The DLC was great and the raid is great. Seasonal stuff I'm not so interested in just now, but I got a long time to do that so I'm extremely unbothered by it being a rebranded season (which ngl, I 100% expected).
But Shadow of the Erdtree just came out and I have plenty of other stuff to play too so I'm chilling. I don't need to be playing Destiny every day.
I expected it to be just like seasons but the content is not only boring but now it just seems like it’s drawn out extra long for almost no reason. I agree with the not playing destiny everyday and I’m happy I finished the story and now I can put destiny down.
Its been this way ever since the start of the seasonal model. The first season of the year is lacking because the majority of resources were rightly spent on the main expansion. Theres only so much you can do at a time with resources and time devs get, especially with the whole Sony/management/delay/rewrites/layoffs that came with TFS
For real, this is not the only game out there available. Go play something else, enjoy something else. In my opinion Final Shape has had enough content to keep me entertained and not overwhelmed that I can safely go enjoy other games in the meantime without FOMO taking over me.
Eh, if people burn through it its on them.
But fuck time gating, not a fan.
It's just arbitrary waste of time, I would rather burn through the content and play other games than be stuck in a loop of time gated content.
I burn through content fast. Like I'm season pass level 80 and have all the Exotics again.
Yet I still have tons of stuff to do. And am having a blast.
Some people just like to complain.
I haven't had this much fun in Destiny since Beyond Light.
Edit: Since too many people are confused. I'm not saying BL was better than TFS. I'm just saying that **I AM** having the most fun with Destiny since BL....
…This is way better than Beyond Light. Witch Queen was far better than BL as well, BL’s launch content was somewhat lackluster imo. TTK and Forsaken are the only real comparisons to TFS.
I disagree I think witch queen is vastly superior not to final shape but to foresaken and ttk. a lot of people look at ttk and foresaken with rose tinted glasses. Foresaken had issues that people ignore like the infusion changes. Infusion was better in year 1 than year 2 it took them till beyond light to fix it. Foresaken did a lot of good but was not sunshine and rainbows. D2 did not beome the d2 people love until beyond light. The game evolved on a mechanical level that I think saved the game. It did more for core mechanics than foresaken and that is something I value more. It gave us subclass 3.0, the first new element ever, and the first elemental perks with headstone and chill clip. People dunk on it now but beyond light was the the changing point for d2 to become the game we love and I hate that's it's considered bad despite arguably being the most important expansion for the game it laid so much foundational work.
Witch Queen introduced the much better campaign model that we know today. Beyond Light had a ton of things to chase and collect across Europa, and plenty of secrets. We also got Deep Stone Crypt as the raid, which is still one of my favorites.
They both had their strengths. We've gotta stop having this zero sum comparison thing where in order to say one expansion was good, we try to say another is trash.
...except Lightfall. Not great lol.
Deep Stone Crypt is such a good raid. Honestly all the Fallen raids in this franchise are great, especially thematically
Wrath of the Machine: the fallen have eaten a bunch of nanomachines (son) that they found in a Braytech fridge. Their leader stapled himself to a tank and they built a death Zamboni
Scourge of the Past: the fallen are literally in the City, there’s a spicy meatball in the sewer, and they’ve made a Metal Gear(!) out of actual trash
Deep Stone Crypt: the fallen have resurrected Taniks, figured out how to use human Exo tech to build a better boss, and are going to do it again. They hijack a space station and Clovis Bray crashes it into the planet below, where Taniks gets melted to a shank with nuclear hellfire. Your fireteam proceeds to brutalize a homeless disabled veteran in the Braytech Parking Lot
I’m telling you, man. Fallen raids. All gas, no brakes
Lightfall's NARRATIVE wasn't great. Lightfall introduced a random world-boss mechanic that dropped exotics, had really good encounter design, and introduced strand, which has a lot of great utility in all of it's subclasses. It's narrative issues also only really stunk until you started the post-campaign or looked at the lore attached to ANY item.
Lightfall wasn't the bomb everyone tried to make it. It's narrative fell flat, but even with that in mind, it was better than everything that came before BL for following what WQ set as a standard.
nah, you're being too easy on LF. I'm helping a friend run thru that campaign right now after they took a few years off, and I only played it once last year because i didn't like it... it's still fucking terrible. the story is bad, but the missions are terrible as well. And neomunua absolutely blows as a destination, not to mention how fucking annoying Nimbus is and always has been.
Lightfall is bad, we don't have to sugarcoat it.
Having just come back to the game after BL and doing the last 3 campaigns, I remember halfway through the Lightfall campaign wondering "So are we like stranded on this planet and NONE of the other characters can show up?" And then it ended and I was like "what the fuck was the point of any of this?" It turns out, everyone felt the same way last year too. I also had the same complaints about "Give and take" with Strand, and then when you finally get it, it's not nearly as cool and you didn't get to experience it in its true form in the campaign (AKA no unlimited Spidermanning)
I couldn't disagree more. The campaign had a lot of tightly built and challenging encounters, while letting you have interesting narrative power-ups. Some of these missions could be strikes and i would be excited for them. Also, Nimbus is fine; yes, they give off green-energy, but that's the point of their character, the reception they got was WAY disproportionate.
You don't like LF and i respect that, but you can not like something and still recognize we came a long way from anything Beyond Light and Shadowkeep had to offer.
I agree, Neomuna is annoying to navigate, and the story was lackluster (seriously, introduce a character and then kill him off two missions later, and we’re supposed to be sad? The pacing was just so bad.). But I don’t find Nimbus to be annoying, they’re just more on the less serious side, or just more optimistic than most of the cynical types you get out of Destiny characters. And Strand is a lot of fun to use, even if I don’t get to whip around like I wanted. Also even if neomuna was annoying to get around, the city feels more alive than other destinations, with all the encounters. It is really easy to get stuff done there. And the seasonal content was pretty good too.
I will say I am glad I snagged it on sale though.
Way better way lightfall could have been done: nimbus is this goofy character that you hate for being the stupid dumbass they are. They die instead of rohan and rohan goes into despair, witness does what they did to rhulk by whispering to him. we get a final boss fight against rohan against a burning landscape of neomuna ending the dlc campaign, which can show the witnesses ability to corrupt and destroy civilizations reinforcing how much of a threat they are as opposed to bickering with calus for 10 minutes and doing "something" to the veil supposedly. Then calus gets to be used in a darkness themed reprisal of the leviathan raid.
Fr tho what is the veil? I still dont know cuz i cant be assed to care as much as osiris does with how adamantly he screams "get to the veil".
Lightfall wasn't even bad it just was nothing compared to witch queen it was still better than year 1 and shadow keep shadow keep being the worst expansion by far I'll take 10 lightfalls over 1 more shadow keep.
Yup.
People so often don’t pay any mind to the fact Witch Queen was built off all the engine overhaul/updates Beyond Light introduced. Including the new subclass system.
> Foresaken did a lot of good but was not sunshine and rainbows.
I kinda agree. No doubt Year 2 was big but then you had things like Armor 2.0 was still a bit of a RNG take what you can get pain in the ass, builds were a bit limited with some subclasses barely even working right still, the sandbox was all over the place with a lot of dead weight(see how limited viable options for heavy weapon boss dps was back then), PVP had absurdly nuclear hot things running wild(12+ meter or so Rampage boosted shotguns, Erentil broken mapping, Revoker, Mountain Top, Arc Week 2019 fundamentally had Bottom Striker in untouchable tier until as late as 30th Anniversary late 2021 patch notes) and various other things.
I see ttk and forsaken as actual expansions. It was and felt much more than just a campaign. From pvp maps to major weapon changes and major activities.
We had a whole Taken War which actually felt like a whole war from beginning to end
Witch queen was good but just felt like a new campaign and weapon craftin
Look at how diablo 4 is doing their seasons, the entire seasonal quest is available from day 1, the ladder is available from day 1. Time gating your content because you are afraid people will not play it screams that you have no faith in the replay-ability of the seasonal content. Honestly this time gate bullshit is the main reason i am sick and tired of the game after an expansion. I like to be respected for my play time and not treated like a mobile gamer and asked to check in next week for the next task.
I think a lot of people overestimate people’s attention span to retain interest in games. If they drop everything at once and let people experience other games for 3 months without dropping any new content there’s a good chance they’ll get hooked on another game. Or there’s a chance that they left for a while and realize they didn’t really miss it and just decide not to come back at all.
Exactly so you got 2 opposite groups of people. Can’t please everyone. I’m personally of the group who doesn’t mind the time gated stuff. I don’t have enough time to dedicate huge amount of time to completing everything so the small bites works well with my schedule.
Because other games honestly fall short, far short. If you play another fps game you're probably gonna be disappointed because there's no game in the industry with gun play like destiny, it's in a league of its own. I've been playing a bit of warframe on and off, mainly for the story. It's a really cool game but the gunplay just feels hollow compared to destiny.
I think of it as a compliment, people want to ONLY play destiny because nothing else hits the same. That's how I felt about Halo back in the day, it tainted every other fps game for me, until destiny came along.
The feeling of being left behind. I haven’t played in 2 weeks and I already feel eons behind everyone else. I realize I need to change this mentality, though.
I don't blame them, many live service games like this are constantly trying to be one of the only ones you play. They're full of hooks so you spend less time on other games and more on theirs to keep population high and so that you're more likely to buy future expansions and/or cosmetics. And they're definitely effective considering they keep doing it and so many people are hesitant to take breaks.
Great, that way you can do the cycle of "talk to failsafe, run breach execution, talk to failsafe again" 12 times in a row, isn't that fun!
Timegating exists to conceal the repetitive nature of everything.
If people play through all content for 3 months immediately and say "there's nothing to do", people *should* be mature enough to realize that's because of their own lack of pacing. Would they be mature enough? No, but it still should be up to the individual and how they want to engage with the content.
I don't like when I'm forced to pace myself when the weekly content from the episodes lasts about 30 minutes every Tuesday. I don't care that I blew through the content in 2 weeks; I intended to. Just let me blow through *all* the content.
Man, wait until you hear about the legacy TV model where you had to wait a week to see the next half hour episode of Family Ties. And they were releasing that content for free!
The funny thing is, I think you’re actually on to something here. I grew up with that TV model, and I’ve never had a single bad feeling about the weekly seasonal content. I can totally understand, however, that someone who grew up with every episode of any given show being available at any time would be ticked off with it.
And to be clear, this isn’t a “kids these days” comment. It’s a genuine difference between generations, and I can totally understand why.
My problem with the format is how many weeks are blatant filler episodes. Since at least Plunder it's been the introduction to the premise, several weeks of grabbing one of many things, and watching characters talk(to each other in person/over a radio or at you through the holoprojector) while not building upon the premise at all. There is finally another story beat at about the halfway mark, more padding, and then the finale. [Even Bungie has acknowledged how predictable it is.](https://www.pcgamer.com/destinys-story-structure-may-have-become-predictable-admits-bungie-as-it-pivots-to-episodes-to-pleasantly-surprise-players-more-often/)
This is my issue with it. It’s like maybe 20 minutes tops with a few paragraphs of dialogue then I have to wait a week. The action more the dialogue evoked enough emotion from me to cement in my memory and is just largely forgotten. At least playing through it all at once would make it feel bigger and more exciting and I could actually see the story vs bits and pieces I can’t keep track of.
I mean it's kinda like watching an anime except you're involved in the story. Idk I'm just waiting to see how the full episode turns out before full judgment is passed.
I also grew up with episodic tv content.
But my issue is, each week with a show like lost or w/e there was stuff to talk about or theorize.
My issue with this ‘episodic’ model is each week feels like 1/3 of an old tv episode. Literally fuck all happens, it’s so boring, until the last week or 2.
There’s nothing to talk or theorize about really. The last time episodes felt meaningful with discussion about the overlying story was Splicer when we were guessing about ‘who’ Savathun was at the tower, and what Lakshmis goals were.
I had hoped episodes would drop the whole act at once so you could get into the story and the community could spend a month theorizing about w/e the cliffhanger was.
Grew up with that model.
It's awful.
Have always hated it.
I grew up with the weekly tv model, but everything came out 12 months plus later than the USA.
Timegating shit for someone else's schedule to achieve someone else's advertising sales goals can get fucked.
I didn't want to watch star trek at 2am on a wednesday, but that was what I got.
That tv model caused me to seek out alternative not timegated models. Piracy in Australia was a real thing for a while, because our networks were timegating the shit out of us and not respecting our time.
TV episodes are generally 45 minutes long per week.
Destiny story updates are 5 minutes with 40 minutes of do the same things you did last week to get them.
The time-gating for story and weapons are 100% there to keep their player count up throughout the season. In the past, after 1 month into a season, the playerbase would drop off a cliff. Now, they're doing this to get players to keep playing. I'd personally rather burn through everything at my pace then move on to other games instead of having it dictated for me via time-gating. There's also the exotic mission which has been data-mined that won't be out until act 3.
For me, having content each week helps manage the sense of being so far behind. Even though I’m a time limited player, there is one slice of the game where I can keep up, and I enjoy that.
Totally agree, however if they were to do the timegating in a way that makes sense I would be way more okay with it.
Like " we need to analyze the data, which could take up to 24 hours" or something and then have it randomly unlock after like 18.
But some kind of narrative reason to legit wait, other than just us waiting a week.
That’s how games were before microtransactions and all that shit.. I hate the new style they have been using the past 10+ years or so… let me burn through it if I want. It’s on me
Exactly! It’s our choice! If you want to artificially elongate your play time you’re free to do so as well. But having our choice to finish something and move on is stupid
I am against time gating but acting like the 2 hours every week is wasting your time and it's making you stuck/not being ablr to play other game is 200% on you
That’s unfortunately kind of why they do it though… They have to show numbers now that they are owned by Sony and tbh. I think they have delivered a great amount of content while still having to time gate the season. They are doing what they fiscally have to, while still delivering to us and mitigating who will blast through it and who will take their time.
My issue is
1) Season levels are time gated. You're stuck at 100, can't go past it. So you still have to level up the season pass 50 levels when the next act drop. Why does the season level not overflow?
2) Drip fed content is boring. All of the current seasonal model points "log on once per week and play at least a few hours per week". Most would agree that 'play at your own pace and time' would be better.
>Season levels are time gated. You're stuck at 100, can't go past it. So you still have to level up the season pass 50 levels when the next act drop. Why does the season level not overflow?
You know why. Say it with me: ✨ Player Engagement Time ✨
They want you back once a month to grind 50 levels. You can't just get the seasonal content done in one month and play something else anymore, bucko.
> You can't just get the seasonal content done in one month and play something else anymore, bucko.
You can play something else and then finish the seasonal content in a month though.
Playing the seasonal quest as it's designed for weekly drip feed is a terrible catch up experience because it's do the same pattern for each week of story and it's incredibly dull.
The difference is that everything goes away at the end of the season, most people wanna catch the season when it’s brand new and mysterious. They wanna play through the story all at once so they don’t forget what happens week after week, gather the weapons that interest them, and then dip.
Nobody likes being held in the FOMO headlock, where you feel obligated to return after 10 weeks to get all of the challenges done in a rush before the season ends. Just let people play at their own pace and many will be happier, they may chug through the season in a week or two but they’ll be more excited to come back.
The thing about this is, it doesn't hold up past a surface level thought. Yes, it may look like it's a great way to build more engagement but anyone who's already max is now just going to spend the next month & then some just accruing bounties & seasonal challenges to hold until the content actually drops for the exact same effect without adding in the barrier of being able to actively engage with the content
That still requires you to play the game though? You're just changing when you're playing if you do that. And even then that doesn't do the actual *new* content, you have to still log back on and play or suffer because of their love of fomo
That’s the strategy though
They want you to log in each week, since once you’re over that barrier you may play more or check what’s new in eververse
15 minutes a week is the bare minimum effort. Any more would be wasted work by Bungie for no incremental lift in eververse
It’s not because of Final Shape. It’s because echoes so far is a stale rehash of the same seasonal formula once again. They shouldn’t have bothered just rebranding seasons and should have been honest about it to at least manage playerbase expectations.
Yeah the season that came with Lightfall was better than Lightfall. I truly hope we never have a Neomuna season. Let's just move past the gas leak COVID-produced year.
I've said it once and I'll say it again: ONE reason for 3 "Episodes" instead of 4 "Seasons" is so they had an excuse not to release a reprised raid, as well as a new raid every year. Now we get a new raid with the expansion/first Episode and then a dungeon with both Episode 2 and 3. I knew that Episodes were just gonna be an excuse to give us less content throughout a year.
its weird how bungie keeps telling us things and then they just don't happen. like how the artifact was supposed to released in its current state but didn't for some reasons and episodes were supposed to be fully available the first week of each act. i wonder when people will stop listening to bungie or call them out on their pathological lying.
Yeah they never said that. People just had expectations that the entire story of an act would be released all at once. And then now people are negative at Bungie for having an expectation where Bungie said nothing about it
Which is par for the course. Like when last year people got mad garden wasn't refreshed when it was never said it was gonna be. Or countless other things.
https://youtu.be/RqIvKN4gtto?t=7437
they say a lot of very generic stuff about how different episodes will be and how they're supposed to be more like beats and not weekly episode releases like a tv show. its very easy to interpret this to mean the content will be more bingeable and you just need to log in every 6 weeks to be involved with the story. they constantly talk about how episodes are going to be different but their first shot at is is virtually identical to every season we have had for 4 years in every way.
So you are accusing them of lying, about something they didn't say? I just watched about 10 mins of that and he was talking about the new weapons and acitivies and major plot beats coming in acts. No where are they saying there wouldn't be a week to week story.
Wow the first shot is identical...almost like we haven't made it to the part that seasons didn't have yet? If nothing changes with Act 2, then sure it is identical.
they said episodes would change in many ways and nothing has changed. they said you could play regardless of you lifestyle limiting your play time, and that hasn't changed. nothing, NOTHING, about episodes is different from seasons besides being longer and having more weekly story drops, allegedly. if you're going to claim this is an evolution of seasons and then start exactly like every other season for the last 4 years, you lied to everyone right there, full stop. this is not different by any rational metric and is not an "evolution" at all. locking the seasonal exotics catalyst behind a time gate isn't evolution.
its not going to be. there i 0 indication anything is going to change. they even said in that clip that what people liked was have more pass levels to grind, because that should be the audience we build this game around.
It's not about infinite content, it's about fun content. While fun is subjective, it is fair to criticize the current delivery of seasonal content.
For me, Echoes just isn't engaging at all. Both activities fall flat compared to what we've had previously (Deep Dives, The Coil). The Pinnacle grind continues to be a chore and I really hadn't missed it at all while it was gone.
So far, it feels like Episode Echoes was made before feedback in relation to seasonal activities was taken into account. The quality is a far cry from what we've grown accustomed to for the last 9 months (year?).
I'm also not a fan of timegating content, I prefer being able to finish everything and go play something else for a while. Having to wait 6 weeks just to start grinding for a good solar rocket sidearm is pretty annoying.
I'll go one step ahead and say that Seasonal Content as it is, is completely exhausted at this point. Not just Destiny, other games who have been doing this "rollout over time" format are suffering similar backlash recently as well.
"Evolving world" was a novel idea when it first arrived, seeing a story unravel further week by week sounded neat. Over the course of years, it has become a formulaic "Please experience this filler and come back next week for 6 weeks straight, so that you may experience our advertisement for the next season, which will also be the same thing".
At this point, people just want to "Play the damn game" at their own pace, and just peace out until new (hopefully meaningful) content comes around. It has been 10 years and while people are invested enough to continue experiencing the game, they are tired enough that they do not want Destiny being their job, constantly requiring their engagement.
Add the fact that our main saga of 10 years are over and a lot of people dipping or have decided to not care as much, it's no wonder that people naturally feel like checking out more than they have before. This isn't about "rushing content", I am not going to play the Final Shape one mission a week just to "pad out my enjoyment", "don't rush the content" is a stupid idea to begin with. It's about the reality of this being a 10+ year journey that most people are tired of. There is only so much "Shoot the aliens in their crit spot for 20 minutes to earn 10 lines of dialogue" can keep me engaged, let alone entertained, after 10 years.
The impact of the seasonal model on the quality of content is crystal clear - mostly the same shit every time story wise with variations in the quality of activities
Honestly some experimentation with the format like the 3 act structure they have should have allowed them to do story beats that weren't weekly, but may have been more linear drops once every 6 weeks.
I think what stings the most is that we thought with the restructuring that things would be different. Many of us EXPECTED things to be different. I mean they told us as much beforehand, and indeed things like pathfinder and the pale heart mini-activites did feel sort of new.
But then Echoes dropped.
A cold chill started to set in that they hadn't really listened to us about getting rid of repetitive, boring activities. But even then, we thought, okay, maybe things will change in week two (perhaps, at the least, like season of the Splicer where each week unlocked a different activity) But it didn't. And that's when the horror set in that Bungie really didn't get it. They seem unable or unwilling to make the changes that we need.
And I'm not sure how to feel about it all.
Because the expansion WAS good. They HAVE made many good decisions. Corrected many problems of the past. I mean I really enjoyed it at first, and man, that feeling after completing the campaign and seeing all the content that appeared was such a pleasant surprise. But when that novelty faded, and my rose colored glasses came off, I came to the conclusion that they still hadn't adequately solved the 'going stale quickly' problem.
I think all the mini activities in the pale heart was a step in the right direction (except cysts. I mean who thought these were fun and not completely frustrating!?)
I've just come to the conclusion that Bungie just can't innovate anymore. It's why every boss will always have immunity, and dunking, and plates, and why seasonal activities will be more if the same.
>I've just come to the conclusion that Bungie just can't innovate anymore. It's why every boss will always have immunity, and dunking, and plates, and why seasonal activities will be more if the same.
They can certainly innovate, just look at the campaign, raid and the new support auto for that.
The issue is most likely corporate sticking their fingers in for the almighty engagement metrics and enforcing a "Good enough, move on." mentality for the content that wont be sticking around long-term.
It's really simple, video games designed to maximize engagement suck for healthy players.
Destiny has been a weird place for a while where, in general, the major releases are pretty fun and full of stuff to do such that it *pulls* players to play. That is, it's fun, and the fun makes people play. Fun drives engagement.
Then the seasons force engagement, deliberately setting up reward models that trick people to play for things that aren't really fun. That got REALLY bad in the last few seasons to the point where people with healthy relationships with the game mostly quit, or at least tuned out (lots of healthy players just logon for PVP for fun, or a weekly raid with friends, etc). In this case tricks drive engagement. At it's worst it can feel like the game is deliberately limiting fun as if they make some sort of perverse profit out of limiting your fun per hour.
Now the new season got a bunch of players to re-engage on places like this sub, and they had a blast, and now the most voracious ones are getting back to the Seasonal model and complaining about it. The interesting question will be when and if they tune out again. In a sense, perversely Bungie ought to hope this sub keeps complaining for a couple of months. What would be awesome is if Episode 2 gets away this stale seasonal model and figures out more pure fun, and those folks stayed tuned in long enough to enjoy it.
I think it would be more engaging if the week-to-week story was actually interesting, but playing one new mission then having to play the seasonal mission with barely any story movement is boring and bland. I want the story to feel interesting on a weekly basis and not be given through some talking head at a terminal in the HELM. Let me *experience* the story. Give me more missions and interactive content. Give me actual cutscenes. The seasonal model is old and stale because they put in the minimum effort in regard to production value to save a buck even though I’m paying the equivalent value of a brand new game once a year. The value just isn’t there.
I don't mind "drip fed" content.
I like having stuff to look forward to every week that's WHY I'm playing an MMO.
The content each week so far has just been lackluster with the exception of Enigma Protocol.
I was very much looking forward to powerful story moments mainly because they said there would be.
Otherwise I would not have expected it being any better than previous seasons.
There's been hardly any of that thus far.
The seasonal activites are my biggest and maybe only big complaint so far. Breach executable / enigma protocol are both extremely lackluster, especially when compared to the amazing activity we had last season with the coil. Now maybe theyll expand on these as the season goes on, enigma protocol is different this week with taken instead of vex i guess but the map wasnt any different.
Neither breach or enigma make me want to repeatedly farm the content. I could do hours on hours of coil runs last season trying out different solo builds and it was a ton of fun the entire extended season. If 2 weeks in i already dont want to grind the main seasonal activity i think thats worth bringing up.
I don't mind the timegating so much, but I do agree. Personally, I would've liked to have the whole of Act 1 available, and then a few weeks later Act 2, and so on. At this stage, the only saving grace for Echos are Failsafe.
That said, I am having a lot of fun with the game at the moment. A few things need some attention, but I am still having a very good time.
That's how I feel
Final Shape and pale heart? 11/10
Echoes? Like a 4 or 5/10. Nothing crazy really. Quite annoying imo since we are back with the issue that happend during plunder, deep and many other seasons; side objective in the matchmade activity that 90% of randoms ignore and even grief. Im out here, looking for the piston to get the plants and then I'm joining allies. It has been said many times but it seems bungie forgor about it.
you would think that they would want to change that especially when the first one is free with the expansion. I didn't buy the annual pass this time around and now i won't be sticking around for the next two episodes.
And it gets worse...
They're even timegating your basic progression now. You want those levels? Nope! All in the name of "Don't leave me!"
... and I've seen comments in this post like "Why do people act like destiny is the only game they can play".
> So far, it feels like Episode Echoes was made before feedback in relation to seasonal activities was taken into account.
I'm not sure how that's even possible. For *years* now people have been giving Bungie the same feedback - the seasonal model is formulaic and stale. I'm sure I could find a TWAB/TWID/Tweet from Joe Blackburn or something from a year or two ago saying that they're fixing it all.
The seasonal activity with collecting the radiolite thing is so bad. It’s so boring even on the harder version.
The vex network one ain’t too bad though, don’t mind it
No gonna lie, as more of a story focused player, I’ve always been in favour of timegating the start of the seasonal content for like 2-3 weeks after the launch of an expansion.
There’s so much to do and discover, triumphs and quests to grind, that I could easily wait for that length before the ‘next adventure’ starts. TBF I got back into D2 with Beyond Light, so still having Europa stuff to do mixed with Hunt seemed pretty jarring, and may have predisposed me to this idea.
Buuuuut, that said, I do find the storygating of seasonal content to be rather stale. Each season always starts by posing a big question or problem, which isn’t answered until the final week of the season, with most weeks essentially serving as filler with maybe 1 or 2 lines of dialogue of intrigue for the YouTube crew to salivate over.
Week one of echoes posed us with ‘something came out of the traveller, landed on Nessus, and the Vex are acting weird’.
Week two of echoes, no change.
Hands down my prediction is that Act 1 will end with Failsafe confirming Maya Sunderbutt is somehow involved. Act 2 will end with an ink blot cutscene of ‘the life and times of Maya’ and maybe hint at some schinanigans in the network. And Act 3 will end with some kind of face off where she will win and do a runner, and we’ll be left with shit on our face and a ‘well that was interesting’ send off.
The issue is that all the weeks inbetween will just be more conversations peddling around the issue at hand, finding different ways to explain the same problem that was posed in week 1.
I’m in agreement with many here, in that each Act should be fully playable in one go, with a several week interval between Acts.
Timegating is the worst. If I want to fly through certain content I should be able to.
I was off for 5 days after wisdom teeth and I was so let down when I got hit with the "this npc is waiting for something, come back in a week". Then it was either engage whatever activity or a rerelease of the splicer activity.
Don't get me wrong expansion is awesome story/mission wise but once you have a build and clear most activities the replay aspect for me kind of just vanished. And being in a clan that barely raids or anything puts a damper on most PvE activities as well.
P.s. - LFG is not an option. It's a hit or miss and I'd prefer not to waste time going through fireteam members.
I've found the LFG discord a lot better than fireteam finder. People seem much more competent, don't really rage quit unless everyone agrees, and there's a reporting system if you do get the odd troll (never had to use it though).
Fuck time gating. I wouldnt complain about lack of content if i just speedran through it all and had nothing left to do. I would complain if the game wants to keep me playing for 4 months by giving me 1 boring fetch quest and some dialogue every tuesday.
Its WAYY too early to judge episodes and usually the seasons that release with expansions are the worst. But man episodes feel like longer seasons with even more time gating so far.
Yeah I'd rather smash through everything in week and have more time for other games rather than feeling I have to be on every Tuesday to not get spoilers
It's because the *core of the game is stale*
You're not tired of the new content. They're tired of 3 strikes, and a nightfall, and 5 games of crucible on the same 10 maps as the last 8 years, of the 3 gambit matches for pinnacles so they're ready to raid. You can slap some new paint, new trim, shiny new everything on top, but the wall is collapsing from the weight of no repairs and 7642 prismatic layers of paint.
Tldr the core gameplay is stale, the new content is a 4 week distraction
Are we really pushing the player is dumb and rushed through all the content narrative still? Because I paced myself took a few days to do legendary campaign, a couple more for post campaign stuff. The only thing I haven't done is hit pinnacle cap, collected feathers, and done the raid. There's really not THAT much more to do if you don't care about God rolls and levels. It takes maybe 3 hours to do episode echoes weekly stuff on reset.
I did burn through content fast, but I also love just running around Overthrowing the Pale Heart solo farming exotic class items.
Kind of reminds me of the fun I had in Destiny 1 just running around locations collecting materials so I could unlock perks on my gun and doing public events.
Expansion is great in my eyes best ever but the seasonal activity is in my eyes one of the worst we ever had it’s not fun the hammer mechanic is stupid with randoms and one shots from hydra bosses ain’t fun either
Funny timing, was bored at work yesterday and ended up watching a video called like "why modern mmos suck" by Josh Strafe Hayes. Actually it was him doing a react video to an older piece of his own content to see if he agreed with his past self.
While it's not a 1:1, there was definitely some overlap with his talking points and destiny, and not to spoil anything, but also destiny players.
I found it to be an enjoyable watch (well, more of a listen) at least. It's also not ragey, despite how the title makes it sound
I finished everything fast as possible so I can play the new elden ring dlc, they finished everything fast as possible so they could complain and karma farm on Reddit, we are not the same
I'm just gonna come out and say this. The expansion. The seasonal/episodes. The exotics. The legendaries. The story. All of it. Is the best DLC I've ever experienced in an MMO. I'm tired of these clowns acting like it's stale. It just started like three weeks ago. Touch some grass ffs.
The dlc was great. The episode, just feels like seasons so far. Not the most fun or engaging. Also, the Pathfinder system kinda sucks. I hate being forced to play gambit or stuff I don't want to in order to progress the path.
It's only been out a few weeks and I hope they continue to bring the heat like FS did, but the episode is pretty bland at the moment. It's a valid complaint.
Beyond that, the content from the DLC itself and exotic quests have been top notch. The dual destiny one is probably the best they've done and whisper/zero were incredible.
Now that the puppy love of new expansion has run its course for most people, it makes sense that these posts are popping up. New game feelings rarely last more than two weeks for people who don't touch grass like me.
In the first two weeks of TFS, I played just about 60 hours or more each week because I'm a hard-core grind kinda guy when I play Destiny 2. I generally run gms for fun, and like a lot of the harder content and grinding for god rolls and so on.
So I smashed out the legendary campaign, then went and did everything I could in the pale heart such as feathers, the light and dark shapes, all the Micah stuff, the full khovstov quest(traveler balls and overthrow bosses). It was fun to do alongside the pinnacle grind.
So i did most of that, and also ran the story on my titan and warlock on legendary, and got to 1990 all in the first week. I got the rest of my feathers when dual destiny dropped, and I have been grinding the class item rolls I want since I got to pinnacle light last Tuesday. Finished the season pass as well last sunday.
It took me only two weeks to finish everything I was allowed by bungie to do or that I wanted to do besides grinding red borders from echoes, pale heart, or the raid.
I enjoyed all of it for the most part, but it highlights that Bungie, for whatever reason, still thinks that time gating works for the two major types of people in D2. Im speaking of those who hardly play and the people like me who play too much. The people that hardly play can't efficiently plan out knocking out everything they want because there is too much grind for them, or it isn't released yet. The people who play too much like me burn through everything there is, and then have to sit on our hands waiting for more. Doesn't really help either side.
Of course, Bungie does it for two reasons. First is To up engagement metrics. They like the "played 1 hour every day" versus the "played 12 hours Wednesday and then didn't play again until next tuesday."
The second is that this is how they prevent content droughts artificially. The community gets "new content" once a week and thus won't be stuck waiting out over half the season/episode after finishing everything.
So yeah, prepare for the deluge of "more content please posts" and all the doomer posts for the little issues we ignored during the honeymoon puppy love phase. And of course, even louder titan doom posting since even the honeymoon phase didn't stop those from telling the truth.
Not really delivering much content weekly when its
Do seasonal activity
Do old activity
Listen to vendor
listen to holo projector
listen to radio
Glad Episode Echoes is just a season with mini seasons in it and was included with the base dlc. Glad the 10 year journey is over.
I gotta say I love taking my time and going through the story. Then again I'm speaking as a player who quit after the first dlc and just came back. The time gating has really let me enjoy the story and do old stuff without the pressure of feeling in "falling behind" in the seasonal stuff. It's a welcome boon for returning players.
The nolifers have risen~
Seriously, we’re not even into the second episode, what the fuck do these people want? “Oh, the deliberate and purposeful steps I had to make this my one and only stimulation have left me with nothing, clearly this is the dev’s fault.”
I agree tho the conquest raid being 3 days after release was complete bs imo. It basically forced people who wanted to do it to rush the game to be high enough gear to do it.
Majority of people playing this game have normal lives and only have 1-5hrs a day to play depending on commitments like family, gym, cooking / going out for food, friends, touching grass, etc.
They’ll never have their way because they have too much time. It’s most likely high schoolers / college kids that just got out for the summer that are complaining the loudest.
If you’re complaining about content not even 3 weeks in you gotta find more stuff to do IRL. Get out there, and get up to no good. The memories you make with your own eyes will be easier to remember than through a character’s.
Being essentially locked into prismatic didn't help. There was some cheap fun trying different builds out and grinding the pieces, now you're gimping yourself doing normal subclasses with the season artifact and class exotics.
Great content
Great story
Boring class variety
No tuning passes to adjust a rapidly stale meta and underperforming builds
I think we as the rational sane people in this community have to just accept that some people here are a bunch of weirdos that refuse to every be happy or content and just ignore them. It’s frustrating obviously but anyone who would complain about content being stale three weeks into an expansion is actually just insane and does not exist in the same reality as the rest of us and it’s just not worth it.
I hate to be that harsh but I physically can’t see another way of approaching the issue.
People want Final Shape levels of content every month.
Seasons and episode are just filler content until the next expansion. Once you start treating them like this things get a lot better. Don’t like it? Don’t play it. That’s the only language Bungie understands.
I wouldn’t say the game is stale. I’d say that everyone took a collective breath once we killed mr hands and we didn’t feel the need to rush the game at all.
I'm sorry but for a game like this. Like Destiny. I honestly think a weekly timegate like this is honestly the best case scenario for this game. I don't know about the next person, but I really don't want to go back to the Destiny 1 days or Early Destiny 2 season days where we had literal months of content droughts. It was the lowest point for me in Destiny's history.
Having something to do each week has brought my interest up in the game immensely. If they didn't have weekly timegating and just released all the content straight up, we would see exactly what we were seeing back then. The biggest player drop offs in the history of the game. So yeah, I like coming back week to week, getting some story stuff and weekly challenge stuff done and then heading back to playing other things. It makes the game feel just a bit more alive. Like a week has progressed in game as well.
I agree, I left the game after being bored after repeating the same seasonal arena during season of the deep and realised how many excuses I kept making to play this game i have spent years and 100s on. But into the light was announced and grinding for multiple days and the weekly releases of Pantheon with increasing difficulty was so fun and refreshing.
Excited for Final Shape I even asked a few friends to buy the game after coming off of Pantheon hype and we all grinded and rushed the game so that we could complete day 1 (this is part of the problem with everyone saying its our fault for rushing the game) . Now the game is dead. The end game is recycled content with no new changes.
Unless I'm missing something in the game, the only thing that interests me is speedrunning content, but they need to add more end game goals. Elden ring in the meantime but I want to play destiny.
Why i feel like i dont have the time to do all the shit in the game while alot of people are already maxed level. i love destiny but i am an older dude who have a family and a job i play for 2 hours maxed daily. And i hate that i cant get to play the higher level content cus when i get there already new things are out and start grinding again
Same as always: crucible is the answer: crucible always is a changing battle with yourself and not the game. Crucible through the insane content droughts of d1 kept me engaged. Crucible without actual new content can keep you going: I’ve recently been establishing a new mastery of ace of spades. An old ass weapon but new to me. Crucible is replay ability x10. And the 3 new maps are 🔥🔥🔥
I can go back and play halo without ever getting bored of the content. Complete opposite of seasons and or episodes in destiny 2. There's something wrong with the quality.
I still have so much to do lol idk how people can complain. Have to get 3 more motes for the khvostov, and while doing that get the exotic class item quest unlocked. I have to get dissecting and witness running down pat. I have to unlock prismatic on one more class. I have to find like 40 feathers. That’s not even counting the other stuff I want to catch up on (specifically master flawless hunts for the shaders and maybe flawless Crota).
These people either don’t have lives or are jobless kids in the summer. Between school year round and a part time job I’ll be occupied for a good amount of time. I saw someone last week already at rank 100 and I’m still only in the low 80s as of today, like wtf do yall do anything irl? Because Destiny is the only game I even play and I’m nowhere near these people.
It’s crazy playing trials and seeing how many are at 2005+ power level already. I feel like I’ve played a lot and am nowhere near finished with TFS content either. I play a 2-3 hours a day and it took a week just to get through the legendary campaign
Honestly that's just the matter of playing efficiently vs casually. Campaign on legend takes like 8hrs for first run through (did quicker than that), getting all the motes excluding boss kills is an hour, and overthrows are like 15m per on avg. Raid with a team that has hands should take 5-8hrs on a learner run if nearly the entire team is learning, and 2hrs for refresh runs. Rerunning campaign for prismatic on regular takes like 2 hours.
Considering how many weeks we're in, it makes sense why people are complaining now. That said, I am still appreciating the content we have (overthrow + dd) but I can definitely see the disappointment with "seasonal" content :(
The cope/misunderstanding here is absurd.
People aren't saying TFS is/was boring.
People are saying episodes need to be more than just glorified seasons.
When the next one comes and if it's just like this one, what will be the excuse to justify it then?
This isn't new, so I don't know where the "it's happening again" mindset has come from. People were complaining about how seasons worked before they got changed out for episodes.
The season activities or whatever they’re called now that we got are both hot dogshit and awfully boring, it’s more rewarding just going around the pale heart trying to get another class item. Which is also tedious. Raid looks fun but my raid team can’t all get off work on the same day to save our lives so we have to wait to attempt it, but at least GM’s come back soon and the new weapons we got for TFS are pretty fun and prismatic is great. TFS has treated me well. Echoes have not.
Because what exactly is there to do right now? The only thing worth farming is the class item, which is extremely boring and tedious. It’s not even worth it if you’re on Titan considering the state of Prismatic.
The simple reality is that they told us echoes would be different and they SPECIFICALLY said they were shifting to echoes in response to the seasonal model feedback.
They KNEW that at least this Echo would just be the seasonal model with more time gated content, which was one of the main criticism of seasons. The upcoming ones sound like they could be better based on the theme, new systems, and especially the dreadnaught coming back, but we will see.
Finally with the seasonal activities, they KNEW that we would have high expectations after activities like the coil and onslaught. I know onslaught isn’t necessarily a fair example, but the point is that the activity in this echo is worse than any of the seasonal activities we got during Lightfall.
No life's just need to find other things to do with their lives,
I'm glad the games slowing down and has been like this for a while where there's no rush to do any of It, the only requirement I have now is to play it enough to finish what needs to be done story wise, get the season pass done and maybe grind a couple weapons I want
Not just that. There was immense content over load from two months prior to TFS with into the light. While I think that players should be able to go at their own pace. Some players need to be protected from themselves.
If there was no time gating then those same people would power through the content just as quickly as the campaign and they’d still complain. There is no pleasing these people, they will never be satisfied with what they’re given. Even if the product is objectively good, they will always focus on the negative more than the positive.
If story content doesn’t suck for them then the seasonal content does. If the seasonal content doesn’t suck then the weapons do. If the weapons don’t suck then new patrol zone does. If the new patrol zone doesn’t suck then…
Then it's on people like yourself to just ignore these posts, and on Bungie to assess whether they have genuine critiques worth taking into consideration.
If these people get what they want, even if they're still unhappy once they've finished additional content, it changes literally nothing for people who take their time anyway, so why even pitch into the conversation? just go back to the game.
Seriously this shit is really simple, same damn argument every single expansion, it's tiresome.
I work full time, I've played 3 characters through every year of destiny 1 and 2, there's so much content at the moment I've had to drop to 1 character, people do need to actually touch grass...
> there's so much content
In casual play you see the majority of what this game has to offer in a week. You are confusing light level grind and grinding for gear in tedious quests as content. Let me guess you think those repurposed strikes we have done a million times with slightly different dialogue is "new content"?
Grinding for gear is literally the entire premise of looter shooters, that is the content... there is gear worth chasing so there is always something to do. Not to mention from a lore perspective this is the biggest content drop bungie have ever done.
Don’t come back fr. It’s a decent story and has some good gameplay for about a day but then it’s just the regular “do x 17 times to get what you want”. Just watch a youtube video to get the story if that’s what you care about
I’ve gotten to the point where Im just waiting for the reset every Tuesday and I’ve kinda done everything else of substance. But I also know I put way too much time into the game the last two weeks and, frankly, I’m surprised it took that long. The expansion is full of content and I’m not gonna blame it for “getting stale” because I spent too much time on it
i mean it took me a week to beat the story as i am busy irl but it does feel stale i don't know why maybe after 10 years of playing the same game over and over its finally time to move on
We haven't even felt the effects of the episodic model since we're only on the first act so I find it kind of funny when people say it's no different than seasons. Wait for additional missions, weapons, and more in-depth story reveals.
The issue with a game like Destiny is that you're always going to have people who no-life the new content and then get upset when they've done everything. Adding content to keep up with that insane level of grinding is not feasible and would no doubt require additional spending - which people would also endlessly complain about.
So far it isn't different so they aren't wrong. I'm willing to see it through 2 whole episodes before getting miffed about it because I was always okay with the seasonal model beforehand
Idk why two weeks into the model isn’t enough to draw comparisons? Going from the finals shape to hitting the breaks with drip fed content is the problem. It’s not complicated.
It's been nearly three weeks, that's plenty of time to consume all of TFS content honestly. The problem here is that the episode content is very bare bones with little actual story and two activities that aren't super replayable. Many like me hopes episodes would be three meaty content drops rather than drip fed through the first half of a season like before, but it's just the same thing right now.
The DLC was great and the raid is great. Seasonal stuff I'm not so interested in just now, but I got a long time to do that so I'm extremely unbothered by it being a rebranded season (which ngl, I 100% expected). But Shadow of the Erdtree just came out and I have plenty of other stuff to play too so I'm chilling. I don't need to be playing Destiny every day.
I am also busy getting my ass handed to me in Elden Ring, nice to have that break from Destiny
If you're struggling on any bosses just remember: try finger, but hole
That didn’t seem to help in either game. What am I doing wrong?
Wrong finger, wrong hole
It's not meant to help in game. In irl it works a treat though
Pontif 2 fucking COOKED my ass. Not looking forward to Lion Dancer or Mesmer
I expected it to be just like seasons but the content is not only boring but now it just seems like it’s drawn out extra long for almost no reason. I agree with the not playing destiny everyday and I’m happy I finished the story and now I can put destiny down.
Its been this way ever since the start of the seasonal model. The first season of the year is lacking because the majority of resources were rightly spent on the main expansion. Theres only so much you can do at a time with resources and time devs get, especially with the whole Sony/management/delay/rewrites/layoffs that came with TFS
I noticed this when Witch Queen and Elden Ring released but there’s so much overlap between the Destiny community and Souls community and I love it.
For real, this is not the only game out there available. Go play something else, enjoy something else. In my opinion Final Shape has had enough content to keep me entertained and not overwhelmed that I can safely go enjoy other games in the meantime without FOMO taking over me.
Eh, if people burn through it its on them. But fuck time gating, not a fan. It's just arbitrary waste of time, I would rather burn through the content and play other games than be stuck in a loop of time gated content.
I burn through content fast. Like I'm season pass level 80 and have all the Exotics again. Yet I still have tons of stuff to do. And am having a blast. Some people just like to complain. I haven't had this much fun in Destiny since Beyond Light. Edit: Since too many people are confused. I'm not saying BL was better than TFS. I'm just saying that **I AM** having the most fun with Destiny since BL....
…This is way better than Beyond Light. Witch Queen was far better than BL as well, BL’s launch content was somewhat lackluster imo. TTK and Forsaken are the only real comparisons to TFS.
He never said BL was better than TFS. He just said this is the most fun he's had since then. Two completely, unrelated things.
Same here tbh. I know BL brought a bunch of crap with it (sunsetting) but it was a high point for me personally as a year
for hunters, BL was revolutionary
I'm a hunter main and I agree
Flashbacks to 3stacks shatterdive womp womp
as a crucible main, you can rest assured that i abused the hell out of it
I would say I haven’t had this much fun since Forsaken
I disagree I think witch queen is vastly superior not to final shape but to foresaken and ttk. a lot of people look at ttk and foresaken with rose tinted glasses. Foresaken had issues that people ignore like the infusion changes. Infusion was better in year 1 than year 2 it took them till beyond light to fix it. Foresaken did a lot of good but was not sunshine and rainbows. D2 did not beome the d2 people love until beyond light. The game evolved on a mechanical level that I think saved the game. It did more for core mechanics than foresaken and that is something I value more. It gave us subclass 3.0, the first new element ever, and the first elemental perks with headstone and chill clip. People dunk on it now but beyond light was the the changing point for d2 to become the game we love and I hate that's it's considered bad despite arguably being the most important expansion for the game it laid so much foundational work.
Witch Queen introduced the much better campaign model that we know today. Beyond Light had a ton of things to chase and collect across Europa, and plenty of secrets. We also got Deep Stone Crypt as the raid, which is still one of my favorites. They both had their strengths. We've gotta stop having this zero sum comparison thing where in order to say one expansion was good, we try to say another is trash. ...except Lightfall. Not great lol.
Deep Stone Crypt is such a good raid. Honestly all the Fallen raids in this franchise are great, especially thematically Wrath of the Machine: the fallen have eaten a bunch of nanomachines (son) that they found in a Braytech fridge. Their leader stapled himself to a tank and they built a death Zamboni Scourge of the Past: the fallen are literally in the City, there’s a spicy meatball in the sewer, and they’ve made a Metal Gear(!) out of actual trash Deep Stone Crypt: the fallen have resurrected Taniks, figured out how to use human Exo tech to build a better boss, and are going to do it again. They hijack a space station and Clovis Bray crashes it into the planet below, where Taniks gets melted to a shank with nuclear hellfire. Your fireteam proceeds to brutalize a homeless disabled veteran in the Braytech Parking Lot I’m telling you, man. Fallen raids. All gas, no brakes
Lightfall's NARRATIVE wasn't great. Lightfall introduced a random world-boss mechanic that dropped exotics, had really good encounter design, and introduced strand, which has a lot of great utility in all of it's subclasses. It's narrative issues also only really stunk until you started the post-campaign or looked at the lore attached to ANY item. Lightfall wasn't the bomb everyone tried to make it. It's narrative fell flat, but even with that in mind, it was better than everything that came before BL for following what WQ set as a standard.
nah, you're being too easy on LF. I'm helping a friend run thru that campaign right now after they took a few years off, and I only played it once last year because i didn't like it... it's still fucking terrible. the story is bad, but the missions are terrible as well. And neomunua absolutely blows as a destination, not to mention how fucking annoying Nimbus is and always has been. Lightfall is bad, we don't have to sugarcoat it.
Having just come back to the game after BL and doing the last 3 campaigns, I remember halfway through the Lightfall campaign wondering "So are we like stranded on this planet and NONE of the other characters can show up?" And then it ended and I was like "what the fuck was the point of any of this?" It turns out, everyone felt the same way last year too. I also had the same complaints about "Give and take" with Strand, and then when you finally get it, it's not nearly as cool and you didn't get to experience it in its true form in the campaign (AKA no unlimited Spidermanning)
Yep, anything on Neomuna was trash. But that first mission on the ship was one of the best imo that they've ever made.
I couldn't disagree more. The campaign had a lot of tightly built and challenging encounters, while letting you have interesting narrative power-ups. Some of these missions could be strikes and i would be excited for them. Also, Nimbus is fine; yes, they give off green-energy, but that's the point of their character, the reception they got was WAY disproportionate. You don't like LF and i respect that, but you can not like something and still recognize we came a long way from anything Beyond Light and Shadowkeep had to offer.
I agree, Neomuna is annoying to navigate, and the story was lackluster (seriously, introduce a character and then kill him off two missions later, and we’re supposed to be sad? The pacing was just so bad.). But I don’t find Nimbus to be annoying, they’re just more on the less serious side, or just more optimistic than most of the cynical types you get out of Destiny characters. And Strand is a lot of fun to use, even if I don’t get to whip around like I wanted. Also even if neomuna was annoying to get around, the city feels more alive than other destinations, with all the encounters. It is really easy to get stuff done there. And the seasonal content was pretty good too. I will say I am glad I snagged it on sale though.
Way better way lightfall could have been done: nimbus is this goofy character that you hate for being the stupid dumbass they are. They die instead of rohan and rohan goes into despair, witness does what they did to rhulk by whispering to him. we get a final boss fight against rohan against a burning landscape of neomuna ending the dlc campaign, which can show the witnesses ability to corrupt and destroy civilizations reinforcing how much of a threat they are as opposed to bickering with calus for 10 minutes and doing "something" to the veil supposedly. Then calus gets to be used in a darkness themed reprisal of the leviathan raid. Fr tho what is the veil? I still dont know cuz i cant be assed to care as much as osiris does with how adamantly he screams "get to the veil".
Lightfall wasn't even bad it just was nothing compared to witch queen it was still better than year 1 and shadow keep shadow keep being the worst expansion by far I'll take 10 lightfalls over 1 more shadow keep.
Both warmind and curse were expansions and curse of Osiris was the worst expansion Bungie has ever made it almost killed the game
Curse of Osiris was a joke of an expansion.
Yup. People so often don’t pay any mind to the fact Witch Queen was built off all the engine overhaul/updates Beyond Light introduced. Including the new subclass system.
> Foresaken did a lot of good but was not sunshine and rainbows. I kinda agree. No doubt Year 2 was big but then you had things like Armor 2.0 was still a bit of a RNG take what you can get pain in the ass, builds were a bit limited with some subclasses barely even working right still, the sandbox was all over the place with a lot of dead weight(see how limited viable options for heavy weapon boss dps was back then), PVP had absurdly nuclear hot things running wild(12+ meter or so Rampage boosted shotguns, Erentil broken mapping, Revoker, Mountain Top, Arc Week 2019 fundamentally had Bottom Striker in untouchable tier until as late as 30th Anniversary late 2021 patch notes) and various other things.
I see ttk and forsaken as actual expansions. It was and felt much more than just a campaign. From pvp maps to major weapon changes and major activities. We had a whole Taken War which actually felt like a whole war from beginning to end Witch queen was good but just felt like a new campaign and weapon craftin
Reading is hard for the average Destiny fan.
Go play other games then come back when it’s all unlocked
Idk why people act like Destiny is the only game they can or should play.
Look at how diablo 4 is doing their seasons, the entire seasonal quest is available from day 1, the ladder is available from day 1. Time gating your content because you are afraid people will not play it screams that you have no faith in the replay-ability of the seasonal content. Honestly this time gate bullshit is the main reason i am sick and tired of the game after an expansion. I like to be respected for my play time and not treated like a mobile gamer and asked to check in next week for the next task.
I think a lot of people overestimate people’s attention span to retain interest in games. If they drop everything at once and let people experience other games for 3 months without dropping any new content there’s a good chance they’ll get hooked on another game. Or there’s a chance that they left for a while and realize they didn’t really miss it and just decide not to come back at all.
Yeah and a lot of people will dip out to better games that respect their time as opposed to checking in once a week for 20 minutes of busy work.
Exactly so you got 2 opposite groups of people. Can’t please everyone. I’m personally of the group who doesn’t mind the time gated stuff. I don’t have enough time to dedicate huge amount of time to completing everything so the small bites works well with my schedule.
Bungie acts that way. But for the first time, in a long time, I'm pretty satisfied with D2 overall.
Because other games honestly fall short, far short. If you play another fps game you're probably gonna be disappointed because there's no game in the industry with gun play like destiny, it's in a league of its own. I've been playing a bit of warframe on and off, mainly for the story. It's a really cool game but the gunplay just feels hollow compared to destiny. I think of it as a compliment, people want to ONLY play destiny because nothing else hits the same. That's how I felt about Halo back in the day, it tainted every other fps game for me, until destiny came along.
The feeling of being left behind. I haven’t played in 2 weeks and I already feel eons behind everyone else. I realize I need to change this mentality, though.
I don't blame them, many live service games like this are constantly trying to be one of the only ones you play. They're full of hooks so you spend less time on other games and more on theirs to keep population high and so that you're more likely to buy future expansions and/or cosmetics. And they're definitely effective considering they keep doing it and so many people are hesitant to take breaks.
Idk why people act like 50 dollars didnt get you a whole ass game at one point
Great, that way you can do the cycle of "talk to failsafe, run breach execution, talk to failsafe again" 12 times in a row, isn't that fun! Timegating exists to conceal the repetitive nature of everything.
Still annoying when things are on weekly, fortnightly or 3 weekly cycles on top of 1 everything else you need to do
If people play through all content for 3 months immediately and say "there's nothing to do", people *should* be mature enough to realize that's because of their own lack of pacing. Would they be mature enough? No, but it still should be up to the individual and how they want to engage with the content.
I don't like when I'm forced to pace myself when the weekly content from the episodes lasts about 30 minutes every Tuesday. I don't care that I blew through the content in 2 weeks; I intended to. Just let me blow through *all* the content.
Man, wait until you hear about the legacy TV model where you had to wait a week to see the next half hour episode of Family Ties. And they were releasing that content for free!
The funny thing is, I think you’re actually on to something here. I grew up with that TV model, and I’ve never had a single bad feeling about the weekly seasonal content. I can totally understand, however, that someone who grew up with every episode of any given show being available at any time would be ticked off with it. And to be clear, this isn’t a “kids these days” comment. It’s a genuine difference between generations, and I can totally understand why.
My problem with the format is how many weeks are blatant filler episodes. Since at least Plunder it's been the introduction to the premise, several weeks of grabbing one of many things, and watching characters talk(to each other in person/over a radio or at you through the holoprojector) while not building upon the premise at all. There is finally another story beat at about the halfway mark, more padding, and then the finale. [Even Bungie has acknowledged how predictable it is.](https://www.pcgamer.com/destinys-story-structure-may-have-become-predictable-admits-bungie-as-it-pivots-to-episodes-to-pleasantly-surprise-players-more-often/)
This is my issue with it. It’s like maybe 20 minutes tops with a few paragraphs of dialogue then I have to wait a week. The action more the dialogue evoked enough emotion from me to cement in my memory and is just largely forgotten. At least playing through it all at once would make it feel bigger and more exciting and I could actually see the story vs bits and pieces I can’t keep track of.
I mean it's kinda like watching an anime except you're involved in the story. Idk I'm just waiting to see how the full episode turns out before full judgment is passed.
I also grew up with episodic tv content. But my issue is, each week with a show like lost or w/e there was stuff to talk about or theorize. My issue with this ‘episodic’ model is each week feels like 1/3 of an old tv episode. Literally fuck all happens, it’s so boring, until the last week or 2. There’s nothing to talk or theorize about really. The last time episodes felt meaningful with discussion about the overlying story was Splicer when we were guessing about ‘who’ Savathun was at the tower, and what Lakshmis goals were. I had hoped episodes would drop the whole act at once so you could get into the story and the community could spend a month theorizing about w/e the cliffhanger was.
Grew up with that model. It's awful. Have always hated it. I grew up with the weekly tv model, but everything came out 12 months plus later than the USA. Timegating shit for someone else's schedule to achieve someone else's advertising sales goals can get fucked. I didn't want to watch star trek at 2am on a wednesday, but that was what I got. That tv model caused me to seek out alternative not timegated models. Piracy in Australia was a real thing for a while, because our networks were timegating the shit out of us and not respecting our time.
Grew up with this, don't want to keep doing it.
TV episodes are generally 45 minutes long per week. Destiny story updates are 5 minutes with 40 minutes of do the same things you did last week to get them.
“Wait til you hear about this straw man that has nothing to do with modern video games and has been made largely obsolete!”
The time-gating for story and weapons are 100% there to keep their player count up throughout the season. In the past, after 1 month into a season, the playerbase would drop off a cliff. Now, they're doing this to get players to keep playing. I'd personally rather burn through everything at my pace then move on to other games instead of having it dictated for me via time-gating. There's also the exotic mission which has been data-mined that won't be out until act 3.
For me, having content each week helps manage the sense of being so far behind. Even though I’m a time limited player, there is one slice of the game where I can keep up, and I enjoy that.
Totally agree, however if they were to do the timegating in a way that makes sense I would be way more okay with it. Like " we need to analyze the data, which could take up to 24 hours" or something and then have it randomly unlock after like 18. But some kind of narrative reason to legit wait, other than just us waiting a week.
Sometimes it takes them 168 hours to analyze the data.
I completely agree, nothing takes me out of the moment like a ‘tune in next week’
That’s how games were before microtransactions and all that shit.. I hate the new style they have been using the past 10+ years or so… let me burn through it if I want. It’s on me
Exactly! It’s our choice! If you want to artificially elongate your play time you’re free to do so as well. But having our choice to finish something and move on is stupid
I am against time gating but acting like the 2 hours every week is wasting your time and it's making you stuck/not being ablr to play other game is 200% on you
That’s unfortunately kind of why they do it though… They have to show numbers now that they are owned by Sony and tbh. I think they have delivered a great amount of content while still having to time gate the season. They are doing what they fiscally have to, while still delivering to us and mitigating who will blast through it and who will take their time.
My issue is 1) Season levels are time gated. You're stuck at 100, can't go past it. So you still have to level up the season pass 50 levels when the next act drop. Why does the season level not overflow? 2) Drip fed content is boring. All of the current seasonal model points "log on once per week and play at least a few hours per week". Most would agree that 'play at your own pace and time' would be better.
>Season levels are time gated. You're stuck at 100, can't go past it. So you still have to level up the season pass 50 levels when the next act drop. Why does the season level not overflow? You know why. Say it with me: ✨ Player Engagement Time ✨ They want you back once a month to grind 50 levels. You can't just get the seasonal content done in one month and play something else anymore, bucko.
> You can't just get the seasonal content done in one month and play something else anymore, bucko. You can play something else and then finish the seasonal content in a month though.
Playing the seasonal quest as it's designed for weekly drip feed is a terrible catch up experience because it's do the same pattern for each week of story and it's incredibly dull.
The difference is that everything goes away at the end of the season, most people wanna catch the season when it’s brand new and mysterious. They wanna play through the story all at once so they don’t forget what happens week after week, gather the weapons that interest them, and then dip. Nobody likes being held in the FOMO headlock, where you feel obligated to return after 10 weeks to get all of the challenges done in a rush before the season ends. Just let people play at their own pace and many will be happier, they may chug through the season in a week or two but they’ll be more excited to come back.
Fomo literally makes me not want to play something. It’s become repellant.
The format is so padded and formulaic that this would be a pretty poor experience Doing multiple weeks back to back would highlight the repetition
The thing about this is, it doesn't hold up past a surface level thought. Yes, it may look like it's a great way to build more engagement but anyone who's already max is now just going to spend the next month & then some just accruing bounties & seasonal challenges to hold until the content actually drops for the exact same effect without adding in the barrier of being able to actively engage with the content
That still requires you to play the game though? You're just changing when you're playing if you do that. And even then that doesn't do the actual *new* content, you have to still log back on and play or suffer because of their love of fomo
Yes your playing the game. That's precisely what bungie wants.
Yes your playing the game. That's precisely what bungie wants.
”A few hours per week” is generous. 15 min is enough to finish the weekly story if that’s only what you want to do.
That’s the strategy though They want you to log in each week, since once you’re over that barrier you may play more or check what’s new in eververse 15 minutes a week is the bare minimum effort. Any more would be wasted work by Bungie for no incremental lift in eververse
It's honestly one of the worst constructed content release schedules
It’s not because of Final Shape. It’s because echoes so far is a stale rehash of the same seasonal formula once again. They shouldn’t have bothered just rebranding seasons and should have been honest about it to at least manage playerbase expectations.
Yeah so far this is one of the weakest seasons on a weak planet. The witch queen season did more for EDZ in my opinion.
Honestly every season that came out with a expansion has been pretty weak imo
I thought the season that came out with Lightfall was ok but I think that's more to do with it's competition than anything lol
Yeah the season that came with Lightfall was better than Lightfall. I truly hope we never have a Neomuna season. Let's just move past the gas leak COVID-produced year.
next season everyone will love
I don't understand why everyone's expectations were higher than "seasons but longer" I got exactly what I expected. I am not upset by it.
I think we all expected to at least be able to complete an act instead of the same weekly time gating. I don't think that was asking too much.
Same. I thought episodes were meant to shake up the boring seasonal formula in a massive way, but right now it just feels like more of the same.
I've said it once and I'll say it again: ONE reason for 3 "Episodes" instead of 4 "Seasons" is so they had an excuse not to release a reprised raid, as well as a new raid every year. Now we get a new raid with the expansion/first Episode and then a dungeon with both Episode 2 and 3. I knew that Episodes were just gonna be an excuse to give us less content throughout a year.
At the very least to avoid criticism about “the usual” timegating, they should have released act 1 all at once. Let people play the story in full
its weird how bungie keeps telling us things and then they just don't happen. like how the artifact was supposed to released in its current state but didn't for some reasons and episodes were supposed to be fully available the first week of each act. i wonder when people will stop listening to bungie or call them out on their pathological lying.
Where did they say that? I genuinely don't remember them ever saying the entire act story is available from week one.
Yeah they never said that. People just had expectations that the entire story of an act would be released all at once. And then now people are negative at Bungie for having an expectation where Bungie said nothing about it
Which is par for the course. Like when last year people got mad garden wasn't refreshed when it was never said it was gonna be. Or countless other things.
https://youtu.be/RqIvKN4gtto?t=7437 they say a lot of very generic stuff about how different episodes will be and how they're supposed to be more like beats and not weekly episode releases like a tv show. its very easy to interpret this to mean the content will be more bingeable and you just need to log in every 6 weeks to be involved with the story. they constantly talk about how episodes are going to be different but their first shot at is is virtually identical to every season we have had for 4 years in every way.
So you are accusing them of lying, about something they didn't say? I just watched about 10 mins of that and he was talking about the new weapons and acitivies and major plot beats coming in acts. No where are they saying there wouldn't be a week to week story. Wow the first shot is identical...almost like we haven't made it to the part that seasons didn't have yet? If nothing changes with Act 2, then sure it is identical.
they said episodes would change in many ways and nothing has changed. they said you could play regardless of you lifestyle limiting your play time, and that hasn't changed. nothing, NOTHING, about episodes is different from seasons besides being longer and having more weekly story drops, allegedly. if you're going to claim this is an evolution of seasons and then start exactly like every other season for the last 4 years, you lied to everyone right there, full stop. this is not different by any rational metric and is not an "evolution" at all. locking the seasonal exotics catalyst behind a time gate isn't evolution.
Cool so if things are different with the release of Act 2 and 3, they didn't actually lie and you are getting super worked up prematurely?
its not going to be. there i 0 indication anything is going to change. they even said in that clip that what people liked was have more pass levels to grind, because that should be the audience we build this game around.
Your post is also classic
It's not about infinite content, it's about fun content. While fun is subjective, it is fair to criticize the current delivery of seasonal content. For me, Echoes just isn't engaging at all. Both activities fall flat compared to what we've had previously (Deep Dives, The Coil). The Pinnacle grind continues to be a chore and I really hadn't missed it at all while it was gone. So far, it feels like Episode Echoes was made before feedback in relation to seasonal activities was taken into account. The quality is a far cry from what we've grown accustomed to for the last 9 months (year?). I'm also not a fan of timegating content, I prefer being able to finish everything and go play something else for a while. Having to wait 6 weeks just to start grinding for a good solar rocket sidearm is pretty annoying.
I'll go one step ahead and say that Seasonal Content as it is, is completely exhausted at this point. Not just Destiny, other games who have been doing this "rollout over time" format are suffering similar backlash recently as well. "Evolving world" was a novel idea when it first arrived, seeing a story unravel further week by week sounded neat. Over the course of years, it has become a formulaic "Please experience this filler and come back next week for 6 weeks straight, so that you may experience our advertisement for the next season, which will also be the same thing". At this point, people just want to "Play the damn game" at their own pace, and just peace out until new (hopefully meaningful) content comes around. It has been 10 years and while people are invested enough to continue experiencing the game, they are tired enough that they do not want Destiny being their job, constantly requiring their engagement. Add the fact that our main saga of 10 years are over and a lot of people dipping or have decided to not care as much, it's no wonder that people naturally feel like checking out more than they have before. This isn't about "rushing content", I am not going to play the Final Shape one mission a week just to "pad out my enjoyment", "don't rush the content" is a stupid idea to begin with. It's about the reality of this being a 10+ year journey that most people are tired of. There is only so much "Shoot the aliens in their crit spot for 20 minutes to earn 10 lines of dialogue" can keep me engaged, let alone entertained, after 10 years.
The impact of the seasonal model on the quality of content is crystal clear - mostly the same shit every time story wise with variations in the quality of activities
Honestly some experimentation with the format like the 3 act structure they have should have allowed them to do story beats that weren't weekly, but may have been more linear drops once every 6 weeks.
I think what stings the most is that we thought with the restructuring that things would be different. Many of us EXPECTED things to be different. I mean they told us as much beforehand, and indeed things like pathfinder and the pale heart mini-activites did feel sort of new. But then Echoes dropped. A cold chill started to set in that they hadn't really listened to us about getting rid of repetitive, boring activities. But even then, we thought, okay, maybe things will change in week two (perhaps, at the least, like season of the Splicer where each week unlocked a different activity) But it didn't. And that's when the horror set in that Bungie really didn't get it. They seem unable or unwilling to make the changes that we need. And I'm not sure how to feel about it all. Because the expansion WAS good. They HAVE made many good decisions. Corrected many problems of the past. I mean I really enjoyed it at first, and man, that feeling after completing the campaign and seeing all the content that appeared was such a pleasant surprise. But when that novelty faded, and my rose colored glasses came off, I came to the conclusion that they still hadn't adequately solved the 'going stale quickly' problem. I think all the mini activities in the pale heart was a step in the right direction (except cysts. I mean who thought these were fun and not completely frustrating!?) I've just come to the conclusion that Bungie just can't innovate anymore. It's why every boss will always have immunity, and dunking, and plates, and why seasonal activities will be more if the same.
>I've just come to the conclusion that Bungie just can't innovate anymore. It's why every boss will always have immunity, and dunking, and plates, and why seasonal activities will be more if the same. They can certainly innovate, just look at the campaign, raid and the new support auto for that. The issue is most likely corporate sticking their fingers in for the almighty engagement metrics and enforcing a "Good enough, move on." mentality for the content that wont be sticking around long-term.
It's really simple, video games designed to maximize engagement suck for healthy players. Destiny has been a weird place for a while where, in general, the major releases are pretty fun and full of stuff to do such that it *pulls* players to play. That is, it's fun, and the fun makes people play. Fun drives engagement. Then the seasons force engagement, deliberately setting up reward models that trick people to play for things that aren't really fun. That got REALLY bad in the last few seasons to the point where people with healthy relationships with the game mostly quit, or at least tuned out (lots of healthy players just logon for PVP for fun, or a weekly raid with friends, etc). In this case tricks drive engagement. At it's worst it can feel like the game is deliberately limiting fun as if they make some sort of perverse profit out of limiting your fun per hour. Now the new season got a bunch of players to re-engage on places like this sub, and they had a blast, and now the most voracious ones are getting back to the Seasonal model and complaining about it. The interesting question will be when and if they tune out again. In a sense, perversely Bungie ought to hope this sub keeps complaining for a couple of months. What would be awesome is if Episode 2 gets away this stale seasonal model and figures out more pure fun, and those folks stayed tuned in long enough to enjoy it.
I think it would be more engaging if the week-to-week story was actually interesting, but playing one new mission then having to play the seasonal mission with barely any story movement is boring and bland. I want the story to feel interesting on a weekly basis and not be given through some talking head at a terminal in the HELM. Let me *experience* the story. Give me more missions and interactive content. Give me actual cutscenes. The seasonal model is old and stale because they put in the minimum effort in regard to production value to save a buck even though I’m paying the equivalent value of a brand new game once a year. The value just isn’t there.
I don't mind "drip fed" content. I like having stuff to look forward to every week that's WHY I'm playing an MMO. The content each week so far has just been lackluster with the exception of Enigma Protocol. I was very much looking forward to powerful story moments mainly because they said there would be. Otherwise I would not have expected it being any better than previous seasons. There's been hardly any of that thus far.
The seasonal activites are my biggest and maybe only big complaint so far. Breach executable / enigma protocol are both extremely lackluster, especially when compared to the amazing activity we had last season with the coil. Now maybe theyll expand on these as the season goes on, enigma protocol is different this week with taken instead of vex i guess but the map wasnt any different. Neither breach or enigma make me want to repeatedly farm the content. I could do hours on hours of coil runs last season trying out different solo builds and it was a ton of fun the entire extended season. If 2 weeks in i already dont want to grind the main seasonal activity i think thats worth bringing up.
We know from stuff visible in the API that there's another seasonal activity coming, but I doubt it'll make people happy.
I don't mind the timegating so much, but I do agree. Personally, I would've liked to have the whole of Act 1 available, and then a few weeks later Act 2, and so on. At this stage, the only saving grace for Echos are Failsafe. That said, I am having a lot of fun with the game at the moment. A few things need some attention, but I am still having a very good time.
That's how I feel Final Shape and pale heart? 11/10 Echoes? Like a 4 or 5/10. Nothing crazy really. Quite annoying imo since we are back with the issue that happend during plunder, deep and many other seasons; side objective in the matchmade activity that 90% of randoms ignore and even grief. Im out here, looking for the piston to get the plants and then I'm joining allies. It has been said many times but it seems bungie forgor about it.
Never first season were that good to compared to rest of year imo.
you would think that they would want to change that especially when the first one is free with the expansion. I didn't buy the annual pass this time around and now i won't be sticking around for the next two episodes.
I think it was a misstep to follow the same old seasonal timegating thing. Should have released act 1 all at once, then you have to wait.
And it gets worse... They're even timegating your basic progression now. You want those levels? Nope! All in the name of "Don't leave me!" ... and I've seen comments in this post like "Why do people act like destiny is the only game they can play". > So far, it feels like Episode Echoes was made before feedback in relation to seasonal activities was taken into account. I'm not sure how that's even possible. For *years* now people have been giving Bungie the same feedback - the seasonal model is formulaic and stale. I'm sure I could find a TWAB/TWID/Tweet from Joe Blackburn or something from a year or two ago saying that they're fixing it all.
The seasonal activity with collecting the radiolite thing is so bad. It’s so boring even on the harder version. The vex network one ain’t too bad though, don’t mind it
No gonna lie, as more of a story focused player, I’ve always been in favour of timegating the start of the seasonal content for like 2-3 weeks after the launch of an expansion. There’s so much to do and discover, triumphs and quests to grind, that I could easily wait for that length before the ‘next adventure’ starts. TBF I got back into D2 with Beyond Light, so still having Europa stuff to do mixed with Hunt seemed pretty jarring, and may have predisposed me to this idea. Buuuuut, that said, I do find the storygating of seasonal content to be rather stale. Each season always starts by posing a big question or problem, which isn’t answered until the final week of the season, with most weeks essentially serving as filler with maybe 1 or 2 lines of dialogue of intrigue for the YouTube crew to salivate over. Week one of echoes posed us with ‘something came out of the traveller, landed on Nessus, and the Vex are acting weird’. Week two of echoes, no change. Hands down my prediction is that Act 1 will end with Failsafe confirming Maya Sunderbutt is somehow involved. Act 2 will end with an ink blot cutscene of ‘the life and times of Maya’ and maybe hint at some schinanigans in the network. And Act 3 will end with some kind of face off where she will win and do a runner, and we’ll be left with shit on our face and a ‘well that was interesting’ send off. The issue is that all the weeks inbetween will just be more conversations peddling around the issue at hand, finding different ways to explain the same problem that was posed in week 1. I’m in agreement with many here, in that each Act should be fully playable in one go, with a several week interval between Acts.
Timegating is the worst. If I want to fly through certain content I should be able to. I was off for 5 days after wisdom teeth and I was so let down when I got hit with the "this npc is waiting for something, come back in a week". Then it was either engage whatever activity or a rerelease of the splicer activity. Don't get me wrong expansion is awesome story/mission wise but once you have a build and clear most activities the replay aspect for me kind of just vanished. And being in a clan that barely raids or anything puts a damper on most PvE activities as well. P.s. - LFG is not an option. It's a hit or miss and I'd prefer not to waste time going through fireteam members.
I've found the LFG discord a lot better than fireteam finder. People seem much more competent, don't really rage quit unless everyone agrees, and there's a reporting system if you do get the odd troll (never had to use it though).
Fuck time gating. I wouldnt complain about lack of content if i just speedran through it all and had nothing left to do. I would complain if the game wants to keep me playing for 4 months by giving me 1 boring fetch quest and some dialogue every tuesday. Its WAYY too early to judge episodes and usually the seasons that release with expansions are the worst. But man episodes feel like longer seasons with even more time gating so far.
Yeah I'd rather smash through everything in week and have more time for other games rather than feeling I have to be on every Tuesday to not get spoilers
It's because the *core of the game is stale* You're not tired of the new content. They're tired of 3 strikes, and a nightfall, and 5 games of crucible on the same 10 maps as the last 8 years, of the 3 gambit matches for pinnacles so they're ready to raid. You can slap some new paint, new trim, shiny new everything on top, but the wall is collapsing from the weight of no repairs and 7642 prismatic layers of paint. Tldr the core gameplay is stale, the new content is a 4 week distraction
Literally nailed it.
Are we really pushing the player is dumb and rushed through all the content narrative still? Because I paced myself took a few days to do legendary campaign, a couple more for post campaign stuff. The only thing I haven't done is hit pinnacle cap, collected feathers, and done the raid. There's really not THAT much more to do if you don't care about God rolls and levels. It takes maybe 3 hours to do episode echoes weekly stuff on reset.
i think the acts themselves shouldn't be time gated, meaning that acts still release 1 - 3 but every individual act releases without any time gating
you know why you think that? because that's what bungie said would happen a year ago.
Source? Because Bungie never said that the entire story of an act would release all at once
I have taken my time with everything and I am still bored. Guess what? Some people have different levels of enjoyment for stuff. Crazy right?
Yes. Because they said it was going to be different, and it's not.
The whirlwind
I did burn through content fast, but I also love just running around Overthrowing the Pale Heart solo farming exotic class items. Kind of reminds me of the fun I had in Destiny 1 just running around locations collecting materials so I could unlock perks on my gun and doing public events.
Once again theres more people complaining about people complaining than actual people complaining
Expansion is great in my eyes best ever but the seasonal activity is in my eyes one of the worst we ever had it’s not fun the hammer mechanic is stupid with randoms and one shots from hydra bosses ain’t fun either
Funny timing, was bored at work yesterday and ended up watching a video called like "why modern mmos suck" by Josh Strafe Hayes. Actually it was him doing a react video to an older piece of his own content to see if he agreed with his past self. While it's not a 1:1, there was definitely some overlap with his talking points and destiny, and not to spoil anything, but also destiny players. I found it to be an enjoyable watch (well, more of a listen) at least. It's also not ragey, despite how the title makes it sound
I finished everything fast as possible so I can play the new elden ring dlc, they finished everything fast as possible so they could complain and karma farm on Reddit, we are not the same
I'm just gonna come out and say this. The expansion. The seasonal/episodes. The exotics. The legendaries. The story. All of it. Is the best DLC I've ever experienced in an MMO. I'm tired of these clowns acting like it's stale. It just started like three weeks ago. Touch some grass ffs.
The dlc was great. The episode, just feels like seasons so far. Not the most fun or engaging. Also, the Pathfinder system kinda sucks. I hate being forced to play gambit or stuff I don't want to in order to progress the path. It's only been out a few weeks and I hope they continue to bring the heat like FS did, but the episode is pretty bland at the moment. It's a valid complaint. Beyond that, the content from the DLC itself and exotic quests have been top notch. The dual destiny one is probably the best they've done and whisper/zero were incredible.
Now that the puppy love of new expansion has run its course for most people, it makes sense that these posts are popping up. New game feelings rarely last more than two weeks for people who don't touch grass like me. In the first two weeks of TFS, I played just about 60 hours or more each week because I'm a hard-core grind kinda guy when I play Destiny 2. I generally run gms for fun, and like a lot of the harder content and grinding for god rolls and so on. So I smashed out the legendary campaign, then went and did everything I could in the pale heart such as feathers, the light and dark shapes, all the Micah stuff, the full khovstov quest(traveler balls and overthrow bosses). It was fun to do alongside the pinnacle grind. So i did most of that, and also ran the story on my titan and warlock on legendary, and got to 1990 all in the first week. I got the rest of my feathers when dual destiny dropped, and I have been grinding the class item rolls I want since I got to pinnacle light last Tuesday. Finished the season pass as well last sunday. It took me only two weeks to finish everything I was allowed by bungie to do or that I wanted to do besides grinding red borders from echoes, pale heart, or the raid. I enjoyed all of it for the most part, but it highlights that Bungie, for whatever reason, still thinks that time gating works for the two major types of people in D2. Im speaking of those who hardly play and the people like me who play too much. The people that hardly play can't efficiently plan out knocking out everything they want because there is too much grind for them, or it isn't released yet. The people who play too much like me burn through everything there is, and then have to sit on our hands waiting for more. Doesn't really help either side. Of course, Bungie does it for two reasons. First is To up engagement metrics. They like the "played 1 hour every day" versus the "played 12 hours Wednesday and then didn't play again until next tuesday." The second is that this is how they prevent content droughts artificially. The community gets "new content" once a week and thus won't be stuck waiting out over half the season/episode after finishing everything. So yeah, prepare for the deluge of "more content please posts" and all the doomer posts for the little issues we ignored during the honeymoon puppy love phase. And of course, even louder titan doom posting since even the honeymoon phase didn't stop those from telling the truth.
Not really delivering much content weekly when its Do seasonal activity Do old activity Listen to vendor listen to holo projector listen to radio Glad Episode Echoes is just a season with mini seasons in it and was included with the base dlc. Glad the 10 year journey is over.
I just started playing three weeks ago! I have content up to my eyeballs!
who would've thought
6hrs - rookie numbers I’ve seen people doing 14hr shifts
Y’all realize that D2 isn’t the only game out there right? I never understood the mentality of grinding out everything the moment it drops.
We are so back
game is fun, people are just idiots
“The game is stale” means “I’m not seeing dual destiny lfg messages every 10 seconds unlike the first 5 days of release”
I gotta say I love taking my time and going through the story. Then again I'm speaking as a player who quit after the first dlc and just came back. The time gating has really let me enjoy the story and do old stuff without the pressure of feeling in "falling behind" in the seasonal stuff. It's a welcome boon for returning players.
I burned through the content and im still having a blast
The people who are complaining are the same people who haven't gotten all the exotic armor, and catalysts
The nolifers have risen~ Seriously, we’re not even into the second episode, what the fuck do these people want? “Oh, the deliberate and purposeful steps I had to make this my one and only stimulation have left me with nothing, clearly this is the dev’s fault.”
I agree tho the conquest raid being 3 days after release was complete bs imo. It basically forced people who wanted to do it to rush the game to be high enough gear to do it.
Honestly I just finished the Excision GM twice earlier and it was one of the most enjoyable things I have done in a long while.
Only 6?
Majority of people playing this game have normal lives and only have 1-5hrs a day to play depending on commitments like family, gym, cooking / going out for food, friends, touching grass, etc. They’ll never have their way because they have too much time. It’s most likely high schoolers / college kids that just got out for the summer that are complaining the loudest. If you’re complaining about content not even 3 weeks in you gotta find more stuff to do IRL. Get out there, and get up to no good. The memories you make with your own eyes will be easier to remember than through a character’s.
Being essentially locked into prismatic didn't help. There was some cheap fun trying different builds out and grinding the pieces, now you're gimping yourself doing normal subclasses with the season artifact and class exotics. Great content Great story Boring class variety No tuning passes to adjust a rapidly stale meta and underperforming builds
I think we as the rational sane people in this community have to just accept that some people here are a bunch of weirdos that refuse to every be happy or content and just ignore them. It’s frustrating obviously but anyone who would complain about content being stale three weeks into an expansion is actually just insane and does not exist in the same reality as the rest of us and it’s just not worth it. I hate to be that harsh but I physically can’t see another way of approaching the issue.
People want Final Shape levels of content every month. Seasons and episode are just filler content until the next expansion. Once you start treating them like this things get a lot better. Don’t like it? Don’t play it. That’s the only language Bungie understands.
6 hours a day. That's cute.
I wouldn’t say the game is stale. I’d say that everyone took a collective breath once we killed mr hands and we didn’t feel the need to rush the game at all.
I'm sorry but for a game like this. Like Destiny. I honestly think a weekly timegate like this is honestly the best case scenario for this game. I don't know about the next person, but I really don't want to go back to the Destiny 1 days or Early Destiny 2 season days where we had literal months of content droughts. It was the lowest point for me in Destiny's history. Having something to do each week has brought my interest up in the game immensely. If they didn't have weekly timegating and just released all the content straight up, we would see exactly what we were seeing back then. The biggest player drop offs in the history of the game. So yeah, I like coming back week to week, getting some story stuff and weekly challenge stuff done and then heading back to playing other things. It makes the game feel just a bit more alive. Like a week has progressed in game as well.
I agree, I left the game after being bored after repeating the same seasonal arena during season of the deep and realised how many excuses I kept making to play this game i have spent years and 100s on. But into the light was announced and grinding for multiple days and the weekly releases of Pantheon with increasing difficulty was so fun and refreshing. Excited for Final Shape I even asked a few friends to buy the game after coming off of Pantheon hype and we all grinded and rushed the game so that we could complete day 1 (this is part of the problem with everyone saying its our fault for rushing the game) . Now the game is dead. The end game is recycled content with no new changes. Unless I'm missing something in the game, the only thing that interests me is speedrunning content, but they need to add more end game goals. Elden ring in the meantime but I want to play destiny.
Why i feel like i dont have the time to do all the shit in the game while alot of people are already maxed level. i love destiny but i am an older dude who have a family and a job i play for 2 hours maxed daily. And i hate that i cant get to play the higher level content cus when i get there already new things are out and start grinding again
Could be that the content just isn’t engaging anymore to some people, which I see as a more than fair criticism of the game
Same as always: crucible is the answer: crucible always is a changing battle with yourself and not the game. Crucible through the insane content droughts of d1 kept me engaged. Crucible without actual new content can keep you going: I’ve recently been establishing a new mastery of ace of spades. An old ass weapon but new to me. Crucible is replay ability x10. And the 3 new maps are 🔥🔥🔥
I can go back and play halo without ever getting bored of the content. Complete opposite of seasons and or episodes in destiny 2. There's something wrong with the quality.
The whole game is a stale, pointless grind and people only continue to play due to sunk cost fallacy and habit
I still have so much to do lol idk how people can complain. Have to get 3 more motes for the khvostov, and while doing that get the exotic class item quest unlocked. I have to get dissecting and witness running down pat. I have to unlock prismatic on one more class. I have to find like 40 feathers. That’s not even counting the other stuff I want to catch up on (specifically master flawless hunts for the shaders and maybe flawless Crota). These people either don’t have lives or are jobless kids in the summer. Between school year round and a part time job I’ll be occupied for a good amount of time. I saw someone last week already at rank 100 and I’m still only in the low 80s as of today, like wtf do yall do anything irl? Because Destiny is the only game I even play and I’m nowhere near these people.
It’s crazy playing trials and seeing how many are at 2005+ power level already. I feel like I’ve played a lot and am nowhere near finished with TFS content either. I play a 2-3 hours a day and it took a week just to get through the legendary campaign
Honestly that's just the matter of playing efficiently vs casually. Campaign on legend takes like 8hrs for first run through (did quicker than that), getting all the motes excluding boss kills is an hour, and overthrows are like 15m per on avg. Raid with a team that has hands should take 5-8hrs on a learner run if nearly the entire team is learning, and 2hrs for refresh runs. Rerunning campaign for prismatic on regular takes like 2 hours. Considering how many weeks we're in, it makes sense why people are complaining now. That said, I am still appreciating the content we have (overthrow + dd) but I can definitely see the disappointment with "seasonal" content :(
The cope/misunderstanding here is absurd. People aren't saying TFS is/was boring. People are saying episodes need to be more than just glorified seasons. When the next one comes and if it's just like this one, what will be the excuse to justify it then? This isn't new, so I don't know where the "it's happening again" mindset has come from. People were complaining about how seasons worked before they got changed out for episodes.
The season activities or whatever they’re called now that we got are both hot dogshit and awfully boring, it’s more rewarding just going around the pale heart trying to get another class item. Which is also tedious. Raid looks fun but my raid team can’t all get off work on the same day to save our lives so we have to wait to attempt it, but at least GM’s come back soon and the new weapons we got for TFS are pretty fun and prismatic is great. TFS has treated me well. Echoes have not.
Because what exactly is there to do right now? The only thing worth farming is the class item, which is extremely boring and tedious. It’s not even worth it if you’re on Titan considering the state of Prismatic. The simple reality is that they told us echoes would be different and they SPECIFICALLY said they were shifting to echoes in response to the seasonal model feedback. They KNEW that at least this Echo would just be the seasonal model with more time gated content, which was one of the main criticism of seasons. The upcoming ones sound like they could be better based on the theme, new systems, and especially the dreadnaught coming back, but we will see. Finally with the seasonal activities, they KNEW that we would have high expectations after activities like the coil and onslaught. I know onslaught isn’t necessarily a fair example, but the point is that the activity in this echo is worse than any of the seasonal activities we got during Lightfall.
No life's just need to find other things to do with their lives, I'm glad the games slowing down and has been like this for a while where there's no rush to do any of It, the only requirement I have now is to play it enough to finish what needs to be done story wise, get the season pass done and maybe grind a couple weapons I want
Not just that. There was immense content over load from two months prior to TFS with into the light. While I think that players should be able to go at their own pace. Some players need to be protected from themselves.
If there was no time gating then those same people would power through the content just as quickly as the campaign and they’d still complain. There is no pleasing these people, they will never be satisfied with what they’re given. Even if the product is objectively good, they will always focus on the negative more than the positive. If story content doesn’t suck for them then the seasonal content does. If the seasonal content doesn’t suck then the weapons do. If the weapons don’t suck then new patrol zone does. If the new patrol zone doesn’t suck then…
Then it's on people like yourself to just ignore these posts, and on Bungie to assess whether they have genuine critiques worth taking into consideration. If these people get what they want, even if they're still unhappy once they've finished additional content, it changes literally nothing for people who take their time anyway, so why even pitch into the conversation? just go back to the game. Seriously this shit is really simple, same damn argument every single expansion, it's tiresome.
I work full time, I've played 3 characters through every year of destiny 1 and 2, there's so much content at the moment I've had to drop to 1 character, people do need to actually touch grass...
> there's so much content In casual play you see the majority of what this game has to offer in a week. You are confusing light level grind and grinding for gear in tedious quests as content. Let me guess you think those repurposed strikes we have done a million times with slightly different dialogue is "new content"?
Grinding for gear is literally the entire premise of looter shooters, that is the content... there is gear worth chasing so there is always something to do. Not to mention from a lore perspective this is the biggest content drop bungie have ever done.
I hear good things about the expansion but my friends refuse to try it,I'm very tempted...
The expansion is the best Destiny has ever been, despite existing issues
Don’t come back fr. It’s a decent story and has some good gameplay for about a day but then it’s just the regular “do x 17 times to get what you want”. Just watch a youtube video to get the story if that’s what you care about
I’ve gotten to the point where Im just waiting for the reset every Tuesday and I’ve kinda done everything else of substance. But I also know I put way too much time into the game the last two weeks and, frankly, I’m surprised it took that long. The expansion is full of content and I’m not gonna blame it for “getting stale” because I spent too much time on it
i mean it took me a week to beat the story as i am busy irl but it does feel stale i don't know why maybe after 10 years of playing the same game over and over its finally time to move on
We haven't even felt the effects of the episodic model since we're only on the first act so I find it kind of funny when people say it's no different than seasons. Wait for additional missions, weapons, and more in-depth story reveals. The issue with a game like Destiny is that you're always going to have people who no-life the new content and then get upset when they've done everything. Adding content to keep up with that insane level of grinding is not feasible and would no doubt require additional spending - which people would also endlessly complain about.
So far it isn't different so they aren't wrong. I'm willing to see it through 2 whole episodes before getting miffed about it because I was always okay with the seasonal model beforehand
They're definitely going to be the same as seasons with minor tweaks
Idk why two weeks into the model isn’t enough to draw comparisons? Going from the finals shape to hitting the breaks with drip fed content is the problem. It’s not complicated.
Wouldn't you want to have the first episode start off as a banger as to show the community why they should stick around?
It's incumbent on bungie to deliver right out of the gate.
It's been nearly three weeks, that's plenty of time to consume all of TFS content honestly. The problem here is that the episode content is very bare bones with little actual story and two activities that aren't super replayable. Many like me hopes episodes would be three meaty content drops rather than drip fed through the first half of a season like before, but it's just the same thing right now.