Ubiquitous, melancholy title not withstanding, Destiny 2 is not a bad game. <pause while collective internet minds explode> Ok. If you made it past that first sentence, lets have a realistic look at Destiny 2 and what's right and what is wrong. As I stated, Destiny 2 is not a bad game. It is still a beautiful game with smooth, fun classes and abilities and, in my opinion the best weapon play in gaming. It is a game that is still fun for hundreds of hours of playtime and can be really fun with friends. Destiny 2 can still be a lot better. When D1 released, there wasn't really a lot to do in PvE if you weren't raiding. There were Strikes, the Nightfall and bounties and that was pretty much it. Yet I ran those strikes everyday all day and the first thing I'd do each reset was log in and solo the Nightfall on all 3 characters. Why? Because weapons were hard to get. Even when you got a purple engram, it would decrypt to blue gear 99.9% of the time. I played for 3 days before I got my first legendary weapon (Cryptic Dragon). It took a week to get my first exotic weapon (Hardlight). Was it a better game? Hell no, but it was a more rewarding getting drops. I logged into D2 last night and none of my friends were around so I sat in orbit and, as someone who has played D2 for hundreds of hours and like Destiny, what i found is this: When I look at the strike playlist, I look at the rewards. I see the possible blue and purple drops and I know that they're going to be level 294 99% of the time (I'm currently 305 on all my characters) and I don't feel like running them just to run them like I did The Devil's Lair, Winter's Run, etc. When I look at the Nightfall, yes it drops powerful rewards but it's not the Nightfalls I used to love to log on and run each week. Hasn't been since TTK dropped really, but these Nightfalls with their timers aren't especially fun. It's just killing things as fast as possible and racing to beat the clock. Timers are cheap. They're artificial difficulty and they're not particularly fun. D1 year 1's RTO's were punishing, but that was real difficulty and real challenge, particularly playing solo, and yes the bosses all had various cheese tactics, but they were still a bitch and one wrong maneuver meant starting everything over. AND THEY WERE REWARDING. If you wanted Gjally, Suros, Icebreaker, etc, and your name wasn't Smoggypluto, your absolute best chance at them in year one D1 was running the Nightfalls. Now there is no solo running and the powerful rewards are just the regular drops of everywhere else but at decent power levels. There is a prestige version to get the aura. PvP is an afterthought. I've written a lot on PvP already, but my friends and I had a conversation about it the other day and the question we had was, where would Destiny 2 be with its current pretty robust (if not rewarding enough) overall PvE component and a PvP experience as robust as Halo: Reach? I'll get to rewards in a bit, but honestly again for all the talk (that people maddeningly still cling to) that D2 is a PvP game built for the PvP crowd and yadda, yadda... THE ABSOLUTE LACK OF DEPTH IN PVP is what is holding D2 back the most. In D1 when we were bored of doing strikes, when we'd finished the raids or didn't feel like running, we were in the Crucible. Clash, Control, Supremacy, Mayhem and Iron Banner for hours and hours and hours. When I played solo year one, after I had spent endless hours grinding PvE for good weapons, I then spent MONTHS in PvP. D2 we played a few games of IB. Couple matches before that to unlock it. THAT'S IT. It's not particularly fun. We can't play with our friends. We can't play what we want and there's no real incentive to go in there anyway. I'd already not really understood how the Halo games Bungie made went from being so robust and tracking and giving us so much information on stats (down to heat maps of every kill and death) to what Destiny offered. D1 expanded as it grew and added functionality like private matches, but D2 is like someone went to trim some fat off a steak and left nothing but the bone. The mantra from the Devs was that this would be the best Destiny PvP experience possible and I like the Devs and I respect them and know that they honestly wanted that, but it's just not the case. There isn't a single experience possible in D2 PvP that is as much fun as playing Mayhem Clash with 5 other friends in D1. The good news is that Destiny 2 is still a fun game and can easily be much better. I know there are posts suggesting the whole thing is a mistake and should be scrapped but there is one other thing that most fail to recognize about D1 which shaped and ultimately broke the entire game. Destiny 1 launched with the absolute best endgame weapons of the franchise available in vanilla. Destiny was supposed to be a game that saw us get more powerful with better gear and weapons as we progressed. The problem was that there wasn't progressing beyond or getting better than vanilla Gjallerhorn, Vex, Thunderlord, etc. Bungie had painted itself into a corner and the only way out was the reverse power-creep and what would ultimately be an endless succession of nerfs. I firmly believe D2 recognizes that and that it's been built with what many feel are lackluster weapons now vs what we had in D1, but with the potential to have true power growth in D2 and to get progressively cooler and more powerful gear. I don't think D2 released with enough variety (particularly in a game with set rolls) and I think the mod system needs revisited to allow more customization, but that said I think with what we've seen of the new assets coming in season 2, this game is being made to give us significant steps up as it progresses. Whether that can be maintained over the lifespan remains to be seen, but I do believe this game will get MUCH better than the current state. What D2 needs the most right now is to feel more rewarding and to have more for groups of friends to log on and play together and HAVE FUN. There is a balance there, but I'll wrap this up by adding one more thought to Bungie. The thing I'm trying to get the most in your game at the moment is the Manannan-arama. How do I grind for this mythic scout rifle? By runnign strikes? By playing PvP? By running the raid? By doing Lost Sectors or heroic Public Events? By an epic bounty chain or secret heroic quest? No. I get it by dismantling gear and hoping the Gunsmith gives it to me. The game is good. The game will be better. Lets talk and listen to each other and make it great.