A Farewell to Destiny 2

Though it may take years, maybe even decades, online games do eventually either shut down or get put into maintenance mode. With a new story arc in Destiny 2, it felt like that eventual fate was far off in the distance. But with how badly Year of Prophecy went, the end for Destiny 2 came a lot sooner than many would have thought. From the sounds of it, this decision was pretty sudden considering that Bungie was actively developing the next expansion when the news broke.

Just like its predecessor, Destiny 2 has had many ups and downs over the years. From its rocky start to its incredibly satisfying conclusion in The Final Shape, Destiny 2 is practically a video game version of the Ship of Theseus with how much the game has changed over the past nine years. Yet for everything that Bungie did right with Destiny 2, there were significantly more things that they messed up. Between poor management and the questionable decision to remove content from the game, it is easy to see how Destiny 2 ended up in this situation.

While I will certainly speak more about those issues later, I wanted to take this time to reflect on my time with both Destiny 2 and Destiny as a series. The future is, unfortunately, uncertain for this franchise, and there is no time like the present to have the first editorial piece at Real Rant Press be about the game that kickstarted my career as a journalist.

How It Started

I had been avidly watching for any news of Destiny practically since 2011 when Bungie released the O Brave New World video documentary about their history as a company. Near the end, they briefly teased Destiny by showing off employees wearing Destiny-themed shirts, talking about "Project Tiger", and then having the tricorn appear briefly at the end.

I'll never forget the day that they revealed Destiny several years later. They posted another video documentary called Pathways Out of Darkness. The moment I heard the Destiny theme play for the very first time, my imagination was immediately captured. The setting was so intriguing, and I could tell that Bungie's next game was going to be something truly special.

Actual gameplay wasn't shown until E3 a few months later, and while that ended up being a bunch of smoke and mirrors, it was still exciting to see the game in action for the first time. When the Alpha for PlayStation 4 was revealed a year later, I immediately signed up.

To cut a long story short, I really enjoyed my time with Destiny in both the Alpha and the Beta. I got up super early the day the game launched and pretty much played it all day. Did the game have its issues? Absolutely. Was it fun as hell to play? Definitely! The story was a mess due to leadership at Bungie deciding that redoing the entire campaign with only one year left before release was a great idea (it wasn't).

But as time went on and additional content was released, Destiny kept on getting better and better. Fast forward to September 2017 when Destiny 2 was released. At the start, Destiny 2 showed a lot of promise and had an absolutely unforgettable opening with the destruction of the Tower and the Vanguard getting their teeth kicked in by the Red Legion.

The Progression of Destiny 2

While Destiny 2 had a strong start, its lack of loot quickly resulted in many players leaving after beating the campaign. Unlike Destiny 1, Destiny 2 (at the time) didn't have any random rolls on weapons or much loot that was worth chasing. Not to mention that the gameplay had slowed down significantly with an emphasis on having two primary weapons with the rest of the weapon types shoved into the heavy slot. The endgame was mostly either doing Nightfalls, the Leviathan raid, or grinding Heroic Public Events in hopes of collecting all the Exotic weapons and armor.

But with each expansion, Bungie reiterated and improved Destiny 2. Forsaken changed the weapon slot system to be similar to the way it was in Destiny 1, along with giving weapons random rolls again. Just being able to search for the perfect combination of traits (or god rolls as the community calls them) added significantly more life to the game along with giving players loot to chase. Year 3 expanded on this further with being able to customize your stats via the update to armor. This was also when Bungie started doing seasonal content and the reward pass.

It was also during Year 3 that Bungie took a more experimental method for telling the story. During both Season 10 and Season 11, there were live one-time events that occurred in the game. For Season 10, it was the destruction of the Almighty, and for Season 11 it was the Traveler healing itself in preparation for the arrival of the Witness and its fleet. Both events could be seen simply by going to the Tower, but the downside was that if you couldn't sign on, you would miss the event entirely. It was a neat idea, but I can see why they never did it again.

Other big additions/changes included weapon crafting, Darkness subclasses, in-game groupfinder, and so much more. Yet not every change in Destiny 2 was for the better, though. One of the most unpopular things added during Year 3 was Champions, essentially really annoying enemies that were tougher than Majors or Elites, but you had to have certain mods equipped to counter their abilities. While this sounds fine in theory, it was very frustrating having to adjust builds around Champions. It was even worse if you were doing anything with matchmaking and you were the only one who bothered to prepare for Champions.

But the most unpopular and near universally hated change was the decision to remove half the game at the start of Year 4.

The Canary in the Salt Mine

Destiny 2's downfall did not come from one source. But the earliest point that could be considered the first sign of trouble would be the notorious Destiny Content Vault. Destiny 2 was never designed to have content just added and added like it was, and the game was breaking frequently as a result. Rather than develop a Destiny 3, Bungie decided to try and find a way to keep Destiny 2 running.

The only way they could do this was by removing content from the game. As Beyond Light launched, roughly half of the game was removed. All Year 1 content was removed except the Tower, EDZ, and Nessus. The Tangled Shore was removed a year later with the release of The Witch Queen. With the release of each new expansion, all seasonal content (including crucial story content) between expansions was removed as well.

With large chunks of the story removed, it made it very difficult for newer players to follow along with what is going on. As if that wasn't bad enough, the feature creep from all the content added to Destiny 2 resulted in a bunch of systems thrown at new players with no real explanation or tutorial beyond Bungie's notoriously bad UI design.

Bungie loosely tried to fix this with a new player experience in the Cosmodrome, an area brought into Destiny 2 from the first game. But then leadership decided it would be a great idea (once again, it wasn't) to save costs by not improving on the new player experience in the slightest. As a result, Destiny 2 gained a reputation for being incredibly difficult for a new player to get into and stick with. If your game is unapproachable to new players, it is going to impact your revenue.

A few years ago, when my partner and our mutual friend from college started playing Destiny 2 together, I spent a lot of time teaching them the mechanics that Bungie failed to properly introduce and explain. I was even told by my friend that the only reason they stuck with the game was that I was there to help explain systems and answer questions along the way.

Not everyone who picks up Destiny 2 has someone there to explain mechanics, and Bungie should never have put that expectation on the community to do their job for them. Don't get me wrong, I was more than happy to help people I know in real life, but it was frustrating to see Bungie ignore such a blatant issue with the game until it was far too late to do anything about it.

In addition to taking paid content out of the game and making it extremely unapproachable, Bungie burned itself out (and the player base) with the seasonal cadence. They were burning huge amounts of money developing content that wasn't even going to be in the game for more than a year. To put it mildly, that is a colossal waste of time, resources, and budget. This fed into the new player issue where major story beats that helped bridge the gap between one expansion and the next are no longer in the game, making it even more difficult to follow the story for those who haven't been following the game since day one.

Those issues together, along with the aggressive monetization, did not put Destiny 2 in the best place. Management continuing to make bad choices also added more fuel to the fire, especially with how Lightfall was handled.

It was no surprise when the player population dropped after The Final Shape. The final mission to defeat the Witness helped bring the story to a satisfying conclusion, and Episode Echoes was not good enough to convince people to continue playing. Combine that with the absolutely terrible feature that was the Portal during Year of Prophecy, and it was a recipe for making most of your player base leave within a year or less.

Hope For the Future

While I have plenty of grievances with how badly Bungie fumbled Destiny 2, I still have many fond memories of the game. I remember how exciting it was to see the game revealed and to get to play it for the first time. I remember eagerly opening the various Collector's Editions I got of expansions and finding places to display them.

I could go on and on about the small story beat moments, or rant and rave about how satisfying it felt to clear my first raid. But the thing I remember the most fondly about Destiny and Destiny 2 is the time I spent playing it with the people I knew in real life.

After not having played any games together for years, my partner, our friend from college, and I all decided to play Destiny 2 one night. We ended up playing till nearly three in the morning, and then we started playing almost every Friday for years. Despite its ups and downs and Bungie's failings, Destiny 2 was a great game, but it was even better with friends.

Sentimentality aside, I wanted to briefly discuss the future of Destiny. Despite the petition and the community's attempt to get Sony to notice the increase in player count, I don't see Sony changing their mind and suddenly greenlighting the development of Destiny 3. I'd like to think that they will at least do some kind of single-player/co-op spin-off that isn't a live service game, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

It is possible that we may see another Destiny game someday, but it won't be for a long time. Even if it does happen, it may not even be Bungie that makes it. It is too early to tell, but at least the story has been left in a place where it could continue someday. Only time will tell, but until then... see you starside, Guardians.