My experience with MMO's is very limited. I have dipped my toes into multiple MMO's over the years including "City of heroes", "Lineage 2", a little "WOW" and I feel I have tried a few others, but not too many more. The problem is that I rarely jump into a MMO until it has entered the free phase which means its usually almost dead. City of heroes was fun, but when my friends stopped playing I stopped paying. And Lineage 2 was nothing special for me, the only real reason I gave it a shot was that one of my friends was running a free hacked server so I didn't have to pay. Overall for me MMO's lack fun without friends to play with.
Destiny is trying oh so desperately to say it is not an MMO, but everything about the game screams MMO. So at this point I think it is only fair to label it such. Now I am trying to walk away from reviews overall, because I am terrible at them. Plus I figure if I want to do something different than most I should try to just write about my experiences. My next blog post will describe this perfectly. The goal of this post is to give a list of my experiences with the game that I dumped a million hours into.
From the moment I started playing Destiny I was hooked. I still cannot tell you exactly what happened with this game but it filled a perfect hole in my heart and made me glad for the first time that I owned a current gen console. Every night I would jump on and play and every day I would look at videos, talk with coworkers (mostly cam), check blogs, and keep and eye on the bungie site to see what was happening in the Destiny universe that day. I remember at one point looking at hours played and being shocked to see over 160 hours. God there were so many late nights and exhausted days. This game was perfect... or so I thought. There were 3 phases of the game that should have been red flags and should have caused me to quit much earlier.
The 3 red flags:
- Level 20-25 (ish) - The game made perfect sense to me until I hit level 20. I felt I could understood the natural progression because it was the same as all games. Then I hit level 20. At level 20 you start to do the arbitrary light and light armor game to try to level up. This requires blue/purple/yellow armor. Each piece of armor has light associated with it and i think every 20 light you gain a level or something. After taking almost no time to hit level 20 this took me 2 or 3 weeks to get past this hump. At first it was fine because it extended the game, but I remember hours of frustration trying to get some purple armor and trying to get ascendent energy.
- Level 26-30 - As mentioned earlier in this article I never actually reached level 30 and instead I got stuck at level 28. I had the ascendent shards to make it to level 29, but I did not see a benefit in wasting such a precious material for a single level boost. I had 1 piece of raid gear and 1 exotic, both maxed out. For me to hit level 30 I would need two more pieces of raid level armor and to max them out with shards. The wall I hit was with my current crew of Destiny friends and that we could not beat the raid boss... we just couldnt. We tried but failed on a couple of occasions. So I could get to level 29 easily enough, but I would never get to level 30.
- Starting a new character - Most of my friends had second a third characters that they were playing with. One of my friends had 3 characters above level 25. So i thought hey maybe its time for me to work on another character since basically I was unable to further my hunter character. So I rolled a titan and started playing. I barely finished the earth level before I wanted to break the disk of this game. It was so boring and repetitive. The thing that really pushed me over the edge was doing the exact bounties I had just done with the hunter class earlier that day. I dont know why that bothered me. I mean I wasn't shocked that all the bounties were all the same for every character, but for some reason that pushed me over the edge. I became so angry doing the exact story and the exact bounties.
- New Character - This was of course the weekend I rolled a new character, and as mentioned above the first time i saw the lack of story. I was shocked at the lack of difference between the characters the most... I mean why even have multiple races or characters? Why not just have a power option and go from their?
- Crucible - During the beta I didnt enjoy the crucible, but over time I found some joy in it and it was a good substitute for lack of shooter.. Plus I got really good at it. That Saturday most of my time spent was in the crucible. I wanted to get my crucible rank to level 3 before the weekend was up. I spent 4-6 hours playing and barely leveled up and did all of the bounties. It was tedious to get no where.
- Bounties - At first I was not disappointed by how the bounty system worked. I found it quite easy to grab 4 bounties, run to location, kill or farm whatever, and collect. I dont know why doing the same bounty with another character bothered me... but it did... it really did. I hated the fact that when I went to do the bounties on my freshly rolled characters that I just ended up doing the same thing again. Plus after the third time killing the same boss you start to not care as much.
- Guns - While there seems to be an endless supply of guns the only ones that really matter are your exotic choice and void damage weapons. I had in my arsenal multiple weapons especially in the specials category. I carried at all times 2 shotguns (void, and fire), 3 fusion rifles (void, blue, and fire), and 2 snipers (lower void, and fire). I did this because at any point you could be required to use one of these specials on the boss of the week. But at a certain point I realized all I really ever used was the void damage sniper or fusion in the regular game and the shotgun in the multiplayer. The shotgun was absolutely worthless in PVE (especially in weekly/nightfall) while I was absolutely worthless without the shotgun in multiplayer. And it seemed like a huge flaw not to have primary weapons with elemental damage. I was blown away by this considering that one of the enemies void weapons would kill you almost instantly.
- Exotics - As with the regular guns it seems there is no end to the variance of exotic armor or weapons. I was extremely shocked to find out that you could only arm one exotic weapon and one exotic armor piece. I guess I dont understand the reasoning since it was a way to get to level 30 and since the raid weapons were so much more powerful than anything in the exotic realm. I also wanted to add exotic bounties here. I got a pretty good hand cannon and pretty good shotgun, but outside of those the exotic bounties seem to be the same 3 or 4 bounties and they dont really give you a weapon worth the bounty itself. The hand cannon especially sucks, the multiplayer part of it wasnt too bad, but the final boss challenge sucked!! Seriously sucked!! And the shotgun costs so much glimmer that you wonder if its worth the cost.
- Tower - The thing that really ended up shocking me was the size of the tower and the lack of character it has. I mean I love the ball and the fan thing, but it lacked so much character. There were multiple empty store locations. Nothing really interesting to do. It acts as a hub but you cannot interact with other players beyond waving and dancing. The craziest part is that you go around to the different gun stores and they all have the same guns. I mean there is slight variance, but overall they are all carrying the same inventory and you cannot really buy anything worth while from them because of it. The same goes for the armor. But even take the characters you interact with daily. The cryptoguy is basically worthless after level 20. The bounty dude brings nothing to the table. I mean you could go the same route as borderlands and have the bounties on the board eliminating the need for an extra npc. There is just nothing. No reason to go there except the game forces you there.
- Bad guys - There is some character variance in the bad guy area, but because of lack of story you dont understand why you are killing them. And there isnt that much variance in the characters... not enough to justify them. The biggest flaw though is the lack of story and reference to build the characters.
- Ships/Sparrows/Ghosts- This one is a catchall for all vehicles and extras. The space ships are pointless and without a ship customization absolutely annoying more than anything. The sparrows are basically ghosts without guns. I am ok they dont have guns, but with limited customization options they are just another form of fast travel. Why in the HELL are their 9 slots for ghosts when I had one ghost and the people that preordered had another. 9 slots for 2 ghost variants?!?!?!
- Difficulty - There is a real lack of difficulty in this game. 95% of the game is like 0-3 out of 10 and that is on solo. This is even doing missions at level 28. There isnt any real challenge, which I dont actually mind. I mean I use to love doing comp stomps as a kid. And It becomes even easier with 1 or 2 other people playing. That covers 95-97 percent of the game. Then comes the weekly, nightfall, and raid missions. These turn the dial up to 11 or 12. I mean I knew the raid was going to be hard and that is why I avoided it for so long, but when we finally did it I had no idea what to expect. And hell even to this day we have only beat it once by knocking him off the edge. Now lets take a look at the nightfall and weekly challenges. Between Cam, Mike and i we have beat most of the weekly challenges... hell I think we did most of them straight-up. On the other hand. i dont know if we have ever completed even one nightfall without cheesing it in one way or another. It feels like a huge unbalance. I feel with a team of 3 we should be able to beat most nightfall missions with some challenge, but even thinking back real hard i dont know if there was even a single one we beat without hiding in a corner and sniper the final boss.
- Rewards - I dont want to dig into this at this point too much, but there is a problem when you doing a higher level mission or even a regular mission turned up to level 28 and when its done you either get nothing or a couple of green or blue items. There is NO incentive to go for the higher level missions when doing bounties... there is much more to be said about this, but it doesnt belong here.
At this point the next article will be less bitchy and more focus on the positive while still pointing out some of the top flaws. The third article is going to be mostly hope based. I will be focusing on the things I would love to see changed about Destiny 2. I hope this wasnt too terrible and I feel now I should have reversed the articles, but honestly had no idea this was going this direction.
Thanks for reading and see you next article.
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