It’s been a difficult few months for Destiny 2, ever since the release of The Edge of Fate expansion’s Portal—a new progression system that replaced the old seasonal content model with, bluntly, a soulless and underbaked grind. I’ve written extensively about my problems with the Portal’s many baffling design choices, but until now Bungie has only tentatively admitted to the size of the problem.
A series of patches and U-turns have tried to soften the abrasive edges of the Portal’s design—aimed at reducing the absurd power grind as well as making buildcrafting feel less restrictive and punishing. Still, these felt like temporary stopgaps—desperate attempts to staunch the bleed that didn’t address the root issues at the heart of the new design.
In a blog post last night, Bungie finally laid it all out:
“With Edge of Fate, we presented a different vision for the future of Destiny 2’s core game. One intended to refocus our releases and player call-to-action on a familiar but deeper pursuit of Power and ascending to higher Tiers of gear across a wider range of activities supporting customizable challenge and commensurate rewards.
“Very quickly, the feedback made it clear that this was the wrong path for Destiny.
“Even if our execution had been perfect, and we see plainly that it was not, it is clear that grinding Power will never be a substitute for earning a trophy. Climbing though throwaway tiers en-route to the gear you want to build around isn’t aspirational. And the Portal itself surrenders too much of Destiny’s feeling of place and exploration. These lessons, and many others besides them, have been taken to heart by our team over the last three months.”
It’ll go down as one of the more major mea culpas in Destiny 2’s history, perhaps rivalling the lengthy video former game director Joe Blackburn once posted to social media addressing the game’s previous failings.
As for what Bungie is going to do about the current state of things, that’s less clear. A big ‘State of the Game’ post is due next year, along with a multi-year roadmap laying out the future of Destiny 2. For now, though, Bungie is continuing to pile on quality-of-life fixes to mitigate the current problems.
With the release of Renegades next month, Bungie is increasing vault space by another 300 slots—addressing some of the issues players have had in collecting the new armour sets and weapons. And players are being allowed to apply any exotic armour ornament to any exotic armour of the same class and slot for PvE activities, which doesn’t actually fix anything, but does feel like a pretty easy win in terms of getting some immediate goodwill from fashion-conscious Guardians.
Renegades is also introducing a new weekly objective playlist—bringing back Grandmaster Nightfalls under a new name—to counteract the fact that, currently, one of the things the Portal is worst at is giving you a reason to play with others. That this change will reintroduce the old Grandmaster difficulty, separate to the new Portal-based Grandmaster difficulty is maybe a sign of how chaotic the game is becoming as it tries to pivot away from The Edge of Fate’s changes.
Really, then, we’re just treading water until the roadmap and State of the Game arrive. Bungie has done all it can to mitigate the Portal ahead of Renegades’ release—scrapping the plans to reset players’ seasonal power levels and keeping the New Gear bonus active on all gear earned during The Edge of Fate.
But it leaves Renegades in a difficult place; a weird temporary holding ground that tries to get us hyped for a new release while clearly still being the product of maybe one of the most disastrous big swings I’ve seen from a live service game trying to reinvent itself. That’s not a great place for the big, exciting Star Wars crossover expansion to find itself in.
I’m hoping the scope of this admission from Bungie means that, when the roadmap does arrive next year, it’ll be taking a major swing to actually fix the game’s many current problems. But I also can’t help feel burned by how much development time and effort was expended on this venture—on the belief that the Portal was the right way to go. “Through our successes and failures,” writes Bungie at the end of its post, “we are grateful for the opportunities to explore different paths, learn from them, and with that clarity, build an inspiring new vision with, and for, our players.”
As one of those players, I’m not sure I see an upside to just how big of a failure this has been.
