A couple of days ago I wrote a ‘damning with faint praise’ kind of post about Destiny 2, saying it was fine. At the time I was level 11 or 12 and working through the campaign.
I still haven’t finished the campaign but I’m pretty close to the end, and I have hit level 20. Along the way I have unlocked a lot of content-systems. For the most part I still feel like the campaign itself is “fine” but all the other stuff is pretty good and for me at least, more fun than the mostly predictable campaign missions.
Content-type spoilers incoming. I won’t spoil the story but I’m going to talk about systems that are missing early on and get added later.
So the open world areas of Destiny 2 feel kind of more constricting than those in Destiny 1. I’ve yet to find huge open areas like the Cosmodrome or Mars in Destiny 2. Titan in particular is narrow and confusing and I die more there to “mishap” (falling off the edge of things) than to enemies. I kind of miss the big areas of D1.
But in pretty much every other way, the open areas in D2 are better than D1 once you progress far enough to unlock stuff. There are the Adventures which are kind of side-missions. Early on there are only a couple of these per zone but more get added later. There are the Lost Sectors which are basically semi-hidden mini-dungeons that you can do. There are scattered loot chests laying around, and “high value targets” which also drop a chest of loot if you (and whomever else is in the area) take them down. Public events return but you can see in advance where they’re going to happen and so head there to be ready for them (and there is Fast Travel to get you near very quickly). I wish there were more of these in terms of variety (frequency is fine but doing the same few events over and over gets old) but I’m betting we’ll see more added over time.
Patrols are missing in Destiny 2 until you get pretty far into the campaign. Then you get a mission like you had on the Dreadnaught in The Taken King to re-establish the patrol network. Once you do that patrols are back.
Bounties seem to be gone for good, but Challenges have been added. Challenges are pretty similar to bounties except you don’t have to go to an NPC to get them. When you land in an open world zone you’ll get 3 Challenges to work on. Stuff like “Kill X of enemy species Y” or “Find a lost sector in area X” So they feel a lot like bounties. You get a little reward for each one and a bigger reward (that you have to return to the Farm for) if you do all three.
Anyway, the point is that I still feel like the campaign is pretty “meh” but just running around doing stuff to earn loot feels a lot more diverse than it did in Destiny 1.
I’m SLOWLY coming around on the gun system. I’ve just kind of accepted that I’ll probably never use a sniper rifle or shotgun in D2. Kind of a bummer but oh well.
I STILL haven’t done a strike, though I have them unlocked. And after you get to a certain point in the campaign you have a lot more reasons to head back to the Farm so it no longer feels as deserted as it did on that first day.
If you hated Destiny 1 this isn’t going to sway you and I’m still not totally blown away but I’m liking it more than I was a few days ago.