One day, in 2013, a young, 10 year old lad from Wisconsin was up past his bedtime scrolling YouTube on the family laptop when he gets a recommendation for the reveal of a strange new video game called “Destiny”. The very first thing the video states is that its from the creators of Halo and the company that brought you Call of Duty. He knows these words. They trigger positive responses in his brain, recognition pathways light up, and he likes what comes next even better. What seems to be a knight in shining armor fires an extravagant looking rocket launcher at an alien tank, a cloaked bounty hunter wields a flaming revolver to incinerate several large alien soldiers, and some sort of robed wizard fires a black hole, decimating an entire battle line.
The very next day he begs his mom to drive him down to the local GameStop and preorder a copy on the spot.
I’ve never been to an AA meeting, but I’ve heard the first step towards recovery is admitting you’re an addict. So, hey everyone, I’m the aforementioned young kid, and I’m a Destiny addict. I played this game for 10 years and have recently entered the retirement stage. Sounds a bit like an over-exaggeration, but Destiny has legitimately been a cornerstone of my life for a decade. That is half of my life. I had–and, to an extent, still do have–a deep emotional investment in that game, its community, and the universe that surrounds it. I’ve played Bungie games my whole life, starting my love of gaming and sci-fi with Halo and continuing it with Destiny from a very young age. I’ve met friends, made lifelong connections, and have great memories all involving Destiny. Its had its ups and downs (a LOT of downs), but I’ll always cherish it for what it brought to my life. It is not far fetched in the slightest to state that I would not be the same person I am today without Destiny
So in June, The Final Shape released. Big expansion. Story events that had been building for years got their payoff, lots of new activities, and a great new raid. Everything was great! I played it for around 2 weeks, did the raid when it came out and I enjoyed all of it. Destiny was back in a big way, and the future looked very bright.
And then I logged in the day after the raid had come out and the desire was gone. I booted it up, logged in, selected my character and just stared at the Orbit screen for five minutes, scrolling endlessly through the same daily tasks I had done for years and I simply did not feel any drive to play anymore. The fire was out, The Final Shape the last, massive dump of kerosene to try and keep alive what had likely been a sputtering and dying flame for some time now
So what the hell even happened? I have a few theories for why the sudden burnout hit me and many others at around the same time-Destiny 2 has been hemorrhaging players since The Final Shape launch, even if testimony from people who still play tells me that the new content has been half decent. Lets examine a few objective facts and personal feelings together, if you’ll indulge me.
1. Seasonal Burnout
The most likely culprit of the sudden drop in interest of me and many others I suspect has been an overall tiredness with the seasonal model. For those who didn’t waste a decade of their lives, Destiny used to have an “Expansion Cycle” where 2 smaller expansions would release over about a year/year and a half, followed by a big one that really changes the game up. Developer Bungie ditched this model for various reasons in 2018 with the introduction of the Seasonal Model, basically replacing the smaller expansions with stretched out miniature content drops meant to sustain the more dry parts of the content cycle.
Noble intentions, I’m sure; Destiny had long periods of basically having nothing new to do under the previous system. But I think these “content draughts”, as people called them, were not as bad as many think for the health of the game.
See, the genius of Destiny to me was that it felt like a big MMO such as World of Warcraft of Final Fantasy 14, but didn’t have the enormous time commitment that those games required. Yeah, when I was in middle and high school I had a ton of time to spend doing nothing but play video games, so this wasn’t a big deal to me, but then I got into college and suddenly sort of missed the long stretches where I could drop Destiny for a bit and come back to it refreshed and excited for new expansions after a break.
Destiny no longer wants you to take that break. It wants you to keep playing, and keep feeding you food while you run on its eternal hamster wheel. And the fact of the matter is that the hamster wheel is tiring, and the tube they feed you out of isn’t really good food most of the time; its just slop meant to tide you over to when the next batch of good hamster food is ready. When I got done with The Final Shape’s incredible campaign, endgame content and raid and then looked at the New Content section and saw the hamster wheel waiting with the slop tube dripping the tasteless hamster food, I felt nothing but dread, and decided I no longer wanted to run on it. I suspect many others felt this way as well, accounting for a big drop in player engagement.
2. Loss of Faith in Bungie
Seems a bit like stating the obvious, but Bungie lately has not been the best acting company for those in the loop. Yeah, its a big shocker that the multi-billion dollar company doesn’t always act in the most moral ways, but for a while, Bungie seemed like a genuinely decent company to follow-they supported a ton of charities, always seemed to treat their employees decently, and had lots of open communication between the playerbase and the developers, so it felt less like a faceless corp and more like a group of actual people.
A lot changed in around Spring 2023 however when CEO Pete Parsons decided to lay off a ton of Bungie old guard, some going back to the Halo and even the Marathon days in some cases. Big names leaving Bungie either forcefully or by circumstance included longtime project leads Chris Proctor and Joe Blackburn, along with face of the projects Chris Barett, longtime artist Lorraine McClean from the Marathon days, and beloved composer Michael Salvatori all departed the company amidst allegations against several current and past Bungie executives, and apparently Parsons bought another sports car amongst the chaos, which is just not great optics. Communication between players and company was also cut down a lot during this time period, due to bad actors on both sides.
This big scandal involving the layoffs among other issues such as the ever-increasing prevalence of the Eververse microtransaction store led to a general loss of faith in the Bungie team of developers and executives; if they can’t treat both the consumer and the employee right after a year of record profits, how can we keep the faith that they’ll start doing it again later while developing another game in tandem with the Marathon reboot (Which has also been in an iffy development state as far as we know)? This likely didn’t lead to a huge drop off in player retention directly, but led to increasing feelings of hostility towards the organization as a whole and a general feeling of “This is the last straw” across the community. Why keep giving Bungie a free pass–and my money–if this is how they’re going to spend it?
3. Division of Resources and Lack of Direction
I’m going to make a very bold claim that will get me ostracized in many circles if I’m ever relevant enough for my opinion to matter on anything:
Destiny should have axed PvP years ago, and the game is worse off for its insistence on continuing to cater to its ever decreasing audience.
Destiny 1’s Crucible PvP was bullshit. It was low-stakes, it was unbalanced, it was clearly a bit of an afterthought and that was great. It was a fun little side-mode that didn’t take too much away from the game that had a competitive element in Trials of Osiris but was mostly just for goofing off and grinding specific items.
With Destiny 2, Bungie wanted–and still wants–for people to care about PvP, but the nature of Destiny as a game and how it functions makes it very hard. It will always be unbalanced and unfair, because that’s just the nature of the beast with a game that functions around unique loot drops and stats that you can acquire in places that aren’t the PvP mode. This insistence on catering to the dwindling PvP crowd, however has continuously harmed other parts of the game either indirectly or very directly, with balance changes neutering PvE items for the sake of PvP balance and money, time and resources being devoted to this gamemode that only sub-human bug men and Twitch streamers have ever cared about. PvP continued to get updates and balance changes where core playlists like the Vanguard playlist and actual unique ideas like Gambit (Which should’ve been the future of “competitive” Destiny, but that’s a story for another day) rotted in the corner.
This isn’t a problem that falls directly at the feet of the PvP team and playerbase, but it is indicative of a lack of true direction with what Destiny wants to be. Destiny has struggled with the question of what it wants to be since its inception; its constantly in the pursuit of trying to please everyone, but often ends of pleasing no one at all as a result. If I was in charge–which I’m not, because I’m a guy who complains online and doesn’t make video games for a living, but I digress–Destiny PvP would be treated like Warframe’s PvP: It gets a new map every now and then, but is explicitly a side mode for you to goof around in with your buds and the focus is on the real meat of the game. Bungie won’t ever do something like this though, because their insistence on trying to please everyone has spawned a very loud vocal minority that thinks Destiny should be a PvP first game, and the resources that the PvP commitment demands will always pull Destiny away from being a truly excellent PvE focused game.
4. A Good Time To Ride Into The Sunset
This is simultaneously the least and the most complex reason for my own and many others current feelings on Destiny. The fact of the matter is is that The Final Shape just kind of felt like the right time, thematically and story-wise, to call it a day with Destiny as a part of my life. This is gonna get a bit sappy here, and I hate to sound sappy over a video game, but if anyone has earned the right to be sappy over Destiny its me goddammit.
The Final Shape was the conclusion for a story that had been building for 10 years. As we sprinted towards the conclusion through all the ups and downs of the past few years, having The Final Shape completely nail the landing as far as narrative content goes felt great, and uniting several alien races under the same banner of resistance, reconnecting with old characters, passing the torch to new characters and blowing an evil God bent on the destruction of whatever civilization is left in the solar system felt like a nice time to lay down the rifle and ride into the sunset.
In a weird canon sense, I like to imagine my Guardian as very, very tired by the end of The Final Shape. The dude has been through the shit, died and came back thousands of times and killed everything from Gods, to Kings, to God-Kings all in the name of chasing a fancy new gun for 10 years. On a personal level, however, I was also tired. I was 10 years old when Destiny released. I’m 21 now. I’m in college, I’m looking for real jobs, people that I met playing Destiny who are older than me have real jobs, and relationships, and even kids.
I’ve made tons of friends that I still talk to to this day from Destiny-I even met one of my current best friends because we both played in 5th grade. I will be forever grateful for what this game has done for my life, even if that involved a lot of money and time spent on bullshit. It continues to be an incredibly unique experience in the industry that nothing quite replicates. No one has done or does what Destiny does. But, thematically, ending on a 10 year saga that I had played for half my life felt like a good time to put a cap on it and say “Yeah, that was awesome. But its time to move on. Thank you”.
Don’t get me wrong; I long every day of my life to go back to a time when Destiny was still new, and mysterious, and I had this drive to play all day with my buddies. I’m still chasing the itch; I’ve tried Diablo IV, Borderlands, and I’ve been playing Path of Exile 2 lately, but nothing has replicated the feeling I got with Destiny. The world, the mechanics, how it FELT to play Destiny has never been close to being matched by any other MMO or “Looter Shooter” I’ve ever played, not to mention the excellent community and friends I made playing. But with all these factors, Bungie losing goodwill fast and nothing interesting on the horizon regarding Destiny, it is time for me to move on, at least for now.
The Final Shape ends with the music track from one of my favorite pieces in a franchise with already excellent music: As the final cutscene plays, the famous sting from “The Hope” rings out, which is not only one of the first things you heard upon booting up Destiny 1 for the first time, but also one of the first pieces of music from Destiny ever shared, appearing in the original trailer for Destiny way back in 2013. Its an unironically beautiful piece of music, and to hear it again at the end of it all genuinely moved me to tears. I’m even getting a bit misty eyed thinking about it now. I have so many memories and emotions intrinsically linked to this stupid game about shooting aliens, and to bring it full circle at the very end after a decade of investment… I couldn’t have asked for a better ending.
So if anyone who has ever worked on Destiny in the past decade somehow ends up reading this, yeah. That was awesome. But its time for me to go. Thank you, for everything. I’ll see you starside.
