Are these relatively pointless grinds? Yes, but so was grinding to upgrade every legendary item in D1, so was grinding for a 0.1% chance at a perfect roll, so was ticking up numbers in the literally meaningless Grimoire score.ĭestiny 2 is a better game because of how much it’s slimmed down.
You can grind endlessly for Bright Engrams, because lord knows no one is ever going to have a full collection of that stuff.
You can farm for missing pieces of full armor sets, you can build out kits with mods for every subclass. Getting every exotic is going to take a long time due to RNG alone.
Designing a grindy endgame just for that group seems ill-advised, and creating a game that gives more players a sense of accomplishing and finishing something benefits the series overall.Īnd frankly, if people want to grind, they can grind. I have no idea how many people will go to D2’s Trials lighthouse, but it’s going to be a tiny fraction. This is a game where last I checked, only 2% of the playerbase had done a prestige Nightfall. I know that the most devoted portion of the playerbase is the loudest, but they certainly are not the most populous. Doing things with friends and family IRL. I like the fact that if I’m just playing a few hours a week, I can make progress, and that I don’t feel like I’m slacking if I’m not scheduling raids or Trials matches every weekend. But frankly, I’m glad that Destiny 2 isn’t making itself a psychological burden by constantly telling me my gear, my character is never good enough. We have gotten so obsessed with this mindset that unless a game in this genre demands our attention for 1,000+ hours, it’s doing something wrong.
The end result of this is that I will likely stop playing Destiny 2 sooner. It’s let me enjoy something like Faction Rally, where even dedicating a handful of hours to it, I was rewarded with almost full armor and weapon sets across every faction.
It finally lets me feel like I’ve accomplished something by getting a Better Devils hand cannon, one of the best guns in the game, and not having that discounted because I didn’t farm 50 Better Devils to get the exact perfect perk rolls I wanted. I do not miss Grimoire score, which was just one more arbitrary number to hunt and often something the community used to further divided the “most dedicated” from everyone else depending on how many thousands of points you racked up.īy eliminating so much of the useless, endless grind of Destiny 1, the end product is finally a game that is allowing me to enjoy it in smaller doses without burning out.I do not miss getting what I thought was a cool set of gear but it still being miles away from the perfected “tier 12” gear that other players had. I do not miss being afraid to upgrade exotics because of a limited stash of Exotics Shards. Endless farming for planetary materials, grinding for Strange Coins, acquiring Motes of Light to upgrade guns which each required a massive investment to fully unlock to see if they were even worthwhile. I do not miss the kinds of artificial time sinks that Destiny 1 was drowning in.I like being able to build what feels like a coherent, complete collection of gear. I do not find much value in spending dozens of hours chasing a 1/50 drop and 1/500 rolls on that drop. I actually like the fact that getting one piece of Legendary armor or one Legendary weapon means you…have that item, as the rolls are unchanged through further drops.