The vibes around Destiny 2 right are mostly bad to mixed as the game has now planted itself in its “Portal Era,” and is in the middle of that during the recent launch of Destiny Rising, the NetEase mobile game that is genuinely surprising in terms of its quality.
No, I’m not going to declare Destiny Rising a better game that Destiny 2. I mean mayyyybe for the moment, or at least as long as you’re still working through Destiny Rising’s story content, including its blockbuster final mission. But playing through Destiny Rising there are a comical amount of things it does that seem like no-brainers for Destiny 2, either things that fans have requested for ages, or new ideas that would be good to implement. Let’s go through the shockingly long list.
1) Actual Tutorials – Destiny Rising has playable tutorials for nearly everything in game, each character, each skill, each type of enemy, and even rewards players for completing them. This is opposed to Destiny 2’s exceptionally poor onboarding experience which has only gotten worse in time.
2) Actual Numbers – Destiny as a series has been deathly afraid of giving out numerical data for its skills and perks and abilities for its entire lifespan, while Destiny Rising offers detailed figures for every single aspect so YouTubers don’t have to manually test everything and tell us.
3) It’s Social – While Destiny 2 used to be at least somewhat social, Destiny Rising has gone back to actual, populated patrol spaces in an era when D2 has just herded everyone into a portal and has created its last two locations as single-instance only where no other players besides you are there. There are also a number of different chat channels for various aspects of Destiny Rising.
4) Fun Casual Games – Among other things, Destiny Rising has a better fishing system than the previous, now-deleted minigame Destiny 2 had in a past season. It brought back sparrow racing. It has a card game you play via The Drifter that is actually pretty good. All of these grant actually useful rewards.
5) Material Information – Yes, there are a million materials you need to upgrade everything in Destiny Rising to the point where it can be confusing. But there, it allows you to click on any material, it will tell you where to get it, and then you can just click to launch that activity instantly.
6) Clear Goals – The story campaign is relatively straightforward, but the game also gives you clear goals to progress, most of which involve experimenting with all the various activities you unlock and powering up at least a core team using all the various systems, which in effect, acts as another sort of tutorial.
7) Better Gambit – Destiny Rising introduces Shifting Gates, a new activity, very early on that serves as part battle royale with multiple teams, part Gambit where players collect and deposit motes, while killing AI enemies, big bosses and other players as different bonuses appear like double drops at times. There’s an entire progression and leveling system within this specific activity.
8) Other Great Activities – I like almost all of these, and all of them are mobile-length short, which allows you to dip in and out at your leisure (the game literally warns you when something will take longer than 15 minutes). Each activity targets specific things from gear to materials, and I really enjoy ones like a Nine-based activity where you go through rounds and get upgrades each time. Good upgrades, not extremely basic ones like we’ve seen in some similar Destiny activities.
9) Stacking Engrams – You don’t just hold 10 engrams at a time, there are a number of types of engrams and they all stack in each slot.
10) Clan Housing – A long, long requested feature that Destiny 2 players have wanted for years, and Destiny Rising launched with it.
11) Patch Notes in Game – They’re all posted in the game itself rather than purely sending players to a blog.
12) Patch/Downtime Rewards – Destiny Rising gives out compensation if they fix broken things or have unexpected downtime.
13) Instant Fixes – Within a week, Destiny Rising fixed some core issues including significantly upping some lagging drop rates of some items.
14) Actual Navigation – A glowing line when you need it rather than a dancing around white square that can often be more confusing than useful.
15) Multiple Trash Deletion – Destiny 2 makes you salvage items individually where you can filter or manually select dozens of items at a time to dismantle in Destiny Rising.
16) Generosity – I’m not talking about currency to do gacha pulls, as while you’ll get some at the start, that peters out rather fast. But when you run activities you will usually be drowned in useful materials and loot, sometimes pages full, and it 90% not junk, and actually something you need or should at least be stockpiling. Destiny has entire activities you run for 20 minutes in The Portal right now for a single drop, much of the time, and with a very small percentage of that not being junk.
This isn’t all of them. As I wrote this a new one would pop into my head every thirty seconds or so, and I’ll add more below this. I am obviously skipping over the bad things in Destiny Rising, albeit most of those are just typical mobile/gacha annoyances. But yeah, there’s a whole lot to learn for Bungie here.
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