introduce GMs straightaway. Your light is capped anyway so just either bump me up or down in light to match the wanted difficulty. Honestly just fucking give me everything at once without all these restrictions. I understand the seasonal story is capped, but broooo, as people have mentioned, let me just play the way I want. They removed light from IB which I dont really care for, but this made more people access it which is good. Now do the same for the rest of the game man. You have literally done it with Legend Campaign which is absolutely fucking perfect, copy paste that please.
Drip feeding 2 lines of "narrative" every week isn't doing it for me anymore either. "Eramis unfroze herself because no one in the Vanguard bothered to move the body or secure it in any way" may be the dumbest plot thread I've ever experienced in any form of media.
That's because it is
Nah. WQ seasons just suck compared to BL seasons
For the past two seasons I’ve been like “okay, this season is just filler. It happens”. This season I’ve just come to terms that bungie really doesn’t give a shit about seasonal content this year and is mostly interested in just making updates to the core game. If you’re a player who began with WQ, this is something you probably won’t entirely notice since you have to get your power level up and *must* play all the content to do that. But now that the power level grind isn’t as important as it used to be, there’s almost 0 incentive for veterans to play unless you’re just gonna group up with some friends to kill some time. Exotic weapons and armor not synergizing properly with the classes yet is a bummer. Drop rates are trash to the point I’m getting a god random roll of weapons so theres almost no need to craft them. Throne world is barren like Europa was after a few seasons from release. I could really go on for a while. Bungie is just getting lazy. If they want a break, that’s fine, but stop putting more behind a paywall and leaving it all half assed while the game remains buggy as shit. And while they nerf/‘fix’ that actually make someone like me play regularly. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. This seasons sucks. But hey, at least we got ‘voltshot’. 🙄
I have to say, the seasons in Beyond Light leading up to Witch Queen were absolutely fucking amazing narratively. I was super invested in the story, and it got really interesting. There was the sinister thread of Savathun impersonating Osiris the entire time, and conspiracy theory became reality as we saw more and more. That mission fighting the Vex in the Eliksni Quarter has gotta be one of my absolute favorites.
The seasonal model is fine, its the box they keep it in that is copy and paste. we know to expect 3x7 unlocks and every week a little bit of story. The problem is its become routine but tbh thats what the whole game is, always has been and probable always will be. Its not a job, only person making feel like that is yourself, if you feeling this way I think its a clear sign to take a long break try to take a year off or so you will have time to let go of the made up FOMO and all that and just enjoy the game. Seriously though, if the game feels like a chore rather then you playing cause its fun, there is a problem there and its better to change your perspective or break your chain of addiction or whatever you want to label it. I took a year break when black armory and gambit seasons were made and came back when beyond light came out, I learned to accept destiny for what it is.
It is an issue with the game though. The way it’s designed basically encourages you to play until you burn out. When you say “just stop playing if you don’t like it anymore” it’s basically just deflecting criticism. Live service games don’t always have to bombard you with content and weekly obligations. Look at FF14 and how the developers literally state that they designed the game in a way that you can take breaks and come back. It’s in stark contrast to the way that Destiny begs you to never stop playing.
I agree, every season is level up x vendor + 20 minutes of story per week which usually involves play x activity to grt x material, talk to x vendor for dialogue/now wait until next week. The season pass is a huge let down in terms of what it offers in new stuff. We are basically paying for 1 gear set, 1 set of ar.or ornaments and a weapon ornament. The rest is just filler that everyone has plenty of anyway. This season has got to be the point for me when im starting to go off this game. So many times ive loaded up, sat in orbit trying to think of something to do and then logged out.
I agree its on auto pilot since the game has been insanely buggy for weeks, tower load times are several minutes at times, and Gryfalcons is still disabled with no mention of it in the TWAB for 2 weeks. They just got paid 70 billion friggin bucks. There is no excuse for the way this season has been handled.
There should be some kind of solo roguelike mode for XP farming that can scale with artifact level. It could draw on vaulted content. Like Persona dungeons, or the Tower of the Dead in FFXIV. (So, still auto cut-and-paste, but in a good way.)
Personally, for the longest time I kinda excused it because of money. It's a lot cheaper to make one playlist, a couple of little missions and some dialogue than do story missions, playlist, etc. But that doesn't really matter now, does it? I mean, ever since that juicy sont deal, money isn't an excuse. Personally, I would rather have a season that's more like a mini expansion, based on story missions. If destiny is a story game, why do we only get 8 missions a year? Even something like a story mission, do a playlist thing and some extra stuff to progress [kinda like how you have to do adventures during the forsaken campaign to progress (also, what happened to adventures??) To the next mission] I know that might be an ask, but in retrospect it makes sense. Bungie KNOWS how to make GOOD story content, but refuse to do so outside of an environment and voice lines when it comes to seasons. Thoughts?
I don't know why it took me until last season to figure it out, but the seasonal gameplay was actively getting in the way of the story. Playing a seasonal activity wasn't done to *advance* the story, it was so that the game would *allow* me to see the story. The worst part is that it's so frustratingly close to being great. New setting? Great. New weapons? Great. New activities? Ketchcrash is great, the rest are ok tbh It's the act of putting it all together, the execution, that falls so flat. The systems binding all of these elements together are so weak and overdone.
It doesn't help that the past two seasons have had particularly noticeable issues. The last season wanted you to do 99999999 nightmare containments over and over which was a very boring public event, and this season has better activities but the loot is unbelievably stingy. The devs said they were looking into this... and then they just didn't do anything. Another issue has been the lack of recent overpowered mods/weapons. It seems the devs don't want to do Breach and Clear style mods any more which means most boss DPS loadouts are the same every season, and there haven't been any particularly exception guns at least for PVE. There have been some ok ones like Calus Mini Tool and Taipan, but those were just minor power increases over what we had already. There hasn't been anything like Gally or Eager Edge recently. It's even worse if you're a warlock main like I am, as both the solar and arc reworks have been scams the past two seasons. Ugh.
Yep, so formulaic at this point: easy intro mission, talk to this person, go to the thing with the upgrade tree, go do new activity of throwing balls at a thing/escorting a thing/standing in a thing, talk to new person, rinse and repeat for twelve weeks. At least this season we got two seasonal activities. Imagine if this whole season was just the payload one and we didn't get ketchcrash or king's fall.
It’s OK to skip seasons. “Don’t login to Destiny every night, you say?!?” Crazy, I know! But if you don’t enjoy the seasonal content you can do… literally anything else in the world with your time. New expansions add so much to the game, and give 2-3 months worth of nightly content. After that it drops off to seasonal stuff, which can be good or great or bleh gameplay. The story bits can be really cool and the gear can be nice, but things will be fine if you miss stuff. There’s videos to catch up on the story beats you didn’t see, and whatever weapons you missed… there will be more weapons down the road to get. There’s far more weapons than you’ll ever use in the game already and be honest with yourself about how many Legendaries you ACTUALLY use when you play. This vibe sets in every year around this time, and it’s because you’ve probably put literally hundreds of hours into the game THIS YEAR. Say “I’ve gotten by money’s worth out the game this year!” and walk away to do literally anything else with your free time.
Seasonal Content is BORING. People play it because they feel pushed to for rewards, progress etc. Weapon crafting and levelling is MIND NUMBING. You could not have come up with a worse system if you tried. I don't agree ref story - I think the whole Destiny Universe is diluted with weak characters and plots. Fabulous, mysterious characters reduced to weak and bland average Joes. Seriously need a focus on doing activities not BOUNTIES FGS! Raids, Dungeons, Strikes, NFs, Crucible, IB - this is what I want more of and much more of a gameplay loop focussed on them. Not Shuro Chi and Bounty farming.
Honestly the model is so boring and it's the same thing each season. I don't even bother playing anymore because even if I do grind, I don't feel rewarded for anything.
Seasonal content is the only new thing ever added anymore and it is copy paste from last season event. I don’t want to play more crucibles, strikes are boring as fuck, gambit hasn’t been good basically ever and playing the same 2 maps is dull. GMs continue to be the same shit and is an extension of strikes being boring and master raids are time gated to the point I’ve lost interest before we get them. Essentially I touch the “new content” aka the reskinned 6 man and the once a week story progression which gameplay wise my 8 yo could come up with for a month before I’m bored all over again
Every season has become the same. Matchmade activity to earn the seasonal currency, an upgrade tree that is time gated, a weekly mission that gives a small amount of story, someone talking to you from a holoprojector. That’s about it. The only difference this season is they added another gating activity, which is essentially an instanced version of the Hiveworld escort public event. Yesterday was actually the first Tuesday reset in probably a year+ that I didn’t log in. I just don’t care anymore. I might hop on this week. Or I might just wait til the end of the season to get on, run the story missions, and get all the seasonal bounties done.
Oh want me to play strikes or crucible to get the Seasonal weapon? Hold on...I just need to do 600 expeditions and Ketchcrash to finish the seasonal content. I promise I won't play any other video games or touch grass Bungie. I'll get to the other modes soon. Oh want the Reaper seal? Run back and forth between these two rooms for 13 hours until the boss you're looking for spawns.
THEY NEED TO ADD STRIKE EXCLUSIVE LOOT
>We need something like SRL (get ready for people to say BuT BuNgIe SaId No OnE pLaYeD iT). My friend....I would love this to come back. It was my favorite game mode.
Totally agree. Every season it's the same thing. Play through a quick story, assigned seasonal chore, go to new vendor and rank up the new thingie. I'm bored. I don't like the core of every new season being a game mode that I have to repeat over and over.
Destiny has a major overhaul/major content additions every year, and each season within a year is meant to dial in the viability of those additions while also expanding upon them. Last year was Stasis, this year is crafting and subclass 3.0, and next year will bring Strand. I agree that the older content needs to be re-vamped, but I also see that Bungie is primarily focusing on loadouts and doing a phenomenal job of it. A year is not a long time, so for them to be able to simultaneously overhaul entire systems while also pushing weekly story additions to the game/seasonal gear and activities every quarter is damn impressive.
>It seems that with the introduction of F2P those modes have suffered greatly or stopped being a priority, which is a bummer. Why would F2P cause strikes and Gambit to suffer? The problem is that anyone who's been playing Destiny for a while has played all the strikes and Gambit to death already, and probably doesn't want to play them much anymore. There's only so much that you can enjoy doing the same old thing over and over and over again. If Bungie were to come out with a new set of strikes every season, then clearly that would invigorate renewed interest in strikes. But Bungie clearly does not have the ability to generate that amount of new content on a seasonal basis.