It's bittersweet that the best time to play Destiny 2 in years coincides with its end, but I'm happy for the new players who get to experience its most liberating iteration yet

When Bungie announced the final update for Destiny 2, I felt relieved. It surprised me as well. As someone who's spent the past six years (and over 3,000 hours) battling humanity's enemies across the solar system, you'd think that news of my favorite MMO's end would fill me with sadness. But no, just a bittersweet sense of relief as I considered we were finally moving on (as we should've after The Final Shape's year) to whatever the future may hold.

Whether Destiny 3 gets made or not, I genuinely think this is the best thing that could've happened. For fans of the series, it gives us time to reassess our relationship with the games and remember what made them special in the first place, something that definitely felt impossible for me while I was still strapped into endless Portal power climb and the ever grinding gears of the live service machine.

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Even though it's "the end" of Destiny 2, there's still lots to do. My first port of call is filling out those extra loadout slots with some builds based on the new void and arc armour, plus all the exotic reworks. After that, I think I'm going to continue ticking off solo dungeons. Hopefully, there'll be a few more raids on the cards, too, if we can get the band back together.

And this is what makes Destiny 2's final update, ironically, a good place to start. It adds numerous quality of life features we've been requesting for years, loot refreshes, exotic reworks, and even attempts to revitalise stale old destinations with the new Distortions activity. The narrative conclusion might be lackluster, but 71 pages of patch notes stand testament to just how much this final update has added to the game.

It's a patch about revitalising and reliving what it was, versus what it became in its final year or so.

What exactly does the new update bring, then? 17,000 words of changes detail the exact tweaks being made, but to summarize briefly:

• Sparrow Racing returns from Destiny 1
• A new Pantheon raid boss gauntlet brings back vaulted bosses
• Restored destination director and simplified Portal
• Lots of new guns, perk, and loot refreshes
• The ability to upgrade gear tier for weapons (making the tier system mostly redundant, thank god)
• Catalysts for all exotic weapons that didn't have them
• Reworked anti-champion mods so they're linked to weapon frames and the ability to choose between seven artifacts (seasonal buff sets)
• New aspects, grenades, and abilities
• More attunement options so you can target farm easily
• 300 more vault space slots and eight more loadout slots

Even Gambit got some love. As Destiny players do, our clan has had numerous QoL complaints over the years, one of the foremost being the inability to link seasonal artifact perks to loadouts—but Bungie even tweaked that. It's such a strange situation to suddenly have all of these amazing quality of life additions only for it to coincide with the end.

Couldn't it have been this way all along? *sigh* well, at least if you're starting now you can benefit from all of these lovely inclusions. And to clarify, Destiny 2 is still a very good game. I think the reason why anyone on the outside noticed players frequently getting so frustrated with it during its lifespan is frankly (despite Bungie's bungling) because there's no other game quite like it—sure, you can go play something else, but there are few other places you can go for a true Destiny-like experience.

Even though I fell off shortly after the release of Renegades and Edge of Fate's dire Portal grind, I wouldn't trade my 3,000 hours in Destiny 2 for any other game. When it's good, it's really good, especially its raids, dungeons, and high-level activities. There's a reason I've gilded the Conqueror title seven times, because in pure PvE buildcrafting and gameplay terms, Destiny 2 is still at the top of its game.

Obviously, there's an elephant in the room, though—what about the Red War? What about the original Destiny 2 campaign that sets the narrative foundation for every expansion after? I would've liked to replay the campaigns, and it would've gone a long way to repairing relations with players who are still smarting about that content vaulting years after the fact.

Sadly, though, Bungie wasn't able to bring it back out of the vault for whatever reason, presumably because it would fundamentally break the newer version of the game, which I think Destiny players are well aware is held together by string and duct tape. It did, however, finally create a collection bundle where you can grab all of the available expansions in a straightforward way. It's massively discounted right now, and I assume will be for a while yet.

The final update announcement actually made me more excited to play the game than I have been in a long time—finally, I thought, I can enjoy Destiny separate from the live service structure that came to dominate it, sometimes to its detriment. No more escalating power gains or pointless grinds, and all with the backdrop of the current QoL changes like tons of loadout slots so I don't have to think about Guardian Rank, and wide-ranging attunement so I can farm more easily for what I want.

It's like Bungie has unlocked Destiny 2 with this update, and it'll be the most liberating iteration of the game's new player experience ever. And for those of us who've done almost everything, there are new exotics to grab, new builds to make, and time still to tackle those challenges you've always pondered, like ticking off solo dungeons or trying the Pantheon.