Destiny, and I say this as someone who loved D1 and tried very hard to love D2, suffers from a mix of the worst of art-by-committee and the worst of art-by-auteur.

Every game director has managed to come across both a simpering sycophant and clueless tyrant, trying to cater to both the vicitudes of MTX optimization and the whims of their 50-hour-a-week players, both of which command Bungie's ear to try to make the most addictive game on the least content.

As a result they are stuck to committing to a constant release schedule where they have barely enough time to create basic terrain and voice overs, throw in their usual stock of enemies and press-button-while-holding-a-shape game play. And they are damned if they do and damned if they don't touch the PvP mode, where half the players are mad if they lose a single engagement in a single match in a single game while playing with the most optimized loadout, and the other half are the same but playing with random trash they found on the floor.

The gun play is great, but it's clear they can't think of anything exciting to do with it any more. All sense of mystery has gone from the old story, and the new story doesn't have time to explain why they don't have time to explain.

Their most recent season was focused loosely around pagan witchcraft, I'm a amateur (secular) Tarot reader, my wife and I are loosely (atheist) pagan celebrants, and they even had a custom tarot deck as merch - couldn't hold my attention because it was still an easier Court of Oryx from Destiny 1, and the main game play is "shoot monster, go to the HAM radio which for some reason is the size of a fridge to listen to an alien with a Brooklyn accent chat shit about something that happened 2 years ago"

The sub average ubi game will be 10 bucks in a few years anyway. Just in case it was somewhat good by accident.

The last ubi game I got at release was the first Mario vs Rabbids. It was great, and yet I still regretted getting it so soon. Because let me tell you what happened next : for 2 years, the cost of getting the season pass for that game was more than buying the full gold edition. They just didn't offer any discount on DLC, just the gold edition.

And for more bullshit, the season pass included stuff that could only be obtained through it (or in gold edition, of course). So until the full content was available, you had the choice of getting a season pass of content that didn't exist yet and on which you had zero guarantee , or getting individual DLCs when they drop, and already know that some stuff will never be available to you.

Of course I didn't get the second game on release. I haven't got it yet in fact. Guess what, exact same pattern regarding DLC pricing. Gold is already cheaper than individual DLCs. I'm sure it can go lower, I am not in a hurry.

I mean i wouldn't either, but now it's definitely worse than a subscribtion base. Now you pay for the expansion, dungeons keys, raids, battlepass...

Final fantasy 14?

It depends. If destiny was sub based and all additional content free? I might still recommend it. It plays like an MMO already, why not lean into it? Make players start at zero and play through all the campaigns so they know what's going on in the story, they have to unlock and learn all the trees, that sort of thing. That would be a damn sight better than dumping new players in at 1250 or whatever base power is and letting them figure it the fuck out themselves. It'd be a bigger time sink, which is what bungo wants anyway, but new players won't be dumped into a world they know nothing about with no tutorial beyond "press g to throw a grenade."

The problem is they're trying to split the difference between a long-play MMO and instant action shooter and only getting the worst of both worlds.

The lore was something that kept me interested for so long, but when they said that the awoken have a well over a million year long society and Mara Sov is 14 million years old is when I lost interest. I got to see the Ahamkara and that was a good send off for me

Not sure when you last played it, but they've revamped the new player stuff a lot to make the transition much better. I never had a big issue with how it was personally but I think it's gotten way better about introducing new players to how the game works. Definitely not at all the case that you need a hundred hours to get into it, that's just ridiculous hyperbole in my opinion. I think it may take a few hours of play to start getting into the habits and finding cool mods and stuff to experiment with, but definitely not a hundred hours of grinding. If you haven't in a long time, try it out, it's really great.

I got back into the game in Season 21 and played all the campaigns then. I enjoyed all of them. Shadowkeep was very cool, I felt bad for Eris. Witch Queen was fun, I found the story gripping. Lightfall was kinda meh, but Strand is so powerful. Every campaign doesn't need to be amazing much like every season of a TV show need to be amazing, but I'll still watch Futurama and Bones and The Office over and over.

The only campaign I haven't played again is Beyond Light, which I mostly finished back when it came out.

I think the part I disliked the most of all the campaigns was getting Strand meditations for my Banner of War Titan. But the levels were fun to play even if the story wasn't great.

We're spending $15 every few months. That costs way less than a full season of a TV show or even a single movie, especially in the theater, and we play Destiny for many more hours than watch a TV season or movie.