 Hey everyone, I just wanted to let you guys know I'll be doing a video on the new indie title from System Shock and BioShock team members called Void Bastards. It's a roguelite strategy, FPS title that's pretty unique so it deserves its own video. As a little pre-TLDR, it's worth a purchase as a solid game. And I will be going on vacation this week, so it'll be a week and a half or two videos until I get that one up. But for today, we're gonna do something else. I started this channel basically because of Destiny 2. And since beginning it, I've played almost all of the big release games as service titles. Of those, I think it's clear that Anthem and D2 were the most consequential and newsworthy for a variety of reasons. Today, we're gonna look at D2 and Anthem and see where each game is and try to compare them directly to see why D2 has turned a corner and become a very playable MMO light while Anthem is dying a slow death. After the logo. So I started this channel because I was so disappointed with Destiny 2 on release and especially with Curse of Osiris. As a bunch of crappy games as a service titles have released this year, the story about Destiny 2 has changed. If you scan the Anthem Reddit or bigger outrage machine YouTubers, you'll hear people compare Anthem and Destiny 2 at launch and it's for all the wrong reasons. People talk about Destiny 2 and microtransactions and while that was a problem, it wasn't a big problem and it was solved very quickly when Bungie gave away so much XP it became unnecessary to buy anything at all. You'll also hear people compare the amount of content in the game and this is just ridiculously flat out wrong. Destiny 2 reviewed very very well because most reviewers didn't play the original game for all that long. Nobody at all thought that Destiny 2 didn't have a ton of content on release and people like me who were frustrated never once complained about a lack of value. All of Destiny 2's problems were gameplay related. Like from the beta, D2 felt nothing like Destiny 1. It was frustrating to wait through but Destiny 2 consistently improved where it mattered. It's still not perfect but it is a very good game. In the last two weeks, I started playing Destiny again and I think the only way we can show each game's strength and weaknesses here is to examine them at its launch and look only at the big problems. We'll see that the games have very little in common because while both Anthem and D2 had problems with their gameplay at launch, one game's issues were easily fixable while the other game's problems are baked directly into the design. Let's do the longer one first and take a look at D2. Destiny 1 Alright, I like games that feel good to play. I like narrative games and puzzle games and walking simulators too but when I have nothing to play, I generally navigate back to a few games that feel good and require me to be constantly making decisions. I played Doom 7, 8, 9 times since it launched. I beat it on its hardest difficulty and I've gotten every single player achievement and even a bunch of the multiplayer ones. I played Titanfall 2 for over a year. I played Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne every year, at least once or twice. And the thing that brings me back to a game over and over is getting a certain feeling. It's the feeling I got playing baseball and ice hockey in high school and college. It's the same feeling I got playing shows, solo or with bands. It's the in the zone feeling. That feeling where something is so engrossing and requires so much focus that you aren't thinking about anything else. I spend my days thinking. So much thinking. I relish the feeling of disappearing into a game. Playing Doom 2016 on the hardest difficulty does this perfectly. You cannot think while you play it. You've got to be moving constantly and making nearly subconscious decisions about where to go, what to shoot, and with what weapon in milliseconds. If you fuck it up, you die. Destiny and now Destiny 2 at its best does exactly this in its most difficult activities like gambit, raids, and nightfalls. Or when you play content underleveled, you've got to be using all of the game's mechanics to succeed. The beauty of Destiny is that even when it's easy, the combat encounters are so well designed that it still requires all of your attention. Destiny plays absolutely nothing like most of the modern shooters. It has nothing to do with Call of Duty. The sheer volume of enemies means you are always under pressure. This is what Destiny 1 did better than almost any other shooter. It's why so many people got hooked despite the game's many shortcomings. Because regardless of how bad the story was, or how shitty the drop rates were at the end of the day, movement and combat felt exquisite. There's a secret sauce that's the result of hundreds of small details that all combine to make a nearly perfect feeling shooter, if you played it long enough to truly master its systems. When I would watch people who reviewed D1 badly play, I saw that they played it very much like a modern military shooter. They stood still and shot, and when they took damage, they got behind a rock. But that is not how the game is played. Destiny is at its best when you never stop moving. It has a relentless forward motion, and this is even driven home by the music, by almost everything in the design. Destiny's strikes are perfectly designed because when you're in a team of players who know what they're doing, there is almost never a moment when you're standing still. Literally, you can run through the strikes shooting while you're in midair. Both games also create these moments by having predictable enemy spawns, so that when you master it, you're killing 120 enemies in 10 minutes, all while constantly moving and jumping. The game has surprising depth to its combat because it features a wide variety of enemy types, all mixed together, all of whom require different strategies to defeat most efficiently. Everything in Destiny 1, from its heavy aim assist to the animations, were in service to making the game feel like a combat race. In small things, like not having much head bob, but instead imitating that look by having your gun bob up and down, everything, it all felt perfect. Fast cooldowns, a ridiculous variety of weapons, supers, grenades, melees, meant that the same strike played 100 times still felt great on the 101st because it felt so damn good to feel like you were playing it perfectly. Destiny also never got credit for something else it does very well. Destiny was originally marketed as being open world, or at least that's the impression that many consumers got, and when the game launched it did not have a true open world as gamers have come to know them. What it did have was really well designed levels. Not only were they beautiful, and almost 6 years later Destiny is still a very good looking game, but the levels were wonderfully designed and served as combat canvases, with verticality, cover, and well thought out enemy spawns. Most of Destiny 1 felt less like an open world and more like large halo maps strung together. It's disappointing that they never received the credit for this that they deserved. Destiny 1 basically perfected its most important systems, movement, guns, tools, levels, and enemies. They combined to make a shooter so damn good it could survive even though it launched with a hilariously bad story and not nearly enough content to do. In the run up to Destiny 2, most people I knew wanted the same thing. I never once heard anyone say, man I hope Destiny 2 has a great story, or man I hope it has a massively huge open world map. Almost everyone I played with wanted Destiny 1, with some new enemies, and a game that launched with all of the first game's quality of life improvements as well as some more content. So what was D2 at launch? When D2 dropped, it did indeed have a ridiculous amount of content. It had less strikes on launch day, but D2 had public events that were actually really great. Adventures, lost sectors, strikes, nightfall strikes, its raid, crucible, if Destiny 2 had simply brought over all of the quality of life improvements, its same progression systems, and the exact same gameplay feel it would have been everything the players had hoped for. Destiny 2 is an amazing looking game, and there is a large amount of content for leveling. But Destiny 2, while well reviewed, was poorly received by people like me. People who had put in a thousand hours plus in the first game. Let's look at what went wrong and why Anthem's problems really aren't the same problems at all. Destiny 2's problems at launch were mainly around three things. The micro-transaction store, the progression and leveling system, and most importantly, gameplay tweaks that seemed small but were actually so incredibly important, I stopped playing the day after I finished the campaign. As I've said, Destiny 1 was a nearly perfect shooter when it came to game feel. For all the shit the first game took in reviews and comment sections, there's one thing everyone admitted that it felt good to play. One would think that when you've made a gameplay experience that is almost universally praised, you would be very careful changing anything about it at all. Destiny's enemies are not typical modern shooter enemies. First of all, almost none of them have hit scan weapons. I can only think of one rare enemy that uses hit scan attacks, the little cabal turret things, and those things suck. First of all, each enemy faction features a mix of enemies that pressure the player. A typical encounter will have four or five melee enemies running at the player while two or three snipe from behind cover and another few enemies launching powerful slow shots with high splash damage. The game's design is a horde shooter. You need to be constantly moving and you can actually dodge attacks with awareness and smart use of your movement abilities. This whole system was very carefully balanced around the tools the players had at their disposal. The reason you didn't need to take cover in Destiny 1 was the game gave you all the tools you needed as long as you used them exactly as the game demanded. Destiny 2 made several small changes to the player kit and almost zero changes to the enemy behavior, so what was a perfectly balanced combat system in the first game was a miserable, boring slog in Destiny 2. And may as well get it out of there. All of the changes that Ruin D2 had launched were made for the same reasons. A more balanced and less chaotic PvP game and a more accessible PvE game. Most of these changes lowered the skill ceiling in both modes. First, and for me most important, was that player speed was significantly lowered. Jumps were slowed down substantially in all of the ways players had used their jumps to go even faster than in sprint speed was eliminated. Instead of speeding you up like in Destiny 1, jumps now slowed you down. When I excitedly logged on to D2's beta, I turned to my wife 5 minutes in and this is true and I said, holy shit they broke the game, this is a piece of shit. These changes meant that players could not avoid damage by using the movement system like they could in Destiny 1. There was nothing to learn or master in the movement system. A brand new player would move as well as a veteran player. Destiny skating and Warlock skating were gone. The hunter's ability to get out of danger by jumping was gone because while their jump was changed the least, it was still slowed down considerably. But that's not all. In an effort to make PvP more easily understood and less frustrating for inexperienced players, Destiny took and broke the one system that literally every single person in the world agreed was perfect. It's weapon system. Destiny's weapons were crucially important not only because it added gameplay variety but also because enemy types and encounters were balanced around players having three different kinds of weapons at all times. Players had primary weapons which were your normal shooter weapons like these here. Rifles, handguns, auto rifles, pulse rifles, sidearms. Secondary weapons which were powerful one hit kill weapons against players and two or three hit kills against elite enemies in PvE if used properly. These were your shotguns, sniper rifles, fusion rifles, etc. These had much less ammo and fairly infrequent ammo drops. They used the rare special ammo because they were guns for special occasions. They were nearly perfectly balanced in PvE because they had a purpose. Primary weapons were for regular low health enemies. Special weapons were for tougher, more dangerous enemies and then for bosses and elite enemies players had heavy weapons, rockets, swords, light machine guns. Getting good at Destiny required you to master your tools, your movements, and know immediately who to shoot with what when. The special weapons were not easy mode. Using a fusion or shotgun could easily get you killed if you were stupid. You needed to know how the guns handled and make sure you could kill the tough enemy and get out in time. Destiny 2 inexplicably took its special weapons and moved them into the heavy slot. So instead of this, you had this. And heavy ammo almost never dropped meaning if you were crazy and decided to use a shotgun instead of a rocket launcher as your heavy ammo you might get 6 rounds to fire in a 10 minute strike as opposed to 40 in a Destiny 1 strike. So by design players would be using the boring guns almost all the time and the fun guns would be saved only for bosses. I'm not even going to get into the awful changes to the PvP ammo economy because I don't have time and it's still in the game which makes PvP still less fun than Destiny 1. But those two changes and again with almost zero corresponding changes to enemy and encounter design would have been enough to slow the game down and turn it into a boring cover shooter but that wasn't enough. There was one more change in store. Destiny 2 doubled the cooldown of players grenades, melees and supers. I know that was a lot to take in so let me sum this up quickly for you. Destiny 2's enemy design, health and encounters were balanced around players having fast movement and jumps that players could master having a powerful secondary weapon to quickly take down high health enemies and having a grenade and a melee every 25 seconds and a super every two and a half minutes. Destiny 2's enemies had the same behavior, the same health, the same AI and the same encounter design but players now had two primary weapons, slowed movement speed, slow crappy jumps and grenades and melees every minute and a half and a super every 5 minutes. In Destiny 1 I would average 8, 9, 10 supers per strike. In Destiny 2 at launch I averaged 3. This absolutely broke the combat system. Every enemy felt like a tedious boring sponge. You spent most of your time popping out from cover as far away as possible to plink away at enemies with headshots from a scout rifle. Moving around was out of the question. Destiny 2 nailed the player in place. You simply no longer had the tools to always be moving forward. You couldn't jump all over the place flinging grenade and taking down dangerous enemies with a shotgun before jumping to safety and shooting your red bar in the air. Instead, strikes had you and your teammates standing behind a rock, shooting each enemy before moving to the next rock and doing it again. Those little changes broke the perfectly balanced Destiny combat sauce. On top of that, D2 took D1's most iconic system and turned it to shit. Legendary weapons no longer had random rolls. If you got 10 better devils, you got the exact same fucking gun 10 times. Exotic armor and weapons were nerfed into hilarious garbage with exciting exotics like ready and reload speed on SMGs increased. D2 turned their exotics into legendaries, legendaries into blues, and blues into greens. And all armor was made totally cosmetic with no perks at all, clearly to be able to sell armor in the micro transaction store without being called pay to win. The other problem at launch was that players may not have realized how much content there was because Bungie broke their progression system too. When I finished the campaign, I had almost all of the lost sectors and adventures left on the maps. The game's progression system had been designed to be reviewer friendly. Players could level past much of the content in only 12-15 hours. This eliminated the charge that the game was grindy and perhaps was responsible for D2's glowing reviews. But it also meant that huge chunks of excellent content was left unplayed and irrelevant. Destiny's adventures are actually really good. Many of them are better than the campaign missions, but they offered rewards below the soft cap, meaning that they became pointless to play as a result of a poorly designed progression system. Now D2's progression still has all sorts of problems. Bungie seems intent on having a progression system that makes precisely nobody happy and swinging wildly from so fast half the game is left unplayed to so slow you need to grind for two weeks to play the new DLC. They still have not figured it out. But we'll get back to that. When all is said and done, Destiny 2's combat was slower and less fun. Movement was slower and less fun. Progression was too fast and left much of the content pointless to play and weapons and armor were weaker and less interesting than Destiny 1. And there was infinitely less of it with the removal of random roles. But here's the thing, all of those problems were huge. They ruined the game for thousands and thousands of people like me. They almost destroyed the game. Your accounts crashed. But crucially, all of the most important problems within the game were easily fixable. Return movement speed and jumps as close as possible to Destiny 1. Return to the Destiny 1 weapons system. Return to the Destiny 1 cooldowns or at least lower them by a lot. Make exotics as powerful as they were in Destiny 1. Make armor have perks like Destiny 1. Return random roles to guns like Destiny 1. The way to fix Destiny 2 was simply returned nearly every system to what it was before they changed it. Destiny 2 had a huge amount of high quality content. The volume and quality was never the problem. The problem was it simply wasn't fun to play what was there anymore. And to Bungie's credit, right after the Curse of Osiris launched, they acknowledged the game's problems and came out with their classic roadmap to fix them. Movement speed was increased and jumps were improved a little bit at a time. By the time Warmind released, movement, supers, and grenades finally felt good. Warminds began the process of reworking all the exotics to make them as powerful as D1 and it was jarring how much more fun it was. Then they went back to the old weapons system. Then they returned random roles and armor perks. One week before Forsaken launched, Destiny 2 released the last of these rollbacks. I logged in on that Tuesday and made a video titled, Bungie Admits Failure Fixes Destiny 2. Now, as I always do with these games, I got burnt out at the start of this year. I had grinded so hard to get the Dredgen title from Gambit as a solo player and it was such a miserable experience that once I finally got it, I was basically done. But two weeks ago, I started playing again on PC. Let me tell you man, Destiny 2 on PC is so good. It is like a different game. I run it at the highest settings at 1440p and I get 100 frames per second. The game looks, feels, and plays great. And playing through the campaign and DLCs this time with all of the important gameplay systems returned to how they felt in D1, it makes you realize that the content that Bungie made was actually really good. The lore remains fantastic, but the story of the campaign and DLCs are terrible. But I don't care about that. I play games that feel good. And Destiny 2 on PC today, it is an excellent game. There is a ridiculous amount of content and almost all of it is good. Destiny 2 is in a great spot. The combat, once again, is best in class. The guns, graphics, music, armor, movement, levels, modes, enemies, leaving aside how much it costs, the game is fully featured and excellent to play. Destiny 2 may get brought up when Anthem is discussed, but their problems have very little to do with each other. Destiny's problems were all related to changes that were made for poorly thought out reasons. Perhaps it was publisher pressure to make the game more accessible or maybe they really thought these were improvements. I mean, looking at last week's livestream that was literally one hour of them saying every single thing I wanted to hear about RPG systems, social systems, and player choices, I tend to think that it was business that drove many of these changes. But now, Destiny 2 is great. In September, when D2 and its first expansions become free to play, new players will have dozens and dozens of hours of high quality content in which to use Destiny's best in class co-op shooting mechanics. The game is not perfect. There are so many things about it that either disappoint me or piss me off. But now that all of its systems are fixed, playing through the content from year one is a whole different experience. A good experience because D2's problems were never that there wasn't enough high quality content. If you checked out Before Forsaken, I would recommend starting over on PC when it all goes free to play on Steam in September. And let's take a brief look at Anthem now. This will be shorter A, because you guys know most of the story and B, they actually had not fixed anything yet. As I've said, many people have compared these two games because both were controversial at launch. And they do have one thing in common. The controversy was entirely the result of expectations. As a committed Destiny 1 player, I had a reasonable expectation that the core gameplay of Destiny 2 would not change by much. Anthem sold itself as a bio-ware, games as surface. They had that classic thing, Shared World, My Story. Mass Effect storytelling in a Shared World MMO Lite. Anthem failed miserably at the one thing it needed to do well that set itself apart, story and choice. People were looking forward to Anthem because the idea of an MMO Lite with a really, really great RPG story was so enticing. But we now know that Anthem's story was, shockingly, actually worse than Destiny 2's, as amazing as that is to say. If you were going to slow the game down and force me into dialogue sections, you need to make damn sure that those dialogue sections aren't horrendous 5th grade writing quality garbage. The idea that Anthem can solve its problems and turn the game around because D2 has done the same is actually crazy. Anthem's problems aren't that they've changed excellent systems. It's that they have never developed excellent systems. Anthem's combat is average. Its enemy design, encounter design, level design are all subpar. It would take an entire redesign or more likely a sequel to fix these core baked-in problems. All enemies in Anthem have hitscan weapons. Its vaunted traversal system isn't even useful in combat. In a game with flight, you spend a tremendous amount of your time hovering or standing in place. Its flight is not a combat mechanic. It's the equivalent of a vehicle. You get to use to go to the next encounter. Leveling, stats, loot, gear, story, dialogue, all of these basic core systems are below average at best and utterly broken at worst. Added on top of this, Anthem has a shocking lack of content. Four dungeons, two or three open world public events that you have to solo because no one can see them on a map or at least couldn't. Legendary Contacts, which are pretty much longer patrols from Destiny and the ability to replay a few story missions, that is Anthem's content. Playing these games back to back is striking. Destiny 2's launch content dwarfs that of Anthem's. Even if Anthem's core gameplay and systems were excellent, it still would not have nearly enough to sustain any kind of player based long term. Anthem is a game that isn't going to turn itself around like Destiny 2. It doesn't have a clear and easy path forward like Bungie had. Destiny 2's most glaring problems were all able to be fixed with slight knob turning and it had a ready made model of all the systems that players loved sitting in their first game. Anthem's failures aren't because they changed their loot system or made unwelcome tweaks to gameplay. Anthem's problems center around the core systems of the game being poorly designed from the beginning. Fallout 76 has an easier path forward than Anthem does. When you hear people compare Anthem and D2 at launch, they are making a common mistake. The idea that because both games struggled at launch, they must have faced similar issues, but this simply is not the case. Destiny 2 never had a problem with lack of content. That's the one thing that Bungie actually did fix from Destiny 1. D2 was loaded with high quality things to do and its issues were immediately obvious and specific. These weren't the loot systems broken, they were, please bring back random rolls and armor perks. Anthem's problems are so huge, they are unlikely to be fixed. They can't go back now and take out hitscan weapons, they can't redesign all the levels, they can't change all the public events and missions. Destiny 2 required players to wait and buy expansions before the game was totally fixed and that is frustrating, but to Bungie's credit, Destiny 2, while not a perfect game, is totally fixed. Its annual pass wasn't all great, but it was solid value that Bungie is making more consumer friendly going forward by letting people buy everything a la carte. These games simply had different problems and Destiny 2 had much simpler solutions. Alright, that's it, I'll see you in a week or two, thanks for coming, bye.