There was plenty great about Destiny, the problem is that eventually Bungie just stopped giving a shit about making a good game and focused on milking Destiny for everything they can. Like their biggest changes to gameplay they’ve done in the last 3 years is to fix the issues they themselves created on prior years. Those fixes are presented as some new cool feature when in reality they’re things they should’ve iterated upon when it was originally introduced.

For instance with armor 2.0 they added armor affinities that would indicate what kind of mods(armor perks) you can use. Dnd then each piece also needed to be upgraded to be able to fit mods into the armor. So not only did you have limited amount of mods you could have you also needed 3 different versions of an armor piece (ideally with a good statline) to fully take advantage of the new build system. They also introduced the artifact which was supposed to be horizontal progression but it contained seasonal mods that you would have to use within the new armor 2.0 system. So you would have to compromise between using seasonal mods vs non-seasonal armor mods.

The biggest feedback they got was that the system is too restrictive and some of the solutions they got was a) get rid of armor affinity and b) make artifact mods into artifact perks. Guess what they introduced this year as a part of their grand plan to shake up the game? Getting rid of armor affinity and turning artifact mods into perks (though they still somewhat act like mods), 3 years after the community told them to do it. And with it they created a new problem for them to fix down the line. They scrapped all the existing armor mods they created in the last 3 years and replaced them with the most uninteresting mods.

And what about the core gameplay loop? That has largely stayed the same for the last, well some would argue since the start of D2. Every activity for the last 3 years has been a variation of stand at a specific place, shoot at a specific thing, carry something from a to b, throw a ball or insert collected things. And obviously shoot mostly the same enemies you’ve been shooting for the past decade.

In short the game is stale and it’s because Bungie has focused on keeping the content treadmill running rather than actually improving the game.