Europa is an Environment Masterclass (After Raid) (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Sunday, November 22, 2020, 16:56 (1465 days ago) @ cheapLEY

I don’t think you’re wrong necessarily, I guess it just doesn’t bother me all that much. I like the hub zones of Europa quite a bit (except for Asterion Abyss—sorry Bungie, Vex architecture blows. It’s a pain to navigate, it’s not all that appealing looking. It seems like a waste of effort when they could do literally anything else).

I think multiple landing zones ruined the way they designed Destinations. Even the vanilla D2 zones had lots of dead ends, mostly used during Adventures. Instead of making the loop back out somehow, they just figured folks would fast travel out. Europa just didn’t get the memo that it only really had one landing zone. I certainly miss only having one, I knew all the D1 areas much better than any of the D2 areas, even the ones I actively enjoyed being in. It was just too easy to fast travel to where I needed to go. That seems like an unambiguous bad thing, when you have these massive zones that no one spends any real time in.

Europa is sort of a mixed bag. I really love it. There’s a lot happening there, and I genuinely enjoy just roaming around the area doing all the little events that pop up. They added several more yesterday. However, it also feels like just another Destiny zone. Why not something more interesting? I genuinely want something like the Bray Exoscience facility, but massive. Make that the entire zone. Titan came close to that sort of feeling, I think, but that was also the worst zone probably ever in trend of unused dead ends. Hell, it’s the reason I was initially disappointed by the Dreaming City. How are you going to call a location the Dreaming City and none of it is in a city? The gameplay possibility in a space like that is so appealing. Look no further than the first encounter of Scourge. It rules! I want a whole Destination built like that.

At the very least, they could have alleviated some dead ends. You’re telling me they didn’t build a train tunnel from the city they lived in to the science facility they worked in? They didn’t build one from the science facility to the big ass Vex portal that was the primary source of everything they did? They just trundled through the snow? I don’t buy it.

I definitely agree that Bungie has mostly failed to find ways to make patrol zones compelling past the first hour or two. I think that’s why I ultimately prefer having lots of landing zones. If I don’t particularly enjoy patrol activities, at least multiple landing zones makes it fast and convenient to get in and do what I need to do.

I will push back a bit on the point that all the other destinations have dead ends too. They do, you’re certainly right about that, but I’d argue they’re nowhere close to what we have on Europa. The best comparison I can think of is Mars. You know that path that leads up to Rasputin? The path that’s cool when you first go through it as part of a story mission, but every time after that it feels like a completely repetitive chore? Well Europa has 3 of those, and all these bounties or “quests” require us to run along these paths over and over and over. And since these spaces are technically really narrow patrol spaces (just without any patrol beacons) the enemy encounters are exactly the same each and every time. Typically, the only times in D2 where we get such long linear sections of the map to travers are during strikes, which feature far more exciting and unique encounters, and at the end you are sent to orbit. But all these Europa activities involve running way down these paths, fighting through the exact same clusters of patrol enemies every single time, and then you reach the end and either have to run all the way back or transmat to Variks. Locations like the Dreaming City managed to avoid this kind of thing almost completely. No matter where you are, you have multiple paths out which connect to several other parts of the map. It allowed them to create missions and objectives that could start and end almost anywhere, and they could take you along completely different paths from one mission to the next.

I just wish it felt like Bungie was learning from their previous releases. But to me it looks more and more like even when they get things right, it’s an accident and they don’t know how to replicate it (see Trials, TTK & Forsaken campaigns, loot systems, etc).