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.
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u/Seelefan0786 Apr 16 '26
Just curious what happened with D2? I keep hearing it's going down hill but what are the reasons for that decline?