When Bungie announced Destiny, players the world over got hyped. An a🃏ll🧜-new IP in the age of post-Bungie Halo? Sold! It prob🥂ably helped that back in 2014, there weren’t a lot of AAA titles for the new console generation, m⛦uch less one that wasn’t part of a well-known series. The fact that Destiny felt so new and out-there for a company that had more or less stꦜuck with one g𝓀reat thing their entire career only fanned the flames of fanboyism.
When we act🦂ually got the game, opinions were divided. On one hand, it’s fair to say that Destiny ꦰis a unique experience with a potential playtime in the hundreds of hours. On the other, a litany of problems w𓃲ere noted: grinding, poor storytelling techniques, cut-and-paste side quests, and a minimalist approach to classes left some with a bad taste in their mouth. On the whole, though, the game was and is well-loved by many.
Enter Destiny 2. The announcement that Bungie would 💝already be moving on to a Destiny sequel sওurprised a great many people, who now face the same problem with perhaps a more 🏅realist perspective: will Destiny 2 be good? It certainly has a strong framework to work from, but there are already some red flags based on the𒐪 currently-limited information that we have. So let me play devil’s advocate and give you 16 reasons you should skip Destiny 2.
If you need aꩵ reminder about what was great and terrible about the original, check out our 8 Best and 7 Worst Things About Destiny.
16 Destiny 2 Took Half the Time To Make As The Original
As many players noted when Destiny originally came out, it was an absolutely massive investment. This was the fir🌞st big IP Bungie was making after Halo, after all, and as usua🉐l Bungie decided to go big. Even without considering the stunning amount of cash invested in the game’s development and marketing by Activision -- rounding out $500 million according to -- there’s another important factor in making the game the powerhouse that it is today: t🃏ime.
Destiny took approximately four years to make, around twice as much time as it is estimated Destiny 2 will take to finish. This could certainly change, leading to a delay that in itself would be concerning, but as it stands that seems doubtful; more real𝓀isti𝔉cally, Destiny 2 was simply less of the high-stakes pressure cooker that the original proved t💜o be and that could generally lead to a less well-crafted game.
15 Recycled Content Is Likely
To that ෴point, the most obvious and dangerous possibility to the game’s enjoyment could be a large degree o⛎f recycled content. If we define “recycled content” as low-effort re-skins, cut-and-paste side missions, and an overall lack of diversification and innovation on a game’s core elements, Destiny was full of it.
While the first incarnation of Destiny had a truly incredible degree of content that helped to mitigate the samey-ness of some of its content, the same cannot be said about the DLC practices that followed in the few years after. This clear lack of ingenuity—or at least unwillingness to keep at the same pace of ꦡdevelopment—has possibly bled into the sequel, as is apparent by some of the other topics on this list. If that initial level of unique and engaging content is not found in Destiny 2 before the obligatory mountains of DLC to com𒈔e, it might make the experience much more boring and repetitive than on-release Destiny ever was.
14 No Dedicated Servers To Fix Connectivity Issues…
Fans of Destiny begged Bungie for one thing perhaps more than anything else: dedicated servers. The nature of the game as inherently multiplayer-focused naturally means that connectivity issu🌠es are a huge disappointment. Connectivity was so bad in the original partially because there were no dedicated servers to host the thousand🐓s of players in-game at any given time. Instead, Bungie opted to use the systems themselves to host games, leading to widespreaꦡd host migration and an overall dull experience.
While Bungie has promised that Destiny 2 will address the is🉐sue of co♐nnectivity by using a “” approach which will reportedly nix the host migration issue altogether—done by moving all of 🌃the to the "worldserver"—the core problem of undependable c🍎onnectivity remains in question. While this is clearly a step in the right direction, the fact that such a major concern is being treated with a band-aid rather than a suture is troubling, to say the least.
13 ...And The “Solution” Makes Cheating Inevitable
Wh🍒ile the issue of 🔯host migration and general connectivity troubleshooting has plagued Destiny—and as just seen, could very well become botꦛhersome in the sequel as well—the metaphor of a band-aid versus a suture might even 𒉰be too lenient; a band-aid rarely causes new problems to arise, after all. Destiny 2’s hybrid solution could very well open the game up to aᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ new, and much more debilitating headache: cheating.
As Kyle Orland of Ars Technica , the choice to use this particular solution gives control💜 to the player while using the server as a sort of informational intermediary, meaning enterprising gamers could send “fake data” to the server about their game’s status and muck everything up for others. Orland goes on to remind us that this is exactly the kind of condition that led to The Division’s massive influx of cheaters, something Bungie re♕🐻ally ought to consider when deciding whether or not to cough up for the servers.
12 PC Port Likely Months Off... If It’s Good At All
Some of the major questions for Destiny 2 will revolve around t𝔉he PC port. Considering this is the first time PC gam꧂ers will be able to play the game, this is something of a debut to an entire market. If other major developers are the model here, that doesn’t always turn out very well; PC ports are oftentimes notorious for being terrible, even for highly visible games like the Dark Souls series. So for PC players at least, the amount of e𒉰ffort Bung💛ie puts into this port matters significantly.
Even if the PC port is decent, there are stillᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ a lot of questions to answer: when will it be released? How much content will be consol𝕴e-only? Will Bungie include all of the amenities that PC gamers are used to—FOV sliders, colorblind settings, multiple forms of anti-aliasing, etc.? None of the questions have answers yet, and Bungie is keeping it close to the chest on this one.
11 Consoles Locked At 30FPS
Despite the major milestones conso💫le games have made in the 🤪years since Destiny made its first appearance꧟ at 30FPS, and the fact that the PC will likely run at much higher rates, Destiny 2 is confirmed to run at the exact same frame rate. That’s a huge p𝓰roblem, as the flow of combat in an action game is directly tied to frame rate and 3🌊0FPS on a AAA title is something that shouldn’t satisfy console gamers.
Both the Xbox One and PS4 have shown they ca🀅n run games at 60FPS—Forza 5 and Killzone: Shadow Fall respectively, for just two examples—so there’s no excuse to artificially lock the rate at half what the system is capable of. Given, these examples are far from standard fare, but c🐽onsidering that Bungie artificially locked all consoles to 30FPS in the original to maintain consistency, this only speaks more to the homogenization of Destiny 2 for mass appeal.
10 PS4 Has The Worst Specs, But The Most Content
Speaking of specs and frame rate, why is it exactly that cons🌃oles✱ are locked to 30FPS? Oh yeah, that’s right, because . You would think, perhaps, that a company would shy away from centering its design process on the hardware wi൩th the lowest specs, considering that would lower the quality across all systems (to those who might🅰 argue otherwise, I hope you also argue that Call of Duty should be designed e🧜xplicitly for the Wii U). Not Bungie!
Aꩲnd why is that again? Right, because they have a brand deal with Sony! The console with the worst specs also has syst൩em-exclusive content.
To reiterate, the system with the best potential, the PC, is months behind, the system with the worst specs, the PS4, is incentivized, and those stuck in the middle with the Xbox One have to s💙uffer worse frame rates to maintain a singular experience. Weird design philosophy, Bungie.
9 Bungie’s Alternative To Grimoire Cards Is Vague
One of the most loathed elements of Destiny was the method of telling lore. The “grimoire cards” were collectibles that told the story through various actions in-game. Ther𓃲e’s a major problem w🔯ith this, of course; storytelling is best when it’s told through the universe.
For Destiny 2, Bungie has taken to expressing the lore more through the game...supposedly. Rather than being tight-lipped, as Bungie and Activision have been on other topics, they’ve been very explicit in hoꦿw t🦂hey intend for “”: it will be in the “adventures,” “story,” “campaign” and “scannables.” On the surface, that’s great! But if you think about it for a moment, what’s actually being said? Aren’t scannables just mechanics-based collectibles? And “adventures” are unique side content,ไ which can be missed altogether. So the quali𓆏ty of story integration inherently depends on Bungie’s skill at content apportionment—better, but not necessarily good.
8 Progress Not Imported
If the grimoire card systཧem was the most complained-about portion of Destiny, then almost assuredly the largest hurdle for this fledgling iteration is that content from your original save 𓆏can’t be transferred over. All the grinding—dozens, even hundreds of hours—gone in the blink of an eye.
Giv🌠en, some players prefer the option to start over, and the multiplayer-focused nature of the game makes it difficult to make all people happy, but the general standard I hold for games is this: more player choice is always better. It’s not like games haven’t contended with balancing issues in the past. Considering💮 the extremely heavy multiplayer focus of first-person shooters in the late-2000s/early-2010s, and the fact that, you know, Bungie already made one of the biggest ones ever, it’s not inconceivable that they could have put the effort in to make it work. At the very least, they could have done better tying it into the story than what little we’ve seen so far.
7 Chaဣracters Aren’t 🌳Transferred Unless Level 20 Or Higher
Speaking of which, there’s one little fact about this whole transferring profile🅷 business that’s irke▨d a lot of gamers: namely, that players are being allowed to transfer their c🎉ha🥂racter’s aesthetics, but only if they’re level 20 or higher and have compl𓆉eted the original.
Literally what?
If you have the infrastructure in place to do this, Bungie, why not give everyone the opportunity? You’re already dedicating in-game rewards for thꦜe longtime, high-level players🧔 of Destiny, this just seems extremely petty. It’s𓆏 doubtful that many players who were going to buy Destiny 2 would be turned off by the idea that Bungie is giving preferential treatment to certain players in aesthetics alone, but it still cues us in on the develop🃏ment process...i.e., that they’re a little out of touch.