A Destiny 2 Rev-Eulogy: Why I Stopped Playing
This "Old Light" Finally Accepted Retirement and Shares his Thoughts.
In my review for Destiny Rising, the opening introduction starts with explaining my history with Destiny 2, albeit briefly. I have always thought I could do a video on Destiny 2, but I no longer own hardware in my home that can run the game. Maybe if it becomes playable on Linux or Switch 2 I would return for a time, but the current state of Bungie leads me to believe this will never happen. So, thus is born this supplementary article that may have served as the script to such a video, with my all encompassing thoughts.
If you’d like to hear my thoughts on Destiny Rising, and hear me verbalize my Destiny 2 history discussed throughout this article, you can do that by watching my latest YouTube video here:
Destiny 2, over the past decade has without a doubt, been one of my favorite game experiences of all time. I enjoyed participating as an active force in its live service, week to week plots.
This is unquestionably true. Bungie’s Destiny is what I believe to be one of the greatest science fiction universes ever imagined. From game mechanics interacting deeply with the most complex of its lore, to the quippy characters that grow on you, the guns and powers you wield, against the gods you kill, all while making a few friends along the way. It’s fantastic. There’s nothing like it.
When you do play, it is so interesting to do so regularly. You have a community that experiences that current vertical slice of game all at the same time. There’s a lot of camaraderie in that. You live the high’s and the lows of the grind. You speculate where things could go next in the story. It’s like you’re a character in a TV show. It’s a super novel concept, and while you’re actively playing and thinking about it, it’s a fantastic hook.
But the candle burns away as it’s made. Stop playing for a week, that’s fine. One month, and you’re behind. Six months and you may as well be a new player. A year and it’s a whole new game. That vertical slice you played a year ago, is now inaccessible. Sometimes even just a month or two ago, brings changes to the game, making no singular time ever the same. No mechanic or detail is safe. Eventually, everything you play will never be something you can return to, no matter how much you enjoy it or want it to stick around, unless development completely ceases.
I can’t go back and play the Destiny 2 I picked up and started playing in 2019. I can’t use the weapons from that time period today either. You can, but they are not good compared to the new stuff in the current game sandbox. There’s always new stuff. It replaces old stuff. It’s a constant cycle, an ouroboros if you will, and the foundation of D2 is that it can never stop. I can “feel nostalgic” about classic Destiny 2 but I can never indulge in the feeling by replaying old stuff. Just like real life, you can only look at old pictures or videos and remember how you felt, as you saved the solar system with your friends during that unique slice of game you all played together. It’s unique that way, but as a game, a piece of media, that sucks, man.
It allowed me to create mountains of positive memories with my close friends through many of these experiences.
But if memories were currency, boy, Destiny 2 would make me rich. Late nights with your buddies. Super long day one raiding sessions. Excitedly earning exotics and playing through some difficult end game content solo. Learning this universe and its secrets piece by piece, season by season, tied to the digital guns I’ve amassed in my vault. Metaphorically speaking, I’ve got a different kind of vault in my mind rich with these glorious memories I’ve made in the game. It’s always made the sacrifice to play worth it.
But after all 1500+ of these hours, and all the money I’ve thrown into that game, I became super burnt out after I concluded the games Final Shape campaign.
What’s that sacrifice specifically? My time.
I got a rage-bait comment under my Destiny Rising video that said “1500 hours is nothing!” along with some other rude things so I banished them from my channel forever (lol). While understandably the internet is full of mostly 12-year-olds, here’s why this is a significant number for me: This is the most time I’ve ever given any entertainment IP. Ever. I do not play games like this, for this long. The only thing that MAY come close is Minecraft, which I have played on and off since it was released to BETA, and has not tracked my play time at all.
And before you go and double check my steam hourly counts, yeah, 1500 is a bit higher than what’s tracked. I played a crap ton on Stadia while on my college campus, while that was a thing. Several hours a day, in the middle of the day... it was good times. I round up for my fair guess-timation of that portion of my life force. But anyway,
The game I have the most hours in behind D2 is Satisfactory, at 312 Hours. Which includes maybe 20 hours of idle. The game below that is Warframe at 262 hours. (CS:GO was played by a friend who had my account on loan, but still) These are the outliers. From here it’s games that hardly crack 100. Most commonly, I’m playing stuff for 20-50 hours. 1500? That’s exponentially more than anything else.
At my core I’m a variety gamer. I love experiencing all sorts of narratives, playing with fun and inventive mechanics, and absorbing intriguing new world-building ideas. You can do that in live service games. But it’s most potent when you just complete one game, then pick another one up.
However, D2 was successfully varied for a long time. Lightfall was ABYSMAL in its story telling, but the new gameplay mechanics with the grapple hook were to die for. Final Shape’s Prismatic mixing and matching ability set gave me unprecedented amounts of control in my build-crafting, but also delivered on a satisfying end to it’s overarching story.
Other expansions had their own things. Beyond Light took my weapons away from me in the first ever sun-setting, but introduced Stasis abilities. Witch Queen didn’t have new abilities, but had a phenomenal story, and introduced craftable weapons. Along the way they had their own little moments of spice and spectacle, and all provided these vibrant worlds to explore, teeming with lore and secrets. Some seasons were rough, and had me leave for their duration due to some boring grind or another, combined with their usually weaker plots.
I found myself returning year after year, if nothing else but to play the campaign and continue the story, and have something to play with friends for that year or so. But of course, the main plot concludes in Final Shape, and what happens?
It got difficult to look at Destiny 2 and Bungie without being critical for one reason or another, because of something or other. With each new hour I threw into the game beyond that finale, my cynicism towards it and Bungie grew… Until I stopped playing.
The content after The Final Shape could not have been more of a disappointment. The outliers were of course, the dungeons, which were always fun to play. But the stories of the episodes felt more phoned in as compared to their seasonal counterparts, and became a less substantial part of the game. There were no new ability sets on the horizon. Weapons stopped being craftable. The new activities? Could not be more boring. No new overworld / patrol areas to explore either, so it’s more of the same old stuff... well, minus the areas that were still removed, of course.
There wasn’t any super cool armor sets to earn, and the weapons, while some were interesting, seemed more and more like optional things I didn’t need to grind for. After all, I have 20 trusty god rolls of everything else, plus a heap-load of crafted alien-killing machines, with some of the strongest exotic and legendary armor pairings with their respective builds in the game... and the biggest bad of this universe is dead.
Plus, when the activities are the most boring they’ve ever been, with the narrative stakes also at their very lowest, playing more of the same game I’ve played almost one HUNDRED times longer than the majority of other games I sink my teeth into in a month to month basis... I mean... really though, what’s the point?
Well the point is to keep making memories with friends of course. So I bite the bullet and keep playing the boring stuff. I grind out pinnacles almost against my will. To keep up with my friends light level, I’m spending like 5-8 hours a week to keep up. I’m shoving D2 in the morning hours of 5-7am before my day job. Few seasons the light cap isn’t increased which feels like an incredible relief. Playing the game should be the relief though right? From life?
So much solo prep... I chased what was interesting for me, and did the power grind for as long as I could, then slowed down and played less and less solo stuff, until I wasn’t playing solo anymore and it was just once or twice a week. Then when that died out, I kinda just was like, well I’ll wait for someone to ask me to play with them and I will. And when those invitations ran out... I guess that’s when my adventure in Destiny 2 kinda ended.
But it wasn’t like, I woke up one day and decided I’d never play again. No, I was open to playing with an invitation for a long time, up till recently. Even still, to this day, I’m just as every bit tapped into Destiny 2 news as I was when I was regularly playing. The thing is, I want Bungie to succeed and make a fun game. I want them to introduce fun ideas. I want the game to sell gang busters. I’ve been there for every live stream and showcase for the past two years, hoping I’d see ANYTHING interesting enough to get me to return to a fun and interesting game.
Of course, nothing has done it for me. In fact more often, they’ve introduced ideas that have pushed me away from the game further. The portal has to be one of the bigger deterrents. Pick a bunch of difficulty modifiers from a huge pool of them and be scored on it? Then here’s some tiered rewards, which are some of the most incomprehensible loot of any game ever made. Oh! Also, the new stuff you get invalidates every other piece of gear you have. Weapons specifically have, straight up, a RAW FAT bonus on damage, just because it’s new. That happens every expansion too now. “But it’s not sunsetting guys!” I can hear modern Bungie mockingly say.
Also, the sense of exploration is completely invalidated by this design choice. Sure, the whole, ‘vendor at a location’ thing was getting stale, but man, at least it contributed to the atmosphere of the universe. You’re robbing the game of its sense of adventure. Its glorious skyboxes. “It’s so fast though! Just click and boom you’re playing the game!” Bungie might say, in defense of it. Well dude, the ‘game’ may have always had a core of looting and shooting, but come on. The destinations connect it all together. Without those... Bah. Where’s the spirit of it gone? On that note...
What is modern Bungie thinking? Who is making this game? You look at any of the proposed (and even implemented) changes and it’s unfathomable how a team of people carrying a legacy game could even come up with some of this stuff. Even a few weeks ago I saw that they’re changing how bounties work? Are you serious? Yeah. That’ll bring players back. An excellent Gambit of developer man hours. Not like the game continues to shrivel up and die or anything! Like, are they trying to rage bait people with this stuff just for the buzz of the press or what? Unbelievable. There are actual core, fundamental issues they could focus on, a myriad of which would bring players back. Yet everywhere I read, they are not doing stuff even remotely in that sphere of things.
Their PR team is listening though! Apparently!
I dunno man. The old Bungie guard, both good and bad, are off and away now. This new generation is trying to make Destiny 2 their own thing and around every turn it seems that their decisions have been critical missteps. Everyone can say what Bungie should have done post-Final Shape, even I’ve said things. Oddly enough, that’s the one thing this crayon eating community can agree on. That this new direction in the majority of its ways, just sucks. Funny how that is.
For the record, so it’s written down somewhere, my perspective is that no new content should have been added after The Final Shape. Those “episodes” of epilogues right after the finale, they should have never been conceived. That entire expansion should have wrapped up with the Witness dying, and further development time should have been put into remastering old content to bring back into the game (so you can actually play through the entire story), while you have a handful of people brainstorming a sequel on the strings of questions left on that finale. Destiny 2 should have FINISHED development, just like Destiny did. But it should have started on the road of becoming content complete for preservation reasons. I’m biased and that may be impossible, but that’s what I think should have happened.
I know the technical impossibilities of it (they don’t have working builds of things, etc. etc.), but I’m dead serious dude. How many players could they have wrangled back if they had “remastered” Red War content, post The Final Shape? Can you imagine? I would have happily been there. Let me get armor from the old battle passes. Let me work on those titles. Let people be completionists. Give the IP time to breath for a bit.
The journey concluding has been bitter sweet. The bitter, from losing out on opportunities to continue creating new memories with my friends, the sweet being the time I’ve gained in my life to quite literally start this YouTube channel.
I’ve made so many sacrifices to start making YouTube videos, and some days I even regret that I began on the path in the first place. It’s cost me extra tension in my marriage, and a reduction in my relationships with friends and family across the board, even beyond D2. I play less games than I ever have. Games I do play for me and not YouTube take me months to complete. The backlog grows. I’m tired.
I might even be crazy for even attempting to do this, in the current climate of YouTube, and the world’s economics. There’s a real part of me that believes I should have just got a second job instead and been done with my life as I knew it. Same degree of sacrifice to my time, immediate monetary results, and a path everyone could understand and empathize with instantly.
I’ve mentioned this in a few of my Case Study articles (paywalled, sorry). Dune inspired me to recognize the trajectory of my life from this point and it’s not great. I only have so much time to improve it before I really do get stuck as a multi-job slave the rest of my life. YouTube is my gamble of life force to the universe that if successful allows me to break out of that future which I have so envisioned myself stuck in.
Had modern Bungie made a game I was more interested to play, I simply would not have had the time to even experiment with any of this content creating stuff. Sacrificing it and my other gaming habits is the time allotment it needs to work.
Does it make me sad? Immensely. But I’m playing on a board much larger than people realize, plotting many turns in advance.
Still keep up on the news for D2 though. That has been... even more disheartening to say the least.
I think this was covered enough earlier.
Overall, I really do wish Bungie would make a fun, digestible version of Destiny 2. I can’t fathom committing time to it right now though. There are too many Great games out in the world that I have not played. To play anything I consider less than great, in the little spare time I allow myself, would just be a disservice to my mental health, honestly. I can play other games with friends. For my Destiny fix, Destiny Rising can be casually played in short play sessions. Until Bungie really WOW’s me, I’m good being out of D2 for now.
I’ll never forget my time with Destiny 2. I’d recommend my journey in that game to any player 1000 times over. But, sadly these days, oh reader mine, you must carve out your own adventure, and create your own destiny, in whatever vertical slice is currently available to you. Should you so choose to take the dive into the game now, I wish you the best of luck, as you navigate what may very well be the dying breaths of a fictional universe that I have truly loved greatly.
Here’s to wishing that the franchise still has a chance at a sequel.
