You know what really scares me? With Crow going into the pale heart first, it's ENTIRELY possible crow will meet cayde and have that long awaited interaction off screen
I don't think we will see crow to begin with, I think he has turned into the light that is now inside of cayde that is price to pay for it being a wish with a ahamkara.
Season of the Seraph FELT like the season before the end of the light and dark saga. Lightfall and it's seasons COMPLETELY diluted the impact and phenomenal setup / stakes of that season.
Seraphs story was good. The end of the season was so deeply undercut knowing we had a whole extra year between this massive event that just happened and TFS… Lightfall should have never existed
Rasputin has been such a wasted character and opportunity for years and this expansion just made his sacrifice feel so useless and cheap. I cannot forgive them for doing that to him.
In order to accurately judge Bungie's story by their own standards, you have to release bits and pieces of the review in a seasonal format. Bonus points for omitting the important details behind a paywall.
Arrivals, as a season, felt more apocalyptic than Lightfall did as a complete expansion. The music changing on the planets, the quests to prep everyone for either evac or final holdouts, the pyramid ships appearing over destinations back when what we knew about them was still extremely limited, everything felt genuinely oppressive and grim.
We spent an entire season feeding weeds to a magic space whale who expositioned the Witness backstory/motivations that we didn't need because it was a giant pile of nothing while retconning that guardians can't be Taken.
Season of the deep and the revelation about the witness should have absolutely been in the core lightfall experience. Deep should have instead tied into Witch, given Ahsa played a part in Eris' plans that season. Man lightfall sucked, I wish i never played that
Season Of The Deep & Witch should have been for something better like: "Season Of The Veil" -uncover the depths of the shared mind within the veil & its secrets heavily tied to The Witness & its goal for finalty.
@brmawe That's too generous. Call it "Season of Results" where you pick up puzzle pieces for 3 months that drop from fighting the Taken, and when you put them together they show a Cabal symbol (that's the enemy faction of the upcoming season!)
@@TFconfusedand therein lies the truth. Two posts, two different viewpoints so why the fuck does kangaroo face seem to think his opinion is worth more than some tramp on the street? Why should I or anyone else give a single fuck what anyone else thinks of a game?
Sadly Gaul even just being a cabal was able to kill more guardians and was an endgame thanos level threat in comparison to the witness who just fucked off into the traveler after being foreshadowed to bring forth the next collapse
@@shadyzekrom3463The concept of the Witness being so utterly uncaring of interference is cool when we can actually see that impact in gameplay, but all we got were 3 (three) guardian ships that It swiped it's hand at and cut them to pieces in a cutscene. If Bungie could have actually leaned more into truly showing the impact the Witness had as what is essentially the mastermind of all the events since D1Y1 in Lightfall's campaign, or even the Year of Lightfall, that'd make the stakes feel much much higher and keep people (me, at least) invested
@@MagatsuDiarahan yeah but that would require Bungi to actually get off their asses to do real work, and bungi can't even code their way out of a wet paper bag let alone make a half decent story
Lmao A space turtle was a bigger threat than the witness A space turtle stole the light Also I find it absolutely HILARIOUS how the traveler just destroyed ghaul yet didn’t do shit when the witness showed up but shoot a flower beam And it’s also funny how when the traveler exploded when ghaul showed up those flowers didn’t exist So what gives Also why do a whole separate move instead of exploding again This games story is so ass Ghaul was a bigger threat than oryx like how tf
the filler expansion should have gotten way more heat. Literally paid filler with trash content. Like lol bungie playerbase has been so abused its stockholme syndrome.
TBH I felt that the Veil containment lore was more like an "Oh shit, we didn't talk about what the Veil is... Let's quickly cobble something together just to satisfy the crowd and run with the narrative that it's intentionally divided up to be 'interconnected'". It felt like the adding of the voicelines and the logs were a "record this week, and play it 2 weeks later" kind of situation.
Except that's not how voice recording works. You cannot just call a VA to record lines on a whim. There's a reason Voice Lines are one of the first things to get done in development, and that is because VA have busy schedules, and you have to plan and record in advance in order for them to be available. This is doubly so with Destiny, as it has a ton of A list VAs who juggle with many projects at the same time. To give you an example, the day before Lance Reddick passed away (may he rest in peace), he had already finished recording all his lines for the entirety of the Lightfall year, and that happened at the very beggining of the expansion.
@@voltus20you act like it's impossible when all people have to do is throw money around and that VA will be in the recording booth like a hooker in your bed
I would argue that the predictability of the story is only half down the the live service model. The other half is Bungie's steadfast refusal to do anything even a little interesting with it. Nimbus should have been the one to sacrifice himself in lightfall. It would have added weight to both his characterization, as well as give the narrative team something important to play with. Now Rohan has to find a new apprentice to train before his body finally gives out. This would allow us to help and dive in headfirst into the lore and world building. Eris should have remained Hive at the end of season of the witch. It woulf have given her a far more interesting character arc, as well as cause players to ask questions around her reliability and the "morality" of the hive. But Bungie stubbornly clings to a sitcom model where each week, bo matter what happens, nothing actually changes. And because of that, most of their work feels incredibly dull and repetitive.
'do you ever think a villain is more interesting when you don't know anything about them, but then you learn and it goes down hill?' Yes, Kylo Wren in Star Wars 7,8 and 9.
There are some projects which are written by someone with a story to tell. There are other projects which are written by an executive saying "That sounds fine".
Biggest thing I can't believe is that, if I were a new player joining Destiny a week into the Final Shape, I could not access the Witness' backstory from Season of the Deep. It would be sunset, and all the other ways that Bungie puts context into the game are shoved so far into corners that it's difficult to find them and experience them easily. Another thing about the "Narrative Experiment" of making an expansion that serves as a starting ground for the year of seasonal storytelling to come, that kind of falls flat when that very story is going to go away in 12-16 months after it comes out. It only harms the expansion itself, in my opinion, because now it can't be a standalone story, but the other parts that support and expand it are gone by design.
Bungie already said multiple times that both the Witness' cutscene and all the missions and lore related to the lightfall story year will remain post end of the year.
It's simple. Season of the Seraph was the epic story leading into Lightfall, or at least the Lightfall that was revealed to us in the Beyond Light showcase. Somewhere along the line, fall when they originally said they could, and I think this is what led us to getting the light fall we got. The lightfold we got was filler. People were even pointing out how the first and last cut scenes of light fall take place almost back to back. With all the rumors around strands being delayed and not coming with the witch queen, and the cutscene evidence from the lightfall we got, I think it's clear that this whole year of Destiny 2 was an experiment to bridge the gap. If instead you consider as leading up to the final shape, I think there we see a lot greater quality of story than what we're getting now
The whole changing the approach thing was a steaming pile of horseshit. They didn't at all, they just didn't want to come out and admit they'd fucked up big time. Everything after the initial launch of lightfall is just them scrambling with shit content to try and back up their own lie.
Destiny started falling apart when monetization was prioritized above the story and gameplay. As for Crow, it has always seemed hypocritical to me that so many characters seemed so quick to jump on the “Crow and Uldren are two different people so he can’t be blamed for anything” bandwagon, since that is not the case for any other person who has been chosen as a guardian. Elsie Bray openly calls Ana her sister and Clovis refers to her as his granddaughter. Shinobu kept the same identity when she became a guardian. Savathun kept the same identity when she became a guardian and if that’s only because her memories were restored, Savathun also restored Crow’s memories of being Uldren. Therefore, Crow is Uldren. However, that doesn’t mean he’s unredeemable. If they actually had an ark in which the characters come to forgive Uldren for what he did, that would be actual redemption for the character.
There is a bald dude who is inside the traveller trying to end space and time, meanwhile I'm at the helm trying to befriend a Taken Wishdragon by finding its' long lost lover.
The Thanos Comparison to The Witness is perfect. Both have similar motives, are the main bad for a story that's been going on for around 10 years, they have both taken a back seat throughout the years not being front and center etc... but only one is an actually good character that is legit threatening. The way the Witness should have been handled is similar to how Thanos was in the MCU. Instead, we only learned his name recently and before then I'm pretty sure he didn't even exist in the writer's room. We hardly know anything about him or his motives, and what we do know is vague, not relatable, or just boring. "Oh, he/they want the Final shape because the traveler never spoke to them, and it is chaos" bla bla bla. How are we supposed to relate to that concept? Living in a literal Utopia for centuries, but they complain about chaos? WHAT? VS Thanos whose backstory is a very real topic of overpopulation taken to the max leading to a solution that (though extreme) has logic to it. 100% they introduced the Witness late in the story for who knows why (no new race, to have an actual entity as the final boss instead of an enigmatic concept like the darkness etc...) and that has done a lot of damage.
Not only was it incredibly disappointing the pyramid ships were empty...neomuna an entirely new planet had TWO people on it and everyone else was inside the planets servers that was just lazy AF imo
Because she never survived long enough to reach the point where we even know of the Witness. Everything always went to shit in other timelines by the time guardians get darkness powers. She herself says this, and is mentioned in several lore pieces.
@@voltus20The real reason is that the witness didn't exist until the witch queen and that the writers were making shit up as they went along. Retcons retcons retcons
@@FrostyAkuma0oh my sweet summer child. I don't blame anyone for not playing vanilla D2, but the story was okay. Except Hawthorne, who was insufferable. But gameplay was terrible. You didn't miss anything on the gameplay side.
If veil containment is "experimental", then I'm very concerned with what Bungie considers "risky". Experimental in my mind is along the lines of "oooh this is a bit crazy, not sure if you guys will like it, but we went crazy and wanna see how you think" This was literally just talking to a computer and listening to story. Where's the experimentation? I thought it was a panic story injection to try and appease the audience and answer some shit, but pump it out fast. The story in veil containment was good, but it may as well have been a lore book. Also as much as I like the Witness's origin story cutscene and how well that's done, making his main minions the scorn is so fucking lazy and very very barely holds together. The best we've got as to why the witness has a bunch of scorn, afaik, is literally "Idk man, pretty weird though, huh". We've had a few voice lines that seem to lead to "just because lol, go kill some of them" Lastly that outro song is a TUUUNEEE. I finally found it, Ben Elson - Harmonies.
I'm gonna say it, I hate the Witness. I hate that Bungie essentially retconned so much mystery and dark lore since D1. There's no reason for the Dark Fleet either. The Witness should have a proper army, we shouldve seen their back story in full CGI not an inkblot cinematic, and the Veiled Woman Statue should still be the main big bad of the Darkness. I hate that they try implying the Witness gave Oryx the ability to Take, when Oryx made an Ogre that was used like a Walkie Talkee in the Deep to talk to the Darkness. Retconning all this cool ass, mysterious lore surrounding the Darkness was all tainted,underminded, and ruined by shoe-horning the Witness into ALL OF IT. Imagine if in Mass Effect 3 if the Reapers were just 1 person and the ships were completely empty? Imagine if there were no Orc or anything in LOTR but it was just Sauron? Imagine Star Wars if it was just Darth Vader, no empire, no Storm Troopers? It's so damn underwhelming that I have to try not to think about it because it makes me apathetic af to Destiny. Always been a lore guy, over 7k hours in D2 on steam alone, been playing since the closed D1 beta, and I just don't care anymore. That's not good. I hope Final Shape brings my love back, but those hopes aren't very high.
This whole year all I've wanted to tell Bungie's narrative team is that just mentioning that the veil exists isn't enough to explain what it is or why it was so pivotal
11:50 Imagine if in the final shape's raid we somehow separate the Witness back into it's civilization using the creative powers of the traveler, and that's how we get the next race "The Remains". Imagine that 'leaked' idea of a 12-player mission after the raid involves us having to fend off The Remains after defeating the Witness to stop them from inacting the Final Shape one last time. To me that concept would be soo damn sick, but that is but an idea on how to fix the "The Witness is the culmination of a civilization" error made this year, and I doubt Bungie is capable even with the extra time.
Bungie having to go a season without writing something complex and interesting off as being paracausal (they literally can’t go 15 minutes without mentioning the word for something we don’t understand)
I stopped caring about the "lore" when the cut scenes became lazier and my actions are railroaded no matter what we do. Crow? He was a character concept for the original draft of Destiny before its overhaul. They were looking for a quick fix to their story and added this character to extend their money grab.
remember waaaay back on the warminds being retconned? That began the trickling of me beginning to not care about the lore which was a huge reason for me caring about the game in general.
@@noobpaints6114 Straight facts. When D1 was here, (and when I was a kid) I felt that the things I did made a difference. And each time we got the new DLC the game took a good turn in the story especially when we met Eris Morn. Also, we've been fighting literally the EXACT same enemy model for 10 years, lol Bungie couldn't add new Archetypes of enemies this entire time?
What tf are you talking about? How did the cutscenes become lazier when the length and quality and quantity has gone up, and crow is used as a cash grab how? And how was he used to fixed a story?
@@Blue-qt8ms You ought to watch the video reviewing the Entire history of Destiny. You'll learn how Crow *was* a concept that got scrapped but reused later. Crow isn't new, he was originally was to be in Destiny 1 in Caydes position but, we see how that went. And yes, it's lazier. The cutscenes have no drive like how they did, they drag on and give little to no good narrative, story telling is more than just saying what's going on.
Even when you understand the lore...the base conflict in the story is MID at best. They lean so heavily on what happened during or before the golden age, but never show any cool shit. The closest we ever got to that was the black and white ai looking art which was basically a slide show in power point. WE WANT THE COOL SHIT IN THE STORY WHILE WERE PLAYING STORY HELLLLOOOOO???
I’m glad we have lore channels. I been a destiny player since D1 and still have no idea who, what or why we’re fighting all I know of everyone with a health bar must die 😂
Bungie just saying "let's start experimenting" on the fuckin penultimate campaign for the saga they've been building for a decade, is truly astounding.
I won't lie I completely memory holed Defiance. When Myelin brought up the fact they never explained why the hell the shadow cabal were kidnapping groups of like 5 people at a time I was a little dumbfounded.
All this criticism about the "fragmented" story telling being spread over mutliple season and expansions, yet we are completely overlooking an arguably even worse aspect of this type of story telling. If you were to hop on the game right now after not playing for the last year, you would be able to play every single season story and expansion story line all at the same time. Imagine getting into the game as a new player, you watch Amanda die while playing one mission, then the next mission you see on your "to-do" list takes you 6 months back in story time and you see Amanda just talking to you normally. Bungie's way of onboarding new players is to give someone every single MCU movie, then told to watch it in chronological order with near zero context of where to start.
There is only like 8 missions left in The Final Shape. Not enough time to properly resolve so much stuff they have set up the last 10 years. So much wasted time in Lightfall.
For real. At this point in the story 8 missions is not enough to do any substantial story telling. If lightfall had 10? 12 missions? We would actually get to bond with Rohan and have his death mean something or do some explanation and setup on the veil. If Final Shape only has 8 missions I will be shocked if it’s satisfying
I haven't played Destiny 2 for a while now. But there is a saying. Something like "If you have to point out that you are the boss, you are not a good boss." I am not english speaking from the start, so it may go differently. But the core is the same. If you have to tell someone to like your work, you haven't done it well.
This comment became an essay, just skip it. The problem with Bungie's storytelling in Destiny is that, despite their insistence that it's "intentional" that the vague narrative threads that are left vague and underdeveloped on purpose, they feel unintentionally vague. They don't seem to know any principles of storytelling. As an English teacher who has read thousands of essays and who teaches logic, writing, and plotting, the series feels like it has no consistent creative direction and the assurances that it's "intentional" are just cover. (video 20:30 mark says it better, the writing feels like trying to meet word count) One specific problem: Focusing on Lightfall and the post-Lightfall seasons, we have a story expansion that is permanently in the game that had almost zero story, while the seasons (which disappear at some point) tell a lot of story without making explicit connections back to the expansion. It all feels random. The writers are terrible at dealing with time progression (a philosophical problem in an MMO, where the world needs consistency while the quests need progression). Not to mention the complaint from the video that we never get a satisfactory reason for the Shadow Legion to be abducting rando humans to begin with (no, we should have been dealing with Shadow Legion collaborators sabotaging the Farm or something like that) And look, yes we all (probably) agree that Lightfall was filler. BUT, Lightfall wasn't sold as filler, it was sold as a full expansion. If it was key to the story the marketing should have reflected this better. Okay, fine, things played out the way that they did. But look at how small of a span Lightfall really is. The whole game takes place between those two interconnected cut scenes of the Tower Guardians looking out the window at the Traveller and Witness. It doesn't make sense for the guardian to take a Neomuna vacation to learn a new Darkness subclass during an invasion of the Traveller. The sense of time doesn't work. The priorities don't work. This is a core problem, expansion storytelling is lazy and vague to drive customer/players to the seasons, but as a player it feels defeating to buy seasons that will disappear along with the majority of the game's actual story. Witch Queen is a statistical outlier. It's bad storytelling because it's lazy storytelling. Like Neomuna, it's all flash with no substance. And I find this frustrating because the universe is ripe with lore and we could have smaller, more intimate stories about life on Earth. I mean, we're a zombie super-soldier who is an enforcer for a military government with zero oversight who kills aliens on-sight. We're space fascists from a dying civilization and nobody in the game really questions that (except sometimes Drifter and Savathun, but they do this uncritically and are both surprisingly supportive).
Getting close to the million sub mark Cross! If you continue to expand your content like you already have been I could see you hitting that threshold this year.
One thing I loved in Season of the Lost + Seraph (Aka the other previous seasons before a major expansion) was the sense of unity and coming together of numerous factions of allies to deal with the present or upcoming threat. We all knew the outcome because of the DLC that would come after but the preparation the characters underwent to prepare was super intriguing. Not to mention the threats present in these seasons were also very interesting also (Eramis and her conflicted alliance with the Witness and XIvu immediately comes to mind). Season of the Wish did not have this in my opinion, and its a real shame given that the next expansion's stakes trump these other seasons. I think the solution through the 15th Wish was a cool idea sure, but the urgency was nonexistent because both the threat present felt very weak (IE a crippled Xivu who may or may not be controlling the taken, and the Sol Divisive whom have no real villian we can point at) and the objective seemed very shallow compared to other seasons. Exorcising Savathuns worm or Arming Rasputin for a potential invasion by Xivu felt far more engaging than collecting an egg each week. I mean sure the Ahamkara are cool and Im happy we may have more stories tied to them in the future, but the height of the stakes for the next DLC make this story feel very shallow. Once the last wish was revealed to be the key we all knew that was going to be the solution (Which is fine because we knew Savathun was going to escape/return when Lost was going to end), but how that story was dealt with in-between was imperative. I personally did not second guess if the last wish was going to work, maybe thats just me, but I feel like that doubt and mystery of what could happen between the start and end of a season was solely missed in this final season before the end of this saga. TL;DR : The stakes and main objective in the plot, characters reactions and involvement, and the villain's presence in Season of the Wish felt pretty shallow when the situation has never been more dire, which is why I felt quite whelmed by the story that was told this season and going into Final Shape.
17:58 I am so glad he came around to this thought. This was one of the reslasons I haven't been playing much at all, and why I went back to playing games like GoW, Gears of War, Tomb Raider, Devil May Cry, etc.
@@chillhour6155 😂 for real imagine that being reality and ngl I was really hoping that brother Vance would be the witness from another timeline taken over by his other self or just a evil version of him.
Same, mostly cause it was the stupidest thing to see the sisters ""heal"" EVERY.SINGLE.WEEK from their trauma and Clovis speaking some truth, but no, we make our own path or some bs, delete his conscious.
I wonder if Bungie even considered that, once the seasons are gone after Final Shape releases, we're literally going to be completely missing the middle of the "book"? Expansions won't be sunset, seasonal content will. So even if they did manage to pull off the "interconnected seasons", new players would never know what happened in the middle of the story. Lightfall introduces all the storylines unresolved, Final Shape finishes it, but new players have no idea what happened in between.
It's locked behind a seasonal cutscene the most important story beat of lightfall is in a seasonal cutscene at the end of a quest line 😂🤦♂️ th-cam.com/video/Z0CKckjryVI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=XxUEXfXrfYSWR8-4
It would be awesome if Into The Light gave us the return of Wrath Of The Machine.... This would be absolutely amazing people would be so ecstatic, This would probably keep people engaged with destiny until closer to the final shapes release. P.S. Another good idea for Into The Light would be for bungie to make every Raid and Dungeon farmable every week from the beginning of Into The Light until the release of the final shape.
Imagine if you skipped defiance, had a couple of missions that were communicating with Ahsa, a couple of missions reviving Savathun, and a couple of missions using Riven's power to wish ourselves through the portal into the Pale Heart, and that's where the game really opens up with a strangely familiar landscape, with a few missions leading up to the final confrontation. Nezarec himself could have been an episode. Final Shape feels like it will be trying to stretch the final 25% of Lightfal into an entire game.
i think myelin touched on something at the beginning of the video. that i didnt even thing about but seems accurate. bungie says they wanted light fall to be like the beginning of the story. what they did was give us the beginning of a campaign charged us full price as if it where a full campaign with beginning, middle, and end. and then charged us half the price of a full campaign for the in between beginning and middle, then again for the middle, then again for in between middle and end, and then AGAIN for the end...... oh and charged us again for the easter eggs in a campaign in the form of dungeons. thinking about it like that kinda makes me tilt my head and look at the ceiling in thought.
Destiny lost its touch once they shifted over focusing on $$$$ than putting out cohesive content that encapsulates us into the environments they create. That’s why I feel like VOW is the best raid. It felt for a moment, that we were absorbing all the mystery of these pyramids by being inside of them. Down to the soundtrack inside that raid. The symbols. The stories behind all those symbols. It felt like they gave it the attention it deserved. Not this half built recycled seasonal garbage.
Says more about them than you, There's a reason clans are dying left and right, mine only has 2-3 people playing at most through this entire last season or 2, I'm not getting the next expansion/seasons either.
I ask people this all the time...tell me the story of "Destiny 2" JUST in terms of the free intro content, and expansions...and tell me that feels like a genuinely compelling beginning, middle and end narrative. Bungie wants people to follow their "chain link" from expansion to season to season to season to season to expansion, etc., but the problem is...THEY REMOVE SEASONAL CONTENT. They sell the season pass with story stuff, they remove that content (or chuck it in the Timeline), and the expansions, without those crucial "chain links," make ZERO sense on their own! Newer players, hearing how great Destiny is, are trying out Destiny and feeling NOTHING for the characters or circumstances. The only people "feeling" anything are veteran players, and they, too, aren't happy with how this has all transpired, leading to the "10 year climax" sold to us 10 years ago because Destiny 1's story shat the bed so hard at BUNGIE'S discretion. They needed to do it like Warframe does...take a bit longer to release MASSIVE expansions to move the story significantly...smaller updates between to keep players busy or engaged, but all in all...let players decide when they want to come back, via more permanent content. The seasonal Destiny content doesn't let players make that choice, because it needs to be played in one year, then the seasons are gone.
@@chillhour6155 Yup. I remember when Destiny 2 went "totally" free to play, or mostly I guess you could say. Forsaken and Shadowkeep were the only paid expansions at the time. Everything else before that became free, you just had to grind out XP for the planets. Basically around the time of the Activision Bungie split. I remember thinking, I could be mad at this, but I wasn't. More accessibility, more people coming in to play...none of that bad. Once the Beyond Light showcase hit and they announced the DCV, it was all over for me. And the Destiny community rolled over and took it. Defended it. Regurgitated all of Bungie's excuses. Completely ridiculous.
I hated the backstory of the Witness. It was kind of the last straw for me personally. I have been waiting so long to learn about the villain and I hated the reveal. Kind of killed me buzz for the game. It's just so shitty to have been playing this game since before D1 launch and they fuck the ending up so hard.
Can we all talk about how they expect 100$ for us even tho they give us recycled content.. dungeons not coming up with DLC is criminal honestly. There’s no reason for this company to be asking for this much look at fortnite dude they are RICH off COSMETICS 😂 Games that expect checks off DLCS aren’t winning and I understand the industry money is different but dude ya make so much money.. just to give us ANOTHER CABAL RAID like WTF 😂 vow was witch queen and had no light bearers.. Spire had a literal garden boss RECYCLED CONTENT. Warlords ruin final boss Is a RECYCLED GAMBIT BOSS…. HOW. I’m honestly on the brink of not playing no more they seriously can’t deliver anything right this game is all lore.. nezarec god of pain was a tormentor with a dad bod…. Like bro we dump so much money into this game just for them to drop nothing but mechanics Let’s talk about how the smg from ghost of the deep is worse than gambits and it’s a recycled model too 😂 30$dungeon for recycled content bro.. Destiny could be so much more man 🤦🏽♂️ So much talent WASTED The witness doesn’t even look menacing.. just another stand still boss with a witch model that we’re gonna div with a linear..
Your talking points are spot on askeladd took that boys father then slowly became one for him. Beautiful. The other point I wholeheartedly agree with is the author pulling you into their world and altering your thought process. I can't forget the book series the night angel trilogy by Brent Weeks the characters and world was so gritty it made me appreciate what I have I'm my life maybe not the best but it wasn't like the protagonists life truly painful. The "TRICK" to his powers absolutely jaw-dropping loved it.
I see what Bungie was trying to do with this "experiment" of theirs because I distinctly remember back before Beyond Light came out feeling incredibly underwhelmed, not because I thought the expansion was necessarily bad, but because prior to it was nothing but this massive buildup of "The Darkness is coming. It's coming. It's coming. It's almost here. It's here guys! Holy shit, it's here!" and so logically you'd expect the big expansion that comes with that moment to be about the Darkness' arrival...but it really wasn't. It was tangentially, at least with regards to us getting Stasis, but for the most part it had nothing to do with the Darkness itself. It was narratively underwhelming. The problem is that their experiment failed. I mean hell, even going into Lightfall, prior to us knowing it was going to suck, it was still a really weird pivot for the story because unless you REALLY kept up with the lore, Neomuna comes almost out of nowhere so you're left wondering: "Wait, why are we here again? Why is the Witness here? Why didn't we discover this ages ago?" Overall, it was just a huge failure in storytelling. And of course the cynic in me wonders if this even was an "experiment", or if that was actually just Bungie's way of trying to save face with what was an obvious filler expansion. Just toss out the idea that it was an intentional experiment, they totally tried their best and weren't just trying to scam us/tie us over for a 1+ year.
Here’s what was going on in Defiance: The bad guys were abducting people and planning on melting them down to form a human based pyramid ship…. Or I may be getting that mixed up with a different sci-fi game…
Lol jumping into destiny at lightfall was hilariously confusing. Figured its alright i can just go back and figure it all out playing older expansions. Lol boy was i wrong
It’s amazing it’s taken this long for people to realise this! This came to me a year over a year ago. I dropped this game a long time ago because of this very reason! If this was done like halo was it would have made waaaaaaay more sense! All they see (upper management) is customers as cash cows.
to think that there was urgency in fighting the witness, is stupid because he has been inside the traveler for about a year now. all sense of urgency has been lost.
I feel like if Bungie just never deleted seasonal content, never removed the Red War, things like that. . . Then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Because they’re both MMOs, I’ll draw a comparison to FF14. While yes, they do build up the next expansion in the post expansion patches, they never delete the old content (except if it’s not integral to the Main Story and entirely optional like Diadem which failed horribly.) which means that new players are very much able to get the full picture. While I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with leaving some things unanswered and coming back to it later, if said lore will essentially be wiped away AND is needed for the full picture then that’s not really acceptable.
Agree. Probably no new player will approach destiny for the lore at this time, because he would have to find infos on the internet, and still don't understanding a lot of things. For me, the thing that bungie have to do is try to bring back in the game all the players that stopped playing destiny, not trying to recruit new players that will get bored after 2 weeks. I think about this after the quote of helldivers that cross have read a few videos ago: "a game for everyone is a game for no one". And goddamn, the main problem for destiny is actually this. Trying to be a game for everyone.
I'd love to play a horror game as a Civilian on the run from a Hive Knight trying to upload data to Rasputain or something during the Collaspe. Idea #2: City Guard during the building of the Last City. #3: city builder making the last city during the Dark Age
He's so right about the lack of urgency... I'll never forget, D1 was the first live service game I had ever played... I had no plans of buying every expansion, but before the Dark Below expansion released, one of my favorites, they had a bunch of hive knights, spawning on the cosmodrome with these relic swords... They introduced these Dark Below public events, and this build up, was so amazing, I was sold and pre-ordered The Dark Below! If this is this is what they did, even before they started seasons, then they surely could've done something similar this season. Some build up, make us excited to buy the damn expansion. Most of us that buy it, are only going to buy it to see how it ends. 10yrs is a long time. But there's nothing going on now in the game that makes anyone excited for lightfall. And cross, love this format if you reviewing things going on in the community! Keep up the good work. And as always, slap the LIKE button like your momma taught you write.
*Thank you all for 800k!*
FINALLY!!!🎉🎉🎉
That belching sound when someone subscribes/follows is making this unwatchable
Glad to be here!
Congratz dude !
Congrats homie!
You know what really scares me? With Crow going into the pale heart first, it's ENTIRELY possible crow will meet cayde and have that long awaited interaction off screen
Don't worry. We'll get an audio log about it.
😂@@BiZkWiK87
The lore tab on some hunter armor (eververse only armor of course) will explain the entire interaction.
I don't think we will see crow to begin with, I think he has turned into the light that is now inside of cayde that is price to pay for it being a wish with a ahamkara.
That's 💯 what they will do
Season of the Seraph FELT like the season before the end of the light and dark saga. Lightfall and it's seasons COMPLETELY diluted the impact and phenomenal setup / stakes of that season.
Hard agree. The entire year of lightfall and the expansion killed the game hard.
Seraphs story was good. The end of the season was so deeply undercut knowing we had a whole extra year between this massive event that just happened and TFS… Lightfall should have never existed
Rasputin has been such a wasted character and opportunity for years and this expansion just made his sacrifice feel so useless and cheap. I cannot forgive them for doing that to him.
@Cojosho97 He should have been resurrected as a guardian. Not just an Exo, but a warmind guardian. If written well it could have been awesome!
In order to accurately judge Bungie's story by their own standards, you have to release bits and pieces of the review in a seasonal format.
Bonus points for omitting the important details behind a paywall.
Also, remove the first parts of the review before someone can reach the end, so no going back to double check on stated things.
@@SuperInuAnd saying something contrary as to what actually happened for the review being cut up.
Best comment 💯
Definitely gotta throw in an alternative version wearing a different color shirt for an extra $20.
Or offscreen
"The veil is the G spot, if they can't find it, how am I supposed to find it"
- aztecross
I mean.. if you stare at it long enough it kinda looks like…🫣
Most Destiny players: "what's a g spot?"
😂
Bungie devs quite quitting lol😅
Traveler and Veil must've had a couple quarrel in ancient times in destiny 😂😂
Bungie cured my 9 year addiction this expansion.
Wellcome to freedom. I stoped after my whole clan froze me out after crota. Best feeling beeing free from this dogshit of a game
Same.
Yup
It sucks. That my used to be favorite game is where it is
Bro same, used to be all in but now I'm all in Warframe
Amanda Holiday was just the first of the bungie layoffs
Foreshadowing lmao
LOL
She got fired 🔥
Oohhhh true maybe they didn’t want to pay the VO for anything past the season
Season of arrivals felt like a real final season.
Arrivals, as a season, felt more apocalyptic than Lightfall did as a complete expansion. The music changing on the planets, the quests to prep everyone for either evac or final holdouts, the pyramid ships appearing over destinations back when what we knew about them was still extremely limited, everything felt genuinely oppressive and grim.
Arrivals was the last time I felt like playing lol
@@griffinfaulkner3514the evac/final stand lore cards should’ve been end of season cutscenes.
Only for the pyramids to be underwhelming 💀
Can’t wait for Myelin to react to Cross reacting to Myelin’s video.
I'm gonna need to buy more popcorn ...
its will be a clip.. ever-lasting broShip
I love how he makes us watch other TH-camrs' content LOL
@@rolandvirag8522kinda an over reach, imo
Nobody’s making you watch his reaction vids
Featuring overlay commentary from Datto and FalloutPlays ☠️😆
We spent an entire season feeding weeds to a magic space whale who expositioned the Witness backstory/motivations that we didn't need because it was a giant pile of nothing while retconning that guardians can't be Taken.
Season of the deep and the revelation about the witness should have absolutely been in the core lightfall experience. Deep should have instead tied into Witch, given Ahsa played a part in Eris' plans that season. Man lightfall sucked, I wish i never played that
Season Of The Deep & Witch should have been for something better like:
"Season Of The Veil"
-uncover the depths of the shared mind within the veil & its secrets heavily tied to The Witness & its goal for finalty.
@brmawe That's too generous. Call it "Season of Results" where you pick up puzzle pieces for 3 months that drop from fighting the Taken, and when you put them together they show a Cabal symbol (that's the enemy faction of the upcoming season!)
Season of the Deep set up a Taken sub class with Sloane, but we won't get it
at this point, i'd be surprised if there wasn't a significant retcon every season lol
The Final Shape should feel like Mass Effect 3 or Halo 3, but it feels like just another Tuesday rolling into it
Mass effect 3? All the build up for some bs ending, is it that far off?
@@hootie6787 Ending isn't that bad especially with the addon
@@TFconfused if you have to qualify it, it's that bad.
@@hootie6787 I like the ending except for the kid. It doesn't ruin the whole trilogy. It is not that bad
@@TFconfusedand therein lies the truth. Two posts, two different viewpoints so why the fuck does kangaroo face seem to think his opinion is worth more than some tramp on the street? Why should I or anyone else give a single fuck what anyone else thinks of a game?
Ghaul was a more threatning and interesting villain and he died like 6 years ago
Sadly Gaul even just being a cabal was able to kill more guardians and was an endgame thanos level threat in comparison to the witness who just fucked off into the traveler after being foreshadowed to bring forth the next collapse
@@shadyzekrom3463The concept of the Witness being so utterly uncaring of interference is cool when we can actually see that impact in gameplay, but all we got were 3 (three) guardian ships that It swiped it's hand at and cut them to pieces in a cutscene. If Bungie could have actually leaned more into truly showing the impact the Witness had as what is essentially the mastermind of all the events since D1Y1 in Lightfall's campaign, or even the Year of Lightfall, that'd make the stakes feel much much higher and keep people (me, at least) invested
@@MagatsuDiarahan yeah but that would require Bungi to actually get off their asses to do real work, and bungi can't even code their way out of a wet paper bag let alone make a half decent story
Not really lol
Lmao
A space turtle was a bigger threat than the witness
A space turtle stole the light
Also I find it absolutely HILARIOUS how the traveler just destroyed ghaul yet didn’t do shit when the witness showed up but shoot a flower beam
And it’s also funny how when the traveler exploded when ghaul showed up those flowers didn’t exist
So what gives
Also why do a whole separate move instead of exploding again
This games story is so ass
Ghaul was a bigger threat than oryx like how tf
Veil Containment was a Band-Aid desperately applied to an arterial bleed.
I have not yet seen a comment that so PERFECTLY describes exactly what VC was.
I call BS that lightfall and its seasons were a narritive experiment. The seasons are filler for the filler expansion that was lightfall
the filler expansion should have gotten way more heat. Literally paid filler with trash content. Like lol bungie playerbase has been so abused its stockholme syndrome.
The experiment was testing to see how little bungie has to add with their skeleton crew until they drop development post episodes.
The Final Sale is still upon us ;)
Technically it could be counted as an experiment, "How to extend a players tolerance for filler" it's just that it didn't work out.
Bungie NEVER admits fault.
TBH I felt that the Veil containment lore was more like an "Oh shit, we didn't talk about what the Veil is... Let's quickly cobble something together just to satisfy the crowd and run with the narrative that it's intentionally divided up to be 'interconnected'". It felt like the adding of the voicelines and the logs were a "record this week, and play it 2 weeks later" kind of situation.
Except that's not how voice recording works.
You cannot just call a VA to record lines on a whim. There's a reason Voice Lines are one of the first things to get done in development, and that is because VA have busy schedules, and you have to plan and record in advance in order for them to be available. This is doubly so with Destiny, as it has a ton of A list VAs who juggle with many projects at the same time.
To give you an example, the day before Lance Reddick passed away (may he rest in peace), he had already finished recording all his lines for the entirety of the Lightfall year, and that happened at the very beggining of the expansion.
@@voltus20you act like it's impossible when all people have to do is throw money around and that VA will be in the recording booth like a hooker in your bed
Sadly it’s how all of Destiny 2 has felt since forsaken. Like they are just making it up as they go.
@@voltus20yeah but that’s what it FEELS like. If they had the voices already recorded, why not put em in Lightfall?
“Satisfy the crowd” oops missed that goal too
I would argue that the predictability of the story is only half down the the live service model. The other half is Bungie's steadfast refusal to do anything even a little interesting with it. Nimbus should have been the one to sacrifice himself in lightfall. It would have added weight to both his characterization, as well as give the narrative team something important to play with. Now Rohan has to find a new apprentice to train before his body finally gives out. This would allow us to help and dive in headfirst into the lore and world building. Eris should have remained Hive at the end of season of the witch. It woulf have given her a far more interesting character arc, as well as cause players to ask questions around her reliability and the "morality" of the hive.
But Bungie stubbornly clings to a sitcom model where each week, bo matter what happens, nothing actually changes. And because of that, most of their work feels incredibly dull and repetitive.
This is literally the best take I’ve ever read
This needs 10k likes
Indeed, it really feels like they have established a status quo, of sorts, and every season ends with us returning to that status quo.
When nothing matters, nothing matters.
'do you ever think a villain is more interesting when you don't know anything about them, but then you learn and it goes down hill?' Yes, Kylo Wren in Star Wars 7,8 and 9.
There are some projects which are written by someone with a story to tell.
There are other projects which are written by an executive saying "That sounds fine".
Yep, and Destiny 2 "sounds fine."
Zero real creativity allowed at that studio. Those execs should be ousted.
Biggest thing I can't believe is that, if I were a new player joining Destiny a week into the Final Shape, I could not access the Witness' backstory from Season of the Deep. It would be sunset, and all the other ways that Bungie puts context into the game are shoved so far into corners that it's difficult to find them and experience them easily.
Another thing about the "Narrative Experiment" of making an expansion that serves as a starting ground for the year of seasonal storytelling to come, that kind of falls flat when that very story is going to go away in 12-16 months after it comes out. It only harms the expansion itself, in my opinion, because now it can't be a standalone story, but the other parts that support and expand it are gone by design.
The cutscene about the Witness' origin will still be available in TFS.
Sounds like someone just watched Byf video just before this one
Gonna credit byf with that? You repeated him almost verbatim
Bungies already covered this. The cutscene from season of the deep is not going away.
Bungie already said multiple times that both the Witness' cutscene and all the missions and lore related to the lightfall story year will remain post end of the year.
Never forget Bungie to this day still refer to Veil Containment as an activity
And a "new way to deliver story". lmao, so lazy and sad.
@@gargathulothhastur4981 welcome to radio Neomuna, the best way to enjoy your content
It's simple. Season of the Seraph was the epic story leading into Lightfall, or at least the Lightfall that was revealed to us in the Beyond Light showcase.
Somewhere along the line, fall when they originally said they could, and I think this is what led us to getting the light fall we got. The lightfold we got was filler. People were even pointing out how the first and last cut scenes of light fall take place almost back to back.
With all the rumors around strands being delayed and not coming with the witch queen, and the cutscene evidence from the lightfall we got, I think it's clear that this whole year of Destiny 2 was an experiment to bridge the gap. If instead you consider as leading up to the final shape, I think there we see a lot greater quality of story than what we're getting now
The whole changing the approach thing was a steaming pile of horseshit. They didn't at all, they just didn't want to come out and admit they'd fucked up big time. Everything after the initial launch of lightfall is just them scrambling with shit content to try and back up their own lie.
I can’t help but wonder what the hell the Witness has been doing throughout this whole year lol.
blah blah time was diluted so a minute was a whole damn year blah blah.
Probably binge watching all of the shows that he missed during the ~700 years that he was away from earth.
Playing with the birds inside the Traveller.
Destiny started falling apart when monetization was prioritized above the story and gameplay.
As for Crow, it has always seemed hypocritical to me that so many characters seemed so quick to jump on the “Crow and Uldren are two different people so he can’t be blamed for anything” bandwagon, since that is not the case for any other person who has been chosen as a guardian. Elsie Bray openly calls Ana her sister and Clovis refers to her as his granddaughter. Shinobu kept the same identity when she became a guardian. Savathun kept the same identity when she became a guardian and if that’s only because her memories were restored, Savathun also restored Crow’s memories of being Uldren. Therefore, Crow is Uldren. However, that doesn’t mean he’s unredeemable. If they actually had an ark in which the characters come to forgive Uldren for what he did, that would be actual redemption for the character.
There is a bald dude who is inside the traveller trying to end space and time, meanwhile I'm at the helm trying to befriend a Taken Wishdragon by finding its' long lost lover.
The Thanos Comparison to The Witness is perfect. Both have similar motives, are the main bad for a story that's been going on for around 10 years, they have both taken a back seat throughout the years not being front and center etc... but only one is an actually good character that is legit threatening.
The way the Witness should have been handled is similar to how Thanos was in the MCU. Instead, we only learned his name recently and before then I'm pretty sure he didn't even exist in the writer's room. We hardly know anything about him or his motives, and what we do know is vague, not relatable, or just boring. "Oh, he/they want the Final shape because the traveler never spoke to them, and it is chaos" bla bla bla. How are we supposed to relate to that concept? Living in a literal Utopia for centuries, but they complain about chaos? WHAT? VS Thanos whose backstory is a very real topic of overpopulation taken to the max leading to a solution that (though extreme) has logic to it.
100% they introduced the Witness late in the story for who knows why (no new race, to have an actual entity as the final boss instead of an enigmatic concept like the darkness etc...) and that has done a lot of damage.
Not only was it incredibly disappointing the pyramid ships were empty...neomuna an entirely new planet had TWO people on it and everyone else was inside the planets servers that was just lazy AF imo
It’s insane how we have a literal time traveler in our side and we don’t consult her ONCE after beyond light
Because she never survived long enough to reach the point where we even know of the Witness.
Everything always went to shit in other timelines by the time guardians get darkness powers.
She herself says this, and is mentioned in several lore pieces.
@@voltus20The real reason is that the witness didn't exist until the witch queen and that the writers were making shit up as they went along. Retcons retcons retcons
Wait didn’t they show the witness or the smoke head below a pyramid in the red war ending
@@FrostyAkuma0 no, all that was shown was the pyramid fleet. The witness was never seen until the end of the witch queen campaign.
@@FrostyAkuma0oh my sweet summer child. I don't blame anyone for not playing vanilla D2, but the story was okay. Except Hawthorne, who was insufferable. But gameplay was terrible. You didn't miss anything on the gameplay side.
If veil containment is "experimental", then I'm very concerned with what Bungie considers "risky". Experimental in my mind is along the lines of "oooh this is a bit crazy, not sure if you guys will like it, but we went crazy and wanna see how you think"
This was literally just talking to a computer and listening to story. Where's the experimentation? I thought it was a panic story injection to try and appease the audience and answer some shit, but pump it out fast.
The story in veil containment was good, but it may as well have been a lore book.
Also as much as I like the Witness's origin story cutscene and how well that's done, making his main minions the scorn is so fucking lazy and very very barely holds together. The best we've got as to why the witness has a bunch of scorn, afaik, is literally "Idk man, pretty weird though, huh". We've had a few voice lines that seem to lead to "just because lol, go kill some of them"
Lastly that outro song is a TUUUNEEE. I finally found it, Ben Elson - Harmonies.
I'm gonna say it, I hate the Witness. I hate that Bungie essentially retconned so much mystery and dark lore since D1. There's no reason for the Dark Fleet either. The Witness should have a proper army, we shouldve seen their back story in full CGI not an inkblot cinematic, and the Veiled Woman Statue should still be the main big bad of the Darkness.
I hate that they try implying the Witness gave Oryx the ability to Take, when Oryx made an Ogre that was used like a Walkie Talkee in the Deep to talk to the Darkness.
Retconning all this cool ass, mysterious lore surrounding the Darkness was all tainted,underminded, and ruined by shoe-horning the Witness into ALL OF IT.
Imagine if in Mass Effect 3 if the Reapers were just 1 person and the ships were completely empty? Imagine if there were no Orc or anything in LOTR but it was just Sauron? Imagine Star Wars if it was just Darth Vader, no empire, no Storm Troopers?
It's so damn underwhelming that I have to try not to think about it because it makes me apathetic af to Destiny.
Always been a lore guy, over 7k hours in D2 on steam alone, been playing since the closed D1 beta, and I just don't care anymore. That's not good.
I hope Final Shape brings my love back, but those hopes aren't very high.
This whole year all I've wanted to tell Bungie's narrative team is that just mentioning that the veil exists isn't enough to explain what it is or why it was so pivotal
11:50 Imagine if in the final shape's raid we somehow separate the Witness back into it's civilization using the creative powers of the traveler, and that's how we get the next race "The Remains". Imagine that 'leaked' idea of a 12-player mission after the raid involves us having to fend off The Remains after defeating the Witness to stop them from inacting the Final Shape one last time.
To me that concept would be soo damn sick, but that is but an idea on how to fix the "The Witness is the culmination of a civilization" error made this year, and I doubt Bungie is capable even with the extra time.
Bungie having to go a season without writing something complex and interesting off as being paracausal (they literally can’t go 15 minutes without mentioning the word for something we don’t understand)
I stopped caring about the "lore" when the cut scenes became lazier and my actions are railroaded no matter what we do. Crow? He was a character concept for the original draft of Destiny before its overhaul. They were looking for a quick fix to their story and added this character to extend their money grab.
What a shit take. Adding a mediocre character somehow extends the games lifespan by years? You are deluded.
remember waaaay back on the warminds being retconned? That began the trickling of me beginning to not care about the lore which was a huge reason for me caring about the game in general.
@@noobpaints6114 Straight facts. When D1 was here, (and when I was a kid) I felt that the things I did made a difference. And each time we got the new DLC the game took a good turn in the story especially when we met Eris Morn. Also, we've been fighting literally the EXACT same enemy model for 10 years, lol Bungie couldn't add new Archetypes of enemies this entire time?
What tf are you talking about? How did the cutscenes become lazier when the length and quality and quantity has gone up, and crow is used as a cash grab how? And how was he used to fixed a story?
@@Blue-qt8ms You ought to watch the video reviewing the Entire history of Destiny. You'll learn how Crow *was* a concept that got scrapped but reused later. Crow isn't new, he was originally was to be in Destiny 1 in Caydes position but, we see how that went. And yes, it's lazier. The cutscenes have no drive like how they did, they drag on and give little to no good narrative, story telling is more than just saying what's going on.
I never did the veil containment. I NEVER saw it or knew it was on the map till like 4 months after they added it.
Even when you understand the lore...the base conflict in the story is MID at best. They lean so heavily on what happened during or before the golden age, but never show any cool shit. The closest we ever got to that was the black and white ai looking art which was basically a slide show in power point. WE WANT THE COOL SHIT IN THE STORY WHILE WERE PLAYING STORY HELLLLOOOOO???
Mentioning Vinland Saga as fantastic way of writing a "villain" is peak right there.
I love when a charmander goes somewhere and they just appear in the helm in their normal spot.
Character*
I also love the fact that they always turn and walk away, right as they transmat somewhere. 😆
I’m glad we have lore channels. I been a destiny player since D1 and still have no idea who, what or why we’re fighting all I know of everyone with a health bar must die 😂
It's almost like bungie actually *didn't* have a narrative and were making shit up to try and justify how shit lightfall was.
My hype has been killed as well. First time I've ever not pre-ordered
Same I’m waiting until reviews and if it’s dog shit I will wait for a sale
@@proassassin8473if it's dog shit you shouldn't get it as they will drop the game even harder if sales are bad
Bungie just saying "let's start experimenting" on the fuckin penultimate campaign for the saga they've been building for a decade, is truly astounding.
Yeah whether it was the truth or a lie to sell us filler, either way it’s shitty behaviour
I won't lie I completely memory holed Defiance. When Myelin brought up the fact they never explained why the hell the shadow cabal were kidnapping groups of like 5 people at a time I was a little dumbfounded.
All this criticism about the "fragmented" story telling being spread over mutliple season and expansions, yet we are completely overlooking an arguably even worse aspect of this type of story telling. If you were to hop on the game right now after not playing for the last year, you would be able to play every single season story and expansion story line all at the same time. Imagine getting into the game as a new player, you watch Amanda die while playing one mission, then the next mission you see on your "to-do" list takes you 6 months back in story time and you see Amanda just talking to you normally.
Bungie's way of onboarding new players is to give someone every single MCU movie, then told to watch it in chronological order with near zero context of where to start.
Congrats on 800k Aztecross community.
"The Veil is like the G-spot - is it there? Maybe. Somewhere." is probably the most accurate analogy of Destiny's lore. 😂
Congrats on 800k man!! Well deserved. Been here since under 100k!! Love your content i watch every video every day. 1 mill incoming
There is only like 8 missions left in The Final Shape. Not enough time to properly resolve so much stuff they have set up the last 10 years. So much wasted time in Lightfall.
For real. At this point in the story 8 missions is not enough to do any substantial story telling. If lightfall had 10? 12 missions? We would actually get to bond with Rohan and have his death mean something or do some explanation and setup on the veil.
If Final Shape only has 8 missions I will be shocked if it’s satisfying
I haven't played Destiny 2 for a while now. But there is a saying. Something like "If you have to point out that you are the boss, you are not a good boss." I am not english speaking from the start, so it may go differently. But the core is the same. If you have to tell someone to like your work, you haven't done it well.
"THE VEIL IS LIKE A G SPOT!
iS IT THERE? MAYBE?!"
LMFAO
15:25
Cross: the veil is like the "G-spot"
Let this man cook
That comment by *Aztecross* made me laugh so hard 😂!
I need a cropped out gif of Aztecross eating popcorn with a very intense face
This comment became an essay, just skip it.
The problem with Bungie's storytelling in Destiny is that, despite their insistence that it's "intentional" that the vague narrative threads that are left vague and underdeveloped on purpose, they feel unintentionally vague. They don't seem to know any principles of storytelling. As an English teacher who has read thousands of essays and who teaches logic, writing, and plotting, the series feels like it has no consistent creative direction and the assurances that it's "intentional" are just cover. (video 20:30 mark says it better, the writing feels like trying to meet word count)
One specific problem: Focusing on Lightfall and the post-Lightfall seasons, we have a story expansion that is permanently in the game that had almost zero story, while the seasons (which disappear at some point) tell a lot of story without making explicit connections back to the expansion. It all feels random. The writers are terrible at dealing with time progression (a philosophical problem in an MMO, where the world needs consistency while the quests need progression). Not to mention the complaint from the video that we never get a satisfactory reason for the Shadow Legion to be abducting rando humans to begin with (no, we should have been dealing with Shadow Legion collaborators sabotaging the Farm or something like that)
And look, yes we all (probably) agree that Lightfall was filler. BUT, Lightfall wasn't sold as filler, it was sold as a full expansion. If it was key to the story the marketing should have reflected this better. Okay, fine, things played out the way that they did. But look at how small of a span Lightfall really is. The whole game takes place between those two interconnected cut scenes of the Tower Guardians looking out the window at the Traveller and Witness. It doesn't make sense for the guardian to take a Neomuna vacation to learn a new Darkness subclass during an invasion of the Traveller. The sense of time doesn't work. The priorities don't work. This is a core problem, expansion storytelling is lazy and vague to drive customer/players to the seasons, but as a player it feels defeating to buy seasons that will disappear along with the majority of the game's actual story. Witch Queen is a statistical outlier.
It's bad storytelling because it's lazy storytelling. Like Neomuna, it's all flash with no substance. And I find this frustrating because the universe is ripe with lore and we could have smaller, more intimate stories about life on Earth. I mean, we're a zombie super-soldier who is an enforcer for a military government with zero oversight who kills aliens on-sight. We're space fascists from a dying civilization and nobody in the game really questions that (except sometimes Drifter and Savathun, but they do this uncritically and are both surprisingly supportive).
Getting close to the million sub mark Cross! If you continue to expand your content like you already have been I could see you hitting that threshold this year.
Vinland Saga reference completely unexpected. Great show
I mean bro, the developers cant even figure out their own gender identity, how the fuck they supposed to write a story thats easy to understand!?!?!?
One thing I loved in Season of the Lost + Seraph (Aka the other previous seasons before a major expansion) was the sense of unity and coming together of numerous factions of allies to deal with the present or upcoming threat. We all knew the outcome because of the DLC that would come after but the preparation the characters underwent to prepare was super intriguing. Not to mention the threats present in these seasons were also very interesting also (Eramis and her conflicted alliance with the Witness and XIvu immediately comes to mind).
Season of the Wish did not have this in my opinion, and its a real shame given that the next expansion's stakes trump these other seasons. I think the solution through the 15th Wish was a cool idea sure, but the urgency was nonexistent because both the threat present felt very weak (IE a crippled Xivu who may or may not be controlling the taken, and the Sol Divisive whom have no real villian we can point at) and the objective seemed very shallow compared to other seasons. Exorcising Savathuns worm or Arming Rasputin for a potential invasion by Xivu felt far more engaging than collecting an egg each week.
I mean sure the Ahamkara are cool and Im happy we may have more stories tied to them in the future, but the height of the stakes for the next DLC make this story feel very shallow. Once the last wish was revealed to be the key we all knew that was going to be the solution (Which is fine because we knew Savathun was going to escape/return when Lost was going to end), but how that story was dealt with in-between was imperative. I personally did not second guess if the last wish was going to work, maybe thats just me, but I feel like that doubt and mystery of what could happen between the start and end of a season was solely missed in this final season before the end of this saga.
TL;DR : The stakes and main objective in the plot, characters reactions and involvement, and the villain's presence in Season of the Wish felt pretty shallow when the situation has never been more dire, which is why I felt quite whelmed by the story that was told this season and going into Final Shape.
17:58 I am so glad he came around to this thought. This was one of the reslasons I haven't been playing much at all, and why I went back to playing games like GoW, Gears of War, Tomb Raider, Devil May Cry, etc.
I rooted for Clovis the entire time
Same, he wanted to get sht done, but nah Bungie wanted us to feel sad for an AI
@@chillhour6155 😂 for real imagine that being reality and ngl I was really hoping that brother Vance would be the witness from another timeline taken over by his other self or just a evil version of him.
👁
Keep spitting them facts.
Same, mostly cause it was the stupidest thing to see the sisters ""heal"" EVERY.SINGLE.WEEK from their trauma and Clovis speaking some truth, but no, we make our own path or some bs, delete his conscious.
I wonder if Bungie even considered that, once the seasons are gone after Final Shape releases, we're literally going to be completely missing the middle of the "book"? Expansions won't be sunset, seasonal content will. So even if they did manage to pull off the "interconnected seasons", new players would never know what happened in the middle of the story. Lightfall introduces all the storylines unresolved, Final Shape finishes it, but new players have no idea what happened in between.
The craziest part is I still don't know what The Veil is, and at this point, I don't think I care
It's locked behind a seasonal cutscene the most important story beat of lightfall is in a seasonal cutscene at the end of a quest line 😂🤦♂️
th-cam.com/video/Z0CKckjryVI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=XxUEXfXrfYSWR8-4
It be really fun if when we rendezvous with Crow he’s got a big beard and is like “wtf took yall so long?”
15:40 every time I see you look over at chat I can see just how proud you were of that g-spot joke
Honestly that whole article in the beginning was Bungie pretty much saying Lightfall & it’s following seasons were all just filler
It would be awesome if Into The Light gave us the return of Wrath Of The Machine.... This would be absolutely amazing people would be so ecstatic, This would probably keep people engaged with destiny until closer to the final shapes release.
P.S. Another good idea for Into The Light would be for bungie to make every Raid and Dungeon farmable every week from the beginning of Into The Light until the release of the final shape.
Little light, beyond light, into the light, ray of light, small light, big light, moist light, hard light.
Imagine if you skipped defiance, had a couple of missions that were communicating with Ahsa, a couple of missions reviving Savathun, and a couple of missions using Riven's power to wish ourselves through the portal into the Pale Heart, and that's where the game really opens up with a strangely familiar landscape, with a few missions leading up to the final confrontation. Nezarec himself could have been an episode.
Final Shape feels like it will be trying to stretch the final 25% of Lightfal into an entire game.
i think myelin touched on something at the beginning of the video. that i didnt even thing about but seems accurate. bungie says they wanted light fall to be like the beginning of the story. what they did was give us the beginning of a campaign charged us full price as if it where a full campaign with beginning, middle, and end. and then charged us half the price of a full campaign for the in between beginning and middle, then again for the middle, then again for in between middle and end, and then AGAIN for the end...... oh and charged us again for the easter eggs in a campaign in the form of dungeons. thinking about it like that kinda makes me tilt my head and look at the ceiling in thought.
Destiny lost its touch once they shifted over focusing on $$$$ than putting out cohesive content that encapsulates us into the environments they create. That’s why I feel like VOW is the best raid. It felt for a moment, that we were absorbing all the mystery of these pyramids by being inside of them. Down to the soundtrack inside that raid. The symbols. The stories behind all those symbols. It felt like they gave it the attention it deserved. Not this half built recycled seasonal garbage.
Eyy congratulations on the 800k!!! Well done Titan!
24:50 Exactly, they're trying to shake off the criticism of LF not making a lot of sense.
Corporate > Devs is the only truth you need to go by and you won't have aneurisms trying to figure out lore.
thank you for making a video I can send to my friends who get mad at my utter disinterest and distaste for Destiny's horrible story 🤝
Says more about them than you, There's a reason clans are dying left and right, mine only has 2-3 people playing at most through this entire last season or 2, I'm not getting the next expansion/seasons either.
26:33 Whoever typed that out, stop drinking your tap water
When you think of cabal, you think invasion, vex, extermination, hive, primal killing. Witness, you think 💭 he’s at the hotdog stand.
I ask people this all the time...tell me the story of "Destiny 2" JUST in terms of the free intro content, and expansions...and tell me that feels like a genuinely compelling beginning, middle and end narrative.
Bungie wants people to follow their "chain link" from expansion to season to season to season to season to expansion, etc., but the problem is...THEY REMOVE SEASONAL CONTENT. They sell the season pass with story stuff, they remove that content (or chuck it in the Timeline), and the expansions, without those crucial "chain links," make ZERO sense on their own! Newer players, hearing how great Destiny is, are trying out Destiny and feeling NOTHING for the characters or circumstances. The only people "feeling" anything are veteran players, and they, too, aren't happy with how this has all transpired, leading to the "10 year climax" sold to us 10 years ago because Destiny 1's story shat the bed so hard at BUNGIE'S discretion.
They needed to do it like Warframe does...take a bit longer to release MASSIVE expansions to move the story significantly...smaller updates between to keep players busy or engaged, but all in all...let players decide when they want to come back, via more permanent content. The seasonal Destiny content doesn't let players make that choice, because it needs to be played in one year, then the seasons are gone.
Saddest part is warframes content isn't just NOT vaulted, it's also completely free to everyone
@@chillhour6155 Yup. I remember when Destiny 2 went "totally" free to play, or mostly I guess you could say. Forsaken and Shadowkeep were the only paid expansions at the time. Everything else before that became free, you just had to grind out XP for the planets. Basically around the time of the Activision Bungie split. I remember thinking, I could be mad at this, but I wasn't. More accessibility, more people coming in to play...none of that bad.
Once the Beyond Light showcase hit and they announced the DCV, it was all over for me. And the Destiny community rolled over and took it. Defended it. Regurgitated all of Bungie's excuses.
Completely ridiculous.
The end of the video made me realize again we need the Aztecross Anime Review channel time now
I hated the backstory of the Witness. It was kind of the last straw for me personally. I have been waiting so long to learn about the villain and I hated the reveal. Kind of killed me buzz for the game. It's just so shitty to have been playing this game since before D1 launch and they fuck the ending up so hard.
Can we all talk about how they expect 100$ for us even tho they give us recycled content..
dungeons not coming up with DLC is criminal honestly.
There’s no reason for this company to be asking for this much look at fortnite dude they are RICH off COSMETICS 😂
Games that expect checks off DLCS aren’t winning and I understand the industry money is different but dude ya make so much money.. just to give us ANOTHER CABAL RAID like WTF 😂 vow was witch queen and had no light bearers..
Spire had a literal garden boss RECYCLED CONTENT.
Warlords ruin final boss
Is a RECYCLED GAMBIT BOSS….
HOW.
I’m honestly on the brink of not playing no more they seriously can’t deliver anything right this game is all lore..
nezarec god of pain was a tormentor with a dad bod….
Like bro we dump so much money into this game just for them to drop nothing but mechanics
Let’s talk about how the smg from ghost of the deep is worse than gambits and it’s a recycled model too 😂 30$dungeon for recycled content bro..
Destiny could be so much more man 🤦🏽♂️
So much talent WASTED
The witness doesn’t even look menacing..
just another stand still boss with a witch model that we’re gonna div with a linear..
Your talking points are spot on askeladd took that boys father then slowly became one for him. Beautiful. The other point I wholeheartedly agree with is the author pulling you into their world and altering your thought process. I can't forget the book series the night angel trilogy by Brent Weeks the characters and world was so gritty it made me appreciate what I have I'm my life maybe not the best but it wasn't like the protagonists life truly painful. The "TRICK" to his powers absolutely jaw-dropping loved it.
I see what Bungie was trying to do with this "experiment" of theirs because I distinctly remember back before Beyond Light came out feeling incredibly underwhelmed, not because I thought the expansion was necessarily bad, but because prior to it was nothing but this massive buildup of "The Darkness is coming. It's coming. It's coming. It's almost here. It's here guys! Holy shit, it's here!" and so logically you'd expect the big expansion that comes with that moment to be about the Darkness' arrival...but it really wasn't. It was tangentially, at least with regards to us getting Stasis, but for the most part it had nothing to do with the Darkness itself. It was narratively underwhelming.
The problem is that their experiment failed. I mean hell, even going into Lightfall, prior to us knowing it was going to suck, it was still a really weird pivot for the story because unless you REALLY kept up with the lore, Neomuna comes almost out of nowhere so you're left wondering: "Wait, why are we here again? Why is the Witness here? Why didn't we discover this ages ago?" Overall, it was just a huge failure in storytelling.
And of course the cynic in me wonders if this even was an "experiment", or if that was actually just Bungie's way of trying to save face with what was an obvious filler expansion. Just toss out the idea that it was an intentional experiment, they totally tried their best and weren't just trying to scam us/tie us over for a 1+ year.
Here’s what was going on in Defiance: The bad guys were abducting people and planning on melting them down to form a human based pyramid ship…. Or I may be getting that mixed up with a different sci-fi game…
i like how this one ended like the Sopranos ended, just mid-sentence.
Hearing Cross suddenly mentions Vinland Saga makes me happy
Thank the maker for Myelin!!! Because I would be so freakin lost with the story!!!!
"The Veil is the G spot. If the Lore master can't find it, how the F' am I supposed to find it!?" 🤣
Just glad Cross recanted on sounding dismissive of Frank and his children and did point out that they do, in fact matter.
Me. I don’t care what the veil is. It’s a Destiny macguffin, it’s nothing.
We literally watched people get mangled and obliterated in halo. So why can’t we get the same result for Destiny😩
From the beginning, the game was hollowed out to be as safe and marketable as possible despite whatever passionate devs tried and had planned.
"If Myelin can't find it... how the HELL am I supposed to FIND IT!?" mint
Lol jumping into destiny at lightfall was hilariously confusing. Figured its alright i can just go back and figure it all out playing older expansions. Lol boy was i wrong
I am so sorry your introduction to D2 was Lightfall
I honestly forgot about the veil and the witness
I'd forget about destiny if it wasn't for YT algorithms. I still enjoy the YT comments though lol
It’s amazing it’s taken this long for people to realise this! This came to me a year over a year ago. I dropped this game a long time ago because of this very reason!
If this was done like halo was it would have made waaaaaaay more sense! All they see (upper management) is customers as cash cows.
to think that there was urgency in fighting the witness, is stupid because he has been inside the traveler for about a year now. all sense of urgency has been lost.
15:23 oh my lord, that's the perfect description lmao
I feel like if Bungie just never deleted seasonal content, never removed the Red War, things like that. . . Then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Because they’re both MMOs, I’ll draw a comparison to FF14. While yes, they do build up the next expansion in the post expansion patches, they never delete the old content (except if it’s not integral to the Main Story and entirely optional like Diadem which failed horribly.) which means that new players are very much able to get the full picture.
While I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with leaving some things unanswered and coming back to it later, if said lore will essentially be wiped away AND is needed for the full picture then that’s not really acceptable.
Agree. Probably no new player will approach destiny for the lore at this time, because he would have to find infos on the internet, and still don't understanding a lot of things. For me, the thing that bungie have to do is try to bring back in the game all the players that stopped playing destiny, not trying to recruit new players that will get bored after 2 weeks. I think about this after the quote of helldivers that cross have read a few videos ago: "a game for everyone is a game for no one". And goddamn, the main problem for destiny is actually this. Trying to be a game for everyone.
Cross's outro music always a banger
When it takes two years to tell a single paragraph of lore, i don't find myself caring anymore
I'd love to play a horror game as a Civilian on the run from a Hive Knight trying to upload data to Rasputain or something during the Collaspe.
Idea #2: City Guard during the building of the Last City.
#3: city builder making the last city during the Dark Age
He's so right about the lack of urgency... I'll never forget, D1 was the first live service game I had ever played... I had no plans of buying every expansion, but before the Dark Below expansion released, one of my favorites, they had a bunch of hive knights, spawning on the cosmodrome with these relic swords... They introduced these Dark Below public events, and this build up, was so amazing, I was sold and pre-ordered The Dark Below!
If this is this is what they did, even before they started seasons, then they surely could've done something similar this season. Some build up, make us excited to buy the damn expansion. Most of us that buy it, are only going to buy it to see how it ends. 10yrs is a long time.
But there's nothing going on now in the game that makes anyone excited for lightfall.
And cross, love this format if you reviewing things going on in the community! Keep up the good work. And as always, slap the LIKE button like your momma taught you write.
Also the build up to house of wolves, who didn't have a blast farming for keys for activity that wasn't in the game yet.
@@raularellanes4101 absolutely! They had so many inventive ways to make ppl excited.