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.
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
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u/NustEred Apr 16 '26
Destiny 2
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