Let me preface this by saying that I love Destiny as a whole. While the story in Destiny 1 suffered from issues within Bungie, I played the heck out of Destiny and loved every bit of it. I preordered the Limited edition for D1 after playing the alpha and beta. I was so excited and put way more hours into it than anticipated. Destiny 2 made me feel like a kid again, waiting for the game to release at midnight so I could pop it into my ps4 and get lost in the sequel to the game that I played so much of. Destiny 2, in my opinion, is definitely an upgrade. I know there are concerns about loot, pvp, endgame, and more, and I'll get to that towards the end, but I would like to focus on what I believe are some missed opportunities in the story that would really enhance the emotion you get from playing the game. Again, I love this game and I only want it to succeed. That's what feedback is for, yeah? To start, I enjoy the idea of the Cabal attacking the tower and taking over the traveler for its light. I hated the cabal in D1 because they were hard to kill, and for almost no other reason. Destin 2 brought a new hatred for the cabal, their shields, dogs, flame throwers, and the like. I think it's cool that Ghaul imprisoned the traveler and locked us out of our light. This is also my first gripe, however. I enjoyed the mission where we escaped the city and saw how damaged it was. I was lead to believe that there would be more people in the city still, especially since we awoke beneath the tower as the attack was still going. I wish I could have seen guardians fighting still, maybe even dying, just to add emphasis to the whole "powerless" play. I understand the game is rated T, but maybe it shouldn't be. Anyway, once we got to the hills and had to use our meager hand cannon and lousy sub machine gun to take out some minor cabal, I felt more worthless. I enjoyed that. I think it was great to see what it was like to be a guardian on his "last life" and having to use some strategy to survive. BUT ONLY TO GET THEIR LIGHT BACK THE NEXT MISSION. C'mon man. I was powerless for all of 15 minutes? I really really REALLY would have liked to have fought through some linear levels of the EDZ and had to face some challenges like a cabal scouting party, a fallen skiff trying to use the traveler for energy, or something. What would make me hate Ghaul more than him making me suffer through the idea of "I could die and never come back". Obviously that’s not the case in a videogame, but adds some pressure to the situation, yeah? I want to hate him. The new sub-classes are cool, and I have no issues with the changes they made to the sub-classes. I haven’t played them all myself so I can’t speak for all of them, but both the hunter and titan feel good to me. So we lost the tower. That’s great. We suck, it's official. To be honest, I’m glad we lost. After taking down the heart in the black garden, Atheon, Crota, and Oryx, it's nice to be shaken from our high horse by someone who isn’t a literal god. The Red Legion is a solid enemy because it's realistic. We didn’t get demolished by some overpowered deity, or a machine capable of time-warp. No, we got wrecked by a formidable army with Ghaul at the head. I have no complaints with the army that is the Red Legion. I DO HOWEVER have some complaints about Ghaul, which I assume align with most others’ feelings, but we’ll get to that later. After we lost the tower, the three musketeers went into hiding on their respective planets. Zaaaaaavalaaa being our first rendezvous was a little disappointing. Rather than being distraught over the loss of the tower, it seemed more like he was simply on titan to come up with a plan to win the tower back. The cinematic trailer of Zavala growing into what we know him as today was awesome because it showed us how hard he had to work to accomplish what he did; being “rezzed”, dying, over and over until he learned to fight, working hard to build the tower, and leading not only an amazing trio, but also showing the path to kinderguardians. I’m just saying there is NO WAY he is still typical stoic Zavala after all that devastating loss. He raised his voice one time during the cut-scenes we saw. Give me a break. I was hoping to see this man broken, bungie. He lost EVERYTHING in a matter of a couple weeks. He was knocked so far down that he had to retreat to Titan. He didn’t just leave the tower, he left earth. How does he come back from that? What sort of desperation is he going through to get is life back to how it was? I know he’s not sitting on the pot until he comes up with a plan. He is supposed to be a broken shell of a great leader, and I’m not buying what I got. Ikora fell back into hiding on Io to reestablish herself. Given her impressive and rambunctious history, I think its fitting that she fell back to formulate a new plan. That being said, I would have liked to see her get outsmarted, outplayed or something of the like, because that’s not what she’s used to. Even though she was part of the team that was defeated, she did all she could and it wasn’t enough. I would love to see her learn something from the experiences on Io, maybe do a couple missions WITH her to watch the growth instead of doing her bidding, per usual. That’s about all I can think of that would improve our time spent “with” Ikora. Typical Cayde retreats into humor, as well as Nessus. I love cayde to death, but sometimes he’s comedic to a fault. The lore would have us assume that he had a wife and kids prior to becoming an exo. He writes journal entries to his son, even though he does not remember. It’s just habit at this point. I would have so much more adoration for cayde if we knew (for a fact) that he was hiding behind his humor in this situation. If in a cutscene he opened up about his past life and his struggles as a hunter and exo. I would be able to not only appreciate his humor because it's comedic gold, but also because we know it’s a defense mechanism and that adds a lot of depth to a comedic relief character. Ghaul is a great sequel villain due solely to the fact that he is a sane, and thoughtful conqueror. We meet him in a time where we are coming off of saving the galaxy for like the 4th time, and he takes our light and literally kicks us out of our house. He’s not this massive beast, nor is he this higher being, but rather, he’s a formidable foe because of his military knowledge, prowess, and motivation. He’s the leader of this army, the most badass cabal we’ve seen to date, and to top it off he’s high on light he stole from the traveler. Tell me why my Scathelocke, Uriels, and Genji sword (I’m a hunter btw) could bring him down? I’m good but I’m not supposed to be 3 supers in one, 5x my size, leader of an army representing a nation good. He should have waxed the floor with me and then made my ghost clean it up. The cutscenes with him and the speaker were cool, and I feel like he was starting to understand the traveler more as the story went on. Then he…. Snaps? Consul tells him to move his ass and Ghaul kills him. That’s fine, that’s the type of ruthlessness that probably got him on top in the first place. What I was expecting was for him to realize the size difference, fight me aggressively, one on one and beat me. I expected him to be the raid boss (more on that later) and of course I wouldn’t be able to do it by myself, I would need 5 other galaxy saviors to take him down a notch, not just a good auto rifle. Ghaul wasn’t power hungry, or he didn’t seem like that initially. I believed that he had motive behind his actions and to see something like a dynamic villain in a game is pretty rare. Speaking of the raid, I really enjoyed it. Was it some of the typical raid formula? Yeah. Can we ever really escape that? Probably not. When you first load up the raid, you fly to the Leviathan and land at the edge of this huge palace. It’s absolutely massive in scale and I guess it would have to be considering it can consume worlds. We don’t really see much of the destructive capabilities of the Leviathan while doing the raid, but rather we are put through trials to reach Calus and then fight him. Are we going to let this world-eater just stick around and be captained by ( SPOILERS)….. multiple clones of this fool? I think it would be great to run through the trial he has provided, and while doing so have access to the underbelly near that encounter and destroy a portion of the ship secretly. For example, in the Pools encounter, we need to exchange positions with either top and bottom or side to side. What if during that transition phase, one guardian had an extra objective to move through a vent beneath the baths to drain that nasty ass water into the aqueduct and ruin the water supply on the ship. Or let it trickle into the gardens and kill the foliage causing something bad to happen. Another thing, we just few to this giant machine with no issues? How about it’s in the middle of destroying a planetoid (maybe Nessus, maybe not) and we have to navigate from Nessus to the Leviathan. Imagine the sense of scale we would have for the palace after seeing the world-eater approaching a planet we’re on.