Destiny 2's Slow, Painful Death Removes a Critical Third Space for Gamers

He stood on the roof of a decaying structure in the Plaguelands section of Old Russia on Earth while his girlfriend, Liv, stood a short distance away, perched atop a nearby building. Over their shared comms, Lord Saladin grimly recalled the fall of the Iron Lords. Across the way, Liv waved to Mac. He smiled and waved back. In real life, they were hundreds of miles apart, and their hearts were breaking.

“It’s quite random, but there was a sequence during the Rise of Iron campaign where the two of us were on opposite ends of a structure while some dialogue was playing, and she just waved at me and I waved back,” Mactics told Polygon via email. “This was after months of being apart, and I can’t remember a time since then that I had had a stronger feeling of being right by her side.”

Nearly a decade later, Mactics stumbled across that memory again while preparing to say goodbye to the game that helped keep them together.

On May 21, Bungie announced that Destiny 2 would receive its final live-service content update on June 9, as the studio shifted its focus toward incubating new games. Destiny 2 wasn’t shutting down: Bungie promised to keep the game playable, just as the original Destiny remains playable today. But after nearly 12 years of the Destiny franchise, the announcement nevertheless marked the end of an era. There would be no more content, no new Strikes or Raids, and aside from the hollow hunt for the perfect Edge Transit roll, no real reason to keep playing.

Six days later, Mactics shared the story of how Destiny had become inextricably linked with his relationship on social media.

Mactics and his now-wife began dating during their sophomore year of high school. When graduation came, they chose colleges hundreds of miles apart. They decided to try long distance rather than abandon a relationship that had already lasted several years. The transition was brutal.

They wrote physical letters to each other, spraying them with cologne or perfume. They exchanged sweatshirts carrying each other’s scent. They would even fall asleep together over FaceTime. None of it could capture the casual intimacy they had taken for granted when seeing one another every day required only a short drive. Then they tried Destiny.

Mactics had started playing the original Destiny around April 2016, after hearing his brother talk incessantly about the game. His girlfriend, meanwhile, wasn’t much of a gamer. Mactics suggested that they try playing together as another way to spend time with each other from afar. What began as a single virtual date soon became a nightly ritual.

“Despite being so far away from each other, seeing her Guardian and her seeing mine made an indescribable difference,” Mactics wrote in his May 27 post. “Our digital characters were a catalyst to manifesting each other’s presence right next to each other despite what felt like being on different sides of the world. We experienced every story, every adventure, every strike and every raid together over and over and over.”

Both played Hunters, the class defined by its agility, precision, and gunslinger flair. “Hunter mains through and through,” Mactics said. His wife would eventually get a Hunter class insignia tattoo. But they never invented elaborate backstories for their Guardians or role-played outright. The fantasy wasn't what mattered. The time together did.

“For us, just feeling like we were next to each other was more than enough,” Mactics said. Sometimes that meant behaving exactly as they would have if they really were in the same room. Standing close together, waving, just chatting while they idled at the Tower.

While taking his girlfriend through The Taken King campaign for the first time, Mactics remembered a notorious trap awaiting players as they climbed the colony ship in the Cosmodrome to retrieve Cayde-6’s stealth drive. During the mission called "Cayde's Stash,” a Taken Phalanx waits behind a door as a bit of a jump scare. (A normal Cabal Phalanx is just a brawny alien with a large shield, but the corrupted Taken version uses that same shield to emit a concussive energy blast.) It’s a trap designed into the mission to knock unsuspecting players off the ledge so they plummet to their death.

Mactics knew it was there. His girlfriend didn’t. Ladies first, right?

“There was a lot of cussing and laughter and feelings of betrayal as her character flopped off the tower,” he said. “Would still do it again, and I guarantee if the roles were reversed, she would’ve done it to me. There is a lot of teasing and banter between us. It’s one of my favorite parts of our chemistry together.”

They kept playing. Mactics credits the time they spent in Sol as a truly enriching part of their relationship.

“Every story, every adventure, every Strike, and every Raid,” Mactics recalled. Four years passed. He graduated, received his first job offer, and the couple moved into a small apartment together in downtown Cincinnati. Now, they now own a house together and are married.

Destiny remained part of Mactics’ life even after it was no longer necessary to bridge the physical distance between them. Mactics eventually made his passion for Destiny into a career as a content creator. Though he's a Twitch Partner with 141 thousand followers, he built his largest audience on the YouTube channel he created in 2020, which has 431,000 subscribers. While his content varies, he often focuses on helping Destiny 2 players tackle the game’s more demanding PvE content, particularly with complex character builds for endgame challenges he’s still publishing today. One of his top posts, to the tune of 800,000 views, focuses on a hugely powerful Arc Hunter build. While he’s branched out into games like Warframe and Bungie’s Marathon, Destiny remains the game around which he built his audience — and, as he tells it, many of his closest relationships.

Even the brother who originally introduced him to Destiny has returned, after roughly half a decade away, and is running raids with him again.

“The idea of something that can make people far away from each other feel connected to that degree is something that is really attractive to immerse yourself in,” Mactics said. He suspects the relationships he built and strengthened through Destiny eventually helped push him toward becoming more involved in its wider community.

So, when Bungie announced that development on Destiny 2 was coming to an end, Mactics found himself sitting at the character-select screen during a livestream, talking with other members of the community as they processed the news together. Then he noticed the View Your Legacy option.

The feature preserves players' milestones: finishing campaigns, completing raids and other moments from a Guardian’s history. Mactics opened it simply to reminisce. Dates marking his first completion of Destiny’s original campaign and his first King’s Fall clear brought back old memories. Then Rise of Iron appeared.

“When I saw that simple screenshot of our names on the Rise of Iron campaign, it hit me like a bus,” Mactics said. “You really don’t realize how much of a real-life impact these video games can have on you.”

There they were: Mactics and Liv, together on Sept. 20, 2016, the day Rise of Iron launched.

“In the blink of an eye, that screenshot took me back to a time when I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my TV at the foot of my bed, playing Rise of Iron with someone hundreds of miles away that I was used to seeing every single day.”

Bungie released Monument of Triumph on June 9, Destiny 2’s final planned live-service update. Fittingly, it was conceived partly as a retrospective, celebrating what Guardians had accomplished over the game’s lifetime while reworking Destiny 2 into something players could return to after active development ended.

Much of the conversation surrounding Destiny’s final years has inevitably revolved around numbers: player counts, engagement, the commercial health of the game and what those metrics meant for its future. Mactics thinks that can obscure what games like Destiny are actually for.

“Games allow us to have fun and make memories,” he said. “The player counts and numbers are for the developers and the businesses to worry about, and I feel that we as players only do ourselves a disservice when we fixate on player counts having a direct correlation to how fun or un-fun a game is for us personally.”

“If numbers were indicative of objective quality in this regard, then McDonald’s would be considered the best restaurant in the world,” he added.

Destiny 2 is no longer active in the live-service sense, but it isn’t dead. Its servers remain online. Guardians still flock to the Tower, raid with clanmates, or simply bounce a big purple ball off their heads. Maybe they’re dancing somewhere in the solar system alongside someone they love. For Mactics, that really matters.

“At the end of the day, it shouldn’t matter if a million, 10 thousand, or 100 people are playing the game that you are also playing,” he said. “If you have fun playing it, feel connected to others through it, or make fond memories while on it, then who cares?”

For four years, Destiny gave Mactics and the woman he would eventually marry somewhere to be together when circumstances split them apart. While it might feel like the game is dead, the memories remain — and so does the game itself.

“If you still have fun playing it,” he said, “then it is as alive as ever.”