Destiny 2's Live Service Death, Makes My Recommendation Eternal
The Best Time to Play Was Years Ago. The Second Best Time, is Now.
Introduction
This has been a difficult script to write, for a video that I’m assuming, will be even tougher to create.
Destiny 2 is officially over, as a live service game. Sony let go of the staff assigned to work on it on June 25th. As of now, there’s hardly even a skeleton crew left behind to be stewards of the servers the game will run on for perpetuity. It’s over over. I’m sad. I’m angry. and I’m also baffled. Destiny 2 is a game I have played more than any other in my entire life, and it’s over just like that...
As my coined word “rev-eulogy” implies, this video will serve as a review, or an evaluation of Destiny 2 as a whole, but I will be doing so while showcasing my thoughts and experiences in commemoration of what Destiny 2 has meant to me over the years. It’s my hope that it inspires you into a curiosity that leads you into trying the game for yourself.
I think I have a good idea on how I’d like to loosely structure this out.
Devotion inspires Bravery
Destiny 2 is a looter shooter by the folks that brought you several installments of Halo. You play as a guardian, a powerful, semi-immortal warrior that wields guns and paracausal powers to protect humanity from hostile alien forces. In the game, you’ll collect a wide variety of guns with unique effects, as you fight these alien factions throughout some linear story driven missions, that you can repeat playing many multiple times for chances at different weapons, or even the same weapon with different “perk combinations”. You’ll do a similar thing with your armors. As your “Light” or power level grows, and as you develop your paracausal abilities, you’ll face tougher and tougher foes, in missions of higher and higher difficulties. Some of those, you’ll fight alone. Others with your friends, or even random players across the globe.
That’s a very high level overview, anyway. Moment to moment gameplay is a fun mix of gun play and abilities, with small respites of platforming challenges, lore dumps from supporting characters, or inspecting that random piece of gear that just fell out of the corpse of a god. We’ll get more into the flow state of the game a touch more in a further section, but know that it’s an incredibly addicting game and I love it.
The Seasonal Cadence
One of the aspects I loved about Destiny while it was live, is that it seriously felt like you were always an active part of its universe, at all times. What you accomplish in the game had significant narrative weight to its large grandiose plots. The true gravitas of this might be something that’s easily lost in translation, so let me explain it a bit further.
Because in most games, you are the main character, and you do push the plot forward there in a very similar way. Let’s take the original Halo, for example. In that campaign, you play as Master Chief. You fight the covenant, and as the main guy, you make a huge difference in the war, across a set of missions all the way to the end of that story. Game ends, credits roll. You can replay the game and relive much of that same experience at any time.
Destiny 2 was different in that it’s timeline ran parallel to real time in real life. You would play through a “campaign” (a large story based expansion) the year of its release. On conclusion of those primary story missions, there might have been a few loose threads left behind, or foreshadowed ahead, so you would also have some missions and activities to do around the solar system in attempts to chase down the smaller scale bad guys (or what have you) in these secondary stories. These all would lead into the next story expansion that would come in the following year.
At an even higher level, there would be teases and hints through all its stories, which pointed to the conclusion of Destiny 2’s major, 10 years running storyline. So in short, every 3 months or so after a major expansion release, the game would update with little minor additions and trickles of content across the board, all through the course of the year.
I think the most non-gamer related way I can explain the story release cadence of this live service game is that Destiny 2 was kind of the video game equivalent of what Marvel did with the Infinity War saga. The yearly and quarterly stories all kinda hinted at this final big bad, which became a reason to play the game, and get stronger, so that you could be powerful enough to be the hero or heroes that could take that type of universe ending threat head on.
Interestingly, at the close of the year with the launch of a new campaign, all of those smaller story threads and their activities would be almost completely deleted from the game. Only the full campaign, and a rare few activities get preserved for future players to experience for themselves. This concept, of removing playable content, and story threads, is inherently anti-consumer, and I could not be more critical of it. The act of doing so may have helped the size of the game ebb and flow, but in truth, it feels more like Bungie was using that system to artificially inducing the Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO of the game.
“Oh, what’s that, you’re not available to play the game heavily right now? That’s too bad. Because this year, this activity will never be playable again, it’s loot likely not earnable ever again. If you’re lucky, you can get a recap of the story from some YouTuber, should you be confused when you come back from your break.”
At least, that’s what I’d imagine some mustache twirling villain of a producer on Bungie to say about the subject. Because, to a degree, the timeline of the game didn’t stop just because you did. It keeps going, and the game continually changes. Gone for three months? The entire meta has changed. Everyone is using rocket launchers for DPS now. Might not be doing so in a month. Anyway. You don’t get that kind of thing from your traditional Mario’s.
This creates a unique scenario where any time you played the Destiny 2, you always played a very specific “vertical slice” of the game within its timeline both narratively and in its gameplay. The story heavily progresses yearly of course, but that’s built upon quarterly, with some sub plots advancing weekly (like a TV show). There are a collection of new weapons the players may be finding and using in this time, with some incentivized and more powerful than others per a “seasonal” (or quarterly) focus.
Some activities are prioritized more than others as well, and may be completely temporary offerings. The bosses within those activities may pose unique challenges that could alter your style of play. All of these things, made the game a constantly changing, constantly evolving, living, breathing world. There was always loot to chase and something to do, always a little mystery or story thread to follow at any given time, some of which may have only been available within the very slice of time you decided to play Destiny 2.
So when I talk to another Destiny 2 player about some event that occurred five years ago, and we both soulfully declare that “we were there for that”, it immediately produces a sense of camaraderie. We can actually revel in our past accomplishments together. Even though some stuff still left playable in the game, they will not be something I play the same as I did when it first released or when I first played it, also adding to this eerie sense of a game left in the past. It’s a different beast now, and unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, will be forever.
Many games are not changed so drastically and frequently as Destiny 2 was. They also, usually have all the pieces of the game available for you to play the day you buy it. So, the removal of stuff every year, and the frequent changes were annoying, but it was also kind of novel to see that as time passed in the real world, so it did in the world of the game, whether you were actively playing it or not. Every update brought an evolution to its foundational pieces, which in turn continuously reshaped its future, leaving behind fragments of a time lost past, or rather, versions of a game never to be seen, played, nor visited again.
In this way, old missions that have been retained in the final version of the game play out to me now like I am reliving my own memories. I can feel the weight of the narrative implications still on my shoulders all those years ago. I can think of what was going on in my life during that time. What weapons I found fun then. I find it weirdly beautiful to juxtapose the state of the game as it was, with how it is (and forever will be) now, and I enjoy remembering those activities in their prime as I play them again, or look at the old depreciated guns I still have from them.
Destiny 2 hasn’t always my favorite game to play. Across seasons, Bungie would reduce your power level, usually quarterly with the coming and going of that seasonal content, and this would make me roll my eyes and sigh. Sometimes I wasn’t very interested in the upcoming story beats, the weapons, or the temporarily available seasonal activities. Other times, despite my gripes, I’d grind anyway to keep my character at a high enough power level to engage with end game content through the season. Other times my lack of ambition wasn’t tied to Destiny, where’d I’d simply be more interested in playing other single player games, or even other operating systems as I had been this past year.
Regardless, Destiny always wanted your time. At minimum I have always felt that it required in the least, maybe three hours a week, but ideally, I’d ballpark Bungie wanting you engaged with the game for about 8-10 hours a week. This aligns with a quote my good friend would often say to me when we would complain about the grind together... paraphrasing him, he’d say “Bungie doesn’t just want Destiny 2 to be another video game you play... they want Destiny 2 to be a hobby that you have alongside your normal gaming.”
An Old Friend…
You know what. This friend of mine. Let’s call him... Sherpa, for its D2 specific significance. That’s right bud. You get your own introduction. He’s a supporter of me so I gotta break the fourth wall here and tease him directly. I’ve not met anyone as devoted to Destiny 2 as Sherpa, and he’s a big reason why I’ve stuck with the game all these years.
Sherpa is one of my closest friends. Our friendship goes back almost two decades. He’s the reason that my ghost found me. Here’s that story: I couldn’t start playing Destiny 2 when it was in Beta, because I didn’t own a computer or console strong enough to play it. But, some time later, I did get the hardware, and playing D2 was one of the first things we did together on that new machine. It was right as the game went free to play and available on Steam with Shadowkeep. After playing through some of the game together, Sherpa generously gifted me the premium track of that season pass. After that I was hooked.
My desire to play would ebb and flow for the next period of years, as I’d play more or less depending on how burnt out I was the previous season from playing too much. But I’d always log in for a bit each season (with one exception) to do a little somethin’ somethin’, that usually being activities with Sherpa.
The actual word “Sherpa” in Destiny 2 terms is an experienced player who is willing to teach inexperienced players how to do something. This is why I have nicknamed my friend “Sherpa”. He is always very informed of the game, from the story to some of the most difficult activities. He also has an incredible teaching ability, being able to break down hard to understand concepts very simply, and effortlessly at that. Sometimes, he would teach a whole group of 5 other people at once and I admire his ability to stay completely cool under that kind of pressure, even when some team members would be particularly dense, or ill equipped for some of the challenges we would all face together.
Brief aside: Destiny 2 is a game with a great culture. I speak fondly of my Sherpa, but I know that players like him are hardly a stone’s throw away. Go into the LFG Discord. Send a chat message in the tower. Look for folks on the Bungie forum. I guarantee that you will be able to find a player who is just as kind and informed as Sherpa is. Over time, you’ll learn the game and activities and you may very well be a Sherpa for your friends or other players. That’s the beauty of this game. Anyway,
Year over year Destiny 2 would add new and interesting activities. You may have heard of its “Raids”, six player activities that require a lot of teamwork and coordination. There are also “Dungeons” which are essentially 3 player versions of raids. It was always a community event to try and complete these activities the very first week they were available.
Sherpa and myself would often meet together a few days before these would release to chow down on some pre-game sushi or wings and talk about the potential game mechanics or story implications the upcoming raid or dungeon could contain. There was some similar cameraderie there for the releases of new campaigns. Crud, we even took work off to play a few of those through together. But those day one activities man, a few of them were so difficult that our team would end up playing for over 14 hours straight and not complete the activity (or win). I think some of you might think of that as an agonizing experience, but honestly those are good memories for me...
Something Sherpa and I have remarked on together is how it’s interesting that the weapons we find along the way as we game together can carry the very memories of that time period with them. There are guns I have in my vault today that I would not consider using in the game now, but would never get rid of, because I remember exactly what I was doing at the time I got that weapon, probably with Sherpa. Raid rewards in particular, but some exotics, some legendary guns, even a few cosmetic items. Anything can hold a memory.
Of course, I’ve had more friends than Sherpa who I’ve played the game with a ton and the memories I’ve made there are just as important to me. Playing through some particularly difficult Grandmaster strikes with a buddy. Duo dungeons with another. Trials of Osiris. Legendary campaigns. These are visceral memories that I hold close to my chest, stuff that I feel has improved my relationships with all of my friends in one way or another. I’m grateful for all of you. You all know that Sherpa deserves the spotlight though. This is, kinda his game.
I’d even like to take a quick second to thank all the random guardians I’ve played with over the years. Sometimes it’s just a little emote at the end of a strike. Other times, we’re talkin’ on comms about the activity. Most of the time though, silent respect for each other. I think that’s cool that you can meet so many people in this way.
But these experiences with my friends are often what drove me. Through grinding my power levels, to getting specific weapons, most of it all on my own free time, usually solo. The burning fire from good memories was strong enough to even push me through some general burn out. That fuel... knowing that if my character was ready for battle, another great memory with my friends could be waiting to be made around the corner with the next update. And with how consistent Bungie was at making those, it was almost a sure fire thing to happen every time (and more than any other game, I might add).
Bravery inspires Sacrifice
Destiny 2 lets you pick from 3 different class types. Warlock, which kind of feels like a wizard, Titan, which is kind of like a warrior tank, and Hunter, which is kind of like a ninja. They all have different ability sets available to them, which inform how you might play as them. The guns across your characters may be the same, but your armor and abilities vary so drastically, that different guns and their perk combinations may be more useful to some than others.
Bungie gives you 3 character slots so it’s only natural that you make a character for each class. There is also a little customization you can do under the helmet with body type, and a few extra sci-fi fantasy races for good measure (simply put, blue people with cool lore and robots with cooler lore). I mixed and matched these all to make my ideal variety of guardians. I wanted to be a warlock and I thought Exos were cool. Male body type, boom that’ll be my main. Was next most interested in the Titans. eh, we’ll go Human also Male those match together in my brain. This leaves the remaining options, as Hunter, female, and Awoken, the three things I wasn’t super interested in picking but felt would balance the variety out well as my last combination. This comes up later, I promise.
My first 200 hours of the game I played as a Warlock. They have a fun ability set. They let you live out that space wizard fantasy very well. They have always had easy healing on-tap and are a great support class. Not to mention, they have some very fun exotic armors, which are equippable clothes items that heavily change how your weapons and abilities synergize with each other and all of them have unique gameplay effects.
After those initial 200 hours I internally made the realization that Sherpa was a Titan. My other friend playing regularly with us was a Warlock. It would only make sense if one of us was a Hunter right? One of each class on the ol regular fire team... that just felt right.
So I switched to Hunter and I honestly have not looked back since. There was a time or two I rotated through my other characters to grind for power levels in preparation for a “day one” raid, back when that was a thing, but beyond then, I’ve played as a Hunter pretty exclusively for years and years now.
That said, the amount of abilities, fragments, exotics, armor bonuses, artifact perks, and legendary weapons that you can mix and match together as any class to create your own unique combat loop (buildcrafting, is what the community calls this) is so incredibly deep that we would be here for a number of days if we were to cover all of them. In fact, I don’t even think that’s possible to list them all out. I’ve left some examples in my YouTube video version of this review, if you’d like to get an idea of how those look and feel in-game.
Become a Legend
Destiny 2’s marketing slogan for the longest time was: Become Legend. Maybe it still is. But there’s something to “becoming legend”, honestly, that I want to highlight. Of course, you’re constantly etching your tales of bravery across the system as you stop gods and villains from destroying humanity, following Bungie’s narrative scripts... But I’m talking more in a gameplay sense.
Let’s take an Expert Solo Lost Sector, for example. That’s a pretty tough activity, that you’re intended to do by yourself. Not impossible though. To complete it, maybe you try a rotation of different weapons. Mix a few different class aspects and fragments around. Different exotics even. And maybe you eek out a clear. But the rewards, while good, aren’t what you’re looking for.
Thus the grind begins. So you take what worked and do it all over again. It’s crazy how good of a flowstate you can get in, repeating a short little thing like a lost sector, and even on higher difficulties too. There’s something so satisfying about overcoming the odds, rotating through the activity faster and faster like some kind of time trial, and being so familiar that you become supremely aware of enemy placements, the bullets left in your magazine, and your super downtime, which all helps you to succeed faster and faster.
In a relatively short time playing this activity, you can feel yourself becoming a “Legendary” force to be reckoned with, a guardian comfortable with their weapons and abilities, adept in the ways of this very particular battle. These activities were always so satisfying to farm because for me I felt it was the ultimate test of my skill versus the developers.
The cool thing is, that this is replicated in a macro scale across the entirety of the game, with every activity. While you can really feel yourself grow during a farm or grind, it’s even more satisfying to look broadly across your accomplishments and see how much you’ve truly grown. How comfortable you really are when the stakes are high and the difficulty is making everyone sweat. Occasionally, you will feel your legend status tested as you rotate through the games many foes and modifiers. Are you really that comfortable without that trusty grenade launcher? Can your fireteam still rely on you, if you switched to a different exotic armor or weapon to boost damage to a boss? Are you nothing more than the god-roll legendary’s you wield?
As you forge yourself into a Legend, these internal questions will get quieter, and over time, will not even be a second thought to you at all. That kind of growth, across a game so expansive as this, with so much freedom for player expression through buildcrafting and gameplay... man, there’s nothing quite like it. I have loved the journey immensely.
You can SOMEWHAT rob yourself of this if you just steal a game breaking build off of YouTube and run through the whole game with it. But, that said, I do think stealing a build, at some point, for a LITTLE BIT is actually essential to your growth.
Some Resources…
Build-crafting videos are a little perk of the community most of which are excellently made, and explain how any particular hyper specific game play loop works in the context of build-crafting, and they really help you get used to “ability VERBS” we’ll call them. Jolt, Weaken, Scorch, & Unravel, to name a few. When a Build-crafter breaks down how those verbs are supposed to crop up in the few builds that you steal, you start seeing and understanding them as you play the game normally. From that point, you can start feeling your way around in homebrewing your own custom builds together. It may not work as good as... you know... the stuff that streamer’s have meticulously optimized as a part of their literal day job... but it sure is fun to try to make some of your personal favorite stuff synergize.
And you might have thought, pshhhh copy a build? That’s gotta be a headache right? It’s totally not. The Destiny 2 API is so open that there are several community apps which reduce that process down to a few clicks and it’ll apply in game. Click the link in the YouTube video description. Tweak a few things that don’t get pulled over or that you don’t have. Save it, and apply in game. That’s a really fun community thing that I have loved over the years. Please use DIM aka app.destinyitemmanager.com. It’s so good. If you’re on steam open the web browser in the overlay and leave open the DIM website. Never look back. The other good community resource for managing your vault is destinyrecipes.com. Also destiny.report is good for looking up weapons.
Anyway the fun thing about finding a community build that you may want to try is sometimes those inform you of what to chase right? Maybe they require a very specific type of gun and perks on that gun. So you look up the activity it comes from, and you play that on repeat for a play session. Maybe during that, you find exotic weapons or armors at random. When you do get that gun, you can then make that build and maybe some harder content becomes easier for you, which opens new opportunities to get better gear and to feel more... awesome.
I’ve been kind of talking with a huge slant on playing Destiny 2 by yourself, but you’re really doing all this so that you can be strong enough to be a competent team member in end game activities. Maybe it’s raids, dungeons, or exotic missions. Maybe it’s the master version of these activities. Becoming legend as a solo kind of allows you to upcycle your experiences into team carrying wisdom which helps your friends to become legend as well.
I know for me, for the longest time, whenever Sherpa would die, I would kind of internally be like... “oh no... it’s all up to me, which means we’re totally freakin’ boned and we’re gonna have to do it all over again”. Right, because his overwhelming aura would kinda lift the whole team up, even if it was just me. Because he’s an incredible player. A legendary guardian. It’s always been my goal to get close to as good as him so that when I randomly load into any activity with a team of 3, or I’m playing a raid or whatever, that my experiences, weapons, armors, and builds are enough for me to bravely play my part, or even carry the team slightly; just like Sherpa has exemplified in all my time with him.
Sacrifice leads to Death
Getting to the point where I feel like I have “become a legend” has taken hundreds of hours of my life, and lots of grinding in the game over countless campaigns and seasons. There’s been times I haven’t felt ready for some activities, but have done anyway. My first solo dungeons for example, each took me like I think 4 hours each initially, but now I can kinda casually boot one up and beat it in 40 minutes. I’ve grown. Evolved.
What would you sacrifice to become legend, should you want to, should you start playing the game as a new player today? Well, I don’t really have a definitive answer for you. If the fun multiplayer raid or dungeon stuff interests you, you don’t have to play much at all, after you purchase the content in question, this due to shared power levels within your team for certain activities.
In this way you can have your very own friendly neighborhood “Sherpa” guide you through this content regardless of whatever weapons you have, at whatever power level you are. Perhaps, you will become the Sherpa for your friends.
But what if you want a nice build? Fun exotics? A myriad of different elemental abilities to choose from? Sure, you can click on DIM links for builds, but to have all that stuff unlocked, you’re going to have to play the game for a bit to be able to obtain or find the crux of a lot of these. So there’s that to keep in mind.
Destiny 2 is also a very story heavy, lore heavy game. You will likely enjoy the gunplay and whatever, sure. But understanding the context of WHY you load into any one mission is what really gives your adventures meaning. They help you get a sense of its otherworldly scale, and show you just how important you are in this universe. Playing through the campaigns and trying to absorb all that really changes your attitude towards everything, but of course, it takes time. The actual depth of the lore goes far beyond what’s playable and the reading you can do on this universe is about as deep as you want it to. Logs are everywhere. There are entire YouTube channels built around dissecting this if you just want some easy listening.
Somewhat related, when the game was live, it was easy to keep your mind space occupied in the world of Destiny, so much so that you could almost feel like real life was an extension of it. Subscribing to destiny related YouTubers is a part of that, where you might be listening to explanations of new story beats, or weapon overviews throughout your work day. Maybe you pre-ordered a special edition of one of the expansions and got high quality audio files for one of the soundtracks included with it to jam to. Recent tragedy strike somewhere in the world? Donate to the Bungie Foundation, get an in game item or even a physical reward for doing so. Complete a tough raid within the first week it’s available? You just unlocked the opportunity to purchase one of the many gorgeous and coveted “raid jackets”. Maybe you’d attend a fan convention with other guardians, or just chat about upcoming in game activities with your friends. It’s easy to make the game a part of the fabric of your very being with so many ways to participate in its culture.
You can get a sense of most of this if you play today, even though the game is no longer getting live updates. Which leads to my one last point for this section.
Truly the biggest sacrifice you’ll give to Destiny 2, when you start playing... is your time. It takes time to get familiar with the systems, in spite of the directionless and almost non-existent new player on-boarding quests. It takes time to be able to sight read and recognize good perk combinations on weapons. You’re going to need to play the raids or dungeons several times before you don’t need some mechanics explained. And boy, it’ll take you quite some time to go through the large handful of campaigns left in the game, in attempts to unlock your abilities completely, not to mention, gain an understanding of the overarching narrative threads through it all built on its foundational lore.
My question for you is what do you want to get out of playing Destiny 2? How much time are you willing to spend? What will your sacrifices be? You have until the servers die, decades from now, to decide. Are you just interested to see how it feels to play over a weekend? Or would you be looking for a more tangible, gratifying, life changing game experience?
Whatever your goal is, and however long you take playing the game to get to that point will be wholly dependent on you. And maybe some of it will depend on your friend group. So, You might think, well, what’s a good goal to have? And to that I’d say, buddy, this is a game people have spent 6000+ hours in. I can attempt to narrow that down and tell you through your screen that I whole-heartedly recommend all of the available campaigns as a start, right? But we’re all different players, and Destiny 2 is a deep deep game. You might find the campaigns to be a waste of your time, but you love the exotic missions. Or the PvP stuff. Or whatever. If you’re interested in the game from the outset, find your goal. Make your fate. Become a Legend.
Death
The game might officially not be receiving any more live support, and thus, is remarked about as “dead”. Is a “dead” live service game worth playing? In my humble, 1000+ hour opinion... Absolutely. If you’ve played Destiny 2 before, come back. The games final update fixed so many rough patches, you would likely be surprised at how fun and refined it is now. And to those of you who have never played, honestly, there has not been a better time to jump in, and experience everything with fresh eyes.
The more you play, the more you’ll be able to empathize with the anger and sadness I have because this universe has reached finality. As you give the game more of your time, you will be haunted by what it could have been, if it could have continued to be actively developed. Some of you may even regret not playing while it was live, but will be grateful for the time spent now.
But, perhaps the one bright side is that, now, you can take all the time in the world to enjoy Destiny 2, in whatever way you see fit. Do you enjoy the Borderlands games? Well, now that there will be no more updates, it’s kind of completable, like one of those.
Find a gun you like while playing? Or maybe you’ll find or make a ‘game breaking’ build of some kind? The gun won’t get nerfed, nor the glitchy build patched. They’re yours forever. Heck, maybe you’re a completionist of some kind. Getting all the available triumphs would be a supreme challenge for you. I could even see a speed-running community get up and going, now that there is a very definitive beginning and end.
Now, you might think that playing a dead live service game isn’t worth your time. Crud, some gamers would even consider playing other living live service games a waste of your life. Even one step further, you and I both know that some non-gamers will even generalize this whole medium and say video games are making society as we know it, worse. But can any one person really be the judge of these things? Can multiple?
Why do you play games? Why do your friends play games? Would you consider video games one of the ultimate forms of artistic expression as I do? Or are they just fun little time wasters? Somewhere in-between? Everyone will interpret games differently as with any other medium. Only you can determine the value of them for yourself. I can only share how I feel, in the hopes that it will nudge you into a curiosity to find if they also hold value for you. As I do with all of my videos, in my own special, on-brand way.
In regards to Destiny 2, the multi-year journey I had with it created a beautifully woven tapestry of experiences that now, in death, have manifested into a complete masterpiece. I will forever remember the magnificent skyboxes that would frequently surprise and wow me. I will miss the major supporting characters, who over the course of my years with the game, I’d swear that I formed some kind of parasocial friendship with. I’ll miss the day one dungeons and raids that became something of a holiday for my friends and I. I’ll miss the ever expanding universe, with its perfectly weird stories. Even the joys of getting that god roll weapon drop, or hot new exotic, that I’d use to make fun, ad clearing builds with. Maybe most of all, I’m saddened that I won’t hear new renditions of that wonderfully crafted guardian motif woven through epic battles of grandeur which would tie the stories all together.
Can I still get a lot of these components from playing the game that still exists (and will continue to exist), and more importantly, can you? Yeah. Absolutely. You can feel some of the things I have felt and described. For me now though, as an old light, end of service has brought with it all a newfound twinge of nostalgiac sadness. For most of you, it’ll be fresh. It’ll feel just like playing any other game.
I fought the Witness, the Traveler’s greatest adversary, in the live game with guardians in the story and across the world. And what did the Witness desire? The end of entropy. The witness succeeding would leave the Destiny universe in an unchanging, fixed state. A ‘Final Shape’, they called it. In my time, we defeated the Witness, stopping this plan from solidifying.
I say this because it is not a stretch of the imagination to see and feel the eerie comparisons between the Witness’s plan, and the end of Destiny 2’s development. A universe that once grew and expanded weekly, quarterly, and yearly, now does not expand at all. Where once, chaos reigned, with constant updates that brought with it loot to chase, stories to follow, and activities to play, followed by many, many patches and hotfixes of its code to keep it all afloat... it now lie dormant. Never to change again... it rests in its Final Shape, and The Architects, gone. Can you feel the anguish this brings to tens of thousands of souls?
Can you also sense their rage?
Rage
With these final updates to Destiny 2, Bungie employees were given the gift of being fired. Not even just extra fluff either, there are industry veterans, titans even, some of whom have worked on the original Halo decades ago, now looking for work. 292 people. It was always leading to this.
Remember in 2024 after the games MOST SUCCESSFUL EXPANSION EVER, Bungie laid off 220 people? The most successful your game has ever been and how do you congratulate your employees? By firing them. This was also, after firing about 100 people just months before that too.
Bungie has always been mismanaged by a moronic C-Suite. Pete Parsons, the old CEO, famously had a massive, exorbidently expensive collection of classic cars. Management in their stupidity would reportedly shoot down good and fun ideas that came from passionate devs. Emotes were one of those things that was forced through managements rejections by devoted staff, implemented in part over a Winter Holiday break, just to give you a little example. It is a gift that we even got a fun Destiny game at all, with it continually hindered across its lifespan.
There are other, better videos about the downfall of Bungie and its work culture from folks far more qualified than myself, I’m sure, so I’ll leave it at that.
The Gospel of Brand is: The gaming industry at large is collapsing. Imploding. Just this past few months Xbox fired 3200 people. PlayStation has laid off hundreds. The past few years it’s all been layoffs after layoffs. In 2025 we saw 5300 people laid off in the gaming industry. Back in 2024, layoffs peaked at a whopping 14900 people. The only outlier is Nintendo. They actually expanded their workforce last year, and this year commented on the importance of giving your employees regular raises. How nice of them to treat their staff like human beings and properly check their businesses balances.
I find it so difficult to understand why gaming is such a mismanaged industry these days. It feels like if games don’t sell well, many people get fired (which is understandable in many cases), but if games do a little bit well, people still get fired. Where is the safety net? How does Nintendo retain employees and make profits when they aren’t doing so hot? Why isn’t their strategy replicated across the industry? Is everyone else stupid?
In the case of Bungie, of course, all the money was getting funnelled into Pete Parsons car collection, and other stupid C-suites wildest dreams. Those demons skimmed as much as they could every time the studio made a profit which left them without a safety net to work with if an expansion didn’t sell well. I suspect a similar thing is happening across the entire games industry. Those who are in positions of power are being greedy, and passing the consequences down to people lower on the totem pole and just getting away with it. They are taking their studios safety nets home and parking them in their garages on their ten million dollar estates. It makes me sick, honestly. Read about Andrew Wilson last year? Give that a Google.
Bigger picture stuff: The cost of living has also skyrocketed, but games have essentially stayed the same price. This combined with the growing amount of new games, year over year, in my opinion, has created an overabundance of them. Imagine how much easier was it to make a profit in the games industry, when Joe Gamer Shmoe 20 years ago just paid a $500 mortgage (or cheaper rent), and only had maybe 50-100 games to choose from at his local video game retailer.
This is likely a bigger reason as to why there is no wiggle room for failures or middling AAA or AA successes anymore. In our world, you set the world on fire with a game that sells like hot cakes… or you get fired. Very cool that some of the biggest companies in the industry could not have bothered to plan for any sort of decline. Let’s give a raise to our CEO’s instead. They’re working so hard to make sure as few people as possible work for them. Again I’ll plug Andrew Wilson’s evil mug as a reference here. Demon.
Man, if I keep going I’m gonna have a heart attack. It’s just not right what happened to Bungie’s Destiny team. So many talented people over the years, gone like that.
There was no warning to the fans, or the developers. The game was canned with one message, the employees with another. What’s worse, this last update is the most successful the game has been in years. There are 150k players logging in week after week and Sony didn’t want to explore if the studio could recreate that kind of success?
That’s 150k wallets that could have potentially opened, on Steam alone, mind you. Are they stupid? Like, are they seriously dumb? Imagine the kind of extra publicity they would get for reversing course on this. The players would have kept returning in droves to prepare for whatever was to come. The next expansion, whenever it would release would have been the biggest ROI in years, had Sony just let them cook.
But to go through with the decision to cut all these people down... after it put up those kind of player numbers and then on top of it all, NOT greenlight a sequel game? Absolutely ridiculous.
Conclusion (Seriously)
Ultimately... I have loved my time with Destiny 2, and in the state it has been left in after its final update... I can’t help but full-heartedly recommend it. The best time to play was years ago, of course. But the second best time is now. When nothing will be removed. Nothing will be changed. Chase what your heart desires. Follow those narrative threads. Become a legend, and put it down when you feel satisfied with your journey.
It’s been more than a game to me. I mentioned it earlier, but Destiny 2 really has woven itself into the fibers of who I am. It has affected the kind of games I enjoy. The kind of person I strive to be. It was a game that was always there with something to do, whether I wanted it or not. And it was always a place my friends and I could band together for fun times.
I will continue to return to the Destiny universe, year over year, until I can no longer do so. I will lament about its discontinuation, and the loss of staff that Bungie had working on it. There will never be another game quite like it for the rest of time, this I am sure of. I am very sad, but fulfilled to have played it while it was live, and am happy that in the least, it will somewhat live on.
I’m not sure if these ramblings have resonated with anyone. But I do encourage you to pick it up and give it a try for yourself, at some point in your life. It is truly a Name Brand game, that I believe many types of players will enjoy, in one way or another.
Thanks for Reading.
