Release on PS4 and Xbox One: September 6, 2017

Release one PC: October 24, 2017

Developer: Bungie

Publisher: Activision Blizzard

Genre: FPS and MMORPG

First person shooters are difficult to get used to. Personally I will always prefer a nice third person perspective to a first. That said, Bungie has done an excellent job keeping the balance between the two. While holding a gun, the camera is in the first person, but while holding a sword, riding a sparrow (a hover bike), or in a safe zone, the camera changes to third person. This allows you to see you character and choose from a wide variety of armors and shaders to get the perfect look for your guardian.

Destiny 1’s character creation was annoying in that it did not allow you to spin the character around and see the back of their head. The only way to see the back of the head was to pick the hair, play through the lengthy intro and get to the Tower, the first safe zone. Something this minor would have been easy to fix for Destiny 2 but the developers chose not to. The same problem sill remains and the intro is even longer this time around. The graphics on hair specifically also seem to have gotten slightly worse, though I don’t understand how that is possible.

In fact there was not a single change to the character creation whatsoever. No new hair, face, or color options were put into the game. I could have easily overlooked this if there had been at least one new playable race, or even a new class. Neither of these wishes came true.

In Destiny 1, a shader would change the color of  your guardians entire outfit. In Destiny 2, changes were made to the shader system. Now, instead of changing the entire outfit, each shader changes only one piece of armor and is consumable, unlike in Destiny 1 where they could be infinitely reused. With the changes also came the ability to shade your weapons, sparrows, and ships, doubling the customization possibilities.

Shaders

Customizable Ship

Every planet in the game has an armor set for each class, and a specific shader that it puts on any armor that drops on that planet. There are also armor sets and shaders available for Crucible, Strikes, and Meditations. To get theses armor sets the player has to acquire Tokens for that planet (or game mode). About twenty tokens will earn you an engram which has a chance to give you anything from a number of planet/mode specific options. The grind for tokens isn’t hard, but the chance of actually getting the pieces of armor that you want are very slim. This system would work much better if players could simply turn in a specific number of tokens for a specific piece of gear. Relying on a random number generator isn’t good for game morale.

Tokens

Vanguard Engrams

Destiny 2 is supposed to be a sequel to Destiny 1, but it feels more like an expansion. The game has remained largely unchanged. It has new planetary bodies (two moons and a centaur) to explore but when on missions, you are taken to the same area of the map over and over again, just like in the first game. There are no new enemies to fight as The Kabal, the Fallen, the Vex, the Hive, and the Taken all make a reappearance on one or more of the new planets.

Destiny 1’s story-line was one of things it took a lot of criticism for. The way it was presented felt bland and generic, despite every race, playable or not, having a deep and rich backstory. The problem was that this story was never put in front of the players. To get into the story, players would have to spend hours on google rather than actually playing the game. In an interview with IGN, Cinematic Lead, Matthew Ward, said, “I hope people complain about how much story we have at the end of this.” It is admirable that the developers have listened to the fans and tried to put more story in the game, however, if you expect the narrative to live up to games like the Mass Effect Trilogy, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

This is where I, as a creative writer, have to take a step back and say that the following is not objective at all. This is my personal, unfiltered, opinion of the “story-line” of Destiny 2. The change that bothered me the most was the decision to remove the voice acting for the guardian. I played a male Awoken Warlock in Destiny 1 and his voice fit him perfectly. In Destiny 2 you play as a mute who is constantly getting cut off by their ghost just in time to not have to speak. Besides this, your custom guardian appears in less than half of the cut scenes. It is even more rare for the guardian to have their helmet off. Most of the “story” revolves around the main villain, a Kabal named Dominus Ghaul. His cut scenes take up at least 60% of the story and they are all marked by the ominous red legion logo.

Dominus Ghaul

Legion Logo

To top it all off, what should have been the biggest moment for the player (a cut scene in which the plan to take down Ghaul is devised), your guardian isn’t even there. It is just Zavalla, Ikora, and Cayde. In an RPG, the goal is to involve the player character in as much as possible. It is very rare for a game that has customizable characters to sideline the player as much as Destiny 2 does.  If most of the game takes place without the player present, it can no longer be considered an RPG.

To the developers of Destiny 2 I say we need more. Not more of the same, we the players need a completely new experience that sets itself apart from Destiny 1. New enemies, deep story that seeps into every corner of the game (which it does not do now). More importantly it must make the player feel like the hero, because lets face it, we won the day, everyone else just helped. My top requests are as follows:

1. More REAL story, not the cookie cutter story-line happening now.
2. Bring back permanent shaders. No matter what your reasoning was or what you thought it would achieve, it didn’t work. Don’t fix something that isn’t broken.
3. No more random engrams. Being able to buy armor directly with tokens would make the game so much less stressful.
4. Do not make the players spend money to put a shader on something. We should not have to spend 15,000 glimmer to shade a ship that only cost 5,000 glimmer to begin with.
5. Get rid of Legendary Shards. Right now the only use for Glimmer is shading things. Give glimmer its value back and have us spend that to dismantle armor pieces for their power.
6. Put a raid matchmaking in the game just like the strike matchmaking. Some of us are not hard core gamers who have a ton of people ready to raid with us. Add difficulties like World of Warcraft so that clans can still do the harder modes while casual players can use the matchmaking system.
   • If the matchmaking isn’t possible, add chat to the game so players can communicate and organize themselves. (It’s possible for console, Final Fantasy XIV has it).
7. If two players are in the same location and join each other’s fireteam, the one joining should not be flown into space to then come back down and be right where they were five minutes ago. It really shouldn’t even require a loading screen.

Overall Destiny 2 is still a great game that I enjoy playing. The biggest issue with it is that it is far too similar to the original. It doesn’t feel like a brand new game, and most of the problems with the first game are still problems now. If this were the first game in the series I would give it a 4.8 out of 5.

That said it isn’t the first game in the series and the faults far outweigh the positives. My rank for Destiny 2 is: