My history with this game have always been strainous. Even though I'm not a Destiny player, I'm a big Bungie fan, and like many of you I've watched wayside as Destiny was miscommunicated.
Someone earlier in this thread said that they hoped D2 would be what D1 was marketed as. But the whole problem about Destiny is that the marketing was terrible, inconsistent and paradoxical in it's messaging.
"It's a first person shooter like Halo- but 10 times as big" / "It's a MMO with a 10 year development cycle we will update for atleast a decade".
We know from the original documents that was leaked in 12 that there was no way a sequel was going to be a sequel sequel:
With that being said you do have to wonder (yet again) why communication is poor. Destiny 2 is a fresh start that lets them start over- But it looks to continue from where the first game looks on, and its content looks like its previous expansions stitched together. So being surprised that people have misguided expectations of something like this with "2" in its name is not super surprising.
Maybe there are major changes to the way the game works that justify breaking from the first game instead of doing expansion? Maybe it's under the hood, in the tech? But regardless, Bungie is not doing a good job at clarifying things. Just like all the PC reveal news was undercut by the release date.
I asked several people in the Destiny threads about this, and Kalamari basically nailed it last year when he said;
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=203057659&postcount=1762
And really. If Destiny took 5 years of development, and the development team spent the time after 2014 trying to fix destiny while building expansions, there was no way in hell that a sequel would have been a new sequel in the sense of having a new engine and major improvements.
It's just not possible when all your staff is focused on keeping something alive as a service.
Look- Blizzard went through the same thing. After WoW came out, for a long time (quite a few years) Blizzard was not doing anything other than WoW. their development teams where not making strides in other areas. And the reason for that is clear- When you have a MMO, it's not just a game, but a service. A service which takes all your attention and support all of the time.
Bungie is most likely still in a phase of figuring out how it operates effectively, and it will probably take a couple of more years before it figures out how to really get cracking at other projects while it manages to juggle supporting Destiny with lesser staff, lesser resources and more on the backburner.
3 years is nothing for a MMO. Destiny hasn't even really fixed its baby fat yet. It's not riped or matured, and I've always felt it's a weak ass move to say you'll support a game for potentially a decade and then skip bail to a new engine instead of fixing your shit and making your shit amazing.
I think a lot of this frustration comes from calling it Destiny 2. It's a weird naming scheme, but they already called some of their updates 2.0. It's been poorly communicated and articulated and that leads to players having insane expectations, and here we are.
I really hope Destiny 2 will be a game that is fucking massive to the brim with variety and content and loot. Destiny was mamed and plauged by struggling with its tech. It would be nice to think that they have a better workflow now that allows them to pump out better content much faster.
I hope for the best.