Destiny 2 is getting a new expansion called “Warmind” today. Our author Schuhmann says: “It just has to be good.”
Should you be ashamed to be a Destiny fan? As a fan of Destiny, you sometimes feel like you belong to some sort of gaming underclass. As if you’re the “RTL 2” viewer among gamers, looked down upon by others.
I watched a video from Jim Sterling yesterday. He’s a bit of a gaming snob who constantly rails against something. This time his big topic: How great God of War is. How great it is that there are such games today. Only Sony can afford such things as a platform provider.
Sterling’s nemesis: The current gaming zeitgeist of AAA publishers in general. And Destiny 2 in particular.
I’ve known this since 2014: Destiny 2 serves as a cautionary example for everything that is wrong in today’s gaming.
Destiny 2: Everything that is bad
Destiny 2 as a cautionary example. The reservations against Destiny are significant. It is too commercial and calculated, too unfinished, too little innovative. There is too little love in it. It is repetitive and generates motivation through artificial things like loot, not through the story. Everything revolves around the cash shop and monetization. Initially, there was criticism of the tiny DLCs, which were allegedly cut from the base game, but today the greedy cash shop and the long content droughts are annoying.
What Sterling preaches can be read on Facebook under every Destiny article. Often in much harsher words. One has to hear: “Destiny is just crap and whoever still plays it is being ripped off.”
And the worst part is: Recently, people like Sterling have been right.
Destiny 2 – an easy target for mockers
A chain of terrible ideas. Terrible decisions from Bungie have made Destiny 2 an easy target for mockers. You can smell the desire for more money behind each of these decisions.
- The focus on Eververse was a terrible idea.
- Believing that Destiny 2 needed to jump on the eSports bandwagon ruined the space magic – and it didn’t even work.
- All the PR bubbles with which Destiny 2 was promoted burst one by one.
- The madness to make the game even more accessible has destroyed much of the old charm.
- Even Cayde-6, who everyone used to like, is now getting on people’s nerves with his wooden “Rascals” tour.
Okay, something went massively wrong in production, one might mumble as a defense.
But strange and wrong decisions were made. That can’t be denied.
I believe in Destiny 2
But I am not ready to accept the end of Destiny. It cannot be that the critics were right all the time. There are many arguments for Destiny.
- The idea of Destiny as an evolving universe where you can spend your free time with friends is just too beautiful to give up.
- The gunplay is fantastic.
- The production values are amazing.
- It feels good and right to play Destiny.
- And it is fun on a gameplay level, even if the abstract reward concepts do not work.
Furthermore, there are hundreds of jobs behind it and it’s a big deal for Activision. By now, even the last one in the upper echelons should have understood that the decisions regarding Destiny 2 were wrong.
Even if Activision and Bungie only care about money, as critics claim: Even then, Destiny 2 must get better now because it will not generate as much money in this form as it used to.
I think there has been a rethinking in recent months that we are now experiencing step by step. Maybe not today with Warmind, but in September with the expansion. But we will experience a Destiny 2 that can be played with pride and joy. And even the apology I was talking about recently, came last night from balance designer Josh Hamrick.
Just as Destiny 1 significantly improved with “The Taken King”, Bungie can achieve that with Destiny 2 as well.
I hope that today with “Warmind” we will take another step into a Destiny that will be as it deserves. At the moment, there are few arguments if you like Destiny. That simply needs to change.
