So long, Destiny 2

It was fun while it lasted

Today it was announced that Bungie is putting Destiny 2 into maintenance mode. There will be no more updates or story. The current story will forever be a cliffhanger. Typical of live service games that people stop playing--their corporate overlords eventually pull the plug.

Why do I care? Let's go back a few years.

My husband was a fan of Destiny 1. I wanted to play it with him because I like shooters, but it was console only. As a PC master race gamer, I can't do a thing with a controller. Mouse and keyboard forever, baby.

Anyway, Destiny 2 was announced for PC. We got copies so we could play together. I was hooked by the funny advertising and the thought-provoking storyline. (The villain makes some pretty compelling arguments about why he should have the Light, which is the power only the heroes have.) In fact, Destiny 2’s Red War storyline was incredibly compelling because it was a philosophical debate between good and evil. Plus the game was fun.

I proceeded to play the dickens out of every expansion. Curse of Osiris, Warmind, and Forsaken fell before my furious mouse finger. My husband and I debated the lore, hunted secrets, and basically lived in the game. I wrote fanfics to explore the holes, because Destiny 2’s lore relied on Unreliable Narrator. It had holes like Swiss Cheese, and I mean the lace kind with a million tiny holes. We mourned the death of the comic relief character and were shocked when his killer was granted the Light. The story had crazy twists and turns. We hoped for novel adapts. Movies. Comics. We didn't get them. Bungie slept on this game. Halo got more love than Destiny.

Then Shadowkeep came out and it was lame. It was a filler expansion to hold the players over until Beyond Light could get finished. I mean, it was fine. But compared to Forsaken, it was just kind of … fine. We go to the moon and fight ghosts. Like … okay, but what about the awesome story with the resurrected killer?

Beyond Light dropped. And Bungie did something that would prove to be their undoing. They scrubbed all the content from Red War, Curse of Osiris, Warmind, and Forsaken. They had vaulted it, they said. To save hard drive space, they said. They would bring it back when it was time, they said.

Bungie is a bunch of sweating, filthy liars.

Beyond Light updated the server infrastructure to be functionally Destiny 3. That vaulted content was never coming back and they knew it.

Oh, they gave us Darkness powers, which was cool. The lore made you feel bad about it, though, so they backpedaled hard on that with later powers down the line. I know people who refused to ever touch the Darkness powers because that wasn't who their character was. The seasonal story covered the resurrected killer, though, and that was the real draw. He has no memory and has no idea why everybody hates him. I only played the game for his redemption arc from then on.

After that was Witch Queen, the big fat expansion that sold two million preorders. Sony bought Bungie at this point, thinking they had struck gold. I personally didn't really like Witch Queen because they changed the lore. They also granted Light powers to a villain, meaning that they now owed an apology to the villain in the first storyline. New villain had way less convincing arguments. New villain pulled an obvious con. She wasn't granted the Light. She stole it. There was a whole season about hacking the brains of her people to figure out how. But that storyline got dropped, forgotten, and never returned to. Bungie did this with a lot of storylines. It's why there were fanfics.

Then Bungie pulled out a big fat knife and cut their own throats. It was another filler expansion before the final one, and it was called Lightfall.

Lightfall trashed the lore. It trashed the characters. It introduced a transvestite character who was incredibly cringe. It made the gameplay harder so only sweaty streamers could play it. It recycled maps from earlier expansions. The new power was literally Spiderman.

Lightfall had a ton of preorders and players. Then the player count fell off a cliff. And never recovered. It's where I stopped playing.

After that was the last expansion, the Final Shape. Pretty good conclusion to the storyline. Every character was there, including the comic relief guy who got killed off years ago. The Darkness gets defeated. It was fun. Except still at the difficulty of the previous expansion. I tried to play it and could not, because I'm a filthy casual, not a sweaty streamer.

Bungie made it clear. Players like me were not welcome.

They tried to start a new storyline after that, but it just wasn't compelling. They were firing huge batches of developers at this time and the mill was showing. Inconsistent characters, difficulty, story, and the lore continues to be trash. Even a Star Wars crossover couldn't bring people back.

What people wanted was the vaulted content back. We spent hundreds of dollars buying all those games. We want them back, please.

Oh, no, we fired the people who knew how to retrieve all that, said Sony. Thanks for throwing your money down a hole.

So concludes that saga of Destiny 2. It is entering maintenance mode in June with a final patch. Bungie intentionally erased all onboarding for new players. They pushed out casual players. They literally expect current players to give new players tutorials. Half the game is forever missing.

Thanks for screwing up your own game, Bungie. Let my fanfics stand as testament to the fun I had for a few years.

You know, until I change the names slightly and publish them as books.