I will be the first to say that I am extremely excited for the release of Forsaken, however, I think it would be foolish to ignore the precedent that bungie has established with content releases. People don't seem to realize that what is being seen in the trailer is a highly curated, minimal glimpse at content that is designed to portray the content in the most positive possible light that it can, even to the point of bending the truth. For instance in the Destiny 1 gameplay reveal trailer bungie showcased the fallen knocking over huge towers and heavily altering the map while flying in for a public event. For Forsaken, I am sure most people have heard of all the new content that we are getting, so I am not going to waste your time restating it here, only clarifying what certain pieces of content are actually giving us.
- New supers: it has already been seen that bungie is essentially reusing assets from the first game. That can be seen in the new nightstalker super, which is essentially an upgraded bladedancer, and the new solar titan super that is literally a reskinned axe from Rise of Iron (not kidding, that is literally what it is).
- Non-Linear Story: This one made me laugh when they announced it. They are touting this like it is some ground-breaking innovation when all it really means is that a player will get to choose what order they want to kill the Barons in, wow, amazing. Jokes aside this is nothing new, and does nothing to extend longevity of the game.
-Barons: These bosses do sound cool, however it seems that they are going to be underutilized. I am essentially seeing these missions playing out almost like strikes, but since they are considered story missions they will likely only be used for daily heroic story missions, meaning it is likely their will be no specific gear or reason to farm them other than the daily heroic powerful engram. They NEED to give the Barons their own gear worth farming for, or they will be forgotten a week after launch.
-New Destinations: Look, these are not going to drastically change how patrol spaces in D2 function. We have already seen gameplay of the end-game destination, with the same old public events (slightly altered), appearing in the playspace. I am sure they will be interesting to explore, for a week, but without mention of any special innovations coming to those spaces, it is unlikely that any insane innovations exist, or else bungie would be marketing the heck out of them.
-Destination Iterations: They are stating that these destinations, especially the Dreaming City, will change week to week. Don't buy in to this. They said the same thing about strikes. Those changes included swapping out enemy types at certain parts of the strike, and sometimes changing the order that you run through a strike in. It is likely that the changes they are referring to with these destinations will be on the same scale.
- What is NOT in the trailer: This should be what most people are looking at when content is announced, what the developer is not telling you. There are no new subclasses, no increase in the number of raids, the number of raid bosses in the new raid is increased but they don't specify if they are planning on bosses simply rotating in or if there are actually 5 different boss encounters. Aside from Gambit there are no new modes, especially endgame ones, meaning that the endgame after Forsaken drops will likely be extremely similar to the current endgame, Milestones, Raids, Trials, repeat. They have not said anything specific about increasing the power fantasy for players in pve (Vagueness often equals lack of existence) Strikes will likely function in a very similar fashion to how they do currently, despite bungie stating that they want to create ways to get players to play them more (They had a similar approach when talking about how continuous drops of the same weapon would still be exciting if random roles were taken out, they did not do anything about it).
- Developer Vagueness: If a developer never specifies how they are intending to make something better, they don't actually have a good way of doing it. Every time a developer knows they are doing something innovative, marketing will capitalize on it. Think about it, has bungie after introduced a major piece of content and not heavily marketed it? Court of Oryx, Archon's Forge, Escalation Protocol, the Infinite Forest, all of these were heavily marketed and known about weeks before launch.
-Conclusion: Forsaken will likely be a nice breath of fresh air and bring many players back to the game. However, people need to realize that it is not like all the issues with the game will be fixed overnight. D2 should have started off better than Destiny 1, when it was at its best. Instead many of the promises in Forsaken are aiming to bring D2 up to D1's level. I will be playing Forsaken the day it drops, but I would encourage people to not set themselves up for disappointment. Let me know what you think of this post, and what you agree or disagree with.
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What are your thoughts about Forsaken now?