There’s a general feeling of discontent among many Destiny 2 players these days. It didn’t help that the recent Corridors of Time puzzle challenged the whole community for days only to result in an exotic weapon quest Bungie had announced weeks before, when many felt it was setting up for something more surprising and exciting in return for all of their effort. But the discontent with the game was there before the puzzle, and one player has brilliantly explained where the problem lies.
Naturally, any game that grows and changes over multiple years will have its low periods as much as its high ones. The first Destiny certainly went through its own content slumps that frustrated players back then, yet a former Bungie gameplay specialist who goes by Mercules904 on Twitter pointed out that there’s a key difference between its low points and Destiny 2’s. That difference, they say, is pretty easy to sum up: “In D1 I wanted to play more but there wasn’t anything to do. In D2 there’s a lot to do but I don’t want to play anymore.”
It’s no secret that Destiny 2 has changed a fair deal in the past year which saw Bungie split from the series’ original publisher, Activision, launch the game's Shadowkeep expansion, and embrace a more seasonal model for new content. An increasing amount of this content, like the Corridors of Time, has been available for only a limited amount of time, and while that can be exciting for players in the moment, Mercules904 feels that this approach makes the game more rigid and less fun in the long run.
“It's the constant perception of being forced to play the game a certain way, during a specific window of time, or else risk missing out on things that may never return,” they write in a Twitter thread. “And the positive reward of acquiring whatever it is ends up being far outweighed by the negative of failing."
“There used to be a certain intrinsic joy to playing Destiny, I used it to unwind after long days at work. Now the thought of playing the game makes me more stressed,” they add. They went on, “I used to feel like Destiny was the game I could always come back to, no matter how long of a break I chose or was forced to take. Now, it feels like if you miss a couple weeks you might as well never come back, because you won't ever be able to catch up on what you missed.”
Despite this feeling, though, Mercules904 stressed that they have no intention of quitting Destiny 2, which seems to be the general consensus among most frustrated players. Rather than give up on the game, many have been coming up with their own suggestions for Bungie to improve Destiny 2. Even with the slump it’s in currently, they seem to feel that Bungie can still turn things around and provide a game they’ll be happy to keep coming back to.
Destiny 2 is available for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One.