I am…hesitant to talk about the current state of Destiny 2, because I have a hunch I’m going to end up getting yelled at by both sides of this debate no matter what I say but hey, if I’m not getting yelled at over a Destiny article, it isn’t a weekday, so here we go.
Destiny 2 finds itself in an unusual spot right now here in Year 2. It’s dramatically different than Destiny 1 Year 2, where after a year of smaller DLCs and The Taken King, D1 shifted into almost nothing but seasonal events, leaving yawning gaps of time where there was simply no reason to play.
To avoid that (and to ensure D2 is an ongoing revenue stream), we have the Annual Pass, which has three micro-DLC content drops throughout the year, starting with this December’s Black Armory. Unlike traditional DLC, these content additions are sttttttretched out as releases over time, like a slow-drip content IV hooked into the collective veins of players. Black Armory, for instance, comes with four Forge activities, but all of them won’t even be fully unlocked until mid-January, despite an early December launch. The goal is to get players coming back time and time again for new stuff to do.
While Destiny has always had to walk something of a tightrope between casual and hardcore players, Black Armory has brought with it a whole new set of challenges regarding that divide we haven’t really seen before.
- The launch of Black Armory revealed that the very first boss at 625-630 power, and many players who weren’t already at the 600 cap felt left behind, like they had nothing to do even after paying for the new expansion. Even those at 600 had to grind a reset’s worth of milestones to even have a chance. Bungie has increased the ease of getting to 600 since, but it didn’t make a good first impression. The counter to this among hardcore fans was “Well they said it would be endgame content,” but few expected that they had to be starting at 600 to even have a prayer at step 1 of the new stuff. Weeks later, many are still catching up, if they stuck around to try at all.
- But the more you play Black Armory, you quickly realize that after you get past that initial power threshold, Forge content in particular becomes incredibly easy. The only measure of difficulty for this content is power scaling, and once you hit ~620 (out of the new cap of 650), it becomes genuinely hard to lose Forge encounters.
- As Black Armory progresses, Bungie is now inserting more and more busywork to try and pad out the content. That was best exemplified in the release of the Izanami Forge this week which requires a questline that can take anywhere from 2-5 hours per character to unlock the new Forge, with many steps that felt like nothing but chores (Minotaur/Blight farming, endless public events). The problem here was not that the unlock process was terribly difficult, but that it was just so long, and the thought of doing this stuff on multiple characters is exhausting. But it does seem clear that Bungie wants players to spread this out over a long period of time (the fourth Forge doesn’t launch until well into January), and these quests aren’t meant to be binged in one day.
You can see how all these issues kind of overlap, and create some fundamental problems with the game, namely that it can often feel like a chore, like a second job, to get to any of the interesting stuff. But then that flies in the face of the opposite problem people used to complain about, that there wasn’t enough content, and many players are telling others to shut up and stop complaining because this is “what we wanted.”
I agree that it is better to have too much content than too little. I do not regret paying for the Annual Pass, and I think it’s at its core, a good idea. But it’s clear that with this experiment, there needs to be some tweaking.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to launch this new content at the power level ceiling of the last content. You cannot launch a paid expansion and have the majority of players unable to complete even the first mission because they didn’t hit the previous max. And this kind of gating served no real purpose, as the hardest core players rocketed up their power so quickly that the Forges became easy by the end of the first week anyway. So there has to be a middleground here where some of this new content is accessible and rewarding for everyone, even if the hardest core players have their own tier of difficulty to pursue down the road. I also feel like I almost have to hit the new 650 max, lest I be left behind in the next expansion if this kind of thing happens again, which is kind of an exhausting feeling in its own right. I also think people want to be able to play multiple characters again instead of there being so much work to do they literally only have time to focus on one.
As for the “grind,” we really have to distinguish between what’s a good grind, and what’s a bad grind. I don’t mind that there’s an unlock process for new Forges. I do mind that there are clearly pointless steps like Fallen multikills or running the same public events or strikes we have done 10,000 times at this point. My theory is that if there’s nothing new about a piece of content, tweaked enemies, modifiers, even in-game dialogue, it shouldn’t be part of these quests. There’s a version of the Izanami unlock quest that includes maybe, 3-4 of the nine steps it currently has that could be fun, but it feels like a chore in its current state.
I think fundamentally Forges are a good kind of grind. The idea of getting frames, getting weapon kills and then forging them for random rolls is exactly the kind of endgame hunt that many players wanted, yet is more interesting than simply re-introducing easy re-rolls for currency. I do think Bungie needs to work on what difficulty means other than power scaling, as that’s an issue that keeps coming up.
Overall I am happy with Black Armory and it is certainly better than the alternative, nothing, which is what we saw in Destiny 1 years 2 and 3. But as an experimental project it needs continued refinement, and I’m sure Bungie will take some of these lessons to heart going forward.
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