Gaming —

Destiny 2 keeps on failing to bring me back

Microtransactions won’t satisfy these post-holiday doldrums.

I'm sorry, it's just not doing it for me anymore guys. I don't know what to tell ya...
Enlarge / I'm sorry, it's just not doing it for me anymore guys. I don't know what to tell ya...

It’s the second week of January and I’m playing Suikoden II, which turns 20 this year. That’s not completely absurd in the lull between the holiday season and the next glut of big new releases that demand my immediate attention. If there was ever a time for me to play a game from 1998, it’s now.

But then I remember that Destiny 2 came out last September—and its first expansion just a few weeks ago. And then some old, familiar jaws are chewing at the back of my mind, reminding me that, by all rights, I should be filling my temporarily free hours by tooling around Mercury and The Leviathan. I want to give myself over to the same satisfying, mechanical repetition that Destiny gave me for hundreds of hours over two years—more time than just about any other game I’ve played.

But I can’t.

Maybe it’s just a hangover from 2017. There were so many incredible games last year that pushed the medium far beyond Destiny’s lizard-brain catharsis of cool headshots, which had carried me so well since 2014. The more I look at Destiny 2 itself, though, the less I feel that same “endless” source of catharsis I found in the original—the same satisfaction I once got from shooting hoops in my parents’ driveway as a child.

Destiny 2 is a fine game if you know when to move on and and when to come back. But the supposed reasons the game uses to keep players coming back have been downright pitiful. I wasn’t prepared for that.

Controversy for Christmas

Neither, I think, was Bungie prepared for hardcore players like me falling off so hard. The company’s behavior since the sequel’s launch speaks to more confidence in the base product than seems warranted. Every week, there seems to be some new controversy plaguing the game, followed by days of silence from Bungie, before ending with an apology and a huge info dump about how things will be tweaked. I doubt I’d be able to keep up if I wanted to anymore.

Case in point: I would have missed the company’s most recent PR debacle entirely if the backlash online weren’t so astronomically vocal. This time, it’s Destiny 2’s take on The Dawning—a winter-themed excuse to collect seasonal loot—that has the game’s community up in arms. That’s not surprising, given this latest outrage revolves around the much-maligned “Eververse” in-game store (again) and a slough of new microtransactions.

Mix a game that players are already very passionate about, like Destiny 2, with a dash of the easily recognizable controversy over microtransactions, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for the kind of outrage that hijacks an entire website with forum topics that only read “Remove Eververse.” It’s not pretty.

But things have been ugly for a while. The excuses to care just aren’t as strong as they used to be. By the time someone asked me for my take on the Eververse issue, I was already unplugged from Destiny 2 in a way that would have seemed ridiculous during the years I spent plugging away at its predecessor.

No more ups, no more downs

Last month’s Curse of Osiris, that aforementioned first expansion, was Destiny 2’s best chance of bringing me back on board. It was... less than I had hoped for. And while I’ve harangued previous Destiny updates, I still clung to them like a castaway with a soggy box of matches. Anything to light that comforting fire at the back of my mind now and again was better than nothing.

What Curse of Osiris and The Dawning have in common, however, is that they both have very little kindling to work with in the first place. Xur, the mysterious NPC that brings rotating goods to players every week, has been underwhelming since the jump to Destiny 2. The Iron Banner, an every-once-in-a-while mutliplayer mode that once enhanced the importance of players’ gear, now feels just like every other PVP mode, with little to no chance to show off your loot. “Faction Rallies” are basically competitive Groupons.

The week-to-week activities that should string the bigger events together are barely distinguishable, much less meaningful. The first Destiny had its lulls between paid content, to be sure, some bigger than others. But, between it all, you could depend on the small, regular activities to bring at least the hardest of the hardcore back for a bit.

The Iron Banner and its ilk in the original Destiny were appointment television time for first-person shooter fans. Now everything feels simple, accessible, and uniform to the point of being unrecognizable.

The drop-off

The Dawning just exacerbates the problem with its arcane, artificially restricted, and often consumable cosmetics. At a time when there are fewer reasons than ever to return to Destiny, one of those excuses seemed intentionally compromised. You can only earn so many of The Dawning’s specific pieces of gear through gameplay, after all, and some of the best items can’t be earned through gameplay at all. All the better to urge you toward spending more money on the $60 game’s loot boxes, right?

Even if The Dawning didn’t impose these restrictive limits on its holiday event (a la Overwatch’s Winter Wonderland event, which lets players earn cosmetics through play ad nauseam) it would have been an uphill battle to get me back into Destiny 2. Its spell over me has been broken at a fundamental level. It’ll take something truly impressive (perhaps an expansion as revolutionary as The Taken King was for the first game) to drag me back now.

I’ve found my methadone—not in any of those lovely 2017 games I haven’t beaten yet, but by checking myself into a nearly two-decade-old JRPG. It doesn’t have the heavy-hitting rhythm of success Destiny gave me in its heyday... but it’s damn close. And Suikoden II’s stripped-down version of the repetitive fantasy won’t hit me up for extra cash.

Channel Ars Technica