Destiny 2 Hates You

In case you’re new around here: I love Halo. It’s one of my favorite video game franchises. Some of my earliest childhood memories are watching my dad play the very first game. I remember saying, “Green robot! Where’d it go?” and he told me that he was playing as the green robot man, and it blew my tiny little four-year-old mind!

Why do I bring this up? Because Bungie, like every other company I loved as a child, has become a shadow of its former self. More than that, it has released a video game I hate more than any other: Destiny 2.

Now, to be clear, I don’t hate Destiny 2 because of the game itself. The core gameplay is plenty fun, it looks gorgeous, the music is jaw-dropping, and the story is… mostly terrible, but it has its moments and the aesthetic of the world is amazing. I wish I liked this game, because at it’s best, it’s really cool!

Destiny 2 has one of the most devout fanbases I’ve ever seen. Despite the number of scandals outnumbering the absurd sum of expansions and the real-cash in-game currencies, people stick around with it. You can’t fake that kind of passion for anything, and I have nothing but respect for the people who love this game.

But if that’s the case, then why? Why, of all the half-baked, broken, soulless, cash-grab games on the market, do I despise Destiny 2 more than any of them? The answer, unfortunately, is simple: this game hates its own players.

If you want all of the content for Destiny 2, you need to drop a ridiculous sum. There are so many expansions, updated editions, and season passes at this point that it’s impossible to keep track of it all, especially as a new player. You never know what you need to buy until you try to access something within the game, and it takes you directly to the store page of whatever it is you need to purchase.

What really gets me is that the content you’re buying may not even be playable for that much longer. Destiny constantly shelves old content, removing it from the game to make room for the new stuff. Bungie literally deleted Destiny 1 when 2 came out, and now you can’t even play any of the campaign content from vanilla D2! If you went to a store and bought a physical version of Destiny 2: Forsaken, congratulations! You’ve purchased content that no longer exists!

Imagine if you went back to watch your favorite movie, only to find out the first hour has been edited out and replaced. Now imagine you spent upwards of seventy dollars for that movie. Feels pretty fucking scummy, doesn’t it?

Surely there are better ways to go about this, right? Yes, there are. But Destiny’s entire development focus isn’t on player enjoyment and contentment. It’s about player engagement.

Fuck me, they straight up admitted it! In a GDC 2022 talk from Justin Truman, the general manager discussed how the development cycle of Destiny is centered not on quality, but on speed. Their business model is to get the product out as quickly as possible, because that’s how you keep players engaged with the product.

In that same discussion, they went over their idea of ‘overdelivery’. Basically, Bungie puts restraints on the developers to keep them from working on gameplay changes that would benefit the game because they believe that will make development harder later down the line. In other words: “Don’t make the game too good, otherwise people will raise their expectations.”

On what planet was that supposed to sound like a good thing?

Look. I get it. Bungie is a company that needs to make money. People with a lot of passion and talent for the game want to keep their jobs. Every single developer who has worked on this project has done some truly incredible work. Again: the players for this game are very passionate for it.

But that just makes the game’s business model even more disgusting. Destiny 2 doesn’t care about delivering the best player experience. It’s out to nickel and dime its audience for everything they’re worth while rushing out content quickly enough that they stay angry at it for not being as good as it could be. The life of the game is built off of harvesting player dissatisfaction.

More than that, it’s extremely predatory towards new players. With all the different editions and expansions and seasons, figuring out where the hell to start is damn near impossible. Some poor sap just looking to try it out may end up buying content that doesn’t even exist in the game anymore.

Worst of all: Destiny’s success changed the game industry. Developers saw the insane profits Bungie were making and wanted a slice of the pie. The result: dozens and dozens of terrible, half-baked live service games. Anthem, Avengers, Babylon’s Fall, the upcoming Suicide Squad game, they’re everywhere! And every single one of them was just as predatory and consumer-unfriendly as Destiny!

While many of them have faded away and died, Destiny 2 remains as profitable as ever. And likely will continue to remain that way. Why would it ever change when it’s business model has proven again and again to work, in spite of it all? Up until the game stops printing money, it will continue to nickel and dime.

I legitimately have no idea why some people are getting excited for Bungie’s new IP. If their treatment of Destiny and its playerbase is anything to go off of, it’s just another disaster waiting to happen. One more game through which they can squeeze their players dry.

When I was a kid, Halo blew me away. It was exciting, it was inspiring, and it gave me memories that I’ll cherish my entire life. Those games are a shining testament to what developer passion and player satisfaction can mean for a video game.

Would that we lived in a world where Destiny had that same spark. But for a game all about light versus dark, good versus evil, it’s completely devoid of even the most basic morality. All we’re gonna get from this are a bunch of bitter memories and microtransactions on our bank statements.

Hope it was worth it, Bungie.