Couple interesting, critical youtubes from destiny community guys claiming D2 has no endgame
I'm tending to agree. There's really shockingly little to do in this game. The only real way to increase power is doing the milestones. Those can be done quickly each week. Then the rest of the week you have no options really (leaving aside the raid for a moment). Grinding PE's for exotics is both exceedingly slow as exotics rarely drop, and not very effective as the exotics drop 5 BELOW your power level (or equal with +5 mods, which still means you have limited chance for gains). Well forgetting all that, I'm 301-302 now, so the power "grind" is nearly tapped out regardless. I also dont love how predetermined it all seems. It seems like everyone is around the same level, because it's the same low hanging fruit that cause big level jumps that everyone gets, then nothing. Basically everybody is on the same plateau. Although those who have good raid teams are at somewhat of an advantage. There's nothing to say "I play a lot, I have higher power than you!".
The raid...in a way I'm glad there's plenty of time to focus on the raid now, but that said there's still issues. It's still highly mechanical and frustrating, maybe worse now. I read somewhere 7% have completed the raid so far, that seems low, I think the difficulty of this raid, and raid's in general, is too high. And there's really little loot worth getting or true reason to raid anymore. I'd say I mostly continue to hack away at the raid for completionism's sake, not any real rewards.
Next lets talk about two systems I feel like are just highlights of awful design. Shaders and Mods. Both are just stupid, annoying, and impenetrable. Like I literally dont even want to go look at my ten million random shaders, who cares? Mods aren't much better, I still dont worry about mods much, other than those +5 I gotta have for power level.
Both these systems are IMO objectively massively inferior to their D1 counterparts, which were already far from perfect. At least in D1 I'd mess with shaders to an extent. In D2 literally my character is just always default cause I'm not gonna go apply a shader to every slot. I just dont care so I dont even bother.
Mods are "kinda like" old perks, but again, much worse. And again, those same jumbled squares that are shaders now, are just awful. And there's way way too many, because Bungie artificially made one apply to every armor, etc etc.
Now lets get to a few key issues, one of the key "endgames" in D1 was weapon rolls. For PVE even or mostly PVP for me. Gone. A huge huge loss of effective content there. Now all you pursue is guns, and it's fairly easy to get all the ones you need.
Grimoire another big endgame, gone.
Most disturbing is Datto's conclusion that Bungie doesn't WANT there to be any endgame. They want you to feel "done" with and satisfied with Destiny.
I just sort of vaguely thought the lack of endgame on Bungie's part wasn't really intentional, probably more incompetence that they'd slowly fix. But Datto's idea that it's completely intentional is likely right, and very frightening for me.
And then we come to the PVP, it's still fairly fun but for me it's still undeniably nowhere near as compelling as D1's, for many reasons. Including the new setup of 4v4 only, you cant choose your mode (the actual crucible gameplay in D2 is a more foundational problem). This is another huge foundational blow to the game IMO.
There's much more of course, such as simplified subclasses setups.
The music, everyone talks about how great it is but IMO it's kind of annoying really. There's one track I absolutely love (the one on EDZ after public events), the rest, meh, to kind of dislike. Again it's worse than D1.
How about PE's? The D2 bedrock of PVE? These suffer poor design IMO. "Get insta-killed by falling rocks 4 times". They feel artificially drawn out, that timer drags on forever.
Oh and let me hit one more big D2 negative: Timed nightfalls. Nightfall is the base PVE in the game IMO. It's the one PVE you do every week. IMO it's now kind of ruined as well, the timed aspect ruins the fun. So yeah, hurting the base PVE in the game in a big way is, kinda big.
Lets talk about sales, what little data we (such as UK physical data) have suggests Destiny 2 sales are way down from D1. That and Bungie's lack of any statement crowing about D2 sales.
It's tempting for me to blame D2's sales on it's problems in my view, but I dont know if that's how it really works since most game sales happen on day 1 and decline massively from there. In fact it's probably more logical to say people where turned off by D1, so they didn't flock to the sequel. Which doesn't fit my agenda that D1 was good and D2 is bad. Maybe the answer is somewhere in the middle.
At the end of the day I'm increasingly gaining a picture that Destiny 2 is a big, big fail by Bungie on many fronts, some like shaders and mods, are almost disastrous. It's still new, and fun, and I'll likely keep playing it for at least a while longer. But I can forsee a short end and a rapidly decreasing player base. Of course I could be completely wrong and maybe everybody will love it, but yeah.
