Some wonk called Destiny the best Star Wars video game ever made. I have to agree.
He didn't call it basically Animal Crossing in space, he said that the reward system was effectively Animal Crossing in space and he's 100% correct. I have put more time into Destiny than all other video games combined and it's because there are concrete rewards for simply showing up and fucking around for an hour or two, every single goddamn day. More than that, the biggest change between D1 and D2 is D2 is hella less grindey and you don't have to be that 1400 hour guy in order to get highest-level drops. So long as you're on a "clan" with that guy, he earns it for the whole goddamn clan.
True true - I was being flippant. My bad. I can totally see why that's reason enough for you to play, but for me there couldn't be a bigger turn-off in a game. Never have I encountered a reward, item or leveling system that has interested me. It's all Reddit karma to me: meaningless digital points & pixels. They might look nice or play slightly better but they leave me completely cold. There's only three reasons for me to play games, no less and no more: social experiences, novelties or creative expressions. I have a lot of hours clocked in TF2, Gmod and play Rocket League and Overwatch regularly because my friends play it and gaming with voicechat is often as fun as hanging out together. There's games that offer a touching or thought-provoking experiences, and if I like them I really love them. Games like Portal 2, Journey, To The Moon and The Beginner's Guide come to mind. Something that leaves a lasting impression. The games that leaves all of them in the dust if I would've logged the hours are SimCity 3000, Rollercoaster Tycoon and Minecraft. I had not much resembling a social life back then so as soon as I got home from elementary school, I'd fire up SC or RCT and create the perfect city or theme park for hours on end. Minecraft came later and scratched not just my creative citybuilding itch but also the social one because I found a very nice online community. As soon as I went to college that stopped dead in its tracks because I made a lot of new friends and found some cool creative outlets. Sometimes I fire up Cities: Skylines when I have a cool design idea. Ten-year-old me would have probably never stopped playing that - but I'm not ten anymore, so I do.
I happily play games for their meaninglessness. For the longest time I had a crushing desire to play The Sims but knew I couldn't because writing is effectively playing The Sims and if I did one, I wouldn't do the other. I give a fuck about social experiences. Whenever I do a thing with the mic on it's heinous. Everyone else who plays is awful and an asshole. There's a kid I play with who seriously friended me because he liked watching the digital butt of my character (he thought I was a girl until I plugged in a mic). He's 11 and homeschooled. I'm older than his parents and his worldview terrifies me. Novelty? Sure. I like things to change within reason; No Man's Sky changes the entire dynamics of the game every time they rev it so I've long since given up. New bad guys? New guns? Yeah that's dope. Creative expression? Get paid to be creative. You'll want to be as uncreative as possible in your leisure pursuits. I played Sim City 1. That game was fun when you were building and a crushing bore as soon as you were managing. That's where I am with pretty much all the sim shit - your sandbox is interesting right up to the point where I find its limits at which point I have lost any interest whatsoever. I also play drunk. On weekdays, you can play PvP in Destiny 2 drunk. On weekends you will get clobbered. In Destiny 1 the only people left were 4000 hour tryhards so you were dead no matter what. If a n00b like me is seriously considering buying a Scuf controller just to not get smeared every single day, you've lost the filthy casuals.
Is Destiny 2 worth it, in your opinion? I've been looking for something with good co-op to enjoy with some folks I've had to move away from.
I'm dozens and dozens of hours into it and i don't play first person shooters as a general rule of thumb. it's breathtakingly addictive. it's also greatly simplified over D1. Load-outs were like rolling a goddamn D&D character. Now they're pretty straightforward.