Last night, the entire Destiny community sat around hitting refresh on their browsers until finally, Bungie released their long-awaited blog post update about the future of Destiny 2.
It felt like déjà vu, a repeated scenario from late November last year when Bungie did the exact same thing with a development update that was supposed to lay out the plan to fix the game, and once again, I find myself with similar thoughts after reading the endless list of bullet points.
Almost all of the changes being proposed here are good, and improvements that should help the game in some capacity. But major, sweeping changes feel forever out of reach. Like I said before, that cake is baked, and we’re not seeing big changes to the loadout system, the total destruction of Eververse or anything like that. And what we are seeing are a number of changes that are, quite simply, reverting back to features and fixes that we saw across three years of Destiny 1.
I’m not exaggerating. It is now officially ridiculous to see just how many of these upcoming changes are rooted in Destiny 1. After D1 fixes like vendors selling gear and Xur’s Three of Coins from the last update, from this new one we have:
- A toned-down Eververse, putting sparrows, ghosts and ships back in to the game’s loot pool in addition to offering them in Bright Engrams
- Raids getting gear with raid-specific perks once more
- The return of strike scoring and the elimination of the timed Nightfall
- Private matches, 6v6 and Rumble returning to Crucible
- Modifiers on Heroic Strikes
- Vault space increase and a marginally expanded exotic collection kiosk
In fact, scanning the entire document, it’s extremely hard for me to pull out fixes that have nothing at all with Destiny 1, and when I do, it’s not even clear they’re improvements. For example:
- Masterwork armor (which reduces damage taken during super) will soon join Masterwork weapons, but it’s not clear this entire system is better than randomized gear rolls from D1.
- Ranked play is coming to PvP, which D1 never had, but without larger, sweeping changes to the sandbox and the new weapon loadout system, it’s not clear anyone will ever like D2 PvP as much as they did D1’s.
Elsewhere, Bungie is still not adequately explaining concrete plans that could be interesting at some unspecified point in the future.
- The mod system is being reworked with no details
- “Endgame pursuits” other than Bright Engram XP grinding are being worked on with no details
- Exotics are being reworked with no details
The other issue is time. Not only are most of these fixes simply crawling back to the way Destiny 1 used to do things, but players will have to wait a long time for these changes to take place. Heroic strike modifiers aren’t coming until spring. Neither are all the new Crucible modes. Addressing shaders and the dismantling issue isn’t on the docket until fall, along with other stuff that sounds actually interesting like “Weapon Slot and Archetype Improvements” and “Masterwork Exotics.” Wait a year, maybe the game will be what you want by then. Maybe.
The thing is, it’s not that any of these improvements are bad. It’s that players are frustrated that Bungie is spending the first year of Destiny 2 trying to revert back to being Destiny 1, when it should have never thrown away so many aspects of that game to begin with. If all these changes are made, we might be somewhat close to the state Destiny 1 was in after year 3, but even then, it seems unlikely we’ll be all the way there as certain major features will probably still be missing (I’m guessing we’re married to dual primaries and consumable shaders forever).
While Destiny 1 had its ups and downs, the general consensus was that it ended its run in a refined, healthy state. And while I’ve gone over why many of those fixes didn’t make their way into D2, mainly because the two were being worked on at the exact same time and it’s tough for everything to translate, that doesn’t make it less frustrating for players who see the game taking demonstrable steps backward, and also making decisions that were just plain bad from the outset.
I’m not seeing a Diablo 3 moment here. Something that is so dramatic that it instantly turns the game from meh to a realization of what it was always meant to be. I don’t believe that’s impossible, or that this is “too little too late,” as any improvements are welcome, but I do think earth-shaking changes are needed to breathe life back into the playerbase. And I don’t think Masterwork armor or a mildly less terrible Eververse or jamming 6v6 matches into 4v4 maps is going to do it.
I’m going to keep playing Destiny 2 when there’s new content to consume, but that means I’m probably setting the game down until spring, and then once more until fall, when perhaps the most interesting changes to the game will finally arrive. Destiny 2 may be heading toward its Taken King moment with a big fall expansion, but the point is that we should need another Taken King moment, as we’ve learned all these lessons and made all these fixes already.
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