Was it the higher difficulty?
It's more nuanced than that. Neomuna, [b]areas and game modes should have varied difficulty[/b]. [i]How they achieve that difficulty[/i] is what's important. [b]Bullet sponges[/b] that [i][b]one shot you[/b][/i] [b]shouldn't be the primary method[/b] of making things more difficult. Ships that kill you as you spawn are unacceptable and shouldn't make it to the final version of the game.
Going to more difficult areas or having periods of time in the game where it's more challenging feels like progression. Growth. It offers opportunities for us to be stronger and to have more complex and interesting AI if we don't settle for bullet sponges.
[u]Increased add density was awesome.[/u] The SPECIAL PUBLIC EVENTS WERE GREAT, when the game didn't kick you. [u]I enjoyed the larger lost sectors.[/u] You can get the NEWEST EXOTICS in a patrol public event! [b]They just missed the mark on how tough all of Neomuna could be on entry[/b] for people that didn't respect resilience changes.
AREAS SHOULD BE HARDER, filled with [i]MORE RISK,[/i] and [b][i][u]provide greater rewards[/u][/i][/b]. More time spent at higher difficulty should always be better rewarded! Time doesn't need to be the only metric, but the more challenging, the greater the reward. You should still be able to do something challenging very quickly if you're doing it properly.
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Maybe for some it was the difficulty, and maybe for others it is indeed a bit more nuanced. I can’t necessarily speak to the difficulty; I felt it was somewhat well balanced (the one hit threshers aside). But, the interesting thing how this kind of discourse brings to light the (many) different reasons Lightfall was subpar for different people. For me, it was the quality of the narrative and the immersion for a $50 price tag that appalled me, and I’m not pre-ordering another Bungie product after that performance. In 2007, Bungie was giving us drop pod cut scenes where we could pan the camera around and see the wreckage of UNSC cruisers, and incoming Covenant craft, as we dropped to a planet surface. In Lightfall, we have to look at the inside of a black box as we drop to a new planet for the first time. I could speculate here about how those resources were probably spent designing more Eververse cosmetics, but it’s just become exhausting at this point…