Why I Quit Playing Destiny 2
After sinking 2000 hours into it, I feel so much better now playing new games that aren't "Live Service" and are actual complete experiences.
Back in 2015, when I originally got into Destiny it was simply because a friend had gotten into it. In February of that year, I was simply looking for games to play with her, but I didn’t realize that I would end up playing the Destiny games for 9 whole years. Every big fuck up, every come back, every depressing slow moments, every big change in the game, I kept playing. There were occasionally moments where I would stop for a couple months just because I was tired but I always came back eventually. But earlier this year The Final Shape came out and I adored it. For a couple years I had bought the 100 dollar version and I figured I should do the same since of course I was gonna continue playing. But once I came to the end of Final Shape, things changed. So now I want to talk about the reasons I quit playing Destiny 2 and how I learned to not fall into the sunk cost fallacy given all my spending on microtransactions and that I had about 2000 hours logged in Destiny 2 by the end.
The Difficulty
For years Destiny was a game where I would log on and play some strikes or patrols or some other PvE activity and turn on a podcast in the background. This was one of my favorite parts of Destiny, being able to turn my brain off and just listen to the podcast while occupying the other part of my brain. Such ADHD energy, but, starting with Shadowkeep, I started to see that Bungie had decided to take the game in a direction that I didn't appreciate when they introduced Champions. For those unaware, champions are boss-like enemies that can only be beaten if you have a specific mod active and specific weapon type equipped. This was their way of doing two things, artificially changing the meta every season as the type of mods would change so you would have to change what weapons you used, and increase difficulty. Both of which I fucking hated.
So many Destiny content creators had been criticizing the game for a long time about how it was "too easy" and that you can literally just not die sometimes in the most difficult content. I wholeheartedly disagreed with this. I understood why they said that but I figured that should only be something that is addressed in the most difficult content available like some Raid challenge modes or later, Master modes. But with the introduction of champions in a lot of activities that I used to just turn my brain off and enjoy playing how I wanted to play, now I had to play how Bungie wanted me to play and if I didn't then it would be way more difficult. This fucking sucked.
Then with the expansion Lightfall, Bungie decided "fuck it", and made the rest of Destiny 2 as hard as the content creators were asking for. All of a sudden you couldn't even do patrol without significant difficulty and the strikes I used to enjoy running for fun became such a chore. I hated this change. It made me feel like Destiny wasn't for people who just wanted to have fun anymore and instead was leaning into its most hard-core players for even the most basic of activities. And even those content creators and hard-core players didn't end up having that much more difficulty. All this update did was make it more frustrating for casual players. The leaks all said that Destiny was eventually gonna get rid of power all together and that that would help somewhat. But this has yet to materialize and may have just been BS leaks or was abandoned long ago by the Devs.
Then, when they put out Final Shape, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I hadn't played much during the prior year so I powered through all that content prior to the expansion so I was all caught up and the expansion was fantastic. I felt powerful again in the main campaign, even on legendary. And I felt like they were allowing their players to not have to have the most amazing build to have fun and do the boss fights. Most of the arenas were big and allowed for hiding and being able to recover. It was wonderful and made me remember the days of playing the original Destiny with how much I was enjoying it, but once the campaign was over and I finished all the post campaign stuff and the raid was beaten by the community so the rest of us could do the capstone mission post raid, I started to look at the real difficulty changes that Bungie had made. They hadn't undone all the problems I had with the difficulty from Lightfall, but they had made me feel stronger in a lot of ways. Then I saw the final nail in the coffin of difficulty: you could no longer over-level to make content easier. This was something I had used for a long time to be able to feel like I could do the more difficult content without dying all. The. Time. But now you were locked at least 5 below the light level. This felt like a stepping stone to getting rid of light level entirely but it was still awful. It made not only all the strikes that I was already having issues with on just the second difficulty that much harder, but made the dungeons more annoying to run and made me feel like just playing the game was a chore and worst of all this lowered the amount of damage you did to bosses without them lowering how much health those bosses had. So all of a sudden what used to take 2-3 phases started taking 4-5 and if you were soloing a dungeon then you were gonna have to do at least 10. It was insane.
To be clear, I love the gameplay in Destiny, but I also don't play games to feel like a weakling who overcomes the odds to complete my activity. I play games to feel powerful. And all of these changes just made me feel like this game that I had loved for so long, this game that I had wanted to get a symbol from it tattooed on me, was no longer for me. The Final Shape finished my time with Destiny. It showed me that the difficulty isn't gonna get better and might even get worse. So what's the fucking point when I can't do what I used to love to do with the game?
I'll answer that rhetorical question, there is none.
The Seasons
For those unaware, Destiny 2 has been a seasonal structure for 5 years now since Shadowkeep in 2019, or arguably 2018 with Foresaken but the current seasonal structure started in 2019. When the game went free to play with Shadowkeep, the devs decided the only thing that mattered was making the content for the seasons so they just dropped entirely keeping the core Playlists interesting (one of the ways they tried to fix this was the above described difficulty changes). This seasonal structure started to just make everything worse with the game. All of a sudden the devs didn't just start making only new worthless activities but they decided that they were gonna wipe those activities from the game after every season (at the start at least, eventually it became at the end of the year but they were still wiping it all from the game).
It was fucking insane. The community hated it and they have obviously made changes since, but continuing to "vault" parts of the game sucked. I initially didn't really have much of a problem with it, but then once The Final Shape came out I had a moment of deep sorrow when I remembered I couldn't play through the whole story back to back in order to experience it in its entirety. My favorite game series is the original Mass Effect Trilogy and I can always go back and re-experience those games over and over and they will never disappear. But here in the game I had logged over 2000 hours in, so much of what I had played during those 2000 hours had been removed. I just, stopped caring once I finished the post campaign stuff. I felt like I was done. Like I had experienced what I wanted to experience.
This was the biggest problem I faced when trying to get friends into the game. None of them could ever experience the whole story. The game was constantly referencing moments that were removed and using characters that had no introductions because they were introduced in other seasons that were removed. I had to constantly be explaining the story to them in order for them to understand and that fucking sucked. None of them played much. Even my partner only ended up playing maybe 90 hours but that was also back in 2022 and they didn’t want to continue with the next 2 expansions. It just didn't matter how good the gameplay was, the story was a mess.
The story being so disjointed and missing so many parts from the removal of prior seasons also lead to the story occasionally retreading the same ground. Now, sometimes retreading the same ground makes sense, but it can still be annoying when it feels like things were already discussed, but because the seasons were removed, new or returning players who had taken a long time off had no idea that it was a retread which was fine for them but annoying for the people who were there the entire time.
I just think the Seasonal structure of the game just completely killed my desire to continue once Final Shape was done. I was done constantly having to log in to do the same shit and knowing what I'm enjoying will eventually be removed so no one else can enjoy it. FOMO is always BS and the more I think about my love for the Mass Effect games, the more I hated Bungie's decision to invest so much development into things that were just gonna be removed.
This is partially a problem with Live Service games. They're built around creating moments where "you just had to be there" and that's cool when you're there, but when you're not and people are telling you about it, you don't think "oh I should keep playing this game so I get to experience some of those cool moments too" you think "oh. Well damn. I guess I missed all these cool moments so what's the point in even playing if I can't also share that experience by replaying it."
On the whole, the Live Service elements of Destiny have done significant harm to its current player base and the developers. Sure they're putting out a ton of content, but they’re also having to spend so much money to continue updating this game perpetually because they have to live up to the "Live" aspect of a Live Service game. It just sucks. I can only imagine how much they must want to put Destiny away sometimes and move on to something fresh. That's how normal game development is supposed to work, Live Service development just sucks and has lead to significant burn out in the industry. Making the same game for a decade can be boring.
If you can't tell, I largely hate Live Service games and think the seasonal structure of Destiny has done nothing but ruin my love for the game over the years.
Monetization
Ya' know what you have to do when you're having to constantly develop new content for a game to keep up the "Live" part of it? Spend a shit fucking ton of money. We now know that Bungie has been operating in the red with Destiny for a long long time and I think there is one single reason for that, a Live Service game costs a lot to run and maintain. So there are only two ways to consistently maintain a Live Service game. Either, you consistently grow your user base or have a consistently invested user base who will spend money for seasons and will continue to play perpetually or you have a ceiling of a player base and instead of being able to rely on all of your player base to buy the seasons, you have to introduce new forms of earning money. Which is what has lead to every single Live Service game introducing increasingly shitty forms of monetization. Here in Destiny that was initially just new Armor Ornaments every season and a season pass. That season pass was initially 10 dollars and most of the Armor Ornaments were 10 dollars. Then they were still operating in the red so they increased the prices of some of those Armor Ornaments to 15 dollars, but then they realized that enough people liked the dungeons that they should start to charge for them so they introduced the Dungeon Pass which got you 2 dungeons a year for 20 dollars. And then that wasn't enough to operate in the black so they decided to implement a new "Event Pass" for 15 dollars which is a fancy pass that allows you to unlock newer more interesting parts of the events that happen multiple times a year. But that still wasn't enough so they decided to increase the price of Seasons to 15 dollars, but of course only if you buy them individually, if you buy the 100 dollar edition then you got all 4 seasons for 10 each and also the Dungeon Pass as well, but that STILL wasn't enough so when they started doing cross overs they decided to make not just Armor Ornaments but also sparrows, ships, and ghost shells and those were sold in a pack together for 10 dollars (I think, could have been 12, I can't remember and won't re-download the game just to check). And with those crossovers came an increase to the Armor Ornaments that had already been increased to 15 dollars to now 20 dollars. And keep in mind they don't use just normal money like what would make sense, they sell their own currency in 5, 10, 20, and 50 dollar packs which also added a few hundred extra silver per pack, increasing depending on how much you spent. So many of these these silver packs weren't exactly enough to buy the thing you want so if you want to buy something that’s 12 or 15 dollars worth you have to buy the 20 dollar silver pack which then gives you some extra silver so that you end up with just a little left so that you'll hopefully spend more real money to even out and get something else new.
I fell for this time and time again and looking back, it sucked. The game begs you to spend money. Constantly. And that doesn't even include that they sell each expansion individually so you have to already spend so much money just to have all the current expansion content. The game is filled with awful monetization that STILL doesn't allow it to operate in the red. So what's the fucking point of all this monetization if none of it is even working.
Well, 2 things: first: greed and second: funding their 3 other games they were developing. They had peeled off large teams of people to work on their new games because, as I stated earlier, it can suck working on the same game for a decade. The game will almost never operate in the black and even after laying off over 300 staff and solely focusing on Destiny and Marathon, I highly doubt the monetization will ever go down.
Marathon and layoffs
I think these two (and the difficulty) are the most influential reasons as to why I left the game. Marathon is obviously what the majority of Bungie is now focused on and I couldn't care less about that game. If it went back to their roots and was a single player shooter, I'd be all over that shit. But it being an extraction shooter has me completely uninterested and it obviously has caused damage to Destiny as a whole by forcing the increase of monetization and peeling off team members who would have been working on keeping the game filled with actually good content. I'm not a PvP person but in 2019 they literally took the ENTIRE PvP Destiny 2 team and had them make Marathon. Then it took 2-3 years for them to finally start setting up another team and only this year did they finally release a free map pack only because of player backlash. Destiny has suffered so Marathon could be developed and I just, I don't care. Any player could tell this was happening and it just made large parts of the community, basically, depressed. It sucked and was an obvious failure of management.
Then come the layoffs. I'm a proponent of Unionization in the entire software developer industry. I think it's the only way for us devs to be respected and given good benefits and fair wages and not be overworked at the detriment to our health. Companies are constantly using that "we are a family here" BS to make their employees not unionize and it does nothing but harm the workers. So when Bungie laid off tons of people, it made me just kinda lose interest. The management had convinced so many of the devs that if The Final Shape was just a success then there wouldn't be layoffs but despite it being a massive success it didn't matter. Management at Bungie said "Fuck you" to their employees and that makes me want to be done with them.
Conclusion
I'm unlikely to be willing to even look at going back to Destiny 2 even if there is a significant change in company leadership. I will not support a company that had made games that I loved who had ruined so many lives and had lied to so many of their employees. Add in the awful decisions for the Difficulty changes that they seem to be almost doubling down on in recent updates I've heard about, the lacking seasonal structure that erases large parts of the game that I had enjoyed and wanted to share with friends (even though they seem to be changing this structure next year which is likely only because they're having to shift focus so much into Marathon so it is a success even though I think it'll be an utter failure because making a successful Live Service game is incredibly difficult and usually they utterly fail), to the awful and constantly increasing monetization and I just don't think I'll be going back.
I don't want to fall into a logical fallacy. Sometimes even when you've sunk loads of time and money into something, it's okay to let go. Its okay to move on to new things. That's what I've been doing since I quit Destiny 2 back in June. Playing a much larger variety of games, allowing myself to enjoy or hate them and to play and complete them. Enjoying the nature of games that are complete experiences instead of a perpetual experience which often just gets worse and more frustrating. I loved large parts of my time with the Destiny franchise. But at the end of the day, I'm so glad to be done with it.
So remember, if you're thinking of quitting something that you've sunk a shit ton of time and money into, you can just quit. It'll be hard at first, but once you're past it, it feels immensely better to have gotten out of that trap.
Meow,
Cat