The worst add-on in Year 1 of the original Destiny was arguably The Dark Below. Some may point out the storyline and the grind for House of Wolves got to be pretty bad, but it gave us new areas, a whole new weapon type (sidearms), the Prison of Elders, and related good stuff. But TDB suffered from basically being a tremendous tease for The Taken King. It gave us the Crota raid, sure. It packed in new weapons and made swords briefly playable (which was more than players had gotten up to that point). It had a lot of great story ideas which didn't execute quite as well as they probably should have, but was partially redeemed with TTK came out.
Up until a day ago, I was firmly of the opinion that Curse of Osiris would remain the champion of bad Destiny 2 expansions. The inevitable first fumble trying to extend the main game. And yet, I'm starting to think there may be a pattern involved which does not bode well for the series. It seems like the first expansion Bungie makes which centers around the Hive is also going to be the one digging the giant crater that later expansions will have to haul themselves out of. Because there is some serious failure happening in Warmind, and it's killing me.
The Good
It's like pulling teeth trying to think of some good that came out of this expansion. The emote management is a nice touch, to be sure. The addition of quest item "pursuits" in the inventory neatly moves things like the raid shotgun quest and new Warmind specific item quests out of the "backpack" where it was taking up slots for gear. The nagging sensation here is that Bungie should have done these things in the first place, particularly the "pursuits" page, which was kind of a thing in the first game (albeit somewhat more curtailed). Probably the one good thing would be the ability to shard items right at the Postmaster. It definitely solves a problem from the initial release. But it's telling that I had to think hard enough to consider it.The Bad
I've deliberately focused this post on the main story campaign and the updates for a particular reason. Whether by accident or design, Bungie seems to have been aiming to try and recreate TTK in spirit if not in fact. Yet they have not been able to catch lightning in a bottle twice.The first great sin of the campaign is, much like CoO, that it's too damned short. A bit longer than CoO, but not appreciably so. There was more meat to TTK's main story campaign in terms of mission count, but comparatively speaking, even TTK was shorter than the original Destiny campaign. I don't mind a relatively short campaign so long as there's a good structure to it, the right sense of pacing and stakes. Warmind's campaign pacing does not fit the stakes, and that's problematic from an enjoyment standpoint. Some people will say, "Screw story, just play the damn game!" For me, story in a game like this is tremendously important. Particularly when I know Bungie can tell a good story, even through a short campaign. They executed such a thing once almost perfectly, and did a pretty good job the time immediately before that. Since then, however, not so much.
This gets into the second problem of the campaign: the stakes are completely out of whack. Taking on giant cybernetically enhanced aliens, beings which sit at the intersection of zombies and demons, and robots from a future timeline is one thing. Going up against the big bosses, the Oryx and Aksis scale threats, knowing you're going to be running into them again for a final confrontation in the raid helps give players a sense of accomplishment while also giving a motivation to keep going in order to prepare for that final fight in the raid. Where Warmind falls apart is that the player isn't given that penultimate fight. They are given the sort of final showdown which probably should have been saved for an actual raid rather than a story mission. Worse, players aren't being given a sense of mission the same way they were with TTK. Instead, they're sent off with an utterly half-baked idea and being told to make bricks from straw. Even the character of Ana Bray questions Zavala on the wisdom of this particular course of action. I kept expecting Eris Morn to show up and shoot Zavala in the head over and over, telling him he was being a moron, because this was one of those times where the resident emo-girl of the Destiny would have been useful to have around. Think about that a moment: one of the biggest one note characters in the series reappearing would have improved this expansion. That should be scaring the hell out of the players and the writers.
The third major problem of this expansion is the vault space. Players were told the vault would be expanding. And it did, by a hundred slots. It sounds impressive taken by itself, but think about all the crap that can be thrown into a 300 slot inventory, which had been previously a 200 slot inventory. Now think about the fact that a bunch of new items have been created. Unless somebody has filled their character slots with the same class, there's going to be a lot of different items for different classes tucked away. There might be somebody at Bungie willing to proclaim "We expanded player vault space by 50%!" with a straight face, but I doubt they would survive the experience if the right group of fans was in arms' reach.
A cursory glance at the item listings gives us some numbers to work with:
- Shaders - 123
- Sparrows - 109
- Ships - 107
- Ghosts - approximately 100 (curiously, Ghost shells are supposed to be searchable in the database, but no database site can actually find them, so the number here is my approximation)
- Legendary Weapons - 274
- Legendary Armor Pieces (across all classes) - 451
The Ugly
The problem with storage space could be alleviated to an extent with the sort of storage kiosks that Destiny eventually introduced for shaders, emblems, and vehicles. What's particularly damning is they already have that system in place for exotic weapons and armor as well as emblems. In any reasonably well made game engine, the ability to expand that sort of functionality should be a relatively short code update. If Bungie were smart, they would give ships, Sparrows, and Ghost shells their own collection page in the vault, which would be a minor update to the vault UI rather than having to add in kiosk models to the Tower and the Farm. Furthermore, they could (and ought to) revert the shader model to the original method where we weren't having to luck into the right "paint chips" and give them a collection page. Why Bungie persists in not doing the smart thing for their players is baffling. The shaders, in particular, have been a constant complaint. Yeah, players might not use all the shaders they get, but this "paint chip" method is just completely bonkers. More importantly, it eliminates a third of the possible items for storage, which can only make players happy since they won't have to be agonizing over non-essential items to keep.I'm not thrilled with the Warmind expansion at this point. While it looks like Bungie is planning to keep players busy with item hunts and exotic masterworks, it should be pointed out that a similar strategy was conceived for CoO, and that seemed to hurt the game more than it helped.
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