 Alright everyone, we all know I spend an inordinate amount of time bitching about Destiny 2. It seems I've settled into a pattern where like 60% of my videos are about games and 40% are about Destiny. I've only got two playlists, game analysis and Destiny 2 videos. I've had a long list of issues with D2 and very slowly, Bungie has fixed some of them while leaving others and making still others even worse. But we're forsaken right around the corner, Bungie did a massive 35GB update and I thought it's finally time for my first positive video about the game. I'm just going to be going off some notes I've got, but I thought I should get some up quicker than I usually do. There are quite a few changes to the game that I won't be really going over here, but there are any number of channels that serve as Destiny 2 news outlets. RickKakusHD is my favorite for that, but I don't do the news thing, so we're really just going to briefly go over a couple of things. Mainly, Destiny has changed its weapon slot system. And while it's a slight tweak on the Destiny 1 system, the truth is it's basically the exact same thing, with one fairly annoying change. Let's start with the good, because in the whole these changes are so overwhelmingly excellent that I'm pissed off I had to wait an entire year for a change that was clearly going to have to be made from the very beginning. In fact, you know what, I'm not even going to get myself worked up, to the changes. Weapon slots. Alright, Bungie deserves no confidence after what has happened in the last 8 months. So when I heard about this new weapon system, I tried to jive it with Bungie's new all-nerfs-all-the-time vision of D2, and I had a few main concerns. I was worried that Bungie would either severely and annoyingly limit the amount of special ammo that drops so you ended up with another rarely used weapon, even further cementing the primary at all time system, or if they didn't do that, that they severely nerfed the damage output of shotguns, fusions, and snipers, so that they were no longer as powerful. Because, here's the thing, man, shotguns, snipers, and fusions. Never belonged in the power slot. All of those weapons have significant drawbacks. Shotguns require you to get dangerously close to enemies. Snipers are hard to use and situational. Infusions have both the range limitation of shotguns, and the added wrinkle of a long charge time when shooting. If Bungie actually wanted this system to work, then you need to make it so that shotguns were just insanely powerful. So powerful you could kill yellow bars with ease. Instead, shotguns and fusions stayed basically the same as they were in D1, but were simply moved to the heavy slot. And the predictable result is that outside of a few overpowered examples like Darcy, or Acreus, or the high-escalation shotgun, nobody used them. Because rockets are better than shotguns. Always. So, I had a bad feeling that Bungie would think, well, these were power weapons, but now let me use all the time, so let's cut their damage in half, and we'd be left in the same spot we were before. Well, I am insanely happy to report that that isn't the case. Special ammo is dropping consistently. You will rarely run out, it's basically like Destiny 1. Every so often you'll run low, but for the most part, you can use your shotgun all the time. And they are exactly the same as they were before this patch, except now you can use them all the time. It is so fucking great, I can't even really express it. Encounters went from this, to this. Not only does this finally mean the combat system feels balanced again, it solves my annoyance at enemy health. It turns out that enemy health was actually fine, if I could have been using special weapons. Added to that is the amazing discovery that the movement system suddenly feels great again. I might have been wrong about the game actually being too slow still. It might simply have been that there was never a reason to move quickly. This one seemingly small change has almost single-handedly fixed the combat system. Right from the beta, the entire Destiny 2 combat system felt broken. They had significantly slowed the player down. They nerfed all of the jumps, drastically decreased our grenade and melee damage, and increased the cooldowns, and made our supers very rare. And then took most of the fun weapons, and made them very rarely used. Maybe all of those changes could have worked, but here's the thing. They didn't change enemy or encounter design. They didn't change enemy or boss health. If anything, they increased enemy health. The idea that you could make fundamental core changes to the tools available to the player without completely overhauling other areas of the design is actually shockingly incompetent. These changes broke the game. Players had no choice but to completely change their behavior and play the game very much like Call of Duty. Then, almost immediately, they began rolling all of these changes back. Before the game even launched, they drastically increased grenade damage and heavy ammo drops. Then they increased player speed and jumping speed. Then they added masterwork armor to increase super use. And while all of those changes helped, none of them actually fully fixed the game. Well, this final change fixes the game. It's the most important piece of the puzzle, and simply letting players use special weapons has made the game feel like destiny again. Now, there were a ton of other important changes to progression and loot that broke that side of the game. But before we briefly go over that, I just want to say what an amazing thing this has been to watch. To watch a company completely break their product, and have to realize that the players understood their game better than they did. And there's simply no way to argue that. Luke Smith's 10th Better Devils line is the ultimate proof. That instantly became a meme because it was immediately apparent to players that they understood the design better than the game's director did. So after a full year of slow and steady changes that got the game feeling close to fun, this final change has basically fixed the game. I've said it before, but it feels like destiny again. I'll be having a full review of all the changes forsaken, but I thought it only fair to get up a quick positive hot take after all the negative hot takes I put up. Now, there are some other changes coming to progression and loot in Forsaken, but there's only two other things I'm going to talk about today. By the way, the mass shader delete isn't working, or I haven't figured it out, or it isn't live yet. Either way, you can still only delete one shader at a time. But there's a bug that is allowing Forsaken items to drop in the game, and for the first time ever, one of these exploits worked in my favor. I received this armor piece. And guess what? It has armor perks on it. Now, there's somewhat underwhelming, but it's something. I got reduced flinch when ADSing, which is pretty cool, and a choice between extra sidearm reserve ammo or extra special ammo drops. Now these were the useful perks from D1, and I'm glad they're back, but they aren't the fun perks from D1. D1 armor had utilitarian perks like these, and then gameplay altering perks like reduced grenade cooldown on shotgun kills, or increased slide distance. So these perks are a massive step up from D2 cosmetic only armor, but not as cool as D1 perks. Hopefully there are better ones out there, or the armor mod system is really good. What I've seen so far from the mods is promising, if there's more variety than they've shown. And with the way the game feels today, I am finally willing to give Bungie the benefit of the doubt. Also, the strike modifiers have been fixed, even though it seems we'll still only have the paltry few to play with. Brawler was retuned and seemingly made even crazier than in Destiny 1. If you watch the background footage, you'll see how fast my melee recharges. And if you mix that with the sunbracers that get 5 instant grenades on melee kill, it means I finally felt like a space magic wizard wrecking crew again. Back to the weapon system, there's only one small negative I have with this system. Because Bungie seems determined to never have primaries with burns again. All weapons with burns are now in your secondary slot. This is the reason for the ability to have 3 snipers or 3 shotguns. Because for someone like me, who wants to use a shotgun all the time, this would mean I'd never be able to use Sunshot or Gravitron again. But this has been avoided by making kinetic shotguns and kinetic snipers. Now, I tend to doubt there'll be kinetic fusion rifles, which might mean a bunch of cool weapons are going to share the same slot with fusions. You'll have to choose between any exotic that has a burn or a fusion rifle. But you know what, if that's the case, I will meet Bungie halfway here. Would I prefer the old system completely? Yes. Am I shocked that Bungie refused to give players exactly what they wanted? No. I'm just happy they didn't create another Rube Goldberg contraption of incompetence. This system works. The game feels fucking good to play again. If you liked D1 and are gone, I can honestly say the game feels right. Now it's still got issues, and I don't know how good it's going to be until I play Forsaken. But until that day comes, you could do worse than logging in and checking it out. And this is just a fantastic example of unintended consequences. Bungie made what they thought was a small change in an effort to balance PvP. And most players gave it a fair shake, but that change completely broke their combat system. Nobody could play D2 today and not realize that. Like I always say, man, games are meticulously designed webs of systems, and small changes in one place can ripple out in unexpected ways to break other systems down the line. It remains inexcusable that Bungie waited this long to make this change. They risked their entire franchise by not immediately realizing just how bad this new system was, either way. Before I go, I want to comment on one other incredibly positive change I saw yesterday. Bungie's new trailer featured our player character, Talking. It seems like Bungie has finally learned their lessons here. They've admitted defeat and rolled back almost every one of the important core features. And I'll be interested to see if Luke Smith stays on as director considering the resources that Bungie has had to allocate to roll back almost every single change he oversaw to the core systems here. From random rolls to the new loadout system to the silent guardian, cosmetic only armor, one-time use shaders, all of these systems had to be fixed. And they seemingly have been fixed. Again, I'm not willing to say this is a great game now. I don't know how good Forsaken will be, but the difference is stark and the game plays like destiny again. I feel comfortable telling friends who were fans of the first game that they can come back now. And I'm ready to give Forsaken a fair shake. Alright, I'm gonna be doing a Forsaken review when that comes out, and then I'll be doing my analysis of the three Dead Space games for the 10 year anniversary. And of course, I'll be playing most of the big releases of the fall. It'll be busy around here for a couple months, so I hope you're around. Also, I got to 450 subscribers, which I know is jack shit, but I actually really appreciate all you guys watch, and I just wanted to say thanks for that. I hope to see you next time. Bye.