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With 'Destiny 2' the Crucible Is More Approachable, But Less Interesting

Is there such a thing as encouraging too much teamwork?
all screenshots courtesy of Activision

I've never been better at Destiny multiplayer. Maybe it's because it's a newer game with a larger community than the original Destiny was by the time I got around to it, and therefore there's a bigger community of talentless incompetents for me to hide in. But it also feels like it's gotten easier to succeed in Destiny 2: if I just try and stick together with my team, the weight of our firepower will carry the day. So far I haven't been called on to do much more than that.

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This is surprising me because when Destiny 2 switched to 4v4 multiplayer, I was worried that it would actually be harder for me to hide my lack of skill inside this game. On a team of six, the odds were better that the liability I represented would be compensated by some Terminator-class player in the top of our score box. But on a team of four, I expected I'd be struggling to carry my weight more.

So far that hasn't been the case, and at least part of it seems to be that on a team of four the decision to split apart has a lot more downsides than it did in a 6v6 format. While there was always an incentive to stick together and support each other in Destiny, being on a team of six also made it feasible to trade that unity for broader map and objective control. It made sense for trios and pairs to freelance around the map and, once you had those small groups roving around, your odds on your own weren't quite so bad either.

But that also meant that a lot of fights in Destiny felt more chaotic and more dependent on an individual's skill. A 1v1 or 2v1 encounter really put more pressure on each player to land their shots, and if you could land your precision hits, you could carry the day. This, I will admit, was not my strong suit.

Fights also seemed harder to track. Players would converge from multiple angles, which demanded a lot of situational awareness and level knowledge if you were going to make sense of the battle and anticipate where threats were going to emerge. One reason that I preferred game modes like Control was that, by having location-based objectives, they gave me something simpler to focus on than the match as a whole. I could camp an objective or two, learn the terrain around them, and just react to what came at me without trying to keep a level layout in my head.

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In Destiny 2 it feels like a lot of the simplifying work has been done by the 8-player cap. There simply aren't that many people on the map and in most cases they're sticking close to one another (or trying to). The most dominant performances I've had has been on teams that largely moved as a four-player unit, rolling across the map and just pummeling our less coordinated rivals. Are we better? Probably not, but we just send more shots flying their way and can rotate fresh Guardians to the front before taking casualties.

The levels themselves feel less important and more interchangeable.

It feels like most other players have drawn the same conclusion about teamwork. I notice that, as opposed to Destiny, my teammates will wait at spawn for everyone to arrive before heading out. Players who head off on their own frequently turn around and come back when they see the rest of the team headed in a different direction. Shaxx himself exhorts us to stick together, complimenting us on our teamwork: "This is why we have fireteams!" he groans from his ecstasies at seeing us extend our killstreaks with combined fire.

The side-effect of this, however, is that the levels themselves feel less important and more interchangeable because I find myself interacting with level architecture and geometry less than I used to. When I'm navigating a battle in Destiny 2, everything is relative to my team's position. The rest of the map kind of ceases to exist except for the small circle around the team.

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This also means that the levels themselves can feel kind of empty to me. A few times a game I'll spawn in a distant part of the map and discover that absolutely nobody is nearby. Everyone is concentrated around their fireteams, and two-thirds of the map is just empty space waiting for our rolling firefight to pass through.

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This is true even in Control, where it generally seems more effective to rove between capture points as a group rather than try to hold them. If you can keep winning the battles you'll generally have the edge on control points, and you're more likely to win them if you're moving together rather than scattering to different capture zones.

I think what's missing for me is some kind of countervailing pressure to split the fireteam. Right now everything is on the "stick together" side of the ledger, without many incentives to expand your presence around the map, or make flanking runs. That's making for an easier game for me to wrap my head around.

ButI wonder if it hasn't also created less tactical variety from game to game, as well as reduced the dynamism of each map and game mode. I'm having more success than I ever had with Destiny, but I have this nagging worry that there's also less for me to aspire to with this take on 4v4 multiplayer.