Monday 5 November 2018

DESTINY 2 FORSAKEN, MORE LIKE FORGIVEN

We approached the first Destiny with eager curiosity.
While it was almost immediately criticized for lack of content we didn't feel that way until after we played the first download content.

We were immersed in a beautiful and alien world: original, unique, varied and rich. There we could roam together and from time to time join or be joined by other heroes/players in quests.
We would battle the never-before-seen vicious aliens and try to salvage our broken world.
Sure the game wasn't perfect, there was too much grinding at the beginnimg, but everything was extremely new and the place beautiful and the world shared, so it was entertaining.

Once we had levelled up enough we started playing Strikes and boy they were fun. Challenging and engaging with a good level design. It would take a while to start beating them and then came the Nighfall.
I won't lie, sometimes cheesing the Nighfalls was the only way to win, hidden behind crates, risking your skin to grab some ammo. We would just go with a 2 people team and it could be brutal, but rewarding at the end. It was a game of strategy, patience and co-operation: just what we were looking for in Destiny.

When the first DLC released, it was pretty clear that it was mostly content stripped from the main game and it definitely didn't add enough.
The most prized content was the new Raid, but that required a 6-people team. We did have fun trying to cheese Crota's End, but after that made-up fun, we left.

Apparently The Taken King would change things, but at the point we were too far away and disenchanted to jump back on board.
Still we believed that was a great sign for the things to come, namely Destiny 2.



When Destiny 2 finally released we were sure Bungie had learned their lesson: They must have filled it with engaging content right from the beginning, right?
Riiiight.
It took us very few hours to find out no lesson had been learned and that this new chapter was even less content-rich than the first one. Yes, the story was slightly better, certainly more explosive, but that is just a nice introductory piece. The real game starts after that.
Apart from most of the locations, so much of the content was the same: your own characters, the enemies too, except for the Taken, kind of: same enemies with a different shader.
Most equipment was also from Destiny 1, many exotic weapons and armors came straight from it.

Still we wanted to like it, so we decided to diligently level up, but that was a bummer too. Levelling up was capped and was also based on NRG, so basically you had to gring, but also be a bit lucky.
And once you were done with your weekly chores, err levelling up, you could just stop playing and wait for next week.
Not really an engaging system.

The content was also the problem, the new Strikes were nothing like the old ones: you could mostly just run through to the final boss, which is only hard to beat because of the lack of proper cover.
All in all a very disappointing experience. We were expecting Destiny 1 bigger and better, instead got a lot of recycled content and some trite chores.

It didn't take long to get bored and walk away from Destiny 2, albeit with regreat.

We forgot all about Destiny 2 until Forsaken was close to release.
Apparently, once again, the big expansion was meant to revoluzionize the game and make it what so many players like us exptected it to be from the very beginning: a complete, varied, compelling experience.

With Forsaken and the two previous expansion we certainly found a lot of new content to play through.
Forsaken didn't just bring two new wonderful and opposite locations, it brought a wealth of challenges, quests and subquests and a ton of new exotic items too.
We recently reached level 600 and are still finding new challenges and haven't yet entered the world of Raids. It's a full co-operative experience unlike anyone else, the biggest downside is having to wait 1 year for the real game and having to pay the price of two full games.

So, with Forsaken we certainly find Destiny 2 has redeemed itself, but if a Destiny 3 will ever be released, we're waiting for the bit expansion before biting again ;)!