Bungie has always been loved for their work on the Halo series, so when they decided to move past Halo and work with Activision to make a persistent world people were ecstatic. In 2013, Bungie release the much-anticipated persistent world game, Destiny. Even though Destiny was a solid first person shooter, the story and content were lacking. The game struggled to keep its promises of being an engaging persistent world where you could go anywhere your eye could see. The game initially promised an open-world style game and delivered an invisible walled hallway shooter. The game lacked content and an engaging story at release. Even after two paid DLC’s the game was still lacking and quickly became boring. Not until The Taken King year two expansion did the game finally feel alive and full of things to do. People started to really enjoy themselves in year two until they realized Destiny 2 was not going to transfer any of their hard work over.
Enter 2017, and Destiny 2! Only after a month, players were scratching their heads wondering why Bungie reversed what they learned in The Taken King and made destiny 2 worse than Destiny 1 on day one. The story seemed a little bit better, but the gameplay was so constrictive and dumbed down, there was no need to play the game after a month. The game quickly alienated even the hardcore fans of Destiny 1 and Bungie had to keep back peddling on decisions they made just to get Destiny 2 up to the lackluster gameplay of vanilla Destiny 1. Frankly, t pissed a lot of the fan base off and they lost all trust in Bungie. For some reason Bungie thought, it was a good idea to lay out a roadmap that mirrored the failures of Destiny 1. The only reasoning behind making a horrible game from the start would be to come back from it in the year 2 expansion, but why would Bungie want to repeat exactly what they did in Destiny 1? The popular consensus points towards the almighty dollar. It makes sense to have people invest their time and money in a game to make them feel obligated to buy every expansion in hopes the game gets better. I know this because I did just that.
I hoped Curse of Osiris was going to fix how bland the game was with the Infinite Forest, but it did not. The Infinite Forest was just a randomly generated gimmick that had no purpose outside of strikes or adventures. Then came the Warmind expansion that was so bad I do not even remember anything good about it. Escalation Protocol only became a fun event after the power level cap was increased in Forsaken to make the event accessible to people just wanting a distraction from the daily grind. Once I finished the Warmind story, I quit playing. During each expansion, I hoped Bungie would make old raid content and lower level Nightfalls accessible to random matchmaking just so the casual player could experience past content that has only one value left to the player base, experiencing the content for fun. To this day, Bungie still does not allow matchmaking for the old raids of lower power level Nightfalls. The choose to punish the people that just want to experience the amazing mechanics of a raid by making them go outside of the game to gather like-minded players that all wish there was an in-game matchmaking system for old content. Their hardcore mentality is just hurting the replay ability of their game.
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Through all the growing pains of the first year of Destiny 2 I feel Forsaken has finally become the game Destiny 1 was at The Taken King. It is sad it took that long and pissed off so many fans they refuse to jump into Forsaken and see any of the great changes. I love the game right now, but I still have not bought the annual pass because I feel I cannot trust Bungie enough to give me fun content beyond the basic experience of Forsaken. Is this really, how Bungie wants their player base to feel? That said, I love Forsaken and have been logging in every day since I waited three weeks for reviews to coming. Again, I did not trust Bungie to make a good expansion and exceed their hype-train of promises. Once I started playing, again I had to beg my two best friends to buy the expansion to play with me. Even then, one of my friends refused to be put through being let down again, so my other friend bought the expansion for him. Even though we are all having a great time in the game and talk about it daily, none of us trust Bungie to keep moving forward without ripping the game out from under us and making Destiny 3.
I have faith Bungie can keep making Destiny 2 a great game. They are now in a great place and recently introduced the Haunted Forest for the Lost Souls event. The Haunted Forest is what the Infinite Forest should have been. If you left Destiny 2 and do not have any of the expansions, you should log into the game and try out the Haunted Forest. Even though the Haunted Forest is fun, if the Infinite Forest was updated to mirror the Haunted Forest it would get old fast without a more robust award system. It could be the next cross between Nightfall (with matchmaking), and horde-mode. I would like to see something like the Brother Vance Verses quests incorporated into a new Infinite Forest timed mode to keep players working towards reputation, materials, weapons, armor, and exclusive drops. They have a good thing going with this event and should evolve the game with it.
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The problem with Bungie evolving Destiny is the fact that they have a contract to make three Destiny games. The fan base knows it is inevitable that all their hard work will be wiped again only to have a game that is crap for a year before it is fixed with a year 2 expansion. I do not see why there has to be a new Destiny 3 base game that resets the world that should be a persistent world. I am dreading any press release for a new Destiny game because it will take the wind out of my sails of excitement like it did When Destiny 2 announced all progress would be wiped in Destiny 2. I do not see why Destiny 2 cannot evolve to Destiny 3.0 off Destiny 2’s base game. I would not mind buying a $60 expansion for Destiny 2-3.0 that just introduces all the old areas in Destiny 1, but revamped. The fan base wants that.
Recently, there have been leaked audio files that point to players returning to the Cosmodome on the October 30th patch that will include easter eggs from the Destiny 1 reveal trailer. The community it truly excited to do a new quest in the Cosmodome for the Thunderlord machinegun. This is what the Destiny universe needs; it does not need a completely new game, it needs people invested in the persistent universe Bungie has built upon since the release of Destiny 1 in 2013.
