Maybe nobody will read this, but I keep hearing from the world that Bungie is watching. This seems like a good idea in today's information age. Lots of hate, lots of love, but nobody ever got better if they believed they had nothing to improve. As a D1 beta player who LOVED the world, the characters, the game, the art (inspiring me to start my own hobby/business making cosplay helmets), the music...the...everything, I put in over 1000 hours (I think over 1500 but deleted one of my characters so lost out on that count) and made some great gaming memories. D2, highly anticipated and initially enjoyed, just "went stale" on me really quickly, and seemed attached to the Wrath of the Machine expansion at the end of D1. This hurt. I had been playing alongside friends and made new ones in the Destiny universe, and now I felt like I could walk away from it without having to think about it. Gun play was great. Levels were new. Game play was new, but not new enough to be a big change or too familiar. Still though, it just went stale REALLY quickly for me. It wasn't the race for the meta load out in PVP (I got my Uriels Gift after all, and Graviton is a beast when used right), but maybe it was a little bit that I was fighting the same enemies as before. Things were different, but not too different. Maybe not different enough. While looking though my Art of Destiny book, I figured it out. I wasn't discovering anything, I was just plowing into it. By discovering, I mean that feeling of actually feeling like I was exploring and discovering something new. This was a universe that humanity had been ejected from. Over run by our enemies for decades and decades. I was the first Guardian to explore and bring The Light back to what it once was. There is a pic in the Art of Destiny book https://www.amazon.com/Art-Destiny-Bungie/dp/1608874206 of a solitary guardian walking through some Vex architecture (picture 6, kind of a group of 3 pics really), all alone, looking about a cave, and that pic more than anything made me want to be a part of the Destiny story. I wanted to be that guy. The scale, the TENSION, the discovery, and all that leads to the story. His gun isn't blazing. He's not hiding, though is appropriately cautious. He's there (He is a "he" in my mind, because I am a "he" and that's how I think my guardians are too), in an alien world, somewhat familiar, trying to find out what happened there and how his story now weaves into that one. Destiny 2 never gave me that feeling. I had it in the boneyards of Terra. I had it in the Dreadnaught (thanks especially to the Touch of Malice quest). I had that in the raids. Scale. Tension. Periods of violence that was necessary. That fell off in the Rise of Iron expansion, and is just not present in Destiny 2. There is no tension in Destiny 2. There is no subtlety. No suspense. Maybe some Jerry Brockheimer nonsense with an orchestral score that the fans of the Transformers movies would consider perfectly done, but pandering to that kind of crowd leads to disappointment an IQ point above, and those are the ones who start complaining and influencing the people who allowed LeBouf to make so much money. It's the lack subtlety above all that's been missing since ROI that leaves me looking in the windows of the Destiny universe. I wasn't looking for horror, I was looking for those moments where things were quiet while I scoped out Martian Malls or the Cosmodrome and cleared what felt like an appropriate enemy presence as I went about finding my place in the world. That D1 Beta day on the moon is one of my favorite gaming memories of all time. It was beautiful. D2 never gave me that. D2 never gave me The Silent Cartographer. Looking into a world, that while lacking the detail of current gen systems can provide, blew me away with its scale, tension, mission focus, action, and subtlety. I've never found that feeling in D2. It's been all Jerry Brockheimer guns blazing, rush rush rush enemies down your throat, explosions, laser beams, high pitched string orchestra moments of urgency ALL THE TIME, and the feeling that I've already done this. Bungie, I love you. I really do. You can't understand what you did for me and my friends, even if you watch this (admittedly corny video done by our local PBS station after a neighbor learned I make helmets), it can't relay how much Halo 1 and 2 meant to bring friends together and make friends of strangers or that they literally helped save the lives of these guys. http://wviz.ideastream.org/news/futuristic-helmets-from-the-halo-universe That's what gaming should do in my mind. Somebody in that Halo 2 special edition DVD said they envisioned video games replacing Poker Night (or some such), but the current state of D2 seems to be that more people are leaving, or clinging on in the face of an impressive amount of distaste for the D2 entry. I don't know when I'll be back, and that saddens me. I don't know when I'll see another Silent Cartographer that leaves me breathless as I finish. I hope its not another Wrath raid which I never complete because it feels stupid. I hope its not a Leviathan raid, with dogs eating plants or whatever idiotic game mechanism causes a group of 6 friends who've been gaming for years to groan and roll their eyes at the utter silliness of the moment after scheduling to meet up and attack it. I've yet to finish that raid, because after the dogs, and playing later with the bad guy with glowing symbols on his head, why would I? I'm not finding anything new. I'm Jerry B's gopher, racing to the next point only to do it again in the hopes of earning a starfish mask and looking like Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy's new apprentice. Take your time. Do it right. Tension and Subtlety in story telling. Worlds worth looking at and exploring instead of racing through. Halo 1-3. Reach and ODST, while maybe not as beloved as the others (probably due to no real addition to the PVP arena), were also beautifully done games that delivered. You saw it disappear in Halo 4 after you handed it off. I have no idea what happened in Halo 5 at all, (AT ALL!) a total disaster of a gaming universe. Bring us your Dreadnaught. Bring us the Silent Cartographer. Bring us back to the lost and mystical universe you built in D1. Standing by, Troy Gordon XBONE