 So Destiny 2 released a new update that does a great job of replacing some of the systems ripped out for no reason, while also addressing issues that still exist by failing to understand exactly what the problems really are. More importantly, I think this final update before Forsaken is a perfect time to look back at the first year of D2, because several of the seemingly best changes on offer here actually don't work, because D2's flaws are baked deeply into the design. In Bungie's effort to get as many systems back to D1 as possible, they seem to have not realized that if they don't fix the underlying problems, none of these old systems will matter. Let's just get right to it, shall we? So first off, there are a couple of changes in the way the gear is acquired during events that take us closer to the perfectly functional system that existed in D1, but unfortunately didn't conform to Bungie's vision of D2. That vision being this. Starting this week, 10 months after the launch of the game, the Iron Banner and faction vendors will sell armor directly for legendary shards and tokens. Now, this change, while unforgivably late, is still welcome, but it's an interesting way to shine a light on Bungie's design of D2 and where things went wrong. It perfectly illustrates the problems that arise when dealing with complex game systems that are layered one atop the other, because changing one thing means other things need to be changed. Destiny 1 had faction NPCs, whose reputation you can level up by doing any number of things. Counties, patrols, strikes, whatever. When you pledge to a faction, you can turn in any of the material's occurrences to that faction and level up your reputation with them. After achieving certain ranks, their inventories became available to you, and at rank 50, you could do a quest to get the only exotic class items in the game. Now, these unfortunately didn't have any real gameplay function, but they were a fun prestige item and it was just cool to see two exotic armor pieces on at a time. These NPCs were, in actuality, vendors. They had a full stock of weapons and armor, and with every DLC or major update, their entire inventory rotated with all new weapons and armor. Not new armor ornaments, all new armor, and not one weapon per reset. All new weapons. The vendors served a very important role, because when the game had random roles and a ton of perks, unlike now, there were a tremendous amount of possible roles in each weapon. The vendors allowed Bungie to occasionally release a god-rolled weapon out into the wild that every player could realistically obtain. Probably, the best example of this is the dead-orbit hung jury during the Taken King that became the staple legendary primary for most serious PvE players. Fast forward to D2, and the faction vendors only show up for a week every month and no longer feature an entirely new set of armor and weapons with each major update. They have one set of armor with hilariously minor ornaments available for each season. Seriously, we went from ornaments like this to ornaments like this. They also do not feature an entire set of weapons with each new content drop. Outside of the laziness on display in their loot tables, the other big change to faction NPCs was you can no longer simply buy items from them. Instead, you had to grind public events and loss sectors to get tokens that you then pumped into the vendor and hoped you got the item you wanted. There's one reason this change was implemented, to artificially hide the now anemic loot pool. With random roles, there were a nearly infinite amount of weapons in Destiny. Every time you leveled up and got a reputation bundle, you didn't know what you'd receive. With random and powerful perks available on both weapons and armor, they gave you a reason to keep getting bundles from the vendor. Because while you may already have acquired 11 of the new monarchy auto rifles, you might not have gotten a really good one. But with static roles, it's obvious what the problem is. Once you've got the dead orbit scout rifle, you've got the dead orbit scout rifle. Allow the player to simply buy what he wants, and that's it. There is zero reason to keep playing. Now, let's leave aside just how fucking insane it was to make this change and realize something. Bungie was fully aware of what a problem this was and had to create a deeply unfun system of total RNG vendors to cover up just how much content ditching random roles removed. It's a perfect example of something we're going to be saying over and over in this video. Destiny 1, like all games, is a complex web of gameplay systems. Each system lays on top of another system, and one change can have cascading effects all throughout the design. So now Iron Banner and faction vendors finally sell their armor. I assume this change was finally made because Bungie, in an effort to add some goals back into the game, decided to lock faction armor ornaments behind tasks that need to be completed while wearing the full armor set. By the way, Bungie, can it please be four pieces of armor? The game already suffers from not enough cool shit. Forcing me to spend 30 hours in a week not using exotic armor is fucking annoying and insane. How did nobody figure out that sucks? Anyway, guess what? This now reverts to the original problem Bungie was addressing by not making the vendors actual vendors, because now you can simply buy the entire stock in one go and you're done. All of these things tie back together. There are no random roles on guns and no perks on armor. So now you've got to figure out a way to slow players from getting all those pieces. So you change vendors to only appear once a month and you put their entire stock into a slot machine. But that's insanely unfun and deeply frustrating when the player gets nine class items and no helmet only to have the vendor disappear, meaning I now cannot unlock the season's ornaments. So then you change the vendors back to vendors and let the players buy the armor. But now I've bought all the armor in one sitting and there's nothing left to drive me to level up a vendor. A huge portion of Destiny's current season economy in general hinged on random rolled weapons and armor. It was the entire reason a player could keep leveling up a vendor and feel good about it. Once you took that away, you effectively neutered and destroyed a part of the game that players had spent three years with and left them with a slot machine instead. And what will become a recurring theme in this video, Bungie has walked back one of those changes but hasn't yet addressed the underlying issues that drove them to make the change in the first place. So faction vendors remain basically pointless aside from the catalyst they are carrying. Faction rally changes. I don't know why but it seems like I'm leveling up faster this time. It could be that I've gotten so efficient at the mindless, boring fucking farm that is the faction rally but it also seems like the game just throws five tokens at me every so often for no apparent reason. I don't remember getting five tokens for completing a public event but that seems to be happening now. I don't know. Seems to be going faster but I can't find anything firm about whether that's actually true or just feels true. I do know it took me two rallies to get the Graviton catalyst and three days to get the Sunshot catalyst so let me know if you've noticed that in the comments. But aside from all that, I still haven't talked yet about the new renown system in the faction rallies. One of the things I wanted for D2 was an event like the Iron Banner but for PVE. So in a way, faction rally is something I was asking for but the implementation here is deeply disappointing. Public events and lost sector farming was so bland and boring that the player base quickly tired of it. Bungie, realizing they had to add some spice into this total failure at an event, decided there had to be at least something resembling gameplay variety that sets this apart from all the other public events you do. It took them many months to arrive at a system and thus the renown system. Now, I am all four having a more difficult, solo PVE event and just grinding the absurdly easy lost sectors after doing public events you do anyway sucked. But once again, the kind of difficulty on offer is so disappointing and uncreative. First off, the idea of losing renown if you die is solid. We needed a solo activity with some stakes. Unfortunately, added on top of that, slowing health regen literally to a crawl is the most fucking boring, obnoxious, lazy kind of difficulty it is possible to add. You leave the player with two choices. Use the Crimson Hand Cannon and only the Crimson Hand Cannon or every single time you take damage, run behind a rock for 20 seconds. Watch this, you're all probably using the Crimson so I wanna show you exactly how fucking ridiculous the health regen thing is. Check it out. How is that fun or dynamic? Hiding for 20 seconds isn't an interesting gameplay mechanic, Bungie. It's literally the opposite of a fun gameplay mechanic. It's actually impossible to create a less fun gameplay mechanic. And on top of that, the lost sector and public event farm can be fun for maybe an hour. But Bungie is asking players to grind 30 hours of it in a week. It's stupid. How about instead of this cheap and lazy system of running the exact same lost sectors but with no health regeneration, we did something like this. The lost sectors stay the same but the faster you clear them, the more tokens you get. Every time you die, you lose renown and end up with less tokens. Now you are finally pushing players into a new play style. You'd have to be as fast and aggressive as possible but also careful enough to not die. Players would need to come up with the optimal builds and loadouts. Or how about we keep the faster equals more reward model but make it so the more renown you have, the more enemies spawn in the lost sector. Or just anything other than what we got. And another thing. Why is it only lost sectors? Why not? Instead, have each day of the rally offer more rewards in one activity. So Monday, the most efficient way to get tokens is in the Crucible. Tuesday, it's heroic strikes. Wednesday, it's heroic adventures, et cetera. As I talked about in my last Destiny video, the game is desperately in need of gameplay variety. Every single time you log in, it feels exactly the same. Destiny 1 accomplished that through making the heroic strike playlist fun and different every week. But Destiny 2 has nothing like that. So the faction rally system still is boring and basically is just another example of how little creativity Bungie is putting into these events. You know what? Let's just move on to the other big changes. Heroic strikes. A week and a half ago, I did a nearly 40 minute video on just how fucking terrible Destiny 2 heroic strikes are. I went back and played D1 heroic strikes for a few days and the difference is unbelievable. D1 heroic strikes, you died just as often because the burn can make certain strikes extremely challenging. But that was offset by having your primary turned into a weapon of mass destruction or throwing grenades literally every 15 seconds or getting 11 supers in a strike or destroying everything with melees. D2 heroic strikes have the same difficulty without any of the fun of D1 strikes. Like I said in that video, I am begging everyone to install D1 again and play those heroic strikes for a couple of hours. It will blow your fucking mind. It isn't just rose colored glasses of nostalgia. Those strikes are better and they are more fun. Anyway, Bungie insisted that everything was fine with D2 heroics before starting to tweet out that they were monitoring player reactions. Well, obviously that monitoring showed what I assumed to be the case that players are flat out not playing heroic strikes after their milestones and they simply avoid the list during glass and blackout. So Bungie said this about the changes on offer here in this update. Check it out. Okay, before anyone says it, I run these strikes at light level 381. So they basically just toned down glass, blackout and grounded. Now I've played about 25 strikes since these changes and I am ready to render a verdict. Grounded indeed is less fucking pathetically obnoxious now. I haven't died from stepping off of a curb, but I still argue that in a game where movement and jumping is half of what makes the game fun, a modifier that punishes jumping is asinine, but at least it's no longer a death sentence. So, you know, small victories. However, glass feels almost exactly the same. I literally don't see a difference. The faster regen is still utterly pointless because the vast majority of majors can kill you almost instantly and you simply can't kill them fast enough to have a shootout. I don't understand how these changes keep getting pushed out the door in the state they're in. Finally, blackout is less obnoxious but still pretty annoying. But here's the thing. These changes completely misunderstand what the fucking problem even is. The problem here isn't that these modifiers are annoying, though they are. It's that, A, these modifiers are annoying. B, there are zero positive modifiers to balance them. C, enemies in heroic strikes have too much fucking health and D, we don't have special weapons. Now, obviously, they're bringing us back special weapons after a full year in $100, which is fucked, but at least it's happening. But even bringing back special weapons will not fix the heroic strike playlist because the other three problems are just as big as the lack of special weapons. I did this in the last video, but here's a list of D1 modifiers. Here's the list of D2 modifiers. There are not enough modifiers to keep the playlist interesting. The elemental singe is so minuscule, it's literally useless. A 15% damage increase on your elemental weapon is nothing. What is that? Maybe three less auto rifle rounds? One less scout rifle round? It's fucking amazing that anyone played it and was like, yup, that feels fun to me. The only time the singe is noticeable on the player's end is in very specific instances, like when it's void singe and you tractor cannon and nova bomb spawn melt a boss. Other than that, while the singe isn't noticeable for the player, when it combines with glass, it is very noticeable for enemies. That same void singe mixed with glass means instant death from ogres or acolyte snipers. Arc singe means night boomers can literally kill you before you can kill them with a rocket launcher. Bungie has these strikes tuned so that they are just jammed with annoying one hit kills and bosses who can throw you over the edge of a map. And by the way, let's briefly acknowledge that. A commenter in the last video, whose name I'm gonna put up on the screen right here, pointed this out in the comments of the heroic strikes video. Why does every fucking boss room feature either pits or environmental hazards? Why does every boss have a really annoying AOE ground slam attack? And why do these attacks launch the player a thousand miles? Even the fucking public event fallen tanks do it. It is lazy and annoying, Bungie. You can be on nearly the other side of the map of Brachion and he will launch you a thousand miles off of the edge. It's just dumb. And it's yet another mechanic that pushes players to stay stationary in cover with a scout rifle. You've literally cut all of the movement and dynamism from your combat. Okay, back to the point. The problem with the heroic strikes is not and has not been that they are too difficult. The problem is they are boring to play because every strike, every day, regardless of modifiers plays exactly the same. With supers that charge too slowly, grenades that are always on cooldown, melee abilities that are just pathetically weak, and shotguns and fusion rifles relegated to very rare use, every combat encounter plays out the same. You have to stay near cover at medium to medium long range and slowly chip away at the enemy health bar. If you try to jump around from target to target, you die. Try to get right up close to enemies, you die. Enjoy running and sliding to shotgun enemies, you die. So the rebalancing of these particularly annoying modifiers not only doesn't feel any different for the most part, it was never the problem to begin with. And this brings us back to the very first point we were making. Why do the strikes feel like this? Because in an effort to make PvP more balanced, Fungi had to drastically cut down the power available to the player. That means less powerful weapons, less grenades, less melees, less supers. When you add in that the AI in Destiny 2 has changed quite a bit with enemies using their abilities almost fucking constantly. Seriously, knights and captains use their shields and teleports literally every few seconds, and the lesser enemies are constantly dodging and dashing to cover. You leave the player with no choice but to slowly shoot them from far away. And actually, while we're on that, can I admit something? I now find fighting the Fallen and Hive so fucking annoying. The Fallen especially spend more than half their time running away from you and hiding behind boxes. It's interesting that Fungi retooled enemy AI to mirror the way their design forces the Guardian to fight, isn't it? This kind of combat simply isn't fun and plays almost nothing like the original Destiny did. Now, the enemy health is another huge problem here. It simply takes far too many shots with your primary weapon to kill a knight. Red bar acolytes and goblins shouldn't take three or four precision shots to kill. It sucks and it just feels bad. It only serves to slow the game down. It literally takes less shots to kill enemies in the raids than it does here in Heroic Strikes, which is crazy. So, will this problem be solved when we get our special weapons back? No, that's one part of the problem but not even close to the whole thing. While special weapons were a big part of the player's power, they were still only a part. Grenades and melee's need to be buffed up to what they were in Destiny 1 and armor and weapon perks need to get the cooldowns back to where they were. Fungi has two options if they want these strikes to be fun again. They need to drastically lower enemy health and damage or they need to drastically increase the power of the player. Drastically weakening the enemies basically means you're just playing the regular strike playlist. So, instead of slowly, piecemeal, trying to fix one system at a time until it all works, Fungi would simply be better off just giving us back to Destiny 1 systems in whole. Let me get my grenade cooldowns back down to 20 seconds. Let me kill an acolyte with one charged melee. Let me use my super as often as I did in D1. What would that do to PvP? Honestly, I don't give a shit. I have only ever played Destiny PvP as a little diversion from the main game. But if they want to keep their precious, sweaty PvP that nobody seems to like, how about simply reverting everything back to D1 and keeping one playlist where all cooldowns and weapon loadouts are kept like D2? They could call it something like, I don't know, competitive. Boom. Now everyone is happy. The 21 people who enjoy D2 PvP get to keep it and the rest of us who vastly preferred the gameplay from Destiny 1 get that too. And finally, let's talk about the last significant change in the update other than the buffing of a few exotic armor pieces that still remain pretty fucking underwhelming. Bounties are back. Let's finish up with the other Destiny 1 system that was added back because perhaps more than anything else I think it perfectly demonstrates what I've been saying about how changing certain systems makes other parts of the design either broken or pointless. We won't have a better example than with bounties. When Destiny 2 launched, the removal of bounties was something I simply didn't understand. And since that time, I've been getting more and more annoyed that something we did every day still wasn't back in the game. Well, the July update finally brings bounties back. They're quicker and easier and are done entirely in strikes and they don't require you to go to different planets to hunt down different enemies. So in general, like almost everything else in Destiny 2, it's the same idea, but less interesting, diverse, and fun. But that's not even what I want to touch on here, okay? The thing is, after finally getting bounties back and doing them for two days, I now realize why they weren't in the game because there's literally zero fucking reason to do them. Are you short on Zavala tokens? Because I am not. I've got Zavala maxed and I have every item in his loot pool 40 times over. Bounties are the perfect example of how changing a few systems makes entire parts of the game pointless. In Destiny 1, there was a reason to gain XP. It wasn't just a way to make sure we stopped by the fucking Eververse store to get some fucking shaders every couple of days. No, we used XP to level up our weapons and armor. We used it to level up faction reputation. It was a system that drove us out into the world. Got a sweet new weapon with a good role you want to try out. Well, now you'll need to level it up and unlock all the perks. And one of the best ways to do that was to grab a bunch of bounties and go from planet to planet completing them. Bounties and heroic strikes were the backbone of the gameplay loop in Destiny 1. But Bungie's entire design imperative for this game was simplicity and instant gratification. Weapons and exotics dropped like crazy and they all dropped with the same role and completely pre-leveled. Bungie decided that players were too stupid and lazy to understand and engage with the systems and economy they built in Destiny 1. They somehow decided that was the reason Destiny 1 got bad reviews and lost to players. Not that the game had perhaps the worst narrative in video game history. Not that it was clearly half finished. Not that the DLC they sold was overpriced and disappointing and that they then went entire years barely adding to the game. No, they seemingly decided the problem was that players were confused. And so, they removed all of the things that kept us playing. Once they took out random roles, there's no reason to level up a weapon more than once. And if that's the case, it was pointless busy work to do it at all. And once there's no reason to level up weapons, there's no real reason to have XP. And once there's no real reason for XP, bounties were completely pointless and on and on down the line. System after system became superfluous as a result of the core design imperatives of Destiny 2. It just didn't quite crystallize why the bounties were gone for me until now. I liked doing them in the first game, they weren't in this game and I wanted them back. But now I haven't done one since the second day because like so much else in the game, bounties are pointless when laid on top of these streamlined systems. It's another example of Bungie bringing back something from the first game, but without bringing back the more important bedrock systems that these things relied upon. This update on the surface gets as closer to a game that looks kind of like Destiny 1, but it's only on the surface. There are bounties, but none of the systems that make bounties necessary. There are heroic strikes, but none of the modifiers or gameplay hooks that made them worth playing. There are faction vendors again, but none of the gear that made them worth buying from. Bungie still has a big problem on their hands. It's almost a year in and while they have delivered on a bunch of the things that players were pissed they removed, they still haven't changed any of the core underlying issues that led them to remove those things in the first place. I am now more worried than ever for the Forsaken because there are still huge gaping holes where core systems resided in the first game. They have really got their work cut out for them. All right, see you next time. Thanks for coming.