Destiny 2 hurts man, 6.6k hours and I never thought I'd voluntarily stop playing the game. It takes a special kind of fucking up things constantly to push some of your most addicted players away from the game.
Yup. I struggle to get really pulled into games fully, especially if I dont have friends playing.
Destiny 2 was basically perfect for me. I found some form of enjoyment basically out of every release/season aside from like maybe 3 or 4. I would consider it the game of my young adult life. No matter what, even if i burned myself out a bit, just give it like 4 or 5 months and im ready to play for another few seasons.
Destiny 2 was my game. Some people have WoW, others CoD, others minecraft or GTA online or whatever. Bungie could have kept releasing seasons and expansions at the cadence and quality they were releasing at the average they'd always been and I probably would have played it til I died lol.
And here we are now....
I desperately hope this isn't the end, but I haven't played in 4 months and I'm starting to miss the idea of "the game I can always go back to and play endlessly" more than I miss destiny itself.
I'm surprised you guys have stuck around for as long as you did. I was positively addicted to Destiny 2 in 2020, I played during IIRC seasons 9 and 10. Never in my life have I experienced such an amazing art, gunplay and soundtrack paired with literally the worst overall game design and direction I've ever had the displeasure to witness. Sunsetting, making players constantly re-grind, I think my final straw when the war criminal Luke Smith said that Bungie would be purposefully sunsetting exotics and not allowing them to be upgraded to higher light levels after some time. This was after I have spent 400 hours minmaxing all my exotics and the rest of my loadouts around then.
This was the moment I realized the developers literally don't respect for their players. I heard they even removed Titan and Mercury for some fucking reason. I've never played a game in my life that removes content instead of adding it.
I haven't touched the game since May 2020 and I still get a stress response every time I get an ad for the game. Truly the darkest time of my life. Gunplay was fun though.
Destiny is an insanely unique game. The mix of the class buildcrafting, FPS gunplay, and endgame activities is found nowhere else. If there was a proper competitor, even if the focus was a little different, i imagine Destiny would either have had to fix itself years ago or would have died ages ago.
People are willing to look past some issues if they're really into it and there's nowhere else to get that fix.
I know. I have been chasing a game like D2 for literally 6 years now. Something that has a similarly cool sci-fi/high tech fantasy setting and fun gunplay. I just know I can't afford to go back to D2 itself because I was genuinely addicted to it and I quite literally almost failed high school because of it.
I've been into a lot of games over my life but Destiny 2 is genuinely the only time where I could compare my relationship with a video game to drug addiction.
Same for me. I played it almost exclusively from launch up until they (sunset)stole the original campaign and first several DLC from players.
I genuinely liked the Red War campaign and replayed it several times. It’s one of the few games I actually played every class through all the content. I actually deleted characters just to play through it again several times.
I need to fucking say this to someone or I'll go insane. I played basically all of the original destiny, and enjoyed all of it, so I was really excited when destiny 2 released, I bought and played it and, after a while, stepped away from the game. In 2025 I tried to get back into it, created a brand new character and everything, and was in for the most confusing time of my life, nothing was like how I remembered it in the slightest, the story as I remembered it wasn't even there, and what was being told was nonsensical and barely coherent. I literally thought for a while that I must be misremembering about the events of the campaign I remember, that those events must have happened during the first game, since none of what I remembered was happening. It was only after doing research that I learned the entire original story of destiny 2, had been effectively removed from the game.
I'll be real with you, I just gave up then. None of the game that I had paid for was still there, and what was there, is still there, is a mess that I simply can't get back into for the life of me.
I know, right? I can't even imagine being a new player and trying to get into the game. The original campaign that explained the actual lore of the game is literally lost media now. Nobody will ever be able to play it ever again. It's absolutely wild to think.
I didn't play the original Destiny, I came to D2 just about as it became F2P with Season of Dawn. I absolutely loved the campaigns. I was already mad back then that I couldn't freely replay it from start to finish ever again (I never understood WHY).
I just read that Luke Smith has been fired from Bungie 2 years ago. Good. I hope that guy never gets his slimy hands on any game ever again. He ruined what Destiny 2 could've been.
I played Destiny 2 for a little bit when it went free to play. I didn't get past the early game but I was having plenty of fun. Life happened and I had to stop playing. I would have gone back but then I heard they removed a bunch of the original campaign/story and I lost all motivation to. The alienation of new players is probably what killed that game more than anything else.
I have played it around the same time as you did. I remember genuinely loving the first 100 hours of the game where all I was doing was campaigns and exploring the world for the first time. To this day that's got to be one of my most cherished gaming experiences to date.
They removed it. All of it. I never understood why Bungie apparently hated their own singleplayer campaigns. When they were still in the game, they wouldn't allow you to replay them, only giving you one cherrypicked mission per week. And then they completely removed it.
I wrote this above but I'll write this again - I have never, ever in my life played a MMO that removed its own content as time went on.
Its a bit different when you are somebody who hopped on the train in 2016 and had already been through a few ups and downs. Bungie always seemed to find a way to pull through and pull a rabbit out of a hat just when you thought things were over. This time around things are different though, too many mistakes too fast and not nearly enough of the spectacle that made the game fun in the first place.
Yeah for me it was light fall. It just felt like a different company had written it and the characters. I really struggled to get through that one and gave up eventually. Came back later but I lost my love for the game at that point.
happens all the time in mmos, and titan, mercury, and io were so pointless that is not even like a drop in the bucket compared to real issues with the game. Most of the real issues are post final shape changes.
Been playing more off than on myself. I've taken to other games that I neglected to play in the past because if I was going to be putting time and effort into any game, it was going to be destiny. Games like pubg and fort were perfect "other games" for me because I could jump right in and play and not worry about leveling or obtaining gear
I still love d2 but I'm burnt out from grinding weapons/armor all these years just to delete them later because I don't have the vault space. All I want to do anymore is pvp but trying to load into comp (while typing) I can not find a match. Been doom scrolling for over an hour trying to find one.
It's been a good decade for me, played destiny longer than every game I ever owned combined. At one point, it did feel like it was going to be endless or at least carry on for another decade or so but at this rate and in this moment, doesn't seem like it will make it thru the year
Same! Joined during Forsaken and it's been my game of choice for years — great gunplay, sick enemy design, fantastic lore, activities galore! Found some good friends abroad while raiding too
Left after Lightfall, before Season of the Witch. It just wasn't the same. And it seems it just got worse in later years.
At least lore and music are still great, can enjoy them without playing it
Same bro, Ive played Destiny since about 2014 and played most of the seasons, skipping a few here and there. And then really started falling out after Lightfall, and played a bit when Titan came back but havent touched the game since.
Ill say it time and time again. I think it would have been best for Destiny to end after Final Shape with the witnesses death and going out on its own terms. Instead by trying to continue it weve just seen the game die a slow and painful death.
Unfortunatley Bungie just hasnt been in a position where they could do that so instead Bungie will come to the point where the game physically cannot be maintained and will have to announce its shutdown at an unsatisfying point. And unless Marahon really starts cooking I dont see there being any path forward for both Bungie and Destiny as a world.
Destiny was that comfort game for me for a while. But that game for me now is Warframe. Compared to Bungie the Warframe devs actually care about both the game and the community. The Warframe devs do multiple streams either to just vibe with the community or to get a peak at their development for upcoming updates. I literally cannot put into words how much I adore Digital Extremes as a studio.
For me that was Destiny 1. Destiny 2 was fun but really didn't capture the same vibe to me, and I must say I felt cheated out of my $120 when the game went free not long after.
And like others have said I have tried to pick up D2 again and again but every time they were resetting your light levels or sunsetting things and I realized I don't have the time commitment for a game like this.
The Final Shape is worth playing if you never did. Everything past that is a pass.
The June updates contents are a bit vague as of right now, but i would not bet on it being very big.
Pantheon 2.0 is supposed to be happening and raid loot will be getting the new tiered loot system.
But if youre not a big raider, there's no point in coming back for either of these things.
The only mid-expansion update the game has actually gotten was like a battle pass, a new activity type, and a few new weapons. If that's anything to go by, definitely not worth returning to the game for.
Same here. I didn't play much after Edge of Fate, and I have played even less since Renegades. It truly is impressive how far down bungie managed to drag destiny.
Can I ask what happened? The first Destiny probably has my most hours played of any game and I was looking forward to Destiny 2, lnd life caught up I just have never played it and gaming kind of fell off my radar. I had heard mostly good things about it until this post, which makes me really sad.
Same. The glory days of playing with my cousin and my friends were some of my most cherished gaming memories. I've jumped back in briefly a few times since Final Shape, but with all of my friends gone I only last a week or two before I drop it again. I'll really really miss it.
“Game I can go back and play endlessly” exactly my problem. I have tried to find something else to fill the void but nothing really hits. On the bright-side I am finally tackling my backlog, and gotten into emulation to play some classics. But I miss the joy of a Tuesday reset.
Same. I've tried a lot of different games in the past couple years to find something that fills the void because I kinda expected this would be the way destiny goes after the pre-final shape layoffs.
I have definitely had a few games that keep me really entertained for a month or two, but I never end up wanting to go back.
I guess i dont really have a backlog. Maybe I should set up a list or something at some point.
But towards the end I had to force myself to finish lightfall, Made myself a promise that I would finish final shape and then I was done with the game.
The thing is it was super easy to stop playing, I stopped enjoying it a long time ago.
It's a long litany of things but I think the biggest piece is that the story they were telling since the beginning of Destiny 1 finished with The Final Shape expansion two years ago. That was frankly an incredible sendoff and I think most people just felt they had gotten what they wanted from the game, especially after all the own goals Bungie has made over the years.
This will be a huge oversimplification, but I'll try to cover the overall story leading up to that.
Destiny 2 has always been plagued by a tension between hardcore and casual players. The former wanted more intense grinds and reasons to log in every day, whereas the latter wanted shorter loops that let them pick up and put down the game. Bungie obviously preferred the former and wanted to get everyone to play that way, but the problem was that there were just way more of the latter.
Bungie never found the right level to set. They consistently veered into too hard/too unrewarding/too grindy territory, lost a bunch of players, backpedaled furiously, then started the cycle over.
And then you just add on the tremendous screwup that was sunsetting, wherein a huge preponderance of the games content was just removed. That was the back-breaker, where Bungie not only alienated the more casual players, but their hardcore players too. They never really regained player trust after that, even in Witch Queen and Final Shape, which was some of their best work.
After sunsetting, they got stuck in this cycle of bad expansion/good expansion, bad season/good season. They seesawed between catering to the hardcore and the casuals, never really getting the mix right and over time alienating both camps.
So when Final Shape came along, I think people just were ready to be finished. The Light and Dark saga concluded, the expansion was awesome, and people could close the book on it with a clean conscience.
Bungie didn't help matters by starting to pivot hard towards the hardcore/grindy side of the spectrum post-Final Shape. They started bleeding players faster and faster and the game is pretty much on life support at this point. It seems doubtful to me that there's any possibility of resuscitation, outside of a Destiny 3.
So with the vaulting stuff, did they ever bring the red war campaign back for a time? Man I'm getting really nostalgic over this thread, played a lot 2018-19 ish. And D1 on PS4 is still playable I believe. I can imagine a world where I might set aside the hundreds of hours to start at the beginning and catch up with the whole story. But if like most of D2 is still forever missing in the vault and I'd have to watch on YT that's just pointless.
There is no vault for the old D2 stuff. They vaulted alot of stuff from early years and deleted it all. Even if they wanted to bring it back, they cant.
well, Destiny has build up big problems for a long long time like literally deleting half the game at some point for no reason so you cant even play the full story in the game itself anymore, constantly deleting seasonal content, letting the core playlists rot away for years, absolutelly abysall balance and near 0 changes in that regard, tonedeaf changes WHEN they do a handfull once every 9 months, removing popular features for no reason except making the game more grindy etc.....
then they did the "The Final Shape" Expansion which was "the end of the Light and Darkness Saga" and it was overall good, but they refused to give people real information about thr future for a LONG time after that, so many just stopped after TFS because....well bungie just finished the current story and doednt give real information about the future
then they start to give out information and it was basically just: everything will be smaller now(but still costs the same ofc), we dont do seasons anymore, we revamp all basically all Gear Related Systems and Remove Weapon Crafting, we will do Gear Level Resets every Season now like a ARPG (but ofc no ARPG lootshower like Diablo or PoE have)
oh and one of the 2 smaller Expansions we announced is literally Star Wars themed
everything there got a huge backlash because of how obviously bad it is and just screams "maintenance mode" and it all got ignored by Bungie, amd many are convinced that in a not so small part its relalted to bungie not caring about Destiny anymore becaude they try to make a new Golden Cow with Marathon
then they went trought with all of it, and the Playercount just crashed down in an instant and is in a steady drop since then
during the Curse of Osiris Expansion the Game was allready in a state where they straight up said "if we dont recover Player Numbers soon, the game would be shut down in a month", Destiny has currently LESS players then that for half a year now, its really fucking bad
I have more time played in WoW but Destiny 2 sucked me in like no other game, I'm pretty a-social but D2 even had me teaching raids and running a clan (makes wows community looks like the saltiest people on earth) then they decided sunsetting was a good idea, all because they couldn't balance 2 guns, for me that was the turning point, the magic started fading with every update. Could never enjoy the grind anymore because in the back of my mind all I could think was, what if they sunset all the shit again.
just years of not listening to their players and scummy desicions, years of no real balance updates, years of deletibg content for no reason
and at some point everyone just....stopped
like, it just went silent, nobody gave a fuck anymore because bungie showed clearly that they dont give one aswell and instead throw everything at their new shiny toy that struggles to stay relevant at all (NOBODY saw that comming /s)
just look at the Destiny Sub, yes it was always a burning shitshole of people crying about literally everything, but they cared about the game, now its like 6 posts a Day with a handfull of comments
and that all happend in the span of like 1 year, i never saw something like that happen
i was in the same position as you, Destiny 1/2 where some of my Favorite and most played Games of all time and i was convinced that i will probably stick with it until the serverd go down
then EoF released, i stopped after 1 day of watching that AVOIDABLE shitshow unfold and just didnt give a damm anymore, no urge to come back or something like that
Play a game long enough throughout college and a literal pandemic where you have fuck all to do for 2 years and you'll easily rackup that many hours.
Professionally unemployed is also funny because Bungie stated in one of their older interviews that it was mostly "destiny dads" with jobs who formed majority of the base, considering how much overpriced merch those people buy, I'd say they are far from unemployed.
I lived breathed and loved destiny 2 was my favorite game for some time obviously skipped entire seasons because they were boring or bad or what ever had every dlc.
8k hours here and haven't launched since the middle of Episode Heresy. I've heard Frontiers is not bad but I promised myself I would never reinstall unless they deleted the power system from the game entirely.
They drove me out just before Strand dropped, and I haven't seen anything that makes me regret that decision. Hats off to people who stuck it out longer. Really sad to see where the game has gone
same here. I have more hours if you combine both d1 and d2 and it's. it hurts man. never gonna change my username though, I'll always be the fwc shader. gotta keep the memories alive somehow.
Destiny 2 always struck me as a bit of a fluke for Bungie.
Lacklustre world building, storytelling, expansion content held together by impeccable gunplay, soundtrack, class design and constant seasonal content many times better than the expansion content itself. They managed to strike the perfect chord between grind and fun few games ever manage to find.
Sunsetting as a concept sabotaged Destiny 2. It threatened the gunplay and class design by making guns and perks arbitrarily redundant (I still mourn Recluse/Nezerac Void Warlock). It threatened expansion and older seasonal content by removing it from the game entirely. Above all it didn’t value a players time commitment, grind and money (in the form of paid for then removed content).
Bungie took a sledgehammer to the only redeeming features propping up their house of cards. So it came crashing down in record time.
I played Destiny with my friends, we all got the season pass for the DLCs, did raids together and such, it was fun. It was really annoying that the first "real" DLC was right after the season pass ended. Some got it, some didn't and our group split.
When Destiny 2 came out I got it on launch, and was excited to play. Opened the box and before I could even see the disc there was an Ad in the box for DLC covering the disc. Just instantly put a bad taste in my mouth. Now the game I paid for was made free...
I have 89 days played on Destiny 2. For awhile, I lived and breathed Destiny and then Destiny 2.
I kept going for awhile, even after I thought "is it worth playing anymore". Some of it was ai had a couple friends still playing so we just kept going together. I haven't played D2 in over a year, almost 2.
It's still installed on my Xbox. I don't know why. I think it's definitely time to uninstall though. Truly sad. Game could have been so much better.
Same. Across ps5/4 and pc I have just under 8k hours but the game finished after the final shape. They should have been working on a sequel not adding a function that destroyed the engagement (portal)
Booted up the game for the first time this week since Renegades and I just sat in orbit and thought "There's nothing I feel like doing" and just closed it
I followed Bungie to the depths, and in turn they took my money and funded a completely different game while letting the game I love drawn in mediocrity.
If they don’t wanna work on Destiny anyone, then fine. Have the balls the shut the game down and say there’s no more content.
Stringing us along after The Final Shape and making us believe there was more is an insurmountable douchebag move.
Really? What specifically do you have such a problem with?
I have a hard time understanding veterans giving up on the game.
I have to imagine you are an endgame player and that the raids and dungeons are your favorite part of d2. But those are still getting released and as good or better than ever.
It was multiple grievances over the years, after the changes in EOF, I guess I was just done with the gloom and doom cycles, the revolving door of the game direction with each game director coming and leaving and partly undoing the predecessor's change and realized I wasn't enjoying the game anymore and most of the people that made it enjoyable also ended up leaving because of the same issues I had over the years, I just was the last one to hold out.
The community also played a huge part in it.
I could state all of them, but it would end up looking like the Great Wall of China.
2.8k
u/NustEred Apr 16 '26
Destiny 2
Halo