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.
A light at the end of the tunnel seems to be that Destiny 2's developers have taken notice of the fan outrage. Both in prior community posts, and in a recent interview with IGN. Game director Tyson Green tells the site that while The Final Shape was meant to put a capstone on the saga, it wasn't intended to be closing time for ol' D2.
"We still want to keep making Destiny; we still have many stories to tell in this universe. There are still lots of things to do, and we have to keep building the game. Unfortunately, it was not gracefully managed, but we had to try something."
Green says that the "something" in question sounded "great on paper, but it didn't work. I think we've been taught a bunch of hard lessons about what our players want, and there are really two kinds of live games: those that listen to the players and respond, and those that don't. And we don't want to be a dead live game, we want to keep building Destiny."
What follows is, unfortunately, a little boilerplate, even if it's technically correct: "We're listening to our players, and what our players are telling us is that they don't want to chase a simple number that goes up, they want real rewards."
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."
Ultimately, Green says that "there are things that we definitely wouldn't have done, but we had to accept and push past those usual boundaries to do these things, and as long as it's still fun and people are responding to it, and the feel is there, then it's the right decision."
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.
