 Ok, so last week I did a video praising Bungie's step forward in storytelling, and the change back to the Destiny 1 weapon system, as well as there finally being a good amount of different content, means that the gameplay of Destiny 2 is in a pretty good place as its second year gets underway. But that certainly doesn't mean it's free of issues. There are, as with any game, a litany of small little nippics I can make, and I think it's fair to say Bungie has left far too many of these linger five years into a franchise, but we're not going to talk about that today. Instead, we're going to focus on just a couple of big, serious issues that still remain with the game, and these are big enough issues that if they were fixed, the game would be immensely more enjoyable to play. Also as a heads up coming in the next week or so, I will be having a video about Rise of the Tomb Raider and Spider-Man, and about how clunky progression systems and bad pacing can ruin otherwise good games, so be on look out for that. I will finally be taking the plunge soon with a video about immigration at the southern border, and one about the prohibition of drugs, gambling, and prostitution. Right from the start, I wanted to do videos about things other than games every so often, and I think it's time. I will keep those in a separate playlist if you're not interested, but overall these will be non-partisan looks at the issues, so if you have any interest at all on this kind of stuff, check it out. Alright, let's get back to bashing Destiny 2 after the logo. Bungie's Desperate Gambit Destiny 2 per se can continue as one of Bungie's greatest and most inexplicable problems, an inability to commit to precisely how social and multiplayer they want this game to be. This problem simply doesn't exist in other games of this nature because most developers fully commit to one or the other experience. Call of Duty is a multiplayer game but it doesn't rely on being a social game, because the gameplay experience doesn't require communication or socialization, the studios who make Call of Duty don't bother investing resources into fully fleshing those systems out. The game isn't an MMO, it doesn't have complex team-based mechanics. All modes can be thoroughly enjoyed with friends, or solo. The best multiplayer shooter of the last 10 years, Titanfall 2, doesn't require team strategies, it isn't an inherently social experience, and the gameplay itself doesn't really require communication, I mean of course it helps, but it's not required. A solo player can turn on Titanfall 2 and get the same experience as a group of people playing together. And reasonably, there are only very modest social systems in that game. There's a kind of clan system that's basically superfluous. But Bungie has created a game that absolutely requires a full, communicating team to complete some of the most compelling content and then did apps of fucking, lootily nothing to facilitate players finding other people to play with. As a result, you are left with the worst of both worlds. A shitty, frustrating solo experience, or a frustrating search for other people to play with. We will be addressing this problem from several angles today, but to start let's use one of the most heavily marketed and promising parts of this expansion. The first new mode Bungie has introduced since Trials of Osiris in Prison of Elders with the House of Wolves expansion 3 years ago. An innovative PvE-PVP blend called Gambit. Now Gambit is a really cool new mode that perfectly illustrates everything great and maddening about Bungie as a studio and Destiny as a game. Before I get to the pitching I want to really quickly praise some things that most players take for granted at this point. Destiny 2 is an absolutely beautiful game that performs amazingly well on console and on PC it looks just insanely good. The enemy design is absolutely great. The AI is extremely good and challenging and the animations of both the enemies and the players is something to behold. I don't think I've ever seen a game that has other players' animations look so damn fluid. Lots of games run at 30 FPS, but for reasons I don't understand and I'm unqualified to comment on Destiny 2 looks orders of magnitude smoother and more fluid than a game like Bloodborne that's running at the same frame rate. I've got a subscriber who's a game dev though I'm not sure they watched the Destiny videos but if you are watching explain this to me in the comments. The new Tomb Raider is running at 30 FPS and yet to my eye it is frustratingly choppy. Destiny 2 at 30 FPS is simply smooth as silk and of course the gunplay, sound effects, visual and particle effects are as good as ever. Shooting things and popping a super looks, feels and sounds amazing. Seriously, watch how fucking awesome this is. Yeah, I'm impressed by shiny things. Before I get to the crushing problems with this really cool new mode let me just get a couple of small nitpicks out of the way too. I think that enemy health is too high and boss health is too low, it just ends up being kind of annoying. They've fixed this everywhere else in the expansion, finally, but in Gambit regular mobs take way too many shots to kill. I'll say it for the 90th time, I would rather shoot 50 enemies once than one enemy 50 times. It just slows things down and encourages passive defensive play and getting to cover which is the opposite of everything that makes playing Destiny the FPS, a breath of fresh air. And I feel like bosses are melted way too quickly and probably have too few mechanics. Maybe it would have been better to have only one 15 minute match instead of breaking it up into rounds. As it stands now it doesn't feel all that satisfying fighting the boss at the end of the match. And as is to be expected in a new mode there are some balance problems with the PvP end of this thing and I'm looking at you sleeper simulant and the fact that invaders don't show up on your radar. But honestly, those things are small and that even if they didn't change it wouldn't really ruin the experience. But I'm quite positive that Bungie will be addressing sleeper simulant. It is absurd. Those are just things that could be tweaked to make the game even better. What can ruin the experience is the same thing that pops up all over Destiny 2 including several really annoying places here in Forsaken. Bungie's contempt for solo players and refusal to give those players in game tools to group up. We'll get into matchmaking problems in other places but to understand the problem here we need to get into what makes Gambit such a fun mode. The basics are that four players in each team race to kill ads and beat a boss before the other team with the option to occasionally invade the other side and kill those players. And if that's all the mode was then your average call of duty or Titanfall matchmaking system would be fine. But to Bungie's credit the game mode is surprisingly mechanics heavy. You don't just kill enemies. Very much like the bounty mode in Titanfall you need to kill enemies and deposit currency in a bank they're called moats here. But there's more than that. When you deposit higher amounts of moats you send more difficult enemies to the other side to prevent them from depositing moats. At five moats you send a dude, at ten you send a big dude and at fifteen you send a mini boss. But there's even more. If a player kills you you lose all of the moats you are carrying and invading players can see right over your head how many moats you are holding. And they can see through walls and you can't see them. So if you're holding fifteen moats and a player invades he'll see you and make a B line to kill you setting your team back considerably and creating a really cool cat and mouse game during invasions as players with lots of moats scurry away and hide. And there's still more mechanics in the mode. When you deposit enough moats to summon a boss invaders who kill your team heal your boss. It is a really cool, really well designed mode that lends itself to all sorts of strategies and teamwork. Which means that Bungie's horrendous matchmaking can make the game an absolute fucking disaster to play. For some incomprehensible reason four solo players are often matched against full four man fire teams communicating on mics. Oh, I'm sorry, did I say often? Yeah, I meant like 90 fucking percent of the time. I had five straight matches at one point with four solo randoms against teams of four. I even had four solos and two duos a bunch of times. Now, even though Destiny 1 and, you know, a whole bunch of other smaller games have separate solo queues Destiny 2 launched with no separate queues for groups and solos. In Crucible this could be pretty fucking annoying in modes like Control. Annoying but not game breaking because while communication can help in the regular Crucible modes it is in an insane almost insurmountable advantage in Gambit because of the way this mode is designed. Solo players have no way to coordinate subclasses. They can't decide who's gonna pick up modes. They can't call out and time their supers. Invading players are invisible on radar and have a powerful over-shield meaning that team-shotting them is crucial. So finding the invader and calling out his location to teammates is all by itself a tremendous advantage. Gambit as a game mode is almost explicitly designed to give advantages to teams that are effectively communicating and coordinating with each other and this advantage is like nowhere else in Destiny's PvP ecosystem. So that all adds up to a truly fucking miserable experience as a solo player sometimes. But here's the thing, when it's four randoms against four other random players or two teams of four against each other those advantages are stripped away and the mode is really cool and an amazing addition to the game. Something for Bungie to be proud of which makes it all the more disappointing because the player experience can be so good when the game is fair and so fucking miserable when one side has a huge advantage and I cannot stress this enough. In order to overcome the advantage that four players talking on mics have against four solo players the solo team would have to be considerably better players which brings us to the real problem here which as we'll see exists all over the game. How could Bungie spend months building and refining a really great mechanically complex game mode and put seemingly zero fucking thought into how those mechanics would interact with their refusal to put tools into the game to help players group up. In this case, as is the case with raids it's not simply a matter of matchmaking. It's an in game LFG. One where players could go and browse for other players or teams who want to raid or play Gambit or do anything else. A tool that allowed for the fast and simple sending of messages. Preferably messages that didn't require opening two sub menus to read. An LFG where players could filter out by power level or experience or age or mics or no mics. The clunky LFG that currently exists outside of the game in a sub menu of a sub menu on their app isn't good enough because it's an annoying other step between players and the game. And the app might even be fine in most games but not in one that insists on having the majority of its very best content be based around heavy team focused mechanics. It remains very hard to understand. Now Bungie's obviously committed to these team based modes and yet they provide quite literally no in game tools to players. Their guided games beta is a piece of shit that features wait times of anywhere from 18 minutes to an hour and you have to spend that hour literally sitting and watching your ship sit in orbit while you make sure your console doesn't time out. There is no guild chat on console for some reason. I don't know why. Only recently was text chat on PC. It has no in game LFG, no optional area chat, nothing. Bungie wanted a game with heavy social mechanics but refused to risk anyone actually being social. And the game's problems have an awful lot to do with this. Warcraft makes players social because there are a myriad of in game ways for players to talk and text chat and group. They're simple, one click private chat, team chat, area chat, guild chat, trade chat, group chat, raid chat and matchmaking for almost everything in the game besides the very top tier in game activities which again players can use the highly functional in game LFG for. The extent of Bungie's in game communication tools is the ability to emote at other players. The studio has completely failed at this and as a result the vast, vast majority of their players have never played a raid. And the raids are, without doubt, Bungie's very best content and very possibly, no, in fact definitely the very best co-op multiplayer experience ever produced for consoles. They are meticulously designed, really, really interesting content. And rather than make that content as easy to access as possible, rather than give players a whole bunch of tools so that the only people who didn't raid were people who didn't like it, Bungie has given players zero, literally zero in game tools. For whatever reason it is now clear that an in game LFG is something that Bungie refuses to do, like nightfall matchmaking which we'll touch on later. But there are a host of other ways to make Gambit a reasonable experience without it. There could, of course, be separate cues for teams like in other games or failing that the matchmaking could wait team size first so that teams of four looked for other teams of four first and foremost before then searching for teams of three, two teams of two, a team of two and only after that four solo players. Or failing even that, Bungie could have a skill-based matchmaking system that conferred a significant skill advantage to the solo players. So a team of four would be matched with four solo players who were all better than they were. Something, anything to make this not be a problem. Instead, Bungie's response is to hint that players should try and group up with other players. Without, of course, giving players even one single in-game tool to accomplish that. It sucks. Next. The escalation of the Arkans well. When The Taken King launched, Bungie tried to implement fun, mechanics-heavy end-game type encounters on the patrol map. The basic idea and the encounters themselves were very cool. Unfortunately, the implementation was, and this is a recurring theme, fucking terrible. Destiny 1 only had one landing spot on each planet, and Bungie decided to put the Court of Orcs in a different area of the map. What's worse is the way Destiny instances players is exceedingly annoying. You can be running with three people next to you, enter one of their seamless loading screens last matchmaking hallways, and watch those players disappear only to load into a completely empty zone. To make matters worse, that run through the hall is the matchmaking, so the faster you go, the less time the system has to put you in a lobby. And even worse than that is the opposite. The slower you go, the more time the system has, and the more likely you are to enter a lobby with other players. And low was born, the crawl walk into the zone. Players needed as many as five others to finish the hardest Court of Orcs bosses at launch, but Bungie has a habit of putting you into empty zones. So players, pathetically, figured out that if they crouch walked in, they might, might empty a full lobby. Or not, in which case you ran out, turned around and crouched in again, and again, and again, until you got into a lobby with enough players. While this was a massive problem, the actual gameplay, as always with Destiny, was really fucking cool. So Bungie did it again with Rise of Iron, except this time they fixed the problem by having a landing zone in the arena and waiting matchmaking to try and put players in full lobbies. No, I'm fucking with you. Bungie launched Archon's Forge with the exact same fucking problem, except with a much further ride to the arena and a much longer hallway to crawl through. Oh, oh yeah, and they fucked it up even more by inexplicably making the encounter only playable by using randomly dropped keys from enemies. Oh yeah, and you could only hold one fucking key in your inventory at a time. So you could get really fucking lucky, enter a lobby with six other people and have a blast playing the madness that was Archon's Forge only for you to suddenly peter out when nobody got a key to drop and everyone just wandered off because you can only have one key in your inventory at a time. High escalation protocol, same problem, except crank to 11 because the event was ridiculously fucking chaotic and still to this day requires at least six players to totally complete unless you are just a ridiculously top tier team, which brings us to the blinds well when Bungie finally figured it out. So let's see, no landing zone, check. Crawl walking into the arena to matchmake, check. Empty lobbies anyway at the time, check. Encounters that require five others to complete the highest tier, check. Consumable key to start the encounters, check. Holy fucking shit, Bungie. Are you kidding? Why? How? So blind well is a greatest fucking hits of Bungie's end game patrol arena failures and to make it even more fucking awesome, what's the possible reward for the higher difficulty blind well completions? Your second new super. Yes, Bungie locks the item that gets you a new super into one of its ridiculously badly matchmade patrol thingies. Let's count the ways that this could be fixed easily. Have an end game LFG, allow six man control fire teams, have a landing zone in the arena, simply have it be a separate matchmade activity which would obviously be the best. Fill every single instance with players so nobody ever enters this fucking place only to find it empty. It is so, so miserably annoying to walk slow, sorry, crouch into the zone only to see two other people with their menus open waiting. I can't really fathom how Bungie spends all this time making cool shit and yes, it is pretty fucking cool only to do every single thing possible to make sure the experience of actually getting to play that cool shit is as frustrating, unintuitive and annoying as humanly possible. And the Bungie defenders can't even say use your LFG to get a team, dude, because you can only have three fucking people and doing the absurd workaround of waiting for randoms to enter only to message them and then have them invite others and then harassing them until they leave is not a legitimate thing. It's ridiculous that that even happened with escalation protocol and is exhibit A in the Bungie incompetence case. Amazing, just simply amazing. It's fun and mechanically cool and totally fucking ridiculous that it's harder to find people to do it than it is to actually do it. Moving on. In conclusion. Forsaken is a very good Destiny expansion. All the things that I wish were a thing like separate balancing for PvP and PvE and more build diversity and gear and perks at a crazier are still a problem, but at this point it's clear the game is what it is. Bungie isn't going to make the game complex or deep. It's obvious that one of the most important bedrock design principles at the studio is simplicity. From the story to the UI, from the matchmaking to the playlist to the gear and subclass trees, Bungie is obsessed with the one button press with being the opposite of Warframe. Where Warframe's menus and systems are ridiculously complicated and require effort to figure out, Bungie's design is all about never being confused, never being inconvenienced, never wasting time in a menu, except when it comes to actually getting to play the game. If an activity has even a thin veneer of complexity, Bungie refuses to help its players navigate that, refuses to get out of the way and give people tools and options. The Nightfall Strike is a key way to level your character. It's not particularly mechanically complex. In fact, it's not really any different than regular strikes. It's just a bit harder with tougher enemies and some different choices of modifiers, but it still has zero matchmaking. No, okay, that's not true. There is matchmaking outside of the game. See, I matchmake with randoms every time I do a Nightfall or a raid. I just have to go outside the game to do it, which is an unneeded step. Every time you put an obstacle between a player and an activity, you will filter some out. Some people don't know about the LFGs, some just don't wanna bother and now those players won't play. From the Nightfall to Gambit to the Raids to Blindwell, Bungie's best content is it's more complex content. The only content where you build subclass and gear actually matters. The only content that actually challenges a team that fosters communication, community, friendships, strategies, but Bungie refuses to do what's necessary to make these really great modes as convenient, accessible and enjoyable for most players. The first time a player crouch walked into a court of orcs, it was incumbent upon Bungie to think, whoa, that's fucking stupid and fix it. When they realized how few players raided, it was incumbent upon them to provide an in-game LFG. For Nightfall, there's simply no fucking reason to not have matchmaking, that I don't understand. I raid and Nightfall less now than I did back at the start of Destiny 1. My life has gotten busier and more tiring the older I get. I still wanna play these things, but I don't want to have to do all the work, Bungie, and that is a perfectly reasonable thing because I'm a customer. Bungie keeps making great shit, a rock-solid shooter, one of the most beautiful games out there. Sound design, music, lore, art design, animations, all of it is top notch, the production values are through the roof and their modes and strikes and raids are all really well-designed. But if they continue to refuse to meet players halfway, if they refuse to do everything they can to facilitate players actually playing their best content, then the game will continue to be underwhelming for a lot of players. Every player who leaves the game without raiding is a failure by Bungie. Every week, I don't Nightfall because I don't feel like scrolling down through an app, waiting and hoping someone messages me back is a failure. Every fucking time I crawl walk into an empty fucking lobby for Blindwell, is a colossal failure by Bungie. Every time I sigh because I matched against the four stacking gambit is a failure. And as always, it's not a failure in the design of the gameplay, it's a failure in the design of getting out of the way so players can play the game. The philosophy around the ways players socialize needs to completely change. Bungie needs to trust players enough to give them in-game tools and get out of the fucking way and let their game design speak for them. If not, the franchise will shrink as more and more people buy the game but don't play its most compelling content and leave feeling underwhelmed. All right, thanks. See you next time.