Maintaining a decade-old game is a non-trivial task. Even Warframe, the poster child of general F2P positivity, struggles with content updates and player expectations every so often. Even more so when your game locks DLCs behind paygates. Further still, uncertainty about the long-term further exacerbates this.
Just a few weeks back, I decided the time was right to give Warframe a shot once more. Full disclosure: I’m very familiar with the game due to spending just under three thousand hours playing it. I did stop a while back, but now that I’m more-or-less done with Destiny 2 as well, I felt it might’ve been good to check what Digital Extremes had been up to.
Honestly, I didn’t like it. Warframe‘s no longer a game for me, and while I recognize there’s a lot of awesome stuff in it, I’m simply over it. The thing that I really made note of, though, was the fact that I didn’t feel lost in it at all. Even though I hadn’t played Warframe since Update 25, every single element of the game made perfect sense to me still. The basics might’ve shifted ever-so-slightly, but the really important bits all stayed the same. With Destiny 2, that’s really not the case at all.
10 years into its lifecycle, Destiny still doesn’t know what to do with its core gameplay and progression systems
The Final Shape was an excellent expansion pack for Destiny 2, but it also served as an excellent off-ramp for many players. The Light vs. Dark saga now basically complete, all there was left to do for the time being was to engage with Bungie’s questionably reinvented seasonal model. Or, if you’re like me, skip it entirely and hope that Frontiers is more engaging in some way, shape, or form.
For what it’s worth, Frontiers genuinely looks interesting, but that’s a different can of worms.
Thinking about all of this made me realize that, even though Destiny 2 does have a baseline gameplay experience and certain tropes that are always present (i.e. the Director UI, the concept of Collections, Vendor-based progression, etc.), virtually everything else in a state of constant flux.
Heck, we don’t even need to look that far back to find the latest example of this being the case. Is the crafting system being taken out of the game? Players aren’t sure. It definitely is being changed to some extent, and its very purpose in the Destiny 2 meta is being tweaked – for better or for worse. What will this materialize into? We don’t know for sure, and that’s really not even the point I’m trying to make.
The point is, instead, that Destiny 2 should not be struggling with its power progression and content formatting this late in its lifecycle. Why is Bungie still reinventing the wheel?
Destiny 2 is changing, every year
I’m honestly not sure how many more times Bungie might need to change how Destiny 2‘s armor works. Or how rewards are doled out. Or, for that matter, how players access and interact with Destiny 2‘s core activities. It’s not that I think Bungie will make these things worse, note. It’s just that, having started my Destiny 2 tenure back in the days of Opulence, I played through several different iterations of each and every one of these systems.
Don’t get me wrong: Destiny 2 is definitely superior to what it was years ago, and even though Bungie does sometimes adopt the tired old “three steps forward, two steps back” philosophy, things are slowly improving. It’s the fact that Destiny 2 even needs to go through so many different versions of the same thing that bugs me.
New resources replace old ones every so often, interfaces combine the feature set of old ones while adding some stuff in and tossing other stuff out, and content rotates in and out of availability. Destiny 2 always has its players on loose footing, and it’s deeply annoying that there’s no end in sight for this process.
Bungie just can’t nail down a system that works, even a decade in
Again, I’ve got no doubt that the upcoming Portal UI will be, in some ways, superior to everything we’ve had in Destiny 2 before it. It’s not going to be perfect though, and we already know that. More specifically, Portal is not even going to fully replace the Director: the Director UI is going to stay right where it is. Even Bungie itself admits that Portal won’t be able to show off every single activity that’s available in the game. It’s just going to show you the seasonally relevant bits, really.
With that in mind, I cannot shake off the feeling that Destiny 2 is continuously reinventing itself simply for the purpose of reinventing itself.
Certainly, there’s merit in keeping things fresh, but does freshness include a retrofit of all the bits and bobs I’ve been mentioning in this article? Reworks are, at this point, crutches for problems that really ought to have been figured out a decade into a game’s lifecycle, and I don’t think this will change anytime soon.
Destiny 2 is as oblique as it has ever been, and Frontiers won’t change that
The biggest issue I take with Destiny 2 after having spent thousands of hours playing it is that its content structure and delivery systems change in a way that doesn’t do anything about staleness.
Sure, Frontiers sounds pretty good right now, but I’d like to highlight that Episodes also sounded good before they first came out. It didn’t take long at all for players to realize that they really are just rebranded seasons in a top hat and a fancy coat.
If it seems like I’m giving no quarter to Bungie, that’s only because I do still care about the game and would like to return to it. Between sunsetting (which is still a thing for seasonal content on a yearly basis), a constant need to keep changing everything all the time, and an uncertain future in the long run, it’s simply become quite hard to keep up with it.
I do think 2025’s Frontiers will improve Destiny 2 in some key areas, but I’m not sure if it’s going to be enough to meaningfully freshen things up and draw in new players. And, since all the current systems are in a state of flux, we won’t have the sort of continuity you get from, say, Warframe. From my experience with Destiny 2, we’ll instead go through just enough change to keep old players on the backfoot, but not enough to permanently improve the core progression loop. Like an Ouroboros of feature creep.
