Join The Club
Next week, Destiny 2 comes to an end. The Monument of Triumph update, releasing on June 9, marks the final release for Bungie's nine-year-old live-service behemoth. I have to admit that, when I first heard the news, I was almost relieved—over the last year I've watched the game's baffling new direction alienate almost every person I regularly played with. Thanks to the disastrous introduction of the Portal and the unravelling of the many player concessions made under the Joe Blackburn era, Destiny simply felt less fun to play.
And yet, there's one final, bitter irony now that the end is in sight: The Monument of Triumph update looks like the best Destiny 2 patch we've had in years.
It is genuinely absurd the number of quality-of-life updates being stuffed into this final patch. While I'd expected an effort to leave the game in a better place for its final, forever state, I'm finding that with every new preview, I'm awaiting next week's release with more and more excitement. Here's just some of the major changes dropping:
- A much more simplified version of the Portal that takes away all of the need to faff around with mods
- A major buff to all primary weapons
- An extra 300 vault slots
- And extra eight loadout slots
- The ability to save your artifact mods directly to your loadouts
- Seven goddamn artifacts to choose between
- Intrinsic anti-champion functionality added to all weapons
- Just an absurdly big update to loot pools throughout the game
And those are just the things that made me actively say "oh shit, that's great". Let me be clear here: Bungie has cooked. The fact that I had to manually adjust my selection of artifact mods every time I changed loadout has been a small but consistent annoyance for years. It's so obviously inconvenient that I'd just assumed that, for whatever reason, Bungie couldn't fix it. And now, here, at the end, it's just solved.
All of which leads to perhaps an obvious question: Why the hell did players need to wait until now—effectively the death of the game—to get this stuff? Entire books could be written about what went on behind the scenes at Bungie across Destiny 2's development. About the studio's history of poor decisions that would irrevocably harm the game. Maybe the constant, grinding need for new content prevented Bungie from prioritising tweaks that would improve the basic day-to-day experience of play.
Whatever the truth, at least the game looks to end on something of a high note. I may be frustrated that the game had to die to get some meaningful improvements, but at least next week's final release offers up a compelling reason to return to the game.
