I had 4000 hours in D1 and over 6,000 hours in D2 even though I haven’t played either game since July of 2025. Edge of Fate just looked boring as hell, the portal and all the other changes they made totally turned me off from the game. I waited eagerly while they released Renegades but saw no relief to the things that bothered me. Not to mention the fact that renegades just made it look even more like Bungie had no concept of what the identity of Destiny should be. It once again just started copying other games or concepts. If I wanted to play a Star wars game, I’d play a Star wars game.
Marathon however does not appeal to me in any way. I don’t give a rat’s ass about extraction shooter games. Why they decided to pour so much time and energy into such a niche game makes no sense to me. We all know they’re going to add PVE as an add-on game mode. But that’s just it, it’s going to be an add-on. Unless it’s extremely robust and thought out and deep, it’s not going to retain players. It may attract some new ones temporarily, but that won’t last. If Bungie can’t keep up with the pace of development needed to support Destiny. 2, what makes people think they’ll be able to do it for Marathon?
Marathon will never generate the revenue that Destiny 2 ever did simply because they chose such a niche game type. They can add whatever game modes they want but at the end of the day it’s still an extraction shooter and it’s primary focus will still be more on PVP in a world where there are plenty of other extraction shooter games out there that have far more players and are far more fleshed out and are far more inviting to new players of all skill ranges.
It’s a sad day indeed and a shitty way to end a 12-year franchise.
Thank goodness they didn’t over deliver.
I am so spiteful that the upper/middle management destroyed a game with so much potential just to chase MTX and bonuses.
Y’all ate slop so they slopped it up even more.
Destiny was the tits though. I didnt play much of 2 because life got in the way, but the core gameplay was satisfying and silky-smooth.
God forbid a gamer enjoy playing a video game and hope a studio learns from their mistakes.
It was created as a live-service game. It was never not a mtx fest.
Correct, but as is the case with Warframe, which has so many more premium currency purchases you CAN make than D2, it is possible to have a live service game and also make something fantastic that players can enjoy for decades.
Correct me if I’m being ignorant here but I don’t know if there’s ever been a single company that’s pulled itself out of a long line of degenerate business practices
The two off the top of my head would be No Man’s Sky and R6 Seige.
No Man’s Sky: https://imkingginger.substack.com/p/the-decade-long-journey-of-no-mans
Not sure how R6 is doing currently, but at one point they had a decent resurgence after they finally doubled down on improving the game.
These don’t match the exact scenario of Bungie, but they work as evidence that a studio CAN create something great out of something mediocre.
To be fair to Hello Games I’m pretty sure that Sony breathing down their necks for the release of No Man’s Sky really screwed them over during initial development. They had to rush big time and it was a huge increase in scope from their previous titles. Definitely not trying to undermine them though, NMS is a pretty great game now, especially compared to how rocky the start was.
As for R6 I remember hearing pretty recently there was a huge hacking incident that lead to players getting free shit en masse and effectively flipped the game economy on its head. I don’t know how they handled the fallout from that but considering it’s Ubisoft I doubt they learned anything substantial. Though if there’s one inadvertently good thing they did it was kicking off the Stop Killing Games movement by shutting down servers for The Crew.
I suspect chicken and egg is reversed in a lot of comments like this. Did popularity fall because they increased monetization? Or did they increase monetization because popularity fell and live services are expensive beasts? Gotta say, I expect it’s the latter, especially since we know Bungie wasn’t doing so hot when Sony bought them.
All you have to do is look at Warframe. Bungie had metric tons more money to work with than DE did during their early life. Warframe is better than D2 in almost every way.
I think whoever was driving the core development decisions at Bungie was actively hindering the success of the game, whether intentionally or not.
At the end of the day, the less money that is spent on the IP, the more money goes to bonuses/exec payouts.
I think the difference in money between them is exactly it, but in how many developers it took to make and how many it still takes to continue to add to it. There is no chance that Warframe had the capex or opex of Destiny at any point in either game’s life.
And as much as people’s minds can be blown by the size of executive bonuses, I have yet to see reporting that ties it as a major contributing factor to why games became too expensive to make or maintain. That cost is mostly in just how many people those games employ to make them multiplied across how many years they’re working on it.
As opposed to what?
I don’t think a game like this should last, and be developed, forever. It will inevitably lead to enshittification.
That’s cool, I enjoyed the game, but got frustrated with how shitty Bungie was with their refusal to learn from past mistakes. I wish this game lasted for much longer, but their pattern of repeating the same mistakes and releasing more mediocre DLCs than good ones drove me away.
Warframe has shown it is possible to exist for a long time, continuously drop quality content, and have a fantastic relationship and collaboration with their community.
Enshittification begins when the profits become a higher focus than the product.
This is the game I put more time on my entire life. I ditched it back in 2022-2023. Greed ruins everyone’s lives, that’s all I can say.
Shit man, I quit after a couple years of playing the first one. Too much time researching and not enough playing. That’s when I decided I was done with these games that don’t give you all the info you need in the game itself. Don’t think I ever even installed 2. Doesn’t even work on Linux.
Do you mean it doesn’t work natively on Linux or via Proton?
via Proton. Per the ProtonDB, it’s “borked”. The Anti-Cheat is overly zealous and modern day corpos at Bungie are the kind that think all Linux users just wanna hack.
Neither. Anticheat.
Been dead to me since no Linux support.
I have played a lot of Destiny 2, I really enjoyed Final Shape and just after but the portal was the beginning of the end. It killed the flow and the scale of the game in one go.
I’ll probably jump in for some of the changes and to slaughter a few teams in Gambit one more time but I doubt I’ll play much at all after that.
Should never have existed!
