Destiny 2 continues to evolve and I can’t keep up
The Forsaken expansion was a good change… but it might have changed too much.
Since the release of Destiny, in 2014, the developers have been saying that they wanted the game to be more like a hobby. It took 4 years, another entry in the series and a game changing expansion to achieve that status, but they finally did it. It has been something that the community wanted, that I wanted, but somehow I feel like it’s something that I can’t keep up with. I find it really hard to see it as a hobby.
Please hold while I look this up. (Screenshots by author)
The Cambridge dictionary describes hobby as “an activity that you do for pleasure when you are not working”. To dive deeper, the dictionary defines pleasure as “a feeling of enjoyment or satisfaction, or something that produces this feeling”. I suspect I’ve found the root of the issue.
The enjoyment or satisfaction from a game can come from different sources. For me, in Destiny 2, it’s linked to getting better loot (weapons and gear) and consequentially having a feel of progression. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. There’s something wrong with how the game values the players time.
Before I stopped playing regularly, I finished the Last Wish raid more than 25 times and still don’t have the raid exotic weapon, “One Thousand Voices”. One could argue that “that’s just RNG”, but in all my playtime with Destiny, around 1809 hours, I’ve never seen this happen. There’s nothing in place to counterbalance the ruthless RNG, to show the player that their time is not being wasted.
The Dreaming City, home of the elusive One Thousand Voices.
Combined with that, the game is now updated in themed seasons, where content is released slowly throughout months instead of all at once. When the Season of the Forge began, to play the small and new content I was supposed to grind the exact same way I did when Forsaken came out in September. There was nothing new to do out of the gate. Obviously, every person decides what they do with their time, but here, for me, it felt like there were new experiences to be had with other games, ways to make my videogame time worthwhile.
I believe there’s a lot to be enjoyed here and I still love the world and game Bungie created. As I read their weekly blog posts (TWAB) and keep up with communities… I can’t wait to see where they take this franchise next (and I’ll probably be back to check it out… I always do).