Destiny 2’s latest game-breaking bug: Players can no longer respawn in solo activities… Like, at all

This afternoon my Destiny 2 clanmate texted me to say: “If you die in Solo Ops or Patrol you can no longer respawn 😂”. That can’t be right, I thought. That would be such a fundamental bug that it would effectively break the game. Anyway, I loaded in, did some testing, and you can probably guess where this is going.

From my own experience, once you die the respawn button will appear after the usual countdown, but cannot be interacted with. In order to start playing again you either need to go to orbit (ie, leave the activity) or switch characters. Which is as big a problem as it sounds. The bug even seems to extend to Patrol zones, although I was occasionally able to self-revive.

Quite how long it will take to fix is anyone’s guess, but as you can tell by the tone of Bungie’s tweet, this is a four alarm fire. You cannot have players trying to complete every solo activity in the game on a single life. I would love to tell you I’m surprised that a bug of this size has made it into the live game, but as we’ve been writing about recently, Destiny 2 is currently in a parlous state, both in terms of its biblical-sized swarm of bugs and player sentiment towards the systemic changes introduced with the Edge of Fate expansion.

Only this morning, I woke up to find a message from a different clanmate about a bug, this time involving a legendary sword that is one-shotting some of the hardest enemies in the game. The only criteria is you need to have no ammo and jump as you light attack with the sword.

See below:

Meanwhile, the exotic hand cannon Sturm is still giving players a +380% damage buff to all outgoing ability damage. Needless to say that is very much not intended. So far, Bungie has disabled the hand cannon in the Trials of Osiris PvP mode, but let the bug slide in PvE. That’s probably because, with the community in near-constant tumult, the studio would rather not be accused of being the fun police.

Perhaps painting itself into a corner, on a recent Bungie livestream the developers said they were pausing any non-critical balance fixes, although Sturm surely qualifies as the kind of critical bug that will have to be fixed sooner rather than later.

Anyway, here’s how you can take advantage of it for now:

And whilst those bugs might sound fun, they are merely the wacky cherries on top of an otherwise fetid cake. Pay a visit to Bungie’s ‘Known Issues‘ page for the Edge of Fate and you will find the Magna Carta of bug lists. Here are some random highlights:

• Players can sometimes be killed immediately upon respawning in the Nightmare of Gahlran Pinnacle Op.
• A number of Strikes are not completing properly after the final boss has been defeated.
• Focusing engrams at a Vendor can cause the reward to drop at a lower Power level than what was displayed.

On and on it goes, so much so that I can only feel sorry for Destiny 2’s embattled community team, which forms the frontline when it comes to dealing with players’ understandable fury. No wonder they sound downbeat today:

Still, at least Bungie has seen sense about the recent armor controversy and effectively given players the chance to earn what would have been a paid set of armor as an in-game reward instead. Although honestly the fact I’m giving credit for that is probably a form of Stockholm Syndrome at this point.