Still Trying To Play Destiny 2

I feel like I should like Destiny 2. Like I should have jumped in on day one and absolutely had a blast and then wanted to play it the next day. But after a couple of sessions, I find myself frustrated and not really sure what to think. Just the other day, I played for three hours, closed Destiny 2 because it was 2:15am and still felt kinda… not satisfied. For reasons unknown, it is still a struggle for me to get into Destiny 2.

I’m not really sure where to begin, aside from the fact that I don’t want to compare Destiny 2 to Warframe. I’ve ranted about this before but the games are only really similar in art style and convoluted lore. The only noticeable comparison is how your Ghost acts like Ordis, but also talks for you seemingly all of the time, rather than some of the time. Oh, and the fact that the game just throws you in with no idea what you are supposed to be doing in terms of new player experiences. To the point that I actually found myself buying the three main content quests – Curse of Osiris (the first DLC), War Mind (the second DLC) and the Red War (literally the main lore quest from the base Destiny 2 game) from an NPC hanging around in a hangar with almost no one around.

Aside from that, these are very, very different games.

But no matter how long I played Destiny 2, I almost yearned for something else. At first, I yearned for some direction. Because every time I played the game solo, I just wandered around an area shooting things then getting overwhelmed and running away and hiding in the small safe areas in every location because I’d accidentally walked into some sort of local event. Really, the base areas are pretty cool and a lot of the maps are much larger than they look initially. Landscaping is a definite 10/10 but the loading areas between them can be rather abrupt.

Even when I did start making some form of progress though, being assisted by Spectre (who knows things about Destiny 2 the same way I know things about Warframe), I was still kinda just wandering around shooting at things and, well, that was it. Occasionally I would need to stand in a circle or shoot a specific thing but that was it. Up until I played with Spectre, I was barely getting any loot either, no guns, nothing, despite opening chests – the only guns I’d received were via a couple of local events I flopped around in.

And even when I did get loot, that loot wasn’t interesting. While I did pick up some different guns and I am genuinely impressed with how cool the bows feel, all I did was pick up duplicate armour pieces and similar guns. I am just picking things up and equipping stuff with the highest number, and that means dismantling a lot of duplicate armour. Most of which I wasn’t even getting anything from because it wasn’t rare enough.

Destiny 2 feels like Borderlands. All I’m doing is shooting things while trying to equip bigger numbers. But unlike the Borderlands games, Destiny 2 is mostly serious apart from a few mini games in safe areas. The shooting is great, it’s classic Halo-like shooting, but the looting is kinda repetitive and there seems to be far less loot anyway. And because you are constantly getting rid of old stuff, at least at first, there’s even less of an incentive to keep anything.

Or stylize anything. Because what I dislike the most is the cosmetic and shader systems, which feel like a resource trap. Sure, I bought a nice new shader for some bright stuff, which I can apparently earn elsewhere, but once I apply that to one item, I’ve used it and have to go into my Collection to be able to craft more of it. So I made the dumb mistake of getting a shader and putting it on literally the only different armour I’d found in my three hours of playing, only to realise ten minutes later that I had obtained some new armour with a bigger number on it, wasting said shader.

Ugh.

I dunno. Maybe I’ll get into Destiny 2 eventually. But it’s going to be like Warframe, where I’ll be dragged kicking and screaming into it. Except it’s worse for Destiny 2 because it has to compete with Borderlands 3 and a hint of Warframe for my time…