https://www.vg247.com/destiny-2-player-count-all-time-low-steam-worse-than-ever
Destiny 2 is becoming increasingly unpopular amongst players, to a degree we'd never seen before.
Dude new player onboarding is fucking awful.
I tried to play with my friend and every upgrade was shit I was doing no damage to anything, anything fun was max level.
Gameplay was good but there was no incentive to play unless you invested a shit load of time.
Pvp was ok I guess?
The gun-play (and maybe movement) is the only good thing that remains of destiny.
Oh and of course music, SFX and VFX
I think that Destiny 2's biggest problem is the monetization model. They made the story be money and the grind free. It's such a shame since the feel of the combat in d2 is my all time top for gun combat.
New players come in, decide to try the free stuff to see if they like the game, get bored of the grind, and don't stick around or pay for the story.
The story is what hooks people. Other games where the story/campaign hooks people have two categories.
Category 1: lump sum payment for everything. Example: baldur's gate 3. This is the classic method where every player experiences the hook.
Category 2: free story, pay for the grind. Example: Genshin Impact. A method that most gacha's use, every player experiences the hook, get drawn in, and stick around for the grind as they wait for more story to drop in future updates.
The main problem is new players can't come in and figure out what the fuck they're doing because Bungie literally removed all the starter content and the on-boarding is literally nonexistent. I had a veteran player try to help me get into the game and it was still nearly impossible, I was just so lost because there's nowhere to start, and it's not obvious what content is worth doing.
I can't get hooked on the story, I don't know where it starts.
Yup. With the current model, only the most recent content really matters as players start with a high base power level. You don't need to do the old content with all that story (and now you can't at all) to get up to the latest patch. It's... "friendly" in that aspect, but I've introduced a few people to destiny and I've had to spend hours just to explain things the game doesn't. I've stopped recommending it since they removed the old xpacs.
Meanwhile a game like FFXIV makes you play through the entirety of every expansion before you can get to the latest, a feat that took me nearly 200 hours of gameplay. That's not great if your friend wants you to do end game raids and stuff, but the fact that they haven't removed any old content and it's actually easy to find people to group with is fantastic.
FFXIV was overwhelming at first but once I got into the groove around the second expac or so I really started to love it, and felt like the story was all worth experiencing.
Destiny with the red war campaign was new player experience at its best. Aside from the expansion system. Now they removed all the good story build up and new players are just thrown into whatever
Destiny 1 and 2 player here. Could have seen this a mile away. The complete lack of input into anything but the eververse store and dripfed seasonal content made it hard to want to show up at the end of the day. Playing the same strikes the same PvP maps and watching gambit go to pot just got overwhelmingly tedious on the players.
I really want to like D2. I used to, in Beyond Light and Witch Queen. Even playing through Forsaken long after it wasn't new was still awesome (and honestly, the gunshot at the end of that campaign's story might be the single most cathartic thing I've ever heard).
But holy fuck did Lightfall suck donkey balls.
The difficulty spike was hilariously bad. (Anyone else get real sick of getting one-shot mapped by Cabal rockets? Killing those bastards became an act of public service.) The new subclass felt like Witch Queen leftovers crudely shoehorned in. Gambit has gotten nothing but worse since I've been playing; I have yet to see a single change to that game mode that I could even partially say made it better, not once. PvP feels like suffering, and wow do people take Trials too goddamn seriously for how bad D2 PvP is.
That one expansion with it's piss poor writing and terrible gameplay changes has largely put me off the game entirely. I'm still undecided whether I will play Final Shape or watch a stream of it for the story. I want to see how this storyline ends, but I'm just not convinced it's worth playing the game in it's current state, and even less sure it's worth paying money again to do so.
Stopped playing after I bought and tried to play beyond light. With that expansion went from 100+ fps to 20-30fps with the "engine overhaul". Was up to over 1,000 hours, whole clan quit before the season was over.
Holy shit pvp was awful in that game. Try hard sweats in a game that does have true dedicated servers, what the hell.
The real issue honestly is that it's the exact same formulae for the last X years. It's boring, it gets old quick no matter how crisp the gunplay is. Bungie needs to innovate if they want to retain player base else it's just another seasonal treadmill selling battlepass.
The problem is they churn through maps and enemies instead of putting the work into making well crafted ones.
There were people with hundreds of hours in D1 despite a relatively small number of strikes because the strikes were designed properly and replayable, and the enemy races were well crafted to play well together for encounters. D2 just threw shit at a wall constantly with no care into how anything worked together.
Did you play destiny 1? It had a rocky start for sure, but once crota came out, they really hit their stride. The taken king was peak destiny, everything was fun, replayability was there, raids were great, pvp was balanced (as well as it could be), the game felt fantastic. Wrath of the machine was a slight downturn, then destiny 2 destroyed all of it. Destiny 2 has yet to live up to the high standard that destiny 1 set.
Currently, I boot it up every once in a blue moon, but I'm stuck not knowing what actually matters, what the story is, or anything. I never fully unlocked stasis because none of it made sense. The green stringy shit is cool and refreshing, but it's the same for all three classes. The game feels like poop, and this is from someone who's been playing since beta
I love this franchise, the gunplay, and movement. I really hope their management can get their shit together. This next DLC will be the deciding factor for me. If it sucks, RIP my 6 year character.