Back in destiny 1 destiny felt like it was post apocalyptic and it was reflected well in the maps; the cosmodrome was a former space centre that would have at one point transported tens or hundreds of thousands to space, it would have been at the pinnacle of Human technology and advancement and when we see it in game it is rusty and broken down, this contributes to the sense that we are in a post apocalyptic world. Venus was similar enough with the Ishtar academy once a place for the greatest minds of humanity to congregate and make scientific discoveries about all sorts of things and when we visit it it is destroyed and broken down; a shell of its former self. Mars too with it’s destroyed cities and Rasputin and so much more made the game feel post apocalyptic. The colour scheme of destiny 1 also complimented this, particularly on earth made it feel post apocalyptic and like we were in a foreign environment, in a wasteland but in destiny 2 we have bright colourful and cheery colour (sorry for spelling color as colour I’m a Brit) pallets such as on Nessus and on io (yes io isn’t bright but it has high colour contrast with green to purple and this adds to that effect), I feel that this takes away from the whole ‘we are the last hope for humanity and we live in a broken world’ mentality and makes it feel more like ‘whoo space wars with no consequences and shooting stuff cos why not’, it doesn’t feel like we are defending anything because there are no stakes, this brings me to a second point. This isn’t a destiny 2 flaw but rather a flaw with destiny as a whole, the game relies on the player playing with other players, there’s no risk or loss, you die and you respawn and that’s it, without ai characters we get no meaningful character deaths and it doesn’t feel like we lose anything and over time we stopped caring. Nobody cared about the iron lords so when they died we shrugged it off and mindlessly did the campaign knowing that there was no way we could fail and even if we did that there wouldn’t be any repercussions so nobody was immersed, the same went for when the reef was betrayed, nobody cared, even if the queen had died I’m sure with the way that destiny works it will be a cutscene like the speak or we would simply be told about it in grimoire much like her actual death. Even at the end of the d2 campaign hearing cayde get shot over the comms didn’t faze us and even when we saw the injured vanguard at the end I bet at least 90% of players didn’t look twice. Games like CoD have memorable campaigns or at least some of the old ones do because we got attached to characters who died, I bet at least half of the people who could be bothered to read this far would know who I was talking about if I said ‘soap’ but in destiny it feels like we can never get a soap moment. The lack of risk contributes to the whole ‘whoo reckless space wars with little to no second thought because meh we’ll just respawn anyway’ mentality which takes away from trying to survive the apocalypse. Sorry for rambling but I want to see what you think, destiny has taken a turn in it’s story that doesn’t look like what we thought we would get, we just got a linear story shooter with no twists, a destiny campaign won’t resonate the same feelings we got from reach because in reach you play to lose essentially but destiny is just kill a bad guy so you can kill the next bad guy. To me at least it feels like destiny has substantially changed from what the game felt like at launch to what it is now, it’s not necessarily bad but I want to know if anyone else agrees. If you did read this far I am very grateful and would be extremely grateful if you reply even if you disagree, I would be more than glad to discuss this in any way shape of form with anyone.