Well I got about 6 hours of play time today so i'll just share my thoughts.
I think Bungie ruined the game. For me anyway.
Every change they made sounds good on paper and the game was in desperate need of updates. There are some things that I really like and appreciate, like the Collections, UI enhancements and Quests... and then there are things I really dislike. Ergo, the new Crucible.
The PvP is one of those areas that needed some changes because the meta game was stale and had dug the game into a power creeping pit with seemingly no end in sight. Again, every change they made to Crucible sounds great on paper; however, what I've played of Crucible today was not great.
Nothing has really changed.
Well, that isn't accurate. It's more like, the only thing that changed is The Last Word. Sure, there are things that are slightly less effective than they were now, so the power creep has gone down. But all of those things were nerfed in tandem, and therefore do not require you to change your playstyle. You can still blink shotgun and thorn arcbolt and pulse rifle your way to victory. The Last Word on the other hand had its legs cut off and now this weapon can't kill one player point blank while hipfiring... which is supposed to be buffed.
I'm not going to insinuate that the game I played today is representative of the potential meta in 2.0. It would be daft to assume so because meta takes time to develop. What I will say however is that the game plays exactly as it did before, except we have on one hand where some OP weapons have been replaced by other OP weapons, and the other hand where an entire playstyle has been lost. By the time you kill anything with hip fire, you're being shotgunned or auto rifled. Blink is unchanged, Shotguns are still OP, and the only gun in the fucking game that can do anything about it is trash.
Bungie tried to offset the weaker sandbox by making ability energy recharge SUPER SLOW. Abilities take forever to regenerate currently and IMO it ruins the pacing of the game. This will most likely change when we reach level 40, but what wont change are the spawn times on special crates. Since they were first nerfed I had a problem with it because less special means more time using primaries. And now that my primary has been nerfed, I'm running around with an empty sniper rifle and a gun that takes 8 rounds to kill one player. Under no circumstance should a Titan be able to skate towards me and slide shotgun before The Last Word kills them. Get out of here with that.
What I played today was a mess of inconsistency, deceptive depth, and noise. Damage drop off scaling was poorly handled and it seems like mid ranged combat has disappeared completely. Bungie could have taken The Last Word out of the game before this patch and I would not have noticed much difference.
Rift sucks - at least on the bad maps. Of the matches I played, I think it only plays well on Black Shield, Bannerfall, and Vertigo, and that's because you don't need to turtle up in some tiny hallway to grab or capture the Spark. Half of the game is fighting over the damn thing because it's in a corridor where people are spamming their nades. As with the weapon meta, it'll be a while before players learn how to play Rift. My impressions thus far however paint it as hopelessly chaotic with little room for strategy beyond "spam supers and camp spawns". The latter especially is a problem because the maps only have 2 spawn zones. On Sector 618, I was literally spawning into the same Titan's shotgun death after death, and of course I can't fucking do anything because my anti-shotgun primary is nerfed and special hasn't spawned yet. All of the maps have predictable spawns and I foresee these being exploited more as time goes on. Destiny needs objective modes, but Bungie needs to design objective maps. Rift doesn't really work on the old maps and it hardly works on the new ones.
Maybe I didn't like it because 98% of the games I played ended early thanks to a rule that seems to be matching me into more lopsided games than ever before.
I wont comment on the maps much because I haven't played them all, but I've already shared my opinion on some of them here. There are good ones and there are garbage ones, so there's nothing new on that front. I just hope Bungie hasn't implemented a quitting penalty yet because the lows this time are really fucking low. I have no intention of playing Sector 618 ever again.
That's just the Crucible side. I didn't do much PvE, but what I've heard on that front doesn't have me optimistic (convulsed Light system, 45% shotgun nerf).
This isn't any kind of review. I'm just sharing my thoughts of what I played today, and it is overwhelmingly negative. I'd say it goes beyond being salty about one weapon being nerfed. Feels like there's no point in playing Gunslinger in PvP anymore. The Tower stuff is cool, the new gear is nice, Bannerfall is fun and I love the new music. Everything else makes me not want to turn my PS4 on tomorrow.
