As we said in our Destiny 2: The Final Shape review, the MMO's latest expansion is a certified hit. It was set to become even better today, June 18, with the release of a Grandmaster version of Excision, the new 12-man activity that caps off the game's 10-year Light and Darkness saga. The only problem is that today's update kicked Destiny 2 servers straight back to the stone age, with many players saying they've been unable to log in at all. Is Destiny 2 down? Not quite, but it does seem a touch wobbly.
"We're currently investigating sign-on issues after today's update went out. More information will be provided when available," the Bungie Help Twitter account said at 1:44pm ET.
"Background maintenance has been extended," a 2:17pm ET update reads, adding that "game services may be impacted." Folks, game services were impacted.
It's unclear whether the downtime is directly related to the release of an updated 12-man activity that would naturally cram a whole bunch of players into instances so large that releasing Excision at all proved to be a technical challenge. It's possible that some other element of today's update, outlined in a recent This Week In Destiny post and detailed in a maintenance timeline which projected a 3pm ET end for maintenance, is what threw a wrench into things, or it may be an unrelated technical issue entirely.
The fact that many players say they can't even log in would suggest to me that the game isn't getting overloaded by Excision specifically. I tried to log in myself and ran into the classic error, "due to increased traffic, login services to Destiny 2 are currently being throttled." I'm assuming this is the result of people flooding in after getting stonewalled by sign-in errors, but I was eventually able to get through.
We're coming up on the end of the last maintenance extension, and the Bungie Help account has just confirmed the patch is finally rolling out, so here's hoping the game's stabilized once again. Grab 11 of your closest friends (or LFG pickups) and put Grandmaster Excision through its paces. "It's going to be very hard, but the reward for completing it will be totally worth it," Bungie teased.
