Destiny 2 Needs to Wisen Up to Succeed Long Term

Destiny, for the most part, is held in a very high regard from loyal fans and fans of Bungie alike, but its player base since launch has dropped immensely — as has the sentiment towards the series itself from non-fans or casual players alike. So the question to ask is; what can Destiny 2 improve upon and do to avoid it having the same fate as its predecessor?

If we take a step back from Destiny for a moment and look at Titanfall, the same thing happened with that player base; it tanked within weeks of release. Then with the release of Titanfall 2 back in October, it sold well below expectations — now sure you can blame this on the monstrous release schedule from fall of last year, but how exactly can Destiny 2 also avoid this same fate? Today I’ll be breaking down the three things that I believe need to be improved upon and that in the end originally made me stop playing.

Tell Me an Actual Story

Easily the biggest complaint I had with the original Destiny at launch was the extreme lack of any kind of narrative. The game was completely void of almost any kind of story or progression structure altogether — a character would blatantly tell you they don’t have time to explain, then you basically stood there and shot waves of enemies, this would then happen about twenty more times throughout the game, then the main quest line would be over. For any real depth, character bio, or lore you’d have to go to some website and read walls of text; invigorating stuff.

So if Destiny 2 is going to have any hope in hell of keeping me interested, it better actually have some characters I can care about — if you’re like me and only played Destiny at launch, let me ask you this; can you even remember a single character’s name from Destiny? — I sure as hell can’t. That or at least throw me some sort of overarching plot or goal I can actually stay attached too, loot grinding and PVP can only keep me interested for so long; which in my case, not very.

Raid Matchmaking Absolutely Needs to be Added

Bungie thought it would be an incredible idea to design these challenging yet fun raids to take part in, which are so hard — you have no choice but to have a full team before going into one… Except they decided you can only play and enter them with your friends because they believed you needed coordination and voice chat in order to tackle these — which is such a weird naively incompetent design choice that it makes my head spin. However it probably also then explains why less than 20% of Destiny’s player-base have never even completed a raid to begin with. This absolutely needs to change for Destiny 2, not including matchmaking for something like this was such a weirdly bad choice from a developer who gave us the Halo trilogy. Which by the way is a common theme in my opinion for Destiny overall — a cool concept wrapped up in weirdly stupid decisions.

Tone Down the Grinding

The final thing that absolutely made me stop playing the original Destiny and made me never come back despite how cool or possibly interesting those expansions were, because I’d always think to myself “Yeah that looks cool, but I don’t wanna spend another 10 hours replaying the same two missions over and over for some new specific gear.” — Seriously when I think back to my time spent with Destiny, I’d say 50% of it was just grinding and replaying the same missions and boss fights over and over late into the night, just so I can find some better gear and increase my level more. I think this needs to be completely toned down in Destiny 2, a game like this shouldn’t have to be a complete grind fest if you want some half decent gear.

But like I mentioned, I haven’t played Destiny since launch — so if any hardcore players still playing today have any recommendations for Destiny 2 I’d love to hear them in the comments below, as always thanks for reading and stay tuned to GameSkinny for more Destiny 2 coverage.