aiat.
I will go on forever. I will understand.
destiny 2 had its final update on june 9th.
this is a somewhat bittersweet thing. destiny 2 is a game of contrasts: on one hand, it has an incredible world and visual design style, and bungie has repeatedly knocked it out of the park with making it look cool with every update and trailer. destiny 2 lore is some of my favorite worldbuilding ever; it explores concepts of life and death, service and freedom, and a healthy dose of the kind of fantasy conceptual Weirdness that i love in media. the vex will not only kill you, but make you to never have existed in the first place. the hive will fight, and die, and through death tithe power to shackled gods to rewrite existence until the state space of possible futures is broken into the shape of death. destiny 2 lore is a story of the war of ideas and titanic powers. bungie had commisioned entire books of worldbuilding background lore, and most of them are very good. seth dickinson, who wrote two of the most memorable lore books (The Book of Sorrow, and Marasenna) knocked it out of the park, and has continued to play with conceptual ideas like these through his published books The Traitor Baru Cormorant and Exordia to great effect. the idea of destiny 2, as game and as a world, has always been very appealing to me. i have loved, and will continue to love, pouring over the thousands and thousands of lore entries saturating the game.
on the other, you have the game itself. the actual story for expansions are, charitably, Fine at best, and mostly only vaguely gesture at the expansive world beneath the surface because gamers really just want to shoot things. the gameplay is good, but exotics and builds are seemingly constantly bugged or poorly balanced (one way or the other). and the gameplay loops of what content to do in the game always felt oddly shallow, with a gulf between easy matchmaking "run some strikes" and hard "raids" that require manually finding a clan.
the development of destiny 2 has unfortunately been plagued with bungie repeatedly unloading entire clips into their feet: they would revamp a system and make it ten times worse, slowly improve it until it's finally fine again, and then revamp it back to being terrible because they categorically refused to learn from their past mistakes and had such a schizophrenic vision of how destiny should be and work. they did this with armor and weapon mods, character ability building, and activity rewards all several times each. this is no more striking than with the entire Portal system they launched with edge of fate that revamped how players interact with the game and choose what content to play - which was universally hated by the player base, currently blamed for some of the game's death, and largely rolled back as part of this final update.
bungie's homebuilt Tiger engine is, from several internal reports, extremely difficult to work with and cause any changes to have laborious development cycles, which were clearly felt from how slow destiny 2 development was. destiny 2 for most of its lifetime only ever got minimal changes outside the yearly expansions or seasonal updates, with balance changes or bugfixes pushed for months at a time until a "midseason patch". because they could only do even normal small patches so rarely, the balance patches ended up with huge swinging changes where guns or abilities would have 70% or more nerfs or buffs, or things being left in a broken state for months or years without being fixed. for the vast majority of destiny 2's lifetime, we had a very limited enemy pool: forsaken introduced a new enemy race only because their publisher brought in two additional studios to save destiny 2 from the brink of death, and we didn't get another until the final shape which was a Big Deal. the intermediate expansions would add some new abilities (statis attacks for fallen) or one-off new enemies (tormentors), but only up to a point and few and far between. not making new enemies in your PvE game designed around shooting enemies was always very striking to me and i believe contributed a lot towards the game feeling boring over long timespans. they allowed the PvP crucible mode and PvPvE gambit game modes languish for most of the game's life, despite nominally being two of the three "core activities" for much of it - eventually admitting that they weren't going to update gambit because they didn't know what to do with it and didn't want to invest the effort into either fixing it or adding more maps.
development cycles being so long meant that bungie had an extremely slow turning ship when reacting to player sentiment, and several times communicated that although player reception to new seasons were negative and the playerbase was sick of formulaic seasonal models they already had several multiple-month seasons already nearly complete because they had to develop things so far ahead of time, and they had no way to incorporate that feedback for months or years.
most egregious, the slow development cycle means that destiny 2 had stagnated extremely hard in a world where video games is a mammoth of an industry and consumers have a glut of choices. paying $60 for a destiny 2 yearly expansion was a hard sell in 2017. it was nearly impossible in 2027 for the amount of content you got in a game for a legacy IP that had repeatedly burned player goodwill, most notably by deleting the entire base destiny 2 story and several expansions through the Destiny Content Vault because of bumping up against size limitations with their own game engine. and yet the complete lack of investment towards onboarding new players or making the game approachable to players not already enfranchised in destiny was also extremely obvious, and a lot of players have the story of trying to introduce a friend to destiny only for them to bounce off it hard because they had no idea what was going on, what to do, and not even being able to play activities together unless they also bought all the previous expansions. bungie for years pulled, and pulled hard, the destiny 1 nostalgia horn and let new players languish. is it any surprise that their player base largely shrank year over year?
in contrast the most recent EoL update is extremely notable for how much new content it adds, with several new character abilities finally being added despite players begging for options for the last ten years, new aspects, a reprisal for legacy weapon and armor, catalysts for every single exotic, new public event content, etc. it is bungie ending on a high note, with a host of changes that people have been clamoring for and had mostly accepted as never happening for one reason or another. in terms of game system and sandbox changes (and ignoring the lack of new campaign content or raids), it's likely to be one of the best updates they've ever done. and while great to finally have an alternate melee on void hunter, it leaves a sour taste in the mouth to realize they apparently could've done this at any time and simply chose not to.
the real death knell for destiny 2 wasn't that the gamers got tired of it, or that the game got repetitive, or there wasn't enough content - although all true individually. it's that bungie as a studio horribly mismanaged the game and killed the golden goose. as part of their large layoffs in 2024 they revealed that they were incubating five games and aggresively hired to support those, only to mothball all of them. they created Marathon, which launched this year as a bizarre competitive extraction shooter and is now their sole game. they devoted an enormous amount of time, effort, and money into everything except destiny 2, in some cases during some of the worst periods of the game's life (such as the extremely disliked Lightfall expansion); even in the "good times" they didn't re-invest into the game that was keeping their company afloat. a lot of gamers are currently writing rants about how this translates into "management" strangling the company despite the best efforts of "developers" - and while a lot of these problems are definitely squarely the fault of broader management, the idea that developers all would've made the perfect game if only management let them i think is largely overly idealic. the truth is that if destiny 2 development has been plagued with issues for its entire 10 year lifespan, repeatedly redoing the same mistakes, simply Letting The Devs Cook isn't a solution for the large structural issues the game had. the purpose of a system, it is said, is what it does.
The Book of Sorrow is the philosophy of the hive, which is a philosophy of survival of the fittest. it is moral to kill something, because if it was weak enough that it could not cling to life jealously, couldn't defeat its enemy and prove that it should live and its enemy should not, then it was inferior. a beautiful but weak universe is a perversion of nature: although death is tragic, it is the only way to play the game. the most adept to life, which is the same as the most adept to causing death, will rule the universe because there is no other way.
destiny 2 was unable to justify its own existence, and has now been cut away by the sword logic. something else, and perhaps something stronger, will go on to inherit the universe instead. aiat.
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