I think subjective quality of games and enjoyment of said games are not mutually exclusive.

This has never been more evident in my love/hate/mostly hate relationship with destiny 2. Its a popular analogy, but being a fan of destiny is like having being in an abusive relationship.

You're bled dry of your time and money.

"Oh but it has so much potential to be better!"

"Yeah sure the past few weeks/months/years have been disappointing but things are looking up!"

Things like that.

But then in orbit, deep stone lullaby plays. and I'm reminded of the awe I felt in the deep stone crypt, in the middle of the night with five of my best friends.

"You now face godlike judgement. May it extend eternally."

The gorgeous skybox filled with a fleet of fallen ships, surrounding a giant space station piloted by an egomaniacal trillionaire that's survived thousands of years. You see the icy tundras of Europa thousands of metres beneath you, and the violent icy winds that sweep the destination curl like ribbons in its atmosphere.

It was new years day, and that night we finished every single raid in the game. Memories like that is why destiny is so special to me.

The talent and passion of the music team, the art of the game, the skyboxes, the sound designers... Hundreds of people poured their heart and soul into this massive project, and I felt that. I felt it in the wee hours of the morning grinding dungeons, I felt it on the final win on trials of osiris cards, and I felt it when I killed oryx with my clan.

All that being said, I cannot in good conscience reccomend this game to literally anyone. I spent nearly 300 dollars just to play it. That is not an amount of money anybody should spend on dlc alone.

Bungie is one of the greediest game studios in existence. They laid off hundreds of employees, including the person that made the aforementioned deep stone lullaby. Skins in the microtransaction store cost 10 dollars a pop. Each DLC on release costs almost 100 dollars, and every year they remove added content from the game, content that you PAID for. All so their executives could line their pockets.

They continue to ignore the pleas of fans for no good reason, laying off their community managers for the game.

There was so much wasted potential that I can't help but feel so, so angry. That something I used to enjoy so much and had so many fond memories of will never reach the heights I believed it would reach. A game that so many brilliant people worked on but will never get compensated fairly for their hard work. A game that I spent so many hours on and made so many memories with so many friends on.

I waited so long for destiny to become what so many people believed it could be, and im done waiting.

Destiny 2 has been through many phases - as someone who has played since its beginning, its hard to express what's wrong with this game in its current state.

Soulless, overly monetized and with even worse writing than ever before; Bungie have seemingly abandoned the core tenants that kept the game, in its prime, so engaging.

With no new-player on-boarding and an ever-frustrated existing player base, its hard to see Bungie investing in another 'Forsaken' level expansion.

One of the best and worst games I ever played. Best because it's completely crunchy, the gunplay feels divine and the world design is out of this world. Raids are an experience to be had, unmatched in anything else I ever played. And even as a timewaster, it's phenomenal: log in, do some quests, log out.

However, the bad part is pretty terrible: unless you have most of your days free, it's entirely impossible to play Destiny 2 "properly" and have other games on the side. You just can't. This game eats your free time, and FOMOs you into playing it every day. Pretty soon it starts feeling like work, and the magic wears off.

Fun games aren't supposed to feel like this.

I played at launch and had a fair amount of fun. Shooting feels good, movement feels good, writing is pretty good, all around pretty good. But when I got to what the 'endgame' was at the time, it became a confusing slog. You had to get your special number up but it stopped giving you items that made your special number go up unless you did specific things but it wasn't very good at actually telling you what specific things you needed to do. So I spent something nearly two weeks making next to no progress. Granted, it made for a good podcast game but I still burnt out on that eventually. Then Curse of Osiris came out a few weeks later and when I came back I felt so out of it that I wasn't sure how to get my special number up so I just did the new story stuff and it wasn't very good. Not particularly interesting writing or mechanics but the infinite forest had kind of an interesting look to it.

Then I came back and tried again when the game transitioned from Battlenet to Steam and was thoroughly confused. I had never finished Osiris so I wanted to wrap that up and do the other DLCs but that had all been buried away somewhere because they don't want people to play it? And there was zero explanation about what I should be doing? It just gave me a bunch of quests and told me to use some new mechanics and was an absolute mess. I cannot imagine what that must've been like for anyone coming to the game for the first time. I didn't take long for me to just give up on the game after that. What a weird experience.

Trying to review this game or even muse on it is an exercise in frustration, which is really poignant considering playing it hits the same notes of confusion and dissatisfaction.

I could point to any one era of Destiny and go "it was better/worse back then!" but to even do that as a lighthearted joke would require enough context, setup and exposition that it'd make a Yakuza game blush. But I'll try because it's 1:26am as of writing and none of my sleeping aids have aided in sleeping.

Once upon a time this franchise was little more than "High Sci-fi Borderlands x Halo shooting with dailies and weeklies", and while that might make some of you sweat and wish that videogames never progressed past the level of Tetris, for me it was enough to sustain my interest. Tacking on Bungie's best-in-class sense of scale and environment design was just delicious icing on a juicy spongecake.

When I opened this google doc I had a lot of jokes at Destiny's expense swirling around my head but I'm already four paragraphs in and struggling, because those jokes are predicated on the assumption that Destiny is art, and my particular brand of autism means I hate jokes that aren't grounded in reality.

Destiny 2 is a product to be sold more than it is 'art' and the only real difference between the game in 2017 and the game in 2023 is that Bungie's upper management have simply stripped away the pretense. I know this might ring hollow to any of you who play AAA games or know what 'Fortnite' means, and even as I type it I find myself furrowing my brow and saying "hmmmm" out loud like I'm in a Persona game, but I think 'product' applies to Destiny 2 more than most other games.

Because Destiny 2 has a shelf life, and unlike many other live service games it is actually upfront about this shelf life. Not as upfront as it should be, but nonethless any Seasons a person purchases will be thrown in the garbage once an expansion's cycle ends. These seasons often have a worse shelf life than some of the crisps I buy. Did you like that one activity from Season of Plunder? You didn't because nobody liked Ketchrash, but if you hypothetically did then tough luck buddy. It's gone forever. It's temporary. Almost everything is temporary. It's a lot like life except rather than capping off the highlights of your life with comfort, you get Lightfall instead.

I bring all this up first because the actual gameplay, story and anything without profit incentives behind them are superfluous. Bungie's concept of balance is still as bad as it was in 2004, the story is written ad-hoc by an endlessly spinning carousel of underpaid and overworked writers, and while the environments are pretty they are ultimately backdrops for dailies, weeklies and grinds.

My cynicism might seem overbearing, but really I'm just truncating Bungie's appalling GDC conference to you. Trigger warning: They say the word "overdelivery" with all sincerity.

Everything in Destiny 2, for good or ill, is secondary to player retention and cash. This goes for most games, and all 'live' games, but D2 sticks out because it is unique in its antipathy for the player. Bungie do not care if you're having fun, they do not care if you like specific content, they do not care about the player. Again, this is not me kvetching about 'mistreatment' or somesuch nonsense (for I made my peace with this game's state after Shadowkeep and the free trial debacle), it is simply Bungie's stated policy.

What really makes Bungie stick out compared to even Epic or the thousands of gacha games aimed at lonely people in their 20s who want idol culture but hate human beings is that Bungie have a very open and recorded distaste for Destiny as a piece of art. While even Epic are willing to bring back an entire season/map for nostalgia bait, Bungie burn their content bridges with glee and only really drag things out for brief 1 minute setpieces to appease the 5-6 people who're still earnestly engaged with the story in much the same way I reference Fesh Pince of Blair to see if anyone in VC is still awake. At times, discussing the history of D2 and the amount of burnt bridges is not unlike talking about a Discord server staffed entirely by people whose conflict resolution skills stopped developing once they learned their times tables.

I have unfortunately been on this ride since the start, because much like anyone who has spent 20+ years playing videogames I went through a cringe phase and mine was Bungie worship. Admittedly, I lucked out by not being a Team Fortress 2 defender or one of those guys who thinks Metal Gear Solid V's rocky development is an artful critique on player expectation. What I can tell you, having played this series since D1, is that it honestly does just kind of suck?

I'm going to dispense with the jokes for a minute and also switch back to my usual manner of speaking: The whole thing is just kind of immature. It's Bungie having a moment of imposter syndrome after two Seroquel and a cluster migraine. The core of their games for the last two decades is there and it's great, but it's wrapped in a thick layer of insincerity and insecurity. High profile VAs, dramatic mid-mission speeches, an addiction to melodrama so crippling that it makes Kojima seem chaste, and 'lore' that's somehow less captivating than a lot of randomly generated Dwarf Fortress stuff.

It is wank. Were Destiny posited as a parody of high sci-fi I would be much kinder to it, but it is not so I have to endure cutscenes where almost every single major factor in the plot is "The [Thing]". The Traveler, The Witness, The Darkness, The Fallen, The Veil, The Gardener, The Winnower, The The The The The The. Dispensing with the pretense and calling The Witness "The Bad Guy" would be more dignified at this point. There's also an alarming addiction to vagueness. This is not Hideo Kojima "I leave it vague because speculation amuses me" vagueness or Hidetaka Miyazaki "I leave it vague to recreate the feeling I had reading English picturebooks as a kid" vagueness, it's... Hmm.

I'll go ahead and call it crutch-vagueness. Dart vagueness. Throwing shit at the wall vagueness. Whatever metaphor for inaccuracy and creative insecurity you want vagueness. It is Bungie couching their 'lore' in a thick layer of vague metaphor so that they can pull back the curtain and pretend the pig in lipstick was always planned. I know this because I and most other creatives I know who've made a failed attempt to write an epic as one of their first literary outings did the same thing. It worked for Halo because Halo ended, but much like queer infighting Destiny is doomed to continue forever.

You've heard of technical debt, now get ready for narrative debt! [Disclaimer: Any FFXIV fans from 15-20 years in the future who're making a "The Downfall of FFXIV" video are free to use this one.]

And no, text entries of poorly named characters speaking entirely in abstracts or concepts isn't 'lore'. It's not even fluff. It's the shit I did when I was 12, when I thought having every character's name be a bible/torah reference was clever and every work I wrote was named after a song I liked. You can replace most words in Unveiling with anything and it'll still make just as much sense and have just as much narrative weight.

This penchant for gormless melodrama is carried over into the actual text, mind you. A great number of the cutscenes and dialogues in this game are two models doing canned emotes at one another while the voice actors audibly sound like they regret not listening to dad and becoming a lawyer. It's honestly impressive that they got a man like Lance Reddick [RIP] into the studio to record lines with all the gravity of someone ordering McDonalds at 4am on a work day. It's doubly impressive that Bungie backslid from the Halo series in terms of cutscene direction and are now producing dialogue exchanges with all the tenseness and artistic flair as Fable 2. If I ever decay that hard please just take me to a rabbit cafe, slip some cyanide in my poison, and tell me to go for a nap.

If you're wondering what prompted this diatribe, someone asked me to hop on the latest season "because the writing is really good". So I looked up the cutscenes and realized that I should stop taking game recommendations from people with shonen anime avatars.

There are things about Destiny to praise, of course, but with the above in mind the question becomes "why bother"? I could sit here and regale you with stories of how beautiful The Reef (ugh.) was, how great the Black Armory weapons were, how much fun I had doing the Leviathan raids, how Forsaken's story content is a cut above the rest, but none of that content currently exists. Parts will inevitably be brought out of the content vault when player numbers dip and Bungie crave a surge, but is there any point in reviewing something that 'might' happen? You may as well review your lottery ticket, your future child, or your inevitable death.

I don't really have a succinct finisher for this ramble, but that's okay because Destiny 2 will end just as poorly.

Ugh, Destiny 2.

Another awful grind based game that eventually got so convoluted that the devs through out the campaign to service the never ending garbage DLC.

How this game has so many fans, I’ll never know, but what I do know is that this game is 100% Stockholm syndrome from Bungie to its fans.

Destiny 2 is a better game than Destiny 1 in every way I could think of measuring it; however, I put about 1/3 of the time into Destiny 2 before getting burned out and bouncing off and my clan fell apart shortly after release. The biggest thing that Destiny, as a series, always struggles with is how to be accessible to new or casual players while still keeping the hardcore players engaged. Destiny 2, at some point, swung way too far to the "hardcore players" side of that pendulum and the game became a massive un-fun grind. So, I quit and never went back. At its core, Destiny is still the best-feeling shooter I've ever played and the raids are some of the most fun game content I've ever experienced, but I have no interest in no-lifing this game anymore.

If I had unlimited money and time to spend on this game then this might be my favourite game ever made, the power fantasy, loot, and gunplay are almost unrivalled. However, nobody has infinite money and time, and the sooner Bungie acknowledges this the better. From content I payed for being "vaulted" indefinitely, to the annual subscription of new (and sometimes lesser) content costing the price of almost two new triple-A titles, I can no longer reconcile playing this game. Any hope that this game would ever meet its potential was killed long ago.

(Note: This review is updated as of Season of Arrivals. This also only covers The Red War + content that came with it, and the new player experience in general. Raid content not included, review will be updated as soon as I finish Leviathan)

Destiny 2 base content actually infuriates me, almost entirely due to how good it actually ends up getting on paper and in execution yet holds itself ludicrously back. Combine that with the general awful new player experience and quality of life of Destiny 2 current you have to go through, and it makes the start of this game stumble and fall on every step. Despite that, there is actually something I can see here, underneath the Activision-forced rubble.

The campaign is fine, and it also shows the biggest elements of how easily stuff can be fixed. Enemy designs are all solid conceptually, each with strengths and weaknesses that are intuitive to understand and majority of the projectiles can be dodged, which in theory would make for an elegant dance which combined with your pretty good toolkit of movement and gunplay should make for some awesome combat right? Nope, because almost all of the encounters are way way way too easy. Like it's actually pathetic how you can turn your brain off and not care through it all, enemies do peanut damage and it's not an issue of gear, enemies scale in the campaign with your power level. This leads to a lot of frustration in my mind because something as simple as tuning the damage could make the content legitimately super fun to go through, because the levels are solid enough and there's a lot of variety, even if the enemies are almost entirely from D1 with no new stuff otherwise.

The presentation in contrast is really great. The music slaps, and the art style and scenery is just excellent at bringing you in. I honestly found myself immersed at times, with certain highlights etched in my mind when I touched down on Nessus or drove in my vehicle through parts of the DMZ. I wish it was attached to a story that earns that presentation though, because the story is laughably rushed and incredibly shallow. Character quips range from decently humorous to groan worthy, and while personalities are distinct none of it rung with me because there's no engagement with them outside their already established importance. Story elements just happen with pacing way too fast for any scene to sell it either, the setting is totaled in front of you despite literally just getting into it. It expects you to care from Destiny 1, but from what I've been told it was hard to care that much too (you go from like, powerlessness to full power in the span of 10 minutes it's super sloppy).

And then there's the endgame/post-campaign content, most of which is a grindy mess. Strikes are just as easy if not worse than the campaign without the immersive attachment, basically hitting off a checklist of shoot thing and continue on with nothing else exciting to them. World and weapon quests are locked behind grindy enemy waves and the story of them are not worth the tedium you have to do to get them. Although, as a stark positive, the lore is actually rather incredible and I highly recommend reading or watching through it to get caught up on the setting. It's not a requirement at all but stuff like the origins of The Hive are raw as fuck.

But alas, this, and pretty much everything positive about Destiny 2 base, is buried under a mountain of new player experience that is simultaneously frustrating to parse and it is to go through. New player experience would have you go through old content without any context to finish New Light, and then have you do raids that DO NOT HAVE A ROULETTE AND YOU HAVE TO GET A TEAM FOR, leaving a lot of content, some of which is even considered the Good part of Destiny 2, behind a series of lacking QoL to get to. I for one haven't been able to get my group just to get one raid done, and LFG has been a nightmare.

Overall, I do not recommend playing Destiny 2. I enjoyed myself with The Red War and had my moments, but it's definitely not good and 100% worth skipping over.