If you haven't been following the saga of Destiny 2In the “eternal game”, whose history began more than ten years ago, things are not so good. Player morale has been in free fall for some time now, exacerbated by the disastrous launch of Portal – a poorly conceived replacement for the game's seasonal content system – and some poorly timed decisions about power levels and loot.
Before we delve into the latest catastrophe to hit the solar system, let's do a quick recap. I have already shared my skepticism about incorporating the Star Wars license into Bungie's shared world shooter, and back in August we heard that Former Bungie CEO Pete Parsons was expected to resign. as head of the company after a series of missteps and controversies. In the summer I assessed the issue with the game and his impossible task is to retain the current players and bring back those who have left.. Before that, back in 2023, I wrote about how Michael Salvatori's firing marked the beginning of the end of the series. And unfortunately, it looks like I was right.
Over the weekend, a new tool went live online that allows us to examine Destiny 2 player numbers like never before. Previously we used data from SteamDB; although this shows us one element of the popularity of MMOFPS, its use is limited to Steam players only. This new tool popularity.report kindly provided rich destinyis much more detailed and shows how pressing the problem is for Bungie in the lead up to “Renegades” update due to launch later this year.
As you can see from the chart, to be precise, the total number of players is by far the worst we've ever seen. Notably, the decline here is even worse than the Curse of Osiris era (shown in yellow on the chart), when the community completely turned against Bungie and players complained about the short story, repetitive patrol zone, weak ending, and overall mismanagement of the sandbox. Oddly enough, now, eight years later, we find ourselves in the same place: players are complaining about the unsatisfying story, repetitive encounters and actions, a terrible ending, and a disappointing and uninteresting meta and ending. Funny how history repeats itself.
Back in the troubled days of Curse of Osiris, Bungie thought its goose was ready. Then-Destiny 2 general manager Justin Truman gave a presentation at GDC about two years ago we looked at the state of the game and how the studio was navigating the turbulent waters of live service hell. Regarding the unpopularity of The Curse of Osiris, Truman noted:
“[Showing the impact of the update visually]these are our Destiny 2 weekly active users for the first few months, and for comparison, here's what Destiny 1 looked like. It's going well! But then it started happening. And this moment, right here in February 2018, was fucking terrifying.”
“So this graph shows the trend of our weekly active users,” he continues. “And at the rate we were losing players, we calculated that if this had gone on for another five weeks, our entire population of players would have disappeared. Seriously, we were one month away from closing the Destiny 2 store completely. So, like I said, it was the end of February 2018.”
Since then, the studio has also downsized. Mass layoffs and moving talent to the ever-delayed Marathon means that resources in Destiny 2 are much more scarce than they were. Authors like it Funeral, Datto And Jernadake everyone stopped broadcasting and playing the game. The exodus of players continues. If the studio was “scared” by the fallout from Curse of Osiris, morale must be at an all-time low right now.
And I'm not the only one who thinks this is the end. The most popular post on the Destiny subreddit over the past month is a post with a dark title. “I think this game is finally dying” a post where the community at large complains about how Bungie has managed the game over the last year-plus. “This is such an insult to me and the 48 other people who still play Destiny,” joked one of the most popular responses. The Destiny community has never really been happy, but I can't remember a time in the game's decade-plus history when things looked this bad. And I, too, was in the trenches during the Curse of Osiris.
So what's next? Perhaps the Renegades expansion will fix some of the bugs – Bungie has already done that. made good sounds and promises to scrap some of its more controversial plans (like resetting the power cap again). Will this be enough to drag people back to the Tower? With success Battlefield 6 and a shiny new Call of Duty to play, Bungie is going to have to face more competition in the shooter space than it will for a while, and with player satisfaction at an all-time low, the studio is really going to have to do whatever it takes to stop this life-threatening bleeding.
Could a Star Wars-themed update really reverse the damage? I'm not sure. There are far more serious problems with Destiny 2 than what the new expansion can cover up: the new player journey is terrible, much of the story is now locked away as legacy content, the in-game menus have become more of a chore than most players are comfortable with. After Curse of Osiris, the Forsaken update fixed a lot of bugs in Destiny 2 at launch, but now the problems are much deeper. Forsaken proved that Bungie was willing to listen to player feedback and change its approach to suit the player base… but as things stand now, I and much of the community feel the developer is cagey and single-minded.
I think the writing may be on the wall for a series I've put over 1000 hours into, and I promise you it's very painful to type.
