Destiny 2 is a mess

What a disaster...

Once upon a time I was a true believer in the vision of Bungie's Destiny. What they sold it as, what they wanted to be, and how we as the players were meant to fit into that vision. A single video game updated over the space of a decade with new stories, expanding scope and systems and an ongoing narrative as we became 'legend'. Of course, then the team gaslit the entire world by releasing a sequel and pretending they never said the 'ten years' thing, but I had fallen out of love with Destiny long before that period. My heart was broken when they got a bit too greedy for their own good and locked me out of the multiplayer under a £50 DLC gate. It took nearly a decade of nursing that wound for me to finally get around to Destiny 2 and take a gander at what it was I was missing, and I came away totally astounded about what an honestly pathetically badly designed mess Destiny 2 is. For a AAA studio with the pedigree of Bungie they should be ashamed over what they call their 'flagship product'.

Let me start by harping on an old issue people have mentioned for quite a while- the utterly moronic way that Bungie choose to 'maintain' their content over the years. As a full throated live service Bungie was of course married to the idea of brief content infusions for events such as seasons or major world events. No great surprise there. Where Bungie pushed themselves beyond taste, however, was in employing that same tactic for core story content. Yes, log on to Destiny 2 for the first time today and be in wonder for the fact you cannot experience the main story of base Destiny 2. That tailor-made campaign about fighting to reclaim the Traveller? Yeah, you get to see it in a half-hearted recap montage, the actual missions themselves are no more. So what's in it's place? Remember the Destiny 1 intro? Slow and cumbersome as it is? Yeah, they copy-and-pasted that with some minor reworks to slide into the new story. Honestly just lazy.

What gets me is that this intro being recycled only really makes sense for someone fresh to the universe of Destiny altogether, as it tells the story of the Guardian being born. When I started Destiny 2 I was greeted to a greatest hits compilation of my achievements in the first game alongside the dates I did them which made me feel very old; essentially meaning Bungie had the means to recognise I was a returning player. But instead of playing a campaign designed to be for returning players, I had to replay my own birth again. See how off-putting that is? On the most basic level of immersion the team has stumbled and failed, and yes: I recognise that Bungie have promised not to remove content anymore with the same energy of a rampant alcoholic promising they won't drink and drive again after causing their second collision casualty- (They shouldn't have needed to be told in the first place) for some reason they refuse to restore what is already gone. What, do Bungie have a 'delete all files when done' policy? Actually, their standards have slipped so far, I wouldn't be surprised.

So Destiny 2 expects its players to be up-to-date with events- even if they're brand spanking new to the game in question. And how do they maintain this standard? What would be the laziest way possible? Well the laziest way would be massive screens of text, thankfully they don't stoop that low- instead we got verbal context dumps. Slideshows and lectures, spitting names and places and events at you with a rapidity that, guess what, makes it all sound like fantasy gibberish. I didn't just play Density 1, I studied that sucker! I got the third party app to read all the codex entries and watched lore videos speculating on why a certain banner was flying from a particular rampant on bloody Venus- I was in the lore trenches! And I can't follow these slide-show presentations for the life of me. What the heck is a totally fresh player supposed to think apart from "Uh oh, I'm not welcome here, am I?"

Destiny 2 borrows from a trend that a lot of modern games have championed, where the UI and presentation is so overstuffed that new players are quickly overwhelmed. And it's depressing to see this issue when Destiny 1 mastered a gorgeously minimalist UX with it's cursor-pointer map, linear progression quests and constrained Tower playspace. I imagine Destiny 2 must have started out like that too, but over the years they've added counters and menus and sub-menus and reminders and context bars and new vendors and new currencies and just so much stuff. Stuff piled ontop of stuff until the result is an ugly confusing mess. Better hope you were there to learn these additions one-by-one because if not... good luck!

But that's just the experience of people who play the base free-to-play package, what about the lunatics who decide they want to throw down some cold hard cash? What do they get for their sacrifice? Well I wanted to experience some of the campaigns, and so I made the fool's gambit of buying the DLC in a package deal, and maybe you shouldn't be selling a package deal for your game if you absolutely cannot figure out how to present that to the player. Whilst getting to grips with Destiny 2, figuring out the tutorial and realising that this game boasts an even looser grip on it's narrative than the first game had, I had to turn off and do something else after a while. And when I came back I was greeted to the most mind numbing design decision of all time.

You see, Destiny 2 didn't load me back up to the tutorial world I was cutting my teeth on. They threw me into Venus, in the starting mission of one of the expansions- after waterboarding me with a lore dump I only realised 2 minutes in was essentially spoiling all major narrative events that had happened before that canonical point. Confused, I exited out the game and loaded back in. What did I get? Another intro cutscene for a different expansion and I was thrown into that campaign. There's no choice, each expansion is forced upon the player before they've had any chance to figure out the basics of the game so that they have no chance to naturally experience the world, get to know the story and their place within it a little bit, and then naturally move onto the new content. Destiny 2 just dumps every possible rule of cohesive and non-intrusive design out of the window.

And I know the reason why. That constant content grind where every single update needs to be immediately followed up with something shiny and new- typically something that glitters on the item store to make a quick buck. All of Bungie's effort is sunk into trying to keep concurrent players buying and spending their time glued to Destiny, they couldn't even spare the brain power to concieve of what a new player has to go through. That layer of new gamer unfriendlyness is a huge barrier to the continued growth of a franchise that is Bungie's only gratis at this point in time, and by the time Destiny 3 rolls around I wonder if they'll still retain the knowledge for being welcoming to new customers. The state of Destiny 2, how it presents itself and what it has become, is a disgrace to a once legendary studio that seems to have shed all it's once glistening talent. I miss the Halo Bungie, man...