State of Destiny 2 as a "single, evolving world" (Retrospective) > Destiny 2 - Feedback | Forums | Bungie.net (2024)

The community is so divided right now, it's clearly visible as soon as anything Destiny related gets out of the Destiny bubble - anything inside the fanbase is met with mostly positive reaction, when anything that gets out immediately gets hit with a wave of criticism, negativity and insults. As an example, you can check the comments and like/dislike ratio on the same Accolades trailer on the Playstation channel and Destiny 2 channel or any social media post from small content creators and posts with Destiny 2 mentioned from bigger or variety content creators. Overall community feels abused, just check out Steam reviews for the main game or DLC, including the last one. Yes, there is a lot of complaining about the servers, but many games that had similar issues and still have good reviews, and since Shadowkeep we didn't have that kind of problems with the log in systems, with improvements in Beyond Light and even smoother experience in Witch Queen.I wonder why price of all of the content has gone up for the last few years, but the amount of content didn't change, the quality is very inconsistent, we actually get less content for the higher price when the old content doesn't get fixed, the price of all of the content goes up each update. Please don't tell me "everything is expensive now", the game isn't getting better with price increases, it isn't even similar to the old content and the price of all the stuff in the game is truly gigantic. There's so much cosmetic content that's priced similar to the f2p games that have all of the content accessible for free when you need to pay a lot of money to access all of the content for Destiny 2. If we look back at the development history and communication with players - more questions.We've got one cosmetic set for bright dust each season since the release of Destiny 2, now we get Silver only sets (I don't even talk about collaboration sets, there's probably license agreements and profit promises, except sets from Sony franchises, this is literally current publisher and owner of the studio, those sets could've been available for bright dust), Silver only exotic related legendary ornaments, Silver only event items that are behind separate event passes, Silver only "season flashbacks" that have the seasonal ornaments that cannot be bought for bright dust even if you own the season, Silver only campaign skips for alt characters that cost 2000 Silver, Silver only dungeon keys that cannot be bought any other way, Silver only season passes, Silver only rank-ups, Silver only vehicles if you missed the event (yes, I have the GG skimmer, it's not about "I didn't get it" or "mom I want that one!"), Silver only finishers and that's on top of the price increases for expansions, dungeon keys, Season price increase last year.Other cosmetic content source - bright engrams, gives so many dupes, that even their description was changed on the Bungie Help article that was saying that there should be no duplicate items from those engrams. And it was acknowledged after such a long time too. We've had the Prismatic Matrix system before that would allow them to choose our reward, why we can't have it now, or at least have the duplicate protection back?Bright dust economy took a hit every year, only this year I'm not sure how it feels as of right now. Pathfinder was changed this patch a bit to fulfill the promises on "player agency", so maybe it's now will be a bit better than bounties. Seasonal challenges also had a similar promise to "play how we want", but ended up being mandatory and still forced to play a certain way to get those big bright dust packages at the end of the season.The game is the buggiest it's ever been, the playlists get very rare updates, PvP was almost dead for multiple years, Gambit is almost abandoned completely, and still somehow seasonal challenges and Pathfinder include tons of Gambit related and Gambit only challenges (Pathfinder changed this patch actually, wow).Story is still mostly vaulted with no permanently returned locations other than Cosmodrome from D1, and when the locations are back in the game, they're accessible only as a part of a paid content activities ("We will bring back (or “unvault”) activity and destination content from the DCV each year." - [url]https://www.bungie.net/7/en/News/article/49189[/url] . We get only the destination with a PAID activity and no destination content or direct access to it). Cosmodrome also is barely used anywhere, other than game intro with our character rising, 3 strikes and a whole Onslaught map, so from the point of DCV this destination should be removed and replaced with something more useful (DCV targets, how it was presented and explained - [url]https://youtu.be/W18AKdj51EA?feature=shared&t=2178[/url]).One of the points that was used in DCV presentation - 115 GB of storage for the game is a lot, so we need to cycle out some content before bringing new back. The game now is 120+ GB, we have so many dead and unused destinations that are just being used now in the TFS side quests and besides that haven't been touched for a very long time, and they feel exactly like the planets that need to be in DCV based on its initial presentation I linked in this post.Current story suffered a lot, with Lightfall as a previous expansion, and Final Shape having so much nostalgia bait that it's unbelievable. TFS story spoiler: [spoiler]bringing fan favorite character back just to kill him again at the lowest point for the game for a second time felt like the cheapest trick in the book to get the reaction out of the player, it doesn't even feel emotional because of that. I know that it was emotional for a lot of people, but I played since Forsaken, stopped because Lightfall promo was too sus, and didn't feel anything when it happened because it was so cheap.[/spoiler]Overall it feels like from the technical standpoint there needs to be a small pause in content production to fix all of this mess (which is obviously "impossible" for the current state of Destiny because now the studio is dependent on the yearly release schedule), or pack activities/destinations into DLC packs that can be downloaded separately. It all takes time, and time=money, I know.I hope that the new Destiny that was leaked some time ago will have some of the content or similar systems that will allow us to have all the content in one place, because it feels like Destiny is just a service that will live by customer aquisition being just a bit faster or on par with the customer turnover. The statements about the "new number on the box" were pretty clear on that Beyond Light reveal stream (refer to the same YT video I linked with the DCV presentation if you want to see them for yourself), so I hope that we either get all the content in D2, or if the studio leads actually decided to start from scratch, at least something meaningful will be carried over from D2.Any changes to the progression systems that players are unhappy with can realistically happen like half a year later because of the extremely tight development cycle with no breaks, QA is at all time low because devs are pulled to other projects and previously mentioned short development cycle. New progression systems always come out with issues, broken promises, no significant changes, etc.There's no learning from old mistakes with timegating seasonal content, there's no changes in terms of FOMO (by the way, mentioned here, 4 years ago now - [url]https://youtu.be/W18AKdj51EA?feature=shared&t=1995[/url]), with one being much worse than before with arrival of episodes and second one having zero changes since Shadowkeep release. Tons of dev team members love single player games, or play other MMOs, ask them how they feel about not being able to play something they bought or not being able to earn something in a game that is literally made for the collectors because they decided to move to other games or take a break. Yes, PvP games with seasonal model do this, Destiny isn't one of them; yes, WoW does similar thing, but this is a completely different game with a lot more content that cannot be directly compared to D2 in any way, shape or form; yes, other F2P games do this, but D2 cannot be played entirely F2P, with a hefty expansion prices and a lot of different tiers AND a lot of confusion on what to buy for the inexperienced players that want to dive into the game.New player experience is getting better a little bit like once a year. Bugs and the new player experience itself are holding all of this back. Player gets bombarded with different paid stuff promoted, quests are very grindy and don't explain much, the narrative itself is just barely entertaining. Making the "skip" button for the Into The Light was basically an admission of guilt on that part.UI got a bunch of updates, but still has issues. Some activities still have important buffs on the bottom left, all of the buffs have 3 number timers even if they're less than 10 seconds, so they take up part of the screen, there's no customization to the buff UI at all. Overall the UI evolves much faster that it was before, and it's good, but looks like something listed above this paragraph still interferes with R&D and QA.I like this game, liked all of the time, played since the free trial in Forsaken and took a break in Lightfall, all of this comes from love for the game and remembering the better days of Destiny 2. It pains me to return 1.5 year later and seeing so little improvements done to the game overall with no clear future or visible changes on the horizon other than another D2 expansion. Thank you everyone who work/ed on the game, and I hope that this text will change the minds of the people who make THE decisions on the topics that were mentioned in the community and even by the developers themselves.

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