Bilious Green said:
My WoW guildies have been pestering me to play Destiny with them and I went on a bit of a rant on Discord about Activision's business practices; only one other person agreed with me. I hate to say it, but it feels like a losing battle.
The ironic thing about Destiny 2 is actually not about said practices (altho the game does include multiple, differently priced editions and a virtual currency to buy loot crates with). It's simply not a good game. I bought the middle, blody expensive edition with the season pass, and I wish I could get a refund. Being a PC gamer, I've not been able to play a Bungie game before, and hearing only good things about Halo over the years (consolised a game series as it may be), it piqued my interest enough.
Firstly, there's no public chat channels. It's the deadest, quietest online multiplayer game ever. You cannot talk to anyone. NO asking for help or advice, no chatting, no LFG, nothing at all. Secondly, "dungeons" or Strikes can only be played by joining and random queue which matches you with random people for a random dungeon. You cannot choose the activity you do, nor with whom you do it. Thirdly, there's no RP. Every single character of a given (sub)class is identical. There are no builds per se, nothing that changes between players, excepting gear. Fourthly, and to me the worst of all, is the mechanically poor combat.
They've locked snipers and shotties away as "Power Weapons" which have miniscule ammo pools. As such, if you enjoy a close up, mobile shotgun playstyle (like me), or a long range cover one, you get to do it for basically 15 seconds, and you're done. The rest of the time you have variations of full/semi auto and burst rifles that are essentially identical. All enemies scale relative to you so combat is precisely the same at level 1 as it is at lvl 20. Same number of bullets, same enemy types, same same. And for class abilities, they're all on horrifically long cooldowns. The "Super", your chosen subclass ability takes maybe 5 minutes to charge, with some abilities helping a little. As such, in even a long Strike, you might get to use it twice, maybe. You get 10seconds every 5 minutes where you get to play as your chosen class and have fun, and then you're done and it's back to the shitty auto rifles, no different from any other player.
All of these are huge detriments to the game and every one was a conscious design choice. Whatever fools designed these systems explicitly decided this would be how they wanted it to work. A boring, monotonous game devoid of any online interaction with other players wherein you get to enjoy very rare 10 second bursts of fun. I was desperate for the campaign to be over towards the end and I have no idea what it was about. I have deep buyer's remorse over this one and have already gone back to other games.
It's a bad RPG, it's a bad MMO, it's a bad lootgrind/skinnerbox and it's a mediocre shooter. Borderlands 2 is better than it in every way that matters.