The Pros & Cons of Destiny 2

With the recent release of Destiny’s newest expansion, The Witch Queen, I have found myself drawn back into the world of this post-apocalyptic world of guardians and ghosts and where enemies become allies in this ever-evolving door of mystery and intrigue.

I haven’t been this excited about an expansion since Forsaken. Forsaken was such an emotional roller coaster ride where my character really starts to walk a darker path - and I loved it! Losing a much-beloved character in Forsaken was such a heart-wrenching thing to go through - and as heartbreaking as it was - it was what any RPG player like myself wants in a good game.

We want the feels, even the bad ones. Just like any good story regardless of medium, a character death, complicated bad guys, and grey area good guys are some of the best things to bring a really good story to life.

But Destiny 2 is a game that isn’t like other MMOs. It is a looter shooter MMO but also has a strong RPG element to it. While others like SWTOR and ESO (the only other two that I play), you can play ALL of the expansions anytime you start a new character, Destiny - unfortunately - doesn’t do that.

Destiny 2 doesn’t have as much of a draw to newcomers as the before-mentioned games. Especially for us RPG-oriented players.

There are a few reasons for that. And yes, I started with a con. Let me start with the pros first.

The Pros:

The story is amazing! Going all the way to D1 (a bad experience for me but I’ll put that aside for now) you play one of three races within the humanity groups: Human, Awoken, or Exo. Now, I’m not the most familiar with all of the back story lore but what I do know is that you are a dead person. Then this little A.I.-looking thing called a ghost brings you back to life. You do not remember your past. You’ve basically been given a second chance at life only now you have special abilities and are basically, well, a badass.

Classes: You can choose between three different classes; Titan, Hunter, and Warlock. Titan is the tank. Hunter is the rogue character and of course, the Warlock is the mage character. Within your class are your subclasses - Solar, Arc, Void - and within those are also 3 different choices. We also recently got the Stasis subclass.

The Combat is awesome! I adore the combat in this game. While I am not a huge fan of 1st person shooters, Destiny is one of those games I make an exception for. And there are times when you go into 3rd person anyway so it’s all good. The guns are incredible and such a huge variety of them as well. While describing combat, I just can’t do it justice in words. The best I can do is show you with the video below (realizing I really have to add more Destiny to my YouTube, lol)

The other characters. As I said earlier, the characters in the story are complicated and no one is all good or all bad. It’s fascinating to get a vast variety of different characters in the game that have such an amazing story themselves. I’ll give an example: Remember the much-beloved character I mentioned earlier? Well, his murderer comes back as a guardian! And he doesn’t remember anything. Talk about complicated!

Making friends: This is an MMO after all. You are in a world with other players. You can choose to socialize with them or not. It is a choice but if you choose to socialize, you can make some pretty good friends in the game. I had a very good friend group in Destiny 2 that I will always be thankful for and appreciate. In the words of Hawthorn, “A clan is just a family you choose to join” Your clan can become your friends, maybe even your best friends.

The Game has so many great qualities. I love this game, I really do. But… there is a but. I have had my own interest and disinterest in this beloved franchise.

The Cons:

The Community can be very Toxic: Now to be fair, every single game has a toxic community. I see this all the time. Twitter is full of them. What I’m talking about though is while you are playing you may get toxic messages from other players while you are in the middle of gameplay. Or you may join a fireteam just to do some strikes and maybe make a new friend and someone in the group will just be a major asshat for no real reason. And don’t get me started on PvP. I love PvP in Destiny myself but I only have fun by myself or with a TRUSTED group of friends. Note: I haven’t experienced this on PC as of this writing and I’ve been on PC for a year now. On Xbox though, that’s an entirely different story.

Some missions can be very hard Solo: If you’re a solo player and aren’t really interested in playing with other people (like me) prepare yourself for a lot of dying in certain missions. It can be done but just don’t expect every mission to be easy-peasy. Especially those that require a fireteam in order to do the mission and/or complete it. The game is designed for you to play with others. Just be aware of this.

New Players May Find it Hard to Connect to the Game: This is a big problem for Bungie (the developers of Destiny). Unlike ESO and SWTOR, Destiny 2 doesn’t have all of the expansions available to the new players as (and I’ll get to this later) the game wasn’t designed for it. Because of this, however, new players are missing out on A LOT of incredible story and lore.

Outside Resources Are Necessary: What I mean by that is new players now have to watch videos on both the lore (if they want to really get to know the world they are playing in) as well as many other combat-oriented and weapons and armor videos out there. This may leave new players feeling confused, overwhelmed, and just daunted by the amount of information that the game isn’t giving them.

Missing Out: One of the best stories in the game is actually the first one, The Red War. It is the introduction to the world, the story, characters, and everything that would have a new player invested and wanting to play this game. Unfortunately, the Red War is no longer available and that is a major downfall for Destiny.

Now I’m going to talk more about the Cons here because they need to be addressed. First off, these cons exist for a reason. You see, Destiny 2 wasn’t meant to be an ever-evolving game. There was supposed to be a Destiny 3. Bungie was originally with Activision when Destiny 2 started and the plan was to have the game last a few years then move onto Destiny 3.

Then Bungie left Activision. Bungie then became an indie game company. Great right? It was. For awhile. Now, I don’t know the details or the ins and outs that prompted this but Bungie decided to scrap Destiny 3 and just keep going with Destiny 2.

The problem with that is the engine isn’t built for it. Again, I don’t understand all of the tech mumbo jumbo here but from my limited understanding, because Destiny 2 wasn’t supposed to become this big evolving ever-growing game, it literally can’t handle more than a few things at a time.

So, Bungie decided to put past storylines and expansions in a vault. They can bring that out anytime but we don’t know when. This leaves new players without a beginning, ergo, without the connection, we veteran players have, to the story, characters, etc.

This, in my opinion, is what causes disinterest in this otherwise really amazing, well-done game. The graphics are gorgeous. The combat is incredible and even the organization of the game is so much better than say, SWTOR.

Of course, I am a veteran of the game. What would a newbie think though? Some that I have talked to have gotten confused and overwhelmed. I know how that feels. I felt that way with Destiny 1.

My experience with D1 wasn’t great. I went in with a group of people whose only interest was getting me to level 40 so I can raid with them. Never mind that I had never done a raid. I was rushed through the game just to get to a raid, so they could get rewards. It took me forever to even understand what was happening in the Vault of Glass raid and as a result, I hated it.

Destiny was the very first MMO I had ever played too. It was overwhelmingly confusing for this solo RPG player, to put it mildly. They dragged me into PvP for the first time and again, I had no idea what I was doing.

I didn’t get the chance to really learn the lore or the characters in this world. So I had no connection to the game. In fact, I hated it.

Then Destiny 2 came around and I went back and forth on whether or not to try it. I bought the game and decided that I was going to do what I do best: Play Solo!

I went in, played the campaign, ON ALL THREE CHARACTERS, and the rest is history. I fell in love with Destiny. I even made some good friends and discovered that I am a Titan Main! I even raided for awhile.

This is something I’m told by new players (who are like me) that doesn’t happen for them.

And that is unfortunate because Destiny 2 really is one of the best games. It has to be to one’s taste though and I wish Bungie would do more to allow new players the space to really get invested.

Then again, that’s where we veterans come in. I’ll be helping out a few new people maybe this weekend and hopefully, I will be able to bring a few new lovers of the franchise. That’s my hope. Wish me luck.

Thanks so much for reading!