Destiny 2 Devs Are Alive!

While Bungie has been spending a lot of time and focus on promoting Destiny 2’s upcoming expansion, The Curse of Osiris, their silence elsewhere has been deafening.

Make no mistake about it, Destiny 2 was a vast improvement on its predecessor. The story was much better and more fleshed out. The rewards system was overhauled, making it easier to obtain higher level gear. It finally came out on PC, which allowed for a much cleaner experience. The raid was great. The strikes felt more in-depth, with bosses that had some minor mechanics instead of being mere bullet sponges. All in all, it was a huge improvement on vanilla Destiny.

After putting a significant amount of time into the game, however, the cracks began to show. In making the game more accessible to those who didn’t have the time to pour hours upon hours into the true endgame of Destiny, Bungie tipped the scale too far into the casual territory. This isn’t bad in itself, mind you, but for those of us who planned on putting hundreds of hours into the game, it left the final product feeling shallow. Because you could now gear up to max level without the need of using the endgame activities, those activities lost a lot of weight and significance. Why should I do the raid on all three of my characters every week when I can hit max level by just doing public events and other weekly milestones?

Not only do the endgame activities feel tedious but some of the other activities suffer from this same level of tedium. Strike-specific loot was a puzzling omission, as it injected plenty of replayability into what is normally a monotonous activity. On the PvP side of the equation, the decision to make every mode 4v4 put a heavy reliance on team-shooting and created a product that feels less fluid and enjoyable as compared to the original Destiny.

Even aside from those specific activities, the loot system itself runs out of legs real quick. Without the inclusion of randomized rolls for weapons, eventually you’ll obtain all the weapons and be left without much to grind for. All of this put together leads to the game having a seemingly finite amount of replayability when it should be infinitely replayable in reality.

All of these opinions flooded Reddit, the Bungie forums, and even Twitch chat. It wasn’t long before streamers began to get bored with the lack of depth and moved on to other games (Fortnite being the main one for many streamers).

Almost two months went by before we heard anything at all about updates to many of these issues that the community was bringing forward.

On October 26, however, it seemed like we were finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel when Bungie included this list of updates the team was working on.

Turns out this tunnel was the longest one known to man, however. It has taken the team another 30 days to give any update on what is up with these changes. This is despite them holding two streams in as many weeks to go over the new content that will come with The Curse of Osiris. While that content is well and good, it is finite after all. Eventually we’ll burn through it and then be stuck wondering what we’re supposed to do now.

Thankfully, we now have an idea what is coming in the next few weeks thanks to some tweets from Game Director, Luke Smith, Saturday afternoon.

Smith has listed all of issues outlined in the October 26 update, along with saying it is coming in “the December update.”

Let me speak for all hardcore Destiny fans when I say, HALLELUJAH!!

The simple fact that we have a (sort of) timeline for when we’ll get these Quality of Life updates is music to my eyes after waiting so long for an answer. Granted, the systems and updates Bungie brings could be terrible. That is certainly within the realm of possibility given their track record of not always getting something right on the first try (exotic shards with Dark Below and the original infusion system with House of Wolves come to mind).

Regardless, the silence from the Bungie Live Team is no longer deafening. While Smith didn’t say when they will talk about these upcoming changes, I’d imagine that it will likely happen during the last Curse of Osiris livestream this Wednesday.

Here’s to hoping that these updates are enough to keep all of us hardcore players from putting down the game for good.