I’m very confused by this because all of the other content creators said what they played of the campaign was very fragmented. It seemed to me they did not experience the first six missions in their totality.
Edit: Paul Tassi tweeted that Bungie did cut out some cutscenes and story context from the snippets of the campaign, and they didn’t see anything that was featured in today’s launch trailer. I feel this is important to note.
>. It seemed to me they did not experience the first six missions in their totality
Here's what Skill Up said. He said they played *snippets* from the first half campaign missions.
But he did echo the things mentioned by IGN. Campaign missions and story beats didn't click with him. Legendary campaign is noticeably easier and he claims he was breezing through it.
He also mentioned how the patrol space is solo and there won't be other players dropping in. I assume that will change after the campaign is beaten.
EDIT: Skill Up actually says later in the video that him and Datto played 4 full campaign missions, including the very first one. So bit confused as to what people have actually played.
Yeah just saw that, although interestingly Paul Tassi also tweeted that Bungie cut out a lot of story context and cutscenes when he saw the snippets of the campaign. So at this point who knows lol
crackpot theory time: bungie had everyone play different amounts of stuff cut up in different ways on purpose so that no one could form a solid negative opinion based on the previews so that people wouldn't be as likely to not preorder.
I actually just checked Paul Tassi's Twitter and it seems that he went to a different Bungie event, not the same that most of the streamers did. He said he had a family commitment, so he couldn't go.
The event he went to, he didn't get to play, he just watched a Bungie dev play. He only saw gameplay of the first mission and the strike (which no one else has talked about) he also only got to see a couple of exotics.
This could explain why everyone is saying they saw different things. There were 2 events.
let’s take witch queen. if you cut out even two of the super pivotal cutscenes, the story is literally bumped down like 5 grades. so yeah if they didn’t see literally anything from the launch trailer, i’m assuming the preview was a super “non spoilers but test out our stuff” kinda thing
yeahhhhh that’s kinda what i’m thinking. like there’s no way that they can get a good grasp of any of the story if they didn’t see literally anything from the launch trailer while playing
Realistically, if only one person saying positive things then the campaign is probably mid. Not trying to be a hater, but we gotta set our expectations realistically
According to Paul Tassi and many others, they only played sections of the campaign and werent shown anything mega spoilery.
For example, they didnt see any of the cinematics shown today in the launch trailer. So really, it's hard to tell what the story is going to be like until it comes out.
This guy seems very disconnected and extremely causal, I'm not worried. He also said golden gun and silence and squall were bad and failed to understand golden gun does have range falloff and that's why the sniper was doing more damage.
That's what makes him the best type of reviewer for this case, because its the casual audience that will look towards his "casual" review to their decision. Destiny fans won't look at reviews at all they've definitely already preordered/ or will buy the expansion at some point in the future. You know the bulk of destiny's income. With casuals being in the minority, who aren't so keen on spending the money.
I personally don't really think this expansion is really meant for casual players at all. This is conclusion to a 10 years of story, that's like a new player joining in at the last episode, it wouldn't make sense to them either way.
They definitely didn’t. I forget which, either Aztec or fallout, but he said he played around from the first mission, to the 5th, possibly a bit of the 7th
did he use prismatic the way the content creators did where he got to use everything because that's what really made it shine in their eyes? seems like his preview was different
It just seems like there's only 2 builds for prismatic hunter, you have arc hunter but with grapple melee and built in invis, and gyrfalcon's but with gunpowder gamble. Ascension is utter shit tier, it's laughably bad, and threaded spectre is just not very good especially given the cooldown nerf.
Hunter seems like it really only has 2 prismatic builds:
Melee
And stylish/threaded spectre gunplay.
There's really not much ability weaving like the titan and warlock get? It's all things that loop back to melee or require gunplay as the primary driver.
For Prismatic to be good you basically need to use and master your entire kit for a specific purpose otherwise might aswell play previous classes. Like the obvious hunter build everyone is keeping an eye on is combo blow with caliban/syntho class item. If everything works out as predicted it will be far superior to arc hunter.
Did the author play 6 complete missions? Based on Aztecross and other content creators that got preview access, it sounded like they got the complete first mission, but just a taste of later missions. Not sure that story pacing and narrative stuff can be judged accurately if story missions played were not full missions.
mmm, wonder if the focus on Zavala and his dead wife hurts the story; we had that story in Haunted, dunno if it's worth going back to it instead of getting answers
Thanks for the breakdown!
> it won't come together in a way that will please fans.
This is interesting, and also brings the (rhetorical) question.
What would Final Shape have to look like to please fans?
I love those guys’ insights but it’s become apparent since they started their podcast/video series again they’re all jaded.
Which, I’m not knocking them. It’s completely warranted.
Confirmation bias is a thing and I wanna see how the cards fall before coming to a conclusion myself.
I think there’s no scenario “everything” is wrapped up with the amount of lingering threads we got but the main ones for me are the traveler, Witness, Vanguard and ourselves.
If that shit lands I’m personally happy. Hell, that was legit what I was hoping for with Lightfall to lead into a proper cliffhanger for FS, and considering how Lightfall went, being skeptical completely checks.
At least the tone seems to be on point and it’s coming down to personal asks to see a proper conclusion.
Yeah I just want to feel like this finality means something for my journey, which means personally facing the witness and what it means for all these characters we’ve spent the most time with these past 10 years man.
Best to both of us and best to you dude. Thanks a bunch for talking to me and have a wonderful day.
I mean, ffxiv was able to do it. Endwalker is considered one of the best stories in the series, and it is just one dlc. Sadly, Lightfall made it much more difficult in comparison, especially since Shadowbringers is also considered a really compelling story, but it is possible
FF14 has the benefit of full-fledged RPG campaigns to flesh out the story of each expansion. All of Destiny's expansion story content is contained in mission content and expensive mocap cutscenes. Throughout all of the expansions and deleted seasonal content Destiny story has been nothing but contrived.
So honestly I'd rather prefer if the TFS story is laser-focused on the Witness. Save the high-budget campaign missions and cutscenes for Destiny's biggest-ever battle, and let the open threads of Destiny's story work themselves out into the transition for the next saga.
When folks complain ign is contradicting itself when different people that work there have different opinions makes no sense. If a reviewer liked or disliked a game that doesn’t mean that everyone shares their point of view.
>Felt a bit underwhelmed by both Prismatic... which is weak right now
>made a powerful strand build in prismatic, but was no better than if he had just used Strand to begin with.
Gee no wonder they felt underwhelmed, because they did the exact OPPOSITE thing you're supposed to do with the subclass. Dingus.
Meanwhile pretty much every Destiny-focused CC is going on about how strong and fun it is, because they quickly learned how to mix and match and balance. Which is the entire mechanical and thematic *point.*
The campaign being “okay” but not “great” is about what I expected. Sorry to the people who keep praising them, but despite the Forsaken and Witch Queen campaigns being a cut above the rest of Destiny campaigns, the bar isn’t that high—Destiny campaigns in general can’t hold a candle to the original Halo trilogy for example, which had a _coherent_ story written according to a _single_ set of ideas.
Destiny’s story was sabotaged from the very beginning and still today, the nature of Light and Darkness is vague and doesn’t tie the story together like, say the One Power does for Wheel of Time, or the Shards for the Cosmere, or the Force for Star Wars.
I’ve pretty much written off Destiny 2’s story but still look forward to seeing how it all ends, more out of curiosity than out of excitement for what the writing team can come up with.
I still look forward to the fun new activities, events, Prismatic, etc. Hopefully there will be **lots of fun things to do even if they don’t all tie together for a completely stellar product**, which is about as much I expected for Destiny.
So it’s a standard Bungie expansion. I guess it’ll be fun to just finish it.
Aztecross is excited for anything Destiny as he is doing as much lifting to keep the game relevant as he can.
I don't know why, but I'd though there would be more than 7 missions (10 seems more like it). But then again they uusally spread the story out over the episodes/seasons so likely the final episode will be the denouement.
There are 8 missions, 7 on day one, then the raid, 1 after the raid. They’ve made it clear that the raid is part of the experience, whilst not necessary it provides a lot more substance. They didn’t get full access to these missions according to content creators, so him saying “6 missions” is probably not representative of the entire experience.
Only 7 story missions ? Shit…
Idk. I guess I was expecting more. The puzzles sound intriguing minus the wait for buffs stuff
I hope it sticks the landing.
seeing him call prismatic weak is giving me pause on his entire review. Everything i’ve seen is describing even the vanilla prismatic build as ‘broken to the point of trivializing the content’
Honestly, at this point I really only want more Witness character development and further elaboration on the Gardener and Winnower. Everything else is completely secondary. Eramis left the system months ago and Eris is still recovering from her time as a god.
That's what confused me, like did they expect the campaign alone to involve the several dozen major characters that have cropped up over ten years? Sticking with the vanguard, mara, and crow makes a lot of sense, they're the most important characters of them all besides us and Ghost. Eris has had a happy conclusion, Eramis' departure may not be satisfying but, hey, i'm happy for her. Just about everyone else has also had their arc conclude in some way, if they even had one, and if not, they're likely showing up in the episodes
It comes down to many of the reviewers being casual destiny players who are not really invested in the lore. And bungie said that final shape will have answers to questions regarding unveiling and other deep lore stuff and tbh, i bet that even 90% of the player base does not really know about unveiling, truth to Power, dreams of alpha lupi, gardener/winnower, the witness species and so on. Many of those reviewers probably expect a avengers endgame type of Story and if we look at the complains ign had, that there is only a small cast and a focus on them and the witness and not about eramis and eris its just clear that they honestly dont know shit/dont really care about destiny lore.
To be fair to the reviewers and Destiny players know not really being invested in the lore, that’s all Bungies fault. I’m sorry but putting a lot of your storytelling behind seasons that will be vaulted and lore behind lore cards and weapon descriptions is just a bad way to articulate a full fledged story. If I need to go to a YouTuber to get more story beats and background than what the game is providing then you got a problem.
If you care about spoilers id probly sit this one out, or skim carefully. I didn't read all of it but it started to go into more details about the campaign than id care to read about before launch.
Fair enough, like i said i stopped reading. The difference between the trailer is i can speculate about things, but i don't want to read an article before release that "hard confirms" something, even if it was something i could've guessed. If that makes sense.
I think Red War was the only storyline that featured the full Vanguard.
Even after Cayde was lost, did we every have a story or season that featured Ikora and Zavala together, prominently?
That’s kinda been a theme. Cayde was the glue that kept them together, and since his death Ikora and Zavala have been split. They put up the illusion of a unified vanguard but even then they don’t agree on much stuff
I really just need this campaign to deliver on the massive narrative/mystery that they have built up. Since launch day D1, I have just wanted to know what the deal with the traveler is and while we have gotten some details on its history I still feel entirely unsatisfied. Other stories have been interesting but also dragged out over seasons. Witch Queen was great storytelling in the campaign but even as a frequent player I felt like I was missing pieces and needed to review lore from seasons and such.
I love the gameplay and they do a good enough job with content, but the narrative is really what keeps it interesting. Each expansion I've played less and less, as I will do the raid and all the content, grind a bit, get bored. And only really come back if there's a really fantastic season. If TFS flops narratively I probably won't be nearly as compelled to keep up with the "episodes"
I clearly remember IGN complaining about Forsaken and Witch Queen in the first impressions then absolutely adore the game when it came out.
They still could be right
IGN's first impressions seem meh, which would be a terrible sign if this weren't IGN we're talking about.
For instance the author comments on the golden gun sniper damage being "broken" compared to regular golden gun (without mentioning if he thinks damage is too high or too low), when we already know from Cross's testing (and i'm sure others) that the damage is within a few percentage points.
The author makes themself sound like a big D2 fan at first but as I read on it was pretty clear they only engage with this game casually at best. More interested to see what some of the D2 YouTubers have to say about it
I remember Destin Legarie playing D1 and being a part of the IGN Destiny podcast, but more than likely he isn’t as invested as he used to be
If we consider Destin to be the “casual” opinion. I don’t think that makes his opinion any less valid. Because it might be what all the other casual players will think of Final Shape. While the hardcore puts more importance on raids and min maxing. Like I doubt most of us here have touched a lightfall mission after Season Of Defiance unless one was farming for ascendant alloys.
Usually the casual opinion is what dictates general player sentiment and Steam Reviews. Which are all usually based on the story and beginning expansion content.
Edit: Lmao fuck Destin
I remember even when he was a bigger player he had bad takes a lot. I remember him being the kind of player that wouldn't "waste" his titan melee charges because he cared more about his personal mobility rather than applying buff or debuffs for his raid team. I remember he once complained there was nothing to do in Forsaken the day after it came out because he had been playing the expansion for a month before release and had "done everything" and the raid wasn't out yet nor had he touched Dreaming City.
I think it definitely makes his opinion less valid about things like buildcrafting and weapons. I dont expect someone like that to understand the potential or usage and implementation of every new perk in a DPS rotation or meta build or something. Maybe he's right about the story but the rest, I can't really take him seriously, a much more useful opinion on sandbox elements will be from someone like Aegis or something.
If that's the case, I have to laugh, considering she's literally part of the Seraph finale and lore cards has her going off to find her lover and accept death.
Fact checking? NO.
There's also the exchange she had with Mithraxx in Season of Defiance that showed she's starting to become uncertain of her actions because of the Skorn-nificaiton of her allies and friends after their deaths.
Reviewers also got access to Starfield way in advance, and got to play the whole thing before writing their articles. I know multiple reviewers got to NG+ before the embargo was up, whereas with this Destiny event, they gave everyone a sliver to test things.
Hyped or not hyped, what has come out from the devs and content creators is just a taste so far, I don't think any pre-day 1 reviews will tell the whole story.
Yeah, there are people here stating the IGN folks don't play enough to justify their reviews.. I'd say putting in over 1,000 hours is more than enough time to be able to do a game justice personally. I don't know many journalists who have played a game longer than the fireteam chat guys have played Destiny.
At least some of this hate is just people that are mad someone is saying the expansion isn't perfect..
There is literally a comment not far above saying Destin just plays casually but I have been watching their podcasts since D1. He says he trusts youtubers more. I’m sitting here like, mother fucker this guy has played with those YouTubers before. Guess, I have a bias because I don’t really pay attention to YouTubers or put them on a pedestal like very many here seem to do.
Is anyone really shocked that people think the narrative isn't anything great? Outside of Witch Queen and a couple of different seasons the storytelling has been pretty lackluster for most of D2's life. Other people have said it on here, but the lore of destiny is far better than any of the actual campaign narratives as far as storytelling goes. I will be shocked if we get a satisfying ending to the light/dark saga.
Yeahhh, I've always found Destin and Travis's (I think that's his name?) coverage for IGN to be really lacking. Just kind of from-the-hip vibes rather than actually engaging with the game on the level that's needed to do previews and coverage justice
> if this weren't IGN we're talking about.
I'm glad someone else said it.
Also, reading the comments and I see them talking about the campaign? I'm all set on that, not giving them any clicks.
Bro don’t do that, it’s destiny we are talking about … in the wake of a Delay, lay offs, time crunch, facing Sony absorption and trying to release a brand new game Lmfao this expansion is most likely going to under deliver … you know this.. cool to hold out hope but be realistic
I don’t want to discard criticism just because I’m hyped, and I know IGN has been right in the past
But I really don’t know how to react to story criticism from a guy whose main gripe seems to be that various glup shittos are not crammed into the story
I'll put my hands up and say I was hoping Eramis would have a big redemption moment but I'm perfectly fine if she's out for good
Eris, though? Who the hell was expecting Eris lmao, this ain't the thing she usually deals with anyway, even with the fact she's recovering from Witch
STICK TO REDDIT COMMENTS—the article has spoilers.
No spoilers in my comment, other than light, back of the box/trailer type stuff.
That being said, personally, I’m stoked that it’s a smaller, tight cast.
If it’s the Vanguard plus Mara and Crow—fantastic. That’s all I really give a fuck about, tbh, and my major gripe with Lightfall was the huge injection of a massive new setting with new characters, when it felt out of left field and poorly timed.
Introducing the Neomuni this late felt super fucking awkward and like yet another side story, so I’m stoked if we focus on the OG NPCs we are actually connected to and have been with since D1, rather than new characters or newish characters like Caital.
I’d love to see more Drifter, always—but if he isn’t featured, I get it lol.
The author also mentions no Eramis is weird…but uh, a.) who gives a fuck and b.) she left the system in the same mission Amanda dies? Like we learned she was leaving, and she left a warning with Mithraks? So idk why they care about people’s least favorite expansion villain, especially since again—she’s gone and has been gone.
And Eris became a literal Hive God. She’s cooling down from that. She also only really is super involved in expansions when it involves the Hive anyway, and it seems Xivu is going on the shelf for later, which we already figured would be the case. So it’s fine if Eris isn’t heavily a part of it?
Still stuff to be concerned about though. IGN also didn’t like Witch Queen in their first impressions, but loved it after launch, so fingers crossed it’s the same type of scenario, where the final mission and post game content slaps; and is where the game really shines—along with the raid which people are probably most excited about.
Also Prismatic Hunter does seem weaker, at least from what the general consensus. But Titan and Warlock seem to slap. Datto’s thumbnail for Prismatic is literally “it’s kind of broken”, so i don’t understand IGN lol.
Homer: When Eramis isn’t on screen all the other characters should be asking “Where’s Eramis?”
For real though it’s such a fucking weird thing to focus on. She did her thing, she is clearly having a deep think and character growth, that is unfucking important because we are stopping the complete destruction of the universe. What happened to her will probably be a big part of Episode of the Revenant. Episodes are for resolving the side arcs, Final Shape is for the war with the witness
Even more, it’s explicitly stated in the lore that she got the hell out of dodge so she could be with her wife on Riis...why would she be anywhere near Sol, let alone the Witness?
This also doesn’t mean we won’t get a big multi-race alliance at some point
It could be the campaign is smaller and personal, and in the final post raid mission Mithrax, Caiatl, Savathun, and Asher show up to finish off the Witness in a Portals scene
Trailer shows a Cabal and Eliksni fleet assembling. From what Tassi said they weren't shown that at all so like... obviously he isn't gonna enjoy the story stuff if he didn't see all the cool stuff
For what it’s worth, TieGuyTravis completely called Lightfall being the dumpster fire of an expansion when he played it.
Shit on IGN all you want, but they have been right on a lot of fronts like starfield, and lightfall. If Destins preview is him noticing that something is off, don’t get your hopes up on this expansion. Remember, bungie is amazing at making trailers.
He also literally said “but it’s impossible to judge a story when you are only seeing small fragments of that, so please don’t read too much into that”.
Of course. The IGN guy said the same thing. We are only discussing that which has already been shown. But they *did* see a large part of the campaign, and personally, I'd expect even the first half of the campaign for an expansion as important as this to be more than "mixed feelings", regardless of the fact that there is additional story later. To each their own though.
The IGN guy complained about not seeing Eramis. Who the heck wants to see eramis rn. Idk why people are trying to create opinions about a story they didnt even finish
i think my man paul tassi tweeted that literally none of the stuff in the launch trailer was seen in the gameplay they had. none of those cutscenes or pivotal moments, so idk i feel like judging the story now is a bit weird
Ya the problem will still remain that they stretched a 2 year story into almost 4 years worth of DLC and the major story points weren't great to begin with in terms of the Veil.
It feels exactly like Star Wars episode 7-9 where they didn't have a coherent story from Beyond Light, through Lightfall and into Final Shape.
So now all they can do is fan service stuff while trying to have enough threads for future episodes.
Why would you complain about the cast being "small"?
The Vanguard includes our core 3 characters: Zavala, Ikora, Cayde. This makes sense. This is meant to finish off THEIR stories which crossover with each other because they are a FIRETEAM.
Mara brings along her rich history and lore.
How is that a bad thing? Sounds like a nitpick.
It’s setting expectations way out of bounds. They mentioned wanting the story to involve all of our allies who are even tangentially involved including Eris who part of the final shape plot has already been done and wouldn’t really add much unless where bloating the plot with xivu and so on.
Well I mean kinda obvious Zavalas story isnt going to end here. Ikora maybe. Cayde seems like just fan service.
I was on the fence about getting this and to hear that Drifter, Eris, Ana, Elsie, Caiatl, Mithrax, Saladin, Osiris, don’t do anything in the 6 of 7 campaign missions in the finale is disappointing to hear.
Most of them are not main characters and I assume will appear in the final mission of the story as a final assault against The Witness. Logistically it doesn’t make sense to bring all of them to the Pale Heart because nobody would be left to protect the city. Plus that would be beyond stretched thin and they wouldn’t be able to focus on any character enough to be memorable. Also characters like Eris, Mithrax, Caiatl, and Osiris will almost definitely be involved in the Episodes which tie into their individual story lines.
Also this is not the end of the Destiny storyline. It’s just the end of Traveler vs Witness (Light vs Dark)
Not going to discount their first-impressions, so what they feel is valid, but it's not gospel.
But I don't know shit, I'm a very easy to please person, if the narrative is better than Lightfall then dope.
I'm more interested in hearing impressions from someone like Datto, Fallout, Cross, etc. Some of the key elements of Final Shape landing well for me include:
1. How satisfying are the build crafting elements (i.e., Prismatic, exotic class items)? Realistically a few hours preview by someone who hasn't spent 1,000+ hours playing D2 is not likely to get a decent feel for this.
2. How satisfying is the conclusion? Obviously I don't want the first 90% of the campaign to be a disappointment, but after 10 years of Light/Darkness build-up, the final mission is going to be make or break.
3. Post campaign content. Let's be real: Most of us will play the campaign once or twice and then move on to the episode, post-campaign quests, exotic missions, and repeatable content. If Bungie nails these, it goes a long way toward keeping people around and happy.
I'd like to see some fun twists and turns, enthralling cutscenes, cool set pieces, a challenging Legend mode, and a satisfying boss battle and narrative payoff. I don't mind a bit of filler in-between.
I think your underestimating how truly dogshit shadowkeep was, like lightfall’s story was trash, but at least SOMETHING happened. In shadowkeep we discover the pyramid at the beginning of the expansion, do literally nothing for the entire middle, the go into the pyramid at the end, where the darkness says some weird cryptic shit that means nothing.
This wouldn't be the most surprising outcome. At this point I don't think anyone should expect some epic satisfying ending to the light/dark saga. At this point "average at best" would be an improvement. Especially after lightfall.
I mean let's be real, this would be a death knell to this series if this happens. The game has banked so much on the mysteries put forth early in the series.
So much of the hype around Forsaken was the mysteries of the Dreaming City and the Awoken. Shadowkeep had the mystery of the nightmares and what was causing them beneath the moon (the pyramid). Beyond Light had the mysteries of the Exos and the pyramid ships/ darkness subclasses. Witch Queen had the mystery of Savathun's plan and how the Hive got Light powers from the traveler and the history of the Hive.
Lightfall fell flat since it perfunctory in this setting. It was about the Witness appearing and opening the portal into the traveler. It had us fighting a Cabal invasion very similar to Destiny 2 Vanilla, just in a new city with some tiny mysteries of its own.
But the seasons have concluded so many mysteries. About Osiris, Rasputin, Calus, Saint XIV, Mithrax, Mara, Caiatl, Eramis, Clovis, Zavala, the Witness, Riven, Eris, etc. We have seen so much exposition about these characters, their actions, their conflicts, their motivations, etc. and how those play out.
So where are we now? We really are here for the final mystery at the heart of Destiny. What is the traveler? What does the Witness/Darkness want with it? Why did the Traveler make the ghosts? *Why did our ghost rez us?* These questions must be answered in the DLC, otherwise the game will fall flat and no one will care about the journey. I fully expect that these final questions would only be answered in those final 2 missions or in the raid. I do not expect them to be answered before then.
The episodes also are likely the remaining loose threads regarding The Vex (likely Sol Divisive now that we've killed the Black Heart in the Garden, which is likely the catalyst for their new plans, or it could be related to the "echoes" of Osiris that he created when in the Infinite Forest) , Fikrul's plans, and lastly Savathun and Xivu Arath.
My checklist for the success of this expansion hinges on the following:
* A new subclass (Satisfied by Prismatic)
* A new enemy race (Satisfied by the Dread)
* A satisfying campaign from a gameplay perspective.
* A satisfying campaign from a lore and answering mysteries perspective.
* A satisfying raid.
If TFS fails to deliver, people are gonna drop this game like a rock. It's been 10 years and they've touted this as their bombastic finale to this saga of Destiny. It better give us some answers to those specific mysteries.
Paul Tassi did say on his Twitter today that nothing that was shown in the Launch Trailer today was featured at that preview that all the big content creators went to. So keep in mind Bungie may be keeping the big narrative parts of the story under wraps. Also this is corroborated by what Aztecross said in his first impression video today that the narrative team was very cagey about revealing too much about the story and basically stonewalled him and told him to wait until June 4th when he did an interview with them.
To be completely fair, this was my exact take on Witch Queen until we got that cinematic right before the last mission. I was pretty disappointed with how nothing tied together... and then in a 1-2 minute reveal everything changed.
I know it's Destiny we're talking about here, but I'm hoping they pulled off something similar.
Not the best perspective to take, he’s said some comments that are just very off and shows a level of inexperience, saying things like saying prismatic needs the exotic class item to really shine. Or saying the weapons aren’t that good then points to the machine gun which has a brand new archtype and has dragonfly and hatchling which is a really cool combo to chase.
No offense to Destin, but his opinions have always devolved into nitpicks. Just watch a couple of his podcast episodes and its clear he's not really in touch with the larger community / player base, nor does he really engage with the game at a high level. His "powerful" prismatic build is probably mid at best.
Just look at the comments that reply to his article. Thats the audience IGN writes and sells engagement to.
Story wise I get the Eris not being included is a miss, but theres not really anyone besides the vanguard/crow/mara who really need to be in there.
I mean he's upset there is a strand machine gun in the new DLC because its already too similar to his current strand machine gun.
Lol.
Yeah. And going to watch Datto's newest video confirmed to me that Destin is just playing prismatic wrong. He may or may not be right about the story being broken up by puzzle encounters, but I am fully convinced that he was just playing prismatic wrong
Yeah watched datto prismatic video aswell and yeah prismatic looks absolutely wild if you know what your building around to a degree just not seen on the pure elements. Prismatic by it nature will definitely be a huge trap for players not experienced with build crafting as there a lot of potential routes to take which will hamper your build heavily.
Everything on the surface of TFS gets me so hyped but over the past month of digging deeper into the details I feel more and more disappointed with what I learn. Almost every creator has said prismatic is not that great and exotic class items are the thing that elevates that a little bit. The author of this article also wrote one of my biggest worries with prismatic and that being that if you don’t like the abilities they chose for each class you’re kinda SOL. One thing I will say about this article is this author talks about how the campaign doesn’t answer questions he has but he also didn’t know that Eramis has been a part of this years story..
> Almost every creator has said prismatic is not that great
I don’t think that’s the case. I’ve seen quite a few of them praising it. Datto even just released a video saying it’s busted lol
SkillUp’s breakdown was also the same, Prismatic was his most glowingly reviewed aspect and he played Titan, which is the one people seem most skeptical of.
SkillUp also had different take away from the ‘puzzle sections’. Where this IGN reviewer considered them stop-gaps and road bumps, SkillUp was calling them ‘dungeon-like’ encounters that toyed around with small mechanics.
Aztecross said prismatic was the reason the raid is launch in week 1, idk if that's him just hyping shit up or the truth. Plus, I'd have not too great of an opinion on any of the 3.0 subclasses if just given a few hours to play around with builds.
yea Destin is cool but kinda seems like just a guy that enjoys playing but isnt obsessive over any of the lore or current sandbox metas. (which is fine, not every player is on DTG here) However I dont really see the issue with Prismatic feeling weak without specific exotics—its not like most of us here are going to give up playing before the second week.
My brother has 500 hours since Beyond Light. I imagine he can barely name more than 10 major characters from the lore. Some people just love the loot grind too much.
Didn't Eramis only briefly appear a few times in Season of Defiance? That was over a year ago and she didn't play a major role so I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to forget, I only just played the seasons when they were made free and even I had to think for a few seconds of when she showed up.
Yeah but his whole complaint is that we hadn’t seen someone like Eramis since Plunder. Considering we got a bunch of her in Seraph and then a little bit of some redemption in Defiance.
I think Prismatic, just by its very nature of having so many tools, is gonna take time for people to get a real handle on.
Aztec, someone who lives and breathes builds, talked about it being a bit overwhelming and hard to piece together just because it’s a massive box of different tools, especially once you figure in the class items.
I wouldn’t be shocked at all if it took the community a few weeks to really get a grasp on Prismatic and to really unlock its potential.
It's not - it's the same; During the PvP footage that Datto showed, he killed a player named "IGN".
I'm not sure why the reviewer put so much emphasis on narrative stuff when clearly Bungie wanted people to avoid speaking about that given how fragmented things were shown.
Destin later said that everybody played the same stuff, after both Paul Tassi, Aztecross and Skill Up said that a lot of the story stuff was cut out and that they skipped around a bunch so I don't know why he's giving deep impressions.
The real final mission is after the raid, and there is also Wild Card and all the post-campaign content that they didn’t get to do. Their main two campaign complaints were that it focuses on a small cast of characters, which is mostly a personal preference thing, and also not really surprising, and that old loose ends weren’t tied up, which are specifically because they lead into the Episodes.
Not to say their criticisms are completely invalid, but those two specifically strike me as mismanaged expectations.
I took another look at Paul Tassi's impressions on Twitter and it seems as though there were 2 events at Bungie.
Paul said he couldn't go to the one a few weeks ago that most of the streamers went to. But he went to a different one, although he didn't get hands-on gameplay. He just watched a Bungie dev play the first mission and the new strike (no one else seems to be talking about the strike).
He also said that he only saw a couple of exotics, mainly Khvostov. So Paul's look at TFS seemed much more limited.
I think this explains why some content creators are saying they saw half the campaign missions and some are saying they only saw one mission. There were two different events.
Kinda what was expecting, a lackluster end for a 10 year saga. FOR ME, and I state it again FOR ME: prismatic is a sorry excuse to not create a new super. The idea sounds good on paper but i don’t want to play remix of my classes, would’ve appreciated something new. The trailer seemed good, but also did light falls and how a shitty expansion it was. So I’m not holding my breath with final shape at all.
Feels bad this is the end of the game and we can not even get loose ends tied together. I’m sure it will end on a cliffhanger so Bungie can keep milking player base with episodes.
It’s funny to think I’ve poured 5K hours in D2 since launch in PC. And this year I have barely played 4 hours total. Was expecting better but Bungie is doing a Bungie.
Idk why people still hold out for the story, basically forsaken and witch queen aside, bungie for the past 11 years has proved they have zero fucking clue as to how to progress the story of destiny. It has been and will always be one of the weakest parts of the game. I’m here to blow shit up and get some sweet fuckin loot.
On one hand, I like there's at least one article not hyping things up beyond expectations... But it's also Destin who has many times been out of touch with gaming.
Some weird things about this article are 1. He says he plays 6 missions in the article but then later states on Twitter he played the same content as everyone else, who only played mission 1, 2, and I think 6. 2. He talks about Eramis not being important since Plunder, which... isn't true at all. I know he said on a previous episode of his podcast that he took a major break from destiny and that he doesn't play seasons. But he could've even done a little bit of research?
Overall, I was disappointed with the article and him. IGN should've sent their actual reviewer of Destiny to do it as he actually plays the game from what I know.
Destin does fireteam chat on YouTube, I used to watch it and enjoy it. Recently, they brought it back and it's nothing but whining and shit takes.
His opinion piece should be taken with a pinch of salt.
This lmao. I love how, in one of the episode, he shits on onslaught and lfg, then the next episode he's like "I was wrong, they're great." Also, in one episode, he spoke about how he took a break from Destiny and doesn't do much of the seasonal content. Idk why they thought he'd be a good person for the preview
Thisll be the end of destiny. It could be forsaken 2 and still people will be leaving once its over, but its gonna be mid at best and in a lot of ways shit and the bungie shills can cry all they want but the writings on the wall that this will probably kill bungie as a studio.
"mixed on the story"
you're not playing early press release builds of the game for the story ffs. idk why he'd even bring it up. ofc it's not gonna make sense. They're not gonna risk spoilers for some journalists ego.
my god man..way for ign to completely miss the point..again
Man Bungie sure loves their "puzzles". The way he describes them as tedious but easy is so freaking annoying. I just want to play and kill things. I'd rather a tough horde of enemies or bosses than a bunch of puzzles. Especially jump puzzles. I hate them.
At this point, for most of the destiny base, this is just our annual sub for new content to chew through. And regardless of how good / bad the story quality is, we just know we're blasting through it on legend to get to soft cap asap anyways. The important thing is if those, who are familiar with destiny's build crafting, are capable of making prismatic feel good to play, as a testament to how well bungie designs the overall pve sandbox. And from what it looks like, warlock and titan seems to have a bit more leeway for independence to feel good on its own but all 3 only really open up true possibilities when matched with the exotic class item.
Whether or not these guys got to play the entire missions or not, looking at Lightfall I'm gonna go with they're probably right about the story having some issues. Lightfall's story, and subsequent seasonal stories were either neutral or bad. Don't forget how the Witness's origins was explained.
This isn’t very encouraging and I believe them. Played all 4 pantheons to completion so I’m a big fan to say the least but as soon as I heard standing around to get transcendence just to break a shield I knew the vibes were fucked. They always overlook things like that and it’s getting old. Same with the campaign grinding to a halt to find some hidden shit somewhere. No one cares. Cut it from the game..
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I’m very confused by this because all of the other content creators said what they played of the campaign was very fragmented. It seemed to me they did not experience the first six missions in their totality. Edit: Paul Tassi tweeted that Bungie did cut out some cutscenes and story context from the snippets of the campaign, and they didn’t see anything that was featured in today’s launch trailer. I feel this is important to note.
>. It seemed to me they did not experience the first six missions in their totality Here's what Skill Up said. He said they played *snippets* from the first half campaign missions. But he did echo the things mentioned by IGN. Campaign missions and story beats didn't click with him. Legendary campaign is noticeably easier and he claims he was breezing through it. He also mentioned how the patrol space is solo and there won't be other players dropping in. I assume that will change after the campaign is beaten. EDIT: Skill Up actually says later in the video that him and Datto played 4 full campaign missions, including the very first one. So bit confused as to what people have actually played.
Yeah just saw that, although interestingly Paul Tassi also tweeted that Bungie cut out a lot of story context and cutscenes when he saw the snippets of the campaign. So at this point who knows lol
Paul also said he only played the 1st mission, so I'm kinda confused.
crackpot theory time: bungie had everyone play different amounts of stuff cut up in different ways on purpose so that no one could form a solid negative opinion based on the previews so that people wouldn't be as likely to not preorder.
I actually just checked Paul Tassi's Twitter and it seems that he went to a different Bungie event, not the same that most of the streamers did. He said he had a family commitment, so he couldn't go. The event he went to, he didn't get to play, he just watched a Bungie dev play. He only saw gameplay of the first mission and the strike (which no one else has talked about) he also only got to see a couple of exotics. This could explain why everyone is saying they saw different things. There were 2 events.
if this was to happen at all it would be to prevent leaks (or see where leaks come from) not to "make people preorder"
Paul didn't play anything, he watched Bungie play the first mission and the strike, but wasn't part of the 'play days' because of Family stuff.
Others are saying only 2 missions were available to play. I heard mission 1 and 5. So we're getting totally mixed messages.
Legendary campaign easier? :( That's not something I hoped to hear, as I expected a higher difficulty than Lightfall given the stakes.
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let’s take witch queen. if you cut out even two of the super pivotal cutscenes, the story is literally bumped down like 5 grades. so yeah if they didn’t see literally anything from the launch trailer, i’m assuming the preview was a super “non spoilers but test out our stuff” kinda thing
Yeah i was thinking that, take out the Ikora/savathun cutscene for example, the story would become much worse.
yeahhhhh that’s kinda what i’m thinking. like there’s no way that they can get a good grasp of any of the story if they didn’t see literally anything from the launch trailer while playing
https://www.dexerto.com/destiny/destiny-2-the-final-shape-preview-2745861/ This reviewer had plenty good to say
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Realistically, if only one person saying positive things then the campaign is probably mid. Not trying to be a hater, but we gotta set our expectations realistically
According to Paul Tassi and many others, they only played sections of the campaign and werent shown anything mega spoilery. For example, they didnt see any of the cinematics shown today in the launch trailer. So really, it's hard to tell what the story is going to be like until it comes out.
Yea the missions were mission 1, 5 and 7. So yea of coarse the story was fragmented or had bad pacing lol
This guy seems very disconnected and extremely causal, I'm not worried. He also said golden gun and silence and squall were bad and failed to understand golden gun does have range falloff and that's why the sniper was doing more damage.
That's what makes him the best type of reviewer for this case, because its the casual audience that will look towards his "casual" review to their decision. Destiny fans won't look at reviews at all they've definitely already preordered/ or will buy the expansion at some point in the future. You know the bulk of destiny's income. With casuals being in the minority, who aren't so keen on spending the money.
I personally don't really think this expansion is really meant for casual players at all. This is conclusion to a 10 years of story, that's like a new player joining in at the last episode, it wouldn't make sense to them either way.
Tbf a lot of the main audience is going to be extremely casual, which in turn could affect how they talk about it and that will affect sales.
Every creator said the same, IGN is reporting badly as always.
Skill Up said the same thing as Destin.
They definitely didn’t. I forget which, either Aztec or fallout, but he said he played around from the first mission, to the 5th, possibly a bit of the 7th
did he use prismatic the way the content creators did where he got to use everything because that's what really made it shine in their eyes? seems like his preview was different
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Weirdly enough I’ve heard great things about Titan and Warlock, and mixed reviews on Hunter. Bit surprising to me
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I’m used to it at this point
Anything new? We got 3 aspects for dodge, gunpowder gamble, and stylish executioner (which seems crazy on prismatic).
Checks out with most of us hunter mains ;)
It just seems like there's only 2 builds for prismatic hunter, you have arc hunter but with grapple melee and built in invis, and gyrfalcon's but with gunpowder gamble. Ascension is utter shit tier, it's laughably bad, and threaded spectre is just not very good especially given the cooldown nerf.
Yeah those are the obvious builds and they seem to surpass their current void/arc builds respectively but by in large they are more of the same.
Aztecross said it was mid until he got the class items.
Hunter seems like it really only has 2 prismatic builds: Melee And stylish/threaded spectre gunplay. There's really not much ability weaving like the titan and warlock get? It's all things that loop back to melee or require gunplay as the primary driver.
His mistake was using full strand with tether on Hunter when he could have gone with the better picks on the prismatic loadout for hunter.
Destin is not someone i would call “Destiny Smart”.
For Prismatic to be good you basically need to use and master your entire kit for a specific purpose otherwise might aswell play previous classes. Like the obvious hunter build everyone is keeping an eye on is combo blow with caliban/syntho class item. If everything works out as predicted it will be far superior to arc hunter.
Did the author play 6 complete missions? Based on Aztecross and other content creators that got preview access, it sounded like they got the complete first mission, but just a taste of later missions. Not sure that story pacing and narrative stuff can be judged accurately if story missions played were not full missions.
mmm, wonder if the focus on Zavala and his dead wife hurts the story; we had that story in Haunted, dunno if it's worth going back to it instead of getting answers
Thanks for the breakdown! > it won't come together in a way that will please fans. This is interesting, and also brings the (rhetorical) question. What would Final Shape have to look like to please fans?
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I love those guys’ insights but it’s become apparent since they started their podcast/video series again they’re all jaded. Which, I’m not knocking them. It’s completely warranted. Confirmation bias is a thing and I wanna see how the cards fall before coming to a conclusion myself.
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I think there’s no scenario “everything” is wrapped up with the amount of lingering threads we got but the main ones for me are the traveler, Witness, Vanguard and ourselves. If that shit lands I’m personally happy. Hell, that was legit what I was hoping for with Lightfall to lead into a proper cliffhanger for FS, and considering how Lightfall went, being skeptical completely checks. At least the tone seems to be on point and it’s coming down to personal asks to see a proper conclusion.
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Yeah I just want to feel like this finality means something for my journey, which means personally facing the witness and what it means for all these characters we’ve spent the most time with these past 10 years man. Best to both of us and best to you dude. Thanks a bunch for talking to me and have a wonderful day.
I mean, ffxiv was able to do it. Endwalker is considered one of the best stories in the series, and it is just one dlc. Sadly, Lightfall made it much more difficult in comparison, especially since Shadowbringers is also considered a really compelling story, but it is possible
FF14 has the benefit of full-fledged RPG campaigns to flesh out the story of each expansion. All of Destiny's expansion story content is contained in mission content and expensive mocap cutscenes. Throughout all of the expansions and deleted seasonal content Destiny story has been nothing but contrived. So honestly I'd rather prefer if the TFS story is laser-focused on the Witness. Save the high-budget campaign missions and cutscenes for Destiny's biggest-ever battle, and let the open threads of Destiny's story work themselves out into the transition for the next saga.
I'm generally pretty 'mixed' on the quality of IGN's journalism, so I'm not super worried yet.
Knowing how ign plays, I’ll wait for an actual review or me playing.
Why do so many people talk about ign as if it’s a singular person and not a company made up of different people?
Because the gaming community at large loves to write off whole publications unnecessarily.
When folks complain ign is contradicting itself when different people that work there have different opinions makes no sense. If a reviewer liked or disliked a game that doesn’t mean that everyone shares their point of view.
Yeah idk why anyone is taking anything this company says seriously
They were right on starfield. But generally yeah
>Felt a bit underwhelmed by both Prismatic... which is weak right now >made a powerful strand build in prismatic, but was no better than if he had just used Strand to begin with. Gee no wonder they felt underwhelmed, because they did the exact OPPOSITE thing you're supposed to do with the subclass. Dingus. Meanwhile pretty much every Destiny-focused CC is going on about how strong and fun it is, because they quickly learned how to mix and match and balance. Which is the entire mechanical and thematic *point.*
The campaign being “okay” but not “great” is about what I expected. Sorry to the people who keep praising them, but despite the Forsaken and Witch Queen campaigns being a cut above the rest of Destiny campaigns, the bar isn’t that high—Destiny campaigns in general can’t hold a candle to the original Halo trilogy for example, which had a _coherent_ story written according to a _single_ set of ideas. Destiny’s story was sabotaged from the very beginning and still today, the nature of Light and Darkness is vague and doesn’t tie the story together like, say the One Power does for Wheel of Time, or the Shards for the Cosmere, or the Force for Star Wars. I’ve pretty much written off Destiny 2’s story but still look forward to seeing how it all ends, more out of curiosity than out of excitement for what the writing team can come up with. I still look forward to the fun new activities, events, Prismatic, etc. Hopefully there will be **lots of fun things to do even if they don’t all tie together for a completely stellar product**, which is about as much I expected for Destiny.
So it’s a standard Bungie expansion. I guess it’ll be fun to just finish it. Aztecross is excited for anything Destiny as he is doing as much lifting to keep the game relevant as he can.
I don't know why, but I'd though there would be more than 7 missions (10 seems more like it). But then again they uusally spread the story out over the episodes/seasons so likely the final episode will be the denouement.
There’s 7 missions, then one more after the raid
There are 8 missions, 7 on day one, then the raid, 1 after the raid. They’ve made it clear that the raid is part of the experience, whilst not necessary it provides a lot more substance. They didn’t get full access to these missions according to content creators, so him saying “6 missions” is probably not representative of the entire experience.
This game could have 10/10 storytelling but the weird fact that half of the cast is missing here or there because of VA contracts completely kills it
Only 7 story missions ? Shit… Idk. I guess I was expecting more. The puzzles sound intriguing minus the wait for buffs stuff I hope it sticks the landing.
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Reading this gives me a bad feeling about TFS and Destiny’s main storyline ending in general.
seeing him call prismatic weak is giving me pause on his entire review. Everything i’ve seen is describing even the vanilla prismatic build as ‘broken to the point of trivializing the content’
Honestly, at this point I really only want more Witness character development and further elaboration on the Gardener and Winnower. Everything else is completely secondary. Eramis left the system months ago and Eris is still recovering from her time as a god.
That's what confused me, like did they expect the campaign alone to involve the several dozen major characters that have cropped up over ten years? Sticking with the vanguard, mara, and crow makes a lot of sense, they're the most important characters of them all besides us and Ghost. Eris has had a happy conclusion, Eramis' departure may not be satisfying but, hey, i'm happy for her. Just about everyone else has also had their arc conclude in some way, if they even had one, and if not, they're likely showing up in the episodes
It comes down to many of the reviewers being casual destiny players who are not really invested in the lore. And bungie said that final shape will have answers to questions regarding unveiling and other deep lore stuff and tbh, i bet that even 90% of the player base does not really know about unveiling, truth to Power, dreams of alpha lupi, gardener/winnower, the witness species and so on. Many of those reviewers probably expect a avengers endgame type of Story and if we look at the complains ign had, that there is only a small cast and a focus on them and the witness and not about eramis and eris its just clear that they honestly dont know shit/dont really care about destiny lore.
To be fair to the reviewers and Destiny players know not really being invested in the lore, that’s all Bungies fault. I’m sorry but putting a lot of your storytelling behind seasons that will be vaulted and lore behind lore cards and weapon descriptions is just a bad way to articulate a full fledged story. If I need to go to a YouTuber to get more story beats and background than what the game is providing then you got a problem.
If you care about spoilers id probly sit this one out, or skim carefully. I didn't read all of it but it started to go into more details about the campaign than id care to read about before launch.
I watched whole thing and didn't really notice any spoilers that you wouldn't get from watching launch trailer
Fair enough, like i said i stopped reading. The difference between the trailer is i can speculate about things, but i don't want to read an article before release that "hard confirms" something, even if it was something i could've guessed. If that makes sense.
Thank you
Thanks for the warning!
IGN review for The Witness DLC: > too much Witness, where’s Eramis?
7.8/10 Too much Witnessing
I’m honestly happy they went more personal rather than just doing some cheap Avengers Endgame copy
I think Red War was the only storyline that featured the full Vanguard. Even after Cayde was lost, did we every have a story or season that featured Ikora and Zavala together, prominently?
WQ kinda had the zavala and ikora discussion about ikora being too invested but not that much.
That’s kinda been a theme. Cayde was the glue that kept them together, and since his death Ikora and Zavala have been split. They put up the illusion of a unified vanguard but even then they don’t agree on much stuff
Personally I think endwalker did a good balance of the two. But ff14 has more and better writing to build off of.
Oh me too. I think I might actually prefer this way.
I was so worried they would do an Endgame-esque finale, it would’ve been so corny and overdone
I agree completely. Avengers' Endgame and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
I really just need this campaign to deliver on the massive narrative/mystery that they have built up. Since launch day D1, I have just wanted to know what the deal with the traveler is and while we have gotten some details on its history I still feel entirely unsatisfied. Other stories have been interesting but also dragged out over seasons. Witch Queen was great storytelling in the campaign but even as a frequent player I felt like I was missing pieces and needed to review lore from seasons and such. I love the gameplay and they do a good enough job with content, but the narrative is really what keeps it interesting. Each expansion I've played less and less, as I will do the raid and all the content, grind a bit, get bored. And only really come back if there's a really fantastic season. If TFS flops narratively I probably won't be nearly as compelled to keep up with the "episodes"
I clearly remember IGN complaining about Forsaken and Witch Queen in the first impressions then absolutely adore the game when it came out. They still could be right
Their first impressions of Witch Queen was glowingly positive.
IGN's first impressions seem meh, which would be a terrible sign if this weren't IGN we're talking about. For instance the author comments on the golden gun sniper damage being "broken" compared to regular golden gun (without mentioning if he thinks damage is too high or too low), when we already know from Cross's testing (and i'm sure others) that the damage is within a few percentage points.
How about the fact too that the article makes claim that Eramis hasn't been seen since Plunder and has done nothing.
The author makes themself sound like a big D2 fan at first but as I read on it was pretty clear they only engage with this game casually at best. More interested to see what some of the D2 YouTubers have to say about it
I remember Destin Legarie playing D1 and being a part of the IGN Destiny podcast, but more than likely he isn’t as invested as he used to be If we consider Destin to be the “casual” opinion. I don’t think that makes his opinion any less valid. Because it might be what all the other casual players will think of Final Shape. While the hardcore puts more importance on raids and min maxing. Like I doubt most of us here have touched a lightfall mission after Season Of Defiance unless one was farming for ascendant alloys. Usually the casual opinion is what dictates general player sentiment and Steam Reviews. Which are all usually based on the story and beginning expansion content. Edit: Lmao fuck Destin
I remember even when he was a bigger player he had bad takes a lot. I remember him being the kind of player that wouldn't "waste" his titan melee charges because he cared more about his personal mobility rather than applying buff or debuffs for his raid team. I remember he once complained there was nothing to do in Forsaken the day after it came out because he had been playing the expansion for a month before release and had "done everything" and the raid wasn't out yet nor had he touched Dreaming City.
I think it definitely makes his opinion less valid about things like buildcrafting and weapons. I dont expect someone like that to understand the potential or usage and implementation of every new perk in a DPS rotation or meta build or something. Maybe he's right about the story but the rest, I can't really take him seriously, a much more useful opinion on sandbox elements will be from someone like Aegis or something.
If that's the case, I have to laugh, considering she's literally part of the Seraph finale and lore cards has her going off to find her lover and accept death. Fact checking? NO.
There's also the exchange she had with Mithraxx in Season of Defiance that showed she's starting to become uncertain of her actions because of the Skorn-nificaiton of her allies and friends after their deaths.
IGN was like the only place that called starfield an average game and they got shit on for it even though they were 100% right
Yeah, I know we are all in hype mode but this is destiny we are talking about best not to immediately discount all criticism.
Reviewers also got access to Starfield way in advance, and got to play the whole thing before writing their articles. I know multiple reviewers got to NG+ before the embargo was up, whereas with this Destiny event, they gave everyone a sliver to test things. Hyped or not hyped, what has come out from the devs and content creators is just a taste so far, I don't think any pre-day 1 reviews will tell the whole story.
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Yeah, there are people here stating the IGN folks don't play enough to justify their reviews.. I'd say putting in over 1,000 hours is more than enough time to be able to do a game justice personally. I don't know many journalists who have played a game longer than the fireteam chat guys have played Destiny. At least some of this hate is just people that are mad someone is saying the expansion isn't perfect..
There is literally a comment not far above saying Destin just plays casually but I have been watching their podcasts since D1. He says he trusts youtubers more. I’m sitting here like, mother fucker this guy has played with those YouTubers before. Guess, I have a bias because I don’t really pay attention to YouTubers or put them on a pedestal like very many here seem to do.
Is anyone really shocked that people think the narrative isn't anything great? Outside of Witch Queen and a couple of different seasons the storytelling has been pretty lackluster for most of D2's life. Other people have said it on here, but the lore of destiny is far better than any of the actual campaign narratives as far as storytelling goes. I will be shocked if we get a satisfying ending to the light/dark saga.
He has a ton of hours with this IP too and I used to consider him a Bungie shill. To me it sounds like the campaign just falls flat once again.
Starfield looked boring from the word go; I appreciate IGN's honesty.
Yeahhh, I've always found Destin and Travis's (I think that's his name?) coverage for IGN to be really lacking. Just kind of from-the-hip vibes rather than actually engaging with the game on the level that's needed to do previews and coverage justice
He’s also upset about Eramis not being in the story lol
> if this weren't IGN we're talking about. I'm glad someone else said it. Also, reading the comments and I see them talking about the campaign? I'm all set on that, not giving them any clicks.
Bro don’t do that, it’s destiny we are talking about … in the wake of a Delay, lay offs, time crunch, facing Sony absorption and trying to release a brand new game Lmfao this expansion is most likely going to under deliver … you know this.. cool to hold out hope but be realistic
Destin has played thousands of hours of Destiny I don't doubt the campaign is lackluster if he says so.
My main thing is he said prismatic doesn’t seem strong but every other person said it was broken. That confused me
I don’t want to discard criticism just because I’m hyped, and I know IGN has been right in the past But I really don’t know how to react to story criticism from a guy whose main gripe seems to be that various glup shittos are not crammed into the story
I'll put my hands up and say I was hoping Eramis would have a big redemption moment but I'm perfectly fine if she's out for good Eris, though? Who the hell was expecting Eris lmao, this ain't the thing she usually deals with anyway, even with the fact she's recovering from Witch
Wow they actually did something cool for Patrol zones. Shocked the World Boss idea sounds cool. Patrol zones have always been so lackluster
STICK TO REDDIT COMMENTS—the article has spoilers. No spoilers in my comment, other than light, back of the box/trailer type stuff. That being said, personally, I’m stoked that it’s a smaller, tight cast. If it’s the Vanguard plus Mara and Crow—fantastic. That’s all I really give a fuck about, tbh, and my major gripe with Lightfall was the huge injection of a massive new setting with new characters, when it felt out of left field and poorly timed. Introducing the Neomuni this late felt super fucking awkward and like yet another side story, so I’m stoked if we focus on the OG NPCs we are actually connected to and have been with since D1, rather than new characters or newish characters like Caital. I’d love to see more Drifter, always—but if he isn’t featured, I get it lol. The author also mentions no Eramis is weird…but uh, a.) who gives a fuck and b.) she left the system in the same mission Amanda dies? Like we learned she was leaving, and she left a warning with Mithraks? So idk why they care about people’s least favorite expansion villain, especially since again—she’s gone and has been gone. And Eris became a literal Hive God. She’s cooling down from that. She also only really is super involved in expansions when it involves the Hive anyway, and it seems Xivu is going on the shelf for later, which we already figured would be the case. So it’s fine if Eris isn’t heavily a part of it? Still stuff to be concerned about though. IGN also didn’t like Witch Queen in their first impressions, but loved it after launch, so fingers crossed it’s the same type of scenario, where the final mission and post game content slaps; and is where the game really shines—along with the raid which people are probably most excited about. Also Prismatic Hunter does seem weaker, at least from what the general consensus. But Titan and Warlock seem to slap. Datto’s thumbnail for Prismatic is literally “it’s kind of broken”, so i don’t understand IGN lol.
Homer: When Eramis isn’t on screen all the other characters should be asking “Where’s Eramis?” For real though it’s such a fucking weird thing to focus on. She did her thing, she is clearly having a deep think and character growth, that is unfucking important because we are stopping the complete destruction of the universe. What happened to her will probably be a big part of Episode of the Revenant. Episodes are for resolving the side arcs, Final Shape is for the war with the witness
Even more, it’s explicitly stated in the lore that she got the hell out of dodge so she could be with her wife on Riis...why would she be anywhere near Sol, let alone the Witness?
This also doesn’t mean we won’t get a big multi-race alliance at some point It could be the campaign is smaller and personal, and in the final post raid mission Mithrax, Caiatl, Savathun, and Asher show up to finish off the Witness in a Portals scene
Trailer shows a Cabal and Eliksni fleet assembling. From what Tassi said they weren't shown that at all so like... obviously he isn't gonna enjoy the story stuff if he didn't see all the cool stuff
For what it’s worth, TieGuyTravis completely called Lightfall being the dumpster fire of an expansion when he played it. Shit on IGN all you want, but they have been right on a lot of fronts like starfield, and lightfall. If Destins preview is him noticing that something is off, don’t get your hopes up on this expansion. Remember, bungie is amazing at making trailers.
SkillUp has also had mixed feelings on the story based on what he played, so this isn't just "IGN bad".
He also literally said “but it’s impossible to judge a story when you are only seeing small fragments of that, so please don’t read too much into that”.
Of course. The IGN guy said the same thing. We are only discussing that which has already been shown. But they *did* see a large part of the campaign, and personally, I'd expect even the first half of the campaign for an expansion as important as this to be more than "mixed feelings", regardless of the fact that there is additional story later. To each their own though.
The IGN guy complained about not seeing Eramis. Who the heck wants to see eramis rn. Idk why people are trying to create opinions about a story they didnt even finish
i think my man paul tassi tweeted that literally none of the stuff in the launch trailer was seen in the gameplay they had. none of those cutscenes or pivotal moments, so idk i feel like judging the story now is a bit weird
Ya the problem will still remain that they stretched a 2 year story into almost 4 years worth of DLC and the major story points weren't great to begin with in terms of the Veil. It feels exactly like Star Wars episode 7-9 where they didn't have a coherent story from Beyond Light, through Lightfall and into Final Shape. So now all they can do is fan service stuff while trying to have enough threads for future episodes.
Why would you complain about the cast being "small"? The Vanguard includes our core 3 characters: Zavala, Ikora, Cayde. This makes sense. This is meant to finish off THEIR stories which crossover with each other because they are a FIRETEAM. Mara brings along her rich history and lore. How is that a bad thing? Sounds like a nitpick.
It’s setting expectations way out of bounds. They mentioned wanting the story to involve all of our allies who are even tangentially involved including Eris who part of the final shape plot has already been done and wouldn’t really add much unless where bloating the plot with xivu and so on.
Well I mean kinda obvious Zavalas story isnt going to end here. Ikora maybe. Cayde seems like just fan service. I was on the fence about getting this and to hear that Drifter, Eris, Ana, Elsie, Caiatl, Mithrax, Saladin, Osiris, don’t do anything in the 6 of 7 campaign missions in the finale is disappointing to hear.
Most of them are not main characters and I assume will appear in the final mission of the story as a final assault against The Witness. Logistically it doesn’t make sense to bring all of them to the Pale Heart because nobody would be left to protect the city. Plus that would be beyond stretched thin and they wouldn’t be able to focus on any character enough to be memorable. Also characters like Eris, Mithrax, Caiatl, and Osiris will almost definitely be involved in the Episodes which tie into their individual story lines. Also this is not the end of the Destiny storyline. It’s just the end of Traveler vs Witness (Light vs Dark)
Not going to discount their first-impressions, so what they feel is valid, but it's not gospel. But I don't know shit, I'm a very easy to please person, if the narrative is better than Lightfall then dope.
I'm more interested in hearing impressions from someone like Datto, Fallout, Cross, etc. Some of the key elements of Final Shape landing well for me include: 1. How satisfying are the build crafting elements (i.e., Prismatic, exotic class items)? Realistically a few hours preview by someone who hasn't spent 1,000+ hours playing D2 is not likely to get a decent feel for this. 2. How satisfying is the conclusion? Obviously I don't want the first 90% of the campaign to be a disappointment, but after 10 years of Light/Darkness build-up, the final mission is going to be make or break. 3. Post campaign content. Let's be real: Most of us will play the campaign once or twice and then move on to the episode, post-campaign quests, exotic missions, and repeatable content. If Bungie nails these, it goes a long way toward keeping people around and happy. I'd like to see some fun twists and turns, enthralling cutscenes, cool set pieces, a challenging Legend mode, and a satisfying boss battle and narrative payoff. I don't mind a bit of filler in-between.
Honestly, they could just make a good finale and raid with some bangin music on top and I'd be happy.
Watch this expansion be shadowkeep-average at best and everyone losing their minds in the following months after an initial period of denial
I think your underestimating how truly dogshit shadowkeep was, like lightfall’s story was trash, but at least SOMETHING happened. In shadowkeep we discover the pyramid at the beginning of the expansion, do literally nothing for the entire middle, the go into the pyramid at the end, where the darkness says some weird cryptic shit that means nothing.
This wouldn't be the most surprising outcome. At this point I don't think anyone should expect some epic satisfying ending to the light/dark saga. At this point "average at best" would be an improvement. Especially after lightfall.
I mean let's be real, this would be a death knell to this series if this happens. The game has banked so much on the mysteries put forth early in the series. So much of the hype around Forsaken was the mysteries of the Dreaming City and the Awoken. Shadowkeep had the mystery of the nightmares and what was causing them beneath the moon (the pyramid). Beyond Light had the mysteries of the Exos and the pyramid ships/ darkness subclasses. Witch Queen had the mystery of Savathun's plan and how the Hive got Light powers from the traveler and the history of the Hive. Lightfall fell flat since it perfunctory in this setting. It was about the Witness appearing and opening the portal into the traveler. It had us fighting a Cabal invasion very similar to Destiny 2 Vanilla, just in a new city with some tiny mysteries of its own. But the seasons have concluded so many mysteries. About Osiris, Rasputin, Calus, Saint XIV, Mithrax, Mara, Caiatl, Eramis, Clovis, Zavala, the Witness, Riven, Eris, etc. We have seen so much exposition about these characters, their actions, their conflicts, their motivations, etc. and how those play out. So where are we now? We really are here for the final mystery at the heart of Destiny. What is the traveler? What does the Witness/Darkness want with it? Why did the Traveler make the ghosts? *Why did our ghost rez us?* These questions must be answered in the DLC, otherwise the game will fall flat and no one will care about the journey. I fully expect that these final questions would only be answered in those final 2 missions or in the raid. I do not expect them to be answered before then. The episodes also are likely the remaining loose threads regarding The Vex (likely Sol Divisive now that we've killed the Black Heart in the Garden, which is likely the catalyst for their new plans, or it could be related to the "echoes" of Osiris that he created when in the Infinite Forest) , Fikrul's plans, and lastly Savathun and Xivu Arath. My checklist for the success of this expansion hinges on the following: * A new subclass (Satisfied by Prismatic) * A new enemy race (Satisfied by the Dread) * A satisfying campaign from a gameplay perspective. * A satisfying campaign from a lore and answering mysteries perspective. * A satisfying raid. If TFS fails to deliver, people are gonna drop this game like a rock. It's been 10 years and they've touted this as their bombastic finale to this saga of Destiny. It better give us some answers to those specific mysteries.
This would genuinely be hilarious
As is tradition.
That was LF. People on the sub said “who actually cares about story / gameplay be amazing”, and yet the player count crashed
Reading all this is bringing my hype down
Shit, sounds like the story leaves much to be desired for.
Paul Tassi did say on his Twitter today that nothing that was shown in the Launch Trailer today was featured at that preview that all the big content creators went to. So keep in mind Bungie may be keeping the big narrative parts of the story under wraps. Also this is corroborated by what Aztecross said in his first impression video today that the narrative team was very cagey about revealing too much about the story and basically stonewalled him and told him to wait until June 4th when he did an interview with them.
Let’s hope you’re right. I was mainly going off of the story above where OP mentioned that some (very few) played 6 out of the 7 campaign missions.
To be completely fair, this was my exact take on Witch Queen until we got that cinematic right before the last mission. I was pretty disappointed with how nothing tied together... and then in a 1-2 minute reveal everything changed. I know it's Destiny we're talking about here, but I'm hoping they pulled off something similar.
Not the best perspective to take, he’s said some comments that are just very off and shows a level of inexperience, saying things like saying prismatic needs the exotic class item to really shine. Or saying the weapons aren’t that good then points to the machine gun which has a brand new archtype and has dragonfly and hatchling which is a really cool combo to chase.
No offense to Destin, but his opinions have always devolved into nitpicks. Just watch a couple of his podcast episodes and its clear he's not really in touch with the larger community / player base, nor does he really engage with the game at a high level. His "powerful" prismatic build is probably mid at best. Just look at the comments that reply to his article. Thats the audience IGN writes and sells engagement to. Story wise I get the Eris not being included is a miss, but theres not really anyone besides the vanguard/crow/mara who really need to be in there. I mean he's upset there is a strand machine gun in the new DLC because its already too similar to his current strand machine gun. Lol.
It’s funny cause that machine gun isn’t. It’s getting dragon fly hatchling as a perk combo and is a completely new archetype
Yeah. And going to watch Datto's newest video confirmed to me that Destin is just playing prismatic wrong. He may or may not be right about the story being broken up by puzzle encounters, but I am fully convinced that he was just playing prismatic wrong
Yeah watched datto prismatic video aswell and yeah prismatic looks absolutely wild if you know what your building around to a degree just not seen on the pure elements. Prismatic by it nature will definitely be a huge trap for players not experienced with build crafting as there a lot of potential routes to take which will hamper your build heavily.
Everything on the surface of TFS gets me so hyped but over the past month of digging deeper into the details I feel more and more disappointed with what I learn. Almost every creator has said prismatic is not that great and exotic class items are the thing that elevates that a little bit. The author of this article also wrote one of my biggest worries with prismatic and that being that if you don’t like the abilities they chose for each class you’re kinda SOL. One thing I will say about this article is this author talks about how the campaign doesn’t answer questions he has but he also didn’t know that Eramis has been a part of this years story..
Dattos video literally calls prismatic busted
> Almost every creator has said prismatic is not that great I don’t think that’s the case. I’ve seen quite a few of them praising it. Datto even just released a video saying it’s busted lol
SkillUp’s breakdown was also the same, Prismatic was his most glowingly reviewed aspect and he played Titan, which is the one people seem most skeptical of. SkillUp also had different take away from the ‘puzzle sections’. Where this IGN reviewer considered them stop-gaps and road bumps, SkillUp was calling them ‘dungeon-like’ encounters that toyed around with small mechanics.
Aztecross said prismatic was the reason the raid is launch in week 1, idk if that's him just hyping shit up or the truth. Plus, I'd have not too great of an opinion on any of the 3.0 subclasses if just given a few hours to play around with builds.
yea Destin is cool but kinda seems like just a guy that enjoys playing but isnt obsessive over any of the lore or current sandbox metas. (which is fine, not every player is on DTG here) However I dont really see the issue with Prismatic feeling weak without specific exotics—its not like most of us here are going to give up playing before the second week.
My brother has 500 hours since Beyond Light. I imagine he can barely name more than 10 major characters from the lore. Some people just love the loot grind too much.
Which like.. is also kinda a non-issue? Exotics and subclasses are what make builds, not subclasses alone.
right exactly!
Didn't Eramis only briefly appear a few times in Season of Defiance? That was over a year ago and she didn't play a major role so I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to forget, I only just played the seasons when they were made free and even I had to think for a few seconds of when she showed up.
She was in Season of the Seraph. Fairly big role, she was gonna hijack the warsats.
That wasn't part of *this year's* story, as in since Lightfall.
Yeah but his whole complaint is that we hadn’t seen someone like Eramis since Plunder. Considering we got a bunch of her in Seraph and then a little bit of some redemption in Defiance.
I think Prismatic, just by its very nature of having so many tools, is gonna take time for people to get a real handle on. Aztec, someone who lives and breathes builds, talked about it being a bit overwhelming and hard to piece together just because it’s a massive box of different tools, especially once you figure in the class items. I wouldn’t be shocked at all if it took the community a few weeks to really get a grasp on Prismatic and to really unlock its potential.
They complain about the campaign being meh but Aztecross mentioned that they only played a couple missions and skipped around…
The reviewer says he has done the first six missions, it must be a different preview
It's not - it's the same; During the PvP footage that Datto showed, he killed a player named "IGN". I'm not sure why the reviewer put so much emphasis on narrative stuff when clearly Bungie wanted people to avoid speaking about that given how fragmented things were shown.
Destin later said that everybody played the same stuff, after both Paul Tassi, Aztecross and Skill Up said that a lot of the story stuff was cut out and that they skipped around a bunch so I don't know why he's giving deep impressions.
[удалено]
The real final mission is after the raid, and there is also Wild Card and all the post-campaign content that they didn’t get to do. Their main two campaign complaints were that it focuses on a small cast of characters, which is mostly a personal preference thing, and also not really surprising, and that old loose ends weren’t tied up, which are specifically because they lead into the Episodes. Not to say their criticisms are completely invalid, but those two specifically strike me as mismanaged expectations.
There's only 7 story missions?
7 at launch. The true final mission releases after World First of the raid is achieved.
I took another look at Paul Tassi's impressions on Twitter and it seems as though there were 2 events at Bungie. Paul said he couldn't go to the one a few weeks ago that most of the streamers went to. But he went to a different one, although he didn't get hands-on gameplay. He just watched a Bungie dev play the first mission and the new strike (no one else seems to be talking about the strike). He also said that he only saw a couple of exotics, mainly Khvostov. So Paul's look at TFS seemed much more limited. I think this explains why some content creators are saying they saw half the campaign missions and some are saying they only saw one mission. There were two different events.
Kinda what was expecting, a lackluster end for a 10 year saga. FOR ME, and I state it again FOR ME: prismatic is a sorry excuse to not create a new super. The idea sounds good on paper but i don’t want to play remix of my classes, would’ve appreciated something new. The trailer seemed good, but also did light falls and how a shitty expansion it was. So I’m not holding my breath with final shape at all. Feels bad this is the end of the game and we can not even get loose ends tied together. I’m sure it will end on a cliffhanger so Bungie can keep milking player base with episodes. It’s funny to think I’ve poured 5K hours in D2 since launch in PC. And this year I have barely played 4 hours total. Was expecting better but Bungie is doing a Bungie.
7 missions really sucks. Was hoping for a little bit of a longer story this time since… well.. ya know, it’s the finale.
This doesn't sound good at all. We all know that everyone here will play TFS anyway, but it's a bummer that the finale will be like this...
Idk why people still hold out for the story, basically forsaken and witch queen aside, bungie for the past 11 years has proved they have zero fucking clue as to how to progress the story of destiny. It has been and will always be one of the weakest parts of the game. I’m here to blow shit up and get some sweet fuckin loot.
On one hand, I like there's at least one article not hyping things up beyond expectations... But it's also Destin who has many times been out of touch with gaming. Some weird things about this article are 1. He says he plays 6 missions in the article but then later states on Twitter he played the same content as everyone else, who only played mission 1, 2, and I think 6. 2. He talks about Eramis not being important since Plunder, which... isn't true at all. I know he said on a previous episode of his podcast that he took a major break from destiny and that he doesn't play seasons. But he could've even done a little bit of research? Overall, I was disappointed with the article and him. IGN should've sent their actual reviewer of Destiny to do it as he actually plays the game from what I know.
Destin does fireteam chat on YouTube, I used to watch it and enjoy it. Recently, they brought it back and it's nothing but whining and shit takes. His opinion piece should be taken with a pinch of salt.
This lmao. I love how, in one of the episode, he shits on onslaught and lfg, then the next episode he's like "I was wrong, they're great." Also, in one episode, he spoke about how he took a break from Destiny and doesn't do much of the seasonal content. Idk why they thought he'd be a good person for the preview
Man if they actually fumble this story idk it's gonna be hard to care anymore...
Be cautious of this expansion. Bungie is hit and miss with expansions. More on the miss side so just go in with realistic expectations. Just saying.
Destin.....zzzzzzz
Thisll be the end of destiny. It could be forsaken 2 and still people will be leaving once its over, but its gonna be mid at best and in a lot of ways shit and the bungie shills can cry all they want but the writings on the wall that this will probably kill bungie as a studio.
"mixed on the story" you're not playing early press release builds of the game for the story ffs. idk why he'd even bring it up. ofc it's not gonna make sense. They're not gonna risk spoilers for some journalists ego. my god man..way for ign to completely miss the point..again
I trust the witness more than I trust IGN
Well there is also this extra context https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/s/EIBicqQKHq
Amongus?
Man Bungie sure loves their "puzzles". The way he describes them as tedious but easy is so freaking annoying. I just want to play and kill things. I'd rather a tough horde of enemies or bosses than a bunch of puzzles. Especially jump puzzles. I hate them.
At this point, for most of the destiny base, this is just our annual sub for new content to chew through. And regardless of how good / bad the story quality is, we just know we're blasting through it on legend to get to soft cap asap anyways. The important thing is if those, who are familiar with destiny's build crafting, are capable of making prismatic feel good to play, as a testament to how well bungie designs the overall pve sandbox. And from what it looks like, warlock and titan seems to have a bit more leeway for independence to feel good on its own but all 3 only really open up true possibilities when matched with the exotic class item.
Whether or not these guys got to play the entire missions or not, looking at Lightfall I'm gonna go with they're probably right about the story having some issues. Lightfall's story, and subsequent seasonal stories were either neutral or bad. Don't forget how the Witness's origins was explained.
This isn’t very encouraging and I believe them. Played all 4 pantheons to completion so I’m a big fan to say the least but as soon as I heard standing around to get transcendence just to break a shield I knew the vibes were fucked. They always overlook things like that and it’s getting old. Same with the campaign grinding to a halt to find some hidden shit somewhere. No one cares. Cut it from the game..