Yesterday, Destiny 2 launched its latest dungeon, Sundered Doctrine, which now has a contest mode and a race for the first completion among the community. At over four hours, that was longer than some raid races as dungeons get longer and more puzzling in time, especially in contest mode.
The dungeon was very creative, blending lore and gameplay in ways that we have not seen before. In general, I think through all the complaints and doom, that it’s important to stop and recognize that after 10+ years now, Destiny 2 is still doing a lot of things right, and building lots of cool things, even if it’s having trouble motivating players to stay engaged with it all. So, time for some positivity.
Raids and dungeons – Thematically and mechanically Destiny has been able to keep things fresh in this area and produces some of the only “pinnacle” FPS content in the entire industry at this level. Other looter shooters have tried to match it, and not many are close.
Expansions – Sure, there’s the occasional miss (Lightfall, most recently), but generally speaking Destiny 2 has done excellent work on these, including The Final Shape being arguably the best expansion they’ve released after ten full years of the series existing, and somehow they crafted a fitting ending for that saga in a way that seemed almost impossible.
Story Twists – While the story of Destiny is hit or miss, especially the past two episodes, Destiny 2 can still surprise us with massive story turns like what we just saw in Heresy, genuine surprises when you aren’t expecting them and hopefully they can do more of this kind of thing in the future.
Activities – The Coil, Tomb of Elders, effectively three new strikes in one Episodes, and now its new roguelike Nether mode in Heresy. These are genuinely some of the best seasonal activities we’ve gotten, and seasonal content has only grown in volume and quality in time. We used to have things that were little more than a single public event has the entire content for the season. The problem, of course, is the motivation to play these activities, and if Destiny is struggling with one aspect overall, it’s this. But they are still making a lot of content compared to everyone else in this live genre. Few compare to it.
Meta – This is a combination of new weapons, new exotics, new subclasses, new aspects, new artifacts and new balance patches, which genuinely makes each season or episode or expansion feel different in terms of buildcrafting or whatever meta is happening at the moment. I’m pulling out weapons I haven’t touched in years (Queenbreaker?) or chasing after new guns with (admittedly power crept) perks that can indeed make your builds more fun and interesting. I really enjoy finding new fun builds every season at this point.
Cosmetics – If there is one area that has seen non-stop improvement for this entire decade it’s the cosmetics team, producing incredible armor, ornament and shader sets, along with ships, sparrows, emotes and all the rest. Now, even the licensing department is going hard landing things like a Star Wars collaboration. The problem here, of course, is prices, but the design team themselves has continued to go crazy for years now.
Destiny 2 has major problems. Player motivation is chief among them. Pricing is another. Storytelling and content release cadence. Individual nitpicks within activities or with looting or major bugs that take far too long to fix. But they’re doing a lot right, and they are doing a lot, both compared to other games in the industry, and taking into account the fact that Bungie has been cut in half in terms of headcount the last few years and the remaining devs constantly operate under the threat of more layoffs. They’re doing great overall, and sometimes it’s okay to take a pause from complaining to recognize that.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
