With “Age of Triumph,” Bungie wants to give Destiny players a “victory lap”

For nearly three years, Destiny has been the source of strife, joy, frustration, and often fierce loyalty to millions of players. With a full sequel to the game just announced on Twitter, developer Bungie has elected to close things out with a celebration of sorts.

“The dream of Destiny has always been that it is an adventure that continues,” Bungie Community Manager David “DeeJ” Dague told Ars in a recent interview. “With ‘Age of Triumph,’ we’re taking a moment before a brand-new beginning to take stock of everything that our community has achieved thus far.”

“Age of Triumph” is the latest (and apparently last) of the original Destiny’s live events. These free updates came with new activities and rewards for players to rally around, but they lacked the new missions, maps, enemies, or other more substantive additions you would find in paid expansions. With a sequel on the way, Bungie has every incentive to ensure players come away from the first game with a pleasant memory of this final event. To that end, “Age of Triumph” adds new in-game rewards like armor and a “Record Book” of achievements to showcase players who reach Bungie-approved milestones.

“Anyone who has poured their heart and soul into Destiny will find something in ‘Age of Triumph’ that will recognize their contribution to the adventures we’ve all shared,” Dague elaborated. “The Record Book was designed to let every Guardian document their accomplishments.”

Go for the record book

That new Record Book looks to be a huge part of “Age of Triumph.” It recognizes activities that used to be mostly meaningless from the game’s point of view. The Record Book will recognize nearly every possible activity in the first game and reward those accomplishments with weapons, armor, ornaments, and the satisfaction of visible recognition for all that time spent playing.

The Record Book is the final outcome of Bungie learning from its community’s habits, which led the average player to spend 100 hours in a game most agreed was quite thin. It also says much about what Destiny has become in its twilight months. In its nearly three-year history, the game has been slammed for a lack of substantive, “meaningful” content. When paid expansions did deliver new in-game areas and modes to the shooter, they could be hit or miss.

In response, and as an excuse to keep engaging with the shooter’s exquisite gameplay, players began squeezing every last bit of juice from the Destiny orange. In the absence of new, assigned activities like Strikes, for instance, players played the same Strikes over and over again to earn currency to spend collecting unique but mostly useless items from vendors.

Even without a meaningful in-game reward for these repetitive missions, players went through the motions anyway. They met Bungie halfway to make a fun game feel as big as it deserved to be. So when Dague says Bungie’s “approach to keeping the world of Destiny alive has been a collaborative one,” he’s talking about a process that evolved in reaction to players’ actions.

Rejoin the raids

Destiny’s final live event also brings a few more direct excuses for players to continue racking up the in-game hours. That includes one feature that Dague acknowledges players have been demanding for a long time.

“‘Age of Triumph’ has also been an answer to some of the most frequent feedback we’ve received from our community,” he said. “So many players have longed for a renewed call to action to dive back into the Raids they’ve mastered.”

As Destiny’s ultimate endgame, the multi-stage, six-player, hyper-difficult strings of combat puzzles, platforming, and cooperative choreography known as Raids are the best anything Destiny has ever offered. But they’ve always had a major flaw: when the overall player level cap was increased from expansion to expansion, the old Raids and their rewards weren’t rebalanced to reflect it.

That meant each new Raid unseated the last in terms of balance and rewards. If you hadn’t played one of the old Raids before a new one arrived, the only excuse to return was that implicit, player-driven desire to see everything Destiny has to offer—whatever gameplay-relevant rewards they offered would be grossly under-powered.

Since Raids are far and away the best of Destiny’s cooperative content, having a better reason to go back and complete them—one that’s as mathematically rewarding as it is emotionally—has been a heavily requested feature. Thus, “Age of Triumph” drags every Raid up to just shy of Destiny’s latest level cap.

Better to look good than to feel good

These rebalanced missions also include new, appropriately leveled gear rewards that will “let each player define which elements of Destiny have been most important to them.” Armor, especially, is the most visible and recognizable means of customization in Destiny. Since all of the new armor is themed after the look of specific Raids, the idea seems to be that players will be able to garb themselves in whatever look best represents their personal tastes and their chosen locale. “This is a chance for self-expression and bragging rights,” according to Dague.

While the Record Book is a nice, superficially rewarding pat on the shoulder, this final extension to Destiny’s intangible collection is “Age of Triumph’s” true crowd-pleaser. That such a long-awaited change is only coming now, two-and-a-half years after Destiny’s second Raid was added, is annoying. Yet it also feels like a fitting denouement to the story of Bungie observing the ways Destiny is played and incorporating those player habits into the game itself.

Dague calls “Age of Triumph” “a chance [for players] to remember their finest moments and decorate themselves as masters of their new domain.” In many ways, that accomplishment dies with Destiny 1, since none of these new rewards will carry over into Destiny 2. When the sequel is released, all early players can carry with them is the meaning they themselves ascribe to the time they spent with the game.

Making your peace and moving on

That’s true of pretty much all media, when you get down to it, but Destiny has always been billed as “an adventure that continues.” This promise has caused a lot of players to invest a lot of continuing value in their progress, power, and level of experience with specific in-game activities. With Destiny 2, the only bits of that experience that will carry over are the memories.

Players have “piled millions of combined hours into the world we created for them to explore,” according to Dague, and that kind of time investment comes with an emotional investment as well. Intentionally or not, “Age of Triumph” could well act as a cool-down period for players to disentangle the strife, joy, frustration, loyalty, and hundreds of hours they’ve spent playing from the concrete rewards Bungie has learned to offer them.

“Age of Triumph” will also give players a chance to reflect on the momentary enjoyment they received in those millions of hours while letting go of the ephemeral gear, ornaments, and digital books stored on their hard drives. That’s a lot of pressure to lay at the feet of a single free update to a nearly three-year-old game with millions of still-active players. But that’s what happens when you make a single live event the effective farewell tour for such a well-loved, long-running game.

With “Age of Triumph,” Bungie seems to be painfully aware of how important it is for players to have a “victory lap” through the game that Destiny has grown into. As Dague finally put it, “every player decides when they are done.”

“Age of Triumph” launches within Destiny on March 28.