[b]Gameplay[/b] [u]Gameworld[/u] In their 2013 vidoc, Bungie talked about Destiny offering a "rich, vivid game world players love to return to". Today, Destiny could hardly be less of that. Compared to other good open world RPG games, the game world of Destiny is small, cramped and lifeless - a graphically beautiful, but uninspiring backdrop for what Destiny really is: An endless grinding chore, requiring you to do the same few, simple, boring as hell tasks ("bounties") over and over to maximize yet another exchangeable weapon you got. [u]Weapons[/u] I have played this game a lot (which makes me the typical victim of Destiny's abuse of the brain's reward mechanisms - I am well aware of that ;p). In the course of that I have acquired, maxed and tried a lot of legendary and quite a few exotic weapons. In the end I have found myself using the same weapon combo at least 95% of the time, with two or three weapons thrown in at special occasions. This makes me inclined to believe that most weapons aren't worth the grind; Maxing them is a waste of time, which is intended by the game designers for lack of real content. Bungie also has made it quite time consuming to get the upgrade materials you need to max out a weapon: Not only do you have to farm materials for extended periods of time, you also need special ingredients for the final upgrades in the form of ascendent energy. The same is true for armor, where you need ascendent shards in the end. You only get two pieces of ascendent material per day and character when playing a level 28 heroic daily mission. You have no control whether you will get shards or energy though, and you can get stuck for quite a while until you have your gear maxed out - only to find out it doesn't make a difference and you will have yet another gun that rusts in your (soon too small) vault. What Bungie basically did here was to replace content with endless chores, a worthless upgrade being the only reward our brains are fed with, keeping us forever hungry for the ever same stimulus that will get us nowhere really in this game. The only other source for ascendent materials are raids, and looking at the numbers of people who have participated and who have actually finished the raid, you will notice that only a fraction of the Destiny players had been lucky enough to actually come to enjoy Destiny's "endgame content". [u]PvP Bias[/u] For whatever reason, Bungie has a clear PvP bias. Weapons are getting nerfed whenever Bungie comes to the conclusion they would be imbalanced for PvP play. Very obviously, Bungie couldn't care less about the people mainly using and enjoying those guns in PvE play. Very obviously, Bungie also cannot be bothered to implement a rather simple solution for this dilemma, shown by other (better) MMOs before, and that is to implement separate weapon stats and perks for PvP and PvE. This again would be a rather easy to implement thing and would require a small patch. [u]Point Defense[/u] The only mission element Bungie has found to add challenge to a mission is point defense. This is just pathetic. So many other games have shown so many alternatives to that. Here's just one: Escort missions. More have been proposed in this forum. [u]Artificial Difficulty[/u] Apart from point defense being the only challenge Bungie's mission designers have been competent enough to come up with, they have unnecessarily raised the difficulty bar on already very difficult mission even more, e.g. by putting the team back to orbit during nightfall missions when all players of the team have died. Nightfalls strikes already have a pretty high level of difficulty due to their various modifiers. Forcing the team to replay the entire strike when they die is just annoying. I understand that some people feel this is a part of the challenge, but my opinion is that Bungie used this as a means to increase the challenge for lack of better options. [u]Exotic Weapons[/u] This has led to many, if not most exotic weapons not being worth the attribute. An exotic weapon should be a weapon that, while limited in some way, should be vastly OP in a certain area of application. I only know two exotic weapons that fulfill such a requirement: The Icebreaker and the Gjallarhorn. All other exotic weapons have limitations (nerfs) that hit them so hard that they make them less useful than a good, maxed legendary weapon of the same class, be it the Red Death or Bad Juju with their too small ammo clips, the Pocket Finity with its castrated battery and either insane instability or pathetic range, or the Thunderlord that (despite what the lightning round perk's description says) does not get more accurate the longer the trigger is held, etc. etc. Destiny's game design is corrupted and full of failure where ever you look.