I don’t think looter-shooters (and loot games in general) are inherently limiting, but loot needs to be exciting. I’ve played thousands of hours of Path Of Exile, and hundreds of hours of other looter games, and what holds my interest is interesting loot and build variety/depth. That simply doesn’t happen in Destiny. Compare Destiny to Borderlands, for instance, and you can see how boring the loot really is. Look at games like Path Of Exile, Grim Dawn, or Last Epoch, and you can see how boring the skill trees are. In all of those other games, I’ve had items drop where I’ve been excited to redo my entire build to accommodate it, or to make a new character built around it. In Destiny, items just don’t feel exciting enough. (Not every game needs to be as complex as Path Of Exile, but Destiny is incredibly shallow.)
And, of course, Destiny’s story has consistently been disappointing. There’s some great lore there, but they’ve failed to translate that into a well-told, engaging story over and over again.
combined with fragments, aspects and seasonal mods it’s just a spreadsheet simulator now.
When in other games I can pick something up with a big green number and purple text that indicates “this will blow shit up real good” Destiny has a icon with some circles and a dot which indicates that if the community does a few hours of research, I can look up on a third party website that this gun will increase my fire rate by 0.3% but decrease my airborne accuracy by 0
.2% unless I’m within 9 meters of 3 enemies and I threw my grenade longer than 1 second ago but sooner than 8 seconds ago in which case it’ll decrease my airborne accuracy by 0.1% and increase any shoe-related buff cooldowns by a third of a second
See, I love spreadsheets and being able to optimise things, but I do need to actually be able to feel the impact in the gameplay, too. And yeah, Destiny is terrible for that; the buffs and upgrades you do get just feel irrelevant, for the most part. Especially with the terrible scaling system they use where you never feel any stronger against weaker enemies, just weaker against stronger enemies. When getting a huge numerical upgrade (in terms of gear score) doesn’t change anything about how the game feels to play, I think that’s poor design.
I did have a pretty bonkers warlock build that had a bunch of mods or gear that gave me rift regen, plus the boots that shoot orbs as people while I stand in a rift. I basically just used rift on cooldown and could have as many as 5 at once and spam healed the team. Also used rose to heal as well. Obviously not optimal, but I wasn’t about to spend the time collecting the obscure mods and stats that the spreadsheet wizards said I should have, only for the meta to change completely next season.
I don’t think looter-shooters (and loot games in general) are inherently limiting, but loot needs to be exciting. I’ve played thousands of hours of Path Of Exile, and hundreds of hours of other looter games, and what holds my interest is interesting loot and build variety/depth. That simply doesn’t happen in Destiny. Compare Destiny to Borderlands, for instance, and you can see how boring the loot really is. Look at games like Path Of Exile, Grim Dawn, or Last Epoch, and you can see how boring the skill trees are. In all of those other games, I’ve had items drop where I’ve been excited to redo my entire build to accommodate it, or to make a new character built around it. In Destiny, items just don’t feel exciting enough. (Not every game needs to be as complex as Path Of Exile, but Destiny is incredibly shallow.)
And, of course, Destiny’s story has consistently been disappointing. There’s some great lore there, but they’ve failed to translate that into a well-told, engaging story over and over again.
combined with fragments, aspects and seasonal mods it’s just a spreadsheet simulator now.
When in other games I can pick something up with a big green number and purple text that indicates “this will blow shit up real good” Destiny has a icon with some circles and a dot which indicates that if the community does a few hours of research, I can look up on a third party website that this gun will increase my fire rate by 0.3% but decrease my airborne accuracy by 0 .2% unless I’m within 9 meters of 3 enemies and I threw my grenade longer than 1 second ago but sooner than 8 seconds ago in which case it’ll decrease my airborne accuracy by 0.1% and increase any shoe-related buff cooldowns by a third of a second
“is that good?”
“dunno”
See, I love spreadsheets and being able to optimise things, but I do need to actually be able to feel the impact in the gameplay, too. And yeah, Destiny is terrible for that; the buffs and upgrades you do get just feel irrelevant, for the most part. Especially with the terrible scaling system they use where you never feel any stronger against weaker enemies, just weaker against stronger enemies. When getting a huge numerical upgrade (in terms of gear score) doesn’t change anything about how the game feels to play, I think that’s poor design.
I did have a pretty bonkers warlock build that had a bunch of mods or gear that gave me rift regen, plus the boots that shoot orbs as people while I stand in a rift. I basically just used rift on cooldown and could have as many as 5 at once and spam healed the team. Also used rose to heal as well. Obviously not optimal, but I wasn’t about to spend the time collecting the obscure mods and stats that the spreadsheet wizards said I should have, only for the meta to change completely next season.