Everyone has their own story as to why Destiny 2 isn’t quite hooking them the way it use to, but I wanted to try to quantify it. As such, I visited the Destiny 2 “heatmap” site that has been around for years, and can chart how much you’ve played in a given month or around given expansions.
As it turns out, it’s not an illusion. From what I can tell, Season of the Deep is the least amount of Destiny 2 I’ve played during a new release since the ill-fated Curse of Osiris expansion back in 2017-2018. There was a campaign, you beat it, there wasn’t much else to do after that. That block also has three month window where I played exactly one day for 42 minutes before Warmind launched, which I played quite a bit more (I think we forget how things used to be in that era).
But since then? Yes, there are “dead” months, but they usually only come late in the season, the last month out of three when everything is over, essentially. The end of the six month Season of Arrivals was an especially empty time. But looking at the first half of a season, yeah, I think Deep takes it, without question.
Much of this is due to Diablo 4’s release for me personally, it’s not that I’m that disengaged with Destiny like many others, but I have been thinking about some things with my time away.
Keeping Up With The Story Is Easy – If you want to play a season of Destiny to simply keep up with the story, it’s essentially no more than an hour a week to do so, sometimes 20 minutes. That’s missions, cutscenes, lore reading, all of it, which is why it gets spread so thin. Bungie just doesn’t want you to binge it all in the first eight hours of launch. And I mean, I get that. And it’s sort of nice to feel like I can keep up with the story if I choose.
Farming Weapons – We have reached the point where once again, my vault is overstuffed, so I’m deleting the old weapons I grinded that I used to deem good enough to keep, in favor of new weapons which are…better? I guess? Yes, there has been some amount of power creep, but now with limited time, you feel a lot less invested in the chase unless there is something particularly outrageous released. And there…isn’t this season. Reprised, bad rolls of Reckoning weapons. Some cool looking Taken Stasis and Strand weapons that are not especially good. A couple okay dungeon weapons. But that’s it. The one unique thing to truly grind for is the dungeon exotic, but that leads me to…
Dungeons – When you aren’t playing much of the season, it’s extremely weird to realize the best content alongside that season is a dungeon that doesn’t come with it. Very strange to be asked to spend $20 on two dungeons, one two seasons a way, to play what is effectively story content (with some huge reveals!) sold separately from the season it’s attached to. I maintain this should be changed.
Farming Armor – This has just gotten bad. Legendary armor farming has long been pointless and that hasn’t changed. You are either A) running Legendary Lost Sectors until you get a single drop of the new exotic armor from that season or B) running something like the dungeon just for pure transmog, because you already have a zillion pieces of 65+ armor you’re using. Target exotic focusing has been way too expensive and unreliable, and slightly higher, slightly better distributed stats is just not exciting at all.
Fishing – It was a funny gag, but look man, I do not have time for this nonsense after like two days of goofing around. Now it’s an exotic quest step? Sigh.
I think if I had to sum things up, it’s that taking some time away has not really made me miss the game that much like you might think. I am struggling to find a “why” in terms of loot, which is 95% of the season unless you’re just like, playing Crucible for fun. If your “why” is seeing the story developments, it’s maybe eight total hours a season and probably more like six total minutes of the most relevant cutscenes.
I don’t think this will change much as time goes on this season, and playtime will continue to dive, especially once Diablo season 1 launches. There’s an exotic quest coming, but we don’t know the scope. There’s Solstice, where we probably do know the scope. Then we’ll head toward our Savathun resurrection season, and we’ll see if things get more compelling.
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