As Bungie flounders following Destiny 2's disastrous Portal update, is there any saving the game?

When I reviewed The Edge of Fate, I had plenty of issues with the new direction Destiny 2 was taking. The expansion itself was… fine—a few highlights, but mostly unremarkable. The more pressing issue was the Portal, the new hub for Destiny 2's seasonal power grind.

Still, I figured I'd give it a chance. Maybe it made a poor first impression. Maybe things would pick up once I started earning better gear. This season, I committed myself to the grind; to finding out if I was wrong, if things weren't as bad as I feared.

Now that I've achieved power level 400, I can definitively say that, no, it's actually so much worse.

It's not just that the power grind feels unrewarding—although it does. This new version of Destiny 2 fails across the board. It fails in ways that would never happen if you were creating a game from the ground up; its issues partly a result of crowbarring the old version of the game into this ill-fitting suit.

This was a critical moment for Bungie, and the worst possible time to make such a fundamental misstep. After the layoffs, the uncertainty, and the underwhelming response to Marathon, the studio desperately needed a win. Unfortunately the new version of the game feels designed for no-one; a boardroom idea of player engagement and monthly active users given life, existing in stark contrast to what any Destiny 2 player actually wanted. And even then, it's bungled throughout—a muddled hodgepodge of contrasting systems that somehow punishes players for even attempting to engage with it at face value.

As someone who has enjoyed Destiny 2 throughout its lifespan—in spite of many of the decisions made by Bungie along the way—I would like the game to be good again. And so I'm going to go into excruciating detail about my problems with what Destiny 2 has become. Get ready, because there are a lot.

The power grind is too long

This seems to be the main point Bungie has conceded to—telling players a few weeks ago that, "Progression is clearly slower than we want it to be, and we plan to generally increase the speed of progression for most players".

Despite this, Bungie announced a series of short-term changes that would have actually slowed the speed of progression—a move that just a week later they walked back after the inevitable community backlash. This is a concern, and not just because of Bungie's terminal inability to not walk on landmines of its own making. The proposed short-term tweaks suggest that Bungie may be looking to gently nudge us towards a faster levelling curve, instead of what it should actually be doing: smashing the power grind with hammers.

I'll lay out my bias here: I hate the power grind. I have always hated the power grind. Previously, at least, it was just an inconvenience. Before The Edge of Fate, raising your level was a thing that happened slowly because you could only earn a certain number of powerful and pinnacle engrams each week. And while that was annoying, there was at least variety and consistency inherent to the system.

Most activities would have some form of weekly reward that would increase your power level, encouraging you to dip into a selection of matchmade playlists. And those playlists would inevitably have their own loot pools and progression systems, so you at least have the chance to complete multiple goals at once.

In recent years, under former game director Joe Blackburn's stewardship, Bungie even experimented with not raising the power cap season-to-season at all, instead using power deltas—capping activities at a fixed difficulty regardless of your actual level. For me it was a success: letting me focus on what I wanted without having to do the requisite busywork for the privilege to play. It was a tantalising glimpse of a better game that's been cruelly ripped away.

Now the power grind is not only back, it's been supersized. I've seen some argue that it's a better system on paper because there is no weekly limit to how much power increase you can earn. I disagree, because to balance that concession, Bungie has taken this—the most boring part of the game—and made it the hard barrier to getting what you actually want. If your aim is to get the best loot in this looter shooter, your only choice is to buckle down and grind until your number is high enough for good gear to drop.

According to Time Wasted on Destiny, my climb to my current level of 400 has taken 70 hours. Estimating about 20 of that was spent with the expansion's campaign and destination, that means my seasonal grind—levelling from 200-400—took me approximately 50 hours of playtime.

That's 50 hours of running the same handful of activities, watching as a number slowly increased up to the arbitrary cap that meant I was getting better rewards. They were some of the most tedious, unrewarding hours I've ever spent in Destiny 2. If it wasn't for Netflix on the second screen and a perverse desire to fully experience how bad things were, I'd have never made it. Most of my friends didn't—almost everybody I used to play with checked out weeks ago.

The Portal doesn't have enough to do

Once you hit 400, you're guaranteed the highest rewards you can currently earn—tier four loot, with a small chance for them to drop as tier five. Ostensibly this means I've finished the climb: I can finally focus on earning gear for my builds.

This should be the fun stage: Dropping into whatever I want, and being appropriately rewarded for it. In practice, what that actually means is running the same handful of activities as before, but now with slightly better loot at the end.

Before The Edge of Fate, Destiny 2 was made up of separate activities that each contained their own loot pool. Seasonal activities, destinations, Vanguard Ops, Crucible, Gambit, raids, dungeons and Nightfalls all had distinct weapons. The loot chase wasn't particularly deep, but it did lend itself to pursuing drops across a variety of modes. Even if there weren't any weapons you were excited for in a given season, there were plenty of progression hooks that rewarded materials or bonuses. There was some value in playing a variety of different things.

In Edge of Fate, outside of the expansion and the new raid, everything else has been flattened into the Portal, which contains three loot pools—one for Crucible, one for Pinnacle Ops, and one that covers both Solo and Fireteam Ops. For a variety of reasons (I'll get to them), there's really no point running anything outside of the Portal any more. And the Portal simply doesn't have enough to do.

We've gone from a game so big that Bungie felt it had to remove entire chunks of it, to one that hyperfocuses on a small handful of activities that are supposed to keep players busy for half a year.

Currently there are four Pinnacle Ops, repurposed Exotic missions that struggle to hold up to repeat play. Even with the promise of a new Mint Retrograde—easily the best weapon added this expansion—it's hard to stomach yet another run of Starcrossed or Kell's Fall. Worse, there are only six Solo Ops, an actual disaster given how heavily the grind prioritises them.

Fireteam Ops are more numerous—a whole 16 missions! But that playlist is poisoned by how inconsistent it is. Unlike Solo and Pinnacle Ops, which grant score based on objectives, securing a top rank rating in Fireteam Ops requires you and your team to kill enemies, with a time bonus for finishing quickly. Even in the best case scenario, these two goals are at odds with each other. It's easy to misjudge and finish with a lower rank, which means lower tier rewards. Unless you can guarantee top rank, you've essentially wasted your time.

The removal of distinct loot pools has a marked effect on what's worth playing. The reason Onslaught was so popular back when Into the Light released was because it showered you with some of the best guns available in the game. The reason the version of Onslaught released during Episode: Revenant was less popular was because it showered you with some of the most mid guns in the game.

Now, the Portal version of Onslaught offers up the exact same loot you'd get for doing any other Fireteam or Solo Op. And because Onslaught is both long and has a built-in fail state, it's possible to spend 30 minutes achieving basically nothing. In that time you could do six runs of the Caldera Solo Op to earn the same rewards. Simply put: The Portal fails because it encourages players to judge activities not on what's fun, but what their baseline time to reward efficiency is. There is no other reason to play.

Difficulty doesn't matter—only the big number

Every day, three different Fireteam Ops activities are picked for matchmaking privileges. Generally speaking, these are pretty fun—a decent challenge thanks to the fixed modifiers and power delta. Again, though, it's an inconsistent way to play thanks to both the time pressure and the potential to wipe, failing the activity. Jumping in with randoms is a dice roll, difficult to justify when the solo experience is more forgiving.

Outside of these scant few matchmade activities, difficulty is entirely customisable—letting you select modifiers that give you bonuses to your final completion rank. Ostensibly it's a system that should tie reward to risk. But as long as the modifiers put you in range of the top rating, you're fine.

That means customisable modifiers are an exercise in mitigating difficulty; making the process as smooth and as frictionless as possible because all that matters is the number of completions, rather than their quality. At 400, I can reliably guarantee a top-rank rating of a Solo Ops run with just a couple of negative modifiers, letting the time bonus take me the rest of the way.

A matchmade Grandmaster Fireteam Op locks my at 40 under power with a selection of negative and positive modifiers. Due to the lack of modifiers needed, my customised Solo and Pinnacle Ops are faster and easier—just 20 under power while still guaranteeing the best rewards.

In a version of the game that made sense, the most difficult activities would reward the best loot. Instead, this version of Destiny has a difficulty curve that oscillates wildly, temporarily spiking every 20 levels when you move up a reward score bracket. When you do, you just need to find the new combination of modifiers that's easiest to run, earn a few more drops to increase your level and, congratulations, you're back in easy mode.

And again, when it comes to the rewards, the only thing that matters is your power level. I've been running Grandmaster difficulty since I hit level 370 or so, but I wasn't earning those tier four drops until my character hit 400 power. That feels dumb on an individual level, but it's worse in a group. If I brought a friend into Grandmaster difficulty, our loot tiers for completing the same activity would be different based on our respective power level. If a friend and I went Flawless in the Trials of Osiris, the shared victory would result in vastly different rewards.

It's all broken. I want the game to reward me for completing difficult activities, and I want the barrier to entry for those difficulties to not be my power level, but my ability and gear. I want a system where newer players are encouraged to climb difficulty ranks to earn better rewards as their game knowledge increases, while those of us who've been accumulating knowledge and gear since launch can jump straight to the good stuff.

Let me pick difficulty based on the kind of reward I want to earn. Don't encourage me to customise the fun out of the game because doing the quick thing is more rewarding and consistent. And don't make me grind levels to get there, punishing me with worst loot for not hitting some arbitrary number.

Infuriatingly the expansion comes close to getting this right in places. Completing the Mythic difficulty weekly campaign missions rewards tier five loot drops. But it only does that because, at 350 power, I unlocked a permanent tier upgrade to every drop in the expansion's destination. Every part of the game is infected with this doomed obsession with raising your power level.

The 'New Gear' bonuses make everything worse

Every weapon and armour piece released in this expansion has a special icon next to it, marking it as new gear. Equipping this new gear gives you a bonus—an up to 10% boost to weapon damage, depending on the gun's tier, and a 15% bump to damage resistance for armour. This was a major point of contention for players before The Edge of Fate released, but I'll admit that I didn't think it would make much difference. After all, 10% extra damage is less than any decent weapon perk in the game. Surely it doesn't mean that much.

I was wrong. The new gear bonuses are a disaster for the long-term health of the game.

The problem isn't the buffs to damage and resistance. It's that new gear is prioritised in other ways too. The most insidious of these is that it increases the score you earn from Portal completions. With a full set of new gear, you'll need significantly fewer modifiers to guarantee an A-rank rating than if you're equipping older stuff. Given that's now the whole point of the game, it's punishing you for using anything else in your vault.

Seasonal conquests—special versions of Portal activities that are ostensibly the aspirational content of the new model, even if they reward the same loot as regular completions—feature a new modifier, avant garde, which forces you to equip new gear. At every stage, the new system is trying to cajole you into putting away your Zhaoli's Bane.

In case it needs spelling out, this sucks. Only certain exotics each season are featured—given the same status and bonuses as new gear. And only a limited number of weapons are available each season, meaning certain elements and archetypes are severely underrepresented. All of which means there are whole builds that are simply unviable.

Worse, though, it makes everything that came before The Edge of Fate pointless. If you still hadn't farmed your god rolls in some of the old dungeons, or unlocked crafted versions of all the weapons in an old raid, there's no point doing it now. Why chase loot if the game is going to penalise you for using it?

The thousands of hours I spent earning and enhancing my weapons? They feel useless now. My vault is full of hundreds of guns that I'd be stupid to ever equip.

And to make things worse: Next season, it all happens again. When Renegades launches in December, two things occur:

1. Everybody's power level resets back to 200
2. A new set of new gear will arrive

This means the excruciating power grind begins anew, and it'll be harder and slower for anyone still using the gear they earned this go around. Bungie has created an endless hamster wheel, and it's hoping you never get off.

This season Bungie introduced set bonuses for armour—perks akin to a weapon's origin trait that reward you for equipping multiple pieces from the same set. This should be all that's needed to get players invested in seasonal loot. This year's Solstice armour had a bonus that was well suited to Solar builds, and so I would have tried to get some good stat rolls on it regardless of whether it was new gear.

But instead of having faith in that system, Bungie has opted for a backhanded version of sunsetting—invalidating players time by penalising the use of anything but the current treadmill.

Crafting is dead, RNG reigns supreme

The Witch Queen introduced weapon crafting to the game—a much needed form of bad-luck protection that let you mitigate bad RNG by creating a version of a gun that had the exact perks you wanted.

Unfortunately, Bungie made a mistake with the initial version of the system. The crafted rolls had 'enhanced' perks that were outright better than those you could earn as random drops—not by much, but psychologically it didn't matter. It shifted the focus of the playerbase away from earning random rolls and towards earning enough 'red border' versions of each weapon to unlock its pattern for crafting.

For this new version of the game, crafting has been removed entirely—a single exotic weapon notwithstanding. We saw the warning signs of this change in the latter episodes of The Final Shape, but The Edge of Fate goes further still. You can't even craft weapons from the new raid, let alone those found in the Portal.

As someone who has farmed plenty of dungeons for rolls I never ended up earning, I was a fan of crafting as an option. I think some form of bad luck protection is ultimately healthy for the game, because it feels bad to pursue a goal with no guaranteed way to actually acquire it. And if the system had been swapped—where perks on weapon drops could be enhanced, but the crafted version couldn't—it would have probably kept people chasing new rolls.

Instead, Bungie has seemingly scrapped crafting entirely, despite the fact that it makes even more sense with the new tiered loot system. Crafted weapons were roughly analogous to tier two weapons in the current system, which means that higher tiers are strictly better—not by much, but psychologically it wouldn't matter. Those that want the very best of the best are free to farm tier fives. Those that don't could craft a perfectly fine version of the weapon instead.

Both this and the new gear change suggest to me an extreme lack of confidence from Bungie in its ability to design meaningful armour and weapons. If the enhanced barrels and origin traits you get from higher tier weapons meant something, the developers wouldn't need to remove crafting. If armour sets were actually transformative to your builds, the gear would be desirable without piling on bonuses for using it.

Every aspect of the game feels designed around fear that players will ever take a moment to leave the treadmill of acquiring new power and loot. Concessions to quality of life are being removed because the new system prioritises stick over carrot—a system that doesn't care if the loot you're chasing is good, because the chase is the only thing that matters. And if you throw your playerbase the occasional bone, maybe they'd do something other than play Destiny 2.

It's an exhausting space to play in. For many of the people I regularly grouped with, the removal of crafting back in Episode: Revenant ironically caused them to play the game less. It was a backslide for a game that, up until that point, had started to deprioritise the power grind and at least made an attempt to make Destiny more approachable to a variety of players. That era of the game was far from perfect, but it at least promised a better version of what Destiny 2 could be.

That's not all…

Somehow this isn't even all of my problems with the new progression system. Here are some more quickfire points:

• Once you hit level 400, the cost for infusing your gear to your current level becomes absurdly restrictive; another way the new system punishes variety and using old gear.
• Earning low-tier loot for completing raid encounters feels horrendous. And while there's a system for unlocking 'feats' that increase the difficulty and thus the tier of the rewards, that still means multiple completions of earning insta-delete trash.
• The lack of new vault space is a critical issue given the new armour stats and set bonuses. Players have more loot to hold onto, but nowhere to put it.
• There's an extreme lack of aspirational activities. I don't even know what I'd play with friends if they were still active in the game. There's nothing that feels like it rewards earning the high tier gear that Bungie is pushing us towards collecting.
• Fragile mods, which can only be inserted into new weapons and expire after a season are yet another reason not to use old gear. Maddeningly, one of these—Temporal Blast—is so much better than all the others that they might as well not exist, essentially rendering their design effort wasted.

The mid-season update, Ash & Iron, launches next week, and maybe it will solve some of these problems. A new Ultimate difficulty mode is being introduced, and maybe that will break out of the current power spike journey that plagues the rest of the Portal. Fireteam Ops is being rebalanced, hopefully resulting in more consistent A-rank ratings. And Bungie is moving some things around to fill out the Pinnacle Ops section a bit more.

Maybe this will help, but Bungie is also increasing the power grind by another 100 levels, and doubling down on new gear bonuses by adding a modifier—touché—that combines locked loadout and avant garde. Presumably that will become the easiest way to earn score, once again leaving older gear in the dirt.

Ultimately these changes are just more small tweaks and adjustments to an unpopular system that needs a vast and wide-ranging overhaul. Perhaps there's a version of the Portal that works, but beyond some vague allusions to reducing the power grind, it's not even clear that Bungie is planning to address the full extent of what ails this version of the game.

Destiny 2 was always a game that felt on the cusp of being great—albeit one that always fell short of reaching its full potential. What worries me is this new version feels so far from even that point that I'm not sure Bungie will ever get back to where it was.

Maybe the studio is banking that enough players will persist with Destiny 2 that these changes are worth the complaints from the community at large. But as someone who's been playing since the start, I can confidently say this season is the first time I've genuinely regretted the hours I put into the game. The power climb was unsatisfying, unrewarding and unstimulating. And when Renegades arrives and invalidates all that work, I can't imagine having to do it all again.