Long time readers may recall I was pretty big on Destiny 2 last year, playing it pretty regularly and sometimes writing about it here where I felt it relevant. By about May of 2018, though, I just stopped, and haven’t really fired the game back up at all since that time.
I figured it’d be fun to quickly go over just why I stopped, as there wasn’t any particular reason that I can think of — one day I just didn’t want to play anymore.
This was in the time frame between the first and second expansions. I had played a little bit of Curse of Osiris and while I found it fun, it was still much of the same. In the simplest form, Destiny on a whole, after I had played so much of the first game and had spent a few months playing the second steadily, had just gotten boring.
The random loot drops, the very slow and tedious power improvements to my character, the issues with PVP which were common at that time (I’m not big on PVP anyway) and the fact that the game seems to want to make that somewhat mandatory, the fact that, being an MMO it locks the biggest challenges behind group activities that I just don’t’ care to be involved in — it had all just kind of gotten to me and I was burned out on it all. I could lone-wolf my way through most of the game, but the parts that require typical MMO group work? That’s not my kind of stuff.
The cyclical daily and weekly nature of it had also grown stale. Again, this is all par for the course for MMO’s, recall I had played Guild Wars 2 almost religiously for the first year of it being released, but once they started changing the game around I grew tired of it, so the fact I even bothered with Destiny for the year or two I did, combined with what I did play of Destiny 2 was a bit of a stretch.
Now granted, one could say “well, it’s an MMO and if you don’t like those kinds of things you shouldn’t be playing it” which is somewhat true but I have a reply — they could do an MMO where those aspects remain optional. Hell, Destiny and Guild Wars 2 both had that kind of nature going on in their main worlds, where random people could team up against an enemy or something without really needing to be an actual communicating team or party up — they were just world events and everyone got rewards for participating. World Bosses in Guild Wars 2 were the same way.
What I mean is, things can be done differently. Every MMO doesn’t have to follow instance based everything and MOB locking for rewards like Everquest, World of Warcraft, or Final Fantasy XI did. They can do their own thing and still keep elements of the genre that work.
Hell, Destiny is a first person shooter, yet it’s an MMO RPG. How does that even work? Honestly, it works pretty well, and I did have fun with the game for the time I really played it, but I just got tired of the repetitiveness of it all.
I never did play Warmind and as you can imagine I haven’t purchased any of the other expansion content released over the past year. I want to get back to it sometime soon, maybe, but at this stage I stay so busy with other personal projects and work that I don’t game nearly as much as people may think I do. Hell, anyone who follows me on Xbox Live can vouch for that — you may see me playing a game once a week, if even that often.
That being said, I just remembered that I do have my old Xbox One here at my computer desk, which means I could set myself up to play Destiny 2 here at my desk while I work on other things. I’ve been known to do that before…
Still, that would be quite a bit of effort I’d have to go through to really start on everything again — re-learn the certainly changed game feel, get accustomed to new areas, buy the new expansions, play what I can of the old stuff and play catch up to about a year of game progress. Not that I can’t do it, but do I actually feel like it? Will I have fun with it?
I guess I’ll let you know if I do decide to do this.
More to come, as always.