No, this is not a post to say "fuck bungo they're shit at developing games". This is a post for me to share my thoughts on the game, and CoO in light of the controversy that has been/currently is happening.
Lots of posts saying the DLC should be free for the content we get, the writing is exceptionally poor, and that the whole game now just feels like an Eververse advertisement. What I've realized is that after 3 years of Bungie developing this franchise, they clearly still don't "get it". It genuinely feels like the main dev team at Bungie is intentionally making the game bad for the lulz. So here are my 4 biggest issues with CoO/D2 as a whole right now.
DLC Pricing
Should the DLC be free? Probably not. But the price/value ratio is not anywhere near reasonable. Seeing how games like Overwatch (another Activision/Blizzard game) are able to pump out seemingly constant balance updates, free new maps, and free new heros with pretty damn good consistency, makes paying $20 for this content really disheartening. Sure, its more content than ONE new map or playable character, but all that Overwatch content is funded via loot boxes. So compare the content OW gets from their loot box funds to what Destiny gets from its lootbox funds (1 small free content update per year, and maybe 2 live events) and its pretty disappointing. Especially considering the live events are mostly excuses to have limited time hype Eververse offerings (FotL/Dawning). Couple this with the fact that D2 hadn't gotten a substantial QoL update since launch to DLC launch is kinda pathetic.
Now compare CoO with the Frozen Wilds DLC for Horizon. Both priced $20 (Frozen wilds is actually only $15 with PS+), then compare the amount of content you get with each, and tell me CoO is fairly priced. The same complaint about pricing was made with TDB and HoW in D1 year 1. Everyone was hoping the DLC would be more substantial this time around, but it isn't. So the $20 price feels outrageous to me. Should the DLC be free? No. But it should be priced around $10 IMO. Bungie says they have new dev tools that made content creation much easier for them now, so there is no more excuse for them to hide behind on this one. A small amount of content that is lacking in quality. That was the complaint in D1 and they said "our dev tools take 12 hours to load up", so they made new dev tools and we still have this complaint.
Also, food for thought, people who didn't buy the DLC lost access to prestige raid because the power level for prestige raid went above what vanilla D2 offered. Normal raid is now the power level of prestige raid. What happens when the power levels get bumped up again with DLC 2 and now the normal raid is above the power level of vanilla D2? Do people who didn't buy the DLC lose access to the raid entirely? Seriously shady.
Silent Protagonist
It's not working. The silent protagonist made D2's story feel weird at times (think when Cayde is stuck and screams at us "SAY SOMETHING!", we go to speak, and then Ghost cuts us off). This has been made even more awkward with CoO. Not to mention that the writing for Ghost keeps getting worse and worse. I don't want my Ghost to be my voice, I am the guardian that killed 2 hive gods and their entire court, stopped the Vex from erasing me from existence, prevented a fallen takeover of the City, stopped SIVA from fucking up our shit and became an Iron Lord, and defeated the undefeated Red Legion when they came to blow up our solar system. This dinky floating little light gets to speak on my behalf?! Silent protagonist makes the writing feel lazy, the the fact that the main speaking character in the game is terribly written and super cringey doesn't help their choice for a silent protagonist at all.
Balancing PvE and PvP Together
Throughout all of D1 I defended Bungies choice to balance the two together because I respected their sentiment of wanting guns to feel and play consistently across both game modes. We're in our 4th year now and D2 has clearly shown that the pursuit of balance is not worth the cost of fun that it entails. Our abilities charge painfully slow and hit like marshmallows, our weapon loadout is now 2 primaries and a special or heavy in the third slot. Because oh boy there's nothing I love more than killing seas of trash mobs or a bullet sponge boss with two primaries, ~3 shotgun shots, and maybe a super if I time it right. I feel so powerful I have truly become a legendary wielder of space magic /s. PvE gameplay now feels very dull compared to D1 because of chances made to core game mechanics, changes made in the name of easier PvP balancing. Guess what? PvP feels dull, slow and boring as well! My feelings on this issue can be summed up really easy with this quote from Tim Cook...
"Anything can be forced to converge. But the problem is that the products are about tradeoffs, you begin to make tradeoffs to the point that what you have left at the end of the day doesn't please anyone. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but you know those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user."
They've forced PvE and PvP to be balanced together and as a result neither is very fun to play. They've technically made both "balanced", and the tradeoff was the fun. Now watch, Prometheus Lense is terribly broken for PvP and also very good and fun to use in PvE. Instead of saying "we're going to tone it down for crucible and leave it the same vs AI combatants" they're just going to nerf the weapon itself, and there will be another exotic that nobody will ever use because its worse than most legionaries.
Eververse
When it started in D1 it was fine, because they created new item categories (emotes, masks, lenses, LL 3 gear, exotic ornaments etc) to put in the loot boxes. Now in D2 Eververse has overstepped, because instead of just being those few types of items it also includes ships, ghost shells, shaders and sparrows. They took all this loot that in D1 we could earn in game and shoved it in loot boxes. What if instead of paying for RNG engrams to get a ship we wanted... we actually... played the game to get it? Like in D1? EV was fine at first because it was new content that we wouldn't have otherwise, now it's content that we were expecting to be earn-able through gameplay which makes it unacceptable to me. The worst thing about it isn't even just the fact that they took all those items and made them microtransaction fodder, its how restricted Bungie is now in what they can do. All design decisions need to ensure that they don't discourage us from spending money now. Hence no more endgame ships or sparrows, and the piss poor shader system we have now. If these things worked the way they did in D1 that would make it easier for us to get items like this that we wanted without spending $$$, which is unacceptable to them. The fruits of the Live Team funded by these microtransactions will be more cosmetic items, and some limited time activities that encourage us to buy said Eververse items. Eververse is by far and away my BIGGEST issue with D2 as a whole, and actively makes me feel bad about buying silver in D1 seeing what it has now come to. I thought Bungie would handle microtransactions in a good manner and wouldn't overstep. Shows you how much of an absolute idiot I am.
Even after all of this I feel like I'm just scratching the surface on the fundamental issues that D2 has. IMO the game is in a very bad state right now and is going to need a lot of work to get back to D1 Y3 levels of enjoyment. My biggest fear is that some of these issues are so deeply rooted that they cannot be remedied with updates and patches, we'd need to wait for a whole new game to see them fixed. I'm hoping for the best and that Bungie can turn this around.
TL;DR: My biggest issues with D2 are the DLC being overpriced, the silent protagonist + poor writing, PvP/PvE balancing together, and Eververse.
Submitted December 06, 2017 at 10:27PM by SolarPhantom http://ift.tt/2ABAmJJ DestinyTheGame
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