Destiny 2 Wild Style 2 is headed in the right direction. Perhaps it’s too little too late or maybe it could pull a healthy player base back in. For now, Destiny 2 is trying its best and is showing signs of quality of life for its future. Today it’s no surprise when buying a new game to be hit immediately by a patch, because what game makes it out of the door ever without having to go through a few updates and patches once it’s out the gate? Usually a major update will hit games freshly released within the first month followed by the steady stream of content and improvements. All of this is commonplace in the video game world and yet we as the audience still find time to get mad that games aren’t the perfect embodiment of what was envisioned. Developers do have a responsibility to be open with their audience and it does become a let down when certain things promised are nowhere to be seen or the game is more broken than let on. So let the saga of Destiny as it continues through the ages be a lesson, one that we are seeing more and more frequently – Anthem is on the horizon, after all. But it’s our responsibility as players and developers to keep the dialogue going to get the best experience possible from all sides. Good luck out there, Guardian.
It’s been less than a year since Destiny 2’s launch, with highs and lows, but mostly lows. Players may have fallen off Destiny 2 faster than a Sparrow racing its way through…oh wait (I miss Sparrow Racing). It’s this exact feeling, however, that Bungie is battering its player base with. For those who have come from Destiny and stuck around — through gritted teeth — and those who are newcomers to the IP, it’s been like climbing a vertical mountain that’s starting to invert itself on the way up. Slowly, Bungie has course corrected and it’s filling in much of the gaps that should have been filled in to begin with. When an entire weapon selection is useless for much of the first year, something might be wrong, especially because it leads to one of the worst grievances of all — not having fun.
Bungie did turn a corner with the laying out of the plan moving forward for Destiny 2, which was a nice gesture, but showing us the content road ahead isn’t what earns trust back ; it’s the work put into Destiny 2. Guardians have been putting in the work of playing the game. Many couldn’t keep up with the grind, but those that stayed see that brighter tomorrow that every NPC is always gabbing about to whichever Guardian will listen.
On paper, The Infinite Forest sounds like a fascinating concept. Bringing in procedurally-generated dungeons would be an exciting way to invigorate the endgame like with Bloodborne’s Chalice dungeons. Sadly, even this concept is ruined thanks to asinine levels of repetition. All the Infinite Forest is is just a linear set of platforms populated with generic enemies players have been fighting for the past three years. The sad thing is, there’s not much of a challenge here. It’s possible just to skip the enemies and head towards the door. On occasion you do need to kill an enemy to unlock the door, you can accomplish it by just hanging near the last platform and shooting them from afar.
Whether they intended it or not, when Bungie stated during the livestream that community was what bound Destiny together, they made relationship clear. Destiny is about playing with friends new and old. It could be a one off, with the new Guided Games or something more concrete with friends who have banded together again to face the encroaching darkness. If community is so important to Destiny, it was only understandable that this path would be traversed eventually. Relationship, is something most of us take part in everyday whether we like it or not. Even the Guardians in the Tower couldn’t escape the inevitable crouchers that would surround you or the dance parties. Oh, the dance parties. People can’t help but be drawn to each other, even if it means joining others only in digital spaces.
To add insult to injury, you can’t even play in the Infinite Forest whenever you want. After beating the three adventures, players can only access the Infinite Forest through additional Adventures acquired through Brother Vance, which you can only get once per week. For being a key feature of this DLC, players aren’t allotted a lot of time with the Infinite Forest.
The Last City isn’t the only thing out there. One of my first memories of Destiny is one of the story missions, the name of which escapes me at the moment. In this particular mission, after activating some beacons, your Ghost makes the comment of things deeper out in the universe, things unseen and ancient. While this may have been a reference to Crota at the time or even Oryx, it still felt as if Bungie was hinting at a lot up its sleeve. When really digging into the Destiny Grimoire or even just playing the game, it’s obvious humans expanded across the stars at rapid pace. Destiny 2 is following in suit, with the three new locations Titan, Nessas and Io they couldn’t be digging the heels more into lore. These are spaces that will show off how humanity took control of their…Destiny. The Traveler brought with it the Golden Age and Destiny 2 seems to want to show just what that means.