10 Reasons Why Destiny 2 Is Bad And How To Make It Better

Updated:

11 Dec 2023

Destiny 2 is a game fraught with problems, as veterans thereof know all too well. Far be it from me, your humble tierlist maker, to say the contrary.

Most of my opinions are echoes of what people in the community have been saying for years upon years, but there are a lot of problems with Destiny 2 that should have been fixed years ago. Let’s take a look at the uglier side of our favorite looter-shooter, shall we?

10. Nightmare Hunts, Empire Hunts, Exo Challenges, and Wellspring

To be fair, these four cool activities are pretty fun. Wellspring’s a bit more of a timegated boss combined with a public event, but Exo Challenges in particular is an extremely unique experience.

The bad side? There’s literally no reason to play them. When you have a game like Destiny 2 that’s all about loot, having an activity that rewards you with a dummy-rolled High Albedo or Crystocrene Strides ain’t gonna cut it when you could just go farm Legend Lost Sectors for exotics.

Destiny 2 has a lot of legacy content that doesn’t really have a reason to play. This isn’t quite true of older raids, but why play Garden of Salvation when you could farm King’s Fall or Vow of the Disciple? Pinnacles? Who cares about the useless power grind? A new system of rewards needs to be implemented for these legacy activities, like Skeleton Keys in Destiny 1. Something to make the player think it’s worth their time.

9. Lacking Campaign Experience

The Witch Queen Legendary campaign was stellar, both in terms of writing and gameplay. It was a hearkening back to the old Halo days, a solid story with interesting characters and a dynamic difficulty level.

Unfortunately, the writing, gameplay, and rewards of the two other campaigns still in the game suck, as well as a massive piece of the narrative (Red War and Forsaken) gone missing as well.

As much as Bungie would like to forge ahead and create new content, I believe some care needs to be given to old campaigns. The writing of Beyond Light is pretty much Beyond Repair at this point, but a legendary difficulty coupled with better rewards might be a good idea.

Shadowkeep could have similar things done to it, and Forsaken needs to return along with Red War if we’re supposed to have a decent campaign experience in the game once more.

8. Hurrying New Players To The Endgame

Part of the fun in Destiny was the journey to the top. As with any MMO, not everything should be accessible to the character as soon as they jump into the game. Joe who started yesterday can leap into LFG and do raids along with Bob the veteran who’s been playing pre-Alpha.

Needless to say, this cuts the leveling Experience completely out of the game (and we’ll talk about that next) and feels unrewarding to have all your hard work trumped by new players who just got into the game.

If you fall behind in an MMO, you fall behind. It’s just that simple. If you start late, you start late. Some kind of robust leveling system should be instituted to gatekeep endgame content like Raids, Dungeons, Trials of Osiris, Iron Banner, and more.

7. The Leveling Experience

Ah, yes. You mean the Leveling Experience that used to exist, now only existing in the memories of veterans. After you have some kind of gatekeeping measure in place, you need to give new players a good experience as they level up. Right now you have the Season Pass and Power Level, both of which don’t give any meaningful upgrades.

Traditionally, the leveling experience has included a decent campaign, an unlocking of powers through XP, and an endgame of activities as soon as the player hits level cap. Right now, the campaign experience sucks and you can unlock space magic through glimmer, so that BS has got to go.

Instead, institute a system of class trainers (complete with those Traveler Shard missions where you get new supers, perhaps introduce Seeds of light) and make it so that you can’t get legendaries until near or at cap level and exotics until afterwards. You need to give the player the feeling that they’re growing in power, something Destiny 2 really doesn’t have right now.

6. Power Level

Power Level is a pain point for a lot of players, particularly how Bungie is managing it. Every season, your power level is essentially reset to be ground out in a few more months to get ready for GMs and Trials, but that’s something nobody’s too keen on anymore.

The thing about Power Level is that it actually serves as the leveling system in Destiny, and it’s one of the poorest I’ve seen in any video game. Your actual level is put towards the Season Pass, which is a terrible idea for leveling. Power level should be backseated for experience-based leveling, and maybe removed altogether. Maybe it should be changed to influencing how high your power goes after hitting level caps to make things like GMs and Master Raids easier, but in any case, Power Level in its current institution needs to be replaced by real leveling.

5. The State of Crucible

I don’t have much to say on this subject since Bungie just decided to update it, but I still have some concerns. My biggest concern by far is how distressingly long it took for Bungie to rework the competitive playlist. I hope we won’t see much more of this slow response nonsense.

Second, there’s still no “ultimate reward” for reaching max rank in the competitive playlist. This change has a lot of people pissed, and Bungie just needs to make an emblem, a shader, a special cosmetic, or pretty much anything to let experienced players flex.

The team over at Bungie said they were playing with such ideas post Lightfall, but with every respect I can pay we need those changes at Lightfall at the latest. These changes should have come months or even years ago, and waiting past Lightfall to implement these much-needed changes is a terrible idea.

4. Crafting And All Its Many Warts

Ah, crafting. Personally, my biggest pain point in the game right now and part of the reason why I haven’t picked up Destiny 2 in a few days now. Crafting feels like such a waste of time: you can sink so much time into farming Shuro Chi for levels, even more time farming for red boxes, and tons of crafting materials…all so that you can get a gun that’s not too much better than a non-crafted version.

No dice. This has to change pronto. First of all, leveling needs to take less time: activities completions like Raid encounters, Crucible matches, Strikes, and Gambit should grant more weapon experience, as should enemy killing. Just playing as you normally would with a weapon equipped for four or so hours should net you ten levels of experience.

In addition, when you unlock crafted perks on a weapon, they should stay crafted. As icing on the cake, the best change Bungie could make is to let all normal versions of perks on weapons be able to be crafted as soon as you shape the weapon. Do that, and they’re in business.

3. Master Raids

Simply put: Master Raids are a waste of your time. Don’t play them. Boring, frustrating, difficult in the worst way imaginable, and with useless rewards to compensate. This one is also one of the easiest fixes in gaming history, so I’m actually ashamed of how bad it really is.

Instead of slathering the raid with champions, remove them altogether (on second thought, just take them out of the game entirely). Instead, make it so that every challenge must be completed or it’s a guaranteed wipe. Then, make Adept raid weapons drop with Enhanced perks in two selectable columns. Leave increased health pools and burns on. Simple as that, Bungie.

2. Eververse

If there’s anything that annoys players, it’s the greedy monetization of Event Cards, Dungeon Passes, and thousands of items in the cash shop. Now, if people are going to waste their money, that’s one thing that’s none of my business, but the way things are locked behind ridiculous paywalls is simply infuriating.

Thought you bought the Dungeon along with the season? Tough luck, chum! You gotta spend twenty more bucks now. Oh, what’s that? You bought the expansion in hopes that you’d get a season? Didn’t read the fine print, I see. What’s this? You think that buying the Dungeon pass will allow you to have the Upgraded Event Card? Haw haw, you’re funny.

Jeez, Bungo. Just put everything behind the Deluxe Edition and take the cash shop out of the Director. Greedy monetization annoys players to no end. Look, I get that Bungie’s out to get your money first and foremost, and I can’t blame them for that. That’s how businesses work. But when overbearing monetization is actively hurting player experience, it has to reform.

1. The New Player Experience

Oh, boy. Where to start with this one? Well, Destiny 2 is a very complicated game. It’s a vibrant world full of mystery, a party full of fun-loving characters, a place to solve puzzles and make memories. However, if first impressions are anything to go by, Destiny 2 is a shallow mobile game with annoying characters, cheesy dialogue, and a half a million other things that don’t make sense.

Any bad word in my locker would be suitable to be attached to Destiny 2’s New Player experience. The campaign sucks, it doesn’t begin to explain things like armor affinity/energy, mods, pinnacle and powerful drops, Raids, how Trials will beat your buns off, among many, many other things.

I vote for the NPE to be immediately replaced by the Red War and Forsaken campaigns, for new tutorials to be introduced that explain complicated game mechanics, an in-game LFG for new players’ convenience, a refined UI, and a simplification of the game’s overcomplicated monetization. And we need it to happen yesterday.

If you enjoyed this article, do me a favor by dropping a comment below. Be sure to check out my other articles for more Destiny 2 content. And if you’ve ever wanted to get into writing, I can give you some friendly advice at thewritersrack.com, where I blog daily Monday-Friday. Looking for your next fantasy fiction read? You might want to check out Praetors of Lost Magic, Book 1: The Mage’s Gambit on Amazon, soon to be a finished trilogy!

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Titus Van Kleeck

I'm a young author with 2-3 years of experience in fiction, nonfiction, and blog posts. However, I've been playing games all my life, and (though I'm somewhat of a scrub) I love writing about them!

Gamer Since:

2005

Favorite Genre:

RPG

Currently Playing:

Destiny 2

Top 3 Favorite Games:

Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void, Crysis 3, World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor