Destiny 2
I played a fair bit of Destiny 2 over the weekend, completing the campaign and story missions. I haven't done any organized multiplayer, but soloed my way up to just over power level 260 and picked up the popular MIDA Multi-Tool. So, what do I think? Well...
The story has ups and downs. The campaign feels like a "big thing," but ends up feeling a bit short. Maybe more would have felt like unnecessary padding, but things roll pretty fast through the "you've lost your Light" and the "time to take the fight back to them" phases. The Earth zones feel sort of baseline. Titan felt a bit dull - I kind of like uncovering the arcology, but powering up ocean platforms is "meh." Io itself felt kind of week in general, though I probably find the Vex to be the most interesting enemy faction. I enjoyed Nessus most of all largely because of the guiding/contact NPC, Failsafe. The game does a decent job with it all, but I do find myself still wishing I were more invested. Perhaps I would be if I played the original.
The gameplay is still solid mostly-FPSing. Super attacks put you in third person temporarily, as does riding vehicles. The combat vehicles actually work pretty well. The hovercraft feel a little floaty, but that fits. The tanks, rare though they are, move well. It's not too hard to get around, though you don't get a summoning vehicle until completing the campaign. It's easy to get into the public events, though they get repetitive. I enjoyed the Lost Sectors, though there's little to them beyond finding an entrance and clearing the end room in most cases. There's always something to do, but there could stand to be more variety.
Several exotic weapons are acquired through mission chains that start after doing post-campaign planetary story missions. It threw me off initially how these dump a quest item into your weapon inventory. That seems a weird way to handle it. Then you get various objective to complete that might range from collecting drops from certain enemy types to killing "powerful" enemy types on a specific world with a specific weapon or getting kills with a submachine gun while in the air. They feel a little arbitrary and some are certainly more difficult than others. In the end, you get a good weapon, but you can only equip one exotic weapon and one exotic armor piece at any given time, so there's a limited amount of basking in the accomplishment there.
Similarly, I find the leveling to be a little dissatisfying. Both base level and power/light level seem to serve more as limiters than anything else, with certain activities requiring minimums. But as I leveled up to 20 and then built up power, I didn't really feel any more powerful. There is definitely level scaling going on with enemies. A power 300+ character may kill a specific enemy more quickly than a level 1 character would, but the difference is not huge. I find things that took about two shots to kill with a rare scout rifle while running the campaign still take about two shots to kill with the exotic Multi-Tool. That is... perhaps good for gameplay, as it means more content has not been trivialized, but it doesn't feel very rewarding either. I sit back right now, and I don't really see a lot of point in grinding up to higher power levels. I could contrast this to Warframe, where I still have a long way to go before maxing out any frame/weapons of mine, there's still a huge variety of things to unlock, and I can completely blaze through some content now that was once hard (but there's still hard stuff out there).
I'm not sure if this makes me "done" with the game for now, but... I'm not sure it doesn't, either.
The story has ups and downs. The campaign feels like a "big thing," but ends up feeling a bit short. Maybe more would have felt like unnecessary padding, but things roll pretty fast through the "you've lost your Light" and the "time to take the fight back to them" phases. The Earth zones feel sort of baseline. Titan felt a bit dull - I kind of like uncovering the arcology, but powering up ocean platforms is "meh." Io itself felt kind of week in general, though I probably find the Vex to be the most interesting enemy faction. I enjoyed Nessus most of all largely because of the guiding/contact NPC, Failsafe. The game does a decent job with it all, but I do find myself still wishing I were more invested. Perhaps I would be if I played the original.
The gameplay is still solid mostly-FPSing. Super attacks put you in third person temporarily, as does riding vehicles. The combat vehicles actually work pretty well. The hovercraft feel a little floaty, but that fits. The tanks, rare though they are, move well. It's not too hard to get around, though you don't get a summoning vehicle until completing the campaign. It's easy to get into the public events, though they get repetitive. I enjoyed the Lost Sectors, though there's little to them beyond finding an entrance and clearing the end room in most cases. There's always something to do, but there could stand to be more variety.
Several exotic weapons are acquired through mission chains that start after doing post-campaign planetary story missions. It threw me off initially how these dump a quest item into your weapon inventory. That seems a weird way to handle it. Then you get various objective to complete that might range from collecting drops from certain enemy types to killing "powerful" enemy types on a specific world with a specific weapon or getting kills with a submachine gun while in the air. They feel a little arbitrary and some are certainly more difficult than others. In the end, you get a good weapon, but you can only equip one exotic weapon and one exotic armor piece at any given time, so there's a limited amount of basking in the accomplishment there.
Similarly, I find the leveling to be a little dissatisfying. Both base level and power/light level seem to serve more as limiters than anything else, with certain activities requiring minimums. But as I leveled up to 20 and then built up power, I didn't really feel any more powerful. There is definitely level scaling going on with enemies. A power 300+ character may kill a specific enemy more quickly than a level 1 character would, but the difference is not huge. I find things that took about two shots to kill with a rare scout rifle while running the campaign still take about two shots to kill with the exotic Multi-Tool. That is... perhaps good for gameplay, as it means more content has not been trivialized, but it doesn't feel very rewarding either. I sit back right now, and I don't really see a lot of point in grinding up to higher power levels. I could contrast this to Warframe, where I still have a long way to go before maxing out any frame/weapons of mine, there's still a huge variety of things to unlock, and I can completely blaze through some content now that was once hard (but there's still hard stuff out there).
I'm not sure if this makes me "done" with the game for now, but... I'm not sure it doesn't, either.
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