Destiny, and I say this as someone who loved D1 and tried very hard to love D2, suffers from a mix of the worst of art-by-committee and the worst of art-by-auteur.
Every game director has managed to come across both a simpering sycophant and clueless tyrant, trying to cater to both the vicitudes of MTX optimization and the whims of their 50-hour-a-week players, both of which command Bungie’s ear to try to make the most addictive game on the least content.
As a result they are stuck to committing to a constant release schedule where they have barely enough time to create basic terrain and voice overs, throw in their usual stock of enemies and press-button-while-holding-a-shape game play. And they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t touch the PvP mode, where half the players are mad if they lose a single engagement in a single match in a single game while playing with the most optimized loadout, and the other half are the same but playing with random trash they found on the floor.
The gun play is great, but it’s clear they can’t think of anything exciting to do with it any more. All sense of mystery has gone from the old story, and the new story doesn’t have time to explain why they don’t have time to explain.
Their most recent season was focused loosely around pagan witchcraft, I’m a amateur (secular) Tarot reader, my wife and I are loosely (atheist) pagan celebrants, and they even had a custom tarot deck as merch - couldn’t hold my attention because it was still an easier Court of Oryx from Destiny 1, and the main game play is “shoot monster, go to the HAM radio which for some reason is the size of a fridge to listen to an alien with a Brooklyn accent chat shit about something that happened 2 years ago”
Destiny, and I say this as someone who loved D1 and tried very hard to love D2, suffers from a mix of the worst of art-by-committee and the worst of art-by-auteur.
Every game director has managed to come across both a simpering sycophant and clueless tyrant, trying to cater to both the vicitudes of MTX optimization and the whims of their 50-hour-a-week players, both of which command Bungie’s ear to try to make the most addictive game on the least content.
As a result they are stuck to committing to a constant release schedule where they have barely enough time to create basic terrain and voice overs, throw in their usual stock of enemies and press-button-while-holding-a-shape game play. And they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t touch the PvP mode, where half the players are mad if they lose a single engagement in a single match in a single game while playing with the most optimized loadout, and the other half are the same but playing with random trash they found on the floor.
The gun play is great, but it’s clear they can’t think of anything exciting to do with it any more. All sense of mystery has gone from the old story, and the new story doesn’t have time to explain why they don’t have time to explain.
Their most recent season was focused loosely around pagan witchcraft, I’m a amateur (secular) Tarot reader, my wife and I are loosely (atheist) pagan celebrants, and they even had a custom tarot deck as merch - couldn’t hold my attention because it was still an easier Court of Oryx from Destiny 1, and the main game play is “shoot monster, go to the HAM radio which for some reason is the size of a fridge to listen to an alien with a Brooklyn accent chat shit about something that happened 2 years ago”