Destiny 2 is backtracking on its biggest player-oriented wins, and for what?

It feels to me like Destiny 2 (and Destiny at large) is inoculated against repeated success. With Bungie reducing the importance of weapon crafting and doubling down on the Power grind, the community is slowly growing more and more tired of how the studio is handling the game.

Specifically, we’ve now had not one but two huge Reddit threads where a Destiny 2 player going under the name of Techman- went deep into discussing what’s going on with Bungie’s flagship project. Their assessment? That Bungie is slowly but steadily dismantling the legacy of Destiny 2‘s former Game Director, Joe Blackburn. I wasn’t too worried when Blackburn, who was beloved by the community, announced his departure. His replacement was a different Bungie veteran, Tyson Green, and the future seemed reasonably bright at the time.

That assessment of mine can now safely be revised, as it hasn’t aged all that well. On top of releasing one buggy disaster after another, the delightful heights that Destiny 2 reached upon the release of The Final Shape have now been replaced by a series of confusing lows. Techman- has got an idea of why that is the case.

Bungie is messing up the legacy of Joe Blackburn, and that’s not a good sign for Destiny at large

Techman-‘s posts, which are massively upvoted and popular on the DestinyTheGame subreddit, have helped me contextualize what’s gone wrong with Destiny 2 over the past months. These assessments are exceedingly well-sourced and hugely supported by other members of the community, and they posit a few simple claims:

• that Joe Blackburn’s de-emphasized gear FOMO is being done away with
• that Destiny 2 is reverting to its old grindy self, necessitating a frankly extreme time investment from players

This is seemingly being accomplished mainly through a renewed focus on Power grinding and by deliberately not making cutting-edge top-of-the-line weapons craftable, which they were under Blackburn. Weapon crafting is a particularly notable issue here because it offered players a relatively straightforward and (more importantly) RNG-free way of earning endgame-ready gear.

Techman-‘s original post garnered lots of support when it was first posted, but Bungie’s recent developer update spurred them into action once again with a new assessment of the matter:

The author of these posts now feels that Bungie is working with “ego-based decision-making”, with Destiny 2 slowly peeling back all the many different quality-of-life improvements it received under Blackburn’s umbrella. The community now feels that Bungie doesn’t understand what the community wants and that the recent Episode Revenant’s Tonic-based RNG optimizing system is a straight downgrade compared to the established weapon crafting systems.

From my point of view, it seems entirely obvious that Bungie is floundering with Destiny 2. Earlier this year, I finally managed to put my feelings about the game into words with a simple argument: that this franchise’s biggest problem by far has always been uncertainty. This wasn’t quite as pronounced in the years past when we knew quite clearly what Bungie’s next step might be. Now, though, with Episodes falling flat on their faces time and again, and with Destiny 2: Frontiers being a huge unknown, the community is absolutely beset by uncertainty.

Players just don’t know what to make of Bungie’s current plans for the game, and given the studio’s latest developer update, there now seems to be a severe disconnect between the team and the community. That’s a huge issue for a live-service game that lives and dies by how much its players care about the present and the future.

Compared to what we had on the cusp of The Final Shape, Destiny 2 is now grindier and less approachable. These issues are compounded further still by the fact that Frontiers is supposed to be a huge revamp of the core progression loop with sandbox campaigns, Metroidvania elements, and more. Techman-‘s posts are a solid mirror of the current state of Destiny 2‘s community, and I highly recommend reading up on them if you haven’t kept up with things. On the flip side, it seems like Destiny: Rising is better than anyone expected it to be, so hey.

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