We skipped last week because we were all getting ready for Woke Week. Now that that’s all over, let’s talk about the temporary bout of psychosis I seem to be experiencing.
I had a great time with Destiny 2 a long, long time ago. I enjoyed its stories, I played enough of the raids to earn but not buy a raid ring, and for a while, I logged on every single day just for a chance to experience its snappy gunplay. Then, around the time the Lightfall expansion came out, I simply lost interest. That’s the thing with live service games—it’s hard for one to actually sustain a person’s interest year over year. They have their season, and I assumed that my season with Destiny 2, and basically all live service shooters, was over.
Enter Marathon, another Bungie live service shooter. Marathon is a game that I’ve been thinking about a lot since I first played it, and even if I don’t have a ton of time to play it (I just unlocked Outpost), I want to be playing it all the time. The way this game stuck in my mind has made me want to go backwards in time and try to understand the choke hold Destiny 2 used to have on me.
Of course, you can never go home again. Destiny 2 is radically different from the way it used to be. There aren’t light levels anymore, gear has tiers, you can modify your armor and create “builds” and most upsetting for me, the Tower is slightly different and I don’t remember where anything is. Where are all my friends?
All the stuff from Destiny 2, the activities that make up the bulk of the game, are now located in a new menu called “The Portal,” which appears to put all the Strikes and other group activities into a playlist, streamlining the player experience. Brother, this sucks. I don’t want this game to be streamlined! I loved kinda just running around different planets and getting lost on my way to an objective—that was the special sauce that kept me returning to Destiny 2, stumbling upon vistas where I could sit and look at the digital night’s sky.
I had a little ritual of returning to the Tower after doing my daily tasks, which I used to call “putting my Guardian to bed.” Before I logged off, I wanted to know that my robot girl and her Ghost were somewhere safe and cozy. Now, The Portal is literally accessible as soon as I open the game. My Guardian no longer feels like a character that lives in a very specific world—she’s just an arm attached to a gun. That said, when I did visit Europa and break out my combat bow to snipe some Vex in the head, it felt as if I had never left. There is simply nothing like double jumping up into the air, drawing back your bow, and hitting something so hard in the head it fucking explodes and the remains of its body launches into the air.
How about you? Are you returning to an old game? Trying something new? Been at one thing for a while? I want to hear it all.
