“Season of the Deep” is a huge fail for Destiny| Mid-season review

[Vertigo]

What this really has turned into is the season of growing pains and painful indeed it is.

Firstly, I do want to commend the quality-of-life improvements….

I very much welcome the removal of the pointless power lvl grind. It’s insignificant outside of grandmaster content none will ever care to play and I appreciate the direction towards what represents difficulty levels. It has also afforded me the chance to engage the game in only the ways that I care to, which is PvP and endgame pve dungeons and raids.

Season started out front loaded and narrative direction is going pretty well. But that of course is the least important part for its players. It’s always fun to log in and catch a new episode of your favorite tv show. And that’s how this narrative rolls out… it’s going over better than Lightfall itself has that’s for certain. But we expect this.

Just yesterday an interview dropped with Bungie on how seasonal narrative is more directly linked from season to season to lead into the next expansion.

https://www.gamesradar.com/bungie-r...ightfalls-story-we-arent-done-giving-answers/

And here’s a link to everyone’s favorite Paul Tassi and his thoughts on it:

Today, the final piece of seasonal content dropped. This is uncharacteristically late into the season and I do believe this was intentional to work around the onslaught of summer blockbusters that just rolled out.

I’m gated out from this for weeks however. Why? Because of the absolutely terrible addition of fishing.

Players engage with fishing because it’s farmable for easy loot and they will always love the path of least resistance. But it’s far from an engaging activity and you can only catch one exotic fish a week; you need three to unlock the exotic quest.

With drop rates for an exotic fish being caught being low you can imagine how painfully NOT FUN this can be. You will waste hours and not get a single exotic fish since fishing gets interrupted when public events spawn. I’m sorry Bungie I CANNOT be bothered with this.

They’ve gated missions is strange ways before. The coolest and original being the “Whisper of the Worm” mission; which in order to unlock required waiting for a particular public event to spawn and upon searching the area for secret enemies located nearby and killing them; which then opened up a portal to a secret mission. Another was in “zero hour” which required sparing the life of a Fallen alien combatant during a sidequest that appeared in game a year before the mission was even launched.

What they did here is worse. And it needs to be addressed asap. They might. The sad part is I hear it’s a challenge and it would be nice to actually play it.

The best part of this season’s content drop is without question the dungeon itself. I will echo Datto’s sentiments in saying it’s a better piece of showcase content for the game than the last expansion’s headlining raid. His thoughts in the video below:

This is the least I’ve played the game in a long time. It somewhat feels by design but was that really the intent? To fit content around big software releases? If that’s the case… why create so many hoops to jump thru for a major piece of content meant to bring those players back? Doesn’t Bungie want their players to see the final showcase piece of content for this season?

It’s not even the content that’s the issue here. And while some seasonal event will end the season with decent player numbers I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re gonna hit a new all time low in a few weeks.

Dungeon is SOLD SEPARATELY from the seasonal content. Play that if anything.

Final Verdict: FAIL

PS - don’t want to forget that this season also featured one of the most important cutscenes in the game’s history and explains the origin of the the big bad villain. Watch below

 

[Bryank75]

I have so much to play and Destiny and its seasons and the grind just really are not enticing to me right now.

The amount of money you're paying and the value you're getting don't seem aligned very well.

I wish they'd have some innovation in what they were offering, the diversity of activities etc.

But it's late in the lifecycle of the game now and I think I'll just play the next expansion and experience the main story and let that be it till Marathon comes out.

Marathon needs to make sure it doesn't have the same issues.

 

[Vertigo]

Well my prediction was correct. They’re at their all time lowest of lows for the game. This is as bad as Curse of Osiris numbers during vanilla D2’s trash launch year. True Vanguard just announced he’s quit making content for the game. I don’t blame him one bit.

They did a hell of a job of completely alienating the PvP player this season. And seeing how those players are exactly who carry the game year round for the last decade it’s actually a bit insulting how they’ve ruined pvp where the least stressful playlists are friggin 3v3 comp modes. The real endgame has always been PvP and taking the loot you got from a raid or dungeon and using it to more effectively shoot another player in the face. That’s the main gameplay loop and obvious when you see that all destiny YouTube content is lore and PvP weapon reviews.

Skill-based matchmaking and every single attempt to further tune it has made PvP more and more unbearable and unfun to play. It has changed the pacing of matches with the laning and most op of metas in effect always.

Balancing team composition in matchmaking is mistake and at this point I am indeed calling for whoever is responsible for these decisions to be fired from the job. Fuck your graphs and 50/50 booking. It doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked. It literally doesn’t work in any fucking game.

You cannot expect to balance a game where someone spends years min/max’ing their armor stats and build. You need to measure both time invested, build quality and skill. And that won’t work anyway.

Next season is promising some PvP content and work. We shall see but I’ve quit the game completely till that launches and I’ve always dabbled in PvP and endgame just as comfort food. Not anymore.

The weapon sandbox is great. The game content itself is great. I can’t believe something like matchmaking being the culprit but it is. I don’t blame content or new maps being debuted. The 30 weapons each season and sweeping ability changes are often sufficient changes to PvP. SBMM tho and their attempts at tuning it? Utter fucking disaster.

That and increased movement speed and options is leading me to think 6v6 should be made into 5v5. Too much laning and players just stacking on top of each other. There are weeks when there feels like there’s no playlist to have fun with in PvP. We now recognize this as iron banner.

They know they fucked up. They can’t ignore this shit and intentionally leaked the next subclass for the game for some damage control. Cool I guess but I’ll still be playing the same two classes I always play as so kinda don’t care much at all about a new subclass. Especially if it’s a roaming super.

Destiny 2’s Sixth Subclass May Have Leaked The Same Way As Strand

Is this Destiny 2's new subclass for The Final Shape?

www.forbes.com

Oh and the free solstice event? Not even worth mentioning. No one will bat an eye when they delete it.

Destiny needs another axe taken to it ASAP. It feels like they’re working towards a soft reboot and relaunch … that’s not necessarily a good feeling right now.