So in this post https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/134447535 I went through some of the missteps of Destiny. Now I'd like to offer up my vision of what Destiny could have been and still could be. While I previously wrote that the reality of Destiny is somewhat of a letdown, not all is lost. For all the wrong turns and cut content, the basic gameplay is still absolutely stellar. The character classes all offer unique experiences that are incredibly fun and polished. The feel of the weapons is superb and the gun play is tight. The various supers are all good enough to piss off the other classes in pretty much equal measure which is a great sign that they're pretty well balanced. If it was all gloom and doom, none of us would be here playing still after hundreds and thousands of hours. [u][b]The Planets: Part 1[/b][/u] If I could go back in time and influence the development of Destiny, I would not have visited so many planets in the initial release. I'd have picked one starting world and made it massive; a true sandbox experience that rivaled any GTA experience. The mountains in the distance would be scalable. The world underneath them would have been ripe with secret tunnels and lairs to explore and get lost in. Outside the walls of the Cosmodrome, there would have been a real world filled with hidden secrets from the past as well as ever present danger from random enemy dropships and patrols The blueprint I would have suggested using for designing every experience would have been the island level from the first Halo. To this day it is still one of the most perfectly designed game levels of all time. There were multiple objectives around the Island, but they could be approached in different ways and order. When we dropped onto that beach, we could go left and our friends could go right and we could each clear different objectives. I would have tried to develop a massive world built around a series of pockets of island-type experiences. Crest a hill and find a giant factory... Explore a forest and find an enemy stronghold... Follow a shattered road and come across the ruins of a town or city... All of them a self-contained Halo island-esq experiences, but still a part of the overall world. Each one with its own story to tell and secrets to give up helping us understand our missions, our enemies and our motivations. [u][b]The Planets: Part 2[/b][/u] The second thing I would do differently with the planets is that when we did travel beyond our planet, I would try to instill a sense of “Holy sh*t, we're traveling to the Venus!” Something more meaningful than “press A on the director to go to Venus”, “press A to go to Mars”, and instantly be in any of these places. The journey should be more epic and meaningful and the various planets more ALIEN. I don't want to go to Venus for it to just be Earth with red water. One way that could have been approached for visiting other planets that could have been amazing is the extremely under-used (but always effective) fight your way home genre. From the classic film The Warriors, to the classic anime Robotech, to the more recent Apocolypto and Battlestar Gallactica, there is just something really raw and intense about the struggle to fight your way home and Destiny was a perfect opportunity to implement that in a game. We could have started on Earth and at the end of the first game, had to flee to the moon, Mars or even out to Pluto. Maybe an expansion could require us to get to Europa or Mercury to escape our enemies and search for the means to their destruction. And each destination could have offered new nuances to gameplay. The moon could have been low gravity, which would have been just sick and amazing with our jump and boost abilities. It could have offered a real verticality to the experience and level designs. This could have really set PvP apart by allowing the various planet maps to play differently. -The moon again could have played vertically with tall bases and hills. -Venus could have had a heavy atmosphere with limited sight distances which lent it more of a survival/horror vibe in PvE and a tense stealthy/radar-reliant PvP experience. -Mars could have had high winds to contend with that affected jumps and boosts as well as sand storms. This could have lent itself to a base-to-base/cover-to-cover tactical approach to gameplay in both PvE and PvP. The point is that, if we weren't trying to go everywhere at once, maybe there could be some roses for us to smell along the way and we could have actual reasons to want to revisit planets. Because again, right now there is no motivation to see the moon other than we're supposed to kill things that happen to be there. If I had no bounty or mission that required me to go there, I would never go just to experience being on the moon. That is just sad. [u][b]The Enemies[/b][/u] I would have begun the game with one enemy to fight. If we started on Earth, I'd have made the Fallen the entire focus of the first release and really told their story and why they're on Earth and what they want. I'd have tried to find a way to give them their own personality like the Covenant from Halo and beyond that, I would have tried to make them truly fearsome and worthy of both our hatred of what they stand for and respect for their fighting prowess. And if I introduced say the Hive into the mix, I'd have tried to show why the Fallen we're not happy to see them and why they fight them. Again, the expansions are going a ways towards rectifying this by giving the Hive and Fallen more defined stories and motivations, but my fear is that the concept of the Taken is just going to make everything more of a clusterf**k story-wise. We’ll see. [u][b]Gear/Loot[/b][/u] If I made Destiny there would be no RNGesus. It's okay to have loot drop randomly as we level, but once we hit endgame content there should be a defined way to earn everything in this game. There should not 10 months into this game be people that still haven't been able to get Gjallarhorn. Every exotic should either have its own bounty or be acquirable through achieving a specific goal. You could do anything from earn 20K AR kills for Suros to complete 100 Nightfalls for Gjallarhorn. Whether it is an exotic weapon, shader, sparrow, rare class item, etc, we should be able to quest, grind or work to get them. And honestly, it would make the game a lot more fun and replayable if we were challenged to solo a level 28 Strike without taking damage to earn Patience and Time rather than hope it drops some year or Xur sells it. We are defined in-game by our gear and weapons, why not let us build the Guardians we want to be? Reforging is a positive step, but wouldn't it be great if in future expansions we find and add customized weapon parts to improve our favorite weapons? Maybe an add-on that expands the magazine or allows us to swap scopes or alters impact at the expense of stability… If there's one thing we've found out the last 10 months, it's that people like their go-to weapons, so why not let those weapons evolve over the course of the game while still introducing new classes and versions. ARs that fire plasma? Sweet! Scouts with under-slung grenades launchers? Ca-f**king-ching! It's limitless what you could do and it would be FUN. RNG is not fun, it's the antithesis of fun. [u][b]Balance[/b][/u] If we’re using our own gear, stand behind that. If you want everything balanced, put generic weapons in PvP and stop screwing up our gear. https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/114553028/0/0 [u][b]Accessibility[/b][/u] Here's a link. I've already written my opinion on how to fix this. https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/129939506/0/0 [u][b]Communication[/b][/u] This one is the easiest fix right now. There are a lot a wonderful conversations going on in the forums on things that make Destiny great and things that drive us a bit crazy, but none of them matter if no one from Bungie is willing to take part in any of them. Can every question or post be answered? No, but the current Bungie approach does not work. There is a huge divide between Bungie and the community right now and it's actually comical to here DeeJ constantly tell us we'll get answers in updates that invariably turn into fluff pieces with nothing spoken on anything we want to know. Once more with feeling, we play your game, we buy (and you want us to continue buying) your expansions. If you want to keep that status quo, I would highly suggest you stop patronizing and start actually talking. So where are we now? Who knows. The version of TTK that new players will step into with the $60-$80 bundles will be closer to the experience we thought we were stepping into a year ago, but Destiny is still a long ways from the adventure that it seemed. I'm not saying anything I've written in this post could happen or that they’re the best ways this game could have been built, but I am putting out there for Destiny 2 and beyond that there are different approaches to these enemies and worlds than we have experienced so far. Destiny will continue to grow and everything holding it back is infinitely fixable still. There is still time for a story, there is still room for exploration (there is still Older Russia), there is still the ability to make our Guardians truly our own, and there is still the ability for us all to find our destiny and to become legend. I hope we're all still around to find out.