Most importantly, Homecoming is thematic for getting rid of the old and bringing in the new. The Tower was a place of excitement and frustration in the first game. Players would have to continuously go back to The Tower constantly and eventually it became a chore. Walking through the destroyed halls you walked through thousands of times is poignant. We’re saying goodbye to The Tower.
This new loot box is known as a "Prismatic Matrix" and works very much like a package gacha. The Prismatic Matrix has its own pool of ten possible items for players to pull out of it and players can make ten pulls per week. Once the next weekly reset hits, the matrix will refresh with a stock of ten new items. The Prismatic Matrix only awards items players don’t already have, so each pull will award the player with something new. It sounds good at first, but there are a few catches. Players only get one free pull per week and all the others have to be paid for with real money. Players can’t even bank their weekly pulls in order to guarantee themselves something they want because Destiny 2 will only allow players to bank a maximum of three free pulls. This means that the absolute most one could get for free in a week is four items. That...really doesn’t sound like much of an improvement does it? If anything, these boxes will encourage burst spending as overeager players race to make sure they have all the items available for a given week.
When Destiny first launched in 2014, it received a mixed reception. There was a consensus among fans and critics that there just wasn’t enough content. With Destiny 2 being a full-blown sequel, how are you approaching content so that it doesn’t end up like its predecessor?
For game modes, the vast majority of game modes from the original game are back, alongside two new modes: Survival and Countdown. Survival gives each team a shared-pool of eight lives. Once that depletes, permadeath kicks in. The last team standing wins. Countdown is Destiny 2’s take on Search and Destroy. The attacking team attempts to plant a bomb, and the defending team must either defuse it or kill the entire team before it detonates. The first team to five victories wins.
It wants to be a sci-fi epic, but also a dedicated "fan’s game." It wants to welcome in new players, but old systems built in are great for pushing them away. It wants so much, and it can’t focus on what. This can most prominently be seen in the new Raid-lair coming out. Destiny as a series has gained a reputation for world-first completions of its raid, something to be seen as a race. What happens then to those who casually play that might want in on the action? It pushes them away, like everything else in Destiny 2. Why would anyone want to try their hand at the end-game content when it’s advertised as something for the best of the best.
The battlefield then led to the dig site, which shows just how cinematic Bungie intends all missions to be. Giant drills are circling around, and getting smacked by one of them automatically kills a Guardian. You have to navigate across a Cliffside while trying not to get hit by them, and dealing with the Cabal. With so many moving parts, The Inverted Spire is easily more cinematic than anything in the vanilla version of Destiny.
The action continues after a short cutscene (yes, there are cutscenes in missions now). We’ve boarded the Cabal capital ship and need to take down the shields. The level ended in the shield generator room where we were introduced to Destiny 2 Exotic Armor 2’s main antagonist, Ghaul. Large and menacing, Bungie claims that he’s a more complex villain than, say, Oryx, but he didn’t come across that way in the demo. Hopefully, we’ll see another side of him in the main game.
The people running Bungie and Activision aren’t stupid. It takes a great deal of smarts and business acumen to successfully run and grow any kind of company; they know exactly what they're doing. They’re trying to make it sound like they’re doing their fans a favor, but we wouldn’t be seeing this if that were truly the case. If they really wanted to do their consumers a favor, they could do any of the following:
It’s been nearly three years since Bungie and Activision first brought us into the world of Destiny . The 2014 first-person loot shooter with MMO-lite mechanics strived to be the next big thing, but was ultimately disappointing. A lack of content, a thrown together campaign and repetitive missions marred what was supposed to be the next big Activision IP. Though Bungie got their act together and released the stellar Taken King and OK Rise of Iron expansions, neither felt like the proper leap forward the franchise needed. Well, now we have Destiny 2, a new chance for Bungie to hit the reset button.
"Outside of the Prismatic Matrix, players may continue to earn Bright Engrams each time they level up, and they can still purchase these engrams if they want a chance to get everything from the Season 3 catalog. Additionally, we’re increasing the number of items available from Tess each week with Bright Dust, from 14 to 18 items.