The Final Death of Destiny
So, Destiny 2 is officially being put to pasture. As of Tuesday, all game updates will cease, and the game will, for all intents, be on life support.
A colleague asked me this week if I was joining the fan-created "server slam" to mark it, where tons of players will symbolically sign in and play to try drum up some support for a Destiny 3. As a veteran player, he assumed he knew my answer: Destiny was my game, from about a month after launch to The Final Shape. Surely, this event was made for me?
He was shocked by the "no". How quick it was. How confident it was. He shouldn't have been.
Yes, I have a long history with Destiny. Hell, I have a long history with Bungie; I literally bought an Xbox for the original Halo Combat Evolved, helped run LANs of it, played the whole series on Legendary, the whole lot. I mained a Titan in Destiny literally for the whole life of it, put in thousands of hours, completed every Raid, had a dedicated Clan, the works. I was a member of r/destinythegame pretty much from its founding, there to congratulate the members elevated to Community Managers, to celebrate with Guardians as DLC after DLC launched, live events happened, and our saga grew.
The grand irony is, The Last Shape literally killed all of that.
It was a great DLC, truly. Some amazing storytelling, new enemies and locales, deep chances for exploration, tasks that would take weeks to complete. After Lightfall, it was a welcome change; though the Raid for Lightfall was an instant classic and its campaign a strong piece of content, Neptune itself was a bit of a letdown. Inside the Traveller was very different, a bizarre twisting of previous locales and all-new sights. There seemed to be so much to do, to explore.
And then they killed it. Literally.
The first bad sign was that the Raid, a key component of every DLC, was made available on the Friday of launch week. Teams of "World's First" raiders had literal days to pump that content hard, get Light levels risen, and be ready for a Raid that had been promised to be "the best yet".
The race became, quickly, a farce.
Normally, World's First races are spectacles, with highly varying first completion times. The first ever raid, the Vault of Glass, took around 14 hours; The Eater of Worlds, a mere 1h 40 mins. The promise was this one would be epic, like the nigh-19 hours it had taken to crack The Last Wish, and nothing like the 2 and a half hours Lightfall's Root of Nightmares had fallen in. Players were ready for an epic, and in a very Greek way that is what they got.
It became noticeable really fast that this raid was a tad unforgiving. From the very beginning, mechanics seemed to very much rely on a highly coordinated team of six players at their utter best. Small slip-ups were causing encounter wipes; teams were getting frustrated fast. Slowly, though, strategies began to form, the coordination got better, and progress, though slow, was being made. But that clock had really advanced, and some really good teams had struggled, hard. And then teams met a huge roadblock.
There is a part of the Raid - "Verity" - that is, for all intents and purposes, a hard check. As the fourth and penultimate stage of the raid, it requires some serious coordination, possibly a little help from some external tools, and most importantly, all six players to be damn good at survival. The gist is this: you are in a room that exists in two states of existence, or planes if you will. Half of the team will be sent to each of these planes, and each plane has a job to do, all while fighting off waves of enemies. Shapes will appear after key enemies die, and these shapes must be deposited in specific places at specific times, with one team able to see the shapes and the other able to see where they need to be. At checkpoints in progress, the two sides will have to act to save the other, or the encounter will wipe for everyone. There is little margin for error.
And my highly experienced clan of players found it utterly impenetrable. We were no slouches; several of us had taken part in World's First races, some even having Day One Finish rewards to show for this. Several members of the team had solo completion of Dungeons, three man mini-raids the game had added at various points. And we just... could not get it done. Some people went off, joined LFG teams, got their completions, but as a clan, we were failing hard. It hit hard, and this tightly knit group of players, at one point with numbers nearing 90 members, began to crack hard.
The second bad sign was also about timing. Episode: Echoes launched literally a week after the DLC. Players had a week to explore, to adjust, before the new plot started. It's like being shown a giant, elegant buffet of starters and side dishes and then being forced to walk off to select your main course after a first bite, and of course many players also wanted to train to do the raid. But, fine, the Episodes are supposed to set up what comes after the grand end of the Light and Dark Saga! Seasonal content's never that heavy, so a day to do the week's activities would be fine and the rest of the time polishing off the many other challenges and raiding.
Sadly, it became clear quite quickly that, despite multiple promises that Episodes was going to be " a new way of expanding the universe" it was a tarted up season from previous DLC. Despite promises, it played out exactly as all previous seasonal content had, and the voices decrying how close to DLC release it had come out got a lot louder. On the Reddit, questions were being asked, a lot of questions. Bungie had been through a lot. A lot of popular staff had left. Rumours were circulating, bad rumours, about studio culture, future games, and possible buyouts.
None of that mattered to me. Because, frustratingly, the third sign was more personal: it had become abundantly clear my clan was dead. For some reason, The Final Shape had sucked the energy out of too many players, and people were wandering off to play other games. Fewer and fewer players were turning up, less raids were getting planned, and players were not grouping up to tackle content at all. Fatigue, simply put. People bounced off of the raid and instead of thinking "we need to try again, and harder" they thought "I'm good, I have other stuff to do". Five years as a dedicated unit was crumbling before me, and worse, friendships were collapsing.
An obvious death spiral had formed, and it was tearing people apart. The three core veterans at the heart of the clan had lost all interest, off playing all sorts of stuff including free to play Destiny clone The Last Descendent. Others wanted to work hard to revive the clan, to do more, to push to get things kindled again, and were met with bewilderment and indifference. The clan began bickering, and before I knew it people were leaving to join or form other clans. As a clan vet, this hurt a lot, and I too tried to do something, anything, to hold it all together.
Near the end of the second Episode of content, I broke. The game's nine year spell over me just ceased, and I couldn't keep going. After years of collecting, spending and grinding away, I felt free. I uninstalled the game on Steam, and moved on to my colossal backlog of games.
That's the personal side of why I'll not be back for the server slam. The other side: Why in the HELL would I support Bungie, and why the hell would I think they could even make a Destiny 3 I would want to play?
Bungie, the Destiny era studio, has been a mess from day one. Bungie of the Halo era decided it wanted its freedom from Microsoft, so it decided to buy its way out. Some disagreed with this, and formed 343 Industries to become "the Halo people". The newly free Bungie didn't throw shade at them for this, just thanked them for their service and ploughed on into their new idea they'd teased all the way back in Halo: ODST. They also teamed in a strategic partnership with Activision Blizzard to publish and support the game. First previews looked amazing, visually distinct from Halo in every way, and with a very RPG set of skills and systems attached.
At the same time, rumours swirled. The Activision contract was said to be very predatory, with strict deadlines to be met with heavy punishments for failure, including the wholesale folding of Bungie into Activision as a whole. People were quick to blame the troublesome Activision for a lot of things they were hearing, be it about personnel changes, the possibility of heavy microtransaction based economies, and expensive special edition launches. Bungie remained tight lipped about it all.
The game came out to huge support. People loved it. Content was abundant, there were multiplayer zones, strikes, matchmaking, the crucible PVP, and people were happy. The first raid was huge and complicated, advanced the story, and drove a lot of players to work real hard grinding to have the gear score to be able to reap its rewards. The first DLC added even more to this, expanding the world and its lore and setting a trend that players expected would continue for years and years. Dlc two was even better, and the promise of a bigger expansion that would form year two had players hyped.
The first real bump in the road was Eververse, the microtransaction shop added just over a year in. Bungie promised it was just to help alleviate some of the cost of keeping the game going, and focused on fun cosmetic items. People were unsure, but were quickly won around with some freebies and enticing emotes such as "Enthusiastic Dance", a fully motion captured copy of Carlton's dance from The Fresh Prince.
The second real bump was the content desert that followed The Taken King. Bungie talked of a desire to move to an event based model rather than DLCs, with an evolving world throughout the year that brought new events and activities. We got the Halloween themed Festival of the Lost, collecting candy and masks, and the year after during Rise of Iron it returned and was followed by the Sparrow Racing League and the Dawning event (Christmas). A huge "2.0" overhaul of the game added strike scoring and many other features, and the player base was very happy.
Things at Bungie were not happy, though. Their partnership with Activision, it seemed, was fractious, and the threat of being devoured whole did not sit well with the higher ups. Rumours began to swell; Destiny had been hugely successful, and money at the studio meant they could begin to look at a way out of the contract and true freedom. Destiny was to get a sequel, with a colossal overhaul, and it would fully be on the new consoles and able to take advantage of them.
Destiny 2 was, indeed, a big change. The first question many had was "wait. Why the fuck do I have two primary weapons? Why does this one use special ammo? Why are all the special weapons in my heavy slot, as well as the heavy weapons?" Players were confused, and worse, angry. They'd suffered a literal resetting of their characters, with only lip service paid to their status as veterans of the game. Worse, the launch was a disaster, with huge wait times for players to get in, if they even got the game working. Yes, the gameplay and content was great. It was also a huge change, and not in a good way to many.
Eververse also changed. And this was where many grew angrier. Suddenly, armour shaders applied to a single piece, and once. This meant you needed four of a shader to do the whole armour. Worse, the design of the icon - a quartered square - didn't give much of a preview of what said shader would even look like. People instantly suspected "they'll sell shaders, and possibly sell permanent ones that aren't limited use". It looked like Eververse had gone from "fun little extras" to "truly a part of the game economy", and that made people very angry.
That's how Destiny 2 started. I would argue it was all downhill from there.
Staff departures, such as sacking legendary soundtrack guy Marty O'Donnell, not to mention multiple core studio writers who had literally shaped Destiny. Buying themselves out. The revelation Activision was never behind Eververse, that was all Bungie. That several major bits of content were made by partner Activision studios and not Bungie at all. Rollbacks, poor launches, cashgrabs... lots happened, too much to continue to write about in detail. And it all came to a head with The Final Shape.
The Final Shape, as it was billed, was the always planned end to the Light and Dark Saga, the grand story they had been telling for the entire time of Destiny that they'd extended and stretched and reforged over time. It would answer all the players' question, tie up the plot, and help shape what would follow. A whole new saga was promised, a new saga to start in an undefined future. First, TFS would cap Light and Dark Saga. Then, there'd be a gap, while the studio planned and prepared for The Next Great Saga. They teased some sponsored Star Wars tie-in content, and Big Things Coming. And then TFS landed with the splat I talked about above - DLC Tuesday, new Raid on the Friday, the Episodes the following Tuesday at reset. People worried.
And they were right to be.
It became apparent fast there was no great future plan, no new saga. Sony bought the studio up, Marathon became their focus, as well as a rumoured party game known mysteriously as Project Jelly Bean that people were comparing to Fall Guys. Talk circulated Sony wanted their expertise to help make other Destiny style games, but to kill Destiny as it was a multiplatform non-exclusive property. People immediately leapt to sides, as some immediately say "this is just blaming Activision all over again" and others "you guys why would Sony want to build a game for its big rivals". The community, like my clan, was falling apart.
And here we are, one failed big DLC later. Like me, a vast majority of players left after TFS, and that left Renegades high and dry. It has become clear that Destiny 3, as a concept, is likely dead, and the rumours that Sony don't want to support what they don't control could very well be true. Marathon seems to have whiffed, and the rumoured other game as far as I know has never shown up.
So yeah. With all the above, why in the HELL would I want to do a server slam? The game took over my life. It ended quite a few friendships of people around me. The studio is at best a skeleton of what it was. And people want to me to support that?
Destiny is dead. Long live Destiny. And all hopes for a new Division game...
