 Hey everyone. So while we're still very much in the dog days for summer for games, we've gotten a few good releases lately. Unfortunately, they were all smaller games, which means I only get like 500 views on them So I didn't make a video about any of them. We got roller drone, which is quite good But also a bit frustrating near the end of the game when it basically becomes a never-ending dodge spam simulator Still, it's well worth the asking price. We got Cult of the Lamb, which I was surprised to find I absolutely loved It plays a bit weird on the Steam Deck because you need to do some reading and the fonts are insanely small But overall, it's one of the best indie games in the last few years Combining an above average hack and slash rogue light with a building and management sim that allows you to sacrifice your cult members and Serve their flesh to your group Or you can be less evil like I was and just marry a bunch of them instead Ultracill released its next group of levels, which I have not played yet But my son assures me is just as good as the early levels And we got a PC port of Spider-Man, which is both a nearly perfect port and an almost perfect open-world action game But I've probably spent more time lately playing Destiny 2 because when there's not much else going on That's the live service game I returned to after having gotten the reveal of November's lightfall today Let's talk about where the game is where it's going and what is the remaining big issue that the game is left unaddressed after the logo So much destiny I have played a ton of destiny going back to the original in 2014 At the time I was running my own roofing business in the evenings and weekends so that I could stay home days with my youngest kid While my wife went to college This left me with an enormous amount of free time and almost zero disposable income I had played Warcraft from launch until Warlords of Drainer But the game had finally outpaced my computer and there was no possible way to upgrade it Plus I couldn't afford the monthly subscription anymore and luckily I truly hated the expansion anyway It pretty much ended any desire I had to keep playing and I had not been back since but for Christmas of that year I found a used Xbox 360 for a hundred bucks that I bought for my kids When I heard about destiny and the fact that it was a buy once and play forever MMO ended up filling a Warcraft size hole in my life Destiny started pretty bad vanilla had one of the very worst stories in video game history I don't even have time to explain why I don't have time to explain and Basically zero social features at all What it did have however was excellent shooting Amazing art design and enough loot to chase to keep me playing But I was playing the vault of glass raid and the ridiculous grind to get the myth of class that basically hooked me on Destiny 1 destiny raids don't get enough credit for what they are There's nothing like them in Borderlands or the division the only place you can get a similar experience is by doing MMO raids They're the most mechanically interesting missions in FPS history So that kept me playing through the boring first few months until the dark below which was also quite terrible Though the raid while small or in simpler was still pretty damn good house of wolves changed everything though The second destiny expansion fixed many of the game's glaring weaknesses with a pretty good or at least a coherent story campaign a new three-player and game activity a rework of leveling to be less painfully asinine and Slightly less punitive drop rates across the game Slightly less punitive and from there D1 got better and better after the Taken King Which was basically perfect There was a long content drought But the game got better and better and ended its life as a great game with a ton of shit to do and a thriving community then Destiny 2 broke everything While the Red War campaign was large and made some degree of sense the story was just awful And every massive quality of life change to players had won over three years Was rolled back and made even worse Curse of Osiris was such garbage that it made me create a YouTube channel And for the first time ever to stop playing Curse of Osiris was destiny 2's warlords of trainer except it happened like three months after the game came out It was boring overpriced low effort trash it makes me angry thinking about it to this day while it's Frustrating that D2 had to go through the exact same development pitfalls as D1 It's also true that exactly like D1 Things started to turn around with the second small DLC Warmind And then they were basically fixed with the Forsaken the first major expansion Just like destiny 1 since Forsaken D2 has made steady progress Turning itself from a half-baked MMO to a trend-setting live service game The last year in particular has fully crystallized D2 So now we basically know what we're getting with every season and release and now we're in the final months of which Queen it's time to see where we're at and what remains to be done better setting expectations If there's one thing I learned from destiny 2 from launch through beyond light It's that bungee will always deliver less than you thought they were going to this isn't a critique of the developers So much as one of the marketing cycle and inconsistency the game was played with Seasons and expansions had a very wide variance in quality and quantity of content This started to even out with the shadowkeep expansion Got noticeably better with beyond light seasons and has now finally settled into a place where a player can have a Good idea of what they're getting when they buy in for the year There will never be an expansion as large and uniformly excellent as Forsaken again But there also won't be anything as dreadful as season of the drifter again Instead we've now settled into a place where we can be certain The expansions will be somewhat similar to beyond light and the following seasons will be good or mediocre Depending on how decent the season of activity is bungee has finally gotten its storytelling up to a place where it's at least Consistently interesting if not particularly excellent in the game still it's consistently given out through dialogue and cutscenes Characters are involved and sometimes developed and then there's an actual narrative reason to play each season Those narrative payoffs are small and time-gated behind each week But they're certainly interesting enough to be worth playing for simply knowing what you're getting for your money is a big step forward and deserves praise Bungee has finally gotten in handle on managing expectations around seasonal content That doesn't mean the seasonal model doesn't have serious issues of its own But it's definitely better than the game has ever been in delivering consistent Relatively quality updates to the game on a fixed schedule that players can look forward to it's no longer a guessing game or gamble about What you're gonna get and I appreciate that a lot Now the question is whether there's enough content to justify the amount of hours D2 wants you to commit and there I have to say the answer is Complicated it blows my mind when like three days into a season I see someone with a hundred and fifty battle pass levels Because the truth is that destiny simply isn't set up to be played like an MMO The great strength of MMOs is the sheer breadth of the content and the robust social experience you get Eventually playing wow or guild wars you arrive at the endgame, but the journey there is long and broad Huge open worlds chance encounters with other players Social systems that actively drive you to become friends rather than making it a pain in the ass Destiny 2 has a lot of stuff to do, but it simply isn't comparable to an MMO There's just not enough variety and open world content and the game very very quickly funnels you into the equivalent of the rep grind in Wow, you got a short run up and then you're on the weekly treadmill only without the massive open world Gathering and crafting and player driven economy a good MMO relies on to keep you playing after you finished your weekly raid in dungeons Still D2 is able to provide a few weeks of interesting content every season I found this year that the best way to play D2 is to wait until the final month of the season and then play all The content in a row over the last couple of weeks this way you get about two weeks of what a real MMO feels like Every three months and for those two or three weeks. It is very engaging There's a real problem though And that's the fact that destiny 2 is full of a bunch of systems and foundations that actively punishes you for not Consistently sticking around endlessly looping power levels. Let's go through just a few of these issues here really quick Yeah, just to show you what I'm talking about. This isn't all of them There's just a few of them Each season comes with an exotic weapon that requires an absurdly long quest to unlock the catalyst and Bungie continues to lock the four-time quest progression on the battle pass. That is fine I don't mind knocking out the battle pass The issue is that the four-time progression disappears once the season ends and when you unlock it again The next season it only works for that new seasons exotic Which means unless you spend weeks working specifically on that weapon you will end up with something like this Where it will take 400 strikes to complete and just playlist strikes as for some incomprehensible reason Nightfall strikes don't count Now a strike takes at least 10-12 minutes to finish including loading and matchmaking Sometimes as much as 15 minutes, but let's just do 12 12 times 400 That's 4,800 minutes divided by 60. That's 80 hours of Strikes just strikes to unlock the catalyst for this weapon This weapon here is particularly onerous and remains unfixed, but this is the case for lots of the catalysts Why? Because it's a deliberate design decision made to punish you for not playing every single day There's really no defense for this kind of shit. It's not an issue of being a difficult thing to accomplish It's just a miserable time-consuming thing to accomplish unless you played every day in the season the weapon launched Then it was a hundred strikes or 20 hours of strikes, which is still horrendous, frankly But less putridly inexcusable then of course There's the fact that destiny 2 has fully bought into the borrowed power design philosophy Wow is actually the one who kind of popularized this whole thing as far as I know in Mists of Fenderia Which was in my opinion Wow's best expansion just ahead of Wrath of the Lich King Players got to the endgame and then could acquire a legendary cloak which required an absurd amount of effort for a significant bump in power This was a pretty heavy time investment, but getting the damn cloak was very awesome But of course as soon as Warlords of Draenor launched you eventually ended up outpacing your awesome cloak with some blue shit from a quest While that always happens in new MMO expansions The cloak felt different because it was a temporary boost in power that one had to grind to get It was popular and wad then replaced that cloak with a legendary ring and this led into legions artifact weapons which led into a never-ending series of systems that players spend an entire expansion Leveling up before having it become totally useless and replaced by a new totally different But pretty much exactly the same system destiny 2 now centers this exact loop around its artifact Except it doesn't reset every expansion But rather is quickly leveled up every season before restarting every three months They use this artifact to shake up the meta But it ends up feeling pretty bad to have builds appear and disappear every three months and to have to re-earn the ability to stun Champions with a very specific group of weapons I actually don't hate champions like everyone else seems to but I very much don't like being funneled into a set load out for Three months every time a new season comes it devolves into logging in on day one Looking at the artifact and saying well, I guess I'm running a bow and a sidearm for the next three months It's simply not an interesting way to implement challenge in the game Which brings us to my biggest remaining gripe with destiny 2 Something that has only gotten worse and worse as the game has gotten older destiny 2 has simply gotten Terrible at handling difficulty in the game Destiny 2 is far far too easy Last week's light forward deal undercut a few major issues I still have with the game d2 is a cluster fuck of horrendous quality of life issues From 14,000 pointless currencies to needlessly ridiculous upgrade paths to a crafting system That is so miserably stupid and poorly thought out I have chosen to simply not engage with it at all aside from one weapon, but after eight years They are finally addressing what I considered to be the biggest flaw in the game until now Bungie has finally decided to implement an in-game LFG and a loadout system now It is important to not count our chickens because Bungie has a storied history of taking a simple figured out Obvious system and implementing it in such an asinine way that they reinvent the wheel and end up with a square See guided games, but from what we saw I can finally after allow me to remind you eight years Stop being massively pissed off that the game lacks an in-game LFG It's important to realize that Blizzard introduced this system in one second. Let me check on 2009 Bakudos to Bungie for finally admitting that they were simply wrong and then an in-game LFG is a basic core Function that must be provided in your game must Must must must but while that takes one of the three biggest core issues with d2 and solves it sometime next year Apparently maybe as long as they don't fuck it up. Please don't fuck it up Bungie Don't think you need to make this the Bungie LFG Just make an LFG but again Even though that solves a major issue it leaves two other foundational problems that must be addressed to keep the game healthy The most crucial of these is how terrible and I mean Absolutely fucking terrible Bungie isn't managing difficulty in the game Remember when I showed you that catalyst that required 400 strike completions now, that's terrible, right? I think we can all agree that's terrible But the thing that makes it almost Unbearably terrible isn't the number of strikes even though that is awful. It's how mind-numbingly boring Strikes now are in D2 destiny one had heroic strikes Which were challenging enough to be interesting but easy enough to not be frustrating you could relax playing them But destiny two's only rotating strike list is its default difficulty Which should be labeled baby's first video game difficulty now? I am totally okay with this mode existing I am constantly saying that every game should have difficulty settings There's an entire class of players for instance who are only interested in running an activity as fast as humanly possible So that they can get the reward, but I don't give a fuck about the reward I don't play games like slot machines, man I play games because I like the game itself which makes playing the regular strike playlist Unbearable I am forced to instead play a minigame with myself Or if I get more kills than the other two guys combined I win and if the other two players combine tie me I lose that helps, but it's not enough If you get lucky and get one of the battlegrounds, it's at least a little bit better But for the most part these are utterly mindless trash at this difficulty The seasonal activities are universally terrible because they are so miserably easy. It is pointless They feel like three-person activities that accidentally have six people in them It'll be one thing if you could just not engage with this stuff, but it's everything Planets are pointless because you literally cannot die You can seriously stand in front of enemies and they won't kill you strikes pointless while sectors pointless Seasonal activities pointless Now the legend nightfall ordeals are pretty engaging It's still unlikely you'll die unless you play stupid, but everything is at least a threat and needed to pay attention It feels good, but it's one fucking strike a week one The ordeal playlist needs to rotate all nightfall strikes So you don't have to do the same fucking one three times a week and then not touch it again because you're bored Then there's GM strikes, which are basically the destiny one nightfall strikes currently I had no interest in them because using the out-of-game LFG is annoying and inconsistent But even when I do play them, they're not very fun Tons of enemies one hit kill making entire weapon classes useless to the point the strategy for every single one of these strikes is Cower behind cover and peak shoot enemies until they're dead when you add in the insanely restrictive champion system the horrendously awful locked loadout system and the Toxically unfun match game system you end up with something that is indeed quite challenging, but also insanely unfun I Like to do one night falls because they're an extremely rare form of difficulty in the game But indeed to every activity is either babies first video game or you form your own group Extinguish match game locked loadouts champions one hit kill peak shooting every single one Which means D2 functionally has two difficulties outside of the legend ordeal so easy It's horrendous or obnoxiously tedious Master loss sectors are the same thing until you hit 1580 power at which point they become significantly easier But still require match game and locks loadouts and champion mods. It sucks. It totally sucks Now there are precisely two other place where the game gets difficulty correct soloing dungeons and the witch queen legendary campaign the solo legendary campaign was the perfect Difficulty and they accomplished that without negative 20 light levels without match game without locked loadouts It was basically perfect each mission could see you die once or twice until you figured out a plan But enemies weren't one hit killing you likewise dungeons once you're at level recommended are about perfect difficulty Aside from it being annoying as fuck to have the boss have three times too much health and Mechanics being clearly designed for three players in a legendary campaign Bungee had finally implemented scaling for how many players there are but that is the only place in the game They do that listen the legendary campaign that needs to be the base Difficulty for the entire game That's what everything from the planets to seasonal activities to strikes to raids should feel like The vast majority of players should always be playing at that difficulty and have the option For either the easy mode or the master difficulty as it stands now I simply cannot keep playing because almost nothing in the game is hard enough to be enjoyable While being easy enough to not be a frustrating slog Lightfall will have a legendary campaign again, which is great, but it's not enough All of the standard match made activities need to feel like that Every seasonal activity quickly becomes so damn boring The strike playlist is just Unplayable in its current state and needing to LFG for a group to do any content beyond babies first video game Is a horrendous waste of time I don't need people on calms to play the equivalent of D1 heroic strikes Wrapping up listen It's important to give bungee a ton of credit for everything they've gotten right over the last few years The game plays faster than ever the story is much improved There is consistently stuff to do and they're finally adding in several crucial quality of life features that it's Inexcusable took eight years to implement, but they're doing it The legendary campaign was great and the game runs better than it has since launch They've added cross-play a finally functional armor mod system and a ton of new perks All that stuff is great, but the game still has a rotting hole at its core The player has gotten ludicrously powerful over the last three years And yet the vast majority of the game is balanced on having two primary weapons and a shotgun is your heavy You can now make a ton of super powerful builds But half the strikes were made when movement speed was like 30 percent slower The destinations remain utterly pointless three weeks after an expansion because difficulty isn't set to a fun level But it's instead decided by a number D2 has most edges of its game Finally humming along but as long as the core of the game is so horrendously easy It puts you into a trance. It will never be the game. It can be The default difficulty of every single activity needs to be bumped up to legend nightfall level Champions need to be de-emphasized Everywhere or they need to at least make the artifact mods apply to weapon slots not types like Overload heavy unstoppable energy, etc They need to make how the game feels now a selectable easy mode and have legendary be default and GM a Final challenge for people who enjoy standing behind a rock slowly shooting the night 16 times in the head with a scout rifle Which isn't me as it stands now It is monumentally boring after you finish the expansion campaign If you're gonna ask the player to replay the same things literally dozens of times a week You need those things to be engaging So the one thing I hope for more than anything else going forward is that the witch queen finally taught them that their players Have played a video game before They can be trusted to die every few hours without quitting and something being too easy is actually way worse for the game Then something being too hard All right, I got a few other videos planned including a special on be coming up next week. See you next time. Thanks for coming. Bye