Defining Destiny is a strange paradox. It has great vision but bungles execution, it has massive overarching problems, but nails the minutia. Today I want to look at what Destiny is, is not and yet may be. Feel free to pull up a chair if you'd like. [u][b]The Basic Premise[/b][/u] The idea of Destiny is amazing… a civilization on the brink, saved by a mysterious Traveler and trying to rebuild as the instruments of mankind's demise return. An epic adventure and brutal war waged across our solar system as we try to take back our civilization a planet at a time. The reality of Destiny is a more of a letdown. The game released with virtually no story. We were introduced to the Fallen, Hive, Vex and Cabal and had no real idea why we were fighting any of them or they each other. We were given a basic premise of protecting the Traveler but have literally done nothing with the Traveler since. [u][b]The Planets[/b][/u] One of the biggest failings in vanilla Destiny was that it tried to do too much and ended up barely doing anything. We had different planets, but for their seeming size they were mostly facades. Instead of open worlds to explore, we had invisible corridors we were funneled down to each new objective. The second problem became glaringly apparent the second we dropped onto the moon. The wonder and the pull of the moon is that image stuck in our heads of astronauts bounding across its surface in low gravity. The second we take that first step, it completely shatters the illusion. Things don't improve when we hit Venus and Mars either. They contain the same terrain, canyons and big looping corridor layouts as the Cosmodrome. For all intents and purposes, they all may as well be Earth with different color palettes. The biggest indictment I can think of though, is in simply asking the question; if you didn't have missions or patrols to run or bounties to collect, would you ever just go to any of these planets just to see them? For me the answer is no and that is frightening in the scope of what this game is supposed to be. There is nothing on any of these planets worth going back just to explore after you've made the initial circuit around them. [u][b]The Enemies[/b][/u] Besides the fact that we had no real idea of why we were fighting any of them when the game launched, a bigger problem is that they are all essentially the same. Each has their peon cannon fodder, mid level snipers and shielded majors. Outside of the Vex going berserker when beheaded, none have any real personalities or character traits that make them interesting like the Grunts and Elites from Halo. Okay hop over to Mars, shoot Cabal! Bop to Earth, shoot Fallen! Scoot to the moon, shoot Hive! Zip to Venus, shoot Vex! Do we even care who we're shooting? Do we approach any enemy differently from any other? No and no. They aren't really anything, they just are. [u] [b]The Shared World Experience[/b][/u] This may be the most baffling aspect of the entire game. We go to these planets and we congregate in The Tower and The Reef, but there is virtually no interaction between us other than to point, wave or dance with each other. Without any default proximity chat options in these worlds, it was completely pointless to make this game a shared world experience and the resources devoted to allowing us to populate these worlds together could have been allocated fleshing out the game. Destiny as we play it today should be a single player game just like the Halo series that we can invite friends to play co-op online. The really maddening thing is that in Halo 3 and Reach, you could play with 3 other friends through the campaign. Destiny you can only play with 2... I do not blame Bungie for their initial vision for Destiny, but when the walls started caving in, and content started being cut, they should have completely reexamined the entire game. At this point the shared world is a massive failure and it might be the single biggest thing holding back the version of the game that made it to release. [u][b]Gear/Loot[/b][/u] There are some truly amazing weapons and truly awesome armor in this game and I would say that they might be the most satisfying of any shooter I've ever played. The problem is that the sh*t is all acquired randomly, Xur sells it randomly and now we reforge it randomly. Add to that the complete failures of the initial upgrade systems, the shifting economies required to upgrade as well as purchase gear and the panic fix from the wtf moment of making gear obsolete 3 months in (which in turn led to everything being upgradable, which in turn completely f**ked vault space… which was ill-conceived and stupid to begin with) and the sh*t is just a mess. Now we have rumors that our current gear will not ramp up with TTK, which in all honestly makes absolutely no sense after you decided to introduce reforging on all legendary gear. If I'm able to reroll something to get the weapon I want [i]just right[/i], why would you make that perfect killing machine worthless with the next expansion? If gear was going to be obsolete and we were going to have to constantly re-up, then you should have stuck to your guns (get it) from the start. What all this shows is a massive failure in designing and play testing this game. [u][b]Balance[/b][/u] Ironically, this is one of the things that I think Bungie pretty much nailed at the start... only to completely shoot themselves in the foot with the panic nerf of the Vex Mythoclast. For all the different weapons, gear, supers and class abilities, there is pretty much a way to counter anything that an opposing guardian can throw at us. The way Destiny was set up (with us taking our own weapons and armor into PvP) meant that it was possible to be out-geared or outgunned, but the overall arsenals at our disposal meant that we always had a chance in any encounter if we played smart, strategized and maximized our abilities. It was up to us to find our own great weapons and armor and be the badasses with the big guns. The Vex Mythoclast was a badass weapon to be sure, but when Bungie caved and nerfed it, the floodgates opened on every single thing in this game that is possible of getting a kill. I'm not saying every weapon was perfect from the start or that they are now, but it's one thing to tune weapons by dropping off the effective range and it's another to implement massive damage nerfs to an entire class. As long as we are striving to find new and better gear and weapons in the world that we can use in PvP, it is not ever going to be a completely balanced game down to every item level. If it were, what is the point of getting anything new? [u][b]Accessibility[/b][/u] Oh Bungie… you and your stupid, stupid philosophy. You design the Vault of Glass, which by most initial accounts and reviews was the one saving grace of the vanilla Destiny experience... And you couldn't in all the years of development, come up with any kind of matchmaking or LFG system? So here you had this shining gem and almost no one ran or completed it. It sucked when Crota still lacked any matchmaking of LFG, but your coup de grace was the House of Wolves. -No raid, which pissed off all the raiders. -Trials of Osiris PvP tournament with no matchmaking, which pissed off all the casuals. -Prison of Elders level 28, 32, 34, 35 with matchmaking only available for level 28, which pissed off mostly everyone. I literally went from 15-20 hours playtime a week pre-HoW to maybe 3-5 since the end of the last Iron Banner because it is just such a massive pain in the ass to play any meaningful content in HoW. Regardless of your pricing snafus with The Taken King, without any in-game matchmaking or LFG systems implemented, I'm not sure I see any value in purchasing another expansion when 90 % of the content I'm currently running is the same vanilla content we've run from day one. [u][b]Communication[/b][/u] This is probably your #1 problem at the moment. Your approach to your community sucks. DeeJ writes stupid things like "we'll talk more next week" when he has never once actually engaged in a conversation with anyone on the forums about anything that I’ve seen. With each of these posts that go up and get liked by the community, you have an opportunity to join in on discussions and get ideas from the people who populate your worlds. We all know Bungie play the game too, but there's a reason authors have editors, musicians have producers and directors have post production crews. When you're right up in the middle of making something, sometimes you need that fresh set of eyes or ears to really see things you can't. That's what this forum is. So why do you let your "algorithms" take down post after post of trending topics that are trying to help improve your game? ---Edit--- That's where we've been. Here's where we could yet go... https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/134447681