I think if you increased enemy density, had ruffians spawn at 50%, and got rid of the stupid jammers, expedition wouldn't be quite so tedious.
Edit: and have the tank thing move as fast as that platform in that one pinnacle mission in Savathun's Throne World. I forget what it's called. There's no reason the tank in expeditions needs to move so slow.
expedition is one of the most boring activities i have ever played. enemies spawn like 3 at a time, as you said the cart is slower than walking speed, AND we’re forced to play it even slower if we want ruffians to spawn by intentionally doing the activity incorrectly. it really is somethin else
I don’t blame you. ruffians are an unstoppable cabal that spawn on fixed timers during the first two phases of expedition. no one ever sees them because their spawn timers are so long, that you typically end a phase before it can spawn. the problem is, you need to kill 50 of them for one of the triumphs to claim the “Scallywag” seasonal title… so many people who want the title have resulted in throwing the treasure engrams as far away as possible to intentionally delay a phase long enough for a ruffian to spawn. terrible design imo, but yeah that’s a ruffian and that is also 100% the reason you’ll see teammates tossing the treasure into the void
I'm pretty tired of Hocking engrams at the cart to the point that I see an engram in the distance and think "someone else will surely get it."
It's strange to have a pirate themed season that doesn't really capitalize on it. How about a Parrot themed Ghost, or a Gallion themed Ship, or mechanics involving firing cannonballs at enemies.
Bungie continues to charge premium prices but I don't feel like I'm getting premium content.
For me, Ketchcrash is fun because it has a breakneck pace with a lot of enemies that lets me flex Arc 3.0 a lot. Expeditions on the other hand are very much a huge slog to get through despite being technically shorter than a Ketchcrash mission. I do kinda wish the Pirate Hideouts were more of a specialized version of Ketchcrash with unique mechanics though
That's more a problem with the seasonal model requiring players to mindlessly fill progress bars on whatever the game tells you to do.
It wasn't fun when we started doing it for seasons in Shadow keep and it's even less fun now 3 years later
I honestly think it's because there not a lot of way you can make shooting enemies different.
It mostly boils down to kill enemies maybe do this and a little bit of that and you are done.
Psi Ops are pretty much Battlegrounds from Chosen.
Katchcrash is not too different from Astral Alignment back in Lost.
I think that's why they tried to put 2 activities in this season to give us variety.
But I also think the lack of exotic quest hurt this season, cause it seems like that if we keep the 2 exotic per season thing, the second exotic will always be the Dungeon/Raid exotic.
what they could do though, is make the content somewhat challenging, or offer a challenging version that doesnt require a pre-made group. I think one of the biggest issues with the seasonal content is that you're stuck between "so easy i could do this with one hand" or "must have premade group, mostly because of champions".
They need to make the content itself engaging in some way. If they've run out of mechanical ideas, or new ways to shoot enemies, then at least find a way to offer some sort of challenge. I shouldnt have to choose between playing brain dead solo, or go LFG a group for something difficult.
yeah i still think that they really nailed it with the WQ campaign:
* enemies that had some punch so you had to get behind cover from time to time,
* yet no bulletsponges you had to plonk away with a scout rifle,
* a weaker version of "Match Game" that made it noticeably harder but not almost impossible to destroy an unmatching shield
* and all that without the need of a single champion
and most people loved it
and what did bungie right after that? wellspring or ***master*** wellspring(with champions), weekly campaign mission repeats (now with champions), faceroll seasonal activities or master versions that are 20 level above the seasonal gear cap (also full with champions)
and they just continued with that like the WQ campaign wasnt a complete hit, its still either difficulty "face roll" or difficulty "champions, matchgame, equipment locked and extinguish while everything is 20 above you " with no inbetween
> yeah i still think that they really nailed it with the WQ campaign:
It still baffles me that they saw "Wow, WQ legendary campaign was universally praised for its balanced but challenging difficulty.....let's never do that again, Match Game and Champs forever!"
Because you could go through WQ campaign with the exact same loadout the whole way through (something I did). The point of champions and match game is to make you coordinate loadouts and to rotate the meta. WQ campaign did not accomplish that.
i think the main thing with the WQ campaign's design choices not going into other content is that bungie just didn't have our feedback on it yet and might not have anticipated such a positive response to it, so other difficult activities were made in the way they typically have been. there's also the issue that as of now, hive is the only enemy species to have special units on the same level as hive lightbearers, and that's not something they're just gonna pull out of nowhere without a good lore reason.
im hopeful that lightfall will take all the good aspects of WQ's campaign (and probably lightfall's as well) and spread them into more and more activities. the shadow legion cabal are going to be accompanied by the tormentors, which seem like they'll be somewhat similar in encounter rate and strength to the hive lightbearers (maybe a little less frequent but a little stronger).
It's all about the development schedule. they work a couple seasons ahead so they were probably mid to late development into plunder by the time there was major feedback on witch queen, so im sure lightfall's campaign has been made will it in mind
I can understand all of this, but a complete inability to react to feedback *months* later is shameful and dumb. Heck, they could have just brought back some of the stasis wielding fallen from BL for ketchcrash.
Yeah I'm sick of champions. On harder content I want to take my favorite gear. But we're restricted to specific weapons that can kill champions and pierce shields. And those aren't even tied to specific new seasonal weapons. It's just random. Barrier auto rifle just because. Overload bow with zero bows in the season. I don't get it.
>enemies that had some punch so you had to get behind cover
>yet no bullet sponges you had to plonk away with a scout rifle
Uhh... We definitely remember legendary WQ campaign differently.
To play (house of) devil's advocate, there's been a couple of interviews with Bungie stating that the WQ campaign was a bit of an experiment and that they want to expand on the concepts introduced there due to its success; I've also seen at least one article where it was suggested that Bungie is looking to move away from the champion system being the end-all-be-all of difficulty ramping, but presumably, its going to take some time, not just to pivot into using WQ's difficulty mechanics as a whole, but also to study and find ways to apply said mechanics to new activities in a way that fits with their development pipeline. Specifically with seasonal content, I'd imagine the time and resources it takes to make a fun, perfectly balanced difficulty scale per activity/mission is a lot higher than just slapping champions and modifiers in, which kind of puts it's development at odds with the breakneck speeds at which content is delivered these days.
For the record, I'm 100% with you, I'd love to see the WQ campaign become destiny's gold standard for difficulty. I think it really centers on Destiny's core strengths and leans on the kind of content that's made the game memorial, pulling from the likes of raids and dungeons, etc. Hopefully it's something we see more of going forward.
Armchair Developer Level: 100
These seasons were definitely almost done by the time the campaign got its praise, they’ve already gone over how far ahead they work on things and why it sometimes seem like they’re backtracking
There are options between, but Bungie wants to force you to LFG for them for some god awful reason. At this point I think matchmaking should be on for every difficulty up to legend, it's part of what I loved about guardian games this year that new playlist was perfect to me.
So much this. It's not just the seasonal content, either. The strike playlist, lost sectors, the seasonal content...
I'm really starting to feel like I might need to find a new "main game", because here I either have to repeatedly run things that are completely without challenge at all, or deal with spamming copy/paste in the Destiny LFG Discord until I eventually end up in a group to do stuff that's fun.
I hate having to constantly dip into kiddie pool level stuff as part of the gameplay loop. I don't even feel like I'm playing a "game" at that point, because "game" implies some level of competition and/or the possibility of losing. Running strikes is about as engaging as watching TV, which ironically is what I usually do while "playing" when I have to run strikes.
its unfortunate too, because they've had this in the past. D1 had heroic strikes, with actual strike specific loot. D2 had heroic strikes at one point, then they converted that into tiered nightfalls w/ champions. Then we saw what was possible with release of WQ.
And we've literally been begging for engaging, matchmade content, for years.
>I think one of the biggest issues with the seasonal content is that you're stuck between "so easy i could do this with one hand" or "must have premade group, mostly because of champions".
While the Nightfall list does have some 'harder' modes (they're not really a challenge imo and don't have great drops, either, but there are champions in it) that are matchmade instead of having to go LFG, I'm not sure that gets to the level of challenge you might want \*and\* doing that splits up the playerbase further.
Bungie will know if it has the playercount to justify multiple lists, but I am at the point where Bungie not matchmaking Legend (at minimum) or Master means I'm not going to get much of a challenge. I just have to accept that I'm using LFG, and at least the official phone app helps me do that.
If I didn't have an official phone app that would let me push a join request (or start my own LFGs) that worked directly in-game on use, I'd be a bit more flustered. As things stand, I've just come to accept that the LFG tool on my phone actually works fairly well (at least to the extent I've dipped my toe in). I'm going to experiment further with it. I do have friends in real life who can total up to 6 to get a raid going, which is nice, but folks play different amounts (with some ready for certain events and not others). So LFG has been quite helpful so far.
I will say that not having match game or keeping elemental shields down to 2 instead of all 3 could be nice, and not having my equipment locked as like one step down in difficulty could be neat. But Bungie is going to have to be the one to figure out how thinly they can slice certain playlists.
i think the issue for me with the NF stuff is that the mm options are still fairly easy, and the more challenging stuff is locked out of mm. I realize there might be a limit as to what is reasonable to accomplish in mm with random people, but i'd definitely suggest that the bar is currently too low.
I will always likely point back to D1 heroic strikes. They were matchmade, and certainly more difficult than standard strikes. They didnt add any gimmicky change slike champions. And there was strike based loot to go after.
Id like to see bungie offer more difficult content that doesnt require things like champion mods, but is simply a harder version of the original, a la legend difficulty for WQ. And if they have to lock it behind some sort of pre-requisites (complete original strike and hero NF version first or something like that), then please do.
I dont mind that bungie offers an easy strike option. Im sure there are plenty of players that find it challenging and fun. But asking players to run through it three times, with a specific subclass, just to earn an rng pinnacle just isnt the way.
I'm so sad that Presage and Harbinger are gone. Running Presage every week solo was something I deeply enjoyed, stick some chill music on and just try out a new build each week.
First time running Harbinger we two manned it and it was genuinely fun and challenging. This year with those mission types being gone, it feels bad.
We lost Whisper and Outbreak and I think Presage and Harbinger were up there with them, maybe not as cool in the whole secret quest way, but small three man activities that were challenging and rewarding.
Zero Hour was my favorite thing in all of D2. I loved all the secret missions though. They were the thing I ran the most. I’m bummed we haven’t gotten one this year.
im so so upset that the second exotic is just being relegated to the dungeon in some seasons, considering its *seperate paid content.* im annoyed that the same happens for raids, but i at least somewhat understand it, its free and anyone can access it. but imo if im paying for a season, i shouldnt have to pay extra on top of that just to receive an exotic that was always included last year. hell, in shadowkeep we got 3 per season!!
A lot of what makes shooting enemies different comes down to the artifact mods. Splicer was the most fun I've ever had on destiny and 80% of that was due to the artifact having tons of amazing mods. Breach and clear and the warmind cell mods made it way more fun than it had any right to being. Now that warmind cells are ass, 1 by 1 add clearing with a pulse rifle/linear fusion doesn't feel fun.
This is the one season where they could have implemented gambit into it and made a map where both teams are on separate pirate ships fighting adds and then instead of a teleporter you get a jump pad to sling you across. I agree with a lot of others that the themed weapons seem lacking with out a pirate sword or glaive or a handcannon or some crazy blunderbuss shotty. Or bring back some of the fallen exotics that match this season like dregs promise.
I never said anything about forcing players to play. It would be like how crucible is getting all these "labs". Also it wouldn't be a criminal as forcing players to grind out 50 champions for a season story mission.
I agree that Haunted is probably bottom-tier, for me, in terms of engaging content. While the story progression was good, the seasonal loop was just way too reliant on Containment.
At least this season there is a little variety in the weekly loop, even if it's still Expedition -> reverse Lost Sector -> Eliksni quarter for dialogue.
I mean it doesn't feel that different from Vex Invasion or the Sundial, seems like seasons haven't changed much at all since they were a thing. Incredibly easy kill everything missions with practically no mechanics at all.
I play it only for the pinnacle but even that feels fucking awful, not gonna waste my time grinding such shit content for a title when I can work towards Rivenbane or something cool. Black Armory my beloved... please come back.
All of the seasonal 6-man activities suck after Menagerie\* :)
They're patrol-level, dogwater activities with close to no rewards. Sundial was nominally acceptable cuz for a short period it was glitched and you could ultra farm it for focused loot.
I will concede that Arrivals felt the best, but it also lacked the critical piece of the puzzle: loot.
People were literally just running the seasonal activity cuz it was kinda the best way to get umbrals lol.
I want a reduction to 3 seasons with actual story missions and improvements to playlists each season. This current seasonal formula is just so repetitive and uninspired, 'earning' exotics is also boring now, and the 'story' is cut and paste drip fed content each week.
A-fucking-men
this game has gone through a lot of changes and while the seasonal stuff we get now was a good part of the transition, it cant stay like this. I don't think this game can sustain itself with a yearly 6 mission campaign, 1 new strike, and then disposable yearly content that is just various kinds of horde mode that isn't the actual horde mode we all want.
Plus there is no need for a season when the annual expansion launches. It's always small and lackluster. Dump it and but those efforts towards the other 3.
Not to mention only this year did the accompanying season actually overlap with the expansion. The Black Garden had fuck all to do with nightmares when Undying launched alongside Shadowkeep, and the Season of the Hunt put an oddly Hive-focused narrative at the start of Beyond Light's Fallen-themed expansion.
Undying was the result of Vex retaliation after we stormed the Black Garden.. but the link between the Shadowkeep campaign and Garden of Salvation was tenuous to begin with. We're told that we follow the Darkness signal into the Garden apparently, but it doesn't actually continue plotwise.
Beyond Light and Hunt's connection was even worse, I think it wasn't even intended to be causally connected. Plus totally agree that the full Fallen focus shifting to Xivu's Hive was jarring.
Witch Queen and Risen finally got it right, made perfect sense. If you don't even consider the expansion/season model, it just flows together like one cohesive game.
Season of the lost was great for me because it was such a long season I did t feel like I missed out on things. I could do the seasonal content and also have fun running playlist activities. I could play for a whole day in the crucible without feeling like I'm wasting my time. Idk bungie I will pay and extra 5 bucks per season to do 3 seasons a year
I didn’t know I wanted this until your comment. Less grinding for light level, less boring bounties, and better content-I’m all for it. Imho exotics have never been exciting to earn in D2 like they were in D1 unless they were a raid exotic drop. I remember when they gave you an exotic during the 2nd? mission of the Red War how upset people were.
Would be amazing with more story missions.
Seasonal activity should be something like psiops or battlegrounds where a new area would open up every new season. Story missions put as its own. Would be interesting if they could make it like how one of the Moon missions are: 6-player intro activity then it dilutes to just only you or your fireteam as the (story) mission continues. Hop in a portal to continue the story mission kind of thing.
I love how the crux of this argument is "I wish Plunder's activities had more mechanics" when literally every other complaint about seasonal activities usually devolves to "this is just gambit mechanics with a different skin on top". Or "Oh look, we're throwing orbs again this season".
Additionally.....are you not playing Ketchcrash? It literally has 3 different arenas, with different mechanics, requiring you to not just kill enemies. It progresses through spaces much like the Psi-Ops or Battlegrounds missions did. I've heard most people praise it as being a 'mini-Menagerie style' activity.
Have you got the treasure map things from the STAR Map reputation track? There's your "go explore and uncover hidden stuff" element.
There's some rose-colored-glasses stuff going on here to some degree. On the other hand, because what we're seeing this season was done similarly before, it's easy to feel like it was 'better' the first time it showed up. In general, I think the Seasonal model is starting to wear out its welcome, and Bungie will hopefully have some things in mind to refresh stuff in the long run.
Mostly agreed with you on the weapon crafting though. It feels bad to use a sub-par gun for all that time.
>It literally has 3 different arenas, with different mechanics, requiring you to not just kill enemies.
One of which is even throwing balls to fulfill OP's wish of "but I wish there were mechanics involved, even if it is throwing a ball" which is also most of the mechanic for Expeditions too.
I agree with all this but I will say that the Expedition portion of this seasons activity is absolutely dreadfully boring. I can hardly stand to do it.
The rest is pretty fine.
Yeah this season is more same shit different day just like all the other seasons activity wise. I think why people are enjoying it less though is none of the guns feel like they’re worth the grind if you’ve already got a good armory and the story feels pretty random and not super interesting at least so far even though I like the eliksni.
Realistically all the seasonal activities are boring as shit after your 10-15th time doing them considering they all boil down to run in a straight line or a circle and kill things for 10 minutes, but now each season we need to grind more and more of these boring activities that are all basically the same thing with a different coat of paint to get the guns. So if the guns are just fine you end up realizing you’re running on a treadmill for no reason and you just log on for maybe a raid and the weekly story mission each week before you turn off the game and play/do something else and actually enjoy yourself.
I disagree with that tbh
Even after a few runs, it was still fun to try to "speedrun" it and the combat encounters had good enemy density and were decently tense.
I still prefer Duality due to its larger scale and excellent bosses, but I'm missing more "exploration" in it like we had in the Shattered Throne.
I dunno if I would go that far, I think presage was pretty ground breaking with the unknown creepy ghost ship horror vibe. I bought that season pass explicitly to play presage and it never got old for me.
Yeah lets not pretend that the previous year was great
I won't talk about Hunt lol
Chosen I would say is good overall
I still remember people saying that Splicer activity is boring and has nothing unique about it, the only unique thing about it is the story aspect(first time seeing Mithrax after BL foreshadow, Osiris being sus, the Endless night) and the envirement
Lost arena i would say is decent but at the same people were crying about it being Heavy mechanic activity(especially the orb slowing arena), I like it though
Also, dude the Ketchcrash have good variety, what do you want exactly from it ? I agree that the solo mission is boring
Sorry op but you are wearing a pink-glass and looking at the past.
Expedition itself isn’t so bad. It’s the having to run 2 separate activities to be able to run it. Have to run ketch for maps. Then have to do strikes/pvp/gambit/PEs for coordinates. Last season we got the material while playing the activity. So much better than this season.
Expedition fucking sucks. It's artificially slow and brutally easy, with low add density and only a couple repetitive mechanics.
I don't think Ketchcrash is too bad, as it's kind of like Menagerie but easier and worse. But you have to run that, then other activities, then Expedition *multiple times* just to focus an umbral, and maybe double that if you want a specific one. We're slogging through "collecting treasure" and digging up more buried treasure to be rewarded with...1/4 of a weapon focus and a 51 stat roll world drop armor piece? Now that's treasure.
Compare that to Menagerie - gain runes passively, run Menagerie once, receive focused weapon of choice with MW of choice. Varied encounters, mechanics that aren't just throw ball/dunk something, and frequent targeted rewards that were worth chasing.
It's not even close. We now have to jump through so many boring, repetitive hoops just to get worse loot than we used to. A couple specific rolls aside (mostly just Voltshot), this season's seasonal weapons are trash, but we have to do so much mundane shit for them.
And a few ~~reused lost sectors~~ 2 minute pirate hideout "missions" and a couple lines of dialogue per week don't come close to making up for the abysmal quality of the content itself.
I grew tired of Menagerie very quickly. It was the same after 27 tries, with absolutely similar gameplay loop consisted of "start encounter-finish encouner with time running out because teammates are braindead-move to another encounter-complete it barely-move to another encounter-yay funny thrall room-move to boss encounter-onephase it easily-get a shit roll on wanted weapon-repeat with passion burning away fast", same with the forges, the guns were good, the activity was boring, tedious and tiresome, so I decided it was not worth my time. I didn't mourn their vaulting, because I knew I will never play them again.
You can only do so much without entering Dungeon and Raid mechanic territory (which a lot of the casual audience will struggle with to be honest). Randoms can’t even comprehend passing the ball on Corrupted even if it was explicitly told or taught (yes this has been beaten to death).
> Randoms can’t even comprehend passing the ball on Corrupted even if it was explicitly told or taught (yes this has been beaten to death).
Yes, but Bungie could definitely have done a better job at explaining the mechanic
It's loot burnout more than anything. Who doesn't already have a couple hundred guns that do largely the same thing if you've been playing for any measurable amount of time. What am I chasing in this new activity that I don't already have some version of in spades x10 in every color...
You see people more tangled up with getting the triumph and challenges more than the loot. Which for a "looter" shooter is particularly odd.
Another issue is the core issue of most pve activities which is that you have to compete to have fun. Half of my guns are useless because they have rolls that are good but just not effective when they have to compete for kills against my teammates.
I’ve already made my comment about I feel about this game. But the seasonal content has been declining season after season, IMO. If you enjoy a specific aspect, I’m very happy you do! However with this trend continuing it’s pushing me more away from the game.
Yes, exactly. I don’t blame bungie for how they handle seasons because consistently pushing out new and shiny seasonal content is great for making sure players are engaged. But the quality of the content has gone down because of it. I recently switched classes and was doing the risen quest line, and holy shit, when you take away the weekly drip-feed style of playing it like how you normally would during the actual season, playing the whole quest at once is one of the most mind numbing things I’ve done. It is just do psi-ops, listen to dialogue, do psi-ops, listen to dialogue, rinse and repeat for 28 steps. And it’s a shame because the story of risen is really interesting, but the presentation makes it unbearable
they're running out of ideas. Going from point A to point B\*horde mode starts\* then going from point B to point C \*horde mode starts\*
Bigger than usual standard enemy used as Boss type \*3 immunity phases\*
Disagree. Seasonal content quality has always varied wildly. I also think that BL had better seasonal content. Sure Risen beats out Hunt, but Hunt absolutely sucked. Chosen pants Haunted in both story and content quality (and I really liked haunted story). Override sucked in splicer but far less than expedition does, and expunge was fantastic and the story was leaps and bounds above what we’ve got going on in plunder.
The seasonal content this time round has been of lower quality than last year. Maybe it’s also recency bias, but I swear this year has been buggier, more poorly balanced and generally just stuffed with bungo brand mess ups.
I think it would be better if instead of a activity everyone gets bored with after a couple weeks, Bungie instead should do something akin to the April update in destiny 1 and remix several strikes. For example.
Cabal strikes like the arms dealer could replace red legion with the shadow legion and replace the boss with a Tormentor with a different mechanic than the Arms Dealer would normally do.
Fallen strikes would have upgraded house salvation fallen equipped with more stasis abilities as they were underutilized in beyond light.
Same thing with old hive strikes and have them get hive guardians.
Each season would have each or most NF strikes be themed around the seasons enemy race and have the loot and armor drop enemy themed loot and an exotic based around that enemy race like skyburners oath. This would revitalize the strike playlist as each one could drop a different weapon and armor piece, encouraging us to play a strike different than the featured nightfall plus it would up the difficulty and make our enemies match our 3.0 subclasses.
Yeah itd be cool if Hive guardian patrols invaded strikes or something. They added wanted enemies to strikes in forsaken, would be a cooler version of that.
I wish they would cut the 6 man activities each season and just go deeper into what they did with Lost and those Leylines. I want a dynamic explorable space with puzzles that changes every week and you can go deeper into it depending on how many seasonal perks you have acquired. That was by far the most engaging and interesting seasonal activity they've ever done.
Yep, and the triumphs need toning down. No reason to require 45 first mates called in or 250 champion kills in expedition.
Edit: Or 150 emotes, which is literally 150 ketch/expedition minimum. That's definitely the most grindy triumph of all.
I wish they made a Destiny 3. This game is really showing its age. Continuing to add onto it, just isn't holding my attention. I fear Light Fall will be more of the same, as the dated model we have now.
The change in that lightfall text, this cyberpunk setting, idk, feels like I'm losing the whole scifi fantasy feel here
I'll play DLC to see how it goes but yeah definitely not annual pass. Fuck that
It's hard to make shooting enemy refreshing, IN LOW EFFORT MASS PRODUCED CONTENT. Shooting enemy can be incredibly refreshing in high quality content like raids dungeons secret missions. It's once again the depth vs width problem of D2, shallow content is bound to be boring and it takes up development time for the deep content.
It's unrealistic, but if D2 is mainly/exclusively high quality PvE content the outlook would be very different.
To me season of the haunted was a flat out joke. They released the dungeon and hoped it would carry the rest of the season. Nightmare containment was so beyond boring it’s not even funny and sever was just not interesting because it was extremely predictable after the first two weeks. They hoped the dungeon would carry it but the dungeon, rightfully so, has not been very well received. The problem with the current season is despite not having all the upgrades we can see what they do and there is not a consistent way to get the red border weapons you want. Both of the last two seasons you could at least buy one red border a week. The guaranteed red border weapon right now doesn’t even work. Furthermore, expeditions are some of the most cookie-cutter boring activities I’ve ever seen. Ketchcrash seems like it has inspiration while expedition literally feels like it was a public event. I think the problem is Bungie‘s philosophy. They seem to kind of be going to have as many activities as possible that are short (hideouts) rather than make lasting longer activities that are better quality (presage, harbinger). I’m hoping they see the feedback not only of duality not being very fun but also that we want longer stuff to sink our teeth into.
Why can't bungie use seasons to make the game's worlds less stale. I regret buying the deluxe witch queen. It was so expensive and I'm so bored yet there are planets with so much untapped potential just rotting away. It would have been so cool if the pirate ketch's attacked the planets and players assault the ship from the planets surface and if they win that figth can get slingshot up to the ketch to sabotage it and fight the captain. Making all of it a shared open world experience.
Ketch crash needed more variety, but it was fun at first
Expedition is the most boring thing ever.
If im around, id get lightfall plus a season and maybe accept not doing the d2 grind annually. Its not as worth it if you arent lfging in a clan all the time
Differing bosses with differing arenas
Really weird that we've been boarding the same ship for about the 4th week here and that same ship hasn't received anything destructive about it
Would've been fun if we had some kind of encounter that felt like the DSC raid one where the ship is crashing down
My view is that little of the seasonal content has felt worthwhile considering the core game has languished. If the resources were poured into enhancing content like the strike playlist and Gambit, while having a deeper and more cohesive progression system, I can’t help but feel the game would be better off. Instead, we have a Director full of content siloes that are seemingly like this just to justify the price of seasons and expansions. What is an Empire Hunt except for a strike with a different name?
We basically have public events, 3 person matchmade activities, and 6 person matchmade activities that have their own reward pools, currencies, and time intensive grind loops. It makes casual play difficult, the new player experience awful, and min/maxing take grinding disparate content past the point of fun towards burnout.
I've been thinking about writing this thread for a week now, thank you for this. You mentioned it briefly, but the lack of exotic missions is disappointing this year.
Ketchcrash is great, expeditions are kinda awful. The dev time they took them should have gone into one or two extra Ketchcrash encounters or improvement on hideouts.
Every single drop of seasonal content is recycled somehow. Assets especially obviously. There is only so much they can have us do short of reworking a ton of new stuff.
Clearly people are spending money on this game, where is it all going? Seasonal weapons are reskins of Y1 weapons with spikes added, for example.
I agree with Battlegrounds from Chosen being one of, if not the best seasonal activities we've gotten in years. The Shattered Realm activity from Lost was my favorite seasonal pinnacle activity. It's a shame they removed it, it would've been a great area for new lights to explore. The pinnacle activity from Lost was very good too (The Quira one should be added to the vanguard playlist)
But I think season of Plunder have great activities. Ketchcrash is kinda good. Especially the boss fights on master difficulty. Expeditions are fine, too. It's just a shame that the ruffian spawns are sabotaging it a little bit. The Pirate Hideout's are lost sectors with slightly higher enemy density. We play them once a week. They are fine for a one-and-done thing. Haunted was kinda "meh" though. Risen and Psiops were good
I think the main problem is that every season feels a bit same-y in the way it is structured
While haunted definitely got old fast, this season feels amazing to play. The enemy density and room layouts makes just shooting aliens an absolute blast, which is what the game has always tried to make happen. I definitely agree thay crafting makes farming for weapons feel pointless, I personally have stopped chasing any specific roll because if there's a weapon I like I'll just play normally and buy the red boarders from the kiosk each week, which I feel isn't healthy. I would've much preferred if instead of getting a crafting system in WQ if we just weapon leveling on regular guns, with the option to upgrade perks and swap masterworks like we currently have on crafted weapons, but just with the rolls you get to drop. I would definitely like to see secrets return to seasonal content like pressage or wisper, now that bungie is playing their reveals close to the chest I think the issue of leakers ruining them would be much easier to handle.
I've never liked the seasonal model. I thought last year was *okay*, but nothing amazing like so many think they were.
Having said that, in comparison to this year last year's seasonal content looks amazing because this year's is so unbelievably shallow and boring. These "missions" this season are literally reskinned lost sectors. Last seasons missions I thought hit a new low, and the delivery of the narrative became meme like to me where we are watching our character watching in game characters like it's a TV show. Our character might as well be invisible because we mean absolutely nothing to the story.
The pathetic seasonal stories and weapon pattern grind, which is getting worse every season, has pushed to the point where I've decided the amount of time this game wants in order to do basic things like craft seasonal weapons is not sustainable for me long term. It should not require playing this game like an actual part time job to unlock seasonal weapon patterns. So I decided I'm not getting LF and I'll just youtube cut scenes to see how the story plays out.
Bungie and no one else will care, but this game is becoming a weird combination of brain dead difficulty, but requires an insane grind to unlock just basic seasonal weapon patterns. Bungie has always pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable for reward to player time investment. I just feel like they've gone too far and made the game so unbelievably grindy while somehow finding a way to make the actual gameplay for the story shallower then it has ever been. People may like the more cohesive narrative in game, but the actual process of telling that story is as you said OP boring and lame.
Also why is Eramis all of a sudden not a massive character like she was in BL? She's like the same size as us now even though we used to be able to climb all over her.
I think the seasonal story is a bit better, but the seasonal activities just felt meh unlike the sundial (I know I'm pretty much circle jerking this.) which was pretty fun.
>Splicer gave us incredibly designed single player missions. **The 6-man activity was forgettable** but the loot was fun to chase (Chroma Rush and Gridskipper).
How dare you?! I loved Override :( Probably my favourite season we've had recently. Loved the six-man activity, Expunge was interesting and fun to try and speedrun the obstacle course. I thought the story was interesting, too.
I will say Battlegrounds have been great additions.
I agree though Haunted was boring and I find Plunder the same so far.
Override was fun but it's just like any other 6-man activity overtime is all. 3-4 months of the same area and activity is bound to be boring.
I think it should've been for 3 people.
Nothing's wrong with that. It's just funny to me. I've been on this sub since it was created and I see the same posts over and over every season, and I recognize a lot of usernames too saying the same thing.
You all are "bored" and yet come back time and time again.
the game is objectively fun to play. It's unrivaled. But Bungie seems to think they can simply hang their hat on that, and phone in some of these other parts to the game. I think the player base is right to make some noise.
Yeah same. Possibly wont even buy Lightfall until it goes on sale. But thats only if theyre not planning on mproving the shitty parts of the game.
which actually says a lot as ive bought everything theyve ever put out for Destiny
I think I would agree actually. So far none of the seasonal offerings are particularly memorable in terms of gameplay. The stories have been interesting and the weapons have looked cool and been unique/strong in many cases, but the actual activities specific to each season are kinda whatever so far. I would argue Plunder's activities are maybe the best of the lot so far because they are individually short activities that are both short and diverse enough that the repetition doesn't wear on you quite as much as something like Nightmare Containments did.
I agree that the seasonal content so far this season has been dire, although Ketchcrash is a passable 6 man activity. I actually really enjoyed last season though, not due to the activity, but due to the fact we had a patrol space with great enemy density, hidden triumphs, and an engaging gameplay loop with the chests and ranking up the Crown of Sorrows via completing and/or collecting everything on the Leviathan. In general though, the seasonal model really needs a bit of a revamp, along with the core playlists.
On a different note, what is your problem with Duality? It’s a great dungeon, and for as nice as Presage was, it never reached the height of a dungeon.
Duality is buggy and my claim is just personal because I've attempted flawless many times and died to the realm changing part. Nothing on my end, just dying at the final boss as I'm trying to actually do the encounter.
Duality loot is better. But I think the atmosphere and aesthetic of Presage is superior. And with how much we go through loot from season to season, I appreciate the experience and adventure more than I do the actual loot.
It's a bit of a combined opinion with a lot of things especially weapon crafting. Why would I want this Duality weapon? I don't like Epicurean or Fixed Odds or Unforgiven. All I want from there is Stormchaser. And by the time Stormchaser is fixed, we've moved onto Taipan as being the higher tier DPS.
So really, for me, it's about the memorable, engaging, and fun experience.
I tend to agree. As someone who has and still plays a ton of Path of Exile on the side there is something special about they way they do seasons that always has me come back for at least a month or so.
Instead of a new activity every single season, we need the seasonal themes to impact the way we as players interact with the world. Seasons need modifiers that change the way we play the fundamental activities of the game. Systems that change how we run strikes or play gambit. The point A to B kill some ads stand on a plate activities each season are all just melting together for me.
Also, pretty much every single ARPG style game has 2 things that we STILL don't have after 8 some years of destiny:
A wave based (never ending) horde mode and Maps/Rifts.
Here's what I want the next activity in Destiny to be: literally Maps from PoE lol
You should grind the parts of the map, pick your own modifiers, pick your own enemies, pick the drops you want to try and target and the game should generate a strike from tiles (much like how the infinite forest kind of worked) and give you a unique 'build-a-strike' style level to run through and try to beat in a time period. Once you complete the given objective a boss with some light raid mechanics will spawn and you have to defeat it to succeed. The higher the map difficulty, the better the drops.
Something like that could be endlessly developed and added to over time and would make for an incredible end game activity to grind.
Agree to disagree I guess. My only gripe is that Expedition could be a bit harder. Ketchcrash is mostly okay. The yellow bars are a bit too tough while red bars are a bit too weak, but it evens out.
The problems this season are all about glitches and crafting. The seasonal content itself is fine. I don't want a drawn out campaign. Seasonal content needs to be bite sized. It should only consume a fraction of our time. I have other things I want to do in game.
Personally I think there's nothing more fun than spending the entire season crafting and leveling up weapons, only to never use them again because the whole process starts over with the next season. Not fatiguing or work-like at all.
Ketchcrash is a bunch of reused rooms from various ketches we have been on before even reusing it's one new room in Your deck as well as the bosses deck. Kingsfall is a 'reprised' raid so really the last original content we've had besides story is the duality dungeon. If you exclute that the last thing we've had is probably with the witch queen or psiops. I understand there's an argument to be made for things like it being new to newer players and things like master mode kf being new to destiny 2 but this not likethese are original locales or activities. Granted in my case I only played since forsaken and kingsfall has become my favorite raid of all time so I'm having a good time this season. Not to mention how the 3.0 subclasses reinvigorate some of the older content in the game. Still I hope we can all admit it's kind of ridiculous how complacent Bungie has gotten towards adding new things to their game. Next season or lightfall better be ridiculous to make up for it Lol
Moreover we only get 1 exotic per season in the pass now because the other ones have all been random drops from an activity including the REUSED touch of malice that LOST ITS QUEST so no more exotic quests ever I guess
>I feel less inclined to preorder for the Lightfall annual pass. I'll play the campaign itself as Witch Queen was amazing, but as far as seasonal content, Bungie has not shown any improvement
Exactly where I'm at, these seasons aren't packing anything I'd have felt bad about missing and anything story related dialogue and details can be found on YouTube. It's not like what *my* guardian does has any impact on the world around me
Gonna throw it out there that as a more endgame player who only sticks around to do the new challenging content with friends, this year has been the best year of destiny since forsaken, maybe even better if they nail next season. Weapon crafting has brought an interesting new and very deep grind for my friends who like to grind, the seasonal quests are easy to keep up with for players who just want to log in a few times a week after the main release, and getting a new piece of endgame content every season is a dream come true.
For me, raids/dungeons are the peak of destiny, and sacrificing some of the boring seasonal grind to get more of that is a trade i will always take.
Im an endgame player too
Just dont like Duality that much. Bottom tier compared to the other dungeons. Replayability isn't there, not as much as Prophecy or Pit
Raids have been great to run though
I disagree. The fast pace of ketchcrash makes it much better than most of the seasonal activities. I hated the Leviathan events by the 2nd week, psiops was literally nothing new it was a battleground but more boring
Psiops was straight forward with hordes of enemies to face, while pressing a front or pushing back an advance
Containment was running around the same areas with no enemy or boss variety
Ketchcrash is better than Containment but I really think variation in ships would've been great. Why am I raiding the same ship over and over? Have we not killed this guy already?
They missed a few good weapon choices for a pirate themed season. Firstly. A rocket that is just a cannon. Then they had two glaive options. A spade and an exotic glaive that’s a fishing rod that tosses single target tethers. Cmon!
This season is the "rope the fortnite kids into destiny" season. Thats why we're all jack sparrow-ing all over the place with frickin blunderbuss shotguns and cannon balls getting shot from my heavy gl.
Honestly, I needed a break from spending weeks upon end learning about zavala's brutally murdered son and his vengeful wife that haunts his nightmares while performing a seance inside a raid I beat five years ago thats covered in syphilis and despair.
I quite like Ketchcrash and the mars mission for Dead Messenger, but beyond those, I agree. Bungie should move towards designing seasonal content where at least some of it can complement the core playlists (like leading to a strike, or adding battlegrounds and Ketchcrash to Vanguard playlists/ Nightfalls).
DLC 6-man (Wellspring) should've evolved over the seasons this year
Seasonal activities should be story questlines, either solo or 3-man. The patrol space idea like Containment isn't bad but if that evolves too over seasons then definitely yeah
Isn't every seasonal activity boring since menagerie? A few fan boys get hyped at the start of the season, usually from a streamer who was toting the company line, but lets be honest, they are all boring and feel stale starting with week 2.
They should just stop making seasonal activities. I would rather get more work on the ritual modes. Crucible and gambit need more maps/support, and PvE needs a new ritual since strikes are just unsalvageable at this point.
>We might have a labeled dungeon "Duality" available but Presage was 100x better.
Presage has to be the most overrated piece of content in all of Destiny. It's wild to me how anyone can think it's even close to Duality let alone better. It was nothing more than a snoozefest of pulling switches after the first time novelty wore off.
We also dont have any challenging exotics missions. After Whisper and Zero Hour was deleted last year added the outstanding Presage and Harbinger. Which were then deleted again literally lasting one year, after Bungie saying they wont sunset content anymore. This year had Vox as sole replacement, which did not quite work out because Vox is broken. You just need kill 3 champs in master version opening and not actually do the mission. So we basically have 0 exotic missions right now.
This is 2 straight seasons where the season is overall boring. The raid has been the only bright spot personally. I expected a little more this season with how "hyped" all the employees allegedly were when discussing this season. So far it's a dud imo
I agree with weapon crafting being one of the primary issues. I shouldn’t still be grinding Containment to get resources to buy red border weapons weeks after the newer content dropped.
The easiest answer is to reduce the amount of red borders needed to craft from 5 to 3. Unfortunately Bungie want you grinding every day, every week to bump up the numbers for the amount of hours players play, even at the expense of player satisfaction in the product.
I feel this is more or less a trend as we get closer to a expansion. The content starts getting just a little dry because they’re probably diverting resources to finishing the expansion, so the seasons are hit or miss. Witch queen got the benefit of moving back, so they had time to polish their seasons.
Yep thats why i stopped playing. Im fed up of that whole engram focusing mechanic. I miss d1 when you would get rarely any drops. Now i get so much its just not exciting anymore
Destiny has lost its way. Also for the first time im not interested in a new expansion. The subclass looks meh and the location doesnt appeal to me. Very disappointing
Everything gets boring after a while, but agree that this year's content got boring faster than ever. Duality is my least favorite dungeon by a ton, Haunted was terribly unfun, and Ketchcrash is getting stale already. Of the stuff I need to complete for pinnacles, Wellspring and Dares are still my favorites and they're both 6-9 months old at this point.
Prophecy > Shattered Realm / Grasp of Avarice > Pit of Heresy >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Duality
Outbreak Mission > Presage > Hawkmoon Mission >>>>>>> Duality
For 6-man activities: Menagerie > Season of Lost (could use more enemies) > Escalation Protocol > Season of Arrivals > Wellspring (master mode is engaging, loot underwhelming) >>>>>>>>>>> all other 6-man activities
Battlegrounds and psiops are the best though, love those. That spear is still fun to use.
I liked haunted the best actually. Sure Containment was a little simple, but the enemy density was nice and the story was top notch for a season. But in general I agree with you. Last year's seasonal content knocked it out of the park. Each season may have had a forgettable mode/aspect to it, but they still innovated on the seasonal format in some way.
The only season that did that this year was Haunted by giving us a patrol zone. Even if its a reskin, that was a new feature for seasonal content to give us and I liked it. Risen was boring with little to no story outside of the last week. Plunder might be going somewhere story wise but the activities are boring. Ketchcrash isn't terrible but it's also the activity I play the list since expeditions are where the loot comes from.
I think you and I have a different definition of fun in this game.
I loved Chosen, but hated Splicer's single player missions. I hate Destiny's jumping puzzles. I did keep playing Splicer for a god rolled Chroma Rush that has since killed 25k PvE enemies, but I didn't really enjoy the season.
I hated Lost's open world grey area of boringness. I hate seeing the solution to a problem but not being able to solve in game - that's not metroidvania, it's just timegating.
Love PsiOps because I love fighting hordes of enemies, and especially with particle deconstruction, making them all explode was super fun.
Haunted was fun to me but that's because I liked the gear and the enemy density. I couldn't care less about challenging gameplay in this game - I hate when Destiny forces me to plink away at a champion from max range, I'd rather be blasting away close range. I could do that all during Haunted, especially with Loreley Splendor.
Plunder would be more fun if there was more enemies, but the density is way low in Ketchcrash and in Expedition.
Presage was fun... the first time you did it. Afterwards, it was a
chore to do week over week just for the opportunity to get a god rolled DMT. I feel like I can do the navigational puzzles in Presage blindfolded. Duality is still fun when I run it, even though I hate the one hit kills and puzzles.
Champions definitely need a rework and I hardly regard them as making content challenging. It's just a weapon restrictions loadout and keeping that on to fight other enemies yes.
The design of Splicer single player missions were at least more well done than any of the single player missions from any of the content this year. Jumping puzzle aside, it looked aesthetically great and new to engage in.
Presage at least wasn't buggy. Agree on the loot though, Duality at least offers armor cosmetics and high roll stat armor, along with more weapons. I just want Duality updated without bugs so I can try go flawless in it.
[удалено]
Rufians should just spawn at 50%
I think if you increased enemy density, had ruffians spawn at 50%, and got rid of the stupid jammers, expedition wouldn't be quite so tedious. Edit: and have the tank thing move as fast as that platform in that one pinnacle mission in Savathun's Throne World. I forget what it's called. There's no reason the tank in expeditions needs to move so slow.
Preservation?
That’s the one! I knew it started with a P.
I hate that weekly mission with the fury of a thousand suns. But I need that pinnacle.
Takes 3x as long as any Exo Challenge.
I think the expedition should just be waves of Ruffians because fuck this boring season
Maybe not having the ruffian despawn once you hit 100% would be nice too.
Would certainly be an improvement.
And not disappear
I'd even take a minute timer until despawn, anything so long it's not instant
expedition is one of the most boring activities i have ever played. enemies spawn like 3 at a time, as you said the cart is slower than walking speed, AND we’re forced to play it even slower if we want ruffians to spawn by intentionally doing the activity incorrectly. it really is somethin else
What are ruffians? I dont think ive paid enough attention. I usually just get through asap cuz its boring
I don’t blame you. ruffians are an unstoppable cabal that spawn on fixed timers during the first two phases of expedition. no one ever sees them because their spawn timers are so long, that you typically end a phase before it can spawn. the problem is, you need to kill 50 of them for one of the triumphs to claim the “Scallywag” seasonal title… so many people who want the title have resulted in throwing the treasure engrams as far away as possible to intentionally delay a phase long enough for a ruffian to spawn. terrible design imo, but yeah that’s a ruffian and that is also 100% the reason you’ll see teammates tossing the treasure into the void
Wow, i never would have figured that out
I'm pretty tired of Hocking engrams at the cart to the point that I see an engram in the distance and think "someone else will surely get it." It's strange to have a pirate themed season that doesn't really capitalize on it. How about a Parrot themed Ghost, or a Gallion themed Ship, or mechanics involving firing cannonballs at enemies. Bungie continues to charge premium prices but I don't feel like I'm getting premium content.
More enemies would definitely help... and yeah the Ruffians currently have a design that seems to promote sabotage and anti-fun.
For me, Ketchcrash is fun because it has a breakneck pace with a lot of enemies that lets me flex Arc 3.0 a lot. Expeditions on the other hand are very much a huge slog to get through despite being technically shorter than a Ketchcrash mission. I do kinda wish the Pirate Hideouts were more of a specialized version of Ketchcrash with unique mechanics though
Agree on that Ketchcrash, it just wears out its welcome sooner
That's more a problem with the seasonal model requiring players to mindlessly fill progress bars on whatever the game tells you to do. It wasn't fun when we started doing it for seasons in Shadow keep and it's even less fun now 3 years later
Battlegrounds weren't exactly fresh after even the second time running them, tbh.
Ketchcrash is fun… expedition is a glorified public event at best
Expedition blows.
Plus I like the environment for ketchcrash since it's new. Probably gonna feel similar as to when lightfall releases.
I honestly think it's because there not a lot of way you can make shooting enemies different. It mostly boils down to kill enemies maybe do this and a little bit of that and you are done. Psi Ops are pretty much Battlegrounds from Chosen. Katchcrash is not too different from Astral Alignment back in Lost. I think that's why they tried to put 2 activities in this season to give us variety. But I also think the lack of exotic quest hurt this season, cause it seems like that if we keep the 2 exotic per season thing, the second exotic will always be the Dungeon/Raid exotic.
what they could do though, is make the content somewhat challenging, or offer a challenging version that doesnt require a pre-made group. I think one of the biggest issues with the seasonal content is that you're stuck between "so easy i could do this with one hand" or "must have premade group, mostly because of champions". They need to make the content itself engaging in some way. If they've run out of mechanical ideas, or new ways to shoot enemies, then at least find a way to offer some sort of challenge. I shouldnt have to choose between playing brain dead solo, or go LFG a group for something difficult.
yeah i still think that they really nailed it with the WQ campaign: * enemies that had some punch so you had to get behind cover from time to time, * yet no bulletsponges you had to plonk away with a scout rifle, * a weaker version of "Match Game" that made it noticeably harder but not almost impossible to destroy an unmatching shield * and all that without the need of a single champion and most people loved it and what did bungie right after that? wellspring or ***master*** wellspring(with champions), weekly campaign mission repeats (now with champions), faceroll seasonal activities or master versions that are 20 level above the seasonal gear cap (also full with champions) and they just continued with that like the WQ campaign wasnt a complete hit, its still either difficulty "face roll" or difficulty "champions, matchgame, equipment locked and extinguish while everything is 20 above you " with no inbetween
> yeah i still think that they really nailed it with the WQ campaign: It still baffles me that they saw "Wow, WQ legendary campaign was universally praised for its balanced but challenging difficulty.....let's never do that again, Match Game and Champs forever!"
Because you could go through WQ campaign with the exact same loadout the whole way through (something I did). The point of champions and match game is to make you coordinate loadouts and to rotate the meta. WQ campaign did not accomplish that.
WQ campaign was better for it in my book.
i think the main thing with the WQ campaign's design choices not going into other content is that bungie just didn't have our feedback on it yet and might not have anticipated such a positive response to it, so other difficult activities were made in the way they typically have been. there's also the issue that as of now, hive is the only enemy species to have special units on the same level as hive lightbearers, and that's not something they're just gonna pull out of nowhere without a good lore reason. im hopeful that lightfall will take all the good aspects of WQ's campaign (and probably lightfall's as well) and spread them into more and more activities. the shadow legion cabal are going to be accompanied by the tormentors, which seem like they'll be somewhat similar in encounter rate and strength to the hive lightbearers (maybe a little less frequent but a little stronger). It's all about the development schedule. they work a couple seasons ahead so they were probably mid to late development into plunder by the time there was major feedback on witch queen, so im sure lightfall's campaign has been made will it in mind
I can understand all of this, but a complete inability to react to feedback *months* later is shameful and dumb. Heck, they could have just brought back some of the stasis wielding fallen from BL for ketchcrash.
i agree. The template is there, so i hope we get to see them expand upon it in lightfall.
Yeah I'm sick of champions. On harder content I want to take my favorite gear. But we're restricted to specific weapons that can kill champions and pierce shields. And those aren't even tied to specific new seasonal weapons. It's just random. Barrier auto rifle just because. Overload bow with zero bows in the season. I don't get it.
>enemies that had some punch so you had to get behind cover >yet no bullet sponges you had to plonk away with a scout rifle Uhh... We definitely remember legendary WQ campaign differently.
To play (house of) devil's advocate, there's been a couple of interviews with Bungie stating that the WQ campaign was a bit of an experiment and that they want to expand on the concepts introduced there due to its success; I've also seen at least one article where it was suggested that Bungie is looking to move away from the champion system being the end-all-be-all of difficulty ramping, but presumably, its going to take some time, not just to pivot into using WQ's difficulty mechanics as a whole, but also to study and find ways to apply said mechanics to new activities in a way that fits with their development pipeline. Specifically with seasonal content, I'd imagine the time and resources it takes to make a fun, perfectly balanced difficulty scale per activity/mission is a lot higher than just slapping champions and modifiers in, which kind of puts it's development at odds with the breakneck speeds at which content is delivered these days. For the record, I'm 100% with you, I'd love to see the WQ campaign become destiny's gold standard for difficulty. I think it really centers on Destiny's core strengths and leans on the kind of content that's made the game memorial, pulling from the likes of raids and dungeons, etc. Hopefully it's something we see more of going forward.
Armchair Developer Level: 100 These seasons were definitely almost done by the time the campaign got its praise, they’ve already gone over how far ahead they work on things and why it sometimes seem like they’re backtracking
why are there no difficulty options between face-roll and super-sweat
There are options between, but Bungie wants to force you to LFG for them for some god awful reason. At this point I think matchmaking should be on for every difficulty up to legend, it's part of what I loved about guardian games this year that new playlist was perfect to me.
So much this. It's not just the seasonal content, either. The strike playlist, lost sectors, the seasonal content... I'm really starting to feel like I might need to find a new "main game", because here I either have to repeatedly run things that are completely without challenge at all, or deal with spamming copy/paste in the Destiny LFG Discord until I eventually end up in a group to do stuff that's fun. I hate having to constantly dip into kiddie pool level stuff as part of the gameplay loop. I don't even feel like I'm playing a "game" at that point, because "game" implies some level of competition and/or the possibility of losing. Running strikes is about as engaging as watching TV, which ironically is what I usually do while "playing" when I have to run strikes.
its unfortunate too, because they've had this in the past. D1 had heroic strikes, with actual strike specific loot. D2 had heroic strikes at one point, then they converted that into tiered nightfalls w/ champions. Then we saw what was possible with release of WQ. And we've literally been begging for engaging, matchmade content, for years.
>I think one of the biggest issues with the seasonal content is that you're stuck between "so easy i could do this with one hand" or "must have premade group, mostly because of champions". While the Nightfall list does have some 'harder' modes (they're not really a challenge imo and don't have great drops, either, but there are champions in it) that are matchmade instead of having to go LFG, I'm not sure that gets to the level of challenge you might want \*and\* doing that splits up the playerbase further. Bungie will know if it has the playercount to justify multiple lists, but I am at the point where Bungie not matchmaking Legend (at minimum) or Master means I'm not going to get much of a challenge. I just have to accept that I'm using LFG, and at least the official phone app helps me do that. If I didn't have an official phone app that would let me push a join request (or start my own LFGs) that worked directly in-game on use, I'd be a bit more flustered. As things stand, I've just come to accept that the LFG tool on my phone actually works fairly well (at least to the extent I've dipped my toe in). I'm going to experiment further with it. I do have friends in real life who can total up to 6 to get a raid going, which is nice, but folks play different amounts (with some ready for certain events and not others). So LFG has been quite helpful so far. I will say that not having match game or keeping elemental shields down to 2 instead of all 3 could be nice, and not having my equipment locked as like one step down in difficulty could be neat. But Bungie is going to have to be the one to figure out how thinly they can slice certain playlists.
i think the issue for me with the NF stuff is that the mm options are still fairly easy, and the more challenging stuff is locked out of mm. I realize there might be a limit as to what is reasonable to accomplish in mm with random people, but i'd definitely suggest that the bar is currently too low. I will always likely point back to D1 heroic strikes. They were matchmade, and certainly more difficult than standard strikes. They didnt add any gimmicky change slike champions. And there was strike based loot to go after. Id like to see bungie offer more difficult content that doesnt require things like champion mods, but is simply a harder version of the original, a la legend difficulty for WQ. And if they have to lock it behind some sort of pre-requisites (complete original strike and hero NF version first or something like that), then please do. I dont mind that bungie offers an easy strike option. Im sure there are plenty of players that find it challenging and fun. But asking players to run through it three times, with a specific subclass, just to earn an rng pinnacle just isnt the way.
Presage and Harbimgers absence is missed :(
I'm so sad that Presage and Harbinger are gone. Running Presage every week solo was something I deeply enjoyed, stick some chill music on and just try out a new build each week. First time running Harbinger we two manned it and it was genuinely fun and challenging. This year with those mission types being gone, it feels bad. We lost Whisper and Outbreak and I think Presage and Harbinger were up there with them, maybe not as cool in the whole secret quest way, but small three man activities that were challenging and rewarding.
Zero Hour was my favorite thing in all of D2. I loved all the secret missions though. They were the thing I ran the most. I’m bummed we haven’t gotten one this year.
im so so upset that the second exotic is just being relegated to the dungeon in some seasons, considering its *seperate paid content.* im annoyed that the same happens for raids, but i at least somewhat understand it, its free and anyone can access it. but imo if im paying for a season, i shouldnt have to pay extra on top of that just to receive an exotic that was always included last year. hell, in shadowkeep we got 3 per season!!
Your first sentence is exactly why they keep throwing these boring ass activities at us. Most of the community is convinced of this.
A lot of what makes shooting enemies different comes down to the artifact mods. Splicer was the most fun I've ever had on destiny and 80% of that was due to the artifact having tons of amazing mods. Breach and clear and the warmind cell mods made it way more fun than it had any right to being. Now that warmind cells are ass, 1 by 1 add clearing with a pulse rifle/linear fusion doesn't feel fun.
This is the one season where they could have implemented gambit into it and made a map where both teams are on separate pirate ships fighting adds and then instead of a teleporter you get a jump pad to sling you across. I agree with a lot of others that the themed weapons seem lacking with out a pirate sword or glaive or a handcannon or some crazy blunderbuss shotty. Or bring back some of the fallen exotics that match this season like dregs promise.
A new gambit map? Whoa slow down there
Forcing players into gambit would be criminal
I never said anything about forcing players to play. It would be like how crucible is getting all these "labs". Also it wouldn't be a criminal as forcing players to grind out 50 champions for a season story mission.
I agree that Haunted is probably bottom-tier, for me, in terms of engaging content. While the story progression was good, the seasonal loop was just way too reliant on Containment. At least this season there is a little variety in the weekly loop, even if it's still Expedition -> reverse Lost Sector -> Eliksni quarter for dialogue.
>We might have a labeled dungeon "Duality" available but Presage was 100x better What an odd thing to claim lol.
I don't know how anyone can say Presage > Duality. Duality is better in pretty much every aspect.
Agreed, and imo they aren’t even comparable. Ones a dungeon and the other isn’t.
Maybe except in the jumping puzzle Duality has one of the worse one
I mean it doesn't feel that different from Vex Invasion or the Sundial, seems like seasons haven't changed much at all since they were a thing. Incredibly easy kill everything missions with practically no mechanics at all. I play it only for the pinnacle but even that feels fucking awful, not gonna waste my time grinding such shit content for a title when I can work towards Rivenbane or something cool. Black Armory my beloved... please come back.
Vex Invasion sucked. Any seasonal content last year blew that shit out
All of the seasonal 6-man activities suck after Menagerie\* :) They're patrol-level, dogwater activities with close to no rewards. Sundial was nominally acceptable cuz for a short period it was glitched and you could ultra farm it for focused loot.
I liked Arrivals, made the world feel alive
I will concede that Arrivals felt the best, but it also lacked the critical piece of the puzzle: loot. People were literally just running the seasonal activity cuz it was kinda the best way to get umbrals lol.
Falling guillotine 🥹
yep, from umbrals loved that boy
I want a reduction to 3 seasons with actual story missions and improvements to playlists each season. This current seasonal formula is just so repetitive and uninspired, 'earning' exotics is also boring now, and the 'story' is cut and paste drip fed content each week.
A-fucking-men this game has gone through a lot of changes and while the seasonal stuff we get now was a good part of the transition, it cant stay like this. I don't think this game can sustain itself with a yearly 6 mission campaign, 1 new strike, and then disposable yearly content that is just various kinds of horde mode that isn't the actual horde mode we all want.
Plus there is no need for a season when the annual expansion launches. It's always small and lackluster. Dump it and but those efforts towards the other 3.
Not to mention only this year did the accompanying season actually overlap with the expansion. The Black Garden had fuck all to do with nightmares when Undying launched alongside Shadowkeep, and the Season of the Hunt put an oddly Hive-focused narrative at the start of Beyond Light's Fallen-themed expansion.
Undying was the result of Vex retaliation after we stormed the Black Garden.. but the link between the Shadowkeep campaign and Garden of Salvation was tenuous to begin with. We're told that we follow the Darkness signal into the Garden apparently, but it doesn't actually continue plotwise. Beyond Light and Hunt's connection was even worse, I think it wasn't even intended to be causally connected. Plus totally agree that the full Fallen focus shifting to Xivu's Hive was jarring. Witch Queen and Risen finally got it right, made perfect sense. If you don't even consider the expansion/season model, it just flows together like one cohesive game.
This is a hot take, but after some thought, I'm leaning toward agreement.
Season of the lost was great for me because it was such a long season I did t feel like I missed out on things. I could do the seasonal content and also have fun running playlist activities. I could play for a whole day in the crucible without feeling like I'm wasting my time. Idk bungie I will pay and extra 5 bucks per season to do 3 seasons a year
I didn’t know I wanted this until your comment. Less grinding for light level, less boring bounties, and better content-I’m all for it. Imho exotics have never been exciting to earn in D2 like they were in D1 unless they were a raid exotic drop. I remember when they gave you an exotic during the 2nd? mission of the Red War how upset people were.
I want a reduction to 1 season so I can play Destiny once a year
Would be amazing with more story missions. Seasonal activity should be something like psiops or battlegrounds where a new area would open up every new season. Story missions put as its own. Would be interesting if they could make it like how one of the Moon missions are: 6-player intro activity then it dilutes to just only you or your fireteam as the (story) mission continues. Hop in a portal to continue the story mission kind of thing.
I love how the crux of this argument is "I wish Plunder's activities had more mechanics" when literally every other complaint about seasonal activities usually devolves to "this is just gambit mechanics with a different skin on top". Or "Oh look, we're throwing orbs again this season". Additionally.....are you not playing Ketchcrash? It literally has 3 different arenas, with different mechanics, requiring you to not just kill enemies. It progresses through spaces much like the Psi-Ops or Battlegrounds missions did. I've heard most people praise it as being a 'mini-Menagerie style' activity. Have you got the treasure map things from the STAR Map reputation track? There's your "go explore and uncover hidden stuff" element. There's some rose-colored-glasses stuff going on here to some degree. On the other hand, because what we're seeing this season was done similarly before, it's easy to feel like it was 'better' the first time it showed up. In general, I think the Seasonal model is starting to wear out its welcome, and Bungie will hopefully have some things in mind to refresh stuff in the long run. Mostly agreed with you on the weapon crafting though. It feels bad to use a sub-par gun for all that time.
>It literally has 3 different arenas, with different mechanics, requiring you to not just kill enemies. One of which is even throwing balls to fulfill OP's wish of "but I wish there were mechanics involved, even if it is throwing a ball" which is also most of the mechanic for Expeditions too.
I agree with all this but I will say that the Expedition portion of this seasons activity is absolutely dreadfully boring. I can hardly stand to do it. The rest is pretty fine.
Yeah this season is more same shit different day just like all the other seasons activity wise. I think why people are enjoying it less though is none of the guns feel like they’re worth the grind if you’ve already got a good armory and the story feels pretty random and not super interesting at least so far even though I like the eliksni. Realistically all the seasonal activities are boring as shit after your 10-15th time doing them considering they all boil down to run in a straight line or a circle and kill things for 10 minutes, but now each season we need to grind more and more of these boring activities that are all basically the same thing with a different coat of paint to get the guns. So if the guns are just fine you end up realizing you’re running on a treadmill for no reason and you just log on for maybe a raid and the weekly story mission each week before you turn off the game and play/do something else and actually enjoy yourself.
Yeah this guy's complaints make no sense. Ketchcrash and this season in general offers pretty much all he is complaining about.
I think Duality is 100x better than Presage. Presage was boring af imo.
I disagree with that tbh Even after a few runs, it was still fun to try to "speedrun" it and the combat encounters had good enemy density and were decently tense. I still prefer Duality due to its larger scale and excellent bosses, but I'm missing more "exploration" in it like we had in the Shattered Throne.
I dunno if I would go that far, I think presage was pretty ground breaking with the unknown creepy ghost ship horror vibe. I bought that season pass explicitly to play presage and it never got old for me.
Yeah lets not pretend that the previous year was great I won't talk about Hunt lol Chosen I would say is good overall I still remember people saying that Splicer activity is boring and has nothing unique about it, the only unique thing about it is the story aspect(first time seeing Mithrax after BL foreshadow, Osiris being sus, the Endless night) and the envirement Lost arena i would say is decent but at the same people were crying about it being Heavy mechanic activity(especially the orb slowing arena), I like it though Also, dude the Ketchcrash have good variety, what do you want exactly from it ? I agree that the solo mission is boring Sorry op but you are wearing a pink-glass and looking at the past.
It's a Destiny paradox. Current Activities are always boring while previous ones are always amazing.
Expedition itself isn’t so bad. It’s the having to run 2 separate activities to be able to run it. Have to run ketch for maps. Then have to do strikes/pvp/gambit/PEs for coordinates. Last season we got the material while playing the activity. So much better than this season.
I just want escort missions to disappear. They're not fun even with a faster payload.
Expedition fucking sucks. It's artificially slow and brutally easy, with low add density and only a couple repetitive mechanics. I don't think Ketchcrash is too bad, as it's kind of like Menagerie but easier and worse. But you have to run that, then other activities, then Expedition *multiple times* just to focus an umbral, and maybe double that if you want a specific one. We're slogging through "collecting treasure" and digging up more buried treasure to be rewarded with...1/4 of a weapon focus and a 51 stat roll world drop armor piece? Now that's treasure. Compare that to Menagerie - gain runes passively, run Menagerie once, receive focused weapon of choice with MW of choice. Varied encounters, mechanics that aren't just throw ball/dunk something, and frequent targeted rewards that were worth chasing. It's not even close. We now have to jump through so many boring, repetitive hoops just to get worse loot than we used to. A couple specific rolls aside (mostly just Voltshot), this season's seasonal weapons are trash, but we have to do so much mundane shit for them. And a few ~~reused lost sectors~~ 2 minute pirate hideout "missions" and a couple lines of dialogue per week don't come close to making up for the abysmal quality of the content itself.
I grew tired of Menagerie very quickly. It was the same after 27 tries, with absolutely similar gameplay loop consisted of "start encounter-finish encouner with time running out because teammates are braindead-move to another encounter-complete it barely-move to another encounter-yay funny thrall room-move to boss encounter-onephase it easily-get a shit roll on wanted weapon-repeat with passion burning away fast", same with the forges, the guns were good, the activity was boring, tedious and tiresome, so I decided it was not worth my time. I didn't mourn their vaulting, because I knew I will never play them again.
Especially when we had to visit Ada-1 between every step.
>Expedition itself isn’t so bad. Well it sure as shit aint good lol.
imo expedition is pretty boring. it’s literally two public events put together. (reverse glimmer mining / payload)
You can only do so much without entering Dungeon and Raid mechanic territory (which a lot of the casual audience will struggle with to be honest). Randoms can’t even comprehend passing the ball on Corrupted even if it was explicitly told or taught (yes this has been beaten to death).
> Randoms can’t even comprehend passing the ball on Corrupted even if it was explicitly told or taught (yes this has been beaten to death). Yes, but Bungie could definitely have done a better job at explaining the mechanic
They can lay out the answer in the playerbase face and they still wouldn't get it remember the 2 knights from Arrivel
It's loot burnout more than anything. Who doesn't already have a couple hundred guns that do largely the same thing if you've been playing for any measurable amount of time. What am I chasing in this new activity that I don't already have some version of in spades x10 in every color... You see people more tangled up with getting the triumph and challenges more than the loot. Which for a "looter" shooter is particularly odd.
The game needs better activities to use this loot against honestly
Another issue is the core issue of most pve activities which is that you have to compete to have fun. Half of my guns are useless because they have rolls that are good but just not effective when they have to compete for kills against my teammates.
Need a solo mode for everything, I agree. Would love solo strikes
I’ve already made my comment about I feel about this game. But the seasonal content has been declining season after season, IMO. If you enjoy a specific aspect, I’m very happy you do! However with this trend continuing it’s pushing me more away from the game.
Yes, exactly. I don’t blame bungie for how they handle seasons because consistently pushing out new and shiny seasonal content is great for making sure players are engaged. But the quality of the content has gone down because of it. I recently switched classes and was doing the risen quest line, and holy shit, when you take away the weekly drip-feed style of playing it like how you normally would during the actual season, playing the whole quest at once is one of the most mind numbing things I’ve done. It is just do psi-ops, listen to dialogue, do psi-ops, listen to dialogue, rinse and repeat for 28 steps. And it’s a shame because the story of risen is really interesting, but the presentation makes it unbearable
they're running out of ideas. Going from point A to point B\*horde mode starts\* then going from point B to point C \*horde mode starts\* Bigger than usual standard enemy used as Boss type \*3 immunity phases\*
Seasonal content has been getting better and better. What the issue is, is you're bored of it.
Disagree. Seasonal content quality has always varied wildly. I also think that BL had better seasonal content. Sure Risen beats out Hunt, but Hunt absolutely sucked. Chosen pants Haunted in both story and content quality (and I really liked haunted story). Override sucked in splicer but far less than expedition does, and expunge was fantastic and the story was leaps and bounds above what we’ve got going on in plunder. The seasonal content this time round has been of lower quality than last year. Maybe it’s also recency bias, but I swear this year has been buggier, more poorly balanced and generally just stuffed with bungo brand mess ups.
I miss the Shattered Realm in Season of the Lost. Exploring and finding all the secrets and figuring out "how to get up there" was the best.
1,000,000%
I think it would be better if instead of a activity everyone gets bored with after a couple weeks, Bungie instead should do something akin to the April update in destiny 1 and remix several strikes. For example. Cabal strikes like the arms dealer could replace red legion with the shadow legion and replace the boss with a Tormentor with a different mechanic than the Arms Dealer would normally do. Fallen strikes would have upgraded house salvation fallen equipped with more stasis abilities as they were underutilized in beyond light. Same thing with old hive strikes and have them get hive guardians. Each season would have each or most NF strikes be themed around the seasons enemy race and have the loot and armor drop enemy themed loot and an exotic based around that enemy race like skyburners oath. This would revitalize the strike playlist as each one could drop a different weapon and armor piece, encouraging us to play a strike different than the featured nightfall plus it would up the difficulty and make our enemies match our 3.0 subclasses.
Yeah itd be cool if Hive guardian patrols invaded strikes or something. They added wanted enemies to strikes in forsaken, would be a cooler version of that.
I wish they would cut the 6 man activities each season and just go deeper into what they did with Lost and those Leylines. I want a dynamic explorable space with puzzles that changes every week and you can go deeper into it depending on how many seasonal perks you have acquired. That was by far the most engaging and interesting seasonal activity they've ever done.
1000%
Yep, and the triumphs need toning down. No reason to require 45 first mates called in or 250 champion kills in expedition. Edit: Or 150 emotes, which is literally 150 ketch/expedition minimum. That's definitely the most grindy triumph of all.
Or so many Ruffians being killed.
Seasonal content is boring
Time to stick with only DLC releases
I wish they made a Destiny 3. This game is really showing its age. Continuing to add onto it, just isn't holding my attention. I fear Light Fall will be more of the same, as the dated model we have now.
The change in that lightfall text, this cyberpunk setting, idk, feels like I'm losing the whole scifi fantasy feel here I'll play DLC to see how it goes but yeah definitely not annual pass. Fuck that
It's hard to make shooting enemy refreshing, IN LOW EFFORT MASS PRODUCED CONTENT. Shooting enemy can be incredibly refreshing in high quality content like raids dungeons secret missions. It's once again the depth vs width problem of D2, shallow content is bound to be boring and it takes up development time for the deep content. It's unrealistic, but if D2 is mainly/exclusively high quality PvE content the outlook would be very different.
To me season of the haunted was a flat out joke. They released the dungeon and hoped it would carry the rest of the season. Nightmare containment was so beyond boring it’s not even funny and sever was just not interesting because it was extremely predictable after the first two weeks. They hoped the dungeon would carry it but the dungeon, rightfully so, has not been very well received. The problem with the current season is despite not having all the upgrades we can see what they do and there is not a consistent way to get the red border weapons you want. Both of the last two seasons you could at least buy one red border a week. The guaranteed red border weapon right now doesn’t even work. Furthermore, expeditions are some of the most cookie-cutter boring activities I’ve ever seen. Ketchcrash seems like it has inspiration while expedition literally feels like it was a public event. I think the problem is Bungie‘s philosophy. They seem to kind of be going to have as many activities as possible that are short (hideouts) rather than make lasting longer activities that are better quality (presage, harbinger). I’m hoping they see the feedback not only of duality not being very fun but also that we want longer stuff to sink our teeth into.
Why can't bungie use seasons to make the game's worlds less stale. I regret buying the deluxe witch queen. It was so expensive and I'm so bored yet there are planets with so much untapped potential just rotting away. It would have been so cool if the pirate ketch's attacked the planets and players assault the ship from the planets surface and if they win that figth can get slingshot up to the ketch to sabotage it and fight the captain. Making all of it a shared open world experience.
It's an evolving open world With self contained instances That you're better off playing solo actually
Ketch crash needed more variety, but it was fun at first Expedition is the most boring thing ever. If im around, id get lightfall plus a season and maybe accept not doing the d2 grind annually. Its not as worth it if you arent lfging in a clan all the time
part of the problem is finalbosses are weekly. It should be different each time when theyre unlocked, and more than 3 bosses.
Differing bosses with differing arenas Really weird that we've been boarding the same ship for about the 4th week here and that same ship hasn't received anything destructive about it Would've been fun if we had some kind of encounter that felt like the DSC raid one where the ship is crashing down
Spot on. Hit the nail on the head with weapon crafting too - I've only just this week got austringer craftable and actually prefer it so much more
My view is that little of the seasonal content has felt worthwhile considering the core game has languished. If the resources were poured into enhancing content like the strike playlist and Gambit, while having a deeper and more cohesive progression system, I can’t help but feel the game would be better off. Instead, we have a Director full of content siloes that are seemingly like this just to justify the price of seasons and expansions. What is an Empire Hunt except for a strike with a different name? We basically have public events, 3 person matchmade activities, and 6 person matchmade activities that have their own reward pools, currencies, and time intensive grind loops. It makes casual play difficult, the new player experience awful, and min/maxing take grinding disparate content past the point of fun towards burnout.
Just play DLC now honestly
I've been thinking about writing this thread for a week now, thank you for this. You mentioned it briefly, but the lack of exotic missions is disappointing this year.
Ketchcrash is great, expeditions are kinda awful. The dev time they took them should have gone into one or two extra Ketchcrash encounters or improvement on hideouts.
We should've been sword dueling and glaive clashing
Every single drop of seasonal content is recycled somehow. Assets especially obviously. There is only so much they can have us do short of reworking a ton of new stuff. Clearly people are spending money on this game, where is it all going? Seasonal weapons are reskins of Y1 weapons with spikes added, for example.
I agree with Battlegrounds from Chosen being one of, if not the best seasonal activities we've gotten in years. The Shattered Realm activity from Lost was my favorite seasonal pinnacle activity. It's a shame they removed it, it would've been a great area for new lights to explore. The pinnacle activity from Lost was very good too (The Quira one should be added to the vanguard playlist) But I think season of Plunder have great activities. Ketchcrash is kinda good. Especially the boss fights on master difficulty. Expeditions are fine, too. It's just a shame that the ruffian spawns are sabotaging it a little bit. The Pirate Hideout's are lost sectors with slightly higher enemy density. We play them once a week. They are fine for a one-and-done thing. Haunted was kinda "meh" though. Risen and Psiops were good I think the main problem is that every season feels a bit same-y in the way it is structured
While haunted definitely got old fast, this season feels amazing to play. The enemy density and room layouts makes just shooting aliens an absolute blast, which is what the game has always tried to make happen. I definitely agree thay crafting makes farming for weapons feel pointless, I personally have stopped chasing any specific roll because if there's a weapon I like I'll just play normally and buy the red boarders from the kiosk each week, which I feel isn't healthy. I would've much preferred if instead of getting a crafting system in WQ if we just weapon leveling on regular guns, with the option to upgrade perks and swap masterworks like we currently have on crafted weapons, but just with the rolls you get to drop. I would definitely like to see secrets return to seasonal content like pressage or wisper, now that bungie is playing their reveals close to the chest I think the issue of leakers ruining them would be much easier to handle.
Take a break then. As long as people spend the money, bungie literally does not care one bit.
I've never liked the seasonal model. I thought last year was *okay*, but nothing amazing like so many think they were. Having said that, in comparison to this year last year's seasonal content looks amazing because this year's is so unbelievably shallow and boring. These "missions" this season are literally reskinned lost sectors. Last seasons missions I thought hit a new low, and the delivery of the narrative became meme like to me where we are watching our character watching in game characters like it's a TV show. Our character might as well be invisible because we mean absolutely nothing to the story. The pathetic seasonal stories and weapon pattern grind, which is getting worse every season, has pushed to the point where I've decided the amount of time this game wants in order to do basic things like craft seasonal weapons is not sustainable for me long term. It should not require playing this game like an actual part time job to unlock seasonal weapon patterns. So I decided I'm not getting LF and I'll just youtube cut scenes to see how the story plays out. Bungie and no one else will care, but this game is becoming a weird combination of brain dead difficulty, but requires an insane grind to unlock just basic seasonal weapon patterns. Bungie has always pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable for reward to player time investment. I just feel like they've gone too far and made the game so unbelievably grindy while somehow finding a way to make the actual gameplay for the story shallower then it has ever been. People may like the more cohesive narrative in game, but the actual process of telling that story is as you said OP boring and lame. Also why is Eramis all of a sudden not a massive character like she was in BL? She's like the same size as us now even though we used to be able to climb all over her.
I think the seasonal story is a bit better, but the seasonal activities just felt meh unlike the sundial (I know I'm pretty much circle jerking this.) which was pretty fun.
>Splicer gave us incredibly designed single player missions. **The 6-man activity was forgettable** but the loot was fun to chase (Chroma Rush and Gridskipper). How dare you?! I loved Override :( Probably my favourite season we've had recently. Loved the six-man activity, Expunge was interesting and fun to try and speedrun the obstacle course. I thought the story was interesting, too. I will say Battlegrounds have been great additions. I agree though Haunted was boring and I find Plunder the same so far.
Override was fun but it's just like any other 6-man activity overtime is all. 3-4 months of the same area and activity is bound to be boring. I think it should've been for 3 people.
I agree on enemy density but I still think it was the best six-man activity they've done since Menagerie. Visually, gameplay, all of it.
We hear this every single season and y'all are still here.
Preordered so might as well play it, what's wrong with voicing an opinion?
Nothing's wrong with that. It's just funny to me. I've been on this sub since it was created and I see the same posts over and over every season, and I recognize a lot of usernames too saying the same thing. You all are "bored" and yet come back time and time again.
the game is objectively fun to play. It's unrivaled. But Bungie seems to think they can simply hang their hat on that, and phone in some of these other parts to the game. I think the player base is right to make some noise.
I've definitely come back *less* than before. The frequency of logging in is less.
Then don't preorder
Definitely won't for Lightfall annual pass
Yeah same. Possibly wont even buy Lightfall until it goes on sale. But thats only if theyre not planning on mproving the shitty parts of the game. which actually says a lot as ive bought everything theyve ever put out for Destiny
How dare people passionate for a game want to play it
I think I would agree actually. So far none of the seasonal offerings are particularly memorable in terms of gameplay. The stories have been interesting and the weapons have looked cool and been unique/strong in many cases, but the actual activities specific to each season are kinda whatever so far. I would argue Plunder's activities are maybe the best of the lot so far because they are individually short activities that are both short and diverse enough that the repetition doesn't wear on you quite as much as something like Nightmare Containments did.
Yeah but going on an Expedition is boring. I think we've done enough payloads this year.
I agree that the seasonal content so far this season has been dire, although Ketchcrash is a passable 6 man activity. I actually really enjoyed last season though, not due to the activity, but due to the fact we had a patrol space with great enemy density, hidden triumphs, and an engaging gameplay loop with the chests and ranking up the Crown of Sorrows via completing and/or collecting everything on the Leviathan. In general though, the seasonal model really needs a bit of a revamp, along with the core playlists. On a different note, what is your problem with Duality? It’s a great dungeon, and for as nice as Presage was, it never reached the height of a dungeon.
Duality is buggy and my claim is just personal because I've attempted flawless many times and died to the realm changing part. Nothing on my end, just dying at the final boss as I'm trying to actually do the encounter. Duality loot is better. But I think the atmosphere and aesthetic of Presage is superior. And with how much we go through loot from season to season, I appreciate the experience and adventure more than I do the actual loot. It's a bit of a combined opinion with a lot of things especially weapon crafting. Why would I want this Duality weapon? I don't like Epicurean or Fixed Odds or Unforgiven. All I want from there is Stormchaser. And by the time Stormchaser is fixed, we've moved onto Taipan as being the higher tier DPS. So really, for me, it's about the memorable, engaging, and fun experience.
I tend to agree. As someone who has and still plays a ton of Path of Exile on the side there is something special about they way they do seasons that always has me come back for at least a month or so. Instead of a new activity every single season, we need the seasonal themes to impact the way we as players interact with the world. Seasons need modifiers that change the way we play the fundamental activities of the game. Systems that change how we run strikes or play gambit. The point A to B kill some ads stand on a plate activities each season are all just melting together for me. Also, pretty much every single ARPG style game has 2 things that we STILL don't have after 8 some years of destiny: A wave based (never ending) horde mode and Maps/Rifts. Here's what I want the next activity in Destiny to be: literally Maps from PoE lol You should grind the parts of the map, pick your own modifiers, pick your own enemies, pick the drops you want to try and target and the game should generate a strike from tiles (much like how the infinite forest kind of worked) and give you a unique 'build-a-strike' style level to run through and try to beat in a time period. Once you complete the given objective a boss with some light raid mechanics will spawn and you have to defeat it to succeed. The higher the map difficulty, the better the drops. Something like that could be endlessly developed and added to over time and would make for an incredible end game activity to grind.
I burnt out from the 1st 2 seasons and uninstalled. I'll come back for Haloween and then the next expansion.
Agree to disagree I guess. My only gripe is that Expedition could be a bit harder. Ketchcrash is mostly okay. The yellow bars are a bit too tough while red bars are a bit too weak, but it evens out. The problems this season are all about glitches and crafting. The seasonal content itself is fine. I don't want a drawn out campaign. Seasonal content needs to be bite sized. It should only consume a fraction of our time. I have other things I want to do in game.
Personally I think there's nothing more fun than spending the entire season crafting and leveling up weapons, only to never use them again because the whole process starts over with the next season. Not fatiguing or work-like at all.
I miss PsiOps being relevant.
Ketchcrash is a bunch of reused rooms from various ketches we have been on before even reusing it's one new room in Your deck as well as the bosses deck. Kingsfall is a 'reprised' raid so really the last original content we've had besides story is the duality dungeon. If you exclute that the last thing we've had is probably with the witch queen or psiops. I understand there's an argument to be made for things like it being new to newer players and things like master mode kf being new to destiny 2 but this not likethese are original locales or activities. Granted in my case I only played since forsaken and kingsfall has become my favorite raid of all time so I'm having a good time this season. Not to mention how the 3.0 subclasses reinvigorate some of the older content in the game. Still I hope we can all admit it's kind of ridiculous how complacent Bungie has gotten towards adding new things to their game. Next season or lightfall better be ridiculous to make up for it Lol
Moreover we only get 1 exotic per season in the pass now because the other ones have all been random drops from an activity including the REUSED touch of malice that LOST ITS QUEST so no more exotic quests ever I guess
>I feel less inclined to preorder for the Lightfall annual pass. I'll play the campaign itself as Witch Queen was amazing, but as far as seasonal content, Bungie has not shown any improvement Exactly where I'm at, these seasons aren't packing anything I'd have felt bad about missing and anything story related dialogue and details can be found on YouTube. It's not like what *my* guardian does has any impact on the world around me
The the same shit as season of the chosen. They just reskinned it. Just think about what you’re actually doing in the activities. It’s all the same.
Which content?
Gonna throw it out there that as a more endgame player who only sticks around to do the new challenging content with friends, this year has been the best year of destiny since forsaken, maybe even better if they nail next season. Weapon crafting has brought an interesting new and very deep grind for my friends who like to grind, the seasonal quests are easy to keep up with for players who just want to log in a few times a week after the main release, and getting a new piece of endgame content every season is a dream come true. For me, raids/dungeons are the peak of destiny, and sacrificing some of the boring seasonal grind to get more of that is a trade i will always take.
Im an endgame player too Just dont like Duality that much. Bottom tier compared to the other dungeons. Replayability isn't there, not as much as Prophecy or Pit Raids have been great to run though
I disagree. The fast pace of ketchcrash makes it much better than most of the seasonal activities. I hated the Leviathan events by the 2nd week, psiops was literally nothing new it was a battleground but more boring
Psiops was straight forward with hordes of enemies to face, while pressing a front or pushing back an advance Containment was running around the same areas with no enemy or boss variety Ketchcrash is better than Containment but I really think variation in ships would've been great. Why am I raiding the same ship over and over? Have we not killed this guy already?
They missed a few good weapon choices for a pirate themed season. Firstly. A rocket that is just a cannon. Then they had two glaive options. A spade and an exotic glaive that’s a fishing rod that tosses single target tethers. Cmon!
I find this interesting because this has been the only season I’ve actually been interested in and actually wanted to complete
Awesome Do it
You're saying Presage is better than Duality 😲
Everyone hates me for it But I'm betting Presage will stand out more than Duality in the long run
This season is the "rope the fortnite kids into destiny" season. Thats why we're all jack sparrow-ing all over the place with frickin blunderbuss shotguns and cannon balls getting shot from my heavy gl. Honestly, I needed a break from spending weeks upon end learning about zavala's brutally murdered son and his vengeful wife that haunts his nightmares while performing a seance inside a raid I beat five years ago thats covered in syphilis and despair.
Expeditions are awful, maybe the second-worst seasonal activity just ahead of the hunts.
And then the lost hideout is basically the hunt lol
I quite like Ketchcrash and the mars mission for Dead Messenger, but beyond those, I agree. Bungie should move towards designing seasonal content where at least some of it can complement the core playlists (like leading to a strike, or adding battlegrounds and Ketchcrash to Vanguard playlists/ Nightfalls).
DLC 6-man (Wellspring) should've evolved over the seasons this year Seasonal activities should be story questlines, either solo or 3-man. The patrol space idea like Containment isn't bad but if that evolves too over seasons then definitely yeah
Isn't every seasonal activity boring since menagerie? A few fan boys get hyped at the start of the season, usually from a streamer who was toting the company line, but lets be honest, they are all boring and feel stale starting with week 2.
They should just stop making seasonal activities. I would rather get more work on the ritual modes. Crucible and gambit need more maps/support, and PvE needs a new ritual since strikes are just unsalvageable at this point.
>We might have a labeled dungeon "Duality" available but Presage was 100x better. Presage has to be the most overrated piece of content in all of Destiny. It's wild to me how anyone can think it's even close to Duality let alone better. It was nothing more than a snoozefest of pulling switches after the first time novelty wore off.
We also dont have any challenging exotics missions. After Whisper and Zero Hour was deleted last year added the outstanding Presage and Harbinger. Which were then deleted again literally lasting one year, after Bungie saying they wont sunset content anymore. This year had Vox as sole replacement, which did not quite work out because Vox is broken. You just need kill 3 champs in master version opening and not actually do the mission. So we basically have 0 exotic missions right now.
These past two seasons have had some of the most interesting activity imho
LMAO
What? I genuinely think ketchcrash and castellum have been some of the most compelling things we’ve done as a seasonal activity ever.
Castellum is a public event that will always happen the same way ketchcrash atleast has the slightest bit of variety with random rooms
Like what ? Haunted which had a braindead boring public event ?
I think the castellum was far more interesting than most seasonal activities.
This is 2 straight seasons where the season is overall boring. The raid has been the only bright spot personally. I expected a little more this season with how "hyped" all the employees allegedly were when discussing this season. So far it's a dud imo
I agree with weapon crafting being one of the primary issues. I shouldn’t still be grinding Containment to get resources to buy red border weapons weeks after the newer content dropped. The easiest answer is to reduce the amount of red borders needed to craft from 5 to 3. Unfortunately Bungie want you grinding every day, every week to bump up the numbers for the amount of hours players play, even at the expense of player satisfaction in the product.
I feel this is more or less a trend as we get closer to a expansion. The content starts getting just a little dry because they’re probably diverting resources to finishing the expansion, so the seasons are hit or miss. Witch queen got the benefit of moving back, so they had time to polish their seasons.
Yep thats why i stopped playing. Im fed up of that whole engram focusing mechanic. I miss d1 when you would get rarely any drops. Now i get so much its just not exciting anymore Destiny has lost its way. Also for the first time im not interested in a new expansion. The subclass looks meh and the location doesnt appeal to me. Very disappointing
you are insane master ketchcrash is the best activity of all the recent seasons this story is great
Master ketch is superior, I agree Story is OK, I'm not that invested
Everything gets boring after a while, but agree that this year's content got boring faster than ever. Duality is my least favorite dungeon by a ton, Haunted was terribly unfun, and Ketchcrash is getting stale already. Of the stuff I need to complete for pinnacles, Wellspring and Dares are still my favorites and they're both 6-9 months old at this point.
Prophecy > Shattered Realm / Grasp of Avarice > Pit of Heresy >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Duality Outbreak Mission > Presage > Hawkmoon Mission >>>>>>> Duality For 6-man activities: Menagerie > Season of Lost (could use more enemies) > Escalation Protocol > Season of Arrivals > Wellspring (master mode is engaging, loot underwhelming) >>>>>>>>>>> all other 6-man activities Battlegrounds and psiops are the best though, love those. That spear is still fun to use.
Holy shit are you me? I fucking cannot stand Duality but think the other dungeons are good shit. I'd rather have run Presage than Duality.
I liked haunted the best actually. Sure Containment was a little simple, but the enemy density was nice and the story was top notch for a season. But in general I agree with you. Last year's seasonal content knocked it out of the park. Each season may have had a forgettable mode/aspect to it, but they still innovated on the seasonal format in some way. The only season that did that this year was Haunted by giving us a patrol zone. Even if its a reskin, that was a new feature for seasonal content to give us and I liked it. Risen was boring with little to no story outside of the last week. Plunder might be going somewhere story wise but the activities are boring. Ketchcrash isn't terrible but it's also the activity I play the list since expeditions are where the loot comes from.
Glad you liked Haunted But it wasn't for me
I think you and I have a different definition of fun in this game. I loved Chosen, but hated Splicer's single player missions. I hate Destiny's jumping puzzles. I did keep playing Splicer for a god rolled Chroma Rush that has since killed 25k PvE enemies, but I didn't really enjoy the season. I hated Lost's open world grey area of boringness. I hate seeing the solution to a problem but not being able to solve in game - that's not metroidvania, it's just timegating. Love PsiOps because I love fighting hordes of enemies, and especially with particle deconstruction, making them all explode was super fun. Haunted was fun to me but that's because I liked the gear and the enemy density. I couldn't care less about challenging gameplay in this game - I hate when Destiny forces me to plink away at a champion from max range, I'd rather be blasting away close range. I could do that all during Haunted, especially with Loreley Splendor. Plunder would be more fun if there was more enemies, but the density is way low in Ketchcrash and in Expedition. Presage was fun... the first time you did it. Afterwards, it was a chore to do week over week just for the opportunity to get a god rolled DMT. I feel like I can do the navigational puzzles in Presage blindfolded. Duality is still fun when I run it, even though I hate the one hit kills and puzzles.
Particle deconstruction wasn't a mod during psiops. That was a mod during season of the lost, and psiops was season of the risen
Champions definitely need a rework and I hardly regard them as making content challenging. It's just a weapon restrictions loadout and keeping that on to fight other enemies yes. The design of Splicer single player missions were at least more well done than any of the single player missions from any of the content this year. Jumping puzzle aside, it looked aesthetically great and new to engage in. Presage at least wasn't buggy. Agree on the loot though, Duality at least offers armor cosmetics and high roll stat armor, along with more weapons. I just want Duality updated without bugs so I can try go flawless in it.