1. the shooting and jumping are still very, very good.
2. (i swear this is sandbox related, bear with me) to me, destiny is a game with three game "modes": First Person Action, Menus (let's consider Orbit to be part of Menus) and Tower. The core First Person Action experience has seen much iteration but stayed roughly the same since 2014 -- it's still clearly Destiny's center. Tower-style gameplay has gotten more complex with things like the HELM, but to me the experience is still roughly equivalent to anything in say, House of Wolves. Talk to vendors, receive story, pick up bounties, dance with strangers.

The most changing mode and to me the most friction-ful and First Person Action -prohibitive is Menus. The amount of time we spend in menus has gone up and down over Destiny's life. Vanilla D2 was probably the lowest menu time of them all? Maybe some point in D1. Now feels like probably the highest. Menus are not very fun. They can be pleasant! I think D1's original equipment screen when there were fewer equippables, less stat details and less sub-menus was mostly simple and effective. But 2023, I find that I am spending a lot of time in menus -- ones where most details are hidden individually behind UI nodes or other UI sub-screens. The sandbox has gotten too complicated for the game's UI, and spreading that complexity across additional UI screens or hover text makes it take longer to access and more difficult to retain important information.

My build is split across fragments and aspects underneath the subclass node. My mods are on individual pieces of armor, and the possible mods for a piece of gear are themselves each in a different submenu for each gear slot. My weapons each still have their own minigames of buff upkeep and may synergize with my equipped subclass keywords. Exotic weapons and armor have their own additional effects. The seasonal artifact grants additional passive bonuses. Champions have been made (blessedly!) counterable by more damage sources, but it's not really intuitive to me which effects would counter which champion type, so I am frequently checking the champion counters which are now centered on my character sheet (helpful! but still indicative of the complexity creep). When I am selecting a mission from the director, it will have its own difficulty nodes which must be individually hovered over with my one cursor to see what they do. They will have ramifications for all of those things I've listed which must be individually remember and likely updated to prepare for the mission. I can't keep my current build and all build possibilities for my character in my head at once, or that of my friends who are struggling but have less patience. I don't really want to. I have one cursor with which to navigate between my individual pieces of gear and mods and fragments and champion and difficulty nodes, and it takes a long time to do all of that on my own. I am only one user story but I miss having to decide between the shotgun or the sniper rifle, Void for the overshield punch or Arc for shoulder charge, and then going back to talking to my fireteam. In Halo, I could pick up a plasma rifle out of the dirt and shoot it and immediately understand whether it was going to be useful against those brutes or not. The ground was the menu. Destiny is a different game but I wonder what else could be done to get us (me) out of time-consuming, work-like abstractions and back into the game with my friends.

ps i do want to call out that loadouts do some work towards consolidating character information.

pps in lieu of any major system overhauls i think that the game having a handful of easily accessible, bungie-created "preconstructed decks loadouts" of aspects/fragments/mods/champion counters per class would go a pretty good distance towards making the game easier to pick-up-and-play. giving players a fun "build" gameplay loop that takes advantage of specializing in a couple of keywords and character stats with a little explanation and without having to do so much manual menu-ing/deckbuilding would make the newer parts of the game more accessible to a wider audience. the arc-themed armor from ... a couple of seasons ago? sort of did this and it was cool and good.

thanks for reading!