The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Destiny 2: Shadowkeep Review

Episode Date: October 3, 2019

Destiny 2: Shadowkeep Review

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, coming to you with another great review of a game. So this will be for our gaming channels on thechrisvossshow.com. It will also be on our Chris Voss Gaming podcast. You can go to chrisvossgaming.com and see that. And you can follow both of our podcasts across the interwebs. We do a lot of interviews all around Chris Voss Gaming for gaming developers that come on the show, review of games, etc., etc., and different products for the gaming community, if you will.

So anyway, we're going to talk about one of my favorite games of all time, Destiny, made by the developer Bungie. And this is their first big DLC launch. They're launching the Destiny 2 Shadowkeep DLC, and it's pretty interesting what they are launching. So let's talk about what I think about it. Now, like I said, I've been a fan of Destiny since its beginning. I've been a year one player since almost the very first moment, and I've loved the game. I've been very addicted to it. I played the hell out of it. I was really in love with Destiny 1.

Destiny 2 had a lot of initial problems that drove a lot of players from the game, including myself. And the changes were completely unnecessary. I mean, all most people expected out of D2 was new maps, new reskins of stuff, new kind of content or missions. But we all kind of knew all the guns are going to be reskinned, all the outfits would be

reskinned. You know, you can feel the archetypes of D1 guns even now in guns that come out. So that's all we wanted. But instead, Bungie and or Activision decided to turn everything on its head just for seemingly the purpose of just selling it. Well, the game's totally changed. We didn't want a totally changed game. You know, you learn this in business. You don't take your whole business model and turn it upside down just to say turn it upside down and try and resell it.

You make incremental changes to your product, and that's where Bungie really failed with Destiny 2's initial launch. They did save the game with Forsaken and Forsaken was a great launch. It also taught Bungie, in my opinion, a lot of different things about keeping activities busy like they do at the other games that are out there, Apex Legends. There's the other game that's Fortnite that's really popular with people. Constantly having activities, constantly having new content, different things, new challenges come up. Having a whole agenda where you're constantly bringing stuff up seemed to influence Bungie to, you know, start doing this sort of stuff. And they've gotten better and better and better over the years. So they have launched Shadowkeep, which is an interesting thing.

Now, what's kind of funny, one thing that was kind of funny is I've been longing for a return to D1. Most people love D1. In fact, after D launch failed its launch, a lot of players like me were going back to D1 and playing it because it was just a better experience. Crucible was a better experience, everything else. And there still is this love of D1 among D2 players, Destiny players. experience crucible is a better experience everything else and there

still is this love of d1 among d2 players destiny players anybody who played d1 you know always talks about like I really love d1 and and d2 is something that I think players still even to now struggle with so for months I've talked about how wouldn't it be great if Bungie would make a remastered version of D1? Like you'd go play all the old fun D1 stuff and it'd be remastered. And everyone's like, yeah, I'd buy that. That'd be awesome. Well, I don't know if Bungie was listening to me or just, this just makes sense actually. Because you're making a perfect homage to D1.

One of the other things I talked about, if Bungie's listening as well, is I talked for a long time about how, for years I've talked about this, it would be really cool. You know, we kind of have this after apocalypse sort of landscape and activities and, you know, all the buildings and everything is after, you know, everything went to hell with the civilization of us trying to populate these planets i'd love to see a pre like a pre-destiny that would show how you know life was like in our wonderful community and we know we're going to the moon we're digging on the moon oh it's all great and then you know you see the moments where everything goes off the rail and they dig up the hive and all that crap um so that would be fun destiny if you understand to make that but let's get into the shadowkeep review uh this is going to be a review that's uh we're three days into the game. I think I've played the hell out of it over the past two days with as less sleep as I possibly can do.

We don't have the raid out, but we'll be doing the review of the raid and the whole arcing thing in an update in a post once the raid drops. I like what I see so far. So I'm hoping that what Bungie, the choices they made, are going to be just as good in the raid. And I feel pretty confident about that. But, you know, we'll see, and we'll do a post. So watch for that if you haven't got a chance to. Subscribe to the show. So basically what D1 has done, and this is brilliant on their part, they have built a perfect homage, or almost perfect homage, to D1.

I mean, there's a lot still they could do, and there's a lot of promises about what they're going to do, and that may play out as it wells. So basically, you return to the moon. Now, if you're a D1 player, you know what this means. Everything came out of the moon pretty much. For the most part, you awaken the hive and all that sort of good stuff, and There was all sorts of content on the moon. I spent so many hours on the moon. It was crazy. So you're returning to the moon to fight the new, more powerful hive.

You're finding discoveries. You're finding new things that are at the base and core of why the hive are on the moon and what goes on behind that, getting deeper into the lore and the story and everything else but i gotta tell you being a destiny one player having bungie return us to the moon having bungie return us to places like the cosmodrome and we're actually playing the remastered maps and everything else of uh of the thing i don't even know if they redid them but they they appear to be either remastered or redone but But it basically feels the same. And it's such a heartwarming return to something that we really loved. And I think probably one of the smartest plays Bungie could do with this new launch.

It's really just wonderful. It's like you play through it and you get goosebumps. You're like, wow, I'm playing in D1 again my favorite game the game that i loved and it's probably really good too because it mixes the d2 and kind of takes away some of the sting that players still feel d2 being launched so uh let's talk about some of the other things you really feel like you go back in the game i i really love that uh initially when you go through the story uh bungee's been getting better at this there's no more long four-hour stories you got to hammer through just to uncrack the game and be able to play other parts of it uh they've been off that for a while but they did a really good job this time i think of being able to not make long story

missions that you gotta you gotta complete them all to play the game um and you can jump in and out of the story missions which is really nice some of the story missions are just kind of scrummy where you can have other players and they're in public areas uh some you know you gotta go on some missions to play but they're not long extensive boring missions uh they're not the sort of missions that we saw that were horrible like with the red war and and uh the osiris stuff which uh just people hated that um i love how they've set it up where you can get in you can get out you can kind of do them in your own pace you can have fun you can enjoy the game you're not locked into like you can't do anything until you play your story um so i like how they set it up i like how they

it's very easy to consume. You don't feel grinded. Uh, and you just want to keep playing the game because you're not burnt out doing some stupid story and you can easily go play with your friends. Like if your friend called, Hey, you want to go play some gamut real quick? Oh yeah. Cool, man. I'm in the story sequence, but you know, I I'm in a place I can go play with you and you know, I can come back to that later. I think that just makes for a better experience for community and everything else. The Crucible was the big thing that drove a lot of people from the game. And I really, really love, Bungie, what you did with Crucible. You

still need a lot of work, but I love what you've done so far. I used to play Crucible eight hours a day, and I loved Clash. And anybody who's good loved Clash. One of the things that people hate, hate, hate, hate, hate in Destiny 2 is the fact that Iron Banner, which used to be the premier sort of game place to play for most of the community. I mean, if you were ultra premier, you played in Trials. But for most of the community, we playing uh iron banana iron banner we call it the banana but you know that's a d1 thing uh so iron banner was awesome but anybody who was a really good player loved playing iron banner

clash and hated iron banner control uh somewhere in the failure of launch of d2 uh bungie had to create you know uh iron banner that was just solely uh based upon team shooting and and cruise and control and people hated it i still hate it to this day i can't stand iron banner control it's the one of the biggest failures that bungie ever did and driving people from the game the other thing that drove people from the game was the team shooting element of d2 and a lot of other things actually but um what with getting the pinnacle weapons was also something that i'm so glad that bungee is getting rid of um the pinnacle weapons all they did was make t bungee's team shooting uh thing and team farming and algorithms made it so you just, if you're a solo player, if you're just playing alone, if you can't team up or you don't have a team,

or you just want to go and have fun, man, if your friends aren't around, all you do is get farmed and wrecked by team shooting players that are stack teams that come against you. It created a horrible pattern in Destiny where anybody who's worth their salt or just doesn't want to be farmed actually dips out of every time there's a crucible. There's a crucible farming team, stack team, that shows up. And it just creates a mess for the environment and the community. You know, here's the thing, and I'm glad Bungie got rid of pinnacle weapons.

This is really smart on their part. The problem is a very small group of elite players that are really good at the game, they go and get the pinnacle weapons. These guys are already good at the game. They're already going to top the leaderboards, and they're already going to farm the crap out of players and make good at the game. They're already going to top the leaderboards, and they're already going to farm the crap out of players and make them hate the game. Giving them pinnacle weapons on top of that is just stupid.

I mean, if anything, you should give pinnacle weapons to the people who are really bad at the game so they can have a chance to actually fight the bigger guys. But that would be hard to take and work out. So getting rid of the pinnacle weapons is super important. Making these guys even better. All you do in early D2 was just feel like a piece of meat being farmed by stack teams doing team shooting. It took away the individualist sort of operation, whereas an individual, you could rock and roll.

You could kick ass. And if you couldn't form a team or make a bunch of friends on Destiny, which failed at claning and everything else, they still fail at being able to build these communities. Until, I think, Shadowkeep, everything has really been anti-community in the way they've built things. And I love to sit down with Destiny sometime and show them what they're doing wrong. But they've moved away from a lot of that with Shadowkeep,

so I definitely have loved that. There is now, just like D1, a Crucible where you can go play Clash. That's been one of the biggest complaints I've heard from players in Destiny that they can't just go play Clash. They get forced into playing Control and other game modes that they fucking hate. Give your customers choice, Bungie. Duh. Makes fucking sense.

They also have said that their algorithm makes it so that it's harder to get stacked up against individual teams if you're playing on your own. And hopefully that's something that will help me return to the game uh when it comes to crucible uh since d2 i've avoided crucible i hate playing crucible i hate getting farmed by teams i hate getting farmed by pinnacle weapons uh it just ruined the game you basically bungee's one of bungee's biggest failures over the years has constantly been listening to streamers, listening to their high-end 1%, 10%, rich get richer base, and moating the game to them. Well, unfortunately, they've driven so many people off the game that are casual players, they feel like they have to appeal to those people because those are the people who regularly play the game and are addicted to the game.

Well, the problem is you wouldn't drive so many people from the game, you wouldn't have made Fortnite such an epic success if you would have just kept the principles of D1 and play and not flipped them for D2. So by taking and drawing this back to where the individual can have a chance again, people can choose clash if they want, or they just focused on shooting people. One of the biggest problems you have with control is people don't play the objective. So if you're trying to play the objective, especially in Iron Banner, you get really angry at the game and other players in the community because they don't play

the objective. They go play clash when it's when it's control why because no one fucking likes clash or control that's any good so that's why anyway uh kind of got off a little segue there but uh basically um they've fixed crucible and i think i like it a lot better we're going to kind of see the long term of it and how it plays. Most people seem to like the changes that are out there. I think more and more Bungie needs to make a segment of Crucible where in every game mode there is an individual freelance join. I would really like to see that because I get tired of playing against teams. It's really old. And it's just not fair.

It's not fun. And people leave the game. And that will bring people to the game, I think, Bungie, if you quit driving people away. So they're making some really good choices with Shadowkeep. I love what they're doing there. The D1 field going back is awesome. The other thing I liked is their ability to farm better rolls.

They've put a chest next to Aeris Morn. They brought her back. There's the lectern of enchantment. And you're able to random roll farm by getting bounties and going doing them, and you can get rolls of different things. I love the menagerie. The menagerie's been a great experience. When you play activities, you can even get these sort of bounties out of chests

and activities that you do. So they just kind of encourage you or give you a way to have more control of the game to get the random rolls that you want. And I love that. I love that about Menagerie where you can, hey, I want to go grind for a specific gun. I can't grind quite for the roll, but I can kind of grind for what I'm looking for on it. And that just makes it more fun. You feel like you control the game a whole lot more,

and that's really important as well as a consumer for any product. The new guns are very cool. The redesigns are really cool. Going back to Cosmonauts, really cool. I like that. And the game is so content-rich now. It's just awesome. There's a lot of different things that they are uh taking and doing and i'm

hoping that steam can reinvigorate the pc base the activation uh base on battle.net really died hard when they issued the free version of d2 people uh loaded into the game on npc and signed up and tried the game and there just wasn't enough quality in what they're being offered to get them to stay the game and pony up the money. Um, given it was free, but we created like 10 clans overnight on PC and within, I don't know, three or four months of the content being content being consumed or the free being consumed, uh, people just didn't stay with the game. They left. And that's probably one of the things that contributed to Activision saying we can't do this.

So I'm hoping that Steam is going to be a great PC reinvigoration of the base, get people to the game. The free version they have of New Light, that thing can be really awesome, hopefully to draw players to the game. And, of course, they have the options of being more in the community than they were with Battle.net activision launch of pc um so i really really like what i'm seeing so far on a lot of different facets as well there's a lot of different things they have put forth that they're going to be doing with the future roadmap of shadowkeep i like what bungee has put forth here they've got different seasons of course

they're taking and doing the seasonal update is free for all players which is really nice they're coming out with the Garden of Salvation raid launch on October 5th the Vex offensive activity begins the season of dying there's gonna be see hero legend nightmare hunts master nightmare hunts iron banner exotic quest for leviathan's breath bow and festival lost of course in october pvp modes will be coming out something called momentum control shadowkeep dungeon launch i've been loving the dungeon i like the dungeon things those are fun it's a three-man raid basically so yeah get some fun with that it's not a quest for divinity trace rifle and then november there'll be a first raid challenge and and uh vex offensive so uh bungee's gotten really good and i like this

bungee about uh making it so there's plenty of content there's plenty of new activities you know they're just not launching a dlc like, well, we'll see you guys in three months or six months or whatever. They're keeping it fun and activity rich. So let's talk about what I didn't like about Shadowkeep so far. Bungie sometimes gives communities challenges to change the game. And in doing so, it does take the community a little bit of while to get it. But one of the biggest challenges is when it confuses casual players. So the one downside of Shadowkeep is the armor 2.0.

It's very confusing to players. It's annoying to people who have built great outfits. I kind of get what bungee's kind of trying to do it does give us activity to grind for new outfits and stuff i don't know why they couldn't just you know re-roll everything at version 2.0 uh but i imagine they want us to go grind for more outfits and get the new gear and blah blah um the community's gonna adapt to it it's nothing i think that's too big to overcome, but I'm finding a lot of people are just really confused

that it's very what I like to call non-intuitive, which is what we look for when we review products as to how easy it is for the consumer to adopt it, adapt it, understand it, and utilize it. And right now I'm seeing a lot of confusion with that. There's a lot of different menu items that bungie has added and different things and some of it's a might be a little bit overloaded but we'll see what the community does with it um the nightfall is really poorly

non-intuitive as well there's a multiple nightfalls it's confusing how to use it it's very it's very not clear i mean even players like me who've been in D1, we're all sitting around with our D1 players going, what the fuck is going on? I don't understand this. If you're confusing D1 players that have been playing since D1, you may want to rethink about what you're doing or how you're delivering it because that's the problem with non-intuitive issues. Those are the only two main things that really stuck out at me uh there's some beautiful new guns there's an interesting

rocket launcher that's out there that's uh it's pretty much to die for uh i love it i love the design of it and everything that bungie put into it it is called the death bringer rocket launcher and it's really neat uh what they did with it, and a lot of fun. And there's a lot of other fun stuff they put in it, and people seem to like the design of everything so far. The content of Shadowkeep is, it looks kind of like a mixture of a Chinese lost city,

very doomish, alien castles kind of on the moon. The new enemies are very cool-looking if not rehashed, I mean, you know, but they made them cool and There's different elements of when you go through missions that kind of remind you of the raid initial raid from the Crota raid and of course Crota's in there and and Who else we've got gall. It's kind of like a Hallmark back to everything else. Just a great homage.

So overall, I love the game. I love what they did. I love what they built so far. We're going to see long-term how Crucible weighs out. If it brings people back to the game, wants to play Crucible. If people like me end up playing Crucible, it will definitely be a win for Bungie because they need to bring the community back.

Bungie needs to quit listening to top- tier players. They need to listen to casual players. Top tier players keep getting Bungie in trouble and players know it. We complain about all the time that you guys just listen to the top tier players. When Bungie launched the EP, they made the EP harder because top tier players told them to and then no one could complete the game and they had to go dial it back there's lots of different instances of that throughout the d2 experience where bungie is not listening to casual player and therefore alienate him and that's where they're failing on a massive basis uh up to uh forsaken and even then they're you know they still keep

having their own little gaffes. Overall, I love the game. I love what Bungie's doing. I think they're working really hard to make a better thing. The launch was an epic fail of embarrassment. We wrote about that on the Chris Foss show. Bungie, 24 hours to clean up your shit and get it launched or do a beta or do anything. But Jesus, you had so many people that wanted to see that launch the launch was just uh just a poor shit show of a mess in fact most people walked away from the game i'm not sure if they came back but i know a lot of my friends just were like fuck this i'm

gonna go to work i'm gonna do something else i don't care about this game this is stupid um so just a dumb thing to do on a product launch uh get, get it right or, or go home, I guess. I don't know. Um, so anyway, overall, I love the game. I'm going to give it eight out of 10 stars. Uh, like I said, the only two things that I think were downside is some of the non-intuitive confusion of the nightfall and the armor 2.0 just seems like something that really didn't have to be done um you know a bunch you really need to get the fact that we just want new activities new maps new whatever try not to screw with our game i do like how they've nerfed everything down the pinnacle weapons and everything

so everyone's on the same level and that really comes down to you actualizing yourself in your own skill level as opposed to, well, somebody has a gun, so they're better than you. When maybe they aren't or maybe they are and now they're 10 times better than you and you're just farming meat. And no one likes to be farming meat. So, you know, people like to excel in their own thing. So anyway, kudos to Bungie. Overall, I'm really happy with it. I love what they've done with it. It's a great load of content.

8 out of 10 stars they give it. And I think the community is going to adapt to the Armor 2.0. They're going to figure out the nightfalls and how to beat them. That's what this community does. They're pretty brilliant at even coming up with stuff that Bungie didn't think of. So I'm sure they'll get through it it's just initially i i'd stay three and i'm still hearing players go i don't understand what's going on with this thing um so you might want to take a look at that but the con it's really content rich

right now in the game it's the best time to play destiny 2 there's so much stuff to do you can't even choose from all the stuff or do everything i suppose you could if you just don't sleep but i think it's great because players have a lot of choices they have a lot of different things they can do with their friends and everything else and i hope steam is going to just really bring in a lot of great player base to the pc thing i'm really crossing my fingers and hoping that's going to happen anyway guys thanks for tuning in to the chris foss show and chris Gaming Podcast. Be sure to subscribe to both iTunes, Google Play,

Spotify, every place on the internet you can think of. We are out there as well. Be sure to watch for my read review coming up when that launches. We'll give you some ideas on what we think about that and what Bungie has done. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.