As I watch Destiny 2 continue to lose 10,000 concurrent players every weekend, I don’t think it’s any real mystery as to why.
The scope of Destiny 2 has been dramatically reduced with the launch of The Edge of Fate and this entire new era. Edge of Fate itself was decently sized for what it is, albeit now lacking things like any sort of weekly story updates. But the real culprit is The Portal, and the fact that its adjacent new tiered armor and weapon system has sunset the entire rest of the game. Like the entire rest of the game.
This is not an exaggeration. In an era where the entire game is now the pursuit of power and tiered weapons and armor, this new system launched…without powerful drops or tiered weapons and armor anywhere in the game besides Kepler and The Portal. That’s it, outside of a few holidays and things like Trials.
This means all old campaigns, destinations, playlists, dungeons and raids do not play into this system at all. You can run them for old gear, gear which cannot be converted or upgraded into the new system. The playlist vendors, for instance, do not even have a reward track any more. The relatively recent well-liked Pathfinder system was deleted entirely. Grandmaster strikes don’t exist at all anymore.
This is, without exaggeration, at least 80% of the existing, playable content in Destiny 2, and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. And you can see what might be coming as a “fix” for this in the future.
An easy to make prediction is that for the fourth or fifth time, Bungie will probably start reintroducing and reissuing these weapons under the new tier system. A few new perks and the ability to land tier 1-5s with the new system and its new difficulty tiers. Destiny has done this forever with each new pass on gear, but at this point it’s just exhausting and trying to earn the same Hung Jury for the fifth time, but now with a tier, is maddening.
The problem is there is no solution here other than what I’ve just said, which is not really anything satisfying in the first place. Bungie does not want you playing old content any more, they very much want you playing new content, as lord only knows that playercounts have crashed post-Final Shape, and they have to herd players into the new stuff.
The Portal is not going away. It can’t. The entire game has been restructured around it, and even if Tiers are added here and there in other parts, The Portal will always be the core. That’s not good, and it’s especially not good when Bungie does not seem to known how to properly balance the game within The Portal itself, all these many weeks later still unable to get players away from running the same two activities for loot while everything else feels like a waste of time.
This is a bad situation. The Portal as an additional the ecosystem of the game could have worked, as there are some neat things about it. The Portal as almost the entirety of Destiny 2 right now may be the thing that ultimately sinks it. I hope that’s not true.
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