I don't use these forums much so I have no idea about post ettiquete but i don't care that much. Sorry if you get into nerd rage.
Destiny cared about being more than a product. It was about you, as a human being sitting on your couch as a kid, not really knowing what life was, feeling like humanity could be something great, and pure, and recognising where we came from, while that music filled you with emotion. Just like halo emblematised its relative peak of society, and its aspirations and potential when it came out, so did destiny, being a selective mirror of the world at the time, and it's hopes and what it aspired to be. These games stir deep things inside you, even aspirations, if you're like me that's why you play them in part. There's something spiritual here. Destiny was a message delivered through the vehicle of a video game.
Destiny 2 is similar, it is a selective mirror of our even more modern world, and how we've changed, and honestly, how bungie's changed. That modern urge to provide consumptive activities at every opportunity, while good natured, and obviously financially beneficial, cheapens it, and the tonal consistency has taken a nosedive, with the witness looking like a character from you know which epic games multiplayer shooter directly contrasing those human values of integrity and breaking the perfect immersion from D1 by obviously following a market instead of standing its ground, not to mention the adoption of the gross increasingly disembodied "vacant" modern character animations. The taken king still pulls you in because it's a world, not an activity, and it had life breathed into it. You felt like you as the guy sitting on the couch were going into that throne world and personally violating that ship six ways to sunday. Every d1 expansion felt revelatory, like a seismic shift in a real universe and the design language was the strongest in essentially any game at the time.
I know this is probably a deeper reading, but these games hold up to deep reading, and they are built off of it.
Please don't flanderise and infantilise every character and interaction in the name of feeding a parasocial, unhealthily online community :) There's players who don't interact with online communities for a reason, and we don't want storytelling with that parasocial "lean".
So I'm just wishing that the studio comes back to its old philosophies, what it means to champion being the best of humanity in a slightly more modern world, and how to portray things like danger, power, connection to history, reverence, companionship, wonder, terror, and hope again :)
-
There was also a feeling of us the player being brought into a world that is much further into our possible future. The understanding in the game that guardians don't remember their past. Yet we as players have the inherent perk of knowing since we are playing the game outside their world. Heck even our ghost in D1 at times was confused as to how we knew things of older technology and how to work them even though it didn't. It was even hinted at when D2 was getting interesting with the Envoy and The Nine talking about us the player. That seemed to have gone out the way side but I hold onto hope that this thread is pulled again as it is the only thing in lore that I still care about.