 So this should be my last Destiny 2 video for at least a month or so as I've got a backlock of games I want to write about but I've been playing a lot of D2 this year and I got some things to say again. After the massively terrible season of the hunt, Bungie has released season of the chosen and it's good. Or at least way better than season of the hunt. Today, I want to talk about what makes chosen better and then talk about my continued belief The Destiny 2 needs a season of the refresh because as good as some of the new stuff is this season It's still plagued by years of poor design and tired activities that have been left to languish So today let's take a look at Destiny 2 one more time and figure out what it's doing Well at the moment and what big things need to change to give D2 the foundation it needs to keep succeeding into the future After the logo Like all Destiny 2 releases season of the chosen is a pretty mixed bag even at its worst Destiny's always at least a good game and even a season as bad as hunt has some great stuff in it The Hawkmoon quest and missions were really good with excellent story moments and really well-designed missions themselves All the story stuff with the crow was miles better than the abysmal story We got with Beyond Light, but we're at a point where the entire season's hinge on how bearable it is to repeatedly grind Whatever thrown together activity bungee manages to push out the door when it's something like menagerie and the tribute hall It's an amazingly great season when it's something like serif towers not so much Battlegrounds are the new seasonal activity and luckily they are a nice mixture of previous seasonal activities They take place in planetary patrol spaces But at least for now bungee has realized that matchmaking and Instancing these activities is far superior to just plopping them into patrol The fact that you can endlessly queue into them like forges is already a massive improvement and unlike Wrathborn hunts, they're not embarrassing in quality Hunts were so absurdly easy that they felt almost like bungee didn't even test them at all And when you use laments in them, they literally took longer to load into the planet than to kill the boss Battlegrounds are both pretty well-designed and Relatively challenging They're well-designed because they do something that bungee desperately needs to do more of going forward Reuse their best spaces and their best designs Battlegrounds feel like strikes that take place entirely in patrol spaces They're almost exactly laid out like strikes with each having three set piece wave battles And then a few places where you run or sparrow through the space This basic formula is destiny at its best It used to drive me nuts when I heard game reviewers pan destiny and its three wave structure and strikes like that three wave structure Is great, but what's the problem? so battlegrounds save development time by reusing the patrol spaces that always felt pretty pointless and Leaning into destiny strike design style and best of all they aren't embarrassing Lee easy Battlegrounds aren't hard in that you can fail them, but they're full of enough enemies that they're constantly at least engaging In fact, I haven't seen anyone really mention this But there are more enemies in these activities than I have ever seen in destiny before Especially during the boss encounters. It sometimes approaches like doom eternal levels of mayhem It makes for fun combat encounters at all times Now I think the Cosmic Drone one is clearly the best with Europa a close second and Nessus being kind of the weakest of the bunch But all of them are quite enjoyable and the story that's given during these battlegrounds are actually some of the best dialogue We've gotten in years crow suddenly acting as the conscience of the guardians after being aldrin's sov is really effective Hearing him talk about the fact that the cabal aren't monsters is something I've been asking the game to do for ages If Bungie handles the rest of this season's story with the subtlety that we've seen in the dialogue section to the battlegrounds It'll end up as easily the best story. We've gotten in a season Now it is not perfect the story in dialogue We've gotten is really very strong, but there's also very very little of it Still I would prefer a little bit of very good dialogue to a bunch of terrible cutscenes So this feels like real progress now I have a feeling that everyone is going to be so relieved that chosen isn't a disaster That they'll lose sight of the big picture season of the chosen will keep everyone playing and thankfully at least for now Bungie's ridiculous decision to change how mouse and keyboard recoil works was subtle enough that it's either bugged Or it was totally pointless, which is great because changing the one thing that is unequivocally Excellent about destiny would have been another hilarious blunder. However, even this good season has a negative side There's still not enough loot in the battlegrounds loot pool to really make it worth grinding a hundred times in a season there's a rocket launcher the sidearm the linear fusion which are still entirely fucking pointless in their current state and What a sniper and an SMG maybe I think Either way, that's not enough man And then there's three different battlegrounds that all play slightly differently But there's a distinct lack of different mechanics around the final bosses So it really feels like one boss spread across all three battlegrounds I would really like Bungie to start having more complex boss mechanics in these seasonal activities Complex raid-like bosses are one of the game's very best features So it remains really frustrating that Bungie can't figure out how to get that into the rest of the game Even a little if people are going to say oh blueberries are too stupid. That's no excuse Put text on the screen have crow say exactly what to do I mean whatever man more raid mechanics need to make their way into the rest of the game It simply needs to happen anyway as a seasonal activity Battlegrounds are well above average. It's nowhere close to menagerie, but it's way better than Rathborn hunts or Seraph towers It's probably better even than the forges well above their average and more than good enough to keep me playing in the season But remember destiny to is a cursed monkey's paw. So even when it's great, there's always another side Let's talk about the new exotic quest for dead man's tale Last season the mission that granted the Hawk moon was great a perfect example of a really fantastic destiny story mission This season we just got the mission for the dead man's tale and it is I think Without a doubt the very finest mission the destiny to has ever made Now this doesn't count dungeons like zero hour or whisper but rather just single-player story missions and dead man's tale Is a masterpiece of a single-player story mission. It's challenging interesting Dripping with a unique horror vibe. It's in an entirely new area. That's arresting and unique the MPC dialogue and lore is great Sound design is perfect. The music was fantastic and the pacing of exploration Puzzle and combat the first time through was just fantastic Now it's even better is going back and running it again is fast, but still extremely fun It is just amazing The only other missions that I think even come close are the original taking King mission on Phobos The first mission on the dreadnought itself and the prison break mission that started the forsaken campaign It is basically perfect challenging Interesting unique as soon as I finished it the first thing that popped into my head was Every mission should feel like this and these things need to stop being one-off moments that we never revisit Bungie is capable of making spectacular FPS missions in fact the opening mission of almost every single release is always great I think we deserve a couple of these each season But between battlegrounds and this replayable mission I feel that I got more than my money's worth this season as Opposed a season of the hunt that I wouldn't have even liked if it was free now Let's wrap up this little review of the new season by saying its best parts are great and the rest is above average enough to not be bad Still the game has issues and to segue into that I want to show you something that pisses me off Even though a bunch you're gonna say this doesn't matter and even though it's something it's been in here from day one Why does this happen in destiny to we are about to talk about a ton of little things Season of the chosen gets most of the big things right but every time this Happens when I'm playing a battleground. It reminds me of all the small annoyances that have built up over years into the franchise This will be a theme but small things like this endlessly piss me off Why don't drop pods have a warning on the ground? What design goal is achieved by the player being killed instantly by a physics object is Impossible to see coming unless you're shooting into the air for some reason. Why isn't there an audio cue? It's not some big deal, but like lots of stuff in destiny 2. It's an annoyance that shouldn't be They can do it Cylons drop little cover objects in public events and those have an animation on the ground to let you know They're about to appear so yeah season of the chosen is really good above average destiny 2 But the fact that this is about as good as we can ever expect these seasons to be brings us to the real purpose of this video Season of the chosen still isn't good enough because so many problems both huge and Tiny have built up that even good seasons are now just being piled atop an increasingly rotten core When these seasons are decent or better It keeps the problems lurking just beneath the surface when the seasons are bad or below average The game explodes in annoyance and anger. That's why what D2 desperately desperately needs is Season of the foundation The last D2 video I made got the comments you would expect Half the comments were people who are constantly annoyed at the game the other half were people who think the game is literally Perfect in this video I'm not gonna focus on the story or how big or small the map is or how Objectively terrible armor sunsetting is or any of the things that most other people focus on Instead, I want to talk about how almost three and a half years into the game a ton of small issues or a lack of progress or even fundamental design flaws have piled up and How it's more important than ever that bungee bite the bullet and focus an entire season or even to Not on some new activity that nobody will remember or care about in three months But on these core issues that simply need to be addressed Let's start with one of my biggest pet peeves Destiny 1 had multiple difficulties for almost every activity. There were strikes Heroic strikes and nightfall strikes. There were several difficulties for missions. There were heroic missions There were raids and hard mode raids There was even eventually a heroic patrol zone kind of this diversity of difficulties wasn't perfect But it allowed for a wider sphere of challenge, but even the D1 system really wasn't good enough There wasn't nearly enough difficult solo content The only thing that was even close was running nightfall strikes solo, but often doing that was annoying as fuck I still did it, but it ended up being really infuriating sometimes Finding Rocket's mcdick face solo was really only possible by crouching under the stairs and plinking him in the face with a scout rifle Fighting shield bros meant perching yourself up on the ceiling in the boss room Omnigul meant hiding in the little room where the night spawned This wasn't difficult challenging solo content It was running three-person content alone and then cheesing the boss I want to be able to run nightfall strikes Solo and destiny 2 without having to effectively cheese it I want to be able to run ordeals with champions solo and have it be hard enough to engage me and I want there to be Specific rewards for that and please don't throw esoteric at me because that's meaningless Mike Trout can hit 90 mile an hour sliders all day That doesn't mean I want to face Garrett Cole the batting cage Facing Garrett Cole at the batting cage would be deeply unfun and likely dangerous at my age the whole purpose of difficulty options and Solo and group cues is that different people are engaged at different difficulties What's hard for me might be easy for you. What's easy for me might be hard for someone else I want the option to run normal and heroic strikes solo because those feel perfectly balanced to be fun and challenging solo activities Regular strikes with three people are just not fun at all because they are just way too easy Bungie needs to fundamentally re-examine both how it match makes and Scales its activities simply scaling strikes to the player count and letting players cue alone would work But it would be much better to have all of the different activities have specific Solo modes and then tie all sorts of cosmetic rewards to that system Like battlegrounds that would take existing content and utilize it to its fullest degree The new mission for the dead man's tail exotic scout is well balanced to play solo There could certainly stand to be a harder version But even as it is it's the most fun. I've had playing alone in ages and yet dying to a puzzle still has a 15 second respawn timer Why? These are the small things that show the game simply isn't well designed for either solo or group play I mean if this mission was so fun solo It must be way too easy with two people and just trivial with three So why does it feel like it's been designed to only be played in a group or does Bungie think a 15 second respawn timer as a Solo player is good design? Dungeons are all over the place Pit of heresy was perfectly balanced to be played solo, but others have not been and Even pit would really benefit from having several difficulty options The current version would be the hard solo mode But there's no reason to not have a few different versions with enemies that are below the player's light level Make rewards better based on what difficulty you play make better rewards for people who play in groups But what's the harm in having a solo version of like zero hour? Why wasn't there a match made version of it? Even if you wanted to keep outbreak and the catalyst only in the most difficult version and launch it only in that state After a couple of months failing to use what was an objectively amazing mission for more than just pre-made groups was a total waste Destiny 2's PvE needs to better utilize what it has and add more ways to play what's already there Instead of spending months making the next wrath-borne hunts They should spend months making a campaign mission playlist with three difficulties all able to be played match made or solo or pre-made and rather than designing the next serif towers a few different difficulty solo versions of the strike Playlists would be a far better use of resources. This goes with everything Champions have been one of the very best additions to the game in years not because it's some activity that will disappear But because it has fundamentally changed how old Activities play I don't really even like the regular strike miss because I said they're too easy every moment I'm playing in that list feels like a waste of my time But if I was able to play them solo that would be a different thing Let me give another example D2 launched with no heroic strikes This was probably the biggest reason I stopped playing a few days after curse of Osiris after never really leaving D1 It took months to finally add them back and when they came back They were and remain worse than the Destiny 1 version in every single way The amount of modifiers is basically half of what it was in D1 The burn modifier is pointless really the strike scoring isn't as good as it should be As it stands the only point of strike scoring is setting personal goals I treat strikes like this if I get more kills and the other two players combined I win if the other two players combined beat me I lose while this is fun It could be so much better Destiny 2 strikes are basically some of the best content the game has to offer And are without a doubt the very best content available to players who only use matchmaking Why are they so poorly used? Why are they like dying on the vine and the same as they were at launch? Imagine instead a playlist that lets you play solo or with a group There would be multiple difficulty options twice or even three times as many modifiers Including imaginative new ones that rotate every day Imagine if strike scoring meant that finishing first awarded two ascendant shards Finishing second two upgrade modules and finishing third two cores The nightfall ordeal system is great aside from the fact that it's one strike each week Which means I ran devil's lair like 35 times the first week Destiny 2 has plenty of great content But the way it's delivered is stale and drives apathy a playlist of rotating campaign missions with modifiers and three or four Difficulty options would be great. I've got more to say about how to improve the PvE player experience in the next section But let's take a quick look at the crucible It's just dying on the vine because it is completely stagnant three modes isn't enough Why isn't there a 12 on 12 mode destiny could do a version of Titanfall's attrition That would be one of the best PvP shooter modes around why hasn't rift come back How can you not have a capture the flag mode or a move the payload mode after three years destiny is full of great patrol maps Why isn't there a mode that provides a battlefield style conquest mode that has played on the different patrol maps? I mean, I know this is kind of funny to say But like a destiny 2 version of battle royale actually would be amazing The game is perfectly set up for that or a big player battle battlefield style that has PvE mobs and bosses on the map that revolves around capturing territory This isn't even asking for huge innovations or extreme creativity Just that the game be better at using all the great stuff it already has Or at least getting players something new by learning from other shooters and using some of the better ideas that other games have used Call of Duty managed to make a ridiculously successful battle royale just by making a call of duty flavored version Destiny 2 has now gone over a full year without even adding a map It hasn't added a mode that feels fundamentally different to what came before since rift and destiny 1 There needs to be a greater focus on the foundations of the game And things that will stay relevant for more than three months Not just another seasonal activity Now let's talk about one of the other biggest issues in the game The fact that bungee thinks they have a social game But refuses to devote even a penny to implementing social features A bad MMO Destiny forums have been full of players consistently asking for better matchmaking options Destiny 2 is one of the most embarrassing guild and social systems you will find in a supposed MMO There's no in-game LFG Text chat doesn't exist on console On Steam in order to play with clan mates, you need to still add them to your Steam friends list There's no general chat All of these things are serious problems with the health of the game It leads to low engagement with raids And worse, it leads to a social game that does a terrible, terrible job at letting players meet other players World of Warcraft became such a massive hit because everything in the game's design Drove players to make friends, cooperate with others, and find like-minded people I mean, Warcraft created thousands of marriages and that's not a fluke or a coincidence Even at launch, that was one of the game's greatest strengths But Blizzard didn't stop there They eventually added matchmade versions of the raids that were simpler But still gave the general experience and trains people how to do the next one up They didn't matchmake the normal heroic versions But they did implement an extremely robust, fully featured in-game group finder That made it easy to find others to play with without ever leaving the game Destiny 2 badly needs to have matchmade versions and solo versions of all strikes and missions For raids and dungeons, it desperately needs an in-game LFG It needs text chat across all platforms It needs a far easier to use friend system It needs a much better imagined clan system These are the kind of changes that may not make a sexy trailer But they are the kind of changes that will do more to bring in new players And turn them into weekly raiders than anything else It's the kind of foundational changes, like the ones I talked about with strikes and missions That I believe most players would be more than happy to have traded Seraph towers for Odds and Ends Finally, there's just a bunch of huge quality of life changes that need to be made Destiny 2's currency and upgrade system is an absolute mess Just a nightmare of bloated inventories, useless currencies, random and arbitrary limits on stack size and vault options and annoying grinds and needs to change There's no reason to have so many different materials and currencies, none In Warcraft, the game is loaded with currencies and resources But that only works in a game with a thriving real economy and actual crafting In Destiny, it's just a confusing mess for no reason It needs to be studied and thoughtfully fixed The bounty system is deeply, deeply unfun And while the new challenge system that was introduced this season is a big improvement There is still a ton of room to improve the entire way XP works in the game XP gains, like so much in the game, is totally opaque The player is completely in the dark about how much XP one activity will award compared to another How much XP will this bounty give? I don't know How much XP does a strike give? I don't know Again, I will use Warcraft because whatever your issues with that game It is a successful and easy to use MMO In Warcraft, you accept a quest and right there at the bottom is the exact amount of XP you will be awarded Why aren't activity and bounty XP rewards clearly communicated to the player? The vault, postmaster and item transfer system is inexcusably garbage Like, shockingly so It's so terrible that using Destiny Item Manager or another out-of-game app is mandatory Why? Why isn't the vault and postmaster in your director back in D1 before all of these apps You could have made the argument that Bungie wanted to drive players to the social space But that argument is now moot and it was a terrible argument to begin with In D1, every raid had to begin with five people going to the tower Putting gear in the vault, logging out, logging back in on another tune Going to the tower, pulling things from the vault and then going to raid It's the kind of stuff that's just terrible design, almost undesigned There's a million little things like that Like dying to a cabal drop pod that simply shouldn't be Each one of these issues is a small issue in and of itself But cumulatively, they add up to a game that is noxiously user-unfriendly These systems create a game that often feels like it's straight up wasting your time That's constantly getting in your way One last thing Bungie has now settled into a pattern with their battle pass exotics You buy the exotic for 10 bucks Then you get the catalyst quest and realize that Bungie has nerfed progression on it to ridiculous degrees So they can have something else to put on the pass So Bungie creates a terrible problem and then sells the solution further down the battle pass I stopped playing early in season of the worthy So I never finished the catalyst quest for Ariana's Val Which means I missed out on the times 4 catalyst booster for that season Which means I still need another 170 playlist activities to finish the quest 170 This is a perfect example of something that's basically indefensible These grinds that don't have purpose Requirements that make no sense For the last year, Bungie has been leaning harder and harder into these kind of quote-unquote quests This isn't content, man This season's first exotic is Tikku's divination It's actually a pretty fun bow It's not Trinity Ghoul and probably won't be used all that often But I have enjoyed using it anyway What this bow is not is a decent PvP weapon Yet Bungie has 100 Guardian Kills as a step in the second part of this quest After getting the times 4 booster, it's like 14 final blows And even that was a miserable disaster because it's bugged The explosion doesn't count You only get credit for kills with the normal ADS bow shots Using this bow in Crucible with only the ADS was horrendously frustrating I will never use this bow in Crucible again I'm willing to bet that a max of .01% of players will ever use this in PvP again So why the hell is a PvP step even on the bow? How on earth does a bug that means you literally cannot use the exotic perk that makes the bow fun Make it into the quest? Why is there even a PvP component at all? For a catalyst on a bow that's obviously designed to be a PvE ad clearing weapon And for players who leave and don't finish Next season they will need 100 Guardian Kills with this terrible bow for PvP This isn't a rare thing It's a constant example of poor testing and poorly thought out quests If Bungie thinks 15 kills in PvP is what it should take to get this catalyst Do that But now that it's 100, next season someone who just gets it will have to get 100 kills Why? It's time to stop these quests that are annoying checklists And it's certainly time to stop tying their progression to the battle pass in only that season Stop making utterly random lists that last anywhere from 1 hour to 150 hours Depending on whether you do it today or in June It's not a reasonable or logical way to design something The entire way that Bungie sets up their quests and catalyst grinds needs to be rethought Now in 2010 Blizzard released their third expansion for World of Warcraft They used it to completely revamp the game and update the engine The whole map changed, a bunch of systems changed And quality of life improvements were one of the biggest components of the expansion It wasn't actually one of the best And looking back most players didn't recall it all that fondly But it set the foundation for what the game was going to be going forward Bungie needs to do its own series of mini-cataclysm seasons They need to make one season focus almost exclusively on quality of life Revamped economy and XP systems, adding LFG and better clan support And say a solo strike playlist They need one that's focused on implementing difficulty options Single player options, replayable missions, massively expanding the modifier system And adding champions in other places and a heroic patrol They need a season that massively expands the matchmaking system Comes up with a better quest and bounty system and delivers much better social support And they need to finally deliver a far more diverse set of PVP modes And maps and move the crucible forward Rather than focus on story missions, cutscenes, dialogue, or the next forgettable seasonal activity Instead of yet another tower, lore, hammer, chalice, or whatever they want to Next time, they need a season of the foundation Battlegrounds are pretty good, but 18 months from now, none of us will give a shit about the sidearm we got out of this activity But if they actually spent all of their time for the next five months delivering substantial, well-designed quality of life and system changes We would benefit for the rest of the game's life Battlegrounds is as good as we can ever expect these seasons to be And I am enjoying myself a lot But if that's really the case, I will gladly trade the next two battlegrounds for Destiny's version of Cataclysm If I had to choose between Seraph Towers slash Wrathborn Hunts Or an in-game LFG and an end-to-currency bloat Fixed XP systems and a better inventory and vault system It's not even a question, man The first two are totally forgettable The latter is stuff that will make the game better every day for the rest of its life It's time to rebuild the foundation It's time to fix the millions of things that just keep getting added on It's time to stop having fucking drop pods Fall in my fucking head Without any way to know where they're gonna land It's time for a significant refresh The game needs it And we all deserve it All right Thanks for coming I'll see you next time Bye