The Destiny Quandary

   

 Destiny is a game surrounded by controversy; developed by Bungie, the esteemed Halo creators, there were definitely high expectations surrounding its release. However, when the game did release in September 2014 people were displeased with what they got. Despite having tight gunplay, spot-on controls, and fun overall gameplay, players were disappointed with the overall amount of content they received. Many suspected that there was tons of cut content locked behind a DLC pay wall, and like usual, the internet was pissed.

     Even though there was a lot of bad press surrounding Destiny and its release, a lot  of people play it, including myself. I played Destiny a lot. I've done all the content from the first expansion, and all of the vanilla content, though I haven't played since before the second expansion launched. This seems to be the case for more than just myself, though. The player base seemingly dropped off after people were doing hard mode Vault of Glass (the first Raid(Raids are long team based, instanced areas with objectives and exclusive loot)) because there was very little content for you hit after you hit level 30(The level cap). I say nothing very lightly because you could level up another character, keep doing the Vault of Glass in attempts to get the exclusive legendary and exotic weapons and level them up, and also do some PvP.

    The Dark Below, the second expansion, introduced new exotic weapons, armor, a new raid, some new strikes, new story missions, a new faction, and some new PvP maps. The expansion also raised the level cap, the armor ratings, and the damage done by weapons. Now, this all sounds promising, it's seemingly a lot of content and will bring a ton of players back. Well, there are a few problems with the expansion overall. MMO's (which is a subgenre of Destiny) are grindy in nature, you have to repeat the same content over and over to level up. With the introduction of the new exotics in the Dark Below, a lot of the grind people did in the vanilla game was negated because of the new damage cap, along with the armor and armor cap. This is insulting, honestly. All of the at least 100 hours of work I (and other people) put in to level up these weapons and armor was made irrelevant by the expansion.

    The regular, not too hardcore audience of this game, I can almost guarantee aren't attracted to the hours of grinding needed to get to the meat of the game (I can attest to this because I was once not a hardcore gamer) and the fact that Bungie tries to deny the MMO grind aspect of this game is a little weird and denial-y. I feel like Bungie is alienating non-hardcore gamers by saying the ease-of-entry is low when really you have to be acclimated to the grind of MMO's and the like.

     Bungie is planning on releasing an expansion this September and we'll see how it turns out, I may jump back in to write a review or something.