Blogs
on December 5, 2025
Competitive multiplayer returns in the form of Crucible, which has gone through extensive tweaks. Gone are the 6v6 matches, replaced with 4v4 matches. While this is a curious choice, the player count works rather well in-game. All multiplayer maps have been designed with this number in mind and it’s easy to find firefights. Playing Crucible is also more rewarding with loot generously dropped and Crucible Reputation tokens after each match.
The most significant aspect of Destiny 2’s campaign is that it has an actual campaign. After Destiny and Rise of Iron’s cookie-cutter missions, it’s nice to have something with more variety and substance than "bad guy over there, go kill it." That’s not saying Destiny 2’s campaign is anything deep. Characters jump in and out of the campaign quickly as the story moves you from world-to-world. While the quick pacing keeps things moving, it never slows down enough to create any connections between the player and the world. Worst yet is the player’s Guardian who, in Destiny 2, is relegated to a silent protagonist. Ghost ends up speaking the entire time for the player and comes off as annoying. The current set up with the Ghost quickly becomes grating, and even more annoying when other characters point out your silence. This was purposefully done so that players can become invested in their Guardian, but in execution comes off as cartoonish.
Jumping in, the beta opens with a great start, showcasing the opening mission which immediately wraps up a story arc for old players and wipes the slate clean for new players. It’s a guaranteed win-win. Unless you’re a guardian, that is, then it’s a significant loss. For a mission showcase, this is an excellent example; this story mission had more feeling in it than all of my time spent with my guardian. Characters are interacting with you. Mysteries as to where other characters went are easy to spot in the environment and it all around creates a sense of awe. Where is Eris Morn? Her glowing green jar half buried in ruble where she once stood. Or the cleaning bot that maintains its programming, casually sweeping up the blood of dead Cabal while the Tower is literally on fire in every other regard. Seeing some of the most famous guardians in action, working with you. Entering a hallway and seeing the very people Guardians are supposedly protecting, scared, huddling together as their home is taken away. Destiny 2 wants to hit with impact, and it does.
Fallout 4 and Dead Space 3 were both the standout best sellers of their respective series. More gamers are familiar with these series thanks to their widespread success. On it’s own, this success is a good thing. In the case of Fallout at least, it means that the series has a future. Just like with Destiny 2, however, that success came with a price. In the case of Fallout 4 , greater success and mainstream appeal came at the cost of its RPG depth. Instead of defining what kind of character they want to play at the outset of the game, players can instead develop them as they play. The Sole Survivor’s identity is fluid. They can be anything and everything given enough time. They’re basically competent in everything from the outset of the game and developing them is mostly just a matter of increasing their damage with/resistance to different types of weapons.
Casual players are the single largest audience in gaming; there’s no getting around it. This is the audience that every major publisher wants to appeal to; the one group that every development studio hopes will latch onto their game. After all, capturing the attention of the casual or mainstream audience usually means massive success and wondrous profit. So it’s understandable that they, publishers especially, would have a vested interest in making their games more accessible and appealing to that audience. Making that appeal often means simplification. The simpler the game is, the more accessible it is, the more mainstream appeal it can have. While there’s nothing innately wrong with making one’s game more accessible to the wider gaming audience, doing so always comes at a cost. Just as a game cannot be both simple and complex, neither can it simultaneously serve its niche and successfully appeal to the mainstream audience. Therefore compromises must be made, usually ones that rob the game of what made it special in the first place.
Dead Space 3’s compromises were a bit more subtle , but they still resulted in a not-so-minor departure for the series. Where the first two games were horror games first and Https://Destiny2focus.Com/ shooters second, Dead Space 3 was the opposite. It traded careful resource management and situational weapons for resource crafting and all-purpose creations. Rather than a tense experience that required its players to think on the fly, players got an occasionally startling but overall leisurely romp through an undead ice planet. Once players acquired enough resources to craft a gun with both long and short range firing modes, any semblance of genuine scares and vulnerability went right out the airlock. Supposedly, Isaac isn’t even alone for most of the game thanks to his partner, Carver, appearing out of the ether during every other cutscene. Just like with Fallout 4 and Destiny 2, Dead Space 3 represented a shift in genre for the sake of more mainstream appeal. The semblance of the game its fans loved was still there, but that’s all it was: a semblance. The traits that made it unique, that attracted a fanbase in the first place, those were either severely watered down or cut out entirely in the name of attracting more casual players.
Jumping in, the beta opens with a great start, showcasing the opening mission which immediately wraps up a story arc for old players and wipes the slate clean for new players. It’s a guaranteed win-win. Unless you’re a guardian, that is, then it’s a significant loss. For a mission showcase, this is an excellent example; this story mission had more feeling in it than all of my time spent with my guardian. Characters are interacting with you. Mysteries as to where other characters went are easy to spot in the environment and it all around creates a sense of awe. Where is Eris Morn? Her glowing green jar half buried in ruble where she once stood. Or the cleaning bot that maintains its programming, casually sweeping up the blood of dead Cabal while the Tower is literally on fire in every other regard. Seeing some of the most famous guardians in action, working with you. Entering a hallway and seeing the very people Guardians are supposedly protecting, scared, huddling together as their home is taken away. Destiny 2 wants to hit with impact, and it does.
Fallout 4 and Dead Space 3 were both the standout best sellers of their respective series. More gamers are familiar with these series thanks to their widespread success. On it’s own, this success is a good thing. In the case of Fallout at least, it means that the series has a future. Just like with Destiny 2, however, that success came with a price. In the case of Fallout 4 , greater success and mainstream appeal came at the cost of its RPG depth. Instead of defining what kind of character they want to play at the outset of the game, players can instead develop them as they play. The Sole Survivor’s identity is fluid. They can be anything and everything given enough time. They’re basically competent in everything from the outset of the game and developing them is mostly just a matter of increasing their damage with/resistance to different types of weapons.
Casual players are the single largest audience in gaming; there’s no getting around it. This is the audience that every major publisher wants to appeal to; the one group that every development studio hopes will latch onto their game. After all, capturing the attention of the casual or mainstream audience usually means massive success and wondrous profit. So it’s understandable that they, publishers especially, would have a vested interest in making their games more accessible and appealing to that audience. Making that appeal often means simplification. The simpler the game is, the more accessible it is, the more mainstream appeal it can have. While there’s nothing innately wrong with making one’s game more accessible to the wider gaming audience, doing so always comes at a cost. Just as a game cannot be both simple and complex, neither can it simultaneously serve its niche and successfully appeal to the mainstream audience. Therefore compromises must be made, usually ones that rob the game of what made it special in the first place.
Dead Space 3’s compromises were a bit more subtle , but they still resulted in a not-so-minor departure for the series. Where the first two games were horror games first and Https://Destiny2focus.Com/ shooters second, Dead Space 3 was the opposite. It traded careful resource management and situational weapons for resource crafting and all-purpose creations. Rather than a tense experience that required its players to think on the fly, players got an occasionally startling but overall leisurely romp through an undead ice planet. Once players acquired enough resources to craft a gun with both long and short range firing modes, any semblance of genuine scares and vulnerability went right out the airlock. Supposedly, Isaac isn’t even alone for most of the game thanks to his partner, Carver, appearing out of the ether during every other cutscene. Just like with Fallout 4 and Destiny 2, Dead Space 3 represented a shift in genre for the sake of more mainstream appeal. The semblance of the game its fans loved was still there, but that’s all it was: a semblance. The traits that made it unique, that attracted a fanbase in the first place, those were either severely watered down or cut out entirely in the name of attracting more casual players.