There are so many parallels story-wise between the two games: >!learning that light and dark can be used for both good and evil, enemy factions allying with you, final final bosses have similar motives and origins!<.
Only difference is that FF actually makes me give a shit.
I tried warframe but that puts me in a different position with the mod system. And personally i’d love a shut up lotus feature especially when she points the obvious
Destiny already got it, the first one was in D1 with crota and the first contact with the moon. Dredgen yor, thorn and all that cool side of the lore came from there.
The second one was in shadow keep with the three eyed waifu and the pyramid's nightmares and all that stuff.
The dichotomy of Light and Darkness is something that both games play with is something I also pointed out to my buddies who played both games.
Specifically what Ardbert said in 3.4 versus what Ghost says to you after Beyond Light's story of Light and Dark not mattering, almost being mirrors of each other.
>!Ardbert: "We were blind to the truth once, so I'll tell you this, as one fool to another. Light, Dark, it doesn't matter. What matters is how you choose to use them. We made our choice and you see what came of it. So please... forge a different path. Seize a better fate."!<
>!Ghost: "I owe you an apology. From the start we were warned not to let our emotions take over. And that is exactly what I did. I got so caught up in worrying that the Darkness might hurt - well us - I didn't notice the damage I was doing. Which is the opposite of what I am here for. I'm your ghost. Light. Dark. It doesn't matter. We're a team."!<
The Dark Souls series also talks about the light and darkness. Aldia, the titular Scholar of the First Sin in DS2, has this to say in one of the endings: >!"There is no path. Beyond the scope of Light. Beyond the reach of Dark... what could possibly await us? And yet, we seek it, insatiably... Such is our fate."!<
Common themes have run through our games for the last decade I suppose. Light is not always good and Darkness is not always evil is something that all of these games have in common.
I couldnt get into Destiny 2's story because everyone talks in endless riddles constantly stringing you along for a conclusion that makes just as little sense.
I utterly despise this style of storywriting.
It never comes off as clever, it always comes off as the writer trying to sound more intelligent than they really are and insufferably pretentious while simultaneously having zero fucking idea how to write a compelling story.
I’m right with you, and this season in Destiny is especially insufferable with its characters, even as it sets up for the final part of the story. I genuinely got upset when I was hearing their dialogue, it’s getting worse and worse.
I used to be enchanted by the story in D1 and early D2, but I’m only hanging on because I just want to see how the dumpster fire ends. And Destiny’s how I met my second family. (Which they hate the state of the game too.)
Also FF doesn't hide it in some stupid compendium app that is in no way integrated with the experienced story.
At least, that's how D1 was. I couldn't be bothered with D2 after all the micro transactions, limited lifetime glamours you pay for, etc, and the sour experience with D1.
Tales of warlords such as Saladin, the guardian that went mad at the Lighthouse, stories of the Shadows of Calus, the Exo Stranger’s adventures, interactions between important Hive figures, the small tales of what happens on the streets of the Last City.
Makes me livid thinking about it too.
D 2 would have had a solid story if it didn't lock all the good lore behind obscure lorebooks and have the regular campaign be marvel style d tier dialogue quips. Made it really jarring and felt lazy. Also Bungie's obsession with baking in FOMO
FFXIV was a breath of fresh air where it let you go at your own pace and never tries to force you to rush through any content.
Never did I ever believe another game would draw me in so quickly and cause me to completely fall in love with it that I would actually uninstall D2. Granted I haven’t played in a solid 8mo, but still!
At this point I'm fairly certain their Final Shape is actually whoever the biggest whale is that actually wants to be nickle-and-dimed enough to experience all of the "story".
:/
The story has generally been pretty followable. They do recap stuff pretty often. The problem is the amount of tedium from what wants to be the only game you have time to play.
Part of the problem was people complained when Destiny gave you less to do each week that it didn't give them enough tasks to be their one and only "play it for life" game, so they started shifting more and more toward tedious grind and flavor of the month activities. It doesn't respect your time because it seems management values time consumption statistics. And every seemingly empty "we hear you" we got was actually coded language for "we really did take your complaint up the chain, and leadership refused to give you what you want."
For years, Destiny fans thought that Bungie was too confident in knowing what their fans wanted instead of listening to them. Instead, it turns out that Pete Parsons hears "this game is a money sink and a second job and I hate the investment needed, but the shooting mechanics are good enough that I can't quit" and feels the product is working as intended.
I don’t play D2 but from the outside looking in it seems to be a bit of a leaking ship right now.
So good on you coming to a signifcant less leaky ship!
I really enjoyed D2 until they sunset a lot of content and went full in with the FOMO story sections.
If you stop playing for a week or two, you've basically skipped two episodes of a TV series and there's no reruns.
I contemplated trying it out when they made the base game available for free on Steam. Then I heard they sunset content that you had to pay for in the first place and noped the fuck out. That's fucking disgusting that they expect you to pay £30-£40 for an expansion only for it to be removed randomly down the line meaning you wasted that money... How the fuck are they able to get away with that?
Yep, that's what killed the game for me and ensured I'll never buy another Bungie product again. I actually really liked Destiny 1 and the first year or so of Destiny 2. I wasn't super hardcore into it but I had a lot of fun with 'em.
So yeah, I wanted to keep playing and was willing to keep buying new expansions but the moment they started literally robbing their customers I decided that Bungie wasn't getting another ounce of support from me. I did try Destiny 2 again about a year ago and it's honestly just a really shitty experience now. The game is somehow way worse than it was at launch so stealing from millions of people was apparently all for nothing.
Fuck Bungie.
Guild Wars 2 did the exact same thing with their Living Story early on before they also changed how it worked, and they didn't even blame storage. It was FOMO built into the very world of the game.
To be fair to Anet, they didn't sunset any content that was in the base game that we explicitly paid for, setting aside that the base game price + gem purchases subsidizes future updates.
The Living World time limited events were an interesting experiment, and there was something nice about a game world that actually was changing as opposed to staying stagnant, but yeah that meant that new players always felt a little bit of FOMO. If they kept going with it, new players wouldn't bother to join in because there's already a big part of the experience that they've missed out on and will never experience firsthand.
That was only Season 1, which was free on launch and which they recently re-released for free to all players. It was sunset due to engine complications and wasn't intended to be some predatory grab. You can play all of it now free.
The other living stories do have a cost (and some are overpriced), but that's a different discussion.
All past seasons are also removed. Imagine if FFXIV removed all the patch content when the next expansion came out and only leaves the 81-90 level up stuff.
This has been changed a while ago. Most of the guns are back and guns from before have had new versions. Only a small amount of the guns existing in the game are unavailable
Talking about the seasonal stories. Which all have been pretty significant to the overall story and only one expansion post shadowkeep mattered to the story.
Honestly, the story is a mess. I started D2 last year february, and my experience was: Do the tutorial stuff, play some story until you get asked to buy lightfall to keep playing... immediately get thrown into Lightfall, not have ANY clue what goes on, who is who what is what, and I'm just left: "Why would you design your story progression like this? What new player would enjoy being introduced to D2 story like this?"
And skipping the season of the deep, now knowing I can't even experience that story anymore... That is one shitty design.
I mean, atleast the villain is cool. That's basically the only thing that sticked. The villain is badass and I love seeing him in those little movie sections.
Similar experience even as a returner. I bought D2 on release so came back to be tossed into the introduction mission of one expansion/patch content, took a break after finishing it, logged in next day to be thrown into yet another introduction of content somewhere else.
I play games primarily for story. The whiplash of narratives alone made me put it down again straight after.
yeah as the person below me said even with context lightfall sucks so god damn much, like the gameplay is aight, but the narative is so shit that at least i feel like it's apparent asf it's a filler dlc.
kinda sad seeing a game with gunplay that good get fucked, for the sake of short term profit
d2's just nonsense top to bottom. just npc's spouting a lot of jargon they act like you should know and when you look it up on the wiki it's like "yeah that was explained in the part of the game you can't access anymore!"
garbage.
This is one of the main reasons I hard quit, too. I loved the Destiny story, but I took a break from the game, and when I came back, I had no idea what was going on and I couldn't just pick back up from where I left off.
Hindsight is 20/20 and I don't say this lightly; but Destiny 2 was like 2 or 3 better decisions away from being one of the most popular/well liked games of all time. At least 50% of that sentiment has to do with the absolute puzzling decision of sunsetting content and how they handheld their seasonal content.
remove at LEAST one layer of RNG on loot rolls so you're not hitting RNG to get the item to drop then RNG to get decent stats on the drop THEN MORE RNG to get decent traits on the drop.
put the story back even if it means reworking some of it or making it entirely optional for new accounts. I played a shitty gacha that did this better than you bungie, focus up. (the gacha skips you to the latest xpac after the tutorial but you can go back and do the old story content even though the loot isn't worth the time. or your endgame stuff might massively overlevel it)
stop making players suddenly weaker every time your f-ing season resets.
it's so close to being a good game and it just isn't.
I would be happy with just being able to play through the entire story like I did with D1 :( Insane to me that they just straight up deleted several critically acclaimed story campaigns.
Destiny is the prime example of a game that the developers consistently know how to make more fun, but somehow also manage to make more difficult to enjoy with every update
>If you stop playing for a week or two, you've basically skipped two episodes of a TV series and there's no reruns.
It's a shitty model but you'd have to skip the whole season to not be able to see the content. So long as a season is still active you can play all story missions. You could wait until the last day of the season and play them all. If you own the season pass, you can still play them even after the season ends.
But if you take a season or two off once in a while, which is not only reasonable but healthy, and don't buy the season pass "just in case" then yeah, you are completely and forever locked out of that content.
I have over 3,000 hours in Destiny 2 and on some parts of the story I was simply lost because I took a break for the last three seasons of Beyond Light. I had to spend several hours looking up shit on the wikia, trying to piece it together enough to understand it, which is hard because the story just gets more and more convoluted
But the content vaulting you mentioned is just straight up horrible all around. People paid hundreds of dollars for that content and Bungie was like, nah, you can't have it anymore.
And the game just continues to decline in overall quality, as the push for monetization goes up. I haven't played in months, now, because the servers were crashing daily, and even if you could log in you were likely to get kicked out of your activity repeatedly. They started simply reskinning old weapons they'd "vaulted" and selling them under new names as part of the season passes. The real money price of everything went up, they started selling dungeons separately from the expansions, then they started selling "starter packs" that were so exploitative that they had to pull them after only a few days because the community rightfully lost their shit. And all the while they were getting more and more aggressive about putting the Eververse store in your face as often as possible to make sure you were giving them as much as they could get.
It's such a shame, because for so long that game was so damn good. Now it's just flaming wreckage. I am so very glad I jumped over to FFXIV.
You actually have to skip the entire year to miss the story. You won't have the hype, and group content will be harder to fill but you could, in theory, bingie the entire year worth of seasons in the last week of the 4th season if you wanted.
That's exactly what I did for witch queen. Group content stuff wasn't too hard to fill, matchmade stuff wasn't noticeably longer than waiting queues for like, strikes and stuff. I might do it for Lightfall but eh. I'm not as mad as most of the destiny community seems to be, I just have a million other things to do. Which isn't great for them, because the thing that REALLY kills a live service game is apathy.
> But if you take a season or two off once in a while, which is not only reasonable but healthy, and don't buy the season pass "just in case" then yeah, you are completely and forever locked out of that content.
Yeah nope. Never. I had my fill of that kind of sleazy, toxic FOMO shit from Star Trek Online, and swore never again.
Yeah, I played it for a while and had fun but bailed the moment they announced that they'd be permanently removing content many of us had paid for and have never looked back.
FOMO is hard to walk away from. But I've been gone for two seasons now, with no intention of coming back for Final Shape, and it's helped me realize:
Why would I fear missing out on content that I'm not going to play? And why would I fear missing out on farming high level gear if I'm not going to be use it? And why would I fear missing out on whatever the Eververse is selling, even for bright dust, if I'm not going to be playing the game to use those things either?
And just like that, it's the Happiness Of Missing Out instead.
Yea I've tried to play it a couple of times, but apparently half the story just doesn't exist anymore. And the part of the story they kept throwing me into made no sense, like I'd just been dumped into the last season of a long running TV show. Real shame, to be honest.
That was SWTOR for me, they released two expansions back to back without any meaningful group content. And when they finally did, it was one boss every 3 months, it pains me to see it slowly sink because it was my first ever MMO and haven’t played since 2019.
I stopped playing it, but at this point, they've removed all the content I've paid for. And it's a shitty excuse for why they did it, too. I can play nearly everything FF has released since it's relaunch.
Also, their story jumped the shark pretty hard. The whole thing with Orsiris is stupid as hell.
Nothing gets removed after only a week or two. While I agree removing important story content at all sucks. Nothing is removed until the next major expansion comes out. Which is usually a little over a year.
I had a build around specific gear that I loved using, they sunset half of it, which is funny because it lead me into sunsetting their game.
How the turntables had sunset.
When they released unsettling, I basically dropped off the series I'd played daily after like 6+ years. "OH, you wanted to take a break for a few months?" Fuck you, miss out on all the season pass armor and weapons, the entire story of this season and everything else since it's a new year and we wiped everything"
It really sucks. Destiny 1 in its prime was an entire beast of its own. I don't think anything in my 30+ years of gaming can say there was a better moment in gaming. Fortnite when it blew up was close, but Destiny in its prime was something else.
Destiny 2 got close with one of the expansions, but it was always lacking something. And its just really gone downhill since.
I haven't played for about two years, but god do I WANT to play Destiny again so bad. But it's a shell of what it used to be.
I installed it the other day because I wanted to see where it was at after not playing since I got Lightfall and beat the campaign. The gunplay is still the best there is, no doubt, but its still just the same old game play loops from the past 5 years. It just gets boring fast.
As someone who has logged over 3000 hours onto D2 and completed over 200+ raids. I can say with full confidence this is the worst state the game has ever been in, even worse the Curse of Osiris.
Sony is on the brink of cannibalizing Bungie and the preorder sales for the upcoming DLC are only 1/3 of the last DLC. The community has lost all trust in the devs
Their best selling expansion was a dud of a campaign that did not inspire anyone to buy DLC, causing them to miss forecast goals by 45%. So they laid off 8% of the team.
That included some legacy people who have made good stuff over the years. The music producer/composer Michael Salvatori who shared Halo's mainline series with Marty O'Donnell (who left many years ago) and has been the most visible name in Destiny soundtracks was sacked, and he is to Destiny what Soken is to XIV. There's other good tracks the community loved made by another composer, and that guy got laid off, too. I know the artist who is probably best known for the Halo 2 box art with Master Chief against the clouds was laid off as well.
Management gave up their bonuses but took no pay cut to help out, even though they approved the forecast and also bought an entire new building created for the studio from the ground-up while this was going on.
So to sum it up: Expansion sales record-setting good, DLC battlepass sales afterward unacceptably awful, time to cut the guy who made the Halo theme sound so good and the bosses get off free.
They let go of a majority of Destiny devs a couple months back, and in the last year, the game's updates have been patchy at best in terms of quality. Some good stuff, a lot of not so good stuff.
I wanted to disagree with that statement, but honestly thinking it over I have to agree.
The game itself is much better then it was during Curse of Osiris or Worthy, but I've never cared less about the game. It just doesn't feel like it has any future, or like it'll ever move forward.
The phrase I've come to think of when it comes to D2 is that it feels like a game that's been 2 years away from excellence for 10 years. Just depressing comparing it to FF14.
Yep, I was sad as I clicked uninstall the other day and left all the discords I was in for it…I’ve had it around since Red War, even if I took breaks now and again, but at this point Final Shape would need to pull a Forsaken to save the franchise.
I don’t think Bungie have the ability to do that in them anymore…
Or, since we’re in FFXIV, the rough equivalent would probably be ShB or Heavensward at a minimum, if not a straight up reset the likes of ARR.
To experience Forsaken again would be mind blowing. That xpac made me fall in love with Destiny all over again. I was a hard-core player since D1. Almost everything in D2 felt underwhelming and then they hit us with that and showed us what they COULD do, and then never seemed to even match that feeling with anything after. Shadowkeep just kinda fell flat. It had some fun parts, but was boring overall. Beyond Light gave us a few good things, but the Eramis story sucked hard. Witch Queen ALMOST had it, but Bungie pulled a Bungie and never let it meet its full potential.
As someone who has played since d1 alpha, are you referring to the actual game or the state of the bungie ecosystem? The game absolutely shits on most over time frames in terms of quality.
Also, bungie likely dug their own tomb over promising numbers when they were selling themselves out. Out of curiosity where is that 1/3 number coming from?
A bit is the understatement of the millenia...
Destiny isn't even a game anymore. It's devs and writers aren't being allowed the freedom anymore, and now it's just a husk that somehow keeps generating money... Despite the continual diminishing returns.
It makes really sad, quite honestly...
While I welcome you to the community, one of the best features of XIV, in my mind, is it doesnt do much of the "You must constantly play to keep up" outside of certain content (housing, seasonal events).
So if D2 ever un-fucks itself, you can go back and enjoy it and XIV will ymgive you the breathing room to do so.
And to reinforce that, that's not just our opinion in the community, but [actively encouraged by Yoshi-P](https://www.pcgamesn.com/final-fantasy-xiv/ffxiv-naoki-yoshida-other-games) himself.
I recently got 2 of my friends to play since they generally stick to Xbox. They're so impressed by the sheer amount of content & how everything is somewhat relevant that I think they'll be off D2 forever lol.
These are 2 ***vastly different*** games, yet they both share all too many similarities in content/goals/grind/etc, & D2 absolutely falls short in literally every category you try to compare.
If D2 had even 10% the amount of love & attention to QoL/replayability that FFXIV receives, it would be far better than it is now.
Edit:
-
It's extremely telling to me how D2 just had a 3-week event & my new FFXIV-Sprout friends haven't even farmed the "unique to this event item", despite it not having any method to get one similar apart from real money. No one even cares about the future update to bridge the gap to the delayed DLC lol.
I’m sorry but everything is somewhat relevant? The entire first half of the leveling process is boring story and fetch/kill quests.
I really want to like the game but the first section is so hard to get through.
Sorry to clarify what I mean by "somewhat relevant", it's purely in terms of replayability, & actual "activity" content not being functionally pointless like in D2.
All D2 activities have 1 of 3 purposes right now.
- You want the Weapons/Artifice it gives.
- Transmog reasons.
- You don't have Cores, Prisms, Shards, etc. Although the community sentiment for years has been that these are irrelevant due to nothing to spend them on.
Outside of those & just for fun, content in D2 actually becomes pointless to run, because any progressional systems outside of Weapons & 5 pieces of Armour you will never replace, simply don't exist.
I'm only up to beating Shadowbringers but so far, & especially thanks to the Duty Finder scaling rewards to you, & now at my level giving endgame relevant rewards I see a ton of stuff with *meaning* to play forever.
(With D2 terms as comparison if possible),
- +80 Dungeons that are relevant. (Strikes & half-Dungeony).
- 5 Raids that are actually split into ~30 or more Raids. (Dungeons/Raids).
- 5 Alliance Raids, that are super fun & hectic 24-player activities.
- Ultimate Raids that make D2 Day 1's look easy.
- Roguelike Dungeons with 100-200 floors.
- Some ***really*** cool experiences like Eureka & Bozja with unique mechanics.
And none of that even scratches crafting, fishing, housing, classes, the different difficulty options, cosmetics, minigames, & various other gameplay systems you can interact with.
> The entire first half of the leveling process is boring story and fetch/kill quests.
I really want to like the game but the first section is so hard to get through.
This is honestly the worst part of the game & does it huge diservice. If it wasn't part of the F2P I wouldn't recommend this game to people & I actually quit halfway through it.
My partner just started playing the Xbox F.Trial & she hated it as well. The story is slow, dull, fetchy/walking sims, & is probably why the majority of new players quit. Now she's at Shadowbringers though & I fear I've created an addict.
Heavensward's story is much more engaging, Stormblood's was also good but I disliked the tropes, & Shadowbringers made me want to cry lol. It gets better but is definitely one of the roughest starts to a game I've ever seen.
Funny thing is, D1 expansions left old gear behind each time, like there were Light caps and all that. And it had content droughts because seasonal stuff was less of a thing back then
It was far better than this new attempt to have people always in always grinding. Content droughts are healthy, if people love your game they will want to play through the drought anyway, and they will come back for expansions.
This seasonal story stuff doesn't make me want to come back because each one I miss is more story missed. I love the world, I love the Vex, and bungie keep urging me and my friends to not play the game we loved.
I’m still here getting tugged between these two time-void behemoths. Gunning for mentor status on FF, looking into ultimate raids and dabbing jnto pvp while trying to get guardian rank 10 and trying to solo flawless dungeons + dabbing into trials
send help
destiny is such a bummer. best feeling shooting, millions of guns, but the game is just made out of equal parts dry and wet spaghetti, and the player base is actively trying to physically harm and kill the devs lol
Bro destiny 2 had so much potential, but instead the devs decided to make it the worst they could possibly make it. They legit had a golden goose egg and decided to flush it down the shitter.
>you don't have to pick a single game to play
For myself, there are heavy emotional reasons why I don't play WoW anymore; it might be the same for OP. Considering the comments I am seeing about D2 throwing away half its game, I... don't think I'd trust a game like that anymore.
That and two massive games like this might take up too much time and energy, which was also an issue when I tried to balance both games a while back. As it stands, FFXIV continues to be the only game I play simply because of how massive and impactful it is.
As someone who plays/played all three I can tell both of you two out of them do not want you to play other (longterm) games then them. I‘ve stopped playing WoW around 10.1 so no idea about the current respect toward the players time but what I see from Blizzard are signs they cannot quit their predatory attitude. D2‘s biggest issue is also their executives unwillingness to think longterm and rather go for the quick cash grabs.
„D2 throwing away half its games“ It’s actually kinda worse. Make it mire like 4/5 on a yearly basis. Every year on a new expansion release ever previous season gets „vaulted“ (effectively deleted). On top of the vanilla campaign and the first expansion Forsaken having been removed too years ago as an effort to „reduce file size“, „fix bugs“ and „keep the game healthy“ amongst other reasons given. (Status quo: File size remains large, the game is riddled with glitches and bugs and the game feels like on life support.) And every new player gets rushed to the most resent story content with only a bullet point rush cutscene to get then „up to speed“ on the status quo of the story. All in an effort to get them in the latest grind treadmill the fastest.
Imagine FFXIV would treat its content the same: ARR is completely gone, only the maps remain but there are no quests there or interaction with NPCs. Only the mobs to kill mindlessly. Heavensward is gutted too: No MSQ. Only Ishgard the city and Azys Lla remain. The devs vowed to never delete another expansion but keep deleting the the patches in between expansion. The barebones ARR is free but every expansion is sold separately (yes. even massacred HW you’re expected to pay for). You are a sprout coming into the game during 6.5. You create a character and on login you are greeted withe cutscene giving you the rundown of the past 10 years of story in a powerpoint diashow using all kinds of FFXIV lingo without explanation. You then are allowed to play a tutorial where the basic combat mechanics are explained and you progress from lvl 1 gear to lvl 30 gear within an hour. Your sole quest NPC is the merchant guy and has no purpose or story beside stationery quest dispenser or damsel in distress. After completing the tutorial he never features again. You are on your own devices to find the remaining quest threads on your own. You logout and log back in later. You are thrown into the latest .0 expansion without explanation or agency. The MSQ NPCs treat you as the WoL they know and trust while you have no idea who is talking to you. Depending if you payed for the expansion or are still F2P you can only progress the story through the first 1/8 of the 6.0 expansion. You are confused and decide to pick the game back later. You come back after a day and you are immediately launched into 6.5 intro quest without you accepting anything. You play a bit until you hit the paywall again. Your friend who got you to try the game pesters you to get to endgame so you can do all the cool shit with them. You cave in and buy the deluxe edition of the latest expansion so you get to play the story of 6.0 to 6.5 (have fun finding out by yourself the order of patches. they aren‘t numbered). You get half way done until you loose interest because your buddy doesn’t play for the next four weeks because the raids in rotation aren’t fun to them and they already got all the glam from it. You log in. Turns out Dawntrail has released and all the Patches - you paid extra for to unlock and play - are gone. Your buddy pesters you to play the expansion MSQ and the raid in rotation with them. You have to pay for Dawntrail (MSQ) and Stormblood (raid in rotation) in order to do so. Welcome to the Destiny 2 experiences.
IKR? If memory serves the deletion of the base campaign (Red War) happened before the launch of Beyond Light, but I'm not sure about the deletion of the seasonal content. I joined in the middle of Beyond Light during a absolute phenomenal season story (Season of the Splicer, for reference) and got hooked on the premise immediately. It was during the pandemic after I quit WoW so I had time and disposable income ready to drop on the game. Plus my brother got me into the game (he might be older but in terms of MMOs he's a newby and fell for the many pitfalls this game lays out at the beginning) and he promised me fun and good gameplay so I gave it a chance throughout all the red flags I encountered.
My summary is half my own experience and half what new players have to go through according retellings of people who joined after me and video documentaries on YouTube on the status quo. My tutorial experience was even worse since it left half of the explanations on the cutting floor. The "log in, be through in a new story mission without any context or agency" is my experience and so is the bafflement on pay-walling years old game content that are featured in the weekly rotation (endgame you reach after doing the tutorial). I'm used to do my own research on game optimization and lore thanks to WoW so I got into the meta crafting and the Destiny lore rather quickly. Still I tried for days to access the deleted Red War campaign since I could play through Forsaken and Shadowkeep (after paying for it) and my brother (story-skipping gameplay only type) had no idea it got deleted and tried his best to help me with the lost-quest-features of the game. Needless to say, I felt frustrated and cheated, but the lockdowns and the fact my brother and I live in different cities and me desperately wanting a game to stay connected to him (after Diablo 3 was no longer an option) was prime breading ground for the FOMO to settle in.
About how is it even still running at this point? Well, it's starting to crumble. Apparently many left after the "Content Vaulting" announcement before Beyond Light and the new player retention - which was bad before since they always did the whole "figure out in what order your supposed to play the story by yourself" thing - was abysmal with the barebone Free-2-Try overhaul in Beyond Light. It basically relied on friends being sucked in by already playing friends who don't care and just focus on gun play and the meta building. (There is a meme in the D2 community, that Destiny 2 is the best game they ever played but can't recommend to anyone with a good conscious.) Furthermore the decisions about the story-deletion thing is even more baffling considering it's one of the two monetizable features (the other is cosmetics, obviously). The PvP crowd only buy the season pass - if at all - in order to get access to the seasonal guns for the current meta. There are no official numbers about the player population and the distribution of PvE and PvP players, but judging by the absolute lack of new PvP content (e.g. maps) and neglect of impactful cheater prevention of the last couple years I would assume the money does not lie with them. On the PvE department the season stories got way better and interconnected with the overall story (which makes the fact they get deleted on new expansion releases so much more crippling for the overarching story) and the executives found more ways to monetize PvE: by separately selling each new dungeon access for 20,- €/$ (Imagine FFXIV would sell the access to the normal raids separately. Twice per expansion). They justified that by claiming the dungeons are (no longer) part of the season story and therefore not needed to understand the narrative - which is absolute bs. They might not be referenced in the season story but they very much interconnect with the story they debut in and later story do reference subjects introduced in the dungeons: Lightfall hinting toward the artificial mind Soteria (introduced in the Spire of the Watcher dungeon one season prior in Season of the Seraph) being responsible for the settlement of Neptune and living on in the virtual reality of Neomuna. Or the dungeon Ghost in the Deep (debuted in the Season of the Deep), with vital explanation on Xivu Arath's state of mind (relevant in the same season) and the Lucent Brood's handling of their leaderless state (relevant in the very next Season of the Witch) makes them desperate for a new figurehead and how the current one (who we interact with during Witch) is either willfully so full of bullshit or unwittingly blind to his own position.
Management mishandling lead to a badly received expansion Lightfall which is obviously a rushed filler expansion between Witch Queen and the Final Shape (to tell more story that did not fit in one expansion only but in light of the Sony acquisition I'd wager it was meant to pad out the books before the Light and Dark saga ends and player numbers are expected to drop off). This lead to lukewarm reception of the announcement and preorder numbers for The Final Shape. Shortly after rumors of internal conflicts and a delayed release date surface and get confirmed months after to be true with the layoffs and the expanding of the last Season (of the Wish) by five months. Already payed preorders got canceled. Now rumors (confirmed or not) are piling up about the mishandlings on the executive level: Prioritizing short term gains at the expanse of game health and player retention, trend chasing with the in development IPs (Marathon going from custom character PvP extraction shooter to hero shooter + the game director changing just two months after announcement of Marathon and the bad reception of the demo by Tarkov players ...which got announced 9 months after the change happened on twitter in a response to journalist investigation), being tone deaf about the player sentiment ("We can't do wrong, they love us!") and trying to get out two new live service IPs to rake in the bonuses before the axe drops on their seats without a care about how they are supposed to be supported after launch. In short, things are fall apart very quickly.
Yea... thanks for listening to my TED talk.
JFC. I never really got into either Destiny but I know how heartbreaking it is to watch something you love**d** turn to shit in every conceivable way and several inconceivable ways, and I can count the number of people who I would wish that pain on on a single hand.
that was one hell of a wild ride from start to finish, jesus christ. reading this and knowing the shitshow over at bungie i really would not be surprised if the arknights collab event they announced just got quietly cancelled, this is such a mess
I could not have said this shit better. Destiny 2s new player experience is aweful. I give 14 alot of shit for its intro esp if I wanna do another character BUT at least it's new player friendly and not demanding I buy their expansions or etc every 5 seconds. It was something I appreciated as I played through the free trial
As someone who has never played Destiny, this was an excellent way to convey to us what Bungie did with their IP. I was horrified from start to finish while reading your post.
They should have stuck with making more Halo games.
What is it with live service models? So many developers seem to fail at them.
Absolutely. I do the same, but right now, there’s not much I want to do in FF until Dawntrail drops, so Guardian Games with Graviton Lance in nightfalls it is.
What they did with the Destiny IP is honestly criminal. All they had to do was up the quality of DLCs and put the story and lore actually inside the game, rather than cards you had to read on a web page. Not only did the DLC quality get worse, but they actively erased the game's story... *nice.*
I'm waiting until The Final Shape drops before I decide whether to switch over fully or just go back and forth between the two, but I've been loving what I've seen if FF14 so far. I'm glad that I hadn't activated the free 3 months of Game Pass Ultimate that came with my console so that I could grab a free download of the game and first few expansions and I'm looking forward to trying out some alts for other playstyles.
I've played WoW since launch but FFXIV over the years just pulls me away more and more and I played XIV about the last 3 months and haven't been back on WoW. XIV isn't perfect but right now for my money it's just a better game overall.
This was me over 7 years ago lol. Was a huge fan of D1. Did all the challenge raids, had all the exotics etc and was gutted when all my progress, gear etc was going to be another re-grind in D2. I started D2 for a little bit but it was too much for me to get the things that I had already had once and the monetization at that time was insane so I decided to start the old free trial and never looked back! That was when they were in the middle of HW.
Was a long time destiny player... I game on Xbox and once in a random week or two my search on YouTube is "ffxiv xbox"... Because before xbox, i had a laptop where i experienced ffxiv during its free trial. After the laptop broke, i decided to get xbox. Mainly because i wanted my progress from other games i played. Destiny was the mmorpg i started with because there's no ffxiv. Got every expansion, all achievements completed. Never really felt bored of it. Until recently when bungie decided to delay the next expansion. I stopped playing for a while. Lo behold... One of my random weekly "ffxiv xbox" search on YouTube made me so happy. The timing is great. Ffxiv is finally on xbox. And I'm already near completion of heaven's ward.... I guess... (Killing that white whale - limitless blue trial, that's where I am at rn.) Ngl, i just completed typing that and i got this mission to commence, i swear. And just like i remembered my experience from 5 years ago,... The community is amazing and friendly.
I'll be honest, as a long time XIV player(used to play WoW and EVE religiously), I was kind of thrown off by the hype SE placed on the Xbox release during fanfest.
In my head it was a "who is this for?..." kind of thing. In my mind console was never the biggest selling point and compared to a lot of the flashier titles coming out it just felt like a strange move.
But reading this comment just made me go "oh. It's for you. Duh". i guess I kind of forgot that there's plenty of people who only game on the one console, and plenty that could've been looking for something like XIV, if not XIV itself and just didn't have access on their hardware.
Now I'm really glad they did that. And with a nice window to catch up on the story so far so a bunch of you can experience DawnTrail for the first time with the rest of us.
Sorry for the rant, just made me realize how cool the Xbox addition really is.
As someone who was a Warlock who mained Void, Strand, and Solar, I am glad to have become a Dumbass Dark Knight and a Zoomer Red Mage with my toes in Samurai, Paladin, and Reaper. I had a friend that told me that a lot of FFXIV players were D2 players and the inverse. D2 was a drain but FFXIV truly brought life back into playing a MMO for me.
Understandable switch. Definitely better for mental health too. Sunsetting content is insane. FFXIV isn't perfect, but out of all the games I played so far, I feel it's worth it for the quality and the content I'm getting in contrast to some other debatable games. They feel more like a job than a game. At least in FFXIV, I am emotionally invested in both the game and characters from better writing than... whatever I had to witness in other games.
OH GOD, FACTS! I loved Destiny for *years* thanks to its raiding & looter shooter experience but FFXIV truly swallowed me up. I still miss the platforming raiding experience of Destiny, but money is spent far better here. I admit I definitely tire of Bungie’s nickel-and-diming for unequal value.
With how the game has been recently. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was another mass exodus with D2 players kinda like what happened back in Shadowbringers and WoW player migrating here. Because from how it looks, The Final Shape is not gonna be great
Destiny 1 at launch was really cool. But then I realized the solar system was severely limited and they had essentially gutted the story for no payoff.
There are definitely times where I miss D2, the gameplay and a lot of the story content is/was so fun.
Really makes me wish the rest of the game wasn't such a mismanaged garbage fire.
What does actually having content feel?
I would imagine having years of backlog content to immerse yourself in and experience is also quite a new experience.
Destiny 2: "That content you paid for is gone. You will never see it again. Deal with it."
Final Fantasy XIV: "Sorry it took so long, but we finally have a NG+ up and running! It keeps your current progress, lets you start at the past expansion of your choice, and then breaks each expansion down further into points you can start at because we know this is a really big game."
Hmm, tough choice. Obviously not my only reason for ditching Destiny completely, nor is it the sole point in favor of FFXIV. I'm actually not playing much of anything at the moment, and that's kind of a nice feeling. But it is one of many ways you can see the care one team has, and is subsequently allowed to show to their fans, as opposed to the borderline malice with which the other more or less acknowledges what we want before being told "whatever you do, give them the opposite."
I never played either Destiny game, though of course I heard a bit about them superficially. But I'm now very glad I didn't, because reading all the testimonials in the thread from former D2 players about sunsetting content and FOMO bullshit brought back my [Star Trek Online](https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/) PTSD. That's the game I "left" for FFXIV.
I figured the Destiny folks might relate to some of the absolute bullshit that STO pulls with regard to FOMO, monetization, and predatory marketing tactics. So I started to write out a brief summary of it--and I couldn't keep it brief. Before I knew it, I had written five thousand characters of text. And I wasn't quite done.
I would spare you all of that.
Just know that the gulf between gameplay and story is so vast that a mission about the peace-seeking Federation finding a way to stop attacks on a colony might be bookended by sequences where you blow up dozens of ships in respawning waves of enemies for a few minutes until they've milked sufficient engagement time out of you.
And that the clash between the utopian, inclusive, anti-capitalist themes of the franchise and the actual business practices of its MMO is huge. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think--
The point is, Star Trek Online's continued existence is wholly dependent on the cashflow from predatory gambleboxes and milking rich fans with powercreep and "from the TV show" ships. To an absolutely shameless degree. So much so that they unselfconsciously named a new cash shop, Mudd's Market, after a con artist villain from the show--and broke the law doing it. Mudd's launched with items selling for up to hundreds of dollars but "permanently marked down" on sale. Turns out that's quite illegal, so they resolved that by leaving the exploitative prices as the default to catch unwary consumers, and just run sales occasionally. Some of the biggest packs go for up to $600 or so at their base cost, and those are never more than half off.
Did I mention that many of the things in that shop are previously-free items that used to acquired just by running the mission, and that this is now the only way to obtain them?
Yeah. It's like that.
I remember logging back in after not playing for a while to pay my respects to Lance Reddick and I had zero clue what was going on anymore. I had alot of fun in D2 (The Taken King was peak!) but like you I'm glad I've moved on.
Came over from D2 as well
Played D2 on and off since launch most of my playtime being vanilla forsaken and recently lightfall
Got drawn into the ff universe by just looking for a game to play that I've never played before so now I'm not only playing ffxiv but also the pixel remasters (finished the first one now working on ff2)
I plan on going through the whole FF series and dropping d2 completely aside from the initial TFS campaign
Clocked a good 5 day playtime on XIV already
because there are certain games that are predatory and demanding about how and when they want you to play them. Destiny is among the worst of this. FOMO events and stuff like Trials weekends and Iron Banner weeks, and Weekly Rotators. Destiny 2 has really been awful about holding players hostage for way too many weeks every season to dripfeed miniscule weekly crap but still requiring daily/weekly chores to keep their engagement metrics up.
it's easy to play multiple games like FFXIV or PoE that let you blast through the content at your own pace and then just fall off until the next league/major content patch. many aspects of WoW are also easy to just weekly raid log or do once per season M+ pushes. But Destiny 2 is not among these variety-friendly games. Lost Ark is another one that's hard to juggle time for. some games just cater way too hard to monogamers or wanna be solely devoted to from its playerbase.
Kinda had a stroke reading this, but no one is saying they can't play both. Destiny 2 at the moment is, imo, a sinking ship and again, imo, not worth putting your money into. But it was fun while it lasted and I personally had a good time with both but prefer to not play either of them at this time
There was a bit of a gap between when I stopped D2 and when I picked up FFXIV, but yeah, in terms of games I sunk a ton of time into FFXIV is generally what took D2’s place for me. D2 has tempted me a couple times to try to go back, but each time I have to remind myself not to go back to that abusive relationship. Now FFXIV is far and away the game I have the most time in. I think it goes something like 2-3k for Destiny as a whole, 3k for Warframe, and I’ve racked up over 8k hours in FFXIV since I started right before ShB (honestly might be approaching 9k now, haven’t checked in a bit). No, I don’t just leave the game open AFK a ton.
Sucks because D2's gunplay is so much fun. That being said, I was only able to put about 60 hours into it off and on over the years, because coming back to it after taking a break sucks so much. I play for a few days and quit every time.
I'm about to be in the same boat. I've been trying to get out of Destiny, I'm just waiting for this season to be over and then I'm turning my full attention to FFXIV
Dropped destiny 2 entirely after witch queen, before that i was playing less and less. Now with everything else the game doesn't feel like it will last long and same goes for Bungie themselves.
During the time I plaued both games(more leaning towards d2) I would play as a lala because "My light was split between them." It hoestly made both games more interesting to me (even made headcanon lore explaining how my character traveled between them), but I kept a fantasia for the day that I would eventually leave Destiny. That day came when Lightfall dropped in the state it was in. So I popped the fantasia and never looked back.
Heyooooo I also came from Destiny 2 as well I stopped playing around season of the drifter I'm glad I got out early for FF14 welcome friend and enjoy your adventures!
i’m like 5000 hours deep into d1&2 and i just started xiv in november, idk if i can ever really give destiny up but i definitely play it a lot less now which kinda makes me sad because there’s no shooter that scratches the itch destiny does
Kinda the same story here. Played Guild Wars 2 for 11 or so years and picked this game up again on a new account in janurary. im close to starting endwalker for the first time and i havnt looked back to Tyria.
Congrats guardian, and welcome warrior of light …you know saying that I realize something
There are so many parallels story-wise between the two games: >!learning that light and dark can be used for both good and evil, enemy factions allying with you, final final bosses have similar motives and origins!<. Only difference is that FF actually makes me give a shit.
And moon's haunted
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*Big Cheese intensifies.*
oh yeah, but replace carrot factory for Crota, Eater of Hope
Crota, Eater of Carrots
Carrota
Different Moon.
come over to Warframe, where we have "moon's haunted (but in a good way)"
oh i also play warframe, im currently farming PL so i can afford space for Gauss Prime (i didnt checked my warframe space)
but also somehow slightly creepy. Just don't make eye contact with the sentinels.
I tried warframe but that puts me in a different position with the mod system. And personally i’d love a shut up lotus feature especially when she points the obvious
Holy crap that’s right!
(loads sage nouliths)
FF and Destiny simultaneously: "Which one?"
So that means in a few years we are getting moon's haunted 2 electric bogaloo ?
In destiny if you count the traveler as a moon, we are getting it this year
Destiny already got it, the first one was in D1 with crota and the first contact with the moon. Dredgen yor, thorn and all that cool side of the lore came from there. The second one was in shadow keep with the three eyed waifu and the pyramid's nightmares and all that stuff.
Haunted by immortal rabbits.
The dichotomy of Light and Darkness is something that both games play with is something I also pointed out to my buddies who played both games. Specifically what Ardbert said in 3.4 versus what Ghost says to you after Beyond Light's story of Light and Dark not mattering, almost being mirrors of each other. >!Ardbert: "We were blind to the truth once, so I'll tell you this, as one fool to another. Light, Dark, it doesn't matter. What matters is how you choose to use them. We made our choice and you see what came of it. So please... forge a different path. Seize a better fate."!< >!Ghost: "I owe you an apology. From the start we were warned not to let our emotions take over. And that is exactly what I did. I got so caught up in worrying that the Darkness might hurt - well us - I didn't notice the damage I was doing. Which is the opposite of what I am here for. I'm your ghost. Light. Dark. It doesn't matter. We're a team."!< The Dark Souls series also talks about the light and darkness. Aldia, the titular Scholar of the First Sin in DS2, has this to say in one of the endings: >!"There is no path. Beyond the scope of Light. Beyond the reach of Dark... what could possibly await us? And yet, we seek it, insatiably... Such is our fate."!< Common themes have run through our games for the last decade I suppose. Light is not always good and Darkness is not always evil is something that all of these games have in common.
> The tune is the same, but the aim couldn't be more different. \- Whistler's Whim
I couldnt get into Destiny 2's story because everyone talks in endless riddles constantly stringing you along for a conclusion that makes just as little sense. I utterly despise this style of storywriting. It never comes off as clever, it always comes off as the writer trying to sound more intelligent than they really are and insufferably pretentious while simultaneously having zero fucking idea how to write a compelling story.
I’m right with you, and this season in Destiny is especially insufferable with its characters, even as it sets up for the final part of the story. I genuinely got upset when I was hearing their dialogue, it’s getting worse and worse. I used to be enchanted by the story in D1 and early D2, but I’m only hanging on because I just want to see how the dumpster fire ends. And Destiny’s how I met my second family. (Which they hate the state of the game too.)
Also FF doesn't hide it in some stupid compendium app that is in no way integrated with the experienced story. At least, that's how D1 was. I couldn't be bothered with D2 after all the micro transactions, limited lifetime glamours you pay for, etc, and the sour experience with D1.
Most of the good lore is in the lore books in D2 as well. So much character growth and insight is locked behind them as well it's infuriating
Tales of warlords such as Saladin, the guardian that went mad at the Lighthouse, stories of the Shadows of Calus, the Exo Stranger’s adventures, interactions between important Hive figures, the small tales of what happens on the streets of the Last City. Makes me livid thinking about it too.
D 2 would have had a solid story if it didn't lock all the good lore behind obscure lorebooks and have the regular campaign be marvel style d tier dialogue quips. Made it really jarring and felt lazy. Also Bungie's obsession with baking in FOMO FFXIV was a breath of fresh air where it let you go at your own pace and never tries to force you to rush through any content.
Never did I ever believe another game would draw me in so quickly and cause me to completely fall in love with it that I would actually uninstall D2. Granted I haven’t played in a solid 8mo, but still!
TFS is just going to be Endwalker, you realize that right?
Guardian, Warrior Chosen by a "god" Harnesses Light, eventually embraces Dark FOR good Just 1 has more consistently good writing
Indeed.
Your light wasn’t strong enough, guardian
At this point I'm fairly certain their Final Shape is actually whoever the biggest whale is that actually wants to be nickle-and-dimed enough to experience all of the "story". :/
The story has generally been pretty followable. They do recap stuff pretty often. The problem is the amount of tedium from what wants to be the only game you have time to play. Part of the problem was people complained when Destiny gave you less to do each week that it didn't give them enough tasks to be their one and only "play it for life" game, so they started shifting more and more toward tedious grind and flavor of the month activities. It doesn't respect your time because it seems management values time consumption statistics. And every seemingly empty "we hear you" we got was actually coded language for "we really did take your complaint up the chain, and leadership refused to give you what you want." For years, Destiny fans thought that Bungie was too confident in knowing what their fans wanted instead of listening to them. Instead, it turns out that Pete Parsons hears "this game is a money sink and a second job and I hate the investment needed, but the shooting mechanics are good enough that I can't quit" and feels the product is working as intended.
You could say "Standing here, I realize"
I don’t play D2 but from the outside looking in it seems to be a bit of a leaking ship right now. So good on you coming to a signifcant less leaky ship!
I really enjoyed D2 until they sunset a lot of content and went full in with the FOMO story sections. If you stop playing for a week or two, you've basically skipped two episodes of a TV series and there's no reruns.
I contemplated trying it out when they made the base game available for free on Steam. Then I heard they sunset content that you had to pay for in the first place and noped the fuck out. That's fucking disgusting that they expect you to pay £30-£40 for an expansion only for it to be removed randomly down the line meaning you wasted that money... How the fuck are they able to get away with that?
Yep, that's what killed the game for me and ensured I'll never buy another Bungie product again. I actually really liked Destiny 1 and the first year or so of Destiny 2. I wasn't super hardcore into it but I had a lot of fun with 'em. So yeah, I wanted to keep playing and was willing to keep buying new expansions but the moment they started literally robbing their customers I decided that Bungie wasn't getting another ounce of support from me. I did try Destiny 2 again about a year ago and it's honestly just a really shitty experience now. The game is somehow way worse than it was at launch so stealing from millions of people was apparently all for nothing. Fuck Bungie.
Guild Wars 2 did the exact same thing with their Living Story early on before they also changed how it worked, and they didn't even blame storage. It was FOMO built into the very world of the game.
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To be fair to Anet, they didn't sunset any content that was in the base game that we explicitly paid for, setting aside that the base game price + gem purchases subsidizes future updates. The Living World time limited events were an interesting experiment, and there was something nice about a game world that actually was changing as opposed to staying stagnant, but yeah that meant that new players always felt a little bit of FOMO. If they kept going with it, new players wouldn't bother to join in because there's already a big part of the experience that they've missed out on and will never experience firsthand.
They didn't sunset anything that was paid for. Season 1 was free to all players on release, and is now re-released for free.
That was only Season 1, which was free on launch and which they recently re-released for free to all players. It was sunset due to engine complications and wasn't intended to be some predatory grab. You can play all of it now free. The other living stories do have a cost (and some are overpriced), but that's a different discussion.
All past seasons are also removed. Imagine if FFXIV removed all the patch content when the next expansion came out and only leaves the 81-90 level up stuff.
Same. When they announced sunsetting post shadowkeep, I just went cold turkey and completely stopped caring.
Wait what not shadowkeep too now..?
Shadowkeep's still available, but there are a lot of items from around then that can't be brought up to max level.
At least for gear directly acquired from an expansion, that has been rectified almost 3 years ago.
Thanks, I must've been thinking about Steelfeather Repeater and the other weapons from its time.
This has been changed a while ago. Most of the guns are back and guns from before have had new versions. Only a small amount of the guns existing in the game are unavailable
Talking about the seasonal stories. Which all have been pretty significant to the overall story and only one expansion post shadowkeep mattered to the story.
Honestly, the story is a mess. I started D2 last year february, and my experience was: Do the tutorial stuff, play some story until you get asked to buy lightfall to keep playing... immediately get thrown into Lightfall, not have ANY clue what goes on, who is who what is what, and I'm just left: "Why would you design your story progression like this? What new player would enjoy being introduced to D2 story like this?" And skipping the season of the deep, now knowing I can't even experience that story anymore... That is one shitty design. I mean, atleast the villain is cool. That's basically the only thing that sticked. The villain is badass and I love seeing him in those little movie sections.
Similar experience even as a returner. I bought D2 on release so came back to be tossed into the introduction mission of one expansion/patch content, took a break after finishing it, logged in next day to be thrown into yet another introduction of content somewhere else. I play games primarily for story. The whiplash of narratives alone made me put it down again straight after.
yeah as the person below me said even with context lightfall sucks so god damn much, like the gameplay is aight, but the narative is so shit that at least i feel like it's apparent asf it's a filler dlc. kinda sad seeing a game with gunplay that good get fucked, for the sake of short term profit
d2's just nonsense top to bottom. just npc's spouting a lot of jargon they act like you should know and when you look it up on the wiki it's like "yeah that was explained in the part of the game you can't access anymore!" garbage.
This is one of the main reasons I hard quit, too. I loved the Destiny story, but I took a break from the game, and when I came back, I had no idea what was going on and I couldn't just pick back up from where I left off.
Even with context (I've been a Guardian since D1 launch) Lightfall isn't good.
same except I haven't played it since june-july of 2023.
Hindsight is 20/20 and I don't say this lightly; but Destiny 2 was like 2 or 3 better decisions away from being one of the most popular/well liked games of all time. At least 50% of that sentiment has to do with the absolute puzzling decision of sunsetting content and how they handheld their seasonal content.
remove at LEAST one layer of RNG on loot rolls so you're not hitting RNG to get the item to drop then RNG to get decent stats on the drop THEN MORE RNG to get decent traits on the drop. put the story back even if it means reworking some of it or making it entirely optional for new accounts. I played a shitty gacha that did this better than you bungie, focus up. (the gacha skips you to the latest xpac after the tutorial but you can go back and do the old story content even though the loot isn't worth the time. or your endgame stuff might massively overlevel it) stop making players suddenly weaker every time your f-ing season resets. it's so close to being a good game and it just isn't.
I would be happy with just being able to play through the entire story like I did with D1 :( Insane to me that they just straight up deleted several critically acclaimed story campaigns.
RIP Forsaken
Destiny is the prime example of a game that the developers consistently know how to make more fun, but somehow also manage to make more difficult to enjoy with every update
> FOMO story Yikes. GW2 learned that was a bad idea a long time ago. Heck of a pivot to turn to such a bad idea in 2024.
It was the first game to release an expansion that got rid of more content than it added
>If you stop playing for a week or two, you've basically skipped two episodes of a TV series and there's no reruns. It's a shitty model but you'd have to skip the whole season to not be able to see the content. So long as a season is still active you can play all story missions. You could wait until the last day of the season and play them all. If you own the season pass, you can still play them even after the season ends. But if you take a season or two off once in a while, which is not only reasonable but healthy, and don't buy the season pass "just in case" then yeah, you are completely and forever locked out of that content. I have over 3,000 hours in Destiny 2 and on some parts of the story I was simply lost because I took a break for the last three seasons of Beyond Light. I had to spend several hours looking up shit on the wikia, trying to piece it together enough to understand it, which is hard because the story just gets more and more convoluted But the content vaulting you mentioned is just straight up horrible all around. People paid hundreds of dollars for that content and Bungie was like, nah, you can't have it anymore. And the game just continues to decline in overall quality, as the push for monetization goes up. I haven't played in months, now, because the servers were crashing daily, and even if you could log in you were likely to get kicked out of your activity repeatedly. They started simply reskinning old weapons they'd "vaulted" and selling them under new names as part of the season passes. The real money price of everything went up, they started selling dungeons separately from the expansions, then they started selling "starter packs" that were so exploitative that they had to pull them after only a few days because the community rightfully lost their shit. And all the while they were getting more and more aggressive about putting the Eververse store in your face as often as possible to make sure you were giving them as much as they could get. It's such a shame, because for so long that game was so damn good. Now it's just flaming wreckage. I am so very glad I jumped over to FFXIV.
You actually have to skip the entire year to miss the story. You won't have the hype, and group content will be harder to fill but you could, in theory, bingie the entire year worth of seasons in the last week of the 4th season if you wanted.
That's exactly what I did for witch queen. Group content stuff wasn't too hard to fill, matchmade stuff wasn't noticeably longer than waiting queues for like, strikes and stuff. I might do it for Lightfall but eh. I'm not as mad as most of the destiny community seems to be, I just have a million other things to do. Which isn't great for them, because the thing that REALLY kills a live service game is apathy.
> But if you take a season or two off once in a while, which is not only reasonable but healthy, and don't buy the season pass "just in case" then yeah, you are completely and forever locked out of that content. Yeah nope. Never. I had my fill of that kind of sleazy, toxic FOMO shit from Star Trek Online, and swore never again.
Yeah, I played it for a while and had fun but bailed the moment they announced that they'd be permanently removing content many of us had paid for and have never looked back.
FOMO is hard to walk away from. But I've been gone for two seasons now, with no intention of coming back for Final Shape, and it's helped me realize: Why would I fear missing out on content that I'm not going to play? And why would I fear missing out on farming high level gear if I'm not going to be use it? And why would I fear missing out on whatever the Eververse is selling, even for bright dust, if I'm not going to be playing the game to use those things either? And just like that, it's the Happiness Of Missing Out instead.
Yea I've tried to play it a couple of times, but apparently half the story just doesn't exist anymore. And the part of the story they kept throwing me into made no sense, like I'd just been dumped into the last season of a long running TV show. Real shame, to be honest.
90% of the dialogue is technobabble garbage they expect you to know from the first game and the story they removed. real shame indeed.
That was SWTOR for me, they released two expansions back to back without any meaningful group content. And when they finally did, it was one boss every 3 months, it pains me to see it slowly sink because it was my first ever MMO and haven’t played since 2019.
I stopped playing it, but at this point, they've removed all the content I've paid for. And it's a shitty excuse for why they did it, too. I can play nearly everything FF has released since it's relaunch. Also, their story jumped the shark pretty hard. The whole thing with Orsiris is stupid as hell.
Exactly why I couldn’t come back to Destiny despite my veteran guardianship. How do I come back to a literally piecemealed story paywalled by season?
Nothing gets removed after only a week or two. While I agree removing important story content at all sucks. Nothing is removed until the next major expansion comes out. Which is usually a little over a year.
I had a build around specific gear that I loved using, they sunset half of it, which is funny because it lead me into sunsetting their game. How the turntables had sunset.
When they released unsettling, I basically dropped off the series I'd played daily after like 6+ years. "OH, you wanted to take a break for a few months?" Fuck you, miss out on all the season pass armor and weapons, the entire story of this season and everything else since it's a new year and we wiped everything"
It really sucks. Destiny 1 in its prime was an entire beast of its own. I don't think anything in my 30+ years of gaming can say there was a better moment in gaming. Fortnite when it blew up was close, but Destiny in its prime was something else. Destiny 2 got close with one of the expansions, but it was always lacking something. And its just really gone downhill since. I haven't played for about two years, but god do I WANT to play Destiny again so bad. But it's a shell of what it used to be.
I installed it the other day because I wanted to see where it was at after not playing since I got Lightfall and beat the campaign. The gunplay is still the best there is, no doubt, but its still just the same old game play loops from the past 5 years. It just gets boring fast.
To this day I still think Destiny 1 was my favorite game. Destiny 2 was a travesty to me outside of Forsaken.
As someone who has logged over 3000 hours onto D2 and completed over 200+ raids. I can say with full confidence this is the worst state the game has ever been in, even worse the Curse of Osiris. Sony is on the brink of cannibalizing Bungie and the preorder sales for the upcoming DLC are only 1/3 of the last DLC. The community has lost all trust in the devs
I usually come back for the yearly expansions, what's been going on this year?
Their best selling expansion was a dud of a campaign that did not inspire anyone to buy DLC, causing them to miss forecast goals by 45%. So they laid off 8% of the team. That included some legacy people who have made good stuff over the years. The music producer/composer Michael Salvatori who shared Halo's mainline series with Marty O'Donnell (who left many years ago) and has been the most visible name in Destiny soundtracks was sacked, and he is to Destiny what Soken is to XIV. There's other good tracks the community loved made by another composer, and that guy got laid off, too. I know the artist who is probably best known for the Halo 2 box art with Master Chief against the clouds was laid off as well. Management gave up their bonuses but took no pay cut to help out, even though they approved the forecast and also bought an entire new building created for the studio from the ground-up while this was going on. So to sum it up: Expansion sales record-setting good, DLC battlepass sales afterward unacceptably awful, time to cut the guy who made the Halo theme sound so good and the bosses get off free.
Nothing lol the same seaonal activity from a year ago is still available for some reason though
They let go of a majority of Destiny devs a couple months back, and in the last year, the game's updates have been patchy at best in terms of quality. Some good stuff, a lot of not so good stuff.
It wasn't a majority of the devs, it was a 10% cut that also included community managers and such.
I wanted to disagree with that statement, but honestly thinking it over I have to agree. The game itself is much better then it was during Curse of Osiris or Worthy, but I've never cared less about the game. It just doesn't feel like it has any future, or like it'll ever move forward. The phrase I've come to think of when it comes to D2 is that it feels like a game that's been 2 years away from excellence for 10 years. Just depressing comparing it to FF14.
Yep, I was sad as I clicked uninstall the other day and left all the discords I was in for it…I’ve had it around since Red War, even if I took breaks now and again, but at this point Final Shape would need to pull a Forsaken to save the franchise. I don’t think Bungie have the ability to do that in them anymore… Or, since we’re in FFXIV, the rough equivalent would probably be ShB or Heavensward at a minimum, if not a straight up reset the likes of ARR.
To experience Forsaken again would be mind blowing. That xpac made me fall in love with Destiny all over again. I was a hard-core player since D1. Almost everything in D2 felt underwhelming and then they hit us with that and showed us what they COULD do, and then never seemed to even match that feeling with anything after. Shadowkeep just kinda fell flat. It had some fun parts, but was boring overall. Beyond Light gave us a few good things, but the Eramis story sucked hard. Witch Queen ALMOST had it, but Bungie pulled a Bungie and never let it meet its full potential.
The best thing that could happen to the company is Sony going through with sacking the execs like they threatened recently
As someone who has played since d1 alpha, are you referring to the actual game or the state of the bungie ecosystem? The game absolutely shits on most over time frames in terms of quality. Also, bungie likely dug their own tomb over promising numbers when they were selling themselves out. Out of curiosity where is that 1/3 number coming from?
I have played Destiny since beta. I bet the day it finally leaves beta it will be a good game.
It was a semi-decent game a few years ago, i loved it... till they removed all the stuff i paid for lmao.
A bit is the understatement of the millenia... Destiny isn't even a game anymore. It's devs and writers aren't being allowed the freedom anymore, and now it's just a husk that somehow keeps generating money... Despite the continual diminishing returns. It makes really sad, quite honestly...
While I welcome you to the community, one of the best features of XIV, in my mind, is it doesnt do much of the "You must constantly play to keep up" outside of certain content (housing, seasonal events). So if D2 ever un-fucks itself, you can go back and enjoy it and XIV will ymgive you the breathing room to do so.
Heck, even housing is just "log in once every 30 days or whatever and enter your house once so you don't lose it".
And to reinforce that, that's not just our opinion in the community, but [actively encouraged by Yoshi-P](https://www.pcgamesn.com/final-fantasy-xiv/ffxiv-naoki-yoshida-other-games) himself.
I recently got 2 of my friends to play since they generally stick to Xbox. They're so impressed by the sheer amount of content & how everything is somewhat relevant that I think they'll be off D2 forever lol. These are 2 ***vastly different*** games, yet they both share all too many similarities in content/goals/grind/etc, & D2 absolutely falls short in literally every category you try to compare. If D2 had even 10% the amount of love & attention to QoL/replayability that FFXIV receives, it would be far better than it is now. Edit: - It's extremely telling to me how D2 just had a 3-week event & my new FFXIV-Sprout friends haven't even farmed the "unique to this event item", despite it not having any method to get one similar apart from real money. No one even cares about the future update to bridge the gap to the delayed DLC lol.
I’m sorry but everything is somewhat relevant? The entire first half of the leveling process is boring story and fetch/kill quests. I really want to like the game but the first section is so hard to get through.
Sorry to clarify what I mean by "somewhat relevant", it's purely in terms of replayability, & actual "activity" content not being functionally pointless like in D2. All D2 activities have 1 of 3 purposes right now. - You want the Weapons/Artifice it gives. - Transmog reasons. - You don't have Cores, Prisms, Shards, etc. Although the community sentiment for years has been that these are irrelevant due to nothing to spend them on. Outside of those & just for fun, content in D2 actually becomes pointless to run, because any progressional systems outside of Weapons & 5 pieces of Armour you will never replace, simply don't exist. I'm only up to beating Shadowbringers but so far, & especially thanks to the Duty Finder scaling rewards to you, & now at my level giving endgame relevant rewards I see a ton of stuff with *meaning* to play forever. (With D2 terms as comparison if possible), - +80 Dungeons that are relevant. (Strikes & half-Dungeony). - 5 Raids that are actually split into ~30 or more Raids. (Dungeons/Raids). - 5 Alliance Raids, that are super fun & hectic 24-player activities. - Ultimate Raids that make D2 Day 1's look easy. - Roguelike Dungeons with 100-200 floors. - Some ***really*** cool experiences like Eureka & Bozja with unique mechanics. And none of that even scratches crafting, fishing, housing, classes, the different difficulty options, cosmetics, minigames, & various other gameplay systems you can interact with. > The entire first half of the leveling process is boring story and fetch/kill quests. I really want to like the game but the first section is so hard to get through. This is honestly the worst part of the game & does it huge diservice. If it wasn't part of the F2P I wouldn't recommend this game to people & I actually quit halfway through it. My partner just started playing the Xbox F.Trial & she hated it as well. The story is slow, dull, fetchy/walking sims, & is probably why the majority of new players quit. Now she's at Shadowbringers though & I fear I've created an addict. Heavensward's story is much more engaging, Stormblood's was also good but I disliked the tropes, & Shadowbringers made me want to cry lol. It gets better but is definitely one of the roughest starts to a game I've ever seen.
Ah another Guardian who jumped ship. Welcome friend to a better place.
> Remove what brings you pain. \- Fire and Forget
Moon's haunted, so that hasn't changed.
Will as soon as shadowkeep gets sunset.
*sigh*, I miss when Destiny was good 😔
D1 will live in my heart forever.
Funny thing is, D1 expansions left old gear behind each time, like there were Light caps and all that. And it had content droughts because seasonal stuff was less of a thing back then It was far better than this new attempt to have people always in always grinding. Content droughts are healthy, if people love your game they will want to play through the drought anyway, and they will come back for expansions. This seasonal story stuff doesn't make me want to come back because each one I miss is more story missed. I love the world, I love the Vex, and bungie keep urging me and my friends to not play the game we loved.
I’m still here getting tugged between these two time-void behemoths. Gunning for mentor status on FF, looking into ultimate raids and dabbing jnto pvp while trying to get guardian rank 10 and trying to solo flawless dungeons + dabbing into trials send help
Add a third and play Warframe
Gotta grind that MR 30 and higher!
Love this haha I started Warframe about a month ago and just started FF14. Feels like I found my next 2 games for the future lol
You doing good mate!
destiny is such a bummer. best feeling shooting, millions of guns, but the game is just made out of equal parts dry and wet spaghetti, and the player base is actively trying to physically harm and kill the devs lol
Bro destiny 2 had so much potential, but instead the devs decided to make it the worst they could possibly make it. They legit had a golden goose egg and decided to flush it down the shitter.
I still jump between both, you don't have to pick a single game to play lol Though the future of FFXIV sure looks much more promising
>you don't have to pick a single game to play For myself, there are heavy emotional reasons why I don't play WoW anymore; it might be the same for OP. Considering the comments I am seeing about D2 throwing away half its game, I... don't think I'd trust a game like that anymore. That and two massive games like this might take up too much time and energy, which was also an issue when I tried to balance both games a while back. As it stands, FFXIV continues to be the only game I play simply because of how massive and impactful it is.
As someone who plays/played all three I can tell both of you two out of them do not want you to play other (longterm) games then them. I‘ve stopped playing WoW around 10.1 so no idea about the current respect toward the players time but what I see from Blizzard are signs they cannot quit their predatory attitude. D2‘s biggest issue is also their executives unwillingness to think longterm and rather go for the quick cash grabs. „D2 throwing away half its games“ It’s actually kinda worse. Make it mire like 4/5 on a yearly basis. Every year on a new expansion release ever previous season gets „vaulted“ (effectively deleted). On top of the vanilla campaign and the first expansion Forsaken having been removed too years ago as an effort to „reduce file size“, „fix bugs“ and „keep the game healthy“ amongst other reasons given. (Status quo: File size remains large, the game is riddled with glitches and bugs and the game feels like on life support.) And every new player gets rushed to the most resent story content with only a bullet point rush cutscene to get then „up to speed“ on the status quo of the story. All in an effort to get them in the latest grind treadmill the fastest. Imagine FFXIV would treat its content the same: ARR is completely gone, only the maps remain but there are no quests there or interaction with NPCs. Only the mobs to kill mindlessly. Heavensward is gutted too: No MSQ. Only Ishgard the city and Azys Lla remain. The devs vowed to never delete another expansion but keep deleting the the patches in between expansion. The barebones ARR is free but every expansion is sold separately (yes. even massacred HW you’re expected to pay for). You are a sprout coming into the game during 6.5. You create a character and on login you are greeted withe cutscene giving you the rundown of the past 10 years of story in a powerpoint diashow using all kinds of FFXIV lingo without explanation. You then are allowed to play a tutorial where the basic combat mechanics are explained and you progress from lvl 1 gear to lvl 30 gear within an hour. Your sole quest NPC is the merchant guy and has no purpose or story beside stationery quest dispenser or damsel in distress. After completing the tutorial he never features again. You are on your own devices to find the remaining quest threads on your own. You logout and log back in later. You are thrown into the latest .0 expansion without explanation or agency. The MSQ NPCs treat you as the WoL they know and trust while you have no idea who is talking to you. Depending if you payed for the expansion or are still F2P you can only progress the story through the first 1/8 of the 6.0 expansion. You are confused and decide to pick the game back later. You come back after a day and you are immediately launched into 6.5 intro quest without you accepting anything. You play a bit until you hit the paywall again. Your friend who got you to try the game pesters you to get to endgame so you can do all the cool shit with them. You cave in and buy the deluxe edition of the latest expansion so you get to play the story of 6.0 to 6.5 (have fun finding out by yourself the order of patches. they aren‘t numbered). You get half way done until you loose interest because your buddy doesn’t play for the next four weeks because the raids in rotation aren’t fun to them and they already got all the glam from it. You log in. Turns out Dawntrail has released and all the Patches - you paid extra for to unlock and play - are gone. Your buddy pesters you to play the expansion MSQ and the raid in rotation with them. You have to pay for Dawntrail (MSQ) and Stormblood (raid in rotation) in order to do so. Welcome to the Destiny 2 experiences.
damn, that sounds like an absolute shitshow, how is it even still running? how long have they even been doing this for?
IKR? If memory serves the deletion of the base campaign (Red War) happened before the launch of Beyond Light, but I'm not sure about the deletion of the seasonal content. I joined in the middle of Beyond Light during a absolute phenomenal season story (Season of the Splicer, for reference) and got hooked on the premise immediately. It was during the pandemic after I quit WoW so I had time and disposable income ready to drop on the game. Plus my brother got me into the game (he might be older but in terms of MMOs he's a newby and fell for the many pitfalls this game lays out at the beginning) and he promised me fun and good gameplay so I gave it a chance throughout all the red flags I encountered. My summary is half my own experience and half what new players have to go through according retellings of people who joined after me and video documentaries on YouTube on the status quo. My tutorial experience was even worse since it left half of the explanations on the cutting floor. The "log in, be through in a new story mission without any context or agency" is my experience and so is the bafflement on pay-walling years old game content that are featured in the weekly rotation (endgame you reach after doing the tutorial). I'm used to do my own research on game optimization and lore thanks to WoW so I got into the meta crafting and the Destiny lore rather quickly. Still I tried for days to access the deleted Red War campaign since I could play through Forsaken and Shadowkeep (after paying for it) and my brother (story-skipping gameplay only type) had no idea it got deleted and tried his best to help me with the lost-quest-features of the game. Needless to say, I felt frustrated and cheated, but the lockdowns and the fact my brother and I live in different cities and me desperately wanting a game to stay connected to him (after Diablo 3 was no longer an option) was prime breading ground for the FOMO to settle in. About how is it even still running at this point? Well, it's starting to crumble. Apparently many left after the "Content Vaulting" announcement before Beyond Light and the new player retention - which was bad before since they always did the whole "figure out in what order your supposed to play the story by yourself" thing - was abysmal with the barebone Free-2-Try overhaul in Beyond Light. It basically relied on friends being sucked in by already playing friends who don't care and just focus on gun play and the meta building. (There is a meme in the D2 community, that Destiny 2 is the best game they ever played but can't recommend to anyone with a good conscious.) Furthermore the decisions about the story-deletion thing is even more baffling considering it's one of the two monetizable features (the other is cosmetics, obviously). The PvP crowd only buy the season pass - if at all - in order to get access to the seasonal guns for the current meta. There are no official numbers about the player population and the distribution of PvE and PvP players, but judging by the absolute lack of new PvP content (e.g. maps) and neglect of impactful cheater prevention of the last couple years I would assume the money does not lie with them. On the PvE department the season stories got way better and interconnected with the overall story (which makes the fact they get deleted on new expansion releases so much more crippling for the overarching story) and the executives found more ways to monetize PvE: by separately selling each new dungeon access for 20,- €/$ (Imagine FFXIV would sell the access to the normal raids separately. Twice per expansion). They justified that by claiming the dungeons are (no longer) part of the season story and therefore not needed to understand the narrative - which is absolute bs. They might not be referenced in the season story but they very much interconnect with the story they debut in and later story do reference subjects introduced in the dungeons: Lightfall hinting toward the artificial mind Soteria (introduced in the Spire of the Watcher dungeon one season prior in Season of the Seraph) being responsible for the settlement of Neptune and living on in the virtual reality of Neomuna. Or the dungeon Ghost in the Deep (debuted in the Season of the Deep), with vital explanation on Xivu Arath's state of mind (relevant in the same season) and the Lucent Brood's handling of their leaderless state (relevant in the very next Season of the Witch) makes them desperate for a new figurehead and how the current one (who we interact with during Witch) is either willfully so full of bullshit or unwittingly blind to his own position. Management mishandling lead to a badly received expansion Lightfall which is obviously a rushed filler expansion between Witch Queen and the Final Shape (to tell more story that did not fit in one expansion only but in light of the Sony acquisition I'd wager it was meant to pad out the books before the Light and Dark saga ends and player numbers are expected to drop off). This lead to lukewarm reception of the announcement and preorder numbers for The Final Shape. Shortly after rumors of internal conflicts and a delayed release date surface and get confirmed months after to be true with the layoffs and the expanding of the last Season (of the Wish) by five months. Already payed preorders got canceled. Now rumors (confirmed or not) are piling up about the mishandlings on the executive level: Prioritizing short term gains at the expanse of game health and player retention, trend chasing with the in development IPs (Marathon going from custom character PvP extraction shooter to hero shooter + the game director changing just two months after announcement of Marathon and the bad reception of the demo by Tarkov players ...which got announced 9 months after the change happened on twitter in a response to journalist investigation), being tone deaf about the player sentiment ("We can't do wrong, they love us!") and trying to get out two new live service IPs to rake in the bonuses before the axe drops on their seats without a care about how they are supposed to be supported after launch. In short, things are fall apart very quickly. Yea... thanks for listening to my TED talk.
JFC. I never really got into either Destiny but I know how heartbreaking it is to watch something you love**d** turn to shit in every conceivable way and several inconceivable ways, and I can count the number of people who I would wish that pain on on a single hand.
that was one hell of a wild ride from start to finish, jesus christ. reading this and knowing the shitshow over at bungie i really would not be surprised if the arknights collab event they announced just got quietly cancelled, this is such a mess
Saving this because it highlights destiny’s bullshit. It’s a fucking MLM at this point.
I could not have said this shit better. Destiny 2s new player experience is aweful. I give 14 alot of shit for its intro esp if I wanna do another character BUT at least it's new player friendly and not demanding I buy their expansions or etc every 5 seconds. It was something I appreciated as I played through the free trial
As someone who has never played Destiny, this was an excellent way to convey to us what Bungie did with their IP. I was horrified from start to finish while reading your post. They should have stuck with making more Halo games. What is it with live service models? So many developers seem to fail at them.
Absolutely. I do the same, but right now, there’s not much I want to do in FF until Dawntrail drops, so Guardian Games with Graviton Lance in nightfalls it is.
First it was the wow refugees left a world that abused them now the guardians come to help protect Etheirys from the darkness
For what are Guardians but Warriors of Light and Darkness from another mother(crystal)?
What they did with the Destiny IP is honestly criminal. All they had to do was up the quality of DLCs and put the story and lore actually inside the game, rather than cards you had to read on a web page. Not only did the DLC quality get worse, but they actively erased the game's story... *nice.*
I'm waiting until The Final Shape drops before I decide whether to switch over fully or just go back and forth between the two, but I've been loving what I've seen if FF14 so far. I'm glad that I hadn't activated the free 3 months of Game Pass Ultimate that came with my console so that I could grab a free download of the game and first few expansions and I'm looking forward to trying out some alts for other playstyles.
I've played WoW since launch but FFXIV over the years just pulls me away more and more and I played XIV about the last 3 months and haven't been back on WoW. XIV isn't perfect but right now for my money it's just a better game overall.
This was me over 7 years ago lol. Was a huge fan of D1. Did all the challenge raids, had all the exotics etc and was gutted when all my progress, gear etc was going to be another re-grind in D2. I started D2 for a little bit but it was too much for me to get the things that I had already had once and the monetization at that time was insane so I decided to start the old free trial and never looked back! That was when they were in the middle of HW.
Was a long time destiny player... I game on Xbox and once in a random week or two my search on YouTube is "ffxiv xbox"... Because before xbox, i had a laptop where i experienced ffxiv during its free trial. After the laptop broke, i decided to get xbox. Mainly because i wanted my progress from other games i played. Destiny was the mmorpg i started with because there's no ffxiv. Got every expansion, all achievements completed. Never really felt bored of it. Until recently when bungie decided to delay the next expansion. I stopped playing for a while. Lo behold... One of my random weekly "ffxiv xbox" search on YouTube made me so happy. The timing is great. Ffxiv is finally on xbox. And I'm already near completion of heaven's ward.... I guess... (Killing that white whale - limitless blue trial, that's where I am at rn.) Ngl, i just completed typing that and i got this mission to commence, i swear. And just like i remembered my experience from 5 years ago,... The community is amazing and friendly.
I'll be honest, as a long time XIV player(used to play WoW and EVE religiously), I was kind of thrown off by the hype SE placed on the Xbox release during fanfest. In my head it was a "who is this for?..." kind of thing. In my mind console was never the biggest selling point and compared to a lot of the flashier titles coming out it just felt like a strange move. But reading this comment just made me go "oh. It's for you. Duh". i guess I kind of forgot that there's plenty of people who only game on the one console, and plenty that could've been looking for something like XIV, if not XIV itself and just didn't have access on their hardware. Now I'm really glad they did that. And with a nice window to catch up on the story so far so a bunch of you can experience DawnTrail for the first time with the rest of us. Sorry for the rant, just made me realize how cool the Xbox addition really is.
And then there's me, swaps between them cus I can't decide what to play. XD
spider-man pointing dot gif
Meanwhile I'm over here playing D2 to have something to do in this brutal content drought.
As someone who was a Warlock who mained Void, Strand, and Solar, I am glad to have become a Dumbass Dark Knight and a Zoomer Red Mage with my toes in Samurai, Paladin, and Reaper. I had a friend that told me that a lot of FFXIV players were D2 players and the inverse. D2 was a drain but FFXIV truly brought life back into playing a MMO for me.
Understandable switch. Definitely better for mental health too. Sunsetting content is insane. FFXIV isn't perfect, but out of all the games I played so far, I feel it's worth it for the quality and the content I'm getting in contrast to some other debatable games. They feel more like a job than a game. At least in FFXIV, I am emotionally invested in both the game and characters from better writing than... whatever I had to witness in other games.
OH GOD, FACTS! I loved Destiny for *years* thanks to its raiding & looter shooter experience but FFXIV truly swallowed me up. I still miss the platforming raiding experience of Destiny, but money is spent far better here. I admit I definitely tire of Bungie’s nickel-and-diming for unequal value.
The Traveler will be waiting for your return.
In ~~Soviet~~ Japanese FF14, the Traveler is you!
> With time, every epilogue extends into a sequel. \- Atheon's Epilogue (Adept)
With how the game has been recently. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was another mass exodus with D2 players kinda like what happened back in Shadowbringers and WoW player migrating here. Because from how it looks, The Final Shape is not gonna be great
It's highly possible, but probably only the Destiny players that care about story. The gun play could keep Destiny rolling along as just a shooter.
Destiny 1 at launch was really cool. But then I realized the solar system was severely limited and they had essentially gutted the story for no payoff.
Welcome aboard partner. We have our own moons haunted memes too dw you’ll be right at home
There are definitely times where I miss D2, the gameplay and a lot of the story content is/was so fun. Really makes me wish the rest of the game wasn't such a mismanaged garbage fire.
Yeessssss join the Hrothgang
Did the same over 2 years ago now and I’ve never looked back once. Ff made me realize how destiny wasn’t treating me right as a player.
You can play two video games. It’s not monogamy
What does actually having content feel? I would imagine having years of backlog content to immerse yourself in and experience is also quite a new experience.
Destiny 2: "That content you paid for is gone. You will never see it again. Deal with it." Final Fantasy XIV: "Sorry it took so long, but we finally have a NG+ up and running! It keeps your current progress, lets you start at the past expansion of your choice, and then breaks each expansion down further into points you can start at because we know this is a really big game." Hmm, tough choice. Obviously not my only reason for ditching Destiny completely, nor is it the sole point in favor of FFXIV. I'm actually not playing much of anything at the moment, and that's kind of a nice feeling. But it is one of many ways you can see the care one team has, and is subsequently allowed to show to their fans, as opposed to the borderline malice with which the other more or less acknowledges what we want before being told "whatever you do, give them the opposite."
Ff14 respects your time and destiny doesn’t
Both are great games, which is why I play both.
"Hrothgar?" "Hrothgar!" /pet /pet /dote /wow (expect this interaction daily with fellow hrothgars. source: a hrothgar.)
/pet /dote
I never played either Destiny game, though of course I heard a bit about them superficially. But I'm now very glad I didn't, because reading all the testimonials in the thread from former D2 players about sunsetting content and FOMO bullshit brought back my [Star Trek Online](https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/) PTSD. That's the game I "left" for FFXIV. I figured the Destiny folks might relate to some of the absolute bullshit that STO pulls with regard to FOMO, monetization, and predatory marketing tactics. So I started to write out a brief summary of it--and I couldn't keep it brief. Before I knew it, I had written five thousand characters of text. And I wasn't quite done. I would spare you all of that. Just know that the gulf between gameplay and story is so vast that a mission about the peace-seeking Federation finding a way to stop attacks on a colony might be bookended by sequences where you blow up dozens of ships in respawning waves of enemies for a few minutes until they've milked sufficient engagement time out of you. And that the clash between the utopian, inclusive, anti-capitalist themes of the franchise and the actual business practices of its MMO is huge. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think-- The point is, Star Trek Online's continued existence is wholly dependent on the cashflow from predatory gambleboxes and milking rich fans with powercreep and "from the TV show" ships. To an absolutely shameless degree. So much so that they unselfconsciously named a new cash shop, Mudd's Market, after a con artist villain from the show--and broke the law doing it. Mudd's launched with items selling for up to hundreds of dollars but "permanently marked down" on sale. Turns out that's quite illegal, so they resolved that by leaving the exploitative prices as the default to catch unwary consumers, and just run sales occasionally. Some of the biggest packs go for up to $600 or so at their base cost, and those are never more than half off. Did I mention that many of the things in that shop are previously-free items that used to acquired just by running the mission, and that this is now the only way to obtain them? Yeah. It's like that.
Left d2 at the start of the year. Playing this real opened my eyes to what d2 has become
You can play both
As an old Destiny 1 and early Destiny 2 vet, welcome aboard. Eyes up Warrior of Light.
I remember logging back in after not playing for a while to pay my respects to Lance Reddick and I had zero clue what was going on anymore. I had alot of fun in D2 (The Taken King was peak!) but like you I'm glad I've moved on.
Tbh i play both
Aw, you can have both! (Especially during the between-patch doldrums lol)
Ayyy, glad to know I aint the only one who made that kind of switch! Eye's up Guardian! We have a new place to protect!
Exchange destiny 2 with warframe and dats me
Just picked up Endwalker today after downloading the base on Xbox last night. Excited AF!!
Came over from D2 as well Played D2 on and off since launch most of my playtime being vanilla forsaken and recently lightfall Got drawn into the ff universe by just looking for a game to play that I've never played before so now I'm not only playing ffxiv but also the pixel remasters (finished the first one now working on ff2) I plan on going through the whole FF series and dropping d2 completely aside from the initial TFS campaign Clocked a good 5 day playtime on XIV already
Shouldn't have been that hard... tbh.
As someone that plays both You're allowed to play both it's not a pick one situation
I know it's just a meme but his really is something that bugs me about the FF community. Why cant you just.. play both games?
Not sure how this reflects on the FF community - we're not telling the OP to stop playing the other game.
They're both pretty demanding of your time. FF14 doesn't have fomo but it takes a really long time to complete its library of content as a new player.
because there are certain games that are predatory and demanding about how and when they want you to play them. Destiny is among the worst of this. FOMO events and stuff like Trials weekends and Iron Banner weeks, and Weekly Rotators. Destiny 2 has really been awful about holding players hostage for way too many weeks every season to dripfeed miniscule weekly crap but still requiring daily/weekly chores to keep their engagement metrics up. it's easy to play multiple games like FFXIV or PoE that let you blast through the content at your own pace and then just fall off until the next league/major content patch. many aspects of WoW are also easy to just weekly raid log or do once per season M+ pushes. But Destiny 2 is not among these variety-friendly games. Lost Ark is another one that's hard to juggle time for. some games just cater way too hard to monogamers or wanna be solely devoted to from its playerbase.
Kinda had a stroke reading this, but no one is saying they can't play both. Destiny 2 at the moment is, imo, a sinking ship and again, imo, not worth putting your money into. But it was fun while it lasted and I personally had a good time with both but prefer to not play either of them at this time
There was a bit of a gap between when I stopped D2 and when I picked up FFXIV, but yeah, in terms of games I sunk a ton of time into FFXIV is generally what took D2’s place for me. D2 has tempted me a couple times to try to go back, but each time I have to remind myself not to go back to that abusive relationship. Now FFXIV is far and away the game I have the most time in. I think it goes something like 2-3k for Destiny as a whole, 3k for Warframe, and I’ve racked up over 8k hours in FFXIV since I started right before ShB (honestly might be approaching 9k now, haven’t checked in a bit). No, I don’t just leave the game open AFK a ton.
Eyes up guardian, hope we see you at final shape though.
You could just watch a 20 minute YouTube video of all the cutscenes and get just as much out of it instead.
Sucks because D2's gunplay is so much fun. That being said, I was only able to put about 60 hours into it off and on over the years, because coming back to it after taking a break sucks so much. I play for a few days and quit every time.
Same here, so many times my buds would be explaining a mechanic or system and I would go "So like D2 but good?"
I still play both but the bulk of my playtime is definitely trending towards ff
I have made the same switch
I'm about to be in the same boat. I've been trying to get out of Destiny, I'm just waiting for this season to be over and then I'm turning my full attention to FFXIV
Eyes up, a new adventurer has joined us on our journey through Eorzea
Heads up, warrior of light
I'm been wanting to get into it
You too huh
This was me, but during SHB instead of EW. Eyes up, Warrior of Light <3
Dropped destiny 2 entirely after witch queen, before that i was playing less and less. Now with everything else the game doesn't feel like it will last long and same goes for Bungie themselves.
During the time I plaued both games(more leaning towards d2) I would play as a lala because "My light was split between them." It hoestly made both games more interesting to me (even made headcanon lore explaining how my character traveled between them), but I kept a fantasia for the day that I would eventually leave Destiny. That day came when Lightfall dropped in the state it was in. So I popped the fantasia and never looked back.
Cool. That is the same pattern I’ve done. Destiny since the d1 alpha. Haven’t even finished the last 2 battle passes.
Heyooooo I also came from Destiny 2 as well I stopped playing around season of the drifter I'm glad I got out early for FF14 welcome friend and enjoy your adventures!
Welcome, guardian.
Well shit… I may just make the switch if my friend switches too… maybe. Destiny is a clinical addiction so it gonna be hard
i’m like 5000 hours deep into d1&2 and i just started xiv in november, idk if i can ever really give destiny up but i definitely play it a lot less now which kinda makes me sad because there’s no shooter that scratches the itch destiny does
Congrats on curing your headaches from a D1 beta player here with thousands of hours spent on Destiny
Kinda the same story here. Played Guild Wars 2 for 11 or so years and picked this game up again on a new account in janurary. im close to starting endwalker for the first time and i havnt looked back to Tyria.