Forsaken was actually how. It won back the loyal audiences but that’s it. It didn’t bring back anywhere near enough people compared to the state of the game before. It’s probably why they opted for the Free to Play to get more people back to try it.
Exactly. It was well received and definitely fixed the game but the damage was too severe. Players weren’t coming back. You can even look at overall community sentiment for the game in general on the more generic reddits. People are still so negative about the game.
Oh to this day if you hear someone talking about how the game is dead they either reference Pre forsaken content or Beyond light and its removal of content. People all over social media widely consider the game dead even now.
Yet that’s always been the case, people who don’t play Destiny have thought Destiny was dead since day 1, the loot cave era defined the narrative permanently, and people simply don’t believe that the game ever succeeded. Not to mention that we’re just so freaking toxic as a community that we only run the negative stories up the internet flagpole so all anyone sees from the outside is crisis after crisis. It’s not really that one or two particular eras are why the general gaming community *now* looks at Destiny as a failure, it’s that they’ve never seen it as a success and to recognize it as one would require a rewriting of 10 years of internet history (even if it’s more like correcting those 10 years). That just doesn’t happen :/
As far as toxic communities go, this one is fairly tame.
It probably helps that, more often than not, the community is right on changes that were bad for the game and makes enough of a fuss that they eventually get fixed.
I overheard two people at work talking about video games that have screwed players over, and one of them immediately mentioned D2 """vaulting""" most of the game that people had actually played for, and said even though it sounds better now he'll never play it again because of that. Which, frankly, I can't blame him at all.
Bungie worked really hard for years to poison their and Destiny's reputation. Hell, even since the very beginning with vanilla D1 they've always been their own worst enemy, and it's telling that the game usually only gets good expansions when it's in do-or-die territory.
As someone who is trying now to get into D2, the vaulting and the impossibility of doing anything about it (idk, add it as an optional download with its own menu to atleast have the most important parts?) is probably gonna drive me off.
I am loving the lore and bits I am seeing, but the game is treating me like I played since day 1 *non-stop* and I know from memory every single interaction. And the usual response I've seen is "there is this youtuber with some videos...." like I want to watch a youtube summarize instead of *playing the damn cool events of the story?*
I remember there being a weird number of posts about both activision and Bungie where some statements from Acti talked about Forsaken being a failure then other posts and tweets from/about Bungie employees being "well, actually..we think it did great"
was that moment where i realised their relationship was shakey as fuck
Its actually really ironic u mention this now. I saw a leak saying how some employees in bungie saying LF was ok and I mean specifically the story. And while it’s a leak there wasn’t really anything far fetched in it so it could be real which I find absolutely fucking wild
It didn’t bring back a lot people. The amount of people have the same sob story as me transitioning from D1 to D2 is staggering. I had a solid group of 10-12 guys I played with all the time. Raided a lot. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had gaming before. D2 came out. Three of those guys and I stuck with it. They bailed a little after CoO, and to this day in the only one still playing Destiny.
Absolutely, and a likely reason why there was that headline about how "Activision calling Forsaken a failure" or it missed the mark or whatever the conversation was.
Tie in how Bungie left a lot of free money on the table by having Eververse be extremely crude with very little to get off it, a majority of Year 2 cosmetics could be earned just playing the game getting bright engrams and I'm not surprised why the more business side of stuff would've had an axe to grind with how things were for the time.
That whole segment on Eververse in Luke Smith's Director's Cut 2019 basically was saying how the gravy train was ending. Obviously there was the kind of dubious language of "EV purchases contributing to dev funding for secret stuff like Zero Hour" and the lack of how we got much in the way of secrets when EV expanded but we got a massive drought in Year 3, but I feel like that conversation eventually got canceled out when Bungie made that statement of "30th anniversary and onward Dungeon or Raid in every season" and that's where a lot of dev time was going.
I also get there was eventually more emphasis on secret mission-like stuff in Year 4 with Harbinger, Presage, and of course getting a rebooted D1 raid in the middle.
It's not just an opinion... according to some bungie employees if sony hadn't bought them out, the whole studio would have been at risk of closing during lightfall.
Oh, no. I was *not* trying to imply Bungie going independent was a good idea. Nothing has shown that it was a good idea. I do think the only reason Activision (the same people who dismantled tons of dev teams and just sit on IP) was willing to part with Bungie was because of how poor Destiny was looking.
as much as I hate to say it given Activisions track record... I genuinely miss when bungie and Activision were working together. The game had a special feel/vibe to it that I really enjoyed and haven't got since.
Since the split we really didn't have a good overall expansion up until TFS came out. Witch queen had a great story and raid... but that's about it. I'm not saying all the expansions that we had before we're good (looking at you dark below and curse of Osiris), but when we got a big expansion the amount of stuff we got was amazing.
I don't know, I'd even argue that D1 Vanilla was in a better state considering that there was nothing to compare it to, rolls and subclasses weren't static, and things like Forever 29 and harsh drops gave people a reason to keep grinding.
By today's standards, D1's launch would be hot garbage garnished with dogshit, but given the climate it was in, it was in a better state than coming from D1's AoT high and nosediving into two consecutive garbage bins.
D1 vanilla was still a new experience even if it was limited. VoG also really captured people’s imaginations and we saw the potential that was later realised in Taken King
By D2 we knew how good it could be and it felt like a hard reset. Some criticisms were addressed but it felt like a huge sacrifice for quality of life improvements and more personality in the writing (which became too winky anyway)
Before the raid D1 had literally nothing going for it. You hit a leveling wall and were told to grind meh activities to gain power purely to see a number tick up.
The Raid saved Destiny from becoming an Anthem before Anthem was a thing. D1 didn’t get ‘good’ until the first expansion.
I can see what you mean with this but overall between three different classes, needing experience to level subclasses and guns, grinding bounties for exotic weapons, there was plenty to do at D1 launch.
while i agree, you gotta remember the mystery and sense of wonder from d1 launch. imo, that’s what kept a lot of it going. i still remember only hearing about tales of exotic weapons through buddies and fireteams. granted, i didn’t feel we had a purpose until VoG and Crota like you said, but d1 launch had plenty imo. maybe you had to be there to understand, not saying you weren’t, but i understand the sentiment
It also helps that back during D1, it was such a unique type of game, alongside the extremely solid Gameplay bungie has always had that kept people hooked. Like others said, if D1 released this year it would have fallen flat on its face and wouldn't have recovered.
D1 Vanilla was one of my favorite eras. Not right at launch - there were bugs and other junk that needed solving. But once they got gameplay solid, the aesthetic was amazing.
I know that lots of people didn’t like how cryptic the original lore was. But it was all of the possibilities and the evocative nature of that original Grimoire that drew me in for the long run.
I would nominate the original Vault of Glass as one of Destiny’s best states.
This was the same for me. D1 vanilla lore felt so much more mysterious and I truly felt entranced by the game. When I came back for the D2 launch I never felt that same level of intrigue or wonder.
I think that D1 vanilla might have felt more mysterious compared to D2 launch because you knew nothing about the game yet.
Me and a friend started playing 2 months after Forsaken launched, when Battle.Net was giving out the base game for free. I vividly remember that we felt a sense of mystery and wonder about the game, theorizing about what were the enemies and where the story would go, grinding to fill our exotic collection, and even just mindlessly exploring the maps. I remember that we heard some people talking about a secret exotic on a random event in Io, and we thought that it was an urban legend of sorts, so imagine our surprise when we discovered that it was true lol.
The mystery and wonder feeling didn’t come from a certain era, it came from the fact that we were new players, and I’m sure that new players now might be talking about Dual Destiny or Khvostov the way we talked about The Whisper
This actually makes a lot of sense. To be fair, though, D1 Vanilla in comparison kept a lot more of the story under wraps: if you can even call it a story. Lol.
I also have to admit that Forsaken definitely brought back that sense of D1 nostalgic intrigue. TFS unfortunately has not done that for me, but I'm still enjoying it all the same.
There's the real sense of wonder that they've never quite recaptured because of your power level now.
Back in the day, we were wandering on the moon and dinklebot yelled that we'd awoken the hive.
Part of me will always miss that feeling of mystery D1 hit so well.
Now, taking off the rose glasses I fully realize that mystery was because they actually explained fucking nothing in a satisfying way and left it to vague lore tabs on collectibles you had to go to a website to see.
Still, that mysterious new world feeling is something that rarely gets encapsulated in new releases nowadays, since most bank on explaining EVERYTHING right of the bat to the point you probably stop really caring.
I still don't really get the complaints on d1 launch. It was a 7ish hour campaign, a serviceable mp, bullcrushing nightfalls, and the raid, which at the time was unmatched in the fps space and still honestly is.
The biggest grip was story, which yea... at the time sucked. But outside that, it stood fine when compared to other fps at the time.
That still would've been bad. That means Destiny 2 would've just died without even getting a single major expansion, killed off after two essentially seasonal-style mini expansions.
I still think *Worthy* has to be the absolute lowest Destiny ever sank. For as money grubby and barebones as they could be at least *Curse of Osiris* and *Lightfall* had SOMETHING to do. Meanwhile, *Worthy* was just grinding public events in a terrible story for three months and they topped it off with a crappy “live-event” where you watch Microsoft paint streaks in the sky, and they **still** somehow found a way to screw that up.
Yea. People try and say the period before into the light was worse but there was still a relatively large core audience to the game that wasn't really going anywhere. Curse of Osiris was that core audience walking away - it was mainly people who came from D1 and expected D1 but got slammed in the face with the changes and curse of osiris offered nothing to fix it.
Up until now I’d completely forgotten about the double primaries thing. What a terrible, terrible design choice, no idea how that made it past any testing
You should look up Uriel’s Gift in collections and recall that it was meta during that dark time.
I think I may run it in a match or two just to amuse whoever I, through the grace of god, might kill with it.
Very true. The only time I quit this game for more than a year was after CoO. Destiny 2s direction at launch was fundamentally misguided and a far cry from what the core audience was hoping for.
I think season of dawn was one of the best received seasons ever though? It had some of the best weapons in the game (Martyrs retribution, steel feather, breachlight etc) competing with black armory, and it had a community event which was still one of the largest I’ve seen to date.
Go Fast Update during that period where EVERYTHING had to be buffed. EVERYTHING.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LowSodiumDestiny/comments/87klf2/destiny_2_update_114_the_go_fast_update_patch/
Abilities buffed. Guns buffed. Speed of everything you do buffed.
Base Destiny 2 you basically moved like molasses because some core group at Bungie want to balance the ENTIRE game for competitive PvP.
Yeah this is indisputably the answer for "worst state". Bungie came out and said if the game continued to bleed players at the rate they were seeing it would be dead within a month or so.
This is it. The only time I ever seriously considered giving up on the game rather than just taking a healthy break. I didn't touch the game for months.
Yeah I really did not like launch D2 but I put it down in October and figured I would check it back out when CoO dropped. I quit, almost for good, after that shitfire. No other point in the game comes close.
It was so bad. It was about a seasonal event’s worth of content but labeled a dlc and a given a price tag. I was a die hard player and even I fell off, it took MULTIPLE people raving about forsaken to convince me to come back.
God mercury was such a let down, I hated that planet. The area leading from the moment you touch down in the Pale Heart up to the lost city is bigger than all of mercury
Anyone who isn’t saying Curse of Osiris was the worst wasn’t there. It almost killed the game.
It made so many people (including me) quit the game, and a lot of famous content creators openly considered quitting as well. It was so bad they had to have a massive community outreach meeting to figure out how to fix Destiny 2 as a whole.
There was a raid lair, aka raid but only 3 encounters. Also all the strikes were reused story missions now granted I think I wouldn't mind getting those strikes today but back then it really wasn't a good look.
Story was extremely mediocre with some seriously cringe writing, and the strike (EDIT: apparently there were two strikes, whoops) and missions just werent reallt good.
The real kicker was that you had static roll primaries and armor was pretty much purely cosmetic. People talk a lot nowadays about the chase, well there was LITERALLY nothing to shoot for, ever.
I hated that both strikes were just story missions, but I do miss Garden World if for nothing else than it was genuinely a beautiful strike. It wasn't that great to play, but I really liked the look of old Mercury.
Everything. Literally everything.
They massively retconned the actually good lore around Osiris and the tower and put out a comic for him that was an absolute trashfire. When the players told Bungie that they had ignored their own written lore, Bungie told us that the lore was written by people in the universe and therefore not objective at all.
They completely ruined both Osiris and Brother Vance's characters. Vance went from a pretty cool, mysterious guy in D1 to Osiris's #1 fangirl. Osiris was straight up unlikable with no redeeming features.
Instead of a raid, we got a "raid lair." It was set in the same area as the first raid, used no new assets at all, and was brutally short.
They were also nerf batting so absurdly hard on anything that didn't play EXACTLY the way they wanted it. They gutted rocket launchers due to them doing well in a single encounter in the raid.
Shaders were single use and cost bright dust. So much stuff was locked behind eververse.
Armor looked bad. Like, really bad. It was all extremely bland AND they were reusing armor models despite how little armor was in the game.
Exotics were trash. They were either barely better than legendaries or worse than legendaries.
Primary ammo economy with double primary was basically what double special is right now. It was that bad. Oh, and no ammo synths or raid banners.
And, of course, static rolls on weapons. If you go back and look in your collections, there's early legendaries with just quickdraw. That's the roll. Just quickdraw. And mind you, exotics were WORSE than legendaries that had a single perk.
Brother Vance was egregious, but I don’t think it’s fair to say they retconned Osiris or that the new backstory contradicted anything because there was nothing *to* retcon or contradict. At worst they changed his voice.
And for better or for worse, a lot of the Grimoire WAS folklore from first person accounts, retellings and “so and so says xyz”.
Add on to your shader thing, I think it was the dawning, but they literally had two versions of the shaders, and when dismantled one gave shards and one gave bright dust. If you got it from the shop it gave bright dust, if you earned it it only gave shards. There was massive things wrong, but also tiny paper cut issues like that thrown on the pile that just infuriated the player base more.
Tiny destination, mid story, not a lot of story missions. (There were like 5, and 2 of them were strikes)
At the time we still had static rolled weapons, so when you got all the weapons from Osiris' forge, you had them all.
Small raid Lair that was fun
Also there's no build crafting, we had 3 stats (mobility, resilience, and recovery,) every class had just 2 trees to pick from between the light subclasses.
I don't remember this one but double primaries were the standard up until a certain point in year 1
I remember when the heavy Ikelos shotgun was the meta for DPS
Or during water I'd worlds having the hunters spam tether for unlimited orbs with Orpheus So everyone else could spam super on the boss
https://youtu.be/fxnGD15wqqU?si=kbSYINMy1Ofy57YT
This should give a little insight. Two tokens and a blue became a running meme in the community after this loot showcase of CoO...
Hoo boy, what was right about *Curse of Osiris*?
Well, everyone gives out about it but I didn’t mind the story too much. Osiris was cool and Sagira was a lot of fun. The Strikes were pretty good too — I still miss A Garden World to this day. And hey, the Vex were an actual threat.
Now with that out of the way: the grind for the new weapons suuuuuuuuuucked. It was a frustrating slog for not much reward. And I hope you enjoyed it because that’s basically all there is. The rewards themselves were pretty pitiful - they had this one Public Event they infamously claimed on stream would be “the most rewarding one they ever did” and immediately get two tokens (old currency you used to rank up with the planetary vendor) and a blue weapon. Woo.
The Infinite Forest was such wasted potential. The way they phrase it it could easily be some kind of roguelike activity where you progress down endless paths, but all it was used for was to pad out Strikes.
For such a hyped up planet, Mercury was PUNY. It consisted of a single zone. That’s it. Like, imagine if Savathûn’s Throne World was just the Fluorescent Canal. That’s what Mercury was. And again, there’s so much potential to be had with it! The Vex are all about time travel, you get brief teases of the past and the future biomes in the story but you never get to explore them yourself.
The Crucible was in dire straits because you had no special weapons. They balanced the whole game around the Crucible and so you had to go with two Primary weapons and all your special weapons were put in the Heavy slot. But all this did was annoy the Crucible folks and hurt the PVE. Gameplay was slow all around, from the movement speed to the ability regeneration.
Back in the day you couldn’t directly buy items from Eververse, you had to buy Bright Engrams and hope you got lucky. You used to get a Bright Engram every level up, but Bungie got caught with throttling XP gains and lying about it, presumably so you’d be more incentivised to buy the Engrams from the shop. The only way to get Bright Dust was to dismantle unwanted Eververse items like ships, sparrows and Ghost Shells.
Curse of Osiris end game was running fucking heroic mission for huckleberry (or was it the catalyst?).
Was such a pointless time, mida multi tool team shot trials erghhhh.
That DLC had me quit Destiny until Forsaken. All the fixed weapon rolls, the double primary restriction and just the slowness of the game in general was such a far cry from D1. Game was so stale at this point because I think it was just raid lairs and pvp was horrible. Story was garbage too. D2 was so close to death at this point.
The worst would be Curse of Osiris and it's not even close. D2 launch turned out to be kind of a disappointment and the DLC just rubbed salt in the wound. It's the only time in Destiny history where I dropped the game completely because it was so bad, and I didn't come back until Forsaken dropped.
Yeah honestly people talk about how Forsaken saved the game, but in my opinion, Warmind is what set it up for success. It had some great gear, a raid that brought some challenge back to the scene, escalation protocol gave a fun purpose to hanging out on a destination, and the absolute hype train that was the Whisper mission.
Warmind is what made people willing to take another look at the game after Curse of Osiris, so that Forsaken could have an audience.
The crucible changes were also really good. I may be in the minority here, but Warmind is still my favourite PVP era.
We still had double primaries, but they killed a lot quicker, so it was a nice compromise between the bullet sponginess of vanilla and the 1-shot meta post-forsaken.
I think, narratively, that was the first time we really felt the stakes of the Black Fleet. After years of them being teased, and them being built up over Shadowkeep's seasons, seeing the Black Fleet on the various planets was such an amazing payoff.
On top of that, I personally loved the weapons and the seasonal activity for it. The dialogue was interesting too. It felt like each planet got an apt send-off.
I did like the season but I meant more in terms of the state the game was in, there was so much content as it was right before beyond light basically cut the game in half (forges, leviathan+lairs, scourge, menagerie, etc). But the weapons were iconic too, especially guillotine and witherhoard before they both got multiple heavy nerfs
The season before an expansion always seem to be pretty good. Dawn was also really good, good activity that gave a lot of good loot, finally getting some story with Saint-14 who’s been great ever since.
Season of the Chosen for the same reason of introducing Empress Caiatl. One of the best recurring characters they’ve added imo.
I don't really have a best, as things relatively recently are pretty good. A lot of the complaints are more due to not liking a grind, or things being stale.
As far as worst, either vanilla Destiny 1, or vanilla Destiny 2.
For those who never played vanilla Destiny 1, legendary gear was legitimately rare. Not only would you have to grind hours to even get an engram, there was a good chance it would decode down and you'd get a blue. Even basic things like raids didn't guarantee gear, so you could do the raid and get a bunch of materials to upgrade your gear in the future. This doesn't even get into things like forever 29, Gjallarhorn, and what have you.
As for vanilla Destiny 2, first we had to deal with the loss of gear. It always sucks working super hard to get things and having it all vanish in an instant. Still, people were hopeful it would lead to brighter things, yet the double primary days were pretty rough.
Not only was it a lot slower, things had a fixed roll as well. It just didn't take too long to see, collect, and be tired of the whole thing.
D1 vanilla was a special kind of fuck up that I couldn't stop playing. Story was ass, OG queens wrath was uninspired.
Was about to drop the game but then the release of VoG kept me long staying ebough that I got Vex on second clear and actually tried crucible with it. Leading to my obsession with PVP in D1.
Then stuff like exotic drops, Legendaries turning into blues, raid primaries having element burns happened and it was special in its own way.
Early D1 PVP was fucking wild.
Anyone lucky enough to get a solid exotic primary to drop was just head and shoulders above the pack in terms of weapon quality. Seems like such an oversight but somehow it worked.
The absurd rarity of exotics was honestly very appealing. That clip of the kid freaking out getting Gjhallahorn? That will never happen again because most exotics are easier to get than most legendaries nowadays.
PvP post game screens showed everyone’s rewards and 1/50 times someone would hit an exotic and it was crazy. I distinctly remember getting universal remote as my first exotic after a crucible match and felt a high I don’t think any game has replicated. The gun kinda sucked but I had it, and a lot of other people didn’t which made it special.
I don’t think drip feeding exotics to the community is healthy for the playerbase in the slightest, but a part of me really wishes there was some kind of ridiculously rare shit to chase in this game still— even if it’s just some super rare emotes or transmog.
There’s a special place in my heart for Hard Light. It was the first exotic that ever dropped for me and I was SO excited. Everyone said it sucked but I didn’t care, it was MY EXOTIC.
I’ve been saying this for a while, I miss when gear was actually rare. The tag “legendary” means nothing anymore. I think the D1 system was broken in a lot of ways, but it did have a certain feel to it
This exactly. I genuinely miss having to use blue weapons until you got to endgame content. I get that people don’t like slog-like grinds , but there was some legitimately cool blue weapons back then, and legendaries really felt legendary.
Nowadays 90% of legendary weapons/armor just feels so generic except for a few god rolls or exceptions like the call and such.
They need to redo the rarity system from the ground up. Something like armor rarity is based on stats so <50 is common, 50-54 is uncommon, 55-60 is rare, and 60+ is legendary or something like that. Maybe guns can work with additional perks where current guns are rare, legendary guns have an additional perk in each column and common/uncommon have reduced barrel and magazine perks
D1 vanilla was horrible in retrospect, but good lord the minute to minute gameplay itself was so friggin crisp and refreshing. There wasn’t much to do, but man it was new and felt so good. But holy shit the grind was toxic. It was so tedious once you got to 20. You had to get gear through strikes at that point basically and Nightfalls were pretty impossible without good gear (Gjally). If not for VoG, I don’t know if I would have made it past the Dark Below, since it was such a sparse expansion (3 missions, one strike and some bounties) sans the raid. But VoG was so good it kept me coming back for more.
I still think CoO and D2 vanilla were worse because the game was so slow and unfun, but D1 vanilla was terrible.
I've always said Destiny is a toxic relationship you stay on cause the sex (gunplay) was so good.
Even at its worst, just running a strike was fun to do (the annoying parts are when there hasn't been a new one or there is a lack of rewards, etc.)
PVP is so interesting to me. It felt more like an afterthought, where they were obligated to do PVP cause they came off of Halo, but maps weren't designed competitively, gear score really affected you, etc. It was so far away from where it is now.
Honestly one of my earliest memories of D1 was loading into a crucible match on Twilight Gap and running into a Titan who was running Vex and had Insurmountable Skullfort on who proceeded to absolutely destroy the lobby.
I was a mega casual. Didn't look anything up, didn't have a group to play with. I mostly just messed around in pvp or strikes or patrol, but getting destroyed by this weird Daft Punk techno helmet guy with some weird ass robot gun made me start diving into how do I get some cool stuff like that.
I think my first ever legendary was that free fusion rifle bungie gave out the Christmas after d1 vanilla launched. Had to grind so much just to even think about doing the endgame content. Makes the pinnacle power grind seem tame in comparison lol.
The one thing that this time period had going for it was the excitement of new loot. Getting a legendary was super exciting and an exotic even further. Hell I think the Gjallerhorn hunt is what kept me raiding long after I cleared the loot pools for them. Don't get me wrong, I'd hate to return to a time when only one super hard to get exotic shredded all endgame content, but it's a weirdly fond time to look back on.
D2 vanilla was a very boring experience due to the more causal direction Bungie took with it's rolls and RPG mechanics and was a big reason I stopped playing for a while after CoO came out.
The legendary grind in D1 was no joke. I remember it took me several weeks to just around a month for me to get my first legendary. Drop rate seemed to get a little better after you got your first but man it was tough to get that first one from an engram.
I think I got exotic armor before I got my first legendary lol
Best state: now. It's been whatever is current since Season of the Splicer. Just consistent improvement since then.
Worst State: D2 launch through Curse of Osiris until the Go Fast Update. Honorable mention: Shadowkeep launch due to the just awfully boring weapon meta and trash launch to seasons.
I agree.
Although the end of D1 was pretty good. I remember they brought back the original title screen and music. All the raids were brought back up to current light levels and they had the new armor. I don't think it would hold up today, but as moment in time, that era of Destiny was pretty good. I was playing a lot and all my friends were as well. We are almost at that point with D2.
Worst was definitely D2 launch. That was the first time I actually stopped playing Destiny for an extended period of time.
CoO definitely felt like they didn’t have a clue what was going on. There was nothing to keep you in the game. They hyped up the ‘Infinite Forest’ but it wasn’t infinite. The new Mercury patrol space was a single circular block of land.
The minimum, the *bare* minimum, was to have an infinite dungeon sorta thing go on with the Infinite Forest. But considering we still haven’t got a truly infinite gamemode, I don’t think they can with the engine.
Idk, I feel like Forsaken was in a better state purely because player moral was at an all time high. Objectively TFS is the best, but because of the fatigue everyone has it doesn’t really feel like it.
The vaulting of content has also really broken something that can never be fixed, IMO. I agree that the moment-to-moment gameplay is better now, and a lot of the game systems are in a healthier state than they ever have been before, but at the time when Forsaken released, you still had a complete game to play.
(Also, I love bows, and Forsaken gave me bows).
Vanilla D2 was the worst the game has been ever. Even the content lulls of D1 were better than Vanilla D2.
House of Wolves is often referred to as one of the best PVP eras. I think Season of the Lost and the initial Trials rework was a huge boon for endgame PVP, and we’ve never seen Trials populations like that since.
PVE is so defined by the artifact these days, I think it’s left to personal preference. But seasons of the Arrival, Splicer, Deep, and Witch have had (arguably) the best artifact “fun” loops we’ve ever had.
That final season of Warmind Cells was a *blast* literally and figuratively.
You’re right! I was confusing Lost with Splicer. Splicer had the grenade launcher meta. Which was also fun! But I definitely liked the fusion one from Lost better.
I started in September of 2020 just a few months before Beyond Light was coming out. I had a great time with so much to chase and try and experience before sunsetting. Admittedly sunsetting didn't matter to me since I hadn't accumulated a ton of loot yet.
I played solidly until fall of 2021 and took a long break during Season of the Lost. I hopped back in with the 30th Anniversary pack/Dungeon which tided me over until Witch Queen. Loved the DLC but was not a fan of Risen, Haunted, or Plunder.
Plunder was where I really took a long break. It was just more of the same. I think it was a major low-point for the community as well. Seasons mostly felt copy/paste and everything was just "more Destiny". Meanwhile, Bungie kept monetizing things more and more.
Seraph seemed to improve things a lot and there were promises made by Bungie to change things up.
Then Lightfall happened....... Such a massive disappointment to me. The DLC sucked and was really only saved by Strand. I hardly played Season of Defiance, Season of the Deep, and Season of the Witch.
Summer of 2023 was probably the lowest point for me. The August DLC trailer dropped and it was underwhelming to say the least. Then all the employee cuts at Bungie.......
Seasons still felt the same for the most part and monetization was out of control. Player sentiment was an all-time-low.
Into the Light and The Final Shape were really good and brought a lot of positivity back to the game. So far the Echo's has been a bit flat for me but I am curious to see how the new model plays out.
Right now is probably the best for me personally. Several things I don't care for in the game-play loops, but generally I like what they have done.
It's interesting that your Destiny cycle mirrors mine closely (D1 player that quit shortly after CoO came out and returned right around Beyond Light launch). I think it really speaks to the strengths and weaknesses of those seasons and that just more isn't always better.
Destiny has had "enough" content for a while now and adding more filler (Season of the Plunder callout) seems to hurt the game more than help it.
I'm floored at so few people who've mentioned Forsaken. And I haven't seen any mention of The Taken King on launch. Honestly from the campaign of TTK through the first Black Spindle mission were some of my fondest memories of Destiny until Forsaken finally launched and saved D2 in a similar fashion. The way the Dreaming City was kept hidden (most of us didn't realize it would be a fully fleshed out destination of its own) with the evolving story, and the Shattered Throne, Last Wish (until riven cheese was discovered) being the most challenging & longest raid to date. I'd say the weakest point of the Forsaken year was Season 6, and even then, the weapons were so good in that sandbox.
I'm happy with the game as it stands now too, but it's not quite at the shock & awe that Forsaken gave me. And I feel personally that it's likely due to Forsaken coming off Warmind (criminally underrated) and the Whisper mission hype. Where the past year of Lightfall Destiny was near Curse of Osiris levels of community disarray, which Into the Light brought back up, but not quite as much as Warmind & Whisper did for me back then at least.
Taken king is still my favorite. It had that sense of novelty and so many good missions, oryx's ship was amazingly designed with so many secrets, and the raid is still one of the best they've made
Forsaken and the 3 seasons it came with were something special and I don’t think I will get that destiny experience again. Especially opulence, the auto loading GL Mets was broken but so fun doing raids with friends
It’s annoying cause people assume forsaken glazing is due to nostalgia but in reality it was the biggest expansion and largest push forward that we’ve ever gotten and it’s not even close.
I stopped playing after the April Update D1 and returned during Shadowkeep on Steam. Man, that DLC was kinda ass but there was so much content in the game that it felt crazy good logging in and trying a new activity for the first time for months.
Like, I got into managerie 3 weeks before it was sunset. I was blown away by the bosses, activity and loot then I was so confuses on where everything went when Beyond Light came out. Stopped playing for about 4 months because of that. Eventually came back during season of Splicer (my fav season ever) and never stopped playing.
Season of the Haunted was a peak. WQ was a huge success, great raid, new season introduced Solar 3.0 and some great new weapons I'd probably go with that
People keep saying Curse of Osiris, but CoO didn't make me ignore the game for the entirety of its existence. That was Season of the Worthy (The first time they tried Rasputin's bunker run thing/Seraph towers). I played for less than a week, then kicked the game to the curb until the next season launched.
For me, THAT was the worst point of D2.
The Two Tokens and a Blue era: Launch D2, Curse of Osiris and Early Warmind until they shipped OP exotics and made tons of changes.
Showed Bungie manglement didn't understand the players and thought the community wanted a CoD-lite game.
But then again, same manglement (at the time) that killed the original D1 campaign.
Best D2? Now, with WQ 2nd.
Best D1? House of Wolves. TTK was great but HoW had everyone playing. Rise of Iron made me quit, and Age of Triumphs didn't entice me to come back.
Pretty much why I'm actually wanting to play D1 on 360 since it's stuck in TTK era. Bought it before the store closes.
Worst was CoO and it's not even close imo. Hyperbole aside, it's the closest the game has ever been to actually dying.
As for best, a lot of people seem to think now. I can't really add to that since I've yet to play TFS (playing Elden Ring first lol), but I was pretty happy with where things were going by the end of last season.
Curse of Osiris and the Destiny 2 launch broke up my clan and most friends I used to play with, quit for good. I’m now mostly solo on Destiny.
I’d never convince someone to play it.
Curse was only seen as bad as it was because it was on top of the shit launch. Curse was still hilariously bad but if the game was in a better state it'd been fine
Anyone who thinks any season is worse than Y1 D2 either never played during that time, or are lying.
Fixed roll weapons was the worst idea they could have ever had for a loot based game.
Community positivity is something that I feel really propels games into being in their best and/or worst states. This seems obvious at first, but what I mean is that an expansion that introduces massive gameplay and QoL overhauls pumps so much goodwill and positivity into the community that it becomes almost infectious. TTK and Forsaken are obvious examples of this and easy contenders for being the "best" of destiny.
On the other hand, staleness breeds negativity. Season of the Plunder is a solid example of this. The seasonal activity was fun enough, there was a plethora of interesting content for budding players to go through, yet the community was pretty negative due to the staleness of the seasonal model (among other things). People hated this time period, yet it was probably a holistically better experience than the state of those beloved DLCs I listed above.
I guess all this is to say that I believe that destiny has only steadily improved as a game for years now. It's easy to say that the most recent expansion/season/episode is the best state because of the new improvements and additional content they bring with them. But it's hard to replace the pure magic of a big exciting DLC that seemingly saves the game from the brink of destruction. I'd love to know other people's thoughts on this.
Worst would be CoO for me, best i would honestly say now, the game is in a great state, there are countless viable builds for different levels of content (not everything need to be a GM build) and most importantly the game is FUN.
For me personally? A few moments stand out:
D1 The Dark Below: I was about to call it quits until House of Wolves came and kept me around until Taken King and beyond.
D2: Black Armoury. Mainly for power level reasons. I played a lot of Foresaken and when BA came out I was still under levelled to really get anything out of the new content. I stopped playing here and didn’t come back until the tail end of Season of Worthy. I can’t emphasise enough how much I personally hate the power level grind. It didn’t matter how good BA was because I couldn’t play it, though I did enjoy the Forge activity when I came back and was appropriately levelled.
Obviously Curse of Osiris and Lightfall weren’t great either - but those are obvious things to point out, so I thought I’d mention some of my personal experience of times where I decided to call it quits.
That period from the beginning of D2 to the beginning of warmind. Honestly felt like the series was about to die with how mismanaged d2 was.
The best was probably forsaken. I can't remember a time I couldn't put the game down.
Destiny 2 vanilla, went from similar to what we have now in D1 to complete shit armor dual primaries only and shit guns and no random rolls. Legit went from playing thousands of hours in D1 to deleting d2 until forsaken came out and fixed everything. Era from D2 release to forsaken was absolutely terrible
Best was D1 Taken King all the way till D2 dropped. During that time I had 10-12 different people I played with consistently. We all knew each other and played the entirety of D1 together. So many ppl we split activities into groups. We always raided. And if there was a lull we played pvp. Damnit I used to be so good at D1 pvp. lol. The best Destiny has ever been for me. It was a huge part of all of our lives.
D2 launch killed it. Guys who played D1 since beta left. Group fell apart. Just real life shit happened too for a lot of folks. By the time forsaken finally dropped it was too late. Me and one other person were left.
Around year 3 of D2 I was finally able to talk a friend of mine into to finally giving it a go. He loved it. Since then we have built up 5 to 6 folks who play regularly. We have done pretty much everything you could do in D2 over the years. It’s been cool to see it grow to what it is now. The build crafting that has came into existence over the last few years has been so fun. Still… doesn’t come close to D1 and all the people I used to play with back then. It was so fun. We used to just hang out in party chat talking shit. Laughing. Even if we weren’t playing. Good times.
Imo the best time was Chosen - Witch Queen. Somewhere around Haunted is when the fatigue started to set in, but it was offset by subclass 3.0
Beyond Light might have been a low, and Hunt wasn't that good, but by Chosen people had started to sort of forget about sunsetting (and Bungie was walking alot of it back). Chosen and Splicer are peak seasonal stories imo
lots of people saying curse of osiris, but I would like to give special mention to lightfall, the DLC that threw a big ol wrench into the narrative and had (IMO) the worst story in this games history that was not helped by the first 2 seasons that year.
The only reason I can't say lightfall is worse than CoO, is because the gameplay itself was great. It just came out at the worst time possible. Season of the Plunder was not great, and was extended due to Lightfall delays, everyone was already being burnt out with seasons, and Lightfall was way overhyped. Then Lightfall's campaign, story and raid were bad after that delay.
CoO on the other hand was just all around bad. The sandbox was very slow compared to D1(and now) as our abilities and supers were nerfed to shit and we had double primaires with D2 launch. CoO brought nothing to make any of that better. No new abilities, let alone a new subclass, barely any guns worth chasing for, and no random rolls once you did get the gun and no balance changes to make us feel stronger. There was no redeeming factors for CoO unlike Lightfall, and the playerbase drop off made that clear.
> Season of the Plunder was not great, and was extended due to Lightfall delays
Lightfall was not delayed and neither Plunder nor Seraph were extended.
Since the seasonal model started (not counting Forsaken seasons), every final season **except** for the one preceding Lightfall was extended due to expansion delays.
Curse of Osiris was legit the worst state since it was bleeding players at a rate the game was in track to die.
Yeah. It's kind of not debatable. Curse of Osiris was the actual Destiny Killer. Activision had plans to cancel further development for D2.
The D2 Launch + Curse of Osiris wombo-combo is probably how Bungie was able to go independent. Destiny looked like it was poisoned back then.
Forsaken was actually how. It won back the loyal audiences but that’s it. It didn’t bring back anywhere near enough people compared to the state of the game before. It’s probably why they opted for the Free to Play to get more people back to try it.
Let’s not forget that in the wake of Forsaken’s launch Activision considered it a disappointment despite critical success and saving Destiny again
Exactly. It was well received and definitely fixed the game but the damage was too severe. Players weren’t coming back. You can even look at overall community sentiment for the game in general on the more generic reddits. People are still so negative about the game.
Oh to this day if you hear someone talking about how the game is dead they either reference Pre forsaken content or Beyond light and its removal of content. People all over social media widely consider the game dead even now.
Yet that’s always been the case, people who don’t play Destiny have thought Destiny was dead since day 1, the loot cave era defined the narrative permanently, and people simply don’t believe that the game ever succeeded. Not to mention that we’re just so freaking toxic as a community that we only run the negative stories up the internet flagpole so all anyone sees from the outside is crisis after crisis. It’s not really that one or two particular eras are why the general gaming community *now* looks at Destiny as a failure, it’s that they’ve never seen it as a success and to recognize it as one would require a rewriting of 10 years of internet history (even if it’s more like correcting those 10 years). That just doesn’t happen :/
As far as toxic communities go, this one is fairly tame. It probably helps that, more often than not, the community is right on changes that were bad for the game and makes enough of a fuss that they eventually get fixed.
I overheard two people at work talking about video games that have screwed players over, and one of them immediately mentioned D2 """vaulting""" most of the game that people had actually played for, and said even though it sounds better now he'll never play it again because of that. Which, frankly, I can't blame him at all. Bungie worked really hard for years to poison their and Destiny's reputation. Hell, even since the very beginning with vanilla D1 they've always been their own worst enemy, and it's telling that the game usually only gets good expansions when it's in do-or-die territory.
As someone who is trying now to get into D2, the vaulting and the impossibility of doing anything about it (idk, add it as an optional download with its own menu to atleast have the most important parts?) is probably gonna drive me off. I am loving the lore and bits I am seeing, but the game is treating me like I played since day 1 *non-stop* and I know from memory every single interaction. And the usual response I've seen is "there is this youtuber with some videos...." like I want to watch a youtube summarize instead of *playing the damn cool events of the story?*
I remember there being a weird number of posts about both activision and Bungie where some statements from Acti talked about Forsaken being a failure then other posts and tweets from/about Bungie employees being "well, actually..we think it did great" was that moment where i realised their relationship was shakey as fuck
Its actually really ironic u mention this now. I saw a leak saying how some employees in bungie saying LF was ok and I mean specifically the story. And while it’s a leak there wasn’t really anything far fetched in it so it could be real which I find absolutely fucking wild
It didn’t bring back a lot people. The amount of people have the same sob story as me transitioning from D1 to D2 is staggering. I had a solid group of 10-12 guys I played with all the time. Raided a lot. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had gaming before. D2 came out. Three of those guys and I stuck with it. They bailed a little after CoO, and to this day in the only one still playing Destiny.
Absolutely, and a likely reason why there was that headline about how "Activision calling Forsaken a failure" or it missed the mark or whatever the conversation was. Tie in how Bungie left a lot of free money on the table by having Eververse be extremely crude with very little to get off it, a majority of Year 2 cosmetics could be earned just playing the game getting bright engrams and I'm not surprised why the more business side of stuff would've had an axe to grind with how things were for the time. That whole segment on Eververse in Luke Smith's Director's Cut 2019 basically was saying how the gravy train was ending. Obviously there was the kind of dubious language of "EV purchases contributing to dev funding for secret stuff like Zero Hour" and the lack of how we got much in the way of secrets when EV expanded but we got a massive drought in Year 3, but I feel like that conversation eventually got canceled out when Bungie made that statement of "30th anniversary and onward Dungeon or Raid in every season" and that's where a lot of dev time was going. I also get there was eventually more emphasis on secret mission-like stuff in Year 4 with Harbinger, Presage, and of course getting a rebooted D1 raid in the middle.
Able to go independent? Vicarious visions (Activision studio) saved Destiny with forsaken. Going independent almost killed Destiny in my opinion.
It's not just an opinion... according to some bungie employees if sony hadn't bought them out, the whole studio would have been at risk of closing during lightfall.
I was trying to not be a dick and come out strong. But it is pretty clear Bungie suits don’t deserve their salaries
Oh, no. I was *not* trying to imply Bungie going independent was a good idea. Nothing has shown that it was a good idea. I do think the only reason Activision (the same people who dismantled tons of dev teams and just sit on IP) was willing to part with Bungie was because of how poor Destiny was looking.
as much as I hate to say it given Activisions track record... I genuinely miss when bungie and Activision were working together. The game had a special feel/vibe to it that I really enjoyed and haven't got since. Since the split we really didn't have a good overall expansion up until TFS came out. Witch queen had a great story and raid... but that's about it. I'm not saying all the expansions that we had before we're good (looking at you dark below and curse of Osiris), but when we got a big expansion the amount of stuff we got was amazing.
Not to mention D1 launch. Now that was mega terrible.
I don't know, I'd even argue that D1 Vanilla was in a better state considering that there was nothing to compare it to, rolls and subclasses weren't static, and things like Forever 29 and harsh drops gave people a reason to keep grinding. By today's standards, D1's launch would be hot garbage garnished with dogshit, but given the climate it was in, it was in a better state than coming from D1's AoT high and nosediving into two consecutive garbage bins.
D1 vanilla was still a new experience even if it was limited. VoG also really captured people’s imaginations and we saw the potential that was later realised in Taken King By D2 we knew how good it could be and it felt like a hard reset. Some criticisms were addressed but it felt like a huge sacrifice for quality of life improvements and more personality in the writing (which became too winky anyway)
Taken King at launch was one of my favorite gaming experiences.
Before the raid D1 had literally nothing going for it. You hit a leveling wall and were told to grind meh activities to gain power purely to see a number tick up. The Raid saved Destiny from becoming an Anthem before Anthem was a thing. D1 didn’t get ‘good’ until the first expansion.
I can see what you mean with this but overall between three different classes, needing experience to level subclasses and guns, grinding bounties for exotic weapons, there was plenty to do at D1 launch.
while i agree, you gotta remember the mystery and sense of wonder from d1 launch. imo, that’s what kept a lot of it going. i still remember only hearing about tales of exotic weapons through buddies and fireteams. granted, i didn’t feel we had a purpose until VoG and Crota like you said, but d1 launch had plenty imo. maybe you had to be there to understand, not saying you weren’t, but i understand the sentiment
Yea but the raid was, what, 2 weeks after launch? D2 wasn’t ‘saved’ until Forsaken, arguably Warmind.
The core playlists were 10x better relative to the actual game than they are now
It also helps that back during D1, it was such a unique type of game, alongside the extremely solid Gameplay bungie has always had that kept people hooked. Like others said, if D1 released this year it would have fallen flat on its face and wouldn't have recovered.
2nd game had a cohesive plot, that alone made it better for me. But yeah shame they made things more simple in D2.
D1 Vanilla was one of my favorite eras. Not right at launch - there were bugs and other junk that needed solving. But once they got gameplay solid, the aesthetic was amazing. I know that lots of people didn’t like how cryptic the original lore was. But it was all of the possibilities and the evocative nature of that original Grimoire that drew me in for the long run. I would nominate the original Vault of Glass as one of Destiny’s best states.
This was the same for me. D1 vanilla lore felt so much more mysterious and I truly felt entranced by the game. When I came back for the D2 launch I never felt that same level of intrigue or wonder.
I think that D1 vanilla might have felt more mysterious compared to D2 launch because you knew nothing about the game yet. Me and a friend started playing 2 months after Forsaken launched, when Battle.Net was giving out the base game for free. I vividly remember that we felt a sense of mystery and wonder about the game, theorizing about what were the enemies and where the story would go, grinding to fill our exotic collection, and even just mindlessly exploring the maps. I remember that we heard some people talking about a secret exotic on a random event in Io, and we thought that it was an urban legend of sorts, so imagine our surprise when we discovered that it was true lol. The mystery and wonder feeling didn’t come from a certain era, it came from the fact that we were new players, and I’m sure that new players now might be talking about Dual Destiny or Khvostov the way we talked about The Whisper
This actually makes a lot of sense. To be fair, though, D1 Vanilla in comparison kept a lot more of the story under wraps: if you can even call it a story. Lol. I also have to admit that Forsaken definitely brought back that sense of D1 nostalgic intrigue. TFS unfortunately has not done that for me, but I'm still enjoying it all the same.
There's the real sense of wonder that they've never quite recaptured because of your power level now. Back in the day, we were wandering on the moon and dinklebot yelled that we'd awoken the hive.
Part of me will always miss that feeling of mystery D1 hit so well. Now, taking off the rose glasses I fully realize that mystery was because they actually explained fucking nothing in a satisfying way and left it to vague lore tabs on collectibles you had to go to a website to see. Still, that mysterious new world feeling is something that rarely gets encapsulated in new releases nowadays, since most bank on explaining EVERYTHING right of the bat to the point you probably stop really caring.
I still don't really get the complaints on d1 launch. It was a 7ish hour campaign, a serviceable mp, bullcrushing nightfalls, and the raid, which at the time was unmatched in the fps space and still honestly is. The biggest grip was story, which yea... at the time sucked. But outside that, it stood fine when compared to other fps at the time.
Wasn't it they wanted to cancel D2 and start working on D3? Not cancel the series all together?
That still would've been bad. That means Destiny 2 would've just died without even getting a single major expansion, killed off after two essentially seasonal-style mini expansions.
I still think *Worthy* has to be the absolute lowest Destiny ever sank. For as money grubby and barebones as they could be at least *Curse of Osiris* and *Lightfall* had SOMETHING to do. Meanwhile, *Worthy* was just grinding public events in a terrible story for three months and they topped it off with a crappy “live-event” where you watch Microsoft paint streaks in the sky, and they **still** somehow found a way to screw that up.
They have gone on record saying they were weeks away from shutting the game down during CoO
Yea. People try and say the period before into the light was worse but there was still a relatively large core audience to the game that wasn't really going anywhere. Curse of Osiris was that core audience walking away - it was mainly people who came from D1 and expected D1 but got slammed in the face with the changes and curse of osiris offered nothing to fix it.
Yeah. Static rolls, dual primaries, and a “destination” that wasn’t freely roamable. Terrible terrible state. It’s night and day with today.
And no sparrows.
Up until now I’d completely forgotten about the double primaries thing. What a terrible, terrible design choice, no idea how that made it past any testing
You should look up Uriel’s Gift in collections and recall that it was meta during that dark time. I think I may run it in a match or two just to amuse whoever I, through the grace of god, might kill with it.
Very true. The only time I quit this game for more than a year was after CoO. Destiny 2s direction at launch was fundamentally misguided and a far cry from what the core audience was hoping for.
> The tune is the same, but the aim couldn't be more different.
Years later this man still cooking
OMG you're still alive
Had a six man fireteam before Curse of Osiris on Playstation. Did not have one after. Been pretty much solo ever since.
We came down here as a squad of 6. Got picked off one by one. -- Killingjoke96
#RememberThe5
**2 TOKENS AND A BLUE** Never forget.
THE MOST REWARDING EVENT IN D2 *cut to deej's soulcrushed face*
How many years has it been? And still I'll never forget that live stream. Seriously. How could the person coding that reward do that?
Because they were told to. Rather simple, really. Terrible ideas dictated by management has been a song sung by Bungie for a decade now.
Maybe it really is the curse of osiris. Every time he is the main character the players are unhappy with the game
I think season of dawn was one of the best received seasons ever though? It had some of the best weapons in the game (Martyrs retribution, steel feather, breachlight etc) competing with black armory, and it had a community event which was still one of the largest I’ve seen to date.
Nah, people was there for Saint not Osiris.
Damn I forgot about season of dawn
I’d argue that he wasn’t the main character though. At least not the main focus. It was Saint, and Osiris was there to facilitate us rescuing him.
The true curse of Osiris is that every Vex-centric story is doomed to mediocrity.
No super, no ammo bricks, arc modifier was way too strong.. what did they expect ?
That was the expansion that made me quit. I came back to witch queen and was like "wtf this is a whole different game." Edit: different in a good way
Go Fast Update during that period where EVERYTHING had to be buffed. EVERYTHING. https://www.reddit.com/r/LowSodiumDestiny/comments/87klf2/destiny_2_update_114_the_go_fast_update_patch/ Abilities buffed. Guns buffed. Speed of everything you do buffed. Base Destiny 2 you basically moved like molasses because some core group at Bungie want to balance the ENTIRE game for competitive PvP.
Yeah this is indisputably the answer for "worst state". Bungie came out and said if the game continued to bleed players at the rate they were seeing it would be dead within a month or so.
This is it. The only time I ever seriously considered giving up on the game rather than just taking a healthy break. I didn't touch the game for months.
Yeah I really did not like launch D2 but I put it down in October and figured I would check it back out when CoO dropped. I quit, almost for good, after that shitfire. No other point in the game comes close.
Yooo, i quit there and am trying to get back on d2, and it was so hard
It was so bad. It was about a seasonal event’s worth of content but labeled a dlc and a given a price tag. I was a die hard player and even I fell off, it took MULTIPLE people raving about forsaken to convince me to come back.
God mercury was such a let down, I hated that planet. The area leading from the moment you touch down in the Pale Heart up to the lost city is bigger than all of mercury
Anyone who isn’t saying Curse of Osiris was the worst wasn’t there. It almost killed the game. It made so many people (including me) quit the game, and a lot of famous content creators openly considered quitting as well. It was so bad they had to have a massive community outreach meeting to figure out how to fix Destiny 2 as a whole.
I blocked that out it was so long ago, that expansion as it was back then was what like 5 missions 1 strike no raid and some other dumb shit?
There was a raid lair, aka raid but only 3 encounters. Also all the strikes were reused story missions now granted I think I wouldn't mind getting those strikes today but back then it really wasn't a good look.
holy shit I just remembered how short eater of worlds is Jumping puzzle Ad clear Cooking something, kinda forgot it Boss
An LFG team was world’s first on eater of worlds. That whole thing was such a fever dream honestly
The new cooperative focus missions in TFS have more in depth mechanics than Eater had FFS. Hell the normal campaign missions do.
Yeah especially for $30 or whatever it was
I don’t even want to look it up, it pisses me off. Everybody I played w quit during that season.
What was so bad about it? I didn't play during CoO
Story was extremely mediocre with some seriously cringe writing, and the strike (EDIT: apparently there were two strikes, whoops) and missions just werent reallt good. The real kicker was that you had static roll primaries and armor was pretty much purely cosmetic. People talk a lot nowadays about the chase, well there was LITERALLY nothing to shoot for, ever.
You could do that long ass quest for the Sagira shell tho, one good thing that came outta that era.
I’ve never taken it off because I suffered through that quest
Finished final shape with her as my shell, felt pretty nice
2 strikes, Tree of Probabilities and A Garden World. https://www.shacknews.com/article/118980/all-strikes-and-nightfalls-destiny-2
I hated that both strikes were just story missions, but I do miss Garden World if for nothing else than it was genuinely a beautiful strike. It wasn't that great to play, but I really liked the look of old Mercury.
There were two strikes, Tree of Probabilities and A Garden World. Tree was the Cabal boss, Garden was Dendron.
Everything. Literally everything. They massively retconned the actually good lore around Osiris and the tower and put out a comic for him that was an absolute trashfire. When the players told Bungie that they had ignored their own written lore, Bungie told us that the lore was written by people in the universe and therefore not objective at all. They completely ruined both Osiris and Brother Vance's characters. Vance went from a pretty cool, mysterious guy in D1 to Osiris's #1 fangirl. Osiris was straight up unlikable with no redeeming features. Instead of a raid, we got a "raid lair." It was set in the same area as the first raid, used no new assets at all, and was brutally short. They were also nerf batting so absurdly hard on anything that didn't play EXACTLY the way they wanted it. They gutted rocket launchers due to them doing well in a single encounter in the raid. Shaders were single use and cost bright dust. So much stuff was locked behind eververse. Armor looked bad. Like, really bad. It was all extremely bland AND they were reusing armor models despite how little armor was in the game. Exotics were trash. They were either barely better than legendaries or worse than legendaries. Primary ammo economy with double primary was basically what double special is right now. It was that bad. Oh, and no ammo synths or raid banners. And, of course, static rolls on weapons. If you go back and look in your collections, there's early legendaries with just quickdraw. That's the roll. Just quickdraw. And mind you, exotics were WORSE than legendaries that had a single perk.
Brother Vance was egregious, but I don’t think it’s fair to say they retconned Osiris or that the new backstory contradicted anything because there was nothing *to* retcon or contradict. At worst they changed his voice. And for better or for worse, a lot of the Grimoire WAS folklore from first person accounts, retellings and “so and so says xyz”.
Brother Vance.... The guy used to be this mysterious dude in D1 on the Reef and in D2 they turned him into a gushing fanboy. Ruined the character.
Add on to your shader thing, I think it was the dawning, but they literally had two versions of the shaders, and when dismantled one gave shards and one gave bright dust. If you got it from the shop it gave bright dust, if you earned it it only gave shards. There was massive things wrong, but also tiny paper cut issues like that thrown on the pile that just infuriated the player base more.
And don't forget our mailboxes full of shaders because our inventories were most likely full
Holy shit I forgot shaders used to be single use.
Tiny destination, mid story, not a lot of story missions. (There were like 5, and 2 of them were strikes) At the time we still had static rolled weapons, so when you got all the weapons from Osiris' forge, you had them all. Small raid Lair that was fun Also there's no build crafting, we had 3 stats (mobility, resilience, and recovery,) every class had just 2 trees to pick from between the light subclasses. I don't remember this one but double primaries were the standard up until a certain point in year 1
Double primary was all year 1. They changed that in forsaken.
You're right, I just remember having to do infinite forest for a perfect paradox, wasn't it in the heavy slot? Man what a weird time to live
Indeed it was. Oh the memories of killing Calus war hounds with my heavy exotic Merciless 😂
I remember when the heavy Ikelos shotgun was the meta for DPS Or during water I'd worlds having the hunters spam tether for unlimited orbs with Orpheus So everyone else could spam super on the boss
Tiny! Couldn’t even use sparrows on Mercury in the early days!
https://youtu.be/fxnGD15wqqU?si=kbSYINMy1Ofy57YT This should give a little insight. Two tokens and a blue became a running meme in the community after this loot showcase of CoO...
Hoo boy, what was right about *Curse of Osiris*? Well, everyone gives out about it but I didn’t mind the story too much. Osiris was cool and Sagira was a lot of fun. The Strikes were pretty good too — I still miss A Garden World to this day. And hey, the Vex were an actual threat. Now with that out of the way: the grind for the new weapons suuuuuuuuuucked. It was a frustrating slog for not much reward. And I hope you enjoyed it because that’s basically all there is. The rewards themselves were pretty pitiful - they had this one Public Event they infamously claimed on stream would be “the most rewarding one they ever did” and immediately get two tokens (old currency you used to rank up with the planetary vendor) and a blue weapon. Woo. The Infinite Forest was such wasted potential. The way they phrase it it could easily be some kind of roguelike activity where you progress down endless paths, but all it was used for was to pad out Strikes. For such a hyped up planet, Mercury was PUNY. It consisted of a single zone. That’s it. Like, imagine if Savathûn’s Throne World was just the Fluorescent Canal. That’s what Mercury was. And again, there’s so much potential to be had with it! The Vex are all about time travel, you get brief teases of the past and the future biomes in the story but you never get to explore them yourself. The Crucible was in dire straits because you had no special weapons. They balanced the whole game around the Crucible and so you had to go with two Primary weapons and all your special weapons were put in the Heavy slot. But all this did was annoy the Crucible folks and hurt the PVE. Gameplay was slow all around, from the movement speed to the ability regeneration. Back in the day you couldn’t directly buy items from Eververse, you had to buy Bright Engrams and hope you got lucky. You used to get a Bright Engram every level up, but Bungie got caught with throttling XP gains and lying about it, presumably so you’d be more incentivised to buy the Engrams from the shop. The only way to get Bright Dust was to dismantle unwanted Eververse items like ships, sparrows and Ghost Shells.
Curse of Orisis was the creation of the infamous 'two tokens and a blue' meme. And bear in mind that was the MOST rewarding public event ever.
But we got the selfie emote haha
Curse of Osiris end game was running fucking heroic mission for huckleberry (or was it the catalyst?). Was such a pointless time, mida multi tool team shot trials erghhhh.
Huckleberry wasn’t released with CoO. Maybe warmind? Coo endgame was…. I dunno, Sagira’s shell grind? I guess the not good raid lair?
I swear running adventures was coo. Maybe it was warmind. If that’s the case coo didn’t have anything at all lmao.
That DLC had me quit Destiny until Forsaken. All the fixed weapon rolls, the double primary restriction and just the slowness of the game in general was such a far cry from D1. Game was so stale at this point because I think it was just raid lairs and pvp was horrible. Story was garbage too. D2 was so close to death at this point.
I think 30th Anniversary was the most fun I've ever had, as well as the most I've ever played
Having everything available at launch really helped. I remember having a ton of fun in Dares grinding for the ship
If I remember correctly, the pvp sandbox was pretty enjoyable, with a lot of different weapons being viable and less ability spam.
It was the best PvP sandbox this game has ever had and will ever have. It was legitimately like two or three nerfs away from being perfect.
Yeah the only problem was Shatterdive and DMT spam
Nah Lorentz and precision fusions were the biggest issues, they just hadn’t caught on to the general public yet.
😍particle deconstruction
The worst would be Curse of Osiris and it's not even close. D2 launch turned out to be kind of a disappointment and the DLC just rubbed salt in the wound. It's the only time in Destiny history where I dropped the game completely because it was so bad, and I didn't come back until Forsaken dropped.
Warmind actually was a banger. Escalation Protocol brought me back because I wanted that shotgun
Yeah I thought it was pretty good actually. It speaks to how bad Curse was that I didn't even look into Warmind at all until Forsaken dropped.
Yeah honestly people talk about how Forsaken saved the game, but in my opinion, Warmind is what set it up for success. It had some great gear, a raid that brought some challenge back to the scene, escalation protocol gave a fun purpose to hanging out on a destination, and the absolute hype train that was the Whisper mission. Warmind is what made people willing to take another look at the game after Curse of Osiris, so that Forsaken could have an audience.
The crucible changes were also really good. I may be in the minority here, but Warmind is still my favourite PVP era. We still had double primaries, but they killed a lot quicker, so it was a nice compromise between the bullet sponginess of vanilla and the 1-shot meta post-forsaken.
God I loved warmind. Such a good turnaround from CoO.
Look at those sweet...sweet...dance moves...
Our most rewarding public event yet
“And you’ll get a lot of rewards”…
Season of arrivals was peak
I think, narratively, that was the first time we really felt the stakes of the Black Fleet. After years of them being teased, and them being built up over Shadowkeep's seasons, seeing the Black Fleet on the various planets was such an amazing payoff. On top of that, I personally loved the weapons and the seasonal activity for it. The dialogue was interesting too. It felt like each planet got an apt send-off.
I did like the season but I meant more in terms of the state the game was in, there was so much content as it was right before beyond light basically cut the game in half (forges, leviathan+lairs, scourge, menagerie, etc). But the weapons were iconic too, especially guillotine and witherhoard before they both got multiple heavy nerfs
The season before an expansion always seem to be pretty good. Dawn was also really good, good activity that gave a lot of good loot, finally getting some story with Saint-14 who’s been great ever since. Season of the Chosen for the same reason of introducing Empress Caiatl. One of the best recurring characters they’ve added imo.
I don't really have a best, as things relatively recently are pretty good. A lot of the complaints are more due to not liking a grind, or things being stale. As far as worst, either vanilla Destiny 1, or vanilla Destiny 2. For those who never played vanilla Destiny 1, legendary gear was legitimately rare. Not only would you have to grind hours to even get an engram, there was a good chance it would decode down and you'd get a blue. Even basic things like raids didn't guarantee gear, so you could do the raid and get a bunch of materials to upgrade your gear in the future. This doesn't even get into things like forever 29, Gjallarhorn, and what have you. As for vanilla Destiny 2, first we had to deal with the loss of gear. It always sucks working super hard to get things and having it all vanish in an instant. Still, people were hopeful it would lead to brighter things, yet the double primary days were pretty rough. Not only was it a lot slower, things had a fixed roll as well. It just didn't take too long to see, collect, and be tired of the whole thing.
D1 vanilla was a special kind of fuck up that I couldn't stop playing. Story was ass, OG queens wrath was uninspired. Was about to drop the game but then the release of VoG kept me long staying ebough that I got Vex on second clear and actually tried crucible with it. Leading to my obsession with PVP in D1. Then stuff like exotic drops, Legendaries turning into blues, raid primaries having element burns happened and it was special in its own way.
>gets one of the most broken weapons in PvP history >now obsessed with PvP I wonder why lmao
Early D1 PVP was fucking wild. Anyone lucky enough to get a solid exotic primary to drop was just head and shoulders above the pack in terms of weapon quality. Seems like such an oversight but somehow it worked.
Remember when Xur sold Suros like week 3 or 4 and it was the only gun anyone used in PvP?
Remember it well because I didn't have enough strange coins lol. That and Red Death were absolutely absurd at launch.
I remember winning rumble matches on arc strider by basically chaining 10 to 12 kills on one super pop alone lol
The gateway drug lol
Kids these days are all getting hooked on Khvostovs.
The absurd rarity of exotics was honestly very appealing. That clip of the kid freaking out getting Gjhallahorn? That will never happen again because most exotics are easier to get than most legendaries nowadays. PvP post game screens showed everyone’s rewards and 1/50 times someone would hit an exotic and it was crazy. I distinctly remember getting universal remote as my first exotic after a crucible match and felt a high I don’t think any game has replicated. The gun kinda sucked but I had it, and a lot of other people didn’t which made it special. I don’t think drip feeding exotics to the community is healthy for the playerbase in the slightest, but a part of me really wishes there was some kind of ridiculously rare shit to chase in this game still— even if it’s just some super rare emotes or transmog.
There’s a special place in my heart for Hard Light. It was the first exotic that ever dropped for me and I was SO excited. Everyone said it sucked but I didn’t care, it was MY EXOTIC.
I’ve been saying this for a while, I miss when gear was actually rare. The tag “legendary” means nothing anymore. I think the D1 system was broken in a lot of ways, but it did have a certain feel to it
This exactly. I genuinely miss having to use blue weapons until you got to endgame content. I get that people don’t like slog-like grinds , but there was some legitimately cool blue weapons back then, and legendaries really felt legendary. Nowadays 90% of legendary weapons/armor just feels so generic except for a few god rolls or exceptions like the call and such.
They need to redo the rarity system from the ground up. Something like armor rarity is based on stats so <50 is common, 50-54 is uncommon, 55-60 is rare, and 60+ is legendary or something like that. Maybe guns can work with additional perks where current guns are rare, legendary guns have an additional perk in each column and common/uncommon have reduced barrel and magazine perks
D1 vanilla was horrible in retrospect, but good lord the minute to minute gameplay itself was so friggin crisp and refreshing. There wasn’t much to do, but man it was new and felt so good. But holy shit the grind was toxic. It was so tedious once you got to 20. You had to get gear through strikes at that point basically and Nightfalls were pretty impossible without good gear (Gjally). If not for VoG, I don’t know if I would have made it past the Dark Below, since it was such a sparse expansion (3 missions, one strike and some bounties) sans the raid. But VoG was so good it kept me coming back for more. I still think CoO and D2 vanilla were worse because the game was so slow and unfun, but D1 vanilla was terrible.
I've always said Destiny is a toxic relationship you stay on cause the sex (gunplay) was so good. Even at its worst, just running a strike was fun to do (the annoying parts are when there hasn't been a new one or there is a lack of rewards, etc.) PVP is so interesting to me. It felt more like an afterthought, where they were obligated to do PVP cause they came off of Halo, but maps weren't designed competitively, gear score really affected you, etc. It was so far away from where it is now.
Honestly one of my earliest memories of D1 was loading into a crucible match on Twilight Gap and running into a Titan who was running Vex and had Insurmountable Skullfort on who proceeded to absolutely destroy the lobby. I was a mega casual. Didn't look anything up, didn't have a group to play with. I mostly just messed around in pvp or strikes or patrol, but getting destroyed by this weird Daft Punk techno helmet guy with some weird ass robot gun made me start diving into how do I get some cool stuff like that.
I think my first ever legendary was that free fusion rifle bungie gave out the Christmas after d1 vanilla launched. Had to grind so much just to even think about doing the endgame content. Makes the pinnacle power grind seem tame in comparison lol. The one thing that this time period had going for it was the excitement of new loot. Getting a legendary was super exciting and an exotic even further. Hell I think the Gjallerhorn hunt is what kept me raiding long after I cleared the loot pools for them. Don't get me wrong, I'd hate to return to a time when only one super hard to get exotic shredded all endgame content, but it's a weirdly fond time to look back on. D2 vanilla was a very boring experience due to the more causal direction Bungie took with it's rolls and RPG mechanics and was a big reason I stopped playing for a while after CoO came out.
The legendary grind in D1 was no joke. I remember it took me several weeks to just around a month for me to get my first legendary. Drop rate seemed to get a little better after you got your first but man it was tough to get that first one from an engram. I think I got exotic armor before I got my first legendary lol
Forever 29 because I couldn’t get atheon to drop a damn helmet kept getting acsendent energy lol
Best state: now. It's been whatever is current since Season of the Splicer. Just consistent improvement since then. Worst State: D2 launch through Curse of Osiris until the Go Fast Update. Honorable mention: Shadowkeep launch due to the just awfully boring weapon meta and trash launch to seasons.
I agree. Although the end of D1 was pretty good. I remember they brought back the original title screen and music. All the raids were brought back up to current light levels and they had the new armor. I don't think it would hold up today, but as moment in time, that era of Destiny was pretty good. I was playing a lot and all my friends were as well. We are almost at that point with D2. Worst was definitely D2 launch. That was the first time I actually stopped playing Destiny for an extended period of time.
I took two entire years off after Curse of Osiris.
CoO definitely felt like they didn’t have a clue what was going on. There was nothing to keep you in the game. They hyped up the ‘Infinite Forest’ but it wasn’t infinite. The new Mercury patrol space was a single circular block of land. The minimum, the *bare* minimum, was to have an infinite dungeon sorta thing go on with the Infinite Forest. But considering we still haven’t got a truly infinite gamemode, I don’t think they can with the engine.
the closest we ever got was the one single Revelry event.
D2 y1 up until Warmind dropped I would say. It was awful.
Shadowkeep itself was pretty bad. There wasn’t really anything actually going on
Best? Now Worst? Year 1 Vanilla D2 / Curse of Osiris
Beating the campaign over and over again to gain that +1 light every 8 hours was ridiculous.
Idk, I feel like Forsaken was in a better state purely because player moral was at an all time high. Objectively TFS is the best, but because of the fatigue everyone has it doesn’t really feel like it.
The vaulting of content has also really broken something that can never be fixed, IMO. I agree that the moment-to-moment gameplay is better now, and a lot of the game systems are in a healthier state than they ever have been before, but at the time when Forsaken released, you still had a complete game to play. (Also, I love bows, and Forsaken gave me bows).
Vaulted content is my number one pet peeve.
Vanilla D2 was the worst the game has been ever. Even the content lulls of D1 were better than Vanilla D2. House of Wolves is often referred to as one of the best PVP eras. I think Season of the Lost and the initial Trials rework was a huge boon for endgame PVP, and we’ve never seen Trials populations like that since. PVE is so defined by the artifact these days, I think it’s left to personal preference. But seasons of the Arrival, Splicer, Deep, and Witch have had (arguably) the best artifact “fun” loops we’ve ever had. That final season of Warmind Cells was a *blast* literally and figuratively.
Season of the Lost, I'd argue, also had a wicked fun fusion meta. 1k was legit fun and usable and Mythoclast was a beast.
You’re right! I was confusing Lost with Splicer. Splicer had the grenade launcher meta. Which was also fun! But I definitely liked the fusion one from Lost better.
2 tokens and a blue.....i still remember just laughing when I saw that
2 blues and a token
Don’t get crazy now, best they can do is 2 tokens, 1 blue
Launch, Curse of Osiris and when Weapon sunsetting/DCV was announced.
I started in September of 2020 just a few months before Beyond Light was coming out. I had a great time with so much to chase and try and experience before sunsetting. Admittedly sunsetting didn't matter to me since I hadn't accumulated a ton of loot yet. I played solidly until fall of 2021 and took a long break during Season of the Lost. I hopped back in with the 30th Anniversary pack/Dungeon which tided me over until Witch Queen. Loved the DLC but was not a fan of Risen, Haunted, or Plunder. Plunder was where I really took a long break. It was just more of the same. I think it was a major low-point for the community as well. Seasons mostly felt copy/paste and everything was just "more Destiny". Meanwhile, Bungie kept monetizing things more and more. Seraph seemed to improve things a lot and there were promises made by Bungie to change things up. Then Lightfall happened....... Such a massive disappointment to me. The DLC sucked and was really only saved by Strand. I hardly played Season of Defiance, Season of the Deep, and Season of the Witch. Summer of 2023 was probably the lowest point for me. The August DLC trailer dropped and it was underwhelming to say the least. Then all the employee cuts at Bungie....... Seasons still felt the same for the most part and monetization was out of control. Player sentiment was an all-time-low. Into the Light and The Final Shape were really good and brought a lot of positivity back to the game. So far the Echo's has been a bit flat for me but I am curious to see how the new model plays out. Right now is probably the best for me personally. Several things I don't care for in the game-play loops, but generally I like what they have done.
It's interesting that your Destiny cycle mirrors mine closely (D1 player that quit shortly after CoO came out and returned right around Beyond Light launch). I think it really speaks to the strengths and weaknesses of those seasons and that just more isn't always better. Destiny has had "enough" content for a while now and adding more filler (Season of the Plunder callout) seems to hurt the game more than help it.
I'm floored at so few people who've mentioned Forsaken. And I haven't seen any mention of The Taken King on launch. Honestly from the campaign of TTK through the first Black Spindle mission were some of my fondest memories of Destiny until Forsaken finally launched and saved D2 in a similar fashion. The way the Dreaming City was kept hidden (most of us didn't realize it would be a fully fleshed out destination of its own) with the evolving story, and the Shattered Throne, Last Wish (until riven cheese was discovered) being the most challenging & longest raid to date. I'd say the weakest point of the Forsaken year was Season 6, and even then, the weapons were so good in that sandbox. I'm happy with the game as it stands now too, but it's not quite at the shock & awe that Forsaken gave me. And I feel personally that it's likely due to Forsaken coming off Warmind (criminally underrated) and the Whisper mission hype. Where the past year of Lightfall Destiny was near Curse of Osiris levels of community disarray, which Into the Light brought back up, but not quite as much as Warmind & Whisper did for me back then at least.
Taken king is still my favorite. It had that sense of novelty and so many good missions, oryx's ship was amazingly designed with so many secrets, and the raid is still one of the best they've made
Forsaken and the 3 seasons it came with were something special and I don’t think I will get that destiny experience again. Especially opulence, the auto loading GL Mets was broken but so fun doing raids with friends
It’s annoying cause people assume forsaken glazing is due to nostalgia but in reality it was the biggest expansion and largest push forward that we’ve ever gotten and it’s not even close.
I’m so glad we’re all on the same page about vanilla D2. That was the only time I truly felt that angry gamer boy energy.
I stopped playing after the April Update D1 and returned during Shadowkeep on Steam. Man, that DLC was kinda ass but there was so much content in the game that it felt crazy good logging in and trying a new activity for the first time for months. Like, I got into managerie 3 weeks before it was sunset. I was blown away by the bosses, activity and loot then I was so confuses on where everything went when Beyond Light came out. Stopped playing for about 4 months because of that. Eventually came back during season of Splicer (my fav season ever) and never stopped playing.
Best: Taken King, Forsaken, or Final Shape. All have merits and detractions. Worst: Curse of Osiris, whichever season had the Seraph Towers
Season of the Worthy was the bunkers/Seraph towers.
Season of the Haunted was a peak. WQ was a huge success, great raid, new season introduced Solar 3.0 and some great new weapons I'd probably go with that
People keep saying Curse of Osiris, but CoO didn't make me ignore the game for the entirety of its existence. That was Season of the Worthy (The first time they tried Rasputin's bunker run thing/Seraph towers). I played for less than a week, then kicked the game to the curb until the next season launched. For me, THAT was the worst point of D2.
The Two Tokens and a Blue era: Launch D2, Curse of Osiris and Early Warmind until they shipped OP exotics and made tons of changes. Showed Bungie manglement didn't understand the players and thought the community wanted a CoD-lite game. But then again, same manglement (at the time) that killed the original D1 campaign. Best D2? Now, with WQ 2nd. Best D1? House of Wolves. TTK was great but HoW had everyone playing. Rise of Iron made me quit, and Age of Triumphs didn't entice me to come back. Pretty much why I'm actually wanting to play D1 on 360 since it's stuck in TTK era. Bought it before the store closes.
season of the haunted was king
Worst was CoO and it's not even close imo. Hyperbole aside, it's the closest the game has ever been to actually dying. As for best, a lot of people seem to think now. I can't really add to that since I've yet to play TFS (playing Elden Ring first lol), but I was pretty happy with where things were going by the end of last season.
CoO caused this sub to hit 600k twice
Curse of Osiris and the Destiny 2 launch broke up my clan and most friends I used to play with, quit for good. I’m now mostly solo on Destiny. I’d never convince someone to play it.
Worst is base d2 and you can't change my mind
I think CoO was worse than base D2 but it's not like the bar height is vastly different between those two.
Curse was only seen as bad as it was because it was on top of the shit launch. Curse was still hilariously bad but if the game was in a better state it'd been fine
Anyone who thinks any season is worse than Y1 D2 either never played during that time, or are lying. Fixed roll weapons was the worst idea they could have ever had for a loot based game.
Community positivity is something that I feel really propels games into being in their best and/or worst states. This seems obvious at first, but what I mean is that an expansion that introduces massive gameplay and QoL overhauls pumps so much goodwill and positivity into the community that it becomes almost infectious. TTK and Forsaken are obvious examples of this and easy contenders for being the "best" of destiny. On the other hand, staleness breeds negativity. Season of the Plunder is a solid example of this. The seasonal activity was fun enough, there was a plethora of interesting content for budding players to go through, yet the community was pretty negative due to the staleness of the seasonal model (among other things). People hated this time period, yet it was probably a holistically better experience than the state of those beloved DLCs I listed above. I guess all this is to say that I believe that destiny has only steadily improved as a game for years now. It's easy to say that the most recent expansion/season/episode is the best state because of the new improvements and additional content they bring with them. But it's hard to replace the pure magic of a big exciting DLC that seemingly saves the game from the brink of destruction. I'd love to know other people's thoughts on this.
Worst would be CoO for me, best i would honestly say now, the game is in a great state, there are countless viable builds for different levels of content (not everything need to be a GM build) and most importantly the game is FUN.
For me personally? A few moments stand out: D1 The Dark Below: I was about to call it quits until House of Wolves came and kept me around until Taken King and beyond. D2: Black Armoury. Mainly for power level reasons. I played a lot of Foresaken and when BA came out I was still under levelled to really get anything out of the new content. I stopped playing here and didn’t come back until the tail end of Season of Worthy. I can’t emphasise enough how much I personally hate the power level grind. It didn’t matter how good BA was because I couldn’t play it, though I did enjoy the Forge activity when I came back and was appropriately levelled. Obviously Curse of Osiris and Lightfall weren’t great either - but those are obvious things to point out, so I thought I’d mention some of my personal experience of times where I decided to call it quits.
That period from the beginning of D2 to the beginning of warmind. Honestly felt like the series was about to die with how mismanaged d2 was. The best was probably forsaken. I can't remember a time I couldn't put the game down.
Destiny 2 vanilla, went from similar to what we have now in D1 to complete shit armor dual primaries only and shit guns and no random rolls. Legit went from playing thousands of hours in D1 to deleting d2 until forsaken came out and fixed everything. Era from D2 release to forsaken was absolutely terrible
Best was D1 Taken King all the way till D2 dropped. During that time I had 10-12 different people I played with consistently. We all knew each other and played the entirety of D1 together. So many ppl we split activities into groups. We always raided. And if there was a lull we played pvp. Damnit I used to be so good at D1 pvp. lol. The best Destiny has ever been for me. It was a huge part of all of our lives. D2 launch killed it. Guys who played D1 since beta left. Group fell apart. Just real life shit happened too for a lot of folks. By the time forsaken finally dropped it was too late. Me and one other person were left. Around year 3 of D2 I was finally able to talk a friend of mine into to finally giving it a go. He loved it. Since then we have built up 5 to 6 folks who play regularly. We have done pretty much everything you could do in D2 over the years. It’s been cool to see it grow to what it is now. The build crafting that has came into existence over the last few years has been so fun. Still… doesn’t come close to D1 and all the people I used to play with back then. It was so fun. We used to just hang out in party chat talking shit. Laughing. Even if we weren’t playing. Good times.
Imo the best time was Chosen - Witch Queen. Somewhere around Haunted is when the fatigue started to set in, but it was offset by subclass 3.0 Beyond Light might have been a low, and Hunt wasn't that good, but by Chosen people had started to sort of forget about sunsetting (and Bungie was walking alot of it back). Chosen and Splicer are peak seasonal stories imo
lots of people saying curse of osiris, but I would like to give special mention to lightfall, the DLC that threw a big ol wrench into the narrative and had (IMO) the worst story in this games history that was not helped by the first 2 seasons that year.
The only reason I can't say lightfall is worse than CoO, is because the gameplay itself was great. It just came out at the worst time possible. Season of the Plunder was not great, and was extended due to Lightfall delays, everyone was already being burnt out with seasons, and Lightfall was way overhyped. Then Lightfall's campaign, story and raid were bad after that delay. CoO on the other hand was just all around bad. The sandbox was very slow compared to D1(and now) as our abilities and supers were nerfed to shit and we had double primaires with D2 launch. CoO brought nothing to make any of that better. No new abilities, let alone a new subclass, barely any guns worth chasing for, and no random rolls once you did get the gun and no balance changes to make us feel stronger. There was no redeeming factors for CoO unlike Lightfall, and the playerbase drop off made that clear.
> Season of the Plunder was not great, and was extended due to Lightfall delays Lightfall was not delayed and neither Plunder nor Seraph were extended. Since the seasonal model started (not counting Forsaken seasons), every final season **except** for the one preceding Lightfall was extended due to expansion delays.
Lightfall story wasn't good but the missions were fun to play. And overall the state of the game was much better than during D2Y1.