It has officially been a year as of today (November 10th 2021) that Destiny 2: Beyond Light launched. Whilst Beyond Light had its ups and downs, looking at you stasis, this year was a success in terms of content.
Bungie introduced a lot of new changes into the seasonal model when Beyond Light came out, including seasonal challenges, more story elements and a lot more loot to chase. Speaking of story, this years overarching storyline has easily been the best the Destiny universe has ever seen. I actually care about the characters that aren’t Cayde-6, may he rest in peace, which is a shock because normally I wouldn’t care about any of them. Back to the point, as someone who plays Destiny 2 easily 5 days a week, there was a good amount of content to nibble on as time went by. However towards each seasons end the problems were becoming increasingly clearer, there simply isn’t enough content to feed the masses.
A lot of good has come from this year of content though, and it is very obvious to see that Bungie are taking the game seriously and want it to be the best it can be. So lets talk about some of these points starting with seasonal challenges, which have actually been a highlight of the past year.
The new seasonal challenges introduced in Beyond Light were a nice check list of activities each week that kept new and hardcore players like myself coming back. Some of them were of course needlessly tedious and far too grindy, they were still a good addition to the world of Destiny and I actually look forward to doing them each season. They incentivized playing all the core activities and doing the seasonal content too, whether this be the weekly story mission or playing the 6 player activity that came with the season.
However, whilst the challenges brought about a lot of good and reason to play, they also came with negatives. Each seasons vendor upgrades were locked behind a particular weeks challenges and they needed to be completed in order to fully upgrade that vendor for the season. The time-gating Bungie has implemented season after season has become increasingly more tedious and I sincerely hope that Bungie are re-thinking this for next years content when Witch Queen launches.
Since I mentioned the seasonal activity lets talk about it a bit. The means of acquiring loot each season have been above and beyond the previous years seasonal activities, aside from season of the Worthy’s sundial. They have been different in terms of location and visuals, while each having their own unique mechanics and bosses, unfortunately this has not stopped them from becoming repetitive and boring over time. Whilst the current seasons activity, which is set in the dreaming city and is visually stunning, is fun at first, it eventually became a bit of a gruelling slog that I tried to avoid every week unless I needed to do it. This may possibly stem from Bungies need to not give us loot, but more on that later. It had only 2 bosses, one of which was incredibly designed and 3 different sub waves before the boss that were unnecessarily long. There is only so many times I can shoot blue balls of ether out of the air before I question existence.
This has been a pattern with Bungie over the past year, an overly dramatic boss fight that is straight after a very lacklustre horde mode lite, which ruins the fun due to how much time it takes. In my opinion Season of the Splicer had the best seasonal activity but even then it was far too long. 3 waves of banking motes in a pillar with a boss after each wave, this then led to the final boss fight in which the health bar was gated making you literally jump through hoops just to be able to go back and melt the second bar. Which was done in approximately 5 seconds if the people you were playing with had any sort of knowledge on how to play effectively.
They clearly learnt from Season of the Hunt as that seasons activity was basically non existent as you simply killed a boss and got loot, but were unable to gain access to the boss fight unless you had charged a Lure Module from playing playlist activities. Even typing this out its exhausting to think about. This is the main problem I and a lot of other players have with each new season, is that in order to obtain new loot you had to keep playing old content. I would prefer it if I was able to farm the seasonal content for the new loot but wasn’t met with this feeling every time that Bungie do not want us farming the new gear too quickly. This stems into the Destiny 2 loot problem.
The loot problem in this game is something I have been meaning to vent about for quite a while now. Recently Trials of Osiris, a topic I am excited to discuss, had a huge overhaul and has become a game mode worth farming loot for. Allowing you to pick and choose what piece of gear you want was easily the best part of this overhaul. Bungie knows that this is a path to success because Season of Opulence’s Menagerie was so well received and is still spoken about as the best activity Bungie has added.
This overhaul is something that Iron Banner, Strikes, Crucible and Gambit sorely need. (It is rumoured Iron Banner is getting this treatment soon though). A means of acquiring the loot I want without feeling like my time has been wasted. I would love to be able to play strikes and obtain Vanguard Engrams to then choose which strike weapon I would like from Zavala’s inventory screen. It really is simple talking about it in this means but I am not a developer so I just do not know how difficult it is to do something like this. As it stands now I could spend 4 to 5 hours in the strike playlist and not see the weapon I want to drop once because the loot pool is so over crowded. Or spend 2000+ tokens to Lord Saladin and not see a single Shotgun drop, to put that into perspective that is 100 drops.
From where I am standing it seems Bungie are scared to give us tons of loot as it will stop us from playing the game and therefore the player base will drop off quickly making it harder for newer players to matchmake into other activities. This could not be further from the truth. I have almost 3000 hours on Destiny 2 on steam alone, this does not include hours on Battle.net, and I can say without a doubt there are dozens of weapons I do not have the roll I want on. I think it is time that in these core activities, Bungie ups the drop rates of loot and let us play in this amazing sandbox they have designed!
This could actually be a reason as to why Exotic Primaries are used much more than non exotic ones. Ace of Spades is statistically the best gun in the game for PvP and can simply be purchased through a vendor screen, whilst a well rolled Palindrome or Igenous Hammer could take hours of grinding in ways that certain players just simply wouldn’t enjoy. I used these two examples because Palindrome can only be obtained from playing Nightfalls, an endgame PvE activity which requires a high light level and Igenous Hammer can only be obtained from Trials of Osiris a PvP activity.
These two activities have actually been improved upon drastically with the Trials changes and the fact that a Grandmaster completion is guaranteed to drop a weapon now, however in Bungie fashion, they took two steps forward and one step back by having two nightfall weapons a week meaning RNG is even harder to overcome now as you need to get the weapon you want to drop, then the perks in each of the 4 columns you want too. Changes like these solidify my fear that they do not like us having loot and are trying to prolong the grind for every player, which is ironic because they want more players but this deters them away unless they love the grind.
Now this all stems into the main problem Destiny 2 has had over the past year and it is going to continue getting worse and worse until Bungie choose to take action. I am of course, talking about the PvP portion of the game. If you are apart of the Destiny community you will know by now PvP has been a hot topic for a while now. Maybe this could be because of Stasis, maybe it is because we haven’t had a new map in over 700 days, or maybe it is because Bungie didn’t have a PvP team over the past year or so. No, I will tell you what it is, all of the above.
Destiny 2 has a gameplay loop, a simple one, grind PvE for awesome weapons then take them into PvP and ruin some other persons day. This then makes that person question where to get this gun or ability. It makes them want to go out and get it so they can use it, thus the cycle is born. Bungie seem to have forgotten this. It is what made the original Destiny so fun. I still think Destiny 2 is the better game but you can see my point.
When Beyond Light came out, Bungie removed roughly 14 crucible maps from the game, this was a large amount of content. It was a necessary evil because they updated the game to a brand new engine and didn’t have enough time to update those maps before Beyond Lights launch. Whilst players were sceptical I and many other players were under the assumption that they were going to add brand new maps into the crucible throughout the course of 2021, this did not happen. Which is why it has been almost 700 days without a new map and a whole year since we lost 14 of them.
This, however, does not take away my enjoyment of Destiny 2’s PvP as I play it on a daily basis and still enjoy it as trying as it can be some times. I am not ignorant to the problems it has though and I am very open in my opinion about them. Whilst maps are super important and needed to keep the game feeling fresh, it is not where the main problem stems from. It stems from a lack of communication on Bungies part, (something over the course of the year which has been getting better) lack of updates to the sandbox before a new season comes out and finally a lack of obvious testing before launches.
Abilities have become rampant and with Bungie adding new ways each season to get them faster the problem is becoming worse. Bungie have stated multiple times that they want to the PvP to feel like an arcade shooter however, it is becoming a grenade simulator and losing that shooter essence. Guns have become a secondary though to a lot of players, which is super unhealthy for an FPS. Skill is now becoming “easier” to obtain as more and more players are doing better because the guns matter less, it is important for any PvP to have skill levels. This is what keeps people playing, it incentivises skill and awareness growth, which in the long run creates more hardcore and dedicated players.
To summarise, I have a lot of issues with the game as a hardcore player, I want to see this game rise and reach its full potential. I believe Bungie want that too. There needs to be some drastic changes next year to keep the player pool alive, or maybe there won’t be because Bungie know we are all addicted and will come back regardless; I love this game and whilst there has been a lot of downs this year I believe the ups have more than made up for it. The loot has been phenomenal, the story has been excellent and the hype for Destiny’s future has never been higher. Of course I could of stated that at the beginning but that would not have been a very interesting read at all, would it?
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