Destiny 2 director doesn't want it to 'be a dead live game', as the ailing shooter stares down the barrel of fan outrage: 'We want to keep building Destiny'

Destiny 2 Portal modifiers: A Hunter aiming the New Land Beyond rifle towards the camera in a Vex environment. — (Image credit: Bungie)

Destiny 2's had a bad go of it in 2025. I've only been watching from the sidelines, but you only have to listen to PC Gamer's resident D2 enjoyer (well, not so much, recently) Phil Savage in his tear-down of the game's portal update to get a sense of what's gone wrong:

"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." Oof.

The issues are numerous, and better-described by Phil, but to summarize: A long, dragged-out, seasonal power grind that takes around 50 hours; A dearth of meaningful content at the end of said grind; Clunky and meaningless difficulty progression entirely based on power level; Punishing players for using old gear, rendering past efforts null and void and, to top it all off, tossing the game's bad-luck protection into the trash.

Unfortunately, I've written enough about live service games and MMORPGs to know that talk is cheap—unless you've got good will banked up (and even then, it can be spent) you need to back chatter up with action. Which Bungie wants to do, obviously. Renegades, the game's upcoming expansion, is aiming to fix Destiny 2's recent missteps.

"When you're making something new, you often have a bunch of conventions and boundaries that you have to consider, especially for games that have been around for a long time like Destiny. It's tempting to stick to those conventions as being the boundaries of the rules, but the truth is that you need to re-examine all of them every single time when trying to really create something special and make a splash."

Personally, even though I've got no Sparrow in this race, I'm rooting for Destiny 2—because good lord, it's been a bloodbath for MMOs this year. And while technically an MMO by strained definitions, I'd rather we didn't lose another cousin, albeit a distant one, to big-budget mismanagement.

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Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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