One of the largest complaints you are going to hear from people who recently started to play Destiny 2 because it went free-to-play is that the game does a terrible job of introducing you to exactly what the hell you are supposed to do. As a seasoned yet casual player I can attest to this as I spend loads of time looking at requirements for various missions and have absolutely no idea what they are referring to. They will talk about how i need to get kills a certain way using a specific type of weapon such as "Arc damage" so I equip an arc damage weapon only to not have it count towards the kills. Oh, turns out it wasn't the right kind of arc damage, it has to be from a grenade and the only reason I found that out was because I jumped online and someone else had solved the problem.
Now I don't know if they made this intentionally grueling to figure out for the sake of prolonging the life of the game or to make people go online to find an answer but this happens A LOT in Destiny 2. There is also plenty of arguing online where veteran players call the new players morons for not knowing the terminology. I get it, you have been playing this game for near a decade and know all the ins and outs of it, but it is unreasonable to expect us guys who just jumped on board the gravy train to know what all of these thousands of little things actually mean.
Just to put the overall destination map into the picture and discuss this, every single one of these planets has multiple areas that are on them and sometimes you have to travel a great distance back and forth with very little in the way of actual battle happening. I guess this is meant to progress the story but in the end this is just a "fetch quest" the likes of which A Realm Reborn was so inundated with that I had to quit.
Destiny also has so many quests going on at any particular time for new players that it can be a bit overwhelming to even grasp what it is that you are meant to be doing next. So you choose some random quest-line, dive into it, get to the end of the first section and then discover that this part of the game is completely behind a paywall.
This was almost certainly done intentionally in order to entice free-to-play players to spend real-world money and I am not going to begrudge Bungie for doing this. They aren't a charity after all. It does get frustrating when yet again you go through a 20 minute section of the game, win against the very easy sub boss or boss of the level, then watch a video that is reasonably entertaining because you convince yourself that maybe it is important for me to have some idea about what is going on with the story.... then you get to the end of it and realize all additional missions are behind a paywall and always were going to be. It would have been nice if they had let me know that this was the case because I wouldn't have even bothered with doing the mission in the first place had I known.
There are a ton of DLC's in this game and I suppose that is understandable since they have been going strong since 2017, perhaps before. This is all fine and dandy for the people that have been here from the start and love it but for people like me that would probably be willing to spend some real cash to play are just kind of stuck because I don't know where I am in space and time. Does it matter which ones I do first? It doesn't seem to indicate. I suppose you could look it up online but come on now, I want to play a game not go to school. Upgrading weapons and armor to the levels of the people that I am often in group events with seems like it is a long ways off because some of these guys have rifles that take out an entire group of enemies with a single shot.
This sounds like fun and perhaps a walk in the park for new players but during these group events I actually DO want to do something to contribute and I can't when someone this OP is around. When I look into what it is that I need to do in order to get these sorts of weapons myself the videos are 30 minutes long and seem more like a dissertation than an interesting video that is fun to try to follow. I have kind of resigned myself to the fact that I am likely to never have these things. All this talk about "builds" makes my head spin when we are talking about a game of this magnitude because it is so huge that making one of the builds could likely take a very long time.... then, what if you don't like it in the end?
I have no illusion that I will ever be a top notch player in this game and it is already starting to feel like an MMO to me even though I know that technically it is not. Since I am the kind of person that is happy to have ONLY my PS-Plus membership I am a little disappointed in myself that the sort of marketing that exists in MMO's - which i swore off years ago, seem to be invading my life whether I want them to or not.
So it probably seems as though I am doing a bunch of complaining but I want you to know this: Destiny 2 is a lot of fun and every time I switch on my PS4 I head straight for it. So Bungie has definitely done something correct because I feel as though I am about a week or so away from getting hooked on it.
I will need to make a choice in the coming days: Do I commit to this and accept that I am going to have to spend money on the DLC's or do I walk away now? The mere size of the download would be reason enough for me to not re-install it if I take it off my machine.
At the moment the base game is free to play for everyone and the The Witch Queen DLC is free to PS-Plus members. That only gets you a very small part of the overall game here and just like they say... there is no such thing as free. This extension of the Season of the Witch is clearly just a method of getting you hooked so you will buy more crack.
