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I’m standing in the Skywatch area of the Cosmodrome, Old Russia, in Destiny 2, with a few other random players, and we’re waiting for enemies to spawn. A Hive Tomb ship appears in the sky right over my head and drops off exactly two enemies, and I blast away at them with a machine gun. The other players sprint over, swooping in like hawks, but I manage to snag the two kills before they can, so they jump back onto rooftops and boulders to wait for the next batch of baddies and try again. A lot of long, boring seconds pass before any more enemies spawn and we all repeat the scramble.
I’m shooting these particular fish in this particular barrel because it’s a requirement to unlock the Legend title, a social marker of in-game achievements that appears beneath your name. Another player getting a kill means I don’t, so we’re all competing against each other to spend the least amount of time here. Developer Bungie added this title to the game in honor of the 10th anniversary of the original Destiny, and the objective I’m working on is a joking nod to the early days of that game. We have to kill a bunch of enemies in the Skywatch and loot “engrams,” or weapon/armor drops, from them.
See, back when Destiny launched in 2014, the grind to increase your level and reach the requirements for its endgame content–the Vault of Glass raid–was awful. After a certain point, your strength was determined by the stats on your gear, so you were always chasing weapons and armor with higher levels. Gear was dolled out stingily; you could get it from playing Strike missions, but only in unpredictable fits and starts, and from random drops when you killed aliens. But the gear was never guaranteed to be better than what you already had.
Then players discovered the Loot Cave, a spot in the Cosmodrome’s Skywatch where enemies would spawn almost endlessly if you killed them fast enough. So we all stood on a rock in the Skywatch, which was the correct distance from the cave to keep from interfering with the spawn rates, and just shot into the crowd. Engrams would drop randomly, but there were so many enemies that this increased the drop rate from annoyingly rare to stupidly bountiful. This was still incredibly boring, but it was at least more efficient than playing the same few Strikes over and over and getting nothing for your efforts.
Back in today’s Skywatch, I’m standing on a rock and waiting for enemies to appear, which they do in greater or lesser numbers, for about half an hour. In that time, exactly one engram drops. I grab it, hoping I’m done with this uninspired callback to the worst of Destiny, and check my progress: 7%. I need another 13 engrams.
Yup, I think. This feels like Destiny.
If you told me this Skywatch objective was a straight-up troll on the Destiny community for the Loot Cave, I’d believe you. Contemplating the hours I’d have to spend to complete this, I could see it being a brilliant prank, if it seemed like there was a punch line in there somewhere. But Bungie already made this joke in a funnier and more clever way with the Grasp of Avarice dungeon during the studio’s 30th Anniversary.
Much more likely, however, is that the engram drop rate is just a stupid oversight that turns something fun into something disappointing–and since Bungie says it’ll tweak enemy density in the Skywatch, it seems that’s the case. Something fun turning out to be something disappointing is in keeping with the rest of Destiny’s 10-year anniversary, though.
There’s next to nothing on offer to mark Destiny’s 10th year, in fact. On September 9, the actual anniversary of Destiny’s launch, Bungie added five secret chests you could uncover in the Pale Heart of the Traveler location, all of which are barely hidden, and which give you a set of armor inspired by looks from the original game’s concept art. And there’s the aforementioned title, which you can unlock by completing a few objectives that recall the original game in some slightly nostalgic ways, but mostly just include wearing the armor and playing some activities–the Skywatch objective is by far the most arduous, and sooner or later, that’ll see a fix. Titles are most interesting when they’re tough to earn or require you to do novel things to get them, but the Legend title is so easy to nab (again, hours of boredom notwithstanding) that it’s doubtful anyone would ever bother using it.
Earning the title does come with a sort of celebratory reward–like with the 30th Anniversary, a much bigger in-game event that celebrated the studio with lots of stuff to play and earn, you get the opportunity to preorder a limited-edition Destiny Nerf gun, which is, admittedly, pretty cool (although an artist accused Bungie of stealing their design for a physical version of the in-game weapon, created some nine years ago; Bungie say it is investigating). Disclosure: I bought the Nerf Gjallarhorn last time this happened, and regret nothing.
But there’s nothing to buy in the in-game Eververse store; there are no in-game events commemorating the moment; and there is very little reason to care, overall.
That feels incredibly weird. It’s true that this is the anniversary of Destiny and not Destiny 2, the game we’re playing now, but in the ways that matter most, the distinction really just comes down to the number on the box–overall, the whole thing is, truly, just Destiny.
What’s more, we just saw the culmination of the Light and Darkness Saga, the story that first began on September 9, 2014, with what might have been the best hunk of Destiny content Bungie has made. With The Final Shape, Destiny 2 felt like it was finally achieving what Bungie had always wanted Destiny to be–combining fun shooter fundamentals with a strange and fascinating world easy to get lost in, populated by interesting characters and telling emotional stories.
This should be Bungie’s victory lap. Instead, people seem to be wandering out of the stadium and heading to their cars.
Back when Bungie first announced the game, it did so citing a 10-year journey for players, and at the time, that seemed a bit ludicrous. But here we are, taking the final steps, and the journey has been, in a lot of ways, pretty incredible. You don’t have to be a fan or player to acknowledge that, in terms of longevity, popularity, development, and influence, Destiny is in a category occupied by few others. It has invented and reinvented itself again and again, evolving toward what was envisioned from the start over the course of a decade, and repeatedly dodging the accusation of being a “dead game.” Its success has had an outsized effect on the larger gaming industry–often for the worse, as happens when corporations chase trends–and continues to show what can be exciting about the concept of a “live game.”
And truly, there just aren’t that many instances of a decade-long legacy like what’s happened with Destiny. There are other MMOs in this club, certainly, and multiplayer games like Team Fortress 2 or Counter-Strike 2. It doesn’t take long before you’re talking about series and franchises, though, brand names attached to games and sequels releasing for years. The Destiny 10th anniversary, despite its semantic weirdness of including a technical sequel, is still a rare accomplishment.
Yet despite the studio and the community taking a decade-long journey together, there’s almost nothing to commemorate it. I’m standing in the Skywatch, shooting two enemies per minute, trying to unlock a title I’ll never use because it feels like it was thrown together at the last second and indicative of nothing about my time spent with this game. Disclosure: I won’t be buying the Nerf gun this time.
It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to speculate as to why Destiny’s 10th anniversary feels slapdash. Bungie cut around 220 people in July, less than two months after releasing The Final Shape. That round of layoffs included a bunch of key talent, ranging from longtime executives to members of the writing staff who had helped to grow Destiny 2 into something that felt like more than just another live game. Bungie had fired around 100 people less than a year before in November as well.
Really, what’s there to celebrate? Player counts are down following The Final Shape, somewhat more than the usual ebb following the high of an expansion, and The Final Shape reportedly sold less well than Lightfall, the expansion before it. After purchasing Bungie for $3.6 billion in 2022, Sony seems primed to make further changes or cuts to the studio going forward. What seemed like a bright future for the Destiny franchise less than two years ago now is much, much darker, despite Bungie laying out a loose look at the next year-plus of Destiny 2 in a series of blog posts dropped this past Monday alongside the in-game update.
A lackluster, barely acknowledged anniversary is what happens when you lay off a huge chunk of your team, right at the height of your game franchise.
Every time I talk about the original Destiny, I feel honor-bound to loudly admit that I didn’t much like it, and to discuss how much that position changed over time. As Bungie found the stride in Destiny and Destiny 2, ironing out its worst, most grindy instincts, cutting the time-wasting busywork, and leaning into the unique, fun strangeness of what it had created, I liked it more and more.
Yes, Destiny still often encompasses the many issues of live-service forever games, defined by the need to keep players on an endless treadmill of upward mobility so they’ll spend a few bucks on microtransactions, but it also encompasses the best ideas, too. It could tell fascinating stories that took advantage of its sprawling world and deep lore. It was often immersive and fantastical in ways few other games could be. It showered us with inventive challenges of gameplay and teamwork that I haven’t seen matched in any other game. Destiny started as something interesting, but it became something notable, and often laudable, in the medium of games.
There are two more episodes of content coming to Destiny 2 and expansions planned through 2025, so despite the massive chilling effect yet more layoffs have had on the Destiny community and Bungie itself, it’s premature to say that there is no future for Destiny. But it’s 10 years on, and I’m standing in the Skywatch, waiting for enemies to spawn, wondering if the future of Destiny will look much different from the past.
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