Destiny 2: The Final Shape (June 4, 2024) Video Game • Page 146

I’m excited to spend a few more hours at least checking out the story in the next few days. Anyone else jumping back in?

 

I'll be back on my D2 bullshit tonight after work. Stuck here fore three more hours at least though.

If anyone is playing, please spoiler-tag campaign plot stuff for at least today. I personally don't care about weapon/armor spoilers but if anyone else does feel free to say so.

 

Think I need to finish God of War before I dive back in, but I am slightly excited to play Destiny again

 

ayo who wants to team up with me and @Anthony_ to grind competitive PVP for the claymore?

 

2/3 of Destiny 2’s Warmind Strikes are reused campaign levels, the third is exclusive to PlayStation

shocker

 

yup, the story was rushed, not enough missions, it was weird going from "oh hey let's open up rasputin" to all of the sudden "let's summon xol" like uh.....maybe a little cutscene or something would have been nice at least. At this point it seems like they're still riding off the coattails of the original writer and story from D1/TTK and they're butchering it imo.

Like...I'm scratching my head because the thing with the base game was the story was great, there were so many cutscenes and missions and it told the whole narrative of the red war without needing to really access the grimoire/weapon/armor descriptions to know what is happening like we had to in D1, but the endgame/post-endgame of the base game was sparse...and now with warmind, the story mission is sparse but the post-game is great. Like....come on.

 

do you think the postgame is good enough for me to play

 

The problem of inserting strikes directly into the campaign as story missions is a new Bungie Problem that they picked up after CoO. It's a total misunderstanding of the community asking for strikes to be given more context in the overall narrative of the games. As originally envisioned, they were (it seemed) supposed to be self-contained missions longer than typical campaign missions with a boss at the end that maybe featured some kind of unique mechanic(s). They told their own stories that were ancillary to the main campaign but tied in to the main campaign to varying degrees. I didn't like how, in D1, you just played strikes whenever without any context in terms of where in the timeline of events the strike takes place and how it may feed in to the conclusion of the main narrative, if at all. In vanilla D2, that same problem persisted only with the added problem of not being able to select a strike to play directly. And now we have "campaign strikes," which is the total wrong way to address this issue and just leads to criticism for recycling content. Those two strikes (and the two from CoO) don't entirely feel like strikes, but they don't exactly feel like campaign missions; they're in a weird middle ground where they don't totally satisfy either role.

I really wish they'd go back to how it was in D1, only with some more plot context given for doing them. Still make them optional activities, but have moments in the main campaign where an NPC tells you that you can either continue the story or go do this other thing that will help the main mission in X way because blah blah blah. Or even tie them into the post-game questing. That way they can remain separately selectable self-contained stories that still tie in to the main narrative in a concrete way. The Sunless Cell in TTK was a great example of this done just about as well as it ever was in all of D1.

 

I think the $20 DLCs need to have at least 7-10 story missions, lasting around 2-3 hours with just as many cutscenes, a new planet/zone, 2-4 new non-story strikes, a raid lair, 3-4 new crucible maps, and a few new exotics and weapon/armor sets. These $20 DLCs shouldn't be focusing on QoL updates with some new content being considered a bonus. The whole year long delay (that thankfully gave us RoI and AoT which was nearly peak Destiny imo), was supposed to be so they could perfect the engine to allow for those QoL and sandbox updates to happen more frequently, and now in D2 they were happening less frequently up until the last month or so when the community hit an all time low.

The $60 expansions should have just as much content with them as the D2 base game, no exceptions. 15-20 story missions lasting at least 5 hours, multiple new worlds, an entirely new raid, 5-8 new crucible maps, etc.

 

Yeah like we were saying last night they put in so much to do in this expansion but the campaign is so rushed that it's going to turn a lot of people off.

 

This story needed at least 10 missions, for sure. The nature of the enemy we faced pretty much demanded more room to breath and develop. This is not the kind of story that should've been told in $20 expansion, this is the kind of story they should've saved for a $40 Comet expansion. Something like Skolas is a way better fit for the scope of one of these expansions.

 

For me, my main focus on the post-game is going to be grinding PVP to up my valor and glory rank to get the claymore pulse and all the crucible rewards, since I'm primarily a PVP player. I'm sure @Anthony_ and I will be trying to do the raid lair as we get to that power level minimum, running nightfalls now that there's loot to get from them, and working on collecting the raid, trials, and iron banner sets. So you know you'll at least have us to play with almost every night and you'll be able to put hours into it with us doing both PVE and PVP activities. Whether or not you find grinding the strikes, nightfall, competitive playlist, banner, and the raid worth doing with us, I'm not sure haha.

Like honestly, as much as bungie pisses me off and as big of a fucking hypocrite as I am when I complain about them and how much they've fucked up over the last year, it's undeniable that their world design and aesthetics, sound and audio design, and shooting/moving mechanics are the best in the FPS genre. That's what makes it so hard for me to quit. The game feels and looks and sounds the best of any FPS, but god damn do they give us plenty of reasons not to play it.

 

Yeah this is really what it comes down to. Don't waste the money unless you think you'll be ok with this.

I don't think this makes you a hypocrite. It's fair to criticize the many problems with the game and with Bungie while also enjoying the good things about the game. Being a hypocrite would be, like, saying you'll never play a game that has microtransactions of any kind but then going and playing Destiny 2. This is just being realistic about something that you enjoy despite its faults. They do a lot of things that piss me off too, but at the end of the day I couldn't resist being happy to have new things to do in the game.

 

yeah, you're right. it's recycled content and whether or not this actually happened, it gives us players the impression that during the planning meetings for this DLC, the central question was how little effort can we put into this DLC while still making it worth buying to the average player. And we have our answer: "5" story missions and "3" strikes. It's just blatantly lazy and feels disrespectful to us as players. Like, fuck yeah the QoL and sandbox changes feel great. PVP is SO CLOSE to being in a good spot now, but again I don't think those are worth $20. those should be automatic patches and updates we get in between the $20 DLCs. DLC should be content, not updates.

And yeah, Sunless Cell is probably the perfect strike. Good story telling throughout the strike, provided challenging ad waves, interested mechanics, and had strike-specific loot worth grinding for. That is the bar for what a strike should be.

 

To be fair, those patches and fixes aren't part of the DLC, they just happened to launch at the same time as the DLC. You actually don't need the DLC to get all the QOL changes, including private matches and even access to the new Crucible maps in the playlists. The real problem there is that we shouldn't have to wait until they're deploying a whole DLC (~6 months) to get those QOL changes or things that should've been in the game at launch (like private matches) lol

 

Yeah, that's true. But the way that they advertise and sell it to us is that these are coinciding with the DLC. These patches should be going live at least a week before the DLC launches imo. The fact that they launch at the same time I think is intentionally misleading. And that way if they launch the QoL patches a week early, that gives them time to find and fix the bugs before those QoL changes impact the DLC like with the new matchmaking settings being reverted back because there was a bug. that impacts competitive matchmaking which impacts glory rank which impacts if and when someone gets the claymore.

 

Hey I agree with you. We should be getting, at minimum, monthly patches and fixes. Games like CoD, Warframe, and even The Division do updates that frequently, or even more frequently. It's doable. If it's a problem with the engine, well, too bad they should've used a different engine like they originally said they were going to. Make it work.

 

I was really turned off after doing the campaign. Besides the PVP rewards thing, what else is added with this DLC? I’m curious to see what else there is to see if I want to jump back in. Because I’ve heard pretty solid things about the post-campaign stuff

 

yeah for sure. I really wish this was the September expansion because that last cutscene would have been the perfect transition from the story with Xol to the raid with Xol in their throne world.

I think another SIVA story would have been good for a $20 expansion or something to do with going back to the reef to set up before the comet expansion in the fall.

 

new weapon missions, new hidden exotics to get (sleeper simulant, probably more), the new strikes, new nightfalls, escalation protocol (hoard mode), new raid lair, seems like there's a few hidden secrets possible since a lot of people are finding clues and stuff throughout the missions and patrol areas. I feel like the story is basically just a vehicle for us to power up to do all the post-game stuff as a means to an end rather than something worth doing on it's own, which sucks and leaves a bad initial impression of the DLC. Again, I think we're seeing the mirror opposite of the base game. The base game was worth doing on its own, but once we were done with that there wasn't anything to do afterwards. Now, the DLC story is only worth doing to get to the postgame stuff.

 

Yeah because the $40 fall expansion is going to be all about Prince Uldren and the Fallen, for sure. His ship is crashed into the Lost Sector in the Drifts.

 

If they weren't stuck with the Leviathan as the setting for the raid lairs, it would've been really cool to get a raid lair on Mars where the final boss fight was against Nokris and Xol at the same time, with some mechanic where you need to kill Nokris first because he'll just continually revive Xol if you don't. Would've been awesome.

 

with bungie catering to people who didn't play D1, I wonder how much of the lore/story is going to get watered down on this in order to make it easier for the D2 rookies to understand the story.

 

One thing they're always really good at is the intro cinematics and cutscenes for the expansions. They've been pretty good all the way back to Dark Below. So hopefully they put a detailed explanation for that plotline into the intro scene. Maybe show the battle over Saturn strickly from Uldren's perspective so we see what happened in the aftermath.

 

this would have been amazing. Make it in the cave where we fight Nokris, with Xol weaving in and out of the tunnels like he was doing on the platform at the end. Nokris has can't be damaged until you destroy the crystals, you can only destroy the crystal by all 6 players throwing the balls at the crystal similar to aksis, and Xol can't be damaged until you kill nokris. As Xol weaves through the tunnels, rocks fall down and put holes through the ground so we have smaller platforms to jump to and from to get to cover.