If I had to summarize the State of the Game from this past week, it would be a few neat, minor changes to Destiny 2, with enormous, glaring oversights and a refusal to address some of the game’s largest issues. Either by directly saying they’re not addressing them, or simply ignoring them altogether.
The way I see it, there are five very, very big issues facing Destiny 2 at present, and they are all ones that Bungie does not seem interested in changing. Yet they are massive barriers present in the game and many of the reasons community sentiment has been so low. Here are the five I’m focusing on:
New Player Onboarding – New player onboarding has never been the same since the Red War campaign was vaulted. For a very brief period of time when the Red War, two expansions and three seasons were all free as part of a players first introduction to Destiny 2, that was fantastic, but now, that’s all changed. The experience now is a very short intro string of missions via Shaw Han, an extremely brief story overview summing up years in a single cutscene, and then an unclear path of where to go next, either forcing players to buy five year old expansions, the last one that wasn’t vaulted (Shadowkeep), or to start with the latest one where they will have zero context for anything going on (Lightfall).
Yet nothing about this process appears to be changing, even though it is desperately hard to try to get friends into the game with no real coherent way to do so. If this is going to change significantly after The Final Shape, that should be said, but it wasn’t even hinted at in the State of the Game.
Fractured Expansions – This relates to the above, where the idea that perhaps as time went on, old expansions would be made free as new ones were added. This has not happened at all. Forsaken, instead of being made free, was vaulted and its remaining pieces are being sold as an exotic/raid/dungeon pack at a reduced price. Shadowkeep, Beyond Light, Witch Queen and Lightfall are all still paid expansions, nothing has been added to the free-to-play pool, things have only been taken away.
This also extends to a subclass, Stasis. While Bungie just announced that Stasis would be easier to acquire, they are still locking an entire subclass behind one specific expansion, the game’s third, and one now three years old, when it’s long past time to just open it up to everyone (I mean at this point, all of Beyond Light should probably be free, as should Shadowkeep). The way these expansions are fractured, disjointed because of the deleted seasons between them, has not changed and it appears it will not change.
Microtransactions – I don’t think Eververse was mentioned a single time in the entirety of the State of the Game, but it loomed over everything all the same. Bungie can’t make a single new set of vendor armor per year? Well, they can make 3-5 new paid armor sets a season, including new $20 a piece crossover sets.
The sheer amount of things Eververse sells now, which recently has evolved to include transmog, free in any other game, and shaders, which used to be easy and free to acquire, is absolutely ridiculous, but there are no signs that this is slowing down or being reversed in any fashion. An increasing amount of design time and resources are being absolutely poured into Eververse while earned, in-game rewards are slipping. Nothing is changing here, and if anything, the problem is accelerating. Wild to have 6,400 words of State of the Game and not address microtransactions at all, one of the biggest pain points of the series.
PvP/Gambit Investment – Have been over this a few times now, but this was the most clearly stated aspect of the State of the Game. Investment in PvP will continue to be minor, and that’s because putting more into it would take resources away from PvE content (which is sold, not free like PvP). And PvP resources have already fled from Destiny 2 across the aisle to Marathon and other incubated, with no real replacements to produce more actual content like maps.
Gambit was a good idea that finally landed in a decent place with its rulesets. It’s now effectively being killed, with no new content (just the un-deletion of old content) and a somewhat chastising line about how players didn’t invest into it enough. Of course they didn’t invest in it when essentially no attention had been paid to it in five years. This could have been a really powerful part of the game if it was not endlessly neglected. And now it will never be a focus again.
The Loot – I maintain that Destiny 2 has serious problems with loot at this point. Armor farming is essentially non-existent. Chasing 1-2 stat distributions layered on top of a mod system. Armor is more or less back to being almost entirely cosmetic, and it’s an entire potential loot chase that means nothing now, a far cry from other games in the genre.
Guns have the opposite problems. Too many guns, both reprisals and new ones, where so few ever feel meaningful in any capacity. A 5/5 roll is not a power spike, it’s a power blip, at best. Crafting continues to have muddied the loot chase further as players hunt red borders, not rolls, and the entire state of looting is in a poor place. This was not addressed at all.
However, unless revenue is down, unless playercounts are crashing, nothing really changes here, that much is clear. “Community sentiment” does not seem to be enough to motivate Bungie to change, and we’ll see where things go from here. Probably not very far.
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