Destiny 2 Had To Die For The Series To Ever Live Again
As a longtime fan of the Destiny series, one who’s invested an unfathomable amount of time into both mainline games and their countless expansions, I’m a little lost knowing I won’t have any more of it to look forward to in the near future. Come June 9, when Bungie pushes one last update to Destiny 2, the journey is over.
And yet, while it fills me with a genuinely profound sadness that one of my favorite imaginary worlds is coming to an end, and that so many of the people who've worked on it are reportedly being laid off at Bungie as a consequence, I've known for a long time that in order for the series to live, Destiny 2 had to die.
The Evolution of Destiny 2
Over the years, Destiny 2 transformed into something wildly out of scope and beyond even Bungie's control. In the time since its launch in the fall of 2017, Destiny 2 has worn hundreds of faces. I've seen it wrestle with its own identity, never quite sure whether to lean into its FPS lineage, dive deeper into the MMO elements that first made it stand apart from its competitors, or become something else entirely. I've seen experiments to enliven the sandbox come and go and watched metas rise and fall. I've seen Bungie wrest the game from the hands of Activision, bloom from the glow of this emancipation, and subsequently wilt as the reins were handed over to Sony, which would cut the studio deeply and often.
Destiny 2 changed before my eyes over the years, growing from a hopeful retooling of the original Destiny's fundamentals into a sometimes bright, but often misshapen tool. A monster of a game whose creators could barely keep it in check, it seemed, let alone massage it back into good spirits and health.
The Eververse Shop and Player Engagement
For one, Destiny 2's Eververse shop—the game's microtransaction hub—appeared to take precedence the longer the game was in operation. Increasingly, it appeared that Destiny 2 received more armor and emotes having to do with kind of bad brand collaborations than anything to do with the Destiny community itself. Listen, I understand that making a game, especially one as pricey as Destiny 2, requires lots of capital that these deals produce, but I also wish that if the company were taking on these collaborations, that they might at least find a way to inject some of these crossovers—like a set of Dungeons & Dragons skins in celebration of the tabletop game's 50th anniversary—into the game's active loot pool and activities that already have players grinding for shiny new rewards.
Countless other live-service games have found ways of at least delivering some of that content to players through gameplay, all the while offering further rewards for people willing to pay. As Destiny 2 neared its end, though, announcements of these Eververse crossovers seemed to come more frequently than updates about Destiny's upcoming content and what players might look forward to playing, rather than buying. That, to me, sounds like the surefire sign of a game that's lost sight of what its players actually want. It's no wonder players eventually grew so discontented with the game and platform, given how much it seemed to view them as wallets to be drained rather than a community to serve.
The Destiny Content Vault
Of course, no conversation about Destiny's worst practices would be complete without mentioning the Destiny Content Vault. Content players paid for was ripped out of the game under the promise that it could come back later, after Bungie refined and improved it. It was only later that we found out, in court of all places, that there was, in fact, no longer any possible way to return large chunks of it—like the base game's campaign—to the game. Occasionally, Bungie has found reason over the years to return parts of the game, like a reworked version of the Leviathan destination (sans the raid aspect) that launched alongside Destiny 2, but by and large, the Destiny Content Vault has swallowed parts of the game that have yet to return. Given the recent news, I think it's unlikely we'll ever see any of the Red War campaign returned to players, nor the vaulted expansions released in that first year of the game's lifetime.
Destiny 2 bent a lot in its journey, and outright broke on a number of occasions. It was often "so over" and six months later, it would be "so back." It was turbulent and beautiful to the end, unlike anything before it and surely anything to follow. Much like the game's weapon and ability balance, Destiny 2 only ever ping-ponged from extreme to extreme, rarely enjoying any sense of equilibrium. A game’s existence should not be so tortured, though, nor should its developers or its community. These things are work to make and work to enjoy, which isn’t always such a bad thing, but on some level, this should be easier than it is. Destiny 2 is a video game at the end of the day, so why does interacting with it usually resemble some Sisyphean ordeal?
Why does understanding the story of Destiny require a YouTube game historian's 10-hour video recounting the parts of it that players can't access? Why does it feel impossible to make a definitive claim when someone asks you what content the game actually contains? Why does Destiny 2, at any given point in time, feature at least half a dozen nonsensical currencies, with little or no explanation or direction provided as to where to spend them? Why is it possible for the game that I love one month to become something completely different the next? Why does it seemingly take the development team on Destiny increasingly longer to iterate and implement changes for the health of the game, which seems to have instead nosedived in recent months and years? Why are there more announcements of upcoming microtransactions than there are content roadmaps? Why can I never recommend Destiny 2 to a friend without couching my praise and adoration in several mind-numbing caveats?
These are questions that have plagued Destiny for a long while, primarily because there are plenty of answers, but few good ones that offer a clear path forward.
