Destiny 2's Infinite Forest Sucks
Forbes thinks it could be better
Destiny 2's Infinite Forest is such a minor problem, effectively a single branch on a tree in the forest of issues that affect player's looking for this game to have some entertainment value versus the amount of money we're paying for it, that I think most people will ignore that it could be the game’s saving feature in the short terms. But will probably not get updated and so will be disappointing and tedious for a long time. The issue as I see it is that there's problems with the format of Destiny 2's activities and rewards systems. This is both for returning veterans, who have experienced everything from the original game, through all of the new activities added to the game and which have since been removed, through deprecation. But for right now we're trying to figure out what it is like for all the new players who are trying to figure out what they paid for and where the game is going. Someone buying the base game because this didn't want to commit to the DLC packs having to decide on buying those apparently mandatory content updates based on the game as is.. I can't see any of them being convinced. It's just been controversy since it launched. Easy answer is none of us knows what's in store for the game and Bungie keeps fucking shit up by making stupid decisions for no apparent logical reason. Like removing all the useful materials and level gear up with things like Motes of light. Also.. what happened to the speaker after the campaign ends? Is there a reason why he's not at the new tower? etc I mean I understand that the solo stuff can be underwhelming and focused on learning the game.. but why can't it have value to players that just want to replay that content? There's a large number or people that would like to get their money's worth out of the game while playing solo, or at least without friends because it can be hard to play a game like destiny if you don't know anyone else that plays it, OR more likely because all of your friends have left the game already and aren't going to come back while Bungie keeps making idiotic decisions like dumping everything from the old game. Also there's the thing about having to use a mic for matchmaking activities, some people don't want to because of the negative behavior that they are subjected to when they do. The new raid happened to cause an outcry because it appeared that communication was mandatory for a couple of parts of the activity. Since then players have found ways to complete the activity without voice communication and even without any communication at all. That's the core of the Destiny experience.. that progression towards mastery. The activities might not come off as self evident due to sparse explanation of how they function, but after practicing them for a while it clicks and you can end up mastering the content. That isn't expected from the single player activities of course that tend to be heavy with help for the player to understand how to play.. but once you get into strikes and public events their mechanics aren't always obvious or well explained by the game. Other players will show you what to do. For Raids, you'll have to learn from other players because next to nothing will be explained. Some of the changes that have been made to the game affect those principals in that the single player activities aren't fun or rewarding, for example the Mercury public even which has 2 chests.. that give you nothing for completing it on its Heroic Mode. It feels like Heroic modes don't add much for increasing the rewards getting doled out versus the actual bump in difficulty. Why does that matter? Well as a player starting out you have certain activities open to you and what you're looking at is a couple of hours to a dozen of leveling up. During that process you can expect to collect some gear that is supposed to make those bigger activities easier and prepare you to confront the hard stuff. While that is the case, those harder activities ARE hard for some new players that don't benefit from an established knowledge of the general mechanics of the game. Worse is that the variety of game play in the assortment of activities available in Destiny 2 doesn't feel much different. At least if you're a veteran that has played everything the game has had to offer so far. Because of that difficulty curve and lack of players (because they keep quitting) it feels like new players are getting bored without trying everything. There's no reason for the game to be so poor with giving the player useful rewards. What's a useful reward? Perhaps those new Masterwork weapons that drop orbs? Maybe.. I wouldn't know.. haven't been able to do prestige Nightfall this week and otherwise it doesn't seem like any way to get any of them. It isn't even that the activity is impossible to complete but the time investment with strangers, after finding them, is demanding. Even the regular Heroic Strikes which are straightforward repeatedly caused wipes (not even due to lack of communication which is not expected) but because it is just too easy for all three players to get killed. Example.. one time one of the other players had randomly died.. no problem.. but just as we noticed it myself and the other remaining player got kicked off the platform by god only knows what. It becomes annoying when you're actually trying to complete something hard and then you get wiped for no apparent reason. That aggravation was pervasive in the original game because it was rife with significant bugs and garbage mechanics that Bungie didn't usually fix. Those issue for the most part don't affect Destiny 2 and so present one of the only critical advancements in the series so far.. that the game isn't laugh out loud buggy and you don't often here players saying they are getting Bungie'd. Yet stunningly.. there are those random moments when you just don't know what killed you, or wiped your team. Paradoxically it makes Destiny 2 even more tedious when it happens because it just isn't as common to lose progress for no reason. I say this after playing through the DLC on Xbox and PS4 with 5 characters and don't feel like I've yet seen all the rewards... and that's fine, but not because I haven't played enough.. or that the game is artificially limiting the rewards.. but that there are too many duplicates and some of the new stuff is locked inside loot boxes that take a shit ton of time to earn. The rewards system just feels broken. From the small things that Bungie has claimed to have fixed, like patrol chests that tend to be empty most of the time, and that otherwise offer next to nothing as rewards (just tokens most of the time).. it feels like there's no point in going out on patrols other than when the game forces you to in order to collect materials or complete x number of activities to complete a quest. I'm not really trying to get into the issue of how long it takes to actually earn then, because on 2 accounts with 5 of 6 active characters (one Titan is on vacation).. but that I HAVE seen shit loads of play earned loot boxes return nothing.. or duplicates. If money was actually a consideration in their decision making then there should be more stuff in the loot boxes and fewer garbage items. This has been an ongoing thing because these loot boxes are just for cosmetic things otherwise they'd tread into pay-to-win problems. Bungie could have imported things from the old games for the new players to purchase in the loot boxes like legendary weapons, had they not contorted the gun system so badly. That would give the boxes some value for returning players. As that isn't the case and as the available loot boxes are full of shit items no one wants.. I can't see why they would have designed the game around them and why people would even buy them unless you really are that pressed for play time that you'd buy the game, and DLC and pay extra to unlock vanity items. Buying any amount of them and getting nothing worthwhile would be far worse than spending the time in the game and earning them. And then fully ignore that the items that matter, the weapons and gear.. have been nerfed. There's even less play choice involved in how we set up our gear. Bungie has said that there's potential for Mods to evolve to replace the old min maxing system but they never said why the system was removed in the first place. It was time consuming and perhaps tedious for some players, but that system of complexity was rewarding and helped justify the loot system (dropping so many duplicates). We knew about these changes prior to the games launch because Bungie decided to let us in on, 1 resetting gear and level, 2 gear would no longer be unique, 3 we'd be losing an entire weapon class for no reason as two that have nothing to do with each other would be combined. So before releasing the game, and after the pre-orders were opened, Bungie DID tell us they'd be trying out so really dumb shit. The response was negative. The result is negative. Bungie don't give no fucks. But gear and levelling aside, there's the activities. Would there be activities that would make it worth loading up the game every day? 4v4 PvP isn't going over well. And oddly the most played activity seems to be public events. So popular are public events in patrol for rewards over time played, that Bungie nerfed them. They claim that the rewards are better but that's only because they swapped blue drops which are literally useless.. to purple drops, which tend to be duplicates. Thus the only recent changes they made was to give players more legendary shards. Which has no value. You can dump hundreds into whatever vendors take them and get nothing back.. compared to just playing the game. Some would argue that as you have them anyway.. you might as well just sit there in a tedious menu system mashing a button to empty your shards into a handful of engrams that will have nothing in them. Instead.. just play the game and get experience AND as good odds of hitting exotic drops. But those exotics will most likely be duplicates and can often be of a lower level than the one you already have. Its aggravating because Bungie claims that have systems in place to avoid duplicates. Bullshit. Losing access to several locations from the first game.. for no reason other than that they haven't yet been added to Destiny 2 means that players are forced to explore the new worlds. Had there been a story based reason to block off those locations from patrols at the very least would have been nice but there's no reason given. Bungie doesn't give reasons. They don't explain themselves. Yes the obvious reason is that it would have been too much for them to deal with to add all of those places in a game that would have to grow it's player base.. apparently because their retention from the first game was so poor. Perhaps another argument is that the reception for existing locations would have been lukewarm. We've been to these places already.. why are they still here. Because you're continuing the series not replacing it with something else? Idfk. Is there anything wrong with them? No. Not as such. Titan would be the main location to feel 'poor' because it is so small. I have spent the majority of my hundreds of hours on Titan.. and was delighted when one of the first ghost shells I got was to increase XP gains on Titan. I like Titan because the public events are close together and they used to occur frequently AND their Heroic variants are somewhat easy to complete solo. So as a loot farm, Titan is nirvana. But.. why aren't the public events inside the Arcology? No reason. Very disappointing as there are story locations within the campaign that suggest that Titan should be much large and there's room for other public events but more importantly different and bigger public events. The Curse of Osiris DLC highlights this because the much longer intervaled, more complicated, and much more rewarding public even (not really) public even seems to hint that Bungie wants to try adding much bigger public events. That actually matters now because they resolved and issue (if it was real) that was loading players into empty patrol zones making them have to master solo'ing the public events. Now that the world is getting more populated it makes more sense for bigger public events where there actually is an expectation that you'd have help. The result though is that while Mercury is populated at any given time, the public event takes a long time to cycle. And it's rewards are shit. There's no reason to do it as there are no rewards unique to it. I don't care about the other locations tbh. Io especially just annoys me. And I mean that's the main complaint.. there's no worthwhile rewards from anything. Once you have a set of gear that gets you through the majority of activities.. there's no reason to keep playing. By that time you'll have done everything ad nauseam. But the reason people tend to gravitate to Patrols and public events is that you can complete them almost all of the time so the flow of loot is constant. Trying to do that with Heroic Strikes and Prestige Nightfalls for example.. isn't a guarantee even if you're playing with friends unless you've mastered those activities. Year 1 nightfalls were a joke for a while for having joke rewards like horns and emotes if you got anything at all.. I actually thought those days were done until I started getting blue mods as rewards. Its aggravating to receive something that's worse than useless. These items are worse than useless because they clutter an already small inventory and force the player to spend significant amounts of time emptying bullshit from their inventory like blue mods and shaders. Those inventory spaces get smaller when you ad useless shit like ornaments that are permanent. They show that either Bungie doesn't learn or they intentionally keep designing their menus to be aggravating. There are too many duplicate items due to the gear system which gives the player exact copies of the same gear which requires them to dismantle or infuse virtually everything they receive as rewards for a given activity. This automatic response to the majority of rewards makes the entire rewards system feel very unrewarding. Adding to the tedium of inventory management. Gee I need x item but all I'm getting is 1000x of x. Like right now I have a Heart of Time on Xbox. It took a bit to try it because I hate pulse rifles. But holy shit it is great. https://db.destinytracker.com/d2/en/items/4145119417 I don't have one on PS4. So I'm looking for it but can't get it. In the meantime I'm trying the Nergal PR4. It isn't the same even though the rounds per minute are the same and it's full auto.. should be better. https://db.destinytracker.com/d2/en/items/339343290 And I then accidentally opened my Destiny 1 inventory and started seeing those old Prison of Elders guns... the primaries with elemental burns.. or that were energy weapons in the primary slot. There was no reason to remove them or split the primary slot. Could have just made low mag powerful weapons their own slot and put Kinetic secondaries. Leaving it as weapons determine the slow not what they shoot. A power weapon needs to do damage and have low ammo. Why is that complicated? I'm actually made about this now because Telesto is back and even when the ground is littered with power ammo.. in most encounters you don't have it where it matter. There's no heavy ammo synth for the times when it matters.. when you're in a boss encounter. Telesto should be useful in boss encounters but not when there's no ammo for it. But that in itself wouldn't be bad when you consider that the first games rewards had uniqueness, materials and ammo packs etc, AND encouraged the player to level up the gear they wanted AND some gear was better than others based on their perks. That's all gone and there's very little right now that makes the new systems worthwhile. You'd sometimes obtain GOD roll items which still didn't break the game, it just made it easier to play certain encounters. So.. No God rolls. Fewer perks. Locked perks and stats. Duplicates aplenty. Garbage rewards. No materials, no ammo packs.. and a buch of garbage like armor ornaments that takes up space in the mod inventory for something cosmetic. WHO IS DESIGNING THIS SHIT AND MAKING THESE DECISIONS?! So.. The Infinite Forest Why is the Infinite Forest the camel that breaks my back? I mean there's not much wrong with the design of the infinite forest area except that like the Acrology on Titan.. there's no reason why it isn't a public space with public events. The majority of time on Mercury patrols should be in the IF once you have access to it. That means you would have needed to play through the story to have access to it. FFS there's a god damned door. As long as you get through that door in the campaign then you should have access to that area. Had Bungie not made it so you didn't have a sparrow for the entire campaign (complete idiocy) then getting into the Arcology in patrols would have that same type of gate. Same could have been said for the Raid areas, once you have access to them becoming public areas with public events with rewards in the Plague Lands and Vault of Glass. To some extent even the Dreadnaught could have had a few more patrol zones inside the ascendant realm. Aren't there enough players that would have access to the infinite forest? Now here's the big issue. The old patrol zones don't have to be gone. They could be added into the IF. As well as the old Raids. This again blocks from somewhat from players that haven't yet completed that part of the campaign. But how would the current design of the IF integrate new simulations of those old areas without falling into the trap of too much work to redesign old activities so that they are familiar but still fresh. That's up to Bungie. Adding a forth simulation tower thing that contains all the old activities brought forward into Destiny 2 would help shoe horn it into the overall story. I mean as it stands Osiris is able to modify and build simulations. More importantly it allows Bungie to bring back content that they might not have thought appropriate to, such as the Skolas encounter, because he's dead. And what happens if you consider that any Vex exposure to SIVA would have meant simulations of SIVA.. A SIVA power Gatelord? sounds like another great public event for the Infinite Forest. All those old boss fights could be those bigger public events. So ultimately what we have is a convenient way for Bungie to add stuff back into the game if they wanted without yet opening back up the old patrol zones. It just doesn't answer the question of WHY those areas are gone or are inaccessible.
